Every constructive thing the Bush administration claims to have built up in its 30 months in Iraq is a sham.
The “democratically elected Iraqi transitional government”?
— This government has never been held accountable to the 275-member National Assembly, the body that was directly elected (though in a flawed election) back on January 30. The National Assembly has rarely mustered even a quorum of its members of its members to deliberate together recently. Far less has it been able to hold Iraq’s strange, two-headed government to account.
–The “government” has not been able to deliver basic services to the citizens of Iraq. Provision of vital services– including, crucially, that of public security— has deteriorated markedly since January. A basic function of governments in the modern age is their “responsibility to protect” the citizenry. The transitional government elected in January has completely failed to exercise this reponsibility. In addition, delivery of other basic services like water and electricity has plummeted.
— The two contending “heads” of the governmental system have even, in recent days, had a serious falling out between themselves. I have written before about the troubling bicephaly of the governmental system established by the (completely non-democratic) Transitional Administrative Law of 2004. My reading of TAL would have given the transitional “PM” the executive responsibilities of a head of government, with the “president” exercising only the quasi-ceremonial function of a head of state. I guess the current “President”, the PUK’s Talal Jalabani had a different reading. Today, he even went as far as to call for the resignation of PM Ibrahim Jaafari.
What a sad, sick joke. What has either of them done for the people of Iraq?
Then there are “the Iraqi security forces”?
–Remember the Bush adage, “As the Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down?” So where does that leave the prospects for a speedy, orderly withdrawal of US forces, given that the number of Iraqi battalions deemed ready to fight mysteriously declined by 66% over the course of two days last week? (To a puny total of one brigade.)
As I’ve written here on JWN a number of times in the past, the problem for the Iraqi security forces is not one of basic military training… It’s unit cohesion, and the cohesion and integrity of the command structures… I.e., it is primarily a political problem, not an issue of purely “technical” military training.
So you can send all the grandiose “NATO training missions” you want to Baghdad, with all their attendant fanfare… But if you can’t nail the issue of gaining the political integrity of the security forces, sorry buddy, you’re just pouring your training dollars down the drain.
— Well then, how about the state of the emerging democratic Iraqi constitution?
Ha-(sob)-ha-(sob)-ha…
The Draft Constitution that will be voted on October 15 was “rip’d untimely from its mother’s womb” (to quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, referencing Julius Caesar’s birth), in order to comply with US force planning and political election-planning timetables… It was notably not the result of an organic, inclusive process of intra-Iraqi negotiation… To say the least.
If this constitution is accepted in the referendum, its own terms already stipulate that it will be later be subject to considerable “fleshing out” and the detailed specification of many of its provisions… (But if it passes, most of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs will continue to be majorly pissed off with the political system.)
If it fails to pass, the whole text will have to be renegotiated sometime during the year ahead. (And if it fails to pass, the Kurds will be extremely pissed off, and will accelerate the many moves they’ve already made toward full independence…. )
Let’s be clear, whether this draft constitution is accepted or rejected on October 15, the following will happen:
- 1.There will be an election for a new National Assembly on December 15. (The only question is over whether this will be a “post-constitutional” assembly, or yet another “transitional” assembly.)
2. One or more of Iraq’s three major population groups will be majorly pissed off, and inter-group tensions– having been exacerbated by the very framing and holding of the referendum itself–can be guaranteed to continue.
3. There will remain many fundamental details of the constitution to be decided, and
4. The Kurds will continue their march toward secession/ independence, whether with more or less speed.
So what the heck real difference will the October referendum make? What the heck difference does this wad of paper called the “Iraqi draft constitution” actually make?
Goooood questions.
(And I didn’t even mention yet that the wad of paper that we currently have in our hands represents a massive step back for women’s rights and for freedom of religious conscience inside Iraq… Maybe I should have.)
And then there are… all the other things the Bush administration has constructed during its time in Iraq…
Like, um…
“Peace in our time?” Nah, scratch that.
“Freedom from global terror?” Don’t tell that to the people of London or Bali. (Or indeed, the people of Iraq, since they too are part of what people like to call the “international community”.)
Oh well, how about all those Iraqi schoolrooms that the US troops rebuilt and repainted?
Gosh we haven’t heard much about those recently, have we? Maybe this is because– whether in Tel Afar, Ramadi, or most recently Sadah or Al-Qaim— it is almost certainly the case that in recent months the US troops have been consistently destroying more schoolrooms each month than they’ve been rebuilding.
(Plus, back in the days when they were talking more about “rebuilding” and “repainting” schoolroomss, did you ever think how all those schoolrooms got destroyed in the first place? One hint: as of the US invasion in March 2003, the country’s tens of thousands of schoolrooms were still nearly all in decent– if sometimes rudimentary– shape… And then, the US military tried to get credit for repairing just a few of the many schoolrooms that its invasion of the country destroyed??)
So we need to face it: look as hard as we might, we can’t actually see the US troop presence in Iraq doing anything particularly constructive there at all, whether at the political, the geopolitical, the economic, social, or educational levels.
Meanwhile, they’re creating a heck a lot of physical destruction, and their presence is whipping up a maelstrom of inter-group tension, escalation, and distrust…
G-d save the Iraqi people. Somehow. G-d save the whole Middle Eastern region lest it become sucked into the vortex of violence in Iraq. And G-d save us Americans, and please, please, give us the strength and wisdom we need if we’re to pull our government back from its present destructive course.