Category: Iraq-2006-Q1

Jill Carroll was freed today in Baghdad! She’s reported to be in good shape. Fabulous news!
Now let’s all work for the reease of everyone else illegally deprived of their liberty in the sad, sad country that Iraq has become.

I just read a stunning post by Riverbend, written yesterday. Read it and weep for Iraq.

… Monday afternoon, I took a bit of time out from the US-Iraq women’s
conference I was at to sit in a wifi zone in the hotel there and write up this JWN
post about the conference.  It seems that while I was away, the
differences of opinion that I had noted there between the Iraqi
invitees– and principally, the difference between those who stayed in
Iraq throughout the whole sanctions era and those who lived as exiles
in those years– became much more pointed… to the extent that
participants in this “peace” gathering had been standing up, yelling
at each other, and threatening to walk out.

I guess the organizers and a couple of the US invitees intervened to
try to calm things down.  When I got back there, the Benedictine US nun
Sr. Joan Chittester, one of the organizers, was saying some pacific
things about “well, now you’ve seen how democracy works.  Everyone
has to at least stay and listen to everyone else’s point of view.”

That evening, there were a lot of inter-religious peacemakery things
organized.  I’m not entirely sure about the cultural context of
having people watch two women performing a classical Indian dance…
The dance was fairly pretty to watch, but personally I was extremely
hungry at that point (7:30 p.m.) having been up since 6 a.m.

Then yesterday morning we were back in the conference room again. 
For that session, which was billed as lasting from 9 a.m. through 1
p.m.–with no break anywhere along the way!  can you imagine?–
the moderator was Kate Snow, another rising female star at ABC News who
co-anchors the weekend edition of their morning show and was previously
their White House correspondent.

Snow is another smart young network-groomed woman, like Elizabeth Vargas
yesterday.  But completely out of her depth in this context, since
it didn’t take long before the (purely rhetorical) sparks began to fly
there.  This session had been billed as having six Iraqi women
speakers talking about “Fostering people-to-people dialogue: Changing attitudes
and misperceptions”.

The third of the speakers was Dr.
Katrin Michael,  a Christian woman from the north of Iraq
who had joined the Kurdish opposition in 1982; fled the country in 1988
after having survived a chemical weapons attack (date and details of
which, uncertain); ended up in Algeria; barely escaped the
fundamentalist violence there; ended up as a resettled refugee in
Washington DC in 1997…  Where she still lives.  Nowadays,
she does research there on Iraqi women’s issues.

Her presentation was stridently “exilist”.  She ended up
making a loud appeal for Americans to join in fighting against the
“terrorists” in Iraq, and said “we Iraqis are in the front line against
the terrorists”.  (She didn’t note that there had been no jihadist
militants in Iraq prior to the US invasion of 2003, whereas now,
evidently, there are… ) 

She declared loudly a number of times that “I have forgiven”  the
people who had harmed her earlier.  But honestly, the general
tenor of her very accusatory presentation indicated strongly to me that
there are plenty of people whom she has not even come close to
forgiving.  Again and again, at one point, she said “I am a
victim; I am a victim; I am a victim!”  (I felt like saying to
her, “Katrin, my dear, I heard you the first time.  You are a
victim.  But you know what?  At this point, everyone in Iraq
is feeling very hurt, wounded, and fearful.  Everyont there is a
victim.  And you’re living there in Washington DC… “)

Michael, Lamia Talebani
(who spoke a little later) and
Judge Zakia Hakki (who spoke Monday– and again yesterday) were the most ardent representatives of what I
call the Iraqi  “exilist” viewpoint, that is, the view of those
who (1) had spent the 1990s in exile, (2) had been among those most strongly
advocating the use of US power to overtthrow the Saddamist regime, and
who (3) until today remain supportive of  the 2003 invasion even if
criticial of some of the details of  subsequent US actions in
Iraq.  (Hakki did voice some such criticisms; so did
Talebani.  They have both lived for at least part of the time
since 2003 inside Iraq.  Katrin Michael, who has not spent time in Iraq since 200,3 did not voice any such
criticisms .)

But before I  describe the argument, let me give a quick digest of
what all the speakers on the main panel said.

Continue reading “US-Iraqi women’s conference– Part 2”

The US ambassador in Baghdad, Zal Khalilzad, has been working feverishly around the clock (but notably not behind the scenes) to try to make sure that his favored candidate (SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi) gets the premiership of the National Assembly that was elected– let me see– 104 days ago. The UIA bloc, of which SCIRI is a part, is the biggest bloc in the Assembly. But in an internal deliberation in early February the UIA’s parliamentarians determined that its candidate for PM would not be Abdul-Mahdi but would continue to be Ibrahim Ja’afari of the Daawa Party…
Today, the NYT tells us that Khalilzad has escalated his campaign against Ja’afari by telling senior politicians in the UIA that Czar George W. Bush himself, sitting in his distant imperial capital, has now issued a ukaz (edict, fatwa, diktat… ) to the effect that:

Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister…

The NYT’s Ed Wong reported that Redha Jowad Taki, described as a UIA parliamentarian and an aide to SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim, was one of those who accompanied Hakim to a meeting with Khalilzad last Saturday in which the US viceroy reportedly “told” Hakim,

to pass on a “personal message from President Bush” to the interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari… Mr. Khalilzad said Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister… It was the first “clear and direct message” from the Americans on a specific candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.
…American officials in Baghdad did not dispute the Shiite politicians’ account of the conversation, though they would not discuss the details of the meeting.

I note here– yet again!– that Wong routinely, throughout this piece, describes Hakim as “the head of the main Shiite political bloc”, though in the February vote the UIA showed that not to be the case.
Referring to Hakim as “the head of the UIA, or “the most powerful politician in Iraq” actually obfuscates the whole story. A casual reader of stories making such designations would be left asking, “If Hakim is indeed ‘the head’ of the UIA bloc, and ‘the most powerful Shiite politician in Iraq’, then why on earth is Ibrahim Ja’afari still the UIA’s candidate for PM?”
I note too that there are many Orwellian undertones to the whole story of the US intervention in this whole, extremely lengthy and high-stakes government-formation process in Iraq… In addition to the mere fact of the intervention, that is…
One is that, as I noted in this recent post, Zal and his cohorts keep talking about the need for government that pursues a vision of a “unified” Iraq– but they are hard at work blocking the pol who has the most credibility as a proponent of Iraqi national unity–Moqtada Sadr– from having any influence in the government. (Sadr still has a US ‘arrest warrant’ out against him. He has thrown his considerable political weight behind Ja’afari, who is not a forecful political figure in his own right.)
Another Orwellian undertone is that Zal and his cohorts fulminate in public against the activities of the ‘sectarian militias’– while at the same time they are working hard to bring into the seat of government power SCIRI, which runs the biggest, best-embedded, and most violent of these militias…
These things are not spelled out nearly enough in the MSM. (To say the least!)
At a broader level, though, I am impressed that despite 104 days of the US using all the levers of power at its control in Iraq– US blandishments, promises, bribes, military operations, black operations, etc etc– the UIA has stayed quite steadfast in refusing to allow Czar George and his viceroy to determine who will be the next PM.
In fact, if Zal now has to resort unequivocally to saying– in a meeting with Hakim and his (presumably, all-SCIRI) aides– that Czar George himself doesn’t want Ja’afari in power, then this kind of direct, open intervention is already a mark of how weak and desperate his and the Bush administration’s position has become!
(Bizarre, and to me a sign of weakness, too, that Zal would be seeking to ‘pass on’ this message to Ja’afari through Hakim himself… Actually, extremely bizarre indeed.)
I hope Ja’afari and Sadr both have very good personal-security details.
Also, of course that meeting was Saturday. Sunday the US military attacked (apparently) a Sadrist office/husseiniyah, and after that no UIA pols at all have been prepared to meet with Zal. And notably, it was after Sunday that Hakim’s person, Taki, started talking to the press and spilling the beans about Czar George’s ukaz– presumably as a way of trying to distance SCIRI from any complicity in the anti-Ja’afai campaign. (One can just imagine the conversation: “Ed, I have to tell you that Mr. Hakim was deeply shocked– shocked!– to hear the content of the message the Americans were asking him to transmit”… )
As this piece by Knight-Ridder’s Nancy Youssef and Warren Stroebel tells us, on Tuesday evening,

Salim al-Maliki, the minister of transportation and a member of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance [can anyone tell us from which party? — HC], said al-Jaafari was still the slate’s candidate.
“We do not accept interference by the United States or any other foreign body because it is an internal decision of United Iraqi Alliance,” al-Maliki said.

Youssef and Stroebel also report there that the US has sent a message to Ayatollah Sistani asking his help in “getting us out of this impasse,” as an unnamed official in Washington was quoted as saying.
What “impasse”? The “impasse” in the government-formation process in Iraq that has existed so far — a fact of Iraqi political life that is now absolutely, indubitably harming the interests of the Iraqi people–is completely a creation of the US’s anti-Jaafari blocking tactics.
These journos refer to “leading Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim”…
But they also, sensibly, wrote this:

Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University in Washington, called the reported attempts to pressure al-Jafaari to resign “heavy-handed.”
“They have to know that Sistani does not want to be seen as interfering in the political process,” she said. “You’re guaranteed to get the result that you don’t want.”

This is just to note that our friends Reidar, Shirin, and Salah have continued their good discussion on intra-UIA and UIA-US issues down on this JWN comments board.
Meanwhile, Juan Cole is still referring in a quite uncritical way to Abdel-Aziz Hakim as “the Iraqi Shiite cleric who heads the largest bloc in the elected parliament.”

I’m here attending the two-day conference Creating our Common Future, which is billed as an “Iraqi and American Women’s Summit”. The morning’s session was extraordinary. We had six Iraqi women and one man up there on the platform, in a lengthy panel discussion titled “Stories from the Ground”, that was moderated by Elizabeth Vargas, the co-anchor of the big network news program that ABC News does every day.
Of the seven Iraqis, one (the ethnic Kurdish judge Zakia Hakki) was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of, and continued presence in, Iraq; a couple– including Faiza al-Araji and Dr. Rashad Zaydan (a pharamacist working with a charitable organization in Baghdad and Fallujah)– were outspoken critics; and the rest were all somewhere in between.
I believe the Iraqi “delegates” here (not sure that anyone has actually been “delegated” to be here; but it sounds important, doesn’t it?) have had some time meeting just with each other over the weekend.
And then just before lunch, the deep differences among the US invitees here became clear, too. First up there was Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictne nun who gave a truly inspiring, wonderful short sermon about the folly and tragedy of the whole war venture, and the need for us all “not to drink from the water of hate.” Then there was Olara Otunnu, a Ugandan-American who’s worked with the UN for a long time, including as Sec-Gen’s Special Rep for Children and Armed Conflict. He gave a kind of generic plea for everyone to focus on the children, saying very little of any specificity to Iraq. And then we had Charlotte Ponticelli, who’s the “Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues” at the State Dept.
Sr. Joan had gotten a standing ovation from most of the 120 or so people present, for her oration. Ponticelli tried to follow that performance with some extreme rhetorical flourishes, and with continual references to “the courage of our Iraqi sisters who have stepped up to the plate“– a very provincially American metaphor from (I think) baseball that most people from outside the US find quite mystifying… Exactly what plate it was the Iraqi women had “stepped up to”, and what they were expected to do now they were there– all that was left very general…
And she talked again and again about how her Bushite masters had “liberated” the Iraqis, and how much better things were in Iraq now than before 2003, etc.
It’s been an interesting experience being in this gathering where the differences of opinion within each of the two bodies politic are so very, very evident.
I’m not sure exactly what the organizers are hoping to get out of the event. Oh, here‘s one early expression of their goals:

Continue reading “Iraqi and US women on war, occupation, peace”

It has seemed clear to me for some time now that, despite all the protestations of various US officials that what they most want to see is a “unified” Iraqi government stepping forward, in fact, what they most care about is not the ‘national unity” aspect of the government, but rather that the new Iraqi government NOT be one formed on a basis of commitment to a speedy US withdrawal.
In fact, Ja’afari and Muqtada Sadr are very committed to a unified Iraq– and Sadr has done more than any other Shiite politician to try to keep the links between the country’s Shiite and Sunni populations as strong as possible. (A lot, lot more than, for example, Abdul-Aziz Hakim and his SCIRI party, which as we know has been associated with some of the worst of the anti-Sunni death squads in the country.)
Sadr, in addition, is deeply committed to winning a speedy and complete withdrawal of US occupation forces from his country– this is, indeed, one of the main bases of his political relationship with the Sunnis.
The Americans have been using the Kurdish pols, and others, to continue to block the formation of a government led by Ja’afari, who is currently in alliance with Sadr. (The Americans have never withdrawn their “arrest warrant” against Sadr, the issuance of which back in April 2004 provoked some whole new rounds of very destructive fighting, both at the time and later in 2004.) For some reason, they don’t like Sadr! Perhaps it’s because of his consistently Iraqi-nationalist, anti-occupation stand?
I see that 97 days have now elapsed since Iraq’s “landmark” December election. That’s nearly 14 weeks in which the country has had no clear governance structure, and of course in the absence of such a structure the slide toward greater civil strife has only further continued.
Most recently, Washington has started deploying more actors to try to persuade Ja’afari to “do the right thing” (in Washington’s eyes), and to step down in favor of SCIRI’s favored candidate, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a pro-Washington, pro-privatization person with a very slick political past. These actors have even included, it seems, a group of six US senators now in Baghdad. They were reported by AP to have, “pressured Iraq’s leaders Tuesday to speed up formation of a national unity government, saying American voters were losing patience with Iraqi politicians and increasingly eager to withdraw troops.” (Actually, this last part of the communication probably gave considerable heart to the anti-occupation pols in Baghdad, so it might not have entirely served the Bushies’ purpose… )
But still, the imperial stance adopted by these senators is somewhat breathtaking… That they go trotting off to a foreign country and openly lecture the politicians there on how to run it?
… But of course the really big gun that Washington and its local viceroy, Zal Khalilzad, are now hoping to bring to bear on the Iraqi Shiite pols is political pressure from Teheran. Will this work in the way the US hopes, I wonder? That is, is Teheran going to be both willing and able to pressure Ja’afari to cede in favor of Abdul-Mahdi?
“Willing” is already, in my mind, a big question. And so is “able.” It is probably worth re-reading all the trustworthy sources we have on the relations between Teheran’s rulers and the various strands and personalities within the Iraqi UIA, to gain some guidance on these points.(Help, anyone? Reidar Visser, are you there?)
That AP piece cited above, which is by Vanessa Arrington and not their much more experienced and better-connected Hamza Hendawi, has this interesting tidbit near the end:

Al-Jaafari’s bid for a second term is opposed by Kurds, Sunni Muslims and many secular politicians who claim he cannot unify the country. The Shiite leadership is under heavy pressure to drop him as candidate.

(Not true, by the way! Ja’afari is opposed by both main Kurdish parties, yes– though a little bit of US palm-greasing could swiftly change that situation. But he is certainly not opposed by all the Sunni Muslim pols, or by all the secular politicians. I think Arrington’s claims here are the result of her listening to too much crude US Embassy agitprop.)
But then, she reports this:

Yet interim Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi told reporters after meeting Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Tuesday that “Dr. al-Jaafari is still the (Shiite) Alliance nominee.”
The cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged Abdul-Mahdi and another Iraqi politician — Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Shiite bloc in parliament — to speed things up.
The aim should be to “form a national unity government as soon as possible,” al-Sistani told the men, according to an aide. “Otherwise the people will not forgive you.”

I have to say that the mendacity and Orwellian double-speak of the Bush administration people whenever they say anything about the Iraqis’ government-formation process never cease to amaze me. They go on and on about claiming they want to see a “unified government”, but are meantime stoking the Kurds and everyone else they have any influence with to resist the formation of the one form of unified government that looks both easily achievable and also democratically legitimate– i.e., one led by Ibrahim al-Ja’afari. And they launch all kinds of accusation about Ja’afari’s “divisiveness” while completely minimizing the bad effects of the anti-Sunni divisiveness perpetrated by SCIRI and its allies, as well as (in his day) by Iyad Allawi.
And… and… and…
Meanwhile, here’s a very intriguing quote I found last night when I was reading the March 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker. It’s in an excellent article by Connie Bruck on the Bush administration’s various machinations with Iranian expatriate pols over the years, all of which is certainly well worth reading.
Here’s what she writes on p.54:

James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, told me that in the prewar planning for Iraq “there was an intention that the U.S. would retain troops in Iraq– not for Iraq stabilization, because that was thought not to be needed,[!] but for coercive diplomacy in the region. Meaning Iran and Syria.”

Well, that was then, and now is now. Now, instead of the US being in a position to use “coercive diplomacy” (i.e. diplomacy backed by crude military threats) against Iran, Zal Khalilzad is instead begging Teheran to help him resolve the US’s political problems inside Iraq…
Boy, I would love to be a fly on the wall in these negotiations… But much more than that, I would love to see an empowered, united Iraqi government emerging that is committed to winning Iraq’s real national independence and sending the occupation army home.

Three years into the US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Blair government’s decision to join the invasion effort is on trial in an obscure courtroom in Aldershot, west of London.
The actual case is a military-law prosecution of a New Zealand-born RAF medic called Malcolm Kendall-Smith, who is being tried for refusing to be deployed on a further tour to Iraq (which would be his third.) The charge is that he’s “refusing to obey a lawful command”. His defense is that the order to deploy is not lawful because– as new papers recently revealed in Britain seem to indicate– the original order to launch the war in which he’s being asked to participate was itself not lawful.
The dedicated NZ journo Jon R. Stephenson had a piece in today’s Sunday Star-Times describing the case, which continues.
Kendall-Smith’s case is particularly interesting to me because there was another New Zealander, 90 years ago, who took exemplary and extremely brave actions in pursuit of his desire to be treated as a conscientious objector to all war. He was Archibald Baxter, a Christianity-inspired pacifist who was subjected to the most horrendous punishments and abuses by the New Zealand Army, which refused to recognize anyone’s right to be a Conscientious Objector (CO) at the time.
Including, they sent Baxter to the front in France, completely against his will; and when he refused orders there to wear a uniform they gave him “Field Punishment Number 1” (I think it was), which essentially involved tying him nearly naked to a pole in a yard for a number of days, in a snowstorm.
Like Kendall-Smith, Baxter came from Dunedin in the South Island. Here‘s a link to info about Baxter’s very moving memoir.
… So I’m pretty sure that Kendall-Smith won’t face any punishment as brutal as that one. Indeed, according to this piece in The Independent, former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, who recently resigned because of his objections to the war, “had expected to face a court martial for his refusal to serve– but instead was discharged with a glowing testimonial.”
Does Kendall-Smith’s defense have any chance of succeeding? It seems doubtful. But I wish the trial were getting more coverage in the MSM in both the UK and the US. Here, though, is a fairly full report from today’s Independent.

Susan (Dancewater) over at Today in Iraq has posted the text of an email she got from Doug Pritchard, the Toronto-based co-director of the Christian Peacemaker teams, about Tom’s last journey.
Did you know that CPT still has an active (remaining) team in Iraq, which as of mid-February had seven members? You can read about some of their activities here.
Anyway, here’s Doug’s email:

The U.S. Embassy arranged for Beth Pyles, a member of the CPT Iraq team, to travel to Anaconda, and she was able to keep vigil with Tom for the next 36 hours until his departure. Meanwhile, CPT’ers Rich Meyer and Anne Montgomery traveled to Dover [air-force base in Delaware, US, to which the bodies of deceased US soldiers are sent], and have been in the vicinity since 5 p.m. Mar. 11, keeping vigil and awaiting Tom’s arrival. Pyles was present on the tarmac at Anaconda as Tom’s coffin was loaded onto the plane for Dover. She reported that his coffin was draped in a U.S. flag. This is unusual for a civilian, but Tom may not have been uncomfortable with this since he had always called his nation to live out the high ideals which it professed. Iraqi detainees who die in US custody are also transported to Dover for autopsies and forensics. On this plane, right beside Tom’s coffin, was the coffin of an Iraqi detainee. So Tom accompanied an Iraqi detainee in death, just as he had done so often in life.
At Tom’s departure, Pyles read out from the Gospel of John, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” (1:5). In honour of Tom’s Iraqi companion, she spoke the words called out repeatedly from the mosques of Baghdad during the Shock and Awe bombing campaign in March 2003, “allah akhbar” (God is greater). She concluded the sending with words from the Jewish scriptures, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).
Dawn broke. The contingent of Puerto Rican soldiers nearby saluted. The plane taxied away. Venus, the morning star, shone brightly overhead as the night faded away. Godspeed you, Tom, on your final journey home to your family and friends.

The latest (March-April) issue of Boston Review has a riveting piece of reporting from Iraq by Nir Rosen. Nir is a fearless young reporter who has already racked up huge amounts of experience (and gathered good contacts) in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and other war zones.
This report includes interviews with several Sunni political leaders as well as some high-ranking Sadrists. It was conducted mainly during last Ramadan (October-Novermber). Though it’s a bit dated, I think it still has real value.