Category: Iraq-2006-Q1

45 days and counting… It’s an outrage.
I confess that when I wrote this post on January 25, I for some reason undercounted the number of days since the Iraqi election. Oh well, now I’ve got the automatic counter up there, the software does the counting for me.
I’ll just restate what I wrote there:

The US government, which is the occupying power in Iraq, also claims it is a strong advocate for democratic rule (equals “rule by the people”) everywhere. Yet the voting system put in place by the US, this time, as in the elections of January 2005, has more or less guaranteed that sectarian/ethnic parties would predominate and has made it very hard indeed for these parties to form a government.
Democracy, I repreat, is rule by the people being governed. It has nothing to do with rule by an occupying military power. At its base is the concept of national self-determination. The US military and political bodies in the country have no legitimacy to have any say in running a democratic Iraq. They must plan to leave the country with all possible haste.
In the meantime, their presence and their machinations are yet further delaying the formation of a governing administration in Iraq that is accountable to the country’s people.

I wonder, am I the only person who thinks it’s an unconscionably long time for the Iraqi people to be left in a state of limbo since that very important election? Why does it seem that no-one else is making an issue of this?

Gilbert Achcar has generously sent over his translation into English of an intriguing piece in yesterday’s Hayat that gives some great details about the efforts of some Sunni parties in Iraq to isolate and incapacitate the inflammatory extremists in their community like those led by Abu Musaeb al-Zarkawi.
The piece is titled: The Association of Muslim Scholars: We Are Now Waging Two Battles: Against ‘the Occupation’ and Against ‘the Terrorists’; Sunni Clans Take the Initiative of Launching a Campaign to Expel Zarqawi’s Followers and ‘Foreigners and Intruders’
You can find it here.
It seems like a tough job these Sunni leaders have– trying to deal with both the Americans (as much as they can do, through political means), and the nothing-left-to-lose extremists, whom they call takfiris.
Huge thanks for sending this, Gilbert!
My own theory about fighting terrorism has always been that the trick to success is to be able to find political ways to persuade the condoners of the terrorists to stop their condoning… You’ll find a lot about that in this article.
Obviously, in the case of the extremely violent Sunni extremists in Iraq, the very best-placed people to undertake this campaign are the leaders of the Sunni community itself. But– and this is a big but– those leaders also need to be able to win significant satisfaction of thier own legitiimate political demands, if they are to be effective– or even, to survive…
(The same thing that Israel and the Bushies notably refused to give to Abu Mazen, in Palestine.)
Let’s see if the powers-that-be in Iraq can be smarter than the administrators of the Israeli occupation in Palestine…

I note that today it is 35 days since the Iraqi people went to the polls to vote for the National Assembly.
The US government, which is the occupying power in Iraq, also claims it is a strong advocate for democratic rule (equals “rule by the people”) everywhere. Yet the voting system put in place by the US, this time, as in the elections of January 2005, has more or less guaranteed that sectarian/ethnic parties would predominate and has made it very hard indeed for these parties to form a government.
Democracy, I repreat, is rule by the people being governed. It has nothing to do with rule by an occupying military power. At its base is the concept of national self-determination. The US military and political bodies in the country have no legitimacy to have any say in running a democratic Iraq. They must plan to leave the country with all possible haste.
In the meantime, their presence and their machinations are yet further delaying the formation of a governing administration in Iraq that is accountable to the country’s people.
It is now 35 days since the election. I’ll have to dig out the HTML for the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter I used to have on my sidebar here, and put it up again. How many days (or weeks, or months) more till Iraqis achieve true self-governance?

Reidar Visser, the well-informed and judicious Norwegian specialist on the politics inside Iraq’s politically dominant UIA coalition has now almost completed his analysis of the political balance within the UIA in the wake of last month’s elections. You can find it here.
He notes that there will be some further last developments, depending on who in the UIA will get the 19 “compensation seats” the coalition will most likely be awarded as a result of the election’s slightly complex rules.
His data show that, before those compensation seats are distributed, the nationwide distribution of the UIA’s 109 seats looks like this:

Sadrist (pro-Moqtada): 23%
SCIRI/Badr: 19%
Sadrist (Fadila): 13%
Daawa: 12%
Daawa (Iraq): 11%
Independents (& smaller parties): 22%

He has some great additional analysis there, noting quite rightly that (1) Most western analysts have been describing SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim as “the most important man in Iraq”, though they are wrong to do so; (2) The actual balance of power inside the UIA will have huge impact both on inter-sectarian politics in Iraq, and on the federalism question.
I totally don’t have time to comment further on this right now. (I’m still deep in revising my Africa book.) But huge thanks to Reidar for telling me his work is up there, and congratulations to him on what looks like a thorough and extremely informative piece of analysis.
Check it out! And since he doesn’t really have comments there, feel free to discuss it here.

So Cheney might be trying to persuade the largely-client government in Egypt to help pull the Bush administration’s burning chestnuts out of the fire in Iraq?? [That’s an Arabic-language link; hat-tip for it to Juan Cole.]
Or, is the story that Cheney is trying to set the conditions for a large-scale conventional war inside Iraq between Iranian and Arab armies?
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that troops deployed on so-called “peacekeeping” missions have actually been sent to further sordid political interests, or that such troops have themselves become embroiled in the conflict they were allegedly trying to peacekeep.
I remain pretty confident however that despite the many ways in which the Mubarak government in Egypt is dependent on Washington, and the many means of leverage that Washington has over it, the Cairo regime is not about to fall for such a scheme– even if it does come dressed up in the guise of “saving the Sunnis of Iraq from being over-run by the Shiites”, or whatever.
It is possible– though by no means inevitable– that the day may come when the Sunni Arabs of Iraq might need some major physical protection, and “saving”. If that day comes, then it should of course be the legitimacy of the United Nations that is brought to bear on the issue, not the Machiavellian maneuverings of imperial Washington.
However, we are still some what distant from that day. As this Reuters piece yesterday noted, the country’s politically dominant United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) list is still locked in internal negotiations over who will represent it at the prime ministerial level. This, contrary to so many recent expressions in the western media (including Juan Cole’s blog) of the assumption that SCIRI’s man, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, would easily win the job. As I have noted since Dec. 20, that hasn’t necessarily been true.
The outcome of the intra-UIA struggle will have a huge impact on the approach pursued by the next Iraqi “government”. If SCIRI wins, we can expect an exacerbation of Shiite-Sunni hostility. If Jaafari wins, we can expect much mor weight to be given to the approach of followers of Moqtada Sadr– which is still one of building active alliances and coalitions with the Sunnis, rather than seeking only to settle past scores (real and imagined) against them.
That’s why I have always said that one of the big narratives inside post-election Iraq is the question of what happens inside SCIRI. (Self-correction, Friday: Oops, sorry, I meant “inside the UIA.”)
That is why I say, too, today, that there may well be a chance for an inter-sect entente inside Iraq that can save the country and the region from all-out sectarian war.
A couple of other quick points:
(1) Most Egyptians, though devote Muslims, and Sunnis, are not particularly hostile to Shiites. Indeed, some of their country’s most intriguing and powerful history was tied up with various Egyuptian rulers who were Shiites; and artefacts and expressions of Shiite popular culture are widespread inside Egypt.
(2), It may or may not be true, as Juan says, that most Arab states fear Iran’s development of a bomb. (What are they going to tell the Americans, anyway?) But recent polling of public opinion in the Arab states of the Gulf region showed a high and fairly surprising level of support for the Iranian nuclear program there, with respondents seeing it as the best way to achieve some “balance” in the region with Israel’s existing nuclear arsenal.

Nearly all the media commentary up till now, about the inflammatory statement that SCIRI leader Abdul-Aziz Hakim made Wednesday about the present text of the Constitution being untouchable, has referred to Hakim as incontestably the most powerful individual within the big Shiite electoral coalition, the UIA– and therefore, within all of Iraq. E.g. this news article: “THE most influential politician in Iraq”, as cited uncritically by Juan Cole. Other examples abound in both the MSM and blogosphere…
But why do all these people buy this assumption so uncricitically? It is heavily promoted, of course, by Hakim and his SCIRI supporters themselves…
I noted in several JWN posts between Dec. 20 and Jan. 1 that Hakim’s predominance inside the UIA was by no means a done deal. (See here, here, here, and here.)
I’ve seen no news reports or other evidence since that last post that change the conclusion I expressed there, namely that:

the outcome of the intra-UIA power struggle will be very important for the course Iraq takes over the coming months and years. Thus far, I see the two poles of the main struggle being occupied by Hakim and Sadr, with the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari straddling somewhere between them.

I think, before anyone goes running around blithely describing Hakim as “the most influential politican in Iraq” or whatever, they should actually present the evidence on which they base this conclusion? And also give due consideration to the counter-evidence that is out there. Otherwise, they’re just acting as shills for Hakim.

The British-based anti-poverty movement War on Want is one of the co-publishers of what looks like a well-done new study of the production sharing agreements that Iraq’s American occupiers are trying to develop for Iraq’s oil industry. The study is called Crude Designs – The rip-off of Iraq’s oil wealth.
A recent press release from War on Want says:

Figures published in the report for the first time show:
* the estimated cost to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194 billion, compared with leaving oil development in public hands. These sums represent between two and seven times the current Iraqi state budget.
* the contracts would guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates of return of 42% to 162%.
The kinds of contracts that will provide these returns are known as production sharing agreement(PSAs). PSAs have been heavily promoted by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior figures in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Britain has also encouraged Iraq to open its oilfields to foreign investment.

The report’s Executive Summary lays out those same facts and further explains:

an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields – accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves – for development by multinational oil companies.
Iraqi public opinion is strongly opposed to handing control over oil development to foreign companies. But with the active involvement of the US and British governments a group of powerful Iraqi politicians and technocrats is pushing for a system of long term contracts with foreign oil companies which will be beyond the reach of Iraqi courts, public scrutiny or democratic control.
… The development model being promoted in Iraq, and supported by key figures in the Oil Ministry, is based on contracts known as production sharing agreements (PSAs), which have existed in the oil industry since the late 1960s. Oil experts agree that their purpose is largely political: technically they keep legal ownership of oil reserves in state hands, while practically delivering oil companies the same results as the concession agreements they replaced.
Running to hundreds of pages of complex legal and financial language and generally subject to commercial confidentiality provisions, PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock
governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades.
In Iraq’s case, these contracts could be signed while the government is new and weak, the security situation dire, and the country still under military occupation. As such the terms are likely to be highly unfavourable, but could persist for up to 40 years.

I don’t know much about the strength of the oil workers’ trade unions in Iraq right now. But Gilbert Achcar just sent me this text, which is an English-language version of the speech that Hassan Jumaa Awad, the President of the General Union of Oil Employees in Basra, made at the big anti-war gathering in London on Dec. 10.
Awad concluded his speech thus:

America does not want to withdraw at this time, because it did not complete its operation; it has not yet accomplished the second phase of the occupation, the economic occupation of Iraq. That is why the U.S. administration is currently putting forward its economic plans which include privatization of the oil and manufacturing sectors, and the production sharing agreement [PSA] project.
From this platform, I would like to make clear to all the positions of our Union, which are known to the Iraqi people:
1. Occupation forces must leave the country immediately and unconditionally.
2. We will stand firmly and resolutely against all those who want to tamper with the security and power of the Iraqi people.
3. We condemn terrorist attacks against our people and stress the importance of respecting human rights.
4. We support the honorable resistance that targets and strikes at foreign military forces and seeks to drive the occupiers out.
5. We will not allow the intrusion of foreign companies [in the oil sector] and production sharing agreements, and we will stand with all our force against monopoly firms such as Halliburton, KBR, Shell, and others.
6. We ask the patriotic forces, the antiwar movement and peace-lovers to support our Union in its campaign against privatization and PSAs.
7. We demand the unconditional cancellation of Iraq’s [foreign] debts, as these debts never benefited the Iraqi people but served the buried regime.
In conclusion, I wish you good luck and success, and I look forward to meeting you in a free, democratic, and united Iraq that would be a workshop for all free citizens of the world. I offer again my thanks and appreciation to the organizers of this conference

So anyway, it looks as though the new Iraqi government– when and if it should ever get formed!– will have three extremely important items on its agenda:
(1) Completing the still-incomplete negotiations for the Constitution,
(2) Negotiating the withdrawal (or otherwise) of the US/UK forces, and
(3) Determining the country’s oil policy– an item that looks as if it is going to be forced onto their agenda very early on.
I will just conclude by noting that Iraq’s nationalization of its oil industry, which back in 1972 took control of the industry back from its British and other foreign “concessionaires”, was an extremely important step forward in the country’s history. But now– here come the same-old colonial powers, back once again.

I just saw this report about a young Christian Science Monitor reporter called Jill Caroll being kidnapped in Baghdad.
I am just hoping and praying that she and the translator kidnaped along with her are both okay.
So very many people are being quite illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq today– and threatened, many of them, with physical mistreatment or even annihilation.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell anyone who might know the people who’re holding Jill Carroll a little about the Christian Science Monitor that they might not know.
The newspaper was founded as a regular daily newspaper around 100 years ago by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, a courageous American woman who founded a new branch of Christian belief called Christian Science. The paper is still owned and operated by the Christian Science church, but it functions just like a regular newspaper in the secular world, with the exception that a portion of one page is given over to “today’s religious article.”
The church is not involved in any attempt to “convert” Iraqis or any other Middle Easterners to the faith. Many of the reporters working for the paper are not even members of the C.S. church; some of them are. All of them are good, professional journalists.
I have worked with the newspaper in one way or another since 1976, and have written a regular column for them since 1990. (As regular JWN readers will know, I am not a Christian Scientist, but a member of another Christian church, the Quakers.) One of the things I admire about the paper is the fact that, being owned by a church, it is the only major US national daily that is not subject to commercial pressures by advertisers– a factor that in the case of several other papers and broadcast media has caused journalists to modify their reporting of facts that might be detrimental to Israel. Journalists working for the CSM can describe things as they honestly see them. The CSM has also, throughout the decades, built up a strong record of giving broad and thoughtful coverage to issues in the developing countries.
No-one in Iraq or elsewhere ever deserves to be detained illegally. But it seems particularly tragic– in Jill Carroll’s case, as in that of the four CPT abductees– that western people who are making a serious, peaceful, and respectful attempt to build bridges of understanding with all communities in Iraq should be kidnapped and held in this way.
Please! Can the people holding these abductees find a way to release them all in safety?

Percipient as ever (irony alert there), “Uncle” Jalal Talabani, still the President of Iraq, predicted today that a new government could be formed in his country “within weeks”.
This is all so very reminiscent of what happened after the election of January of last year. Back then it took 88 days between election day and the day on which a new “government” arising from those elections was sworn in.
Those 88 days were marked by terrible, terrible waves of violence in the country. And the administration that was then sworn in was able to solve none of the country’s problems and meet pitifully few of its people’s needs.
I pray to God the same thing is not going to happen this time around, too. But Talabani’s announcement of just how long he thinks government formation might take is really depressing. And of course, just like after the January 2005 election, this time too the violence has been escalating badly.
This Hayat article quotes un-named “diplomats” as saying they expect it will not take three months to cobble together the new government this time, as it did last time…
It also quotes British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying that the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq is “a matter of months”. Also this,

He added that the British troops “will remain as long as the Iraqi government wants them to remain… and we hope in practice that we can withdraw our troops in stages, on our own responsibility, not from Basra in the first instance but from from other governorates. We need to coordinate this withdrawal with the Iraqiswhen they confirm that their troops have become ready to carry all the responsibility in these districts. It is a matter of months, and we are here to liberate Iraq, not exercize imperialism here.” And Straw stressed that the future Iraqi government should be “truly a government of national unity rather than being [a government of] only one party.”

How very kind– one might even say “liberating”– of Minister Straw to tell the Iraqis what kind of a government they should or should not have.

Go read Riverbend’s post of Wednesday on daily life for Baghdadis in the aftermath of the “wonderful” election that Prez Bush has been gushing so much about, recently. It is all worth reading– what a fine, fine writer she is.
It ends thus:

There is talk of major mismanagement and theft in the Oil Ministry. Chalabi took over several days ago and a friend who works in the ministry says the takeover is a joke. “You know how they used to check our handbags when we first walked into the ministry?” She asked the day after Chalabi crowned himself Oil Emperor, “Now WE check our handbags after we leave the ministry- you know- to see if Chalabi stole anything.”
I guess the Iraqis who thought the US was going to turn Iraq into another America weren’t really far from the mark- we too now enjoy inane leaders, shady elections, a shaky economy, large-scale unemployment and soaring gas prices.
Goodbye 2005- the year of SCIRI, fraudulent elections, secret torture chambers, car bombs, white phosphorous, assassinations, sectarianism and fundamentalism… you will not be missed.
Let us see what 2006 has in store for us.

I think the courage and humorous spirit of this young woman– even in the midst of adversity that most westerners can barely even imagine– are a real beacon of hope. For Iraq and for the all of us. The very best of luck to you in 2006, dear Riverbend.