Category: Iraq-2006-Q2

I’ll say this for Condi Rice and Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad: They sure are tenacious… The kind of tenacious that causes our dog to hang onto an old piece of aluminum foil long after she’s licked the last trace of chicken-grease off it… The kind of tenacious that is quite useless and indeed often very counter-productive. (Chewed-up shards of aluminum foil all over the garden…)
I say this because honestly, I’d have thought that once Khalilzad lost his big tussle of wills with Iraq’s United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) bloc back on April 21, he would then step back and let the UIA– which did, after all, win easily the largest number of seats during Dec. 15’s free and fair parliamentary election– form the coalition that it wanted, and through which it might hope to govern.
But no.
I guess I should have started to understand Khalilzad’s(and Rice’s) extraordinarily pointless tenacity back on May 21, when Zal was reported to be intervening in the workings of the Iraqi parliament like “the elephant in the chamber.”
And now, here we are, two weeks after Nuri al-Maliki was designated as the head of the new “Iraqi government”, and he still hasn’t been able to name the key security ministers in it…
And the US bureaucrats are still butting majorly into Iraq’s internal political affairs….
In that report I linked to there AFP’s Kamal Taha wrote

Maliki had originally chosen an independent military figure [for Interior Minister], but according to Shiite politicians, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the most powerful Shiite parties, wanted one of its own in the post.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Sunday that Iraqi politicians will settle the issue in the “next few days.”
“The important thing is that they get it right. And when they get it right, and they will get it right, everybody will forget how long it took them,” she said.
A US official in Baghdad, however, said Washington was quite “disappointed” with the postponement and called for the political parties to support Maliki’s efforts to name a new government.
“We’re quite disappointed at the lack of results in today’s parliament,” said the official, adding that the US believes strongly in the prime minister’s efforts to find qualified independent candidates.
“We support him in these efforts and it is time for all leaders in the national unity government to get behind the prime minister,” the official added, singling out SCIRI for not supporting the prime minister

Well, that official is probably someone who works quite high up in Khalilzad’s office. Intriguingly enough, it now looks as though– in contrast to the position they took in the run-up to the choosing of the PM– this time, the US viceregal palace (a.k.a. the embassy) is campaigning against rather than for SCIRI. (Can anyone explain that more for me?)
But to me, that doesn’t make much difference. How come they have a view on this matter at all? Isn’t Iraq supposed to be independent?
And then, another question: What on earth difference will any of this make to the ignominious ending the Bush project in Iraq is headed for anyway? Aren’t they just seeking to prolong the agony there?
Oh, just bring the troops home, guys… Please! Their continued presence in Iraq is only continuing to sow horrendous violence among the Iraqi people. And for absolutely zero reason.
What was it the Vietnam vets used to say: Just how terrible is it to be the last person to die in a completely pointless war?

Comments are back! And they’re back here, on this blog! With our very own new visual-verification anti-spam measure. Big thanks to the tech adviser… I’ll keep the ‘JWN Comments’ blog open, more or less as it is, in case we need to revert to that at some point. But for now, let the discussions resume here.

So our friend Dr. David Steinbruner was actually involved in treating the courageous and smart CBS News correspondent Kimberley Dozier after her near-fatal injury in Iraq Monday.
Dozier’s colleagues James Brolan and Paul Douglas were killed in that attack. When I was working in Lebanon during the war there, my husband was a TV cameraman. I know that those guys (and the still photogs) run the very biggest risks of anyone.
Deep condolences to Brolan and Douglas’s families.
And my prayers for Dozier’s best possible recovery. (I think that Scott Harrop, who actually knew Dozier fairly well when she was a grad student in Middle East affairs here at Virginia some dozen years ago, is going to post more here about her.)
Dozier is now in Landstuhl military hospital, in Germany. CBS’s latest report states:

Dozier was under heavy sedation when her parents, siblings and boyfriend arrived, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw said. Still, Dozier reacted to the arrival of her boyfriend, Shaw added.
“She was aware of his presence. She is still very seriously injured, but she’s stable and she responds to stimuli,” Shaw said.
Dozier is in critical but stable condition and, according to a statement from CBS, is “resting comfortably today after receiving further treatment for injuries to her head and legs.” “We are encouraged by reports from Dozier’s doctors about the outcome of her recent surgeries,” the statement continued.

David S. has meanwhile been doing a fabulous job as a combat ER doc there in Baghdad. In one of the reflections he sent us, he wrote movingly about how agonizing he found it that according to the military orders under which he works that ER there is allowed to treat only members of the US and “coalition” militaries and members of a small number of other designated groups like some US and coalition non-military people and some Iraqi military people.
It would be great if every person injured in the war in Iraq could receive treatment as expert as Dozier has received.
Of course, if there were not a war in Iraq, none of this would have happened.

This US war in and against Iraq was lost a long time ago.  There remain
many large political questions regarding the manner, timing, and consequences
of the US exit.  But on this weekend, when Americans participate in
their annual commemoration of the fallen of former wars, I wonder what form
the future memorialization of this war will take– both here and in Iraq.

Wars, and those who have lost their lives in them, can be memorialized in
many different ways (or not at all.)  In the United States, memorials
to wars and warfighters past run the gamut from the bronzed triumphalism
of the horse-riding generals who prance atop the traffic circles in Washington
DC to the stark gash of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial.  Somewhere
close to Lin’s mood (but less shocking) is the display in another of my favorite
war memorials, the one at Appomatox
Court House, the place where Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his secessionist “Army
of Northern Virginia” to the federal general Ulysses Grant, thus marking
the end of any hope for victory of the slaveholding southern secessionists.

The Appomattox museum is in a rural area of Virginia around four hours’ drive south of DC. It is sited in a collection of small, old buildings in
a pastoral setting. The particular display that I like is a large room
that presents many photos of the war-dead.  I guess the US Civil War was
fought near the dawn of the age of photography, and the families of many of
the young men going off to war from North or South were able to have photographs
of their loved ones made, to remember them by, before they shipped out to
battle.  (Okay, it seems to have been almost solely the officers
who did that.  I guess photography was still expensive in those
days.)

The casualty rates in the war were truly appalling.  Photography and
the reloadable musket may have made their way onto the scene, but antibiotics
and the practice of antiseptic doctoring certainly had not.  A huge
proportion of those men who set off never came home again.  Relatively
lucky were the families who at least had a treasured daguerrotype of the
loved one, made before he left…

So in this room in the museum today, they have lined the walls with a few
hundred of these photographs.  Each one is mounted on a
matte made in the color of the side he fought for: blue, or grey. And the matted
photos have been put up on the walls in a checkerboard design: blue next
to grey next to blue next to grey…  The room commemorates them all,
equally. Look up close and you see the stiff images of those men, mostly young
men trying to look stern and brave, like warriors.  Look from a distance
and you see a sea of men all cut off in the bloom of their manhood, and
their political affiliations don’t matter at all.

The “message”, if you like, of that display is one of national reconciliation
and national unity, and it is very effectively and movingly conveyed.  (This
mood is lost completely if you click through
this
webpage maintained by the museum, where you click on two different flags
to see the slideshows of the dead from each of the separate sides…)

However, what we need with respect to the US-Iraq war is probably not at
this stage the projection of any message of “unity” or even “friendship”.
 Friendship between the two countries may, or may not, come. At some point.
 But when one country’s army is still occupying another country it seems dishonest to speak of that relationship as having anything to do with “friendship”.  Surely the message that we in the US anti-war,
anti-occupation movement should seek to have our memorial project instead is a strong message
of reproach to our government and to those individuals within it who
dragged our country– and also with far, far worse consequences, Iraq– into this
horrific war.

As well as a message of comfort, remembering, and compassion
to all those who lost loved ones or were wounded in this war.

Reproach and remembering are, of course, the two main messages of Maya
Lin’s beautiful Vietnam War memorial.  But reproach is also a strong
element in another U.S. memorial from the Civil War era:
Arlington National Cemetery
.

Arlington National Cemetery was established right on the grounds of Gen.Robert
E. Lee’s family home, on the banks of the Potomac River looking straight
across at Washington DC. Lee, who had been a general in the Union Army before
the Civil War, was probably the highest ranking military man to defect to
the Confederacy.  (His wife was also the grand-daughter of George and
Martha Washington.)  After Lee’s defection, the Union Army sent troops
to occupy his homealong with all its extensive pastures and other landholdings.  In
1864, the US government expropriated the land from the Lee family.  By
that time the dead from the war were becoming very numerous.  The Union
generals transformed much of the Lee land into a vast war cemetery, burying
the dead right up to the edge of the family home of the man they blamed most
for the prolongation of the rebellion and the terrible, continuing toll of
the fighting.

So here’s my plan.  Maybe the best reproach for this present war would be for
the next US administration to acquire land right up to the door of George
W. Bush’s family home on Prairie Chapel Road, in Crawford, Texas, and to
establish there a large and impressive monument of reproach, mourning, and
remembrance.  Or we could have two such monuments: one in Crawford,
and one in
St. Michaels, Maryland, that could take in and engulf the homes there of both Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld.

Of course, Cindy Sheehan and the folks at Camp Casey in Crawford did
a pretty good job last year, in starting to mount a reproach-and-remembrance
memorial there that would surely have caught George Bush’s eye whenever he drove
along Prairie Chapel Road to his “ranch”.  (Look at the second photo
here,
in particular.)

They used crosses… Which is okay as far as it goes, though perhaps a little too theologically specific for the great public monument I envision. I found the empty boots of the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibition very moving. Maybe something could be done along those lines, instead?

But that’s for later.

Cindy and her friends are resourceful and dedicated.  But they are still
just a bunch of under-resourced individuals.  What we need to do, as a citizenry,
is to get our whole national government into the right frame of mind regarding
the war in Iraq.  That means, first and foremost, electing a government
that will undertake
a troop pullout from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.  But it also means, in the years ahead, following that great group
of Vietnam-war veterans who managed to persuade Congress to build a memorial
to their war that was impressive, serious, and non-triumphalistic.  They
got Congress to give them a great location for their memorial, too.  

Probably, on second thoughts, the future Iraq war memorial should be located
on the National Mall in Washington DC.  As near to the White House– or to the Pentagon–
as possible, I say.

But there could still also be additional memorials in Crawford, Texas, and St. Michaels,
Maryland. Just like Robert E. Lee, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should never
be allowed to forget the extent of the losses that their decision to launch
this war has inflicted on the world.

Nir Rosen has a great piece of reporting/reflection about his most recent trip to Iraq in today’s WaPo “Outlook” section. He describes the trip as having taken place “a few weeks back.”
The headline there is simply Iraq is the Republic of Fear. That picks up on something Rosen wrote in the body of the piece. He recalled that “Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq ‘the republic of fear'”… Well, actually it was Kanaan Makiya who coined that term, writing a book by that name that catapulted him to fame, glory, and financial security back in 1990-91.
Makiya subsequently used his considerable public prominence in the US to urge on the (already weighty) pro-invasion lobby. He was one of three Iraqi oppositionists brought into one of those key meetings with Pres. Bush back in 2002.
As Rosen writes, the anti-Saddam dissidents hoped the “republic of fear”

would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

He recalls some of the changes since he first went to Iraq to write about it in the early days after the invasion:

At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military — with its towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad’s streets and its soldiers like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons — seemed overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.
Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

In this piece, as in the long article Nir had in the March-April issue of Boston Review, he delineates the breaking-up of much of Iraqi society into sect-based sub-communities. This time, in even more sickening detail than before.
He writes:

Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn’t unite Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.
During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites’ indifference.
But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad’s Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
This is when sectarian cleansing truly began…

He concludes on a very pessimistic note:

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

Personally, I cannot be so gloomy. Firstly, because I guess by my psychological constitution and my moral-spiritual stance in the world I just am not (and cannot allow myself to be) that gloomy. And secondly because I truly do judge that a lot of the sectarian asabiyeh (sensitivity/ identification) that has arisen in Iraq in the past two years has been deliberately provoked and stoked by the occupation forces… In line with the infamous advice that Washington’s longtime pro-Israeli “Middle East guru” Martin Indyk gave back in April 2003, when he said publicly that the administration would have to play the imperialists’ traditional game of “divide and rule” in Iraq if it was to have any hope of “winning” there.
So if a lot of the inter-group hatred inside Iraq has indeed been stoked and provoked by the occupation forces and their more shadowy interventionist wings, then once the occupation ends, surely that stoking will also end?
Yes, it is true that inter-group hatred, once stoked, can all too easily acquire a life and cyclical dynamic of its own. It can’t “simply” be turned off– far less reversed. But in the absence of having the imperial (oh sorry, “occupation”) power always there, whispering fear-talk into people’s ears, and offering and making good on deliveries of lethal weapons to all sides, then at least there is more hope for an intentional message of national unity and national reconciliation to receive a decent hearing.
Also, if none of the people and leaders can any more harbor the hope that they can launch their own sectarian adventures while also receiving some protection from that outside power, then there is more chance that all Iraqis can sit down together and figure out more realistically how to deal with each other, with none of them any more relying on outsiders to put a finger on the scales in their support…
So though I have enormous respect and admiration for Nir Rosen, and feel quite confident that he was writing the truth of the situation in Iraq exactly as he saw it– still, I have also lived through and seen situations in which apparently deep-seated hatreds and cycles of violence have been overcome and transcended through the application of smart and compassionate policies of national unity. South Africa is one great example– how many of us, seeing the terrible inter-communal violence back in the 1980s, did not expect a continuation/exacerbation of the bloodbaths there? Mozambique is another. Lebanon, in its own quirky and radically unfinished way, is yet another. (How many people could have expected a Maronite-Sunni alliance such as we see today, or an Aounist-Hizbullah alliance, or indeed any of the literally scores of unlikely political configurations the country has seen since 1975? And still, there, none of the political forces has ever given any serious thought to the idea of secession… )
But anyway, my disagreement with Nir is mainly on the pessimism and fatalism of his prognosis. As for the observations and analysis in today’s article– why, everyone should rush to read them.

Last November, there was an incident in the western-Iraq town of Haditha in which one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. The next day, the New York Times reported this:

“The Marine Corps said Sunday that 15 Iraqi civilians and a marine were killed Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad….The bombing on Saturday in Haditha, on the Euphrates in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, was aimed at a convoy of American marines and Iraqi Army soldiers, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman. After the explosion, gunmen opened fire on the convoy. At least eight insurgents were killed in the firefight, the captain said.”

That story from Capt. Pool was not challenged in the US MSM until March, when Time magazine ran a story– based on video footage shot by a local journalism student and testimony from the townspeople– that said that most or all of the Iraqi casualties had been killed in cold blood, and that none of them were “insurgents”.
The Time story provoked a serious investigation of the incident by the Marine Corps command. Today, Ellen Knickmeyer writes in the WaPo that,

Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation..
An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.
“Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.

I agree with AP’s Robert H. Reidwho today wrote that the charges likely to be brought against the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre, “could threaten President Bush’s effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.”
A number of commentators are comparing the expected effect of the full revelation of what happened in haditha to either the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, or the revelations about the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse in Iraq. However, in May-June 2006, the Bush administration starts out with the domestic and global assessments of its project in Iraq already far more negative than they were at the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004.
Therefore, the Haditha revelations, as they are fully made, could well turn out to be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” of US resolve to stay in Iraq. This, even though it is not clear to me that what happened in Haditha that day is necessarily the worst atrocity committed by the US forces in Iraq. How about the actions committed in Fallujah, or Ramadi, or Tel Afar?
The Haditha massacre seems to have had the same psychological dynamic as the Jenin Camp massacre committed by the IOF in April 2002. In both cases, the occupation force had suffered some casualties at the hands of resisters and then went on a rampage of bloody retribution against the local population. Military forces that go on rampages are generally something commanders want to avoid– not only because it riles the local public and helps keep the flames of resistance burning, but also because such incidents signal a dangerous lack of discipline among the troops.
That AP piece reports that, “U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force ‘only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful.'”
Isn’t it about 38 months too late to deliver that message at this point?
Anyway, huge kudos to John Murtha and to all who have worked hard to uncover the facts about Haditha, to keep this issue alive, and to hold accountable those responsible… Perhaps in this case, as at Abu Ghraib, “those responsible” should include an American political leadership that used an inappropriately composed and inadequately trained military force to launch a gratuitous aggression against a foreign country, and then left those soldiers and Marines there for three-plus years without generating any effective plan for how to deal with the predictable local opposition to the occupation, or how to change the political dynamic and get the troops out.
No wonder some of those Marines were pissed-off, or just plain flat-out scared. If I were under the orders of this Commander-in-Chief I would be really scared, too.
Every month the occupation force stays will see the chance of another one, or two, or three Hadithas.
How can we risk that?
Get out now, before the rot sets in even deeper!
The Bush administration should announce immediately that it intends to have all US and “coalition” forces out of Iraq by the end of October. Then the planning and negotiation for that necessary step can begin in earnest.

The narrative that the Bush administration and its apologists have
been trying to peddle regarding Iraq is that a “sovereign” Iraqi
parliament is now in power in Baghdad, and the government confirmed
yesterday by that parliament is now well launched on its task of
restoring peace and order in the country. (And if, um, the Iraqi
government should fail at that– well, that would be their own fault,
wouldn’t it?)

This narrative completely ignores the “elephant in the room” of
Iraqi politics, i.e. the continuing and heavy-handed influence
exercised over the Iraqi parliament and government by US officials,
primarily “Ambassador”– in reality, “Viceroy”– Zalmay Khalilzad.

Indeed, Khalilzad was actually in the chamber yesterday
during the crucial parliamentary session that confirmed PM Maliki’s
(still incomplete) government list. WaPo reporters Nelson Hernandez and
Omar Fekeiki made clear in this
report that Khalilzad was not only present but also helping to
direct and stage-manage events there:

The Iraqi national anthem, “My Homeland,” played in
an endless
loop as politicians slowly gathered. Khalilzad shook hands with Iraqi
leaders as Western security guards looked on.

While a man read a verse from the Koran, Khalilzad talked to
a Sunni leader, then abruptly stood up and left the room. He returned a
few minutes later with Adnan al-Dulaimi and Khalaf al-Elayan, two
leaders of the main Sunni coalition, who both appeared to be reluctant
to attend.

The fact of Khalilzad’s very “active-duty” presence inside the
chamber intrigued me. One of my main points of reference is the
Lebanese parliament, from having watched it throughout many years in
which it was subjected to very heavyhanded interference from (at
different times) both the Syrians and the Israelis.

Throughout all those years one crucial task for the outside
power was to control the outcome of the crucial vote in which the
Beirut parliament elected the country’s president.  It always did
this indirectly, through two main mechanisms:

(1) its complete control over physical access to the
parliament
building, and

(2) reliance on a broad network of allies– whether
ideological allies, or allies-for-hire– from among the body of the
parliamentarians.

In my recollection, not once did the local Syrian (or Israeli)
viceroy ever actually have to go inside the parliamentary chamber
in order to direct developments there.

To do so would, after all, give the lie to the whole “story”
about the independence of Lebanon!

And I imagine the same was true in most of the parliaments of
East and Central Europe during the years of Soviet domination… (I
wonder, too, whether the local South African viceroys would actually go
inside the parliaments of the nominally “independent” Bantistans to
direct crucial political developments there?)

It is blindingly clear to me that the fact that Khalilzad felt
he had to go into the chamber (and not just as a passive
“guest” or “observer”) signals a deep failure of Washington’s political
project inside Iraq. If you look at those two mechanisms of indirect
control of a parliament that I identified above, it is clear that the
US forces have completely control physical access to the Iraqi parliament,
which is located inside the “Green Zone”. But what the US
administrators in Iraq evidently lack is any confidence that the
parliamentarians gathered inside the chamber would, if left alone out
of Khalilzad’s sight, act at his bidding.

That, despite the huge amounts of money the US has always had
available to hand out as bribes to Iraqi political figures!

In Lebanon, throughout the long years of Syria’s overlordship
there, financial incentives were a strong feature of parliament’s
every-six-years “election” of a president. It was quite a common
observation that the Lebanese MPs would be engaging in an elaborate
game of financial “chicken”, since the price paid for each individual
MP’s vote would increase steeply as the Syrians (or in 1982, Israelis)
came close to meeting the number needed for the election to succeed–
but once that number had been reliably reached, the price would
suddenly plummet to zero.

Gosh, playing that game that must have been one of the hardest
and most stressful jobs those MPs ever had to do during their very
lengthy terms in power…

But in Iraq, despite the huge amount of money the US
administrators have available, and the evident current penury of most
Iraqis, Khalilzad can’t even be certain he can reliably line up a
parliamentary vote in the direction he wants without being physically
present inside the chamber?? What is happening here???

(This fact actually gives me cause for some real hope that the
parliament is not going to act as merely a rubber-stamp for the
Bushists’ desires and projects in Iraq…)

Also on the topic of this “elephant” in the Iraqi chamber, I
read with interest this
piece by John Burns in today’s NYT.

He writes that, in contrast with the policy the US
administrators adopted in spring 2005 during the long-drawn-out process
Ibrahim Jaafari went through as he formed the Iraqi transitional
government–

This time, American officials played a muscular
role in
vetting and negotiating over the new cabinet. Dismayed at what they
have described as the Jaafari government’s incompetence, American
officials reversed the hands-off approach that characterized American
policy as Mr. Jaafari formed his cabinet in early 2005.

Then, the policy laid down by John D. Negroponte, President
Bush’s first ambassador to Iraq, now back in Washington as director of
national intelligence, was to respect Iraq’s standing as a sovereign
state, avoiding heavy-handed American interference in the government’s
formation to discourage an attitude of dependence among Iraqi leaders.

During these [current] negotiations, diplomatic sensitivities
were played down as the envoy who succeeded Mr. Negroponte last summer,
Zalmay Khalilzad, acted as a tireless midwife in the birthing of the
new government. An Afghan-born scholar who worked on Iraq policy in
Washington prior to the invasion, Mr. Khalilzad worked closely with Mr. Maliki,
the new prime minister, in reviewing candidates for crucial ministries,
and shuttling between rival Iraqi party leaders in an effort to sign
them up to the American vision of a national unity government.

Um, how about Mr. Maliki’s vision of a national unity government? 
I thought he was the Iraqi Prime Minister??

But what about that “muscular” role? What an interesting choice of
adjective. I’d love to have someone specify more precisely what it
means…

Burns tells us how his unnamed “American officials” view the new
PM.  He writes that they,

privately hailed the transition of
power from Mr. Jaafari to Mr. Maliki. While the two men have similar
political pedigrees — both are members of a Shiite religious party,
Dawa, which was an early opponent of Mr. Hussein, and both fled Iraq in
the early 1980’s to escape a murderous purge of Dawa loyalists —
American officials who have dealt with both men expect Mr. Maliki to
bring to the post a level of competence, decisiveness and
straightforwardness they say was painfully lacking in Mr. Jaafari.


One thing that remains unclear is how much independence Mr.
Maliki will have from attempts to exercise oversight by Mr. Jaafari,
who remains the new prime minister’s political superior as Dawa’s
leader, and who resisted pressures to relinquish the government
leadership for weeks until all but his closest loyalists abandoned him.

Burns is an interesting reporter. He most likely doesn’t know
very much about Iraq at all apart from what the people in the US
administration in Baghdad tell him. But he is well connected to high
officials in the US administration there, and probably reports publicly
on a decent proportion of whatever it is he hears from them.

In that entire article today, he identified not a single
source by name. Instead, in his second paragraph there he indicated
only that it was based on conversations with “a wide range of
[American] officers and diplomats interviewed before Saturday’s
events.”

In his lede (lead paragraph), he conveyed what I read as a sense
among these people that the Bushist project in Iraq might well
fail rather badly over the months ahead:

As Iraq’s new government was announced Saturday,
some senior
American military and civilian officials watched from the sidelines,
apprehensive that they were witnessing what might be the last chance to
save the American enterprise in Iraq from a descent into chaos and
civil war.

Actually, though Burns names none of his sources for this article
by name, it is my assumption that one of the sources was most likely Khalilzad
himself. And if not Khalilzad, then one or more of his high-ranking
aides who were given permission by Khalilzad to speak to him.
I conclude this because there is a classic piece of Washingtonian
rear-end-covering included near the end of the article:

American officials temper their criticism of the
Jaafari
government with an acknowledgment that the Bush administration, with
its early hostility to “nation building” after the 2003 invasion, paid
scant attention to the need to help develop governmental competence,
and say that the past three years were largely squandered as a result.

In other words– if and when the whole US project in Iraq falls
apart disastrously, please don’t blame Khalilzad!

So Iraq has a new government— sort of.
That is, in Baghdad today, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented an intricately negotiated list of 37 government members to the parliament, which then approved it. What the list lacked, however, were names for the two positions most crucial to the wellbeing of the country’s people: Interior Minister and Defense Minister.
Ever since the entry of the US and coalition forces into the country and the accompanying collapse of the Saddamist power structures, the country’s most glaring problem has been the atrocious lack of public security. Without public security, the work of none of the other ministries has any chance of success. Therefore, I would say that until we see ministers in those two still unfilled positions (and I gather there is also a third unfilled position for national security affairs, too?) and moreover, until we see that these ministers and their ministries are capable of doing their jobs and empowered to do them, then the establishment of this “government” has little meaning.
This government, if it is ever to be able to govern Iraq, needs to succeed in addressing four tough challenges:

(1) to broker and then embody a real inter-Iraqi entente on the way the country will be governed;
(2) to codify that entente in a final version of the as-yet-incomplete national Constitution;
(3) to rebuild administrative structures for the ministries and all other government entities that are effective and capable (and preferably also fully democratically accountable– but see below) ; and
(4) to negotiate the modalities of the (preferably very speedy) withdrawal of all foreign forces and to take whatever other actions are needed to guard Iraq’s national sovereignty and independence from outside influence.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the status of the whole discussion in the west about the “democratization” project in Iraq. I have come quite strongly to the conclusion that the way the Iraqis govern themselves is really none of our business. I still feel very satisfied with the way the Allies forces used their occupations of Germany and Japan after World War 2 to help midwife the institution of robust democratic orders in those two countries, and I guess I have hoped that the same might be the case in Iraq.
But there were two crucial differences between those occupations of 1945 and the post-2003 occupation of Iraq:

(1) The broad strategic/historical context those earlier occupations was different. In 1945, the US and its Allies ended up in military control of Germany and Japan at the end of a bitterly fought war in many theaters which had been sparked by the antecedently aggressive and expansionist policies of the Axis powers. But in 2003 it was the US and its Allies which initiated the completely avoidable and gratuitous war which resulted in the US occupation of Iraq. In the present war/occupation, the US has no valid claim to be able to “impose its will” on the people of the occupied country by way of some form of “punishment” for the aggressive actions of their (previous) government.
(2) The policy of “imposed democratization” that the Allies pursued in Germany and Japan in 1945 was embedded in a broader, and very successfully implemented, policy of seeking the rebuilding and rehabilitation of those two societies. In Iraq, there may (or may not) have been some desire on the part of the Bush administration to rebuild and rehabilitate Iraqi society. But if there was such a desire, the actual policies pursued (and the resources deployed) were woefully unequal to the task. Once again, therefore, absent any serious and successful US commitment to the rehabilitation of Iraqi society, the US really loses any claim it might otherwise have had to be able to determine the shape of Iraq’s political future.

For me, therefore, at this time, the issue of Iraqi self-governance trumps the issue of whether Iraq is to be “democratic” or not. Don’t get me wrong. I sincerely hope the country can be democratically ruled, since I am strongly convinced that without having robust democratic governance mechanisms and strong norms of commitment to the democratic resolution of internal differences, then it will be hard for Iraqis to escape from the cycle of violence into which the events of the past three years have pushed them.
But honestly, since I am a citizen of the “occupying country” (okay, actually of two of the occupying countries), I have to say that what the Iraqis do right now is their business. It is none of my business except inasmuch as I can help persuade my government to undertake a withdrawal of its occupation armies from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.
(We also have many very urgent democracy-rebuilding tasks we need to undertake back here in the US… And if we focus our attentions on those more closely, that can have good effects for everyone involved, at home and abroad.)
In line with the above conclusion, I have decided to replace the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter that I used to have up on the sidebar here with an “Occupation of Iraq” counter, that counts the days since the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of the country. I thought I should complement that with an “Occupation of Palestine and Golan” counter, since it is clear that we are talking about the same phenomenon of rule of a territory and its indigenous residents by a foreign military apparatus in both (all) of these cases. As we can see from the counters, after around 200 more days, the US occupation of Iraq will have lasted 10 percent of the time of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Golan.
… So I wish Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki well. I hope most fervently that he and his colleagues can accomplish the four tasks I have described above. And I will follow their efforts with just the same degree of interest in the future.

My distinguished colleague Reidar Visser has a great new piece up on the ‘Open Democracy’ website. It’s titled Iraq’s partition fantasy. It presents– in the form of a strong but measured argument– some of the main themes in his book (which I have not yet finished reading, alas)… These are also themes that JWN readers are probably already familiar with from his comments here and from his other works as cited and linked to here.
What I really like about the new piece are three things: (1) Visser writing in “persuasive/opinion” mode rather than in the dryer tones of a professional historian (though of course he bases his opinions and arguments closely on his histroical and other work); (2) how well he writes these hard-hitting arguments; and (3) that he has put hyperlinks into the text. Yay!
He certainly does make some excellent arguments against the various partitionist “fantasies” suggested by politicians and armchair theorists in the west.
Visser’s book is about the lead-up to the attempt that some Basrawis (people from Basra) made in 1920 to form an indpendent city state– a sister, if you will, to the city-states then emerging all along the southern coast of the nearby Persian/Arabian Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Umm al-Qawain, Ras al-Khaima, etc etc. Certainly, compared with many of those “Imaras”– princedoms– Basra was much larger, more prosperous, and more populous… So it wasn’t prime facie a crazy idea. But it never went anywhere… And Visser’s book traces that whole story.
(I am really enjoying reading it. I love closely textured histories that have such a wealth of ethnographic and socio-political detail along with the diplomatic/administrative history.)
So anyway, in the OD piece, Visser looks at current developments– and proposals– in light of that history from 1920.
He writes:

Continue reading “Visser on Iraq-splitting plans in ‘Open Democracy’”

I’ve been a little AWOL here recently in commenting on political developments inside Iraq. I guess once the US machinations against Daawa/Sadr were rebuffed I figured that that was one significant watershed, and that Nuri al-Maliki’s subsequent work of government formation would be almost impossible to follow from a distance.
I do, however, have a couple of questions that I need answers to. And I invite readers to help us all find answers!
The first question is this: Even if supposing Maliki is able to pull together a coalition of government ministers that can win a robust majority in the parliament (not terribly difficult)– will it actually be able to govern the country?
I see two main problems in this regard: first, the still heavy hand of the US occupation presence throughout the country, including inside most of the important ministries; and second, the extreme degradation of the administrative and other capabilities of the ministries that has occurred under the US occupation to date. (Obviously, those two problems can’t be completely disaggregated.)
For example, if you’re even something as innocuous (and necessary) as the Minister of Agriculture, and you want to make sure that farmers are getting everything they need in terms of seeds, credit, fertilizers, marketing help, veterinary services, etc– well, how on earth do you do it unless you have a functioning ministry, the ability to communicate with all the parts of the country, reliable procurement mechanisms, etc etc?
… And my second big question is this: If, as is expected, Maliki announces his government over the weekend, do I take the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter down off the sidebar here at that point, or wait a bit before deciding that?
I guess this latter judgment has to do with whether I judge that the government has sufficient democratic legitimacy for me to take the counter down, or not. The whole concept of the counter was based on the judgment I’d make back in December that the vote then, though flawed, did have sufficient bona fides to be counted as democratically legitimate. (As I have written before in connection with developments in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in the context of a complex political transition what one is looking for is not a completely perfect election but one that is sufficiently free and fair.)
Anyway, regarding the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter, after I put up here in early 2005, during the complicated post-election negotiations that led to Ibrahim Jaafari’s formation of a broad “transitional government”– as soon as he had formed it, I took the counter down. I gave him the benefit of the doubt at that point, really.
But this time, the situation is more serious. This government is supposed to be “the real thing”: Iraq’s real, full-term, and presumably fully empowered national government. Not a “transitional” government any more.
But how fully empowered will it be in practice? (See my first question above.)
The views of readers on these points are very welcome…
Meanwhile, let’s all just note that it is now 154 days— just about five months– since the December 15 election. Given the decisive nature of the results of the election, coalition formation absolutely need not have lasted more than one month. So Amb. Zal Khalilzad’s machinations have robbed the Iraqis of four months of self-government already. And it is not just that those “stolen” four months were neutral ones for Iraqis. Indeed, nearly the whole of the past five months has seen a ghastly exacerbation of insecurity throughout the country…
End the occupation and all its machinations! Bring the US troops home!

Ellen Knickmeyer has a piece in today’s waPo that I simply have to draw attention to.
The article is about a network of ill-supervised forces that together make up the Facilities Protection Service (FPS), which she describes as the government’s largest paramilitary force, with 145,000 armed men and no central command, oversight or paymaster.
The FPS was first established by Viceroy Paul Bremer (remember him?) back in September 2003, with the mission of guarding Iraqi government facilities.
That was, of course, some five months after the US troops had stood idly by while just about every Iraqi government ministry, hospital, museum etc was subjected to top-to-bottom looting by private bands of miscreants. (Oh, with the exception of the Oil Ministry, which somehow the US forces did see fit to guard.)
But what’s interesting is how Knickmeyer describes what the FPS has become since September 2003:

Although the FPS guards are not police officers, they were allowed to wear variations of the blue uniform of Iraqi police. Many witnesses and survivors of death squad-style attacks have said the assailants were dressed in police uniforms.
FPS guards often are seen roaming Baghdad’s streets, holding Kalashnikov assault rifles and crowded into the backs of pickup trucks, some marked with insignia of the FPS or of the various government ministries they serve.
Increasingly, U.S. and Interior Ministry officials describe the FPS units as militias, each answering only to the ministry or private security firm that employs it.

As I read her piece, the way that it seems to work is this. Each Iraqi government ministry (and perhaps other government entities, as well) has to put out a contract for its own security. These contracts are placed with what she describes as “private security companies”, which then hire and organize that ministry’s FPS units.
Are the “private security companies” in question Iraqi-owned and run? Or are they owned and run American, British, South African, Israeli, or other foreign “experts” in this field? She doesn’t say.
But what does seem clear is that– in addition to the huge (and notably unsuccessful) efforts the occupation authorities have put into trying to recruit, train, and organize new army and police units for the still-weak Iraqi “government”–the occupation authorities have also been helping to pump arms and money into a large number of FPS units that come under the supervision of “private security companies” (i.e. companies of mercenaries.)
And the funds for these most likely come from the “budgets” of the ministries concerned.
And the result is to establish a large number of parallel and unsupervised mercenary-led forces inside the country.
Does anybody wonder why the “security” situation in occupied Iraq is so shockingly bad?
Does anybody wonder why the Iraqi “government ministries” are unable to accomplish very much of anything at all?
I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked by reading this story. But I was. I had heard of the FPS before, of course; but I’d sort of kept it in mind that it was just one or two forces of “tribal” irregulars who were being paid (or, paid off) to provide security along some isolated lengths of national pipeline somewhere… No big deal.
But the FPS phenomenon is a much bigger deal than that. The way Knickmeyer describes it, every government ministry has one of these things– in other words, they’re operating inside heavily built up areas. And they’re each being run separately, and being run by mercenary security companies…
Maybe this is the ultimate in the neocons’ plan to destroy any concept of a functioning national government for Iraq. I just hope the anti-occupation forces in Iraq are strong and well-organized enough to be able to put an end to this immoral and violence-sowing occupation regime as soon as possible.