Category: Iraq-2006-Q2

I can’t decide whether I find it truly pathetic or quite criminal that US commanders in Baghdad are still– three years after invading Iraq– being described by reporters as trying to teach their troops a few of the fundamentals of waging war in built-up areas.
I mean honestly, how many times have reporters told and retold this exact same story (different general being brown-nosed to) over the past three years?
This, from the LA Times’s James Rainey today:

Some American troops in Iraq have been their “own worst enemy,” unintentionally creating new insurgents by treating the Iraqi people in a heavy-handed or insensitive manner, according to the U.S. commander in charge of day-to-day military operations.
Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, in a weekend training session with troops and in an interview afterward, said he found a need to reemphasize to soldiers that they must use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect, in part because the insurgency has persisted and grown.

Actually, that reasoning is flawed. They should “use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect” because it is the right thing to do, because it is (or should be) in line with their professional values and training, and because they are obligated by the laws of war to do so…
Oh, and as a side-benefit of doing so, they might find it helps their ability to contain the insurgency?
Actually, it is probably ways too late for anything the US troops do in Iraq to make any scintilla of difference to the political outcome. Though they do have the capability to inflict considerable additional suffering on Iraqi families and should certainly be prevented from doing so.
Borzou Daragahi, also of the LAT, had an intriguing piece in the paper over the weekend titled, Iraq’s Shiites Now Chafe at American Presence, Perceived U.S. missteps, a torrent of angry propaganda and the sect’s new political sway have fused to turn welcomers into foes.
The whole of that piece is worth reading. It starts:

A visitor need not go far or search hard to hear and see the anti-American venom that bubbles through this ancient shrine city, which once welcomed U.S. forces as liberators.
“The American ambassador is the gate through which terrorism enters Iraq,” says a banner hanging from the fence surrounding the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, among the most revered martyrs of the Shiite Muslim faith.
… For three years, most of Iraq’s Shiites welcomed — or at least tolerated — the U.S. presence here. In the weeks immediately after the American-led invasion, the mothers and sisters of Saddam Hussein’s Shiite victims clutched clumps of dried earth as they wept over mass graves and thanked God for ending their oppression.
The Shiite acceptance of an American presence allowed troops to concentrate on putting down the insurgency in western Iraq, which is led by Sunni Muslim Arabs. With the exception of an uprising in mid-2004 by followers of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, the south has been relatively quiet and peaceful under the sway of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
But now the mood has shifted. Perceived American missteps, a torrent of anti-U.S. propaganda and a recently emboldened Shiite sense of political prowess have coalesced to make the south a fertile breeding ground for antagonism toward America’s presence…

I have been writing about the likelihood of this happening for, h’mm, three years or more at this point. Lt.-Gen. Chiarelli and his officers may want to go back and read what I was writing, for example, here, in May 2003.
There, I was looking at the way that the Shiites in South Lebanon gradually shifted from being general supporters of Israel’s military invasion of their country in 1982 to being militantly anti-Israeli just– er– three years later…
Not a bad piece, though I say it myself…
Looking at the prospects of radical change in the US-Shiite relationship in Iraq, I wrote there:

of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?

Hey, it still seems like a good idea.
Even better: Don’t go invading and threatening other countries in the first place! Please!!!

Les Gelb, the former President of the influential, New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, has long been an active supporter of splitting up Iraq into three mini-states. In November 2003, he produced this plan for Iraq, called The Three-State Solution. (You now have to pay gobs of money to read it on the NYT’s website there, which is a pity. But commenting on it on JWN at the time, I described it as “almost lunatic and extremely dangerous.”)
Juan Cole’s reaction to Gelb’s partitionist proposal at that time was very similar:

the idea is frankly dangerous. All we need is to have the Iraqi nationalists convinced we intend to break up their country. That will produce more blown-up US troops, God forbid.

Well, times change, eh?
Yesterday, Juan picked up his own red pencil, and going one step further than the British administrator of Iraq, Sir Percy Cox, did in 1922 he decided to redraw a bunch of boundaries inside Iraq.
He wrote:

Personally, I am against breaking up Iraq. I don’t think it is more unworkable than Nigeria or Lebanon. [Last sentence not exactly clear? ~HC] And, the consequences are unforeseeable and potentially very, very dangerous.
I do, however, believe that the tendencies toward separatism must be recognized and managed.
I say that we make 5 superprovinces: Deep South, Middle Euphrates, Baghdad, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan, along with two smaller ethnic enclaves, of Turkomanistan and Chaldeanistan in the north. Bear with me…

Turkomanistan? Chaldeanistan? What on earth has he been smoking?
He then gives us– yes!– his very own map. More colors on it than old Percy ever had! Then he continues by discussing various details of what his plan is, and how to make it work. Along the way, he writes some extremely patronizing and imperialistic things… As in, saying that entering and controlling Kirkuk would be, “a good training wheel mission for the Iraqi army.” (Training wheels, of course, being what parents put on young kids’ bikes when they’re still learning to ride ’em.)… As in, decreeing baldly that, “The Coalition should dictate an oil profit sharing agreement before they go.”…
Well I could go on and on pointing out the follies my esteemed friend in Michigan engages in there. But the fundamental folly, surely, is his assumption that the US government has any right to determine the future shape of governance structures inside Iraq.
Then of course there is also (b), the folly of assuming that the US is still in any way capable of implementing any such scheme.
Today, he was backpedaling a bit. This was in response to yet another partitionist screed from Les Gelb– one in the writing of which Gelb was joined, indeed, by US Senator and long-time presidential wannabe Joe Biden (Democrat, of Delaware).
Yesterday, Juan had described his own proposal as being one for the formation of a bunch of “stans” (which is sort of a buzzword in some US circles for obscure, generally Muslim states located, well, someplace further east over there in Central Asia). Today, he rebranded his proposal, saying it was one for the establishment of “provincial confederacies.” He added:

I do not see them as autonomous as Biden and Gelb propose, and, indeed, I have argued that the federal government should parcel out petroleum income to them in such a way as to bind them to the central state.

Whatever.
Hey Juan, maybe it’s time to sheath the red pencil and start acting a little less like Percy Cox?
Another interesting aspect of this whole story is that finally Les Gelb seems to have been able to persuade Joe Biden (Secretary of State in the next Democratic administration? Joe would love that!) to come on board his partition plan.
One aspect of what they write that I find extremely childish is that they leap right into their article by making a completely unexamined analogy with the situation in another, significantly different part of the world where the US has also in the recent past engaged in imperialistic (though in their view, successful) meddling. Namely, Bosnia.
Let me quote that whole introductory para to their piece:

A decade ago, Bosnia was torn apart by ethnic cleansing and facing its demise as a single country. After much hesitation, the United States stepped in decisively with the Dayton Accords, which kept the country whole by, paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations, even allowing Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies. With the help of American and other forces, Bosnians have lived a decade in relative peace and are now slowly strengthening their common central government, including disbanding those separate armies last year. Now the Bush administration, despite its profound strategic misjudgments in Iraq, has a similar opportunity. To seize it, however, America must get beyond the present false choice between “staying the course” and “bringing the troops home now” and choose a third way that would wind down our military presence responsibly while preventing chaos and preserving our key security goals. The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.

So let’s just glide right over all the atrocities of the ethnic cleansing campaigns by which those “ethnic federations” were created in Bosnia, shall we?
… My friend and esteemed colleague Gary Sick, who’s the Executive Director of the Gulf/2000 Research Listserv and an Adjunct Professor of Middle East politics at Columbia University, has picked up on many problems in the Biden-Gelb proposal in this commentary, which I am putting up on the JWN archive with his permission (and with my thanks to him.)
Gary writes there:

Is Bosnia a fair comparison? There we have a country surrounded by European allies who offer willing cooperation and a per-capita troop level that would make Gen. Shinseki proud. Is it realistic to expect the same in Iraq, which is surrounded by malevolent powers on all sides and plagued with a perpetual troop deficit?
Note that a great deal hinges on what Gelb calls “international police protection.” In other words, we must enlist the United Nations or a coalition of the willing to come in and do what we have been unable to do with our 130,000 troops and $10 billion per month. Is it reasonable to expect that a regional conclave with U.S. (Sunni) allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, U.S. enemies Iran and Syria, plus Turkey, which is preoccupied with the Kurds, will produce a harmonious and enforceable regional compact?
Let’s just imagine that after we adopt a policy of separation under a weak central government, the militias remain vicious, the insurgency accelerates, ethnic cleansing becomes endemic, rights of women and minorities do not improve, and regional powers prove to be more interested in their sectarian interests than in saving Iraq. According to this plan, we have now accepted responsibility for making all of this work. Will we really be better off than we are now?

Good questions, indeed.
…Inside Iraq, meanwhile, there is lots of real, national-level politics going on, as the representatives of all the parties negotiate over how to form what will almost certainly be a government of broad national unity. Beyond that, under PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki it will almost certainly be a government dedicated to maintaining the unity of the country’s administration as far as possible, as well as to negotiating a total and fairly rapid withdrawal of the US troops.
So I guess the pretensions of those Americans inside and outside the Bush administration who want to see the US act in as imperialistic a fashion in Iraq in 2006 as Sir Percy and the British India Office were able to in 1922 will have to come to naught?
Surely, the only “maps” and “red pencils” the US planners will be needing in the months ahead are those that will help them organize the most orderly and efficient form of troop withdrawal… Bring the troops home, and let’s leave Iraq’s future to its own people.

The L.A. Times’s talented Baghdad correspondent Borzou Daragahi wrote me to say it was not true, as I wrote here, that “no-one” in the mainstream media had gotten the story about the impact of Ayatollah Sistani’s re-entry into Iraqi public politics.
He sent me the text of this story, datelined April 28, which he co-authored along with Bruce Wallace and special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf.
They wrote there:

A cleric close to Sistani acknowledged that the statement did signal a new role for the Shiite clergy, that of “monitoring” the performance of the next government and weighing in, perhaps more frequently, on broad policy issues.
“The marjaiyah intends to interfere in some issues,” Sheik Abu Mohammed Baghdadi, a Najaf cleric, said in an interview. “This monitoring and direct interference is an essential matter that has never before been proposed by the clergy. The marjaiyah, through this act, is expressing the voice of the people.”
Sistani’s statement followed a meeting with Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, a conservative Shiite leader. Maliki came to Najaf to solicit Sistani’s views in the midst of efforts to form a government, reinforcing a growing relationship between Shiite politicians in Baghdad and their religious counterparts in Najaf.
Sistani, the most senior of the marjaiyah, the four top Shiite clerics in Najaf, has weighed in on political matters before, notably in 2003 when he demanded that direct elections for a national government be held before a constitution was drafted.
More recently, he criticized the government for its inability to protect Shiite holy sites from a series of bombings by insurgents.
But Sistani’s statement Thursday was among his bluntest and comes at a time of sensitive discussions over the selection of the Iraqi Cabinet and on the status of armed political groups.
“Now we have to go to Sistani,” quipped Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab lawmaker. “What kind of democracy is this?”
… In his statement, Sistani called for a government of “qualified figures, technically and administratively, who have integrity and decent reputations” without regard to “personal, party, sectarian or ethnic interests.”
… [I]t was the unusually direct intervention from Sistani that rang loudest here. The cleric, who is regarded as the voice of Shiite moderation, often prefers to exercise his influence through backroom talks.
Last week, Sistani apparently nudged interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari into abandoning his quest to keep the top job in the face of opposition from Sunni Arabs, Kurds and secular politicians.
On Thursday, Maliki emerged from his meeting with Sistani to tell reporters that the cleric had “advised us, as always, to be Iraqis first.”
Maliki also said his government would merge militias into the legitimate state security forces, a proposal that challenges the power of some of his own strongest backers, notably [Muqtada] Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
Maliki and Sadr held a news conference in Najaf on Thursday afternoon in which Sadr denounced the Rice-Rumsfeld visit, calling it “blatant interference in Iraqi affairs.” The cleric repeated his call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq but dodged the question of whether he would disband his own militia, known as Al Mahdi army.
In his statement, too, Sistani derided the U.S. presence, calling for the new government to “work seriously to remove all traces of the occupier.”

Daragahi and his colleagues in the Iraq bureau have been doing some great reporting recently. They seem to have an ability to gather news outside of the US-controlled Green Zone that is notably superior to that of either the WaPo or the NYT.
See, for example, this Daragahi piece from April 29, which is mainly about the inter-party contacts over forming the government.
Or this piece, datelined today, to which Daragahi and unnamed “special correspondents in Baghdad, Najaf and Ramadi” all contributed. Most of this piece is about the “Biden plan”, which I’m planning to blog about next. But at the end, it noted that Sistani had held a meeting (presumably in Najaf) with some leaders from the Turkmen community in the tinder-box northern city of Kirkuk. It says,

Yalmaz Najar, leading the Turkmen group, said after the conference that Sistani had promised to defend the rights of Shiite Turkmens fighting with Kurds for political control of oil-rich Kirkuk.

A fasacinating piece of information. (Though I imagine that for clarity it should have said “fighting against Kurds”? )
Altogether, though, a significant journalistic operation there. Sorry, Borzou, that I’d failed to read that April 28 piece before I posted last week.

Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad, has been putting his own spin on his failure to break the unity of the UIA bloc by speaking to the WaPo’s David Ignatius and claiming it was a victory for his diplomacy, after all.
Ignatius wrote that Khalilzad told him that “the Iranians ‘pressured everyone for [former UIA candidate Ibrahim] Jafari to stay'”, whereas the reputation of the now-confirmed UIA candidate for PM, Nouri (formerly Jawad) al-Maliki is of “someone who is independent of Iran.”
Yeah, right. Whatever. But by casting matters in that light, Zal is able to keep alive his reputation in Washington as someone who– to quote Ignatius– “has been a match for the Iraqis in his wily political wrangling.” As opposed to, for example, being seen as someone who tried hard but failed to break the basic unity of the UIA bloc.
David does concede, however, that, “Maliki is a tough Arab nationalist who will work with the United States in the short run but will want the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq. His authentic Iraqi credentials could help pull the country together.”
Meanwhile, I see that Maliki has faced one challenge already: He had to turn up at a hastily arranged meeting with Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld who “just happened” to make a swing through Baghdad today.
That report, from AP, notes this:

Rumsfeld said the United Nations Security Council resolution that forms the legal basis for U.S. operations to stabilize and rebuild Iraq is to expire at the end of the year so there will have to be talks with the Iraqi government on arrangements beyond this year.

Right. Negotiating the terms and timetable of the US withdrawal from their country really is one of the main responsibilities this new Iraqi government will have. The other two are tying down the last unfinished details of the country’s Constitution— and the small matter of governing the country.
First, though, Maliki has to form his government. I imagine that trying to make sure he understands Washington’s views on that topic was the main reason Condi and Rummy rushed over so fast to meet him.

I wanted to wait till I’d read Reidar Visser’s book on the pursuit and failure of a project for south-Iraqi separatism in the early 1920s, before I posted a short review here of it.
But here I am, stuck in Philadelphia airport in a rainstorm, forced to wait for a flight home tomorrow, work schedule unavoidably postponed… So I thought I’d post the links to the book for y’all here, at least. And then later, after I get reunited with the copy of the book that he sent me, and that’s sitting at my home back in Virginia, and get back into reading it– then, I can write something substantive here about it.
What’s most interesting about the book, from a current-affairs perspective, is that what Reidar’s writing about is an earlier attempt to form a separate, Shiite-dominated, south-Iraqi state– and about its failure.
I am eager to get to the point in his narrative where he describes the denouement there: Why did the attempt fail? But sadly, here I am, stuck in a rainbound airport and separated from the book.
So anyway, go buy your own copy! Here, depending where you live, is how:
— American Amazon
— British Amazon
— German publisher (English-language text)

The excellent and careful Norwegian historian of modern Iraq Reidar Visser has just produced an extremely helpful analysis of the evolution of the concept of the centralized Iraqi state as it developed in the post-Ottoman era… and he continues this analysis right through the the post-2003 era, concluding with some references to the views of PM-designate Jawad al-Maliki on the topic.
In current (post-March 2003) Iraqi politics this issue has assumed particular importance because of the strong preference of the country’s US occupiers (and also the two makor Kurdish parties) for a radical decentralization and geographic devolution of governing authority in Iraq– a project to which many US analysts misleadingly give the name “federalization”.
In support of this decentralization/devolution project, many commentators have alleged that the entire construct of “Iraq” was a purely manufactured creation of the British– and that therefore there is something “natural”, appropriate, and almost inevitable about the deconstruction of that state.
I note that this argument about the “artificiality” of colonial-era boundaries is one that could– potentially– be applied to states in many parts of the world, perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. (Oh, also the United States and if you think about it, just about every state in the world…) But nowhere else that I know has this argument been used so insistently, as it has with reference to Iraq, to try to justify the radical deconstruction of a central state.
Anyway, into this discussion, Visser is now injecting a much-needed degree of solidly informed historical realism.
He writes:

anyone who researches primary materials from the early 1900s soon understands that it is impossible to deny the existence of Iraq as a geographical and social–historical category at the time. For “Iraq” is simply omnipresent in those sources. Foreign consuls, be they Persians or British, would write about “Iraq”. Ottoman administrators, from the sultan’s advisors down to office clerks in the central registries for state correspondence, referred to “Iraq” as a familiar category which required no further explanation. Not least, people living on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris spoke of an area they knew as Iraq. In Basra in 1910, the municipality agreed on a proposal to erect a statue of the Ottoman statesman Midhat Pasha (1822–1883), to keep alive the memory of “his many services to Iraq” in the 1860s and 1870s.
There is little doubt that some kind of Iraq existed, and that this concept was intelligible to ordinary people. Both Sunnis and Shiite Muslims used it to refer to the combined area of the Ottoman vilayets of Basra and Baghdad, at least north to Samarra. To what extent the popularity of the concept abated further north is a moot point. Some local writers had used expressions like “the Kurdish tribes among the people of Iraq” as early as in the nineteenth century (this would seem to imply that the concept was indeed in use north of Samarra as well); the Ottomans, on the other hand, except for a brief interlude in the early Young Turk period, maintained a distinction between an “Iraq” consisting of Basra and Baghdad and the area to the north which was mostly denoted through its administrative name, the province of Mosul. At any rate it is clear that the standard depiction of Iraq as something that was created by the British from scratch – without any pre-modern roots and essentially forced on the local population – is untenable. The British role was mainly to join Mosul to the two provinces of Basra and Baghdad, whose inhabitants for their part were already familiar with a larger concept of Iraq.
In its most vulgar form, the “constructivist” interpretation of modern Iraq has become allied to an even more problematic ethno-religious caricature map of the country. Mosul, it is claimed, was “Kurdish”; Baghdad, “Sunni Arab”; Basra, “Shiite Arab” or even “Shiite, with a strong orientation towards Persia”. Such models are another unfortunate side effect of twenty-first–century journalism being projected onto atlases of the past. They overlook the fact that the provincial border between Basra and Baghdad was located far south towards the Gulf (it ran eastwards from Nasiriyya to Amara), so that the majority of Shiite Muslims in the area were in fact residents of the province of Baghdad. Similarly, Mosul was highly complex in terms of ethnicity, with large groups of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens, Yazidis and Christians alongside the Kurds. But if this complexity is overlooked, the “artificiality” thesis perpetuates itself: cross-regional cooperation, if taken note of at all, is dismissed as the result of outsiders employing brute force against a population which for their part are portrayed as being locked in internecine antagonisms, unable to conceive of any sort of shared super-regional identity.

I would argue, moreover, that this tendency by many western writers to think of the different “ethnic” and or religious/denominational groupings within Iraq as being locked into internecine antagonism derives from the west-European experience of states having been generally been either created and conceived of along strictly mono-ethnic lines. People who conceive of states in this way find it hard even to imagine states that are formed on multi-ethnic lines. They tend to essentialize ethnicity as an immutable attribute of human experience/practice and to imagine that the world’s different ethnicities must always be competing against each other in one way o0r another…
Visser writes about the decision of the British colonial administrators, who after WW1 had been “awarded” (or, had grabbed) the area of Iraq and ruled it under a League of Nations “mandate”, to create a single, unitary state comprising the previously existing Ottoman regions of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. He notes– and this is of some wry significance today– that one of the goals of the British administrators in doing this was to dilute the influence that the country’s quietly powerful Shiite clerics could exert over its governance…
He notes the determination with which the British pursued their project of creating a unitary state for the whole area (including Mosul), and also the fact that the British used military force including aerial bombardment in their pursuit of it.
He adds this:

Continue reading “Iraqi state centralism historically and for Jawad al-Maliki”

So it is Jawad al-Maliki as UIA nominee. He is a Daawa person.
I’ve been traveling and busy for the past 48 hours. I flew back into Philadelphia yesterday, from Amman. I’m here in Philly for a meeting today, then back home to Virginia tonight.
When I posted here Thursday, I wrote, ” if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy.”
Okay, so Jaafari stepping down was not as “remote” a possibility as I had thought… But Daawa has still won the big battle of wills against Talabani and the Americans.
On Juan Cole’s blog today, he has an amazing collection of links, extracts from documents, and fulltext translations of documents related to Maliki’s nomination, and the reaction of various Iraqi parties to it. His putting these materials up into the public blogosphere is a real service to all of us who seek informed discussion of events there.
On another note, I saw before I left Amman yesterday that the “Iraqi religious leaders gathering” they’d been planning there, for today, has been postponed. Understandably, given the close involvement of many of those religious leaders in Iraq’s political affairs.
I gotta run. I do have one more thing I want to post here before I go off to my meetings. I’ll try to write some more commentary on the Maliki nomination a little later over the weekend.

In Iraq, it looks as though the Jaafari-Sadr bloc within the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) now seems poised, fnally, to cement its victory in the political battle against the US machinators. That, at least is my reading of what Juan Cole was writing very early today— especially in his commentary on this article in today’s Az-Zaman.
In this context, it occurs to me that the nasty street battles in the Baghdad district of al-Adhamiyeh may just be a fizzling reaguard attempt at divide-and-rule between Sunnis and Shiites, undertaken by (or at the very least, enthusiastically stoked by) the US military authorities as they face the possibility that at the political level inside Iraq they are about to lose their campaign to prevent the Jaafari-Sadr bloc from taking power?
Muqtada Sadr is, of course, a longtime bete noire for the Americans, and continues to be one because of his insistence on seeing a speedy withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq– a program in which Jaafari has reportedly joined him and that has apparently received the strong but quiet backing of the leading Shiite religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The broader Shiite parliamentary bloc, the UIA, is reportedly meeting in Baghdad this morning, and will there decide whether to attend the parliament session scheduled for this afternoon.
In order for Iraq to have a government at this point, under the Constitution adopted last October the following needs to happen:

(1) The Assembly elected Dec 15– 126 days ago!– needs to convene, and to elect a Speaker and two deputy speakers. The Assembly thus becomes duly constituted.
(2) The duly constituted Assembly then needs to elect a President (and some vice-presidents?) by a 2/3 majority.
(3) Within 15 days thereafter, the President names the “nominee” of the largest bloc within the Assembly to be the PM.
(4) The PM-designate then has 30 days to assemble a government and define its program, before which deadline he (or she) needs to present both the government list and the program to the Assembly and win a simple-majority vote for their approval.

The Zaman report says that the major parties have now agreed on the candidates to put forward for the first of these steps. As Juan translates it, the final agreement on the list has not been reached, but the Sunni “Iraqi Accord Front” has put forward two (alternate) candidates; the Kurdish Alliance has put forward one; and the UIA has put forward three (alternates). Basically, though, it seems the major issues in this political step have now been resolved.
Basic agreement seems also to have been reached regarding step 2, the designation of the President and the Vicer-Presidents. As Juan writes, quoting Az-Zaman:

[UIA spokesman, Sami] Al-Askari alleges that the United Iraqi Alliance has dropped its earlier opposition to Tariq al-Hashimi, and is now sanguine about his running for vice president. The Shiite UIA candidate will be Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
(Cole: I presume that the reemergence of al-Hashimi comes because he has dropped his opposition to Jaafari as prime minister. Al-Hayat says that Dulaimi admitted that the Sunnis of the Iraqi Accord Front had offered to drop al-Hashimi’s candidacy if the Shiites would drop Jaafari. But it was the Shiites who had the upper hand, and they forced al-Hashimi out to make a point, without giving up anything at all. The Shiites played hard ball on this one).

Quoting Sami al-Askari– who is also a UIA MP– Juan continues:

He said that Iyad Allawi, the secular ex-Baathis Shiite and former interim PM, had no luck in his bid to become a vice president, given these party decisions.
He said that the Dawa Party [which had earlier indicated that it might consider alternatives to Jaafari] met on Wednesday and took a final decision to back Jaafari for prime minister.

And then, here comes something particularly crucial… Ever since Dec. 15, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani has been the spearhead of the internal Iraqi opposition to Jaafari’s nomination. Indeed, throughout the past four months it’s been hard to say who’s been using whom in the anti-Jaafari campaign, between Talabani and the Americans. Talabani’s opposition to Jaafari has been based on the latter’s reported insistence that Iraq’s internal boundaries not be redrawn in such a way as to give the large, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Kurdish Regional Government…
But now, it seems, the Jaafari-Sadr bloc has been able to win out not only over Allawi (who these days is a political lightweight in Iraq, anyway), but also over Talabani. And this, because of the constitutional provision that requires Talabani to get a 2/3 majority in order to win the state presidency that he evidently covets.
Juan continues his rendering of the Zaman piece thus:

Al-Askari said that the United Iraqi Alliance will do a deal with Jalal Talabani, who wants to be president. Talabani needs a 2/3s majority in parliament to become president, and cannot get it without the United Iraqi Alliance, which has 128 [of the 275] members and has 4 other MPs who have announced that they will vote with it. Al-Askari says that the UIA will only pledge to support Talabani if he retracts his opposition to Jaafari.
(Cole: The Shiite fundamentalists are in striking distance of having a simple majority in parliament, and are much more united, despite some frictions, than their opponents. It was always the case that if they maintained their unity, they would be able to impose their will with regard to the incumbents of high political positions. The attempt made by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and former interim PM Iyad Allawi to marshall the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites against Jaafari appears to have been defeated, by simple steadfastness on the part of the UIA.)

Actually– and this is me, Helena, now– Zal Khalilzad’s attempt was broader than that: he was openly trying to split the UIA down the middle and build up supprt within it for Adel Abdul-Mahdi as the PM candidate. But he failed miserably, winning only three open expressions of opposition to the Jaafari candidacy from all those 128 UIA MPs.
H’mm, those three pro-US “heroes”, whose defections from the pro-Jaafari camp were breathlessly reported by the US media just 2-3 weeks ago, have been staying remarkably quiet recently…
So yes, it has been the UIA’s remarkable defense of its internal unity that has been decisive. As for the success of the Jaafari nomination in the Assembly, it requires of course only 138 votes. The non-UIA parties are not nearly as united as the UIA, and I have always been confident that if the UIA could remain substantially united– as it has– then it would have no trouble finding the other 10 votes of support that it needs. I believe Mithal al-Alusi, a respected political indpendent, has already promised his support.
Also, as Juan notes, once Jaafari becomes reinstated as PM, he’ll have a huge budget (= jobs, patronage) to control, so members of many parties will be lining up to join his government.
… Well, if the political knots over Tarek al-Hashemi and Jalal Talabani’s nominations have really been resolved as per Sami al-Askari’s reported comments, then we could see pretty rapid progress toward formation of a Jaafari-led government. However, even if Jaafari in person is not reconfirmed as PM, I think it has been demonstrated pretty clearly that the balance of political power within the UIA remains strongly with the Daawa-Sadr bloc rather than with SCIRI and the pro-Americans inside the UIA… So even if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy.
Which raises the nasty prospect that the US-stoked violence in Adhamiyeh might not be the last attempt at stoking such violence?
Indeed, as Dahr Jamail has noted, the US policy of stoking/enabling sectarian violence to occur, and then offering to step in to the victimized community to help “root out the troublemakers” does sound awfully like a cheap mafia proitection racket, doesn’t it? (Hat-tip to Today in Iraq for that link.)
… All of which makes me really glad that no less a figure than Muqtada Sadr is expected to come here to Jordan for Saturday’s “religious reconciliation in Iraq” meetings that are being convened by King Abdullah with backing from the Arab League.
From the few interactions I’ve had with Jordanians here– mainly professors– I would say there is some serious concern among at least those non-governmental Jordanians that the Shiite Iraqis are somehow “not Arab”, or even that they are all “Iranians”. This is very similar to the anti-Shiite propaganda that was stoked by Saddam Hussein in his time, and if you read the comments that Zeyad of Healing Iraq reported, from “people in the street” in Adhamiyeh in recent days, it also seems pretty widespread there, too.
Jordan, like most other Arab countries, has a strong majority of Sunnis in its national population (and almost 100% of its Muslims are Sunnis). In fact, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon are the only three Arab countries that have a majority of Shiites among their Muslim populations. Anyway, amongst many– but notably not all– Sunni Arab communities and individuals there is considerable distrust of Arab Shiites as conmstituting some kind of possible “fifth column” for an Iranian influence that is seen by many ethnic Arabs as threatening and, well, “different”.
Muqtada Sadr is a clearly Arab and very strongly Iraqi-nationlist Shiite political leader. That’s why it’s good that he is coming to Jordan, and I hope he can do something to reassure Jordanians and other Sunni Arabs that they and their Sunni co-believers inside Iraq have little to fear from the Sadr-Jaafari alliance.
Interestingly, Ayatollah Sistani had been the main Iraqi Shiite personality invited to attend. He sent his regrets– and may well have given his imprimatur to Muqtada’s plan to come, instead. I imagine Sistani is very, very wary of leaving Iraq at this time. The last time he left it– for “heart treatment” that the British doctors said he really needed to have– was in August 2004; and on that occasion the US and UK forces took the opportunity to launch an attack against Muqtada’s forces… Better to stay at home in Najaf this time round, I think…

At the UNU reception here yesterday, my Afghan-Australian colleague Amin Seikal made a comment that I found very thought-provoking though it’s probably something other people have thought a lot more about previously, than I have. We were talking informally about Iraq. (This was shortly after my lengthy, canapé-balancing chat with Queen Noor.) Anyway Amin and I were talking about best-case and worst-case scenarios for the upcoming US withdrawal from Iraq…
He said that the Bushites were presumably looking for a withdrawal with some shred of honor. I said they would more likely, at this point, be looking for a withdrawal in which the degree of dishonor was minimized. He said, “Yes, we should be looking most closely at the analogy with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan– not at Vietnam.”
The Soviet army first went into Afghanistan in force in December 1979. This, from Wikipedia, about the events that led up to their withdrawal nearly a decade later:

Informal negotiations for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had been underway since 1982. In 1988, the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the United States and Soviet Union serving as guarantors, signed an agreement settling the major differences between them known as the Geneva accords. The United Nations set up a special Mission to oversee the process.
In this way, [Soviet puppet PM Mohammad] Najibullah had stabilized his political position enough to begin matching Moscow’s moves toward withdrawal. On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced.
Among other things the Geneva accords identified [mandated? ~HC] the U.S. and Soviet non-intervention with internal affairs of Pakistan and Afghanistan and a timetable for full Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989.
Just over 15,000 Soviet troops were killed from 1979 through 1989, in addition to many hundreds of vehicles and aircraft destroyed/shot down. An estimated one million Afghans died as a result of the invasion during this period.

Not all was roses, of course, after that withdrawal– either for Afghanistan or for the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, the attempts to build a stable government all faltered; the country collapsed into terribly damaging civil war; and the “victorious” west just abandoned it and allowed it to continue on the downward spiral that eventually resulted in the Taliban coming in and being seen by many Afghan nationals as a force that could at least bring an end to the rampant warlordism throughout the country…
And for the Soviet Union, the puncturing of the Soviets’ regime pride in Afghanistran, as well as the massive drain that the hopeless war had constituted on the Soviet budget, both alike contributed the further unraveling of Soviet power, and the the dismantling first of all of the Warsaw Pact (November 1989), and then of the Soviet Union itself, in 1993.
Sic transit gloria mundi. I certainly wish a much better outcome than that for both the Iraqi and the US citizenries. As for the Bushites’ project of extending and maintaining US hegemony over this vital portion of the world– that should be ended as soon as possible.