Category: Iraq-2006-Q2

This is, of course, the kind of question that few in the US public discourse yet dare to ask… (As for me, I’d put it a little differently. I think that a failure of the Bush administration’s project in Iraq could constitute a net victory for the US citizenry, in terms of starting to re-balance our relations with the rest of the world away from imperial hegemony and back towards basic human equality.)
But anyway, how interesting that Roni Bart, an analyst at Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies should be the one now publishing a short analytical paper titled What if the United States fails in Iraq?
Bart judges that:

the specter of failure is there, significantly enhanced by the repercussions from the Samarra bombing. Even if Shiites and Sunnis avoid an all out civil war this time, there is a reasonable chance recurring provocations will, in the end, succeed in undermining the American project in Iraq. It would therefore do well to prepare for a scenario of failure: an American evacuation before the mission is completed, and before Bush vacates the White House in January 20092. True, given the president’s determination such a scenario is highly improbable. Nevertheless, a “what if” speculation is useful in explicating what is at stake.
An evacuation-in-failure could take place due to a protracted political deadlock in Iraq, ongoing guerilla warfare and terror activities with no end in sight, or deterioration into a full scale civil war (perhaps resulting in an increase in American casualties). Such circumstances might force American decision-makers to realize that the mission cannot be achieved and/or that potential fallout, in terms of foreign policy or domestic politics, is too risky. Arguments along these lines are already being made not only by Democrats but also by various Republican groups…

None of this analysis is ‘rocket science’, folks… Bart writes,

Internationally, American stature will suffer. Osama bin Laden will declare victory… Europeans will claim, yet again but with renewed vigor, that their Venus outshines the American Mars; that the American failure in Iraq proves that use of force exacerbates problems rather than solves them; that even as a last resort force must be agreed upon multilaterally by the Security Council; and that such an international consensus, possible only through American patience, might have made the difference in a successful reconstruction of a stable Iraq. A failure in Iraq will also strengthen the balancing-containing-obstructionist attitude of Russia and China vis-à-vis the United States. American prestige will hit a new low; American ability to deter might be undermined, at the very least in cases with potential for long-term military engagement. The United States will be perceived not just as a “Texan cowboy,” but an ineffective one at that. And the weakening in American resolve will project to the world – states and dictators and terrorists – that the United States not only can do less but also wants to do less.

Regarding the implications of an American failure in Iraq for Israel, he writes:

Given that the United States is Israel’s greatest friend and ally, it is safe to say that as a rule, any American failure is bad for Israel. Any global constellation in which the United States is weakened cannot bode well for Israel, because other (strengthened) international actors will be less favorably inclined toward Israel. That said, were the United States to partially disengage due to impatience with Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism (along the lines of Bush’s impatience with Arafat), Israel’s position will be strengthened.
Beyond the immediate Palestinian issue, any American attempt to forge some kind of regional response to a Shiite potential ascendancy and/or to a Sunni terror center will not include Israel. As the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War proved, Israel is perceived as a coalition breaker. Nevertheless, Israel will have to prepare itself for increased security threats, such as a Sunni terror center (with ties to Hamas?) and/or a Shiite-empowered Hizbollah in Lebanon. There may well be ground for covert cooperation with Jordan and Kurdistan against common threats.
The conventional threat posed to Israel by Iraq was removed in 1991; the nuclear one proved to be non-existing. An American failure in Iraq would transform the once ominous “eastern front” from a relatively minor threat to a new source of terror and instability.

Actually there is almost literally nothing new, let alone earth-shaking, here. Bart’s little piece has all the signs of something rushed off at the last minute, under deadline. But still, I find it interesting and noteworthy that the Jaffee Center folks have decided to start thinking and writing about this.
As I wrote elsewhere recently– never mind about the American pols, but I hope to heck the US military has started producing some sensible plans for a speedy and peaceable total evacuation of Iraq, under a number of different but increasingly possible scenarios…

I see from the handy “Democracy denied in Iraqi” counter here that 118 days have now passed since the much-vaunted Iraqi parliamentary election of December 15.
It has become clearer and clearer to me over recent weeks that the major cause of the political impasse that has brought so much uncertainty and violence to the country since then has been the anti-democratic meddling of the machinators of the US occupation force and some of their close political allies within the Iraqi political system. (See e.g., here, here, and here… )
Today, there is news that the acting Speaker of the Parliament, the very venerable Adnan Pachachi, has said he, “will convene the legislature next week to push the formation of a new government that is stalled over who will be prime minister.” Pachachi added, according to that AP report, that “Shiite politicians told him they hope to have the deadlock over the nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari resolved before the session”.
I certainly wish Pachachi well in his efforts. But we need to understand that the big, multi-party Shiite electoral list, the UIA, has thus far stuck firm with its original decision to nominate the current interim PM, Ibrahim Jaafari, to form the new government. That despite huge efforts by President Bush and others to try to scuttle his nomination
Regular JWN readers will know that I’ve been following intra-UIA political developments here for some time– and in a way markedly different from that pursued by most people in the MSM.
Recently, Reidar Visser wrote to me to add some of his own, impressively detailed analysis to what I’d written earlier. He wrote:

In one of your recent posts as well as the Global Policy Forum piece you focus on the combined strength of the Sadrists, i.e. Fadila + Muqtada supporters. This is a highly relevant point, because there are many ideological similarities between the two. But it is worth keeping in mind in this context that in the struggle over the PM nomination, it is the Muqtada faction plus the two Daawa factions that have kept the most unified position. Some leading Fadila members in fact signalled their support for Abd al-Mahdi, although others may also have “defected” (from those “leaders”) during the vote…
It is now rumoured that the Fadila Party have been quite prominent in the wheeling and dealing over government posts (and that they have even toyed with the idea of presenting their own leader, Nadim al-Jabiri, as a compromise PM candidate). If they are this thirsty for office they may well be particularly susceptible to the sort of arm twisting that no doubt is taking place these days. Thus, the Fadila element is probably not an overwhelming anti-Abd al-Mahdi force at the moment, and might conceivably at one point even follow Qasim Dawud’s example. (On the other hand, I have not yet seen any credible reports of the Muqtada supporters and the two Daawa factions reneging on their support for Jaafari. Also I should think that the spiritual leader of Fadila, Muhammad al-Yaqubi, the favourite of Muqtada’s late father, will dislike an ideological sell-out for the sake of positions of power.)

I really appreciate this clarification. Thanks, friend!

Here is Faiza’s description of last month’s Iraqi-US gathering organized by the Global Peace Initiative of Women– that same meeting that I described here and here.

… And talking of “leaked Zarqawi letters”, here’s an interesting story from Sunday’s edition of my old rag the London Sunday Times, talking about the anger of “Israeli military intelligence officials” that people in the Bush administration have publicized a supposed letter to Zarqawi from Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri that the Israelis had given the Americans back in October, on conditions of strictsecrecy…
The reason the Israeli intel people are upset, according to this piece which is bylined Uzi Mahnaimi, is that they fear that publication of the letter will, “undermin[e] their attempts to infiltrate Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq”.
Mahnaimi writes:

Israeli intelligence sources said officials who had worked on “Operation Tiramisu” inside Iraq took emergency steps to protect their sources, but it was not clear how successful they had been in averting the damage to their intelligence network.

H’mm, Israeli intel people running around inside Iraq and in very close contact with some vicious Islamist extremists there… Whatever next?

Thomas Ricks had an interesting piece in yesterday’s WaPo, reporting on some leaks he’d gotten from U.S. Army officers about some PSYOPS (disinformation/ black propagnda) operations that they’d done back in 2004 to try to blacken the name of the possibly mythical Al-Qaeda figure, Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi.
Among the things that at least one officer reported having done, according to the first of these two Power Point stills that someone gave to Ricks, was to make a “Selective leak to [the NYT’s] Dexter Filkins” about Zarqawi, back in February ’04.
Ricks writes,

Filkins’s resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

You can actually still read the Filkins article in question from February 2004. It’s datelined Baghdad.
He wrote there that he’d been shown the Arabic letter in question and an English translation made by the US military, and was allowed to copy down large chunks of the English translation. No indication that he could read the Arabic, or that he was allowed to take his own Arabic translator in there with him…
The gist of the “Zarqawi letter” that Filkins described was– in effect– that Zarqawi was planning to foment a sectarian war. (Gosh, that makes Mr. Z. look rather bad, don’t you think?)
And this– for an administration that was struggling hard to persuade people of the connection between their war in Iraq and the broader “war on terrorism”:

The document would also constitute the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Are we scared yet???
Filkins did retain enough of his reportorial indpendence to write that, in addition to the claims made by his US military contacts that the letter was an “authentic” communication from Zarqawi, “other interpretations may be possible, including that it was written by some other insurgent, but one who exaggerated his involvement.”
He notably didn’t mention the possibility that the whole thing may have been a piece of black propaganda (PSYOPS) perpetrated on him and his unsuspecting readers by the US military.
Oh, but he did try to authenticate the letter in one way. His Washington colleague Douglas Jehl evidently contacted, “a senior United States intelligence official in Washington.”
This person, Filkins wrote,

said, “I know of no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way.” He said the letter was seized in a raid on a known Qaeda safe house in Baghdad, and did not pass through Iraqi groups that American intelligence officials have said in the past may have provided unreliable information

Phew, that was a relief– to learn that the letter did not come from “Iraqi groups” who may have been unreliable… Just, as it happens, from some quite reliably mendacious US PSYOPS people…
In Ricks’s piece yesterday, he wrote,

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter “because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized.” No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document’s authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

Well, if he was skeptical at the time about the letter’s authenticity, he sure didn’t share any of that skepticism with his readers. Instead, with all earnestness, he tried to “persuade” us that, because he’d received authentication from “a senior US intelligence in Washington”, then it was probably genuine.
Greg Mitchell over at Editor & Publisher has dug up some more info about the fallout from the Filkins piece. Writing yesterday, he noted:

Continue reading “Window into US ‘psyops’ in Iraq”

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Services did a phone interview with me Friday, about Iraq, and got this story on the topic up onto the wires on Saturday. It quotes me fairly extensively.
In the phone interview, as in the resulting article, Lobe noted that in many respects my analysis on current developments in Iraq is the same as that of conservative commentator (and Wall Street Journal columnist) Reuel Marc Gerecht. So be it. I call things as I see them, on the basis that if we don’t understand the world how on earth can we hope to change it?
Jim said he’d send me the URL for the piece when it came out. I guess my spam filter ate it? Oh well, I’m glad I caught it over there at Antiwar.com.

Today in Iraq, three years after the US-engineered toppling of the Saddam statue in Firdaws Square, the leaders of the factions in the biggest electoral list, the UIA, all met to affirm their “freedom” to nominate whomsoever they– rather than the Americans– choose to be their nominee for the PM post.
Against the strong pressure that the Americans have been exerting on them for the past two months, they decided to stick with their existing nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari.
Today, near Firdaws Square, Mohammed Ahmed, a money changer whose shop overlooks the impressionistic statue representing “freedom” that was erected in place of the Saddam statue, said, “It has no meaning because there is no freedom.”
AP’s Bushra Juhi reported that Umm Wadhah, a 51-year-old housewife in black robes who lives nearby, said of the statue.”It does not stand for anything,…It does not symbolize the country, or unity, or anything. We want something that stands for us … all of us.”
Yesterday in Cairo, the increasingly autocratic and out-of-touch Egyptian President, a long-time US friend and ally, told al-Arabiyah TV that,

“Definitely Iran has influence on Shiites… Shiites are 65 percent of the Iraqis … Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in.” He also said civil war “has almost started” in Iraq.

President Mubarak is a Sunni Muslim who leads a large, majority-Sunni Muslim nation. (However, many strands of popular culture inside Egypt are very open to traces of the country’s earlier Fatimid/Shiite past, so it’s not necessarily a good idea for Mubarak to try to play an anti-Shiite card.) His hostile and divisive comments about Iraq’s (ethnically Arab) Sunnis provoked Iraq’s highest-ranking Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni Arab leaders — President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Parliament Speaker Adnan Pachachi to issue a joint statement in which they decried what they described as “An attack on their (Shiites’) patriotism and their civilization,”
Many signs of a desire for national unity still exist inside Iraq, regardless of what some of the Arab world’s unelected leaders, and some machinators and pundits elsewhere, might say…
So, to help mark the third aniversary of the fall of Baghdad to the invasion force, I thought I would just look back at what I was writing on JWN at the time…
I recall I was in Arusha, Tanzania when it happened. I watched the toppling of the statue being endlessly replayed on CNN, on the t.v. in my hotel room there. On April 12, once the scale of the post-fall looting in Iraq had become more evident, I posted this post on JWN. Looking back, I think it wasn’t bad for something written from so far away, and with such little access to good sources of information.
I wrote:

The war is not yet finished. Securing the peace has still even to begin. I think we can attribute the tragic mayhem we presently see in Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities to two main factors:
(1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors– and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now– basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and
(2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld’s brilliant “strategy” of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces.

And this:

The fact of the present mayhem behind US-UK lines cannot be wished away, however much Bombs-Away Don desires to do so. It will have lasting as well as immediate political consequences.
Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order.
The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. (“Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!”) And the Americans’ non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don’s public attitude of condoning–almost celebrating!–the looters at their work.
In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it’s not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96… So, still some big uncertainties there.
In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.

And this:

Continue reading “Three years”

Just one last thing before I “go” back to Africa today. Global Policy Forum has just– with my permission– put up on their website a short text I wrote for a private listserve yesterday, that draws together things I’ve been writing on JWN in the past ten days to provide an explanation of what’s going on politically in Iraq.
It might seem a little circular if I put the whole text up here? But anyway, y’all can read it there and then come back and discuss it in the Comments zone here, if you so desire.
(I should note that since I wrote that, I’ve had a couple of further thoughts on the issue which would add further wrinkles to the analysis. But I totally need to get back to my Africa piece and I shan’t come back to JWN until it’s done… )

I’ve been working on a conference paper on (mainly) African topics these past couple of days. So I failed to produce “instant” commentary re the plan that John Kerry proposed for exiting from Iraq, in yesterday’s NYT.
Maybe I’ll come back to it later. But here, I’ll just note the following:

(1) Kerry has come a long way since the time– not so long ago!– when he was urging the administration to deal with the Iraq situation by increasing the troop levels.
(2) He is now urging “a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year’s end.” This is good– even though it’s not spelled out exactly as being the “speedy, total, and generous” US withdrawal that I’ve been urging for nearly a year now. I’m particularly worried about the qualifier “combat” that Kerry put there… What other kinds of US forces are there that might remain according to his plan? Perhaps special ops forces, or MPs, or…
(3) In addition, when Kerry advocates this withdrawal schedule, it’s still conditional on the Iraqis “putting together a government” first….
(4) In fact, this business of placing conditions and demands on the Iraqis is integral to the general approach of his piece, which is to seek to “cover” what is actually a call for (some kind of) withdrawal behind a lot of imperialist-sounding rhetorical bombast… “Iraqi politicians should be told… !”
(5) But this is precisely the point at which his approach is shown to be thin, blustery rhetoric, because what they are to be told is this: “that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military.” Excellent idea! So, John, why don’t we just make plans to “immediately” (i.e., as rapidly as possible) withdraw the military anyway, and forego all the bluff and bluster?? And not just make the withdrawal plans, but also announce and implement them?
(6) For all the operational thin-ness of what Kerry proposed, at least it’s an important development in the upper ranks of the Democratic Party leadership that he has moved this far toward a pro-withdrawal position. (Even if he still feels he has to cover his behind with the rhetorical bombast.)
(7) So when will Hillary and the rest of the party leadership be following him?

There are actually a couple of other things from yesterday that I want to comment on when I have time.
One was Juan Cole’s argument that,

Exit is easy. Exit with honor will be the hardest thing the United States of America has ever done in its over two centuries of history. Exit without honor will endanger the security of the United States for decades.

I’d love to engage with Juan on what exactly he means by “honor.” I guess I have no plans to see him any time soon; but it will be a good thing to talk about.
For my part, I’m fairly distrustful when guys start to talk about “honor” in any context– but particularly in the context of a still-aspiring world hegemon like the mainstream US, it sounds like a cover for keeping the hegemonic aspirations well in place. Personally, I believe the longterm interests of the US citizenry are best served if we seek to reintegrate ourselves into the world community on a respectful, nonviolent, and egalitarian basis that recognizes that actually, we make up only around 4% of humankind… So any aspiration to act hegemonic, boss other people around, change their regimes, invade their countries, etc, is one of pure arrogance (and actually, of zero “honor.”) And in the longer-than-tomorrow term it is doomed not only to fail but to bring great human suffering as it does so.
… In addition yesterday, there was an intriguing piece about Iraqi politics from David Pugnacious in the WaPo, that featured reports of phone conversations he’d had with Zal Khalilzad and Barham Saleh, among others.
It includes this:

Khalilzad recounted the items that the Iraqi political factions have agreed on in private negotiations over the past month. On Sunday, the leaders signed off on the last of these planks of a government of national unity. The Iraqis have saved the hardest issue for last — the names of the politicians who will hold the top jobs. That bitter fight will play out over the next several weeks.
An example of what’s in these unity documents is a passage that calls for “a timetable so the Iraqi forces assume the security tasks completely and end the mission of the multinational force in Iraq.” That timetable language is vague, but it would allow the new government to say it is committed to ending the American occupation. Interestingly, U.S. officials said yesterday that this passage on troop withdrawal is consistent with Bush administration policy.

Just worth spending an extra moment pondering there: the amazingly hubris-revealing content of that first sentence… But all of that excerpt is very, very interesting.
And then there’s this:

the Iraqi factions agreed on two bodies that weren’t mentioned in the constitution. They endorsed a 19-member consultative national security council, which represents all the political factions. And they agreed on a ministerial security council, which will have the Sunni deputy prime minister as its deputy chairman. Shiite leaders have tentatively agreed that the defense minister will be a Sunni. And for the key job of interior minister, the dominant Shiite faction, known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, appears ready to accept the replacement of one of its members by an independent Shiite, perhaps Qasim Dawood, a man acceptable to most Sunni leaders.

Interesting, huh? Qasim Dawood (a.k.a. variously as Kassim Daoud, etc etc) was of course the person who last week was reported to be the first of the UIA parliamentarians to speak out openly against Jaafari’s nomination as PM…
I’ll write more about all of this– and more about the real reasons behind the political ‘impasse’ in Iraq, as best I understand them– as soon as I can. For now, I have to get back (conceptually) to Africa.