Category: Iraq-2006-q4

US pols and the ponderous commentatoriat in this country have become quite fixated on the idea that Iraqis have become unalterably divided into mutually antagonistic blocs of “Kurds”, “Sunnis”, and “Shias”. That is about as far as the analytical capabilities of most of these people go… And you hear all kinds of people arguing earnestly about whether the US ought to “get wholly behind ‘the’ Shia”, or “try to play a balancing game with ‘the’ Soonis”, or whatever. (They can’t even say the words properly; but they try, they try.)
But basically they are parroting and perpetuating a sort of “essentialized” view of Iraq’s 26 million men and women whereby nearly every single Iraqi can be handily put into one of these boxes… Which are always viewed as mutually anatgonistic– and sometimes even genocidally so.
So how come we’ve seen no discussion in the US MSM about reports like this one by As’ad Jemayyel (Jamil?) on the independent Iraqi newswire Aswat al-Iraq yesterday? He wrote– and my translation here is refined from the one that Badger posted yesterday on Missing Links– about an announcement made Sunday by the head of the (majority Sunni) National Dialogue Front, Saleh al-Mutlak, as follows:

Mutlak said today there will soon be an announcement about establishment of a National Salvation Front in Iraq to include various political and religious figures.
Mutlak explained in a statement given to journalists accompanying his visit to the Jordanian capital Amman that, “The announcement of the formation of this front will lead to the correction of effective political work.”
And he added that, “This Front will unclude, inaddition to the National Dialogue Front, the Iraqi List led by Iyad Allawi, the Reconciliation and Liberation Bloc led by Mashaan Juburi, and the Sadrist movement led by Moqtada al-Sadr.”
He noted that, “There will also be participation by parties and currents that are [currently] outside the political process, among them the Foundation Conference led by Jawad al-Halasi, tribal elements from south and central Iraq, along with representatives of the Yazidis and the Turkmen; Kurdish movements that oppose secession; and Christian blocs; along with the Arabist Shiite current.”
And Mutlak said, “This front will be supported by religious figures of political and social weight, among them al-Baghdadi, al-Yaqubi, al-Muiid, the Sarakhi conference, and the Khalisia school.”

Badger also gave us another report on that post, about a separate coalition-building effort at the local level, in Basra, with some good discussion also contributed there by Reidar Visser.
And today, Badger has a short follow-up on the Saleh al-Mutlak story– this one from Az-Zaman— in which Mutlak is quoted as clarifying that the soon-to-be-announced Front will exclude: SCIRI; the part of the Da’wa Party to which PM Nouri al-Maliki belongs; and the two [big] Kurdish parties.
All this is truly fascinating, cross-sectarian politics. But not a peep about it in the mainstream US discourse.
I mean, what is happening is that apparently Moqtada al-Sadr– who was crudely caricatured on the Newsweek cover this week, and portrayed as some kind of near devil-incarnate– is entering a coalition with Mutlak (a “Sooni”) and Allawi (pretty much of a secularist and a fairly strongly Baath-style enforcer), and between them the three of them are also hoping to split Maliki’s party and lure a sizeable chunk of its members over to their new Front….
Important stuff, don’t you think?
The politics of the new Front haven’t been described in any great detail that I’ve seen. But I’m fairly confident that this group of people would be fairly strongly Iraqi-nationalist and anti-occupation. (Though Iyad Allawi looms like a bit of an outlier in this regard.) They are also determinedly cross-sectarian.
So my question remains: Why don’t we hear anything about this in the MSM?
I mean, I know journalists can tend to get lazy and use handy labels like “Shiite” or “Sooni” in a fairly sloppy way… But doing so at a time like the present seems to run at least two serious risks: (1) Inasmuch as western media people have any effect on attitudes in Iraq, the too-sloppy use of such labels would seem to essentialize and harden the inter-sectarian differences in question; and (2) This sloppiness leaves the average US consumer of media– and the average US policymaker– completely in the dark about what is really going on, while strengthening these people’s beliefs that all Iraqis are simply primitive, unidimensional beings who are “consumed by ancient tribal hatreds”, etc etc (and thus, that they more or less “deserve” whatever horrendous things befall them.)
So amidst all this ignorance, it’s even more notable that we have bloggers like Abu Aardvark and Badger to help get these stories out. Thanks, guys.
Addendum Tuesday morning: I also meant to put in a reminder of the extent to which this tracks with what much of Faiza blogged about, regarding the persistence of cross-sectarian ties, in the posts she wrote after her recent trip back to Baghdad– as I noted here.

Reudar Visser has a new article up on his website. It’s titled Federalism from Below in Iraq: Some Historical and Comparative Reflections. It’s a comparison between, mainly, the federalizing process as laid out for Iraq in the “Constitution” rammed through under US pressure in 2005, and the process whereby post-Franco Spain became a federation in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
JWN readers know how much I have always admired Visser and his very careful and well-grounded analytical work on Iraq. There’s lots of interesting information in this new article, and a number of potential lessons. However, I must note that I believe that the situation inside Iraq has changed (deteriorated) so much in the past six months that I find it hard to see that the 2005 “Constitution” is going to be a document of much continuing relevance, let alone of any “binding” quality.
Sorry to be so gloomy.

I guess by the time I get up Thursday, here in Virginia, we’ll know whether Bush was finally able to persuade Maliki to meet him at least once.
This, while of course his own political allies back home, the Sadrists, have pulled their people out of the government already just for the mere fact that he has gone to Jordan with the apparent intention of meeting Bush…
I feel quite sorry for this Kerensky-like figure (Maliki). After all, remember that back during the political battles waged by Khalilzad during the long early months of this year, Maliki ended up being “the Americans’ choice” as PM. They anointed him. Then there were six months of terrible additional US stumblings and escalations inside Iraq.
And now Bush wants to meet Maliki face-to-face to put some direct pressure on him??
I think the best comment on the Hadley memo that was leaked today was the one Dan Froomkin wrote in mid-morning:

The memo describes a guy who talks a good game, but is ultimately clueless and incompetent — and who has been lulled into believing that his rhetoric is true by a small circle of like-minded advisers.
That’s Maliki.

(Of course, it could also have been Bush…)
On a different note, some folks have urged me to comment on this piece of blustering “opinion” written by Saudi royal adviser Nawaf Obeid in today’s WaPo. In the article Obeid is begging the US not to undertake any troop withdrawal from Iraq any time soon, and warns that if it does so then the internal pressure inside Saudi Arabia might force the government to launch its own “massive intervention” inside Iraq.
Some US commentators who don’t know the regional realities very well have been interpreting that as a threat of military intervention. It isn’t. Obeid knows very well that any such threat would be completely risible. He explains that what the “massive intervention” would consist of would be that the Kingdom would provide more support to support to former Baathists and other allied Sunni insurgents inside Iraq while perhaps also “flooding” the international oil market with huge new Saudi production in an attempt to drive prices down to the extent that the much-feared Iranians (whose armed forces are approximately 6 or 7 times the size of Saudi Arabia’s) would finally cry “Uncle.”
And Obeid thinks that that is any kind of a credible “threat”?
Well, I guess the poor old rulers of Saudi Arabia must feel they have to do do (or at least say) something. Their population is by all accounts simply seething with anger over the present situations in Iraq and Palestine. But something Obeid only very indirectly alludes to in his piece is that, by all the accounts that I’ve heard, most of that anger seems to be directed against the US government.
Badger also makes this point well, in this quick survey on his blog of coverage in a couple of important Saudi newspapers today (Wednesday).
His bottom line there is that, according to these newspapers,

[T]the underlying problem has a name, and the name is Bush.
Which in turn suggests that the Saudi intelligensia (can I use that word?) perhaps sees itself more in the role of a critical observer, than in the role of the half-crazed partisan which is so often assigned to them.

Good summary.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day. Which way will Maliki finally end up bending– toward Bush or toward the Sadrists and, probably, most of his own political instincts? (And does his decision on this make any difference at this point, anyway? Actually, yes, I believe it does, a little– but it affects mainly the speed of the ongoing collapse of the US position in Iraq, not its direction.)
And talking of timelines, we now finally have one for the publication of the Iraq Study Group’s report… which is to be one week from today, December 6. There have been a number of indications that the report will recommend that the administration open talks on Iraq, within some format, with both Syria and Iran.
Because I think the risk of a military attack on Iran is much greater before the ISG makes its report public than it will be after their recommendations become the main item on the US agenda, I think we all need to be very careful indeed over the next seven days.
For now, though, bed-time. Gotta be ready to see what happens tomorrow.

The WaPo’s website is reporting that five pro-Sadrist cabinet members and 30 pro-Sadrist deputies have announced the suspension of their support for the Maliki government. Maliki’s upcoming meeting with Pres. Bush constitutes, they say, a “provocation to the feelings of the Iraqi people and a violation of their constitutional rights.”
The Sadrists had talked earlier about their intention to quit if Maliki should go ahead with the meeting, so this development should not come as a surprise.
This move of withdrawing from a weak, US-supported government is eerily parallel to what Hizbullah and its allies have done in Lebanon. It looks as if these parties and their political allies in the region, primarily the regime in Iran, are prepared to provoke serious political crises in Lebanon and Iraq as a way of… what?
Seriously trying to get the attention of Washington?
Sending a (political) shot across Washington’s bows to remind it of the even greater damage that could be wrought to a political order in the region that is still, basically, very pro-American, in the event that Iran itself is subjected to a military attack?
Hardline Bushites, however, might interpret the Sadrists’ decision to quit the government as a partial “achievement” in their latest campaign to try to split Maliki and a substantial group of Iraqi Shiite pols away from a pro-Iranian “rump.” This might give the Bushites the idea that their general “strategy” toward Iraq is working, and give them more confidence to proceed with an attack against Iran….
Which would be good for nobody concerned…. At all… And yes, that certainly includes the 147,000 US service members strung out in widely distributed positions inside Iraq…
This week is a turning point for the the Middle East. More urgently than ever the region needs just exactly the kind of high-level, broadly inclusive, de-escalatory diplomatic gathering that Kofi Annan has called for.
De-escalation now, please!

So much New York Times today, so little time to read and digest it… But as I noted here yesterday, the situation for the whole Bushite scheme in Iraq is this week reaching a clear turning point.
Interesting times…
So my final “selection” from today’s NYT is this piece by Michael Gordon and Dexter Filkins, under the title Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq.
And yes, as the article makes clear, that is Lebanese Hizbullah that they are writing about.
Here’s the lead:

A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.
The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said.

My guess is that the anonymous US official in question is CIA Director Michael Hayden, who in standard journalistic practice is referred to by name elsewhere in the article.
The Mahdi Army is, of course, the main Sadrist paramilitary formation.
Gordon and Filkins write, intriguingly, that the anonymous official’s account,

is consistent with a claim made in Iraq this summer by a mid-level Mahdi commander, who said his militia had sent 300 fighters to Lebanon, ostensibly to fight alongside Hezbollah. “They are the best-trained fighters in the Mahdi Army,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Well, “consistent”, give a or take a difference of some 200% or 500% in the number of Mahdi Army said to have gone to Lebanon to train with Hizbullah… There is, after all, quite a difference between “300” and “1,000 to 2,000”.
However, the report from the mid-level Mahdi commander has some real credibility, since we learn at the end of the article that a Baghdad-based, Iraqi NYT reporter called Hosham Hussein also “contributed reporting” to it. Presumably, it was he who had gotten the interview with the Mahdi Army commander back in summer. (If so, since this is a really important and exclusive interview, Hussein should have been given a full byline rather than letting the two overpaid white guys swagger around with all the glory.)
The article gave the following details:

The mid-level Mahdi commander… said the group sent to Lebanon was called the Ali al-Hadi Brigade, named for one of two imams buried at the Askariya Mosque in Samarra. The bombing of that shrine in February unleashed the fury of Shiite militias and accelerated sectarian violence.
According to the Mahdi commander, the brigade was organized and dispatched by a senior Mahdi officer known as Abu Mujtaba. It went by bus to Syria in July, and was then led across the border into Lebanon, he said. He said the fighters were from Diwaniya and Basra, as well as from the Shiite neighborhoods of Shoala and Sadr City in Baghdad.
“They travel as normal people from Iraq to Syria,” one of the militiamen said. “Once they get to Syria, fighters in Syria take them in.”

The anonymous US official is quoted in the piece as expressing the judgment that,

While Iran wants a stable Iraq… it sees an advantage in “managed instability in the short term” to bog down the American military and defeat the Bush administration’s objectives in the region.
“There seems to have been a strategic decision taken sometime over late winter or early spring by Damascus, Tehran, along with their partners in Lebanese Hezbollah, to provide more support to Sadr to increase pressure on the U.S.,” the American intelligence official said.

Of course, US officials would have a much improved ability to understand Iran’s true goals and motivations inside Iraq if they were ever allowed to actually talk to them, as opposed merely to trying to intuit their intentions from afar…
The US official is quoted as saying that some of the Sadrist fighters who went to Lebanon “were present during the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel this summer, though there was no indication they had taken part in the fighting.”
And the article had this:

Asked what the militia members had learned, the official replied, “Weapons, bomb-making, intelligence, assassinations, the gambit of skill sets.”

H’mm. That would be “gamut” of skill-sets, I believe, not “gambit”. (Such ignorance at the NYT– or the CIA… I am shocked, shocked!)
Anyway, reading that, I thought that what I most hope that the Mahdi Army people learned from Hizbullah was not technical skills like those mentioned but the more important skills of discipline, command and control, and operational security. It is in the realm of these latter kinds of skills that Lebanese Hizbullah has notably excelled– and it is these kinds of skills that the paramilitary groups battling the US occupation in Iraq most notably seem to lack.
For example, the Mahdi Army itself has reportedly splintered into numerous tiny fractions and factions, some with apparently cross-cutting goals. This has horrendous effects for, first and foremost, the civilian population of Iraq. But it also greatly complicates the search for a new and sustainable political entente within Iraq, and makes considerably harder the prospect of being able to negotiate any kind of orderly exit of the US forces from the country.
It is quite understandable to me that, in the circumstances of the immediate period after the US invasion, the Mahdi Army should have grown up into such a sprawling, factionalizable constellation of entitites. (And of course, the policy pursued in Iraq since 2003 by the US, and perhaps also by the Iranians, has strongly stoked that tendency towards factionalism at all levels of Iraqi society.) But now, if a reasonable political and military de-escalation is to be achieved in Iraq, then surely it is better to support the emergence of larger, more unified political entities that have that have the unity of command required to deliver on agreements reached and also, potentially, to allow for a stronger form of accountability to the general Iraqi public.
Throughout history, once strong nationalist forces have been able to throw off the forces of foreign invasion and colonialism, most of the men (and women) who took up arms in the nationalist struggle have been successfully reintegrated back into normal civilian life. But how you get from “here” to “there” in Iraq still looks extremely difficult. I would say that if we see all the main blocs in Iraqi society develop more coherent and disciplined internal decisionmaking structures, along with more civility towards other social and political trends within the nation and a readiness to participate in civilian political life, these developments would all be very helpful for everyone concerned. Hizbullah has gone a considerable distance down that path in recent years and is probably in a good position to help the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement more broadly to develop in this direction.

Earlier today, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley publicly admitted that in Iraq, “obviously, as I think everyone would agree and as the President has said, things are not proceeding well or fast enough…”
You have to know the Bushites are worried. Extremely worried.
The above link goes to the White House transcript of what they call a “press gaggle”, that was given by Hadley and White House press person Tony Snow-job, to reporters flying with Bush to Estonia for a NATO gathering. From there, he’ll be proceeding to Jordan, to meet Iraqi “Prime Minister” Nouri al-Maliki. Cheney and Condi Rice are also burning a lot of jet fuel over the Middle East these days as they try to get a few last-minute (lame?) ducks in a row to prevent a complete catastrophe spiraling out of control in Iraq.
(Where today, incidentally, a major oil refinery in Kirkuk got set ablaze by mortars and a US plane was downed in Anbar province— and numerous other tragedies befell the country’s long-suffering people.)
If you have a few minutes, go read the rest of that “press gaggle” transcript. I think in the future it’ll be a seminal text in Bushology. Including this classic exchange:

Q I have a question… What kind of mood is the President in right now about all these different problems around the world?
MR. HADLEY: You know him — he’s a very resilient guy. And, look, it’s a new Middle East that is emerging. And I think he sees it as a real opportunity, but also challenges. And it is both of those. And the task he’s given for himself and for the rest of us is how to take advantage of these opportunities to advance the war on terror, advance the freedom agenda, and, over time, bring real stability to that part of the region…

Ohmigod. Does he think we’re complete idiots??
And meanwhile, from the other side of the world– Australia– here’s another indicator of how worried Bush and all his supporters ought rightly to be, right now. That PDF doc I linked to there is the text of a lecture given Monday at Sydney’s”Lowy Institute for International Policy” by Robert O’Neill, an experienced and impeccably credentialed guru on strategic affairs who was the Director of the IISS in London back when I joined it in the mid-1980s. After that, he held the Chichele Chair of the History of War at Oxford for many years.
O’Neill, as I remember him from the couple of times I met him, is a charming and fairly laid-back Australian guy. So when he starts distributing his speeches with underlinings, you have to know that he’s trying to make sure he gets his point across.
This is the opening to his lecture (all the underlinings in the excerpts that follow are from the original text there):

We stand at a very testing time in terms of shaping our security environment. I do not want to be overly pessimistic. We and our forebears have come through worse situations and gone on to great periods of prosperity, relative peace and cultural achievement. But for us at this time, that happy end is by no means assured…

Are you paying attention yet?
So first, he talks about some of the lessons he learned while serving as an intelligence officer with the Australian forces fighting in Vietnam. And he lists five sound, very realistic lessons about the nuts and bolts of “counter-insurgency” that he learned there.
Then this:

Fast forward to Iraq in 2006 – is it a familiar picture? Iraq is an even worse problem than Vietnam. It is not a unified nation state like Vietnam but an artificial creation of the British Empire in 1921 to kill two birds with the one stone: holding down an Arab revolt while finding a place for Prince Feisal whom the French had ejected from Syria. Iraq has been held together by force ever since, ready to fly apart once the grip of that force was broken. In 2002 it was clear to me that the main problem in invading Iraq would be the insurgency and chaos phase that would follow the toppling of Saddam. When I put the point then to relevant friends in the United States who supported the pending invasion of Iraq, it was dismissed. “We will do the heavy lifting and get rid of Saddam. The allies can handle the occupation.” Of course toppling Saddam was not the “heavy lifting”. So the coalition went to war with little understanding of what they were about, a flawed strategy and no policy in place for responding to what was bound to follow – a formidable insurgency. The invasion went in with a US force much smaller than that of General Westmoreland in Vietnam, who himself had faced a much smaller problem. As for allied forces in the invasion of Iraq, they were hopelessly short of the strength needed to mount a counter-insurgency campaign.
The Coalition launched the war without enough troops, US or allied, to do the job and without a strategy, force structure and the necessary civil capabilities for meeting the main challenge. Having blundered into a hornets’ nest, the intervening force and its allies in Iraq have taken a hammering. The fate of our Iraqi allies, and their civil population, like that of our Vietnamese partners in the 1970s, is perhaps the saddest aspect of the war. Initially Coalition forces had little idea of how to fight an insurgency. The sense of all five of the points that I mentioned a few minutes ago was ignored or violated…

A few pages later, we come to this assessment, bleak indeed for the Bushites and all other “western” hegemonists:

Given the result of the recent US elections, we need to think hard about the consequences of possible defeat in Iraq. To elaborate on what I said earlier, that conflict can be won only by a much more effective coalition effort, requiring a major increase in US and allied troop numbers in Iraq, substantial improvements in training and operational methods, and a much stronger civil reconstruction effort. This is not likely to happen. The probable outcomes are either a sudden descent into chaos as Coalition forces are withdrawn, or a protracted civil war, overlain with an insurgency against remaining coalition forces.
In the event of chaos, effective government in Iraq will cease for at least some years during which terrorist groups will be able to concentrate, re-build, flourish and reach out to other targets utside Iraq. Enemy forces will be heartened; recruiting will rise; funds and weapons will pour in; pressure will be exerted on regional governments friendly to the West; more young men and women who are willing to commit suicide to harm Western and Israeli interests will become available; and the oil price will rise to new heights. Defeat in Iraq will be a serious blow to the public standing of the United States and will invite other challenges to its authority…
Iran will read a message of encouragement for its intransigence in dealing with the West. It will almost certainly go ahead to produce nuclear weapons. It will exercise an overshadowing influence in Iraq, Syria, the Arab Gulf states and Israel. The lesson of US failure in Iraq will be read (perhaps wrongly) as US unwillingness to attempt regime-change in Iran. The North Koreans will probably draw similar conclusions, although with less justification than in the case of Iran because North Korea is nowhere near as strong a state. Nuclear weapons proliferation will become more difficult to control with the threat of intervention against the proliferators dismissed…

And here is O’Neill’s final take on the US’s situation today:

It has huge capacities for good around the world. But it is also sailing through uncharted waters and in recent years has been in heavy seas. We Australians, as one of America’s serious allies, have a responsibility to help the US through this difficult passage. We can do this in many ways through diplomacy, economic co-operation and military commitments. We also have an obligation, when we see our senior partner about to make a mistake, to speak out and warn of the consequences, and even offer some suggestions on how to reach our common goals more effectively.
As I look into the future I can see some very undesirable outcomes, but we are not in their grip yet. With a major effort intellectually, politically, commercially and militarily, we might just avoid them and come through into the more peaceful upland that we hoped for so much at the end of the Cold War and then failed to find. The great challenge for leaders and analysts in the decades ahead will be to find ways of building cohesion and co-operation, not division and destruction. We must not let the War on Terror destroy the world order from which we derive so much benefit and protection.

Note the way he put that. It is not “terror” that he is accusing of threatening to destroy the world order– but the “War on Terror.” From a man of O’Neill’s strong pro-western leanings, these are strong words indeed.
Bob O’Neill seems very worried. I think that from his perspective he is right to be. I am worried, too, because I know that before there is any chance of any kind of US withdrawal being organized from Iraq– orderly or chaotic– tens of thousands more Iraqis will die, and the whole conflagration may spread to other, very vulnerable parts of the region.
On a related note, I have been trying to take some time to further flesh out my analysis of the “Namibia Option” for a UN-covered, orderly US withdrawal from Iraq… But it still needs a bit more time, and as I work on it I have been having this increasingly strong and sinking feeling that any prospect of an orderly US withdrawal from Iraq is becoming increasingly unlikely with each day that passes. So it feels like a bit of a futile exercise. But still, I do want to get it done…
Afterthought: Oh, this wasn’t meant to be an afterthought but I forgot to put it in the first time around… I just wanted to note that while I don’t agree with Bob O’Neill’s view that Iraq is solely an “artificial creation of the British Empire in 1921”, still, he does signal an extremely significant point there, which is one I’m also confronting as I look at the “Namibia option”. Namely that whereas in Vietnam, or Namibia, the nationalist side basically had one single, dominant organization with centralized decision-making, however ragged it may sometimes have been, in Iraq you very evidently don’t have that kind of nationalist organizational integrity and unity of command. This considerably complicates matters for everyone concerned: the various– and often brutally competing– “nationalist” forces themselves, the occupying forces, and the above all the poor bloody civilians who in Iraq have become caught up in the middle of all this, so horrendously.
In calmer circumstances, this is precisely the kind of complex political picture that some form of democratic process, including a nationwide election, should be able to regulate. But in Iraq you have a situation in which (1) the conditions nowadays look extremely unsuited to the holding of any further elections, and (2) the whole concept of “elections” and “democracy” has probably become seriously tainted by the terrible abuse of the practice under the auspices of the US occupation.
Plus, inside Iraq, the UN enjoys nothing like the political support that it enjoyed in Namibia in the 1980s. (Because of the nefarious role the UN was forced to play during the 1990s, in enforcing the US-UK-imposed sanctions regime against the Iraqi people and their institutions.)
Truly an extremely tangled web. Maybe all we can do at this point is get down on our knees and pray???