Category: Iraq-2006-q4

The ‘Namibia Option’ (for a UN-covered US withdrawal from Iraq)

For four decades after 1948, the apartheid regime in South Africa maintained
an illegal military occupation over the land of present-day Namibia, which
it named ‘South West Africa.’  SWA/Namibia lies immediately to the north
of South Africa’s northwestern border, and to its north again lies the vast country
of Angola. Until 1975, Portugal ruled Angola as an overseas possession, but
in the wake of the democratic, anti-colonial (‘Carnation’) revolution in
Portugal in 1974, Angola speedily gained its independence.  The black
nationalists of the MPLA movement who came to power there had longstanding
ties with South Africa’s own African National Congress (ANC), and with the
Soviet bloc.  At that point, Namibia became an important “front-line
territory” for South Africa, from which South Africa sought to combat the
black nationalist/pro-Soviet nexus in Angola. That also involved stepping
up the brutality with which it oppressed the activities of the territory’s
indigenous ‘South West Africa People’s Organization’ (SWAPO).

The United Nations had never supported either South Africa’s continued military
occupation of SWA/Namibia or the attempt South Africa made in 1948 to annex
SWA.  As the military situation in that region began to escalate in
the years after 1975, the UN Security Council intervened with all the relevant
parties and in September 1978 adopted a key
resolution, number 435
, that called for:

• “the withdrawal of South Africa’s illegal administration from Namibia
  and the transfer of power to the people of Namibia with the assistance of
  the United Nations”,
• the establishment of “a United Nations Transition Assistance Group
  … for a period of up to 12 months in order to… ensure the early independence
  of Namibia through free elections under the supervision and control of the
  United Nations”,
• “Welcomes the preparedness of the South West Africa People’s Organization
  to co-operate… including its expressed readiness to sign and observe the
  cease-fire provisions… “,
• “Calls upon South Africa forthwith to co-operate with the Secretary-General
  in the implementation of the present resolution”,
• Declares that all unilateral measures taken by the illegal administration
  in Namibia… are null and void.”

Despite the hopes that some western leaders had entertained, however, South
Africa refused to agree to the terms of this resolution.  Through the
years that followed, as the apartheid regime continued to battle its opponents
both internal and external, Resolution 435 remained uinimplemented.  But
at least– like Resolution 242 of 1967 relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict–
it still remained on the books, providing the central, internationally agreed
standard for how any future resolution of the Namibia issue should be approached.
 Indeed, throughout the 1980s, successive Secretary-General’s Special Representatives
for the Namibia issue continued to work at the diplomatic level, fleshing
out more details of how resolution 435 might one day be implemented.

By 1988, South Africa was finally ready to agree.  What brought this about
this was the quagmire it finally found itself in inside Angola.
 Over the years, the South Africans had increased the numbers of their
own troops whom they were deploying inside Angola, to fight alongside
the two anti-government forces FNLA and UNITA there.  The MPLA-led Angolan
government, for its part, had exercised its quite legitimate right to bring
its own allies into the equation to help it shore up the defense of  its
country.  Fidel Castro responded with particular vigor to the appeals
President Agostinho Neto had made to him: some 50,000-plus Cuban troops deployed
to southern Angola to help the government forces confront the insurgents
and their South African allies.  As Roger Hearn* has written, “By early
to mid 1988, South Africa was facing its own ‘Vietnam quagmire’, with close
to 50 000 Cuban troops in Angola now deployed, many provocatively close to
the border with Namibia; and mounting domestic pressure for the South African
Government to justify its position in Angola.”(Hearn, p.47)  Hearn noted
that 12 South African soldiers had been killed inside Angola in fall 1987, a development
which forced the government, for the first time to admit that it did indeed
have active-duty troops inside Angola.  He added:

The acknowledgement of direct South African involvement began
to raise concerns of a costly ground war with Cuban and Angolan troops with
massive military support from the Soviet Union.  Arguments were raised
that South Africa was over stretched militarily because of the cost associated
with the state of emergency within South Africa…. The Cuban advance to
the Namibian border, along with the direct engagement of SADF’s with the
Cubans in late June of 1988, intensified the concerns of the South African
public to intolerable levels.(Hearn, pp. 47-48)

As you can see, therefore, there were many similarities (though some differences)
in the broad strategic circumstances in which South Africa finally– in 1988–
came to the realization that it needed to significantly (or perhaps wholly)
draw down its troop presence in the Angola-Namibia theater, and the situation
the US finds itself in today, regarding its troop deployment in Iraq…

(Coming here soon: Similarities in the content of the UN’s task
during the transition out of illegal foreign occupation and into legitimate
national self-rule in Namibia and the task it might perform in Iraq… )

*Roger Hearn, UN Peacekeeping in Action: The Namibian Experience (Commack,
NY: Nova Science, 1999)

Maureen Dowd (also known as MoDo) is a smart, often hilarious, and nearly always very savvy columnist for the NYT. Unfortunately, like all their columnists, she is currently locked up in a little orange box on the NYT.com website, so even though I’m a subscriber to the print edition of the paper I can’t figure out how to unlock her online persona.
She has a column about Iraq today titled Lost in the desert, in which her main point is that in Washington “no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here”.
She cites Dick Cheney. She cites Henry Kissinger. She cites Kofi Annan, Anthony Zinni, Lt.-Gen. Raymond Odierno, Gen. John Abizaid, Peter Beinart, etc., etc.
But she doesn’t cite me. I have a plan. It ain’t perfect, but I’ve thought long and hard about the tricky conundra around political legitimacy, public security, and regional interests that are entangled in Iraq and I’ve come up with what I honestly think is the best chance there is for a workable plan.
I described it most recently here. You could call it the “Namibia option.” It is a way to think through how to achieve a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy, total, orderly, and (I very much hope) generous to Iraq’s long-suffering people.
I’m really peeved she didn’t say anything about my plan. After all, all the “experts” and pundits etc whom she cited were of a certain, frequently testosterone-soaked gender. And her latest book was titled Are Men Necessary?
In thinking through how to actually move from the present, horrendous situation in Iraq to one of orderly US withdrawal and a restoration of public order, calm, political legitimacy and political hopefulness in Iraq, then perhaps men aren’t the most helpful types of people to have around right now…
Meantime, as I’ve noted fairly frequently over recent years, the public discourse in the US ever since 9/11 has been one of extreme rollback of women’s voices on matters of national security. Condi Rice in positions of high authority? That is just “cover” for the rollback of allowing the great mass of female specialists to have much meaningful input. Really, look at all the “experts” who get air-time, fat contracting salaries, etc etc in commentating about the war these days: It is nearly all members of the very same gender that got us into this horrible mess.
So Maureen, go read my “Namibia” plan. And stop saying that “no one” knows what to do in Iraq.

I read carefully the two accounts in the NYT of the hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee held yesterday into the administration’s Iraq policy. Michael Gordon and Mark Mazzetti wrote a fairly standard, ‘news’-type account under the title: General Warns of Risks in Iraq if G.I.’s Are Cut. The general in question being the head of Centcom, Gen. John Abizaid.
However, Abizaid was also apparently warning of “risks” if the US troop level were increased, though that didn’t quite make it to the headline. Here’s what Gordon and Mazzetti wrote:

Gen. John P. Abizaid, made it clear that he did not endorse the phased troop withdrawals being proposed by Democratic lawmakers. Instead, he said the number of troops in Iraq might be increased by a small amount as part of new plans by American commanders to improve the training of the Iraqi Army.
General Abizaid did not rule out a larger troop increase, but he said the American military was stretched too thin to make such a step possible over the long term. And he said such an expansion might dissuade the Iraqis from making more of an effort to provide for their own security.
“We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect,” he said. “But when you look at the overall American force pool that’s available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the Army and the Marine Corps.”

Right next to the Gordon/Mazzetti piece was another account of the same hearing, written by Kate Zernike, who was apparently much more focused on tracking the “party-political” aspects of the hearing. She wrote about the body language the various senators used, how the Republicans arrived late and left early, apparently in pique at having lost the recent election, etc etc.
But she also had this description of Abizaid’s position:

Senator John McCain of Arizona, pressed his argument that more troops were needed in Iraq. When General Abizaid disagreed, Mr. McCain called attention to the remarks of retired military officers who characterized Congressional proposals for phased withdrawal as “terribly naïve.” Mr. McCain’s protégé, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, backed him up; when the general insisted that more troops were not the solution, Mr. Graham cut him off, saying, “Do we need less?” forcing General Abizaid to say that no, that was not the solution, either.

So what message was Abizaid trying to convey here, I ask?
Principally, I would say he was trying to undertake the classic strategy known in the Pentagon as “CYA”, refrring to the need to provide cover to a posterior body part. Boiled down, his message read: “More troops won’t work; nor will less troops.” The only thing the senators failed to ascertain is whether the present troop levels are “working”… But I guess they didn’t need to, since we see the negative answer to that question every day on the nightly news.
(More evidence that Abizaid’s main mission at the hearing was CYA was that he made a point of reminding senators that the US military’s troubles in Iraq go back to Rumsfeld having notably failed to take Gen. Shinseki’s advice on the need for much higher troop levels at the get-go, ways back in late 2002.)
I don’t want to be harsh on Gen. Abizaid, who must be agonizing over the continuing rate of US troops deaths and the understanding he seems to clearly have that there is no military way out of this problem. I just wish he had said that, explicitly and straight out: “Senators, my conclusion is that there is no purely military way out of this problem. We have always done what we were asked to do by the political leadership in this country; and now it is up to that leadership to change the politics opf their intervention in Iraq.”
JWN readers will recall that I sketched out my own main ideas on how this should be done, in this post, which I wrote last Friday. In it I wrote that the new US policy, to have any chance of success, should seek the active engagement in helping solve the Iraq problem of these three parties: Iran, the UN, and Iraq’s other neighbors.
Also speaking at yesterday’s hearing was David Satterfield, the State Department’s policy coordinator for Iraq.
According to Gordon and Mazzetti, Satterfield

told the Senate committee that the United States was prepared “in principle” to discuss the situation in Iraq with Iran, but the timing was uncertain.
“We are prepared in principle to discuss Iranian activities in Iraq,” Mr. Satterfield said. “The timing of such a direct dialogue is one that we still have under review.”

“The timing is uncertain”???? What a load of irresponsible nonsense! The situation in Iraq, for Iraqis, continues to get worse, month by month, and the political pronlems of sectarianism, fear, violence, killing and ethnic cleansing get worse by the month, too. So when is the “right” time for Washington to reach out to Iran and other neighbors (and, crucially, the UN) in order to engage their help??? It is today– or better still, yesterday.
Two other articles of note regarding this question of timing:

(1) This article by Robin Wright in today’s WaPo, under the title: As Pressure for Talks Grows, Iran and Syria Gain Leverage. (Duh!) and…
(2) This great and truly tragic collection of on-the-ground reports from Iraq by Nir Rosen, spanning from before the US invasion to just last April, which clearly shows how much worse the situation has gotten over the past three years.

If you don’t have the time (or perhaps, the stomach) to read Nir’s whole article, scroll down to near the end where he gives his bottom-line:

America did this to Iraq. We divided Iraqis. We set them at war with each other. The least we can do is stop killing them and leave Iraq.

Longtime JWN readers will recall that in this summer 2005 forum on Iraq in The Nation, Nir and I both strongly advocated the speediest possible withdrawal of US troops (and Juan Cole didn’t.)
Imagine if the US, back then, had started implementing the kinds of policies I have been advocating all along: for a US withdrawal from Iraq that is (orderly), speedy, total, and generous… How much better of a situation both countries (and the whole Middle East) would most likely be in today….
Ah well. The US decision-making elite seems, however slowly, to be coming around to my viewpoint. It is just that now, extricating the US troops from Iraq is going to be a whole lot harder (and actually, the strategic/political cost exacted from Washington by the rest of the world a lot higher) than it would have been if the process had started 15 or 30 months ago.
That’s one of the reasons why everyone involved really needs to look long and hard at this point at the “Namibia approach”– that is, to have the US occupation forces work hand-in-hand with the UN in fashioning both the political and the operational modalities of how to withdraw the occupation force and support the emergence of a capable and politically legitimate indigenous successor power there. In its time, Namibia looked extremely politically complex and intracatable, too… But the transition worked.

I’ve been busy and still am. I’m in Cambridge, Mass., thru Tuesday. (Taking part in a panel discussion at MESA Monday evening on blogging the Middle East– along with Juan Cole, As’ad Abu-Khalil, and Abu Aardvaark.)
If you want to talk about Iraq, courteously, here’s where you can do so.

I’ve been thinking through what is likely to emerge regarding policy for Iraq from the new configuration emerging in Washington after Tuesday’s elections.
Giving Donald Rumsfeld the boot the day rights after the election was only the first of a series of changes we can now expect. “Stay the course” is now (finally!) history, and the only question is what approach will be adopted to replace it.
Almost certainly, as had been widely predicted, the Iraq Study Group will play a key role in formulating the new approach. Its contribution is needed much more now than it was before November 7, because it was intentionally composed of people with strong links to the two major US parties and is therefore in a strong role to help broker the intra-US political terms of the “deal” that needs to be done over Iraq.
It is my sense that if, as seems to be the case, the people on the ISG consist mainly of political ‘realists” from both parties, rather than ideologues, they may well seek to move very quickly indeed to formulate the terms of that deal. They can use the present political inter-regnum– before the new Congress is sworn in and while the old Congress now has little if any real political clout– to find a workable and bipartisan policy toward Iraq before Inauguration Day in January, and thus to set the agenda for the incoming Congress.
Though JWN readers must know that I have a few partisan sympathies of my own, I do think that finding a workable bipartisan approach to Iraq (and the related issues) is very valuable. Tough decisions will need to be made and a steady hand placed on the wheel of policy if the poor bloody Iraqis are not to have their country plunged into even greater chaos, and if the current violence in Palestine and the strong sense of unease throughout the rest of the Middle East are not to explode uncontrollably and with massive damage for millions of people throughout the region.
US voters have spoken. On Tuesday they made clear (1) that Iraq was a very strong concern for them, and (2) that, judging the present policy a failure, they need to see a distinct change of policy– one that offers a hope of a US troop withdrawal within a reasonable length of time.
My suggestion for a plan
US citizens do not, obviously, want the manner of the US withdrawal to be either: (1) an operational debacle that brings massive or unnecessary troop losses or a too-evident loss of US face, or (2) one that it leaves a completely failed state in Iraq that could, like pre-2001 Afghanistan, incubate further waves of Qaeda-style terror.
To be frank to my Iraqi readers, I should say that it’s possible that most US citizens don’t give a hoot for the wellbeing of ordinary Iraqis– or rather, they don’t care enough about stability in Iraq to be prepared to lose even one US soldier’s life to ensure it. However, as soon as we start thinking about how to bring about an orderly (i.e., not a debacle-laden) withdrawal of US troops from Iraq– whether this is total or even only, in the first place, ‘substantial’– then it becomes very clear that the possibility of an orderly US withdrawal is inextricably linked to the possibility of Iraq having some form of working governance structure after that withdrawal.
(I’m also of the opinion that there is no such beast, at this point, as a “partial” US withdrawal that would have any significant longevity. But this is not the most immediate issue. In my view, the logic of the negotiations and of real Iraqi self-empowerment will anyway, almost inevitably, lead to a total US troop withdrawal within 1-2 years after the start of a serious, internationally supported peace process for Iraq.)
So the question is, how can we even think of any form of stable Iraqi governance structure emerging? The US has had three and half years of complete hegemony inside the country to try to achieve this goal, but failed. Right now it has neither the credibility to be given another chance at doing it, nor, frankly, any signs that it has the capability of getting it right.
It desperately needs help.
But who can help it?
My answer is, basically, these three parties, in this order: Iran, the UN, and Iraq’s other neighbors:
* Iran, because it is, actually, the newly emerging hegemonic power inside Iraq. It has strong links with all the powerful actors inside Iraq, with the exception of some of the Sunni actors. It has immense proximity, and easy supply lines into Iraq along the lengthy mutual border. Plus, at present you could say that the 147,000 US troops in Iraq are currently there only on Teheran’s sufferance: Teheran likes to have them there because their very vulnerable deployment there form a potent self-deterrent against any dreams US officials might have of launching a military attack against Iran.
There is thus, literally, no hope for the US of having any debacle-free drawdown of troops from Iraq without getting the explicit permission for this from Teheran. And that, of course, also means paying a “price” to Teheran that is considerably higher than merely– and very belatedly– agreeing to “talk” to it. No, there will have to be discussions about a range of issues including nuclear issues and the whole question of the security regime in the Gulf region, that go considerably beyond merely “talking”, i.e., saying hello…
* The UN will be necessary to provide a cover of some international legitimacy for whatever the security regime on the ground inside Iraq will be– and to help broker both the intra-Iraqi political compact that needs to be won and the international dimensions of the agreement over the whole transformation of the security situatin in the region.
As noted above, the US is currently in no position at all, on its own, to broker any kind of new agreement among Iraqis. That’s the big thing it needs the UN for; and indeed, it should hand over the lead role in brokering this agreement to the UN, as soon as possible. But Washington also needs the UN to give “cover”– perhaps through some form of re-hatting operation– for a security regime inside Iraq that will continue, in the interim period, to be dominated by the US troop presence, though it could also helpfully be supplemented by some other, non-US and preferably non-western troops– and especially commanders– who have real and substantial experience in peacekeeping, rather than imperial domination.
Read about Nambia and the role the UN played during the transition from South Africa’s (illegal, foreign occupation) regime there to the emergence of a legitimate and accepted indigenous successor regime.
Read about it very fast.
* Iraq’s other neighbors will also be very important… And here I’m talking about, essentially, the whole of Iraq’s Arab “hinterland” stretching from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait down through the entire Peninsula, and from Jordan and Syria across to Egypt, as well as (though to a lesser extent) Turkey.
The fact of the matter will be that for the US to get out of Iraq, Iran is going to have to be given a bigger role in the Gulf (and the broader Middle East) than the US has allowed it to have at any time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This will be–already is!– deeply unsettling for the conservative, Sunni-ruled monarchs of Jordan and the Gulf, and also for the conservative, Sunni-ruled President of Egypt. So all these rulers– and even more importantly, the restive Arab populations atop whom they today precariously balance– will need to receive a lot of reassurance from the US and from other participants in the process.
There is no way this can happen if, at the same time, the US and the UN are not actively doing something very productive indeed to engage with the very real and longstanding grievances of the Palestinians. Forget the pathetic old “Road Map to Nowhere” which has gotten us to precisely that destination after four years of blather and hot air. What the Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, and others are going to expect to see is something speedy, authoritative, and truly transformational like the Madrid Conference of October 1991.
… Which was convened, we should note, by Jim Baker.
These states (including Syria) will also need to have a meaningful behind-the-scenes role in being a contact group, or whatever, for the transition of power inside Iraq, where they have their own strong interests, fears, and concerns..
… So once we have sketched these kinds of “realistic” paths forward in the Middle East, it becames immediately clear that (1) the Israelis are not going to like a lot of what must lie ahead in these scenarios, and (2) their friends in the Democratic Party won’t like it, either… That’s where the key role in the ISG of Lee Hamilton, a very experienced man who was head of the Democratic-controlled House International Relations Committee for many years, will come in…
The Israelis have already, as I can see, started to read the tea-leaves, and are desperately trying to figure how they stop this train. The bombastic old war-horse Efraim Sneh has again threatened that Israel will will go ahead and bomb Iran on its own if no-one else will do the job. And Olmert is rushing to the US in the coming days…
But Israel’s rightwing leadership has lost a lot of the clout it once had within the US system, by virtue of the now-evident collapse of the neocon network as well of some of the political clout of the Zionist evangelicals.
The Middle East will be waking up to a new day. Let’s hope the ever-looming catastrophes can be avoided and a new sense of realism prevail. Militarism and US hegemonism were, after all, what brought the US and Iraq to the present parlous situation in Iraq.

… Read the latest post of this wise and talented young Iraqi blogger:

we all knew the outcome upfront (Maliki was on television 24 hours before the verdict telling people not to ‘rejoice too much’). I think what surprises me right now is the utter stupidity of the current Iraqi government. The timing is ridiculous- immediately before the congressional elections? How very convenient for Bush. Iraq, today, is at its very worst since the invasion and the beginning occupation. April 2003 is looking like a honeymoon month today. Is it really the time to execute Saddam?
I’m more than a little worried. This is Bush’s final card. The elections came and went and a group of extremists and thieves were put into power (no, no- I meant in Baghdad, not Washington). The constitution which seems to have drowned in the river of Iraqi blood since its elections has been forgotten. It is only dug up when one of the Puppets wants to break apart the country. Reconstruction is an aspiration from another lifetime: I swear we no longer want buildings and bridges, security and an undivided Iraq are more than enough. Things must be deteriorating beyond imagination if Bush needs to use the ‘Execute the Dictator’ card.
Iraq has not been this bad in decades. The occupation is a failure. The various pro-American, pro-Iranian Iraqi governments are failures. The new Iraqi army is a deadly joke. Is it really time to turn Saddam into a martyr?
… Iraq saw demonstrations against and for the verdict. The pro-Saddam demonstrators were attacked by the Iraqi army. This is how free our media is today: the channels that were showing the pro-Saddam demonstrations have been shut down. Iraqi security forces promptly raided them. Welcome to the new Iraq.
… It’s not about the man- presidents come and go, governments come and go. It’s the frustration of feeling like the whole country and every single Iraqi inside and outside of Iraq is at the mercy of American politics. It is the rage of feeling like a mere chess piece to be moved back and forth at will. It is the aggravation of having a government so blind and uncaring about their peoples needs that they don’t even feel like it’s necessary to go through the motions or put up an act. And it’s the deaths. The thousands of dead and dying, with Bush sitting there smirking and lying about progress and winning in a country where every single Iraqi outside of the Green Zone is losing.
Once again… The timing of all of this is impeccable- two days before congressional elections. And if you don’t see it, then I’m sorry, you’re stupid. Let’s see how many times Bush milks this as a ‘success’ in his coming speeches.
A final note. I just read somewhere that some of the families of dead American soldiers are visiting the Iraqi north to see ‘what their sons and daughters died for’. If that’s the goal of the visit, then, “Ladies and gentlemen- to your right is the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, to your left is the Dawry refinery… Each of you get this, a gift bag containing a 3 by 3 color poster of Al Sayid Muqtada Al Sadr (Long May He Live And Prosper), an Ayatollah Sistani t-shirt and a map of Iran, to scale, redrawn with the Islamic Republic of South Iraq. Also… Hey you! You- the female in the back- is that a lock of hair I see? Cover it up or stay home.”
And that is what they died for.

A true cri de coeur. Do you think Bush has read this?
(Footnote. For JWN commenters who have in the past expressed doubts that Riverbend is who she says she is: Go over to her blog and see the photos she has on that post of what various Iraqi TV channels have been broadcasting today… Also, be aware I’m not going to give any further space on the blog’s comments boards for comments calling her authenticity into question.)

The judges at the Iraqi High (formerly “Special”) Tribunal today sentenced Saddam Hussein to death by hanging for his role in the 1982 killing/execution of 148 people in the town of Dujail. Two other former Iraqi officials also received the death sentence in this case.
AP’s account linked to there, from Hamza Hendawi in Baghdad, notes that back in March Saddam argued that he alone had been responsible for the Dujail killings, which he described as executions undertaken by his government in the wake of an assassination attempt launched against him in the town. The assassination plot had apparently been organized by the Islamic Daawa Party– that is, the party of the current Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Hendawi added that, “About 50 of those sentenced [to death] by the ‘Revolutionary Court’ [in 1982] died during interrogation before they could go to the gallows. Some of those hanged were children.”
At this point, I don’t think it’s very helpful to get into a discussion of whether Saddam “deserves” to be executed because of his past actions– though I readily grant that many of those were extremely heinous.
Actually, can any human power at this point deliver “just desserts” to someone who has committed actions like those undertaken by Saddam, Joseph Kony, or other perpetrators of extremely harmful deeds? How would we even start to think about what “just desserts” might be in such cases? As we say in the anti-death penalty movement here in the US: “Do we rape rapists? So why do we think it’s okay to kill killers?”
Also, do we want to be the sort of people who support the extinction of human life under any guise at all, or with any justification?
… Just some questions. But as I said, I don’t want to dwell on issues of what Saddam “deserves”. I want to focus instead on the broad social effects of this death penalty against him and his comrades.
I note, first, that the death penalty most likely won’t be carried out for a while. His lawyers have the right to appeal. An appeals bench will then give a final ruling, and within 30 days of that ruling being given the sentence must be carried out.
What shape will Iraq be in that many weeks into the future, anyway? And during those weeks, what effects can this pending execution be expected to have on the country’s national community?
So anyway, here are the three big questions about this whole affair that I think we need to focus on right now:

(1) What effects will this death sentence have on the possibilities of national reconciliation, conflict prevention, and national liberation in Iraq?
(2) What effects will this death sentence and the work of the court more broadly have on the establishment and strengthening of the concept of “rule of law” in Iraq?
(3) Will the implementation of these sentences help to prevent the reconstitution of the network of oppression and violence that Saddam and his allies once operated in Iraq?

My first answers to these questions are as follows:
Regarding Question 1, it seems very clear that the whole trial (and the second trial, regarding the anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign, which is still underway), and now the handing down of these death sentences, have stoked internal tensions inside Iraq significantly, contributing to the high toll of deaths from sectarian polarization and considerably complicating the prospects of an easy national liberation from US occupation rule.
Regarding Question 2, it is already clear that the “new Iraq” ushered in under the US occupation is one with a very worrying track record in the rule-of-law sphere; and the workings of this tribunal– deeply flawed as they have been by numerous procedural irregularities, as well as by deep structural problems– have been part and parcel of this disregard for the rule of law.
(You can see some of my earlier writings on the (il-)legality of the court’s whole set-up here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.)
Regarding Question 3, in all my work on punishment theory, the incapacitation of the ability of evil-doers to re-offend is one of the few possibly valid justifications (or perhaps, the only possibly valid one) that I can see for punishment, at all. Has the work of the Iraqi High Tribunal helped to incapacitate Saddam’s ability to re-offend? I think not. From inside the courtroom he has continued to rally his former supporters in the “Red Zone” of Iraq, far beyond the courtroom (and such “due process” protections as he has received during the trial have helped him to do that… H’mmm.)
The “incapacitation” of Saddam and the Baathist networks that support him could theoretically have been achieved in one of two ways: through reform and reintegration into a new, more tolerant political order; or through outright suppression. Reform and reintegration of perpetrators of earlier heinous acts worked in the case of Renamo in Mozambique and the apartheid-era enforcers in South Africa. It is the approach now being seriously tried against Joseph Kony, in northern Uganda. As Abraham Lincoln notably said after the US Civil War: “The best way to stop my enemy being my enemy is to make him my friend.”
Reform and reintegration of Baathists (possibly including Saddam) into a “new” Iraq has never been seriously attempted by any of the post-invasion Iraqi regimes, including the present one. Instead, goaded on by Chalabi and many others with a strong grievance against Saddam, the post-invasion regimes have attempted suppression, often with extreme harshness. And that hasn’t worked either…
So Iraq is in the parlous state it currently finds itself in today… The trial and sentencing of Saddam Hussein has not, to be frank, probably made much difference in the course of events there. But the difference it has made has, in my mind, been nearly wholly negative. So much for the (completely a-political and a-historical) dreams of those abstract, jurisprudential idealists who hoped this trial could be a new “Nuremberg” or could usher in a moment of “Grotian”-level reform into the international system.
At the end of the day, no-one looking at conflict-wracked societies can avoid the need to deal with the urgent practical realities of history and politics.

So according to Hassan al-Suneid, an aide to Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki, Maliki demanded a video conference with George Bush Saturday, and when he got Bush on the line he managed to win from him a promise “move swiftly to turn over full control of the Iraqi army to Baghdad.”
That quote was from the AP report on the conversation, as written by Steven Hurst and Qassim Abdul-Zahra. They added that Suneid:

said later the prime minister was intentionally playing on U.S. voter displeasure with the war to strengthen his hand with Washington.

And this is what Suneid quoted Maliki as having told Bush on the phone:

“The U.S. ambassador is not (L. Paul) Bremer (the former U.S. administrator in Iraq). He does not have a free rein to do what he likes. Khalilzad must not behave like Bremer but rather like an ambassador.”

The writers noted that this was

the fourth time in a week that al-Maliki challenged the U.S. handling of the war. The ripostes flowed from an announcement by Khalilzad on Tuesday that al-Maliki had agreed to a U.S. plan to set timelines for progress in quelling violence in Iraq.
Al-Maliki’s anger grew through the week until on Friday, al-Suneid said, the prime minister told Khalilzad: “I am a friend of the United States, but I am not America’s man in Iraq.”
After Saturday’s talks, White House spokesman Tony Snow said of al-Maliki: “He’s not America’s man in Iraq. The United States is there in a role to assist him. He’s the prime minister — he’s the leader of the Iraqi people.”
Snow said that reports of a rift between the United States and Iraq were wrong and that Bush had full confidence in al-Maliki.

And if you believe that, then I have a nice piece of swamp in Florida I’d like to sell you…
It seems to me this might be the pivotal moment in Maliki’s relationship with the Bushites?
There have, of course, been many reports in the past month or so that the Bushites are getting so “tired” of Maliki, or are so “dissatisfied” with him for one reason or another, that they have fairly inelegantly been threatening him that they’d overthrow him in a coup if he didn’t behave.
Well, who’d do that? The Bushites and whose army?
For his part, Maliki now seems to be acting as if he finds such threats and reports inherently non-credible. And maybe at this point, he’s right?
On the other hand, if I were him I’d be very, very careful regarding all aspects of personal security in the days ahead.
Perhaps especially in the days after November 7? After all, it wouldn’t play too well at the polls that day if Bush’s “Potemkin democratization” project in Iraq fell apart in quite such an evident way between now and then. But after November 7??