Category: Iraq-2006-q4

It seems symbolic that it happened in the middle of a “We’re in charge and we have a plan” press conference that Zal Khalilzad and Gen. Casey had teamed up to hold in the GZ today, don’t you think?

A really revealing round-up of the views of many Iraqi bloggers was published last week by the currently exiled Iraqi blogger “Treasure of Baghdad”– ” A young reporter from a destroyed country where truth is lost and lives of the innocent are mixed with their blood.”
ToB asked Iraqis who blog in English a standard set of questions, and on October 18 he published the 16 sets of answers he’d received. They are all well worth reading. His fourth question was: Do you think the war was worth it or not? Why?
Of those 16, eight said clearly it was not worth it; six gave answers expressing uncertainty; and only two said Yes, it was worth it.
It’s not clear to me how many of these bloggers are currently living inside Iraq– some are, some aren’t– or how many had been exiles from Iraq prior to March 2003. But the fact that they blog so articulately in English, and have enough access to internet connections that they can blog with, apparently, some regularity indicates to me that either they are currently living in exile or that if they are still resident in Iraq, then they are most likely from better-off segments of Iraqi society.
In other words, these are people who should have been the natural allies of any credible democratization project inside Iraq. Some of them, like Najma of A Star from Mosul, admit to having changed their views on the value of the US invasion– towards a more critical view of it– over the past three years.
Also Zeyad, who has a pretty famous blog called Healing Iraq, did not “come out” as an open critic of the US invasion of his country until the day after ToB published his survey. In that latter momentous post, Zeyad wrote:

Another close friend of mine has been killed in Baghdad. We had lunch together in Baghdad just days before I left.
I can’t concentrate on anything any more. I should not be here in New York running around a stupid neighbourhood, asking people about their ‘issues’.
I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle.

(Hat-tip for Christiane for sending me to that post and through Healing Iraq to everything else mentioned here.)
In his answer to ToB’s question, “Do you think the war was worth it or not? Why?” Zeyad had answered only, “I’m afraid to answer that question.”
The Iraqi blogosphere is, of course, an area of discourse that has expanded tremendously since the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Prior to his toppling there was already, however, the redoubtable Salam/Pax blogging his way through the last days of Saddam’s rule and through the whole invasion. Salam hasn’t posted anything at all since July 18 on his current blog, which he’d renamed at some point The Daily Absurdity Report..
Amid all the terrible stories about the assaults against gay people in today’s Iraq– and the fact of his ‘out’ gayness– I just hope (a) that Salam’s safe, and probably also (b) that he is no longer in the country.
Regarding my own two long-favored Iraqi bloggers, Riverbend and Faiza, Riverbend had a 2.5-month hiatus there before her most recent post on the Lancet study. And Faiza’s been uncharacteristically quiet recently, too. She wrote this long post, in Arabic, on September 30; but nothing since.
Here’s how she started the post:

I have stopped writing on my website for a while now…
And the reason is perhaps; because I was occupied working with the Iraqis who fled the hell of life inside Iraq, or perhaps that I was bored from the same talk about the painful reality that is going on for more than three years, until I no longer like to talk, as if repeating the same words, uselessly.
Iraqis are still dying everyday; killed by trapped cars, sectarian militia, and death squads who carry out random assassinations on the streets. Or they die by assassinations organized against every nationalist or cultured Iraqi, against every scientist, doctor, or university professor…
There is someone out there who decided to assassinate everything in Iraq, everything that moves on the land of Iraq, and bears the Iraqi identity…
A Sunniey or a Shia’at, rich or poor, a Muslim or not a Muslim, cultured or not, with or against the occupation; all these are targets, and dead bodies are filling the streets, eaten by dogs…
And Bush is still living in his delusions, giving speeches about imaginary victories in Iraq. Is he fooling himself, or his people?
Perhaps both. This is what tyrants do, all over the world.
If Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, this Bush is no less a tyrant…

And near the end she tells this story:

I started working with Iraqi non-governmental organizations who work in Human Rights affairs. We receive here dislodged people from Iraq, who were threatened with death for sectarian reasons, by the death squads and the new death militia which the occupation policy spawned, to rip apart the Iraqi’s unity.
We collect donations from here and there, so we can provide for them some lodgings, cloths, and the least minimum level of a good life.
((Welfare shall remain in my nation until the Day of Judgment)) says the Holy Prophet, (may the blessings of God be upon him).
And from Baghdad, I have a short, sad story, but one which I consider to be a model for the stories of sadness from Iraq.
Some six months ago, one of our neighbors was assassinated. He used to work as an officer in the Iraqi Army. I wrote about him at the time.
He had a wife and two sons, (five and four years), Ahmad and Muhammad.
The wife, I don’t know why, lost her mind, and killed herself one month ago, in her sadness for her husband.
The children remained with their mother’s mother; a lonely, poor old woman. Their father’s kin are in Samara, where two of their uncles were killed, their grandfather was arrested, and the rest of their uncles are detained by the occupation forces.
My friends and I made an agreement to send them cloths and presents from time to time…
If I was living in Baghdad, I would have brought them to my home, to live with my family.
The Holy Prophet says: ((I, and whoever supports the orphan, are in heaven)), (may the blessings of God be upon him).

People who want to explore the recent work of Iraqi bloggers some more can find a good portal to this in this round-up from last week by Salam Adil. Salam Adil, btw, is a nom-de-plume. It is also Arabic for “A just peace.” Wouldn’t that be a great thing for Iraqis– and Palestinians and Israelis and all the peoples of the Middle East– to achieve.

This, from Save the Children via IRIN:

Thousands of students have been forced to stay at home due to escalating violence across the country. Attendance rates for the new school year, which started on 20 September, are a record low, according to the Ministry of Education.
Recently released statistics from the Ministry indicate that only 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to approximately 75 percent of students attending classes the previous year, according to UK-based NGO Save the Children.
“Last year I had nearly 80 students in my class. Today, there are less than 25. Families are keeping their children safe at home, waiting to see how violence will spread, particularly after many schools were targeted countrywide,” said Hiba Addel Lattef, a teacher and coordinator at Mansour Primary School in the capital, Baghdad.
“Education [levels are] deteriorating as a result of violence,” Lattef added.
…According to Faleh Hassan al-Quraishy, an official in the Ministry of Education, threats from insurgents have forced the government to close around 420 of the country’s 16,500 public schools. He added that 310 teachers had been killed and 160 injured over the past year….

Have you checked the ReliefWeb Iraq link on the JWN sidebar recently? This item here is just one of many very sobering reports there.

The pressure has been growing on Pres. Bush to “do something” to reassure Americans– and in particular, the many millions of Republican voters who are currently disaffected, dubious, and distinctly unmotivated to vote GOP on November 7– that he “has a plan” to deal with the still-unraveling debacle in Iraq.
The Prez looks like a deer caught between two headlights: there’s the side of him that wants to repeat the well-worn mantra of “Stay the course” and the side of him that now wants to say “Okay, folks, I’m on top of this; I know how to be flexible and figure out new tactics to deal with evolving situations…”
You can practically see the two memes battling within him. The President “at war” (with himself.) Not a reassuring sight.
Today he did three things. As Reuters tells us here, he,

said on Friday he will resist election-year pressure for a major shift in strategy in Iraq, despite growing doubts among Americans and anxiety over the war among Republican lawmakers.
“Our goal in Iraq is clear and it’s unchanging,” Bush told Republican loyalists, denouncing Democrats who want a course correction as supporting a “doubt and defeat” approach.

He met (for a full half hour!) with Centcom head Gen. John Abizaid, the man responsible for US military operations in the portion of the world that includes both Iraq and Afghahistan. A follow-up meeting is planned for tomorrow, at which,

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top White House officials will meet U.S. military officials in Iraq for a long-scheduled videoconference. Abizaid will be a key presenter at that meeting, [White House spokeswoman Dana] Perino said..

Note the stress that Ms. Perino felt she needed to place on the fact that this is a “long-scheduled” meeting. What, you think a “crisis-response” meeting might actually be more appropriate at the end of a week that has been this much disastrous for the US military in Baghdad? No, no! It’ll just be “business as usual” there in the Bush White House…
(I am not reassured. And I doubt if many Republican congressional candidates are either… )
Okay, that’s two things the Prez did today in response to the Iraq crisis. The third was to have press spokeman Tony Snow (aka “the President’s attempt at having a brain”) go out and try to explain the President’s Iraq policy to the public. Actually, everyone ought to go and read that White House spinscript there. Especially portions like this sophomoric piece of strategy-babble:

The President understands the difficulty in a time of war. And he also understands that what you do is you adjust tactically. I was talking today with General Caldwell, and the way he describes it, the military term of art is you “work the plan.” And if things are not achieving the objectives as you wish, you adjust and you work the plan. And he says they’re continuing to work the plan in Baghdad and elsewhere. Those are the kinds of tactical adjustments…

But the most interesting part of the transcript is what comes right after that:

What the President has made pretty clear is that there are a handful of things that he has ruled out. He is eager to hear about other ideas; but leaving is not going to work, and partition is simply off the table.

In-ter-est-ing… Now I can see why in the run-up to an election Bush would want to slam the idea of “leaving” Iraq. Especially after he’s just criticized the Democrats for being the party of “cut and run”– or “doubt and defeat”, or even worse, as Snow put it there, the party of “walk and talk”, that is, a party that not only leaves Iraq but wants to talk to the Iranians while doing so (!) (Not that many Dems are, actually, advocating that right now. It’s mainly Republican consigliere James Baker who has been raising that as an idea so far. And honestly, good for him.)
But why is Bush/Snow so eager to slam the idea of partition?
I can see no possible party-political benefit in being as definitive about this as Snow (and the president) have been… So maybe they are really serious about it?
More from Snow’s press conference on this:

Q On the partition question, you said yesterday it was a non-starter; today you said the President doesn’t want to think about it. You have prominent Republicans like Senator Hutchison and Senator Santorum saying that it should be looked at. Why does the administration —
MR. SNOW: It has been looked at. It has been looked at.
Q Why is it not — why is it a non-starter?
MR. SNOW: It’s a non-starter because you don’t want to recreate the Balkans. What you have is — within Iraq there is a sense of national identity, and it was expressed at considerable risk by 12 million Iraqis last year. They made it clear that they consider themselves part of a nation. And the idea of breaking them into pieces raises the prospect in the south that you’re going to have pressure from Iran on the largely Shia south; you’re going to have difficulties in the north with the Kurds, with the Turks and the Syrians, who are worried about a greater Kurdistan; and then if you have in the middle a Sunni population that has been cut out of the prosperity by oil to the north and south, you have a recipe for a tinderbox…

I do think he’s trying to get a serious message out there– in particular, to the Iraqi Kurds, who have been working very hard, since 1991, not only to partition Iraq but also to secure Washington’s support for that policy. And the Kurds have plenty of (guilt-ridden) allies within the US political system for that.
So why does Bush seem to be so adamantly opposed to partition at this point?
I think it may be part of the slow process by which he is– oh so gradually!– coming to terms with reality in Iraq.
Look at it this way. Partition of nations has been either part of US policy or a quite acceptable fall-back option in a number of conflicts the US has gotten involved in since WW2. From SKorea to Germany to Vietnam, the US has been quite happy to go along with the partitioning of nations– even in cases where the “will of the people” was quite clearly in favor of national unity.
But in all those earlier cases, the “pro-US” fragment of the nation that was thus partitioned was directly connected to the US’s existing global military supply lines. A landlocked Kurdistan, by contrast, would be more like a landlocked West Berlin during the various Berlin crises from 1948 on than it would be like, say, West Germany or South Korea. A partitioned, quasi-“independent” Kurdistan would have no natural allies among its neighbors, and indeed, mught have to be “sustained” by the US in the midst of a completely engulfing sea of anti-Kurd hostility. Resupplying it would be a logistical challenge that would dwarf the Berlin Airlift… And for what? At least West Berlin played an important role in the US’s big struggle of that era, against the Soviet Union. But what strategic value would a US-dependent Kurdistan have?
If Kurdistan was in southern Iraq, next to the Gulf and next to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Bush and Snow might be speaking very differently about the prospect of partition in Iraq… (But that spot is already taken– by a social/political grouping that is very, very different from the Kurds.)
So I think what we’re seeing now, as the Bushites start to face up to the idea of some truly momentous decisions having to be made regarding Iraq, is the White House telling the Kurds as plainly as it can that yes, once again, as in 1975 and as in 1991, Washington is going to be letting them down. (In 1975, it was Kissinger who did it, too.)
The Iraqi Kurdish leaders are not particularly impressive as exemplars of democratic practice (to say the least!) But they are a wily bunch of guys who’ve survived in their part of the world for many decades now. At this point, they may well revert to some of their earlier alliances there– with Syria, with Iran– or who knows, even perhaps with some of the ethnic-Arab forces in Iraq.
As I said, interesting days.

Well, what did I say here just seven hours ago?

But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?

So then, we had the US military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj.-Gen. William Caldwell saying [BBC] publicly and forthrightly that Operation Forward Together– Gen. George Casey’s recent and much-acclaimed project to “flood the zone” in Baghdad with US troops in order to pacify the city prior to the US election– “ has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in… violence.”
The NYT’s Michael Luo has more Caldwell:

In an unusually gloomy assessment, General Caldwell called the spike in attacks “disheartening” and added that the American military was “working closely with the government of Iraq to determine how to best refocus our efforts.”
It is unclear, however, what other options might be available to American military commanders if their current efforts fail…
In a worrisome development, General Caldwell revealed Thursday that American troops had to return last week to Dora, a troubled southern Baghdad neighborhood that had been a showcase of the new security plan and was one of the first areas to be cleared.
A key concern from the outset of the stepped-up patrols in the capital was the difficulty of holding onto areas after they had been cleared. In other troubled areas of the country that American forces have sought to “clear and hold,” like towns along the Euphrates River corridor from west of Baghdad to the Syrian border, military officials have struggled to deal with insurgents simply melting away prior to the arrival of troops, only to return stronger than ever after focused military offensives have been completed. [Very sneaky of them, eh? ~HC]
In Baghdad, the military has been observing a marked increase recently in sectarian attacks in so-called cleared areas, General Caldwell said, noting that insurgents were “punching back hard.”
“They’re trying to get back into those areas,” he said. “We’re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again.”
General Caldwell also raised the possibility that insurgents have intentionally increased their attacks in recent weeks as a way of influencing political events in the United States.
“We also realize that there is a midterm election that’s taking place in the United States and that the extremist elements understand the power of the media; that if they can in fact produce additional casualties, that in fact is recognized and discussed in the press because everybody would like not to see anybody get killed in these operations, but that does occur,” he said.
By almost any measure, the situation in the capital is in a downward spiral. Last month, General Caldwell said in a briefing that suicide attacks were at an all-time high. October is also on track to be the third-deadliest month of the conflict for the American military, with a large portion of the deaths occurring in Baghdad.
The military on Thursday announced the deaths of two more American troops — a Marine in Anbar province from “enemy action” and a soldier north of Balad from a roadside bomb — bringing the month’s total to at least 72.
American commanders had predicted a spike in violence during Ramadan, but previous Ramadans have been nowhere near as deadly for American troops as October has been so far.
Deaths in Baghdad specifically have leaped this month. Anbar province also continues to be deadly for American troops who are trying to root out Sunni insurgents there.
On Thursday, dozens of black-clad gunmen, toting assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, paraded down a main street in Ramadi, one of the most troublesome cities in Anbar province for American troops. They waved banners identifying them as members of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella group for insurgents. The council had recently announced the creation of an Islamic state in the area, independent of the Iraqi government.

Right. Just in case it hasn’t been clear to JWN readers yet: The two parts of Iraq with the highest current levels of violence are the two areas with the highest concentration of US military operations…
Does anybody out there still claim the US has any valid claim whatsoever to be the power that “fixes” what has been broken in Iraq?
… Anyway, I did think it was worth noting the (relative) courage of Gen. Caldwell in speaking so forthrightly in public. However, from my long study of the US military I am 100 percent convinced that he would not have done this without getting explicit instructions to do so from his commanding officer, Gen. George Casey, the commanding officer in Iraq, and also quite possibly from Casey’s boss, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of Centcom.
In which case, it would have been considerably more gutsy and effective if one of those two more senior generals had personally delivered the same kind of “brutally honest” assessment that, instead, they had their flack Gen. Caldwell deliver. In Britain, remember, it was the army’s very top officer, Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, who delivered the bad news in public last week.
That was considerably gutsier.
Reuters meanwhile has reported that Gen. Casey had a yet lower-level flack deliver this message today:

“General Casey has ordered a review of Operation Together Forward. U.S. casualties are a grave concern but that is not driving the review,” Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said.
“The enemy is adapting and we have to make changes,” he told Reuters. “This is a constant review process.” He said that General George Casey, who commands the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq ordered the review last week…

Bottom line: Britain’s Dannatt still wins the “Speaking Truth to Power” medal for bravery, hands down.

She’s back… thank G-d.
She put up a post yesterday– her first since August 5– in which she somberly considered the recent Lancet study on Iraqi mortality and the controversy it has generated.
She writes,

So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.
The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.
Let’s pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al….

As for her long absence from the blogosphere, she writes:

There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
It’s very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves…

I am so, so glad she is still alive, and still getting her unique voice out into the world. I can only imagine how hard, how soul-searing and desperate the past few months must have been– for her, and for all other Iraqis.
Bring the US troops home.

Things are going seriously badly in Iraq this month. For the Iraqis, but also for the Americans. The number of US dead there has now reached 70 since October 1— and we’re still only at October 18.
For every one of these US service members killed, tens must have been wounded very badly indeed. God help them all.
And of course, Iraqis are being killed, in the many different forms of violence now roiling the country, in far, far greater numbers.
At the Iraqi political level, PM Nuri al-Maliki made a double pilgrimage to Najaf today– to see Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and to see Mahdi Army chief Moqtada Sadr. This, after the phone conversation on Monday with President Bush, which– one can conclude– must have left Maliki far from satisfied about the baselessness of the many recent rumors that Washington was considering replacing him.
On coming out from the meeting with Sistani, Maliki stressed that,

“The Iraqi government is a government of national unity that came to power through the will of the Iraqi people… The Iraqi people are the only authorized party that can remove this government or allow it to continue.”

It seems clear by now that the big gamble the US occupation authorities made in the past siux weeks– that by “flooding the zone” in Baghdad with US troops, they could restore something of a sense of order there before the US elections– has failed. With 147,000 US troops in the country, they still haven’t been able to get a handle on the situation.
This evening, Bill and I watched the highlights of the interview that ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted with Bush somewhere in, I believe Georgia or Florida, earlier today. Bush was more than usually flustered and inarticulate, and really seemed badly taken aback by the direct and simple questions that GS asked him– about Iraq, especially.
As the account on the ABC News website there says,

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
“He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

Yes, indeed. If I were a Republican Party operative I would not find that reassuring.

He’s back. Iraq’s currently imprisoned former president has dictated an open letter through his chief lawyer in which he assures the Iraqi people that “victory is at hand” and calls for their magnanimity towards each other despite recent internecine political differences.
He called on Iraqi Sunnis forgive even those informants who helped the US to track down and kill his two sons, in 2003.
Meanwhile, officials in the “Iraqi” (actually US-dominated) Special Tribunal that has been trying Saddam on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity say that the judges there might deliver the first set of verdicts– on charges related to the killing of 148 Shiites in Dujail in 1982– on November 5.
It is quite possible that, as prosecutors have requested, Saddam might receive a death sentence in that trial. One unresolved question is whether the court will stay “execution” of that sentence long enough to allow completion of the second trial to which he and a group of associates are being subjected– the one involving charges of genocide for his part in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1989.
I would guess that Saddam may have decided to issue his “open letter” now because he fears being silenced fairly soon– either by the imposition of the death penalty, or by imposition of strict restraints on his ability to communicate with his lawyer.
By the way, I’ve just been going through some of my old posts– both here on JWN and on Transitional Justice Forum– on the Saddam trial. Here are some of the more informative ones:

December 17, 2003
June 30, 2004
September 27, 2005
October 18, 2005
October 19, 2005
November 10, 2005
December 22, 2005 (a)
December 22, 2005 (b)
January 29, 2006
February 16, 2006

It is true that, as noted in several of the posts above, there have been many procedural problems with the trial of Saddam Hussein– starting, as Nehal Bhuta noted in a comment on that December 2003 post of mine, with the illegal arrogation by the US occupying power of the “right” to control the whole trial process. But still, this man who is responsible for having launched two brutal wars of external aggression and is credibly accused of having committed genocide and crimes against humanity at home has nonetheless been afforded some form of a semi-open trial process and the dignity of enjoying minimally acceptable conditions of confinement… Whereas right now, in Guantanamo, there languish hundreds of prisoners taken from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world by the US, who have been held in quite inhumane conditions– some of them for nearly five years now– and have not had the benefit of anything like a credible trial…
You could say, “that’s life”? No, I think you should say that is how politics and the untrameled exercise of power by the strong over the weak always tend to work…

British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt has spoken out forcefully in favor of a swift withdrawal of British troops from Iraq:

Sir Richard’s lead in shining a light on the Armed Forces extends to the mission in Iraq. He says with great clarity and honesty that “our presence exacerbates the security problems”. “I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war-fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning.
“History will show that a vacuum was created and into the vacuum malign elements moved. The hope that we might have been able to get out of Iraq in 12, 18, 24 months after the initial start in 2003 has proved fallacious. Now hostile elements have got a hold it has made our life much more difficult in Baghdad and in Basra.
“The original intention was that we put in place a liberal democracy that was an exemplar for the region, was pro-West and might have a beneficial effect on the balance within the Middle East.
“That was the hope. Whether that was a sensible or naïve hope, history will judge. I don’t think we are going to do that. I think we should aim for a lower ambition.”
Sir Richard adds, strongly, that we should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems”. “We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear. “As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited into a country, but we weren’t invited, certainly by those in Iraq at the time. Let’s face it, the military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in.
“That is a fact. I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.”
He contrasts this with the situation in Afghanistan, where we remain at the invitation of President Hamid Karzai’s government.
“There is a clear distinction between our status and position in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which is why I have much more optimism that we can get it right in Afghanistan.”
There is a logistical as well as a moral reason for concentrating on the mission in Afghanistan. Sir Richard talked last month of the Army “running hot”. Our troops are stretched to capacity. We have only one spare battalion. Almost everyone is going to end up serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The whole interview there is worth reading. Ditto these later clarifications to the BBC.

Steve Negus wrote in the FT yesterday about the distinctly rumpish-looking session the Iraqi “parliament” held yesterday to discuss changes in the Constitution that will specify and facilitate the devolution of many powers to “regions”. (Hat-tip to Juan for that.)
Negus wrote that there were “approximately 140” MPs present. Az-zaman apparently wrote that there were 138. 138 is the minimum needed to form a majority (and therefore also a quorum? info on quorum requirements, please?) in the 275-member body. Negus wrote that all the legislators present at yesterday’s session voted for a law that would,

allow Iraq’s 18 governorates to hold referendums on whether to amalgamate into federal regions similar to the Kurdistan self-rule zone in the north, which has its own regional government and security forces.

He notes that,

Shia and Sunni leaders agreed last month to delay the law’s implementation for at least 18 months, postponing the creation of any new autonomous regions until 2008.

However, it’s not clear to me what will be gained from this delay, except yet more bloodshed, given the extreme bad faith with which the proponents of radical devolution (also sometimes misnamed “federalism”) in Iraq have been acting. Including in the way they rushed to convene this session.
Beyond that, given the horrendous situation through which most Iraqi communities are now living, I wonder what the meaning and true impact of this “legislative act” really is. Will it make any difference to the lives of Iraqis? My understanding, from poll data and other sources, is that the vast majority of non-Kurdish Iraqis, including probably a majority within the Shiite community, want to keep Iraq as a unitary state (but that if the Kurds want to grab a lot of powers to their region, at least the non-Kurdish parts of the state should stick together.)
In the period of mayhem and civil conflict that almost certainly lies ahead (given the trend line under US occupation so far), what difference will this “legislation” make? And indeed, what is the relevance of this whole, Green Zone-bound Iraqi “parliament” at all, at this stage?
What relevance it has at this stage derives, I believe, almost solely from international factors. Most evidently, from the support it gets from the US occupying force, which has been able to shoe-horn the present, parliament-derived Iraqi “government” into a degree of international “legitimacy”. (This is similar to the way the US has been working, regarding Somalia, to shore up the international “legitimacy” and recognition of the warlord-dominated, Baidoa-based government, rather than that of the Mogadishu-based Islamic Courts regime, which seems to have considerably more popular support than Baidoa.) In times of civil turmoil, “recognition” by external governments is an important political asset that can be parlayed into further political/diplomatic support, military support, the ability to conclude lucrative contracts (as the Kurds have been doing with the oil supplies in their region), etc etc.
So much for the longheld American idea that the legitimacy of a government derives from the consent of the governed, eh?
So in the present circumstance, regarding the present Iraqi parliament and government, it seems clear that 138 MPs are on board this dangerous “legislative” campaign to split the country. But if 138 (or 140) is the greatest number the splittists can muster, then I think that is fairly pathetic. At the very least, it means that any procedures they enact in the field of devolution will have poor popular support. Either these procedures will die on the vine, or they will be highly contested and yet another cause for internal discord. Either way, they do not point the way, in Iraq’s ethnic-Arab areas, to any orderly progression toward a robust and popular supported devolution of powers. All that this “legislation” really does is give more legislative support and “legitimacy” to the Kurds’ own, already-existing march toward very robust autonomy.
I imagine some quite considerable amounts of money passed hands to ensure the convening of this session.