Category: Iraq-2007-Q1

Fragments from Iraq

Iraq is in fragments.  Over the period since 2002 the government of my country, the US, took a number
of decisions whose effect
(quite regardless of their intention,
something of which we can speak later) has been to destroy the
country’s state apparatus and institutions and to fracture the dense
network of social and political relationships that previously held it
together.

I am very sorry indeed that I and those other US citizens who knew all
along– based on the understanding that many of us had about the nature
of Iraq, the nature of Middle Eastern societies, and also, yes, the
often  quite unexpected effects of the use of military poower–
that the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq would turn out
very badly indeed, and who did what we could to prevent the invasion
from being launched in the first place, were unable to prevent it.

I feel deep shame, as a US citizen, that it is the government of my
country that has visited this death and terrible, terrible destruction
on the people of Iraq.  Also, that our President was re-elected,
or as we might say, elected for the first time; but anyway, returned to
the presidency by the citizenry in a generally free polling process– even in the fall of 2004,
once it was already becoming increasingly clear that (1) the invasion
and its after-effects were inflicting increasingly high levels of
death, damage, and destruction on Iraqis, and (2) the WMD ‘pretext’
that had jerked most of the US citizenry, and most of our lawmakers,
into supporting the invasion had zero evidentiary basis and indeed had
been considerably hyped, exaggerating, and one might even say
manufactured by the Bushites.

During the month-long journey in and around three Arab countries that I have just completed, I had
a much starker and more vivid sense of what the destruction of Iraq
must be like and must feel like, for Iraqis.  I had already, some
30 years ago, lived through the destriction that prolonged civil war
(and intermittent Israeli attacks) visited on that country.  And
now, most recently, here I was again– driving through the settled
fields and olive groves of southern Syria; driving along the canals,
through the date-groves and the new ex-urban conglomerations that ring
Cairo; hearing the call to prayer ring out in a city in northern Jordan
as we passed it; seeing the citizens of all three of these Arab
countries going about their daily business with focus and good humor,
more or less confident (most of them) that they could continue to
pursue this very well-rooted but also remarkably adaptable lifestyle
throughout the months and years ahead, perhaps save a little for their
children’s future, perhaps move a bit toward their long-held dream of
winning more real accountability from their governments, enjoying their
friendships and their webs of relations with people from different
communities, sitting around their coffee-shops and sheesha-houses,
going to their mosques and their many ancient churches… with tomorrow
generally fairly well predictable from today, and crucially, a general
(though not complete) environment of public security and public safety.

And there in Iraq, just a few hundred miles away, people who are very
similar to these Arab citizens in so many ways, and who had been lives
very similar to those I was seeing here, had had all these things taken
brutally from them and were now living (and dying) in a state of
generalized, existential fear and uncertainty.

All the citizens of these other Arab countries with whom I spoke
conveyed passionately to me how deeply, deeply disturbing they found
the developments inside Iraq, especially the more recent rounds of
inter-sectarian killing.. 

(I read a really cruel and stupid Tom Freidman column recently in which
in his most accusatory and preachy was he was ‘bemoaning’ the alleged
fact that no Arab or Muslim leaders have spoken out against the
sectarian carnage being enacted in Iraq.  What complete and utter
nonsense!!  Has Tom Friedman actually been to any Arab countries
in recent months and heard what opinion leaders of all sorts are saying
there?  Has he even spoken to any Arabs at all in recent weeks,
apart from Mamoun Fandy, whom he quoted there, who lives and works here
in London?)

And the destruction in Iraq all seemed so much more vivid to me, when I
was there so close, and in such a very similar environment.

I realize this is mostly because of my own failure– when I sit in the
distant US of A– of being able vividly enough to imagine the lives and
conditions that the people of Iraq currently have to suffer.

When I was in Syria and Jordan– as recently as last Saturday– I both
wanted to visit with and talk with some of the million-plus Iraqis who,
because of what the US has done to their country, have had to flee
their homes and loves there and rush to those two countries to seek the
raw physical survival of themselves and their families; and I also
feared doing that.

What could I say to such an Iraqi refugee?

I had a few small encounters with Iraqis, in Jordan.  But still, I
confess that I found it easier to talk about the Iraqi refugees
with Syrians and Jordanians than I thought I would find it to talk to Iraqi refugees in either
place.

I feel ashamed about that, too.

However, Bill and I did get a chance to sit down and talk in Amman with
two Iraqi friends of fairly long standing.  These are people who
have not– yet– fled their country completely.  They are people
whom I like and admire a lot, but with whom I have in the past had some
strong disagreements.  primarily over the US decision to invade
their country, which both of them supported strongly at the time,
overwhelmingly on human-rights grounds.  But because I like
and admire them both so much, and really care about their wellbeing, I
have tried to keep in touch with them as much as all of our busy
schedules have allowed, and I am glad that they have done the
same.  Our meeting in Amman last week was the first time I’d seen
them since January 2006.  We all had a lot to talk about.

Let me tell you a little about what we discussed with these friends, whom I’ll call ‘T’ and ‘J’…

Continue reading “Fragments from Iraq”

Bushites forced to deal with Syria and Iran

It is excellent news that the Bushites have finally been forced— by their own puppet government in Baghdad, no less– to sit down at the same table with representatives of Iraq and all its neighbors, including Iran and Syria.
That WaPo report says this:

    Rice told the Senate Appropriations Committee,”We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve the relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region.”
    The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.
    …Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has long advocated a regional conference, though originally it was meant to include only Iraq’s neighbors. The administration decided in recent weeks to attend the conference, but in an effort to avoid the spotlight it ensured that it will be joined at the table in March by other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, U.S. officials said. The foreign ministers’ meeting in April will be further expanded to include representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.
    It was decided “relatively recently” to include the permanent Security Council members, and the G-8 was invited “as of last night,” a senior administration official said. Rice’s announcement appeared intended to assuage congressional concerns about the administration’s Iraq policy, which have threatened to derail passage of a nearly $100 billion supplemental spending request for Iraq.
    Administration officials noted that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell attended a regional conference on Iraq in 2004, where at one point he found himself seated next to the Iranian foreign minister and made idle chitchat. But that meeting took place in a different context, before Iran had started uranium enrichment and before Syria was implicated in the killing of a Lebanese political figure — two reasons the administration has frequently cited for limited diplomatic engagement with Tehran and Damascus.

Of course these meetings won’t be the end of the sorry tale of the US’s extremely destructive involvement in Iraq. But they point the way to possible process in which a steady, orderly– and let’s hope complete and speedy!– US withdrawal from Iraq might occur.

Visser on Southern Iraq and oil

The well-informed southern Iraq scholar Reidar Visser has an important new piece of analysis here, titled Basra Crude: The Great Game of Iraq’s “Southern” Oil.
He adds some very important clarifications to the whole current discussion of the linked questions of oil regulations and federalism in Iraq.
Some very important information he injects into this discussion:

    Accounting for one of the world’s greatest concentrations of petroleum wealth, almost all of Iraq’s supergiant oil fields can be found near Basra or in one of its two neighbouring governorates. The other six Shiite-majority governorates of Iraq have little or no oil, and even the most optimistic estimates of new discoveries in Kurdistan pale in comparison with the reserves of Basra and the far south.
    This problem is particularly pronounced with regard to the areas south of Baghdad, where the conflation in the international media of the terms “Shiite”, “Southern Iraq” and “oil” masks an intense battle for control currently underway between competing political currents within Iraq’s Shiite community. Basra is unusual in that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – the Shiite party that has accomplished the remarkable feat of becoming the favourite Iraqi partner of both Washington and Tehran – is completely on the sidelines in local government. Instead, other local factions and especially the Fadila party have dominated since 2005. In the same period, the idea that Basra could become a small-scale federal entity of its own, separated from the rest of the Shiite territories, has gained some ground, while traditional Iraqi nationalism also seems to remain surprisingly strong among the population at large. The implication is that SCIRI’s competing project of a single Shiite super-region south of Baghdad will suffer from a glaring defect unless something changes dramatically in Basra: it will have almost no oil resources.

Visser also notes that if the currently proposed suggestions for revisions in the country’s oil-regulation laws are confirmed by the Iraqi parliament, then “the incentives for seeking federal status for existing governorates – such as Basra – will become greater.”
Anyway, go read his whole piece of analysis there. Then you can come back and discuss it– including, most likely, with Reidar himself– on the comments board attached to this post.

Iraq’s Phoenix Rising Again?

(with thanks to Donald A. Weadon, Jr. for his comments – below))
Heeee’s back. No, not Virgil Goode, (!) but Ahmad Chalabi. Friday’s Wall Street Journal cover headline proclaims that the American “Surge” has returned Chalabi to the “Center Stage” of Iraqi politics.
I wonder how many coffee cups spilled over this one.
Chalabi has become so infamous that his very name deserves a Webster’s dictionary entry. Just as one would not want one’s reputation “Borked” or “Swift-boated,” one would not want to have the “Chalabi” pulled over one’s eyes.

If we observe (correctly) that the neocons wish to anoint an Iranian “Chalabi,” it will be understood that we mean a “fraud,” a “slippery character” who speaketh, as one line of my ancestors might say, “with forked tongue.” An Iranian Chalabi would be an Iranian expatriate who will prattle nicely in English about “democracy” and Israel, will prophecy that an American military overthrow of the Iranian government will be easy and popular, and will boast of a huge personal following inside Iran.
An “Iranian Chalabi” would also have influential MSM columnists publishing glowing tributes to his “leadership” credentials. In case anyone is paying attention (as we all should be), the current neocon frontrunner candidate for “liberating” Iran is Amir Abbas Fakhravar.

JWN regulars over the past four years will recall that Chalabi has long been at the top of Helena’s least favored list, and she has appropriately taken apart (in)famous colleagues like Jim Hoagland (“Hoagie”) and Judith Miller for their willing roles in promoting Chalabi’s frauds. (Type in “Chalabi” on the jwn search feature, and you’ll get a feast of Chalabi bad memories.)
Chalabi’s star status in Washington deteriorated along with America’s misadventure in Iraq, as it devolved from “mission accomplished” to “central front in the war on ter-er.” Over the past year or so, key neocons and even intelligence veteran Pat Lang intimated that Chalabi must have been an Iranian double agent all along. After all, the logic went, how could somebody that nefarious, unscrupulous, and prone to dissimulation have been anything but Iranian connected? Besides, he visits Iran. (as if that proves anything – in itself.)
I was never convinced of this argument. That the Iranians might have endeavored to connect to Chalabi is hardly suprising, as the Iranians have every “rational” interest in trying to have ties to as many Iraqi poltiical players as possible, from Talibani to Sadr to Hakim, to Maleki, to yes, Chalabi.
The Iranians, by the way, were similar disposed to assorted Afghan players in the late 1990’s – amid Iran’s severely strained relations with the Taliban. I recall even warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar finding exile in Iran…. even as it was clear Iran was less than thrilled to have him. (He was expelled in early 2003.)
Still, the bizarre, if tantalizing suggestion that Chalabi was a deep cover Iranian agent back when he was being hawked so rapturously by Miller, Hoagland,(Bernard) Lewis, Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, etc. is too “good” to be believable…. no? Were Miller & Hoagie that blind? Well, the possibility at least made for delicious irony…. :-}
As the neocons and Chalabi went through bitter reciminations and public mutual finger pointing, Chalabi’s political stature appeared to hit rock bottom when his (American favored) list of candidates failed to win a single seat in the December 2005 elections for Iraq’s Parliament.
Phoenix….
Alas, reports of Chalabi’s political demise were premature.
Today’s Journal reports he’s back at the center stage of Iraqi politics, having been appointed by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to serve as “chairman” of a “popular committee to mobilize public support…” for the surge. Astonishingly, Chalabi has been installed as the top “liaison,” the “indispensable link” between the counter-insurgency and the people.
Excerpts of the WSJ report follow below. Yet first, here’s a brilliantly sardonic take on Chalabi’s rising from the ashes, from Donald A. Weadon, Jr. — a distinguished international lawyer, and friend in Washington. Don first contributed this comment on “peace, harmony, & bunny rabbits” to the closed “Gulf 2000 forum.” I re-post here, with Don’s permission and his edits:

“Like a mischievous cat, Ahmad Chalabi bears close watching as he runs through his nine lives.
After dodging a bullet in Jordan for massive bank fraud, he ran to the United States to parlay his intellect and his guile into a close connection to a band of lost intellectuals with grandiose plans, the neoconservatives.
While it is difficult in retrospect to imagine a University of Chicago professor who, being followed by an InterPol warrant for his arrest, comes to Washington D.C. as the darling of a cabal of folks who want to unleash their mindless vision of harmony by way of the sword in the Middle East and provides them the werewithal to give it a try at the public’s expense — well, that’s what happened.
Feeding the neocon butterflies who hovered about the early Bush 41 White House the nectar of fraudulent defectors with fabulous tales of secret WMD shenanigans, mobile nerve gas vans and the like to bolster their grandiose fantasies, he seduced the Administration and Congress into feeding him tens of millions of dollars a year for his most bogus Iraq National Congress and then even more national treasure into a Defense Department petri dish — a building next to the Pentagon under Wolfowitz’s patronage where AC toiled to create a government in exile, ready to “plug in” the minute Saddam was toppled. No wonder Rumsfeld didn’t want to know about “Day 2” onwards — he, too, had been bamboozled by AC, the celestial fraudster, into believing that all one had to do was to topple Saddam and plug him and his coterie in, and all Americans could just go home, and AC would lead the newest, friendliest client state for America smack dab in the middle of the Middle East. Peace, harmony and bunny rabbits.

Continue reading “Iraq’s Phoenix Rising Again?”

Riverbend’s cry from the heart

The talented Iraqi woman blogger Riverbend has posted again today– the first time since December 31.
This post is an agonized reflection on an interview she saw on Al-Jazeera t.v. last night, with an Iraqi woman who had been gang-raped by members of the US-trained Iraqi “security” forces.
As I noted here recently, the use of sexual humiliation and other forms of humiliation to try to “ensure” the post-detention silence of detainees is a common tactic of oppressive, torturing regimes; and it takes enormous courage for any victim to be able to speak out afterwards about what was done to her/him.
Riv writes,

    look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.
    She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbor I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt…

And of course, many non-Iraqi Arabs who watch this on Jazeera will have a very similar response, too.
Riv starts out her post by noting the contrast between the Oprah Winfrey Show, airing at that exact same time on one of the t.v. channels her family is able to access, which dealt with challenges US women face as they make their shopping choices or deal with their shopping addictions… and the other show, the one on Jazeera. She writes, too, that she is (quite understandably) filled with rage. But when she writes, “I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate” I think that is to some her extent her rage and anger talking there.
I did not see the footage, since we don’t have a t.v. in our apartment here. (Can anyone send me a link to a streaming video version of some of this interview?) But evidently, from her account and from this one on the AJ website, it must be very disturbing– and I think it would be so to anyone who watches it, whether Arab, or non-Arab.
This is how Riv ends:

    And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.
    Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

One last question from me. Has this footage aired on any US t.v. channel yet? Will it? Will it provoke the kind of discussion that we US citizens ought most certainly to be engaging in about how we can even start to help repair the damage our government’s policy has wrought in Iraq?
One first step is evidently that we need to stop the perpetration of gross rights abuses in Iraq both by our own troops and by all the allegedly “Iraqi” military formations that have been trained up by the occupation forces and still act effectively under the command of the US occupation forces there.
Under international law the US, as occupying power, continues to hold the responsibility for public security in Iraq. It has failed, utterly failed, to exercise that responsibility. The occupation must end. And everyone concerned– Iraqis, their neighbors, the UN, Arab league, and Islamic Conference– should gather together to do what is possible to repair the damage and re-assemble a working governance structure in Iraq.

Virgil Goode: “In Mohammed We Trust?”

Heee’s baaaack. No, not “Chuckie,” that ” sneering, mean-hearted, movie doll,” nor “Q” from Star Trek fame. But our “Q-ran” fearing Congressman Virgil Goode.
Goode has been the subject of several extended entries here at jwn. He’s the “gift” that keeps on giving – if you like satire. Goode is the Congressman who infamously made a name for himself by portraying incoming Congressman Larry Ellison’s use of {Jefferson’s} Koran for his swearing-in ceremony as a threat to America’s traditional “values and beliefs.”
Hat tip to Eric H. for the alert: our “goode-ole-boy” who represents some of Virginia’s 5th District citizenry is at it again, this time rationalizing his vote for Bush’s “surge” by spreading fear of a mean-green Islamic machine marching on Washington.
Only Virgil Goode could transform his allotted five-minute speech yesterday on whether or not to support President Bush’s “surge” plan for Iraq into another dark warning against a “sea of illegal immigrants” in which more terrorists will swim. That is, if we don’t support the President, a “calamity” will surely befall us in which more Muslim “jihadis” invade our shores.
Below, I provide the transcript, from the Congressional Record, with my annotations inserted between paragraphs. Phonetic transliterations from the video version are kept to a minimum this time. Readers should view the “youtube” version themselves here. Goode’s “stie-ul” is rather unique. Render your own opinions in the discussion.

“We are in the middle of a 4-day marathon here. While I cannot say that I agree with all of the actions of the President in dealing with Iraq, I will not be supporting H. Con. Res. 63. The eyes of the world are upon this House, and there will be commentary from the Middle East to the streets of small-town America about what we do here over this 4-day period, even though this resolution does not carry the weight of law.”

“Eyes of the world?” Since when did Virgil care about what the world thought of “the Vuhgil Goode” position on anything? Instead, he’s with those who would characterize a resolution critical of Bush as giving “aide and comfort to the enemy.” (It occurs to me that for many neocons, the “eyes of the world” and “the enemy” are flip sides of the same coin.)

“When the commentary begins in the Middle East, in no way do I want to comfort and encourage the radical Muslims who want to destroy our country and who want to wipe the so-called infidels like myself and many of you from the face of the Earth. In no way do I want to aid and assist the Islamic jihadists who want the green flag of the crescent and star to wave over the Capitol of the United States and over the White House of this country. I fear that radical Muslims who want to control the Middle East and ultimately the world would love to see “In God We Trust” stricken from our money and replaced with “In Mohammed {“mooo-hahmat”} We Trust.” (emphasis added)

So much ripe material in this paragraph; where to begin?

Continue reading “Virgil Goode: “In Mohammed We Trust?””

More on the possible pre-peace overture from the 1920 Revolution Brigades

A quick search of Juan Cole’s blog revealed about 20 entries there to the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which is the way Juan (generally) renders the name of the Sunni insurgent group in Iraq that was apparently the one that recently forwarded a pre-negotiation proposal to Bob Fisk. (As I posted about yesterday, here.)
Juan really has done an extraordinarily valuable job of drawing together, and presenting to the English-reading public, nearly all the main news developments out of Iraq, day after day after wearying day since late 2002. What a truly incredible archive that blog now represents!
The earliest of Juan’s references to the 1920RB was, as far as I can figure, this one, from November 15, 2004. Juan wrote there:

    The 1920 revolution against the British is key to modern Iraqi history. One of the guerrilla groups taking hostages named itself the “1920 Revolution Brigades.” Western journalists who don’t know Iraqi history have routinely mistranslated the name of this group.

And the most recent was this one– from last Saturday (February 10), in which he wrote:

    Al-Hayat also says that the 1920 Revolution Brigades (also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement) refused to join the “Islamic State of Iraq” coalition or “al-Qa’eda and its allies on the other side. The US has called on the group to enter talks with Washington.

This indicates to me that the document passed to Fisk may have been an early 1920RB response to that invitation from the US? Interesting that they should try to communicate a document to and through Bob Fisk, presumably as a way of trying to win it a bigger readership in English-speaking countries than it could expect if it were handed only to Al-Hayat or other Arabic media.
(This, even if Bob Fisk did apparently misunderstand the exact name of the group communicating with him.)
Anyway, as I wrote in my earlier post and was well established by other commenters there, it is evident that this position from the 1920RB, if they are indeed, as I believe, the originators of the “Jeelani-Fisk proposal” is not one that the US can immediately agree to. But, and I can’t stress this enough, it looks like a good, solid pre-negotiation communication; and it should therefore be met with considerable interest by all Americans, as well as with a cautious– and possibly highly circumspect– welcome by our government, and a commitment to actively explore all aspects of the topics raised.
For example, the demand for the release, “as a goodwill gesture” of 5,000 of the more than 11,000 Sunni Iraqis currently being detained in US prisons in Iraq is surely one that could be looked at and responded to in some measure, or perhaps even fully?
Of course there is still massive distrust between these two sides– the Sunni insurgents and the US government– and this is fed by numerous sizeable grievances that are still vividly remembered by each side. No point trying to silver-coat or ignore that… And numerous vast questions still remain, as I noted in my earlier post, about the “shape” of any negotiations for a final peace in Iraq, including the roster of the parties that should be represented at them.
But as I told Juan in a private communication, I tend to go by “the Oliver Tambo rule”– remembering that that great leader of South Africa’s ANC once recalled that, when he was living in exile in Lusaka, the one thing he was terrified of was that he would not understand or correctly interpret the peace overture from the apartheid regime when– as he confidently expected– they finally decided to send it… and that through his inattentiveness on that score he would thereby consign his people to additional decades of quite unnecessary conflict…
When the peace overture did come to Tambo from Pretoria, in 1989, he did correctly interpret it; and it was he and the ANC’s exile-based National Executive that then authorized Nelson Mandela to proceed with the in-prison negotiations that we all know so much about… (Tambo died soon thereafter, RIP.)
Thank God Tambo went by “the Tambo rule” on that occasion, eh?
In this connection, too, I would recall that great quote from T.E. Lawrence that I wrote about back in this post, last month… In 1919-20, when he was considering the challenges of “dis-imperialism”, i.e. extricating a country’s armies and people from distant and damaging imperial entanglements, Lawrence wrote:

    In pursuing such courses [getting out of empire] we will find our best helpers not in our former most obedient subjects, but among those now most active in agitating against us, for it will be the intellectual leaders of the people who will serve the purpose, and these are not the philosophers nor the rich, but the demagogues and the politicians.
    The alternative is to hold on to them with ever-lessening force, till the anarchy is too expensive, and we let go.

So okay, the 1920RB seems like an organization that still uses violence– perhaps considerable amounts of it.
(So, of course, is the US military, especially in Iraq.)
The 1920RB’s politics seem to be– as Juan Cole described them to me– “murky”. In November 2005, he wrote this about “Iraqi guerrilla groups such as ‘the Islamic Army,’ ‘The Bloc of Holy Warriors,’ and ‘The Revolution of 1920 Brigades’: “Despite the Islamist names of these groups, they are probably mostly neo-Baathist.”
I have no way to judge that claim, for which Juan adduced no further evidence there.
But he also noted there that, at a key Iraqi resistance groups’ conference that was held in Cairo that month, those three groups had,

    conveyed their conditions behind the scenes… Among their demands are 1) working to end the foreign occupation, 2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising from the American invasion; 3) the release of prisoners; and 4) building political and military institutions that are not subservient to American and regional influence.

In that post, which was mainly Juan’s rendering of a long Hayat article on the topic, he presented many details about the sharp differences between those three, determinedly Iraqi guerrilla group and Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaeda-affiliated group. Zarqawi has, of course, since then been killed… And that sharp difference of opinion and strategy apparently still continues to the present. In this post from January 8, 2007, Cole writes– again citing Hayat– that,

    “al-Qaeda” in Fallujah assassinated Muhammad Mahmud, the head of the 1920 Revolution Brigades in the district of al-Saqlawiya, threatening al-Anbar Province with a feud between the two Sunni guerrilla groups…

All in all, I think the “Jeelani-Fisk proposal” is a pre-peace overture to which all of us who want to see the US get out of Iraq in a way that is orderly, total, and speedy should give serious consideration. Let’s hope the relevant figures in the Bush administration are doing the same.
Is it too much to ask that they follow the “Tambo rule” too?

Iraqi insurgents signaling pre-negotiation readiness?

Robert Fisk had an article in Friday’s Independent in which he presented the contents of what could be a very significant statement that was “passed to” him, that could represent the terms on which a significant portion of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq is willing to make peace. (Hat-tip to commenter Diana.)
Fisk indicates that the statement was issued in the name of “Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement.” He wrote that Al-Jeelani’s group, “also calls itself the ’20th Revolution Brigades’, [and] is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003.”
I believe Fisk’s reference there should be to the “Brigades of the 1920 Revolution”, but would welcome clarification on this from commenters. I do know there is an organization of that name, referring back to an earlier heroic anti-occupation insurgency in Iraqi history.
I am also not sure whether, as Fisk implies on one occasion (but not another), this organization or this statement could be said to represent a position supported by all the Sunni insurgents. I strongly suspect not, but again would welcome clarifications and further info from readers.
I wish Fisk had just given us the text in full, with a commentary alongside. Instead, portions of the text are included in a straight new report there. Here’s what Fisk writes about it:

    “Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues,” al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. “Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances.”
    Al-Jeelani suggests the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations and would have to guarantee the security of the participants.
    Then come the conditions:
    * The release of 5,000 detainees held in Iraqi prisons as “proof of goodwill”.
    * Recognition “of the legitimacy of the resistance and the legitimacy of its role in representing the will of the Iraqi people”.
    * An internationally guaranteed timetable for all agreements.
    * The negotiations to take place in public.
    * The resistance “must be represented by a committee comprising the representatives of all the jihadist brigades”.
    * The US to be represented by its ambassador in Iraq and the most senior commander.
    …[T]he insurgent leader specifically calls for the “dissolution of the present government and the revoking of the spurious elections and the constitution…”
    He also insists that all agreements previously entered into by Iraqi authorities or US forces should be declared null and void.
    But there are other points which show that considerable discussion must have gone on within the insurgency movement – possibly involving the group’s rival, the Iraqi Islamic Army.
    They call, for example, for the disbandment of militias and the outlawing of militia organisations – something the US government has been urging the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to do for months.
    The terms also include the legalisation of the old Iraqi army, an “Anglo-American commitment to rebuild Iraq and reconstruct all war damage” – something the occupying powers claim they have been trying to do for a long time – and integrating “resistance fighters” into the recomposed army.
    Al-Jeelani described President George Bush’s new plans for countering the insurgents as “political chicanery” and added that “on the field of battle, we do not believe that the Americans are able to diminish the capability of the resistance fighters to continue the struggle to liberate Iraq from occupation …
    “The resistance groups are not committing crimes to be granted a pardon by America, we are not looking for pretexts to cease our jihad… we fight for a divine aim and one of our rights is the liberation and independence of our land of Iraq.”
    There will, the group says, be no negotiations with Mr Maliki’s government because they consider it “complicit in the slaughter of Iraqis by militias, the security apparatus and death squads”. But they do call for the unity of Iraq and say they “do not recognise the divisions among the Iraqi people”.

Fisk’s main commentary on the proposal is to note that its terms would be quite unacceptable to the Americans. He writes,

    It is not difficult to see why the Americans would object to those terms. They will not want to talk to men they have been describing as “terrorists” for the past four years. And if they were ever to concede that the “resistance” represented “the will of the Iraqi people” then their support for the elected Iraqi government would have been worthless…

But in a real sense, that is not the point. No-one would expect the insurgents to come up with a political program that the US occupiers would immediately be able to agree to. But seeing the emergence of a leadership among the Sunni insurgent groups that is prepared to allow the US a negotiated withdrawal, and to start to spell out the terms for that negotiation, is already a good step forward.
And of course Fisk is right to note that many of the leaders of Shiite political parties– not to mention the Iranians with whom many of them have close links– will find these terms unacceptable. Indeed, figuring out the “shape” of the negotiation, i.e., which Iraqi groups should be represented, and how, is one of the first challenges for anyone trying to think through or plan the modalities of a negotiated US withdrawal. I am convinced the US is in no position to design the shape of this negotiation, even if its leaders wanted to (which they still certainly don’t.) That’s why I welcome the mention in the Jeelani statement of the possibility that “the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations”.
As for this business, also mentioned by Fisk, that the Bushists will not be happy to negotiate with people they have been describing as “terrorists” for the past four years– well, history is absolutely replete with occupying powers and colonial powers that have done exactly that! From the British and French colonial powers in their waning years, through the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1990, through the Rabin government in Israel in 1993… Governments can do this, and survive and prosper (though of course, sadly, Rabin personally did not.)
Could somebody ask Bob Fisk to put the plain text of the Jeelani statement up on the web so we can read it cleanly? Also, further clarification/information on the points I signaled above would be great. Thanks!

Odom: “Victory is Not an Option”

Preface (note – this is Scott writing).
Lest any jwn readers think my satire of CNN’s 3 General Stooges incorrectly reflects a general hostility towards all things military, I note only that my father once dreamed of a military career, and my son is now living that dream (my nightmare) as an officer in the “Virginia” Guard.
Like Helena, I too have closely followed strategic writings of this and that military think tank, sometimes even with great admiration. General William Odom is a case in point. Odom was an upperclassman at West Point when my late father was a plebe there. I think Dad would have admired General Odom’s steely nerve, his Eisenhower-like capacity to speak truth when his colleagues and allies were koolaid-drunk, and best of all, his track record of being right on target, especially when it wasn’t popular with the prevailing winds.
In Sunday’s Post, Odom again is out with an iconoclastic blast that says what many in Washington think, but don’t yet have the courage to say. Helena has already made reference to the essay via the “Delicious” sidebar, so here’s my quick highlighting – for the record!
For Odom, “victory is not an option.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Of course, the Administration lately has been trying to re-define, without admitting, what “victory” means. But Odom is holding up the original standard and pointing out what should have been obvious even before going in — that democracy can’t be imposed at the barrel of a gun, and even it magically does take root, a democratic Iraq will not be predisposed to be pro-American or pro-Israel. These are the two “truths” that American’s need to face:

There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:
First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly “constitutional” — meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it….

I beg to quibble with the general on the point about American political scientists being “irresponsibly quiet.” I rather think the problem was with the power of those neoconservative agitators – who pressured producers and opinion page editors (even at the once venerable CSMonitor or the PBS NewsHour) to avoid the contributions of major, non-beltway, think-tank academics. It’s happening again in the madness to the rush to pick a war with Iran!

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis’ rising animosity toward the United States.

Odom notes that these realities are becoming more widely recognized, even as Congress thus far hasn’t had the courage to act on them for fear of four “pernicious” myths – in need of the dismantling Odom memorably provides:

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CNN’s General cheerleader squad: Marx, Shepard, & Grange

Memo to John Stewart – host of the Comedy Channel’s Daily Show: If you need new material, check out the media generals on CNN.
Since at least 2003, CNN has been dueling with Faux to see which network can have the most generals with the most inane, mind-numbing praises of the President and “the troops.” They call it “fair and balanced” reporting. The weekly CNN program, “This Week at War,” still plays from the neocon chorus book. On this week’s “This Week at War,” (!) host John Roberts interviewed 3 different retired generals – all of whom apparently are on the CNN payroll. Oh great you say! 3 generals – 3 different perspectives? Balanced, no?
Not a chance. You’d have better odds with “three blind mice” than with the CNN “hireling” generals for “This Week at War.” The program’s three regulars are Brigadier General James Spider Marx, U.S. Army, Major General Don Shepard, U.S. Air Force and Brigadier General David Grange, U.S. Army — all retired. (I’d put ’em all in the “brig” for commentary unworthy of their fruit salad.)
In case you missed the “Three Stooges” in action this week, and lest you think I’m making this up, here’s the transcript.
The comedy begins with host John Roberts solemnly noting, “Troubling new developments in Iraq, with six helicopters downed in the past three weeks. Is it new technology or new tactics?” Then too, Roberts wonders rhetorically if the new Pentagon inspector general’s report on prewar intelligence will “erase whatever support {is} left for keeping troops in Iraq?”
The first softball question for the “retired” wise ones is served up to “Spider Marx,” who has long struck me as “outrageous.”

ROBERTS: “You’re the intelligence guy. Talk about this inspector general’s report from the Pentagon, which says that the Intel looked like it was shaped to match the policy rather than the other way around.
How outrageous is that?

BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES SPIDER MARX, U.S. ARMY (RET.): Well, frankly, it is outrageous.
Now, the thing you have to realize about intelligence is it is fundamentally the competition of ideas. What concerns me about this is this came from the office of the director of policy, not intelligence.
So, certainly, that office can have its opinions and it can draw its own conclusions. So you want to have the competition of ideas, but you have to fundamentally fuse and blend together the different forms of intelligence and you’ve got to come up with the solution and, from that solution, you then derive — intelligence drives operations.
It drives operations. It leads you to conclusions. It is a little bit outrageous.

Huh? Hey “Spider,” read that extended quote again yourself and see if you can make any sense of it. So are the allegations really outrageous, or just “a little bit outrageous?” And since when is intel “fundamentally” about the competition of ideas?
Is that like, well, the Israeli intel liaison has his set of “well supported” ideas, and the Egyptian liaison has his “ideas,” then there’s the Ambassador’s ideas, and then there’s this little gem we got from a “well supported” expatriate who thinks “regime change” and installing a pro-American government will be easy?
Whatever happened to facts — those “stubborn things?” Or has intel gone post-modern? Pat Lang where are ye when we need ye?
In any case, the controversy at hand now is hardly about having another “team B” in operation. But the really “outrageous” part was how Douglas Feith’s “Office of Special Plans” cherry-picked intel and then cynically “sexed it up” and shaped it to fit a pre-canned ideology to “justify” an early invasion of Iraq. The policy cooked the intel. And everybody inside then – knew it.
THAT was the outrageous part. Nothing new – but our General Groucho Marx is either clueless or being deliberately “amphlibious” in “ducking” what the real controversy is. He must be still drinking the OSP koolaid himself.
Ok, back to the interview, Roberts next wants to know what the increased casualties from helicopter crashes means.

Continue reading “CNN’s General cheerleader squad: Marx, Shepard, & Grange”