Iraq-2007-Q1 – Page 6 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Iraq: Battle of the narratives

And you thought the war in Iraq was about weapons and armies? No, indeed not. Weapons and armies and such things in the physical world are the tools; but what is really happening in Iraq– as in any civil war, war of insurgency, or similar lengthy inter-group conflict– is primarily a battle of narratives. What each of the parties is seeking to do, basically, is find a way to organize the widest possible coalition of followers around their particular version of “the Truth.”
So what are the major narratives being fought over there? Here’s a first cut at describing the four biggest ones among them:

The Bushists’ narrative (version 78.6, or so)

They would have everyone– Iraqis, the world, but most particularly the US citizenry– believe that what is “at stake” in Iraq is a broad battle between “moderates” (= the good guys) and “extremists” (= the bad guys.) Okay, I know this is extremely thin as an organizing concept. But it’s the best they can come up with after nearly four years of hard slogging inside Iraq, with a huge amount of attrition and/or turnover along the way among their top administrators there. Also, all their previous narratives proved quite useless. Remember “democrats vs. dead-enders” and all those earlier fizzlers?
These guys are tired. And it certainly shows.
Their most recent attempt at a version of the “moderates vs. extremists” narrative was designed explicitly to isolate Moqtada Sadr (= “extremist”). It relied, however, on a major logical and factual flaw. Since the attempt to isolate Moqtada relied on splitting the UIA, the broader Shiite alliance of which he is an important part, the Bushists needed to define their chosen tools within the UIA as “the moderates.” But Abdul-Aziz Hakim, his SCIRI party, and their associated Badr militia are far, far from being in any recognizeable way “moderate”. There is, indeed, considerable evidence that they are significantly more brutal (and also significantly more pro-Iranian) than the Sadrists…
Go figure.
Washington’s isolate-Moqtada plan was fairly definitively blocked by Ayatollah Sistani just before Christmas. Might the whole sad concept of the presently mooted “surge” be related to yet another attempt to revive it?
And then we have…

The militant Sunni/Arabist narrative

This one– peddled furiously by many Sunni Arabs outside Iraq and some inside Iraq– describes the battle in Iraq as one of defending this eastern bulwark of the Arab (and Sunni) world against the looming power of the Shiites, all of whom are described in the more extreme versions of this narratives as somehow secretly either ethnically Persian or anyway controlled by Iran.
Badger recently had a great quote representing this view: something that Sunni Iraqi pol Admnan al-Dulaimi was quoted as saying at the Istanbul Conference, Dec. 13-14:

“[There is a] Shiite, Safavid, Persian, Majousi [i.e., related to the Magi] threat originating in Iran and aiming to consume all of Iraq, and after that neighboring countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, by way of reviving the dream of a new Persian empire.”

Whew! All those four attributes coming together into a critical mass of pure threat there. Talk about rhetorical overkill. However, as As’ad Abou Khalil and many others have noted, this kind of reetoric is being very widely propagated by the Saudis and their media.
In some versions of this narrative, the Iranians are seen as having come together with not only the US but also the Israelis to attack core values and assets of the (Sunni) Arab nation in Iraq.
(Go figure.)
Another attribute of this narrative is that it systematically tries to deny the “authenticity” of most or all Shiite Iraqis by claiming that they are all, somehow, actually ethnic Iranians– not Arabs at all!– and therefore they don’t deserve to have their views as Iraqis taken seriously.
(I suppose a next step in pursuit of this move to marginalize Iraq’s many millions of, yes, ethnically Arab citizens of the Shiite faith from the national discourse would be to seek to expel them physically from the country. The Sunni militants are not strong enough to propose this yet, though of course they have ethnically cleansed many thousands of Arab-Iraqi Shiites from mixed neighborhoods; and some of them have maintained a horrendous campaign of pure, anti-civilian terror against Shiite Iraqi communities throughout the past 30 months or so, using car bombs, individual suicide bombers, truck bombs, etc.)

The militant Shiite narrative

This one, too, has its more hardline propagators mainly outside Iraq, but also a number of propagators inside the country. It holds that the major threat to Iraq comes from the “Wahhabists”– a term that is used to describe either just the most militant of the Sunni activists or, in a more extremist version, just about all the Sunnis in Iraq.
Note that here, as with the use by Sunnis of terms like “Persian, Safavi, Majousi”, one clear intention is to deny the opponents’ “authenticity” as Iraqis, by pinning on them a label associated with an outside power. In this case, Saudi Arabia.
Some Shiite militants also use the terms “Al-Qaeda”, “Salafists”, or “neo-Baathists” as ways to deny the authenticity and legitimacy of Sunni Iraqis as Iraqis.
Here is a classic example of a writer who in September 2005 sought to delegitimize the (actually, not unreasonable) reservations that many Iraqi Sunni politicians were expressing at the time to the Iraqi constitution, by describing the these politicians as “Wahhabi” and “Salafist”. Note that the writer of this article is himself Iranian, not Iraqi at all!

The Iraqi nationalist narrative

This narrative is harder to find represented in the western media than any of the three narratives listed above. (No surprise there.) It holds, as a fundamental tenet, that the continued US occupation is the root cause of Iraq’s current woes and therefore has to end; and that, while there are many grievances between different groups inside Iraq, these can be resolved among Iraqis themselves.
People who advocate the Iraqi nationalist view can be seen as differing on the legacy of Saddam’s rule. They may have some distrust of some or all of Iraq’s neighbors. They hold to a concept of “Iraqi-ness” that may or may not actively embrace the Kurdish roots of a large segment of Iraqis, but that attempts strenuously to maintain or build unity between ethnic-Arab Iraqis who are Sunnis and those who are Shiites, and between those who are more Islamist and those who are more secular (though the latter are a dwindling breed.)
A couple of examples of the Iraqi-nationalist narrative… The first comes from the Association of Muslim Scholars’ Harith al-Dhari, also speaking at that Istanbul conference. He was reported as saying there,

There are both Shiites and Sunnis on the one side under a single banner, and on the other side, arrayed against them, is the Occupation along with its Iraqi agents, aiming at the realization of its colonialist aims.

The second is from the Sadrists’ Baha al-Araji, in the interview that Foreign Policy published recently:

Note, with respect to Shiite proponents of the Iraqi-nationalist narrative, that Araji is not the only one who expresses some distrust of Iran… And some Iranians seem completely to reciprocate that level of distrust.
On January 2, the Tehran Times ran an intriguing piece of commentary. It was by Hassan Hanizadeh, who was the same person who authored that anti-Wahhabi diatribe I referred to above. On January 2, Hanizadeh criticized the Sadrists by name, describing them as acting as, effectively, dupes of hard-line Sunni politicians intent on splitting the UIA:

There are some other notable features of this Hanizadeh op-ed, including that he mirrors the Bushist narrative regarding Iraqi politics in some significant ways! For example, when he says that the UIA is “led by Abdul-Aziz Hakim”, and when he seeks to demean and diminish Moqtada Sadr by referring to him dismissively as “a young cleric.”
Hanizadeh’s argument is also notable when he says it was the Sadrists who sought to break the UIA’s ranks (by going into an alliance with those Sunni trends), whereas what seemed to me to have happened was that it was the Bushists and Abdul-Aziz Hakim (joint darling of both the Bushists and the mullahs in Tehran) who were explicitly trying to break UIA unity by getting the UIA to repudiate Moqtada…
Interesting, huh?
I should send a quick hat-tip to Juan Cole for linking to that Hanizadeh piece. But I don’t think he gave it the attention or the context that it deserved.
We should also keep in mind about the UIA’s eminence grise, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, that though he– like some other members of the clerical class in Iraq, but unlike the vast majority of the country’s Shiite believers— is actually by ethnicity an Iranian, still, he has very significant religious, political, and philosophical differences with the mullahs in Teheran, and centrally over the concept of wilayat al-faqih. Yet another non-trivial wrinkle there.
Anyway, I just want to finish this post with a few quick observations.
(1) In the present situation in Iraq, the two main narratives that I see as competing for the hearts and minds of (Arab) Iraqis are not the two sectarian narratives described above, but rather, the Bushist narrative and the Iraqi-nationalist narrative.
The advocates of each of these two large competing narratives are currently fighting to manipulate the loyalties of the Iraqi supporters of both the sectarian narratives in the direction they want them to go.
In the case of the Iraqi nationalists they want and need to win to their own cause the loyalties of Iraqis who might currently be supporters of one or the other sectarian narrative.
In the case of the Bushists, they want to enlist as many Arab Iraqis as they can to their “moderates vs. extremists” narrative. But even the very dumbest Bushists must understand there is little likelihood of achieving a winning coalition in that way. So more than that, they are probably seeking to pump up both the two sectarian narratives, as a way of minimizing the support for the nationalist narrative, and then to let the proponents of the competing sectarianisms escalate their conflict against each other in a perpetuation of the classic divide-and-rule tactics Washington has been pursuing inside Iraq since April 2003.
(Although, as I have noted elsewhere, this is a very shortsighted thing to do, and will result in far higher risks for the widely dispersed US troops inside Iraq, whether Washington’s desire is for those troops to leave quickly or to stay in Iraq for a fuurther period.)
(2) This is far from the first time that a “battle of the narratives” of such broad and far-reaching proportions has been at issue during a bloody and very lethal battle in that region. Back in 1980 after Saddam launched his extremely aggressive and ill-starred invasion of Iran, there were huge questions about the loyalty to their respective national capitals of (a) the millions of ethnic-Arab Shiites of Iraq, and (b) the millions of ethnic-Arab Shiites of the south of Iran. But it was the citizenship that members of each of these groups had at that time won out over, in the case of the Iraqi Shiites, their sectarian sentiment, and in the case of the ethnic-Arab Iranians, their ethnic identity.
(3) A “battle of the narratives” is not won with tanks, aerial bombardments, or troop surges– though the arrival of additional large numbers of US troops might well end up tipping the balance in favor of the Iraqi nationalists. But basically, a battle of the narratives is won through effective political work.
(4) As noted here previously, the vast majority of the western MSM has ignored or systematically the Iraqi nationalist narrative. This is most likely through some combination of (a) their unfamiliarity with Iraqi politics, (b) their susceptibility to, and in many cases reliance on, the Bushists’ spin, and (c) intellectual laziness. Over the past year or so, Juan Cole has not been a particularly helpful guide to these matters.
(5) The behavior of the onlookers, and perhaps some officials, at Saddam’s hanging was extremely undignifed, and his trial blatantly unfair. But for many Sunni Arab commentators and US commentators now to pile onto Moqtada al-Sadr and blame him for everything that went on there is quite outrageous. (Also, the phsyical manner of the hanging itself was “executed” quite professinally, unlike in Nuremberg where the dying men twisted on their ropes for 20 minutes before they finally expired.)
Look, the whole trial proceeding was presided over at one scant remove by the Americans– and now they want to use this as a pretext to gin up self-righteous criticism of Moqtada Sadr??

Discussing the ‘surge’ with Reidar Visser

Reidar Visser recently sent me a copy of an article he has written,
titled A Timetabled, Conditional Surge, which he would like to see
more widely read and discussed. Because of the great esteem in which
I hold Reidar’s careful, well-informed work on modern Iraq, I am very
pleased to be able to make the whole text available through JWN, with his
permission.

However, as Reidar and I have discussed a little already via email, I do
disagree with some of his argument there (though I don’t, for a moment
question the good intentions with which he thought through and articulated
it.) So in addition to making the full text available via a download,
above, I do also want to engage with it, which I shall do here:

	A Timetabled, Conditional Surge By Reidar Visser, December 27, 2006	Response by HC
A.	As President George W. Bush contemplates policy alternatives for Iraq, input from experts in Washington is polarized. Opponents of the Iraq War consider any increase in troop numbers a non-starter and prefer to focus on the modalities for withdrawal.⁽¹⁾ Supporters of the Bush administration seem incapable of framing their latest idea – that of a temporary surge of US troops – as anything other than a repeat of the same old policy, if perhaps with some added manpower and resources .⁽²⁾	(1) Correct. That is exactly my own preference. But I should add that I see the discussion of a possible “surge” in troop strength as not only a distraction from thinking about modalities for the sorely needed withdrawal but also as having the potential– if there is any surge– of further complicating the task of withdrawal to a considerable degree. (More troops and materiel to extract, and more logistical complexity to doing first one thing and then very soon after that its reverse .) (2) This is generally a true observation. However, they do add some little twists and innovations like articulating the goal (yet again!) of “securing Baghdad.”
B.	Either approach has its problems. A withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq within one or two years seems a natural goal, but right now may be the worst time since 2003 for this kind of operation. The simple reason is that Iraqi politics has deteriorated dramatically: Today, sectarian militia activity has been maximized to levels never seen before in Iraqi history. At the moment, Iraq does need help from the outside, because its elected politicians are incapable of transcending their own narrow party interests in a bid for national unity.⁽¹⁾ And whereas the Iraq Study Group may have offered some sound advice about enhanced regional diplomacy, on the whole their report seems more like a containment strategy than a plan that pro-actively can induce rapid political realignment inside Iraq.⁽²⁾	(1) I agree that most of Iraq’s elected politicians look incapable of transcending narrow party/sectarian interests, though I am not convinced that this is true of all of them. “Iraq needs help from outside”, though? H’mmm. Possibly. If it does, however, I am deeply unconvinced that this US administration is a body that has either (a) the capability, (b) the desire, or (c) the requisite political legitimacy and credibility within Iraq, to be able to do anything helpful for the development of Iraqi politics except to state quite clearly and categorically its intention to withdraw the troops and its short timetable for doing so. Doing that might well do a lot to concentrate the minds of that vast majority of Iraqis who are Iraqi nationalists, and impel them to find a way to deal constructively with each other… (2) This is an interesting characterization of the main thrust of the ISG report. I, too, see the report as urging something of a containment strategy– but with this difference: I read its recommendations as seeking to “contain” the desire and ability of Iraq’s neighbors to maintain or escalate their interventions inside Iraq, as much as seeking to “contain” the ripples of political destuctivity that might spread outward from Iraq if the present deterioration there continues. Anyway, that is perhaps a minor point. More to the point in the present context is that, as I noted in B (1) above, I don’t see the US as having the credibility or the capacity of being able to “induce rapid political alignment inside Iraq.” Or, indeed, the requisite political standing to do so, since it is itself, as occupying power, a major and intrinsic part of the country’s political-security problem.
C.	A troop increase could be equally problematic.⁽¹⁾ Even if more US firepower should succeed in temporarily stemming the violence, there is nothing in the prevalent neo-conservative expositions of the “surge plan” to address the fundamental problem of national reconciliation in Iraq. There simply is no new substance compared with what was being said back in 2003 and 2004; neo-conservatives still seem convinced that as soon as there is calm on the streets of Baghdad, a Mesopotamian zest for democracy will miraculously rise from the ashes. Inside the Bush administration, the only vision about a parallel process at the political level is that of a “new coalition government” – involving a few cosmetic changes to the line-up of Iraqi elite politicians currently engaged in a game of musical chairs inside the Green Zone, and carrying considerable risk of marginalizing those few parliamentary factions that do enjoy a certain degree of popular support, like the Sadrists.(2)	(1)Much, much more problematic, Reidar, not “equally” so! (See A (1) above.) (2) Actually, I don’t see the Bushists as aiming to “marginalize” the Sadrists, but rather to crush and/or otherwise suppress their movement completely. This makes the Bushists’ plans much more potentially destabilizing for Iraq than they would be if they sought only to “marginalize” them. I think it’s also important to note that the Sadrist movement has been one of the Iraqi movements the most intent on building cross-sect coalitions– though as we have seen, the movement’s record of maintaining this political line in its practice has been extremely spotty (to say the least.)
D.	What is required in Iraq today is not cosmetic change, but heavy lifting. The colossal irony of the current situation is that a large majority of Iraqis actually agree with the declared aims of the Bush administration – national reconciliation followed by a withdrawal of US troops – but their “representatives” in the Iraqi parliament (many of them newly returned exiles with limited insights into the situation of the ordinary people) are locked in petty shouting matches instead of working for national unity.(1) It is the open-ended US military commitment that enables them to go on with this:⁽²⁾ Certain Shiite politicians infuriate Sunni politicians with newly concocted demands for federalism; Sunni leaders, in turn, hesitate in condemning even the most grotesque atrocities committed by al-Qaida-linked terrorists. Forgotten in all of this are the ordinary Iraqis. The Shiite masses have so far expressed only limited interest in “Shiite federalism”, and the average Sunni is quite prepared to denounce al-Qaida as long as a minimum of security can be guaranteed.	(1) I think I disagree with you here. Firstly, the Bushists have never committed themselves to the goal of a complete withdrawal– a fact that, in itself, maintains the fears of Iraqis re Washington’s “real” goals inside their country at a very high pitch. Secondly, while it may (just possibly) be true that what the Bushists aim at is something close to a total withdrawal, still, they want to delay this until after a version of “national reconciliation” has been established in Iraq while it still under their suzerainty, and thus the resulting political order would be to their liking. According to everything I know and understand about Iraq, however, nearly all Arab Iraqis simply want the US troops to leave as quickly as possible And they certainly don’t want that withdrawal to be held captive to the completion of some form of US-controlled “national reconciliation” process. So while it might be true at some very general, hypothetical level to say that “both the Iraqis and the Bushists seek the same two goals of a US troop withdrawal and intra-Iraqi reconciliation,” the actual ways these desires play out in the field of everyday politics are very different, indeed. (2) I agree with you about the extremely petty and indeed destructively counter-productive nature of the political “work” being done by most of the elected Iraqi politicians. I disagree over the reason for this. I think it is far more the fact that the elected Iraqi politicians have almost zero actual, functioning levers of national administration through which to govern that has reduced them to shouting ineptitude (and also, to their reportedly high level of personal venality) than the open-endedness of the US military commitment. Don’t get me wrong. I do think the open-endedness of the US military presence brings enormous problems in its wake. But if there were, parallel to the US military presence, a functioning national-level government system, then at least the politicians would have something useful to do and be more hopeful about achieving something good for their country. As it is, given that that must look impossible for them– from inside the Green Zone or outside it– then I imagine a lot of even of the best-intentioned of them throw up their hands and say, “To hell with it! At least I can sock away some money for the family and myself, in Europe.” Of course, one can also certainly argue that both the presence of the US military in Iraq and the content of the policies pursued by the US administrators there has contributed hugely to the breakdown of the country’s national administrative system. That is without a doubt true. But the chain of causality in all this is a little longer and more complex than the way you portray it.
E.	A troop surge offers a unique opportunity for resolving this paradoxical situation. If executed innovatively, it could enable the United States to circumvent the bellicose Iraqi elite politicians and appeal directly to Iraqi nationalism.⁽¹⁾ But success would require that the troop surge be offered as a package, with obligations for both sides. The United States should commit forces and economic aid to create the necessary momentum for a dramatic security improvement, but at the same time should realign itself with Iraqi nationalism by presenting a timetable for a withdrawal after the surge. Iraqi politicians, for their part, should undertake to make immediate constitutional revisions that could bring the Sunnis back in and achieve national reconciliation.⁽²⁾ Washington should not seek to micro-manage this, but ought to make it perfectly clear that the forces that have so far dominated the constitutional process in Iraq (the two biggest Kurdish parties as well as SCIRI, one of the Shiite groups) will need to make general concessions in the areas of federalism and de-Baathification before any troop surge is offered.	(1) This, it seems to me, is the central axis of your argument. Namely, that the troop surge could enable the US to appeal to Iraqis “over the heads of” their deeply problematic politicians… I see a large number of problems in this argument! Particularly, these two: (a) As described a little further down, the US would use this troop surge to effect a “dramatic security improvement.” But it would require a truly enormous troop surge to be able to do this: perhaps doubling the number of troops deployed in Iraq?. Out of the question. The US simply doesn’t have enough troops to do this. And secondly, if the existing troop commitment has, as you argue, allowed Iraqi pols to avoid making hard choices, wouldn’t any kind of a troop surge allow them to think they could do so even more? (b) The US as such has absolutely zero credibility in any political overture that might involve “appeal[ing] directly to Iraqi nationalism.” After everything the Iraqis have seen the US do in their country in the past 3.5 years, what on earth could persuade them to give any credence to arguments that Washington might make along these lines? (2) Once again, you’re arguing here that the Iraqis need to achieve national reconciliation prior to the US troop withdrawal. See my points in D (1) above.
F.	By making the surge conditional, Washington would for the first time create pressure on Iraqi politicians, via their own electorates. If presented with a credible plan for national reconciliation and the eventual withdrawal of US troops, Iraqi politicians would find it hard to persist in their current squabbling. This would enable the United States to tap into a most remarkable factor in Iraqi politics: the seemingly unshakeable belief in the concept of “national unity” among ordinary Iraqis, even in today’s violent climate.	I agree with you that there is still– among Arab Iraqis, at least, a strong desire for national unity in Iraq. I just still cannot see how this US administration can possibly, after everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003, position itself to “tap into” this desire in any constructive way. I am certainly not convinced that the Bushists yet have any desire whatsoever to do this. However, I do believe that the day will not be too long coming when they realize they will need to find a “graceful, fast exit” from Iraq… At that point, but no sooner, we might find ourselves nearing the position described in point D (1) above, where they share with the vast majority of Iraqis the desires for (a) a rapid and complete US troop withdrawal, and (b) Iraqi national reconciliation, which can help facilitate the withdrawal. That will be the point at which real diplomacy can start. The issues then will be those of phasing these two operations, of finetuning all the modalities for the withdrawal, “holding the ring” against internal intervention, etc… But still, I don’t think that this US administration– which will still itself be a major part of the problem in Iraq, rather than of the solution– can negotiate these matters directly with any combination of Iraqis. Rather, Washington will require the good offices of a trusted and neutral outsider to help these negotiations. The UN will also be in a position to provide much of the political “cover” required for particularly delicate parts of the negotiation… Hence the focus I’ve been putting on seeking to replicate the kind of role the UN played in Namibia. The UN, as a body, is potentially in a position to be able to help to mobilize an Iraqi consensus around a call to Iraqi nationalism. But the US? I just don’t see that as a possibility.

The 3,000th– and all the others…

On December 28, 2006
Spc. Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring,
Texas

became
the 3,000th US service-member to die during the current US war in Iraq.

May he and all the other Americans, Iraqis, and citizens of other countries
who have lost their lives because of this war

REST IN PEACE.

My sympathy to all the loved ones they left behind, and to all those injured
in so many ways by this war.

May we all, the living, speedily find the way out of this lethal and anti-humane
entanglement.

Zeyad compiles Iraqi bloggers’ reactions to Saddam’s hanging

Zeyad of Healing Iraq has a very informative compilation of the main reactions that Iraqis blogging in English have had to Saddam Hussein’s hanging. (Okay, it’s also posted at IraqSlogger; but that’s not to say it ain’t worth reading. It certainly is.)
He has reactions from 23 bloggers representing a broad range of political positions. They all look very thoughtful, and many of them express the idea that, though the author may well have looked forward to this day, still the way that it eventually happened left them disquieted or even disgusted.
Some highlights:
From Sami – Iraqi Thoughts:

I don’t think the situation will change in Iraq much because the people who hate Saddam or love him are all still going to have the same deep hatred and divisons towards each other. Unity isn’t about being the same but about accepting each other’s differences and the way Iraqis act that does not look like happening any time soon.

From 24 Steps to Liberty:

What’s next? Does it mean my family will be safe now that Saddam Hussein is dead? Does it mean the Iraqis will stop hating each other and killing each other? There are no more Shiites and Sunnis slaughtering each other? [Ironically Hussein is accused of provoking sectarian conflict in Iraq!] Did they [Iraqi government and their advisors] think killing Saddam Hussein will unite the Iraqis and solve the problem? The answer to those questions is: No. And they don’t care!

From Dr. Fadhil Badran:

The assassination of Saddam Hussein has killed the last hope of peace in Iraq. I think, this assassination has been planned by Iran, Israel, and Britain; those players used the US as a fire-catcher! Iran chose to assassinate him on the 1st. day of Al-Ad’ha to say that the Eid is not on the 30th of December, which means that Muslims are not unified, and of course because Saddam had stopped the Persian dream to occupy the Arab countries in the gulf area. Israel has chose the way of assassination by Hanging him to make revenge for the Israeli spies who were hanged in Baghdad in 1969. Britain insists on the assassination for the revenge of Saddam Hussein nationalization of the Iraqi petroleum in 1971. The only losers in this event are the Iraqis and the American soldiers in Iraq.

… Actually, I’m finding it hard to pick out the “highlights” in this compilation. Nearly everything Zeyad included there is really worth reading. I’m afraid he set it up so that to read the whole thing you have to go to the IraqSlogger version.
In general, Zeyad did a great job of including bloggers from political positions very different from his own, as well as those similar to himself. On the other hand, the political views of many people in Iraq, including Zeyad, have been changing so rapidly recently– and mainly, I think, in a strongly anti-US direction– that it’s getting very hard to make informed judgments (or even guessess) about where many of them “stand”.
Zeyad didn’t include Riverbend’s impassioned criticism of the whole execution process… But then, River didn’t post it till 10:12 p.m., so maybe he hadn’t seen it when he did his compilation.
He did include the blogged-in-English reactions of all three of Faiza’s sons. But he didn’t include any blogged-in-Arabic material. Here, for good Arabic readers, are Faiza’s reflections on the subject, posted yesterday.