Category: Iraq-2007-q3

Regular commenter Frank al-Irlandi quite rightly reminds us that it’s been nearly three months since the ultra-talented Iraqi female blogger Riverbend informed us on her blog that her family had decided they had to leave the country.
Even that post, which reported from inside a family making an extremely tough set of decisions, was characterized by Riverbend’s usual sense of groundedness and grittily wry humor. It ended like this:

I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else- as yet unknown- is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it’s the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I’ve had since the age of four? Is there room for E.’s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?
The problem is that we don’t even know if we’ll ever see this stuff again. We don’t know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?
It’s difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

Since when (April 26) we’ve heard nothing from her.
It is really tragic that so many of these fine people who have done so much, through their blogs, to bring the realities of war and occupation home to the audience in the anglosphere that is to a large extent responsible for the invasions and occupations inflicted on their people, have ended up having to leave their homelands. I’m thinking of Faiza, Riverbend, Laila el-Haddad… But at least, right now, I have a rough idea of where Faiza and Laila are. Riv has dropped out of the blogosphere (as, earlier, did that great US antiwar blogger “Marine’s Girl”). For both of them, I just hope they are alive and well.
Anyway, Frank wrote a short appreciation of his own of the impact of Riverbend’s work, which I am very happy to publish here:

Whatever became of Riverbend?
by Frank al-Irlandi, July 11, 2007
It is now three months since we heard the sad news that Riverbend and her family had given up on Baghdad and loaded up the car to head for the frontier. A smart cookie like Riverbend would have filed the post after they had crossed the frontier
She and her family probably have a small amount of money so they are unlikely to be among the destitute and desperate refugees in Syria and Jordan.
I enjoyed Riverbend’s posts. She gave a human face to the misery being inflicted by our misadventure in Iraq. It was possible to empathise with her description of her family preparing for an American Air raid in Bagdad by comparing it with my mother’s story of cowering under the stairs in Belfast as the house fell down around them during a Luftwaffe Air Raid on the city.
Her sympathy expressed in some of her early posts for bewildered young soldiers far from home in the heat and dust of Baghdad illustrates the size of the missed opportunity to build bridges in Iraq.
Her description of the creeping collapse of civil society starting with her loss of a job because jobs weren’t for girls to harassment about dress and hijabs through the collapse of safety in the city and the rise of local militias protecting districts to the same militias controlling districts to the walling off of districts of the city to the progressive ethnic cleansing of the city shows us just what a developed and sophisticated society we have destroyed.
Her description of the problems of gathering water and lack of electricity in the heat of the Baghdad summer and her grief at the death of her friends and acquaintances all serve to show us that we do not have Neville Chamberlain’s excuse of a far away country of which we know little.
Even in all the misery of Baghdad her humanity is illustrated by the fact that she still had time to express outrage and sympathy for the unfortunates killed and wounded at Cana by an Israeli Air Raid.
It was with some surprise that I saw Simone Veil the French Minister of Government and President of the European Parliament addressing the D-Day veterans in Normandy on the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings. She told them that she wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t landed because she had been liberated from Auschwitz seven months later. She overcame that horror and went on to build the European Union.
I do hope that some University has offered Riverbend the opportunity to use her talents by making available a scholarship to study journalism or history or law and so make her one of the first of the exiles to train in the skills needed to rebuild whatever form of state replaces the present chaos. If this were the prototype of a scheme funded by the EU to build a skill base then so much the better.
Otherwise we will see the effects of the dragon’s teeth that have been sown in the countries around Iraq in the very near future.
Wherever she is, I wish her well.

I would just add that whatever “schemes” the EU might dream up, however visionary or well-meaning, seem to me to be highly unlikely to prevent the terrible effects of the dragon’s teeth that have been sown in the countries around Iraq… And indeed, the dragon’s teeth have already, as we know, majorly ripped into Iraq itself for the past 4.5 years. All that carnage– existing and potential, inside and outside Iraq– needs to be stopped.
If the EU’s people and leaders want to do something constructive in that part of the world they need to do everything possible not just to dissociate themselves from the ghastly US military adventure there, which they are, in a pussyfooting kind of way finally starting to do. But they need to be a lot more proactive in confronting the claims the Bushites are making about the continuing “need” for the US presence in Iraq. The Europeans are well placed to help pull the US government to a real forum to direct the real, sustainable de-escalation of all the region’s tensions, under UN auspices.
But will we see them play such a much-needed, humane, and constructive role any time in the near future? I doubt it.
Well, I realize that my little rant here about the EU’s “learned helplessness” in the face of US power is a diversion from the main topic of this post, which is Riverbend. Sorry about that. I guess I’ll have to write more about EU-US relations here later.

Has Bush’s ability to undertake anything like coherent governance of the US started to implode? In a column in today’s WaPo, Bob Novak writes that several weeks ago, Sen. Chuck Hagel had sent a private letter to Bush advocating the appointment of an international mediator for Iraq under UN Security Council auspices.
Then, according to Novak,

Instead of the president responding to [that] overture from a longtime critic, Hagel was answered in routine fashion by a third-level bureaucrat (Jeffrey Bergner, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs).

Last week, Hagel therefore spelled out the content of his proposal in public, in this opinion piece in the Financial Times.
So one intriguing question is, who on earth in the President’s entourage made the stupid decision to blow Sen. Hagel off with such disrespect? Bush’s behavior there looks eerily like the rank arrogance displayed by Ehud Barak during his brief stint in the PM’s office in Israel, 1999-2000, when he assumed he was “so smart” he didn’t need to take any real account of the Labor Party’s partners in the ruling coalition– or indeed, of most of the other leaders of the Labor Party itself, most of whom had considerably more experience in governing than he did.
As a result, Barak’s coalition quickly collapsed paving the way for Sharon’s arrival into power and the continuing collapse of Labor as a coherent political entity.
Okay, I understand that the US’s governing system is very different from Israel’s (much more responsive) parliamentary system. But still, who in the White House is so arrogant that he would simply blow off Sen., Hagel? Only one, vice-presidential name comes to mind…
Anyway, clearly some people in the President’s entourage are finally getting the message that they need to be more politically agile and less stubborn on Iraq. David Sanger reports in today’s NYT that:

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.
Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15… But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.
Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

Both Sanger and the WaPo’s Shankar Vedantam reports that Secdef Robert Gates has cancelled a planned visit to Latin America this week so that he can work on the “interim report” on the surge that the administration needs to present to Congress before July 15.
I am really glad that Gates has decided to hang around in Washington this week in person. If he weren’t physically there, then Cheney could much more easily dominate and distort the discussion.
Here, by the way, are more details of what Hagel wrote in the FT last week, and a short commentary from on that text:

Continue reading “A crucial week in DC, for Iraq”

Karen DeYoung and Tom Ricks write in today’s WaPo that unnamed senior administration officials involved in Iraq policy have admitted that “The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January”, when he announced his launch of the notably unsuccessful surge policy. And that therefore,

officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war.

In other words: Benchmarks? You thought we had benchmarks? No sirree, all we have is the marks made on the floor after we rapidly shifted the benches across it…
Turns out, though, that these benches can’t be shifted quite that easily… since in May, the Democratic-controlled Congress hoisted Bush on his own well-benchmarked petard and wrote into law not only the 18 goals he had established for Iraq but also a few of their own. They also set September 15 as the deadline by which Petraeus and Crocker need to come to DC to report on how well they have succeeded in meeting these benchmarks.
DeYoung and Ricks write:

“That is a problem,” the official said. “These are congressionally mandated benchmarks now.” They require Bush to certify movement in areas ranging from the passage of specific legislation by the Iraqi parliament to the numbers of Iraqi military units able to operate independently. If he cannot make a convincing case, the legislation requires the president to explain how he will change his strategy.
Top administration officials are aware that the strategy’s stated goal — using U.S. forces to create breathing space for Iraqi political reconciliation — will not be met by September, said one person fresh from a White House meeting. But though some, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have indicated flexibility toward other options, including early troop redeployments, Bush has made no decisions on a possible new course.
“The heart of darkness is the president,” the person said. “Nobody knows what he thinks, even the people who work for him.”

Personally, I think it’s unfair to refer to Bush as “the heart of darkness.” Isn’t there someone else very close to him who deserves that monicker even more (and who, by all accounts, is the person who makes most of the presidential decisions)?
Another of the great quotes in this piece is this one, from a Pentagon official, talking about the Iraqi police:

“half of them are part of the problem, not the solution.”

H’mm, if half of them are part of the problem, then that means that only half or perhaps significantly less than half are part of the solution. So wouldn’t the “problem” ones and the “solution” ones just about cancel each other out?
Why are US taxpayers putting up with this damaging nonsense?
What is the US doing inside that distant foreign country, anyway?
I have always thought the whole idea of “benchmarks” was extremely patronizing, colonialist, stupid, and counter-productive. But given that it has existed out there as an idea in the US political discourse, I do kind of enjoy seeing the administration squirming around trying to deal with it now.
Bottom line: Enough with all these attempts, however well-intentioned, at the complex social and political engineering of another people’s entire country. Just leave!

Another Republican Senator, New Mexico’s Pete Domenici, has thrown his hat into the “stop the surge” ring, bringing to four the number of GOP senators who are now clearly lined up in opposition to Bush’s petulant “stay the course” course.
In a press conference yesterday, Domenici said,

We cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress… I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops. But I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home.

Actually, I wrote above that Domenici’s change of heart brings the number of Resurgent Republican Realists in the senate to four (him, Lugar, Voinovich, and Warner.) But we should probably add in there Sens. Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith, who made their opposition to the surge policy public some time ago– and possibly also the two women GOP senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
On Tuesday, Hagel was back home in Nebraska, where he “received a standing ovation in Lincoln Tuesday after speaking for more than two hours on Iraq and immigration.”
That news account there continues,

About 300 people periodically applauded during Hagel’s pre-July 4th Town Hall meeting at the University of Nebraska campus.
Hagel wants a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq. He also called for an international mediator to improve Iraq’s government and stop sectarian violence.
There is a gradual disintegration of the Iraqi government and it has failed to meet benchmarks for progress, he said…
“I know this issue,” he said. “I knew this (war) was wrong. I believe it’s the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of this country. I’m not afraid to say what I believe.”

The Bushites have been hoping to avoid having either house of Congress do anything definitive on Iraq until September, when Gen Petraeus and Amb. Crocker are scheduled to come back and make some kind of a progress report on the “surge”.
But it now looks as though the RRRs are gaining in strength so rapidly that the Senate will want to do something much sooner than that.
The speculation in the WaPo and elsewhere is now that the Iraq Study Group Implementation Act might provide the vehicle for this action.
Go to that last link to find out more about the ISGIA.
As I wrote about the ISG when it came out,

The ISG report did not urge two of the key steps that I consider essential if the US is to be able to undertake a troop withdrawal from Iraq that is orderly, speedy, total, and generous. It did not urge that President Bush publicly specify a deadline or timetable for the completion of the US withdrawal. And it did not urge giving the key role in sponsoring the diplomacy required to allow this withdrawal to the U.N. However what it did recommend was a quantum-leap improvement over the policies still being pursued and advocated by the President. In particular, I think its call for US engagement with Iran and Syria as part of the strategy of managing and deconflicting the imbroglio in Iraq is both necessary and long overdue.

(I note that Hagel shares my view that an international mediating framework is required for this diplomacy to work. That’s good.)
It is evident from what Sen. Domenici and Sen Smith have said that contact from their constituents in their home-states has been very important in helping them shift into the RRR camp. I therefore urge all US readers of JWN to join the campaign that the Friends Committee on National Legislation is running to persuade people to contact contact their senators– regardless of party affiliation– and urge support for the ISGIA.
Do it today! We the people can start to regain control over our government’s policy in Iraq.