Category: Iraq-2008-q1

The L.A. Times has quoted Joost Hiltermann as saying that Moqtada Sadr looks like the emerging political force inside Iraq, while US-installed PM Nouri al-Maliki looks like a lame duck. But the developments of the past week have had a much wider impact than that. With Maliki’s US-backed forces licking the significant wounds they received from their drubbing in Basra and mortar attacks on the Baghdad Green Zone still continuing, it now looks as if the US military’s ability to maintain its position of dominance in Iraq— let alone “project” its power from there to anywhere else, including of course Iran– has been significantly eroded.
Worth noting: it was not just any Iranian body or individual who brokered the most recent ceasefire around Basra. It was the Commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Yes, the same IRGC that the Bush administration recently decided, with much fanfare, to put onto the US’s “terrorism list.”
So much for the U.S. government’s jejune and often actively counter-productive practice of seeking to exclude significant political forces from any negotiations through the use of these “lists.” (Lists that have little basis in objective reality since they exclude the perpetrators of many well-documented acts of state terrorism such as assassinations and deliberate attempts to starve civilian populations into political submission. Well, I guess the U.S. government cannot count acts like those as “terrorism”, since Washington itself and its Israeli ally rely on them a lot.)
So here we have IRGC restoring– I hope– a measure of calm and a political breathing space to Basra and its environs in southern Iraq by mediating a negotiation among the relevant parties, while Gen. Petraeus and his superiors have to stand on the sidelines.
Paul Krugman says it best, when he notes about US policy in Iraq that,

America is spending $12 billion a month to sustain what has, in practice, become an Iranian sphere of influence.

Basra now clearly looks to have been Maliki’s “bridge too far.” And given the degree to which the US “plan” in Iraq– if we can dignify Washington’s hastily-cobbled-together string of reactions to Iraqi developments with that name– has been reliant on the Maliki government developing some coherence and ability to govern, the debacle he and his forces suffered in Basra may well come to be seen as a turning point for US power in Iraq and in the Gulf region as a whole.
After this, does all the water of US pretensions in the Gulf region just swoosh down the plug-hole fairly rapidly? Could happen.
If the debacle that befell Maliki’s forces in Basra is not now to expand into a disorderly chaos for the whole of the US position in Iraq, Washington needs to start talking to all of Iraq’s neighbors about the situation there, rather quickly. Most especially Iran.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon should convene these negotiations with utmost haste.
One last point. Though for now it looks as if Iran has emerged from the events of the past week as the most powerful force in Iraq, Badger of Missling Links provides some further nuance to the story, noting that there is also an Iraqi-nationalist sub-theme to what has been going on– and therefore, necessarily, a degree of continuing negotiation required between the Iraqi nationalist trends and the more solidly pro-Iranian trends within the anti-US coalition. There are many parallels there with the situation in Lebanon as Israel’s occupation of the country started falling apart in the late 1980s, and most particularly the still-continuing negotiations there between the Lebanese-nationalist trends and the more solidly pro-Syrian trends…
Interesting times.

When the Brits withdrew from Basra city to Basra airport last year, I was intrigued by the strategic implications of this at a number of levels. Most broadly, it seemed to represent a judgment by the British government and general staff that the “western” coalition of which the UK is a part could not “win” in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Afghanistan was more important. (See Dannatt.)
That was obviously, in itself, bad news for those in the US military still tasked by their political bosses to “win” in Iraq. But even worse news for the US military is that the space the Brits were withdrawing from was (and remains) an absolutely vital node on the supply chain for the whole US military in Iraq.
Ever since July 2005, I have been underlining the importance of Basra to the supply chain of the occupation force.
Now, however, it seems that Petraeus and his Centcom superiors may have finally twigged to the importance of Basra. Peter Oborne of Britain’s Daily Mail reports that:

Already at the Basra air base, I can reveal, the British subsidiary of U.S. construction giant KBR is building four huge dining facilities – known to the American army as DFACs. These are capable of feeding 4,000 men and suggest that the U.S. Army is contemplating a massive deployment to southern Iraq – including a major presence inside Basra itself.

(Hat-tip to Cloned Poster for his comment at Pat Lang’s blog, for that.)
So that construction has evidently been planned for some time now… But here was a problem for Petraeus and Co in their project to implant a 4,000-person base in Basra: Iraq is allegedly a “sovereign” state. So how to get Nuri al-Maliki’s allegedly “sovereign” government to agree to the creation of this new base?
Did they, essentially, snooker Maliki into getting into a firefight with the Sadrists in Basra that he very evidently couldn’t win, and that would therefore lead him to call in a robust US (oh, excuse me, “coalition”) ground-force presence there?
Badger of Missing Links has been doing a great job of following the still-evolving story of the new escalation between the Maliki-US axis and the Sadrists. In this post yesterday, he highlighted a great report from Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar that noted the self-deception Maliki has been engaging in by imagining himself not only a military leader but also one who by traveling to the battlefront in Basra could help to rally his forces. (Several alternative explanations of his strange trip to Basra are also possible.)
It hasn’t worked, of course. Indeed, thus far it has been a debacle. Having earlier given a 3-day deadline for the Sadrist/resistance forces in Basra to lay down their weapons, they then extended that to ten days amid reports that it was the government forces that have been majorly laying down their weapons, instead.
Yesterday, the US military sent in its airpower against suspected opposition sites in Basra, and today they did the same again.
The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has some intriguing tidbits, in a report written apparently from Washington DC, about the laments voiced by an (anonymous) “senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence in southern Iraq” to the effect that,

our intelligence in that area is far less than we would like. We don’t have any forces there… [W]e are operating with a good dose of opaqueness.

I also want to draw attention to the fine round-up of war-related news from Iraq that WaPo.com’s Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday.
That round-up included this:

I called attention yesterday to two Time magazine articles that today seem even more prescient and are worth mentioning again. Charles Crain noted how chief military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner (” Bush’s Baghdad Mouthpiece”) refused to say “whether the Americans would become involved more directly if the Iraqi government could not complete its Basra operation. ‘I would say,’ he said, ‘that’s a very hypothetical question at this time.'” But, Crain wrote: “It is also the question of the hour. If the violence continues to intensify and the Iraqi government cannot finish what it started then the U.S. must choose whether to throw its troops into the fight.”
And Darrin Mortenson wrote: “If the U.S. decides to actively go after the Shi’ite forces in the south, it would mean reopening a southern front where American forces once fought some of the Iraq war’s fiercest battles against Sadr but now have only a shadow presence. That would involve draining the concentration of surge troops around Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. It might even require more troop extensions or additional deployments to hold ground and maintain modest gains. Moving against the Shi’ite strongholds could then open opportunities for the Sunni fighters of al-Qaeda to strike Iraqi and U.S. targets in the Sunni triangle as the American heat turns south.”

Froomkin is also excellent at noting the blithe idiocy of the US commander-in-chief. He provides what seems like an excellent critique of the big, cheerleading speech that Bush made on Iraq, Thursday.
Froomkin wrote:

Mocking his critics, Bush asked yesterday: “If America’s strategic interests are not in Iraq — the convergence point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden’s deputy has called ‘the place for the greatest battle,’ the country at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth — then where are they?”
The obvious answer: Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, where bin Laden and the real al-Qaeda are said to be actively re-establishing al-Qaeda training camps.
And Bush, whose prognostication skills have been almost uniformly poor when it comes to Iraq, spoke with great certainty about what would happen if U.S. forces came home:
“The reality is that retreating from Iraq would carry enormous strategic costs for the United States,” he said. “It would incite chaos and killing, destroy the political gains the Iraqis have made, and abandon our friends to terrorists and death squads. It would endanger Iraq’s oil resources and could serve as a severe disruption to the world’s economy. It would increase the likelihood that al Qaeda would gain safe havens that they could use to attack us here at home. It would be a propaganda victory of colossal proportions for the global terrorist movement, which would gain new funds, and find new recruits, and conclude that the way to defeat America is to bleed us into submission. It would signal to Iran that we were not serious about confronting its efforts to impose its will on the region. It would signal to people across the Middle East that the United States cannot be trusted to keep its word. A defeat in Iraq would have consequences far beyond that country — and they would be felt by Americans here at home.”
On each and every count, however, as critics like retired Gen. William Odom have long been arguing, it’s quite possible that the exact opposite is true.

Let’s assume, though, that military planners a few levels under Bush have a better grasp on reality than him; and also that perhaps they have some plan in mind in having egged Maliki into a confrontation with the Sadrists at this time. If so, a concept that would lead to the reinforcement of the “coalition” positions and ground capabilities in Basra would seem to have considerable rationality.
And that is the case, regardless of what any bigger US military “plan” for Iraq might be. Indeed, reinforcing the US positions in Basra would certainly be a worthy goal to win even if it involves leaving US positions elsewhere in the country much more vulnerable, or even letting huge additional areas of Iraq fall out of their hands.
To recall the importance of Basra and retaining control of military supply lines through Basra, just recall what happened to the British-Indian expeditionary force in Iraq in 1915-16. Was it 23,000 troops that they lost there?

McClatchy Baghdad bureau’s Correspondent Jenan has blogged what may be the most heart-rending short essay by any Iraqi anywhere on the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.
In four short paragraphs she sums up the strength of the desire she had, on March 18, 2003, for what she actually calls “salvation” from Saddam, and the depth of her disappointment now, five years later:

Really I can say I was flying with my great expectation of what will happen tomorrow. I wasn’t wait war. I was waiting for new life that fills with justice, fair, happy, hopes and love. I was waiting for the war of change. Even I vowed to God sacrifice sheep if we get rid of Saddam occupation of Iraq that what we believe at that time we were living under Saddam’s occupation. I was happy, exciting, and optimist. Yes I was optimist at that time. I believed all the pretexts of war because I was look like the drowned who is cling to a straw thinking that it will save him.
Unfortunately now I feel that I’m drowning more and more. I discovered that I was deceived and now I believe the old saying “the devil that you know is better than the devil that you don’t know”

Jenan, I wish I could tell you that better days are coming. More peaceful days. Your dignity restored. A time when you and your family can live in security and in harmony with your compatriots and neighbors. A day free of occupation by any military force, whether homegrown or imposed by foreigners.
Well, honestly, I do believe we can bring such days to Iraqis. But only if all of us, Iraqis and non-Iraqis but most especially Americans, focus on the true goal: Days of dignity, calm, and hope. Days marked by friendly cooperation among all nations rather than the attempt by any one or more nations to exercise brute force and tight control over others.

Last week, the Pentagon contractors at the “Institute for Defense Analyses” published a scrubbed-for-public-view version (here in PDF) of their report on the links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and international terrorism. It was based overwhelmingly on documents captured after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that was, we can recall, justified by the Bush administration on the two main grounds that (1) the Iraqi regime had a significant arsenal of WMDs, and (2) the regime had significant ties to Al-Qaeda.
War justification #1 turned out to have no basis in fact.
Many of us had argued all along (as I did here, back in February 2003) that War justification #2 had no basis in fact, either.
Now, the Pentagon and its contractor have confirmed our judgment. The IDA report stated (p.ES-1) that: “This study found no ‘smoking gun’ (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.”
But, and this is a big “but”– it went on to add: “The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq.”
President Bush was fast to seize on this new formulation, and a day or so after the IDA report surfaced he made a speech claiming that the US invasion of Iraq had in fact been justified because of the “state terror” that Saddam had perpetrated against his own citizens. Thus, the concept of “state terror” was handily conscripted there to shift the conversation from Saddam’s alleged “links with al-Qaeda” to his regime’s abusive treatment of its own citizens.
Now, it is indubitably true that Saddam Hussein perpetrated numerous atrocities against his own people. Those fell under the headings of both crimes against humanity and, most likely, genocide. To call them “terrorism” is probably to stretch the definition of “terrorism” further than it should be stretched. Anyway, in international law “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” are far more useful categories.
I note that many US allies have also committed such acts against their own people– in Central America, in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.
Indeed, when Saddam was committing the worst of his acts against Iraq’s Kurdish citizens, in the 1980s, he was acting in an informal but but very real alliance with the US. (That was when Donald Rumsfeld made his visit to Iraq.) But by early 2003, Saddam’s regime had become tightly overstretched as a result of 12 years of extremely punishing US-led sanctions imposed on the people and government of Iraq; and his regime was probably the least abusive it had ever been.
But now, as the fifth anniversary of the invasion approaches, Bush presents us with this “liberationist” description of what the invasion was all about.
The first time a western government decided to use the force of arms to invade and “remake” to its own design a non-western country, and justified this act as being completely “in the true [i.e. invader-defined] interests of the invaded peoples” was when Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sent Christopher Columbus west to “remake” as much of the newly discovered “New World” of the Americas as he could reach.
From that perspective, the key development was not in 1492 when Columbus made landfall on the Caribbean island he named “Hispaniola”, thinking at the time that he had already reached Asia. It was when Ferdinand and Isabella sent him back to Hispaniola the following year, to govern it just as he pleased. (Details here.)
Columbus turned out to be a lousy administrator– perhaps because he used wanton violence against Hispaniola’s indigenous Tainos people, reducing their numbers in just a few years from “hundreds of thousands” to around 60,000.
Two decades later, further generations of (better organized) Conquistadores launched their “liberationist” projects on the mainland of Central and North-Central America. This time they were better backed up by cohorts of Dominicans and other “cultural genocidaires” whose job was to remake the peoples of Central America as Spanish-style Catholics who would always be obedient to the diktats of the (Spanish-dominated) Catholic hierarchy.
The means the Conquistadores used to bring about their “conversions”– which of course were always described as being “for the good of the natives themselves”– were the time-honored means that colonial invaders always use: brute violence, divide-and-rule, and the spreading of both weapons and distrust. Including, many of the same means the Dominicans were using back home in Spain in their Inquisition against suspected unbelievers there.
Well, at least now we can have a richer idea of what the “con” in the word “neocon” stands for. But I still feel fairly sickened whenever I hear President Bush or other gung-ho supporters of the bloody and so destructive invasion of Iraq appropriating the noble discourse of “liberation” and trying to justify the invasion on those grounds.
Perhaps I should get over just feeling sickened by this, and try harder to really understand that Bush and his supporters probably do, in all seriousness, still feel that they have done “a good thing” in Iraq. How, then, can we get into a conversation with such people and point out to them, in a way that “works”, that noble though their intentions may have been, the effects of their actions have been very far indeed from the meliorist project they might have had in mind… And that therefore, they should be much more open than they have been thus far to ideas for Iraq other than just going ahead blindly with the application of continuing amounts of military force?

It is so tragic to realize that just about all the dire predictions I made in 2002 and early 2003 about the consequences of a US invasion of Iraq have been fulfilled– and then some. So many of us worked so hard to try to avert that quite foreseeable and indeed foreseen disaster.
The harmful effects of this war on the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East are still continuing, day after day after day. And they will continue so long as the US military continues to stay there, continually sowing its seeds of divide-and-rule and distrust, and continually pumping into the country both military tools and a militarized mindset. The moment a US President states clearly that he or she intends to pull the US troops out of Iraq completely, defines the timetable within which s/he will achieve that, and calls on the UN to convene the negotiating processes– at the intra-Iraqi level, and at the regional level– required for this to happen in a calm and orderly way, then the dynamic in the country and in the region will change.
It is quite unrealistic (and therefore quite dishonest) for any US leader or official to claim at this point that the US on its own can “control” the modalities of its own exit. But exit there must be– primarily for the good of the Iraqis, whose sufferings over the past five years have been vast; but also for the good of the US and for many other actors.
If this whole, grisly tragedy has had a “silver lining”– and I hesitate even to raise the idea this might be so– then that is that surely it has amply demonstrated to the US citizenry and the world, once again, that military power on its own, however technically “awesome” (and shocking), is in the modern world quite insufficient as a means to securing strategic goals of any significance.
I had hoped that US citizens might have learned this from the war they waged on Vietnam in earklier decades? Or from the outcome of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon? But no. The curve of learning of actual, useful strategic lessons– as opposed to those that are handily “packaged” in Power Point slideshows by the arms manufacturers and their armies of well-paid cheerleaders in the think-tanks and academe– seems notably flat, or perhaps even downward-trending over time.
That is tragic. But let’s try to make sure that this time around, the “Lessons from the failure of US military power in Iraq” are properly learned and properly (and irreversably) integrated into the practice and planning of the US government. That is: we need a drastic redirection of resources from military hardware, military “preparedness”, and global power-projection capabilities into supporting all the many tools of diplomacy and international cooperation that already exist, and some new ones that we should now work with the rest of the world to build from scratch.
We Americans certainly need to have a big and ongoing national conversation about these matters in the months ahead. My book, Re-engage! America and the World After Bush addresses them, and will be published on May 15. (The website associated with the book, which has order forms for it and a lot of associated information, will be published within the next couple of days… Watch this space for the announcement.)
But as our Black Iraqiversary approaches again this year, I think we should all make an effort to showcase and engage with what Iraq’s citizens themselves feel about the occasion, and about their current situation.
Here is a short, tautly ironic commentary from “Correspondent Laith” oin McClatchy’s “Inside Iraq” blog today. It starts off thus:

In the few coming days, we will say good bye to the fifth year since freedom and liberation visited Iraq . For this great anniversary, I want to count some great democratic changes that happened during the five years of freedom and democracy.
1- The most important change is killing and displacing more than three million Iraqis. I think the record of Saddam had been broken long time ago. Now we have Iraqis all over the world even in some places that I never heard about till this moment…

Here is how the International Committee of the Red Cross describes the humanitarian crisis that Iraq is experiencing:

Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.
Despite limited improvements in security in some areas, armed violence is still having a disastrous impact. Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.

The ICRC website also has many other useful resources on the humanitarian situation inside Iraq. Among them is this short recollection by Roland Huguenin, who was spokesman for the ICRC delegation in Baghdad in March 2003.

Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have recently tallied the overall cost to the US economy of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq at $3 trillion. I haven’t read enough of their study to understand what assumption they are using there for the future length of the war going forward. (Can anybody know that at this point? If John McCain is serious about committing the US to the battlefield there for “100 years”, then at what point do the costs of that engagement become simply unquantifiable? Pretty soon into the 100 years, I’d say.)
Next week we will mark the fifth anniversary of this tragic engagement. In those five years Iraq, the country, has been essentially destroyed. Scores of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have lost their lives. More than four million of them have been displaced within or outside the country’s borders. Compared with the suffering that the war has inflicted on Iraqis, it seems almost trivial to mention the loss it has inflicted on the US citizenry. Nearly 4,000 volunteer service members have been killed, and tens of thousands more left with lasting physical injuries; hundreds of thousands with mental and spiritual injuries. (Remembering that just about all Iraq’s 30 million people have been left with mental and spiritual injuries by the war.)
And then, there is also the cost of the financial costs to the US citizenry, which in themselves are by no means trivial.
What was the war alleged to be “about”, again? Oh, WMDs, you might remember. SUNY Purchase professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has tallied the total budget of the UN’s 2002 inspection operation in Iraq (UNMOVIC) at “approximately $80 million, which includes the initial purchase of permanent equipment.” The budget of UNMOVIC’s predecessor, UNSCOM was “$25-30 million per year.” What is more, UNSCOM worked! Its operations and attentiveness did indeed lead to Saddam Hussein ending and destroying all his WMD programs sometime in the mid 1990s.
So imagine if, in 2002, in response to all the– as it turned out, completely hyped up, cherry-picked, and perhaps downright fabricated– allegations about Saddam still having WMD programs, the US had allowed the UN simply to continue with the UNMOVIC program, which was much more intrusive yet than the UNSCOM program.
(Which had worked… Did I mention that before?)
It would have cost the international community around $80 million a year.
Instead of which, the US taxpayers, with almost no help from anyone else (and after all, why should they?) are currently paying out on the continuing war in Iraq at a rate that Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate at $12 billion per month. That is, $144 billion per year.
Back in January 2003, when I went with my friends from the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice to the City Council hearing at which our city became formally designated as a “City for Peace”, I spoke to the councillors and explained how– after my study of Israel’s lengthy military invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon, I had noted the degree to which maintaining that occupation had become a massive drag on Israel’s economy. (I wrote about that, too, in those pre-war months of 2003.) And I told the city councillors that it was evident that:

(1) the US would find it far harder to get out of Iraq than it was to get in, in spite of all the talk about a “cake-walk”, etc;
(2) The costs of the maintaining the post-invasion occupation would be huge, and mounting;
(3) Just the logistics costs alone, of sustaining a massive occupation force at such a distance from the US’s own borders, would be exponentially higher than the comparable costs had been for Israel, given that Lebanon was right next door; and
(4) All this money would have to come from somewhere; and it would in fact come out of the US’s ability to provide decent basic services for its own citizens at home, which meant that it would be communities like Charlottesville that would end up suffering.

Guess what. It has all been happening.
This morning, as I drove from C’ville up to Washington DC I was listening to the hearing the Senate Appropriations Committee held on the costs of the war. Depressing, indeed. But at least we have a democratic majority in the senate which is holding hearings like this. I thought the Committee Chair pro-tem Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) did a great job.

Nir Rosen has produced yet another brilliant piece of reporting, this time about Iraq. His piece, out in Rolling Stone today, is called The Myth of the Surge.
He starts by setting the grim scene:

This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

Most of the piece is an up-close report on the operations in a couple of Baghdad neighborhoods of (a) one of the new “Iraqi Security Volunteer” (ISV) groups, and (b) an officer in the Irasqi National; Police (INP) who treads an extremely difficult path between the mainly-Sunni ISV’s and the Mahdi Army people from his own Shiite sect.
He has a really apt quote from Charles Freeman, an extremely savvy veteran US diplomat who, among other ambassadorships, was ambassador to Saudi Arabia for quite a while:

“We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority,” says Chas Freeman… “Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future.”

Nir gives a very depressing account of US troops blundering around through the bizarre physical, operational and (im-)moral landscape of Baghdad, including going with them on a couple of house raids that net a bunch of misidentified detainees and one against whom the evidence is fabricated by the local ISVs. He also shows the intense rivalries and pettiness within/among the ISVs; the rampant distrust and toadyism; and most importantly of all the fact that there is almost no functioning economy or society at all left in large areas of Baghdad.
At one point he writes, quite correctly:

A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. “I bet there’s an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us,” an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

Go read the whole article. It is right up there alongside the great piece of reporting that Jon Lee Anderson had in The New Yorker last November, in terms of (a) depicting the “Apocalypse Now” landscape of US-occupied Iraq; (b) underscoring how distant the reality on the ground in Baghdad is from the anodyne views of “the success of the surge” that too many US politicians and analysts have bought into into; and (c) underscoring, too, how great the challenge will be that our next president will face in Iraq, on January 20, 2009.
Great job, Nir.

The complex system of party caucuses used by the Democratic party in Iowa is very similar to the system that US overlord L. Paul Bremer proposed introducing in Iraq, back in 2004-2005. Ayatollah Ali Sistani strongly opposed that, and succeeded through street demonstrations etc in persuading Bremer to have the nationwide “party list” system that the US authorities eventually used for the successive elections there, 2005 and 2006, instead.
At the time, I strongly supported Sistani’s argument that the caucus system seemed complex, non-transparent, and very vulnerable to manipulation by the occupying power. The election system advocated by Sistani did not, in the end, generate a national government that did very much– if anything at all– of value to the country’s citizens. But the reasons for that lay not in the system of elections, but in many other political factors…
But perhaps I was wrong to judge at that time that, in the absence of credible promise from the US occupiers that they would refrain from intervening in Iraq’s political system, any system of elections could have been expected to generate a national governing body capable of both providing decent basic services to the Iraqi people and defending their interests against all intrusions including those of the occupying power?
At the time, though, I judged that the strength of the popular movement that Sistani seemed capable of mobilizing would continue to be able to defend the integrity of any national leadership generated through the election system. I was wrong in that judgment. For reasons that i don’t fully understand (though I should have paid more attention to this possibility), Sistani withdrew from playing any direct active role in Iraqi politics once he had made his big “point” about the election system… And in the absence of his playing any role, it was the smaller, much more partisan-minded parties that took the initiative in the Shiite community, with the generally catastrophic results that we have seen over the two years since the January 2006 election.
So in the end, did the choice of which electoral system to use make much difference? Perhaps not…