Category: Iraq-2008-q2

Kudos to McClatchy Newspapers for once again, as so often, getting out of the Washington media-power-elite echo chamber and doing some good, solid reporting on the politics inside both Iraq and the US of the Bushists’ doomed attempt to force a longterm (“permanent”) SOFA onto the occupied Iraqis. On this story today, it is Leila Fadel who takes the honors, backed up by Margaret Talev in DC.
Fadel reports from Baghdad that Iraqi lawmakers tell her the US is actually demanding 58 bases in Iraq under the SOFA, for starters. She quotes Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (IISC, formerly SCIRI), as saying of the US proposal,

The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation. We were occupied by order of the Security Council [referring to UNSC resolution 1511 of, actually, 2003 not 2004]… But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far.
…If we had to choose one or the other, an extension of the [UN] mandate or this agreement, we would probably choose the extension. It is possible that in December we will send a letter the UN informing them that Iraq no longer needs foreign forces to control its internal security. As for external defense, we are still not ready.

Then Fadel has this, about Iraq’s (Kurdish) Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari: “Zebari… criticized the lawmakers for poisoning the public discussion before an agreement is concluded.”
So this is what the Bushists’ push for “democratization” in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East has come to? That Bush and his officials are working with Zebari and other close (bought and paid for) allies in Iraq to ram a truly momentous “security agreement” into force without allowing any meaningful oversight from elected legislators in either Baghdad or Washington?
In Washington, McClatchy’s Talev has been on the case. Presumably it was she who contributed the following important reporting:

Leaders in the U.S. Congress have also demanded a say in the agreement, but the Bush administration says it is planning to make this an executive accord not subject to Senate ratification.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain didn’t respond for requests for comment but the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, said through a spokesman that he believes the Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress and that it should make “absolutely clear” that the United States will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

No reaction that I’ve seen yet from any US politicians to the news of the security agreement that the Iraqi and Iranian defense ministers signed yesterday in Tehran. (And also, no word on how Iraq’s lawmakers will respond to that one.)

The Bush administration has been working with PM Nouri al-Maliki’s government in Iraq since at least November to try to win the Iraqi government’s agreement to both a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and a broader agreement on defense, economic, and political cooperation.
Today, Iraq’s Defense Minister did indeed sign a defense cooperation agreement. But oops, it was not with Washington but with Iraq’s looming eastern neighbor, Iran.
That Reuters report there explained that the signing occurred during a meeting that Iraq’s Defense Minister Abdul Qader Jassim, held with his Iranian counterpart Mostafa Mohammad Najjar. It cited the official Iranian news agency IRNA as saying that, “Mine clearance and the search for soldiers missing in action would be part of the planned cooperation.”
Also,

“The two parties, stressing the importance of defense cooperation in the balanced expansion of ties … called for development of this sort of cooperation with the aim of strengthening peace and stability in the region.”

Jassim has been in Tehran as part of the delegation accompanying PM Maliki on his three-day visit there. During the visit, Maliki has met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and then today with “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i.
This later Reuters report spells out some of the dilemma that Maliki now finds himself in:

Iran’s supreme leader told visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Monday that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq was the biggest obstacle to its development as a united country.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hit out at the “occupiers” in Iraq at a time when Baghdad is negotiating with the United States on a new agreement aimed at giving a legal basis for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq after Dec. 31, when their U.N. mandate expires.
Iran and the United States blame each other for violence in Iraq and are also sharply at odds over Tehran’s nuclear programme…
Maliki’s government treads a fine line in its relations with the Islamic Republic, seeking support while mindful of U.S. accusations that Iran supports Shi’ite militias in Iraq.
Iran denies this and blames the presence of U.S. troops, currently numbering about 150,000, for the bloodshed that has followed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Iraq’s government spokesman said before Maliki’s three-day visit started on Saturday that the issue of Iranian interference would be raised, but it was not clear whether it had been discussed in his meetings so far in Tehran.

But the piece hints– imho correctly– that Tehran is also treading a careful path:

Analysts say Iran does not want Iraq to descend into chaos but nor does it want U.S. forces to have an easy ride, which might give Washington ideas about military options against Iran.

Meanwhile, back home in Baghdad, opposition to the SOFA-plus deal being proposed by the Americans has continued to be strong. AP says that this opposition has even been voiced by the head of the Badr Organization, which is closely allied to Maliki. (But oh, Badr is also even more closely allied to Iran. So I suppose there’s no surprise there.)
Indeed, the main thrust of that last AP article is this:

The Bush administration is conceding for the first time that the United States may not finish a complex security agreement with Iraq before President Bush leaves office.

For all those of us working for a US troop withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, and orderly this is excellent news. It means that the Bushists’ attempt to lock in longterm– or even “permanent”– agreements with Iraq on security and economic issues before they leave office will have failed.
We therefore need to redouble our calls to both the main presidential candidates that they take a clear-eyed look at the balance of forces in the Gulf region– which is still tipping every week further in Iran’s favor– and work for a UN-sponsored agreement on the speedy pullout of US troops from Iraq as soon as possible. (Go look at some of my earlier writings for guidelines on how this can most effectively be done.)
To be durable, any longterm agreement that Washington concludes with Baghdad needs to be concluded with a government in Bagjdad that is truly sovereign. No agreement concluded while US forces dominate the Iraqi strategic environment, including the center of the Iraqi “government” in the Green Zone can win the longterm legitimacy, both inside Iraq and in the broader international community, required for it to endure. (See “May 17 agreement” for an object-lesson in that regard.)
If, as now seems just about certain, the Bushists will not be able to conclude any form of SOFA or SOFA-plus agreement with Baghdad before the end of this year, then the question of the basis in international law for the presence of US troops in the country after December 31 will have somehow to be agreed before December 31 arrives. Currently, the US forces are there under a “mandate” extended to them by the UN Security Council on the grounds that the situation in Iraq falls under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. (That was a nice bit of diplomatic finessing, achieved in UNSC resolution 1511, that the Bushists won from the UNSC after their invasion of Iraq was a done deal, even though the invasion itself had been quite unsanctioned by the UNSC and indeed, as even Kofi Annan admitted later, had been enacted in clear violation of international law.)
But resolution 1511 did require that the UNSC review the mandate it gave the US in Iraq every year. And in December 2007, PM Maliki flexed a nationalist muscle or two when he told the SC that his government would agree for the mandate– then due to run out at the end of 2007– to be extended “for the last time”, by just one further year.
In the immediate run-up to the coming deadline, all parties in the region and on the SC will know who the next US president will be, though the final content of this man’s policies will probably not yet be known, or perhaps not even yet finally decided. But there will have to be some deft diplomacy among the UNSC principals, the governments of Iraq and Iran, and probably both the outgoing and incoming US presidents to try to figure what to do on December 31. Perhaps a “holding pattern”, whereby the UNSC mandate is extended a further six months, might be one way forward.
But who knows what the domestic-Iraqi, regional, and international balances will look like by then?
I just want, finally, to note some of the contortions in the way that an (un-named) US official spoke to the AP’s Lolita Baldor about whether the US had indeed been, as part of the now-failing negotiations, requesting permanent bases in Iraq or not.
Baldor wrote:

The Bush administration is seeking an agreement with Baghdad that would provide for a normal, permanent U.S. military and diplomatic presence in Iraq. The word “permanent” has been a flashpoint for many who oppose the war, both in the U.S. and Iraq. But the U.S. official stressed that the agreement will not call for permanent U.S. bases on Iraqi soil.
Instead, the proposed agreement would allow U.S. troops or personnel to operate out of U.S., Iraqi or joint facilities through either short or long-term contracts, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are not public.
“The idea that the U.S. will have a normal, diplomatic and military presence, and need access to facilities — not necessarily our facilities, but need facilities — is permanent,” said the official, who is close to the ongoing talks.
Those facilities, the official said, could belong to the Iraqis, and the U.S. would simply be using them on a renewable basis. Or they could be existing U.S. facilities that over time would be taken over by the Iraqis.

So what this official– my money is definitely on Crocker– is saying is that the presence of US troops in Iraq would be permanent, though perhaps they might, over time, move from one base to another; and perhaps the bases (“facilities”) they would operate from might have some nominal Iraqi ownership.
It strikes me that this US official simply does not understand the strong distaste for most Iraqis for any idea of a “permanent” presence of any foreign troops on their soil. It’s not the bases the Iraqi object to as much as the permanent presence of US troops on Iraqi soil.
For what it’s worth, this (Arabic only) is what the Sadrists’ Al-Kufiyeh website posted today as being their version of “The secret clauses in the security agreement between the Iraqi government and America.”
Here’s a quick translation:

1 – American forces have the right to build military camps and bases; and these camps will be to support the Iraqi army; their number will be dependent on how the Iraqi government sees the security conditions, in consultation with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and with the American [military] command and the officers in the field, and also in consultation with the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and the competent authorities.
2- ضرورة ان تكون اتفاقية و ليس معاهدة . 2 – It should be a convention and not a treaty. [In an attempt to escape the scrutiny of legislators at either end, I imagine. ~HC]
3- لا يحق للحكومة العراقية ولا لدوائر القضاء العراقي محاسبة القوات الاميركية وافرادها، ويتم توسيع الحصانة حتى للشركات الامنية والمدنية والعسكرية والاسنادية المتعاقدة مع الجيش الاميركي . 3 – Neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi justice authorities have any jurisdiction over the American forces or their personnel, and immunity would also be extended to security, civilian and military companies, and contractors working with the American Army.
4- صلاحيات القوات الاميركية لا تحدد من قبل الحكومة العراقية، ولا يحق للحكومة العراقية تحديد الحركة لهذه القوات، ولا المساحة المشغولة للمعسكرات ولا الطرق المستعملة. 4 – The powers of American forces would not be not determined by the Iraqi government, and nor would the Iraqi Government have the right to define the movement of these forces, the areas used by the military camps, or the roads they would use. used.
5- يحق للقوات الاميركية بناء المراكز الامن بما فيها السجون الخاصة والتابعة للقوات الاميركية حفظا للامن . 5 – The American forces would have the right to build security centres, including special prisons that would belong to the American forces in the interest of security.
6- يحق للقوات الاميركية ممارسة حقها في اعتقال من يهدد الامن والسلم دون الحاجة الى مجوز من الحكومة العراقية و مؤسساتها . 6 – The American forces would have the right to arrest those who threaten peace and security without the need for consent from the Iraqi government and its institutions.
7- للقوات الاميركية الحرية في ضرب أي دولة تهدد الامن والسلم العالمي والاقليمي العام والعراق حكومته و دستوره، او تستفز الارهاب والميليشيات، ولا يمنع الانطلاق من الاراضي العراقية والاستفاده من برها ومياهها وجوها . 7 – The American forces are free to attack any state that [in the US judgment] threatens world or regional security or peace, in general, or Iraq, or its constitution, or that provokes [instigates?] terrorism and militias; and nothing prevents [the American forces] from starting out [on such missions] from Iraq’s land or from using Iraq’s terrain, or waters, or airspace for this.
8- العلاقات الدولية والاقليمية والمعاهدات يجب ان تكون للحكومة الاميركية العلم والمشورة بذلك حفاطا على الامن والدستور . 8 – The American government must be informed of and consulted on all [Iraqi] International and regional relations and treaties, in order to defend security and the Constitution.
9- سيطرة القوات الاميركية على وزارة الدفاع والداخلية والاستخبارات العراقي ولمدة 10 سنوات، يتم خلال هذه المدة تأهيلها و تدريبها واعدادها حسب ما ورد في المصادر المذكورة، وحتى السلاح ونوعيته خاضع للموافقة والمشاورة مع القوات الامريكية . 9 – U.S. forces would have control of the Iraqi Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Intelligence for a period of 10 years, and during this period they would be rehabilitated and trained and prepared as described in the sources mentioned, and even weapons and their types would be subject to approval of and consultation with American forces.
10- السقف الزمني لبقاء القوات هو طويل الأمد وغيرمحدد وقراره لظروف العراق ويتم اعادة النظر بين الحكومة العراقية والاميركية في الامر، الا ان الامر مرهون بتحسن اداء الموسسات الامنية والعسكرية العراقية وتحسن الوضع الامني وتحقق المصالحة والقضاء على الارهاب واخطار الدول المجاورة وسيطرة الدولة وانهاء حرية وتواجد الميليشيات ووجود اجماع سياسي على خروج القوات الاميركية . 10 – The timetable for the forces remaining in place would be a long but undefined period, depending on the circumstances in Iraq, and would be reviewed by the Iraqi government and the U.S.; but this matter would be dependent on improved performance of the Iraqi military and security institutions, the improvement of the security situation and the achievement of reconciliation, dealing with terrorism and the dangers of neighboring countries, the extension of state control, ending the militias’ freedom freedom of action and presence of militias, and the achievement of political consensus on the exit of U.S. forces.

These reported terms are very similar to those that Patrick Cockburn reported on, here, June 5, though his report was more specific at some points, and Al-Kufiyeh’s more specific at others.
Lolita Baldor’s well-reported piece for AP today gave indirect confirmation that both accounts had described the Bushists’ original “ask” from the Iraqis in the agreement essentially correctly. She wrote,

On Monday two Iraqi lawmakers who saw the proposed draft said the document, put forward Sunday, … seeks to address some of Iraq’s concerns. It adds an explicit promise that U.S. forces in Iraq will not attack neighboring countries and that Iraqi authorities will be notified in advance of any action by U.S. ground forces, the lawmakers said.
While it gives U.S. forces the power to arrest suspects, it says any detainees would be handed over to Iraqi authorities, said the lawmakers, Mahmoud Othman and Iman al-Asadi.

That does seems to imply that an earlier draft of the proposal had not had those assurances in it, I think?
Anyway, as noted in the main body of this post, at this point the details of the text the US side was proposing have now all become OBE, operationally irrelevant– and of interest only to afficianados of diplomatic arcana.
So Sunday was the day the US side suddenly proposed the changes described by Baldor. M6nday was the day Iraq signed a security agreement– with Iran.

Joost Hiltermann has just published what has to be the very best assessment in the English language of the situation of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Joost has followed Iraqi-Kurdish developments very closely for 20 years or more now. (A couple of years ago he published a whole book on Saddam’s 1988 use of chemical weapons against Halabja in 1988.)
In this latest article, he writes about the degree to which, after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the two big Kurdish parties were able to start, as he writes, “Kurdifying” Iraqi politics.
He writes:

the Kurds succeeded in “Kurdifying” Iraqi politics to the extent that no decision can be taken without Kurdish input or, more, without the threat of a Kurdish veto. This power was most visibly evident in the country’s interim constitution, the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law, which held that the country’s permanent constitution needed an absolute majority to succeed in a popular referendum and could be voted down by a two-thirds majority in a minimum of three governorates— code for the three Kurdish governorates. In other words, no constitution could be passed without the Kurds’ approval. The result was a constitution that reflected the interests of the parties that had won the January 2005 elections: the Kurds and ISCI (which headed the United Iraqi Alliance, a loose coalition of mostly Shi‘i parties and individuals). Because so much of Iraq’s parliamentary politics since 2005 has concerned constitutionally mandated legislation, the Kurds have left their imprint repeatedly and decisively. They have been helped by their internal discipline and meticulous preparation (especially compared to everybody else), as well as the unity of their strategic vision…

Continue reading “Joost Hiltermann on Iraq’s Kurds”

The attempt by the Bush administration to impose an extremely unfair SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) onto the Iraqi government before July 31 now seems clearly destined for failure, if it has not already, actually, failed.
Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki is on the second day of his current visit to Iran, where he has reassured his host, Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the present Iraqi government “will not allow Iraq to become a launching pad for an attack on Iran.” That AP report there also says the following:

Al-Maliki also appeared to signal that Tehran would not be squeezed out by any agreement, saying Iraq’s “development and stability will be provided through more bilateral cooperation” with Iran.
Ahmadinejad, in turn, underlined that Iran had a key role in Iraq’s security. “The responsibility of (Iraq’s) neighbors is doubled in this regard,” he said, according to [Ahmadinejad’s presidential] Web site.
The Iranian president hinted at concerns that the security agreement would mean U.S. domination in Iraq. “Iraq must reach a certain level of stability so that its enemies are not able to impose their influence,” he said, without specifically mentioning the deal.
Iran fiercely opposes the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, saying it will lead to permanent American bases on its doorstep in Iraq, reflecting Tehran’s fears U.S. forces could attack it. Last week, powerful Iranian politician Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said the deal would “enslave” Iraqis and vowed it would not be permitted to be passed, and Iran’s pro-government press has frequently railed against it.

The Iranian government has acted persistently and skilfully in Iraq over the past six-plus years. First, it worked with its longterm allies and friends among Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds to help push the US government into toppling Saddam Hussein and installing those allies and friends as leaders of the replacement regime there. Then it was careful to increase the effectiveness and visibility of the influence it has continued to exert over those allies so gradually that the Bush administration people either didn’t really realize what was going on, or found themselves unable to react effectively once they did. (The “boil the frog slowly” method.)
In this regard, we could note that Iran was one of the first governments to recognize the US-installed “government” in Baghdad and send an ambassador to post-invasion Baghdad. That, while most Arab states continued to protest the illegality of the US invasion and of the Iraqi “government” that had flowed from it. As a result only a few Arab states have diplomatic representation in Baghdad. Those that do include, not surprisingly, Iran’s ally Syria.
What the Iranians have done in post-invasion Iraq reminds me of the way my Aunty Katy would help me when I was learning to knit… She would patiently work along behind me to pick up all the stitches I had dropped and return my work to something like what was intended. In the case of the Iran-Iraq-US triangle, however, what is emerging is much more what Iran intended than what the Bushists intended.
Hey, for now, having 160,000 US troops tied down as sitting ducks in Iraq is the best guarantee the Iranians have that the US won’t undertake or allow any military attack against them. And meantime, in the vast expanses of Iraq that exist outside the US military cantonments, Iran’s influence is considerably stronger than that of the very distant US.
By the way, I think this is the most interesting portion of the broad range of reporting on Iraqi developments that Al-Hayat carries today.
(Why on earth won’t the folks at Hayat upgrade the English-language portion of their website so it includes some of their excellent news coverage????? I have repeatedly urged them to do that. Meantime, I struggle along trying to read as much of the Arabic as my poor brain can. Google Translate is sometimes of some help, but not much yet I fear… Okay, end of rant.)
Basically that story indicates that Patrick Cockburn’s important recent reporting on the Bushists’ threat to use as a bargaining chip in the SOFA “negotiations”, Iraq’s access to the $50 billion of Iraqi government funds that are held by the US Federal Reserve Bank has drawn excited considerable attention (and pushback) inside Iraq.
The US’s manipulative use of these funds is, of course, strongly analogous to the Israeli government’s quite illegal use of the tax and customs revenues it has collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (under the terms of the Oslo Accords), as a bargaining chip in its ever-stagnant “peace negotiations” with the PA.
Wonder where the Bushists got the idea for this?
Of course, given the present windfall increases in oil prices, Iran is currently quite cash-heavy and probably in a good position to “outbid” whatever economic incentives the Bushists might be trying to offer the Iraqi politicians. For that reason and also because of its obligations under international law, the degree of control Washington can exercise over Iraq’s finances is actually far less than the control Israel exercises over the PA’s. So Washington ends up looking (and being) sleazy and manipulative. It ends up harming Iraq’s hard-pressed citizens. And with all that, it can’t even achieve what it has been seeking in terms of this highly coercive SOFA agreement. What an absolute fiasco of “diplomacy”.
The Bushists have shown themselves quite incapable of converting the overwhelming superiority over all comers that they exhibited in the military realm during the invasion of Iraq (“Shock and Awe”) into any kind of lasting political-strategic gains inside the country. It is quite possible that, in today’s hyperlinked global environment, their use of overwhelming “Shock and Awe” itself meant that they could not win what they wanted at the political level in Iraq thereafter. But I really don’t think the extent and depth of their political failure there was foreordained. Most of it, they have brought completely upon themselves.
US troops out now! No to any coercive SOFA with Iraq!

Addendum relevant to the “Boil a Frog” issue I discussed above:

I see that the Wall Street Journal had a hilariously misdirected editorial on Friday (hat-tip “Gloomy Gus”) in which they argued:

It’s crucial for Americans to understand that, apart from the Sadrists, all factions of Iraqi politics now support some kind of U.S.-Iraq status of forces agreement to succeed the U.N. mandate that expires later this year.
We are winning in Iraq. Indeed, we can now say with certainty that we will win…

My goodness, if that’s the smartest analysis Wall Street can offer, no wonder this country’s economy is in such chaos…

So Maliki’s party has now split. (Also, see here.) One delicious aspect of this development– from the anti-occupation point of view– is that it’s former US puppet-in-chief Ibrahim Jaafari who has led the split, taking about 10 members out of the present PM’s party and into the new “Da’wa National Reform” trend, which has allied itself with the new Iraq-nationalist (i.e. anti-SOFA, anti-US-occupation and also somewhat anti-Iranian) bloc that has been put together by the Sadrists and others.
Does this mean it is definitely curtains for the Bushists’ attempts to force a longterm SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) on the Maliki government before they leave office? Probably.
Juan Cole writes today about the split in Maliki’s party,

It is really quite remarkable that a sitting prime minister should preside over a schism in his own party, despite his control of billions of dollars in patronage.
Apparently, al-Maliki has been maneuvered by the Bush administration into a position where he has virtually no popular or party support, and is left with Washington has his only anchor.

But wait. Washington, it turns out, is not Maliki’s only anchor! Because guess where– in this moment of extreme political threat for his premiership– he is headed today!
You likely already guessed: Iran.
Maliki’s decision to rush off there at a time of such great political tension at home hilariously demonstrates two things:

(a) the degree to which the Bushists have been losing control of the situation in the Iran-Iraq theater; and
(b) the degree to which there is now an increasingly strong convergence of interests between Iran and Washington inside Iraq, as both sides face the increasing strength of the Iraqi-nationalist trend.

Okay, regarding the convergence, see this piece that the ever-well-informed David Ignatius will be publishing in tomorrow’s WaPo.
In it, David is trying to plumb the thinking and intentions of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Qods (Jerusalem) Force.
David writes, somewhat grandiloquently, that

it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran’s bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation’s confrontation with the United States.

Grandiloquent, because while Soleimani might be more powerful in Tehran than Ahmadinejad, both of them are clearly outranked both on paper and in terms of actual decisionmaking by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i.
Still, Soleimani is not inconsequential.
So here’s David’s methodology. He relies almost wholly on the hearsay accounts of someone he identifies only as “an Arab official who met recently with [Soleimani].” For what it’s worth, my money for the source is on the ever-agile Ahmad Chalabi, who I believe has some kind of a job-title that could enable one to describe him as an “official.”
(Chalabi snake-oil again, she groans, clutching her brow in disbelief? This can surely lead nowhere good… )
Well anyway, David does nothing whatsoever to reassure us that Chalabi is not the source…
So here, for what it’s worth, is what David’s un-named Arab tells us about Soleimani’s current thinking:

Soleimani is confident about Iran’s rising power in the region… He sees an America that is weakened by the war in Iraq but still potent. He has told visitors that U.S. and Iranian goals in Iraq are similar, despite the rhetoric of confrontation. But he has expressed no interest in direct, high-level talks. The Quds Force commander prefers to run out the clock on the Bush administration, hoping that the next administration will be more favorable to Iran’s interests.
“The level of confidence of these [Quds Force] guys is that they are it, and everything else is marginal,” says the Arab who meets regularly with Soleimani.

Toward the end of the column David concludes:

The question for Soleimani-watchers is how he will play his hand in the growing confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. The Bush administration seems to have decided on a course of escalating pressure against Tehran during its remaining months in office. The Iranians, while maintaining a tough line on the nuclear issue, as well as in Iraq and Lebanon, appear wary of an all-out confrontation.
So imagine that you are Qassem Soleimani, commander of a covert Iranian army deployed across the Middle East: You doubt the Bush administration would run the risk of a military strike against Iran, but you can’t be sure. You think America can’t afford to play chicken in an election year, but you can’t be certain of that, either. You think Iran is on a roll, but you know how quickly that advantage can be squandered by unwise choices. You know that Arabs, even in Iraq, have become peeved at what they see as meddling and overreaching by Tehran.
So you watch and wait. You give ground where necessary, but you prepare to strike back, as devastatingly as possible — and on your own terms, not those of your adversary.

Sort of inconclusive as an ending, I feel. If David’s source is Chalabi– or actually, regardless of the identity of that near-native informant– then one needs seriously to probe what his goal is in passing on this “information” to David. One also needs to probe David’s goal in publishing this piece.
Regarding Chalabi, the best explanation for the invasion-inciting role he played so brilliantly in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is that he was in good part on the Iranians’ pay-roll in those years, when he was inveigling the Americans into toppling Tehran’s old nemesis Saddam Hussein, and that he looked forward to being installed as the new leader in Iraq with the support of both Washington and Tehran.
First part worked. Second part didn’t. Here he is again?
What is the current game-plan of this ever-shifty manipulator? Who knows?
Meanwhile, back to the Iraqi political system. I am very grateful to Reidar Visser for having added the following additional commentary to what I posted on JWN here yesterday, about the discussion with the two Iraqi parliamentarians:

the list of signatories to the letter you linked to with Iraqi parliamentarians protesting is extremely interesting. It consists of the same parties that have been trying to put together a cross-sectarian alliance ever since 2006, despite the formidable disadvantage of having an opponent (the Maliki government) which receives all the backing of the Bush administration, while they themselves have almost zero support in the outside world.
In October 2006 they tried to defeat the law for implementing federalism, but failed by a small margin. In January 2008, they produced a robust statement calling for a negotiated settlement of Kirkuk (instead of an early referendum) and criticised Kurdish attempts to circumvent Baghdad in oil contract dealings. The high point came in February 2008, when they managed to press through a demand for early provincial elections during the parliamentary debate of the non-federated governorates act, despite the determined opposition of the Maliki government.
Today, they are trying to prevent attempts by Kurds and ISCI to manipulate the electoral process for the upcoming elections – attempts that include suggestions to create an electoral law that would prevent the use of “open” candidate lists (whereby voters can focus on individuals instead of parties).

Visser also asked this extremely important question:

The big question is, when the Bush administration gives all its support to the opponents of this alliance – the Maliki government and the Kurdish–ISCI axis, why is it that the supposed creators of “alternative” US policies in Iraq, the Democrats, are focusing all their energies on outbidding Bush in this regard, by signalling even stronger support for the “soft partition” minority of Iraqis led by Barzani and Hakim?
Would it not be more logical for them to reach out to this nationalist parliamentary bloc, which despite its difficult situation (its enemies are supported by both the US and Iran) could now be a real majority, and could certainly have a great potential if it just received a little help from the outside world? This is a fantastic initiative by the AFSC, but one wishes it had come from American politicians eager to craft an alternative Iraq policy instead…

Visser is absolutely correct to put the Democratic Party in the US on the line like this. I guess if pushed, many Democrats might give strong weight to Israel’s longstanding preference for Iraq not to re-emerge as a strong and capable unitary state…
I guess what I’m hoping, though, is that the visit to Washington by MPs Ulayyan and Jaberi has succeeded at least in opening good channels of continuing communication between them and all the political forces here in DC.
By the way, here is another account of the parliamentarians’ visit here, by the strongly leftist-leaning (except on Israel) reporter ,Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman met the MPs at two events different from the one I attended, and I believe he also reported on their appearance at the House Subcommittee on Wednesday.
Ackerman’s account there has much of interest in it. It is fuller than the account I blogged yesterday, and is completely consonant with what I heard. That’s good. It means the two MPs stayed consistently on-message during their time here.
Actually there is something of a gathering stream of Iraqi pols visiting DC these days. This is one of the collateral benefits of the administration here having undertaken its essentially colonialist project in Iraq in the name of “democratization”: That makes it hard for them to suppress all these outreach efforts inside the US by a wide range of Iraqi voices.

Speaking to a civil-society audience of 60 people here in Washington DC today, Iraqi MPs Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan (National Dialogue Council) and Dr. Nadim al-Jaberi (al-Fadhila) both roundly rejected the idea of negotiating any binding longterm Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States as long as US forces remain in their country. Both also, intriguingly, said that the Arab League might be the outside party best placed to convene the negotiation required to achieve intra-Iraqi reconciliation.
Ulayyan and Jaberi were speaking at a lunch discussion hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They have spoken to a number of civil society groups here in the past two days. On Wednesday– as I noted here earlier today– they testified about their country’s situation at a hearing held by the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight.
While with the Subcommittee, they handed chair Rep. William Delahunt a letter spelling out the view of a majority of Iraq’s MPs that any SOFA completed between the two countries should stipulate a total withdrawal of US troops from the whole of Iraq before a date certain.
In that earlier blog post I also highlighted the importance I saw, in today’s increasingly transparent global environment, of the contacts that non-governmental groups and individuals (including parliamentarians) can now maintain with their counterparts across national borders without having all such interactions regulated by the national governments involved. Ulayyan and Jaberi’s visit to the US– which was originally also to have included three other Iraqis– has been organized by the American Friends Service Committee.
Great work, AFSC!!!
I’m hoping to write up a longer account of today’s Carnegie Endowment gathering as soon as I can. For now, I’ll focus on the questions about the SOFA and the sponsoring mechanism for the still-needed process of internal reconciliation. Those were indeed my main concerns going into the meeting. Someone else asked the two MPs about the SOFA question, and I was then able to ask the two MPs the reconciliation-sponsorship question.
In line with my now three-year-old plan for how the US can get out of Iraq, as laid out in the July 2005 writings linked to here, I also asked the two men what sponsorship they thought would be most effective for the international negotiations required to secure a US troop withdrawal from their country that is speedy, orderly, and complete. (My strong preference is for UN sponsorship.) They did not really address that part of the question. Maybe I’ll get a follow-up meeting with them sometime?
By the way, I think my 2005 plan for how the US can withdraw from Iraq has held up remarkably sturdily over time and is still very apposite.
Anyway, back to today’s Carnegie event. About the SOFA, Ulayyan said:

We learned about the text being proposed by the US only through the media, and we’ve seen that it’s very unfair for the Iraqi people. Whoever sees it will see that Iraq would become not just under US occupation but as if it were part of the US! [But without voting rights, I might add. ~HC] It allows the US to use Iraqi territory and US military bases in Iraq for a very long time, and to use them to attack any country around the world from there. And it gives the US troops and civilians complete immunity from prosecution in the Iraqi court system. The US could do anything it wanted in Iraq without being accountable to anyone!
Clearly, for anyone, it would be impossible to enter into an agreement with another party while being threatened by the other person’s weapons. Therefore the SOFA can’t be concluded as long as there are foreign troops on Iraq’s territory. For any agreement to work, there has to be a balance between the two parties to it.
The timing of this attempt at getting a SOFA right now is also not appropriate because it would impede our national reconciliation process.

I had also asked the MPs whether they thought the US troop presence in Iraq was helpful or harmful to the state of internal relations within Iraq. Ulayyan replied on this point:

We do believe the presence of US troops has been very harmful, for the following reasons: Firstly, the American forces have been creating problems inside Iraq to try to justify their own continued presence here. And secondly because many forces in Iraq today have been built up by the US, and they use the US troop presence to avoid dealing with the other parties.
Therefore the withdrawal of the US troops according to a fixed timetable will aid national reconciliation.

To my question regarding what body they thought might be the one best suited to convene the intra-Iraqi reconciliation process, Jaberi replied,

Some suggest the US or the UN or Iran as the best sponsors, or the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Or even Qatar, which as the lady said, did so well in successfully mediating the recent settlement even after the ‘big power’, the US, had failed. That latter success, by the way, was a way to protest external interventions in Lebanon– and its showed that a tiny country could solve a problem that a large country could not.
But I see the Arab League as the best institution to sponsor a national reconciliation. First of all, it’s neutral, and secondly, it is the one best qualified to understand Iraq’s problems.
We should recall that the Arab League has already been the only institution that has done anything successful at all to bring together the conflicting parties in Iraq– yes, parties that were actually in conflict at the time there– and win agreement from them all around some useful proposals for reconciliation. That was during the reconciliation session they hosted in Cairo in 2005.
It came out with some good proposals, and our situation would have been a lot better now if they had been implemented. But what made it fail was that the parties weren’t allowed to implement it. The US administration blocked its implementation because they saw the Arab League as competing with them for influence.

I found it notable that Dr. Jaberi, who represents a majority-Shiite party in Iraq, expressed such faith in the capacities of the Arab League. I should also note that though Fadhila is a majority-Shiite party, the position Jaberi expressed at many points during the discussion was that Iraq needs to thought of and constituted as “the state of the citizen” (dawlat al-muwatin), rather than being constituted on the basis of sectarian quotas of any kind. Indeed, he expressed strong criticism of the UDS for having introduced the whole idea of sectarian quotas into leading government positions, in the first place.
Jaberi’s mention of the Arab League as being well qualified to convene the internal reconciliation process was also notable because it echoed a point that Ulayyan had made earlier in response to a general question about the mechanisms for reconciliation.
Ulayyan had said,

There should first of all be committees created for this purpose, with participation from both the [Iraqi] government and the political parties. But first, of course, we need to have the true will for national reconciliation…The process has to be inclusive…
Now that Saddam has left there is no reason for us not to manage our own country!
… And we should have the help of the Arab League and the United Nations in helping to establish the basis on which these reconciliation committees can be built.

Interesting convergence, huh?
Over to you, Arab League?
Notable bottom line there, though, that some possibly well-meaning Americans might still need to have highlighted for them: Both these two men– and also, I suspect, a large majority of the Iraqi people– are quite clear that the United States is the party that is just about the worst qualified of all to convene or sponsor a successful intra-Iraqi reconciliation process.
So much for the idea of the so-called “Pottery Barn Rule”, eh?

So in Iraq, earlier today, the (Shiite-dominated) Iraqi government concluded a ceasefire agreement with the Sadr movement… and just hours later the US military started an aerial bombardment of Sadr City that according to this “Voices of Iraq” report lasted six hours.*
What on earth is going on?
Have large parts of the Bush administration and the US military all gone absolutely, criminally bonkers all at the same time?
Only two possible explanations present themselves to me. The first is the “all gone bonkers” one. (Which would also fit with the reports about imminent US missile attacks against Iran.) The other is that this is all part of a sane-but-devilish scheme cooked up by the US military, perhaps in cahoots with some of its people in the Iraqi government… and playing very much according to the “one last battering before the ceasefire gets implemented” playbook followed by Israel in Lebanon in August 2006.
You’ll recall how disastrous that “one last battering” ploy proved to be for Israel at the time.
Anyway, I do note from the “Voices of Iraq” report that the ceasefire goes into operation “Sunday.” (Also noted in the AP/Yahoo account linked to above, and in Xinhua.)
I believe that under the ceasefire agreement the US forces are supposed to leave the positions they had seized inside Sadr City over the past couple of weeks.
It seems to me that in both Sadr City and West Beirut, the anti-US forces have been playing a carefully calibrated game in their relations with national governments that had, until now, been solidly pro-US. (Following Hamas’s playbook there.) Their preferred strategy seems to be not to overthrow or directly confront the national government, unless the national government confronts them… But rather, to do a combination of whittling down the government’s legitimacy while also holding out to it a potential life-raft of cooperation– but on the basis of a nationalist and ever more strongly anti-US platform.
In both Lebanon and Sadre City, the anti-US forces seem to be doing rather well at this game, the ultimate “prize” of which is to win the loyalty of the national government (and therefore, also, all of its international legitimacy.) Given that this game requires smarts, subtlety, patience, and an intimate knowledge of the minutiae of local/national politics, is it any surprise that the US is doing very poorly at it?
I shudder to think of the effects of that six-hour bombardment, though. We peace activists in the US have to redouble our efforts to get the US troops out of Iraq and let the Iraqis have their country back!
—
* Big hat-tip to the ever-diligent Badger.

The L.A. Times’s Tina Susman has a wrenchingly sad post on their blog today, writing about the May 4 killing in Mosul of Iraqi journalist Sarwa Abdul-Wahhab.
Susman writes:

[Sarwa Abdul] Wahab, who was 35, was in a taxi with her mother on the morning of May 4 when gunmen forced the car to stop. It appeared to be a kidnapping attempt. Wahab resisted and was shot to death in front of her mother, whom she was taking to a hospital to visit an ailing relative.

She notes,

In the past year alone, at least three female journalists have been killed in Mosul. They include Zeena Shakir Mahmoud, 35, who was killed on her way home from work last June.
A few days earlier, 44-year-old Sahar al-Haidari had been slain in the city.

The post includes pictures of two of these beautiful, talented, and gutsy women: Sarwa and Zeena.
The fact that so many of the people working these dangerous and high-skill jobs are female underlines the degree to which Iraqi society, even under Saddam, and even through the horrendous, 13-year-long tribulations of the US-spearheaded ‘sanctions’ era, was one in which women got good educations and good professional skills. The US occupation has, tragically, been a major factor in pushing Iraq “back to the Stone Age” in so many respects, not least in terms of the opportunities available to rising generations of girls and younger women.
Susman includes some tragic details about Sarwa Abdul Wahhab’s life:

The object of [Abdul] Wahab’s affection was a Kurdish man. She was not a Kurd, and that was the reason he gave her for not being able to marry. “She died without having the man of her dreams,” her friend wrote, adding that friends counseled Wahab to find someone else to no avail.
Wahab had been supporting her family, including her mother and several siblings, since her father’s death recently. It wasn’t an easy life, and it wasn’t the one she necessarily dreamed of. But, her friend says, she kept on smiling and spent what little extra money she had on colorful scarves and accessories to brighten up her life, and the lives of those around her.

Allah yerhamha. Requiescat in pacem. God have mercy on her (and on us all.) May she rest in peace.

Remember all the ‘WMD programs’ the Bushites told us there were in Iraq, pre-2003?
So more recently, they’ve been telling us about the “Iranian arms” that have been flowing in to non-governmental or anti-governmental forces inside Iraq. Last week, the US commanders in Iraq even planned a big “show and tell” event in Karbala at which thousands of Iranian-supplied arms that had been seized by the US and their Iraqi allies would be shown off to the media before being destroyed.
But guess what. The LA Times’s Tina Sussman tells us that the event

was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran…

Left unclear for now: What actually was the provenance of the arms collected in Karbala?
But the incident has already had non-trivial political consequences. Susman writes,

Iran… continues to seethe after an Iraqi delegation went to Tehran last week to confront it with the [arms-supply] accusations. It has denied the accusations, and it says as long as U.S. forces continue to take part in military action in Iraq’s Shiite strongholds, it won’t consider holding further talks with Washington on how to stabilize Iraq.

This administration seems to have a just about unique capacity for both belligerence and incompetence. This is an extremely dangerous combination.

Attentive Middle East watchers have remarked since 2003 on the similarities between Israel’s various military actions against its neighbors and those of the US in Iraq. The bottom line in all these engagements is that the “western” power has used its military to try to impose its control over the peoples of foreign countries. (I wanted to say “citizens” of foreign countries, but the “citizenship” the Palestinians have is fragmentary and thin, since they have no state of their own. But still, the West Bank and Gaza do not in any sense “belong” to Israel. Hence, my term “peoples of foreign countries.”) But in all these cases, the attempt to impose control– to extract the “compliance” of the natives by using brute force– has failed.
In Lebanon, in 2000 and once again in August 2006, the Israeli government came to recognize the counter-productive nature of its project, withdrew its forces, and halted the use of stand-off weapon attacks against the country.
In Gaza (and the West Bank), it is still grimly trying to continue the project.
In Sadr City, as in many other parts of Iraq, the US occupation forces are suddenly finding themselves in a very Gaza-like, or Dahiyya-like, situation. The natives are refusing to comply– and they are refusing to be cowed by the amazingly destructive arsenals used against them.
Like the Israelis in the 33-day war in Lebanon, the external assailants do not have anywhere near enough ground troops to be able to “swarm” the territory. So, like the Israelis in the 33-day war in Lebanon, they’re trying to cow the population of Sadr City by the use of very destructive standoff weapons. So almost inevitably, oops… here comes Petraeus’s Qana. AFP tells us:

A US rocket attack damaged a hospital in the Iraqi capital’s violent Shiite stronghold of Sadr City on Saturday, wounding 28 people as American forces claimed to have killed 14 militants in the district.

AFP had a reporter on the scene. He or she

said the district’s main Al-Sadr hospital was badly damaged and a fleet of ambulances was destroyed.
Just outside the hospital, a shack which appeared to have been the target was reduced to a pile of rubble.
The military said it destroyed a “criminal element command and control centre” by munitions from a “rocket system” at approximately 10 am (0700 GMT).
“Intelligence reports indicate the command and control centre was used by criminal elements to plan and coordinate attacks against Iraqi security and coalition forces and innocent Iraqi citizens,” it said.
Hospital staff said at least 28 people wounded in the strike were brought inside for treatment at the complex which had its windows shattered and medical and electrical equipment damaged.
Medical staff and other hospital workers were livid.
“They (the Americans) will say it was a weapons cache” that was hit, said the head of the Baghdad health department, Dr Ali Bistan, who arrived to assess the damage.
“But in fact they want to destroy the infrastructure of the country.”
He charged that the attack was aimed at preventing doctors and medicines from reaching the hospital which is in an area that has seen increased clashes between American troops and militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The hospital corridors were littered with glass shards, twisted metal and hanging electrical wiring. Partitions in wards had collapsed.
Huge concrete blocks placed to form a blast wall against explosions had toppled onto parked vehicles, including up to 17 ambulances, disabling emergency response teams.

So the US military claims that the shack was a “criminal element command and control centre.” I would like to see their evidence on that. I would also like to see the reasoning of the US military on why this structure, so close to a hospital, had to be destroyed at that time and in that disproportionately violent way.
The NYT’s Alissa Rubin writes that the destroyed structure was “a small building next door to the hospital that neighbors said was used as a place of prayer for hospital employees, pilgrims and neighborhood residents.” She notes that “the sign at the iron gate at the entrance to the building demolished by the American strike reads ‘Imam Hussein’s Resthouse.'”
She had a lot of other details about the attack. But the big picture is that US forces can’t win this battle, and there is no way they can “win” this war in Iraq. Meantime, they are sowing mayhem and destruction in communities around Iraq; causing Muslims around the world to hate Americans even more than they do already; eating up billions of dollars of US taxpayer dollars per month; and diverting resources and attention from solving the many other huge problems humankind faces around the world.
But tonight, it is the tragedy and shame of the US assault on Sadr City that I’m thinking most about.