Category: Iraq-2008-q3

Back on August 1, I wrote this post about the new report the International Crisis Group has on the situation of Iraq’s refugees. I wish at the time I had thought to check in with the great blog that Faiza Arji, proud Iraqi citizen, writes from Amman, Jordan, where she has spent most of the past three years trying to provide front-line help to some of the very distressed Iraqi refugees in the city.
Because she’s been so busy doing that, in recent months she hasn’t been blogging very much– but that’s no excuse for me.
Today I went, and found this extremely heartfelt post that she put up there in English on June 24.
It is a classic piece of reportage from within one of the most vexing humanitarian crises of our day. (A crisis, I should note, that occurred as a result of Pres. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and his administration’s complete failure to exercise its responsibility as occupying power to assure public security within the country.)
Faiza describes the key demand being raised by the refugees themselves. It is for return home in a situation of general security and assured basic services:

We want a real commitment from the [Iraqi] government, to ensure the return of the displaced inside Iraq to their houses and their areas, to provide security, services, and jobs for them, so they can have a decent life in their homeland.
And how can the government ask the Iraqis in Jordan, Syria and Egypt to return to Iraq, while it hasn’t solved the problem of the internally displaced?
How can we believe that the situation has improved?
If those displaced inside Iraq returned to their towns and their conditions settled, now that would be a positive indication to the government’s credibility, and the Iraqis living in the neighboring countries will return when they see positive encouraging results on the ground… but now, even with all the suffering and the anguish, we do not think of going back; a least here there is security, water, and electricity…

About “re-settlement”, in countries other than Iraq– which is the option most frequently talked about by Americans, many of whom whom have a deeply engrained bias toward the alleged moral virtues of transcontinental migration– Faiza writes this:

I also talk about some families I met here, who are waiting to be re-settled; some of them see this as a temporary solution until Iraq gets back to the state of security and settlement, while others despaired of the improvement in Iraq’s conditions, but they all say- our eyes and hearts will keep on watching Iraq, and we will get back as soon as things get better; we do not believe there is a country anywhere more beautiful than Iraq….

She writes eloquently about the love of Iraq– and, crucially, the adherence to the idea of Iraqi national unity— that she encounters among the refugees she meets and works with:

I am amazed by the Iraqis’ love of Iraq…
When I sit with them, every person and every family, in separate meetings, no one knows about the other, but there is one common theme pulsing in their hearts, as if they have all agreed upon it among them…
Praise to God… Muslim, Christian, Baptist or Yazeedi, they all say the same words, complain about the same wound… Praise to God who united us on the land of Iraq, to the love of Iraq, and the grief about what happened to it…
And this amazing mixture of people lived together for thousands of years, they had an old, deep, common civilization since the dawn of history………. Many religions and various cultures lived on the land of Iraq, forming this beautiful mixture of people, who got accustomed to living together through the sweet and the bitter… wars, sanction, hunger, poverty and deprivation, until the last war came in 2003; which dedicated the ripping and tearing of this social, cultural and religious fabric, a fabric that survived for thousands of years in a tight solidity from the roots…
Iraq is going now through one of the worst experience in Iraq’s life; a big dilemma that will either break it completely, or, Iraq might emerge from it strong, like the phoenix of the mythology, that will rise from the ashes every time; strong, soaring, like it is created all anew. And that is exactly what I hope will happen one day….

Her vision and her commitment are awe-inspiring.
… Especially when you consider the tragic under-side of what she sees among the Iraqis she works with:

The agonies of the families here are countless… poverty, hunger and deprivation; by lack of finances, lack of food and medical services, patients who come from Iraq with diseases, most of which are cancerous, and the costs of treatment here are disastrous in private hospitals. These people suffer from the shortage of finances to cover the treatment costs, and I personally feel that with them I have lost some face; as I sent e-mails or phone calls asking for financial aid to cover treatment costs for this and that. And then I hear news about some Iraqis who drown themselves in nightclubs, dancing, drinking, and corruption, spending thousands of dollars every night on such silly matters, and say to my self: So; God is our aid, and He is enough.
What is happening to the world? Are we passing a phase of losing noble values and an absence of conscience? Where did this hard-heartedness and indifference come from?
I do not know…
Sometimes I imagine the world is closing down on me, and my chest tightens…. I wish I can find a forest or an island in a far-off ocean to live in, and forget about these tiring creatures called- humans; I no longer have common points with them…. But my sorrow for the poor and the needy prevents me from running away, forcing me into the commitment to remain and help them; knocking on all doors, not to abandon them…
… There is a number of Iraqi women who are alone without families; whose husbands or families were killed and they remained alone, waiting to be re-settled. They face improper advances and molestation by this and that, looking towards a life more dignified and more settled, in some spot in this world.
At work, I daily receive women who were beaten and treated cruelly by their husbands. Poverty is the reason in most cases; or the frustration that befalls the man because of poverty and unemployment; they turn him into a wild, cruel, and aggressive creature. This is what happens to some Iraqi families here; the conditions of displacement, poverty, estrangement and degradation all put pressure on the men and the women and increase the rate of family violence…
Some women also come to complain about their husband’s bad manners, being alcoholics, beating wives and children, or molesting their daughters. God help us; He is our aid, and He is enough…
Are these the signs for the end of time, of the dooms day? That the world has lost its mind, its ethics, its mercy, justice, and all its beautiful features?
I, personally, am tired, but I didn’t lose hope that some people still exist in this world who form a beautiful face to it…

I urge JWN readers to go and read the whole of Faiza’s post there.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people who do front-line humanitarian aid work, who have by far the richest and most direct understanding of the humanity and needs of those in distress, often don’t have any time or mental energy left over to get their voice out into the public sphere. As a result, on sorts of issues that directly impact the lives and wellbeing of some of the world’s most vulnerable people, the global “public discussion” ends up being dominated by people like law professors or pundits who have sadly little direct experience of what they’re talking about. (Hence, for example, the easy readiness with which such people view the prospect of the civil war in Northern Uganda being prolonged for several additional years while they, the lawyers and law professors, seek to “prove” some abstract point about the theory of “international justice” in an air-conditioned courtroom in The Hague… )
That’s one of the many things that makes Faiza’s voice so special. She is personally living the Iraqi refugee crisis. And she’s personally deeply engaged in responding to it. And then, in addition, from time to time she makes sure she gets her voice out into the global public sphere about these issues that are of such existential concern to her.
Thank you, Faiza.
She doesn’t give any information on her blog about how to donate to support her projects. I suggest that any readers willing and able to give money to good humanitarian-aid projects directed at Iraqi refugees in Jordan or Syria (where their numbers are even greater) can do so through the US-based organization Mercy Corps International.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari still insists on a “clear timeline” for the withdrawal of US troops from his country, according to this report from AP’s Robert Reid.
Reid writes that Zebari also said that the Iraqi and US negotiators are “very close” to reaching a longterm security agreement, but stressed that Baghdad won’t consider an agreement that doesn’t specify the timeline.
He adds this:

Last week, two senior Iraqi officials told The Associated Press that American negotiators had agreement to a formula which would remove U.S. forces from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009 with all combat troops out of the country by October 2010.
The last American support troops would leave about three years later, the Iraqis said.

His sources on the US official side say there is no agreement on specific dates and that completion of the SOFA/MOU negotiations is not close, putting them at odds with Zebari’s assessment.
As I’ve written here before, I think the Bushites lost the “Battle of Baghdad”– that is, their campaign to lock in security agreements with Baghdad that would allow a longterm US troop presence in Iraq– some time ago.
It was of course Clausewitz who wrote the important truth that “War is an extension of politics by other means.” All wars start and end in politics. Back in late 2002, I remember my pro-invasion Iraqi-Kurdish friend Siyamend Othman talking about the need to win “the Battle of Washington”– that is, the battle to win Washington’s support for the invasion project. Well, he and his Iraqi allies (who of course included Zebari, Ahmed Chalabi, Barham Saleh, etc) won that one. But now, their US allies have lost the Battle of Baghdad.

The ever-diligent Badger has been reading Al Sabah, which he describes as “the Green Zone newspaper”, and gives his translation (scroll down) of what today’s edition says about the progress of the negotiations over the terms of a SOFA and MOU, including its assessment that this could be signed “in the coming [unspecified] period of time.”
Badger does great work, digging around in the Arabic-language primary sources for all of our benefits. Just one critique, though, He describes the present Iraqi government as “the Green Zone leadership”. I think this is too reductive a view of what’s been going on in Baghdad. Georgraphically– and yes, also politically– the Maliki government has a non-trivial presence outside the Green Zone, as well as inside it.
For example, when Maliki and Talabani hosted Pres. Ahmadinejad in Baghdad, this was done not inside the GZ but, as I recall, in the substantial compound that Talabani maintains outside it. In other words, the current Iraqi political leadership is not completely under the thumb of the US military, though it may still depend on it in several important ways.
I see what’s been going on in Iraq in recent months very much as a “struggle for the soul of the Maliki (et al) government”, with the non- and anti-US actors in that struggle having tipped the balance in their favor.
I’ve been reading Tim Weiner’s excellent book “Legacy of Ashes” recently. It’s a very well-sourced and intensely depressing history of the CIA. It reminds us that in earlier decades, in Syria, Iran, South Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere, the US government would frequently overthrow other governments, including those that had been quite duly or even democratically constituted.
In Iraq, thus far, it has not done this to Maliki’s government, even though Maliki has been straying further and further off the US-defined reservation. (Maintaining those lovey-dovey relations with Iran, for example.)
It is worth reflecting a little on this fact and what it says about the US’s currently grossly over-stretched role in the world… Also, what it says about the nature of national power in the present world, and the fact that the “legitimacy” of international actors has become a lot more important in the current century than it was back in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

Yesterday, I went to a thought-provoking discussion at the Carnegie Endowment in which the International Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann presented and discussed ICG’s recent report on the continuing crisis of Iraq’s refugees and IDPs.
Joost is a serious analyst, with considerable experience of documenting and analyzing developments in Iraq. In the presentation, he described the crisis in stark terms, noting that there are now signs of malnutrition emerging among Iraqi refugees in Syria. “We have also seen the evaporation of the Iraqi middle class,” he said, “especially the civil service.”
I imagine Carnegie will be posting the audio record of the event on their website sometime soon. If so, you’ll be able to find it here. It isn’t there yet.
Hiltermann described the political situation inside Iraq as still “very fragile.” He noted, crucially, that “You cannot have any serious advance at the political level inside the country until there is a serious engagement [by the US] with Iran.” He warned that if the US exits Iraq without getting internal political reconciliation in the country, the result could well be a new wave of refugees out of the country– “But this time those seeking to flee may well be stopped at the borders [by the countries they’re trying to flee to], and you would see big tent encampments emerging there at the borders.”
After he spoke, Michel Gabaudan, who’s the UNHCR’s regional representative for the United States and the Caribbean, made a few remarks. He said that from UNHCR’s perspective the treatment that the Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have received from those host governments has improved over the past 18 months, with the numbers of detentions and deportations of refugees going down markedly in both places. “Those who should be noted for their deportations should be the European countries,” he said. He added that those deported by EU countries had often been sent back to Iraq, but finding themselves unable to return to their homes they would end up as IDPs elsewhere in the country.
Gabaudan also, later, noted that some western countries– and he singled out Germany– had been discriminating against the Muslims among the refugees and giving preferential treatment to the Christians. He described that as a very worrying practice that could further stoke sectarian sensitivities and tensions among Iraqis.
Earlier, Joost Hiltermann had spelled out the fact that in Syria, there was a noticeable lack of sectarian tensions and sensitivities among the Iraqi refugees, though they include Iraqis from all the country’s different religious groups. (In Jordan, the government has worked very hard to keep out Iraqi Shiites, though a number of them have managed to take up residence there.)
Actually, as the report itself spells out, calculating the true numbers of refugees in the countries of refuge– especially Jordan– has proven frustratingly difficult.
Here’s what the report says about the size and duration of the problem (pp.3, 4):

Syria is said to have welcomed around 1.5 million although some Western observers believe the number to be much lower. Similar discrepancies exist concerning Jordan, where the government uses a much higher figure for planning and operational purposes than an independent research institute arrived at [later stated as being government:450,000-500,000 versus Norwegian research institute:161,000.] According to UNHCR, between 20,000 and 50,000 Iraqis live in Lebanon; Lebanese authorities claim there are 60,000 to 100,000. Some 70,000 Iraqis reportedly live in Egypt and roughly 57,000 in Iran…
Statistical variations and uncertainties aside, the number clearly is huge and represents one of the world’s largest conflict-induced displacements of people. The most significant outflow occurred after the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, which plunged Iraq further into a bloody blend of sectarian conflict, insurgency warfare and criminality. From then on, the number of Iraqis fleeing insecurity, violence and persecution skyrocketed. As of November 2007, over 70 per cent of the Iraqis in Syria had been there for less than a year; in Jordan, 77 per cent of Iraqis arrived between 2003 and 2007, with most coming after 2006.

In the report, Joost and his ICG colleagues have done a generally good job of sifting through the statistics and assessing a number of policy options regarding the refugees. However, after reading the report carefully, I come away with a frustrating feeling that though it is titled Failed Responsibility: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, still, nowhere in it did they assess the question of responsibility for this problem in anything like a rigorous enough way.
That is, nowhere do they actually spell out the specific responsibility under international law of the occupying and/or UN mandatory power in Iraq for assuring conditions of public security throughout the whole country, a responsibility that the US– which is indeed the power in question– has quite notably and thoroughly failed to live up to. Instead, the report treats the US as, more or less, just another member of “the international community.” Washington’s record on dealing with the refugee crisis (though notably not its record on having caused or occasioned it) is dealt with in Chapter VII of the report, at which point the report implicitly contrasts the relative “generosity” of the US financial contribution to refugee aid with the relative parsimony of the EU and Arab countries.
The report does state, very blandly (p.32) that “Most donor countries believe the U.S. should shoulder the lion’s share of the financial burden.” But it does not give the reasons that other governments adduce for this judgment– and far less does it align the ICG in any way with that judgment.
But if US policy failings have indeed been responsible, in one way or another, for the collapse of public security in Iraq that has motivated the flight of so many millions of Iraqis from their home communities, then how can the displacement crisis be addressed unless US policies– and indeed, the whole US role– inside Iraq are radically changed?
Why does the ICG report say nothing about this question? Why do they spend just about all of their pages criticizing the governments of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and the US-installed “government” of Iraq, without anywhere addressing the responsibility of the occupying/mandatory power?
In introducing Hiltermann, Carnegie President Jessica Mathews described the report as an exemplary piece of analysis of the complex intersection of humanitarian and political concerns. Actually, I don’t think it addressed the crucial political dimension of the crisis nearly sufficiently.
Toward the end of the Q&A portion of yesterday’s discussion, Joost voiced the decidedly depressing expectation that “We probably won’t see any significant returns of the refugees to their homeplaces within the next ten years.”
Afterwards, I went up and chatted with him a bit, and got him to confirm that that meant he did not see any significant breakthrough in the intra-Iraqi peacemaking within that time period.
I was horrified. “But Joost!” I protested, “of course there are ways to get a good, durable settlement inside Iraq in a much shorter amount of time than ten years! Look at all the work all of us have been doing providing guidelines for how that could be done. Yes, I realize it would also require a fair peacemaking process in which all of Iraq’s neighbors could be involved, including Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, but that is possible too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we could see how it could be done. But I don’t see the political will to do it.”
Well, maybe it’s true that we don’t yet have the political will– primarily, here in the US, but also elsewhere– to do what needs to be done to allow for real reconciliation and conflict termination within and around Iraq. But I think we should still all work really hard for that outcome. Political currents can change, and can change fairly rapidly in the present era.
Maybe I’m just an optimist by nature. But I do strongly sense that the tide here in the US has been turning pretty rapidly toward significantly decreasing the amount of control our country seeks to hang onto in Iraq. This is a great shift in the right direction. So let’s try to push it as far and as fast as it will go. Ten more years of chaos and fratricidal conflict inside Iraq, and ten more years of the massive displacement of so many millions of Iraqis from their homes, is a situation quite too horrible to contemplate.

It was an interesting performance this morning, to see Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani do some deft diplomatic footwork– while visiting Washington– to stay atop the fulcrum of the Washington-Baghdad political balance that, as I noted here recently, has tipped significantly in Baghdad’s favor in recent weeks.
Bolani was giving a presentation at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He had been sent (brought?) to Washington primarily to work at nailing down the details of the Iraq-US SOFA and MOU, and he entered the conference room at USIP with his Pentagon handlers colleagues clearly in evidence.
He had a soft-spoken, fairly engaging affect. You could see why, back in June 2006, he was chosen– by some combination of the US occupation authorities and the elected-majority Iraqi UIA coalition– to take over the ultra-sensitive job of Minister of the Interior, that is, to be in charge of all the Iraqi internal police, security, and intelligence forces that are not explicitly under the Defense Ministry. His main personal qualification seemed at the time to be his skill as an emollient diplomat– chosen as he was after his predecessor gained renown for having heavily politicized the Iraqi Police and stuffed it full of still-intact units of the Kurdish and Shiite (especially SCIRI) militias.
It is clear from all the reports I’ve read and heard that that situation is far from ended. But Bolani has been able– thus far– to put a good emollient face on the matter.
At USIP this morning, his skills as a diplomat were on full display. Notably, he filled up most of the time allotted to him with fairly meaningless managerial mumbo-jumbo, made repeated mention of a number of “loved in the US” buzzwords like “rule of law”, “specialized training opportunities”, etc, etc– and he completely avoided giving a clear answer to any of the key questions that were asked him.
All in all, an adroit performance. Next stop for this practised contortionist: Cirque Du Soleil?
It was fascinating to watch him pirouetting with such finesse atop the fulcrum of the Baghdad-Washington balance. We all recall that just ten days ago, as Barack Obama was about to reach Baghdad, Bolani’s boss, PM Maliki, gave him a great political gift by saying he thought that Obama’s timeline for a withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq was about right. But Barack Obama is not the US President yet, and may never be it. The present President is someone who’s still adamantly opposed to any fixed (as opposed to “horizon-related”) timetable for any portion of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Bolani and his boss need to keep some kind of a working relationship– for now– with the guy who is currently Commander in Chief of those 147,000 US troops in Iraq, completely dominating the country’s broad-brush security environment and its financial (and financial payoffs) system.
So, given how much raw military power the US exercises over Iraq, it was quite notable the degree to which Bolani demurred from saying anything that could be understood as expressing support for Bush’s or the GOP’s position in the GOP-Democratic dispute over Iraq.
He didn’t express clearcut support for Obama’s position, either. (Hey, the guy’s not stupid; and he’s in Washington.)
That’s the point. He didn’t say anything clear-cut on matters of importance, at all.
I see that Marc Lynch has blogged the event as, essentially, lacking any newsworthiness. But in the circumstances, I think it was the lack of a ‘story’, in conventional news terms, that was itself, precisely the story.
Here’s how Bolani danced on some of the pinheads that were presented him.
Michael Gordon of the NYT asked him explicitly, “What would the effects be if all the US combat brigades left within 21 months?”
In answering, Bolani said something like:

Today we are looking at the transitional phase… The phase that will enable our police force to do its job and confront the challenges of the earlier era… The measures that have been taken in coordination with the coalition have been important in strengthening the capabilities of our state.

Well, it sounded like a clear, if slightly veiled, “buzz off” to me. A ‘buzz off” couched in a few emollient phrases about how it has been the coalition’s efforts that have gotten Iraqis to the point where they can stand on their own two feet.
M. Gordon pressed the question again. Bolani then– quite understandably– asked where the heck the “21 months” timeframe had come from anyway; and Gordon gave a response that pointed strongly to 23 months, to me. (I.e., supposing an Obama victory in November, then 16 months from January.)
Bolani then once again deflected the question, saying that “The objective is to strengthen the rule of law and this will enable us to confront all challenges, blah-blah-blah… ”
Asked about the current MOU/SOFA negotiations, he said,

We have teams working hard on this, to foster and enhance what’s already been achieved. The environment is moving in the right direction to fulfill the needs of both sides.

He was asked whether, in light of the continuing incidents in which US forces have been killing Iraqi civilians, he thinks the US troops should have immunity under the final MOU/SOFA agreements. He said,

We do have now have a growing experience of discussing such matters, with the aim of reaching the needed balance between the needs of our citizens and the need to have good cooperation between the Iraqi and coalition forces. We have a team working on this issue right now.

In all cases: no “story.”
But altogether: yes, the story.

This, from Reuters in Baghdad today:

Three female suicide bombers killed 28 people and wounded 92 when they blew themselves up among Shi’ites walking through the streets of Baghdad on a religious pilgrimage on Monday, Iraqi police said.
In the northern oil city of Kirkuk a suicide bomber killed 22 people and wounded 150 at a protest against a disputed local elections law, Iraqi health and security officials said. One security official said the bomber may also have been a woman.
The attacks mark one of the bloodiest days in Iraq in months…

At the discussions I attended Friday in Washington with a group at USIP, and also with former Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi at Carnegie, a number of those who spoke warned with great intensity that the situation in Iraq remains very difficult for Iraqis, very politically fragile, and heavy with the threat of new waves of violence. Those who did so included Charles Knight and Rend al-Rahim at USIP, and Allawi at Carnegie.
I record the latest spikes of violence with an incredibly heavy heart and no thought of schadenfreude. But they do, certainly, undercut the claims of those who have been crowing “the surge has succeeded.”
“Succeeded” for whom? Not yet at all for Iraqis, though the casualty figures among US troops are sharply reduced.
Once again I urge that instead of looking at whether Bush’s adoption of the surge “worked” or not, it would be far better to look at the costs and consequences of the fact that for 18 months now he has steadfastly refused to follow the excellent recommendations put forward by the Iraq Study Group back in December 2006.
Those recommendations– or something even more decisive than them– are just as valid and urgent today as they were back then.
But just look at the costs that have been imposed– on the Iraqis, as well as on US citizens– by Bush’s failure to undertake the transformative and very urgent diplomatic and political moves that the ISG recommended.
$180 billion of US taxpayer money… 1,110 US service-members killed… and an Iraqi casualty toll among civilians and security forces that is in the tens of thousands over the past 18 months.
To which, today, add a further 50 Iraqi civilians.

I live-blogged the session just briefly here, yesterday; and Marc Lynch gave his somewhat longer– and later– “first take” on the discussion, here. We can hope that USIP’s own audio (MP3) recording of the session will be at this page on their website soon.

(Update Tuesday: the audio is here. Video promised soon.)

The set-up of the discussion turned out to be that there were two relative outliers– Kim Kagan, a perky and very tightly scripted neocon (and ardent ‘surge’ defender) at one end of the spectrum, and Charles Knight of the Project for Defense Alternatives and the Boston-based Commonwealth Institute at the other. Holding down “the middle” were Colin Kahl of the aggressively “realist” but also blessedly paleocon “Center for a New American Security”, and– here was the surprise– Rend al-Rahim (formerly Rend Rahim Francke), who through 2002-2003 was an ardent ally of Ahmad Chalabi’s, working tirelessly in Washington to gin up support for the 2003 invasion.
I recall that on January 13, 2003, Rahim Francke told a WaPo reporter that she hoped to be “on the first US tank” going to Baghdad. By October 2005, however, she was starting to express unease with Washington’s conduct of its project in Iraq… The fact that her political sponsors in Baghdad never followed through on earlier plans to make her ambassador to Washington may have had something to do with that. (Or maybe they’d fallen out of power in the interim. I forget.) Probably, though, she would be an interesting person to interview.
As I wrote yesterday, all the panelists except Knight expressed– or reflected– the crucial judgment that the US government is politically stronger than the Iraqi government, and can therefore exert leverage over it.
The more I think about it, the more I think that judgment is flawed. It strikes me that some time over the past two months, the balance of political forces between Washington and Baghdad shifted in favor of Baghdad. This, due to a number of factors:

1. George Bush’s presidency is anyway winding down; and in many fields of action he is acting like a lame duck a lot earlier than most two-term presidents do;
2. The momentum of public opinion inside the US has also been shifting noticeably from a focus on Iraq to a focus on Afghanistan. This has been reflected at many levels of society. We could say that the “Dannatt moment” I’ve been writing about for 21 months has now kind of snuck up on us already. (It’s true that we all– including, certainly, me– need to do a lot more thinking about Afghanistan than simply going along with the current near-consensus that what’s needed is only “more US-NATO troops.” I see Brzezinski’s been one of the clearest thinkers on this issue, already.) But regarding the US commitment to Iraq, the arrival of the US’s “Dannatt moment” alters the political calculus between Washington and Baghdad considerably.
3. Inside Iraq, PM Maliki– a man whose main political talent is that of pliability– seems to have made the judgment that going along with the national consensus there on the issue of US troops leaving is better for him than continuing to kowtow to Washington. This doesn’t look like a crazy judgment, given the consolidation of a new nationalist consensus within most of Iraq.

Of course, if you see Washington’s negotiating hand as being stronger, then you would think that Washington could “extract concessions” from Baghdad, or “impose conditions” on it. If you see Baghdad’s as stronger, then that calculus shifts.
Kim Kagan said things like the following:

Whether we as US are able to fulfill our objectives in Iraq depends mainly on what we do…
We as the US have the choice to stay and see that the post-election period is successful. [I believe she was referring to the period after Iraq’s provincial elections, which may have to be delayed till early 2009. Later in the year there will be national elections.] Or we could send the very wrong message that we aren’t in fact committed to the Iraqis’ success and we would signal to all opponents that their time is coming.
This depends on us!
We need to keep our forces there through the spring, at the earliest, to see if the post-election process has worked.

Note in this both– as Lynch noted– the completely “imperial” insistence that the Iraqis would have no meaningful input into the decisionmaking, as well as Kagan’s resurrection of the old “just wait for one more purple finger moment” ploy to try to sell Americans on the idea of maintaining at its present level a troop deployment that is costing US taxpayers $300 million per day.
… From his very different perspective, Charles Knight then gave an excellent presentation of the basic arguments in the “Necessary Steps” report that he and a number of others issued last month, which calls on Washington to announce a firm deadline by which it will have withdrawn all its troops from Iraq, and describes what other steps need to accompany that announcement.
(Alert readers of JWN might be interested to know that, on the ‘Acknowledgments’ page of the currently available online versions of the NS report, its authors have now expressed some acknowledgment of the inspiration my work provided for them, and they’ve inserted two of my own earlier works on hoiw to withdraw from Iraq into the report’s Bibliography. That, after I called them out on their abominably exploitative treatment of me in this June 25 blog post. Now, we are all engaged in discussions of ways to move forward together in a more respectful and inclusive way.)
At yesterday’s session, Knight described some of the broad dimensions of the socio-political crisis the Iraqis are still experiencing, and the costs this has imposed on the US’s standing and capabilities all around the world.
He said,

We need a new basis for our policy there: One that puts Iraqis at the center; and rallies the international community to our side.
We should start by defining a realistic and short timeline for withdrawal. This is necessary in order to draw further Iraqi oppositionists into the political process there and to catalyze international support. But on its own it’s not enough.
We need to recognize that the US presence and actions have been part of the problem in Iraq, not part of the the solution. We’ve been handicapped by being seen there as an alien power… We have also worn our sense of privilege on our sleeve there– including with the administration’s insistence, in the security negotiations, on keeping immunity from Iraqi prosecution for US citizens
Iraqis need to take charge of their own longterm development. Yes, they might need international help but not in same US-dominated model we have used until now…

He urged the following complements to the announcement of the date for withdrawal:

1. The formation of an International Support Group that would include Iraq, all its neighbors, the UN, the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, and other bodies… Including, as part of that, that the US must re-engage Syria and Iran in respectful diplomacy…
2. As we demand that other states respect the principle of non-interference in Iraq’s internal affairs, the US must demonstrate the same commitment as well.

Altogether an excellent and well-argued presentation. My only quibble would be that I think it’s important to spell out that it should be the UN that is asked to convene the various negotiations that will be required– both within Iraq and among a range of international actors– if the withdrawal is to have the maximal chance of being carried out in an orderly fashion and leaving behind an Iraq in which the big political questions are well on their way to resolution.
Knight had started his time at the podium by invoking Monty Python’s iconic “And now for something completely different…” The third one up to speak was Colin Kahl, who started by saying that after hearing the earlier two speakers, he wanted to present what he called “the Goldilocks position– neither too hot, nor too cold, but somewhere in between.”
His presentation was based on a report that his outfit, the Center for a New American Security, issued last month under the title “Shaping the Iraqi Inheritance“. (I’m not sure how I feel about that imagery. I’m not quite prepared to see the US as the benign Aunty who leaves a wonderful inheritance to her niece; and nor do I think that Iraq ever in any sense “belonged” to the US, which would be the only context in which the US could “bequeath” it to the Iraqi people. On the other hand, the idea of an inheritance does strongly imply that dear old Aunty will have gone, exited, kaput, and left the scene… )
Kahl was a co-author of that report, quite possibly its principal co-author. He described the concept of “conditional engagement” that, he said, lies at the heart of their approach.
He noted (imho correctly) that, “Our presence in Iraq undermines our deterrent posture against Iran.” He added,

The war has been devastating to both our hard power and our soft power. But we need to make sure that the way we disengage doesn’t do the same– that it doesn’t lead to a failed state, as Charles’s path would..

He defined the US’s goal in Iraq as being the achievement of ‘sustainable stability’, and helpfully noted that “the passing of a law with the name of a benchmark is not the same as achieving the benchmark!”
Indeed.
Kahl had evidently been working hard to attain the efficient, self-confident affect of an ambitious young wannabe government official. (Indeed, he said he had already served one year in the defense Department; he didn’t say under what auspices.) So he had a number of Power Point slides, most of which were– given the size of the room– completely unreadable from even halfway back in it. Anyway, if you go to the PDF text of the “Iraqi Inheritance” report, on p. 34 of the PDF (32 of the paper version) you can find one of the graphics he displayed, and on p. 44 of the PDF (42 of the paper) you can find another.
The first of those graphics is a simple 2 x 2 matrix summarizing four different policy approaches, plotting the presence or absence of conditionality exerted by the US towards Iraq against whether the basic stance is one of maintaining or ending the US’s “military engagement in Iraq”
He characterized the Bush administration’s approach as one of “unconditional engagement”, whereas he favored the stance of “conditional engagement.”
Whether the US is, actually, capable of credibly imposing political “conditions” on the Baghdad government– including being willing and able to impose sanctions for Baghdad’s failure to meet the conditions– is where I disagree with Kahl.
Here was an interesting point, though. At the end of his presentation, he admitted that the whole goal of being able to impose (and enforce) the US’s “conditions” on Baghdad might not be attainable. He said, “If the ‘conditional’ part of it doesn’t work, then we could go back to what Charles advocates. But that would have to be as Plan B, not Plan A.”
Interesting.
My suggestion to Kahl: Bag your Plan A because it’s not workable. Just deal with developing the very best Plan B that you can. And no, the “fixed timetable for a full withdrawal” approach would not lead unstoppably to state failure in Iraq, as you claimed. There are many, many ways to minimize the probability of that outcome, as I and others have demonstrated. So that accusation you voiced against Charles Knight was an ill-considered cheap shot.
(Anyway, talking of state failure in Iraq, what was the result of Bremerism there? Iraqis have now proven that they can– with great difficulty– overcome the effects of the complete and deliberate destruction of their state’s governing institutions that was achieved by Viceroy Bremer. So why on earth would Colin Kahl or anyone else think they would be prepared to lapse easily back into a situation of state failure once again?)
So if you have time, go look at the second one of those graphics in the PDF of the CNAS report. It nicely sums up the excessively managerialist (i.e. imperialistic, ‘technocratic’) approach that is Kahl’s Plan A.
He also said things like this:

Most Iraqi leaders want some form of US ‘overwatch’. But most don’t want a continuing US presence, except the Kurdish leaders.

Unclear what the exact bottom line from that remark is?
And this:

The Iraqi want a lot of things from us, including military and diplomatic help… But we should extract a price for these things.

Again, I’m not sure he sees the balance of political power question there quite correctly…
So that then brings us to Rend Rahim’s presentation. She announced her policy preference upfront: “I find myself in large agreement with Kahl’s view.”
And from then on, you saw the intriguing sight of this very controlled, and quite intelligent woman agonizing in public over how best to articulate both her diagnosis of the situation and her policy prescriptions. The POV from which she was speaking seemed very ambiguous. On a large number of occasions she spoke about “we”, in a context where she seemed to be referring to the actions of the Bush administration., But she is not a US government official, and I’m not even sure if she’s a US citizen. Maybe she was referring to the “we” of all those– Iraqis and Americans–who had conspired together to work for, and then implemented, the invasion of Iraq? Unclear.
On other occasions, she seemed to be speaking more as an Iraqi.
So here, with those POV issues unresolved, is a digest of more or less what she said:

The presence of US troops is a constant irritant; but the attitudes of the Iraqi leaders and population towards it are ery. conflicted…. We have seen a reversal, where earlier it was the Sunnis wanted us to leave and Shiites wanted us to stay, but now it’s the other way around…
The Iraqis may do things we don’t approve of… and there might be private remonstrances from US leaders. But as Colin said, you never see any public declarations from the Bush administration about this….
We’ve made a number of mistakes, I admit. In the rebuilding of the Iraqi army we’ve concentrated on quantity rather than quality. “We” have trained for combat but not for command and control; “we” have completely ignored the very important question of of the loyalty of the army to the state, as Colin mentioned.
The army has to be constituted on a different basis if we are to have ‘sustainable stability’ in Iraq…
About all the negotiations over a security agreement, I would say that Iraq is still very vulnerable as a state, and most Iraqis still see need for external alliance. The US is seen as the best partner for this.
But trying to get this security agreement in a year that’s an election year in both the US and Iraq– whose idea was that? There are so many complex issues around that negotiation that simply can’t be discussed in Washington in an election year– and similarly, in Iraq…
Maliki now wears the Sadrists’ nationalist mantle and he can’t take it off.
The SOFA was presented as defining conditions for the US troops staying in Iraq– but it should have been framed as defining conditions for troops leaving Iraq. That would have been a much easier sell in both the US & Iraq…
Now, Maliki is looking at getting out from the current UN mandate to the US-led coalition which is under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, and which obliges him to accede to the coalition’s decisions, to having it be under Chapter 6, where the coalition forces would be there at the invitation of the Iraqis… And they are talking about this being a six- or 12-month agreement from when the current resolution expires, which is on December 31
I think an unconditional withdrawal as suggested by Charles would be very worrying. But I also disagree with Kim’s view. Yes, the situation is a lot better than it was previously. But all is not well in Iraq. There is a huge concern that all the relative stability we see is very fragile. The gains on the political level have been very small.
The army is still made up mainly of partisan, militia-based or sectarian units (ISCI; Sahwa, etc.) There is a problem of the chain of command: who do they report to?
The situation is even worse in police. But even in the army we still don’t have it as a national institution.
The constitutional review undertaken last summer (’07) didn’t even address two of the most crucial issues. And even then, the recommendations the review committee made haven’t even been taken up by parliament. We still have a big problem with the constitution, a big problem with the amnesty question, a big problem with Debaaathification, and with the integration integration of the Sahwas and the ‘Sons of Iraq.’
Regarding the latter, the original agreement was to take 20% of them into army and police. But not even that was met. And then, what about the other 80%? If they don’t feel integrated we could see a huge relapse of people back into the ranks of the insurgency.
Also, the issue of displacement is not just a humanitarian issue but also a political question. We’ve had a serious loss of Sunnis, who have been the main group displaced; and in places like Baghdad, Diyala, etc, the political balance has been direly affected.
There is a big problem with the independence of the judiciary…
Finally, we have the elections coming up… What happens in the elections will depend on money, power, and access to weapons. The election season which will take up most of 2009 could be very destabilizing.
Regarding the drawdown of the US troops, we need to have time limitations and time markers for withdrawal… But they must be tied to markers inside Iraq that ensure sustainable stability.
Some people say “the US has no levers”… But I don’t think that’s the case: the US has many levers of influence that it can use. Remember the diplomatic gifts (especially in winning the agreement of various other governments to reschedule or cancel Iraq’s external debts) that we have given to Iraq.
We haven’t done a good job of looking at tools to dangle carrots and so on before the Iraqi government, to establish firm conditionality…

In the Q&A period that followed, here were the most interesting points made:
Kim Kagan– perhaps sensing the US national zeitgeist and eager to find a way to remain relevant to it?– said she does see some possibility for some withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. But she stressed that this should not be before next spring and the post-provincial-election period in Iraq.
Rend al-Rahim warned more about what she described as “the real prospect of violence throughout the election year in Iraq– that is, throughout the whole of 2009– with the highest probability of this being in Anbar Province.”
Colin Kahl admitted that, “The challenge for next president will be to manage our increasing irrelevance in Iraq.”
Indeed.
And then– conceptually related to that– there was the very percipient question that the discussion’s moderator, Dan Serwer, asked, as I noted yesterday, when he pointed out that if the US imposes “conditionality”, then it should have the readiness to withhold promised political goodies from the Baghdad government if those conditions are not met…
An excellent question, that I never heard satisfactorily answered. Okay, maybe that was because I was taking advantage of USIP’s generously offered wireless internet there to live-blog the event right then.
But really, given the way I analyze the balance of forces between Baghdad and Washington these days– regarding matters Iraqi– I’m not sure there is a satisfactory answer to Serwer’s question…

McClatchy’s Iraqi staffer Laith has a great little post on the Inside Iraq blog, describing one instance of how Baghdad’s people keep their sense of humor –and therefore, their sanity and humanity– as they deal with the ever-mushrooming system of high concrete walls that the occupation authorities have been using to physically quadrillage the city.
(*Quadrillage is a fancy French-in-Algeria term for using physical barriers and stringent movement controls to “divide and rule” a subject population. Guess where the US occupiers got this “walling in” idea from, in modern times… )
Laith wrote that usually he finds the long wait to get through the gaps in the wall are frustrating in the extreme. But on the day he was writing about, this happened:

I was only three steps away from the gap but I didn’t want to pass because I kept listening to the funny comments of the young men. A group of young men started talking as if we are in Palestine passing through the big blast wall that was made the Israeli authorities.
Young man 1:- “how is the situation in Gaza?”
Young man 2:-“It’s very bad. The Israeli tanks surround the city and bothering the civilians (referring to the American Humvees which we saw near the main residence area.)
Young man 3 “I don’t know about that. I just came from Rafah and everything was fine.”
I started laughing in pain. We make fun of our pains always but that was never the solution for the big problem of occupation. I’m afraid that one we would envy the People in Palestine because in spite of the improvement of the security situation, the Iraqi authorities insist on putting more blast walls. I’m afraid that I might wake up one day and I find an Iraqi checkpoint near my room’s door searching me every time I get in and out. I think at that time, I would be happy if I can travel to Gaza (the real Gaza in Palestine) for some peace.

I note that though I wrote above that it was the (U.S.) occupation authorities that had erected Baghdad’s wall system, Laith ascribes responsibility to the Iraqi government. That’s interesting– and probably does not bode well for the government’s popularity.

I’m sitting here in this two-hour discussion, which has had four panelists:

* Kimberly Kagan, President, Institute for the Study of War: a big surge supporter, who wants to see a US presence remaining in Iraq for a long time.
* Colin Kahl, Senior Fellow, Center for a New American Security and co-author of ‘Shaping the Iraq Inheritance,’ which urges a continuing but conditional troop presence.
* Charles Knight, one of the co-authors of the recent study, “Quickly, Carefully, and Generously: The Necessary Steps for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq”, which calls for a total withdrawal from Iraq and explains how this might be done, and
* Rend al-Rahim, USIP’s Iraq Fellow; president of the Iraq Foundation; once a big supporter of the invasion and briefly the post-invasion Iraqi government’s ambassador to Washington.

This has been an interesting discussion. All except Knight start from a judgment that the US government has more leverage over the government of Iraq than vice versa. Thus, all those three said that the Iraqi government (and many Iraqis) basically want the US to continue to play a role in, with, and for their country and that therefore the US has leverage over Iraq regarding how much it responds to that.
I think this judgment is fundamentally wrong, as has been demonstrated increasingly over the past two months.
USIP vice-president Dan Serwer, who’s been moderating the discussion, asked a crucial question when he pointed out that if the US imposes “conditions”, then it should have the readiness to withhold the promised political goodies from the Baghdad government if those conditions are not met…
More later if I have time to get to it.

Yesterday, I wrote that, when assessing the surge, it’s important to look at the financial and other costs incurred when the Bushists rejected the recommendations of the ISG (Baker-Hamilton) report and embarked instead on the military surge in Iraq.
Today, Juan Cole does a great job of providing a social history of the surge— from the internal, Iraqi viewpoint. He pulls together material from a lot of sources and does agood job of reminding us that, despite the Bushists’ claims, the results of the surge– for Iraqis– are far, far less rosy than depicted. (Which I also noted in my post.) Juan also concludes, rightly imho, that the intra-Iraqi ‘political’ gains claimed by the Bushists for the surge are far more tenuous than claimed.
His whole post is certainly worth reading. I do think it’s worth adding in the point about the costs— human and financial– of Bush having taken that anti-ISG decision back in December 2006.