Iraq-2008-q4 – Page 2 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

U.S. in Iraq: Good-bye ‘Conditionality’

It is now official: The US government will not be imposing on the Iraqi government any of the ‘conditionality’– as a precondition for the US troop pullback/withdrawal– that the Bush administration, Congress (and numerous Washington think tanks) had all previously demanded.
I called this outcome back in June when I started noting (e.g. here) that the political balance in Baghdad between the US and the Iraqi government had tipped in the Iraqis’ favor. That meant that Washington would no longer be able to impose its conditions on the Iraqis as a “prerequisite” for any drawdown or full withdrawal of the US troop presence in the country. And today we can see that that has indeed been the case.
The main forms of conditionality required by the Democratic-controlled Congress was a set of “benchmarks” the Baghdad government should reach regarding Iraq’s own internal governance system. The Bush administration placed some emphasis on those benchmarks, but it was probably far more intent on winning as much freedom of action for the US military inside Iraq as possible, and if at all possible not to have any terminal date placed on this.
All those forms of conditionality have now been tossed overboard.
The latest– possibly final?– version (Word doc here) of the US -Iraqi SOFA makes clear that all US troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011; that the US troops must be withdrawn from all Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009; that control of the “Green Zone”– once also known as the “International Zone”– will pass into Iraqi hands as of January 1, 2009; that US-employed contractors will enjoy no special immunity from Iraqi jurisdiction after that date; and that in most other respects Iraq will regain its real national sovereignty on January 1, 2009.
Neither this SOFA nor any other current agreement between the two parties that I know of makes any mention of the US having any veto power over Iraq’s internal governance system.
I describe the current version of the SOFA agreement only as “possibly final” because the Iraqi parliament has yet to ratify it, an action that it proposes doing next Wednesday. Inside Iraq, despite the many concessions PM Maliki has wrung out of Washington during the six-month course of this negotiation, there is still significant opposition from the Sadrists to having any American troops remaining for as long as the next three years; and some Kurds and Sunnis have other objections to the current text. So the agreement is not yet a done deal; and it is possible Maliki may yet seek– and win– further concessions from the US side, especially regarding the timing of the final withdrawal.
On the US side, it has been notable both that (a) the Bush administration has argued that this agreement does not, as treaties do, require any ratification from the Senate in order to go into force; and (b) the Democratic leaders of the Senate have made no attempt whatever, throughout the months this SOFA has been in negotiation, to claim this prerogative.
Indeed, after all the bluff and bluster the Congressional Democrats generated last year when they spelled out the “benchmarks” they wanted to impose on the Iraqi government, their silence now that this SOFA is coming close to fruition has been quite deafening. Only Rep. William Delahunt, the chair of a relatively low-level sub-committee in the lower house, has shown any real interest in the subject at all.
Why won’t our Congressional leaders start asking some of the very real hard questions that need asking about why this outcome– the restoration of real Iraqi sovereignty with no longterm US troop presence– was not achieved back in late 2003, instead of the two countries having to go through all the terrible pain, suffering, and costs that have been imposed on them both, but especially on Iraqis, in the five years that have passed since then?
(Maybe because so many members of Congress still clung to the neo-imperial illusion that the US not only could re-make distant nations according to its own plan– but also that it had somehow the right to… Hence the whole shameful history of “benchmarking”.)
I note, too, that just about the whole of the US MSM has colluded in this reluctance to pay serious attention to the question of the SOFA. Only McClatchy has done some– as usual, excellent– real reporting on it.
In this important article November 19, McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef started to unpack some of the negotiating history of the SOFA, from the US side. She identified some serious disagreements on the issue between different portions of the Bush administration, writing,

senior military officials are privately criticizing President Bush for giving Iraq more control over U.S. military operations for the next three years than the U.S. had ever contemplated.

She quoted an un-named “senior administration official” as giving this explanation for the politics behind what happened:

I don’t wholly buy that explanation. But there is a lot more of value in Youssef’s piece, which should certainly be required reading.
My question, though: Why have the “big” US MSM not thrown some of their own considerable resources into reporting on the “inside story” and the real, ever-evolving content of this negotiation?
Meantime, we should absolutely not forget that back on June 10, the Maliki government did sign a security agreement– with Iran.
Some of the implications of that agreement became evident yesterday when US forces who had detained an Iranian man at Baghdad airport were forced to release him, after Iraq’s deputy foreign minister interceded on his behalf…
For my part, I think the current text of the SOFA is worth supporting. I wish the deadline for all US troops to get out of Iraq was a lot sooner than the end of 2011 (though if both sides agree to terminate the presence sooner, that is still possible under the agreement; but extending its term is not.) But I am really glad that– in contradistinction both to longheld Bush administration and to Barack Obama’s long-held position on the matter– there is no provision in the text for a “continuing” US troop presence in Iraq of any type at all, even as a “non-combat” force.
I am concerned that there seems to be no reliable mechanism for mediating the internal political disputes that have already risen inside Iraq over the governance questions that will arise as the US troops withdraw from the cities over the coming months– and then later, from the whole country. Those disputes may well become a lot more intense in the months ahead. I would feel a lot more reassured if an explicit role for the UN had been written into this US troop withdrawal agreement– both to help the Baghdad government mediate any internal disputes and also, even more importantly, to help build a structure of agreements among Iraq’s neighbors to ensure that none feel they need to intervene militarily inside Iraq for whatever reason or pretext.
I note, however, that there is nothing to stop the Baghdad government from requesting such help from the UN (or, the Arab League; but that wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to draw Iran and Turkey into the needed negotiation.) Plus, the UN has a small but possibly quite effective presence inside Iraq, that could certainly be increased as necessary.
… Anyway, bottom line here: All of us who want to see the “rule of law” and rules of basic good, respectful behavior applied in the interactions among the world’s different nations should applaud this accord because it gives the US government no lasting reward for the act of international aggression it committed against the government and people of Iraq in 2003. We can still all work for more accountability for the US officials responsible for that act of aggression, and for some form of adequate reparations to be made to all those who have suffered from their heinous decision.
But seeing Washington being denied the chance to reap any direct and overt longterm political fruits from that act of aggression is an excellent first step.

L. Rozen on Israelis in Kurdistan

Laura Rozen has a great new investigative piece at Mother Jones about the very lucrative business and security activities undertaken in post-2003 Kurdistan by former Israeli Mossad head “Danny” Yatom and his Israeli-US dual-national associate Shlomi Michaels.
HT: Wired’s “Danger Room”.
Rozen describes Michaels thus,

He was a former commando with Israel’s elite internal counterterrorism force, the Yamam; he had since become one of the middlemen who work the seams between the worlds of security, intelligence, and international business, along with a few more colorful sidelines including a private investigations/security business in Beverly Hills.. [H]is business partner was former Mossad head Danny Yatom. Before arriving in Washington, Michaels, a dual Israel-US citizen, ran a string of businesses in Beverly Hills… After 9/11 he left Los Angeles, alighting first in New York (where he taught counterterrorism for a semester at Columbia University) and then in DC, where he would soon launch a lucrative venture to cash in on the Iraq War and its aftermath.

Here were some of his activities:

As Rozen tells it, Michaels and Yatom had some plans that didn’t work out. One was a 2004 offer to sell some alleged “evidence” about Saddam’s former WMD programs to the CIA for $1 million. The CIA, very sensibly, didn’t buy. Also, the two men’s plan to provide security services to the Kurdish Regional Government had to be curtailed after Turkey raised complaints– and the Israeli security services suddenly (a little late in the day?) ‘discovered’ laws that forbade Israeli nationals from entering Iraq Iraq without explicit permission or from dealing in defense equipment without the requisite license…

Continue reading “L. Rozen on Israelis in Kurdistan”

Red Queen Perino declares ‘Victory’ in Iraq

Just like the Red Queen in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, White House spokesperson Dana Perino is determined that words will mean what she wants them to mean!
Especially when it comes to declaring “victory” in Iraq.
Look at this exchange in today’s White House press briefing:

HT to Ben of Think Progress. His post on the matter here even shows us that Perino was dressed for the part.

Urgent memo to Bush: Tell us honestly what this agreement with Iraq says

“All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.”
That’s the text of Article 24, para 1 of the the text of the agreement the US and Iraqi governments reached agreement on over the weekend, as published by Al-Sabah in Baghdad. Raed Jarrar sends us to this English-language translation of the whole Sabah text, which I’ve also uploaded here.)
So why do we not yet see the text of this important document on any of the US government’s many websites yet, or those of the US MSM?
And why did White House press flack Dana Perino today say that the deadline for withdrawal in the text is only “aspirational”? (HT: Ryan of Think Progress.)

Is Perino auditioning for a post-White House career as the Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass”? You know, the one who says that “Words mean only what I want them to mean”?
Memo to Bush: Tell us what this important agreement with the Baghdad government actually says!
Specifically, the translation that Raed gave us says in “Article 24, Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq” the following:

Some Iranian support for the US-Iraq SOFA: Why?

Iranian judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi has been quoted by the state television’s website as expressing his approval of the decision the Iraqi cabinet made Sunday to approve the currently proposed US-Iraqi security agreements.
Raed Jarrar sends us to a translation of the latest text here. (I’ve re-uploaded that hard-to-access text here.)
Regarding the reaction from Tehran, AP tells us that Shahroudi said,

“The Iraqi government has done very well regarding this… We hope the outcome of (the deal) will be in favor of Islam and Iraqi sovereignty.”

There has been some speculation that Iran’s clerical authorities have adopted this apparently cooperative posture as a gesture of goodwill to the US’s president-elect Barack Obama. Perhaps. But I suspect the stronger force driving this position has been an assessment by the Supreme Leader that having US forces tied down as sitting ducks in very-close-by Iraq through the end of 2011 is seen as a handy guarantor– at least for the next three years– that no-one in Washington will decide to attack Iran in this period.
I have thought for a while– along with Hossein Agha and others– that there’s a significant, possibly dominant, trend in Iran that is opposed to the calls so many of the rest of us around the world have made for a speedy and complete US withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (Most recently, see this October 28 post I wrote on JWN.)
The speed with which the main factions in the (heavily Tehran influenced) Iraqi government fell into line with the now-proposed SOFA was additional evidence of that. And now we have the quote from Shahroudi, as well.
Of course, the Iraqi government is a slightly different (and probably more easily influenceable) entity than the Iraqi parliament, which is probably more attuned to the nationalist Iraqi (and therefore both anti-US and anti-Tehran) trends in Iraqi society. And the SOFA agreement does still have to be ratified by the parliament in Iraq– even if Pres. Bush still claims it doesn’t need to be submitted for ratification by the elected Congress in Washington. (Go figure.)
The agreement is currently scheduled to be voted on by the Iraqi parliament on November 24. Let’s see what happens between now and then.
Regarding the reported substance of the agreement, I feel somewhat reassured that it apparently states that all US forces will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. I guess that was one of the non-trivial concessions PM Maliki won from the Americans on behalf of his nationalist constituency?
Specifically, according to Raed’s text, the agreement states in “Article 24: Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq” the following:

As the text of an international agreement, this looks pretty solid to me. (Of course, the US has been known to abrogate or flat-out break numerous treaties in the past. Or, it may have its own, significantly different version of that prefatory text.)
This is not the speedy total withdrawal that so many of us in the antiwar movement have worked for, for so long. But it does have one striking advantage over the position Barack Obama has advocated for some time now: namely, it sets a date certain for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq; and as I read the prefatory sentence in Raed’s version– in both English and Arabic– it does not make this withdrawal “conditional” on anything the Iraqi government does.
Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, Moqtada al-Sadr remains opposed to this agreement. So we’ll have to wait and see what its fate is in the Iraqi parliament.
But our Senate here in the US should surely also be working to win the recognition of the outgoing Bush administration that it, too, has the right of ratification– or non-ratification– of this important international treaty?
Where is our democracy here in the US?

Casino capitalists in the brainwash-Iraqis biz

I have long maintained (e.g. here, PDF) that two of the major goals of all oppressive powers that undertake campaigns of mass incarceration is to use that incarceration both as a means of active political blackmail against the families and communities of those detained (= quite illegal hostage-taking) and to use the control over detainees to brainwash them directly into some form of subservience, or otherwise to break their will.
‘Twas ever thus. Including in all imperial-style campaigns of “counter-insurgency” from the beginnings of imperial/colonial history until today. As in the occupied Palestinian territories (more than 7,000 men detained without trial by Israel) and in Iraq (around 17,000 held without trial by the US, plus thousands more by the Iraqi government), and Afghanistan.
Now, Nick Mottern of Consumers for Peace and Bill Rau have done some excellent spadework investigating the corporate structure of some of the “contractors” (i.e. mercenaries) doing the brainwashing work in the massive US-run detention system in Iraq. They report that the detention system inside Iraq that’s run by the US military’s “Task Force 134” operates a religious brainwashing program that employs 60 claimed “imams”– and that these imams are hired and supervised by a wholly owned subsidiary of Global Innovation (GI) Partners LLP, a California- and London-based private equity firm.
Among those investing in GI Partners are the pension systems run for employees of both the State of California (CALPERS) and Oregon, they report.
The “imams in the detention centers” program looks eerily similar to the way the British in Kenya used Anglican indoctrination in a long-sustained campaign to break the nationalist wills of the Kenyan independence activists known as the Mau-Mau, back in the 1950s. In the horrendous network of detention camps that the British ran then, detainees were humiliated and very seriously– often lethally– mistreated; meanwhile, they were promised better treatment or perhaps even “release” if only they’d abandon their “primitive” indigenous religions and take oaths of conversion into the Anglican faith.
Of course, all such forms of coercive brainwashing is completely illegal under international law, which guarantees the freedom of religion, religious understanding and practice, and conscience, to all persons. (It was illegal in the 1950, too. But that didn’t stop the British from practicing it.)
So now, Mottern and Rau have connected the dots of the story of how the restless forces of casino capitalism that are ever circling the globe in search of the next generator of the hyper-profits they seek, regardless of at whose expense, have met up with the world of mercenary brainwashing, in an allegedly “Islamic” religious context.
Investors, including those running state-employee pension funds, should dissociate themselves from companies that make profits in such a disreputable way.
(One final note: Human Rights Watch, and reportedly also Amnesty International, recently called on the US government not to hand control over its Iraqi detainees over to the Iraqi government under any of the bilateral security agreements it concludes. HRW had previously documented some serious abuses being committed inside the Iraqi-run detention centers. But HRW has done pitifully little to challenge the US’s own extensive– and extremely coercive– use of detention without trial in Iraq. In its latest press release, it calls on the US government only to “ensure that detainees are not in danger of being tortured [by Iraqi jailers] by establishing a mechanism that would provide each detainee with a genuine opportunity to contest a transfer to Iraqi custody, and by verifying the conditions of Iraqi detention facilities to which they could be transferred, through inspections whose results are made public.” Why on earth don’t they call more directly on the US to release all those detainees against whom it is unable to bring any credible charges of malfeasance? Why do they seem to concur so much with the US military’s view that sometimes it’s kinda necessary to detain large numbers of people without trial?)

‘China Hand’ on extrajudicial killings

The excellent (though sporadic) blogger China Hand has a great new post today tracking the degree to which extensive use of extra-judicial killings has been incorporated into the “standard operating procedures” of the counter-insurgency forces fielded by Gen. Petraeus in Iraq and his former counterparts– now subordinates– running the US-led war in Afghanistan.
As I wrote in this recent JWN post,

Extra-judicial killings, also known as assassinations, are always abhorrent. They shock the conscience of anyone who believes in the rule of law. When carried out by states they represent a quite unacceptable excess of state power.

I was writing that in response to the bland, non-questioning reception by members of the US’s elite MSM corps of the spin that the recent US killing raid into Syria was somehow “okay” because it was part of a (possibly) “targeted” killing raid against a named individual.
That is an absolutely unacceptable argument.
What China Hand has done, though is review the evidence that is already widely available that the use of deliberate, extra-judicial killings has been deeply integrated by the US military into its conduct of “counter-insurgency” operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan.
He refers mainly to two easily available sources: the Wikipedia entry on Gen. Petraeus (which CH describes as “adoring”), and Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, titled The War Within.
One thing CH does effectively is unpack the mendacious, though apparently highly “technologized”, language that “people in the know” use to talk about such operations… They do that to hide the fact that, as he states straightforwardly, in the end their policy relies simply on deploying some form of “death squads.”
One of these terms is “targeted kinetic activity.” Personally, when I hear a slimy euphemism like that, I want to vomit.
CH comments:

I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.

For my part, I am not prepared to take anybody’s word that such hush-hush, quite opaque deliberations have any integrity or justifiability to them at all. At all. (And to be fair to China Hand, I think he was writing there with ironic intent.)
President-elect Obama: Please pay attention to this question of extra-judicial killings! They are exactly what the word says: extra-judicial, that is, quite inimical to any concept of the rule of law.
Yes, our country has found itself in a situation where a certain number of people are working actively to harm it. There are many ways to deal with that challenge that do not involve actions that directly undermine the concept of the rule of law.
At a purely utilitarian level, there is absolutely no way the US military can ever “kill” itself successfully out of the many problems and challenges it currently faces in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan.
But beyond that, at a moral/political level, embracing the use of extra-judicial killings (i.e. death squads) as an integral part of what our troops are doing in those distant countries is directly inimical to our own self-understanding and our own interests.
So please: Stop the death squads!

To get out of Iraq…

… will require a completely transformed relationship between Washington and the United Nations.
That is, it will require this if President-elect Obama is serious about pursuing, at the very least, a speedy and deep drawdown of US forces from there, and doing so in an orderly– or as the other word is, ‘responsible’– fashion.
And I think he is.
He’ll need the UN to do the convening of the regional, and probably also the intra-Iraqi, negotiations that will be required if the drawdown is to be orderly. I.e., if the departing US troops are not to be shot at as they depart, and Iraq and the surrounding region are not to descend into unimaginable chaos as the US troops leave.
Why the UN? Because only the UN can deal in a respectful and effective way with Iran and all other regional governments. Washington can’t do this within anything like the timetable required.
As Obama pursues the planning for the ‘drawdown’ from Iraq, in close coordination with the other four permanent members of the Security Council (which is what it’ll take), I think he will come to two important realizations:

re-hatted as part of a UN gendarmerie in a few portions of Iraq

Fortunately, as of January 1, 2009, the UN will already, most likely, be assuming a much more direct role in the governance of Iraqi security affairs. All the efforts the Bush administration has made to bribe and bully the Iraqi government into signing off on the coercive bilateral SOFA-plus arrangements have come to nought. And they can be expected to continue to be unsuccessful until the current ‘mandate’ that the US enjoys in Iraq, courtesy of the Security Council, comes to an end on December 31.
So as of next January 20, the UN Security Council will already have a considerably stronger and more direct role in the governance of Iraqi affairs than it currently has. That’s great.
But it would be even better if we could start to see some effective and inclusive inter-P5 coordination on Iraq and related security affairs starting to take place before December 31.
There are things the departing Bush administration could and should do– regarding Iraq, regarding Palestine, and other topics– long before January 19, if the final ‘legacy’ of this Bush administration in the Middle East is not to be remembered as one of total, and totally callous disaster.

Fortified ’embassy’ to university: Yes!

Here’s a great suggestion from Iraqi-American prof Adil Shamoo:

Shamoo suggests that it should be run as a locally-rooted “American” university– like the long-established centers of academic excellence, the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo. These institutions have also attracted numerous much less excellent imitators in various Gulf States, as well as– as noted here— one already-existing “American University in Iraq”, a venture that has considerably sullied the “brand” throughout Iraq through its heavily politicized nature and the embarrassing lack of basic due diligence in its high-level hiring.
So my suggestion would be to make it into a non-US “International University in Iraq.” Indeed, I’m working with a group that’s trying to promote just such a project…
But transforming this terrible symbol of the fortified “embassy” into a university? What a great idea!

Biggest items on next Prez’s plate

Here’s a good question: Why would anyone want to become president of the United States at a time of such huge and multifaceted crises?
Well, I guess two years ago, when these men decided to throw their hats into the ring, things didn’t look this bad.
But now, on the eve of this year’s election, I’m relatively reassured that in Barack Obama we have a person with the kind of breadth of vision and decision-making skills that will be needed to help our country chart a course through the next four (eight?) years that is as humane, inclusive, and compassionate as possible.
(Though I repeat: No, I don’t expect that, absent continued grassroots pressure, Obama will be anywhere near as humane, inclusive, and compassionate as I would like. So we’ll need to keep up the pressure on him. But he certainly looks closer to my ideal of wise leadership than John McCain does at this time.)
In today’s WaPo, David Ignatius has a column that looks at what’s going to be “on the new president’s plate” come January. It is uncharacteristically disappointing. For starters, it has a glaring internal inconsistency that makes it impossible to figure out what it is that David judges will be “the hardest” or “the worst” problem facing the new Prez. (I’m assuming those two superlatives are supposed to relate to the same item?)
David writes, “Let’s start with the hardest problem, which is Iraq…” And then, a few paras lower, he writes, “And now comes the worst problem of all, the economy…”
So which is the worst/hardest, David? This matters, because resources, attention, and priority should surely be accorded to the problem/challenge that “the worst”.
For my part, I think the “worst” one right now is the economy– with, of course, the grossly over-extended and actually unsustainable nature of our country’s military deployments being a major factor in the country’s indebtedness and general, continuing financial/economic malaise.
But Ignatius, who usually seems pretty savvy on matters Iranian, also makes what I consider to be a gross error of judgment regarding Tehran’s current interests inside Iraq.
About the US war/occupation of Iraq, he writes,

Iran is waging an all-out campaign to push America out as soon as possible — to inflict a visible, painful defeat on the United States.

I think his judgment about Iran there is flat-out wrong. As I noted have noted for a while, most recently here and here, and as others like Rob Malley and Hossein Agha have argued before, right now Iran has a strong (though necessarily somewhat concelaed) interest in keeping a broad deployment of US troops spread out inside Iraq. It’s one of their best guarantees against any US or US-enabled military attack against their country.
Most of the US troops in Afghanistan are deployed much further away from Iran’s borders and would be significantly harder to retaliate against than those in Iraq. Plus, the US troops in Afghanistan have a noticeably stronger “shield” of support/legitimacy from the international community than those in Iraq.
Tehran’s interest in keeping US troops deployed widely inside Iraq for some time to come– and at least until the Supreme Leader can feel reassured that a US (or US-enabled) military attack against his country is finally “off the table”– makes the US’s interactions and choices inside Iraq very different from what Ignatius posits.
And actually, I’d have to say that the US deployment inside Iraq is now not at the top of my list of “most urgent challenges” for the next Prez for these reasons:

I don’t have time to write much more here. I just want to note that, regarding the economic crisis, my biggest hope is that the new Prez will think very broadly about what kind of America he wants to see emerging from the present cascade of challenges. I have a bunch of things to write about that. I started to do that a little bit, back in September, in my post on “Re-imagining America”. But now, I want to refine/revise those thoughts quite a bit.
Now is definitely the time to do that!
(Off to Quaker meeting…. Ommmm.)