“The Reign of Witches” ending.

210 years ago on June 4th, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Taylor, with words of wisdom that speak as clearly to recent ills as to Jefferson’s day. Jefferson then was worried that American had abandoned its principles, most egregiously in the “Alien & Sedition Acts,” that America was in danger of being torn to shreds by foreign entanglements and wars. Jefferson was fearful for his own freedom to criticize such things openly, and implored Taylor not to let a single sentence be “got hold of by the Porcupines” who would use them to “abuse & persecute me in their papers for months.” (think Murdoch media, 18th century style)
Yet Jefferson remained the optimist in that dark hour:

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it’s true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt…. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake. Better luck, therefore, to us all; and health, happiness, & friendly salutations to yourself.

Just over two years after penning these words, Jefferson was elected America’s third president, amid a stark election that historian’s today characterize as Jefferson’s second revolution.
This lesson hardly is meant as a partisan invocation of Jefferson. Our Republican friends must be thinking long and hard about where and how the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower had gone so far off course, how principles both “republican” (as Jefferson used the term) and “American” could have been so cavalierly abandoned.
“Better luck” to us all indeed, in reclaiming the best principles of what it means to be America.

Yes, we did!

It’s been almost an hour now since CNN called the election for Obama.
Virginia put it over the top and then, at the top of the hour, California came in like gangbusters.
Earlier than Virginia, of course, Pennsylvania and Ohio already came in for the O-man.
McCain made an excellent concession speech. Good for him. All those Republican hardliners and lawyers who were preparing legal challenges here and there were thereby rendered irrelevant.
We had about eight friends here in Charlottesville watching the TV returns with us. There were several whoops and hollers throughout the evening.
We’re still waiting on our local congressional race, where Tom Perriello looks to be just a whisker ahead of the dreadful Virgil Goode.
We’re also waiting on Obama’s victory speech, out of Grant Park in Chicago where there’s yet another massive crowd gathering to hear him.
It truly does feel as if history’s being made here in the United States this evening.
The road ahead is still long. But the road of a thousand miles begins with the first step. This is it.
Hallelujah.

European parliamentarians invite Hamas and Fatah lawmakers to Strasbourg

A delegation of Members of the European Parliament headed by Cypriot MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides that’s currently visiting Gaza has invited all elected Palestinian parliamentarians to visit the European Parliament, seated in Strasbourg, next spring.
Triantaphyillides told Reuters that,

    “We don’t care who they are as long as they are members of the Legislative Council…We don’t ask if they are members of Hamas or members of Fatah. The PLC was elected in 2006 and it was democratically elected.”

Yes, indeed it was. But ever since that election– which was certified as free and fair by, among others, EU election monitors and the US-based Carter Center– European government have followed the US and Israel in their quite anti-humane and shameful campaign of punishing the entire Palestinian people for the choice they expressed that day.
That is nearly three years of punishing siege (in Gaza) and campaigns of arrests, ill-treatment, draconian movement controls, and continued illegal land seizures (in the West Bank), that the Palestinians have suffered since then.
The Reuters writer editorializes a bit bit there when he/she writes that Triantaphyllides’s invitation, “appeared to be little more than a symbolic gesture since Israel has jailed some 40 of Hamas’s lawmakers and allows few Gazans to leave the coastal territory.” I think that’s interpreting the facts and editorializing in an unjustifiable way.
It’s quite possible that the MEPs’ invitation is entirely serious, and that they’ll be going back to Strasbourg and to their own countries determined to step up their campaigns to have EU governments use their undoubted trade leverage to persuade Israel to release the elected Palestinian lawmakers from their quite illegal detention.
Let’s hope so. And meantime we who are US citizens should step up our efforts to have the US government do the same.
Holding elected lawmakers in detention without charge or trial for any length of time, let alone as long as these men and women have been held? It’s barbaric.
How can any government that claims to support “democracy” not protest this practice most forcefully?
(Additional note: I see that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has diplomatically said that Hamas “is ready for dialogue with any incoming US president.” He also said, “”I am confident that we are ready to deal with any presidential candidate, but we will always stick to our rights. We acknowledge that the United States is powerful, but we are more powerful on our territory.”)

Fortified ’embassy’ to university: Yes!

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

    convert the controversial US Embassy in Baghdad into a university for the Iraqi people. This powerful message from our new leader would convey to the Iraqi people in particular a new direction for US policy.
    … Currently, the sprawling embassy reminds Iraqis of their occupation by an alien nation. It reminds them of the power and wealth of the United States while they live in squalid conditions, in part, as a result of this occupation.
    …Transforming it into a university, however, would be a striking symbol of American good will toward Iraq.
    Why would the embassy make a fine university? It’s outsized dimensions make it ideal for a university campus in a downtown urban area.
    It’s located in the heart of Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River among Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. The embassy complex sits on 104 acres with 27 buildings and facilities, costing more than $700 million. It can house about 5,000 staff… [I]t is actually more like a small town than a diplomatic outpost. It’s self-contained with water, electricity, power, a food court, a swimming pool, a gym, and other forms of recreation – amenities well suited to school the next generation of Iraqis…

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!

Obama discussing HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Thanks to Dominic who sent me the link to this YouTube video of a meeting Sen. Obama had in August 2006 with some leaders and township-based activists in South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Treatment Action Campaign.
A newsletter that the Treatment Action Campaign sent out today noted that,

    During the closed session of their meeting TAC members suggested to Senator Obama that he run for president. Obama took a strong position on preventing and treating HIV/AIDS…

Watching this video gives you a good reminder that the outcome of today’s election will have a major impact on the lives of billions of people around the world. Including the millions in sub-Saharan Africa who’ve been stricken by HIV/AIDS.
Bush administration spoksepeople have put a lot of emphasis on the generosity of the support it’s given to anti-AIDS efforts in Africa. But those efforts have been horribly held back by the Bushists’ staunch insistence that prevention campaigns should focus only on sexual abstinence rather than the full spectrum ‘ABC’ (Abstain; Be faithful; or Condomize) approach.

US elections: What non-US readers want

Most JWN readers from around the world seem to expect Barack Obama to win tomorrow’s presidential election in the US. And though, by and large, they also seem glad that he will win, still, they harbor some cynicism about whether a President Obama will do as much to change the relationship between the US and the rest of the world as they would hope…
Cynicism (or realism?) notwithstanding, we got some good responses to my invitation to people who are not US citizens to send in their requests of the next US President.
Sergi, commenting from China, included just about all the main points touched on by the other commenters when he wrote:

    I wish the US President will steer the USA as it used to be; pledge real democracy; stop bullying other countries for self interest; pledge fairness as it expect from others; be a leading country as a economic giant, to win respect again; sort out racism, as US is now the most racist country in he world; and cut down on Armed Forces spending and invest in his country’s own people, as they voted for him.
    Yes, this would be a dream and if the new President can bring this dream to reality he will become as much a Legend as George Washington…

I realize that the non-US people who read my blog are not ‘representative’ of the entirety of the 6 billion-plus people in today’s world who are not US citizens. Still, the comments/requests that have come in to the blog give a helpful window into the priorities of this group of, I would say, deeply engaged non-US people.
(You can find another interesting “global snapshot” of worldwide attitudes towards the election– which may not be more representative than mine– in this article in today’s Guardian. It includes interview material from Kabul, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Lahore, Nairobi, and Gaza. And Hizbullah’s fairly impressive English-language website, Al-Manar, has this round-up of reaction/hopes from various places around the world. It’s prefaced with this: ” A widespread anticipation of a new era in relations with the United States spread around the world Tuesday, even before the result of the US presidential election was known. Is it going to be an extended era for the President George W. Bush or is it going to be a new page concerning the US policy inside the country and abroad?…”)
Here on JWN, we had contributions from Thailand, Bangladesh, China, New Zealand Aotearoa, Belgium, India, Sweden, France, South Africa, Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Ireland– and at least one member of Iraq’s tragic current diaspora…
Mahmud H. Tejwal, from Dhaka, Bangladesh, had a very focused and realistic request:

    My request would be – take a small part of the US war spending and allocate it to solve the food crisis afflicting the world’s poor (about $12.5 billion or approximately two weeks cost for the Iraq and Afghanistan war).
    Millions of people are falling through the poverty trap due to rising food prices, itself the result of a complex combination of speculation, energy deficiency, policy prescriptions of the Breton Woods institutions and rapacious free traders!
    Poor nutrition in a setting of inadequate (read privatized) health care, poor to non existent social safety net, substandard infrastructure and non caring subservient national elites – this is the reality of the globalized world of today where the poor go hungry and die of preventable conditions!
    Mr.President, its about time we all should act, and act fast. Thank you and good luck.

Thanks for that, Mahmud. I guess my only further comment would be that though using, $12.5 billion (or whatever it takes) to meet the immediate, or one-year-long, food needs of the world’s poorest families seems to me an absolute moral imperative, still, to actually “solve” the longer-term challenge of food security/ food sustainability for all the world’s people also requires considerable systemic change. That would include, most crucially, an end to the massive subsidies governments give to rich-world farming corporations and big investment in rehabilitation of community-based farming systems all around the world…
Hetty, from Netherlands, advised that,

    First of all Obama should put things right in America, i.e. turn back the neocon wave of privatization and deregulation (including the privatization of the military). That will be a very difficult task after the ‘après moi le déluge’ of the Sun king Dubya; restoring the economy is his first task.
    Then he should demilitarize American foreign policy.
    Well, that’s enough for a whole bunch of presidents. And, to make his job easier, he should put Bush on trial for war crimes and treason.
    I wish Obama, the next president, all the best and good luck.

Brian, writing from Thailand, said,

    I don’t believe either candidate is serious about ‘world peace’ or any thing apart from world empire (aka US interests)! … The US has invaded and sought to control countries and governments since it invaded the Philippines a century ago, while preaching freedom and democracy, and western governments have been happy to support this fraud.
    … So lets not be naive. For the US to reenter peaceful relations with the world, it would need to prosecute those responsible for the current war crimes, and day for the damages done…Will this happen even under Obama? Not likely.

French citizen Yann said he “expects” the next US president to ‘re-engage’ in world peace. He added that France’s own Pres. Sarkozy also needs to become “re-engaged in the pursuit of humanism.”
“Indian”– I’m assuming here, sub-continent Indian– writes that he’s been living in the US for five years and “frankly I’m not optimistic about Obama’s (potential) presidency or the *single* party system.” However, he or she adds, “Suppressing my cynicism for a minute, my wish: The US President must support a climate change mitigation agreement as this affects the entire planet and not to start/escalate any more wars.”
Those thoughts were echoed (and amplified) by Mattias, from Sweden:

    I would like your next president to finish the job Reagan started, regarding nuclear disarmament. It is long past time to retire the left-over doomsday weapons from the cold war.
    I would like him to stand with us in creating a new climate treaty. And obviously I would like him to get serious on using working methods of conflict resolution.
    I would also like him to take America into the mainstream for western countries when it comes to social spending. Now the US is a beacon and example for all the forces here that want to privatize our health care system and reduce or eliminate other social programs. It would sure be nice if the US could set another example.

Frank (from Ireland) tells us:

    Walking away from the Iraq mess without providing compensation to the unfortunate refugees in Damascus and Amman, and the Internally Displaced Camps in Iraq would be a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.

Dominic from South Africa has this succinct advice:

    Yankee go home.

From Canada, “World Peace” writes:

    My wish is beneficial for our country and yours .
    If Barack Obama’s title changed from Senator to Mr. President, I will want Mr. Obama to do as he promised the Americans: rather than spending a billion dollar a day in Iraq, [actually more like a billion dollars every three days, but the argument is the same] he will invest the monies in their beloved country the United States of America. In finding alternative energy and creating thousands of jobs, they will not only become self sufficient, but back on track, as THE world leader .
    My wish will save innocent lives and further destruction, it will put a smile on what is left from the Iraqis, Afghanis, Somalis, Sudanese, Palestinians .
    Humanity is at stake after 8 bloody years of the Bush administration.
    We all need change, hope is what keeps us going…

From the UK, Doug writes:

    Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of an “Industrial, military ‘congressional’ complex” was I think the tip of an oncoming iceberg that the US failed to steer clear of, causing the ensuing ‘titanic’ train-wreck that has spilled out across the globe.
    If the next President could dismantle what President Eisenhower warned of, things might start to improve – but as I said, I don’t think the US system has the wherewithal to reform itself now. The Monster is now too big, to powerful and too sophisticated (and too ugly) to be reined in.
    … My advice to the next President would be simply “Bring the troops home – All OF THEM!!! and sort out your own country!”

It’s notable to me how many of these (non-US) contributors to the discussion had strong advice not just about our foreign policy, but also about our domestic and internal economic affairs. Quite rightly, in my view, they see these spheres of activity as closely linked.
For a long time now, too many Americans have simply assumed (a) that our own “way of life” is not only admirable but also widely admired by others around the world, and (b) that the US somehow has a “right” to tell other countries how to manage their internal affairs. These commenters– and other non-US friends and colleagues I’ve interacted with in recent years– are telling us that today, neither of these assumptions is valid. They’re telling us, moreover, that they consider they have every right to criticize how we’ve been running our internal affairs and to tell us how to do it better. What a reversal, eh?
Finally, anyone interested in the “democratization” agenda that the Bushists pursued fairly hard for a couple of years there, in the Middle East, should go and read the comment that Salah posted to the earlier discussion. (You can’t miss it: It’s the one all in bold.) It’s an excerpt from a letter that Gertrude Bell sent her father in August 1921, but it reads as very timely for today.
… Well, it’s now just seven hours till the polls open in some of the east-coast states. Let’s see how tomorrow goes…
Meanwhile, my big thanks to all of our international readers who sent comments in response to my earlier request. If you’re a US reader of JWN, please do what you can to help circulate and publicize the present post– and the full compilation of comments from the non-US readers, on the comments board here. It’s good to remind “our fellow Americans” that our fellow citizens-of-the-world from elsewhere also have a strong stake in the outcome of Tuesday’s vote.

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,

    Obama may have opposed the war in 2002, but if he’s elected, it will become his war on Jan. 21. 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. How can the next president extricate America from this war without further empowering Iran?

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:

    1. Bush and Petraeus– and, crucially, the pressure of events on the ground, the needs of global US force-planning and the US budget– have already pushed the US military project in Iraq into a “drawdown toward the end-game” phase. Yes, there will still be some very important decisions to be made. (Indeed, some of the most important of these will still need to be made by Bush and other current world leaders: Before December 31, they will be the ones deciding the terms on which the UN mandate to “the coalition” inside Iraq gets renewed.) But all the inside-Washington talk about “conditionality”, “benchmarks”, etc, relating to a continuing US troop presence in Iraq has been nonsense for a long time already… Honestly, there are no serious remaining issues to be decided in that regard. The Iraqis– or perhaps the Iranians– have “won” in Iraq. What’s clear already is that, at the political level, the US has “lost.” Deal with it.
    2. In a very important way, the “how” of the US getting out of Iraq, is a subset of of the “how” of how the US will deal with Iran, for the reasons explicated above. That means that the Iranian question– which also has several other very important dimensions– is more important for the new Prez to deal with than the Iraq question.

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.)

Non-US citizens: What do you want from the next US president?

I’ve always been happy that Just World News has attracted a considerable readership, and numerous contributions to the Comments boards, from outside the United States. The policies of the US have a disproportionately strong effect on the situation and wellbeing of that 95% of global humanity who are not US citizens, but y’all “out there” outside the bounds of our citizenship don’t get to vote in our election here next Tuesday.
So I’d like to invite all of you who are not US citizens to submit a comment here in which you tell the next US president what your top requests of him are. Also describe how US policy has been affecting– and continues to affect– your family, your community, or your country,including some concrete examples, if possible.
Please try to keep your comment to within 300 words, and tell us where you’re from.
(If you haven’t commented before, the easiest way is to go to the archived version of for this post, scroll down to the bottom of the page, fill out the ‘Name’ and ‘Email’ boxes there– the one for ‘URL’ is optional. Type your comment in the box provided. You can insert hyperlinks if you know how to. Then, type in the verification code in the box beneath that one and click on ‘Post’. It may take a minute or two for the comment to be published on the page.)
I hope as many as possible of you will send in your requests. Also, send this post on to as many other non-Americans as you can, who you think would be interested in having their voices heard, too!
Once these comments come rolling in I plan to write a series of posts here in which I pick out some of the main themes– and I have a number of other ideas of ways to get these “Messages from the disenfranchised 95% of humanity” heard in the US discourse over the weeks ahead. (If any of you US-citizen readers have some good ideas of how we can all do this, please let me know!)
Finally, know that the comments, like everything that’s on the blog here, will be published on it under a ‘Creative Commons’ license. This means, basically, that anyone is free to republish what is published here with due attribution, and a hyperlink— provided they do not do so for profit. If anyone wants to use the comments for potentially profit-making purposes, they need to negotiate a specific agreement to do so.
So send ’em in!

    Update Sunday morning, Nov.2: Thanks to everyone who’s commented so far. Tomorrow morning I’ll put some of the comments submitted into a main post (with attribution to the authors), and I’ll try to distribute that as widely as possible inside the US. I may make one or more other compilations later in the week. So carry on sending this post to your friends in the non-US world, and keep the comments coming in. And commenters, please put in what country you’re from. Thanks!

On extra-judicial executions

Since when is it okay for a state (or an individual) to set out to kill a person based solely on accusations against him that have never been publicized and have never been tested against even the most basic norms of criminal procedure?
It is not okay. 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.
Much worse than “judicial” executions, which are (imho quite rightly) strongly criticized throughout much of the world.
So how come so many political leaders, representatives of the western MSM, and other members of the western political elite seem to be completely unpeturbed– or even quietly supportive– when reports come out of US government operatives undertaking acts of extra-judicial killing?
Just because Israel has been carrying out such acts against alleged Palestinian opponents for many years now, does that make it somehow “okay”?
No.
Just because in the early days of the post-9/11 trauma, some mentally sick members of the Bush administration started handing out decks of playing cards with the “52 most wanted” on them, does that make setting out to kill those named individuals, or others later associated with them, somehow okay?
No.
It is time for us US citizens, whose government has carried out numerous acts of extra-judicial execution in recent years, to draw a firm line and say “No more!”
This week, we have had yet another shocking example of

    (a) our government– speaking through still unnamed “administration officials”– trying to “justify” the acts of lethal aggression it committed against Syria on Sunday by saying that they were aiming at (and indeed, also succeeded in) killing an alleged long-time operative of Al-Qaeda in Iraq called Abu Ghadiya; and
    (b) this explanation being reported by many branches of the media– e.g. the NYT, “Wired” magazine, and Britain’s ITV— without those reporters also providing the essential background in national or international law, or in common morality, that would indicate that such acts of assassination constitute serious violations of the rule of law. And without seeking out and quoting the opinion of anyone who states anything to that effect… In other words, these acts of extra-judicial killing are treated by these reporters and the editors who stand behind them simply as “business as usual”, the kind of “normal” acts that a government carries out need that not be exposed to any particular questioning or criticism.

It is time for this to stop. Reporters, editors, and editorialists should probe such activities a lot more deeply. Editors should task reporters to go out and ask their US government sources whether they think that acts of extra-judicial killing are ever valid? And under what circumstances? What procedures are followed before a person is put onto a US government hit list? What safeguards are there to ensure against the use of malicious slander when such hit-lists are compiled? What safeguards are there to insure against cases of mistaken identity in either the placing of a name on a hit list, or the “execution” of the kill? Under what supposed “legal” authority are these assassinations carried out?
My understanding is that the “excuse” US military officials often make when they speak about their missions is that they say their orders are to “capture or kill” the named individuals. But including an explicit “kill” option in there would still require specific legal authority, no?
… As it happens, in the case of Sunday’s Sukkariyeh raid, no less august of a media outlet than the BBC has now thrown some doubt on the claim that it was all “about” targeting this shadowy AQI operative, Abu Ghadiya:

    US officials … are reportedly claiming that [Abu Ghadiyah’s] death in the raid will have a major impact on al-Qaeda’s capabilities.
    But this runs at odds with statements made by the militant’s organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which announced his death on jihadist web sites over two years ago.
    According to an al-Qaeda obituary of the militant released in August 2006, Abu Ghadiya died on the Saudi-Iraqi border sometime after the US-Iraqi offensive on Fallujah in November 2004…

But whether the Sukkariyeh raid was indeed a deliberate attempt to extra-judicially execute this alleged miscreant or not, that fact makes no difference at all to the underlying illegality of the act. An extra-judicial killing is extra-judicial, period. Such an act carried out by the US inside Iraq would, at one level, be no less heinous than one carried out in Syria. But crossing an international border to do it, and violating Syria’s sovereignty in that way, certainly adds an additional level of illegality to the act under international law.
But my basic point here is: Extra-judicial killing is always wrong, and should be treated as such in the public policy discourse.

The struggle for Baghdad’s soul?

The WaPo’s Mary Beth Sheridan has a piece in today’s paper describing the US-Iraqi negotiations over a SOFA as having an important backstory of a US-Iranian struggle for influence over the Iraqi government’s decisionmaking. She writes:

    A deal to authorize the presence of American forces in Iraq beyond 2008 is forcing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to choose between two influential powers in this country: the United States and Iran.
    U.S. officials had hoped Iraq would quickly approve the accord put before the cabinet this month, which would give 150,000 American troops legal authority to remain in Iraq after Dec. 31. But Iraqi political leaders have balked. Maliki has not openly supported the agreement forged by his negotiating team.
    As the U.S. ponders withdrawal, it is clear that American political capital in Iraq is waning as Iran’s grows…

She then describes Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi political analyst at London’s Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy in London as describing the Maliki government as being torn equally between both foreign powers.
For my part, I wrote back in early June that I thought Washington had lost the battle for influence over Baghdad’s decisionmaking, and I see no reason to change that judgment now.
Let’s review a couple of facts:

    1. The US has been extremely eager to “persuade” the Baghdad government to conclude a long-term security agreement it. Baghdad has thus far resisted these entreaties– though it has signed a security agreement with Iran.
    2. The US has also been extremely eager to “persuade” the Baghdad parliament to pass oil legislation that would thereafter allow western oil firms to conclude legally sound contracts with the Baghdad government. The Iraqi government and parliament have been playing a prolonged game of “pass the parcel” regarding that oil legislation, so western oil firms have not yet been able to sign contracts with the Baghdad government. Meantime, back in June, Baghdad concluded a significant ($3 billion) oilfield development/rehab contract with China.

Why do the MSM in the US not report these things, and not take them into adequate account when they’re assessing the present state of play inside Iraq? Why do they connive so deeply in perpetuating the myth maintained by the Bush administration that, (a) the recent history of the US intervention in Iraq has been one of some strategic success; (b) if we can’t yet exactly see the success, still, it is just around the corner; and (c) that Washington is still, definitely, in a position to be able to impose its “conditions” on Baghdad?
However, what is happening in and over Iraq right now is not a purely bilateral, zero-sum game between the influence of Washington and that of Tehran. This, because there are significant actors within Tehran that see the continued deployment of some US troops in Iraq as helpful to their own security (by providing a self-deterrent against any US or US-enabled attack against Iran.)
I think this is the best context in which to understand the otherwise bizarre “threat” that Gen. Ray Odierno delivered to the Baghdad government last week, namely that if the Baghdad government didn’t hurry up and sign the SOFA on the terms Washington wants, why then the US forces might all just have to pack up and go home.
From the point of view of Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki and a strong majority of both the Iraqi population and the Iraqi parliament, that outcome would be just fine. In poll after poll after poll, a strong majority of Arab Iraqis (though not of members of the Kurdish community that makes up around 17% of the national population) say that that is just what they want to happen.
So as a political “threat” against Maliki it doesn’t make any sense. And one has to assume that even Ray Odierno is smart enough to understand that at this point?
But Odierno was presumably calculating that the US message (blackmail threat?) to Maliki would also be heard in Tehran… And there, by contrast, it might indeed have some political traction and relevance?
If this is the case, as I suspect, then we could conclude that Tehran might currently be exerting quiet pressure on the Maliki government to make some of the concessions in the SOFA negotiations that Odierno and his masters seek?
Interesting, if so.