Just World News with Helena Cobban

1,110 dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, and $180 billion of US taxpayer money…
Bush’s military surge in Iraq represented, essentially, an 18-month prolongation of the war there. Now, in July 2008, it is increasingly clear that the US troop presence in Iraq is starting to wind down, one way or another. US public and elite opinion is rapidly “surging” toward the judgment that Afghanistan is more important, and that resources– including many or all of those currently deployed in Iraq– urgently need to be redirected there.
This wind-down in Iraq could have started 18 months earlier. And it would have, if the President had followed the recommendations made in the Iraq Study Group report of December 2006. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he bull-headedly pursued the “surge”, which involved pumping considerable new troops, materiel, and other resources into Iraq.
Apologists for the surge, who include Sen. John McCain, argue that without it, the political situation in Iraq today would not be anywhere near as hopeful as they see it. (They conveniently ignore the fact that the main bedrock of the emerging political entente inside Iraq is a demand that the US troops leave that country to as short a timetable as possible.)
The apologists’ claim is considerably overblown if not flat-out wrong. If Bush had followed the recommendations produced by the determinedly bipartisan ISG, that in itself would have had a huge and positive effect on political relations among Iraqis. Iraq’s political system might well have arrived at the level of (still very fragile) internal entente that we see now– but 18 months sooner than today.
At the start of the 18-month period that started January 1, 2007, the US military organized a massive and very costly operation to assemble and deploy into Iraq an additional 30,000 or so troops. That strained the US force planners’ calculations just about to their limit. Then more recently, they have been bringing the number back to just about where they were back in December 2006.
During the 18 months January 2007 through June 2008, an additional 1,110 servicemembers were killed in Iraq, and many thousands more were badly wounded. 1,110 more American moms had to bury their sons or daughters. Many thousands more were faced with the longterm challenges of dealing with a chronically disabled loved one.
With the Iraqi occupation’s cost running at around $10 billion/month, those wasted 18 months also cost US taxpayers $180 billion more than the speedier, ISG-recommended kind of wind-down would have cost. As with all of George W. Bush’s wars, this money has been financed through debt.
Surge apologists claim that it was only the broader deployments made possible by the surge that succeeded in bringing to Iraqis the relative degree of “pacification” that hey have experienced since December 2006. But there are numerous other, more powerful ways of explaining the currently visible (and still very partial) degree of political entente. Including the buying-off of large portions of the country’s Sunni population and the ceasefire announced (and in good part observed) by the Sadrists. Those processes started before the surge. And, I repeat, if Washington had followed the ISG’s strongly pro-diplomacy recommendations back in December ’06, that would have transformed the regional and internal political situation into one much more conducive to achieving a sustainable political entente inside Iraq.
In his recent speeches, John McCain has tried to score points by saying that Obama “was wrong to oppose the surge.” Obama has replied that he was right on the bigger question of launching the war against Iraq in the first place; but he has largely dodged making any comment about the surge itself. He should certainly carry on stressing the larger point about having opposed the whole war. But he should also counter McCain’s claims about the value and necessity of the surge by pointing out that in late 2006, the far quicker, and most effective, way to win an acceptable outcome in Iraq would have been to follow something like the ISG’s recommendations, instead.
In other words, he should change the subject from the surge to the non-implementation of the ISG report.
He should also, certainly, point out what the delay in diplomacy that the surge represented has cost the nation and the world: 1,110 American lives, $180 billion, and countless lives and material damages in Iraq, too.

In all the recent reporting that I’ve seen on the Iraqi provincial elections, and their now almost certain postponement, I’ve seen almost no mention of one of the biggest administrative/political hurdles to holding these elections: that of the conflict-driven displacement of some four million Iraqis — more than 12 percent of the whole national population–away from their earlier home communities.
Somewhere around or just under two million of those displaced have gone to other countries and are thus considered refugees. Somewhere around or over two million of them are displaced inside the country and are thus defined as ‘Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDPs.)
In all the ‘purple finger moments’ (electoral events) that have been organized inside post-2003 Iraq until now, the fact of those vast displacements was not relevant. Those elections were organized on a nationwide proportional representation (PR) system. Thus, there was no relevance to any voters having an affiliation with a defined constituency. People could vote in them from anywhere within or outside Iraq, based only on possession of an officially issued Iraqi ration card or other proof of citizenship.
But in the context of province-level elections, the large-scale ethnic and sectarian cleansing that has occurred in the country since 2003– and also, before then– becomes very relevant indeed.
Where analysts or media people have focused on the challenge these broad displacements pose to the holding of sub-national-level polls, this attention has nearly always been focused on the special referendum stipulated for Kirkuk. And yes, Kirkuk has been the locus of considerable “demographic contestation”– i.e. successive waves of anti-Kurd, then anti-Arab and anti-Turkmen ethnic cleansing– over the past 30 years.
But ethnic and sectarian “cleansing” (oh, how I hate that word) has been a huge issue elsewhere in Iraq, too.
If province-level elections are to be held throughout the whole country, how will the four million IDPs and refugees be guaranteed their right to participate?
Who will define eligibility to vote in each province?
If everyone is guaranteed the right to vote in the province named as their home province on their ration card, will they be accorded all necessary facilities and protection to go to that home province to cast their vote?
Or, would it somehow be arranged that they cast their vote in the elections for their home province but can do so from wherever they are, inside or outside the country?
These are not trivial matters, at all.
I note that in some of the crucial sub-national elections in Bosnia, voters were accorded full rights to go to their earlier home provinces and cast their votes there. But given the scale of the ethnic cleansing there, organizing that was a massive operation!
The fact is, once you start dividing any country’s national population into territorially based sub-national voting units, there are numerous, very tricky decisions to be made regarding who has political rights within each unit. Should the broad outlines of the ethnic and sectarian cleansing that has occurred since 2003 simply be accepted as a “fact on the ground”, and decisions on voter eligibility be made on that basis? I doubt if many Iraqis want that to happen. (It would also be a highly unethical outcome.) Also, even if that approach were to be adopted regarding the IDPs, where would that leave the two million external refugees?
Iraq doesn’t look close to having reached national consensus on these questions yet.
I note that within the UN there is a considerable body of experience of addressing precisely such questions of untangling complex, conflict-driven demographic changes in the context of conflict-termination projects in several places around the world. The one that I’ve looked at most closely was in Mozambique, which had been subject to massive demographic displacements during the course of its 15-year civil war. But undertaking the repatriation of refugees and IDPs to their earlier home communities is certainly the preferred approach to the plight of these people, within the context of broader DDR efforts.
I’m not sure, frankly, what use provincial elections would really have in Iraq in the absence of such efforts?
I gather the political hopes from the provincial elections in Iraq have mainly been that they would help to integrate the formerly marginalized Sunni parties and blocs back into the political system. But might not the problems of demographic displacement and voter eligibility that would be aroused in the context of a provincial elections be more destabilizing than stabilizing? (Especially given that the Sunnis have probably been disproportionately the victims of ethnic/sectarian cleansing.)
Would it not be better, perhaps, simply to scratch the idea of provincial elections at this point and work on having the largest possible participation in the national elections that are scheduled for next year?

Der Spiegel, the New York Times and other reliable media organizations, having reviewed the tapes of PM Nouri al-Maliki’s interview with Spiegel, have confirmed that he said what Spiegel reported him as having said about his preference for Obama’s 16-month exit plan, or something even shorter than that.
(Obama is actually in Iraq now, I see.)
The US military subsequently ascribed to Ali al-Dabbagh, described as a Maliki aide, the view that Maliki had been misquoted. How much did they pay Dabbagh to have his name used thus, I wonder?
Juan Cole’s comment on the whole business is absolutely spot-on.
He writes:

you see, it does not matter that al-Maliki actually said what he said. It does not matter that Der Spiegel can prove it. All that matters is that the Goebbelses around Bush and Cheney have managed to muddy the waters and produce doubt, taking the hard edge off the interview. Even AFP, the usually skeptical French wire service, asserted that al-Maliki had “denied” the accuracy of the Der Spiegel interview! Of course, al-Maliki has done no such thing. CENTCOM ventriloquising al-Dabbagh engaged in the denial, and a very vague one at that.
That is the way propaganda works, to obscure the truth and ensure it can be denied. Some wingnut even tried to pressure me to retract the little sentence I had written on the affair yesterday, on the grounds of “al-Dabbagh’s” mendacious and ridiculous assertions. Our information system is so corrupt and easily manipulated that even a clumsy ploy can obscure the truth and bully the journalists.

The entire Bushist project is on its last legs. Almost sad to see the ridiculous contortions they’re engaging in to try to save their position.
Hey, I have an idea. How about, instead of trying to lie and bribe their way out of the sinkhole the President’s decisions over the past six years have created in Iraq, they ‘fess up to their own limitations and call for the United Nations to convene the multiple negotiations that are needed to bring about a US withdrawal from the country that is swift, total, orderly– and generous to the Iraqis?
What a novel idea, eh? (Irony alert.)
Actually, the longer the Bushists hang on in Iraq, the worse the terms of their departure. Maybe someone should point this out to them?

In 2004, when the US occupation authorities in Iraq went along with Ayatollah Sistani’s insistence that his country be allowed to elect its new leaders, the assumption among the Bushists was that they could hope to pretty easily sway the results of those elections. In the event, after the final round of “purple finger moments” was held in December 2005, it took the ouccpiers a long time to be able to find the one person capable of filling their specs for the job of PM, namely that he be (a) pliable enough to go along with most of their demands, but also (b) representative enough of the Daawa-Sadrist majority that had emerged from the election that his leadership was not immediately called into question.
Eventually, after many months of searching, they found their man. Nouri (Kamal) al-Maliki.
Now, the tables have turned. Maliki has told Der Spiegel outright that his strong preference is for Barack Obama’s fixed-term plan for a US withdrawal from Iraq.
The Spiegel account said,

When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded “as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned.” He then continued: “US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Though he was careful to say he did not support Obama outright, Maliki’s words– and the fact that on Thursday, he got Pres. Bush to agree for the first time that he would go along with the idea of a “time horizon” for withdrawal– cannot but be good for Obama’s campaign, and bad for McCain, with his much more longterm view of the US presence in Iraq.
Okay, I know Obama’s position on withdrawal is not yet good or complete enough, as I wrote here just last week. But still, Maliki’s statement is another item of good news for Obama’s campaign.
As for Obama himself, he is now in Afghanistan, where he’s visiting as part of a “congressional delegation”, along with Sens/ Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed.

… When it’s a time “horizon”, of course!
As accepted yesterday, regarding the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, by no less a personage than (drum roll, please) President George W. Bush.
Bush is still, notably, not advocating a timetable, or even a time “horizon”, for a complete US troop withdrawal. But still, as Satyam at ‘Think Progress’ so helpfully recalled here, over the years Bush has been notably resistant to the idea of anything approaching a timetable for the US troop withdrawal.
But as I have been arguing consistently since June 2005, announcing a firm timetable for a total troop withdrawal will be a factor that greatly helps the negotiations needed to assure that US commanders can ensure that this withdrawal is orderly, that is, one during which the troops are not being shot at and harassed as they leave.
… I find it fascinating that Bush has been forced to move so fast, so far, toward actually accepting that a substantial– or even, as I still push for, total– withdrawal of troops from Iraq is the best way forward. (As far back as June 8, I concluded that his attempt to force a longterm “Status of Force Agreement” onto the Iraqis already seemed “clearly destined for failure.”)
At the political level inside this country, however, Bush having moved toward accepting the necessity for a substantial drawdown in Iraq, and moreover, for a time “horizon” for this drawdown– as long advocated by Barack Obama– could help Obama rebuff John McCain’s accusations that his troop-drawdown proposal is defeatist and destabilizing.
So it might well help Obama politically.
Interesting.