Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 185 – Info, analysis, discussion

JWN celebrates 4th blogiversary

Gosh, has it been four years already? And who knows, one day I might even figure out what I want to do with this blog…
I sometimes look up from the keyboard long enough to wonder whether it’s all been worthwhile in any meaningful way. Has it made any real difference in the world? Is there perhaps a more effective use I could make of the non-trivial amounts of time I spend doing this?
On the other hand, writing always helps me think more clearly… Plus, with this blog format and the way the comments-board discussions have developed here, I feel I’ve created a very worthwhile forum for cooperative learning. I’ve long been convinced that learning is a fundamentally social activity, and the way we have created new funds of knowledge through our discussions here has underscored that point for me many times.
The blog would feel to me like a very different place indeed if we didn’t have all the great comments discussions here. Yes, it’s true they sometimes get a bit raucous, ill-focused, or non-courteous. But I have learned a tremendous amount from contributions made by so many of the commenters here.
So the first thing I want to do today is say a big thank you to all the commenters! (Particularly the ones who keep inside the courtesy guidelines– whether they agree with me, or not.)
And secondly, for nostalgia’s sake, I just want to go back to my inaugural post here, February 6, 2003. Here it is, in its entirety (and with all my crappy original formating):

at the expense of the basic social programs which would make our community healthier and safer.

The posts I put up over the six weeks that followed there– that is, until the outbreak of war– make pretty poignant reading, too, imho.
Then, in the column I published February 13, 2003 for the CSM, I took apart the claim Powell had made in that UN speech about the links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda… I note that in Fiasco, the book Tom Ricks recently published about the launching and early years of the US war in Iraq, he says that back in February 2003 Colin Powell was broadly successful in persuading all US commentators of the validity of the arguments he made at the UN.
He wasn’t. He never persuaded me; and I was able to write about the flaws in his case both here at JWN and also in CSM. So why didn’t Tom Ricks mention that? Was he not looking– or did he read what I wrote at the time but discount it all for some reason?
I guess I should ask him when I get the chance.
Anyway, that’s for another day. For today, I am just really glad that the internet and this great, easy-to-use blogging software have allowed us all to have such a great global conversation here at JWN.
Long may the conversation continue.

Ramazani: “Surging Backward”

We have featured several essays by R.K. Ramazani here before, and I am happy to draw attention to his latest pithy oped entitled, “Bush’s ‘new way leads backward.”
Ramazani, like most “independent” (e.g., “outside the beltway”) academic observers of the Gulf, is not impressed with President Bush’s plans to add 20 thousand or so additional US troops into the Iraq maelstrom. Deeming the President’s plan as charting “a way backward,” rather than forward, the Bush surge

“promises to deepen the quagmire in which America finds itself. And it carries the enormous risk of widening the theater of war to the detriment of American interests in the Middle East.”

Then and now, blind arrogance guides the Bush-Cheney Administration:

The president made his decision in defiance of counsel from military experts and experienced field commanders. Just as in 2003, when he dismissed the warning of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the army chief of staff, that occupation forces at the time were too small, he recently ignored the view of Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the Central Command, that troop increases were no answer in Iraq.
The president also flouted the advice of civilian experts, most notably, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. The study group’s report urged the Bush administration to set a goal of early 2008 for the withdrawal of almost all U.S. combat troops.
The Bush administration failed equally to heed the message of the mid-term congressional elections, a message heard loud and clear in the halls of the new Congress. The day after the president’s State of the Union address, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by a vote of 12-8, repudiated his plan to send more troops to Baghdad.
Yet on the same day, Vice President Dick Cheney voiced the president’s defiant stance. He said: “We are moving ahead… . [T]he president has made his decision.”

But can such arrogance prevail “in the face of deepening frustration” of publics at home and abroad? Ramazani cites polling data indicating a strong majority of Americans oppose increased deployments of troops to Iran. He then contends that the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of protestors who recently took to the cold streets of Washington “were reminding legislators that the people had elected them and expected them to act as a check on the executive branch.”

Continue reading “Ramazani: “Surging Backward””

Kuwaiti singer satirizes Bush policies

Thanks to Juan Cole for the link to this 5-minute video, which is a hard-hitting anti-Bush satire energetically sung (and performed) by the Kuwaiti singer Shams. She sings a well-known Egyptian popular song of romantic repudiation. “Hi! How are you… You think you’re so great? I never want to see you again!” while hamming it up with a dizzying array of props representing aspects of Bush’s policy in the Middle East. And yes, that includes Washington’s “information” policies, too, with repeated visual references to newspaper stories and to round-table type TV talk-shows…
I’ve remarked before on the complex relationship between pornography and war. In this video– which was apparently shot in Cairo and used remarkably high production values– Shams does her own mocking (and I would say, extremely feminist) riff on that relationship… She sashays provocatively up to a cardboard image of Bush at the “presidential” podium before she takes over the podium herself… She stands dancing and primping in a sand desert in front of huge letters spelling out “DEMOCRACY” before hitting into the sand various heavily armed US soldiers undertaking operations all around her… She wanders with a “lovelorn” look around a sound-studio full of (male) talking heads hung from puppets’ strings around a table, and being manipulated by members of the Bush administration before, with a wicked smile, she snips the string of one of the puppets. (The string/rope left swinging there at the end is an eery visual reminder — same lighting and all– of the videos of the Saddam execution.)
You have to see how she blows the blond toupee off the head of an ageing Arab male journo, provocatively fans herself with the card holding her “detainee number” as she stands in a police line-up, or disports herself langorously along the top of the large letters “GUANTANAMO” laid out in front of (an image of) the White House…
In the fast-paced denouement of the video a cowboy-hatted Bush propositions her on top of a castle built in the sand in the form of an economist’s graph showing, I think, oil-price rises. She swats Bush off the castle (more Saddam hanging imagery here), then throws down on top of him a stone block that turns out to be an “E” that is rapidly joined by all the other letters of the word “LIBERTY”… which is then itself immediately placed behind iron bars… Finally, from a fortune-teller Shams learns that her future is to walk happily off into the sunset with… Naji al-Ali’s iconic, Kuwaiti-born child, Handala. (And if you don’t know who Handala is, or what he represents, then you probably need to find out. Hint: “old-fashioned” pan-Arab nationalism… )
As we all saw with the Saddam execution videos, rapidly distributed video imagery can have a massive effect on public attitudes. This one has been very cleverly crafted to satirize many, many aspects of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East from a broadly Arab-nationalistic perspective.
Another Kuwaiti woman, English-language columnist Muna al-Fuzai, presumably recognized this power in the video when she sputtered:

As a US citizen, I’d like to say that I don’t consider the video “an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for.” I think it’s an astute, well-crafted criticism of not just the content of George Bush’s misbegotten and ill-fated war against Iraq but also the hypocrisy of the wide-reaching propaganda effort that has surrounded his pursuit of the war. And if it’s produced in a way that makes its Arabic-language viewers laugh or even crack a small smile, that is fine by me. A bit of humor can really help a person to survive some tough and otherwise dispiriting times!
I do not see the video as unfairly mocking “all that Americans stand for”: I read the references there to “liberty”, “democracy”, etc., as introduced precisely to pinpoint the disconnect between the Bushists’ very public espousal of those values and their actual practices in places like “Guantanamo.”
For his part, Juan Cole called the video “the oddest thing, but certainly a ‘resistance’ video of a sort.” I don’t know why he sees it as odd. It is political satire presented in the populist genre of an Arabic-language music video. Not “odd”, but rather inventive, I’d say.
Anyway, if you have a fast internet connection, check out the video and tell us what you think.

Update, later Monday:

The Egyptian popular culture site Yallabina tells us:

Whither the Shiite-Sunni “split”

So here I am in Cairo. One of the big issues I plan to look here at is this much-reported-on polarization of attitudes between the Shiites and Sunnis of the Middle East.
Abu Aardvark and Badger are two of the people who have done the most to give us the details of how this relatively new polarization has been spreading almost “virally” throughout much of the Arab world. (There is also some very deadly Shiite-Sunni tension in Pakistan, that is more of a long-running thing; and a certain amount of it historically in Afghanistan, too. But I think the dynamics there might be a bit different? Anyway, I don’t feel qualified to comment on those phenomena. The Middle East alone is quite hard enough to fathom and explain.)
What is frequently described as a Shiite-Sunni “polarization” in today’s Arab world is, in fact, more like a tsunami of anti-Shiite agitation, propagandizing, and also apparently real sentiment that has been sweeping many Sunni-dominated Arab socieies. One of the first things to note is how incredibly fast this tsunami has gathered its force. I mean, it was only last September that we were hearing about the vendors in Cairo’s (deeply Sunni) street-markets naming the choicest among their special Eid baskets of dates after Hizbullah head Sayed Hassan Nasrallah… But here we are today, a bare 4-5 months later, and rumors– never yet substantiated!– of widespread and scary Shiite campaigns to convert Sunnis, and other nefarious plots that are all somehow Shiite-related seem to be sweeping through Egypt and other Sunni Arab communities like wildfire.
So one of the things that I want to do while I’m here is to really probe what’s been happening. And also, to survey the possible future directions in which this sign of sectarian fitna (complete social breakdown) might go.
It seems evident that the whole series of episodes that surrounded the execution of Saddam (and his half brother) at year’s end did a lot to catalyze and/or exacerbate this tsunami of anti-Shiite feeling among many Sunnis… But that is certainly not all that has been afoot. Other very relevant factors include the fact that after three-years-plus of increasingly sectarian carnage in Iraq, the nerves and sensibilities of nearly everyone in the Arab world are very raw. At this level, it doesn’t even “help” the argument much to note that the greatest number by far of casualties from sectarian violence there have been Shiites– those thousands of Iraqi Shiites who have been killed over the past three-plus years by acts of anti-civilian violence of almost mind-numbing callousness… Bombs in markets, bombs in mosques, bombs at religious festivals, etc etc.
And yes, there has also been some extremely callous counter-violence against Iraqi Sunnis. The torture chambers, the mass arrest campaigns, the hundreds of mutilated bodies of Sunni men tossed out on the roadside… But in addition to the hurt from that violence there is also, probably, for many Iraqi Sunnis a broader sense of a stark new vulnerability. From having been valued members of (for many of them) a relatively well-cared-for and well-educated elite– and lauded by many of their fellow Arabs for their role as a bulwark against Iran– most of Iraq’s Sunnis were reduced within a few short months to being members of an extremely vulnerable minority in their own country. That kind of rapid downward mobility can easily– as in post-1919 Germany– be a ready incubator for hate-fueled or even genocidal ideologies…
And in another corner of the Arab world we have Lebanon, where the “national unity” of last summer turned very rapidly– and with the determined help of the Americans– into a sullen form of Shiite-Sunni jousting for power. In Lebanon, too, as in Iraq, the Sunnis have been faced with having to give up a social and political ascendancy over the Shiites (though notably never, in Lebanon, over the Christians) that dated back to the days of the– determinedly Sunni– Ottoman Empire. In a sense, I suppose you could say that what is happening in both Lebanon and Iraq is a last-stage crumbling away of some last vestiges of the Ottoman-bequeathed social order…. And it hasn’t been a happy process for the Sunni communities of those two countries.
Add into this mix a few other complicating factors, too. Starting off with a powerful US-Israeli strategic axis in the region that (a) has projected a very powerful message that the use of force is quite okay in the modern era, while resisting and blocking nearly all the available channels for talking through differences rather than fighting over them, (b) has played a documented role in stoking the internal discord and violence in at least one very visible area: occupied Palestine, and (c) has showed itself openly eager to try to enrol the Sunni Arab regimes, and as much as possible of the Arab publics, in a coalition dedicated to confronting or rolling back the growth of Iran’s regional power. Which, by the way, is Shiite.
The complete smashing-up of the Iraqi state, which many other Arabs had in an earlier era seen as a bastion of the “Arab nation’s” defense against Iran, has certainly heightened all these sensitivities and fears. (Less so, I think, the Iranian nuclear program, though that has been the focus of most of the concern in the west. The Middle Eastern Arabs have, after all, lived for many decades now under the shadow of a local power that is nuclear-armed and has a record of hostile actions against them that is considerably lengthier than Iran’s.)
Then, too, have you seen how easily all these descriptions of the nature of this current crisis can slide between one based primarily on sect (Sunni and Shiite) and one based primarily on ethnicity (Arab and Iranian)? This is another complex aspect of the problem. And in this regard, once again, as in the early 1980s, the ultimate (or at least medium-term) allegiances of the ethnic-Arab Shiites who populate the northern reaches of the Arabian/Persian Gulf will prove key to the way the whole situation turns out.
When Saddam invaded Iran in September 1980, he and his people were betting (as some neocons do once again today) that they could rely on the anti-Persian sentiments of many of Iran’s non-Persian nationalities… Including crucially, the allegedly pro-Baghdad sentiments of those millions of ethnic Arabs who populate Iran’s Ahvaz region, to the east of the Shatt al-Arab. (Very productive oil territory, too.)
But it didn’t work. Back in the 1980s some combination of “national” (i.e. pan-Iranian) and sectarian (Shiite) allegiance proved strong enough to overcome any tendency the Ahvaz Arabs might have had towards ethnic solidarity with Baghdad. They didn’t rise against the mullahs’ regime in Teheran. And nor did any of the other peripheral ethnic minorities whom Saddam had been relying on.
This time around, a lot of what determines how the present threat of regionwide fitna turns out will hang on the outcome of a broadly similar clash of loyalties amongst the many millions of Shiites of southern Iraq— who are the close neighbors and sometimes cousins of their co-ethnics and Shiite co-sectarians right acorss the border. Over the coming months and years will they show their loyalties more to the Iraqi nation and their Arab ethnicity, or to their Shiite co-sectarians in Iran? (This is another take on the issue of the “battle of the narratives” inside Iraq that i wrote about a month ago, here.)
I’ll note a couple of things in this regard. The Iraqis Shiites may have “won” an unprecedented degree of political power, due to the US toppling of Saddam and the subsequent de-Baathification campaigns pursued under US auspices. But if political power was something they longed for for all these decades past, then the actual experience they have had of it in the past four years must have been extremely disappointing. Many of their communities have been ravaged by those hundreds of acts of enormous, anti-civilian savagery, and have lost any sense of public security. And meanwhile the “government” to which they were handed the keys was one that (1) had already been denuded of all the actual instruments of governance, and (2) continued to have its freedom of action circumscribed at every turn by the Americans… So they couldn’t even use the government to assure their own most basic security and wellbeing, let alone having tmuch wherewithal with which to reach out “generously” to their Sunni compatriots.
Also, we’ve seen generally lousy leadership from all strata of the political class in Iraq: Shiite, Sunni, or “nationalist”. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, given the extent to which Saddam, Hussein had stripped the country of any ability to generate good and visionary successor leaders. He murdered scores of such individuals as they arose within the country! Tom Friedman has famously (and perhaps more than slightly accusingly) asked, “Where is the Arab Martin Luther King, Jr.?” I would say that more than that, what would be great would be an Arab Nelson Mandela: someone who could help unify his people around a clear and compelling political program, stick to it until victory, and then act with gracious magnanimity to the people who had thereby lost a degree of their earlier power.
(Mandela and the ANC achieved this, I should note, through a nuanced combination of main reliance on unarmed civilian mass action, supplemented by the actions of a relatively small but symbolically important armed wing. But mainly what strikes me about the ANC’s strength was its focus on organizing, organizing, organizing… and on an internal discipline that was honed over 82 years of nationalist struggle before they reached victory in 1994.)
The nearest that the Arab Shiites have to such a figure is Sayed Hassan Nasrallah. But I don’t think he yet has anything like the gravitas and wisdom of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. It would be great to see him reach out with some gestures of grand magnanimity to the many distressed Sunnis in the Arab world… Particularly, the distressed Sunnis of Iraq.
And then, talking of distressed Sunnis, we also of course have the Palestinians… whose duly elected parliamentary leaders of the Hamas movement have maintained good relations with Teheran. Now Hamas also has close ideological and organizational relations with the Muslim Brotherhood in both Egypt and Jordan. It must be a constant, looming concern for the Bushists that the harshness of the Israeli policies against Hamas that they in general strongly support might at any point tip the political balance in one or both of those key, overwhelmingly Sunni countries against their present pro-US rulers and in favor of the Muslim Brothers… So the anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian propaganda campaigns that these regimes in Cairo and Amman have been undertaking also seem to have the goal of trying to distract their peoples’ attention away from the crisis that continues to grip the Palestinians.
Where is this all headed? That’s one of the things I want to try to figure out more over over my two-plus-week visit here.
One general observation I’ll make is that these days, and perhaps especially in this region, history seems to be proceeding at a dizzyingly fast pace. Near the head of this (admittedly slightly rambly) post I noted the speed with which the present round of anti-Shiite agitation seems to have sunk some roots in Sunni Arab communities. But this trend could stop, or even be reversed, with just the same kind of speed. I have the distinct sense that the coming three to six months will be momentous for this whole region… And yes, I believe that will be the case even if (God willing!) the Bushists should finally decide not to launch any military attack against Iran.
But if they do take such a foolhardy and callous step, then the whole region might erupt in quite unpredictable ways.

War-clouds over Iran?

Are the imminent arrival of the additional US Navy carrier battle group to the waters of the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the despatch of an admiral as the first-ever head of US CentCom decisive signs that some form of an American military strike against Iran is about to begin?
Other signs of this include the increase in the volume of the continuous barrage of anti-Iranian accusations made by the Bush administration, and their apparent orchestration of a very broad anti-Iranian propaganda campaign by their principal aid-recipients in the Arab world. (I’m now in Egypt. You can certainly see some signs of that here.)
In a well compiled contribution to Open Democracy the British analyst Paul Rogers writes:

The Bushists have certainly raised tensions with Iran to a new high over recent weeks,. They have also made many preparations at the levels of both military logistics and propganda/rhetoric for an even greater confrontation with Teheran that may lead– whether by intention or through some “accident” (planned or unplanned)– to an outbreak of actual military conflict.
As I wrote here last September, the two sides urgently need a hot-line arrangement, whether at the level of military-to-military, or leader-to-leader, in order to avert mishaps or miscommunications that might lead to disaster. The inauguration of such a deconfliction mechanism could also be the first step towards building further confidence and establishing further means of averting conflicts.
But meanwhile, what we have from Washington instead is an eery repeat of the kind of propaganda preparations, now directed against Iran, that we saw four years ago directed against Iraq. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has pulled together some old Bush tapes from 2002 to show the keen degree of overlap there. You can view them here. (Hat-tip to D. Froomkin.)
I do note, too, that much of the US MSM– which in 2002 were still nearly all drinking the Bushists’ Koolaid– seem to be much more skeptical and wary of what’s happening this time round.
I’m planning a column for the CSM this week that implores the President not to take us once again down the path of a completely voluntary and quite predictably harmful war. Back in 2002, I was one of that majority of experienced American analysts of the current Middle East who warned loudly that an invasion of Iraq would lead to such harmful consequences as: the incubation of stiff, anti-US resistance by Iraqis, the strengthening of the Shiite Islamist trends, and extremely complex conflicts over Kirkuk and the whole of northern Iraq. The Bushists chose not to listen to us, preferring instead the counsels of Bernard Lewis (a scholar of medieval Islam) and of others– primarily, pro-Israeli ideologues– who assured them that an invasion of Iraq would be “a cakewalk”, whose success at bringing about a pro-US transformation there was virtually guaranteed..
I take no pleasure whatsoever in saying that I and the colleagues who agreed with me then were right. Lewis, Cheney, Adelman, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Woolsey, and all that sad group of pro-war propagandists of that day were wrong.
They have never been held to any account. I think this should be a matter of keen concern to all Americans, as well as all Iraqis (whose sufferings since March 2003 have been a hundred times worse.)
But it completely beggars belief that the counsels of war coming yet again from some of these very same people are once again being listened to by the President.
Just one small footnote from me here: Some friends have suggested that in what I wrote here about the late-January incident at PJCC Karbala I was helping to provide ammunition for the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign in the US. That was certainly not my intention. As I wrote there, I did think that it was “possible” that some Iranian government-backed formation had undertaken the attack on US forces there. But I also noted explicitly that, “I’m in no position to put a probability figure on that scenario.”
Beyond that, I want to note that even if there was an Iranian government hand of some kind in the Karbala attack, I don’t think this would in any way qualify as a “casus belli” for a US attack on Iran.
Finally, since I’m in a hurry here, I just want to put in Paul Rogers’ assessment of the kinds of damage that cane be predicted from a US attack on Iran:

I agree with just about all of that. I would add, however, that any large-scale US or Israeli attack on Iran could very well trigger storms of outrage from a much broader spectrum of Muslim groups than Rogers lists… Yes, including many Sunni Arabs.
It is to try to forestall that possibility, of course, that the US and its allies in the region are now engaged in such a frenzy of anti-Iranian propagandizing. But I am not sure at all that they will succeed.

Interview with Amb. Imad Moustapha

Syria does not fear any imminent US military escalation against itself, though
it fears the Bush administration may yet launch a strike against Iran…
Syria sees itself as the only power that has good relations with all
the parties inside Iraq, and is very willing to use this position to help
mediate and moderate intra-Iraqi disputes… It calls for a reconciliation
process in Iraq in which “all parties should be involved, without exception,
but in which none would dominate the others”; and for a regional peace process
involving Iraq, all of its neighbors, and the US… Syria’s relations
with many portions of US society, including the US Congress, have improved
considerably in the last 18 months, “But the only ‘fortress’ resisting engagement
with us is the administration”….

These were some of the main points in an informal, one-hour interview I held
January 26 with Ambassador Imad Moustapha, in his embassy in Washington DC’s
Kalorama district.

Moustapha drew a strong contrast between the standoff-ish and sullen
attitude the Bush administration presents towards Syria today and the behavior of an earlier US administration, during a period
of much greater substantive tension between the two parties, back in 1983:

Back then, US Navy vessels were directly shelling Syrian military
positions in Lebanon, and the US Air Force was attacking our positions in
the Bekaa valley. You remember, we shot down a US flyer on that
occasion… But despite the continuation of that direct military engagement
between us, the Reagan administration still engaged with us diplomatically,
with the mission of Ambassador Philip Habib, who came to Damascus a number
of times. But now, they won’t even talk to us?

Regarding his embassy’s relations with other sections of US society, he said
he feels he has had some real success reaching out to people in Congress,
the media, and civil society “including Jewish-American groups.” He
recalled that several members of Congress visited Syria over the recent winter
break, and noted in particular that the meeting that ISG co-chair James Baker
held in Damascus with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem last September had
been very successful.

Mouallem was very clear with Baker. He told him that
Syria wants to cooperate on resolving the differences inside Iraq– for its
own reasons. We are not seeking any ‘deal’ to link that issue to Lebanon…

And then, see the strong degree to which we’ve restored our relations with
the government in Iraq. We have just been having this long and very
productive visit to Syria by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, in the course
of which he signed a large number of interior and security agreements with
Damascus. And this was at exactly the same time that Secretary Rice
was criticising us so strongly on Capitol Hill for our allegedly unhelpful
interference inside Iraq? Her criticisms don’t seem to make much sense.

… No, I am not concerned about a possible American imminent escalation
against Syria. But I do worry that the administration might do something
against Iran-– to try to save face and to reawaken patriotic feelings
among the Americans.

This would be disastrous.

Moustapha expressed significant concern about the eruption of Sunni-Shiite
sectarianism in the Arab world. “Many Arabs see this as a direct result
of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq . What happened there was
the dismantling of the state… and then religious, sectarian, and tribal
leaders were the only ones able to provide the most needed sense of some
security in the neighborhoods.”

He said the number of Iraqi refugees in Syria had now reached “nearly one
million”. He described a visit he had made to one of the numerous,
completely new private universities that have been springing up in Syria
in recent years. “But this one was different. This was a completely
Iraqi institution, totally run by Iraqi professors and administrators…
And there’s another one in Jordan,. too.”

I suggested that these institutions must be bringing great benefits to their
host countries. But he said, “No, the main thing is that it’s
a disaster for Iraq! Iraq was always such a great center of Arab higher
edication! My father got his degree there… so many other Arabs did.
And now, it is all becoming destroyed.”

We had a short discussion about the recent reports on a possibly productive
Syrian-Israeli “back-channel” negotiation that occurred between 2004 and
July 2006. Moustapha said the contacts in question never had any authorization
or standing with the government he represents. “Syria’s position is
well-known and consistent,” he said. “I have to tell you we have people
coming to us all the time and offering to conduct some such private
negotiation. But we don’t need it. Our offer to resume the negotiations
at the open, official level with Israel is clear, and it’s on the table.”

He talked a little about his government’s relations with many of the different
parties and groups inside today’s Iraq. He started by recalling how
many of the politicians who emerged in the immediate post-Saddam era had
had long ties with Syria, having spent a good portion of their previous years
of exile in Damascus. “Seventeen of the 25 members of the Interim Governing
Council established by Paul Bremer once carried Syrian diplomatic passports!”
After the US invasion of Iraq, many of those Iraqi politicians had turned
their back on Damascus to some degree– “But now, even those who disdained
us for a while are coming back into a relationship with us.”

Moustapha noted that Moqtada al-Sadr had a very good visit to Syria in early
2005, “and later, he became a kingmaker in the political system in Baghdad.”
He stressed that in his view, Sadr was very far from being any kind
of an Iranian puppet.

He concluded by laying out his proposal for an all-party reconciliation process
inside Iraq, to be parallelled by a regional process involving all Iraq’s
neighbors and the United States. “This wouldn’t solve all the
problems,” he conceded. “But it would certainly change the reginal
dynamics.”

I asked whether he saw a role for the UN in convening such a process. “The
UN can’t act unless the US allows it to,” he said.

… The above account has been written in great haste. I’ve had
a lot of work to do in the past few days, and I’ve also been packing and
preparing for a three-month trip away from home that will take me to Cairo,
various other Middle Eastern places, London, and France. We leave on that
trip less than two hours from now. But I did want to get this account
of the discussion with Amb. Moustapha posted onto the blog before I leave.

He is a smart and engaging man. (Heck, he even has his own blog, which
makes some interesting reading.) He shows a good understanding of the
different trends in the US policymaking elite, and seems to represent his
government’s positions accurately and persuasively. From talking to
him, I got the sense that he– and most likely also the government he represents–
has a degree of quiet self-confidence about the government’s own survival
and prospects, but considerable concern for the possibility of further, more
damaging deteriorations in Iraq, or a US attack on Iran. I have to
say he was pretty scathing about the prospects for the US occupation force
in Iraq, and the prospects of President Bush’s latest “surge” plan in particular.
At one point he noted wryly: “Look , they don’t even seem to be able
to control Haifa Street, which is just a kilometer or so away from the Green
Zone. How on earth do they hope to control the whole country?”

Was the Najaf fight more about tribes?

Zeyad of Healing Iraq compiles several different accounts of who the people were who got so bloodily killed in the shootout in Zarqaa/Najaf on Sunday and early Monday.
One of these accounts– perhaps the most convincing, but who knows?– is what you might call the “tribal” one:

A mourning procession of 200 pilgrims from the Hawatim tribe, which inhabits the area between Najaf and Diwaniya, arrived at the Zarga area at 6 a.m. Sunday. Hajj Sa’ad Nayif Al-Hatemi and his wife were accompanying the procession in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk. They reached an Iraqi Army checkpoint, which suddenly opened fire against the vehicle, killing Hajj Al-Hatemi, his wife and his driver Jabir Ridha Al-Hatemi. The Hawatim tribesmen in the procession, which was fully armed to protect itself in its journey at night, attacked the checkpoint to avenge their slain chief. Members of the Khaza’il tribe, who live in the area, attempted to interfere to stop the fire exchange. About 20 tribesmen were killed. The checkpoint called the Iraqi army and police command calling for backup, saying it was under fire from Al-Qaeda groups and that they have advanced weapons. Minutes later, reinforcements arrived and the tribesmen were surrounded in the orchards and were sustaining heavy fire from all directions…

Zeyad notes the many discrepancies among the various accounts of the incident produced by Iraqi officials. And, too, that these tribes have been fairly resistant or hostile to the organizing efforts of all the big Shiite parties
The only thing that is clear at this point is that this is an extremely “foggy” war. Also, that whichever explanation of what happened is correct, the US-trained “IraqI’ security forces come out looking extremely poorly organized, lethal, and ill-disciplined.
I note, too, that many of these big tribal confederations in southern Iraq straddle the Shiite-Sunni divide, having members belonging to each of the two divisions of Islam.
(Hat-tip to Badger for the above.)

Is the Iraq war all about George W. Bush?

Several people have already commented on the disconnect between the glowing account Pres. Bush gave, in this radio interview Monday, of the performance of the US-trained “Iraqi” forces in recent days and the accounts that reporters in Iraq have been giving of the Iraqi forces’ performance in the battle near Najaf, or the ones raging along Baghdad’s Haifa Street…
For example, in this piece in today’s NYT, Marc Santora, Qais Mizher, and another unnamed Iraqi reporter wrote of the Najaf battle,

Bush truly does seem to live in some bubble-like cloud-cuckoo land when he talks about the capacities of the “Iraqi” forces. This is what he told NPR’s Juan Williams yesterday:

Seemingly obivious to the facts, yes. But I noticed something else there, too: A clear indication that Bush, emperor-like, now thinks that the war in Iraq is all about him… and that the job of the Iraqi forces who have been trained by the Americans is to show him personally how well they can perform.
Maybe the rest of us need to find a better way to break through his bubble of solipsism and self-referentiality.
No, George Bush, this war is not all about you. It’s about the desire for self-rule and national independence of 28 million Iraqis… It’s about the anxious families of the 140,000 US service members whom you have recklessly deployed into harm’s way… And it’s about when and how the US citizenry can find a way out of the quagmire of unilateralism, self-referentiality, and threat into which your ill-informed warmongering has led us.
So please, please don’t carry on acting as though it’s all about you. It’s about all of us, the citizens of all the world’s countries, and how we can build a new set of much more secure relationships among us based on human equality and mutual respect.
One hint: this is probably not best achieved with attack helicopters, F-16s, and 500-pound bombs…

Guest op-ed from Stanley J. Heginbotham

Stanley Heginbotham is someone who thinks carefully and compassionately about issues of war and peace. I was interested to read some thoughts he’s put together on the US-Iraqi imbroglio, and I am happy to publish them here as a contribution to our continuing discussion. ~HC

WHEN IRAQIS PLAY BY IRAQI RULES

Implications for US Strategy

by Stanley J. Heginbotham,

New York City, January 30, 2007

The author served for 10 years as chief of the foreign and
defense policy division at the Congressional Research Service. As a
junior officer in the US Marine Corps in the early 60s he was OIC of a counter
guerrilla warfare school. He received the PhD in political science
from MIT and a BA in History from Stanford. He taught comparative politics
at Columbia University and was VP of the Social Science Research Council.

Americans recognize that Iraqis behave according to their own rules.
But we lack a clear sense of what those rules are. We can, however,
derive some close approximations because we have several years of evidence
of how Iraqis behave – as opposed to what they say — and we know a
lot about basic features of Iraq and countries facing analogous situations:
Iraq’s social stratification, how divided societies response to rapid transitions
from authoritarianism to electoral politics; how people in tribal systems
operate, and how people think in economies that haven’t known sustained secular
growth.

Four rules provide a useful guide to what determines Iraqi behavior.
Further, they suggest a number of predictions of how key groups in Iraq will
behave in the near future.

Rule 1: As Iraq moved from authoritarianism to electoral politics,
successful politicians focused their appeals on core sources of personal
identity: tribe, faction, religion, and ethnic community. Politicians
who staked out broad public policy positions in order to appeal across ethnic
and religious identities have been strikingly unsuccessful and marginalized.

The December 2005 elections marked a profound setback for American
aspirations for such parties and leaders. Ahmad Chalabi was unable
to secure a single seat in the parliament. Support for Iyad Allawi’s
party declined dramatically as a result of those elections. Subsequently
he has been only a peripheral player in national politics and now lives primarily
abroad.

Rule 2: The gains of any political group are seen as being
achieved only at the expense of its adversaries.

The notion of win-win result — Sunni, Shi’a and Kurds
cooperating in a unity government that stimulates growth and benefits all
— is inconceivable to key Iraqi politicians and their followers. The stark
reality is that our invasion dethroned Sunnis and replaced them with Shiites.

This is a classic zero-sum perspective. It is common – and makes good
sense – in societies that haven’t experienced secular economic growth.

The middle and professional classes who could conceive of a win-win solution
no longer matter. Indeed, many have fled Iraq in the face of dashed
hopes and serious threats to their personal survival.

Continue reading “Guest op-ed from Stanley J. Heginbotham”

Sadrist delegation in Kurdistan

Aswat al-Iraq/ Voices of Iraq is reporting that a delegation of four Sadrist MPs has traveled to Arbil to visit with Kurdish President Masoud Barzani.
VOI’s Abdul-Hamid Zibari writes there that Sadrist MP and delegation member Baha al-Araji described the visit as unprecedented. Araji also said that the Sadr movement would back the Kurdistan Coalition’s demands in parliament “if these demands did not clash with the national and Islamic basics.”
This is just another little sign of the cross-“group” politics that still goes on in Iraq, alongside the violence that makes up most of what we read in the MSM.
I don’t understand why– according to the counters posted right there on the VOI site– so few people seem to be reading their very informative newsfeed in English. The range of material they publish there every day is really amazing.
I’ve been revamping my sidebar a bit today, and I just put a link to their English-language homepage there in the “Links” section.