Just World News with Helena Cobban

The narrative that the Bush administration and its apologists have
been trying to peddle regarding Iraq is that a “sovereign” Iraqi
parliament is now in power in Baghdad, and the government confirmed
yesterday by that parliament is now well launched on its task of
restoring peace and order in the country. (And if, um, the Iraqi
government should fail at that– well, that would be their own fault,
wouldn’t it?)

This narrative completely ignores the “elephant in the room” of
Iraqi politics, i.e. the continuing and heavy-handed influence
exercised over the Iraqi parliament and government by US officials,
primarily “Ambassador”– in reality, “Viceroy”– Zalmay Khalilzad.

Indeed, Khalilzad was actually in the chamber yesterday
during the crucial parliamentary session that confirmed PM Maliki’s
(still incomplete) government list. WaPo reporters Nelson Hernandez and
Omar Fekeiki made clear in this
report that Khalilzad was not only present but also helping to
direct and stage-manage events there:

The Iraqi national anthem, “My Homeland,” played in
an endless
loop as politicians slowly gathered. Khalilzad shook hands with Iraqi
leaders as Western security guards looked on.

While a man read a verse from the Koran, Khalilzad talked to
a Sunni leader, then abruptly stood up and left the room. He returned a
few minutes later with Adnan al-Dulaimi and Khalaf al-Elayan, two
leaders of the main Sunni coalition, who both appeared to be reluctant
to attend.

The fact of Khalilzad’s very “active-duty” presence inside the
chamber intrigued me. One of my main points of reference is the
Lebanese parliament, from having watched it throughout many years in
which it was subjected to very heavyhanded interference from (at
different times) both the Syrians and the Israelis.

Throughout all those years one crucial task for the outside
power was to control the outcome of the crucial vote in which the
Beirut parliament elected the country’s president.  It always did
this indirectly, through two main mechanisms:

(1) its complete control over physical access to the
parliament
building, and

(2) reliance on a broad network of allies– whether
ideological allies, or allies-for-hire– from among the body of the
parliamentarians.

In my recollection, not once did the local Syrian (or Israeli)
viceroy ever actually have to go inside the parliamentary chamber
in order to direct developments there.

To do so would, after all, give the lie to the whole “story”
about the independence of Lebanon!

And I imagine the same was true in most of the parliaments of
East and Central Europe during the years of Soviet domination… (I
wonder, too, whether the local South African viceroys would actually go
inside the parliaments of the nominally “independent” Bantistans to
direct crucial political developments there?)

It is blindingly clear to me that the fact that Khalilzad felt
he had to go into the chamber (and not just as a passive
“guest” or “observer”) signals a deep failure of Washington’s political
project inside Iraq. If you look at those two mechanisms of indirect
control of a parliament that I identified above, it is clear that the
US forces have completely control physical access to the Iraqi parliament,
which is located inside the “Green Zone”. But what the US
administrators in Iraq evidently lack is any confidence that the
parliamentarians gathered inside the chamber would, if left alone out
of Khalilzad’s sight, act at his bidding.

That, despite the huge amounts of money the US has always had
available to hand out as bribes to Iraqi political figures!

In Lebanon, throughout the long years of Syria’s overlordship
there, financial incentives were a strong feature of parliament’s
every-six-years “election” of a president. It was quite a common
observation that the Lebanese MPs would be engaging in an elaborate
game of financial “chicken”, since the price paid for each individual
MP’s vote would increase steeply as the Syrians (or in 1982, Israelis)
came close to meeting the number needed for the election to succeed–
but once that number had been reliably reached, the price would
suddenly plummet to zero.

Gosh, playing that game that must have been one of the hardest
and most stressful jobs those MPs ever had to do during their very
lengthy terms in power…

But in Iraq, despite the huge amount of money the US
administrators have available, and the evident current penury of most
Iraqis, Khalilzad can’t even be certain he can reliably line up a
parliamentary vote in the direction he wants without being physically
present inside the chamber?? What is happening here???

(This fact actually gives me cause for some real hope that the
parliament is not going to act as merely a rubber-stamp for the
Bushists’ desires and projects in Iraq…)

Also on the topic of this “elephant” in the Iraqi chamber, I
read with interest this
piece by John Burns in today’s NYT.

He writes that, in contrast with the policy the US
administrators adopted in spring 2005 during the long-drawn-out process
Ibrahim Jaafari went through as he formed the Iraqi transitional
government–

This time, American officials played a muscular
role in
vetting and negotiating over the new cabinet. Dismayed at what they
have described as the Jaafari government’s incompetence, American
officials reversed the hands-off approach that characterized American
policy as Mr. Jaafari formed his cabinet in early 2005.

Then, the policy laid down by John D. Negroponte, President
Bush’s first ambassador to Iraq, now back in Washington as director of
national intelligence, was to respect Iraq’s standing as a sovereign
state, avoiding heavy-handed American interference in the government’s
formation to discourage an attitude of dependence among Iraqi leaders.

During these [current] negotiations, diplomatic sensitivities
were played down as the envoy who succeeded Mr. Negroponte last summer,
Zalmay Khalilzad, acted as a tireless midwife in the birthing of the
new government. An Afghan-born scholar who worked on Iraq policy in
Washington prior to the invasion, Mr. Khalilzad worked closely with Mr. Maliki,
the new prime minister, in reviewing candidates for crucial ministries,
and shuttling between rival Iraqi party leaders in an effort to sign
them up to the American vision of a national unity government.

Um, how about Mr. Maliki’s vision of a national unity government? 
I thought he was the Iraqi Prime Minister??

But what about that “muscular” role? What an interesting choice of
adjective. I’d love to have someone specify more precisely what it
means…

Burns tells us how his unnamed “American officials” view the new
PM.  He writes that they,

privately hailed the transition of
power from Mr. Jaafari to Mr. Maliki. While the two men have similar
political pedigrees — both are members of a Shiite religious party,
Dawa, which was an early opponent of Mr. Hussein, and both fled Iraq in
the early 1980’s to escape a murderous purge of Dawa loyalists —
American officials who have dealt with both men expect Mr. Maliki to
bring to the post a level of competence, decisiveness and
straightforwardness they say was painfully lacking in Mr. Jaafari.


One thing that remains unclear is how much independence Mr.
Maliki will have from attempts to exercise oversight by Mr. Jaafari,
who remains the new prime minister’s political superior as Dawa’s
leader, and who resisted pressures to relinquish the government
leadership for weeks until all but his closest loyalists abandoned him.

Burns is an interesting reporter. He most likely doesn’t know
very much about Iraq at all apart from what the people in the US
administration in Baghdad tell him. But he is well connected to high
officials in the US administration there, and probably reports publicly
on a decent proportion of whatever it is he hears from them.

In that entire article today, he identified not a single
source by name. Instead, in his second paragraph there he indicated
only that it was based on conversations with “a wide range of
[American] officers and diplomats interviewed before Saturday’s
events.”

In his lede (lead paragraph), he conveyed what I read as a sense
among these people that the Bushist project in Iraq might well
fail rather badly over the months ahead:

As Iraq’s new government was announced Saturday,
some senior
American military and civilian officials watched from the sidelines,
apprehensive that they were witnessing what might be the last chance to
save the American enterprise in Iraq from a descent into chaos and
civil war.

Actually, though Burns names none of his sources for this article
by name, it is my assumption that one of the sources was most likely Khalilzad
himself. And if not Khalilzad, then one or more of his high-ranking
aides who were given permission by Khalilzad to speak to him.
I conclude this because there is a classic piece of Washingtonian
rear-end-covering included near the end of the article:

American officials temper their criticism of the
Jaafari
government with an acknowledgment that the Bush administration, with
its early hostility to “nation building” after the 2003 invasion, paid
scant attention to the need to help develop governmental competence,
and say that the past three years were largely squandered as a result.

In other words– if and when the whole US project in Iraq falls
apart disastrously, please don’t blame Khalilzad!

So Iraq has a new government— sort of.
That is, in Baghdad today, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented an intricately negotiated list of 37 government members to the parliament, which then approved it. What the list lacked, however, were names for the two positions most crucial to the wellbeing of the country’s people: Interior Minister and Defense Minister.
Ever since the entry of the US and coalition forces into the country and the accompanying collapse of the Saddamist power structures, the country’s most glaring problem has been the atrocious lack of public security. Without public security, the work of none of the other ministries has any chance of success. Therefore, I would say that until we see ministers in those two still unfilled positions (and I gather there is also a third unfilled position for national security affairs, too?) and moreover, until we see that these ministers and their ministries are capable of doing their jobs and empowered to do them, then the establishment of this “government” has little meaning.
This government, if it is ever to be able to govern Iraq, needs to succeed in addressing four tough challenges:

(1) to broker and then embody a real inter-Iraqi entente on the way the country will be governed;
(2) to codify that entente in a final version of the as-yet-incomplete national Constitution;
(3) to rebuild administrative structures for the ministries and all other government entities that are effective and capable (and preferably also fully democratically accountable– but see below) ; and
(4) to negotiate the modalities of the (preferably very speedy) withdrawal of all foreign forces and to take whatever other actions are needed to guard Iraq’s national sovereignty and independence from outside influence.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the status of the whole discussion in the west about the “democratization” project in Iraq. I have come quite strongly to the conclusion that the way the Iraqis govern themselves is really none of our business. I still feel very satisfied with the way the Allies forces used their occupations of Germany and Japan after World War 2 to help midwife the institution of robust democratic orders in those two countries, and I guess I have hoped that the same might be the case in Iraq.
But there were two crucial differences between those occupations of 1945 and the post-2003 occupation of Iraq:

(1) The broad strategic/historical context those earlier occupations was different. In 1945, the US and its Allies ended up in military control of Germany and Japan at the end of a bitterly fought war in many theaters which had been sparked by the antecedently aggressive and expansionist policies of the Axis powers. But in 2003 it was the US and its Allies which initiated the completely avoidable and gratuitous war which resulted in the US occupation of Iraq. In the present war/occupation, the US has no valid claim to be able to “impose its will” on the people of the occupied country by way of some form of “punishment” for the aggressive actions of their (previous) government.
(2) The policy of “imposed democratization” that the Allies pursued in Germany and Japan in 1945 was embedded in a broader, and very successfully implemented, policy of seeking the rebuilding and rehabilitation of those two societies. In Iraq, there may (or may not) have been some desire on the part of the Bush administration to rebuild and rehabilitate Iraqi society. But if there was such a desire, the actual policies pursued (and the resources deployed) were woefully unequal to the task. Once again, therefore, absent any serious and successful US commitment to the rehabilitation of Iraqi society, the US really loses any claim it might otherwise have had to be able to determine the shape of Iraq’s political future.

For me, therefore, at this time, the issue of Iraqi self-governance trumps the issue of whether Iraq is to be “democratic” or not. Don’t get me wrong. I sincerely hope the country can be democratically ruled, since I am strongly convinced that without having robust democratic governance mechanisms and strong norms of commitment to the democratic resolution of internal differences, then it will be hard for Iraqis to escape from the cycle of violence into which the events of the past three years have pushed them.
But honestly, since I am a citizen of the “occupying country” (okay, actually of two of the occupying countries), I have to say that what the Iraqis do right now is their business. It is none of my business except inasmuch as I can help persuade my government to undertake a withdrawal of its occupation armies from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.
(We also have many very urgent democracy-rebuilding tasks we need to undertake back here in the US… And if we focus our attentions on those more closely, that can have good effects for everyone involved, at home and abroad.)
In line with the above conclusion, I have decided to replace the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter that I used to have up on the sidebar here with an “Occupation of Iraq” counter, that counts the days since the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of the country. I thought I should complement that with an “Occupation of Palestine and Golan” counter, since it is clear that we are talking about the same phenomenon of rule of a territory and its indigenous residents by a foreign military apparatus in both (all) of these cases. As we can see from the counters, after around 200 more days, the US occupation of Iraq will have lasted 10 percent of the time of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Golan.
… So I wish Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki well. I hope most fervently that he and his colleagues can accomplish the four tasks I have described above. And I will follow their efforts with just the same degree of interest in the future.

My distinguished colleague Reidar Visser has a great new piece up on the ‘Open Democracy’ website. It’s titled Iraq’s partition fantasy. It presents– in the form of a strong but measured argument– some of the main themes in his book (which I have not yet finished reading, alas)… These are also themes that JWN readers are probably already familiar with from his comments here and from his other works as cited and linked to here.
What I really like about the new piece are three things: (1) Visser writing in “persuasive/opinion” mode rather than in the dryer tones of a professional historian (though of course he bases his opinions and arguments closely on his histroical and other work); (2) how well he writes these hard-hitting arguments; and (3) that he has put hyperlinks into the text. Yay!
He certainly does make some excellent arguments against the various partitionist “fantasies” suggested by politicians and armchair theorists in the west.
Visser’s book is about the lead-up to the attempt that some Basrawis (people from Basra) made in 1920 to form an indpendent city state– a sister, if you will, to the city-states then emerging all along the southern coast of the nearby Persian/Arabian Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Umm al-Qawain, Ras al-Khaima, etc etc. Certainly, compared with many of those “Imaras”– princedoms– Basra was much larger, more prosperous, and more populous… So it wasn’t prime facie a crazy idea. But it never went anywhere… And Visser’s book traces that whole story.
(I am really enjoying reading it. I love closely textured histories that have such a wealth of ethnographic and socio-political detail along with the diplomatic/administrative history.)
So anyway, in the OD piece, Visser looks at current developments– and proposals– in light of that history from 1920.
He writes:

Continue reading “Visser on Iraq-splitting plans in ‘Open Democracy’”

I’ve been a little AWOL here recently in commenting on political developments inside Iraq. I guess once the US machinations against Daawa/Sadr were rebuffed I figured that that was one significant watershed, and that Nuri al-Maliki’s subsequent work of government formation would be almost impossible to follow from a distance.
I do, however, have a couple of questions that I need answers to. And I invite readers to help us all find answers!
The first question is this: Even if supposing Maliki is able to pull together a coalition of government ministers that can win a robust majority in the parliament (not terribly difficult)– will it actually be able to govern the country?
I see two main problems in this regard: first, the still heavy hand of the US occupation presence throughout the country, including inside most of the important ministries; and second, the extreme degradation of the administrative and other capabilities of the ministries that has occurred under the US occupation to date. (Obviously, those two problems can’t be completely disaggregated.)
For example, if you’re even something as innocuous (and necessary) as the Minister of Agriculture, and you want to make sure that farmers are getting everything they need in terms of seeds, credit, fertilizers, marketing help, veterinary services, etc– well, how on earth do you do it unless you have a functioning ministry, the ability to communicate with all the parts of the country, reliable procurement mechanisms, etc etc?
… And my second big question is this: If, as is expected, Maliki announces his government over the weekend, do I take the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter down off the sidebar here at that point, or wait a bit before deciding that?
I guess this latter judgment has to do with whether I judge that the government has sufficient democratic legitimacy for me to take the counter down, or not. The whole concept of the counter was based on the judgment I’d make back in December that the vote then, though flawed, did have sufficient bona fides to be counted as democratically legitimate. (As I have written before in connection with developments in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in the context of a complex political transition what one is looking for is not a completely perfect election but one that is sufficiently free and fair.)
Anyway, regarding the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter, after I put up here in early 2005, during the complicated post-election negotiations that led to Ibrahim Jaafari’s formation of a broad “transitional government”– as soon as he had formed it, I took the counter down. I gave him the benefit of the doubt at that point, really.
But this time, the situation is more serious. This government is supposed to be “the real thing”: Iraq’s real, full-term, and presumably fully empowered national government. Not a “transitional” government any more.
But how fully empowered will it be in practice? (See my first question above.)
The views of readers on these points are very welcome…
Meanwhile, let’s all just note that it is now 154 days— just about five months– since the December 15 election. Given the decisive nature of the results of the election, coalition formation absolutely need not have lasted more than one month. So Amb. Zal Khalilzad’s machinations have robbed the Iraqis of four months of self-government already. And it is not just that those “stolen” four months were neutral ones for Iraqis. Indeed, nearly the whole of the past five months has seen a ghastly exacerbation of insecurity throughout the country…
End the occupation and all its machinations! Bring the US troops home!