I think that the tech advisor and I (principally him) have now solved the problems JWN commenters have been experiencing over the past week. I’m not sure if your comments will actually publish onto the blog any faster than they used to. But at least, they should not now give the impression of “timing out” by coming back at you with error messages. And the counting thingy should be working properly.
Thanks so much, TA! Now have a good and safe time for the rest of your snowboarding vacation.
Fight over Iraq election in new phase
As I noted here, back on Tuesday, one of the “meta-narratives” of what’s going on in Iraqi politics these days is the contest over the validity of the election conducted on December 15.
This contest has seen two quick new developments in the past couple of days. Yesterday, Craig Jenness, the Canadian national who’s been heading the UN’s election-support team in Iraq, declared publicly, at a press conference in Baghdad, that: “The United Nations is of the view that these elections were transparent and credible.”
Well, that sure sounded definitive. Case closed, you might think?
Think again.
Today, AP’s Patrick Quinn has reported that a new international group will now be traveling to Iraq to review the elections. The new group (or indeed, perhaps it isn’t totally new?), known as the the International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE) will reportedly include two representatives from the Arab League, one member of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians and a respected European academic, acording to (apparently) a spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front, described as “Iraq’s leading Sunni Arab group.”
Quinn also wrote that IMIE already did some monitoring of the elections, in Baghdad, where it had been “assisted by monitors from countries of the European Union working under IMIE’s umbrella.”
He wrote that the IMIE review team,
- will travel to Iraq at the invitation of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said a review could “evaluate what happened during the elections and what’s going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.”
… The invitation to review the process and about 1,500 complaints lodged by candidates and parties was welcomed by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who said “these experts will be arriving immediately and we are ready to assist them, if needed.”
I find this interesting at a number of levels. The dispute over the validity of the election process is the main political issue, right now, that divides Iraq’s Sunni Arabs from its Shiite Arabs. Most Shiite pols (and Ayatollah Sistani) have thus far insisted adamantly that the process– which gave their main party, the UIA, a strong victory– was entirely fair, and the Sunnis have contested its fairness with equal or greater vehemence.
As I noted in a comment on this JWN post, Dec. 20, the possible divergence of views between the Sunni parties and the Sadrist trend within the UIA over the validity of the elections could indeed be a factor that prevents these two trends from taking any broader joint action in the political field… And if those two trends are unable to work together, then we might as well all say goodbye to any hopes for the survival of a single Iraqi state.
The Kurds, meanwhile, are probably just as happy as anything to see this issue dividing Iraq’s large majority of ethnic Arabs into two bitterly anatagonistic factions.
The story of the new, non-UN “international election-monitoring group” is interesting, too, for what it tells us about Khalilzad’s current strategies. He has visited both Saudi Arabia and one of the small Arab Gulf countries in the past couple of days– I forget which. (Though you’d never know about any of that if you read only the US mainstream media, whose reporting from Iraq has been really terrible over the past couple of weeks.)
Khalilzad seems to be trying hard to bring at least some of the Iraqi Sunni political class into the political tent that he’s creating in Baghdad. That’s been really difficult, and was made harder by the fact that the Sunni pols judged that the many complaints they had lodged about election fraud with the Iraqi electoral commission had not been considered with anything like enough seriousness by the commission.
I wonder, btw, why Craig Jenness was so quick off the mark to issue his apparent “certificate of a good practice” in public yesterday? Given the chaotic security situation inside Iraq before, during, and since the election, I honestly wonder on what basis Jenness felt able to render such a speedy and near-definitive judgment on the matter? But anyway, the UN’s election-monitoring unit has been in internal chaos for the past couple of years, culminating in the abrupt termination of its Director, Carina Perelli, just a few weeks ago, on charges of gross mismanagement, so it is hard to know what actual expertise the unit still retains at this point.
So anyway, Khalilzad almost certainly helped– with the aid of his hosts in the Gulf countries he’s been visiting– to cook up the plan for the “new”, and notably non-UN, election review process. My main guess is that he’s playing desperately for time… trying to find any way possible to find a way to, (a) get some credible Sunni pols into the next government and (b) persuade the UIA to let this happen.
All the very technical business about whether there was electoral fraud or not would, I am sure, be rapidly swept under the carpet if only he could find a way to bring about the political outcome he seeks. (So much for “democracy”.)
Meanwhile, many Sunni pols have been feeling deeply deceived by the thus-far-declared results of the election. And as this report from today’s al-Hayat makes clear, the militants inside the Sunni community have been quick off the mark to deride and threaten all the Sunni pols who had argued that participating in the elections could bring the Sunni community results of some serious political value.
Basically, that article (bylined Mushriq Abbas) says that since the election results have started to come out, opinion in the Sunni community has swung strongly toward the hardliners. Abbas reported that “the Partisans of the Sunna” (which he describes as close to al-Qaeda-in-Iraq) and the “Army of the Mujaheds” (which he describes as close to the “Islamic Army”) issued their first ever joint declaration that stated derisively that “The mountain of the elections labored mightily and gave birth to a mouse!” and “Those who ran after a mirage [i.e. who took part in the elections] have ended up only as chess pieces in the hands of their masters.”
The article also says that the declaration’s authors admitted that they had agreed to suspend armed operations during the period of the elections (as he describes it, this was “in deference to the popular will”) but that now, essentially all bets were off, and all mujaheds should just once again place their lives in the hands of God (i.e., resume their armed jihad.)
… So anyway, that’s just a little part of what Khalilzad now finds himself dealing with. It would be hard for anyone to be able to find a way to persuade all the different groupings and interests that have emerged inside Iraq to come to some agreement at this point. But an American viceroy, representing a government that has been responsible for inflicting massive suffering and harm on the Iraqi Sunni community continuously over the past 33 months, is probably one of the worst-placed mediators one could imagine.
Post-election Iraq, Part 2
[I just re-arranged the order in what follows, late Wednesday. Same content though. ~HC]
The two big narratives
As I see it, there are two big mega-stories currently dominating Iraqi politics, with a lot of criss-crossing other narratives going on within each of them, as well as between them.
The two big ones are:
- (1) the continuing contest over the legitimacy of the election process itself, and
(2) the contest within the victorious Shiite mega-list over the policies it should pursue (as well as over the linked issue of who gets which job in the new government).
Regarding the second of those narratives, JWN readers would do well to go down to this recent post, where the well-informed Norwegian researcher Reidar Vissar has now posted two additional comments that describe his own increasing understanding of the power-balances within the UIA… Bottom line there: SCIRI is actually not as strong inside the UIA as many people seem to assume. Check out Vissar’s analysis there!
Regarding the first narrative, Iyad Allawi and the Sunni parties have been very busy in recent days marshaling the forces that question the integrity of major aspects of the election process.
Those parties have formed a new coalition called Mu’tamar al-Rafideen lil-Intikhabat al-Muzawwafa (Maram– the Conference of those rejecting forged elections), that has called for a re-run of the vote in Baghdad Province and elsewhere. Maram pols recently held a planning meeting in Amman, Jordan (a significant location for them); and today they organized a demonstration in western Baghdad which drew either “at least 5,000 particiapnts” (AFP), or “more than 10,000” (AP).
I think it’s great that Sunnis, secularists, and supporters of a non-sectarian Iraqi state pursue their grievances through the means of peaceful demonstrations (and of course, the ballot-box.) I have to say, though, that on the scale of events of a similar type in Iraq since March 2003, these numbers seem pitifully low. The Sadrists have put hundreds of thousands of supporters onto the streets at the drop of a hat, a number of times; and Sistani pulled out ways more than a million back in (was it?) late 2003.
Juan Cole wrote today that the Maram gathering in Amman agreed to, “inform the Arab League Secretary General, Amr Moussa, of their demands that the election be held all over again in the provinces where widespread fraud occurred, especially in the northern cities and in Basra and Baghdad… They are also planning to write a letter to Kofi Annan.”
He also cited al-Sharq al-Awsat as reporting that Maram pols Allawi, Adnan Dulaimi, and Saleh Mutlaq had decided “to boycott parliamentary sessions in an effort to paralyze it if it will not heed their demands.”
Juan’s comment on this boycott plan was this:
Good times at Christmas
We were planning a pretty quiet Christmas, having had all the kids and their signifcant others here for Thanksgiving. We were thinking it would just be Bill, me, and our youngest, Lorna.
On December 24 I was just finishing writing this JWN post when who should come clattering up the stairs to my office but my elder daughter and her husband, who had just made the 7-hour drive from New York to come here for a surprise visit. How fabulous! We spent three days luxuriating in being together.
Saturday evening we had some good friends over and played some excellent rounds of charades after dinner. Sunday, the five of us opened our presents under the tree … I dashed off alone to Quaker meeting, which was a good one… we all spent a bunch of time cooking together and eating. (One vegetarian, two fishetarians, two carnivores… the food just piles up.)
We also spent a bunch of time doing crosswords (the daughters), competing at cut-throat Perquackey (Bill and I), and playing a little more gently a couple of good free-form Scrabble variants that we all enjoy. I think we all prefer the free-form variants over the real thing at this point. Real Scrabble just feels too darn ponderous.
I even decided to put good instructions for them over at Wikipedia. Here and here.
Solstices
Many people have noted the synchronicity of Christmas with other midwinter festivals and observances. And yes, there is something good and hopeful for people living a distance from the Equator as we come to the point in the year when the days, which have been drawing ominously shorter, start once again to lengthen.
We experienced that in New Zealand, too, this year, back in June.
But thinking about this made me think about the general, highly inequitable power relationships over the past 350 years between (some of the) people who are indigenes of nothern climes and just about all of those who indigenes of southern climes. These inequitable relations run across the entire arena of human affairs including economics, politics, and culture…
What kind of midsummer observances are indigenous southerners marking at this time of year?
And then, there are the whole swathe of cultures that grew up fairly close to the Equator, where changes in day-length or sun-angle are less important than the cycle of rainy seasons, monsoons, etc. Those don’t really track with solstices at all, though they generally have their own annual rhythm. I wonder what kinds of festivals and observances the various indigenous cultures of those climes would be marking right now?
Anyway, we’re now coming up to the (Roman-origined) New Year, too… All of these are fine occasions to do some reflection and stock-taking, and think about our wishes and commitments for the year ahead.
This past year has seen the continued, massive perpetration of violence in many of the world’s continents, and humankind’s continued engagement in practices that are highly inequitable among the world’s different peoples. But it also started to see some early checking of the exercise of unilateral U.S. power and the emergence within the US citizenry of new questioning about the nature, uses, and abuses of that power at home and abroad. In 2006, I hope we see much more of this questioning and continued work towards the building of a worldwide movement for nonviolence and human equality.
And though we Quakers don’t stick to a fixed liturgical calendar, we do (as I noted earlier) tend to think at this time of year about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth… A great and gentle teacher, a proponent of nonviolence, and a consistent advocate for human equality. He must be rubbing his eyes in sheer amazement at the many terrible things that have been done in his name– over past centuries, and down into 2005, as well.
Some server problems here
We’ve been having some minor server problems here the past couple of days. If you try to post a comment you may get a “500 internal server error” message back. It’s quite probable, though, that despite that message your comment will have been posted onto the correct page successfully.
But also, the counter thingy that tells you on the front page the number of comments on each post has been failing to count the newly posted comments.
So there may be many recently posted comments on the blog that you’re not aware of. (Including, possibly, ones you may have posted yourself and gotten the “500 internal server error” message for.)
Sorry about this glitch in service. Keep posting your comments! My trusty tech advisor and I will continue trying to fix this.
Legality and the Saddam trial
Throughout many long portions of its life, Saddam Hussein’s regime had a record as a rights abuser and perpetrator of atrocities equaled by few other governments in the world. Under most circumstances I would be delighted to see a person like that not just incapacitated (by being under arrest) but also on trial, and confronted with as full as possible a record of how much sheer misery his actions had inflicted on other people.
The trial now underway in Baghdad, however, has many flaws; and not the least of these is the fact that it attempts to create an impression of lawfulness in a situation marked indelibly with the politics of “might makes right”.
The international human-rights community seems fairly deeply split over the issue of this trial. (Or is that only the way it looks from here inside the US?) Many rights advocates around the world focus on the illegality of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as a factor that has irreparably tainted this court— which is indubitably a US creation (with a tiny, supplementary input from Brits and from Iraqis)– and prevents it from having have any recognized legal standing as a rights-based body. Other rights advocates have focused more on details like the weaknesses in the IST’s due-process protections or its power of capital punishment.
Yet other rights advocates, however– and these are mainly US nationals– seem to have been so enamored with the idea of “pushing forward the practice of atrocities law” and/or with the success of the US “project” in Iraq, that they have been quite happy to leap with a single bound over all those pesky questions about the “legality” of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, or the “weaknesses” in the court’s procedures, etc, and to give their full support to the IST throughout. Some of these individuals– including, for example, Michael Scharf of Case Western Reserve University Law School in Ohio– even took on the task of providing specialized training in atrocities law for the IST’s judges and investigators, on behalf of the US occupation authorities.
The questions about the underlying legality of the court’s operations have not, however, gone away– and neither has the discussion within the community of US-based human-rights lawyers over whether this issue indeed still needs to be addressed square-on by the IST itself before the court can proceed any further with its work, or not.
Last week there was a revealing discussion of this over at “Grotian Moment“, a specialized blog in which a panel of US-based law profs discusses the Saddam Trial from time to time.
In that post I linked to there, half a dozen of the blog’s author’s discuss the question, Who Won the Battle of Wills In the December Proceedings of the Saddam Trial? Well, the post was dated Dec. 14, so they didn’t have quite all the evidence they needed at that point. But in broad terms, the court’s proceedings of yesterday and today don’t seem to have changed very much in the trial.
The most interesting parts of that discussion, imho, are the contributions made by Cherif Bassiouni, a very eminent Egyptian-American legal scholar whom I have had the privilege of working with a little bit, and Leila Sadat, a law prof who is also (I think) an Egyptian-American.
Here’s what they said:
Saddam trial: Iran’s opening bid
So now, Teheran has started making a big push to have its many, very serious grievances against Saddam put onto the docket of the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST).
The report linked to there came from Iran’s Mehr News Agency. It quoted Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki as saying on Wednesday that his ministry would be presenting a formal complaint to the IST concerning Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian personnel during the eight-year war that followed Saddam’s September 1980 invasion of Iran.
Mottaki claimed that,
- “During the war, Saddam used chemical weapons against Iran 200 times, which left 100,000 people chemically disabled,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki said here on Wednesday.
… “The Islamic Republic was the main victim of chemical weapons. It is evident that Saddam carried out all the atrocities against Iran with the help of Western companies and countries,” he added.
Mottaki was speaking to reporters after he’d paid a visit to one of the two Teheran hospitals that still today, 20 years after the event, are needed to provide specialized treatment to CW-affected Iranians. The report continued:
- “Western countries and companies that supplied Saddam with chemicals share the responsibility for this crime,” Mottaki said.
“Saddam acquired chemicals from more than 400 Western companies, including 25 American, 15 German, 10 British, 3 Dutch, 3 Swiss, and 2 French companies.”
Iran is deeply concerned about the influence of its archenemy, the United States, on the trial of Saddam, he added.
“We are concerned about the way the court is trying these war criminals, and America’s pressure on the court (to ignore Iran’s demand).
“Iran is closely observing the trial,” he said.
We should all understand that Iran’s claims about the Saddam regime’s large-scale use of CW against Iranians in the 1980s have been well authenticated by numerous well-informed sources, even if the “100,000” casualties may (or may not) be an exaggeration. For example, check this May 1984 report by SIPRI; or this November 1986 report from the CIA (as posted today on a Pentagon website); or this January 2003 article by an Armed Forces Press Service reporter, also posted on a Pentagon website.
Use of chemical weapons is a war crime. And do I need to note here that many hundreds as many Iranians died from Saddam’s use of CW as died in that outrageous and repressive (but actually, fairly “small”) incident in Dujail for which Saddam is now being tried?
Mottaki’s request to have Iran’s massive charges concerning the Saddam regime’s CW use heard by the court is significant– as its timing. Inasmuch as he is trying to have Iran accepted as complainant in the trial, he is probably trying to wrest some control of its proceedings away from the US authorities who have dominated it thus far (and who can confidently be expected to be extremely reluctant to have the details of Saddam’s 1980s dealings with US and other western chemical companies be aired in open court.) But at the same time, Mottaki is notably not challenging either the legitimacy of the court or even the details of the (largely US-designed) “statute” that guides its work.
For example, the Iranians could also have brought a fairly strong case against Saddam on the grounds that he initiated a quite unwarranted invasion of their country in 1980. But so far they haven’t sought to do that. Indeed, to do that would require a change in the court’s Statute, which gives it the right to try only war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and a very structly limited kind of “crime of aggression”– namely, aggression against a fellow Arab country, which Iran isn’t but which Kuwait is.
The timing of Mottaki’s announcement is significant for at least two reasons. First, it comes as Iraq is in quite a degree of post-election political turmoil– and at a time when Saddam’s trial has become a more important issue within internal Iraqi politics than ever before. Asserting Iran’s interest in the trial at this time therefore has many ramifications in terms of the increase Iran seeks in the already large amount of influence that it wields over Iraq’s politics.
And second, this announcement comes as the western powers are increasing their efforts to contain and roll back an Iranian nuclear program that may or may not be intended to produce an Iranian nuclear arsenal. At such a time, to remind the western powers that Iran is the only state in modern times to have actually suffered large-scale CW attacks from a belligerent neighbor is a not-subtle way of reminding them that Iran may indeed have a better “rationale” for acquiring a nuclear deterrent than any of the existing nuclear-weapons states has, since none of them has suffered such an attack on their personnel since WW-1. (Indeed, in that press conference linked to above, Mottaki segued effortlessly from talking about the Iranian CW casualties to talking about the nuclear issue.)
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Mottaki’s announcement will actually be followed up by Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad making the formal request to the court…
Politics inside the UIA (south)
Reidar Vissar is a Norwegian historian whose knowledge of southern Iraq I have admired in the past. Today he has a fascinating new text on his website, in which he analyzes the results as released so far of the elections, as viewed primarily in the south. His work makes a good, much more detailed complement to the post I put up here on Tuesday with some gleanings of info about the politics within the UIA list.
His first big comment is that there, as elsewhere, Allawi’s more secular list has lost out big-time to the UIA. (I wonder to what extent Allawi’s better showing last January and poorer showing this time are due to the well-known advantages of incumbency? To a large extent, I expect.)
Vissar looks in detail at Basra and two other provinces and writes this:
- the UIA looks set to walk away with 13 of 16 seats in Basra, 10 (possibly 11) of 12 in Dhi Qar, and 6 out of 7 in Maysan. Allawi’s list will probably get 2 seats in Basra and 1 in each of the two neighbouring governorates, whereas an independent Sadrist grouping (list 631) will compete fiercely with the UIA for the last seat in Dhi Qar. Finally, the Iraqi Accord Front, a mostly Sunni party with Islamist leanings, seems certain to get one seat in Basra, where the poor performance of Allawi’s allies may indicate that Sunnis who boycotted in January now have voted largely along sectarian lines. (The more secular Sunni alternative, list 667, could only muster around 1,000 voters across the three southern governorates).
He then turns his attention to the balances inside the UIA:
- It is often assumed that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is the leading force within the UIA. A closer look at the affiliations of the representatives likely to represent Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar shows just how misleading this interpretation is for the south. Only 2 out of the 29 UIA candidates whose seats seem secure have a clear association with SCIRI, and an additional two from the institutionally independent Badr Brigades can be considered as being close to SCIRI. That means that more than 80% of UIA deputies from the south will have other, non-SCIRI, loyalties. Of these, 7 are Sadrists loyal to the radical Islamist Muqtada al-Sadr, 6 are members of the Fadila Party (a competing Sadrist party whose spiritual guiding light is the cleric Muhammad al-Yaqubi) 5 belong to a breakaway faction of the Daawa Party, 3 are from the mother branch of that organisation (also the party of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister), and then there are 4 Islamist independents.
So that would give us:
- SCIRI + pro-SCIRI: 4
Sadrists (both flavors): 13
Daawa + breakaway: 8 (don’t know if the breakaway might have swung to Sadr or elsewhere, though?)
Vissar goes on to assess the effects of this outcome on the plans the SCIRI leaders have declared, to try to create a Shiite “super-region” out of 9 or so of Iraq’s existing provinces (governorates.) He notes that elsewhere in the UIA there is support for other outcomes– principally, either keeping the powers of the central state strong, or the establishment of a ‘small’, south-concentrated region of three governorates, rather than SCIRI’s favored super-region.
His conclusion is:
- despite the indications of an overwhelming UIA election victory in the south, the tripartite model of an ethnically divided Iraq federation may still get competition from older federal designs. These include the non-sectarian “administrative” federation of 5–7 medium-sized entities (with which the small-sized 3-governorate southern region plan would harmonise) as well as the long-established scheme for a bi-national Arab–Kurdish union. The election results also have implications for Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim and SCIRI: they may yet find themselves facing some quite unexpected obstacles in their struggle for supremacy over the Islamist political scene among Iraq’s Shiites.
I think that in order to get a more definitive picture of the politics within the UIA and their ramifications, we still need to get a breakdown of the votes and UIA candidates in other regions– especially Baghdad!– that is as detailed as the one Vissar provides here for the south. But if his figures and analysis are more or less accurate (given that the final results are not yet in), and the patterns he describes in the three southern provinces are representative of what has happened in other strongly UIA parts of the country, then I think his conclusions are sound.
Thanks so much for sending me that link, Reidar! (Nice site you have there, too.)
Does anyone out there have the kind of additional information we need?