Many commentators are writing about the process involved in the present Iraq draft constitution being one of “federalizing democratization” or “democratizing federalism”. It is no such thing. To federate means “to come together for joint action”. It is what happens when functioning, pre-existing states come together in a strong way, pooling many aspects of their soveriegnty into a broader, federated union… Like the 13 US states, in 1787, after they found that their previous “articles of confederation” were too weak. Or the “United Arab Emirates”: 7 small existing states that came together in the early 1970s to pool their respective capabilities.
What the present draft constitution proposes for Iraq is the exact opposite. It is the breakup of many key attributes of Iraqi soveriegnty and their division among a still unknown number of smaller, new sub-entities. It is incorrect to call this process “federation”; it is more rightly called devolution.
What the present draft constitution proposes for Iraq is a breakup very similar to what happened with the breakup of Bosnia into ethnically distinct sub-entities, or the partition of India into India and Pakistan, or the still-continuing breakup of the previous “Soviet Russian Federation”, including in Chechnya.
When initiated by democratic governments that enjoy real political legitimacy– Britain recently, or Spain in the years after democratization– devolution can enhance democratic participation and accountability at many levels. But when initiated under less ideal political circumstances, this breaking-up process can lead to fierce contestation over the newly-drawn internal borders and access to resources, mounting fear and mistrust, and a desire for ethnic-religious homogeneity within the various zones that can can all too easily lead to widespread or even near-complete campaigns of ethnic or sectarian “cleansing”.
The cycle(s) of violence that are launched may take many decades to lose their ferocity.
(By the way, I took the title of this post from a good novel by Bapsi Sidhwa about the pain of the Indian partition: Cracking India.)
And guess what? It is not only Iraq that’s on the neo-con’s menu for “cracking”… Now, some of the cracked-headed among them want to try the same formula in Iran, too…
Well, that’s what Michael Ledeen, the sleazy author of the Iran-Contra scandal and various other ignominious and illegal escapades, is now proposing. On October 26, Ledeen is moderating a conference on the topic at the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-con powerhouse where he’s hung his hat for several years now. The conference is titled The Unknown Iran: Another Case for Federalism? and it involves a roster of apparently exile-Iranian scholars of whom nobody I know ever seems to have heard. (Any further info on those individuals from JWN readers gratefully received.)
Well, there you have it. Occupation-encouraged “cracking” is evidently working so well in Iraq these days (irony alert, folks)– why not tempt Iranians into trying it in their country, too?
G. Achcar on present risks in Iraq & Saudi Arabia
Gilbert Achcar’s latest despatch warns us regarding Saturday’s upcoming referendum in Iraq that:
- whether the [constitutional] draft passes the referendum or not, there will be a largely autonomous Shiite entity in Southern and Central Iraq, in control of the major part of Iraqi oil reserves and allied with Iran. When one bears in mind the fact that the bulk of Saudi oil reserves are located in the Shiite-majority Eastern province of the US-protected Saudi Kingdom, one gets to realize the full extent of what is more and more of a nightmare for Washington.
Anyway, big thanks to Gilbert for sending us yet another update. The translations and analysis that he provides here are really helpful. They provide useful background to everything the English-language MSM is telling us about the maneuverings by Khalilzad, the Arab league etc., in the run-up to the referendum.
So here, starting with a couple of pleasant little literary flourishes, are the three parts of today’s despatch:
1) Gulliver in Iraq —for how long?
US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay
Khalilzad, best epitomizes the actual status of the US occupation
of Iraq, which looks more and more indeed, in its relation to Iraqi Shiites
and Sunnis, like Gulliver among
Lilliputians and Blefuscudans (Google shows that the reference to Gulliver
with regard to Iraq is already very frequent—you know how this episode of
Gulliver’s Travels ended)
.
After having meddled very unsuccessfully in Iraqi haggling over the draft
constitution, and proved unable to convince the Shiite parties to water down
their own demands in order to get an impossible consensus, the Ambassador
is terrified at the result he could not prevent. One more time, the US is
proving to be an “apprentice-sorcerer” in the Middle East (after so many
decades of failed apprenticeship, it is high time for the US government to
quit this ambition).
From the very beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the US administration has
sought to apply the classical imperial recipe of “divide and rule.” In order
to be successful, such a game needs smart Machiavellian players: definitely
not what you’ve got in
Washington
. The result now is that, whether the draft passes the referendum or not,
there will be a largely autonomous Shiite entity in Southern and Central
Iraq, in control of the major part of Iraqi oil reserves and allied with
Iran. When one bears in mind the fact that the bulk of Saudi oil reserves
are located in the Shiite-majority Eastern province of the US-protected Saudi
Kingdom, one gets to realize the full extent of what is more and more of a
nightmare for Washington.
For those who do not know about the Saudi Eastern province, here are excerpts
from a
good Wikipedia
description:
Continue reading “G. Achcar on present risks in Iraq & Saudi Arabia”
Rats and sinking ships
This important piece by Tim Phelps of Newsday highlights the disillusionment that three key, previous ultra-hawks– Kanan Makiya, Rend Rahim (Francke), and Danielle Pletka– are now expressing about the situation inside Iraq, including the contents of the draft constitution. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for noting Tim’s story.)
Kanan and Rend are both Iraqi-Americans… Kanan was probably the leading “liberal” intellectual validator of the whole project of the US invading Iraq (but now admits he earlier misunderstood some key aspects of the Baath Party control system there…. Thanks for telling us, Kanan.)
Rend was the woman who famously, in the run-up to the war, said she hoped to ride atop the first US tank to enter Baghdad. She didn’t do that but was for a while Allawi’s pick to be Iraqi Ambassador to the US.
Pletka is a different kind of political personality. An intensely pro-Likud Jewish-American, she worked a while as Sen. Jesse Helms’s chief foreign-affairs aide and is now Vice-President at key neo-con power-house the American Enterprise Institute. She has outraged people throughout the Arab world by, e.g., insisting on walking through very socially conservative downtown Gaza in a mini-skirt, or going to various capital cities and lecturing heads of government on how they should run their countries. (Oh, and did I mention she was a key advocate of the war?)
I don’t consider any of these three to be, literally, “rats”; and I have some lingering admiration for Kanan, whom I’ve met a couple of times, though I always thought he was more than a little naive.
But if these three individuals are now openly quitting the “ship” of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, then I have to say the ship is headed rapidly for the depths.
(This whole phenomenon seems eerily similar to, and parallel with, the ire that social conservatives are launching against Bush re the Harriet Miers nomination… Interesting, huh?)
Iraqi referendum: a question
Given the truly terrible security situation in many or most of the majority-Sunni parts of Iraq, and concomitant inability of reputable international election-monitoring organizations to field anything like a satisfactory presence of monitors around the country– then if the “no” vote in the majority-Sunni provinces in next Saturday’s referendum on the “constitution” is announced as being not sufficient to block the constitution’s implementation, why should anyone, including Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and their backers and friends elsewhere, be expected to accept the validity of that result?
I’m just asking the question. I guess around this time next week we’ll start to see what the answer might be…
Disasters, natural and man-made
The death toll from yesterday’s earthquake in eastern Pakistan already stands at “more than 20,000 people” and is expected to rise. This IRIN story says:
- About 19,400 people were killed and more than 42,000 hurt in Pakistan, Reuters quoted interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, as saying, with the divided territory of Kashmir and its capital Muzaffarabad worst hit. But the communications minister for Pakistani Kashmir, Tariq Farooq, said the toll there alone could reach 30,000 as the focus so far had been only on the main towns, not mountain villages. At least another 600 people died in the Indian side of Kashmir, where many mud and stone houses were buried by landslides.
On Tuesday, torrential rains and mudslides hit Central America, leaving at least 640 people dead. With 338 people still listed as “missing” in Guatemala alone, it seems very likely the regionwide death toll there will rise above 1,000.
It seems clear to, from my 23 years living in the US, that the Gulf of Mexico storm systems have been getting fiercer in recent years. Central America already got hit very badly back in May… and then we had Katrina and Rita… In September 2004, and September 2003 there were previous bad hurricane systems in the Gulf of Mexico…
And it is less than a year since the South Asian tsunami…
Can’t we all ask our political leaders to, please, take a few deep breaths and then start focusing on protecting humankind from these kinds of disasters, and from the others like avian flu that might be “waiting in the wings”, instead of continuing to wage wars and foment tensions that may well lead to the waging of wars in the future?
Of course, some of the worse natural disasters will always continue to have significant death tolls. But the death tolls from all disasters can be greatly reduced by taking steps like using suitable building methods, enforcing of building codes, installation of early warning systems, planning and implementation of evacuation schemes– and also, steps like long-term ecological planning that could reverse the effects of decades of deforestation in a place like Central America, and could slow down and then hopefully also reverse the effects of global warming.
You could say that an event like the mud-slides that have killed so many this past week in Guatemala– or even, the ferocity of many of the storm-systems now coming out of the Gulf of Mexico– is a combination of a natural and a man-made disaster.
And how about the continuing (and largely avoidable) death toll from disease and malnourishment in vast swathes of Africa: is that the result of “natural” or “man-made” factors? Well, however you choose to describe these phenomena, there are known human actions that could be taken, that would massively reduce the numbers of those deaths… So in a sense, if the world– we, us, and primarily the well-resourced portion of humanity– does not take those steps, then we must bear some responsibility for the deaths of those children, women, and men.
Instead of which… There are George Bush and Tony Blair waging war and causing multiple new cascades of death and disaster in Iraq… there’s Vladimir Putin waging war in Chechnya, and the Chinese playing potentially escalatory war-games around Taiwan… Talk about man-made disasters!
Enough! Those four leaderships make up 80% of the “Permanent Five” who hold the fate of humankind in their hands. (And the French have done plenty of bad things in their time, too.)
So okay, the P-5, when are you going to get your collective act together, declare a moratorium on your own new arms acquisitions, on your transfers of arms to other parties, and on you continued pursuit of war? When are you going to declare a worldwide humanitarian ceasefire, and call the nations of the world together to discuss:
- 1. The resolution of all outstanding conflicts by nonviolent means, and
2. The mobilization of the resources of all the nations to end global poverty and strengthen the resilience of all communities worldwide to the ever-stalking ghosts of hunger, disease, ecological disaster, and war.
It so easily could be done. All it would take is a slight shift of mindset… “An injury to one is an injury to all”– but on a truly global scale.
JWN site design things
This past week has been a time for tweaking the HTML on many aspects of both this blog and the new group blog, Transitional Justice Forum.
You’ll see I’ve changed a couple of things on the sidebar here, which I do from time to time. One of the most useful things I did on JWN, though, was to make the “Topics” index much more useful. Instead of coming up with an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y lengthy fulltext version of all the posts that I’ve filed under each particular category, it now comes up with just a listing, with each item followed by the standard RSS-style excerpt of the post in question.
If you haven’t used the “Topics” index before, you’ll find it down near the bottom of the right sidebar.
So do we still need the sidebar’s listing of ‘JWN Golden Oldies’, I wonder? I haven’t actually added anything to it since the end of 2003… the items on it are become more olden-and-golden with every month that passes. It was kind of a pain to pull it together month by month, back when I was doing it. Maybe I should just let the Topics listing and the MT Search capability do their job and forget the Golden Oldies. (Or I could put their listing into a simple link-to file rather than having them all right there on the sidebar.)
Could the site use a second sidebar, I wonder?
More on Topics’, aka ‘Categories’… I see this MT3.2 that I now have allows for sub-categories as well as main categories… I had tried for something of the same effect recently when I decided to add date-based listings to the main “Iraq” category, which had become completely unwieldy… But it’s not nearly as unwieldy now that I have the excerpt-only delivery system. So I’ve got a couple of different options with “Iraq” now, that I need to sort out… Also, since the Categories (Topics) now do look so much more useful than hitherto, I should go through the whole JWN archive and try to make sure the categories (including multiple categories) are appropriately assigned and indeed appropriately chosen… Sounds like more fairly detailed work… for someone…
Anyway, now that I’m thinking about all this stuff, do send in your comments, reactions, and suggestions re the design of the site. And if you’d like to help with checking out the Category assignations for the archive, or have some good ideas ideas about the present choice of items under Categories, please let me know about that, as well.
Netherlands still hosts NTFU site, despite Wilson arrest
I just checked, and the NTFU website is still up and operating today, even though its owner, Chris Wilson, was arrested yesterday. I think his servers are in the Netherlands. I imagine the anti-obscenity laws there are laxer than in most US jurisdictions.
But how about their anti-war crimes legislation there? I imagine that is much tighter and more effective than in most domestic US jurisdictions?
So can’t we persuade the prosecutors in the Netherlands to go after this site and close it down?
Anyone?
If you go to this page on the NTFU site, you will learn:
- 1. That whereas access to most of the “sex-trophy” pictures requires registration, and thus presumably also the payment of some fees, access to the two areas titled Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – General and Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – Gory require no registration and are thus available to anyone. (Also, at least one of the images in the latter category combines gory war-trophyism with sexual lewdness in a really troubling way.)
2. The site has 191,000 registered users.
Of course, it is quite possible that if the site gets shut down in the Netherlands, it would merely migrate to some less-policed corner of the globe. But does Netherlands really want to be known as the home of trophy-displaying war criminals like the ones posting their photos there?
A final point. Though I think it is very important that these photos be taken down off the web, it is even more important that US forces operating all around the world cease engaging in the torture and abuse of detainees that is continuing, to this day. For this to happen, as I have always argued, we need clear and unequivocal leadership from the very top…
And if there are to be prosecutions of US government personnel, these should go right up the chain of command to the very top and not be limited to the misguided grunts down at the bottom.
NTFU website owner arrested
Chris Wilson, the Florida man who owns and runs the NTFU body-part pornsite, was arrested yesterday by the police in Polk County, Florida.
(That site was the one that posted grisly pictures of dead Iraqis and Afghans interspersed with links to other forms of photographic “trophies”, that is the sexual tropies of its numerous male participants… See how JWN helped break this story in late August, here.)
Wilson was charged with one count of wholesale distribution of obscene material and 300 misdemeanor counts related to 20 online films and 80 photographs obtained from his Web site. Bail was set at $151,000.
However, this Orlando Sentinel story revealed today that,
- Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said late Friday that the 300 obscenity-related charges against Wilson all involve sexual content on his Web site — and not graphic war-scene images posted by soldiers.
Sentinel reporter Anthony Colarossi added that,
- Judd said his obscenity charges have nothing to do with the Army’s interest in the case, and he maintained in a lengthy interview that he was not pressured to investigate Wilson.
“We unilaterally initiated the investigation without any support, help or encouragement from the federal government,” Judd said.
… Before Wilson’s arrest, Polk County Judge Angela Cowden found probable cause that the images and tapes were obscene, Judd said. The obscenity statute is one of the few in which a judge must make such a determination before an arrest is made. Investigators also obtained a search warrant and removed computers from Wilson’s home.
They will be looking for customer lists and other documents to assist the investigation. Information that Army investigators might need in their search will be made available, Judd said.
Though Wilson’s equipment was removed, his Web site remained in operation Friday because the servers used to run the site are overseas.
“It’s never our intent to put somebody out of business,” Judd said. “All we ask is that they obey the laws of Florida. We’ve been investigating vice and pornography long enough to know pretty much what crosses the line. This didn’t just cross the line. This left the line many miles behind.”
It should be an interesting case. When Chris Wilson came onto this JWN comments board back in August, he argued about the pictures of body-parts of dead Iraqis and Afghans on his site that:
- I think everyone should see them. This is a side of the war that is shown from the soldiers THEMSELVES. Where else can you go see that? Right now all we see are pics from the media. I don’t like the media feeding me things, I want to see first hand what’s going on there.
No one making you look, if you don’t like it; don’t look. You know exactly what you are going to see when you go there. There are no tricks, it’s spelled out in plain english.
His lawyer was quoted as saying much the same thing in Colarossi’s story. (Hat-tip to JS who sent me the tip-off on the arrest story.)
HC column on risk of broad Iranian-Arab war
My latest column for al-Hayat was posted on their English-language website Thursday. I’m not sure which day it was in their Arabic edition, but most likely a little earlier…
- Update Sunday a.m.: Actually it is in the October 9 edition. Thanks to Gilbert Achcar for that link.
In the column, I warned of the danger of another full-scale war breaking out between “Iran” (though perhaps, to be more specific, with some ethnic-Arab Shiites also in their camp) and the “Arab world”, with this war spurred by, and indeed also foreshadowed by, the existing grave Sunni-Shiite tensions inside Iraq.
From this perspective, the ghastly sectarian killings that are already taking place inside Iraq could just be a small prelude to what many countries in the region might see in the months ahead.
The “transmission belts”, if you like, for this magnification of sectarian strife, have already started to appear. We have had Jordan’s (Sunni) King Abdullah II warning of the dangers of “Shiite crescent” starting to operate throughout the whole Mashreq… We have had a high official in Iraq’s (Shiite-dominated) transitional government publicly deriding Saudi Arabia’s extremely urbane– and indeed, Princeton-educated– Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, as “a bedouin riding a camel.” I think the Iraqi official in question was not, actually, a Shiite but a Kurdish Iraqi (and therefore probably himself a Sunni). Still, that kind of an insult, voiced in public from Baghdad evidently stung a lot.
In my Hayat column, I recall that during the Iranian-Arab war that continued throughout most of the 1980s, “around one million people—nearly all of them Muslims—died and the economies of two sizeable countries were devastated.” I did not recall there, though perhaps I should have, that the policies of the Regan administration did a lot to foment that war and keep it going when its energy seemed to lag. Back then, Washington shoveled arms shipments to whichever of the two sides looked as though it might lose the war– including during Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad and later the whole Iran-contra arms shipment episode…
In the column, I look at the broader dynamics of the current US-Iran interaction, inasmuch as it’s an important factor in the whole regional dynamics of the Gulf.
Up near the lead of the column, I wrote,
- I am hopeful that cool heads will prevail, and that ways can be found for everyone’s fears and concerns to be aired, for differences to be discussed and resolved through means other than warfare and killing, and for intra-regional hot-lines and other mechanisms to be put in place to limit and prevent any escalation. I remain hopeful even though I know that inside Iraq today, sectarian and apparently sectarian killings are already being perpetrated on a completely unacceptable scale.
Am I actually hopeful today that cooler heads will prevail? The trouble is, is it so darned hard to remain hopeful when the daily news is saturated with news of killing and sectarian strife. We really need to find ways to reverse the dynamic whereby despair, grief, and fear can so easily fuel more and more of the same and then also the kinds of escalatory and nihilistic actions that can easily flow from that…
Gilbert Achcar’s letter
Iraq developments — Oct. 8, 2005
by Gilbert Achcar
1) How US and British Forces help Iraqis recover
their sovereignty
For any person believing in good faith that occupation troops in Iraq are
helping the Iraqis build independent institutions in order to recover their
sovereignty, recent events in Basra—the way British troops stormed police
headquarters in that city—and their aftermath ought to be enough to prove
the contrary.
Yesterday, Reuters (
British troops seize 12 in Basra raids
) and other agencies reported
how British troops arrested 12 persons, including police officers, in Basra.
The account by Reuters correspondent is interesting
(my emphasis):
“Sources in Sadr’s office in Basra said those
detained included several lieutenants in Basra’s interior affairs department,
which is part of the Interior Ministry, and an official with the local electricity
authority.
‘They are mostly Sadr people,’ one of the sources
said.
He said some of the suspects were seized from the police building which was
attacked by British forces last month to free two undercover soldiers who
had been detained by Iraqi police.
The British military said only that the raids took place in the
Hadem district of Basra.
Another source said all 12 men were seized from one house.
The arrests run the risk of increasing tensions between the 8,500 British
troops serving in Iraq and the local population.
After the detention of the two British soldiers last month, angry crowds
of young men attacked British military vehicles with petrol bombs and rocks,
forcing units to pull back.
took place late on Thursday, shortly after the men had broken fast on the
second day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, in what could be seen as a
slight and provoke more anger.”
Karbala—after
Najaf, the second major Shiite holy city in Iraq—was supposed to have
come under full Iraqi sovereignty. In his Radio Address of October 1, Bush
boasted that “this week coalition forces were able to turn over security
responsibility for one of
Iraq
’s largest cities,
Karbala
, to Iraqi soldiers.”
Today, Voice of Iraq broadcast the following report, posted by
nahrainnet (my translation from Arabic) revealing what US forces have
done in Karbala at the same time that their British
counterparts in Basra: