I was, I think, one of the first, back in February, to point out that the complicated system put in place in Iraq by Paul Bremer’s bizarre and almost unilaterally imposed Transitional Administrative Law was seriously hampering the ability of Iraq’s elected leaders to form a government. Then on March 2, I started the “Democracy denied in Iraq” watch on the main sidebar of this blog.
It seems to be only recently that the mainstream US media and other bloggers like Juan Cole have noticed that this delay is indeed, in itself, an issue.
Does anyone cite or give credit to my earlier work on this?
Or, come to that, on the whole issue–now much remarked-upon in the US MSM and blogosphere– of the disgraceful absence of women’s voices from the op-ed pages of major US newspapers.
I wrote about that, and started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch back on Dec 21. I wrote about it a bit more in January, including Jan. 3rd.
Do I get any mentions, any citations, any respect for my pioneering work on that issue, either?
Hah! (That was a snort of disgust.)
Some respect, “guys”, please!
(I actually first posted this rant on JWN yesterday. But commenter Dick Durata suggested– wisely– that I should have made it a separate post. So here it is.)
Sistani’s justified impatience
So today, 51 days after the election in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani is finally reported as expressing his “discontent” over the delay.
51 days is no small matter. According to Paul Bremer’s unilaterally imposed and and excessively complex “Transitional Administrative Law” scheme, Iraq’s Transitional Government and the elected National Assembly have 213 days between the election (Jan. 30) and the deadline to reach agreement on the text of a permanent Constitution (Aug. 31, at the latest).
We have now seen nearly one-fourth of that time period go by– 23.94%, to be precise— without the system even having generated a Transitional Government.
No wonder Sistani’s getting impatient.
How long, I wonder, till he brings his people out onto the street again to demand the implementation of the people’s will?
- Time out for small authorial rant here: I was, I think, one of the first, back in February, to point out that the complicated system put in place by the TAL was seriously hampering the ability of Iraq’s elected leaders to form a government. Then on March 2, I started the “Democracy denied in Iraq” watch on the main JWN sidebar.
It seems to be only recently that the mainstream US media and other bloggers like Juan Cole have noticed that this delay is indeed, in itself, an issue.
Does anyone cite or give credit to my earlier work on this?
Or, on the whole issue–now much remarked-upon in the US MSM and blogosphere– of the disgraceful absence of women’s voices from the op-ed pages of major US newspapers. I wrote about that, and started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch back on Dec 21. Wrote about it a bit more in January, including Jan. 3rd.
Do I get any mentions, any citations, any respect for my pioneering work on that, either?
Hah! (That was a snort of disgust.)
Some respect, “guys”, please!
Iraq burning, Nero(ponte) fiddling?
It is now 26 days since I wrote this about Iraq:
- It is 24 days already since the election. It took the authorities an inordinately long length of time to certify the election. And now, where is the presidential council?
Since then, I’ve increasingly been wondering– what with Neroponte first of all preparing to leave Iraq, and then leaving for his big new intel-management job in Washington… And what with the continued failure of the Iraqi parties to reach agreement on forming a government…
So I’ve been wondering: who the heck, on the US side, has been responsible for shepherding along the political process there?
Look, we might not like the fact, but under the international law of military occupation the US does have overall responsibility for the good governance (hah!) of Iraq, pending conclusion of a final peace agreement between Washington and a representative Iraqi government.
And hey, it’s not just that Neroponte was up and leaving the place, but don’t you remember, some time back, we were all assured that National Security Advisor Condi Rice was going to be “in charge of running Iraqi affairs from Washington”?? But since then she too has been given new responsibilities and now she’s off tooling around various parts of the world in her dominatrix jackboots…
So who is in charge of the Iraq “file”? Maybe just Rumsfeld? Maybe purely the military?
Or how about…nobody?
Yesterday, Steve Wesiman had an intriguing piece in Sunday’s NYT titled U.S. Avoids Role of Mediator as Iraqis Remain Deadlocked.
Here’s what he wrote:
- Senior Bush administration officials said this week that the administration was avoiding direct intervention to break the deadlock among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, still trying to form a government in Iraq six weeks after national elections.
The officials said they had concluded that despite the bitter wrangling over how much power to distribute among the factions, particularly Shiites and Kurds, any attempt by the United States to mediate would be likely to backfire.
“So far, we’re letting it happen,” a senior administration official said, referring to the Kurdish-Shiite dispute. “That’s really by design.”
This official gives the excuse that, “If we try to impose a solution, then anyone who gets the short end of the stick will hold a grudge, not only against us, but against the deal that was reached. It could lead to instability down the road.”
Well, maybe that’s the reason… Or maybe, given the horrendous levels of internal fighting (Sunni vs. Shiite) in the country in the 50 days since the election, Washington’s “non-intervention” in helping to resolve the government-formation problem has more to do with letting those two ethnic-Arab communities continue fighting among themselves while the Iraqi Kurdish parties sit pretty and gain in relative political strength as the other two communities mutually attrite each other?
Weisman– who was reporting from Washington– wrote that a second official he spoke to last week,
- said that Kurds, Shiites and some of Iraq’s Arab neighbors want the United States to play a facilitating role in forming a new government, but that Washington is resisting. “There’s pressure from the players out there, but not here,” he said. “We are comfortable exactly where we are.”
Oh, how fine and ducky for them, all those Bush administration officials sitting pretty in DC while the public-security situation in Iraq continues to be quite nightmarish. But where is “responsibility” in all this?
The price of democracy? (Iraq)
This piece of reporting, by Awadh al-Taee and Steve Negus of the Financial Times, is worth reading every word of.
It adds another dimension to the “First shoot, then lie” story I posted here ten days ago. Namely, that it’s not only the US troops who do this, but also the many private “security contractors”, i.e. foreign mercenaries, now rampaging their way around Iraq.
One particular twist in this story is that the miscreant mob was, as Taee and Negus wrote:
- a three-vehicle convoy belonging to a private security company, transporting a foreigner working to facilitate Iraq’s parliamentary elections
The mercenaries in that convoy shot their way through a crowded intersection, leaving behind them two bullet-injured Iraqi motorists, one of whom died of his wound later that day.
Is this a case of “we had to kill this Iraqi voter in order to save his ability to vote?”
How on earth does the foreign “electoral specialist” in question feel about this incident? How should he or she feel? (Actually, does she or he even know about what happened there?)
But do please read the whole of Taee and Negus’s fine story, which incisively shows how the stark power imbalance between Iraqi citizens and armed foreigners in their land impacts upon the Iraqis.
At one point they write:
- Under constant threat from suicide attackers driving explosive-rigged cars, coalition soldiers and contractors follow combat zone rules of engagement to protect themselves: warn drivers who stray too close, but if that fails, shoot. With procedures designed to protect the identities of anyone who might be singled out for retaliation, the victim’s families may never know what happened, let alone obtain justice. [And who keeps those ‘procedures’ in place, I wonder? ~HC]
In this case, the situation was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the victim’s family after negotiation with the security company. However, it is not clear if the parties would have found each other had foreign journalists not been involved.
Huge kudos to Taee and Negus for their reporting, and to the FT for publishing this piece.
I wonder (!) why we have seen no such careful and hard-hitting reporting in the US media?
I also note that even though Taee and Negus work for the grand “Pink old lady” of pro-capitalist journalism, they admit that they and their paper still felt intimidated enough by the “security company” involved that they did not actually use its name in the story: “its country manager, “John” (a pseudonym) preferred that it not be named. Given the very real risk of retaliation, the FT agreed not to do so.”
Pseudonymous foreign managers, anonymous western companies, lies, evasions, and killings… Yes, welcome to the “New Iraq™”.
By the way, Taee and Negus give us this very poignant little portrait of the man killed:
- The unarmed victim of the January 23 shooting was Abd al-Naser Abbas al-Dulaimi, age 29. Unmarried, he worked in the power station across the river to support his mother, two sisters, and the two children of an older brother who went missing in the 1991 Kuwait war. When he was shot, say police, he was out looking for petrol, which most Iraqis are forced to buy on the black market because of a recent shortage at the pumps. They found no weapons on his body, nor in his car.
Ullah yerhamu (God have mercy on him.) But what about all the dependents he left behind? Who will have mercy on them?
Lebanon: Holding the line for nonviolence
There was a car-bomb in Beirut a short while ago. In the north of the city, a mainly Christian area. Seven people reported injured, thank G-d so far none reported killed.
I hope to heck this is not the beginning of a slide back into violence. I wish every political and community leader in Beirut would publicly join a commitment not to resort to violence. I wish every foreign embassy and NGO would turn itself into an active nonviolence advocacy and monitoring group.
Can the line be held against the onrush of violence? Praying is not enough (though it might help). But it is human choices, human actions, and human leadership that must hold this line.
Paper on “Religion and violence”
You can now download and read a paper on “Religion and violence” that I first presented at a special colloquium on world religions that the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2003.
Many of the papers presented there, including mine, will be published in an upcoming special edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which is published by Oxford University Press.
Well, I’ve been kind of eager for the paper to be published and out there, so I could share it with a bunch of people and get some discussion going on what I said/wrote in it… The JAAR publishing process has seemed to me extremely lengthy but then I guess that’s in the nature of academic publishing. (As opposed to, for example, blogging.)
Now, I just heard that this edition of JAAR will be coming out this December. And here’s the neat thing about the rights to the text that I retain under the terms of the contract with OUP: I can “mount” the pre-published version of the Article–I’m quoting directly from OUP’s rights Agreement here–on my personal Web site, “as long as [I] acknowledge that the Article has been accepted for publication by OUP.”
Okay, I think I’ve acknowledged that.
Actually I’m just re-reading the Agreement here. Even after publication I am “entitled to use parts or all of the Article in other publications written or edited by [my]self, providing that a full acknowledgement is given to the Journal and to Oxford University Press…”
I guess I’ll just go back into the text of the Article, as I recently uploaded it here, and put that acknowledgement in there at the top, and then I can publish it here myself forever…
Done.
Mission accomplished?
So, Negroponte has today left Iraq.
Mission accomplished?
It depends what the mission was, of course. If it was to “lead” Iraq through a mockery of an election, leave the physical and much of the social infrastructure in tatters, public security a nightmare, and the political situation in an impotent impasse, then yes, jolly well done, John!
If on the other hand this man cares one whit about the wellbeing of the people of Iraq, he should be hanging his head in shame and slinking out of the country to hide for a very long time in an “undisclosed location.”
So how do the rest of us think John Negroponte will get treated when he gets to Washington? Feted or fetid?
Two articles on Lebanon
I’ve had two different pieces about Lebanon and “what does it all mean?” come out in recent days.
I wrote this one, Decoding Lebanon, for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the organization that lobbies in Washington around the concerns of US Quakers (and our friends in the peace-and-justice movement.)
This one, Lebanon’s fine example– so far, is in today’s Christian Science Monitor.
The FCNL piece is longer. It is more tightly focused on Lebanon than the CSM one, and gives much more detail about the nature of Hizbullah, Lebanon’s quirky electoral system, etc. I think a person might handily download it and print it to share with friends in your congregation or other community group who are slightly intrigued by what’s been going on in Lebanon but don’t know much at all about the country.
Tell me what you think.
(I’m doing another one for FCNL on broader issues of democratization in the Middle East.)
Post-election terror in Iraq
My “democracy denied in Iraq” counter now stands at 44 days since the Iraqi elections with no elected government in place there yet. (Yes, I just learned that the elected Assembly is supposed to have its inaugural meeting on Wednesday. That may or may not happen; but even if it does it’s not the same as having a working transitional government sworn in. Addendum Wed. a.m.– the Assembly did convene.)
Not having an Iraqi transitional government in place 44 days after the election is a scandal. Yes, perhaps a small portion of responsibility for that might lie in the hands of the political leaders (UIA list heads and Kurdish parties) who’ve been unable to reach agreement yet on the very tough issues of Kirkuk and sharia. But much more responsibility, surely, lies in the hands of the occupying power which arrogantly and virtually unilaterally decreed the “rules” for this whole transitional process on its own, with minimal consultation; which prior then delayed the voting quite unnecessarily for more than 6 months; and which has apparently done little or nothing since January 30 to help the different Iraqi list heads come to a working agreement.
So between the results of the election not having been translated into any degree at all of self-governance, and the security and service-provision aspects of daily life in most of the country still being quite horrendous, is it any surprise that popular frustration with the whole process of “transition” is building up fast?
In much of Iraq, the “security” situation since the elections has been one long nightmare. Nearly all of the victims of recent violence seem to have been Shiites, most of them civilians but also some members of the ever-“rebuilding” security forces…
I’ve been writing a lot about Lebanon recently. So since I need to write something on deadline about Iraq today, I thought I’d go back quickly through Today in Iraq and Juan Cole’s blog to collate a general picture for myself of the incidence of atrocities there in recent weeks.
Scrolling ultra-fast back through those two wonderful resources was a shocking experience. Most of the following comes from TII. A big “chapeau” to Yankeedoodle and his collaborators Friendly Fire and Matt for the work they
do there!
I thought that here I’d list only those recent incidents that involve more than 12 Iraqis killed. Of course, there were many, many more incidents that involved fewer than 12 Iraqis killed– and it’s quite likely that the total number killed in those attacks would be even greater than the numbers killed in the “big”, multi-casualty attacks. (Plus I’m sure I missed some of the big ones, too.)
Anyway, friends, please join in remembering the victims of these incidents from recent weeks:
- March 14, Babel: 12 corpses found
March 13, north & south of Baghdad: 16 killed
March 11, Mosul: >50 killed at funeral
March 10, Mosul: >50 killed
March 9, Rumana: 26 corpses found
March 9, Latifiya: 15 headless corpses found
March 8, Balad: >15 killed
March 8, Baquba: 15 killed (in a number of incidents)
March 7, Baquba: 12 Iraqi police killed
March 7, Balad: 15 killed
February 28, Hillah: 125 killed in attack on medical clinic
February 19, Latifiya, etc: >80 killed in a number of incidents on the occasion of Ashoura rites
God have mercy on their souls and bring some measure of comfort to their loved ones.
… I see two possible political effects of all this suffering:
Karen Hughes?
Sometimes, there are advantages to sitting far enough outside the Washington Beltway to be able to triangulate some on what seems to be happening there.
What I was seeing was that someone had been getting to Bush pretty effectively, and helping set his sails away from the path of confrontation on which he was previously headed, in several significant areas in the Middle East. Like, on Iran (March 11). Or Hizbullah (March 9). Or, to a certain extent, also on Palestine…
On just about all of these Mideast issues, I’d say it’s fairly safe to bet that both Unca Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would have been urging Bush on to greater confrontation…
So, I was sitting here thinking… Who on earth would have the personal clout with the President to be able to over-rule those two mega-heavyweights, and the conviction to want to do so?
Not any furrners (not even Little Lord Tonyleroy). Not Colin Powell. Probably not, I was thinking, Condi.
But then, this: Karen Hughes has announced she’s going back to Washington. It really does start to make sense.
(1) She is one of the very few people enjoying enough personal “heft” with the Prez that she could not only get in to see him past Unca Dick and Rumsfeld, but could also effectively over-rule them in policy terms.
(2) She’s a tough nut, and a policy realist rather than an ideologue.
(3) She’s been hanging around down in Texas which is where Republicans with real (and realist) expertise on the Middle East like former Secretary of State Jim Baker and Ed Djerijian hang their ten-gallon hats…
(4) And now, she’s just been named under secretary of state in charge of public diplomacy…
Look, as far as I understand the strength and length of her relationship with the Prez, she could have had just about any job she wanted in this administration. “Under secretary” of anything? It’s ways beneath what she could have had. Unless she and he specifically chose it so she could make a difference on the substance of policy in a crucial part of the world…
One that he might already be looking at in terms of how it will affect his long-term “legacy”, or role in history…
Interesting, huh?