Just World News with Helena Cobban

Steven Weisman
writes
in today’s NYT that un-named “administration officials” say the
Bush administration now plans to revise the plan for a handover to
self-rule in Iraq that was agreed on just last November 15.  The revision
is reportedly aimed at “responding to” the firm insistence that Ayatollah
Sistani announced Sunday that any Iraqi self-rule government be the result
of–wait for this shocking revelation!– a fully democratic process.

So does this mean that Baghdad fashion maven Jerry Bremer and his Washington
handlers are now prepared to move away from “the Rube Goldberg process”–
the incredibly unwieldy and undemocratic mechanism agreed back in November
whereby undemocratic “caucuses” and other such gatherings would generate
a new Iraqi leadership?

No, it does not.   As Weisman reports it:

The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make
the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental
way.

So I guess we could call the proposed new system “Rube Goldberg, II”.  That
will make it at least the fourth* of the “strategic” plans the administration
has adopted for the handover since the US forces took Baghdad last April.
 (And the pace at which the administration is falling back from one
plan to the next seems to be speeding up.)

And I have a sneaking suspicion that Sistani, who doesn’t seem to be anyone’s
fool, is not necessarily going to have the wool pulled over his eyes on this
one?

Weisman also reports another aspect of Sistani’s Sunday declaration
that I had not seen reported elsewhere, and that likewise came as a big
shock to Bremer and his backers:

Continue reading “DoD suits scrabbling yet again to find a workable plan”

The NYT magazine has a longish piece by Peter Maass today that demonstrates extremely convincingly why the US is NOT destined to win the counter-insurgency/pacification campaign in Iraq.
(You’ll have to take my word on this, since for now my browser won’t bring the article up.)
The piece is called “Professor Nagls’s war”. In it, Maass provides a generally sympathetic, even laudatory, description of the life, thinking, and current work of a U.S. Army major called John Nagl. Nagl’s “normal” job is as a professor of strategy at West Point. But currently, he’s deployed as the operations officer with an 800-soldier battalion near Fallujah in the infamous “Sunni Triangle” of Iraq.
I guess Maass (or the Army?) picked Nagl to be profiled because he has some credentials as an expert in the theory of counter-insurgency warfare. He did a Ph.D. at Oxford University on the subject, no less. The book that resulted from his thesis studies “Counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.”
Nagl himself is presented as having an engaging humility about those credentials:

Continue reading “How NOT to win in Iraq”

Riverbend, the talented Iraqi author of the “Baghdad Burning” blog,
has a very important
new post
up today in which she outlines her fears–and those of all the folks
around her–regarding a possible breakup of her country.

Her bottom line:

We all lived together before- we can live together in the future. Iraqis
are proud of their different ethnicities, but in the end, we all identify
ourselves as “Iraqi”. Every Iraqi’s nightmare is to wake up one morning
and find Iraq split into several parts based on ethnicity and religion.

Riverbend was writing in reaction to something that Salam of “Dear Raed”
had written, that expressed much the same attitude toward the idea. (Click

here
, then scroll down to the bit that starts, “Have you been noticing…”) His
bottom line:

Yes I know identity is important but you see my father is Sunni, my mother
Shia and our neighbors for years Kurds. There are no lines and none should
exist, the situation in Kirkuk does create lines and make people choose sides.

Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.

I remember back at the end of April when Martin Indyk, who was at the apex
of Washington’s Middle East decision-making for all of the Clinton administration,
suddenly saw that the post-war situation in Iraq was not going as smoothly
as he and many of his friends had hoped. Suddenly running scared by
that, he
told an audience
at Washington’s elitist Brookings Institution April 23 that, “We’re going
to have to play the old imperial game of divide and rule and the stakes could
not be higher.”

Continue reading “Fears of Balkanization in Iraq”

Alan Sipress has an important piece in today’s WaPo about Sunni leaders in Iraq organizing a pan-Sunni coordinating/advisory council (shura council).
If the Shura Council becomes a fixture in its present form– still not known–then it could substantially affect the future balance in the country.
According to Sipress,

The shura council includes equal representation from each of the three main currents within the Sunni Muslim community: the politically oriented Muslim Brotherhood, the religious puritans of the Salafi movement and the adherents of the mystical Sufi tradition. Within each group, half the seats are allocated for ethnic Arabs and half are divided between ethnic Kurds and Turkmen. Dozens of other council members are drawn from professionals, intellectuals, tribal leaders and other civic groups.
The council does not plan to exclude former members of Hussein’s government unless they were involved in criminal activities, [said Mohammed Ahmed Rashid, an activist with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is involved in forming the council.]

Also very significant:

The council… is demanding that the next Iraqi government be selected by direct election rather than through local caucuses, as U.S. officials prefer.

Sipress also reports that Dan Senor, a spokesman for the never-sharp (except sartorially) L. Paul Bremer as saying that the U.S.-led occupation authority, “was still learning about the Sunni body.”