Journalist Tom Ricks, author of two high-profile books on the US and the Iraq War, featured this comment on his blog from Nir Rosen, who has been notable for his reportage from Iraq. I found it illuminating for several reasons:
1. Rosen offers a pragmatic, rather than wish-driven, assessment that Iraq will not return to sectarian war. That prediction, which is being hotly debated amongst Iraq specialists, is one of the key issues behind and beyond the forthcoming Iraqi national elections on 7 March.
2. Don’t confuse this, however, with “democracy”, which is likely to be the superficial headline in much press coverage. Democracy promotion was never the goal of the Bush Administration when it invaded Iraq, and it is not the primary concern of the Obama Administration, either. This episode is power politics.
3. And an irony: Rosen’s assessment highlights that the US military is largely a bystander in this process. There will continue to be a running argument as to whether the vaunted “surge” of 2007/8 created the space for a measure of stability and security, but those matters are now in the hands of Iraqis. Not sure, however, that Ricks will appreciate this point even as he posts Rosen’s thoughts: he is one of the spokesmen for the US military’s current push to delay and even break President Obama’s declared date for withdrawal of American forces.
It’s been frustrating to read the latest hysteria about sectarianism returning to Iraq, the threat of a new civil war looming, or even the notion that Iraq is “unraveling.” I left Iraq today after an intense mission on behalf of Refugees International. My colleague Elizabeth Campbell and I traveled comfortably and easily throughout Baghdad, Salahedin, Diyala and Babil. We were out among Iraqis until well into the night every day, often in remote villages, traveling in a normal Toyota Corolla. Our main hassle was traffic and having to go through a thousand security checkpoints a day. Stay tuned for our report next month about the humanitarian crisis in Iraq (which deserves more attention than political squabbles) and the situation of Iraqis displaced since 2003. Stay tuned for my own article about what I found politically as well. And finally stay tuned later this year for my book on the Iraqi civil war, the surge, counterinsurgency and the impact of the war in Iraq on the region.
Apparently a former Vice President spoke last night and said he kept the world safe and the current President doesn’t. Sort of like my Dad saying each time we meet, “You know in my day 1) there was no crime 2) kids knew their place 3) music was much better.”
Mortars were fired in Baghdad, killing 7, and three bombs went off in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing 4 and wounding 48. The bombings were near to holy Shiite shrines, which is extremely dangerous. The bombing of the golden dome at Samarra in February of 2006 set off a vicious Sunni-Shiite civil war that killed thousands each month. The shrine of Imam Husayn, the Prophet’s martyred grandson, in Karbala is among the holiest sites of Shiite Islam.
Iraq continues to be the forgotten American war, as attention turns to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the always-excellent Juan Cole looks at the latest events to assess the significance of bombings, arrests, and power politics before the next elections:
Liz Sly reports from Baghdad on the three bombings that shook Ramadi, capital of al-Anbar Province, to its core on Sunday and left at least 26 dead and a hundred wounded. The first two bombings occurred outside the Governor’s mansion where delegates from the Shiite-dominated government of PM Nuri al-Maliki were meeting with Sunni tribal leaders of the Awakening Council, which had turned against Sunni Muslim radicals and cooperated with US forces. Al-Zaman writing in Arabic says that the second bomb was timed to go off just as rescue workers arrived to deal with the victims of the first one, though another official said there were only 7 minutes between the blasts. A suicide bomber hit the hospital, perhaps timing his attack with the arrival of victims of the first two, though al-Zaman says that he initially tried to bring a truck bomb close to the hospital and was stopped by alert guards. He then came to the hospital wearing a suicide belt bomb and killed two persons when he detonated his payload.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Let me begin, though, by echoing the President’s statement yesterday concerning his approval of the recommendations not only of the Pentagon, but of his entire national security team to deploy a stronger and more comprehensive missile defense system in Europe. This decision came after a lengthy and in-depth review of our assessment of the threats posed, particularly the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missile program, and the technology that we have today, and what might be available in the future to confront it. We believe this is a decision that will leave America stronger, and more capable of defending our troops, our interests, and our allies. Read the rest of this entry »
Apologies for not mincing words, but the US in the midst of a sustained public-relations effort to whitewash the torture stain of the Bush Administration by 1) arguing that it wasn’t torture and 2) if it was, it helped win the War on Terror. After the release this week of the damning 2004 CIA internal report on the Administration’s authorisation of torture and its ineffectiveness, Dick Cheney has been at the front of the campaign to save his legacy, if not America’s standing in the world. Fox News set him with the softball questions this morning.
(An important side note for Iran-watchers. Check out the passage late in the transcript where Cheney comes out as a strong supporter of an airstrike on Iran in 2007-8):
CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: Mr. Vice President, welcome back to “FOX News Sunday.”
RICHARD CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It’s good to be back, Chris.
WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees.
What do you think of that decision?
CHENEY: I think it’s a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel. And the effort now is based upon the inspector general’s report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past. Read the rest of this entry »
Iraq continues to be a violent and unstable country. Yesterday, bombs exploded near five Shi’a mosques in Baghdad, killing 29 people. British forces have finally been forced to complete their withdrawal, with the Iraqi Parliament refusing to extend an agreement for their stay, leaving the US as a “Coalition of One”. Political tension over the future of Kirkuk, the key city in the middle of Iraq’s oil-producing region, is escalating.
Paradoxically, however, six years after the “liberation” of Iraq, the campaign by some in the US military to turn instability into a rationale for a continued US presence persists. So this leaked memorandum for a high-ranking US officer in Baghdad, published in The New York Times, has caused a stir within Iraq, even if it has not been picked up by many in the “mainstream” media. The official response from the US military is that “the author is conveying that the problem is too hard, and therefore we should quit”; Juan Cole offers his own analysis of the issues for the American occupation:
As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.
Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission. Perhaps it is one of those infamous paradoxes of counterinsurgency that while the ISF is not good in any objective sense, it is good enough for Iraq in 2009. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last two years, we paid a good deal of attention to the story of five Iranian officials seized in March 2007 by US forces in Erbil in northern Iraq. It is a measure of how far the world has moved away from the Iraq story, and indeed of how much internal developments in Iran have come to the fore, that the release of the five by the Americans last week received so little attention (apart from Iranian state media, which eagerly featured the return of the men, pictured at left, this weekend).
That’s a mistake because this complex tale leaves two long-lasting lessons. The first is that, despite the tensions of Iran’s post-election crisis, there are officials in the Obama Administration who want to remove obstacles to long-term negotiations. The second is even more important: as Gareth Porter outlines below in a story for Inter Press Service, the release of the five Iranians points to the emergence of an Iraqi Government that is no longer subject to the demands of the US military:
Behind Detainee Release, a US-Iraqi Conflict on Iran
WASHINGTON – The release Friday of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq for two and a half years highlights the long-simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the role of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) there. Read the rest of this entry »
Journalist Tom Ricks, author of two high-profile books on the US and the Iraq War, featured this comment on his blog from Nir Rosen, who has been notable for his reportage from Iraq. I found it illuminating for several reasons:
Iraq continues to be the forgotten American war, as attention turns to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the always-excellent Juan Cole 
Iraq continues to be a violent and unstable country. Yesterday, 
Over the last two years, we paid a good deal of attention to the story of five Iranian officials seized in March 2007 by US forces in Erbil in northern Iraq. It is a measure of how far the world has moved away from the Iraq story, and indeed of how much internal developments in Iran have come to the fore, that the release of the five by the Americans last week received so little attention (apart from Iranian state media, which eagerly featured the return of the men, pictured at left, this weekend).
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