open Democracy News Analysis - iraq: understanding the handover - Comments

AndrewRT on "Iraq’s elections: winners, losers, and what’s next "

AndrewRT — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:55:04 +0000

Excellent summary, most of which completely agree with.

However:

"Moreover, ISCI will seek by any means at its
disposal to prevent an even more crushing defeat in the parliamentary elections
scheduled for December 2009"

I'm not sure. I think ISCI are more clever than that - these elections were a trial of strength between the different parties but I can see ISCI and Maliki coming back together again in the parliamentary elections. They need each other to get the largest coalition status that's needed to claim the Prime Minister's post. ISCI has done well staying in the background and will probably be happy to stay that way, now it knows it can't win on its own.

DesiraeC on "The ghost of Saddam Hussein"

DesiraeC — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 06:28:27 +0000

His name itself is associated with the world’s terrorism. He is such a powerful government opponent making the country feel fear because of bad motives he has. Did you see how well President Bush was received during his last surprise visit to Iraq? The mad shoe-thrower who was none too pleased with the lame president’s treatment of his country made an unexpected protest by throwing his shoes at W. The man has been identified as Muntadhar al-Zeidi, an Iraqi journalist. In Muslim culture, showing the sole of your shoe is a symbol of extreme disrespect, but throwing your shoes goes deeper than an insult. Beleaguered Iraqi citizens took off their shoes and threw them at the toppling statue of Saddam Hussein during liberation – that will tell you more about what an insult it is. Bush laughed this off and referred to it as a "sign of a free society," much like payday loans are. If convicted, he is looking at a minimum of two years in prison for insulting a visiting head of state. Protesters burned American flags and threw shoes at a tank in Najaf, apparently because they feel al-Zeidi should be praised for his “courageous” action. Al-Zeidi and his infamous footwear are still in custody. I doubt there’s any way of getting his shoes back. Click to read more on http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2008/12/16/need-extra-eash-throw-shoes-at-bush/.

AndrewRT on "The futures of Iraq "

AndrewRT — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:55:02 +0000

Generally, I think this article exaggerates the impact of foreign actors. The political stability of Iraq these last few years have been largely determined by domestic political dynamics - particularly the decision of the Sunni Arab community to ally with the US against al-Qaeda and the decisive move by Maliki to impose central government control over Basrah. I expect the same to be true in 2009 - Obama and the next President of Iran will be secondary influences.

Bizarre that you should fail to mention 2009's single biggest flashpoint: the border between Arab Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan; the Kurds will almost certainly lose control of Ninawa province to Maliki's allies next month, Maliki is increasing the pressure on peshmerga in disputed areas like Khanaqin and he is aiming for greater central control over Kurdistani oil revenues. Kirkuk is a volcano waiting to go off, and may well do so if Maliki confronts the KRG next year.

Additionally, next year may see the first referendum on the creation of a Shia Region of Southern Iraq - something will pit Maliki and the Sadrists against the SIIC party of Vice-President Adel Abdul Mahdi. That will be an interesting preview of the December election, where SIIC and Dawa are expected to put up separate slates.

Faisal Kadri on "What Obama means for Iraq"

Faisal Kadri — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:18:18 +0000

Military withdrawal is not the same as political withdrawal from the political process, I hope Obama will have the insite to see that controlling the political process through denying fair census and making Faustian deals with bad Iraqi partners is short term and expensive. UN run Census and Elections in Iraq is the least expensive way to manage change because the cost and responsibility are borne only by Iraqis.

GitanjaliB on "What Obama means for Iraq"

GitanjaliB — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:43:03 +0000

GitanjaliB

Judging by Obama's reliance on former Clinton aides in his appointment of cabinet positions, it seems as though your asssesment of his Mid-East policy in the last paragraph is correct.

The debacle over his current appointment of Rahm Emanuel and whispers in parliament over the subsequent re-instatement of Secretary of State Robert Gates however is making me reconsider Obama's promise of change in the Middle East.

As for Iran - Economic sanctions have not worked in cases such as Gaza and Cuba and threaten to turn negotiations between Iran and the new US administration awrie.

St. Michael Traveler on "Iraq, Iran and the United States: problems and prospects "

St. Michael Traveler — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:03:36 +0100

Jewish Neoconservative and the American Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Iran

Do American people have any understanding about the negative influence of Jewish neoconservatives on the US foreign policy? Their influence has been greatly responsible for the negative international image of the United States. The neoconservatives have followed Israel and in some cases have initiated the negative perception among about the Muslim world, specifically Iran.

This negative influence has resulted of wasted 30 years in not having an effective diplomatic interaction with Iran. Foreign Policy of President Bush and Iran ,
http://straveler-myamerica.blogspot.com/2008/06/foreign-policy-of-president-bush-and.html
dictated by neoconservative advisers had been to sabotage the basic premise of diplomacy by under cutting the actions of European Union foreign policy Chief Javier Solana.

Undersecretary of State William Burns attended the Geneva meeting, the first direct meeting between USA and Iranian representatives. We had build up the expectations before the meeting that mere presence of Burns would stop Iranian producing nuclear fuel; we completely ignored the diplomatic rule of engagement and expected an instant result.
Before we could be effective in our interactions with Iran, we would need to have an understanding of their interests and positions, fears and expectations. To start we would need to know what Iran wants.
What would you do if you were the president of Iran? What does Iran Want?
http://straveler-myamerica.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-would-you-do-if-you-were-president.html
Before drawing a red line with Iran, we must be clear about our own motivations and the expected outcomes.

We have multiple options in our relationships with Iran. Among these is the continuation of the present status, or a robust start of diplomatic interaction. Anatol Lieven and Trita Parsi recent article: Drawing a red line with Iran

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/28/opinion/edlieven.php

provides a realistic expectation for both USA and Iran. Let us stay cool and use diplomatic rules of engagement and talk with Iran. However; Israel similar to the past 45 years, has been a negative influence in our relationship with Iran. This problem is not knew, even during Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

http://www.geocities.com/stmtraveler/M_R_Pahlavi.htm
http://www.geocities.com/usasaintmichael/ShahLobby.htm

Iran suffered in her interaction with US due to the negative influence of Israel and her lobbies.

cherif.rifaat on "Basra’s second battle decoded"

cherif.rifaat — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:51:55 +0100

"Watch Maliki's actions but also remember this action of the Iraqi Army was only their FIRST attempt.. They could get much better with practice. ...."

Western secular armies are a product of the industrial revolution. They have improved and become ever more effective in the post-industrial era, thanks to ever more advanced military technology. The fundamental basis for this vast superiority over pre-industrial age armies is a radical change in mentality so that leaders, officers, politicians, engineers, weapons manufacturers...all of society, has absorbed and developed a new mentality and attitude towards all aspects of life, including warfare.

In most of the world, including the Middle East and Iraq, there has been no Industrial Revolution and no accompanying change in mentality of most individuals within individual nations. But all these peoples see the success of the West and try to emulate them, including in matters of warfare. So they dress up their fighters in uniforms and teach them to march in columns to the rousing music of military bands. They try to acquire Western weapons and train these armies to fight and engage in large battles in the same way post-industrial societies fight. Because the mentality is not there, they only manage to create second class copies of Western Armies which are routinely and quite thoroughly defeated by genuine first class Western Armies.

The Iraqi army specifically is even worse and less effective: it is as a third-class Western-style army. There are a number of reasons for this, such as motivation, reluctance to hurt their own people and the fact that a foreign occupying power will never build an native army which can be good enough to be dangerous to the occupiers themselves, if ever it turns on them.

Now, if the first-class Western armies which invaded Iraq have been unable to defeat the new kinds of guerrilla wars which have stymied them, what makes anyone think that a third-class Iraqi conventional army can do so?

abuelita42pj on "Basra’s second battle decoded"

abuelita42pj — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:01:04 +0100

As I read your article and others from EU/UK and news reports such as PBS's NewsHour, I get the feeling most Westerners, even those of Iraqi extraction, don't really know what al-Maliki had in mind and he'd rather keep it that way.

He can bargain with Al Sadr better if no one else knows exactly what they agreed upon. There seem to be other agreements made with ISCI and al-Hasan's militias. They all want a piece of the "political pie" and al Maliki wants their votes for this fall--as you mentioned.

Iran is a secondary aspect that they will handle in their own way. They can use some of Iran's expertise in re-building their oil derricks and they have to get the smuggling down to less that 10% by having jobs with decent wages given to the workers. Right now many of them have no jobs and no way to care for their extended families. Iran's aid will help them re-build but they won't allow them to TAKE OVER. Iranians are not Arabs so they can't be allowed to "sneak" in as Cyrus and Darius did 2500 years ago. That is still more important than their being Shia. Shia'ism is only 1300 years old, their hatred of Persians is 2500. Also, Iran has only so much money to use to gain Iraq's loyalty. Many Persians/Iranians are already complaining about Ahmedinejad's inability to help them in improving their lives with better pay, lower costs on food and rent, etc. He has about 8 months to get them on his side again or he will be out of a job with no income--just like many other Iranians.

Watch Maliki's actions but also remember this action of the Iraqi Army was only their FIRST attempt.. They could get much better with practice. The loss of 1,000 soldiers could also have been a plus for Maliki. They weren't going to fight, they just wanted a paycheck. We lose 25% to 35% of our recruits in basic training. Iraqis didn't have much of that. Washington lost a lot of his men in the first battles and without the attack on Christmas Eve, he may have lost the War. He was the winner more by luck than by skill. Iraqi soldiers are learning. If they want their land back--and 95% seem to--they will learn how to handle the job or al-Sadr or al-Hakim, etc will be the one that takes over.

Morty3 on "Uncle Sam in Iraq: the war of narratives"

Morty3 — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:39:43 +0000

One of the earliest of the CIA orchestrated regime changes on the region occurred in Iran in 1953, after the voters had the cheek to elect a nationalist, lawyer named Mossadegh. This man had courageously, but naively, promised to bring the Anglo-Iranian oilfields into public ownership, thereby giving his countrymen a larger slice of their own pie. But the CIA and British Intelligence soon orchestrated his downfall and replaced him with Shah Pahlevi, a man more in tune with the needs of the West, who suppressed the population using SAVAK, his secret police. These torturers had been trained by the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, and ran their own secret prisons and torture camps in which leaders of dissident groups were often assassinated.
The highly conspicuous consumption of the Shah and his hangers on soon angered the mass of the people who were, at the time, experiencing double digit inflation and mass unemployment, leading to a potential revolutionary situation.
President Kennedy was so embarrassed by his man’s excesses that he tried to rein him in, but to no avail. In October 1971 the Shah decided to host a lavish party to celebrate the anniversary of the centuries old reign of the Iranian Kings. No expense was spared as French chefs from Maxims were flown in to prepare delicacies such as breast of peacock for his royal guests. A small town was built to accommodate and entertain his visitors who drank the finest wines out of lead crystal glasses and ate food off the most expensive china. The final bill came to over a $100 million and to add insult to injury he then tried to levy a tax on his own people to pay for it. Unsurprisingly revolt soon spread with students striking and even rich Iranians turned against him. But it wasn’t the banned communist TUDEH Party who was to capitalise on this disharmony, as they had largely been destroyed with the help of the CIA, but rather the Islamist Clergy, the Ayatollahs, who ironically were to prove equally dangerous to American business and oil interests.
On January 16th 1979 the Shah was forced into exile and the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini was invited back to help rule. Hostages from the US embassy were then taken by students loyal to the clergy; President Carter failed to liberate them and was eventually forced into a humiliating climb down, leading to further loss of US and Western influence in the area.
But what happened next was to prove even more embarrassing. Given that America had now lost its pet Rottwelier in the region, namely the Shah of Iran, it decided to throw a bone to the Pitbull in the kennel next door, one Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The CIA had already been instrumental in getting rid of his predecessor, Kaseem, after he’d threatened to withdraw his country’s oil reserves from American influence. The US had then backed Hussein’s Baathist Party as the lesser of several evils after they promised to be a bulwark against communism. The CIA allegedly rewarded them by furnishing their chosen ones with the names and addresses of Iraqi communist party members and the Baathist Party duly wiped them out.
In 1980, the petty tyrant known as Saddam Hussein, realising he had the backing of the US and the west, felt confident enough to attack Iran. The war was fought over the disputed region of oil rich Khuzestan and control of the Schatt El-Arab waterway, the main conduit for oil exports to the west, two prizes that would undoubtedly boost the economies of Iraq, Europe and the US. So even though we knew Hussein was using biological and chemical weapons against civilian targets, the USA, Britain, Germany and France were still willing to sell him arms. The CIA even loaned him use of their spy satellites so he could detect Iranian troop movements.
But once again the West seriously underestimated the power of nationalism in Iran. It was widely believed that the minority Sunni in that country would defect and join Hussein’s majority Iraqi Sunnis, and help overthrow the Shia Ayatollahs in Iran. This failed to materialise and the bloody war of attrition dragged on for eight more years. During this time the Iranians became increasingly desperate and began targeting Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. In a massive show of hypocrisy, the world community that had turned a blind eye to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons on civilians now turned its rage on Iran for having the temerity to disrupt oil supplies.
Is it all about to be repeated. Go to www.playitagainunclesam.com and find out.

KVB Tharoor on "Iraq: the politics of the local"

KVB Tharoor — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:16:08 +0000

An excellent and probing piece. One can't help but feel a little bit sorry for the central government; despite its own failings, it's been set up as a kind of straw man, meant to pave the way to its demise. How benignly should we read the American role in the various fractures of power in Iraq (local, regional)? How much do these fractures play into Washington's favour?

basilsmith on "Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited"

basilsmith — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:40:14 +0000

I take your point Paul Carline. This has been a cause for real concern for many years in Australia. Is there any country which is not cursed with the damage caused by ignoring the people, and their right to rule - snatched away from them by power-hungry self-righteous party politicians?
The results in Iraq are truly shocking, but it is also happening all over the world, and the UN is stymied by the the security council's (including the USA's) failure to support it.
Wherever you look democracy is a joke.
Readers may be interested to check out website http://ballotsinparliament.org.
Basil Smith

tezcatlipoca on "Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited"

tezcatlipoca — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:52:57 +0000

The aggressors have no time for a Reconciliation Process, neither restorative justice that exposes the truth and lies of the Bushocracy nor retributive justice that would actually hold someone accountable. Bush et al are too 'morally sound' to allow this to happen. They should be impeached and charged with war crimes, but we all know that this will never happen.

Whether or not 9/11 was fabricated (which I believe it was), the 'suspects' were mostly from Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. And now America is selling a massive amount of weapons to Saudi Arabia. This does not make any sense.

This war, which has cost too many lives, regardless of which numbers are believed, is not about democracy and freedom, but OIL.

Iran, by far the most democratic nation in the region, is next.

pete daine on "Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited"

pete daine — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:44:22 +0000

you write: "The authors of the study published in the Lancet are now arguing that many deaths may have been kept unreported, by implication questioning the independence of a survey conducted with Iraqi national authorities; this would suggest that the international community itself, the World Health Organisation and other participating funding agencies would have trumped scientific excellence to abide by a political agenda".

This is unfair. The Lancet authors are _not_ suggesting anything about the WHO. What they said was this:

"The last time this group (COSIT) did a mortality survey like this they also found a very low crude death rate and when they revisited the exact same homes a second time and just asked about child deaths, they recorded almost twice as many. Thus, the past record suggests people do not want to report deaths to these government employees."
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2008/01/10/les-roberts-on-new-iraq-mortality-study/

So the use of government employees itself may be a problem, they say. What they _don't_ say or suggest (by implication or not) is that the WHO "would have trumped scientific excellence to abide by a political agenda", as you claim.

You write: "There remain three numbers: one too small, one too high, one somewhere in the middle."
There's no doubt that the IBC figures are "too" low. But there's no such certainty for the Lancet figures, though you state that they are "too" high. How do you know?

paul.carline on "Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited"

paul.carline — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:43:01 +0000

Michel Thieren recommends that the warmongers "begin politics and stop the killing". But Clausewitz was right in stating that "war is politics by other means". The wars on and in Afghanistan and Iraq are pre-eminently wars planned, contrived and instigated for political ends - the control of key strategic areas of the planet, together with their resources.

People who have retained their humanity and moral sense will agree that a single death resulting from an immoral and illegal war is a death too many. To that extent the numbers game may be irrelevant (though not, I suspect, if the figure of deaths caused both directly and indirectly were considerably higher - in the millions, as suggested by Gideon Polya).

Surely the problem with MIchel Thieren's recommendation is that there is no mechanism for forcing the aggressors to stop killing and "begin politics". Moreover, what kind of political process does he imagine: a Truth and Reconciliation process? The aggressors are scarcely interested in submitting to a process which would expose the lies and the mass murder (on 9/11) which provided the pretext for war (subsequently reinforced by other bogus 'terrorist' events around the world).

The reality is that most 'democracies' - and especially the US and the UK - are, and have long been, pseudo-democracies in which there are no effective controls on executive action. What is relatively new (we could take Hitler's burning of the Reichstag in 1933 as a starting-point) is the now routine use of state-sponsored terror to create the fiction of an external enemy and to maintain a high level of fear in the domestic population which will then accept both external wars (against the fake enemy) and domestic restriction of civil liberties. The mainstream media play a vital role in the creation and maintenance of the necessary myths - such as 'al-Qaeda' and the 'war on terror'.

If there is a political solution at all, it can come only after the lies have been exposed and the system which manufactures and publicises the lies has been radically reformed. We do need real democracies with constitutional powers to control both the executives and Eisenhower's 'military-industrial complex'. But the political process has been hijacked to such an extent by those forces that it is difficult to see how we can move from the present intolerable situation to something approaching genuine democracy. In the meantime it is vital that the lies which sustain the present structures and politics be scotched.

Ashut on "Kurdistan beyond Iraq"

Ashut — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:04:05 +0100

"A thousand sighs, a thousand tears, a thousand revolts, a thousand hopes", who has heard this poem? This was an impressive article written by obviously an intellectual. If we get our own Kurdistan after Kosovo, we would be the 195. member state in the UN, as there are 193 member states at the moment represented at the UN. But I support the notion of 'Kurdistan, 194. member state of the UN', - before Kosovo.