Informed Comment

Is Kerry’s Inconsistency on Iraq a Liability?

Mother Jones,, rather unaccountably relying on Max Boot, raises the question of whether Kerry’s changing Iraq position will hurt him in the campaign. Kerry voted for the congressional authorization of the war, but then voted against Bush’s request for $87 billion more after the war ($20 bn. for Iraq reconstruction).

So far Iraq isn’t a big factor in the campaign, and unless things go badly wrong, it may not emerge as such. So it isn’t clear that Kerry’s position will be relevant one way or another. But the journalists’ fixation on “consistency” is anyway not usually shared by the public. After all, Kerry’s positions have been pretty typical of most Americans–initial support for the Iraq war, then profound dismay at the Bush adminstration’s handling of the aftermath, then sticker shock at the $87 bn. request (which won’t be the last).

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Bahr al-Ulum: Federalism can work with 18 Provinces

In a recent interview in al-Siyasah, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum implicitly opposed the Iraqi Kurds’ demands for a consolidated Kurdish state:

“(Bilal) Do you think federalism is good for Iraq?”

“(Bahr-al-Ulum) First of all we do not accept the division of Iraq or any situation that leads to the division of Iraq. We stress the unity of the homeland and its territorial integrity. We must spare this country anything that might lead to its division or fragmentation. But I believe that we must make a step towards the creation of 18 governorates enjoying some self-rule and not relying on a central government or a regional federation. This could help citizens serve their interests and objectives. But we should not work for a strong federation that might cause problems.” (via BBC world monitoring via Lexis Nexis.)

Bahr al- Ulum, a Shiite clergyman close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and a member of the Interim Governing Council, has thus rejected the idea of “regional federations” of the sort the Kurds advocate. Most Shiite Arabs are opposed to the Kurdish plan, favoring a relatively strong central government, which they plan to control. The Shiite demonstrations of January 20 included among their demands the rejection of the Kurdish demand for an ethnic canton and a very loose federalism. Bahr al-Ulum appears flexible on the second issue, but not on the first, and he probably is a good guide to mainstream Shiite views.

For contemporary views on Iraqi politics among Kurds in the north, Tom Hundley’s Chicago Tribune piece is well worth looking at.

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Hilfiker on Army Strong-Arm Tactics in Sunni Heartland

Dr. David Hilfiker of the Christian Peacemaker Team has written an important account, presented by Tom Engelhardt, of the tactics employed by Col. Nate Sassaman in dealing with Sunni Arab Iraqis. Sassaman is alleged to have said several things about Iraqi Muslims that verge on racism, and his tactics, such as imprisoning the entire village of Abu Hishma with razor wire (probably borrowed from the Israelis), have brought notoriety to the United States in Iraq.

Hilfiker doesn’t say so, but the Sassaman approach is vehemently contested by the US Marines, who stress winning hearts and minds, and probably were on the verge of making important breakthroughs in places like Fallujah when they were withdrawn and replaced by the army.

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John LeCarre on Iraq Intelligence Failure

From Laura Miller’s recent interview in Salon.com with the famed spy novelist David Cornwell and former British foreign service officer:

“I think it’s perfectly true that after the Cold War ended and the secret war against terror and the business of spying on terror got going, as always the new war was being fought with the weapons of the old one and it didn’t work. It’s terribly difficult to spy on a multinational organization that doesn’t oblige you by using all the toys you can catch them out with: telephones, cellphones, radio, codes that you can break. It doesn’t have a command and control structure that you can penetrate . . .

Your intelligence budget for the CIA alone is, I think, $30 billion a year. The result is a huge proliferation of junk. The art of refining that and turning it into a lucid statement you can write on a postcard and put in front of a busy politician really is very, very difficult stuff. The intelligence business is threatened by exactly the same bad people that your business is threatened by . . . In the intelligence world, with so much money around, there are tremendously sophisticated peddlers who are just making stuff up, feeding information to the empty areas of your head and taking huge sums of money for it and disappearing into the smoke. And I think some of the intelligence services fell for some of that stuff.”

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10 Members of Iraqi Civil Defense Force wounded in Blast

Guerrillas in the northeastern town of Baquba donated a big bomb, targeting a patrol of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force, and wounding 10 of them, according to Reuters.

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10,000 Shiites Protest in Nasiriyah, seek Resignation of Provincial Council

Az-Zaman newspaper reports that Muqtada al-Sadr’s organization staged a demonstration of 10,000 in the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah on Wednesday. They were joined by the Fudala’ Party, also adherents of the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr, but who follow Muhammad Yaqubi rather than Muqtada, Sadiq’s son. Elements from the Sadrist militia, the Army of the Mahdi, also rallied.

They demanded that the appointed provincial council of Dhi Qar province resign, including the governor, Sabri Hamed Badr al-Rumaidh, and be replaced by a popularly elected provincial grovernment. They also wanted the officials and bureaucrats appointed by the current provincial council to be sacked.

AP reported that they chanted, “No to Israel! No to imperialism! No to America!” Nasiriyah, a city of about half a million inhabitants, is 350 kilometers (215 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Az-Zaman says that there had been an earlier demonstration (presumably the one on Tuesday January 20, held in a number of Shiite towns).

AP says that Coalition authorities are denying that al-Rumaidh has resigned, saying only that he has withdrawn from view.

This demonstration clearly is part of pre-election politics. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called for open national elections. The US says it wants to use the appointed provincial councils to select an electoral college. Muqtada’s followers are hedging their bets. Even if the US sticks to its guns and uses the provincial councils as the electorate, they seem to be saying, they want the provincial councils themselves to have been freely elected beforehand.

Similar demonstrations showing dissatisfaction by Shiites with their Coalition-appointed provincial or municipal councils have broken out in recent weeks in Kut and Amara, two other major southern Shiite towns.

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Pachachi Envisages Triumvirate as Iraqi Executive

AFP/al-Zaman report that Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian interim president of the Iraqi Governing Council, envisages that the new transitional Iraqi government due to be installed July 1 will have a three-man executive. He said that the transitional parliament will elect the three presidents. He also insisted that the three-man executive would have real powers and would not just be window dressing. The three would appoint the prime minister, and would approve cabinet appointments along with the parliament, and would have the power to sign or veto legislation. He envisaged legislation originating with government ministries and then being ratified by parliament and by the 3 presidents. Another spokesman said that the 3 would not necessarily reflect Iraq’s major ethnic groups.

This system is completely unworkable and highly undemocratic. The parliament should be the body that chooses the prime minister. The parliament should be the body that thinks up laws and passes them. Pachachi’s scheme seriously blurs the separation of powers, which is a key element in democracy. The 3-man presidency would potentially always be over-ruling the prime minister. Iran after the Revolution initially had both a president and a prime minister, and they fought so viciously and produced so much gridlock that eventually the office of prime minister was abolished.

Pachachi and his backers (possibly the Americans) clearly want to use the 3-man presidency as a brake on Shiite dominance of parliament and the likely Shiite prime minister.

I think such an “executive” would be unable to decide on anything, just as the Interim Governing Council has had trouble making tough decisions. Pachachi and his aides are saying it would prevent the concentration of power in the hands of one man. Uh, Adnan, that’s what an independent legislature and judiciary are supposed to be for.

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