Khalilzad meets al-Hakim
Reuters reports several bombs and attacks in Baghdad, as well as in Baqubah, Khalis, Kirkuk and elsewhere, leaving over a dozen dead. Significant items include the assassination of 3 members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia in Baqubah; the blowing up of a Sunni shrine in Tikrit; and a mortar attack on the offices in Baghdad of the National Dialogue Council (Sunni Arab neo-Baathists). [NDC leader Salih Mutlak said last summer that you couldn't find a better party for Iraq than the Baath).
US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad met Tuesday with the Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to discuss ways of defusing the current crisis.
Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that leaders of the Sadr Movement met with President Jalal Talabani and other Kurdish leaders in an attempt to resolve the current crisis over the formation of a new government. Fadil al-Shara` suggested that the Kurds accept Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister "as long as he is monitored by parliament and by the Sadr bloc."
Faraj al-Haydari of the Kurdistan Democratic Party said that the Kurdistan Alliance position, that Jaafari must go, has not changed.
ABC News quotes retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, on how Iraq is already in a low-intensity civil war, and how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's continued state of denial about this is putting the US in danger:
' "We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.
"It's our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq," added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.
Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."
Ayhan Simsek surveys the whole range of Turkey's concerns in Iraq. They not only include worries that Kurdistan might become independent and draw in Turkish Kurds but also fear of Iranian political Islam having an impact on Turkey itself. Turks who hold this view see Iraq as a buffer between Iran and Turkey, and fear that the buffer is breaking down.
Kofi Annan says that two things are keeping back an expansion of UN activities in Iraq: no nation will transport UN workers inside Iraq by plane, and the general violence that plagues the country. All I can say is that this situation is pretty pitiful.
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/08/2006 12:30:00 AM
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Professor - Reading the commentary on the lead up the war, many of the advocates for attacking Iraq tried to damp down concerns about what may happen between the Turks and Kurds, by noting that Kurdish leadership had promised to work for a unified Iraq. Yet to us non experts, it seemed that was just a pragmatic statement. Surely, the advocates for 'regime change' in Iraq, smart as they are, did not actually think the Kurds would turn on a dime and decide not to achieve autonomy, not to mention give up trying to reclaim what they felt was theirs in Kirkuk. So is it possible that the Bush partisans anticipated the current trouble brewing between Turkey and the Kurdish region and what most people view as worrisome, they may see differently? If so they must know that Turkey has already reserved the right to intervene in N. Iraq. If that happens, will the so-called pro-Kurdish partisans among the pundit class stay with their Kurdish advocacy or will they rally to the concerns of Turkey, a NATO ally? Meanwhile, won't seemingly unrelated issues like EU talks and Cyprus issues also affect things negatively? Does the Bush admin. view what most see as negative, as not so bad?
You wrote : Kofi Annan says that two things are keeping back an expansion of UN activities in Iraq: no nation will transport UN workers inside Iraq by plane, and the general violence that plagues the country. All I can say is that this is pretty pitiful.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pretty pitiful". To my ears this sounds like a critique of the UN and Kofi Annan. As if you intended that the UN offers poor justifications for not doing more in Iraq. In your quote of the article, you put on the same level two arguments which have different weight in the article you quoted. So one get the impression that the UN is using ridiculous arguments in order to justify her low level of activity in Iraq, that she is acting cowardly. I find all this paragraph very unfair. First : the US did all she could to prevent the UN of taking a leading role in the Iraq reconstruction. So why should the UN run to rescue the US multiple blunders ? Secondly : the UN isn't an army, she is composed mainly of functionaries, so what can she do in a country like Iraq, where the US intervention is provocing a civil war ? The UN is still grieving from the July 2003 bombing which clearly indicated that she wasn't welcome. The UN is continually put under pressure by the US (the last being Bolton's opposition to the reform of the Human Rights commission : could it be that the US has something fo fear from a more functional commission, after Bagram, Guantanamo, etc. ?), so why should Kofi Anan run to help the US out of the mess Bush/Rumsfeld and co have created in Iraq ?
you wrote:
"Ayhan Simsek surveys the whole range of Turkey's concerns in Iraq. They not only include worries that Kurdistan might become independent and draw in Turkish Kurds but also fear of Iranian political Islam having an impact on Turkey itself. Turks who hold this view see Iraq as a buffer between Iran and Iraq, and fear that the buffer is breaking down."
i find the last sentence confusing.
Kofi Annan says that two things are keeping back an expansion of UN activities in Iraq: no nation will transport UN workers inside Iraq by plane, and the general violence that plagues the country. All I can say is that this is pretty pitiful.
I hope you don't mean to say that nations other than the US and the UK are morally obliged to send planes. Or that those nations should send UN personnel if they are not adequately protected. Iraq is under a de facto American occupation. We all know that in many parts of the world this occupation is considered illegal. We also know that before they entered Iraq the United States were warned by politicians around the globe that things might get hot there. Now that the US are the effective ruling force in Iraq they are responsible for providing security. They can do that if they allocate enough resources and send enough troops. They can also transport the UN people if they want to. But they don't do these things. So why should other people become involved? From my perspective here in Old Europe it really seems that we shouldn't and that we have no obligations at all.
Generally find your blog extremely informative, though.
So, what is the point of being a neocon if main test for your ideology fails? Just to further improve advanced "democratic" society?
1. Ind. NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
2. Barry R. Posen. How to disengage from Iraq in 18 months
The United States needs a new strategy in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The war is at best a stalemate; the large American presence now causes more trouble than it prevents. We must disengage from Iraq—and we must do it by removing most American and allied military units within 18 months.
Ironically, the U.S. presence probably encourages the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni Arabs each to believe that they are stronger than they are. The Kurds have become accustomed to American protection from the Shia and from Turkey, so they have felt free to demand what amounts to an independent state and control of Iraq’s northern oil fields. The Shia rely on American soldiers to do the hard fighting against the Sunni Arab insurgents, which permits Shia politicians to believe that they can safely strive for a religious state and preserve their monopoly over Iraq’s rich southern oil fields. Some Shia politicians also support purges of officials and soldiers—most of them Sunni Arabs—who may have had an affiliation with Saddam’s regime but who were pragmatically drawn into the Iraqi administration and security services by Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister. The Sunni Arabs probably believe that only the presence of U.S. troops can prevent them from re-establishing their domination of Iraq. Only U.S. troops have been able to dethrone them in the past, and many do not even believe the widely accepted estimate that they are outnumbered three to one by the Shia. They also seem to have forgotten that they preserved their domination of Iraq with chemical weapons, artillery, tanks, and aircraft—all of which are gone. They will not reconcile themselves to a diminished position in Iraq until they discover that they cannot beat the Shia and the Kurds in a fair fight.
My reading of Juan's use of the word pitiful was how sad it is that the United States has created such a horrible mess.
Hmm, in regards to Turkey, could we somehow convince Turkey to allow a Kurdistan on their eastern border?
They could make some sort of agreement to stay out of Turkey's affairs and offer land and living space to the kurds in Turkey. We could do this by allowing the Kurds to expand south to Kirkuk and perhaps Mosul (I think that's Mosul...) so that 1) they would leave Turkey and arrive in Kurdistan and 2)use Kurdistan as the buffer between Turkey and Iran.
Plus I think the Sunni's might be less threatened by the Kurds than the Shiites. If only a by a little.
How much credence in this? Iran, saviour of Iraq?
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