Saddam to Hang;
Shiites, Kurds Celebrate
Some Sunnis Protest
The Daily Telegraph reports that the death verdict against Saddam Hussein announced Sunday has sharpened further Iraq's already parlous ethnic tensions. Shiites in Sadr City, once viciously repressed by Saddam, erupted in celebrations of joy, including celebratory fire. NBC news is reporting some protests by Sunnis in the capital.
Al-Zaman/Reuters reports that when the verdict was read in court, Saddam shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great!) and "Long live the Muslim nation!" (`Ashat al-ummah!) As a secular Arab nationalist, Saddam at one point kept out of the Iraqi constitution any mention of Islam, but since the Gulf War he has mugged for the camera with such slogans. They may have some resonances in Sunni Arab regions, though, as well as in the Muslim world more generally.
Saddam's defense team said that the court was constituted under an American military occupation and therefore could not be impartial, and that the verdict made a mockery of justice.
They also said, according to NBC, that the verdict was timed by the Bush administration in a desperate attempt to influence the US midterm elections. AP reports that Islamist activists around the world are critical of the verdict and also say it was timed cynically.
In other Sunni Arab areas, the Telegraph says, many rejected the legitimacy of the verdict:
' “The hanging of the former Iraqi president is part of an American scheme. He was a symbol of liberation in Iraq,” declared Dr Muzahim Allawi, a university professor, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit.
The theme of foreign interference in the verdict was a constant one, with many accusing the United States and its remaining 150,000 troops in Iraq of persecuting the former strongman for its own ends.
“The sentence is pre-prepared in Washington and Tel Aviv,” spat civil servant Qusay Addai, bitterly.
Student Qasim Nayif agreed: “The Americans are responsible for the judgement which certainly pleased (US President George W.) Bush and (former Israeli premier Ariel) Sharon.” '
Qasim Nayif isn't up on the latest Israeli political news, obviously.
Paul Reynolds of the BBC reviews the pros and cons of the way the trial was conducted. An Amnesty International official said:
' He listed his group's concerns about the trials.
"The independence and impartiality of the court was impugned. There was political interference. The first judge resigned, the second was barred for being a former member of the Baath party, the only political entity at the time, and the third judge had relatives who were killed in Halabje [where Kurds were gassed by Saddam Hussein's forces].
"The security of the court was also impossible to keep. Three defence lawyers were murdered. Saddam himself had no access to legal advice for a year. There were also problems with the defence's ability to function." '
My op-ed, , "Breaking Iraq Apart, is in the Mercury News Perspectives section on Sunday. Excerpt:
' The vagueness and, frankly, incoherence of some of the comments made about splitting up Iraq by politicians on the stump suggests that they are using the idea merely as an election-season mantra. They are putting it forward as an exit strategy. Divide the place up and get out, they say, hoping that if the Iraqis could not live with one another peacefully inside one country, they will be able to do so once they are separated.
Historically, partition has not always brought peace. The partition of Germany by the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II provoked a nuclear standoff and nail-biting tensions for 40 years. The British Empire in its waning days agreed in 1947 to partition colonial India into the nations of India and Pakistan, which went on to fight several wars and now brandish nuclear weapons at one another. The partition of Palestine in 1948 set the stage for six Arab-Israeli wars.
The purely American context of these deliberations about the fate of a whole Middle Eastern nation seems somewhat detached from reality. In Iraq itself, the major proponent of new regional confederacies is Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the largest bloc in parliament. He and his allies wish to see eight or nine largely Shiite provinces join together in a super-province or regional confederacy.
Tehran's support
Hakim is widely seen as close to Iran, and it is believed that Iran supports the idea of a Shiite regional government. Hakim recently rammed through parliament a law specifying the legal mechanisms for establishing such a confederacy. The Sunni Arab bloc boycotted the vote. Should not Americans be suspicious of a plan so warmly supported by Tehran?'
Read the whole thing.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/05/2006 04:30:00 AM
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8 Comments:
The deaths caused by Saddam Hussein were horrendous. The deaths that have occurred since he was ousted from power are even worse. The trial was a farce. Now the death sentence has given the citizens of an already fractured nation even more reason to kill each other. And the timing was so cynical and calculated that even those who would have like to see Saddam brought to justice will feel cheated.
And, in the end, hanging him will do nothing to undo the horrors that were carried out by him and those that have happened since in the name of unseating him.
It will be just one more death after so many others.
Prof. Cole,
Very interesting and timely article. One thing I might add is my disgust that Americans feel we have the right to impose a partition upon a soverign nation. We invaded and destroyed Iraq for our own selfish purposes, and we continue the same arrogant process by feeling it is our divine right to split that nation into separate entities. While partition is politically wrong, it is also morally wrong.
Dear IC,
Riverbend, the Iraqi computer programmer who lives in Baghdad and has been maintaining a blog on the occupation since August 2003, has posted an entry dealing with the Saddam Hussein verdict.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
This is only her second entry since early August of this year. (The other dealt with duelling estimates of civilian casualties following a Johns Hopkins study.) Riverbend has been generally shut down by the "hopelessness" that attends this occupation and insurgency, but her "rage" over the whole evil tragedy has motivated her to deal with a number of problems relating to this trial and verdict.
She touches on press censorship (and includes screen shots of Iraqi channels that were shut down today), the integrity of the trial, and the timing of the verdict.
She also mentions that formerly pro-occupation Iraqis have become noticibly toned-down. There is a parallel effect in the US where, for example, early war-boosters Richard Perle and Ken Adelman have just made dramatic, public reversals. Both were military advisors to the US governement who pushed hard for an invasion. Adelman now calls the occupation a "disater" produced by a "deadly, dysfunctional" Bush Administration.
Iraq War Proponents Decry Administration - New York Times
4 November 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Critics.html
About Iran, what person who has a name believes Iran supports the idea of a Shiite regional government or of partition?
Tehran has never made a statement supportive of partition that I've come across.
They support Hakim who favors it, they also support Sadr, who opposes it. Maliki, who opposes partition, speaks much more negatively about the United States than he does about Iran.
As I've said many times, if Kurdistan is leaving, Hakim will want to leave also regardless of Iran's position, just on the basis that by leaving he would not have to share oil with the Sunnis.
I've never come across evidence that Tehran wants to break up Iraq. A unified 60% Shiite democratic Iraq would suit Iranian purposes just fine.
(On this subject, Tehran would be pretty happy with a democratic 90% Sunni Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Tehran would be ecstatic about a one-person one-vote Lebanon and has even advocated one-person one-vote -- including Palestinian refugees -- to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict.)
There is a laugh-out-loud moment where Talabani rejects partition for the rest of Iraq, he only supports it for Kurdistan.
This is the Kurdish/American fantasy. There is still time to back the Kurds down, but that means no military presence in Kurdistan for the US or Israel, and no US leverage over the Iraqi government.
The US can just tell the Kurds that the US will not be around to protect them, so either the Kurds rejoin Iraq, with Baghdad controlling the oil and foreign policy, or the Kurds fight and lose to the Sunnis, Iranians and Turkey without US help.
The Kurds are sure to put the oil back under Baghdad's control and allow Parliament to ban foreign military presences. Then Hakim can probably be convinced that leaving is not worth it.
If the US refuses to accept a majority Shiite Iraq that is friendly with Hamas and Hezbollah, that considers the US, Israel and UK to be the "triad of evil" (to use Sadr's phrase), and that will refuse to host a US military presence, then the US advocates the violent break up of Iraq.
Those are the two plausible alternatives. The US plan seems to be to help the Kurds go and hope the Shiites somehow become willing to remain with the Sunnis. That plan is structually impossible to accomplish.
The plan is so obviously self-contradictory that nobody advocates the plan out loud. It is questionable that anyone believes it will work.
Dr. Cole implicitly advocates that plan by criticizing Shiite regionalism but not Kurdish regionalism, and by emphasizing Iranian support for Shiites who favor partition while ignoring US support for Kurds who favor partition.
There are two possible outcomes in Iraq. Defeat now - the US allows an intact anti-US Iraq to form, with Kurdistan still part of Iraq without independent control of oil and without the ability to independently invite foreign militaries.
Or defeat later - the US tries to hold onto Kurdistan, watches Iraq descend into civil war and ends up with virulently anti-American Sunnistan and Shiitestan and landlocked Kurdistan dependent on US support.
As Sunnistan, Iran, Turkey and Syria will all refuse to allow the US easy resupply of its forces supporting Kurdistan, that country too will quickly fall out of the US sphere of influence.
The only live question is how many people die before the US loses this one. The only party whose actions will influence the answer to that question is the United States.
There is no possible victory here. There is no way the US ends up with a pro-US Iraq or with a military presence, even in Kurdistan for any prolonged period.
The closest the US can get to victory is that Iraq will remain incapacitated and thereby unable to actively oppose US regional interests for the duration of the civil war.
As profoundly immoral and as profoundly contrary to long-term US Middle East interests as working towards an Iraqi civil war is - all indications are that that is what the US is going for.
I don't think Saddam's execution is going to make the Bushiite agenda in Iraq roll along any smoother... If anything, the Sunni-nationalist militia are going to be even more upset (and the Salafis are not going to be shaking American hands, anyway)...
The US is also in a fix regarding how to deal with the Iraqi Shiite majority while trying to carry out a hostile foreign policy against Iran... A newly declassified Clinton-era War Plan for Iraq (CENTCOM 1999), for example, asked explicitly for US-Iran cooperation in the event of a US-led coalition's invasion and occupation of Iraq...
I have pasted details of that report on my blog .
Professor Juan:
The Daily Telegraph reports that the death verdict against Saddam Hussein announced Sunday has sharpened further Iraq's already parlous ethnic tensions.
Saddam Hussein turned to religion and tribalism, especially after the uprising in the South in March 1991. Some tribal leaders might still be bound by a "blood oath" if Saddam is executed.
Could the scale of possible tribal retribution cause an indefinite stay of the execution?
I am surprised that you would comment extensively on a proposed alternative to Bush Iraq policy that is obviously going nowhere instead of critiquing current Bush policy. Current Bush policy is stuck on the belief that the military alone can impose order on Iraq and refuses to enter into political negotiation. Bush believes that the American military only has to stay long enough in Iraq in order to win. Bush is pursuing the same policy as the British in the colonies in the 1770s, the US in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan. As long as Bush and his yes-men are in charge of Iraq policy, the US Military will be forced to slug it out with both sides of the Iraq Civil War.
The exit from Iraq (as you know) cannot be accomplished without political negotiation. Bush will not negotiate because it would require abandoning his beligerant stance toward Iran and Syria who could help stabilize Iraq in the absence of Americans. Bush believes that negotiation is a sign of weakness and prefers divide and conquer attack politics to compromise (just look at his domestic policy strategy). Bush will not negotiate with al Sadr, because his evangelical base will not let him negotiate with an anti-American muslim cleric. Bush does not have a clear grasp of the parties or positions and routinely mischaracterizes them in public. Unless Bush is forced to turn over the foreign policy portfolio to a fixer like James Baker, the US will remain stuck in Iraq pursuing the military imposition option. The not so secret news is that massive call ups of National Guard and Reserves are set for December, after the elections to increase numbers of American troops in Iraq.
IMHO, Iraq partition is a distraction from the real problem of Bush intransigence and unwillingness to pursue a political settlement. Unless and until we focus on the need for a political settlement in Iraq and bring massive political pressure on the Bush administration to honestly negotiate and make the necessary tough choices, Iraq will only get worse for everyone, not better. The American electorate wants to hear a simple solution to Iraq, not that there are no good options. Unfortunately, the best option requires President Bush to eat crow, something he will never do.
@hans wall
an indefinite postponement seems unlikely. one of saddam hussein's lawyers was quite firm in asserting a week ago that his client would likely be dead by january or february.
http://de.rian.ru/world/20061107/55429723.html
(unfortunately, the agency posted the article in german only. the novosti site, on the other hand, seems to be unreachable.)
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