Maliki Seeks Sunni Support in Tikrit
4 Party Coalition slammed as Elitist Expatriates
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the purpose of PM Nuri al-Maliki's visit to Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's old home base) was to convince some tribal notables there to accept ministerial positions in his government. The main Sunni Arab party, the Iraqi Accord Front, is boycotting al-Maliki's government, and he is therefore desperate to find some Sunnis somewhere who would be willing to join his government. The problem is that although there are prominent Sunni Arab figures in Tikrit, they would not represent anyone but themselves if they joined the government. The Iraqi Accord Front won 44 seats in parliament. A seat is 40,000 votes, so the IAF represents 1,760,0000 persons out of Iraq's 11 million voters. Some son of a tribal sheikh in Tikrit represents no one but himself and maybe some close family members.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the formation of a 4-party bloc to support Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was not met with enthusiasm by the rest of the political spectrum. The Sadr Movement sniffed that the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Islamic Call (Da'wa) party do not represent the Iraqi people and that these were expatriate parties that came to Iraq from the outside. [SIIC was formed in Tehran in 1982 and was based in Iran for most of its existence; Many Da'wa leaders also were in Iran in the 1980s and 1990s, though some were in London, Damascus, Beirut and Kuwait. There were local Da'wa branches in Iraq, though.]
The Sadrists said that the new bloc was just Kurdish and Shiite allies, who were unrepresentative of the whole country, and that there needed to be a non-sectarian coalition.
Hasan al-Shammari, head of the Fadhila bloc in parliament (15 seats) said that their ministers have limited portfolios and that they could not be expected to resolve Iraq's problems.
Izzat Shahbandar of the Iraqi National List agreed. He said that since their inception SIIC and Da'wa had attempted to monopolize political power in Iraq, and this new bloc was just more of the same.
Gareth Porter carefully takes apart the Pentagon's mostly gotten-up case for Iran being a major problem for US troops in Iraq. There has been no evidence that the highest levels of the Iranian government give direct support to the killing of US troops, but Gen. Odierno implies there has been. The US has mounted more operations against the Mahdi Army, but blames consequent increase in US casualties from that quarter on increased Iranian influence. It is a shell game.
And Warren Strobel of McClatchy explains just how dangerous it is for Bush to play chicken with Iran at this juncture. Money grafs:
' "The coercion ... undermines diplomacy. And once diplomacy is undermined, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. By early 2008, "You're in a position where you have a series of escalatory measures ... And then the military option becomes something you can consider," Takeyh said. '
David Enders on the political paralysis in Basra, where the governor was unseated by a vote of no confidence by the governing council, but has refused to step down. His party, Fadhila, has special access to gasoline smuggling and embezzlement from the oil industry, since so much of it is exported via Basra, the port for the major oil producing region of the south.
McClatcy rounds up political violence in Iraq on Friday
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/18/2007 12:35:00 AM
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10 Comments:
The idea of declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terror group can, if played right, help. The focus must shift from attacking Iran to chasing the IRG, and from the military to the financial.
The IRG are hated by the Iranian and the Iraqi people mostly from their underworld and corruption activities, and hurting the IRG seriously will get the Americans a positive score, the exact opposite to threatening the Iranian state.
Iraqi crude oil smuggling is basically an IRG operation. The local Shiia mafias only get a small proportion of the billions in revenue. The IRG, through their commercial and black-market outfits in the UAE and in Jordan do the exporting and money laundering needed. One should think that the US know who these are by now.
The IRG also handles a great chunk of Iran's imports and exports via corporations and groups in the EU and elsewhere, and they can be hit quite easily.
So why hasn't the US attacked the IRG until now? Because they were dumb enough to think that the corrupt IRG were a potential ally in their Regime Change fetish! The support for Iraq's SCIRI (or what-ever it is called now) who are IRG in all but name is part of it. The US and UK have turned a blind eye to the IRG smuggling activities which involves Ammar Hakim, who became Washington's darling in a recent visit as he assured them of the IRG's devotion to the USA! But the Hakim mafia have been saying that for two decades, with no results whatsoever.
Weakining the IRG by starving it of the billions in overseas activities may actually lead to a peaceful Regime Change in Iran but to a better governance rather than a corrupt US-friendly regime, which frankly is a pipe-dream.
Dear Professor Cole
Well it looks like the rumours are true
Lets try Saddam Lite and have a dictator back
He might be a son of a bitch, but at least he is our son of a bitch!
This is the good old French decolonisation method. Appoint a President, lend him a Battalion of Foreign Legion, hold elections, and resume business as usual (acknowledgement to Freddie Forsyth "Dogs of War")
God only knows how you can have elections with 10% of the population in refugee cities in Syria and Jordan.
Really the only issues left are whether Maliki gets shot at his desk or is allowed to go and live in an enormous house in West London along with the rest of the Iraqi expats, and just when Allawi goes after Al Sadr and the boys.
Curious that Tactical Surprise (often a useful element in a coup ) has gone out the window.
Well at least the guys with the few hundred thousand missing rifles can start getting ready.
I'm puzzled by the reluctance of objective Middle Eastern experts to accept the fact that the US believes Iran will do whatever it can to complicate the situation we find ourselves in in Iraq, and to drive us out of Iraq if it can. That's what enemies do to one another. And, absent proof one way or the other, intelligence services seem to rely on capabilities and intentions. Just today, according to Reuters, Kayhan reported that Yahya Rahim Safavi, the commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, threatened to "deal heavier blows in future against the United States" after Washington said it may label the force a terrorist group. Reuters notes that "Iran has threatened to strike U.S. regional interests if attacked over its nuclear program and Safavi has noted that Iranian missiles could hit warships operating anywhere in the Gulf and Oman Sea." Compared to threats to attack US warships, providing training and explosives to Iraqi guerrillas is small potatoes. My own less than expert prediction is that within a year we'll be wondering if Iran is as tough as North Vietnam was. The neocons badly need a new war in the Middle East to salvage American prestige, and Iran seems intent on giving them one.
RE: "There has been no evidence that the highest levels of the Iranian government give direct support to the killing of US troops, but Gen. Odierno implies there has been."
Gen. Odierno's implications are no doubt based on good intelligence. But let us keep in mind what we learned recently when good intelligence convinced our esteemed leaders that S. Hussein certainly had WMDs with 45 minute launch capability. As was explained at the time, truth-value is not essential to good intelligence. While factual truth is a good thing generally, overreliance on factual truth can only lead to angst and indecision. The President, the
Secretary and the Director explained that the mere fact that no WMDs were found did not in any way take away from the "slam-dunkedness" of the intelligence. Our motto: Often wrong, perhaps, but never in doubt.
Ayad Allawi speaks up for Bush. Not exactly but in this WP op-ed Allawi lays all the blame for Iraq's current woes on the Iraqis, and more specifically on al-Maliki.
There is only praise for the US efforts. A conspiracy theorist might conclude that the op-ed is a collaboration between Allawi and his former employer, the CIA. Its a clean way of taking a shot at al-Maliki and giving Bush a nice lift, i.e. it kicks the right asses, and kisses the right asses.
But who would suspect the CHENEYbush administration of conspiratorial behavior?
Maliki's trip to Tikrit reminds me of a scene from some docudrama about Napoleon's invasion of Russia. After entering Moscow he sends out officers to find a Delegation of Notables to welcome him to Moscow. But the people they present to him are obviously of the most common sort, representing only themselves, since everyone else has fled the city. Napoleon flies into a rage, berating the officers for this insult to his dignity.
"But your Majesty, they were the best we could find!" the officers reply by way of self-exculpation.
Maliki is in the same position as those French officers--having driven off the best, he's stuck choosing from among the rest.
Ah! The smuggling concession in Basra. Just like New Jersey (my birthplace) and the Sopranos.
Some mayors can cross cultural boundaries.
peggy
This seems like more of Juan's liberal propaganda. The Lebanese "Daily Star" I believe pointed out recently that when the Iranian's supply marked weapons, as they are apparently doing now in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, they do so to send a message. That's almost certainly why the US military is concerned about who is sending these weapons. There are also some Iranian rockets etc. with the identification partially buffed out.
However General Odierno’s area of operations is restricted to Iraq so he could not talk about who in Iran is supplying the marked weapons, even if he knew. Therefore he simply says "the Iranian's".
Most important Odierno said he thought the problem of Iranian weapons being smuggled into Iraq could be dealt within from within Iraq, and that there is a multi-pronged program underway to deal with it. He said the first objective is to take down the supply networks, and then to continue to emphasize to the Iraqi's what Iranian intentions might be. He also said they detect the Iraqi public starting to talk more about Iranian intentions.
ref : “McClatcy rounds up political violence in Iraq on Friday”
"- 4 Iraqi Army soldiers injured by IED targeting their patrol..."
=> Iraq Coalition toll hits 4,000 : “The figure includes 3,702 US military service members as the majority of the fatalities and 300 from all other countries, which are: 168 Britons, 33 Italians, 21 Poles, 18 Ukrainians, 13 Bulgarians, 11 Spaniards, 7 Danes, 5 Salvadoran, 4 Slovaks, 3 Latvian , 2 Australians, 2 Dutch, 2 Romanians, 2 Thai , 2 Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, one Czech, one Kazakh and one Korean.”
Apparently, there are no Iraqis, casualties, thus ~ who are considered "members" of The Iraq Coalition :-/
True Troop Levels : “There are more than 162,000 American troops and more than 180,000 private military contractors in Iraq.”
iow, there are approximately ~350,000 de facto Occupation Forces "serving" in IRAQ; further, these data do not reflect the what, hundreds of thousands of Naval and Air Force personnel "serving" = allocated to the conflict in and Mission = Occupation of IRAQ. Little is reported about them, their valiant efforts; neither their treasure cost apparent nor personal sacrifices inevitable ~ simply because they do not exist within the arbitrary 'national boundary' that Western Media blindly accept as an isolated, 2-D battle ground within a 3-D global reality.
i (barely begin to) scratch the surface here, with these data ~ because the violence of IRAQ occupation is often marginalized, pooh-poohed as unlike, say ~ the Viet Nam War ~ by this pervasive illusion that the number of combatants engaged, or 'allied' casualties suffered "is so much less."
indeed, if history recounts the present as "The Civil War in IRAQ, during the Occupation of IRAQ by AngloAmerican forces," then the number of Iraqis either fighting offensively or fighting to defend themselves, or fighting against their foreign occupiers ~ probably includes every able-bodied male between the ages of 16 and 60, for whom the fact of their fate is No Exit.
"Really the only issues left are whether Maliki gets shot at his desk or is allowed to go and live in an enormous house in West London along with the rest of the Iraqi expats, and just when Allawi goes after Al Sadr and the boys."
Well, make your bets and take your chances here in the Grand Casino of Human Events: Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs!
Poor M. al-Maliki shot dead at his desk? Maybe 4:1 odds against.
The ineffable Allawi to be reinstalled in quasipower by the Occupyin' Party -- now that's more like 40:1 against.
"Al Sadr and the boys" to be gone after by GOP aggressors and invasionauts? That one seems radically incalculable to me. Of course there would be Hell to pay if the Big Management Party stumblebums ever actually did anything as dumb as that, but my own thumb doesn't prick either way. The bozos might do it, and on the other hand, they might not do it.
Who knows? Wait and see!
God knows best.
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