Obama Sticks to 16 Month Timetable;
Gives Gates 'New Mission';
38 Killed, 100 Wounded in Spate of Bombings;
President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed on Monday that he wants to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration. That would be well before the December, 2011 deadline enshrined in the new security agreement between the two countries. The agreement stipulates that its details can be altered by mutual consent, or by one side giving one year's notice.
Obama, who is retaining Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, said he would give him a new mission, of getting out of Iraq and combatting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. (I don't think there is any al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; at least, no captures there have been announced to my knowledge since 2002).
As many as 38 persons were killed and 100 wounded in a series of attacks in Iraq on Monday. Guerrillas detonated 2 bombs near a police academy in Baghdad, killing 16. An suicide bomber targeted the convoy of Gen. Mudhhir al Mawla, a right hand man of PM Nuri al-Maliki, seriously wounding him and killing 3 others.
In the northern city of Mosul, a man with a suicide bomb vest detonated it near a US convoy, killing some 16 Iraqis.
Iraq will support supply cuts by OPEC to force the price of petroleum back up, even though the US frowns on this practice. Remember the Neoconservative theory of Perle and Wolfowitz that after Saddam was overthrown, Iraq's production would sink OPEC and impoverish Saudi Arabia? Turns out, not so much.
Tension is increasing between PM Nuri al-Maliki and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Al-Maliki has criticized Irbil for trying to act like an independent country-- letting oil bids without checking with Baghdad and giving out visas, etc. The Kurds in turn are suspicious of the Support Councils al-Maliki has been forming among tribes, which have a paramilitary element and are personally loyal to him. In particular, they are upset that he has sought to organize the Arabs of Hawija in this way. These Arabs oppose the Kurdish annexation of Kirkuk.
Turkey bombed Iraq again striking at bases of the Kurdish Workers Party holed up in its mountains on the border with Turkey.
Iran has decided to back the Status of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the US, which parliament passed last week. The Iranians mainly want US troops out of Iraq; the agreement stipulates that all must be out by the end of 2011.
The Chicago Tribune profiles the Iraqi army in Mosul, finding improvement but serious remaining problems of equipment and corruption.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the governor of Diyala province is requesting a postponement of provincial elections in his province. He notes that the election in Kirkuk Province was postponed, and points out that Diyala is more racked with violence than Kirkuk. He also estimates that some 26,000 families have been displaced from the province (that would be 100,000, from a population of about 1.2 million, or nearly 10 percent!)
But I am suspicious of this plea. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a Shiite, pro-Iran party, has a commanding position in Diyala, even though it is thought to be 60% Sunni. The election will redress this situation, which stems from the Sunnis' refusal to vote in January, 2005. Things weren't quiet in 2005, either, but the province voted anyway.
Honor killings are on the rise in Basra.
For his part, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has expressed reservations about the security agreement, which to some extent infringes on Iraqi sovereignty. But his office says he is content to let the people decide on it. Parliament already voted it in, and a national referendum is to be held by June.
Iraq is seeking to license 14 oil fields to corporations for development.
The Iraqi government is seeking to revive 2.5 million square acres of land by removing excess salinity from it. In some provinces of Iraq, salinization has reduced crop yields to half of what they used to be.
McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Monday:
' - Three people were killed and 10 others were injured including security guards by a bomb that was planted in Sleikh neighborhood in east Baghdad near the house of General Mudhhir al Mawla, an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. Al Mawla was seriously injured and his driver was among the killed people. The incident took place around 9 a.m.
- 15 people, including policemen, were killed and 45 others were wounded when two explosions took place near the gate of the police academy on Palestine Street in east Baghdad on Monday morning. The first explosion was done by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest followed by an explosion of a parked car bomb.
- Four people (2 policemen and 2 civilians) were wounded by a bomb in Palestine Street in east Baghdad around 8 p.m.
Nineveh
- Seven civilians (6 women and 1 child) were injured by two adhesive bombs which were stuck to the main gate of two houses in al Yarmouk neighborhood in west Mosul city on Sunday evening.
- Gunmen killed two women in al Yarmouk neighborhood in west Mosul city on Monday morning.
- 16 Iraqis were killed, most of them policemen, and 37 others were injured when a suicide car bomber attacked a joint convoy of Iraqi police and US military in New Mosul area in west Mosul city around 1 p.m.
- Gunmen killed two school teachers in two separated in south Mosul on Monday afternoon.
- Gunmen kidnapped a doctor in al Sarij Khana area in downtown Mosul city on Monday afternoon.
Kirkuk
- Police found 12 unidentified bodies in south Kirkuk.'
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/02/2008 01:25:00 AM
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5 Comments:
Obama is talking about withdrawing combat troops only, so there is no need for amending the agreement which specifies that all troops must leave by end of 2011. The US is free to determine the level of troops meanwhile.
Obama almost certainly wants to keep the so-called non-combat troops indefinetely, which he is unlikely to win agreement for from Iraq.
In general, I think that Obama will fail to bring the promised Change to Washington. He has surrounded himself by establishment figures, and will need superhuman powers to force his agenda (assuming that it is actually different.) There is so much at stake for the Establishment and they will lie, hide information, neutralize whistle-blowers, you name it.
AL SIstani is hypocrit. why didnt he speak out BEFORE the agreement was signed . It is B..too late. He could have allowed the iraqis to have their say BEFORE the signature , now it is Late . Iraq is going to be Occupied long term and its proceeds of oil plundered . shame .
Here's an analysis of the strategic value of Sistani's qualms about the SOFA -- assuming that he's not so much reacting to recent events as he is trying to shape those which lie ahead:
http://needlenose.com/wp/2008/12/02/the-grand-ayatollah-is-a-hard-man-to-please-or-so-he-would-like-you-to-think/
The short version is that Sistani could have killed the agreement outright by denouncing it (either now or before the vote), but didn't. Nor did he call for an earlier referendum.
Which leads me to think this is a way of defusing any public opposition by seeming to share their concerns but postponing any action until the middle of the year. It also opens the door to pressuring Obama for added concessions during implementation of the accord.
"President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed on Monday that he wants to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration. That would be well before the December, 2011 deadline enshrined in the new security agreement between the two countries.
That is a very misleading statement, as have been all the claims that Obama planned to end the occupation within 16 months. Here is what it says in the first paragraph of the article linked to above. He never planned to do any such thing, and article linked to at the top of this post explicitly states that he "said on Monday he believed U.S. combat troops should leave Iraq within 16 months of his taking office.
Obama's plan was always, as he put it, to "withdraw combat troops" within 16 months, leaving a "residual force" in Iraq indefinitely. Further, he has specified a number of "missions" for that "residual force" which includes a number that will involve combat, therefore it is difficult to see how he would be able to withdraw all combat troops.
Obama always intended to reconfigure and rebrand the occupation, not to end it, and I do not understand why people who should know that insist upon repeating the fiction.
We will see what happens in 2011.
The IRAQ "Status Of Forces Agreement" is / will be an interesting historical artifact, imho ~ covering (as it does not) very much about the status of privatized Corporate and/or "proxy" pirate militias in IRAQ... and nothing whatsoever about the AngloAmericans' remote-controlled Weapons of Mass Occupation, or semi-autonomous warriors presence in and around these folks' limited understanding of sovereignity being a derivative of Blood & Soil historical identity.
The relevance of cybernetic warfare (as a means of 'occupation' and neo-colonialism) is as little understood by the peoples of the Second & Third Worlds as was the impact of the internet unforeseen by the late 20th-century writers and others, etc., who created intellectual property, only to have it extracted from them by technological loopholes in their Management -v- Labour 'Status Of Forces Agreement' contracts.
The omnipresent newspeak metric, Professor, of "combat boots on the ground" is imho not only incredibly misleading but naive ~ what with TWO naval fleets in theatre, and almost the entire U.S. Air Force engaged in daily operations (their presence off-shore / in the air all but ignored because they seldom appear to US as "active duty occupation personnel" by their infrequent appearances in the day-to-day death toll lens by which we view The War). Ensemble they are engaged in occupying the second and third dimensions of the Western media's woefully inadequate conceptualization of a flat, land-based battleground: quite literally, the news paper envisions The War = Occupation as something that can be looked up on a paper map, with its quaint, quite arbitrary black boundary lines supposedly meaning something about these peoples in this area in our new era of GPS = You Are Here, a digital person pinpoint without some notion of nation-space origin or destiny that is entirely anonymous, being unbound and unpossessed by any Blood & Soil identity.
(Future historians will no doubt NOT overlook these plain -to- see irregular, unbounded forces and out-sourced mechanisms of occupation in their retrospective accounting of our 'Global War On Terror' ;-)
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