Two of those disqualified actually did run and win. Lami seems to say that the votes for them will simply be invalidated and those MPs disqualified would not be replaced or the seats returned to their parties. If that allegation were true, it would reduce the seats held by the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi to only 90 (one of the victorious excluded candidates is Ibrahim Mutlak, who stood in for his brother Salih, on the Iraqiya list, when the latter was disqualified before the election). It is also not clear, as the discussion at Reidar Visser’s site noted, whether the decision would therefore reduce the number of seats in the Iraqi parliament from 325 to 323.
The party with the single largest number of seats in parliament is asked to make the first go at forming a government, and Iyad Allawi is convinced that he can in this way return to the prime minister’s palace. It is not clear, however, that he or any of the other most likely candidates for PM, can actually attract enough coalition partners to make it possible to form a government (163 votes are needed in an Iraq of 325 seats).
The judicial appeal allowed to the excluded two candidates will take at least a month, so that the final certification of the election results will be further put off. In the absence of final results, the four major parties are reluctant to go forward with forming political coalitions, since they do not know exactly where they stand with one another. The results were already delayed by a manual recount of votes in Baghdad province, ordered at the instance of current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who alleged fraud.Members of the Iraqiya list have now begun saying that if the Baghdad recount were to substantially alter the outcome of the election (in which Allawi’s Iraqiya received 91 votes, the single highest number)– then there might well be a groundswell of support in the Iraqi public for voiding the entire election and holding a new one.
US Ambassador Christopher Hill said Monday that he is concerned that the process of forming a government is taking too long, and that elements of disorder may take advantage of the power vacuum to destabilize the country.
The Israeli law resembles the one recently enacted in Arizona in one respect. Recently-arrived European Jews are demanding that Palestinians, who have inhabited the West Bank for thousands of years, must be able to show their papers in order to stay. In the same way, some of the Latinos who will be hassled by police in Arizona with demands that they ‘show their papers’ will be Hispanics, i.e. the old pre-US elite from the days of the Spanish Empire and early Mexico. The Arizonan yahoos who made this racist law to harass Latinos are recent, uncultured immigrants from the point of view of proud old Hispanic families. Others so hassled will be of mixed Latino and Native American heritage, so that some of their ancestors were in Arizona perhaps 10,000 – 16,000 years ago, but ignorant Euro-Americans are now demanding proof that they belong there.
Racism everywhere tells itself the same transparent lies about blood and soil, and makes the same sleight-of-hand exclusions on the basis of ‘purity’ of blood.
About 1000 protesters massed in the streets of Pul-i Alam in the central Logar Province on Sunday, angry about a NATO attack that they alleged killed innocents. The demonstrators then set fire to 16 NATO convoy trucks carrying fuel for Western troops. The US military insists that its raid only killed bad guys. Local Afghan officials complained that the raid was not coordinated with them. You couldn’t say that in this instance NATO was winning hearts and minds. And, increasing attacks on NATO convoys are especially worrisome given that the instability in Kyrgyzstan may endanger US and NATO use of the Manas air field for resupply of troops in Afghanistan.
India sees Muslim fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan as generally under the sway of Pakistan, and also fears the bombings and political instability of the Taliban and similar groups.
India just announced that it would fund the construction of 13 school buildings in the eastern Kunar Province. Kunar is a Taliban stronghold and perhaps New Delhi hopes that better-educated young people in such places will be less likely to turn to Muslim fundamentalism, which frequently has a rabidly-anti-India agenda.
Among the findings are that modern insurgencies go on for about a decade, and the longer they continue the more likely it is that the government will find a way to defeat them.
Where an insurgency has external state support, loss of that outside help is often fatal to the uprising.
Where the government attempting to face down the insurgency claims to be a democracy, in those instances where it is really only a pseudo-democracy it often proves unable to defeat its foe.
Where the insurgency has a safe area to which it can retreat at will, that external base of operations helps it prevail.
Where insurgents can learn to be careful not to kill innocents, they have a better chance of coming to power.
The Taliban and other Afghan insurgents look like winners in this scenario.
It seems clear that NATO is planning a withdrawal. Although abandoned governments often fall, so too do those perceived as puppets.
You couldn’t have a more pseudo-democracy than that in Afghanistan. The president, Karzai, stole the presidential elections last August-October. The ministries are inefficient and riddled with corruption.
Based on this historical study, you’d have to admit that things don’t look good for Obama’s grand toss of the dice in Afghanistan.
There was also renewed violence in al-Anbar province.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki schizophrenically alleged that the bombings were a reprisal for the killing of two leaders of “al-Qaeda” in Iraq in recent days, but then went on to warn of the dangers still posed by the Baathists (secular Arab nationalists).
The most serious attack was on a mosque in the vast Shiite slum of East Baghdad, Sadr City, killing 36 persons and wounding some 200. In the wake of the bombings, Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr for the first time in two years tried to deploy his paramilitary. He asked that the Mahdi Army mobilize to protect mosques “in cooperation with” the state security forces. Another Sadrist spokesman, Baha’ al-A’raji, told Al-Hayat [Life] that the Mahdi Army had only been mothballed in hopes that the central government would strengthen and would provide security. He observed that that development had not yet taken place.
Iraq is still in the midst of attempting to form a government, and this sectarian violence is intended to disrupt that process.
The militia has been under severe pressure for the past two years, and its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, was forced into exile from Iraq in the holy city of Qom, where he is said to be acquiring the credentials that would lend him respect in the eyes of the world Shiite community. Dozens of his top commanders have been arrested and put behind bars by the al-Maliki government.
Al-Hayat says that bombings targeted two other Shiite houses of worship. One was founded by the father of fraudster Ahmad Chalabi. The other mosque is associated with the US via the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. This mosque is that of Muhsin al-Hakim, grandfather of the leader of ISCI nowadays, Ammar al-Hakim. Muhsin al-Hakim had been the preeminent Shiite religious authority in the 1960s. Eight persons were killed and 26 wounded at the latter site.
Sadrist spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi blamed the poor procedures of Iraq’s 11th Army Division for the security breach. He contrasted them with those of the police.
The episode underlines the ways in which their forced statelessness leaves Palestinians (almost uniquely among major world nationalities) completely vulnerable to loss of the most basic human rights. That he was forcibly moved to Gaza by the Israelis suggests that many of those singled out for potential deportation from the West Bank may be moved to the small slum along the Mediterranean, which the Israelis have cut off from its traditional markets and which they keep under a blockade of the civilian population (a war crime). The Israeli establishment has decided not to try to colonize Gaza, and its isolation and hopelessness make it an attractive place for them to begin exiling West Bank residents, thus making more room for Israeli colonists.
The new policy, which is illegal six ways to Sunday in international law, is the brainchild of the government of far rightwing Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu, an Israeli hawk and expansionist, slapped President Barack Obama in the face again Thursday when he confirmed that he refused to halt construction of new homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is militarily occupied by Israel.
Netanyahu’s announcement is probably the nail in the coffin of any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (in which the Israelis have thrown most Palestinians now living beyond the Green Line off their land and deprived them of citizenship in a state and all the rights that go with such citizenship). Palestinians are so despairing that only 57 percent even believe in having an independent Palestinian state any more. The rest are resigned to becoming Israelis in the distant future, when demographic realities and perhaps world-wide boycotts of Israel for its Apartheid-style policies toward the occupied Palestinian will force Israel to accept them.
Palestinian leaders reject this formulation, which is intended to allow the Israelis to continue aggressively to colonize Palestinian territory while pretending that they are engaged in a ‘peace process.’ The Palestine Authority, established in the 1990s, was already a sort of interim state then, and Palestine’s borders were then ‘temporary.’ So temporary that Israel has made deep inroads into them through massive colonies and building a wall on the Palestinian side of the border, cutting residents off from their own farms and sequestering entire towns and cities.
Netanyahu’s various moves this week, from illegally expelling a Palestinian from the West Bank to Gaza– to blowing off the president of the United States and hitching his wagon to massive increased colonization of Palestinian land– all of these steps are guaranteed to mire Israel in violent disputes for years and perhaps decades. And the US, which has already suffered tremendously in Iraq and elsewhere from its knee-jerk support of illegal and inhumane Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, will suffer further.
Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.
Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.
