Pipeline Blasted Again
Sunnis want Federalism postponed until 2009
Guerrillas blew up pipelines again on Wednesday, halting Iraqi petroleum exports through Turkey. There were some other bombings and shootings. Interior Ministry police commandos (usually Shiites) killed a Sunni cleric in Samarra. This looks bad.
A new report says that the Iraq quagmire is causing the US Army to reach the breaking point. The report notes that the army now appears to be meeting its recruiting goals by admitting high school dropouts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the worst SecDef in the history of the country, wants the military to move in the direction of high tech. I'd say he needs a high school and a university within the army if the dropouts are eventually going to operate that machinery.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said that Arab peace keeping forces for Iraq would require that 1) a sovereign, Iraq, national-unity government ask for them and 2) that US troops withdraw. He said that Arab troops would decline to serve under a US command. An Arab peace keeping force, led by Syria, was deployed in Lebanon during the civil war there.
Iraq needs $60 billion to revive its industries, according to the Iraqi government.
Paul McLeary reports from Baghdad, ' These days, more American reporters are leaving Iraq than arriving. In large part, for the U.S. press, "The party's pretty much over." ' (A tip of the hat to CBS's Public Eye.
A Kurdish writer sentenced to 30 years in prison for "defaming Kurdistan" (a.k.a. warlord Massoud Barzani) will be retried. In civilized countries, journalists are not tried for criticizing governments.
Iraqi journalists constantly face threats, either from guerrillas or from supporters of government officials, for writing critically about either. Reuters reveals that there really is not any freedom of the press in Iraq, and nor could there be given the poor security situation and the unconventional civil war.
Ghali Hassan argues that the US military is another impediment to a free press in Iraq.
Al-Zaman /AFP report [Ar.] that Sunni Arab politicians renewed their opposition to loose federalism and regional confederacies when they met Wednesday with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who leads the largest bloc in parliament. Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council (11 seats) told Agence France Presse that the delegates insisted that loose federalism be abandoned before they would enter the new government. He said that this matter could be taken up by the next parliament, to be elected in 2009.
On another front, Virtue Party leader Nadim al-Jabiri said that the United Iraqi Alliance had broken pledges it had made to coalition partners about the distribution of compensatory seats. Virtue was given only one of these seats, whereas it had joined the United Iraqi Alliance on the promise that it would be given 15 regular seats and 5 compensatory ones. He said that most of the compensatory seats went to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Badr organization, while a few went to the Sadrist movement. He said that when he complained, the UIA leadership denied they had pledged him 5 compensatory seats.
Researcher Reidar Vissar analyzes the affiliation of the members of the United Iraqi Alliance. He concludes that they broke down as follows before the compensatory seats are figured in:
Sadrists (Muqtada): 23%
Da`wa: 23%
Independents: 22%
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Badr: 19%
Virtue Party: 13%
Another 19 seats had yet to be apportioned when Vissar made this chart. Jabiri, above, is claiming that most of the 19 went to SCIRI. My own suspicion is that SCIRI and Badr are also much richer than the other factions inside the UIA, in part because of likely Iranian support. Still, an alliance of Sadrists and the Da`wa Party could form a powerful challenge to SCIRI leadership.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/26/2006 12:30:00 AM
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5 Comments:
"A new report says that the Iraq quagmire is causing the US Army to reach the breaking point. The report notes that the army now appears to be meeting its recruiting goals by admitting high school dropouts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the worst SecDef in the history of the country, wants the military to move in the direction of high tech. I'd say he needs a high school and a university within the army if the dropouts are eventually going to operate that machinery."
This is interesting considering education opportunities offered by the military have always ranked among the top reasons for going in in the first place. While it may seem to outsiders that the military is full of dead-enders who couldn't make unless they were on the inside, the truth is more along the lines of people taking advatange of what the military really does for the country, namely train and educate a large number of people who would otherwise wind up being at a dead end without other resources handy. And a large majority of these are indeed your above average best and brightest. That a person may not have a high school diploma does not indicate a lack of intelligence. There are many several reasons *why* people don't finish school, too numerous to provide in comment. But. The military has a pretty capable education system, with the Air Force (my alma mater, among others) that offers its own Associate Degree program in conjuction with quite a few contracted colleges and universities as well as local institutions. A priority is to get as many of the non-HS graduates into GED programs as possible in order for them to keep moving ahead. This is part and parcel of the military's "up or out" policy. Having a HS diploma has always been the "ideal" situation and has not always been a met goal. Yet, through the education services programs, a non-HS graduate can not only get the GED but almost get a PhD over the course of a career. I know ... I've done quite a bit of counseling and provided assistance to thousands who would have otherwise figured college was a glorified high school. THAT is a real hurdle.
Rummy may be an old dummy but the military goes on in spite of who's the figurehead. Just as he has pieces of paper that attest to his expertise and experience, those who don't have any may indeed have the ken to get things done and done right and well. Ironies abound. As we've seen with the Buscist in Chief, some people can have their educations bought and paid for through Harvard and still haven't any ideas worth considering. Those without the HS diplomas might just be the ones who haven't had the "advantage" of learning the wrong ways of thinking and doing, no toxic education waste dumps they.
Hamas Declares Victory in Palestinian Elections:
It turns out that most Western commentators were dead WRONG in their predictions that Fatah would retain majority in the Palestinian elections - Hamas has swept the polls, and appears poised to win a majority of seats and form its own government.
The Palestinian PM Ahmed Qorei has accepted defeat and resigned, as has the entire Palestinian cabinet, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has invited Hamas to form a new government...
I have addressed the popularity of Islamist groups before, and pointed out how they are the major opposition groups in many Arab countries, even in Egypt where they are banned...
All these neoconned commentators who claim that the Islamists are a minority in their countries are at best ignorant, but most probably lying...
Every free and fair election in the Arab world will show how the Arab masses really feel - and they despise the Bushiites...
The Palestinian elections also need to be seen in comparison to the political mess in Iraq, where Al Jazeera reports an ongoing "political deadlock" in the formation of a government...
Predictably, el Presidente Arbusto has announced yesterday that he will not negotiate with a Hamas government - so this effectively means that the Bushiites will not support a democratically elected government and abandon the Palestinian peace process (yeah, what process)...
This will, once again, reinforce the notion in the Arab and Muslim world that the Bush administration only uses words like "freedom"and "democracy" as excuses for imperial invasions, while rejecting the results of freedom and democracy in the Arab world.
At the end of the day, the Bush administration, as the Clinton administration before it, would rather have an American Shah in Palestine ruling with an Iron fist, than have true freedom and democracy.
Professor Cole,
I'm pretty sure the armed forces all ready have colleges. I think they may play a football game every once in a while;)
Point taken though.
Just a friendly reminder
Karen Kwiatkowski. Neoconservatives Here To Stay
To the comment by raf*,
I am unable to find a legal basis in the Iraqi election law for the procedure you suggest, i.e. letting the coalition redistribute seats internally after they have been won in the provinces. Quite the contrary, article 12 demands that seats shall be allotted “in accordance with the order of the names on the list”, and article 13 specifically warns, “no political entity may withdraw from a candidate the seat awarded to him”. The names of each and every of the 109 UIA candidates confirmed as winners were read out in public by the election commission on 20 January. It would have been rather unsympathetic to voters who risked their lives to cast their ballots if a cadre of elite politicians should be able to summarily rearrange the entire list after the election.
What the UIA can do, of course, is to use the remaining “national” seats as a tool to cancel out what they may see as “imbalances” resulting from the vote in the provinces, thereby perhaps approximating the original formula you mention. This is precisely the process Juan refers to in his quotation from al-Zaman. It is noteworthy though that even if SCIRI should succeed in reasserting themselves through this, they will still end up with a percentage of UIA seats probably not much higher than 25%. My main point throughout has been that the media focus on SCIRI seems incommensurate with that percentage, although, as Juan points out, there are of course other factors at work here as well - i.e. factors that are not related to the elections as such.
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