Troop Agreement Misses Deadline;
Provincial Law Misses Deadline;
Bombings in Mosul, Diyala, Fallujah
First there was going to be a status of forces agreement between the US and Iraq, which would be ratified by the Iraqi parliament and would grant the US long-term bases. Private security guards and US troops would be immune from Iraqi law. US commanders would launch operations at will, would decide who a terrorist was, and would arrest and imprison Iraqis at will.
Then al-Maliki went to Iran for consultations. And Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani forbade a giveaway of Iraqi sovereignty. And the Sadrists began demonstrating every Friday. Then the US launched a unilateral operation in al-Maliki's home town and killed his cousin.
So the private contractors won't have legal immunity. And the agreement will be just for a year, not long-term. And it won't be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, so it is just a vague agreement between two executives. It won't stipulate long-term arrangements, but its interpretive context will be one in which the Iraqi leadership has expressed a desire for US troops to leave in 2010. It isn't clear if US troops will have legal immunity or whether they will have full freedom of action or whether they will be able to arrest and incarcerate Iraqis at will.
And now, it won't be signed by the deadline of July 31.
You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again. The Iraqis want out from under the UN but don't want to recognize that the American presence detracts from their sovereignty. D'oh.
No provincial election law again on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe not.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like . . . a legislative calendar.
John McCain thinks that Iraq and Pakistan have a common border.
[Hat tip to Think Progress.]
Hey, everybody, ask McCain if he'll pull out US troops by 2010 if that is what the Iraqi government says it wants.
McCain keeps boasting about being "right" about the "surge" and saying Obama was "wrong."
Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!
Guerrillas used a tractor bomb to kill 7 persons and wound 8 others in Diyala Province near Iran, where there is a lively contest for power among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
Reuters reports other recent political violence in Iraq:
' * MOSUL - A suicide car bomber killed two private security contractors serving as bodyguards to members of the Kurdish Democratic Party in an attack on their convoy in Mosul . . . The blast also wounded eight civilians nearby.
MOSUL - Gunmen killed two people when they opened fire on their vehicle in southeastern Mosul, police said.
MOSUL - Gunmen killed two brothers and their cousin in a drive-by shooting in northern Mosul on Sunday, police said. . . .
MOSUL - One body was found with gunshot wounds to the head in western Mosul, police said. . .
BAGHDAD - A parked car bomb killed one person and wounded four others on Sunday in Alawi district, central Baghdad, police said.
FALLUJA - Five people were wounded by two roadside bombs exploding within minutes of each other on different streets in central Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, police said.
(Compiled by Aws Qusay and Tim Cocks) '
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/22/2008 12:27:00 AM
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The Americans and Iraqis are still negotiating a non-military long-term agreement. It has received little attention since the focus has rightly been on the military one. This will also bite the dust in due course even if signed.
The Iraqis involved are very ignorant about how the world works, given their backgrounds on top of their lack of principles. Their assumption is that the USA will provide the technology and skills needed for the reconstruction of the country. The idiots don't realize that the US government does not have those, but the US private sector does and they will be happy to sell them. Involving the US government will be the worst thing to do since, as we have seen already, they bring in their corrupt and useless partners like KBR rather than the useful and business-like corporations.
But the Green Zone crowd are on their way out too. There is no way they can win elections, and Obama is not going to spend $100bn a year to prop them up.
Iraq has a lot of experts mostly living outside the country, who will be delighted to get involved once the occupation is over. When the USA had, in effect, a veto on senior officials selection the best qualifications one needed where ignorance and corruption tendencies. That helped the US do what they wanted with them, but obviously couldn't achieve much with such crap.
Once Iraqi sovereignty (proper) is restored and the obscene corruption ends, the right people will be in charge and they will tear up any hideous deal Maliki and Co may have signed.
Aside: McCain should also be asked about his Japan/S Korea model for Iraq.
You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again.
I have to wonder why it is assumed that the occupation must go on, that it must be "ratified" by the US and its compradors in Iraq or by the UN, the US, and its compradors in Iraq? Why are we rooting for the occupation to continue?
I guess that we are sheds some light on the blind support shown for BO. He is definitely in favor of continuing the occupation of Iraq... on "the cheap", to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld.
But if ya gotta ask how much a war costs, you can't afford one, to paraphrase the Robber Baron of all time.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like . . . a legislative calendar.
If they all showed up in Iraq they'd be murdered as the traitors they are. That's a pretty big incentive not to show up. And the checks keep coming in from the US, show or no show.
So the private contractors won't have legal immunity. And the agreement will be just for a year, not long-term. And it won't be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, so it is just a vague agreement between two executives. It won't stipulate long-term arrangements, but its interpretive context will be one in which the Iraqi leadership has expressed a desire for US troops to leave in 2010. It isn't clear if US troops will have legal immunity or whether they will have full freedom of action or whether they will be able to arrest and incarcerate Iraqis at will.
The resistance of the actual Iraqi government is welcome. But on the other side, as long as the US wants to stay in Iraq, few have (none has ?) the power to throw its troops out, but a long war of attrition and a persistently deteriorating the economic situation. If they want to arrest Iraqis, who can prevent them ? if they don't want to see US troops judged by Iraqi, would the Iraqi police be able to arrest them and to bring them to trial ? I'm not sure it will be make a difference whether that is written in a SOFA or in any other document.
Does the absence of a SOFA make a moral difference, one that could limit US imperialism ? Mmmm.. is the rest of the world ready to accept tacitly the grab of a country by another and against the explicit will of its inhabitants ? Answer : they have already accepted it in 2003 (willingly or not, because there was not much to do to prevent it). Will the American citizen accept this colonialist role ? some lies concerning 9/11 and some hypocrite words concerning freedom and democracy did the trick in 2003. Now with mounting concerns about the level of the world oil reserve, they may as well accept that it as unavoidable, if the US is to keep the same way of life and they may well be ready to accept the next stage of infamy; they will probably state, that since they need more oil than the others countries, they have the right to take it where it is (I have already heard that argument stated by rightwingers).
All colonialized countries finally got their freedom and I'm sure that Iraq will regain both its freedom and soveregnity as well; the whole question is how long it will take and how much it will cost to the Iraqi, in terms of wasted life and goods. But in the meantime, whether the US is able to get the SOFA it wants doesn't make much difference; what counts are the "boots on the ground" and the power of force.
The Provincial Elections Law has been ratified. The Kurds walked out but failed to prevent voting.
Kirkuk will be excluded as the Arab and Turkmen groups wanted.
The Kurds will likely become perpetual losers under the Iraqi system. The low attendance rate by the other MPs has provided them with a veto power, but that has gone now.
The best solution for all will be for them to declare full independence or to have a very loose confideration between two (Arab and Kurdish) states.
The McClatchy story offers two pieces of eerie info, even at this late date. The first is that the Special Forces unit which conducted the raids operates "almost independently." Of U.S. command? Of the Iraqis? Second was the description of the raid (by the dead man's brother) makes it sound like a hit on al-Maliki's cousin. Jeez.
"The surge is working" should be:
"The slaughter and anarchy we created is not quite as bad as it was."
Big deal.
If I purposely set your house ablaze then rush over with my fire extinguisher should I congratulate myself? Do I deserve a pat on the back?
.
Today's Jim Lobe item that further details Obama's foreign policy coup also points out for me the great mistake BushCo made in trying to include Iraq in his Global War of Terror and escalating the Holocaust there prior to finishing the job in Afghanistan. Which puts forth the question, was Osama bin-Laden really supposed to be caught? as his "free" status greatly facilitates the War of Terror.
Reasons why the job wasn't finished in Afghanistan are well laid out in Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism, which contains a trove of refrences to think tanks associated with the national security state that provide foreign/military policy direction. If the job had been finished in Afghanistan, following through with the Clinton/Gore policy goal of regime change in Iraq would have been far more difficult, as well as all the other objectives to provide US Empire "energy security."
And we should not forget that there is another player involved in Great Game II located in the Eurasian Heartland--China. This item provides us with details of the happenings in the South China Sea along with some very interesting background history.
Lastly, I would be remiss by not providing this item regarding events related to the third Eurasian Player, India, and how the proposed nuclear deal with the US is playing out in its domestic politics.
As the piece on Energy Imperialism makes clear, events in Iraq, Iran, Russia, India, China, Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Georgia, etc., are all holisticly related in what myself and others have chosen to call The Great Game II. How events in Iraq play-out effects the dynamic of the whole.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like . . . a legislative calendar.
Hmm. Literaliter: when M. Godot finally does show up, is one to denounce him as an impostor? Or merely as grossly overrated in advance, rather like B. Hussein O’Bama?
Sed allegorice: the above was a low blow, coming, as it did, immediately after the quasideputies somehow managed to install replacement quasiministers -- plus a new vice-quasi-premier! -- for the first time. And that despite the Khalílzád Konstitution!!
It was beginning to look as if the Solons of New Baghdád could not manage even the least of parliamentary feats without causing the whole International Zone of Cards to tumble down on their heads. But hey, they actually did it! A small show of appreciation might not be inappropriate. [1]
The bad news, of course, is that, given the Khalílzád Konstitution, anything that does get done must eo ipso have been scarcely worth doing. Oh, well, no thorn without a rose.
God knows best. Happy days.
___
[1] One scribbles merrily, and especially in the Silly Season, yet one could view the ministerial non-crisis with alarm if one chose. The invasion-language press did not mention the following fact, not even the usually more reliable Ms. Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers , but, well, here it is:
100 MPs walk out of parliamentary session in protest of IAF candidates
Baghdad - Voices of Iraq // Saturday , 19/07/2008 Time 4:30:22
A total of 100 parliamentarians from different blocs walked out of a parliamentary session on Saturday in protest of the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front's (IAF) candidates for ministerial posts, according to a parliamentary source. "The Iraqi National List (INL) led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the Sadrist movement, the Arab Bloc for National Dialogue and some members of the Reform Movement led by former Premier Ibrahim al-Jaafari withdrew from today's session in protest of the IAF's candidates, who all belong to the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) led by Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi," MP Abdullah Iskandar from the Arab bloc, who attended the session, told Aswat al-Iraq-(Voices of Iraq)-(VOI). The parliamentarian did not disclose the names of the concerned candidates. The IIP is one of the three key components making up the Sunni front, the third largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament with 40 out of a total 275 seats; while the Arab bloc, led by Saleh al-Motlak, holds 18 seats.
VOI is indispensable, but unfortunately what they write in English is not aimed at native Anglophones ten thousand kilometres away. Here the reporter ("SS -- 459 reads") must have understood why the disgruntled platoon walked out, exactly what it was about the Tawáfuq pols that they disliked and could not be brought to countenance. Maybe all of SS's core audience understand hot stuff like that without being told -- wink, wink, nod, nod -- but out here in the wilds of Zip Code 02139, a lot of us do not. We can detect that there is good deal less "national" "unity" in the I. Z. neorégime than our own media care to trouble anybody with the details of, but beyond that, we are pretty much clueless.
Not to shoot the messenger unduly, but what the VOI-ers leave out becomes especially annoying when they insist on regularly sticking in titbits like this one :
Mosul, the capital city of Ninewa, lies 405 km north of Baghdad. The original city of Mosul stands on the west bank of the Tigris River, opposite the ancient biblical city of Nineveh on the east bank, but the metropolitan area has now grown to encompass substantial areas on both banks, with five bridges linking the two sides. Despite having an amount of Kurdish population, it does not form part of the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The fabric [m]uslin, long manufactured here, is named for this city. Another historically important product of the area is Mosul marble. The city is also a historic center for the Nestorian Christianity of the Assyrians, containing the tombs of several Old Testament prophets such as Jonah, Yunus in Arabic, and Nahum.
Everything you don't particularly need to know, but could easily look up for yourself if you did.
That particular monstrosity, from the latest "Politics & Security" item [07/22/2008 03:13PM] picked at random to illustrate what I complain of, manages to dwarf the poor news story , which was no more than
" ‘Seven civilians were wounded on Tuesday when a roadside bomb exploded targeting a police vehicle patrol in eastern Mosul,’ said a police source. ‘An explosive charge was detonated targeting a police vehicle patrol in Garage al-Shemal region in eastern Mosul, injuring seven civilians,’ .... "
(( "Garage al-Shemal"? ))
The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent.
Where do you get the number for US troops in al-Anbar. The Bush administration claimed that it sent an additional 4,000.
ref : “McCain keeps boasting about being "right" about the "surge" and saying Obama was "wrong."”
The American CableNews media has been desperately in search of another narrative (a.k.a. "Condit Roasting Loop" = Where's Chandra?) ever since they lost the knock-down, dragout "every day is election night!" Democratic Party Primary Campaign golden goose. They watch Mr. Obama's tour of the War Zones as if they were good old boy NASCAR fans, all juiced up on High Fructose Corn Syrup fizzyWater, their eyes all bugged out, straining for that wipeout scene of the leader comin' outta turn 3.
The whole question of “The Surge” in IRAQ is so over, Over There. Somebody should tell the Senator: Hey, John! Osama's not in IRAQ! Ain't nothin' in IRAQ!
Maybe some American "reporter" will ask Mr. McCain whether or not he supports “The Surge”, apparent, in AFGHANISTAN..?
btw, Messrs. Aws Qusay and Tim Cocks: thank you for the "violence roundup". Not a day goes by it doesn't go >BOOM!< fwiw, You might find something "politically violent" stuff happening in Afghanistan, too? And finally fwiw, here is battle-hardened AP reporter Kathy Gannon's "10 Books to Read on Afghanistan" list.
Mr Cole,
There have been some significant developments in Iraq recently, and I would be interested to hear your comments:
1. Sidelining of Allawi's INL
Allawi's INL used to have six ministers in Maliki's government - including Justice and Human Rights. He pulled them out just after the Accordance front pulled theirs out (although the Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael and Science Minister Abu Rawa stayed put). However, whilst the Front have now returned the INL have been quietly sidelined, their places taken by the IAF and UIA.
More details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Al-Maliki_Government
2. Sidelining of Sadrists
Likewise, the Sadrists had four Ministries including Health, Transport and Agriculture. They have all been replaced - mostly, it appears, by SIIC aligned UIA independents.
3. Dawa quits UIA
I read a report saying Dawa had suspended its membership of the UIA - now that Fadila and the Sadrists have left, it leaves only SIIC and soem independents in the largest bloc. All paving the way for an Abdul Mehdi prime ministership?
The Iraqis involved are very ignorant about how the world works, given their backgrounds on top of their lack of principles.
Can't argue that point about the Iraqi puppets put in place by the Bush regime...
The idiots don't realize that the US government does not have those, but the US private sector does and they will be happy to sell them.
...but I've got to question whether you are not subject to the same "idiocy", Anonymous at 5:25, since what's been demonstrated first and foremost over the past six years in Iraq is the way corrupt crony capitalists, in league with Iraqi "experts mostly living outside the country", characterize the US "private sector".
Re: reading list, the latest is the greatest, just published: "Descent into Chaos" by Ahmed Rashid"
To Andrew Turvey :
You may find some answers to your questions by Reider Vissar, who is a specialist of Shiites currents in the South of Iraq. He has a short essay describing the new electoral law and offers some clues in the final paragraph, stating that :
In many ways, the current version of the law for the provincial elections serves to underline the growing confidence of a group of centralist Shiite politicians around Nuri al-Maliki. It challenges the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) with the ban on the use of religious places of worship in elections campaign, while at the same time does not give the Kurds everything they want regarding Kirkuk – Kurdish representatives ultimately abstained from the final vote, where some 127 out of 140 members of parliament reportedly supported the law. Interestingly, complaints about the voting procedure for the law itself prompted criticism from Kurds and UIA independent Khalid al-Atiyya alike, suggesting that the presidential veto may once more come into play in Iraqi politics in relation to this piece of legislation.
Reider Vissar has many other indepth analysis of Iraqi political currents and of the situation of the Sadrists among them. He is well worth reading. Look here for links to his various papers.
John Francis Lee is confusing the Chalabi types with the experts living outside the country. There are thousands of top engineers; financiers; and managers working mainly in the west and the Gulf. They are strongly opposed to the occupation. Many refuse to work for Iraq until it is free from occupation in fact.
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