Fadl Still Blockaded;
Truck Bomb in Mosul;
Doha Summit Fails to Unify Arab voices
A truck bomber struck at police in downtown Mosul (pop. 1.7 mn.) on Tuesday morning, killing 7 and wounding 17.
Al-Zaman writing in Arabic says that Iraqi troops continued for a third straight day their siege of the Sunni Fadl distrinct. The paper alleged that diseases are starting to spread among women and children because of the blockade and curfew. The Sunni Arab Awakening Council in Fadl was accused of trying to revive the banned Baath Party, and its leader was arested, provoking an uprising. But the Iraqi government's crackdown on the Fadl district raised fears or provoked protests among other Sunni Arabs. The Awakening Council leader in Baquba, Diyala province to the east, said that he would stop fighting extremists for the government if Adil Mashhadani,the Fadl Council leader, was not released. Meanwhile, US officers were frantically calling their Sunni contacts and reassuring them that the US would go to bat for them and they would not be left to the mercy of the Shiite militias.
The Arab League Conference in Doha, Qatar has wrapped up, and it too had implications for Sunni-Shiite reconciliation (or lack thereof) inside Iraq.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Arab League had initially planned to hold its next meeting in Baghdad, but the continued poor security in that city has dissuaded the organization, which will meet in Libya instead. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki protested the switch. (It is likely that the move came at least in part in response to the identification among member states with the Sunni Arab population of Fadl District, which was being besieged by Shiite Iraqi troops as the conference unfolded. Most Arab League member states are strongly Sunni and many see Shiite Islam as Persian rather than Arab--which is untrue and unfair.)
Al-Maliki, a Shiite, was snubbed by Saudi King Abdullah, who refused to meet him on the grounds that he had reneged on his pledge to reconcile with the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. Al-Maliki's Da`wa Party had angered the Saudis a couple of years ago by launching a protest movement against Wahhabism, the established branch of Islam in the Saudi kingdom.
Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] reports in Arabic that that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, was asked by Agence France Presse if he supported the return of members of the former Baath party to public life. He is said to have replied that this matter is governed by the Iraqi Constitution, which must be obeyed. (The constitution outlaws the Baath Party). The AFP question was prompted by statements made by Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa after his meeting with Sistani a couple of weeks ago. Moussa implied that Sistani favored national reconciliation with all Iraqis. Sistani in his reply appeared to repudiate Moussa's report of their conversation and to underline his own commitment to continued debaathification.
At the same time, the Islamic Mission Party (Da`wa) led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for the criminalization of the Baath Party, on the grounds that it issued a law in 1980 making it a capital crime to belong to the Da'wa, and carried out numerous pogroms against Da'wa members. This call appears to envision going beyond firing Baathists and forbidding them to hold political office to actually prosecuting them for party membership. Since Sunnis were disproportionately present in the Baath Party (though there were plenty of Shiites in it, too), any such step would lay an especially heavy burden on the Sunni Arabs.
McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Monday:
' Diyala
Three people were killed and eight others were injured when a bicycle bomb in downtown Baquba around 10 a.m.
A policeman was injured by a roadside bomb that targeted a patrol of the Iraqi police in al Mualimeen neighborhood west Baquba around 11 a.m.
The police forces on Khanaqeen Street northeast of Baquba found the body of a civilians few hours after gunmen kidnapped him by insurgents from his house.
Nineveh
One Iraq soldier was killed and two others injured by a roadside bomb that targeted their patrol in west Mosul on Monday morning.
Gunmen assassinated a civilian in west Mosul on Monday morning.
Around 2 p.m. gunmen opened fire killing the general director of the immigrants and displaced people department in Hamdaniyah district southeast of Mosul city and injured his colleague while the two men were leaving the department.
Babil
Gunmen killed three Sahwa members in their car while they were going to work in Eskanderiyah town north of Hilla city on Monday morning.
A man was killed and his sister in law was injured when gunmen opened fire upon them south of Hilla city on Monday morning. '
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/31/2009 12:21:00 AM
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5 Comments:
This is an interesting report from The Real News:
Betrayed in Iraq by Leila Fadel
Leaders of Awakening Councils are arrested, tortured and killed by Iraq government
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3502&updaterx=2009-03-30+21%3A01%3A45
According to Marc Lynch: Fun fact: after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki requested that his country postpone hosting a summit until 2011 instead of trying to do it in 2010 (which would have been quite a logistical challenge, to say the least), the honor of hosting the next summit went to... Libya. That should be interesting.
.
I believe it is fortuitous for the US, and for our national security interests vis-a-vis Iraq, that the dominant Shi'a central government is starting to lord their authority over the Sunnis.
The only justification President Obama was given by his commanders on the ground for delaying the withdrawal of forces from Iraq is that, by staying the course (policy by inertia,) we forestall the inevitable sorting out of power-sharing (or power exclusion.) America assumes that the sorting-out process will explode into overt civil war.
Leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq after 2011, in apparent contravention of the SOFA, or even beyond August 2010, as the Obama Plan calls for,
ostensibly to
*** protect the Embassy or
*** "train" elements of the Shi'a-dominant army and national police forces by accompanying them on combat patrols in Sunni areas, or
*** provide a Quick Reaction Force to strike "terrorist" targets, or
*** provide the logistical, intel and strategic support the Iraqis are not capable of performing themselves,
will no longer be necessary.
The Shi'a are going to go ahead and dive into that power-sharing/ power consolidation sorting-out process, even if it leads to civil war, despite our current force of 140,000+.
Even though we currently have within 20% of the highest number of soldiers ever deployed to Iraq at one time,
that is not stopping the majority, led by the Prime Minister,
from exacting their retribution.
Ergo,
no more reason to bear the costs of staying, if the only justification for staying is gone.
The Obama plan has 4 parts:
___ moving combat forces out of uncontested cities by June 2009;
___ pulling out 2 Brigade Combat Teams (~10,000 people) in 2009;
___ pulling out another 8 Brigades (~40,000 people) and 40,000 support people (medical, logistics, legal, public affairs, etc) between March and August 2010; and
___ leaving a "residual force" of 50,000 (roughly 10 Brigades) for the missions bulleted above until the SOFA expiration in December 2011.
This Plan recognizes and accounts for 2 looming contingencies:
-- either the Iraqi people will vote in mid-2009 to expel all US forces by mid-2010; or
-- the Iraqi government will ask the US to stay even beyond December 2011.
avid student of events overtaking policy decisions
.
Leila Fadel of McClatchy has an article on the former al-‘Iráq called "Vow to fight raises question: Is calm in Iraq just the eye of the storm?"
It seems to me a model of its kind, and certainly everybody ought to read it, but . . .
. . . but the very excellence of the piece means that it might be a good time to wonder exactly how good the kind it belongs to is.
I suppose at the College of Journalism and Barber Science they call the genre in question "human interest." When the patients are foreigners, one may speak of "local colour."
Now the difficulty I detect has to do with those persons at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh who do not care to hear any such discouragin’ words about the great neocolonial enterprise of their Party and their Ideology. If "Iraq" has to be written off, there is really not all that much left for GOP geniuses and AEIdeologues to point to in the period 12 September 2001 through 20 January 2009.
Unfortunately, "human interest" and "local colour" by their nature invite dismissal as what the dismissers would likely call "mere anecdotal evidence." To be sure, the dismissers hardly ever mention that issue when paradin’ their own invasion-friendly anecdotes. Yet what does that prove, really, except that Original Sin LLC is still doing business at the same address as ever?
Ms. Fadel goes out of her way to tempt Fate and the militant extremist Republican Party:
"Most Iraqis think [X]. The U.S.-backed Iraqi government is widely regarded as [Y]."
Only hyperextremists will fancy that the reporter simply invented her Mohammed and Abu Sleiman, but the whole pack can be exprected to agree that McClatchy & Co. do not actually know what "most Iraqis" think or how "widely" the current neorégime is disesteemed. Wingnut City, above the gutter level, will admit that Mohammed and Abu Sleiman exist, but deny ferociously that they are typical or significant of anythin' in particular. "After all, five to ten percent of us would be unhappy in the Garden of Eden! Everybody knows that."
Happy days.
(( As a curiosity: J. Severin, a radio hyperextremist here in Eastern Massachusetts, assured his dupes and marks yesterday afternoon that a SurGe™ could not possibly work well in Afghanistan because 90% of the Afghans live out in the boondocks and up in the hills, whereas 90% of former ‘Iráqis live in Baghdad alone -- so you just build a wall around it and you win.
(( This from a neocomrade who prides himself like a peacock on his IQ and his show prep -- and also after six full years of occupational therapy! ))
"Meanwhile, US officers were frantically calling their Sunni contacts and reassuring them that the US would go to bat for them and they would not be left to the mercy of the...."
Seems like other US officers were saying just about the same thing thirty odd years ago to the Montagnards and a whole lot of others for that matter who in the end were not supplied with helicopters for a picturebook last minute escape from Saigon, or any other help whatsoever, ever. All those people who helped the US and never thought big brawny America would abandon them....
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