Author Archives: Paul Woodward

OPINION: Iraq – who wins?

The victor?
By Peter Galbraith, TomDispatch, September 19, 2007

Iran’s role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq’s central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it supported — by then established as the government of Iraq — as much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the U.S. nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the US and Iran want to see the central government strengthened.)

Since 2005, Iraq’s Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries’ strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official in Iraq’s Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq’s daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq’s production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi army. With the U.S. supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason to invest its own resources.

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, which is home to most of the kingdom’s Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The U.S. Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is under the Eastern Province. [complete article]

NEWS: Iraq unravelling

Future look of Iraq complicated by internal migration
By James Glanz and Alisa J. Rubin, New York Times, September 19, 2007

A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families.

The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of their own sect is just one of those considerations. [complete article]

NEWS AND OPINION: Hamas becomes an ‘enemy entity’

Israel pressures Hamas ahead of Rice’s arrival
By Steven Erlanger and Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 19, 2007

Under international law, Israel is considered an occupying power in Gaza, even though it has removed its troops and settlers. Denying civilians access to the necessities of life is considered collective punishment and a violation of international law under both the Hague and Geneva conventions although the amounts involved could be subject to dispute. Electricity, water and gasoline are considered by many, like the Israeli rights lobbying organizations B’Tselem and Gisha, as well as Oxfam and other groups, to be necessities. But the United States argued, when it bombed power plants in Belgrade during the Kosovo war, that electricity furthered Serbia’s war effort; Israel argued similarly when it bombed Gaza’s main power station in July 2006, after the capture of one of its soldiers.

“Regardless of how they might cloak it, cutting off electricity to a civilian population is collective punishment and a violation of international law,” said Sarit Michaeli of B’Tselem. “It doesn’t really make a difference whether it’s cutting off the supply from Israel or bombing the power station.”

Israel says it would not cut off water, but most of Gaza’s water is indigenous, pumped from wells with electricity; electricity also is important for sewage treatment, Ms. Michaeli said. She condemned the Qassam rockets and said that Israel was legally obligated to defend Israelis, but not by violating international law. [complete article]

Hamas denounces curbs on Gaza as ‘declaration of war’
Haaretz, September 19, 2007

Hamas denounced as a “declaration of war” the Wednesday decision of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s security cabinet to declare Gaza a “hostile entity” and to approve curbs in electricity and fuel supplies to the population of the strip.

“They aim to starve our people and force them to accept humiliating formulas that could emerge from the so-called November peace conference,” said Hamas spokesman Barhoum, referring to a U.S.-sponsored meeting expected to be held in two months.

“It is a declaration of war and continues the criminal, terrorist Zionist actions against our people.” [complete article]

It depends who is doing the torturing
By Amira Hass, Haaretz, September 19, 2007

According to the findings of Palestinian human rights organizations, hundreds of Hamas activists have been arrested, and are still being arrested, in blatant violation of Palestinian law, and by some security forces who do not have the authority to make arrests. Reports from Nablus speak of security personnel who are waiting, with the advent of Ramadan, outside the mosques in order to arrest Hamas activists after evening prayers. Disturbing testimony is piling up that speaks of the severe torture of some detainees – a few of whom required hospitalization. Revenge and intimidation are the name of the game. Some of those released testified that they had been forced to sign a promise to keep completely silent about their experiences during their detention. The arrests are part of a whole complex of offensive tactics: shootings of Hamas activists; attacks, including arson, on Hamas offices; threats to Hamas representatives on local councils, to journalists and members of parliament; and infringement of freedom of the press (including blocking the distribution in the West Bank of the two Hamas newspapers). [complete article]

NEWS: Dividing Jerusalem

Uproar over plan to split Jerusalem
Al Jazeera, September 19, 2007

Israel’s deputy prime minister has sparked uproar with a proposal to divide Jerusalem between Israelis and Palestinians as part of a peace deal.

The proposal by Haim Ramon, reported on Wednesday, was made in a letter to a member of the Jerusalem city council.

In his letter, Ramon suggested that Israel cede control over the occupied and annexed eastern sector to the Palestinians. [complete article]

NEWS: Living with a nuclear Iran

Abizaid: World could abide nuclear Iran
By Robert Burns, AP, September 17, 2007

Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran, a recently retired commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Monday.

John Abizaid, the retired Army general who headed Central Command for nearly four years, said he was confident that if Iran gained nuclear arms, the United States could deter it from using them.

“Iran is not a suicide nation,” he said. “I mean, they may have some people in charge that don’t appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear weapon.”

The Iranians are aware, he said, that the United States has a far superior military capability.

“I believe that we have the power to deter Iran, should it become nuclear,” he said, referring to the theory that Iran would not risk a catastrophic retaliatory strike by using a nuclear weapon against the United States. [complete article]

NEWS: “Something big went down”

Israeli nuclear suspicions linked to raid in Syria
By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 18, 2007

The American and Israeli officials said the Israeli government notified the Bush administration about the planned attack just before the raid. It is not clear whether administration officials expressed support for the action or counseled against it.

The raid has aroused intense speculation in Washington and Jerusalem, but details remain extraordinarily murky. Officials said access to new intelligence about suspected North Korean support to Syria has been confined to a very small group of officials in Washington and Jerusalem.

The details of the Israeli intelligence remain highly classified, and the accounts about Israel’s thinking were provided by current and former officials who are generally sympathetic to Israel’s point of view. It is not clear whether American intelligence agencies agree with the Israeli assessment about the facility targeted in the raid, and some officials expressed doubt that Syria has either the money or the scientific talent to initiate a serious nuclear program.

But current and former American and Israeli officials who have received briefings from Israeli sources said Monday that the raid was an attempt by Israel to destroy a site that Israel believed to be associated with a rudimentary Syrian nuclear program. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — According to the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens, “the least unlikely possibility” of what happened when Israeli fighters struck something in eastern Syria was that we could have “just lived through a partial reprise of the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.” There was an Israeli attack; there wasn’t a nuclear reactor.

“What’s beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6.”

It was big. It went down.

The Jerusalem Post‘s Caroline Glick believes “it is far from clear that either Israel or the US understand the significance of Israel’s operation in Syria.”

Was the operation an act of God? Maybe so. Perhaps that’s why 78% of Israelis — who have no knowledge of what was hit — nevertheless expressed their support for the attack.

FEATURE: Robbing the world of its past

It is the death of history
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, September 17, 2007

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.

“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.” [complete article]

NEWS: Blackwater operates outside the law

What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis? Maybe nothing
By Alex Koppelman and Mark Benjamin, Salon, September 18, 2007

An incident this past weekend in which employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm that has become controversial for its extensive role in the war in Iraq, allegedly opened fire on and killed several Iraqis seems to be the last straw for Iraqi tolerance of the company. Iraqi government officials have promised action, including but not limited to the suspension or outright revocation of the company’s license to operate in Iraq.

But pulling Blackwater’s license may be all the Iraqis can do. Should any Iraqis ever seek redress for the deaths of the civilians in a criminal court, they will be out of luck. Because of an order promulgated by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the now-defunct American occupation government, there appears to be almost no chance that the contractors involved would be, or could be, successfully prosecuted in any court in Iraq. CPA Order 17 says private contractors working for the U.S. or coalition governments in Iraq are not subject to Iraqi law. Should any attempt be made to prosecute Blackwater in the United States, meanwhile, it’s not clear what law, if any, applies. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Neoconservative terrorism

Neoconservative terrorism
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 17, 2007

If neoconservatives experienced the same level of fear that they seem intent on promoting, then it is possible that they might be suffering from what could be called pre-traumatic stress disorder. The fact is, they are far too calm and calculating to be victims of any kind of trauma, and given their focus on fueling widespread fear, the best way of understanding what they do is to say that they are artful practitioners of a particular form of terrorism. That is to say, their intent is to use blind emotion as the means for forcing the adoption of a political agenda that cannot withstand critical analysis.

For conventional terrorists, acts of violence are the means through which a small organization lacking a grassroots constituency can exert broad political influence by employing the instrument of broad-based fear. Neoconservatives, on the other hand, while no greater in number than say the membership of al Qaeda, have much more direct access to the levers of political influence and thus have no need to employ the crude techniques of the average terrorist. Nevertheless, like every terrorist, they see fear as the indispensable tool for furthering their political aims.

Their latest campaign, aimed at stoking hysteria in the Islamophobic West, is what The Observer describes as:

… a series of piecemeal leaks from US officials that gave the impression of being co-ordinated, a narrative … laid out that combined nuclear skulduggery and the surviving members of the ‘axis of evil’: Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Central to this narrative is an event wrapped in mystery: Israel’s strike on unknown targets in Syria and a “suspicious” North Korean freighter, Al Hamed, whereabouts unknown, cargo unknown, ownership unknown.

This is classic smoke and mirrors — there are no substantive allegations and thus nothing to refute. Everything is suggestive — suggestive of the possibility of a strike on Iran, or the outbreak of a long-feared war between Israel and Syria. Yet among the competing theories about what purpose lay behind Israel’s sudden strike — and one has to assume this occurred with Washington’s foreknowledge, consent and support — one detail provides a clear indication that whatever the physical target might have been, the target audience was not in Damascus. Dion Nissenbaum writes:

Hours before the Israeli strike, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly sent word to Syria that it had no hostile intentions. Syrian leaders complained bitterly this week that Olmert’s message was a diversion meant to get Syria to drop its guard before the strike.

Syria’s leaders would of course bitterly complain — after all they were being treated like fools — yet what Olmert seems to have done was in effect to provide Syria with a heads up whose purpose was to make it clear that Israel had no intention of starting a war. A game was in play, Syria’s sovereignty would be treated with contempt — as it has so often been before — but the audience for this performance was located outside the region, in Washington, Europe, and at the UN. If Syria was to protest too loudly, it would compel itself to retaliate. In the interlude, a contrived silence keeps the peace, but at the same time the authors of this peace are framing it quite intently as a prelude to war.

FEATURE: Mohamed ElBaradei

An indispensable irritant to Iran and its foes
By Elaine Sciolini and William J. Broad, New York Times, September 17, 2007

While Dr. ElBaradei’s harshest detractors describe him as drunk with the power of his Nobel, what keeps him on center stage is a pragmatic truth: He is everyone’s best hope.

He has grown ever more indispensable as American credibility on atomic intelligence has nose-dived and European diplomacy with Tehran has stalled.

For the world powers, he is far and away the best source of knowledge about Iran’s nuclear progress — information Washington uses regularly to portray Tehran as an imminent global danger.

Even the Iranians need him (as he likes to remind them) because his maneuvers promise to lessen and perhaps end the sting of United Nations sanctions.

Dr. ElBaradei, who is 65, seems unfazed, even energized, by all the dissent. He alludes to a sense of destiny that has pressed him into the role of world peacemaker. He has called those who advocate war against Iran “crazies,” and in two long recent interviews described himself as a “secular pope” whose mission is to “make sure, frankly, that we do not end up killing each other.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — In their reference to ElBaradei’s “mangled metaphors,” his “naive grandiosity,” and his being “drunk with the power of his Nobel,” (references all conveniently ascribed to others), these reporters betray a subtle contempt reserved for UN officials which we rarely find directed at even some of the most moronic buffoons who sit in Congress or have been presidentially appointed in the executive branch of government. If, as reported, ElBaradei is “everyone’s best hope,” the Times seems intent on doing its best to undercut that hope. And is that for nothing more than the reason that as an Arab, as a Middle Easterner, and as an unelected non-American official, Mohamed ElBaradei’s political authority cannot be acknowledged by the newspaper that treasures its privileged access to the seat of American power?

INTERVIEW: James Carroll interviewed by Tom Engelhardt

American fundamentalisms
James Carroll interviewed by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 17, 2007

He’s a man who knows something about the dangers of mixing religious fervor, war, and the crusading spirit, a subject he dealt with eloquently in his book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. A former Catholic priest turned antiwar activist in the Vietnam era, James Carroll also wrote a moving memoir about his relationship to his father, the founding director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll essentially grew up in that five-sided monument to American imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was “the largest playhouse in the world” and he can still remember sliding down its ramps in his stocking feet, as he’s written in the introduction to his recent, magisterial history of that building and the institution it holds, House of War.

As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice — and warn against — a presidential “slip of the tongue” just after the assaults of 9/11, when George W. Bush referred briefly to his new Global War on Terror as a “crusade.” He was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the country to warn against the consequences of launching a war against Afghanistan in response to those attacks — now just another of the President’s missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War “lost” in print. (“The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?”) His stirring columns on the early years of our President’s attempt to bring “freedom” to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful, moral voice from — to use a very American phrase — the (media) wilderness until much of our American world finally caught up with him. [complete article]

NEWS: Refugees; fewer foreign fighters; more mercenaries; Sadr’s relentless rise; the toll of war

Crocker blasts refugee process
By Spencer S. Hsu and Robin Wright, Washington Post, September 17, 2007

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that it may take the U.S. government as long as two years to process and admit nearly 10,000 Iraqi refugees referred by the United Nations for resettlement to the United States, because of bureaucratic bottlenecks.

In a bluntly worded State Department cable titled “Iraqi Refugee Processing: Can We Speed It Up?” Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker noted that the Department of Homeland Security had only a handful of officers in Jordan to vet the refugees. [complete article]

Fewer foreigners crossing into Iraq from Syria to fight
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, September 16, 2007

The number of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria has decreased noticeably in recent months, corresponding to a similar decrease in suicide bombings and other attacks by the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

“There is an early indication of a trend,” said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, in an interview. Border crossings from Syria that averaged 80 to 90 a month have fallen to “half or two-thirds of that over the last two or three months,” Petraeus said. [complete article]

Muqtada strikes another political blow
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times, September 18, 2007

We have absolutely no intention of pushing Prime Minister [Nuri al-]Maliki out,” said a spokesman for the Sadrist alliance on Sunday. This came after Muqtada al-Sadr finally decided to walk out of the ruling Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA).

For obvious reasons, the prime minister did not believe the assurances, realizing that ever since he broke with Muqtada this year, the rebel-turned-politician has been bent on bringing down the entire Maliki administration in revenge.

Muqtada has been giving Maliki nightmares – serious ones. Step 1 of his “coup” was six of his supporters walking out on the Maliki cabinet, depriving it of Sadrist legitimacy and keeping key positions vacant, such as Transport, Commerce, and Health. Maliki promised a cabinet reshuffle in the summer to fill in the vacant posts, but to date he has not done so. [complete article]

‘Help wanted’ ad belies report on Iraq security
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, September 17, 2007

A week ago today, Gen. David H. Petraeus started his rounds on Capitol Hill, reporting that security in Iraq was improving to the point that a small number of troops could begin coming home by year’s end.

But 10 days ago, his commanders in Baghdad began advertising for private contractors to work in combat-supply warehouses on U.S. bases throughout Iraq because half the soldiers who had been working in the warehouses were needed for patrols, combat and protection of U.S. forces. [complete article]

Sectarian toll includes scars to Iraq psyche
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, September 17, 2007

Iraqis have continued to flee their homes throughout the American troop increase, which began early this year, and despite assurances that it is becoming safe to return, uncrossable lines have been left in Iraqi minds and neighborhoods. Schools, hospitals and municipal buildings are quickly losing their diversity. [complete article]

NEWS: The coming war with Iran

Bush setting America up for war with Iran
By Philip Sherwell and Tim Shipman, The Sunday Telegraph, September 16, 2007

Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Back on July 13, the New York Sun reported:

President Bush is set to instruct the Treasury Department to block assets associated with Iran’s revolutionary guard corps in a new executive order declaring financial war on foreign saboteurs of the Iraqi government.

The paperwork to designate Iran’s revolutionary guard corps, or IRGC, and Quds Force is now on the president’s desk awaiting his signature, according to three administration officials who requested anonymity. The designation of the IRGC and Quds Force would mark the first time the finance related executive order process, reserved usually for foreign terrorist organizations, would be used against a branch of a foreign military.

On August 15, a month later, the Washington Post reported:

The United States has decided to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a “specially designated global terrorist,” according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group’s business operations and finances.

Today, in an article that refers to the “intensifying the debate over the Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the New York Times reports:

While some White House officials and some members of the vice president’s staff have been pushing to blacklist the entire Revolutionary Guard, administration officials said, officials at the State and Treasury Departments have been pushing a narrower approach that would list only the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, or perhaps, only companies and organizations with financial ties to that group.

If either the Quds Force or the entire Revolutionary Guard fits the legal criteria for a “specially designated global terrorist,” why would President Bush have waited two months to sign the order? What the debate and the delay makes clear is that if and when this designation is made it will be done so for purely political reasons. Indeed, if the Iranians were guilty of everything about which they are being accused, the question would not be about when it becomes expedient to apply the force of the US Treasury Department; it would be how the United States is going to respond to acts of war.

We’ve been here before. Whenever this administration is bobbing and diving in the process of shaping its legal arguments, the political thrust is already evident. George Bush’s gut is telling him, it’s time to hit Iran. The legal, strategic, political, and purely rational arguments are being constructed after the fact.

And where in this is it possible to imagine that lessons learned from Iraq are being applied?

Inside Cheney’s brain, I imagine it runs something like this: Shock-and-awe works — it brought down Saddam; reconstruction doesn’t. So long as we don’t send in the army, the air force and the navy can take care of Iran.

And now that the British poodle is no longer available to provide Bush with some sycophantic “international support,” a French poodle has happily taken his place. The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner today said, “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”

EDITORIAL: From yellow cake to cement

From yellow cake to cement
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 15, 2007

The Israeli government has learned that Bashar Al-Assad recently bought significant quantities of cement from North Korea.”

OK. Maybe this line won’t make it into the president’s next State of the Union speech, but we should be in no doubt that once again the neocons are on the loose and in response the Washington Post and New York Times have dutifully put on their dunce caps. Continue reading →

NEWS AND ANALYSIS: Who killed Abdul Sattar Abu Risha?

Super-sheikh murdered by tribal rivals?
By Noah Shachtman, Danger Room, September 14, 2007

An expert on Anbar’s tribal politics offers DANGER ROOM a different view. Tribal rivals, he says, are the most likely culprits.

Think in tribal terms. Sheikh Sattar met with the U.S. President. This reinforced the newly-won position of the Albu Risha. A number of competitor tribes could not afford for the Risha to cement and consolidate its power. The new status quo and the increased power of the Risha had to be challenged. The meeting with the President assisted the Risha and its allies in consolidating their newly gained stature. It is a matter of credibility and legitimacy — a very important component of tribal leadership, whether in terms of an individual Sheikh’s position or the tribes overall position within the tribal system, such as the Dulaymi Confederation. Timing is everything. Assassinating Sattar now was necessary or it would be even harder to dislodge the Risha later. [complete article]

Qaeda group claims killing of Iraqi Sunni leader
Reuters, September 14, 2007

An Al Qaeda-led group said on Friday it was responsible for the killing of Iraqi tribal leader Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, according to an Internet posting on Friday.

The self-styled Islamic State in Iraq called the killing of Abu Risha a “heroic operation.” Its statement could not be authenticated, but it was posted on a main Islamist Web site. [complete article]

NEWS: Iraqi oil law in jeopardy

Compromise on oil law in Iraq seems to be collapsing
By James Glanz, New York Times, September 13, 2007

A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.

Senior Iraqi negotiators met in Baghdad on Wednesday in an attempt to salvage the original compromise, two participants said. But the meeting came against the backdrop of a public series of increasingly strident disagreements over the draft law that had broken out in recent days between Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister, and officials of the provincial government in the Kurdish north, where some of the nation’s largest fields are located.

Mr. Shahristani, a senior member of the Arab Shiite coalition that controls the federal government, negotiated the compromise with leaders of the Kurdish and Arab Sunni parties. But since then, the Kurds have pressed forward with a regional version of the law that Mr. Shahristani says is illegal. Many of the Sunnis who supported the original deal have also pulled out in recent months. [complete article]

OPINION: Deceptive or delusional?

Bush’s appalling Iraq speech
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, September 13, 2007

President Bush’s TV address tonight was the worst speech he’s ever given on the war in Iraq, and that’s saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.

The biggest fiction was that because of the “success” of the surge, we can reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq from 20 combat brigades to 15 by next July. Gen. David Petraeus has recommended this step, and President George W. Bush will order it so. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — President Bush’s basic problem as he addressed the nation last night was that his position has become untenable: he is a president who needs a front man. If General Patraeus could have given a presidential address, Bush seemed like he would happily have handed over the Oval Office.

“The war of good and evil” — phrasing that Bush would in the past have eagerly claimed as his own — this time came instead from an email from the parents of a dead soldier, Army Specialist Brandon Stout of Michigan. Then, in the ultimate act of disownership, Bush said, “now it falls to us to finish the work they have begun.”

Sorry, Mr. President, it wasn’t Americans like Brandon Stout who started this war — they simply blindly followed your lead.

Three and a half years later, faced with the consequences of their casual assent to war, many — perhaps even most Americans — would now support the idea that the president and this administration’s top officials “have to be held accountable.”

That demand also comes from elsewhere — this time from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Today he went on to say, “I have a firm belief that one day this current US president and the American officials will be tried in a fair international court for the atrocities committed in Iraq.”

Washington’s reaction would no doubt be, of course that’s what America’s nemesis would say. Yet as all the neocons and now the president himself each energetically pursue their own personal exit strategy for getting out of responsibility for Iraq, the judgment day they clearly fear is much closer than the hereafter. It comes in the ignominious fall that the mighty will always struggle to evade. Eventually, though, executives lose their privilege.

ANALYSIS: Why the Sunnis have turned against al Qaeda

Sunni world
By Marc Lynch, The American Prospect, September 13, 2007

During his visit to Iraq last week, President Bush carved out an hour to sit down with Shaykh Abd al-Sattar Abu Risha, the controversial head of the Anbar Salvation Council who had become a symbol of America’s Anbar strategy. The pictures from that photo-op were likely the Shaykh’s death warrant: Abu Risha was assassinated today, even as Bush prepared to use the Anbar strategy’s “success” to justify our continued involvement in Iraq.

David Petraeus was quick to blame al-Qaeda for the stunning murder, a leap to judgment emblematic of all which is wrong with America’s current views of the Sunnis of Iraq. In reality there are a plethora of likely suspects, reflecting the reality of an intensely factionalized and divided community which little resembles the picture offered by the administration’s defenders. Leaders of other tribes deeply resented Abu Risha’s prominence. Leaders of the major insurgency factions had for weeks been warning against allowing people such as Abu Risha to illegitimately reap the fruits of their jihad against the occupation. The brazen murder of America’s closest Sunni ally in Iraq was as predictable as it was shocking, and carries a powerful message to both Iraqis and Americans about the real prospects for the long-term success of the American project. [complete article]

See also, Abu Risha’s place in history (Badger) and Iraqi insurgents kill key U.S. ally (BBC News).