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Nir Rosen: Iraq's Spreading Civil War
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Tuesday, Feb 14, 06, 1:48PM
I was able to break away from my obsessive interest in the Cheney hunting accident and tax evasion scandal to hear my colleague, Nir Rosen. speak about Iraq's unacknowledged but significantly expanding civil war.
There are a number of observers such as Al Jazeera's Yosri Fouda, Al Quds' Abdel Barri Atwan, author Amos Oz, Peter Bergen, the University of Chicago's Robert Pape, and the eminent Juan Cole who are high on my list of thoughtful commentators on what is unfolding in the Middle East, but Nir Rosen combines in his excellent commentary the grit that comes from being there and hanging out with insurgents, terrorists, clerics, Iraqi nationalists, and American soldiers.
This Sunday, Nir Rosen will have a major article that focuses on Jordanian jihadists in the New York Times Magazine. I've had a preview -- and it's fascinating and important commentary.
The most disturbing part of our meeting today with Rosen is his view that a civil war in Iraq is raging now, and spreading beyond Iraq's borders. The tempo of violence is increasing.
He reports that there have been several significant failed efforts to unite Shia and Sunni Muslim elements, and these have all failed. I'm not going to go into the fascinating detail that Nir Rosen did today, as I think that much of this will be in his piece on Sunday.
What is really depressing about this growing regional tension, spinning out of Iraq, is that sectarian-fueled identity and violent rage has been aggravated and deepened by the transition from Saddam Hussein, who identified himself more tribally as a Tikriti than as a Sunni, to American occupation.
The Saudis and Jordanians are informally exporting youthful, religious zealots to join the insurgency, particularly Zarqawi's organization -- who are fighting the Americans and the Shia. Muqtada al-Sadr, whose organization is opposed to American occupation, is the leading nationalist Shia cleric -- who does not want the nation torn apart, but neither is a beacon of Shia-Sunni reconciliation.
That said, al-Sadr did attend this year's Haj in Saudi Arabia as the guest of Saudi King Abdullah, a Sunni, who is looked at by many Saudis as the first incorruptible and competent king since Faisal.
So, perhaps there is some strand of hope -- but after spending an hour with Nir Rosen, fresh from trips to Iraq and Jordan, I think that we need to do some reality-checking and testing of the rosey assessments that have recently been issued about the state of Iraq's efforts to stabilize and democratize.
In case you did not see it, read Nir Rosen's important Atlantic Monthly piece "If America Left Iraq: The Case for Cutting and Running".
More later.
-- Steve Clemons
The attorney that Deadeye Dick Cheney shot has had a heart attack. Surgeons also had to remove BB's from the guy's liver. Ouch!
Iraq tumbles into civil war. That must be what Bush and company intended all along. Isn't that exactly what the Bush gang wanted? Iraq just doesn't resemble democracy. But then again, what passes for American foreign policy seems on appearance to be something convoluted. Or criminal. I suppose the substitution works either way.
I worry that our troops in Iraq could be surprised by a coordinated attack from Shia in various Arab countries. If the Iranians sent in a huge force we could be in trouble.
Civil war in Iraq...The only solution:
Bring Sadamm back. He's the onlt onwe to control
THAT fighting.
Rumsfeld should lead the diplomatic corps ...
"When I shook your hand, Sadamm, I promised support...sorry about the tiff...will you please take over now?"
Rosy assessments? And you say you read Juan Cole? Must be a different Juan Cole than I've been reading.
Some of the leading journalists on the ground and mid-east experts have been talking about this for a while, and some of those wondering if it's deliberately planned to keep Iraq weak and ineffectual in the area. A united, anti-American, Iraq wouldn't be the government we'd want in place.
I am glad to see a list of people you follow on the Middle East. Been wondering about that for a while.
The SCRI/Badar Organization now controls the
Interior Ministry in Iraq. This means, in effect,
that they have state sanctioned death squads that
are aimed at the Sunni minority. While I have not
read anything in the press about this, I've been
wondering if the US is turning a blind eye to the
death squad activity. There was a report a while
back about using El Salvadore policies in Iraq
(that is, supporting death squads to suppress the
"bad guys").
I just finished John Bradley's book "Saudi Arabia
Exposed". Bradley speaks arabic and lived in
Saudi Arabia for two years, where his travel was
limited only by the exclusion of Mecca and Medina.
Bradley mentions that the Wahhabi faction (the
religious fanatics) in Saudi Arabia has for years
had a campaign against the Shia. There is a
faction in Saudi Arabia that would do what ever
they can to stop the Shia from becoming more of
a power than they are in the Middle East. So I
believe the report that Saudi Sunni
hot heads are being funneled into Iraq, probably
with money and arms.
There was a front page article in the Wall
Street Journal today (Iran Plays Growing Role
in Iraq Complicating Bush's Strategy by Solomon,
Fassihi and Shishkin 2/14/06) on the growing
influence of Iran. The article notes that virtually
all of the powerful Shia factions have very
close ties with Iran, many having lived in exile
in Iran for decades.
This article notes, as others have, that the Bush
administrations options in countering Iran's
nuclear program are limited, since Iran could
make the US's position in Iraq entirely untenable.
Reading over the above, the amazing success of
the Bush administration's policies should be
self evident. Good job, Arbusto, good job!
Of course the question then becomes what is the U.S policy incase of real civil war? If the iraq army we are training at the moment switches back to it's separate militia components like the kurds peshmerga what do we do? Or incase of an attack on Iran the mahdi army is activated again.
There seems to be a lack of serious planning or any realist longterm strategic view both in the administration and among democrats.
Nir Rosen makes the most sense of any of the participants in this How to get out of Iraq in 18 months roundtable at Boston Review.
The civil war in Iraq began in earnest a year ago, following the January elections, and has been escalating steadily. The conditions for it existed from the beginning of Iraq's existence as a nation but were exacerbated at every turn by U.S. policy from the invasion through the occupation: fostering exile organizations and their militias, disbanding the army, preventing local and district elections with wide participation, emphasizing sectarian quotas in the Interim Governing Council, allowing rigid total purges of Baath Party members, waging brutal and inept counterinsurgency against Sunni communities, culminating in the Grozny-like destruction of Fallujah just six weeks before the elections that were to be the "turning point" in Iraq.
After the Shia/Kurd electoral sweep (low Sunni turnout? what a surprise!), the U.S. at best turned a blind eye to and at worst fostered the conversion of Iraqi police and sectarian militas, supplemented by special commando units, into death squads. Bodies piled up. Retaliatory killings of Shias and Kurds added to the spiral.
Yet all last year, as the civil war grew, opponents of U.S. withdrawal said, "oh, no, that would lead to civil war." Riddle me this, stay-the-coursers: The civil war has escalated every month for the last year, right under the noses of U.S. forces. What is it that they can do that will prevent it?
If I shoot somebody in the face with a shotgun, will I also not be charged?
OT:
Vintage McCain
http://www.mydd.com/
Two Faced McCain Strikes Again on Earmarks
by Matt Stoller, Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 08:19:41 PM EST
"I do enjoy this bit of posturing:
A new earmark-reform proposal authored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is quickly gathering support from unelected critics of pork-barrel spending, but even some of those supporters acknowledge that the measure ignores the lion's share of the federal budget and faces powerful obstacles to enactment.
Shorter John McCain: I'll propose stuff that has no chance of passing and even less of a chance of working.
Let me just point out what's so pernicious about this - here's a guy who just doesn't care if his legislation works. He really doesn't. He's proposing it because it looks like the right thing, not because it is the right thing. That's principle, I guess, but it's the principle of someone who is proud, impatient, stubborn, delusional, and dishonest with himself and others.
Remind you of anyone in charge of a major industrialized nation? No? Me neither."
Reality on the ground does not matter for now. Bush does what he wants with no oversight and no back seat driving or comments from the peanut gallery. The Bush administration has tried to game Iraqi politics so that the US can call the shots and that strategy is and will backfire. We are stuck with whatever Bush wants to do until we have a return to Congressional oversight or the good riddance in 2009.
The US has supported marginal governments against insurgencies in a lot of places, Columbia, for instance, Nicaragua, Honduras, Vietnam, Cambodia....
The US supports oppressive governments to control the insurgencies. Isn't this the model that Bush is following in Iraq? Get our guys running the government, then supply them with military to fight their insurgents. Keep the leaders dependent on US military aid?
This is Republican foreign policy as is practiced by the majority of Republican presidents since thet 20th Century. They need to adopt a new model. Clinton had the right idea in building international institutions, but Bush has done his darndest to tear down everything Clinton built.
Bakho:
There is one crucial difference in the Iraq case: the Shia islamist government is closely allied to a strategic adversary, Iran, and US support for the Iraqi government conflicts with larger strategic objectives; the US has never been in such a "schizophrenic" posture before, where it must support a goverment that has a policy alignment in direct opposition to US intentions.
Frankly, I cannot see, say, Uribe or a prominent Colombian politician from the governing class telling the US that it will fight for Venezuela if the US attacks it; it's like the US propping up the Sandinistas against the Contras!
The Bush administration threw all the models out of the window, and is now having to live with the contradictions that doing so has thrown up. One of the problems for the Iraqi government in dealing with the insurgency is that much of it is motivated by the presence of US occupation forces, who will not leave, thereby perpetuating the insurgency, and who will not supply the Iraqi government with the tools ( humvees, Bradleys, helicopter gunships, an airforce etc..) to do the job it cannot do itself ( for fear that if it does supply the Iraqi government with these tools, they will end up being used against the US military ).
Speaking of news bias and the US. Interesting paragraph from an article in the New York Observer.
And though Nightline has managed to hold onto its Ted Koppel–era ratings, the show’s staff is continuing its steady post-Koppel exodus, with one Washington-based producer leaving every few weeks or months. They are headed to Al Jazeera International—where television producers can do serious international news for a salary commensurate with broadcast news—or to National Public Radio, where television producers can do serious international news for a whole lot less.
Certainly seems to say something about the quality of broadcast news in the US.
Thanks for that link to Nir Rosen. Quite a brave guy to go to those places-his site has interesting articles and some really graphic photographs-reminds me of why I've been against this invasion of Iraq from the first idea of it--needless death,destruction and human suffering.
Our populace is insulated from the worst of the bad news from Iraq. At a minimum they ignore or avoid reading and hearing about the situation over there. The administration abets this with their spin and management of the media. Isn't this a formula for serious shock and backlash should the shit hit the fan in a major way? What will be the reaction when even CNN, FOX, ABC/NBC/CBS and Bushco can't mask the fireworks and bloodshed to come?
Iraq deserves (as does any country trying to establish a peaceful democracy) our support.
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