Needlenose

Back in ’03 I believed that all parties in the recently fractured Iraq would want to keep us around, the newly empowered Shi’ites in the ‘Coalition Government’ for protection, and the coalition of the Evil-Doers (former Baathists and jihadis) to have easy access to Americans to kill.  I posited that it wouldn’t take much for the latter to keep U.S. troops mired in the Quicksand of Iraq through acts of terror or sabotage.

Obama’s decision to close up shop in Iraq is already being sorely tested by the recent Coalition of the Evil-Doer’s massive terror attack, and of course is already being second-guessed by our home-grown warmongering reactionaries.  Of course if it were up to them, we would still be fighting in Vietnam.

Given that an overwhelming majority of Americans are pretty tired of hearing about a war that was only supposed to last a couple of weeks is now almost 9 years old, and that most of them probably don’t really care how many Iraqis die, the Coalition of the Evil-Doers will need to bump up the game and threaten the oil supply to keep around the American piñata – or in the words of Frank Herbert: “The Spice must flow!”

Could President Obama actually be prepared to hold firm to some position this time in his upcoming round of negotiations with the Congressionals?  Or is he some sort of Republican Manchurian Candidate who will just appear to have some sort of plan or convictions and then cave in on demands to cut social programs (as he did recently with the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy)?  What with extending warrantless wiretapping, keeping Gitmo afloat, ‘surging’ troops in Afghanistan and keeping a sizeable number of troops in Iraq, Obama seems to be hell-bent on keeping the Bush Legacy alive!

*Update* California is a crazy bi-partisan microcosm of the Great American Stalemate.  However, under Jerry Brown’s stern governance, we’ve somehow managed to move forward on a budget before our bonds became Junk.  That’s a mixed omen, with a ray of light indicating that budget deals are possible, however the budget was largely an exercise in painful cuts to education and social services.  It wasn’t all bad, though, as it seems like Jerry was still able to piss off a few Reactionaries – some of the more radical counties want to split and form their own Hicksylvania.  I’d be all for it were it not for the creation of two more Repug Senators.

North Korean soldier looking for Repair_Man_Jack's house

…no, just seriously stoopid.  I’ve noticed that of late, as the HuffPos and PajamaMedias of the blogosphere emerge, fewer and fewer people ‘cross over’ to visit blogs and media of the opposing camp.  With all this Tea Party noise about the deficit, I thought I’d take a peak at one of the bigger conservative blogs to see what they had to say about it, and perhaps, as a self-professed ‘balanced budget’ guy, I might find some common ground.

Quite randomly, I found this diatribe by Repair_Man_Jack on RedState with the premise that we can’t cut the U.S. Defense budget without increasing security risk.  The crux of his argument is that there are some potential flashpoints out there such as the Korean Penninsula and the recent Chinese military buildup, and that we need to keep the sea lanes open for trade.

I’m guessing Repair_Man_Jack hasn’t really his homework if he thinks all of the defense budget goes to the cordon sanitaire around N. Korea and into policing the sea lanes.  I can think of many potential cuts that we can take immediately to tip the scales back in the direction of balance.

First, what are we paying per year for Shrubya’s occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan and other misc overseas adventures?  Something like $171 Billion a year….that’s a lot of scratch!  Presumably Jack the Repair Man is still a Believer in these invasions, otherwise undoubtedly he would have seen the Elephant in the budget room.

Then there is Shrubya’s unproven ‘Missile Defense” program, a costly $18B/year!!  Beyond the fact that what few tests that have been conducted have had extremely dubious results, I’m hard-pressed to understand exactly what threat this is supposed to protect us  from – the North Korean missiles might have the range now, but their guidance is questionable.  If either China or Russia get pissed at us and decide to send missiles our way, most likely those would come out of subs off the coast, a ‘use case’ not covered by Shrubya’s Star Wars.

And what of the $8+ Billion a year we are paying to support our nuclear weapons program?  Weren’t we supposed to be decreasing the number of bombs in our stockpile? ConservObama is not just continuing Shrubya’s handouts to aerospace in this filthy industry, but actually increasing the size of the defense and energy budget to support nuclear weapons and nuclear power research.  We haven’t hit the point where the US can get rid of all our stockpile and do no further maintenance, but seriously, how many H-Bomb-equipped MIRVs do we need to wipe out N. Korea, China and Iran?  Let’s close down one of the weapons lab and pare the remaining one back to a core function of reducing our stockpile further, and maintaining a enough weapons to wipe out Jack the Repairman’s overblown threats abroad.

Anyway, I’ll spare you further commentary, just take a look at this list of astronomical military boondoggles if you want to find another trillion or so (over time) in defense spending cuts that we can safely make without provoking a N. Korean invasion of the Fatherland.

As for Repair_Man_Jack, I suggest you stick to repairing drywall.

The street protests have finally spread to Iraq.  Surprising only because it took so long – I would think the Iraqi people are suffering more than anybody in the Arabic world nowadays, along anyway in which you wish to measure quality of life. During the early days of the Shrubya occupation, co-blogger Swopa was fond of discussing the role of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s role as the behind the scenes ‘power broker,’ who could always pull the card of a popular uprising to stop the worst overreaches of Shrubya’s various Mayberry Machinations.

I had once mused that a real popular uprising could upstage Sistani and really bring about an end to the occupation (a concept that Swopa laughingly disparaged).  Well it seems like Sistani is in fact trying to get in front of the popular uprising train, except that it has already left the station.  Hard to say though if this is in fact the beginning of the end for Maliki, or whether this is just another bloody miserable episode in the string of misery that has become the lot of Iraq since the Repugs decided to trash the place and seize the oil

(NOTE: This is a re-written version of the post below, updated to reflect a NY Times story that appeared online after I posted it.  It originally appeared at Firedoglake.)

You’d think the American government would be happy that Iraq’s post-election political process — which has been a perpetual-immobility machine since last spring’s parliamentary elections — is finally starting to inch forward.

But you would be wrong.  In a story from Sunday with the bland headline of “U.S. Presses Iraqi Leaders to Broaden Coalition” (yeah, what else is new?), the New York Times buries this detail after the lead paragraph:

The administration has sought and received assurances that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will not offer the followers of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr positions in charge of Iraq’s security forces in exchange for supporting Mr. Maliki’s bid for a second term in office, according to officials familiar with negotiations now under way.

. . . The Sadrists’ surprising support of Mr. Maliki, only weeks after opposing his nomination, raised alarms in Washington and gave new urgency to the efforts to persuade Mr. Maliki to include the country’s other main factions in a new government.

The article goes on to quote U.S ambassador James Jeffrey as saying the Obama administration wants “clarity on whether the Sadrist movement is a political movement or it is an armed militia which carries out political objectives through violent means.” In fact, though, the Sadrists could soon be both.

Reports to this effect have been cropping up in the fine print of news stories for a few days now.  Last week, the Associated Press reported:

A leading member of al-Sadr’s movement said their demands include as many as six of the 34 Cabinet-level ministry posts, possibly the trade ministry and one post linked to security operations.

Meanwhile, Sam Dagher wrote for the Wall Street Journal:

A senior leader in Mr. Maliki’s party said Mr. Sadr’s movement had demanded key ministries [and] a 25% quota of all government jobs, including in the army and police.

Whatever “assurances” the Obama administration has received that these deals won’t come to fruition are likely to be illusory.  Although his regime has accomplished little else, Maliki has shown expertise in finding or creating loopholes in any rules designed to limit his power–in fact, that is why the prime minister has had such a hard time finding any allies since March.

And here lies the real explanation of why Sadr, who at one point seemed to be the political figure most opposed to Maliki’s re-nomination, become the first major leader to officially endorse him.  The conventional wisdom credited the turnabout to pressure from Iran, but the truth has more to do with cold-blooded horse-trading within Iraq.

Any added power the Sadr faction gains over its previous participation in the government will come at the expense not of Maliki, but of the Sadrists’ erstwhile allies in the short-lived Iraqi National Alliance, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), who named a would-be prime minister (Adel Abdel-Mahdi) with support from the Sadr bloc just a month ago.

Having followed Iraqi politics for a while, that was the announcement that surprised me.  You see, ISCI and the Sadrists have had a feud that dates to before the U.S. invasion and has erupted into violence on several occasions since 2003, usually in regard to ISCI’s control of key Muslim shrines in Najaf and Karbala.  In fact, Maliki came to power as an unknown in 2006 due to Moqtada’s determination to keep the prime minister’s job from going to… Adel Abdel-Mahdi of ISCI.

That history appears to be repeating itself now.  Because, with Sadr’s supposedly secured backing, Abdel-Mahdi and ISCI went hat in hand to other major factions (Iyad Allawi and the Kurdish parties) looking for further support in deposing Maliki — only to have the Sadrists go back to the prime minister and cut a deal that threw ISCI under the bus, leaving their powerful ministries (ISCI had been in charge of the army, police, and finance ministries since the 2005 elections) up for grabs.

Those ministries, and the power they represent, appear to be what Sadr was angling after all along.  I’d say, “cue the Scott Joplin piano music,” if it weren’t for the grim implications of what a Sadr-influenced army and police force might have in store for the Iraqi people.

Cracks finally appear to be forming in the perpetual-immobility machine that has been Iraq’s post-election political process since last spring’s nationwide elections.

This morning, Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the Associated Press reported:

The Sunni-backed political coalition that narrowly won the most votes in Iraq’s parliamentary election appeared Sunday to be giving up its demand for the premiership, boosting the Shiite prime minister’s drive to keep his job.

. . . “We have reached a position that we don’t care anymore about posts,” said Sheik Adnan al-Danbous, a Shiite who is close to Iraqiya chief Ayad Allawi. “Posts are not as important to us as having participation in decision-making.”

. . . “We don’t mind if al-Maliki is the prime minister, but we have to have a decision-making post,” al-Danbous told The Associated Press.

What Abdul-Zahra refers to as a “stunning turnabout” from Iraqiya’s months-long refusal to have anything to do with a Maliki-led government signifies that Allawi is beginning to accept that he’ll be Iraq’s Al Gore, as I dubbed him when his slate won a narrow plurality in the spring elections.

It’s no coincidence that this shift happened just days after Moqtada as-Sadr’s similar about-face caused his faction to back current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki (joined by some smaller allied Shiite parties).  By bringing him within one more key bloc of having a parliamentary majority, the Sadrist endorsement gave Maliki the leverage needed to tell Iraqiya to get on board or miss the train of government power — and the resulting patronage opportunies — completely.

Not that Iraqiya is likely to get the “decision-making post” the Allawi aide mentions as a fallback demand.  In an interview on Friday, Maliki told the Jane Arraf of the Christian Science Monitor that he was offering to create a new National Council for Strategic Studies as part of the cabinet, and put Allawi in charge of it.  But this gambit has been tried before, and failed.  Although his regime has accomplished little else, Maliki has shown expertise in finding or creating loopholes in any rules designed to limit his power… in fact, that is why the prime minister has had such a hard time finding any allies since March.

So why did Sadr, who at one point seemed to be the political figure most opposed to Maliki’s re-nomination, become the first major leader to officially endorse it?  The conventional wisdom has credited the turnabout to pressure from Iran, but I think that view is too shallow.  What Iran wanted was to keep a coalition led by Iraq’s Shiite religious parties in power, and that was always inevitable — the main reason the stalemate over creating a government has dragged out so long is that despites the Sadrists’ fervently voiced objections to Maliki staying in power, they really had nowhere else to go.  It was just a matter of what price they would demand for coming on board.

That price, according to various reports (which, despite a denial in the CSM interview from Maliki, are likely accurate), is that Sadr’s supporters will run substantially more influential ministries than they did the last time they were in the government… including a key role in the army/police forces.  This added power will come at the expense not of Maliki, but of the Sadrists’ erstwhile allies in the short-lived Iraqi National Alliance, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), who named a would-be prime minister (Adel Abdel-Mahdi) with support from the Sadr bloc just a month ago.

With that tentative backing in hand, Abdel-Mahdi and ISCI went hat in hand to Allawi and the Kurdish parties looking for further support in deposing Maliki — only to have the Sadrists go back to the prime minister and cut a deal that threw ISCI under the bus, leaving their powerful ministries (ISCI had been in charge of the army, police, and finance ministries since the 2005 elections) up for grabs.

It’s not really that surprising when you understand that ISCI and the Sadrists have had a feud that dates to before the U.S. invasion and has erupted into violence on several occasions since 2003, usually in regard to ISCI’s control of key Muslim shrines in Najaf and Karbala.  In fact, Maliki came to power as an unknown in 2006 due to Moqtada’s determination to keep the prime minister’s job from going to… Adel Abdel-Mahdi of ISCI.  That history appears to be repeating itself now, even if it was preceded by a thoroughly convincing head fake on Moqtada’s part. (Cue Scott Joplin piano music.)

Of course, you’ll note that in these tales of political maneuvering, there’s precious little to be said about actual government policies, much less the benefits to ordinary Iraqis that should be the goal of such policies.  As with politics in so many other countries, that seems to be an irrelevant concern to the supposed leaders of Iraq.

…in a trophy-hunter kind of way.  This is horrific:
Collateral Murder

Via Huffington Post

“You win some, you lose some. And then there’s that little-known third category…”
– Al Gore, on the 2000 U.S. presidential election

A couple of days ago, while awaiting the final results from Iraq’s parliamentary elections, Marc Lynch (a/k/a Abu Aardvark) wrote that the country “faces a double-edged test”:

If al-Maliki triumphs in a narrow election and assembles a coalition that largely reproduces the outgoing government, many Iraqis may feel that the election was a sham, and that democracy is not capable of producing true change. If al-Maliki loses, he may not surrender power without a fight…

Or, you know, both could happen.  From the New York Times this morning:

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s party lost the Iraqi election, but a day after the results were announced it became clear that he would fight to hold on to his post — even before the outcome was declared.

On Thursday, a day before the results were announced, he quietly persuaded the Iraqi supreme court to issue a ruling that potentially allows him to choose the new government instead of awarding that right to the winner of the election, the former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi.

On another front, officials in charge of purging the government of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party said Saturday that they still expected to disqualify 50 political candidates, many of them members of Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya Party. That could strip Mr. Allawi of his narrow plurality, 91 parliamentary seats compared with 89 for Mr. Maliki’s State of Law party.

And if all that does not work, the prime minister still is clamoring for a recount. . . . Ultimately, the same Supreme Federal Court, which is nominally independent but has proved friendly to Mr. Maliki in the past, will decide the recount issue.

Yes, it’s always nice to have a friendly Supreme Court in your back pocket in case of a close election, isn’t it?

The relevance of the court’s decision is that under the Iraqi constitution, the electoral coalition with the largest number of seats in parliament gets the first chance to form a government, including choosing a prime minister.  But because although Allawi’s slate came in first in the voting, the court ruled that a coalition formed after the election would be eligible — meaning that Maliki’s party and the bloc of Shiite religious parties (who came in second and third, respectively) could unite and thereby “win” the right to stay in power.

As a result, a coalition like the one I predicted two weeks ago is still the most likely outcome: Maliki’s “State of Law” bloc (unfortunate acronym and all), his off-and-on Shiite allies (including those loyal to U.S. bogeyman-cleric Moqtada as-Sadr), and the largest Kurdish parties, creating a near-reunion of the 2005 government.

Why?  Because despite ordinary Iraqis’ unhappiness with the incumbent regime’s corruption and ineptitude, the high-level fault lines that brought about the Shiite-Kurdish alliance — in particular, the desire to remove any trace of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baath party from the government and especially the military — still exist.

In 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani oversaw the creation of a nearly all-Shiite electoral slate in order to ensure that Iraq’s majority sect would control the country’s post-Saddam future.  Even if just enough voters in Iraq’s predominantly Shiite regions rejected that sectarian strategy (either by staying home or defecting to Allawi’s coalition) to tip this month’s election results, Sistani is not likely to accept such a swift unraveling of his master plan — and his will is unlikely to be defied by the politicians he brought to power, especially for the sake of a minority role in an Allawi-led regime.

Similarly, as Juan Cole notes this morning, an alliance between Allawi and the Kurdish factions is implausible because of the battles for influence between Kurds and the Sunni Arabs who make up Allawi’s political base in Kirkuk and other parts of northern Iraq.  As Cole concludes, “Allawi may therefore have a plurality that is incapable of growing into a majority.”

The primary impact of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s surprising (if narrow) second-place finish, if anything, is likely to be felt by Maliki himself.  Even if Team Shiite reunites as I’ve been predicting, Maliki’s rivals in the religious parties may demand his scalp as the price for patching up the assorted feuds of the last four years.  But that would put all of the factions in the troublesome position of having to agree on a successor, meaning even more wrangling before a government can be formed.

But then, given the congested and inconclusive results of the election, I suppose that would be fitting.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

So the election results are trickling in slowly from the Iraqi parliamentary elections, and the coalition led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expressing confidence that they will come away with the largest share of the votes — a confidence that may or may not be related to the gradually accumulating accusations of fraud in the ballot-counting process.

Although all of the blocs that made up the Iraqi national legislature have frayed somewhat since the last round of elections at the end of 2005, virtually all of the major players are expected to return when the dust settles this time… most likely including al-Maliki as the prime minister.

As happened four years ago, you can expect the major Shiite religious parties to join forces with the dominant Kurdish groups to form a ruling coalition, shutting out all but a few token Sunnis as well as secular Shiite politicians like the former U.S.-installed interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi.  Although there was a much-ballyhooed split between Maliki and the other religious factions last summer, several savvy observers noted right away that a reunion was inevitable.

I wrote at the time that the strategy behind the frenemies-style breakup seemed to be to diffuse the public unhappiness with the Shiite-dominated government’s lack of results in delivering basic services:

… Maliki would pick up votes from those who didn’t want to elect a sectarian slate [again], while the Hakim-Sadr-et al. group could pose as running against the Maliki regime… even though (surprise!) everyone would wind up in effect reelecting Team Shiite, with Maliki on top.

For better or worse, judging from the early voting returns and the political jockeying that has already begun, this analysis from last August seems to have been on target.

The difference this time is something that may not bear fruit until the next parliamentary elections, whenever those might be.  By apparently unifying behind Allawi’s slate, the fragmented losers from the 2005 elections — Sunnis of all stripes, as well as secular Shiites — will in effect make him the clear, singular leader of the political opposition.

Given the rampant corruption and ineptitude of the current (and likely to be re-installed) Iraqi government, that could be a favorable spot to hold.  If the next few years aren’t much of an improvement over the last four, and voters choose not to be fooled again by a faux split among the religious Shiite parties, Allawi would be uniquely positioned to ride the wave of political resentment.   (What would happen then is something even I can’t begin to guess.)

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Yesterday was a day of déjà vu news from Iraq:

• The nominally independent election commission barred nearly 500 candidates from the voting scheduled for March 7, after receiving a request from the government to remove individuals accused of having ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. (Iraq expert Reidar Visser referred to the commission’s explanation as “making up the law.”)
• 11 men were sentenced to death for their roles in a massive bombing of two Iraqi government ministries last summer, an alleged Baathist-led plot. The regime claimed to have broken up a similar plot earlier this week.
• Perhaps in reaction to either the conviction or the political maneuvering, multiple bombs exploded in Najaf yesterday evening, near the Imam Ali shrine (shown above; an especially holy site for Shiite Muslims) and the home of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

In the previous national elections, it was Sistani’s endorsement of a slate dominated by Shiite political parties that put the current government in power — and those same parties have consistently used anti-Baathism as a rallying cry for sectarian policies that disenfranchised Sunni Muslims.

In short, the factionalism that tore Iraq apart after the American invasion continues to simmer, even as (to quote Juan Cole) “the remaining 110,000 U.S. troops in Iraq seldom do patrols and seldom see combat any more.” Which shouldn’t come as any surprise.

For the hawks who foisted the Iraq war on us, the invasion and occupation were all about imposing the will of the United States on that country, not to mention the rest of the Middle East. Some who opposed the war saw it through a similar American-centric prism, claiming that the horrific internal violence that followed was purely in response to U.S. imperialism.

In fact, neither was the case. We removed the ruler of a country awash with armaments, and various factions have been fighting ever since for the power to rule it next. The colossal, stupid tragedy of the U.S. involvement there was our government’s decision to set off the conflict in the first place, and then to stay in the middle of it.

Of course, for some, there is an apparent silver lining:

A wave of American companies have been arriving in Iraq in recent months to pursue what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar bonanza of projects to revive the country’s stagnant petroleum industry, as Iraq seeks to establish itself as a rival to Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer.

… The contracts will be administered either directly by the Iraqi government or as part of Baghdad’s oversight of international oil companies that have signed agreements during the past few months to develop the country’s most promising oil fields.

… Among the companies that have started sending workers and equipment to the country or have plans to are Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger, all Houston-based oil-services companies, and several construction and engineering giants, including KBR, Bechtel, Parsons, Fluor and Foster Wheeler.

… While American oil companies have enjoyed only modest success in winning oil development deals in Iraq, the numerous contracts signed in recent months have created an enormous backlog of work that leaves Baghdad with limited alternatives to Halliburton and the other American companies that dominate the oil industry services sector.

Funny (or sad, I guess) that some folks always seem to come out on top, isn’t it?