Needlenose

…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?

Nada Bakri had an interesting article for the Washington Post yesterday on the latest popular TV shows among the denizens of Baghdad’s cafes:

It was time for “Dar Dour,” one of more than a dozen Iraqi TV shows that run only during Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from dawn until sunset.

Ramadan shows — broadcast after iftar, the traditional meal that breaks the fast — are nothing new. . . . But this year, the most popular programs here break with the usual Ramadan fare of formulaic sitcoms and dramas. Instead, they seek humor in Iraq’s precarious — often traumatic — postwar life, with its endemic corruption and violence, rising prices and hours of electricity as short as traffic jams are long.

“I only watch Iraqi series,” Mohammad said as the power went off and the screen went black. “Only those shows know what we have to endure.”

“Dar Dour” is perhaps the most popular of these distinctly Iraqi dark comedies.

Produced by al-Sharqiya, an independent Iraqi satellite TV network based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, it chronicles the days of Abu Wardeh, a helpless man who struggles to make ends meet. . . .

In almost every episode, a policeman stops Abu Wardeh, then arrests him. The charges are always ludicrous: polluting the air, riding his motorcycle without wearing a seat belt, making too much noise and distracting other drivers. And every charge leads to a dialogue with an official that soon turns into a monologue in which Abu Wardeh lists everything that is wrong with Baghdad today: congested traffic, pollution, poverty, unemployment, corruption, bombings, assassinations and the U.S. occupation.

“I’m innocent,” he declares at the end of each monologue.

. . . ”It is a reflection of everything that goes on in Iraq today,” Jalal Naji, a 27-year-old teacher, said as he waited with friends in another cafe for the next program to begin. “The plot, the problems, the events, the people — it is almost like real life.”

. . . Another Ramadan hit here is “Who Will Win the Oil?,” an Iraqi parody of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” The show, produced by al-Sharqiya, was filmed in Cairo but features only Iraqis. The seats and tables are in the shape of oil barrels. The prizes start with five liters — just over a gallon — of oil for the right answer to the first question. Blond women dance to the show’s opening song. “The oil of the people is not for the people,” they sing. “It’s for the thieves.”

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have nothing on these guys.  Then again, I’m sure they’re grateful not to have the Iraqis’ wealth of bleak comedic material to work with.

One didn’t live to see his long-held dream come to fruition. The other did.

Kim Gamel and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the Associated Press report from Baghdad today:

The Iranian-backed Shiite parties that helped propel Iraq’s prime minister into power three years ago dumped him Monday as their candidate for re-election, forming a new alliance to contest the January vote.

The move dealt a blow to Nouri al-Maliki’s chances to keep his job next year and set the stage for a showdown between competing factions in the Shiite coalition that had dominated Iraq’s government since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

. . . The Shiite prime minister’s efforts to win public confidence by portraying himself as a champion of security have taken a battering in recent weeks. A wave of horrific bombings has called into question the government’s ability to protect the Iraqi people two months after most U.S. forces pulled out of urban areas.

. . . Monday’s political announcement — made with fanfare at a news conference — represents a major realignment.

The new bloc, called the Iraqi National Alliance, will include the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, or SIIC, and [Moqtada] al-Sadr’s bloc . . .

. . . [Maliki] stayed out of the new alliance because leaders refused to guarantee him the prime minister’s spot, officials said. Rumored possibilities for the job include new alliance members ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, current Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and even Former Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon favorite.

(*A brief pause here, to allow readers to shudder*)

The realignment does not immediately threaten al-Maliki’s position as prime minister, but points to stormy politics in the election campaign and beyond, as U.S. troops begin scaling back their presence.

Supreme Council lawmaker Reda Jawad Taqi said a last-ditch meeting was held Sunday to try to bring al-Maliki into the fold but it failed to overcome the differences.

Then again, with at least five months to go before the elections, nothing can be considered final:

One of al-Maliki’s advisers, Hassan al-Sineid, said in a televised response that the prime minister and the leaders of the new alliance differed over “the mechanism of participation in the alliance and the need to open this alliance to include a broad range of political powers.”

In other words, the assorted hucksters couldn’t agree on the latest division of the loot (i.e., the respective number of seats in the Iraqi parliament and allotted Cabinet posts, and the opportunities for graft that go with them).

The prime minister instead is working to form an alternate coalition. He is reaching out to a prominent Sunni sheik in Anbar province, whose followers include fighters who joined forces with the Americans against al-Qaida in Iraq.

. . . Despite Monday’s announcement, the new Shiite alliance was careful to leave the door open for the Dawa Party to join later.

Abdul-Mahdi, a top SIIC member, was among those reaching out to Dawa, saying it was important to present a strong united front that can address the overwhelming challenges facing the country.

Bet on Grand Ayatollah/cat-herder-in-chief Ali Sistani to get involved, either personally or through proxies in Iran, to referee the dispute.  By the time the election rolls around, the team is likely to be back together again.

Update: Both Juan Cole and Joel Wing at Musings on Iraq cite claims/rumors endorsing my hunch that the sticking point is how many seats Maliki’s party would be allotted as part of the allied election slate. (Separately, there’s a detailed breakdown of the factions involved from Reidar Visser.)

Prof. Cole raises a point I nearly suggested in my original post — Maliki might run on a different slate from the rest of Team Shiite, then agree to form a governing coalition after the election. The possibly too-clever thinking at work in this scenario could be that Maliki would pick up votes from those who didn’t want to elect a sectarian slate, 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.

What’s important about the memo, revealed yesterday, from an army colonel advising American forces in Iraq that recommends an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country?

It wasn’t an expression of official policy, just one colonel’s advice — and we quickly learned the author, Col. Timothy Reese, was something of a loose cannon in terms of his opinions.

Even so, after years of neocon hype of inevitable “victory,” and as recently as three months ago (even after announcing a withdrawal timeline), President Obama still pretending that there was a mission to be accomplished, Col. Reese has formally placed on the table for discussion within the Pentagon an obvious truth regarding the U.S. in Iraq: “The use of the military instrument of national power in its current form has accomplished all that can be expected.“

It’s about time that top U.S. military officials started facing that fact. For five years now, I’ve been writing about the ability of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the Shiite-dominated government he shepherded into power to resist American pressure — and been right nearly every time I bet on that ability to prevail.

A year ago, when the conventional wisdom was that Iraqi prime minister Maliki’s demands for a withdrawal timeline (during negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA) were just to placate Iraqi public opinion while coming up with a way for the U.S. to stay, I wrote that Sistani’s plan since 2004 was “to use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government’s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.”

Maliki’s successful insistence on a timeline, and the unexpected restrictions that Col. Reese’s memo says are now being placed on U.S. troops in the wake of the SOFA being implemented, represent that plan in action. And contrary to what many progressives would rightly hope, it’s not an expression of sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people. It’s Robert Shaw being hustled out of the building at the end of “The Sting.”

Sure, prime minister Maliki may make noise about extending the U.S. presence — but make no mistake, any new agreement will be on the Iraqi government’s terms, which will have far less to do with building a functional, thriving democracy than with continuing to use American military might to crush Maliki’s political enemies.

The Iraq war was a “victory” not for the United States, nor for the Iraqi people, but rather for a corrupt and authoritarian-leaning regime whose most redeeming characteristic is that it isn’t quite as brutal and dictatorial (yet, anyway) as Saddam Hussein’s — which, sadly, was the obviously probable end result all along.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

If you thought that by electing Obama we’d get out of the Shrubyian quagmires any sooner, you’d be sadly mistaken.  It looks like Obama is following Shrubya’s brokeass ‘strategy,’ i.e. engagements without an exit strategy, no clear goals and a continuing drain of soldiers and cash.

In a move right out of the Shrubya playbook, Obama is replacing one general with another in Afghanistan, saying that it’s time for some ‘fresh thinking.’  Seriously, Mr. President, the only ‘fresh thinking’ we need is from you!!  It doesn’t matter whom you put in the hot seat, he/she will continue to muddle along until such time as it becomes clear what they need to achieve in order to get out of the quicksand.

And in the case of Afghanistan, as long as the Taliban live free and untouchable just across the border this war will drag on for as long as we wish to expend the lives.  Our ally Pakistan will neutralize the Taliban?  Don’t make me laugh, Mr. President, they are already busy getting their asses kicked by the Taliban’s tribal hosts.

And in case you’ve forgotten, Shrubya already tried launching a ‘death from above’ strategy in both quagmires and learned the hard way that for every ‘terrorist’ you kill, you create dozens of pissed-off new terrorists.

If you want to eliminate the Taliban threat to Karzai and ‘new’ Afghanistan, you need to take the war to them…on the ground…where they are.  If you can’t or won’t do that, then get us the hell out of there.  Fresh thinking, Mr. President, fresh thinking!