Needlenose

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!

From November 5th, 2003 to sometime in 2005, Swopa used to regularly post ‘Groundhog Day’ news bits covering what seemed to be the same news of one or a few US soldiers blown to bits or some attack on civilians in the Iraqi Quicksand.

Then for a time, things seemed to stabilize.  Shrubya claimed it was his surge, Petraeus claimed credit for the military’s initiative to bribe the Sunni insurgents, and the reality-based community reckoned it was because most conflict neighborhoods had already been ‘cleansed’ and the US troops withdrew into their fortifications (removing easy targets).

Well it seems that minus the intra-Shi’ite political maneuverings, Groundhog Day appears to be making a comeback.  In today’s news, 3 more US soldiers were killed in a bombing, and suicide attacks are back to being regular news stories.

Swopa really called it when he mused that Obama had walked into a policy trap set for him by Shrubyian dead-enders in the military.

Obama really needs to take a lesson from Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon a few years back – otherwise, he could well be facing another several years of Groundhog Days as various Iraqi factions pull off stunts designed to keep us trapped in Quicksand.

*Update* UK PM Gordon Brown apparently doesn’t read the same news that Swopa & I read – apparently the British there was a ‘success!’ As a village idiot once said: “Heckuva job, Brownie!”

Via the Associated Press: “President Barack Obama is greeted by Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, as he arrives in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, April 7, 2009.”

The Repugs, riding the wave of public indignation, are having a field day with the AIG executive retention bonus crap.  And why shouldn’t they?  It was a Dem legislature that stripped out the provision to cap the bonuses of firms getting Federal bailouts to keep afloat?

I mean, $163 Million sure is a lot of money, right?

Well the public should get a sense of perspective, and call the Repugs out for their feigned amnesia – I mean where the fuck was all the ‘indignation’ when goddman Shrubya & the Repug Congress of the day lost $12 Billion in the ” biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve” in a ‘rebuild Iraq’ program that had Zero oversight and accountability?

It’s time for a reality check here – that is 2 orders of magnitude larger than when the Dems just pooch-screwed away, and what’s more – at least we know where the $163 Million ended up (and we might be able to get it back through a special tax)!!  The $12 Billion just vanished without a trace.

And that’s not including another $10 Billion spent on no-bid contracts with unenforced oversight handed out to Shrubya cronies on “questionable or unsupported charges in Iraq reconstruction contracts.”

There are days when I believe they put funny pills in the American drinking water supply.  Seriously.

The key justification for the crackdown on the Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank spouted by the pro-Israeli camp is that the Palestinians are terrorists, because their suicide bombings and other attacks ‘target civilians.’  Frankly, I fail to see the ‘fine point’ these apologists put on it when, for example, in the recent ‘put down’ of the Hamas rocket launchers, the Israeli army killed an estimated 960 civilians out of a total of 1434 total dead – 67%!

Israel, of course, immediately and automatically disputed the number of civilian dead.  The ultra-nationalist message of the country’s leaders, however, was undercut by direct testimony from members of the IDF, who are coming forward with tales of policy-driven slaughter of civilians, including unarmed women & children.

It’s hard to take the moral high ground after the US did all this and worse during the dark years of the Shrubya Iraqi fiasco.   However, now that we are under new management, I really hope (but sadly doubt)  Clinton will put some pressure on Israel to investigate their war crimes.