Needlenose

Juan Cole discusses some of the fall-out from the latest blast in Mess-o-potamia.  Given that the blast wounded some members of the Iraqi parliament, Hadi al-Ameri, a member of parliament rightly asks:

“We’ve heard a lot of brouhaha about successes on the security front,” he said. “Where are these successes?”

Good question.  Seems like things are heading South again, with increasingly brazen attacks reminiscent of the Groundhog Days of ’04 and ’05.

In the same post, Juan Cole discusses how affairs between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq are heating up around the flashpoint Kirkuk.  Those of you who aren’t afflicted with American Amnesia might remember how we called Kirkuk out as a flashpoint way back when, and how the Kurds have been continuously working to reclaim demographics and control on the ground in this oil-rich city.

I guess with Obama shifting his focus on our other failing occupation, and with our gradual troop removal the Petreus plan to stabilize the Iraqi Civil War is slowly and painfully coming off, like a band-aid on a hairy leg.

Here we are again, ethnic majority actively colonizing a region full of ethnic minorities, promulgating harsh assimilationist policies and then acting surprised when said minority takes to the streets and fights back.  In this case, it’s the Han-Chinese dominated PRC versus the Uighurs in their Western Provinces.

Typically, the PRC fabricated some story about how the Uighurs started it all, blocked any unofficial accounts, and blamed everything on Islamic extremism, terrorism and outside agitators meddling in Chinese internal affairs.  A former Uighur political prisoner provides an alternative, and in my view a more highly likely accounting of the events that lead to the recent riots.

Why do I consider this more likely?  From stories I’ve heard and things I’ve read.  For example, a buddy of mine went to a University in Xian for a couple of years in the early 80s.  At the school were numerous African students.  One night, an African student was seen getting too chummy with a Chinese girl in town.  A vigilante mob armed with various clubs and implements ran around town looking for Africans to beat up.  The students retreated to the dorms and they were locked down for the night, and a curfew was imposed until things calmed down.

In another adventure travel book I read, the author recalled hiring a truck out of Urumchi heading East.  Their young driver didn’t have a truck driving permit.  The truck was stopped, and the driver was hauled out of the car and beaten with truncheons for a few minutes. 

This situation is an familiar slow-motion train wreck.  You’d think some leader, somewhere, would reflect for a minute about the situation in Eastern Turkey with Turks vs. Kurds, or Isreal and it’s occupation of the West Bank, but no.  The PRC followed up on the rights with repressive measures, gunning down Uighur protestors.  I’m sure things will quiet down for a bit, but there are now hundreds of grieving and angry Uighur families out there who won’t forget this anytime soon.

It’s one thing to pick on the Buddhist Tibetans – they aren’t known for suicide bombings and jihads.  The Uighurs certainly aren’t Wahabi wing nuts, but shoot at them and beat them enough and you’ll end up with an Al Qaeda of Western China in no time.

So instead of working with local Uighur leaders (if there actually are any!) to reverse hateful assimilation and colonization policies and trying to mediate the situation, they just pull out the old violent playbook and wave the train on down the track.

Several years ago I suggested that the Kurds could negotiate a deal with Turkey to gain their support for an independent Kurdish state (sorry, haven’t restored those old posts yet).  One of the conditions I had laid out was that Kurdish leaders disavow the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey.

In fact, it looks like they may be going one step further, and helping negotiate a disarmament of the PKK.  Don’t get distracted by Talabani muttering his support of Iraqi Federalism towards the end of the article, he’s just giving lip service to the concept – I think Barzani’s grumbling over an increasing Iraqi army presence in the ‘disputed zones’ of Kurdistan to be  a better indication of where things stand in that regards.

If Obama is set on leaving troops in the region, and remains attached to the Iraqi Federalism concept, he might consider putting the bulk of the troops in the Kurdish north.

*Update* Turkey ‘acknowledges existance of’ Kurdish Regional Government

Last month I argued against Obama’s emerging broke-ass Afghanistan policy.  It looks like he is going forward with an escalation of 17,000 additional US soldiers.  This, is in the face of our increasingly strangled and expensive supply lines.

And as I argued before, if we are dead set on an Afghanistan escalation (that we will eventually lose), we need to first complete the exit from Iraq.  What could possibly go wrong?  How about the existing tensions between the Kurds and Arabs in Northern Iraq flaring up into a full-on war?  And it sure doesn’t help matters when our tactics involve the accidental, but continual slaughter of civilians from aerial bombardment - instead of winning hearts and minds, you need to pick them up from around the target.

Obama has been variously compared to JFK and Lincoln.  Could we in fact be looking at the Reincarnation of LBJ?

Sad, really.

It looks like the Kurds are preparing for the inevitable dissolution of Iraq following the increasingly likely and potentially more rapid US pullout from Iraq.  Sensing the inevitable, Barzani does some sabre-rattling over Maliki’s plan to legitimize Arab ‘tribal councils.’  

It’s not hard to imagine us getting sucked back in the quicksand.

Unpleasant signs of what Iraq’s future holds continue to pop up in the supposedly “quiet” areas of the country. Reuters reports this from Kurdistan in the north:

At least five Iraqis were killed and more than 20 wounded Wednesday when gunfire erupted during a demonstration in Kirkuk, where Kurds are bidding for more control of the oil-rich northern city.

Several thousand Arab and Turkmen protesters marched on the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main Kurdish factions, and surrounded the building, chanting “No to federalism, Kirkuk is Iraqi.”

Kirkuk’s chief of police said two people were killed in a burst of gunfire. Doctors said three more people died later at a nearby hospital and at least 20 were wounded.

Meanwhile, another Reuters article describes the plight of minority Christians in the Shiite south:

Since the war that toppled Saddam, armed groups have looted and set ablaze several liquor stores in the once freewheeling city, where Shi’ite religious parties now wield power and seek to impose strict moral regulations, similar to Iran’s.

More than 400 liquor stores run by Christians, the only community allowed to sell alcohol under the former Baathist government, were forced to close in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

. . . Iraqi Christians are terrified of armed Shi’ite groups, which have names like God’s Vengeance, God’s Party and the Islamic Bases Organization.

Their members roam the streets to chase mobsters, drug addicts and prostitutes, exacting their brand of what they call God’s law.

The common thread in these stories is ethnic majorities seeking to impose their political and social will by force, with virtually no resistance from the U.S. (which is too busy trying to keep its own troops from being blown up to bother with protecting Iraqi minorities).

Juan Cole has a more extensive roundup of recent news from Basra, including uncontrolled smuggling of oil and illegal drugs that the British openly confess they don’t have the troops to deal with.

Heading home for the holidays? Dreading the inevitable collision with that Libertarian uncle or redneck cousin where you both unavoidably launch into a heated, and family-alienating political discussion after he/she taunts you with Bush? Well, this year stay cool and stay on-message with these handy talking points on so-called conservative issues:

Fiscal responsibility:
* $1/2 trillion-dollar budget deficit and climbing, of which:
* $300 billion is pure government welfare pork
* $100-200 billion additional pork pending in the Energy and Prescription Drug bills
- Remind him/her that Clinton balanced the budget

Small government
* 12.5% growth in Federal Government last year
- Remind him/her that Gore, working for Clinton, trimmed 300K federal jobs and reduced Federal spending 3% (as share of GDP)

Fighting Terrorism
* Where’s Osama?
* Why are the Taliban operating out of Pakistan with impunity?
* Why weren’t the CIA/FBI heads and their staffs sacked?
* What happened to the 9/11 investigation?
* Why does Bush withhold information about possible Saudi complicity in 9/11
* Why is Al Qaeda still blowing things up around the world?

The War in Iraq
* War crimes (on the basis of Geneva Conventions) due to U.S. criminal negligence:
# 1,500 civilians killed in uncontrolled looting following the fall of Baghdad; insufficient forces on the ground
# 12,000 unique, priceless artifacts looted from the Iraqi Art Museum
# 1 million unique, priceless historical documents burned in the Iraqi National Library
# 8kg of uranium missing from looted Tuwaitha reactor; enough for several ‘dirty bombs’
# Thousands of Arabs ‘ethnically cleansed’ from Kurdistan
# Dozens killed in ‘reprisal’ slayings and ethnic civil war
# Destruction of houses, farms and other personal property in punative raids
# Hundreds of Iraqis being held without trial or tribunal
# Occupational Authority making significant changes to Iraqi legal system
# Occupational Authority making long term committments of Iraqi resources
*War botched:
# Where’s Hussein?
# Where are the WMD?
# 294 casualties since war ‘ended’
# Soldiers suffering dozens of daily guerilla attacks, the pace is increasing
# Guerillas have easy access to Hussein’s old arsenal
# Large political bloc militias still run free and armed
# No credible Coalition Government has been set up
# Strong-arm tactics appear to be further alienating the civilians
- Remind him/her that Clinton won the war against Serbia without a single U.S. soldier lost

Civil Liberties
* Patriot Act ‘sneak and peak’ provisions clearly unconstitutional
* DeLay used Homeland Security to spy on the movements Texas state legislators
* Why do Bush and war opponents end up on ‘no-fly’ lists?
* The FBI is spying on anti-war protestors
*The Secret Service is selectively enforcing ‘free speech areas’ – America is a free speech area!

I’m under no illusion that I can convince any of my reactionary relations to budge from their simplistic world-view, and I won’t try to persuade you that you will have any better luck. We can, however, potentially discourage them from contributing to Bush Co., and maybe, if they are lazy as well as misguided, discourage them from casting a vote next year. BTW, South Knox Bubba has a more comprehensive list of more general Bush failings that might be useful in political discussions with your non-rabid relations.

Although the reactionary war-mongers appear to have run out of constructive ideas and have abandoned all strategy in favor of thrashing around in Iraq, they still mope and whine about how the Progressives just criticise, and don’t offer any better alternatives. While technically incorrect, I am inclined to agree with them somewhat. Dem presidential hopefuls talk of mending fences with Europe and internationalizing the conflict. The conventional Progressive wisdom seems to be that if only we kiss European butt, foreign aid and reinforcements will flow into Iraq like rain. Even Swopa, who has often promised to post some sort of elegant defense for this position hasn’t yet done so.

The Prog conventional wisdom is bogus. I’m going to put my geopolitical hat on for a moment, and talk about an acheivable ‘way out’ of this unwinnable war. Only bold thinking will bring about near-peace with honor. Here goes:

The U.S. would back the creation of a Kurdish homeland. The quid-pro-quo for this desperately desired statehood would be 99-year leases on prime military bases. Most U.S. forces would then consolidate in still-friendly Northern Iraq, now The Republic of Kurdistan. Sure, it would be a sort of Pita-Republic. Sure it will piss off lots of people. But it would give us a stable base of operations in the heart of the most volatile place in the world. It would give the harrassed Kurds the nation that they deserve, that Churchill had dreamed about but couldn’t get through European realpolitik.

The U.S. should back a few of the more savory Shi’ite Clerics in Southern Iraq, and let them fast-track a constitution and national election. We should then support and back their new Republic, even if it becomes The Islamic Republic of Iraq. Hey, even Iran is coming around, as did Vietnam before it – they may need a few decades to work the extremism out of their systems.

That leaves us with Baghdad & the so-called Sunni triangle. This is the region that should be internationalized, with troops drawn from both Western countries and (non-Turkish) Islamic countries like Egypt & Pakistan. A fresh organization should be created, under joint control of participated forces, with the goal of protecting the inhabitants while pacifying the region. This area will remain in conflict for years, if not decades. However, it will be sandwiched between an independant and non-sympathetic Kurdistan, crawling with U.S. troops, and the rest of the (mostly-Shi’ite) Islamic Republic of Iraq; neither group, once it’s achieved it’s goal of statehood, would be inclined to provide material aid to resistance fighters of whatever ilk, nor would they most likely contenance the passage of ‘foreign jihadis’ into the area (the Kurds aren’t very Arab-friendly, and the Shi’ites aren’t very Sunni-friendly).

If and when the Sunni triangle is pacified, it can join the Iraqi Republic as an autonomous region or state in the larger Federation. And of course we’d insist that both the Kurdistan and Iraqi constitutions would have guarantees for equal protection under the law regardless of ethnicity, religion and what-not. So there you have it – the Green Boy strategy for fixing President Dumbasses mistake of the Century.

I’ve touched on this topic in recent blogs, but I thought it would be useful to summarize why this war is unwinnable. Although the original causus belli changed weekly and our win conditions were never really spelled out, we can infer the final objectives based upon White House pronouncements and consider their attainability.

Regime Change/Iraqi Freedom
Bush demanded loudly and repeatedly for the removal of Saddam and the Baath party; in fact, this was his final ultimatum before the invasion. Now that Saddam and his cronies are nowhere to be found, and U.S. troops are occupying his palaces, we’ve won, right?

Well the problem lies in the ‘change’ part of the objective. Dubya promised a rapid handover to a democratically elected Iraqi goverment within 6 months (conveniently timed around the November elections!), with a total occupation of 18 months. Now the White House is grudgingly admitting that setting up an alternative regime might take a bit longer than 6 months, presumably pushing out the 18-month milestone as well.

But questions of timing aside, the real devil lies in the details – what constitutes an acceptable alternative regime? Dubya has promised to “ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another,” a caveat later expanded by Rumsfeld to preclude either a pro-Iranian regime or an Iran-style Islamic Republic. The difficulty is that the overwhelming majority of the country are deeply religious Shiites (who are already consolidating their power without U.S. help) who have made it abundantly clear in huge, angry focus groups (Bush-speak for demonstrations) that they want an Islamic brand of democracy and will reject any goverment supported by the U.S. This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Territorial Integrity
Last year, Bush committed to preserving Iraq’s territorial integrity, in an attempt to get buy-in from the U.N. and to avoid antagonizing fellow NATO member Turkey. Sure to disrupt Bush’s plans is the fact that the Kurds have other ideas. With little opposition from the few U.S. troops in the region, the heavily armed and organized Kurds have been ethnically cleansing Arabs from Kurdish territory. They will probably content themselves with pay-back reprisals against Arabs and Turks until such time as a new target presents itself in the form of troops from a new, Arab-dominated regime intent on asserting authority in the region. At that point, they’ll stop paying lip-service to ‘regional autonomy’ and will launch a full-blown civil war against Baghdad and any occupation troops that might stand in their way.

Disarming Saddam/Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
The rapid breakup of the Iraqi army has left vast amounts of guerilla war-ready arms and munitions in the hands of the populace, including suspected Baath loyalists. As far as the supposed WMD, what possible motive could Saddam have for destroying them on the eve of a U.S. invasion as Dubya recently asserted (he must think Americans are really dumb)? best case, they never existed outside the delusions of the wrong-wing, worst case, they’re now in the hands of terrorists. Smooth move, Dubya!

Winning the ‘Hearts & Minds’ of the Iraqi people & the ‘Arab Street’
First impressions are hard to shake. How seriously can they take American rhetoric after the abject failure of Jay Garner and the occupation to date? My bet is Humpty Dumpty has already had his great fall, and there’s nothing Viceroy Bremer can do to ‘put him back together again.’

Striking a Blow Against Terrorism
Give me a break!

Conclusion?