American Footprints » Iraq

Shippensburg in Iraq

Brian Ulrich — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:07:27 +0000

I don’t intend to become my university’s new publicist, but this month saw the beginning of an initiative to have Shippensburg assist with the development of business education in Iraq:

“The two-year grant has three components and different individuals will work on the components simultaneously. Their initial visit will be to assess the present situation. Kooti has no illusions about the state of colleges and universities in Iraq as ‘higher education has suffered significantly since the 1980s and it has continued to decline until recently.’

“The first component will be to conduct a feasibility study on establishing a center for excellence in finance and banking. ‘We will work with the government, the ministry of higher education in Iraq, as well as the private sector banking and financial (businesses) to see how we will be able to establish the center in Baghdad.’

“The second component will be to establish a center for excellence for Iraqi colleges of management and economics. ‘The objective is to improve the business programs in selected universities to improve their curriculum to update and upgrade their programs. We will look at capacity building, working with their faculty and their staff to determine what resources are needed. It will be a center for teaching excellence.’

“The third component will be to use the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) standards to assure quality of the programs, the development of administrative capacity and guidance. Grove College has long held AACSB accreditation. By employing the process that AACSB provides, Kooti believes Iraqi colleges and universities will provide a high caliber education, which will be needed as Iraq transitions into a new government, economy and way of life.”

(Crossposted to my blog)

Iraq after the U.S.

Brian Ulrich — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 03:45:43 +0000

Shortly after the official end of U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki moved against high-ranking Sunnis in his government:

“On December 18, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki requested the dismissal of his deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq…

“The next day, December 19, an arrest warrant was issued for Iraqi vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, also a Sunni, on terrorism charges.

“On December 20, Mutlaq was prevented from entering the cabinet building in Baghdad. The same day, vehicles in which two Sunni politicians were travelling in the west of the capital came under fire, apparently from members of the Iraqi security forces.

“Although Mutlaq and Hashemi are the two most senior Sunni Arabs in positions of power, the authorities insist the proceedings against them have nothing to do with sectarian politics.

“State-run television last week showed what purported to be the confessions of Hashemi’s bodyguards, in which they said they assassinated health and foreign ministry officials and Baghdad police officers. They alleged that Hashemi paid them 3,000 US dollars for each attack…

“Hashimi left Baghdad and went to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north after security forces raided his home and office and arrested some of his staff…

“On December 21, the prime minister made it clear he no longer felt bound by the power-sharing agreement in which posts are shared out among Iraq’s various ethnic and confessional groups. Instead, he announced, he would be setting up a new majority-based cabinet.”

The story here is that while Iraq today is politically freer with far more democratic features than it had under Saddam Hussein, the game being played is still one of which faction will dominate the state and the webs of government patronage that makes possible. In the decades prior to the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, the nation was ruled through the Ba’ath Party, which was dominated by military officers from the Sunni regions around Baghdad where power was concentrated under the Ottomans and British. After the complete collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, power passed to militias, either Shi’ites trained by Iran or Sunni units rooted in the old Iraqi army and augmented by foreign salafi fighters. The Sunnis wound up losing that civil war, which was at its peak from 2006-2009 and saw the end of mixed neighborhoods as people were forced to join their co-religionists for their own protection.

Prime Minister al-Maliki came to office through elections, but his power also rests on his dominance of a government which controls much of the economy and security services dominated by veterans of those same Shi’ite militias. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Sunnis live as refugees elsewhere in the Arab world, and al-Maliki’s government is in no hurry to repatriate them. This is why Iraq’s government is widely perceived, not as democracy, but as control by a sectarian strongman, and why those elsewhere in the Arab world always cited it as a negative example rather than a model. This is also why, over the past few months, Sunni regions have begun seeking autonomy:

“In recent months, Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala Provinces have each pushed for a public vote on creating their own regional governments…

“Early Friday morning, Iraqi police commandos arrested a leading advocate of Salahuddin Province’s push for regional status and seized his computer and reams of documents, security officials said. They did not say why he had been detained.

“The provinces are not seeking a total divorce from the rest of Iraq, just a wider separation in the mold of Kurdistan, the relatively prosperous and safe area in northern Iraq. The Kurds, who have lived for decades as a people apart from the rest of Iraq, have their own Parliament and president, command their own security forces and have signed lucrative oil deals with foreign companies without Baghdad’s approval.”

American forces have withdrawn, but the future of the country remains undecided. Its leaders treat their posts as fiefdoms through which to build their own power bases, and the general public fears a collapse of the security situation should competition among those leaders get too out of hand. Furthermore, the empowerment of a previously disadvantaged Shi’ite population has come at the direct expense of Iraq’s Arab Sunnis, and that fact, kept firmly in Arab consciousness by the refugee problem, has been perhaps the most significant ingredient in a spike in anti-Shi’ite attitudes among Sunnis throughout the region. I will not say the country was better off under Saddam Hussein, but no one should pretend for political reasons that the U.S. has mid-wifed a stable democracy rather than a weak yet abusive state in a battered society which serves, not as a model of freedom, but a source of instability.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Patronage and Iraqi Politics

Brian Ulrich — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:51:25 +0000

Maria Fantappie looks at the relationship between Nouri al-Maliki and the Sadr movement in Iraq:

“In 2007, Maliki’s forces drove the Sadrists’ Mehdi army out of Basra. Although allied in the central government, Maliki and the Sadrists are once again competing, but this time through political rather than military means…

“The Sadrists rely on a fluid chain of decision-making that issues policies at the top levels of government and implements projects through local committees in the provinces they run. In just a few months, their ministries have begun to build housing complexes in Maysan, implement infrastructure projects in Muthanna, improve the provision of electricity in Dhi-Qar, and improve access to water in Najaf. Starting with Maysan, Maliki has spared no time in disrupting this flow by limiting government funding, delaying approval for implementation, and hampering foreign investments.

“The rush to outperform each other is most evident in the provinces of Basra and Baghdad. Maliki has hastened the allocation of funds and approved projects, but often the Sadrists have capitalized on Maliki’s efforts by taking credit for implementing projects through local committees and the ministries they run. In Baghdad, when the government began providing free fuel to supply electric generators, Sadrist committees organized distribution to each home in Sadr City and Shula. As the Shatt al-Arab irrigation project began in Basra, Maliki was compelled to create the National Council for Water under his chairmanship, undermining the Ministry of Water in the process.

“If Maliki governs Iraq as its patron –– through a pyramidal hierarchy of command emanating from Baghdad –– the Sadrists deploy a strongly connected network between their representatives in parliament, the Al Ahrar Bloc, and their political bureaus in the provinces. While the prime minister receives local officials in his office in Baghdad, Sadrist members of parliament travel to all of the southern provinces to listen to constituent demands and congratulate local bureaus on their achievements. Competition is high over tribal support. While the Maliki-sponsored ‘Tribal Support Councils’ have co-opted several southern sheiks over the past years, the Sadrists are winning them over by proposing irrigation projects and improving services in the areas they control.”

The context for this is that Maliki can access the highest levers of power in Baghdad, but relies on the Sadr movement to penetrate Iraqi society, which is necessary to maintain power. The conduct of politics as described by Fantassie shows the persistence of patronage networks and informal ties in Iraqi politics. In this type of political economy, the Sadrists can do what other Islamist organizations have done in different Arab countries and fill public service gaps. At the same time, they seem to be serving as a mediator between state and society in a way they did with regional Ba’ath governors during the 1990′s. Whether they can actually parlay that into a greater share of power at the top remains to be seen.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Gulf International Relations

Brian Ulrich — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 02:10:48 +0000

Gregory Gause’s The International Relations of the Persian Gulf provides an excellent overview of its subject over the past 40 years since the British withdrawal, while providing both interesting unifying themes and well-supported arguments about several controversial issues. Gause views the Gulf states bordering the Gulf as forming a “regional security complex,” meaning that the bulk of their foreign policy energy is dedicated to their relations with each other. Between 1971 and at least 2003, the Persian Gulf saw a tripolar system based around Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Politics among them was often characterized by concern with transnational identities, such as Arab ethnicity or Shi’ism, and a critical factor shaping interstate relations, including the major wars, was states’ fears that these identities could be manipulated so as to undermine their own internal security. This is especially true when discussing Iraq.

An early case of a Gulf regime entering a conflict was Saddam Hussein’s decision to attack Iran in 1980. While acknowledging that the Iraqi government saw an opportunity to advance territorial claims at the head of the Gulf, Gause argues based on the timing of events that the actual decision to go to war was motivated by a fear of revolutionary Shi’ism spreading to Iraq, a fear which also motivated support for Iraq by Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. Gause adduces a similar motivation behind Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, producing a great deal of evidence that Saddam Hussein, with a certain amount of paranoia, believed Israel, the United States, and the smaller Gulf monarchies were conspiring with internal dissidents to undermine his regime in the wake of the unsuccessful Iran-Iraq War. A belief that danger was imminent led him to attack Kuwait in August 1990, instead of trying to wait until he had nuclear weapons. In this context, Saddam saw Kuwait’s over-pumping of oil as in part an attempt to undermine his own economy and patronage capacity by driving down prices.

Gause devotes an entire chapter to the American decision to attack Iraq in 2003, which he argues undid the tripolar system leading to a current situation in which it is unclear how power and influence will ultimately be distributed. His argument here is that while some within the Bush administration were in favor of an attack on Iraq from the get-go, Bush himself only came to support the idea after September 11, and this support was based primarily on the belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs and could provide such weapons to terrorists. Once this decision was made, confirmation bias and internal administration politics led to exaggerations of the intelligence in areas such as nuclear weapons and al-Qaeda links that served to make the case for war to the American public.

As someone who follows these issues closely, I felt like I’d heard almost everything in this book before at some point or another, but it was still invaluable to have it all in one place as part of a common narrative and analysis. Looking at the region today, one can see the continued foreign policy salience of regimes’ concerns for their international security in Saudi Arabia’s decision to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain. At the same time, I’m not as convinced as Gause is that Iraq is now primarily a playing field for outsiders as opposed to a power in its own right. While there are definite internal tensions to be resolved, Iraq currently has a stable government with a steadily increasing capacity, and I’m dubious that any of its neighbors want to see it collapse back into civil war. The key issue to watch there is what kind of path it charts amidst the Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

In summary, Gause’s book is a highly effective introduction to key regional issues, as well as a useful resource for those with some background in the area, which will continue as a flashpoint in world affairs for the foreseeable future.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Repression in Bahrain

Brian Ulrich — Sat, 07 May 2011 00:27:40 +0000

Toby Jones notes Bahrain’s ongoing crackdown on dissent:

“An eerie silence and a paralyzing sense of fear currently grip Bahrain. Since mid-March, when tens of thousands of protesters last took to the streets demanding political reform, Bahraini security and military forces have engaged in an ongoing, systematic, and brutal campaign to crush the country’s pro-democracy forces. The crackdown has been sweeping and shocking. Dozens of activists have been killed. Hundreds more have been imprisoned and tortured. Bahrain’s leading independent newspaper, al-Wasat, is expected to close down on May 10.

“Provocative government actions belie claims that all the monarchy seeks is to re-establish law and order. It is apparent, instead, that the government is using martial law to carry out a vendetta against those who challenged the authority of the ruling al-Khalifa. Checkpoints have been set up to harass the country’s Shi’i citizens, who make up the majority of Bahrain’s native population and of its political opposition. Security forces have laid siege to the island’s hospitals and arrested scores of medical personnel, in what appears to be an especially inhumane and spiteful kind of intimidation. For weeks police and pro-regime supporters roamed the streets of Shi’i villages destroying cars and other property. Those who supported the protests now fear leaving their homes, lest they be publicly accosted or, worse, arrested and disappeared.

“The regime is also taking dramatic steps to quiet critics. Authorities have targeted newspapers, journalists, and bloggers in order to stymie public criticism, to control reporting about the scale of the crackdown, and to frighten into silence those who might speak out. In the last few weeks Bahraini blogs and twitter feeds that are normally vibrant have gone quiet, stunned into submission by the brutality of what is happening around them.”

Jones goes on to note in more detail the silencing of potential reporting on events in the island kingdom, as well as the predictable assertions that the largely Shi’ite opposition was pursuing a sectarian agenda. I suspect that in the background of the latter is the fear among Sunnis that Bahrain could become another Iraq, which is now led by a sectarian Shi’ite government with over one million mainly Sunni refugees still in other Arab countries.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Kirkuk and Kurdish Politics

Brian Ulrich — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:59:06 +0000

Denise Natali reports on Kurdish politics in Iraq:

“The protests, which are still ongoing, have not only unleashed populations’ pent-up frustrations with the KRG-party apparatus but also have reinforced fractures in Kurdish politics and society. While most Kurdish populations seek political reform, only those in Sulaimani have had the opportunity and interest to openly challenge KRG and Barzani family power. Political polarization between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) was made evident after the PUK refused the deployment of KDP militia into Sulaimani, which attempted to quell a situation that its KRG partner has proven unable to manage.

“New fissures also have emerged between the KRG and its challengers — Kurdish populations it now refers to as ‘Those Who Do Not Love Kurdistan’. In fact, the entire opposition movement and protests have become highly politicized as old party feuds over leadership and control are intertwined with demands for real political reform. While the KDP and PUK accuse the opposition group, Goran, and demonstrators for being disloyal to Kurdish nationalism, Islamic parties that have joined the protestors in Sulaimani have permitted their mullahs to give sermons referring to the demonstrations as ‘a jihad against the KRG’. These political tensions have widened the Badinani-Soran rift, or the geographical polarizations between regions, that has evolved alongside the aggrandizement of Barzani-family power and weakening of the PUK since 2006, making the possibility of a truly unified Kurdish government unlikely.”

This, I suspect, is a critical context for the KRG’s aggressive moves around Kirkuk:

“On February 25, Arabs and Turkomans planned to protest in Kirkuk against corruption and unemployment. The Kurds believed that these protests would lead to attacks against them and sought to preempt the protests. Therefore, two days earlier, Dr. Najmaldin O. Karim, until recently a prominent spokesman for the Kurds in the United States and now a member of Iraqi parliament from the Kirkuk region, told a press conference in Baghdad that ‘[Arab] chauvinists were planning to destabilize Kirkuk during the protests’ (Kurd Net, March 3). Khalid Shwani, another Kurdish MP from Kirkuk, claimed that the Arab Political Council planned to attack numerous Kurdish administrative and security offices. The following day 8500 to 12,000 heavily-armed peshmerga, including crack units of the Zeravani (paramilitary police), were deployed just west of Kirkuk. The Arab Political Council and Turkoman Front denounced the Kurdish move and demanded its immediate withdrawal. A call for a ‘day of wrath’ to protest the peshmerga presence was only averted by a police-enforced curfew.

“On March 3, Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded through a spokesman that the KRG withdraw its troops: ‘These troops were deployed without the permission of the central government and the Prime Minister has asked them to draw down immediately’ (Kurd Net, March 4). However, Shaykh Ja’afar Mustafa, the Minister of Peshmerga Affairs, announced that the Kurdish forces would not withdraw until the situation normalized (Kurd Net, March 9). He claimed that the Kurds had to protect Kirkuk from al-Qaeda, Arab groups, and Ba’athists and were acting on the basis of intelligence reports that indicated that these groups had been planning to take over the city during the protests (Kurd Net, March 9). Mustafa also asserted that the Kurds were coordinating their actions with the Iraqi army units in the region (Kurd Net, March 2).”

These events in Iraq outside Baghdad have not gotten the attention they deserve, as the type of protests seen across the Middle East are, in Iraq’s north, increasing the volatility of an already situation. On one level, there is the KRG’s stated fear for their interests in Kirkuk. On the other, there is the fact that it is easy for the challenged authorities in Iraq, in this case the KRG, to try and answer protests by standing up for the interests of the community they represent against those of other communities, and portray the opposition as traitors.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Today’s Iraq Protests

Brian Ulrich — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 02:28:59 +0000

Today saw protests throughout Iraq, and six protestors were killed by government security forces. As with other recent protests in Iraq, these are connected to the broader wave of protests in the Arab world these past two months, but Reidar Visser usefully highlights their specific Iraqi context:

“Indeed, the striking aspect of today’s demonstrations was their national character. For one thing, we have seen Kurds rise up against the dominant Kurdish parties, Shiites challenging the hegemony of Maliki’s own ‘all-Shiite’ alliance, and Sunnis complaining against their Sunni local politicians. The cries for better services and employment conform to a universal pattern that has been in emergence over the past few weeks. But more importantly, in terms of slogans and demands, there are signs of a true synthesis of genuine nationwide opposition to the supposed ‘government of national partnership’ that was formed, tentatively at least, in December 2010…

“In Dhi Qar, demonstrators demanded better services, an end to corruption, and, importantly, criticised the system of ethno-sectarian quota-sharing that forms the basis for all of Iraq’s post-2003 government and that is supported by the United States and Iran alike. In Baghdad, protestors are trying to destroy the concrete blast walls put up by the United States since 2007 in its own attempt to engineer ‘sectarian’ reconciliation, American-style, and are calling for a unified Sunni–Shiite political project, with echoes from the uprising against the British in 1920. Again, this seems to indicate a desire for more profound reforms and system change. Some of the activists are highlighting the absence of properly elected local councils at the sub-governorate level across Iraq as one very immediate grievance.”

One again, it needs to be emphasized that Iraq’s sectarian divisions are not timeless enmities, which of course never actually exist, nor are they that comparable to the ethnic nationalism of post-communist eastern Europe. Alongside them there is an ideal of Iraqi nationalism among Arabs, which is why we see factions competing for the apparatus of the central state with regional autonomy as simply an occasional fallback position. Grassroots counter-sectarian activism is plausible, quite possibly sustainable, and welcome, and if the Kurds want to join in, then so much the better.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Iraqi al-Qaeda and Christians

Brian Ulrich — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 01:31:20 +0000

The fact an important Iraqi group acting under the al-Qaeda label has declared war on all Christians is disturbing:

“An al Qa’eda group in Iraq has declared Christians ‘legitimate targets’ as a deadline expired for Egypt’s Coptic church to free women allegedly held after converting to Islam, SITE monitors said today.

“The self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) said in an internet statement that its threat was justified by the church’s refusal to indicate the status of the women it said were being held captive in monasteries, the US-based monitoring group said…

“The group, which claimed the attack on Christians in a Baghdad church that ended on Sunday with the killing of 46 worshippers as security forces attempted to free them, had said that the attack was to seek the release of the alleged converts in Egypt.

“‘Let these idolaters, and at their forefront, the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican, know that the killing sword will not be lifted from the necks of their followers until they declare their innocence from what the dog of the Egyptian Church is doing,’ the ISI said in its latest statement.

This is qualitatively different from the original al-Qaeda’s rhetoric against “Crusaders,” and more like the tone many Islamist militants have adopted toward Jews. If this willingness to push open communal warfare spreads, it will have important consequences for the large Christian communities found throughout the Middle East. Although not the most important aspect of the story, it’s also worth noting the conflation of different Christian groups, as the states motives involve a delicate communal affair among Egypt’s Copts and the Qur’an-burning threat by a Florida pastor, but the massacre was carried out at a Chaldean Catholic church and the statement clearly references the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Iraq’s Nakba

Brian Ulrich — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:22:55 +0000

Matthew Duss compares the conflict which engulfed Iraq after the U.S. invasion to the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis:

“But the point is this: between 2003 and 2009, in addition to the more than 100,000 Iraqis killed and many more wounded and maimed, more than 4.5 million Iraqis were expelled and displaced amid Iraq’s sectarian civil war — new, grim details of which are contained in the WikiLeaks trove. Around 2.6 million remain internally displaced in Iraq, unable to return to their homes. Another 1.9 million remain refugees, mostly in neighboring Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. It has utterly changed the face not only of Iraq, but of the region. If Americans are going to learn the right lessons from Iraq, and satisfy the huge moral debt we’ve incurred, we’ve simply got to regain our sense of shock about the enormity of what we have done there: Through a combination of hubris, idealism, incompetence, and plain ignorance, the United States facilitated, sponsored, and oversaw Iraq’s Nakba.”

Over the summer, I read Deborah Amos’s Eclipse of the Sunnis, which focused on the Iraqi refugee crisis. Before reading it, I had not realized the extent to which it was specifically a Sunni phenomenon. Although I do not believe Amos made her case that the Iraq War is the root of a rising wave of tension between Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East, she did portray very clearly a situation in which large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis are living as refugees, often as an underclass in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and that despite rhetoric, the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government has shown little interest in creating the conditions necessary for their return. The situation has the makings of significant tension within Iraq’s Arab neighbors and between those neighbors and the Iraqi government for years to come.

(Crossposted to my blog)

From the Iraq Documents

Brian Ulrich — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 01:51:18 +0000

The New York Times highlights several key points from the Wikileaks Iraq dump:

“The war in Iraq spawned a reliance on private contractors on a scale not well recognized at the time and previously unknown in American wars. The documents describe an outsourcing of combat and other duties once performed by soldiers that grew and spread to Afghanistan to the point that there are more contractors there than soldiers.

“The documents suggest that the so-called surge worked not only because the American military committed to more troops and a new strategy but because Iraqis themselves, exhausted by years of bloody war, were ready for it. The conditions, the documents suggest, may not be repeatable in the still intensifying war in Afghanistan.

“The deaths of Iraqi civilians — at the hands mainly of other Iraqis, but also of the American military — appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration.

“While the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, particularly at the Abu Ghraib prison, shocked the American public and much of the world, the documents paint an even more lurid picture of abuse by America’s Iraqi allies — a brutality from which the Americans at times averted their eyes.

“Iran’s military, more than has been generally understood, intervened aggressively in support of Shiite combatants, offering weapons, training and sanctuary and in a few instances directly engaging American troops.”

All these conclusions are based on American military field reports.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Myths of Tripartite Iraq

Brian Ulrich — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:36:32 +0000

Reidar Visser has something critical to say:

“There has been much talk about conspiracies by hostile powers to divide Iraq into separate statelets, and most of it is probably unfounded. This partition conspiracy, however, is real and since it mostly goes undiagnosed it represents arguably far most dangerous aspect of the Iraq War: Brilliant Western academics who may have the best possible intentions towards Iraq and its people but who in an attempt at sounding sophisticated perpetuate the toxic paradigm of a tripartite Iraq – be it territorially or sociologically – simply because they have failed to study the country’s history properly through primary sources. The suggestion is not that sectarian and ethnic issues are non-existent in Iraqi history. But if Western academics had stopped reproducing what are outright lies about the origins of the modern Iraqi state, the whole climate of the discourse on Iraq would have looked vastly different. Rewrite that Feldman op-ed, delete everything that is empirically incorrect about Iraq’s history, and check to see how much is left of the original argument.

“Operation Iraqi Freedom may be over, but Operation Iraqi Partition lives on, regardless of Security Council resolutions or status of forces agreements. Unfortunately, there is no anti-war movement against it in the Western world because most of the academics there are in fact its loyal soldiers.”

I suspect a lot of reason for the “tripartite Iraq” model of thinking stems from the superficial similarities between Yugoslavia after communism and Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Tellingly, however, only the Kurds have a heritage of seeking independence. Among Arabs, the idea has always been that a single Arab nation was deliberately divided by foreign powers to keep them weak, and what we’ve seen in Iraqi politics the last seven years hasn’t involved anyone’s quest for independence, but rather control of the resources of the united state.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Fadlallah Dies

Brian Ulrich — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:40:00 +0000

One of the world’s top Shi’ite clerical leaders, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, has died:

“His career as an interpreter of Islamic jurisprudence and Shiite intellectual culture spanned more than half a century and touched on every aspect of public and private life for the millions of Shiite Muslims who considered him their ‘marja’, or ‘object of emulation’, a title bestowed upon only those clerics who have attained the highest level of scholarship and influence.

“But despite these varied religious and intellectual accomplishments, he is best remembered for his fierce resistance to the 1978-2000 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, as well as his role as the first major Muslim cleric of any sect to use religious justification for suicide bombing operations…

“Willingness to discard prior religious precedent…often endeared him to his community of followers far more than his support for military action against Israel, and turned him into one of the most liberal intellectuals in the Muslim world.

“In an interview four years ago, Fadlallah described much of what is considered Sharia as ‘nothing more than outdated Arabic tribal traditions that both pre-date and contradict the teachings of the prophets but are continued by falsely linking them to Islamic tradition’.

“It was this mentality that led him to challenge many tenets commonly associated with Islam that involve family law, divorce, womenâ€™s rights and even sex outside of marriage.

“He often granted divorces to women who could prove abuse or neglect by their husbands and would do so without consulting or even informing the husband or his family, as in his view their opinion was irrelevant once the tenets of marriage were broken by abuse or infidelity…

“This liberalism towards women led him to argue that not only would it be permissible for women to lead prayers in mosques for mixed audiences but that God had actually commanded that women should be allowed into the highest ranks of Shiite Islam as ayatollahs.”

Good pieces on his life and role have been written by Mohamad Bazzi and Juan Cole. Despite living in Lebanon, he was not that close to Hizbullah, but was deeply involved with the leaders of Iraq’s Da’wa Party, as well as its offshoots in the Gulf, particularly Bahrain, and the Bahraini cleric ‘Abdullah al-Ghurayfi is one possibility to rise to the head of his network.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Khomeinism in Iraq

Brian Ulrich — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:26:45 +0000

Two posts I read today hint at some degree of increased strength for Khomeinist theories of government in Iraqi political. First there is Juan Cole:

“Ammar has a say in who serves as the Friday Prayer leader and sermonizer at the mosque of the shrine of Ali in the holy city of Najaf, a position of great influence. It is now held by Sayyid Yasin al-Musawi. Al-Musawi’s sermon on last Friday in Najaf contained a number of themes that suggest that ISCI may be returning to its Khomeinist roots. Al-Musawi praised political obedience to the Shiite grand ayatollahs, not just spiritual obedience. That sounded close to the Khomeinist principle of the guardianship of the jurisprudent, or rule of the ayatollahs, which prevails in Iran. And he warned of conspiracies against Iraqi independence, saying that these conspiracies were launched by ‘global arrogance and the secularists.’”

The Ammar in question is Ammar al-Hakim, leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The other post comes from Reidar Visser:

“Among the more overlooked aspects of the Iraqi parliamentary elections that take place on Sunday is the fact that Kazim al-Haeri, a hardliner cleric of Iraqi origin residing in Qum in Iran, enthusiastically supports participation.

“Haeri belongs to a particular class and generation of Shiite scholars: He is an old-school Khomeinist. Always loyal to the paradigm of wilayat al-faqih, he has written extensive treatises on the inviolability of the power of the supreme leader, not only inside Iran but throughout the Shiite world. He remained supportive of such views when Khamenei emerged as Khomeiniâ€™s successor in the first half 1990s; after 2003 he has formed an important (if not always stable) bridge between Iranian leaders and the Sadrists of Iraq. In this role, Haeri forms the juncture where orthodox Khomeinism and radical Sadrism of southern Iraq meet, and where Tehran has found its best vantage point for domesticating radical Iraqi trends and transforming them into tools of its own interests.”

I note this without comment.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Nir Rosen’s New Take On Iraq – “An Ugly Peace”

motown67 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:54:45 +0000

In the November/December 2009 issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen has a piece called “An Ugly Peace.” In it, Rosen writes about the new status quo in Iraq that was created by the end of the sectarian war and the U.S. Surge, something that he was reluctant to talk about in previous articles. He writes that while Iraq still has plenty of problems such as sectarianism, there are no real challenges to the power of the Iraqi government, and a state of relative stability is beginning to emerge in the country.

Rosen tries to explain how Iraq has come to this new situation. The major reason to him was that the Shiites won the sectarian war. The Mahdi Army, with the implicit and sometimes explicit support of the Iraqi government and security forces were successful in driving large numbers of Sunnis out of central and southern Iraq. Sunni insurgents were also fighting with Al Qaeda in Iraq. By the time the U.S. began the Surge in 2007, many Sunnis were willing to switch sides and work with the Americans for money in the Sons of Iraq (SOI) program to expel the Islamists. U.S. erected blast walls also formalized the new segregation of Iraqi neighborhoods. The success of the Shiites, also led them to turn on each other. The Mahdi Army for example, devolved into several factions, some of which were no better than gangs that preyed on their own communities. In early 2008, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki took advantage of this situation by striking against the Sadrists in Basra and Baghdad, resting control of the streets from them. This helped transform him from a sectarian into a nationalist leader at the front of a newly invigorated Iraqi state.

All of this is generally agreed upon by Iraq observers. What’s new is that Rosen is finally writing about it. This has been a slow transformation. In 2008 for example, he wrote about the Sons of Iraq (SOI) program in an article entitled “The Myth of the Surge” in Rolling Stone that emphasized that the Sons of Iraq were insurgents with blood on their hands, and only a stop-gap measure that was actually increasing violence, and putting off the next battle between Sunnis and Shiites. By April 2009 in “The big sleep” for The National, however, he noted that the Sunnis had actually lost the war, and were done for as a military force. He revealed that back in 2006 Sunni insurgent leaders in Jordan and Syria had told him that they were done for now that the sectarian war had started because they could not beat the numerically superior Shiite militias and Shiite controlled government. Maliki’s arrest of an SOI leader in Fadhil that led to two days of fighting, but no further repercussions also showed that the insurgents were not unified enough to resist the power of the government. In fact, the entire SOI program meant that the former insurgents were publicly known, and denied them the anonymity that would allow them to melt back into the public and return to the insurgency.

Another major change in tone could be seen in Rosen’s opinion of the Mahdi Army. In “Songs for the Mahdi Army” for Mother Jones in December 2008 he wrote about how the Sadrists were a state within a state with their militia and social services. They were a force that could not be ignored, and that they were here to stay, even after the government’s crackdown. By the time of “The Ugly Peace” Rosen was talking about their shortcomings. Whereas before he said that the Mahdi Army attacked Sunnis who were Baathists and militants, now he wrote that the Sadrists were responsible for ethnic cleansing of entire Sunni communities. Sadr had also lost control of parts of his movement, some of which had devolved into gangs. This was a far change from previous reports that gave the impression that Sadrists were everywhere in Shiite communities, the security forces, and the government, and all were loyal followers.

Rosen also seems to have come to the conclusion that Iraq is entering a stage of some type of stability. Back in April 2009 he wrote in “The gathering storm” that while there was no more random violence in Baghdad, that shops were open and customers were out on the streets, that Iraq was rebuilding, and that some displaced and refugees were returning he felt a sense of foreboding of things falling apart once the U.S. withdrew. In “An Ugly Peace” he appears to be arguing that the Iraqis can handle security, and that the Iraqi government is strong enough to stand on its own.

The major problem he sees remaining in Iraq is latent sectarianism. That no longer takes the form of fighting out on the streets, but rather in an emerging Shiite culture in the security forces, and government offices. He found that in almost every Iraqi institution and ministry he went to there were posters of Shiite religious figures hanging from the walls, and Shiite music could be heard. He also mentions the continuing refugee and displaced crisis, corruption and Maliki’s move towards authoritarianism as other issues.

This is what Rosen means by his title. There is an ugly peace in Iraq with the Sadrists having lost their standing, the sectarian war is over, but sectarianism remains, and the Sunnis are thoroughly defeated and divided. The Iraqi state and Prime Minister Maliki are asserting their authority, and face no real challengers. These are all major changes in Rosen’s writing who before emphasized that renewed fighting and conflict were always just around the corner. The major problem is that he knew about many of these changes years ago, but didn’t really write about them until now. Having Sunni insurgent leaders saying that they knew they were going to eventually lose back in 2006 was not reported until 2009. The same is true for the Sadrists. Rosen must have known about their fracturing and loss of standing, but chose not to mention it until the end of this year. The real question is what took him so long to change his tune? Was it that he was so caught up in the moment that he didn’t realize the larger transformations occurring, or did his opposition to the U.S. invasion make him emphasize the resistance and chaos in Iraq to make the Americans look bad?

No SOFA Referendum?

motown67 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:43:54 +0000

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 5, 2009 that there might not be a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between Iraq and the United States. The SOFA is actually two documents that set the future relations between the two countries. When it was originally debated in Iraq’s parliament, the Iraqi Accordance Front successfully pushed through a referendum in a separate, non-binding, Political Reform Document. Originally the balloting was scheduled for July 2009, but neither the cabinet nor the legislature came up with a bill for the election. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki then said he wanted the referendum to occur the same time as the January 2010 parliamentary vote. Now, Iraqi politicians talking to the Wall Street Journal have said that there is no drive to hold the referendum in January either. Parliamentarian Saleh al-Mutlaq worried that there may be a security vacuum if the U.S. is forced to leave early if the SOFA is voted down by the Iraqi public. Currently U.S. combat troops are slated to leave Iraq by December 31, 2011. If the SOFA referendum failed, they would have to leave in January 2011. Members of the United Iraqi Alliance and the Iraqi Islamic Party also said a referendum was unnecessary. Lawmakers are currently busy trying to push through a new parliamentary election law as well. Together that probably means there will be no SOFA referendum, unless Maliki really pushes it since one of his campaign issues is the exit of U.S. forces from Iraq.