July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 25, 2007
There have been plenty of scenarios of where Iraq will be five years from now. The fantasists, the Bush/Cheney camp and their deluded followers, predict it will be a vibrant, healthy, very pro-Washington nation – sort of like pre-Kuwait invasion Iraq sans Saddam. The pessimists believe it will be little more than a state of anarchy, a hotbed of sectarian violence and a breeding ground for global Islamist terrorism. Others, perhaps the realists, believe Iraq won’t be.
No more Iraq? What then?
Just how does Iraq end? The first thing to understand is that the seeds of Iraq’s dissolution were planted in the wake of Desert Storm. Now, despite claims to the contrary, the new Iraq is burdened with a constitution that has been booby-trapped to permit but one outcome. It is a result that’s been waiting to happen since Bush I pushed Saddam out of Iraq. Read on and I think you won’t have much trouble understanding what’s to come.
The most likely answer is three states. Kurdistan in the north. A Sunni Arab state in the middle and a Shia Arab state in the south. North and south get fabulous oil wealth. The Sunni middle gets the shaft.
An outsider who is probably as knowledgeable as anyone is Peter Galbraith, son of Canadian-born economist John Kenneth, and a foreign policy wonk who has been intimately involved with the northern Kurdish state for years. Peter G. sees the writing on the wall. He ought to, some of it is in his very own hand. At the end of the day, he says it will be constitutional democracy that eliminates any prospect of a unified Iraq:
Iraq’s government has not met one of the benchmarks and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable, while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.
Iraq’s mainstream Shi’ite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shi’ites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they would lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The US benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, Hakim’s Shi’ite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad, and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad governorate, with one-quarter of Iraq’s population. Iraq’s decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers.
New local elections are not required until 2009, and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening Muqtada, who is hostile to the United States and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve US interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq’s constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish-Shi’ite deal: the Kurds supported the establishment of a Shi’ite-led government in exchange for Shi’ite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions, such as the one the SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shi’ites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted, but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq’s three groups.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then-US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the US insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.
With input from the UN (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament’s mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad’s expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in Parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan’s voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan’s powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish non-governmental organizations, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a “No” campaign on constitutional revision a “No to Iraq” vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC’s work as “satisfactory”, an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq’s leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don’t agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shi’ites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shi’ite state. By their boycotts and votes, the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shi’ite vision of Iraq’s future, including the new constitution. The Kurds envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.
America’s war in Iraq is lost. Of course, neither President Bush nor the war’s intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning – a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes – but by the consequences of defeat. As Bush put it, “The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”
Tellingly, the Iraq war’s intellectual boosters, while insisting that the “surge” is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people.
…there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq’s Shi’ites are three times as numerous as Iraq’s Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq’s military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, are far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.
Iraq after a US defeat will look very much like Iraq today – a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America’s failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.
My earlier posts go into some detail about Peter Galbraith and his involvement in Iraq, particularly Kurdistan. Galbraith, in fact, has been instrumental in steering the political reality that virtually dooms Iraq – the Kurdish constitution. The background is in the posts listed below.
Previous posts on this subject:
The Other Civil War – October 28
Are The Kurds Ready to Bolt – October 7
Definitely Not Oprah’s Book Club – 3rd Ed., September 17
July 24, 2007
America’s top lawyer, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, is an out and out liar.
He’s such a baldfaced liar that US Senators from both parties aren’t reluctant to call him one.
Gonzales’ latest lie is that he and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card weren’t really planning on taking advantage of former AG John Ashcroft when they rushed to his hospital room late at night while Ashcroft was recovering from surgery.
This mediocre little thug instead told a senate hearing that he and Card merely wanted to tell Ashcroft of the Congressional leadership’s desire that Bush’s intelligence-gathering programme not expire the next day.
Gonzales wasn’t able to answer why, if the visit was all so innocent, FBI Director Robert Mueller thought it necessary to send agents to Ashcroft’s room to prevent Card and Gonzales from keeping Ashcroft’s deputy out.
Ranking Republican senator Arlen Specter minced no words about Gonzales’ credibility:
Mr. Specter signaled that he did not accept Mr. Gonzales’s explanation about the hospital incident. “What credibility is left for you?” the senator asked at one point.
Mr. Specter has accused Mr. Gonzales before of dodging questions, and he did so again today. At one point, the senator said, “I see it’s hopeless.” At another point, he said acidly, “Let’s see if somewhere, somehow we can find a question that you’ll answer.”
July 24, 2007
The Winograd commission enquiring into the Israeli government and Defense Forces’ actions in last summer’s Second Lebanon War, as it’s called, has also agreed to examine claims that the IDF committed war crimes during the fighting.
In response to claims by the left-wing Meretz party that war crimes had been committed by Israeli forces, Winograd said the panel’s final report will examine the war’s events from the perspective of international law.
The examination hinges on the IDF use of cluster-bomb munitions fired by rockets into residential areas. The UN reports that leftover, unexploded bomblets have killed 30-Lebanese civilians and wounded 180 since the hostilities ended last summer. The UN estimates Israel fired about 3-million bomblets into Lebanon.
Most of Israel’s cluster weapons were provided by the United States. Following the war the US State Department investigated and concluded that Israel violated a committment to the US not to fire cluster bomb weapons into population centres.
Last year the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the large number of unexploded cluster bomblets littering Lebanon resulted from the IDF’s decision to buy cheaper and unsafe American cluster weapons:
The cluster bombs constitute the number one humanitarian problem facing Lebanon after the war because many of the bomblets remain unexploded and as duds, they have turned into make-shift mines, converting towns, villages and fields into undeclared minefields. Since the cease-fire went into effect on August 14, at least 14 civilians, including many children, have been killed by the unexploded bomblets.
The United Nations demining unit estimates the ratio of duds in the cluster bomblets fired by Israel could be as high as 30-40 percent. This translates into hundreds of thousands of unexploded bomblets throughout southern Lebanon, endangering the lives of residents and preventing farmers from working their land.
July 24, 2007
Remember all the stories about how we had beaten back the Taliban, knocked them off balance and disrupted their planned spring offensive? Maybe we didn’t achieve quite as much as claimed.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that the recent Taliban kidnapping of 23-Korean aid workers is just the latest evidence of the spreading insurgency.
It suggests that the Taliban have consolidated enough power in border provinces to strike farther north, with an eye toward ringing Kabul from the south. Few analysts say that Kabul itself is in danger of direct attack, and none say it is in any danger of falling. But the situation echoes what happened to the Soviets two decades ago, when they maintained control of the cities and little else.
“Ghazni is important as the gateway to Kabul, and control of that road is very important, both symbolically and practically,” says Joanna Nathan, a Kabul-based security analyst for the International Crisis Group.
The increasing instability on Kabul’s southern doorstep is a concern for President Hamid Karzai’s government and its allies. The insurgency has always been centered in the south, where the Taliban was born from ultraconservative Pashtun tribes. But it is creeping northward and farther from Pakistan.
“It is getting farther away from the border,” says Ms. Nathan. “What was cross-border is becoming local.”
In recent months, suicide bombings in the far north – in Badakhshan and Kunduz – also suggest an attempt to widen the theater of combat, at least superficially. The attempt is more deeply rooted in Ghazni, where the Taliban can attempt to marshal support from a disaffected local populace made up largely of conservative farmers. Local Taliban have been reinforced by Taliban from the deeper south, says Lee.
This does not necessarily suggest growing sympathy for militant Islam. Rather it indicates that some Afghans have lost their patience with the government and are turning against it. The effect has been to constrict the flow of trade on roads south of Kabul, cutting it off from a major trading partner, Pakistan.
July 24, 2007
When it’s completed it’ll house a staff of 1,000 or more. That’s a huge staff for an embassy but the US embassy in Baghdad is huge, Washington’s largest embassy anywhere. It comprises 27-buildings and occupies an area larger than the Vatican.
But aren’t the Americans planning to leave Iraq? So what gives with the mega-embassy?
“It really is sort of betwixt and between,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations who advises the Defense Department. “It’s bigger than it should be if you really expect Iraq to stabilize. It’s not as big as it needs to be to be the nerve center of an ongoing war effort.”
As the LA Times reports, the very size of the embassy complex has given rise to Iraqi suspicions:
“It’s all for them, all of Iraq’s resources, water, electricity, security,” said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlighted site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. “It’s as if it’s their country, and we are guests staying here.”
“They’re not leaving Iraq for a long time,” said Hashim Hamad Ali, another guard, who called the compound “a symbol of oppression and injustice.”
The embassy buildings are being heavily reinforced and surrounded by massive perimeter security. Even that won’t prevent them from becoming a prime target for insurgent mortar and rocket attacks. As a result, Washington is facing enormous reluctance among foreign service workers when it comes to postings to Baghdad.
To be fair and balanced, the embassy complex is within easy range of Shia miltias and Sunni insurgents alike.
July 24, 2007
To the nutjobs, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is dedicated to spreading fear and panic on the strength of unsubstantiated claims that man is changing the world’s climate.
To the nutjobs.
Floods in China, Texas and Britain – vanishing polar ice – receding glaciers – drought and desertification – what once were considered rare anomalies are today commonplace. Did you ever notice how the IPCC reports are regularly overtaken by events almost as soon as they’re released? Why do you think that is?
Here’s the answer. The IPCC doesn’t overstate in its forecasts and predictions. It understates. The IPCC reports are consensus based and they reflect the powerful lobbying efforts of countries such as the United States, China and India demanding that they be understated. That’s why they’ve consistently underestimated the severity and timing of climate change events that have followed.
Now we have a Canadian study that proves what has been predicted all along – that global warming and greenhouse gas emissions are altering global rainfall distribution patterns. The lucky ones – us – are going to receive more rainfall overall, even at the price of massive flood events. The unlucky ones – them – are already seeing their homelands turn uninhabitable by drought, groundwater exhaustion and desertification. This is another reality the IPCC did not overstate.
The impacts of global warming are coming on faster and stronger than what we’d been warned to expect. There’s no short-term answer for this problem. The answers are painfully long-term, multi-generational. The longer we put off accepting our responsibility for what we’ve created, the worse it’s going to be for those who will inherit this world from us.
The time for putting up with the nutjobs is over.
It’s time to fight back. Sure other nations are dragging their heels but that’s no excuse not to accept our responsibility.
July 24, 2007
A plaintive op-ed piece in today’s Globe & Mail about carbon capture and sequestration. The item, written by oil patch spokesman Steve Kaufman, lauds the idea of industrial emitters employing proven technology to capture carbon emissions before they escape the factories and refineries that produce them and then bury the captured carbon underground.
By leveraging the expertise that already exists here to develop the technologies, infrastructure and regulatory models necessary for the creation of a large-scale carbon capture and storage network, Canada would become a global leader in addressing climate change.
The basic technology for carbon capture and storage is already proven and safe. The practice of injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields for enhanced oil recovery has been going on for more than three decades in the United States. Deep geological carbon capture and storage projects currently operating in Norway, Algeria and Saskatchewan are each eliminating about one million tonnes of emissions annually.
Good idea, Steve, so what’s holding your people up? You have to go well down into the article to find it – government subsidies.
Long-term carbon dioxide storage and monitoring will require the kind of visionary government policies and funding mechanisms required for other historic Canadian infrastructure projects such as the Canadian Pacific Railway and the trans-Canada pipeline system. In terms of its potential for transforming industrial activity, creating a national carbon capture and storage infrastructure could be no less significant.
Maybe Steve’s right. Maybe government should pick up the tab for a national, carbon capture and sequestration programme. And, here’s my “maybe”. Maybe the government should impose a carbon tax to cover the costs of this programme. I think it’s called “make the polluter pay”, a principle that’s been widely accepted already and should be applicable to GHG emitters. No handouts on this one. There’s no way I’m willing to subsidize the Tar Sands polluters while they wallow in today’s gas price windfalls.
July 24, 2007
Steve Bell, The Guardian
July 24, 2007
Yeehaw, just when you thought it was safe to go in the water again. A New York Times/CBS News poll has found a sharp increase in the number of Americans who now say that taking military action against Iraq was the right thing to do.
A bare majority of Americans (51%) still say the invasion wasn’t justified but those on the other side have increased from a low of 35% two months ago to 42% today. Two-thirds of the respondents, however, believe the war is going badly.
It’s suspected that Bush’s utterly groundless yet upbeat assessment of the progress on benchmarks and the prospects of his army’s “surge” have worked his old magic with many Americans so desperate to believe. Oh dear.
July 23, 2007
Jean Chretien was addicted to it. He wanted to “grow” Canada’s population through immigration to create new taxpayers to provide for the aging citizenry. Stephen Harper wants to grow Canada’s fossil fuel industry until we become an “energy superpower.”
Growth – it’s the crack cocaine of economics. It’s intoxicating and highly addictive but, like crack, it cannot end well. Why not? Because growth in all its manifestations is about consumption. It entails consumption of resources of all descriptions in a manner devised to then increase consumption. It’s akin to keeping your foot pressed hard on the gas pedal as you accelerate toward a wall.
In some respects our civilization has already hit that wall, even if it’s not apparent quite yet. Take groundwater, for example. In Asia and other parts of the world, including the US, agriculture has been built on exploitation of groundwater. Year after year we’ve pumped water to the surface faster than these aquifers can recharge. We want to drain the swimming pool and yet still dive into it. Do you think that’s very bright?
Then there’s the global warming wall. Again it’s tied directly to growth and consumption. The recalcitrant, like our own Stephen Harper, want to make a token gesture in the form of activity-based greenhouse gas reductions, called “intensity” targets. An intensity based system, for example, calls for a 10% reduction in GHG emissions per barrel of oil. That reduction, however, is rendered meaningless by a 200% increase – or growth – in production. Now you have a problem that is 180% of what it was before you imposed reductions. It only works if you don’t accept that we’re already putting out more than our maximum limit of GHG emissions.
But wait, there’s other progress to be had. Take ethanol, for example. It’s renewable and somewhat cleaner than fossil fuels so let’s go that way. Unfortunately we prefer to produce ethanol from corn. Why? Because those who grow corn and those beholden to them want it to be made from corn. But what does it take to grow corn? Farmland, fertilizers, pesticides, and lots and lots of water and fossil fuels. Water? You got it. So we’re taking two already over exploited resources – fossil fuel and ground water – throwing in a bunch of chemical fertilizers and pesticides – and taking a renewable resource out of the global food supply. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
For decades man has been creating a deficit balance in the world’s resource inventory – renewable and non. Whether you like to hear this or not, we’re going to have to find different ways of doing things and that’s going to take a tide change in our values. We’re going to have to see constant, accelerating growth not as an answer but for what it is – a very serious and immediate threat to our wellbeing. In other words, we’re going to have to learn to live within our means environmentally just as we expect ourselves to live within our means fiscally.
This isn’t just something we ought to do or something we need to do. It’s something we’re going to have to do and if you don’t believe it, you’re defying gravity. The era of trying to grow our way out of our problems is over.
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