Bad News for US "interests" in Iraq - and the Middle East

Actually, it's been a bad few months across the region, as far as the US is concerned:

• In Iran, the UN + US sanctions have had some effect, but the Iranian government seems to be making do; and as the price of oil rises, Iran is raking in more money with which to offset those effects.  Today, it's reported that the latest talks between the "six world powers"  Iran in Istanbul have broken down.  No surprise there: the "world powers" had set a precondition that Iran stop enriching uranium - something that Iran knows that, according to international law, it has every right to do.  Iran demanded that sanctions be ended; no chance that that would happen.  Iran also knows that a military attack against its nuclear facilities is probably off the table.
• The government in Lebanon, which had been led by a pro-West Sunni prime minister, Saad Hariri, has been brought down by Hezbollah, because Hariri has refused to turn his back on the indictments just issued (but not yet unsealed) by the UN's Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was constituted to investigate the assassination of Hariri's father, Rafik Hariri, a former PM and industrialist, several years ago.  Although the Bush administration tried initially to pin the blame on Syria, it's now believed that Hezbollah agents were responsible.  So, Lebanon now has a powerless government, with a disempowered prime minister.  And matters have become even dicier with the news that the leader of Lebanon's Druze community, Walid Jumblatt, supports Hezbollah.  As the NYT notes, this could well mean thatHezbollah has the support it needs in Lebanon's parliament to nominate the next prime minister and formally end the rule of a Western-backed government here."  This could potentially tip off a new civil war in Lebanon.  The horrific war of 1975-1991 pitted Muslims vs. Christians, with Israel intervening on behalf of the Christians (and, frankly, on behalf of Israel); but this one, if it indeed develops, would pit Hezbollah-led Shia (now Lebanon's single largest religious community) vs. Sunni Muslims (who used to rival Christians for domination there), with strong possibilities of such a war pulling in Israel and Iran.  (And in a potentially even more complicating twist - one recent poll indicates that Lebanon's Christians are siding increasingly with Hezbollah in the matter of the STL tribunal.) So much for a stable Middle East, which is what the US needs most of all if it is to ensure access to the region's oil.
• The dictatorship of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, a reliable US ally and friendly force for "stability" (even if he did imprison political opponents) has fallen to a popular pro-democracy revolt. (I highly recommend Time mag's Tony Karon's analysis of the implications.)  Waiting in the wings is the group that Ben Ali repressed most harshly, and that is the last bunch that the US (and its so-called "moderate" Arab allies: Mubarak in Egypt, Abdullah in Jordan) wants to see emerge: Tunisia's Islamists.
• The recent assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province in Pakistan, by an Islamist member of his security detail (evidently because Taseer was opposed to Pakistan's anti-blasphemy law) has been followed by a huge outpouring of support for his assassin. This surely reflects the strength of Islamist hard-liners in Pakistan - and concomitantly, opposition to US influence in the affairs of a nuclear-armed putative ally without whose help the US can expect no "success" next door in Afghanistan.

And then, there's that country that has fallen off our radar screens, because, after all, we've already won there, right?  Iraq is now on the way to a stable democracy, friendly to the US - just like Mr. Bush wanted . . . right?  Well, think again:

• In the last few weeks, suicide and car bombings (three of them on consecutive days this week) have killed more than 120 people (many of them police recruits) and wounded hundreds - in Baquba (western Iraq), Mosul (in the north; a police chief was killed), Tikrit (Saddam's hometown, north of Baghdad), and  Karbala (one of the famed shrine cities of the Shiite south).  Any reports of these in the US MSM are always qualified, of course, with the don't-worry-about-it note that violence overall is down from two years ago.  (Gosh, that's swell.  Thanks, General Petraeus!)
• As these bombings take their toll, the newly re-installed prime minister Nuri al-Maliki presides over a new government that grossly stretches the definition of cobbled-together - and the cobbling isn't even complete; he has  yet to appoint his Cabinet's national security, defense and interior police ministers, because, he says,  he wants more time to select leaders who are apolitical; so,  he controls all security forces until those Cabinet posts are filled.  He controls all security forces.  Saddam must be chuckling somewhere.
• A major force in Maliki's new government is Muqtada al-Sadr, the populist Shii mullah who recently returned to Iraq in triumph, a political star who promptly gave a speech in which he declared that Iraqis must resist the US presence, that all American soldiers must leave Iraq by the agreed date of 31 December 2011 (a demand that Maliki himself has reaffirmed), and that he will support the new Maliki government as long as it defends and serves the Iraqi people.  Muqtada is Maliki's only serious rival for political popularity on the "Arab street" in Iraq, and with a doubt the single political/military leader in Iraq most hated by the US political/military establishment. Why? Between 2004 and 2009, his Mahdi Army was responsible for the killing and wounding of hundreds of US soldiers;  and  although he styles himself an Iraqi nationalist, he (and his famed ayatollah father before him) has strong ties to the Islamist regime in Iran (where, it's been reported today, he seems to have returned).

A last irony here: This week's bombing that killed more than 50 Shii pilgrims in Karbala may have been orchestrated by a leader of  the Sunni Awakening, the Sunni Arab locals who turned on Sunni al-Qaeda jihadists and teamed with US troops during the Petraeus "surge" that brought the US "victory" in Iraq.  As the AP reports,

If the Awakening Council leader is found guilty of the charges, it would affirm widespread government doubts about integrating the Sunni fighters into the nation's security forces — despite their alliance with the U.S. against al-Qaida. It could also signal that the militia's frustration about being sidelined by Iraq's Shiite-dominated government may have finally reached a boiling point.

For Iraq's - and Iraqis' - sake, let's hope that's not the case.  But if so, it raises the specter of renewed sectarian fighting, perhaps with Muqtada calling to arms his militia (now renamed the Promised Day brigades) to defend southern Shia if Maliki's security forces are unable to stem the violence.

Any such development would also finally put paid to any remaining claim that the US invasion somehow "fixed" Iraq, and that the expenditures in lives and treasure that Boy George's Iraqi Adventure cost the US - and the Iraqi people - were somehow worth it.

The Upsides to Ms. Palin's Post-Loughner Video?

In his LA Times essay of a couple of days ago, Doyle McManus asserts that Sarah Palin's post-Loughner video pretty much ended her chance of being elected president (not that they were promising before) because it revealed her as unable to rise to a significant challenge. She came across as defensive, even petty - in stark contrast to Pres. Obama's uplifting eloquence in Tucson in a speech that even John McCain, Obama's 2008 opponent and the Dr. Frankenstein who created Palin, acknowledged in an essay in yesterday's WaPo.  Of course, the woman who was nicknamed the "barracuda" as a high-school cager is hardly about to exit the stage.  She has created around her message - and her person - the aura of a cult of ultra-Americanism and hyper-White-Christianism that has already attracted thousands of like-minded people.  Any more mainstream Republicans who were counting on their support will be faced with the difficult task of easing her off the pedestal before which her followers adore her.  She won't be moved easily, and to the extent that she can cast herself as the martyr-victim of a largely white-male Republican establishment, she will be able to rally her followers to her defense.  I'm only afraid that some of them will literally reload (as she has called upon them to do) and start packing heat in public places and to public events as a show of support.

As a professor of history, however, I'm also grateful to Ms. Palin (in a smirking sort of way) for her careless invocation of the "blood libel."  It's obvious that (in contrast to any of the hundreds of students who have taken my HST 237 course) she was clueless as to the origin of the term, its historical significance, and the way its misuse will resonate against her among some pro-Israel groups on whose support she has relied.  But her miscue has led many commentators (including McManus) to explain to readers what the "blood libel" was actually about, which only serves to better educate an American electorate whose historical ignorance is difficult to under-estimate.

Thank you, Sarah.

Yes, Words Do Matter

I find very convincing Stephen Walt's post today at his Foreign Policy blog, where he takes on David Brooks' recent NYT op-ed defending Sarah Palin et al. from accusations that their spiteful rhetoric (and her famous cross-hairs) may have influenced Jared Loughner's warped decision to take his gun to a political event and shoot a Democratic congresswoman.  He concludes:

 If you believe that Palestinian "incitement" is a powerful impediment to peace in the Middle East, then you think words matter in that context and you ought to acknowledge that they probably matter back here too. If you're worried about the dangers of nationalist rhetoric in the Chinese media, then you recognize that what elites and major media figures say can affect what masses perceive and what some individuals do. If you are one of those people who think that what madrasas in Pakistan teach is a source of terrorist violence, then you understand that violence sometimes arises because of what other people have written or said (sometimes over and over and over). If you believe that Mein Kampf had something to do with convincing Germans to commit genocide, then you've acknowledged that words do matter and sometimes they pave the way to unspeakable acts. So why deny it in this most recent case?

And here's the central point to remember: Violent language and hateful political rhetoric don't make most of the people who hear it run out and kill. Rather, the problem is that it makes it more likely that a handful of more fervent, less stable, more susceptible, less socially connected individuals will hear the message and take it to heart. And in a world where guns are cheap and plentiful, all it takes is one.

The solution, needless to say, is not censorship. The solution is to view those who favor violence as a way of dealing with one's political opponents with contempt, and to treat entertainers who use such language and tropes as moneymaking devices as beneath even that. I don't want the government telling Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, or any other xenophobic whack job what not to say; I just want sensible Americans to switch the channel and confine them to the obscurity that they deserve.

 Palin fans, of course, will reject vehemently the implied linking of their heroine to salafist imams and Nazi ideologues; but that misses the larger point.  When "leaders" speak to "followers," they want followers to take their words seriously, and to act upon them.  When Palin/Beck et al. employ the rhetoric ("Don't retreat; reload") and imagery (gun crosshairs) of violence (or a Sharon Angle proposes recourse to "Second Amendment" solutions) to whip up what amounts to "crusader" fury against "liberal" Democrats (who, in Palin's words, have pitted themselves against the "sacred document" of the U.S. Constitution), they have to expect that some devotees (a term which, BTW, describes many of them quite accurately) will feel compelled to resort to violent measures.

Speaking of which . . . That Congress might not finally see its way to legislating some kind of control that will keep the Jared Loughners of the country from packing heat staggers me.  When the Founding Fathers penned the Second Amendment, they lived in a world where ordinary farmer-citizens kept a musket for hunting and self-defense.  They could not have envisioned as part of "our freedoms" the ability of basically any American to walk into a Walmart and come out with multiple semi-automatic weapons, any one of which could take out dozens of fellow citizens.  

Palin: Journalists' "Blood Libel"?!

Almost fell off my chair when I read this.  Palin is hopeless, absolutely hopeless - a huge, terrible joke played by John McCain on the American people.  And it's even scarier that she evidently has no advisors educated enough to steer her away from using the term "blood libel" so casually.  She better not be planning any trips to Israel soon . . .

Baghdad's Bustling "New" Economy

As reported in the NYT, and brought to Baghdadis courtesy of Boy George's curious Iraq adventure . . . people, dislocated from their homes, and forced to sift through garbage in order to make ends meet . . .

On Muqtada's Return to Iraq

Michael Boyle sums it up nicely in The Guardian:

That Sadr's return holds out the prospect of a return to violence or increasingly illiberal government in Iraq is clear. But it is also now clear that events in Iraq have slipped out of the hands of the US, turning America into a bystander in the aftermath of a war of its own making. Whether Iraq will continue to consolidate its fragile gains, or slip back into violence or authoritarian government, is a matter that the Obama administration may find very hard to influence.

Likewise, Robert Grenier in al-Jazeera:

It is tempting, and perhaps accurate, to ascribe the peaceful return of Iraq's prodigal son to a healthy evolution in Iraq away from violence and toward electoral and factional politics as a means of reconciling the country's deep divisions.

The trepidation which attended al-Sadr's first post-return speech this past Saturday, however, suggested that this transformation remains both tenuous and reversible.

Iraqis do not fear Muqtada's control over 12 percent of the seats in the Council of Representatives. What they fear is the cult-like following which he still commands among the poor, urban Shiite proletariat, perhaps the most potent, least sophisticated, and most manipulable force in Iraqi politics.

Muqtada's standing among this element of the populace would be enough by itself to make him a political force to be reckoned with.

But the real base of Muqtada's power, now as before, is the potential for mob violence posed by his most passionate supporters, as well as the more directed and disciplined threat posed by the Promised Day Brigade, al-Sadr's post-Mahdi Army militia.

Despite its leader's supposed new-found political respectability, an aura of violent illegitimacy still clings to the al-Sadr Trend:  Indeed, at least two Iraqi laws bar organisations affiliated with a militia from political participation. The clear lesson for everyone concerned is that accountability under the law still does not apply to Muqtada al-Sadr. . . .

his reiterated opposition to foreign occupation and his insistence on strict adherence to the agreed timetable for US military withdrawal contained, depending upon one's interpretation, either a clear threat, or a familiar and characteristic ambiguousness on the potential for a return to violence.

Hillary Clinton on a Nuke-Free Middle East

The WaPo  reports on Hillary's appearance on a UAE talk-show:

The hosts and questioners from the audience asked polite but pointed questions about the possibility of war in the Middle East and why the United States tolerated nuclear weapons for Israel but not for Iran. On the latter question, Clinton said the Obama administration supports the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East, eventually.

"We are committed to that, but in order to get there we have to resolve the Palestinian dispute and the Iran issue," she said.

Splendid!  So, does this mean that if the Israelis were to help fashion a truly viable, independent Palestinian state, and if Iran was to abjure definitively any quest for nuclear weapons, then the US would insist that Israel dismantle its nuclear arsenal?

Pakistan's Future after the Assassination of Salman Taseer

Christian Caryl has posted an eloquent, insightful essay at the NYRB blog, in which he claims that Pakistan has perhaps reached a fateful tipping point, of no going back.  He concludes:

I am not a Pakistani. But I can’t help feeling that the killing of Salman Taseer is a calamity for everyone who lives in the country—including the people who are now strewing flowers at the feet of the man who allegedly pulled the trigger. Those who support the takfiri worldview don’t seem to understand that this is an ideology that cedes the definition of “true Islam” to the self-declared defenders of religion—and that these definitions shift according to the political wind, to selfish agendas and narrow factional interests, rather than to the uncorrupted dictates of faith. And that means that those who consider themselves right-minded believers today can easily find themselves on the wrong end of a Kalashnikov tomorrow.

The West, and especially the United States, should also take notice. It is time for policymakers in Washington to understand that Pakistan is not simply a vexing sideshow to the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan—populous, chaotic, and nuclear-armed—needs to be taken seriously in its own right. An imploding Pakistan promises immense pain and turmoil to itself and the world at large. Let’s hope that this realization doesn’t come too late.

Muqtada serves notice to Maliki

It might fairly be said that Iraq's post-invasion history has turned a new page with the return of Muqtada al-Sadr to Iraq.  As Tony Shadid and others have noted, he is perhaps the only Iraqi political leader with as much grassroots support as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which means that if Maliki's government doesn't perform, Muqtada - even though his party is an important piece in Maliki's coalition - could be the focus of a powerful opposition movement.  And in his speech today, Muqtada indeed served notice that he and his followers will stand with Maliki's government if it comes through:"The Iraqi government has been formed," he said. "If it serves the Iraqi people, and provides services, we will stand by it, not against it.

Of course, Muqtada's statement potentially leaves it largely in Muqtada's hands to be the "decider" (to channel W's terminology) about how well the government is indeed serving the people.  That entails several items high on Muqtada's list:

getting basic services like water, sewage, and electrical systems up and running, especially to the urban poor of Baghdad and the south who are Muqtada's base of popular support

getting the Americans out by the agreed-upon end-of-2011 deadline.  Maliki's return was not good news for the US, which dearly wants to maintain a significant military presence there for the sake of "stability" (=American-speak for blocking any increase in Iran's influence, and for preserving Petraeus' "victory" there).  Expect Muqtada to be adamant about this.  If Maliki waffles, Muqtada and his followers could bolt, and Muqtada's Promised Day brigades could make life miserable for US forces and for the Iraqi army (many of whose members, let's remember, are former members of the Shia sectarian militias associated with Maliki's al-Da'wa party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, with whom Sadrist forces have done battle in the past).

Muqtada styles himself as an Iraqi religious nationalist, but some believe that Maliki sweetened his appeal to Muqtada by assuring his party the governorship of four of Iraq's southern directorates, thus providing him a territorial base where he is already very popular, and where presumably his dictates will have immense authority.  To the extent that Maliki might interfere with Muqtada's authority there (and remember, in 2008 Maliki sent Iraqi forces against the Sadrists in Basra and in Baghdad's Sadr City), Muqtada might declare that a failure by Maliki to serve the Iraqi people.

Finally, another major attack by Sunni jihadists ("al-Qaeda") against Iraq Shia, especially if they occur in Sadr City, will give Muqtada yet another pretext for declaring that Maliki's government has failed the Iraqi people.

The weeks ahead are going to be critical for the stability of Maliki's government.

And if the security surrounding Muqtada somehow breaks down or is infiltrated, and Muqtada himself is attacked (or worse) . . . .

McCain calls out Tom Friedman

. . . as reported in The Daily Caller.  McCain continues to push the idea that the US "won" in Iraq, even as Muqtada al-Sadr, one of the most powerful and anti-American political leaders in that country, just returned there - rather triumphantly - from Iran.

No, senator.  The "winners" in Iraq are Iran, and (as Tony Shadid's recent piece makes abundantly clear) Turkey.

And, by the way, why should anyone take seriously the expertise and "wisdom" of a man foolish and thoughtless enough to risk placing Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency of the U.S.?

Netanyahu Wants Obama to Release Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard

As reported by the WaPo.  The request has been widely expected, with the understanding that Obama might grant it in return for some significant "concessions" on Israel's illegal settlement-building in the West Bank.

Netanyahu won't - and can't, from a domestic political standpoint or his own "Greater Israel" principles - make any meaningful concessions.  Nonetheless, as he notes explicitly in his request, he's playing his US Congress card, especially with all those new Republicans now seated.  But if Obama caves on this - and especially, if he does so with no meaningful give-back from Netanyahu - he will be reviled in the CIA.

My sense is that a majority of Americans will not support the release of a man who was, after all, sent to prison for life because he was a traitor whose actions did huge damage to the US intelligence establishment.  And if Obama does relent, he will be seen, not as magnanimous, but as even more pusillanimous than so many have already pegged him.

Lindsey Graham's Colossally Bad Idea

Graham told NBC's "Meet the Press" that, in his opinion, the US ought to establish permanent bases in Afghanistan. (I'll be looking forward to input from Sens. Joe Lieberman and John McCain, the other members of a troika that seldom fails to speak as one.)

This is a colossally stupid idea.

• Maintaining such bases  would be hugely expensive.
• They would be a needless irritant to US relations with China, Russia, and Iran.
• They would be targets for local resistance across the region.

Graham must be thinking that Afghanistan can be set up as an American protectorate a la Japan and Germany after World War II.  No chance.