The Shiite Islamic Republic of Iraq?

Has the American invasion and occupation of Iraq naively handed substantial portions of the country over to Iranian influence? At a ceremony ushering in a new regional parliament for Kurdistan, Peter Galbraith records the following:

Ann Bodine, the head of the American embassy office in Kirkuk, spoke at the ceremony, congratulating the newly minted parliamentarians, and affirming the US commitment to an Iraq that is, she said, "democratic, federal, pluralistic, and united." The phrase evidently did not apply in Erbil. In their oath, the parliamentarians were asked to swear loyalty to the unity of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Many pointedly dropped the "of Iraq."

The shortest speech was given by the head of the Iranian intelligence service in Erbil, a man known to the Kurds as Agha Panayi. Staring directly at Ms. Bodine, he said simply, "This is a great day. Throughout Iraq, the people we supported are in power." He did not add "Thank you, George Bush." The unstated was understood.

We've been following the fear of national fragementation in Iraq here and here and ugly occurences in Basra here and here.

How Conservative is Mainstream?

While George W. Bush may or may not have picked a "mainstream" judge - after all, "mainstream" is a pretty ambiguous term - it is unclear to what extent John Roberts is a Conservative.

It bears re-stating that not all Conservatives are created equal - or perhaps, developed equal.

Sandra Day O'Connor is what could be called a Goldwater Republican - she believed in a firm wall of separation between church and state ("Tying secular and religious authority together poses risks to both,"), she respected the rights of individual women over some amorphous right of government to regulate health issues (authoring the "undue burden" test, which says in part "Only where state regulation imposes an undue burden on a woman's ability to make this decision does the power of the State reach into the heart of the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause.", and she was a champion of the rights of the accused (ruling that the reading of Miranda rights was Constitutionally mandated.

The early indication is that - well, we don't know anything about how John Roberts views these issues. At least, we don't know directly.

Roberts has a history of not making his views public. He's a member of the Federalist Society, which is not a horrible thing. However, there is this short quote that worries me:

"The conventional wisdom is that this is a conservative court," he said. "We have to take that more skeptically. On the three issues the public was most interested in — school prayer, abortion and Miranda rights — the conservatives lost on all."

His very thin resume as an appeals judge doesn't give much indication of how steep his inclination is to bend the law to his ideology (and, let's be honest, everyone does that). This blurb bothers me a bit:

"... he voted to throw out a nearly $1-billion legal verdict won by 17 former American prisoners of war who said they were tortured and abused by Iraq after their capture during the 1991 Persian Gulf War."

Without looking at the opinion and seeing what points of law he ruled on, it is impossible to get a feel for his jurisprudence. It galls me, however, to see our government stand in the way of our POW's being compensated for the pain and suffering they took on our behalf.

He does seem to be no friend of the accused - being one of three judges that ruled short military tribunals were good enough of a guarnatee of rights for Gitmo detainees.

His comments also seem to indicate that his religious views very strongly effect his conception of seperation of church and state:

"I don't know how you can call a court conservative when it upholds the Playboy Channel's right to broadcast its kind of programs."

While I'm not a Playboy subscriber, I think they are perfectly within their rights to broadcast their programming.

So, while there isn't enough to declare Roberts a rapid Republi-vangelical, there is enough to be cautious. After all, if confirmed, this man can be expected to remain on the highest court in our land for at least three decades - and will be a leading candidate for Chief Justice for at least the last two decades of that time.

Once again, Democrats appear to have stepped on themselves. By rushing to cannonize Sandra Day O'Connor as a moderate, Democrats not only made it easier for President to look further to the right for his decision, they almost forced him to do so or appear weak. And Sandra Day O'Connor was no liberal, and her credentials as a moderate exist only on a slender thread:

"In tie-breaking votes (5-4 or 4-3 majorities), she went with the conservative majority (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) 187 times, dissenting on only 29 occasions. Liberal majorities, however, only got the pleasure of her cooperative company 40 times. She dissented from them 78 times (to get an idea of the general tilt of the court, of the 334 cases decided by one-vote majorities during the Rehnquist Court, 216 of them went to the conservatives)."

There are all stripes of Conservatives, and laying claim to that ideology does not, and should not, automatically disqualify anyone from any position (except "Grand Poobah of Liberalism"). However, Liberals have to get smarter about how what they say impacts what Republicans do. There is no way to compromise with an extremist - the result of trying is nothing less than incrementalism. It is the selling out of principles in an attempt to maintain public dignity and a peaceful co-existence.

Perhaps, what Democrats need most, is to rediscover that some things are worth fighting for.

Unanswered Questions in Hoboken

Cross-posted from Tammany on the Hudson

As the history posts indicate, there is simply no way to "start at the beginning" when dealing with corruption in Hudson County. You pretty much have to pick an arbitrary point and go with it.

As good a place as any, for starting, is with the fading star of Hoboken Mayor Anthony Russo. Russo had been mayor for quite some time, and it had been very profitable for him to do so. So profitable that he was convicted of political corruption.

Enter City Councilman Dave Roberts. He saw an opening to move up, but he needed some fresh faces on the Council to make it look good. It wasn't hard to find Carol Marsh, who had successfully built a grassroots coalition to oppose the development of a highrise apartment building on the Pier. His "reformer credentials" looked pretty strong with her on his team.

Their working friendship didn't last long, though. By all accounts, Mayor Roberts quickly moved to "business as usual - Hoboken style" - which was what his predecessor had just been convicted for. At this point, it needs to be stated clearly that no proof of any wrong-doing by Roberts exists. There is enough situational evidence, however, to make many citizens of Hoboken leary of the Mayor.

For example, he used his mayoral authority to prevent a local pay-to-play ban from ever reaching the city council for a vote. Rather than give up, new Hoboken resident Brian Urbano joined with more grassroots activists to get the pay-to-play ban put on the local ballot by initiative. Through lots of hardwork - and sweat from local volunteers - they were ultimately successful in passing the ban by a nine to one margin.

The partnership between Carol Marsh and Brian Urbano seemed natural. So did the addition of sitting Councilmember Tony Soares, who opposed the fiscal mismanagement he saw from Roberts on principle. The addition of Ines Garcia-Keim, also a local grassroots organizer, solidified a formidable opposition ticket for the Hoboken Mayoral/City Council race. Mayor Roberts, having lost his former running mates, looked only to the Hudson County Democratic Committee via the Hoboken Democrats to find ambition ready and waiting. One of his running mates is apparently the man who worked on the state pay-to-play ban enacted a year or so ago and then promptly circulated a memo telling everyone how to circumvent the law - by donating to the County Committees. The two tickets engaged each other in the local press and cafe gossip almost to the exclusion of the remaining candidates.

Behind the local tumult, the early positioning for the New Jersey Governor's race was taking place. Hoboken resident and sitting US Senator Jon Corzine stated his intention to run for the Governor's Mansion. Pretty much every Progressive in the state greeted that news with relief. Corzine had a reputation as a winner, and a background in business. He just might be the one who could clean house for New Jersey Democrats without losing their status as the majority party.

The Marsh team was early supporters of Corzine. Most, if not all, were early donors to the Senator's campaign. However, the Senator launched a state-wide "goodwill donor" tour where he donated rather large sums of money to every county committee in New Jersey - even (especially) Hudson County. Since the Hudson County Democratic Committee was backing Roberts in his re-election bid, this put Marsh and her running mates in the unfavorable position of having donated money that was then "wheeled" to their opposition. How would you like to see your money going to defeat you in your efforts to reform a corrupt governing machine?

The only thing to do is to ask for the money back - which was done, and it was given.

Then more connections between Corzine and Roberts began to surface. A letter from Corzine's office stopping just short of endorsing Dave Roberts got handed out as campaign literature. Corzine's likeness was utilized. Jon Corzine has consistently denied that he was in any way involved with the Roberts campaign - and there is no direct evidence linking them - but for many Marsh supporters, the evidence was getting too big to ignore.

The mayoral/council race ended in a deadlock, and a runoff slated. While the Marsh campaign struggled to pull in more money and volunteers, Roberts only had to go to the HCDC to spend, spend, spend. In all, the Roberts campaign spent over a million dollars to win a mayoral race.

There was also the issue of a robo-call using Corzine's voice that was used for Get-Out-The-Vote calls - which seemed to be targeted towards Roberts' supporters and away from Marsh's.

So now the Hoboken mayor's race is in the past and Marsh is off of the City Council. As much as the grassroots Progressives in Hoboken still want to support Jon Corzine, they find it difficult to forget how their hero was found on the side of corruption and graft at every turn in the mayoral race.

Now, another Hoboken Democrat, State Senator Bernard Kenny, has used his position to prevent passage of the measure that would permanently authorize the municiple pay-to-play bans. Without that authorization, Dave Roberts could begin acquiring a war chest to fend off reformers during his next election, four years from now. Acting Governor Richard Codey has been silent about the bill. So has gubernatorial candidate Jon Corzine.

I was able to ask the Senator about this situation during a conference call earlier this month. The Senator said that he wanted to see pay-to-play bans enacted at all levels of government in New Jersey and that he would use "whatever means necessary" to make sure it happens. That includes, after his inauguration, an executive order banning pay-to-play politics.

That's too late, though. Hudson County can't afford another generation of corruption to get a toehold in our government. We need the Senator to speak up now and use his bully pulpit to force the issue of pay-to-play politics. He can show his hometown that he really means to be a reformer by pushing Senator Kenny to move forward with the ban. Since Democrats in New Jersey by no means has a monopoly on corruption, he can use it as a campaign issue against the Republican Party and to mobilize the Progressive organizers that are milling through the state, signing up voter after voter for their organizations to oppose corruption.

Tomorrow may be too late, Senator. Please, be the man you claim to be. Speak up now. For Hoboken. For Hudson County. For New Jersey.

Bad Boy Talabani

What’s been up with Iraqi President and Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani? Morgan and I have been debating his relative merits and deficiencies as an Iraqi political figure for awhile now, and a check-up is in order. Did Talabani’s presidential guardsmen really break into Baghdad Univeristy two weeks ago? IraqtheModel has this all too brief account:

Iraqi president Jalal Talbani apologized to the minister of higher education Sami Al-Mudhafar after a group of the presidential guardsmen broke into the campus of Baghdad University on Wednesday of last week.

Talbani promised the minister that he's going to make sure that the irresponsible doings of those guards will not go unpunished...

This is one of those stories that the Western media hasn’t touched at all . . . . and why would IraqtheModelbe so glib about it? Maybe amidst all the hellish violence unleashed throughout Iraq, a little Presidential thuggery doesn’t even rank. Imagine the American reaction if the Secret Service was caught breaking into Harvard.

Meanwhile, Talabani engaged in a bit of accusation that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Jaafari, was “monopolizing authority”:

In a message addressed to Jaafari, Talabani considered that Jaafari acts on his own and that he has ignored the content and spirit of the agreement signed between the Shiite coalition and the Kurdish alliance.

Talabani expressed in his message his regret over "Jaafari's formation of ministerial committees linked to him, and converting the Kurdish ministers to non-authorized ministers." Concerning the city of Kirkuk, Talabani said that Jaafari did not ask for transferring necessary money to normalize the situation in the city.

Isn’t Jaafari the head of state? Shouldn’t he have control over the federal ministries? Wierd.
Al Jazeera reported that Talabani was optimistic that the new Iraqi constitution could be completed shortly if just a few of the recalcitrant “Arab brothers” got their acts together:

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said the committee was making good progress "but there are some Arab brothers" who "have some reservations that are being taken into consideration".

But that was just a few short hours before some of those very same “Arab brothers” on the committee got wacked:

Officials in Iraq say two Sunni members of the committee drafting the country’s permanent constitution have been assassinated in a drive-by shooting.

A spokesman, Salih al-Mutlaq, for the Sunni group that the men belonged to said they were gunned down as they left a restaurant in central Baghdad Tuesday. A third man, believed to be an advisor to the committee, was also killed. . . .

The assassinations come just hours after Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, said the drafting committee is making good progress, and the new constitution could be ready ahead of the August 15 deadline.

Maybe their replacements will be more amenable to compromise. Morgan and I actually share concern over Talabani’s “vehement defense (of) the Kurd’s claim to the city of Kirkuk,” and Talabani has recently claimed to support a resolution over Kirkuk’s identity.

Iraq's interim President Jalal Talabani supports a proposal to resolve a dispute over the ethnic identity of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Talabani recently met with an Arab delegation from the northern city and blessed a proposal to allow all ethnic residents originating from Kirkuk to return to their hometown.

Talabani, a Kurd, reportedly insisted Kurds did not want to expel the Arabs from Kirkuk, "but at the same time they oppose the policy of ethnic cleansing and changing the demographic reality" of the city.

The Kurds have demanded Kirkuk become part of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, but the Arabs and Turkmen say the Kurds had never been a majority.

This begs the question as to just what is the “demographic reality” that Talabani has in mind and what “policy of ethnic cleansing” he’s talking about.

Morality By Militia

This blog has covered debates between me and Morgan over the wisdom of demobilizing Iraqi militias in the midst of ever increasing sectarian violence. In brief, my position is that militias, like the Kurdish peshmerga and the SCIRI Badr brigade, should have been demobilized into military/police/national guard units before the end of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s inept reign, and to leave them in place now is a tacit sanctioning of ethnographic and religious division. Militia possess a primary loyalty to their command and cause, not the unity of the Iraqi state. Morgan wishes to hold out for some vague, future point of relative peace, perhaps decades from now, and then demobilize, hoping that in the interim, the state hasn’t been carved into syncretic factions. The Christian Science Monitor has this sad story in response to the latest bombings in Iraq:

Shiite parliamentarian Khudayr al-Khuzai called on the government Sunday to "bring back popular militias" to protect vulnerable Shiite communities. "The plans of the interior and defense ministries to impose security in Iraq have failed to stop the terrorists," he told the National Assembly.

Note, not only that al-Khuzai is asking for protection of a single community, his, but that Prime Minister Jaafari and President Talibani have already permitted the deployment of militia. Perhaps they are not anymore effective against terrorism than the Iraqi and American military, which begs the question of why militia should be left around. Unless, of course, it’s to do some necessary social work for the benefit of the Shiite morality:

The bodies of young women began to appear in Basra six weeks ago.

First there was a group of three, then two, and last week the corpses of six were found, each victim riddled by gunshots and left on the street to die in pools of blood.

The Iraqi police say they have no strong leads. But it is an open secret in the port city why they died.

They worked as prostitutes and their killers are widely believed to be one of the city's armed militias. In recent months they have become increasingly violent in their campaign to enforce a strict interpretation of the social code of Islam.

Morgan, of course, is not completely ignorant of what is going on in Basra, so he can either rationalize the establishment of a “mini-theocracy” as but a temporary impedance or dismiss its significance. Of course, the fact that Sunni insurgents and Al-Qaeda in Iraq are aggressively attempting to exacerbate sectarian tensions and that deploying more ethnic militia, as per al-Kuzai's call (above), would play right into their sinister goals should also be addressed. The tragic aspect to the position I hold is that it may already be too late. Ideally, militia members would either be given a stipend and job training/placement of recruited into a federal force, now however, their roots are so well established that they have successfully infiltrated local police units:

The police do little. In some cases because of fear, but in others because officers are themselves members of the same militias.

Gen Hassan al-Sade, the chief of police, recently admitted that he had lost control of the majority of his officers because of penetration of the force by members of the militias.
In a blunt assessment of where real power lies, he said: "I trust 25 per cent of my force, no more."

Where they suicide bombers?

Michael Ledeen channels some interesting speculation on the London bombers by raising the spirit of the CIA's paranoid panjandrum James Jesus Angleton.

The Cowboy Hat Option

In Stanley Kubrick's dark satire, Dr. Strangelove, actor Slim Pickens, playing Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong, has a great moment is which he believes that Washington DC has been nuked after losing radio contact with the mainland aboard his long-range bomber. Off goes his pilot's helmet and on goes his cowboy hat as martial music keys in the background. Shit is about to go down. The "rational" balance of Mutually Assured Destruction has been upended, and now its time for some good ole American vengeance. I've discussed with OTR's Dr. Emile the potential for another "cowboy hat" option, and speculated both to its target (Mecca) and as to how the Pentagon bureaucracy would handled such a deranged and inevitable idea during the current War on Terror. What I should have been paying closer attention to is Congress:

A Colorado congressman (Tom Tancredo, R) told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons. . . .

"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

I wondered if such a threat might already been whispered into certain ears in Waziristan, in the hopes of reaching bin-Laden, much in the way the James Baker warned Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy Prime Minister, that if chemical weapons were used in Gulf War I, the response would be a "resounding silence in the desert".

Smithson

Our own Timothy Don with some great reflections on Robert Smithson at 3Quarksdaily.

The dirty little suspicion in the heart of every aesthete is that he is no better than a tourist. The appreciation of art and the activity of sightseeing are as old as culture, and their relationship is a lot closer than any of us would like to admit. There have been “art tours” to Florence since the Renaissance; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water is all at once a sight to see, an art experience, and a tourist destination; art museums increasingly become sights one visits for their intrinsic artistic merit, whatever objects they might contain (Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao comes to mind); and then there is Land Art, wherein the artist chooses a remote area or deserted suburb (a “site”), “works” it in some way or another, and returns it to us (or invites us to come see it) as a sight which is itself, after the artist’s intervention, a work of art.

Distinctions between the tourist and the traveler notwithstanding, the trajectory I have traced above, from art tourism to tours as art, recapitulates the trajectory of art in the 20th century from its Representational to its Conceptual phase. One of the pieces of baggage that art was supposed to have lost along the way was the “aura” that objects carried. They went from being singular, authentic objects that were invested with the individual artist’s genius, which was itself invested with and an expression of Nature, or Truth, or the Sublime, to becoming everyday objects or representations of the same that were at times indistinguishable from objects we see every day: a snow shovel, a brillo box, graffiti scrawled across a broken wall, an inflatable flower. If you want to experience one of the last, great examples of Auratic Art, stand in front of one of Jackson Pollack’s giant canvases. The paint on those things is still wet, still dripping and pooling; they shimmer and shiver; they pulse; they emanate aura. When asked if he painted nature, Pollack famously replied, “I am nature.” He was the apogee and, in a certain sense, the end of the auratic in art.

The Robert Smithson retrospective currently at the Whitney, which is a “must-see” for the art tourist, turns this history on its head. One of the earliest practitioners of Land Art, Smithson began by transforming sightseeing into site-seeing, which then became blind-spot-seeing (Patterson, New Jersey) and in turn, finally, seeing sight. His early work is about making you “see” your sight. Mirrors are framed as sculptural objects in such a way that, looking at them, you can’t tell whether you are looking at the thing itself or at the reflection of the thing. These are uncanny, mind-bending works. In a single move, Smithson makes material the assault that Duchamp led, conceptually, upon the retina. Smithson gets behind the lines and forces the collapse of the eye. The entire structure of art as something-one-sees falls in a frenzy of reflections, and one is catapulted into the realm of the conceptual. Language not being up to experience, the only thing one can say at this point is, “Aaaah… now I see!”

After working you over with these mirrors that reflect the frames in which they are placed, thereby creating things that do not exist(!), Smithson introduces an organic element. Now he incorporates seashells, earth, rock salt and stone, so that there is a crossover and a junction between absolute nothingness (the mirror, the surface that only reflects) and elemental matter. I grew giddy at this point. I suddenly realized that I was standing in a room of Robert Smithson’s works, but he hadn’t made a single one of the pieces at which I was looking. They had been assembled not by Smithson (who died in 1973), but by the artslaves of the Whitney. The idea (Pour ten bags of basalt crystals on the floor. Bury a mirror in each one.) was of course Smithson’s, but the objects I was studying had been “made” in that space by someone else. Smithson had not placed each one of those tens of thousands of pebbles there and he had not left diagrams for where each one of them were to be placed in the pile. These were purely conceptual works; and since ideas are immaterial, they prohibit the auratic. Ideas are not wet and nothing sticks to them, neither genius nor nature nor intent—therefore, no aura. Ideas are atemporal. They neither accumulate experience nor decay in time. They escape entropy: hence, the third stage in Smithson’s oeuvre.

At a certain point in his career, Smithson was sponsored (by Yale, I think) to go to Mexico and look at some of the Mayan and Aztec monuments and do something down there. Make some art. What he returned with (and here the difference between the tourist and the traveler makes all the difference) was a series of slides of an old hotel, still functioning but in an advanced state of decay. Smithson had discovered entropy as an idea worthy of aesthetic exploitation. The most famous of the works he would create from this conceptual field, before his tragic death, was Spiral Jetty.

With Spiral Jetty, Smithson does something that I haven’t seen any other artist, anywhere, at any time, do: he renders a concept material, without loss or compromise either to the concept or to the materiality of his art. (The piece that comes closest would have to be van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which are like—but not yet—material sunlight.) I don’t know how Smithson is able to achieve this. It might be because he is not dealing with just a concept but with a universal law; but Spiral Jetty—the object itself—is not just a representation of entropy. It is entropy. It is the very thing it points to. Spiral Jetty is one of those sites (and artists are creating more and more of them) where one can go as witness to and celebrant of a universal sacrament: in this case, the second law of thermodynamics. And in these secular-sacred places, to which all and sundry tourists are invited, the aura, undeniably, returns and abides.

Not a postscript: Some of us have been having a very interesting little discussion as a result of Morgan Meis’s delightful, compelling post on Jeff Koons last Monday. Check it out; leave a note. We’re at over 9,000 words already (scroll down to the comments).

The Iraqi Bill of Rights

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has this first peek at the Iraq Bill of Rights, with a translation by Nathan Brown. (hat tip: Balkinization) A quick perusal reveals some very promising protections, especially against torture, and the occasional use of creepy language, notably Article 5, wth its talk about forbidding threats to "national unity".
AK

Gerecht, Makiya, Diamond, Oh My!

About ten thousand years ago AK and I used to fight (what else is new) about whether or not there was some good post-invasion thinking going on in the State Department that was evetually ignored by the more neo-con minded in the Department of Defnese or elsewhere. Having absolutely no insider information or insight on the matter, we tended to side with the people we already agreed with. Being a Makiya man, I saw it his way. Being insane, AK saw it his own and through the eyes of various of his masters at Foggy Bottom (I tease).

Anyway, all this prefaces the fact that the interesting and very smart, if very Weekly Standard neo-conish, Reuel Marc Gerecht has a review of two books in this weekend's NY Times Book Review that rehashes much of the territory. Interestingly, he has much to say about Larry Diamond's book, the very book that AK has so appreciated in recent weeks. Gerecht has this to say about Diamond:

Diamond favors more Iraqi input and control over their governance. Yet he holds firm to a belief -- not unlike his boss Bremer's -- that national elections must come gradually, ideally after an incubation period of a few years, after security and important national institutions had been restored, and after all parties, but especially Sunni Arabs and secular liberal democrats, had had a chance to organize.

In a perfect world, this makes sense. But in Iraq, people don't like occupation and many, especially the Shiites' pre-eminent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had caught the democratic bug. Had Diamond's prescriptions been followed, the entire country might have flared into rebellion. His call for a postponement of national elections -- he made it in The New York Times in January 2005 -- might have arrayed the entire Shiite community against us and supercharged the spirits of the Sunni-Arab rejectionist camp. For most Iraqis, and for others in the Middle East, Jan. 30, the day of the national elections, remains an inspiring and hopeful moment.

And Gerecht goes in to say:

Diamond's ambivalence makes him representative of an important strain in American liberalism. It will be interesting to see whether he continues to believe, as he did in February 2004, that ''nothing in this decade will so test our purpose and fiber as a nation, and our ability to change the world for the better, as our willingness to stand with the people of Iraq over the long haul as they build a free country.''

About David Phillip's book, Losing Iraq, Gerecht is less kind. And here is where the interesting stuff comes in for the debate about what was really up with The Future of Iraq Project.

There is only one problem with this [Philip's] version of events: for the most part, it's not true. The Future of Iraq Project was not a serious post-Saddam planning exercise for a department readying itself for war. According to the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who was perhaps the most influential voice within the democratic principles working group, it was mostly busywork for Iraqi exiles whom State wanted to guide and control. For exiles like Makiya -- and some neoconservatives in Washington like me, who would have welcomed serious postwar planning in any quarter -- it was clear that the Near Eastern bureau at State, which oversaw the project, did not want to engage in any planning that might make the path to war easier.

In fact, Makiya (who had a tense relationship with Phillips) told me, State stubbornly refused initially to have any democracy-planning component inside the project because it could turn into a platform for a vocal band of Iraqis with ideas that might well run counter to what State envisioned. Congressional pressure and protesting e-mail messages sent by Iraqis inside the project to a variety of senior administration officials, Makiya says, eventually persuaded department officials to allow for a more unrestricted discussion of Iraq's political future. And what most Iraqis involved in the project saw as a first principle of post-Saddam politics -- a provisional government established before an American invasion -- was rejected by State and by virtually everyone else in Washington. According to the final report, all other political ideas and planning flowed from the early establishment of Iraqi sovereignty. Yet Phillips never accurately describes the birth of the democratic principles working group.

The Congo Debacle

Figuring out what can possibly be done to help the situation in Congo has to be a focus for any attempts to address the situation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Easier said than done, of course.

From James Traub:

In the last days of 1962, United Nations peacekeepers under the command of Maj. Gen. Dewan Prem Chand of India launched an offensive, rakishly titled Operation Grand Slam, against the secessionist army of Moise Tshombe in the Congolese province of Katanga. Within days, Chand's jet bombers and fighters had smashed the Katangese Air Force, and his men had overrun the rebel strongholds. Tshombe surrendered, and his rebellion, which was among the things that had kept Congo in a state of continual chaos after independence in 1960, largely collapsed. The U.N. remained in Congo for another 18 months. When the troops withdrew, Secretary General U Thant explained that ''the United Nations cannot permanently protect the Congo or any other country from the internal tensions and disturbances created by its own organic growth toward unity and nationhood.''

Forty-one years later, it is safe to say that while Thant may have been brutally honest about the U.N.'s limitations, he was unduly optimistic about Congo's prospects. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, to use its current and sadly self-mocking name, is on life support, attended around the clock by aid organizations, international bankers, diplomats and, above all, by a vast U.N. civilian and military operation costing $1 billion a year. Congo has in many ways retrogressed since 1960: few Congolese have access to roads, electricity, clean water, medical care or almost any other public services; Congo is a state in name only. Of course, the U.N. doesn't fight wars these days, but even if it did, Congo's problems can no longer be solved by jet fighters. The real problem, of course, is that tangle of ''internal tensions and disturbances,'' which in a happier day seemed like a transitory stage of nationhood.

Mere Anarchy

In response to my post on the twin forces of fragmentation and cohesion that act upon the Iraqi state, reader Robin Varghese queries:

At 1:50 PM, Robin Varghese said...
I understand that there are good arguments against certain types of governments--e.g., a theocracy. But why is a separate Kurdish state necessarily a terrible thing. I'm aware of the security dangers posed by Turkish reaction to such a state, and I personally think that people should generally try to live together, but why is fragmentation in principle a terrible thing?


I’m going to shy away from laying out whether “in principle” fragmentation is good or bad, because the specific variables become far too complex depending on context and country, making the question too large and abstract to grapple with on a mere blog. Instead, I’ll briefly focus on the viability of the “fragments” of Iraq should it dissolve. I think there is a good chance of dissolution, and I’ll call that chance a danger. The primary being that Kurdistan is not likely to be the only piece of Iraq that secedes. Juan Cole elaborates on the many downsides of partitioning Iraq, and I think some of his scenarios are compelling:

It is because it would cause a great deal of trouble to us all, not least Iraqis. Iraq is not divided neatly into three ethnic enclaves. It is all mixed up. There are a million Kurds in Baghdad, a million Sunnis in the Shiite deep south, and lots of mixed provinces (Ta'mim, Ninevah, Diyalah, Babil, Baghdad, etc.). There is a lot of intermarriage among various Iraqi groups. . . . .

Then, how do you split up the resources? If the Sunni Arabs don't get Kirkuk, then they will be poorer than Jordan. Don't you think they will fight for it? The Kurds would fight to the last man for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk if it was a matter of determining in which country it ended up.If the Kurds got Kirkuk and the Sunni Arabs became a poor cousin to Jordan, the Sunni Arabs would almost certainly turn to al-Qaeda in large numbers. Some Iraqi guerrillas are already talking about hitting back at the US mainland. And, Fallujah is not that far from Saudi Arabia, which Bin Laden wants to hit, as well, especially at the oil. Fallujah Salafis would hook up with those in Jordan and Gaza to establish a radical Sunni arc that would destabilize the entire region.

Divorced from the Sunnis, the Shiites of the south would no longer have any counterweight to religious currents like al-Dawa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists. The rump Shiite state would be rich, with the Rumayla and other fields, and might well declare a Shiite Islamic republic. It is being coupled with the Sunnis that mainly keeps them from going down that road.

We can see some of the traffic that might go “down that road” in this grim dispatch of the Shiite “mini-theocracy” already being established in Basra, a tendency that federalist guarantees of minority rights could stop, provided the state coheres. The scenario of minority refugees fleeing from a state in which they are no longer safe, a smaller (hopefully) repeat of the “Midnight” partition between India and Pakistan, is a frightening one, and would be repeated all across Iraq should the state truly dissolve. Questions as to who shares the profits of the oil rich region of Southern Iraq, which contains 80-90% of Iraqi oil (and has its own secessionist movement), become increasingly sticky in the face of disunion. Why should the autonomous province of the Shiite south want to share their resources with the backwater Anbar province with an autonomy of its own? What has Anbar ever done for them beside produce Tirkitis, Husseins, and suicide bombers? What would the land locked and oil deprived “Anbar Republic” rely on economically?

What sort of terrorism and insurgency would find a home in the more Sunni dominated provinces? Lacking a federal authority with a strong national army, what would keep them from becoming an anarchic Waziristan? Conceded, Kurdistan just might be viable as an independent state: the Kurds would have to win Kirkuk, which would be bloody, and establish a pipeline with their traditional enemies in Turkey or Syria -- since they lack a port -- but both of these goals are not impossible. The first cut is the deepest, however, and after Kurdistan is sliced free, what is to keep the rest of the state together? Secession might be inevitable, and it is impossible to know whether partition could possibly turn out less bloody than the present violence, but history has not been kind by example. I’ve wrestled a long time with this subject, and vacillate between my instincts (disintegration) and what I feel comfortable advocating for as the best possible option (the small chance of a successful federal state). Ultimately, I think that though there ought to be much preparation and planning for disunion (massive humanitarian aid and UN involvement), the unity of the current state must be given its best possible shot at preservation.

Kofi Depressed (rightly so)

From an article at the BBC.

“Are we going to repeat what happened in Rwanda?” asked UN Secretary-General Annan in a recent BCC documentary (July 3, 2005). Annan posed the question again: “Is [Darfur] going to be another Rwanda?” Asked about how history “would judge the international response [to Darfur],” Annan said: “Quite likely that we were slow, hesitant, uncaring, and that we have learned nothing from Rwanda” (Reuters, July 3, 2005).

While such an honest assessment is surely welcome, its belatedness and expediency---coming only in the third year of ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur---must be noted as well. For this is not the first time Annan has invoked Darfur in the context of Rwanda. Precisely fifteen months ago, in marking the grim tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Annan (who was head of UN peacekeeping at the time of the Rwandan genocide) declared that the atrocities being reported in Darfur “leave me with a deep sense of foreboding” and, further, that “whatever the language we use” to describe atrocities in Darfur, “the international community cannot stand idle.”

Maybe AK is Right

See AK's posts about the chances for Iraqi cohesion here and our debates about the militias here. From the NY Times.

The loudest sounds emanating from musicians' row these days come from explosions.

Ahmed Ali walked through a shop that sold musical instruments before it was gutted by a bombing a week earlier, the latest in a series of mysterious attacks in this narrow alley in the last half-year, he said. The men here, just a block from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, sell instruments by day and perform at weddings in the evening.

This music store in Basra was bombed, and the owners suspect that the crime was committed by extremists who consider music to be un-Islamic.

"They say it's forbidden by Islam," Mr. Ali, 18, said as he went back to his own shop, its shelves stocked with drums. "We're afraid of everything. I'm afraid of it all. I'm afraid even when I'm talking to you."

A Wall or a Window?

Xpatriated Texan is a semi-regular guest-blogger. You can read more of his work at his personal blog Xpatriated Texan. You can also find his commentary on the Texas political scene at Come and Take It and two aggregator sites Ridin' Herd on the Blogosphere and Roundin' Up the News. For more "high-browed" information, see Thurman Hart's Academic Blog - at worst, it's a cure for insomnia.


I was recently honored to be invited to guest blog at the Christian Alliance for Progress. What I meant as a call for leadership quickly descended into a Bible-quotin', finger-pointin', loud-mouthed discussion on abortion. And religious people wonder why non-religious people view them suspiciously...

I'm used to it. I've lived with it all my life. As a political liberal and a spiritual Christian, I am constantly called on by both groups to defend my membership in the other. All I really want is to be able to say, "This is my faith. It is based on these principles. Those same principles apply politically." What I generally get deluged by is some sort of intimation that I'm not a "real" Christian from one direction and warnings of "separation between church and state" on the other. Both arguments merely prove that people like me - and I believe there are literally millions in the electorate - are placed in a position where we have to hide who and what we are. We have to go along to get along - or we have to stand up and fight.

I have to remind myself quite often that liberty in America does not mean your comments will be greeted with respect and thoughtful replies - it only guarantees that you can say what's on your mind. If you want that respect - and especially if you want it in the public sphere - you have to earn it. You have to take "the slings and arrows of outrageous" morons who simply can't or won't see the world from any other myopic view than the one they favor. You then reply with dignity (or sometimes, when they rub me wrong, with great emotion and conviction) and make a case with your words and actions for being treated with respect.

I grew up in a group of small towns from Central and West Texas to Southeastern New Mexico. "Conservative" is about as descriptive of the political climate there as "dry" is of the Sahara Desert. It wasn't until recently that I identified the churches of my youth as being Fundamental and Evangelical. There is simply no need for those terms in that area (or there wasn't) - the term "Church" covered it. When I say I spent more time in Church as a youngster than I did watching TV, I mean WAAAAAAYYYYYYY more time. We went to Sunday School, followed by Worship Service on Sunday morning, then Fellowship Service on Sunday night, and Stewardship training on Wednesday night. (In case you're wondering, Thursday was for Jr. High football, Friday was for High School football, Saturday was college football, and of course Monday Night football. I think Tuesday was when everyone watched "rasslin" then made more little redneck babies - no statistical proof though). Every time I entered the church doors, I was expected to have yet another Bible verse memorized. They didn't organize the progression or anything, I think they simply tried to make it as hard as possible to keep it all straight. The point is that by the time I hit puberty I had a substantive part of the Bible memorized.

That might have been an error on their part, because I soon entered that part of adolesence when I began to question all authority. At this point, I'm still waiting to outgrow that. I was struck with the injustice of greeting Africans at the door, but not inviting them home. I was struck by the hypocracy of sending missionaries to build homes for the poor in South America but ignoring the poor that lived down the street whose house was literally falling down. I read, "Love they neighbor" and "turn the other cheek" but I saw, "Hate outsiders" and "hit first, apologize if necessary".

By the time I was a teen, school prayer and abortion were the big political issues. I heard about them at school, at home, and at church, at church, at church. I learned that it was a lot easier if I just kept my mouth shut and didn't challenge the beliefs of the elders of the church too often. I learned it was better to flip idly through the Bible than to close my eyes and shake my head when someone was obviously talking out of their butt.

I finally stopped hiding one day when someone in my adult Sunday School challenged me to attend an abortion clinic protest. "I don't think we should," I said. "I think we'd do better to open up a special ministry for expecting mothers and offer pre-natal care during pregnancy, adoption services if they choose them, and day care if they have the baby. If they don't want to have the baby, we should respect their decision and be beside them throughout the process. Jesus calls us to support and care for each other, not vilify and condemn."

I didn't go to church for a long time after that, and no one called to invite me back.

I had a similar experience in my grad school class right after the '04 election when everyone was condemning "stupid people of faith" for voting for Bush. "What can you expect from someone who believes in a Big Sky Daddy who made the whole universe?" As the protest gained speed and voices, I finally spoke up and said, "I feel as unwelcomed in this classroom now as I did the day I walked out of my church."

I lost the respect of more than one person in the room that night - I could see it in their eyes. However, I was surprised but pleased when several more people who had remained silent finally spoke up and revealed that they also reached liberal politics from a Christian perspective. I counted quickly before the end of the class and figured out that at least a quarter of the class were liberal Christians of some level.

Over the intervening months, I've examined what I want in life and what direction I seem to be travelling. Increasingly, I have found myself to be called upon by larger and larger groups to be a voice for liberal Christians. I'm by no means a "leader" of anything, but I've found an ever increasing circle of people who are saying, "Thank you for making it safe for me to say I'm a liberal Christian."

So, I'm extending my comments to this forum, with the kind permission of those who could edit them out. I'd like to hear your comments on what appears to be an emerging Christian Left in America. If you're a liberal Christian (or Jew or Muslim or whatever, I don't mean to be exclusionary), let me know what you want from such a movement. If you're not part of that group, let me hear what you fear from that group.

As for the title, I was thinking today that while we do need a wall of separation between organized religion and organized government, perhaps we should have a window where a person can justify their political stance from a position of faith without trying to foist those beliefs onto society as a whole.

Cohesion vs. Fragmentation in Iraq

All over the blogosphere the perpetual question of the Iraq War: is the US winning? The rubrics and metrics of victory shift and slide and often the measurements rarely factor in the stability and cohesion of the re-founded Iraqi state. This blog has kept an eye out for what centripetal and centrifugal forces are attempting to consolidate or tear apart this grand project in order to determine how viable the new nation will be as a singular entity. Certainly, an increase in Shiite and Sunni violence is not promising:

In the shifting landscape of the new Iraq, Ur, with a population more than 80 percent Shiite, is a troubling example of how lethal the sectarian divide can become. Since late March, at least 12 religious Sunnis, most of them worshipers at Ur mosques, have been killed, according to relatives of the dead and to Sheik Ahmed al-Ani, an imam from Ur who is tracking the deaths. Tallied together with an adjoining neighborhood - Shaab - the death toll is 26.

It is a quiet kind of killing, beneath the radar of car bombs and other headline-grabbing violence. But block by block, battle lines are being drawn, with religious Sunnis and Shiites lining up on opposite sides.

Also troubling is a small movement to carve out an autonomous Shiite province in the south of Iraq:

With the Aug. 15 deadline for writing a new constitution bearing down, a cadre of powerful, mostly secular Shiite politicians is pushing for the creation of an autonomous region in the oil-rich south of Iraq, posing a direct challenge to the nation's central authority.

The politicians argue that the long-impoverished south has never gotten its fair share of the country's oil money, even though the bulk of Iraqi oil reserves lie near Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf. They also say they cannot trust anyone holding power in Baghdad because of the decades of harsh oppression under the Sunni Arab government of Saddam Hussein.

"We want to destroy the central system that connects the entire country to the capital," said Bakr al-Yasseen, a former foe of Mr. Hussein who spent years in exile in Syria. He is one of the chief organizers of the autonomy campaign, which is supported by Ahmad Chalabi, the one-time Pentagon favorite and scion of a prominent Shiite family from the south, among others.

Mr. Yasseen, who has ties to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and a Kurd, is demanding for the south the same broad powers that the Kurds now have, including an independent parliament, ministries and regional military force.

It is noteworthy as to who the secessionist Mr. Yasseen seems to be on good terms with: the protean survivor Ahmed Chalabi and the Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani. In this new movement we see the adverse effects of the voluble Kurdish demands for autonomy, for if semi-secession is permitted by one region or ethnicity, why not another? Really, who wants to remain firmly rooted to the center when it is so chaotic, corrupt and dangerous? The largest check on Mr. Yasseen’s secular efforts will probably be the Shiite religious parties with ties to the ruling political parties of SCIRI and Da’wa.

A more helpful henotic development lies the efforts of a group of Sunni clerics hoping to issue a fatwa in support of the Iraqi government and its constitutional process.

Several senior clerics of Iraq's disaffected Sunni Muslim minority will soon issue a decree calling on followers of the faith to vote in upcoming elections and help write a new constitution, a prominent Sunni leader said Monday. The step could draw Sunni Arabs away from the insurgency and into a political process they have steadfastly rejected.

Adnan Dulaimi, who heads the Sunni Endowment, the government agency responsible for Sunni religious affairs, said the framers of the religious edict, or fatwa , would seek the support of other groups in the fractious Sunni community before issuing it.

We’ll see if Dulaimi can win more support and whether he will, in turn, be target by jihadis opposed to such pragmatism and compromise. A growing clash between Sunnis and foreign jihadis too imperiously nihilistic for Iraqis too tolerate creates more room for assimilationist like Dulaimi. This is heartening news for the coalition and the government of Iraq.

Despotism News

I've become rather fond of T.A. Frank's Today in Despotism at TNR.

Burma. It's been a good few weeks for a certain member of Burma's military, as evidenced by the headline "Adjutant-General Lt-Gen Thein Sein accepts cash and kind from wellwishers hailing MWVO Conference." American Express and PayPal not yet accepted.

The New Light of Myanmar also carries poetry on certain days. Here is a sample of a poem titled "Vigilant Hardcore":

Here to take orders
Spirit hard as diamond
Always faithful to the Nation
Integrity is firm.

From poet's mind to the page, to Burma's news agency, to the web, to the readers of TNR Online. Well, we never said globalization would always benefit you.

Don't Push the Red Button

For the graphically- and/or sonically-inclined fencesitters out there, a new way to experience the US adventure in Iraq. Well, the most recent one, at least.

Here is a view of Coalition fatalities in Iraq, presented as a function of time and location. Simple and to the point, perhaps. For the nationalists out there, you can specify whose dead you wish to track.

The Best of the List: 06.23-07.01

Dear Readers: The editors at OTR maintain a list upon which we trade barbs, accusations, recipes and sometimes even debate. The list waxes and wanes, depending on the news of the week, but some of the exchanges are not without merit. Below is a selection from the past week. If you enjoy it, let us know and we will continue to cull the list for it's best stuff, on a weekly basis. —The Don

The Creature: My point wasn't that the idea that "democracy is in the interest of national security" has clearly won and that everything is good now. I was simply proposing that this notion--global democracy as serving our national security--is the one aspect of a shift in foreign policy by the Bush administration that is actually a little bit intriguing and can't simply be dismissed, as can, for instance, the thinking on national security. But you may be right: it may be a shift that they can't actually follow through on.

Dogboy: The juncture points, the episodes or situations where the traditionally syncretic tropes of democratic globalism and "national security" actually clash will be the most telling. Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al Sadr and SCIRI are my best bets, with Egypt and Saudi Arabia not far behind. As William Kristol writes in his "Springtime for Dictator's" essay which I sent out, there was actually a strong and heated debate within the White House as to how to distance themselves or actually crack down on Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. Then Rummy had a little chat w/Bush and Cheney in which he touted the capabilities of our bases in Uzbekistan and how much he liked them. Debate over. What really is democratic globalism when the policy appears that malleable?

The Creature: What really is democratic globalism when the policy appears that malleable? I’ll tell you: An extremely flawed practice of nation states who ultimately put their own immediate interests beyond what they may intellectually recognize to be the greater long-term good. But I still see that as no reason not to pick one’s spots, as it were. It is interesting, for instance, that the Bush administration was able to position itself pretty well in regards to Georgia, Ukraine, and Krygistan. If you'll remember that debate we all had last year about that English guy’s book about Central Asia, which discussed current White House policy in terms of a continuation of the Great Game that earlier empires played there, than you'll see the kind of attitude I find a little too systems-theoretic for these times. But one would also be foolish to think that this represents some amazing new commitment to global democracy as such.

Okracokepost: One man's view: To use David Rieff's concept, the "leaning away from war" strategy in the places you mentioned has paid off far better than the "leaning toward war" strategy with regard to the huge investments of military power in Iraq and Uzbekistan. The Iranian election and Kristol's editorial calling for hot pursuit into Syria (why not Iran as well?) show the total collapse of the rickety ideological structure upon which the military transformation of the region of the Middle East was based. This is the national failure of imagination with which intellectuals should be grappling. It is of course this ideology, not a realistic critique of it, that is the dreamer's utopian illusion and "systems theory" of our own age. "Military Democratic Globalism" is the seductive Big Universal Idea that is on offer at the moment in unfolding history, and it represents the Thing Which Must Be Resisted intellectually. Not the fostering of democratic self-determination, which is a different kettle of fish and always an important task. The difference being continually elided is the most important feature, which is how the use of force relates to the policy.
It is precisely in those places where the lighter touch has been used--things that probably any American admin would support and foster, like in Ukraine and Georgia--that some measure of success has been achieved by SELF-DETERMINATION, not externally imposed revolution. Yet what is unique to the Bush admin is not in truth a desire to foster global democracy--they're reinventing the wheel in about 101 different ways here, including a slapdash Wilsonian delusion of grandeur and a strong spicy hint of global Manifest Destiny. This is the dead idea of a reactionary and backward-looking era that has already passed into the dustbin of history and washed up mangled and bloated on the inland sealess beaches of Western Iraq. It is the contemporary equivalent of the fatuous illusions that led to the noble lies about World War One.

The Creature: And a sensible view, which I largely agree with, as well.
A couple of points, though. The debacles in Iraq and the hypocrisy in Uzbekistan are, I think, good signs that the ideology of transformation through military means is a poor one. I think this is one thing we've all pretty much agreed with from the beginning. But I also don't think there are really that many people who believe in this 'Military Democratic Globalism' except maybe Don Rumsfeld, a dangerous and powerful man, no doubt, but a man on the downside of his career to say the least. Most conservatives don't like the sound of the 'globalism' and most liberals don't like the sound of the 'military.' Still, it's got to be hounded down to the ground insofar as it has played a role in the worst aspects of current policy.
But there's another problem. I suspect, though I certainly can't prove this, that everyone harbors in their heart of hearts, the tiny, perhaps foreboding suspicion that the incrementalist revolutions and the self-determining movements you talk about of late in the Middle East and Central Asia wouldn't necessarily be happening without the big moment, the world historical shift that was occasioned by the invasion of Iraq. That's not to justify it, perhaps it was a bad idea anyway, perhaps it would have been better that it happen over generations in a way that was much less externally imposed and thereby more authentic. I don't know. But I suspect that, should any of these changes prove more than ephemeral, it is going to be hard to pretend that the two things are completely unrelated. And that will pose a problem for the cut and dried ideological struggle you're trying to delineate.
And further, this question still has something to do with a distinction you are consistently unwilling to countenance. It isn't about who mouths platitudes about democracy and who doesn't or who is a full-on realist and who isn't or who is a pure militarist and who believes more in soft power, though all of these things are important. The difference (and there is no administration in the last 40 years that comes even close to saying this, not Johnson or Nixon or Ford or Carter or Reagan or Bush I, or Clinton) is that this administration made the foreign policy claim that they preferred chaos to stability, if that chaos might lead to movement toward forms of liberal democracy. Now as Dogboy has pointed out, along with Kristol and many others, this claim has not exactly lived up to practice in any consistent way. Often, it has been an empty promise. But more than any other administration I can think of, they've actually also proceeded according to that claim in a number of areas, perhaps to their own dismay. And that isn't so simple as your above ideological analysis makes it seem.