News from Iraq-

[welsh]

While Americans are thinking about New Orleans, it might be wise to think about Iraq as well.

This past week there was a stampede that killed nearly 1000 Iraqi civilians. Apparently it was caused by Sunni insurgents trying to get a civil war.

Meanwhile the Constitution looks like it will fizzle away. This might be a good thing. If the Constitution passes, the Sunnis will start a civil war. If it craps out, the parties can try again.

As for the Iraqi catastrophe (or the most recent in a long run of catastrophe)-

An Iraqi tragedy raises sectarian tension
Aug 31st 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

In the most deadly incident since America’s invasion of Iraq, an estimated 1,000 Shias have died in a stampede in Baghdad, which Sunni insurgents are suspected of causing. Like the row over the draft constitution, the tragedy will worsen sectarian tension

Reuters

AROUND a million of Iraq’s Shia Muslims were making their annual pilgrimage to the north Baghdad shrine of an 8th-century saint on Wednesday August 31st, when pandemonium broke out. Panicking at rumours that a suicide-bomber was trying to blow himself up in their midst, thousands of pilgrims stampeded across a bridge over the Tigris that leads to the shrine. Many were trampled underfoot; others drowned after jumping from, or being pushed off, the bridge. The Iraqi authorities say as many as 1,000 may have died, most of them women and children.

Catastrophes causing heavy loss of life have become almost an everyday event in Iraq since the American-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in early 2003. But no single incident since then has been anything like this deadly. In a sense, the gathering of such a multitude in a restricted space was an accident waiting to happen. Indeed, great crowds at Muslim shrines have turned into deadly crushes before, sometimes with no obvious cause. But some Iraqi government officials and Shia politicians swiftly blamed the tragedy on Sunni Muslim insurgents who, while incessant in their attacks on American and Iraqi forces, have increasingly targeted Shia civilians too. Their apparent aim is to foment a civil war, making the country even more ungovernable than now and forcing American troops to make an ignominious exit.

And in the process make Iraq both bankrupt and ungovernable for years. A power vacume for the nearest big power to gobble up.

Iraq’s interior minister, Bayan Jabor, accused insurgents of deliberately triggering the stampede by spreading the suicide-bombing rumour. Ammar al-Hakim, a leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the dominant party in the Shia-led governing coalition, blamed “terrorists, Saddamists and radical extremists”. The defence minister, Saadoun al-Dulaimi, a Sunni, disagreed, insisting the tragedy was nothing to do with sectarian tensions. However, there were several apparently sectarian attacks on the pilgrims earlier in the day: at least seven people were killed in three separate mortar attacks on the Shias as they marched to the shrine, for instance.

Whether the stampede was a tragic accident or the result of a deliberate attack may never be known for sure. What may matter most is whether Shias conclude that it was sectarian—and whether they decide to react. It would certainly not be the first time the insurgents have attacked a Shia religious festival. In March last year, more than 180 people were killed when suicide-bombers attacked worshippers at the same Baghdad shrine and at another, even more important one in Karbala. More recently, Shia gatherings of all sorts—weddings, funerals and crowds milling around outside mosques—have become vulnerable.

In response, the killings of Sunni leaders and clergy have increased. However, given the level of provocation it is remarkable that the various heavily armed Shia militias have so far resisted the temptation to launch massive reprisals against ordinary Sunnis. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric, has restrained the hands of the most militant of the armed Shia groups, such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. But the huge toll from the stampede will make this much harder. Even if the tragedy does not trigger an all-out conflict between Iraq’s religious and ethnic groups, some say that a low-level civil war is already brewing. Attacks, or threats of them, have forced Shias and Sunnis living in districts where they are a minority to begin moving out.

From what I hear, it sounds like the civil war has already begun.

The proposed Iraqi constitution, which will be put to a referendum in October despite its rejection by Sunni negotiators, seeks to ease the underlying fears of rival communities and thereby prevent a descent into civil war. Its guarantees of democracy should reassure the majority Shias (about 60% of the population) that they will no longer be dominated by the Sunnis (20% of Iraqis), as they were until the fall of Saddam. The Kurds (also 20%) are guaranteed continuing autonomy in their northern homelands. The Sunnis, based predominantly in Iraq’s central and western regions, are promised that oil and gas revenues will be shared between provinces largely on the basis of population—and not grabbed by the Shia south and the Kurdish north, where most of the reserves are.

In practice, however, achieving this equitable division of oil wealth will depend on negotiations between central and provincial governments; and Sunnis are worried that the constitution allows the southern Shias to form a powerful super-region similar to that of the northern Kurds, with its own security forces, based on existing militias. Thus a weak central government may find it hard to persuade the Kurds and Shias to hand over the Sunnis’ fair share of oil earnings, whatever the constitution says.

ANd at the end of the day the Shia's and the Kurds might just say, "fuck this unified country shit" and go their own way and be happy, leaving the Sunnis to be totally left out.

One can see problems in Iraq (or what was Iraq) for many years to come.

Some sort of deal may yet be reached to bring on board enough leading Sunnis to secure a credible yes vote for the constitution. The fresh general election which is set to follow such a vote might then attract more Sunni candidates and voters, finally giving the country a government that all its main groups recognise as legitimate. But it is also quite possible that widespread rejection by Sunnis will undermine all attempts to reach a political accommodation. If so, the insurgency will continue and the slide towards civil war may become ever more unstoppable.

Best thing to do would be to try to hold elections again, get the Sunnis involved and then do a Constitutional agreement. This way at least the Sunnis might get a real vote in this business.

Having a written Constitution is less important than getting all the major parties to be able to deal with each other the nature of those rules.

It’s not Vietnam…it’s worse
Whatever the Bush administration may say publicly, it must increasingly be hoping for a period of relative calm in Iraq so that it can declare victory and bring the troops home—even though Iraq’s security forces are still far from ready to maintain order without American help. For all George Bush’s talk about staying the course, the pressure to cut and run is growing. An ABC News/Washington Post poll on Tuesday showed the president’s approval ratings at an all-time low of 45%, owing to concerns over the Iraq war and soaring oil prices.

Lower than that. I think approval is like 38% and if the approval polls take into consideration that Homeland Security was not able to prevent the catastrophe in New Orleans- on W's watch- than those polls may slip further.

In a report released on Wednesday, the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, two think-tanks critical of the war, estimated that operations in Iraq were now costing American taxpayers $5.6 billion a month. Adjusting for inflation, they reckon this is about 10% higher than the average military cost of the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s. But pulling the troops out at this stage would be a crushing defeat for America, as well as a spectacular victory for the insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies. Iraq might collapse into a religious and ethnic war far more bloody than the conflict has been up to now—and might break up altogether. There is still a chance that such a terrible outcome can be avoided. But whoever it was whose rumour-mongering triggered the deadly stampede has done his best to make it happen.

And yet the war continues to slide against the US.

And there is some talk that the American marines who got killed in August were getting shot by the Iraqi army.


http://d-n-i.net/lind/lind_archive.htm

thanks 4too for this bit.

 

[welsh]

Ok, double post but perhaps this is interesting.

Western Journalists and writers often write from the Western audience and stay with the invading armies. Not often do they go off and speak to the other side.

Here is a book that's an exception to that rule.

Review follows

Iraq

A grim chronicle

Sep 1st 2005
From The Economist print edition

The war in Iraq has been widely reported, but thinly understood. A new book, by an Arabic-speaking American journalist, sets out to right that wrong

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
By Anthony Shadid

"AT 5:34am, on Thursday March 20th 2003, the United States began a war of its own choosing, buoyed by grand ambition and perhaps folly.” Its declared reason—to wrest terrifying weapons from Saddam Hussein—was bogus or a delusion; its plan for the occupation that followed a scribbled afterthought; some 25,000 Iraqi civilians and 2,000 American and British troops have since been killed in chaos that may yet wreak civil war.

Much more than these bold facts, however, the average western newspaper reader will not know. It is not easy to understand fully what is going on; still less so to make any accurate predictions about how it will end. Targeted by head-chopping Muslim fanatics, most foreign journalists do not leave the generous, if inevitably jaundiced, embrace of American and British troops. And even those who do must rely heavily on official sources—mostly Americans who are out of touch with the complex and changing world outside their fortress compounds, and who, like their government, have tended also to invent good news where there is none.

Thank goodness, then, for those reporters, both western and Iraqi, who are prepared to take risks in search of a more nuanced reality, among them Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for the Washington Post, whose words begin this article. Mr Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, who speaks Arabic like a native and writes English like an angel, has put his best reporting into this book. Even-handed and keenly observed, containing just enough (and no more) of the author to suggest a decent man worthy of our trust, it is written for the inexpert but has fresh material for scholars. Mr Shadid calls his work story-telling rather than serious criticism, and so it is. But stories this insightful—of dead Iraqi insurgents and their motivations; of a 14-year-old Iraqi Anne Frank, with extracts from her wartime diary—are more than journalism; they are valuable chronicles.

For several weeks before the war, until the spring of 2004, when a Shia insurgency under Muqtada al-Sadr erupted in central and southern Iraq, in addition to the Sunni resistance blazing in the west, Mr Shadid embedded himself among ordinary Baghdadis. His method was “to ask endless questions in face-to-face conversations in the cramped rooms of street-corner mosques.” When American troops arrive in Iraq's capital, he speaks to the minority waving to greet them, also to those who wish to kill them and to the worried majority waiting to see what they would bring. It is an excellent method. Soon after, in a suburb of Baghdad, Mr Shadid follows the trail of an American foot-patrol which a colleague of his had accompanied. Afterwards, the two journalists compare notes. Beaming, the soldiers considered the locals “99% friendly”. After they have passed, Mr Shadid finds sullen crowds who are bitterly resentful, at best, of the helmeted and booted invaders.

Mr Shadid writes engagingly about history and lyrically about destruction. (“The hospital ward was littered with blood-soaked gauze, the stretchers and blankets themselves bore scabs”.) He writes about the Americans in Iraq scarcely at all. The reader comes to see them almost through Iraqi eyes, as distant and dangerous, their presence expressed by absence—of electricity through a burning summer, and of security, when Baghdad is ransacked as the Baathist regime folds. Where Americans do come in, Mr Shadid prefers to let them damn themselves. Why, one startled English-speaking Iraqi asks, did the tank that advanced on his village have “We remember 9/11” written on its gun-barrel? In the Baghdad citadel, the “Green Zone”, from which America ruled Iraq, Mr Shadid encounters a breed of chirpy young Republicans, unflaggingly loyal to their government and wholly inadequate to their tasks: “Iraqis rock!” two of them tell him.

While America's leadership bragged of bringing freedom (a “catchphrase it used reflexively,” he says), Mr Shadid asks again and again the question thrown up during the 7th-century squabble between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq, which has not been settled since: “Who has the right to rule, and from where does that right arise?” In the flourishing of radical Islam and nationalism after the invasion, that turned Shia and Sunni against each other and both groups against the invader, he sees a breakneck bid to supply the answer. So too in the democratic process that America and its allies hastily, if belatedly, introduced, with elections last January. Which logic will prevail, war and domination, or negotiation and compromise, Mr Shadid is careful not to try to predict.

Even if, against the odds, Iraqis manage to avert worse violence, history will still condemn America for its blundering in their country. Mr Shadid lists the mistakes dispassionately, including those well known—the insufficient number of occupying troops, the disbanding of Iraq's security forces—and those less advertised, that the Sadrist uprising began after an American helicopter rammed a sacred Shia flag for fun, or that the resistance in Fallujah began after American troops there massacred 15 unarmed protesters.

And yet, he asks, even without all these errors, was the occupation's failure inevitable? Mr Shadid suggests that it was. Brutalised over two decades, yet still bristling with ancient pride and possessing no common idea of how their country should be, Iraqis were ripe for revolt the day the dictator's boot was lifted from their throats. And America, a well-meaning but ignorant occupier, widely distrusted across the Arab world because of its backing for Israel, was hopelessly ill-equipped to quell them. “Not insubstantial were decades over which the United States had grown as an antagonist in the eyes of many Arabs. Iraq had long been removed from the Arab world, isolated by dictatorship, war, and sanctions, but it remained Arab.”

 

[Maphusio]

God it disgusted me to hear the insurgence/freedom fighters came and fired into the crowd that came to mourn the 1000 dead. Yeah I was absolutely stupefied by that. And the fact they Shia's got that fucked over in that constitution. There was no way they could compromise? I had a feeling this would happen all along. It's just like so many other times NATO and the US tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together.