Middle East

Not an interesting piece by me, of course.  Let’s not be ridiculous.   FPA War Crimes blogger Daniel Graeber has an excellent piece in UPI on the long-term consequences of arming Sunni militants to fight al-Qaeda.   He discusses why this is a short-sighted plan, and one possibly doomed to blow-back in even more violence and mayhem, moreso, I think, than anything al-Qaeda could inflict.

 But as the Sons of Iraq increasingly shed blood for the country, they are growing increasingly disenfranchised with the political rewards. Iraqis, including the Awakening Councils, want peace and stability, but as in any form of participatory government, they also want power. In Diyala province recently, members of the Sons of Iraq abandoned their checkpoints in protest of the Iraqi central government’s choice for police chief, who happened to be Shiite. That’s just one minor example of the swelling tide of political discontent emerging from the Awakening Councils, as many simply see no purpose in continuing the fight as the Awakening came with few rewards. Adding to the complexity is the tenuous cease-fire by the fighters loyal to the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who many of the Sawha forces fear.

Read the whole piece.  Graeber brings up historical and regional analogies, and offers a shrewd analysis of how this can blow up.   The plan of arming one set of militants to fight the another, a strategy that is both over-arching and disturbingly ad hoc, redounded poorly against the US in Gaza, and can do so in Iraq in larger and more frightening ways.

Sabrina Tavernise has a brutal and harrowing piece in today’s New York Times about how the cleric-driven violence in Iraq has led many to question their faith, which they have seen as bringing them nothing but misery and blood.

“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”

“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”

“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”

Now, Tavernese has said she interviewed forty people over five cities, which isn’t nothing, but isn’t a huge sample-size, either.   Still, her conclusions stand to reason.  In the post-Saddam vacuum, religion was a way to make sense of the chaos.  Not for everyone: tribalism and family remained strong (one would expect this to be the case after a dominant figure collapses and then the very state is called into question- people fall back into older, more secure identities). 

But those identities didn’t provide security; they unspun into chaos.   As the war got worse and worse, and became more brutal and more criminal, it seems some young Iraqis turned away from the hollow and deadly intonations of the preachers.

In large part these preachers turned out to be nothing more than criminals, barely concealing their venal motives with a translucent mask of piety.   The scared became unwashably profane, and the youth of Iraq- hardened, no one’s fools- could see through it.   This kind of fake-jihadist is not uncommon; Mark Bowden has an excellent Atlantic articleabout one in the Philippines.

 Issac Choitner in The New Republic thinks this is a hopeful article, and I agree with him to a point.   It is good that this veneer is being ripped away, but I can’t get too excited that many people had to be tortured and killed, blown-apart, for us to get here.  Still, if it shows anything, it shows what one commenter, teplukhin, succinctly described.

I think it offers hope in that it’s now very clear that the jihadist “pitch” to prospective recruits is almost totally about material or at least non-religious, apolitical incentives– the same pitch, more or less, that a drug dealer makes to prospective mules.

If there’s ever a surge that would work, it’s a massive civil effort to get money and jobs to young unemployed Iraqi men in neighborhoods where the jihad does most of its recruiting. This isn’t rocket science.

That is what the US has to do in Iraq.  The surge has helped quell some violence, but, as noted, it hasn’t helped much in the way of political progress.  But even if it did help that, it wouldn’t much change conditions on the ground for young Iraqis, especially young Iraqi men.  It is the same from Liberia to Serbia to American inner-cities: bored young men with nothing to do and no prospects for employment are easily turned to violence.  If the US doesn’t recognize that it has an opening, a way to slow down the allure of criminal activities, then its presence there will be indefinite or a complete failure.

Of all of Iraq’s myriad impossible situations, Kirkuk has America tied into perhaps its tightest Gordian Knot.   The Institute for War and Peace Reporting has a good little summary of the mutual frustration between Kurdistan and whatever passes as Iraq’s central government. 

The Kurdish Alliance, the second-largest political bloc in the country, holds 53 of Baghdad parliament’s 275 seats and are members of Maliki’s Shia-led government. The recent tensions have damaged one of the strongest alliances in Iraq’s severely fractured political landscape.The political disputes have simmered since last summer, escalating over the past few weeks. While Kurdish leaders insist they won’t pull out of Maliki’s government, they are growing increasingly vocal with their demands.“I wouldn’t call it a crisis, but there are ups and downs and mistrust between the two sides,” said Qassim Dawd, an Iraqi parliament MP from the Maliki’s United Iraqi Alliance list.

And, of course, central places in a national consciousness are only heightened by a shared history of suffering.   The battle of Kosovo Pjole maintains a major part of the Serbian national mythology, and was used my Milosevic to re-awaken Serbian nationalism.

 And the Serbs lostthat battle.  And it took place in 1389.   The tragedy of Kirkuk, in which Saddam uprooted as many as 100,000 Kurds during his Arabization programs (in tandem with thegenocidal Anfal campaign), has made it a place of sorrow and pain and longing.  

The US feels it owes the Kurds, who have been loyal and incredibly helpful to US goals, something.  A lot, actually.  But to re-Kurd Kirkuk would be just as traumatic to its Arab and Turkmen population.   This has already begun to happen, according to the Council on Foriegn Relations.

Since the removal of Saddam in 2003, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Kurds and Turkmen returned to Kirkuk to reclaim their lost properties or reside in camps on the eastern fringe of the city. Some experts say their motivation is to rebalance the city’s population in preparation for the December 2007 referendum. Most experts say Kurds now make up a clear majority and retain control over most of the city’s important political posts (because of a ruling allowing around 70,000 displaced Kurds to vote despite not residing in the city).  

(that CFR article is also a neat little summary of Kirkuk’s issues).

If the US allows Kurds their prize it may continue to tear up to government and the country.  If it doesn’t the fiercely independent Kurds, so close to their national dream of independence, may tear it apart anyway.  Right now the Kurds are playing ball, but no one knows for how long, and it seems, considering their historical suffering and their current position as strong allies, few have the indecency to ask.

 (Update: The New York Times has a good article on how the Kurds might have over-played their hand, and are now letting their long-term goals slip away.)

The Institute of War and Peace Reporting has a new series called Iraqi Women’s Voices.  The first one, also printed in the Middle East Times, is called “Life After the Islamic State,” about a woman whose Baghdad neighborhood, once secular and free of the Sunni-Shi’ite divide, fell under the sway of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

My parents are liberal and never told me what to wear, so I enjoyed a lot of freedom growing up. The new restrictions were difficult for me to take. I have complied with the new “laws” of my neighbourhood, while my blood silently boiled.

It was one of the worst times of my life, and I hope that it remains a thing of the past.

She reports that things have improved as the security situation has gotten better.  It is worth a read, and we will keep our eye on this series.