Meet the Blues 03/05/2010
 
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There is a new party in Kurdish politics and it's likely that it will have a significant effect on the ongoing Iraqi election. The Goran or "change" party was founded by Nawshirwan Mustafa specifically to challenge the two party PUK, KDP coalition that has dominated politics in the region since it became semi-autonomous after the first Gulf War.

Al Jazeera correspondent Zeina Khodr has an excellent profile on the newcomers here.

Money quote:

For the first time since 2003, Kurdish politicians will lack unity. But that doesn't seem to bother Goran's supporters. I went to one of their rallies and most of them will tell you that they welcome new parties because it brings about a real democracy.

But the question is how will this new reality affect the Kurds' political influence in Baghdad? After all, Sunday's national elections is not just about rival Kurdish parties vying for parliamentary seats, it is about Kurds wanting to expand their influence in Baghdad.

That's influence they need if they want to resolve pending Arab-Kurdish issues, like the fate of Kirkuk and other disputed territories, the oil law and the status of federalism.

It is still not clear if Nawshirwan Mustafa, the head of the Goran movement, will co-operate with his Kurdish rivals in the next Iraqi parliament. "I hope we do," is what he told me an hour before he addressed a crowd of his supporters.

For more background check out this article Jon wrote way back in July 2009.
 
 
Thomas Ricks, a respected Washington war reporter, argues that the U.S. needs to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement and keep 30,000-50,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely. The current agreement, signed by both the Bush administration and the Iraqi leadership in 2008, stipulates that all US forces are to be out of Iraq by the end of the next year. Andrew Sullivan, sensing the coming pushback against withdrawal, is livid:

If Obama does not have the courage to withdraw [from Iraq] regardless of the consequences, he will end up entrenching Bush's insane gamble, not ending it, as he was elected to do. If Obama increases troop levels in Afghanistan and extends Bush's timetable for leaving Iraq, why on earth did we support him? Those were McCain's policies. Why have elections if they are essentially meaningiless?

Occupations are the foreign [policy] equivalent [sic] of entitlement programs. They never end. Why should Americans be denied basic access to health insurance because the money is going to sustain 50,000 troops in Germany, for Pete's sake, or to tamp down sectarian conflicts that have existed for centuries in a country we had no troops in for all of US history until 2003? 

When will this madness end? Do we really have to go completely bankrupt and be forced to withdraw from these anachronistic pretensions? Are seven years not enough?
 
 
Nir Rosen, recently back from Iraq, rebuts the idea that Sunnis are going to stage a repeat of the 2005, when they boycotted elections and turned instead to militias for power. This is part of the general worry amongst American policymakers that for all the successes of the surge, there is still no political reconciliation and no agreed method for distributing government revenues. Money quote:

...what can Sunnis do? Nothing, they're screwed and they have to accept it, and they have. The alternative is far worse for them. Sunnis in the region will not go to war alongside the Sunnis of Iraq. That moment came and went in 2006. Iraqi Sunnis don't even have a single leader who is charismatic and has real appeal, they're divided among themselves and these days your average Iraqi just isn't that into politics. I've heard it hundreds of times by now, they blame the religious parties, they say they got fooled and now they understand. Now that's not completely true, but the militias were able to mobilize people because of a security vacuum. These days it doesn't matter how remote and shitty the village I visit is, there are Iraqi Security Forces, and people have good things to say about them. Compared to the first three years of the occupation, Sunnis seem downright docile, maybe bitter or wistful, maybe angry, but their leadership is emasculated, in jail, abroad, just trying to survive, or just trying to make money.
 
 
Check out Daniel Larison's short piece in the The Week. Money quote:

Today, we are at the end of an era defined by conservative internationalism, a creed both exceedingly ambitious in its goals and extremely parsimonious in the resources provided to reach them. For the past 30 years, conservative internationalists have largely dominated national security debates; even internationalist Democrats have been influenced by them or been forced to mimic their arguments. During and after Vietnam, conservative internationalists wished to preserve an active, "forward" foreign policy while avoiding the political costs such a policy entails.  Consequently, they turned to air power, missile defenses, covert operations, and short wars to minimize both American casualties and public backlash. In short, conservative internationalists found a way to insulate an activist national security state from the people it was supposed to serve….

…In recent years, it was common for liberals to ask why President Bush never asked for collective sacrifice in support of a war effort that his administration routinely described as vital, even  "existential."  As Zelizer explains, Bush couldn’t have done so without undermining a pillar of conservative internationalism—the "promise of minimal sacrifice."  In reality, the sacrifice is not so small, but it is made to seem small by pushing the fiscal costs of war into the future and carefully hiding the human costs from public scrutiny. The pain is buried in abstract projections of future deficits and in the quiet stoicism of the professional military.
 
 
From Baghdad to Beirut, by Michael Totten. Totten compares Iraq and Lebanon, the Arab world's two putative democracies. Money quote:

Iraq’s sectarian divisions, like those in Lebanon, attract outside powers. Many Sunni Arabs enlisted al-Qaida terrorists from 2004 to 2007 in their fight against the American military and the Shi’a-dominated central government, for instance. But no Middle Eastern country interferes simultaneously in Lebanon and Iraq as much as Iran. In 2008, Ryan Crocker—the American ambassador to Lebanon from 1990 to 1993 and to Iraq from 2007 to 2009—told Congress that Iran was pursuing a “Lebanonization strategy” in Iraq, “using the same techniques they used in Lebanon to co-opt elements of the local Shi’a community and use them as basically instruments of Iranian force.” In his new book, The Gamble, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Ricks elaborates: Crocker raised concerns about “what he termed the Lebanonization of Iraq—that is, the weakening of the government, the division of the people into sectarian groups, and the rise of militias that rival the government in reliable firepower.”
 
 
Evan and I promised ourselves when we started this blog not to fall victim to America's ADD "breaking" news cycle, which ignores most of the world until a crisis occurs.

Well, you wouldn't know it from reading the news, but last month the US military had zero combat deaths in Iraq. December 2009 was the first month since the US invasion in which not a single American soldier was killed.

This is in large part because the US military is no longer very visible to Iraqi society since it has pulled out of most major cities. Over the past few months, insurgents have instead launched devastating attacks on Iraqi governmental ministries.

There are parliamentary elections due for March 7th, and for the first time, people will be able to vote for individual candidates rather than just candidate lists. This could make individual MPs more accountable.

Huge unresolved problems remain in Mosul and Kirkuk. There is still no real national reconciliation. And although the recent security breaches have not yet hurt PM Nuri al-Maliki's popularity on the street, it will if these attacks continue. The US is supposed to pull out all combat troops by August of this year. How that will turn out is anybody's guess.

For an informative interview on the current political situation in Iraq, check the CFR's discussion with the Christian Science Monitor's former Baghdad correspondent here.
 
 
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Most al-Qaeda terrorists cross into Iraq from Syria
Michael Bronner has a very interesting interview with "Abu Khalid," a terrorist from Lebanon who joined al-Qaeda to become a suicide bomber. Abu Khalid's Iraqi handlers decided that they already had enough suicide bombers, and sent him back to Lebanon to fundraise and recruit people with more high-level skills.

The interview sheds light on the role of foreign jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially the rise of suicide bombing as a tactic in Afghanistan, where it was insignificant until 2005.

Money quote:

In the fall of 2007, U.S. Special Forces recovered a set of computer hard drives during a raid on an al-Qaeda in Iraq (A.Q.I.) [safehouse]...Surprisingly detailed A.Q.I. personnel records, covering a period from August 2006 to August 2007, revealed a highly professional, highly efficient smuggling operation that moved some 600 foreign fighters from 21 countries across the Syrian border and into the insurgency network in that short period alone. They made their way to war through the most banal of channels, many by air, connecting to Damascus through international airports in Europe or Egypt, then moving, like Abu Khalid, alongside the daily illicit cross-border traffic of cattle, cigarettes, cement, pharmaceuticals, diesel, guns, and gold that have been smugglers’ sustenance in the border region through peace and war before.
 
 
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Turkey's foreign policy since AKP solidified its domestic political position in 2007 has largely been defined by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's dogmatic interest in eliminating potential liabilities. One of his most notable successes has been the improvement of Turkey's relationship with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq.

On October 31st, less than three years after Turkish troops invaded Northern Iraq, Davutoglu stood shoulder to shoulder with KRG President Masoud Barzani at the inauguration of Turkey's new consulate in Erbil--an image very few Turkey observers thought they would ever see.

Undergirding the dramatic improvement of diplomatic ties has been the growth of economic relations between Turkey and the KRG. Turkey is by far the region's largest source of foreign direct investment and Turkish companies participate in virtually every sector of the Kurdish economy from construction to airport management. Additionally, natural gas from the Kurdish controlled regions of Iraq is an important part of Turkey's plan to become a regional energy hub.

Unfortunately, Davutoglu's masterpiece is in danger.

More after the jump ->
 
 
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He was a real looker
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was at the time the most wanted man in Iraq after trying to ignite a Sunni-Shia civil war in the country. Additionally, he was public enemy number 1 in his native Jordan for bombing 3 Amman hotels. This is the apparent story of how America killed him, from a NY Times piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

This time, McChrystal believed, Zarqawi was in his sights. The tip was long in coming, a result of thousands of hours of intelligence work, but according to several sources, it boiled down to this: Under interrogation, an Iraqi insurgent who was a member of Zarqawi’s inner circle pointed to an Iraqi named Abd al-Rahman, who, the insurgent said, served as Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. 

Whenever Rahman was preparing to meet Zarqawi, the source told the Americans, he would send his wife and family out of Baghdad the day before. McChrystal and his JSOC team watched Rahman for 17 consecutive days. Then, on June 6, 2006, it happened — Rahman’s family was seen piling into a vehicle and leaving the city. 

The next day, a Predator drone followed Rahman himself as he made his way northeast out of Baghdad, to a small house in a palm grove near the village of Hibhib. Rahman went inside. McChrystal had a commando team on the ground, 18 minutes away. 

As McChrystal and his staff watched through the Predator camera, a man, dressed in black, walked from the house to the edge of the road. The man looked to his right, then to his left. It was Zarqawi. He walked back inside. They were sure it was him. At an operations center, a senior Special Forces commander, realizing that time was short, ordered an airstrike. Two F-16’s were dispatched; one of them was hooked up to a refueling plane; the second jet was told to go alone. A pair of 500-pound bombs killed Zarqawi.

 
 
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For anyone who follows Turkey, this image is shocking.
Developments between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan have been moving at unbelievable speed.

On Friday Oct 31, in the evening (Bush's preferred time slot for making news disappear), Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu visited Erbil and held a joint news conference with Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Massoud Barzani is despised by mainstream Turks.

In 2007, the the military scuttled attempts by the AKP to setup a meeting between then Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and then Kurdish PM Nechirvan Barzani.

But since that time, the AKP has scored successive blows against the military, both by appointing Gul president in 2007 and then by defeating attempts by the military to shut down the AKP in the summer of 2008.

The AKP government agreed to let the military launch an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan in February 2008, perhaps in hindsight to placate the Turkish military and prepare for a rapprochement.

In conjunction with Davutoglu's visit, the AKP has been issuing amnesties for Kurdish PKK members without blood on their hands and relaxing restrictions on the Kurdish language. But by implicitly acknowledging Iraqi Kurdistan as a separate entity from the rest of Iraq, and agreeing to open a consulate in Erbil, the AKP is really entering untested waters. Many Turks deeply fear Kurdish separatist ambitions, and for them, the increasingly independent Kurds of Iraq are a nightmare.

For Turkey, this new Iraqi Kurdistan policy fits in well with Davutoglu's vision for Turkey as a new Middle Eastern power. For Turkish business, it means a windfall of profits in the underdeveloped but oil-rich Kurdistan. For Barzani, the Iraqi Arabs are the real foes, followed by the Persians and Syrians. Turkey is the least antipathetic of Iraqi Kurdistan's neighbors and has good ties with the West, which has traditionally been the Kurds' protector.

But the Turkish public is way behind Davutoglu and the Turkish business community on this one. After 80 years of denying that the Kurds even existed, and a brutal 20 year war against the PKK in Turkey's southeast, the AKP has to do more to encourage reconciliation in society. Otherwise, prepare for an ugly backlash.
 
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