From a new RAND report on fallout from the Iraq War:

"The Iraq War’s reverberations in the region are broad ranging,
affecting relations between states, political and societal dynamics
inside states, the calculations of terrorists and paramilitaries, and shifts
in public views of American credibility. The balance sheet of these
changes does not bode well for long-term U.S. objectives in the Middle
East. That said, a better understanding of how Middle Eastern states
and nonstate actors are responding to the war’s aftermath can help
contribute to U.S. policies that may better contain and ameliorate the
negative consequences of the conflict and perhaps even increase U.S.
leverage."

Zakaria on Obama's Pakistan Win:

There has been a spate of good news coming out of that complicated country, which has long promised to take action against Islamic militants but rarely done so. (The reason: Pakistan has used many of these same militants to destabilize its traditional foe, India, and to gain influence in Afghanistan.) Over the past few months, the Pakistani military has engaged in serious and successful operations in the militant havens of Swat, Malakand, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. Some of these areas are badlands where no Pakistani government has been able to establish its writ, so the achievement is all the more important. The Pakistanis have also ramped up their intelligence sharing with the U.S. This latter process led to the arrest a month ago of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Afghan Taliban, among other Taliban figures.

'Temporary Marriage' and the Economy of Pleasure (in Iran)

During the past few years, the ninth government [Ahmadinejad's first administration, 2005-9] and the seventh and eighth parliaments have turned the revival of this custom and its promotion as "temporary marriage" into one of the foundations of their sexual politics. The government and the parliament went so far as to ratify the new family law bill despite women's strong opposition. This bill gives legal justification to conditional polygamy, including multiple [permanent] wives and sigheh. It no longer even requires permission from the first wife.

The NYTimes on Corruption in Iraq

Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions — involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery — made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.

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.

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.