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Been quiet on the news so far as Iraq is concerned, although by all accounts it hasn't been quiet in Iraq. Be interesting to see what effect the elections have. At this stage, even with the humilitation of delaying the elections, I'm not certain that it wouldn't make sense for us to have a delay, anyhow. Even if they go peacefully (which they may well do, as Sunnis might just stay away), I'm not sure it's right to be having elections of this sort when we can't guarantee Sunni representation.

quote:

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Blistering attacks threaten Iraq election

Analysis

By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs Correspondent, BBC News website


While the world's attention has been on the disaster in Asia, the situation in Iraq has deteriorated so much that the insurgency has developed into near-open warfare.


The head of Iraq's intelligence service Gen Muhammad Shahwani now puts the number of insurgents at 200,000, of which 40,000 are said to be the hard core and the rest active supporters.

These figures do not represent an insurgency. They represent a war.

Despite calls for the election to be delayed from its scheduled date of 30 January, the interim Prime Minister Iyyad Allawi insisted on Wednesday that the vote should go ahead.

"The violence, terrorists and the outlaws will not be allowed to stop the political process and destroy the country," he said.

"Elections will play a big role in calming the situation and enable the next government to face the upcoming challenges in a decisive manner."


Questions

However, questions have to be asked about what happens after the election if the fighters, mainly Sunni Islamists and nationalists, continue their attacks.

If they do, they and the likely winners of the election, parties representing the majority Shia population, could come into conflict. This in turn could lead to a possible civil war.

Shia leaders have called for talks with Sunni representatives in the hope of averting such a scenario.

Nobody has as yet openly called for the withdrawal of US troops as the price of ending at least the nationalist part of the insurgency. But the idea could arise at some stage.

Matters post-30 January would be made worse if there was a low turnout in the Sunni areas because there would then be at best only a weak voice for a powerful section of Iraqi society and the one supporting the current fighting.

Calls for delay

A leading Sunni party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, is boycotting the vote. Elder statesman Adnan Pachachi has again called for a delay and a few more voices have been added to his chorus.

Defence Minister Hazem Shaalan said he had asked Egypt to approach Sunni leaders and urge them to participate.

"We want to give our Sunni brothers another chance even if this means delaying the vote," he said.

Iraq's UN ambassador Samir al-Sumaidaie had earlier proposed a delay of two or three weeks and suggested reserving some seats for the Sunnis for later selection, in an interview with the Washington Post.

The power of the insurgents was demonstrated again on Tuesday with the assassination of the governor of Baghdad Ali al-Haidri - the latest in a blistering series of attacks.

Many of these have targeted the Iraqi security forces which just do not have the ability to fight back effectively.

An example of this also came on Tuesday. A tanker loaded with explosives and driven by a suicide bomber - of whom there appears to be an unlimited supply - blew up at an Iraqi interior ministry commando headquarters in Baghdad, killing eight commandos and two civilians.

These commandos were formed as a special unit to target insurgents and to help make up for the ineffective regular police and national guard. Instead they are the target.

Loss of control

Until recently, the US military has talked of there being about 25,000 fighters in Iraq.

Gen Shahwani has not just upped the estimate, but has put it into the wider context of the active guerrilla support which perhaps gives a truer picture. There are 150,000 US troops.

Anthony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington commented: "The Iraqi figures do... recognise the reality that the insurgency in Iraq has broad support in Sunni areas, while the US figures downplay this to the point of denial."

Mr Cordesman has for months pointed out the weakness of the local Iraq forces, saying recently that they were basically unprepared and "sent out to die."

The level of attacks is now so intense and sophisticated that it is not surprising that the former British representative to the former Coalition Authority, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said recently that the insurgency was "irremediable" and "ineradicable" by US and other foreign troops alone.

"It depends on the Iraqis. We have lost the primary control," he said.

Recent events indicate that Iraqis have lost the primary control as well.

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The timing of the elections is a tough call. I have a lot of sympathy for Bush's position, that being "Set a deadline, stick to it, if one group chooses to boycott, fuck em they won't have any power". I don't know if conditions will EVER be ideal enough for an election, sadly, so perhaps it really is better to just shove forward with it no matter how shitty it is. It's easy to play it safe and delay the elections, but then what about next time, and the time after that, etc etc etc>

This is some other news about Iraq, from Newsweek. That's NEWSWEEK, not Drudge, not the New York Times, not Zmag, but Newsweek:

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I say let the savages vote, pull out, then turn the region into glass so the world can continue to evolve. I'm feeling testy.

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Apart from the killing all those people that Bush and Blair claimed to be freeing, it would rather be an admission of total failure and that, basically, the US and UK got their arses kicked by a bunch of towel-wearing bullies. Any sort of pull-out would be the same in that regard, and even if we can con ourselves into thinking that it wasn't a defeat, no-one else will be fooled.

The really disturbing thing about that sort of defeat scenario would be that we picked the fight ourselves. And I don't think that failure was inevitable (nor is it now) but if we fail, we have to own it. We didn't have to go in, and once we had decided to, we could have spent long enough to plan it, and could have put enough personnel in there to do it right.

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But it's not like we choose to be there. We had to. Because of Iraq's imminent threat to us, or weapons of mass destruction, or freedom, or some damn thing.

BTW, funding and training Death Squads in a country our military chose to occupy is like hiring a gigolo to fuck your wife.

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anything to stop her from masturbating.
HELLO BELABOURED EXTENSION OF ANALOGY.

to me, the fact that this is being reported in newsweek is extra disturbing. is it that serious an option, or are newsweeks' sources a) very good or b) exaggerating? it seems pretty sick for "many U.S. conservatives" to say that training death squads were a success when the government never really admitted to doing so. unless i missed the announcement, and that outpouring of emotion over reagan's death was a joke or something.

furthermore, imposing a system on people and then allowing dissenters to be left out of it upon inception does not spell "stable new democracy".

i am a ball of negativity.

ps. i love you.

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Iraq is defintely a fine example of what happens when one tries to do imperialism on the cheap.

It will certainly be interesting to see what the White House does next after the election is over and Iraq is a satellite state of Iran by ethnic proxy. I expect that some idiot press officer will come to the White House podium and praise such an abject failure in the "war on terror" as a resounding success for freedom.

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Ok. Phil...I just dont like your word choices at all. Ive decided, after careful thought, thats its not you personally that pisses me off...its how you say some things. Like 'imperialism on the cheap'...can you really call it cheap? And this whole ethnic proxy thing...good God, how borderline racist. Im just positive that nationality DOES matter...lets hope moreso than religion...but the bond isnt race...I mean, Iraqis simply are not persians. The Shia majority is not as terribly profound as its made out to be either...I can show you like, shit, like a whole bunch of countries who have dominant religious groups or other dominant cleavages that can still operate without some sort of cataclysmic system failure. Furthermore I see no reason why an Iraqi powerbase is dependent on an Iranian counterpart...I just cant accept the logic that says Baghdad can be ruled from Tehran...it really has to be ruled from Baghdad...but I digress...

It is my guess that the election in Iraq will see quite good turnout. I would say something like 90%+ of the eligible population will vote. If you want to call the US a liar or just dont like whatever official figures come out of it...knock 10% off that number when its released and Ill bet you...let me look around for a sec...Ill bet you my paperback copy of Leviathan(shipping included) its still over 75%. This can be our bet.

It will be a success in the long run. How can it not? I mean...maybe we have different definitions of the word...different concepts of it or different measures or something. I mean, I would say things like an existing democratic government in Iraq(it wont be perfect, how could it?), even in name, is a step up. A narrowing down of the 'really super not cool if these guys become real live state sponsors of terror' list to one: Iran...who I think we have ample opportunity to better relations with in the future...who I think are entirely more managable than Iraq was...all of that. Anyways, Im not really tring to argue the deeper logic of it all...those things are just unproductive...but damnit, proofread.

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quote:

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Originally posted by philjit
Iraq is defintely a fine example of what happens when one tries to do imperialism on the cheap.

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3MTA3, I would say that an Iraq that is a client state for Iran is a Bad Thing and, worse, a failure. A divided Iraq would probably be bad too, as Turkey has said that it will invade an independent Kurdistan. An Iraq in which the Sunni triangle continues to be lawless and ungovernable and in which Islamic fundamentalists base themselves with relative impunity would also be bad. Any Iraq that poses as great a threat to regional stability as did Saddam's Iraq is clearly a failure (because, you know, we could just have left Iraq alone and things would have been better). So there are definitely failure scenarios, I would say, even ignoring the damage to America's reputation and willingness to act abroad in the future. That isn't to say that it will be a failure, but it might be.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Smug Git
Apart from the killing all those people that Bush and Blair claimed to be freeing, it would rather be an admission of total failure and that, basically, the US and UK got their arses kicked by a bunch of towel-wearing bullies. Any sort of pull-out would be the same in that regard, and even if we can con ourselves into thinking that it wasn't a defeat, no-one else will be fooled.

The really disturbing thing about that sort of defeat scenario would be that we picked the fight ourselves. And I don't think that failure was inevitable (nor is it now) but if we fail, we have to own it. We didn't have to go in, and once we had decided to, we could have spent long enough to plan it, and could have put enough personnel in there to do it right.

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Most Iraqis aren't against us, it would appear, so most of the people targeted for freedom are at least persuadable in the long-term. It appears that we didn't realise that we'd need more men and better planning to deal with the people that weren't on our side, and in failing to do so we have effectively helped their recruitment for a variety of reasons. I mean, it would be nice to say that 'our planning failed because we thought too highly of the natives' because that makes it sound like we failed by being too aspirational and decent ourselves, but I think that it is deeper than that; in particular, I don't think that it is the average Iraqi's fault. This current scenario was predictable and isn't excusable; all we have to hope is that we can remedy it. The mistakes, to my mind, have been of the conventional 'misunderstanding the situation' sort and those are bad ones to make; in particular, it appears that the ideological slant of certain members of the administration blinded them to the information that more open-minded individuals were able to see, that would indicate that there was a problem.

Best of all, when the media (no strangers to seeing situations develop) started talking about the insurgency, Rumsfeld and co. said that they were missing all the good stuff, not concentrating on what was important. You don't hear that any more, but you don't hear the hawks admitting that the media was right, either (indeed, you can occasionally hear some hawks with a tenuous grip on sanity blaming the media for making it this way, hah), that the media saw what was important (and, as I say, the media are pretty experienced, themselves) and didn't bother with the ephemera that the hawks were tying their hopes to. When people have raw sewerage running through the streets (which wasn't the case when Saddam was in power, for all his other faults), when the crime of kidnapping for ransom is becoming endemic, when hundreds of thousands of young men have been made unemployed by the ill-advised disbanding of the military, when coalition fear of its own casualties leads to the accidental shooting of civilians, yeah, what we really need is a bunch of marines building us a new school. The journalists were right, the French were right. The least we can do is admit it, then fix the problems they saw coming before we were prepared to admit that we saw them coming (and it was at the highest levels that this blindness persisted longest; the capable people who saw these problems early were, apparently, ignored).

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The journalists may have been right, but the French? Please. They were too busy cashing checks from Saddam to be right about anything.

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But they were right. Mostly by accident, I suspect, but even so. And now they are offering to help, training Iraqi military and police out of country (the Germans are offering to help in the same way), which Congressmen from both parties admit will be very helpful. Hopefully Bush can swallow his pride enough to accept their help.

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He should. We'll have plenty of time to repay those cheese-eating cunts for their treachery later on.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Smug Git
3MTA3, I would say that an Iraq that is a client state for Iran is a Bad Thing and, worse, a failure. A divided Iraq would probably be bad too, as Turkey has said that it will invade an independent Kurdistan. An Iraq in which the Sunni triangle continues to be lawless and ungovernable and in which Islamic fundamentalists base themselves with relative impunity would also be bad. Any Iraq that poses as great a threat to regional stability as did Saddam's Iraq is clearly a failure (because, you know, we could just have left Iraq alone and things would have been better). So there are definitely failure scenarios, I would say, even ignoring the damage to America's reputation and willingness to act abroad in the future. That isn't to say that it will be a failure, but it might be.

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Because Iran currently doesn't have clients, it can't have clients?

The leader of the favourites to win the election is the clerical leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Until not long ago, we considered them to be a terrorist organisation (they were based out of Tehran).

The historical animosity is between the Iraqi Sunnis and the Iranian Shia, isn't it (well, and the Iraqi Sunnis and the Iraqu Shia)? And I was under the impression that things really got bad between Iran and Iraq when Saddam was in power (as a Sunni Baathist secularist) and the Iranians had their religiously inspired revolution.

I don't think that it is yet a disaster, but I don't think that it is a 'no lose' situation, either.

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quote:

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Originally posted by 3MTA3
It will be a success in the long run. How can it not? I mean...maybe we have different definitions of the word...different concepts of it or different measures or something.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Coincidence
you can officially be considered brainwashed if you still support it.

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