Once Agains the Pessimists Are Wrong [Iraq elections]

Great Debates
41

There’s actually little change in this election from previous elections. In previous elections the main Shiite groups* ran on a combined ticket and picked up half the vote. They ran on a split ticket this time and picked up half the vote. They only need to pick up four seats from the independents to have an overall majority. But they need a two-thirds majority to seat a Prime Minister and for this they need an alliance with the Kurds. Or Allawi, who only picked up 11 extra seats compared to last time, does, but he’d also have to pick up every single independent group as well. But Allawi’s coalition is half-ish Sunni and the Sunnis and the Kurds are ready to go to war with each other over oil-rich Kirkuk and its surrounding region. (Imagine people prepared to go to war over oil! They’ll fight over anything, those Arabs.) So it’s much easier for the Shiites, who have no real dog in the Kirkuk fight, to ally with the Kurds than a half-Sunni faction, as has already proved the case in the previous two elections.

However Maliki and the other Shiite faction don’t get along. Maliki is only in his job because Mookie Al-Sadr, peace be upon him, demanded the previous head of Maliki’s party, Jafaari, resign as a condition of Mookie’s support as leader of the overall Shiite alliance. Something similar will probably happen this time. According to the Arab press both factions are currently in Tehran working out a new alliance.

*The main Shiite groups that won the 2005 and 2007 elections and went on to run the government with the Kurds were all formed into a single ticket by the Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani and are:

The Al-Dawa (Islamic Mission) party.

This is Maliki’s party. The Dawa party have a fine democratic tradition of car bombings, airplane hijackings and blowing up buildings, most notably the US Embassy in Kuwait in 1983. Saddam’s regime for some reason called them an Iranian-backed terrorist group, probably due to all the bombings they carried out in Iraq. They operated from Iranian territory where Maliki spent most of his time apart from a few years in the Dawa Damascus office helping the forerunners of Hezbollah start their operations during the Lebanese civil war.

The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Now called the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, having got their Islamic revolution in Iraq. These guys fought for Iran against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, their Badr military wing was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and lots of its current members, now officers in the Iraqi security forces, were Iranian Revolutionary Guard members and still receive pensions from the IRG. Here’s what Donald Rumsfeld had to say about these guys back when we invaded :

Asked more about the Badr Corps, Rumsfeld said there are reports of
numbers in the hundreds operating in Iraq and more on the other side
of the border. He described the corps as “the military wing of the
Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq” and said it is
“trained, equipped and directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary
Guard.” As yet, he said, the corps has not done anything that would be
perceived by the coalition as hostile. But “the entrance into Iraq by
military forces, intelligence personnel or proxies not under the
direct operational control of [U.S. Central Command Commander] General
[Tommy] Franks will be taken as a potential threat to coalition
forces,” he said.

Rumsfeld said the coalition would hold the Iranian government
responsible for the corps’ actions, and armed Badr corps members found
in Iraq “will have to be treated as combatants.”
http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/press/2003/march/032901.html
And the third group, who need no introduction, are the Sadrists, peace be upon them.
Mookie’s people are currently allied with the Supreme Islamic dudes, that’s the second
faction in the former single coalition. But as you can see it’s wrong to claim Maliki is secular
although we did until an actual secular guy won more seats than him. Funny that.

42

Yeah! It’s another ponyfor the friends of America’s Torture President:

Another trillion or two, and we’ll have a proper little satellite of Iran over there.

43

But, but PEACE was supposed to spill outward from this bastion of democracy!!

What is all that stuff spilling inward?

44

Blood, democracy; what matters is that it spills, right?

45

Robert Dreyfuss writes in The Nation:

46

The New York Times reports:

47

McClatchy reported that Monday. See post 42.

48

The very latest in the Arab press is that Allawi wants to join the discussions about forming a government in Iran and that the Iranians want him to become part of a national unity government. And that Mookie Al-Sadr, peace be upon him, is going to hold a nationwide referendum this weekend to choose Iraq’s next pm, or at least choose who the Sadrist bloc in parliament should support, with a list of half a dozen candidates. But this is just shadow-boxing before the horse-trading starts and once they do get down to actual negotiations they could go on for months.

49

Men in Iraqi army uniforms kill 24 in Sunni area

Iraq election tangle stokes fears of new violence

50

Baghdad suicide blasts target embassies; 32 dead

Where are the optimists to tell us that this is just a “rough patch” and that our trillion dollar investment will soon be returned, with interest?
The seem silent as the grave this Easter morning.

51

But we are turning the corner in Iraq!

52

Of course, the problem is that when you are always turning the corner, that means you are just going in circles…

53

Having spend time in Iraq, both several years ago and recently, which most here can’t claim I’d guess, they clearly have “turned the corner” and things are much better. And no, you won’t read that here that on this site, because it’s not popular that either a Republican administration, or the U. S. military has done something good. But virtually all people and all organizations have a political slant. As had been discussed ad nauseam here, this board slants left. We’ve all learned to deal with that.

What I don’t think gets factored in enough (here and elsewhere) is what the cost in terms of misery, torture and death would be if the Hussein regime, both Saddam and is son’s continued to be in power for the last seven years, and for the foreseeable future. Both in terms of destabilizing the region, and in the brutal treatment of his people.

Even the most casual observer should acknowledge that things are turning out better than most predicted, and that the lasting effect of the war is looking to be a positive one.

54

Point the first: that cost is unknowable, and there for not meaningfully factorable.

Point the second: that cost, whatever it would have been, would not have been the moral responsibility of the United States.

55

Ah, the war seen as a welfare program for poor downtrodden Iraqis.
I don’t suppose you virtuous types could see fit to cutting me, and the rest of the country, a check for your expensive, socialistic do-goodery?

56

http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/ Forget casual observer, here is an educated Iraqi woman telling how she sees it. They have been taken over by an outside power.
When we go into a country, I try to get 3 blogs from people living in the country to see how they see things. I have been following The Family in Baghdad, blog since we went in. There is a lot of it available in her blog. I think she would say “Thanks for nothing”.You are buying the viewpoint of the people who invaded a country without cause. We have to find a way to justify the horror of what we did. It fails miserably.

57

I’ll go a step further and point out that whenever his regime ended, whether it was with his death, or his sons, or some other thing, that also would have been unpleasant. But that said, come on. Do you think that over the last seven years, he would have killed a couple hundred thousand people, displaced several million, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and caused a widespread sectarian conflict? Because I don’t think that was in the cards.

58

I think you just cut yourself in for some at my expense, but health care is the subject of 30 other debates, not this one.

59

So we’re even?

60

Nope, spifflog’s got to resurrect all the dead, punish the torturers and restore America’s good name internationally for there to be any real equivalency.