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Bush's Worst Appointment
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of them all. Now he's poised to seize his place in history. Will
he be the sleaziest Interior Secretary in history, sleazier than
Watt, fouler than Fall?
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in that dawn" Not in Michigan! Raymond Garcia describes
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Now!
"There was a ghastly absurdity about
Tony Blair's optimism ..."
Which
is the Real Iraq?
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Arbil, Iraq.
Blair's view: 'We have a government
of national unity that crosses all boundaries. Iraqi people are
able to write the next chapter of their history themselves.'
Another view: Two car bombs
explode in Baghdad, killing nine. At least 23 more die in attacks
elsewhere, bringing the death toll in May to 848 as sectarian
violence spreads.
A frustrating aspect of writing
about Iraq since the invasion is that the worse the situation
becomes, the easier it is for Tony Blair or George Bush to pretend
it is improving. That is because as Baghdad and Iraq, aside from
the three Kurdish provinces, become the stalking ground for death
squads and assassins, it is impossible to report the collapse
of security without being killed doing so.
There was a ghastly absurdity
about Tony Blair's optimism as he stood beside the new Iraqi
Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, in Baghdad's heavily fortified
Green Zone yesterday. As usual, Mr Blair arrived by helicopter.
Anybody entering the zone on foot has to negotiate eight checkpoints
defended by heavily armed troops and guards surrounded by sandbags,
razor wire, sniffer dogs and X-ray machines.
Mr Blair said the establishment
of a national unity government meant there was no longer any
justification for the insurgency. He announced that now at last
the "Iraqi people [are] able to take charge of their own
destiny and write the next chapter of
Iraqi history themselves".
But Zalmay Khalilzad, the US
ambassador, played a crucial role in getting rid of the last
duly elected prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. His officials
do not conceal that the envoy has been what The New York Times
described as "a tireless midwife in the birthing of the
new government" . That is hardly the sign of a sovereign
and independent Iraqi administration.
Mr Blair said "we have
a government of national unity that crosses all boundaries".
Unfortunately that is exactly what we do not have. The five months
it has taken to form a government since the election for the
Iraqi parliament on December 15 shows the depth of existing
divisions. This government has a Minister of Tourism but, as
yet, no Minister of the Interior or Defense, the two crucial
jobs in a country torn apart by war.
In the two parliamentary elections
and a referendum on the constitution in 2005, Iraqis voted along
strictly sectarian or ethnic lines. The Shia and Sunni religious
parties and the Kurdish coalition triumphed; secular and nationalist
candidates performed dismally. The new constitution shifting
power to Kurdish and Shia super-regions with control over new
oil discoveries means that, in future, Iraq will be largely a
geographical expression.
So divided is the new government
that each ministry becomes the fief of the party that holds it.
The ministries are, in practice, patronage machines employing
only party loyalists. They are milked for money, jobs and contracts.
Ministers cannot be dismissed for incompetence or corruption,
however gross, because it would lead to the deal between the
parties and communities unravelling. The government has become
a sort of bureaucratic feudalism with each ministry presided
over by an independent chieftain.
Mr Blair claimed yesterday
that one of the strengths of the new government was that it was
"directly elected by the votes of millions of Iraqi people".
But the US and British embassies in Baghdad have spent much of
the past five months trying to foist figures such as the former
prime minister Iyad Allawi into the government, despite the poor
performance of his party at the polls.
The problem for the US and
Britain in Iraq is at one level quite simple. " If you have
democracy in Iraq it will be in the interests of Iran, religious
organizations and the Shia," said Sami Shoresh, a commentator
on Iraqi affairs.
All these things the US and
Britain want to avoid, but it is proving impossible to do so.
The Sunnis, the heart of the
uprising against the occupation, are now waiting to see who will
be appointed to run the Interior and Defence ministries. Terrified
of Shia death squads run by the Interior Ministry, the militiamen
of the Badr Organisation or the Mehdi Army, the Sunnis are looking
to greater protection from the US. But it is unlikely that their
community, having fought the occupation for three years, will
now support it.
One of the strengths of Mr
Maliki's government should be that it includes Sunni members
whose parties did well in the election in December. But the five
million Sunni Arabs do not have a leadership as coherent as that
of the Shia and the Kurds. The elected politicians cannot deliver
the armed resistance. In any case, these parliamentary leaders
of the Sunnis, only 20 per cent of the Iraqi population, know
that the only reason the Americans take them seriously is because
of the guerrilla war that has so far killed or wounded 20,000
US troops.
The Shias, for their part,
having used the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein to gain
power, have no intention of seeing it taken away from them by
Ambassador Khalilzad or anybody else. The end of foreign military
occupation will come when they decide it is no longer in their
interests.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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