Libertarian Leanings

Dead end?

Iraq's prime minister Nouri al Maliki has reportedly said that negotiations over the long-term security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq are at a dead end. American proposals "violate Iraqi sovereignty," he said.  While the prime minister's words offer no hope that an agreement will be reached, an al Maliki adviser says things may not be so bad.

A senior al-Maliki adviser, Yassin Majid, said at Amman that despite the "impasse," negotiations were "still continuing" in a bid to overcome the deadlock.

What was rejected was the "preliminary draft" presented by both sides, "but there are alternative ideas that will be presented to the negotiating table at an upcoming meeting," he said.

He declined to say when the meeting was to take place, but other Iraqi officials accompanying the prime minister said the impasse came about "because the ceiling of American requests were extremely high."

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the main point of contention was the issue of the continued American troop presence in Iraq.

Failure to strike the security deal soon would leave the future of the American military presence in Iraq to the next administration. Mr. al-Maliki's stance increased doubts the deal could be struck before the upcoming American presidential election.

Iraqi opposition to the deal has mainly focused on concerns that the agreement would cement American military, political, and economic domination of Iraq.

American officials have refused to release details of the talks while they are still under way but have expressed their respect for Iraqi sovereignty.

The top State Department adviser on Iraq, David Satterfield, told reporters this week that the two sides would meet a July target date to finish the agreement, which must be ratified by the Iraqi parliament.

President Bush said this week in Germany that he was also confident that a deal would be reached.

We'll see fairly soon if this amounts to anything more than haggling.

Taji Awakening update

Portsmouth, New Hampshire native Nathan Ritzo is on his second tour with the U.S. Army in Iraq. At the moment he is in the area north of Baghdad called Taji where he is getting a first hand look at Iraqi efforts to reconcile and rebuild.  From Ritzo's perspective it's going pretty well.

Iraqi Shi'ite and Sunni leaders reached out to each other in the District of Taji on Nov. 8 to discuss the future of northern Baghdad Province. The conference was part of the "Taji Awakening," an historic political reconciliation between Iraqi Shi'ites and Sunnis in the region.

Shi'ite and Sunni tribal leaders from across Iraq met with officials from the Iraqi government, military and security forces to discuss expanding the new alliance between Iraq's Shi'ite and Sunni communities to combat Al Qaeda's presence in the region. Also discussed was how to improve the quality of life in northern Baghdad Province after decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein, four years of terrorist occupation in the Taji region, and sectarian fighting after the regime change...

...Tom Burke is the team leader for the region's embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (ePRT), which played an important role in aiding the Iraqis to plan and organize the event.

"Today the principle members of each of the tribes are present," Burke said. He continued by saying that the Iraqis selected who would attend the conference, and not the Coalition. "They did the selection. Not us. These are the key players for them," he said.

The conference began with speakers addressing the attendees on their concerns for the future of the Taji area and the various problems specific to the different tribes living in the region.

The conference became more informal as the day progressed; the attendees mingled with one another over lunch to further discuss matters concerning the reconciliation process, repairing infrastructure damage and the future of the region.

We take for granted, here in America, that our local elected officials will often confer with officials at the state and national levels to address local concerns.  We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this is probably quite a novel concept to the average Iraqi. Saddam Hussein, and more recently al Qaeda, had a very different approach to solving local problems. 

Ritzo's earlier column on the Taji Awakening is here.

Draft legislation presented to Iraqi Parliament

The Washington Post reports that draft legislation aimed at reconciliation has been presented to the Iraqi Parliament.

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 -- A draft law that would ease restrictions on former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, a measure seen by the Bush administration as crucial to national reconciliation, was presented in parliament on Sunday for the first time.

A powerful Shiite faction quickly objected to any moves to bring back the Baathists to government jobs, and table-pounding argument erupted in the closed-door session, forcing postponement of the debate.

"Come home"

Michael Yon attended mass at St John’s Church in Baghdad yesterday.  Also in attendance were American soldiers from the 2-12 infantry battalion, members of the Iraqi Army 3rd Division, and, of course, Iraqis from the neighborhood.   

...It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda. Real Muslims here are quick to say that al Qaeda members are not true Muslims. From charging “rent,” al Qaeda’s harassment escalated to killing Christians, and also Muslims. Untold thousands of Christians and Muslims fled Baghdad in the wake of the darkness of civil war.  Most of the Christians are gone now; having fled to Syria, Jordan or Northern Iraq.

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

St. John's is the church in Yon's famous picture of the cross going up.  Read all of Yon's post.  He has lots of great pictures with it.

Failure of the insurgency

Iraq the Model reports on the formation of a political council for the Iraqi resistance and what it means.

What is important in my opinion regarding this development and aside from whether to negotiate with it or not, is the very announcement of forming this new political entity.  It consists of remnants of the former regime and it had led the violent campaign against the change and now its leaders announce the transformation into a political entity seeking negotiations with the government. This represents an admission of the failure of the insurgency.

Closing on an optimistic note Mohammed says,

The incremental building of a nation and the simultaneous prelude for the contraction of an insurgency were not easy to see through the smoke of battle, but now things have changed and the results will be clear.

Of course the challenges are still great, yet the defeat of al-Qaeda and the fall of the insurgency tell us clear and loud that determination can and will defeat the rest of the enemies.

Of course things look much different to many of us over here than they do to Mohammed over there.  Over there, the smoke of the battle is clearing, but over here it's not.

The real benchmark

According to Frederick W. Kagan the Iraqi parliament is acting like a bunch of politicians, and that's a good thing.  The real benchmark is not reconciliation as much as it is the process they follow to get there.

As the violence recedes, leaders in all the contending Iraqi communities will naturally seek to address their internal differences. Our interest in the outcome is limited: As long as the Iraqis are committed to the principle of resolving their differences through a political process rather than violence, and as long as any settlement they reach is sufficiently fair so as not to reignite the violence, then our interests will have been secured. The Iraqis can continue to debate the oil law, provincial rights, federalism, and so on for decades (as Americans have debated civil rights, Social Security, immigration, health care, and states rights) with no harm to our interests, assuming their debates are channeled through a political process. And this is almost certainly what will happen. Even if the current Iraqi parliament passed all the benchmark legislation Americans desire tomorrow, Iraqis would continue to debate, argue, adjust, and press for reforms on these key issues, probably for generations. That is what a self-governing people does.

We therefore made an enormous mistake--one in which the Bush administration was complicit when it promulgated the benchmarks in 2006--by defining success as the resolution of Iraq's internal problems, rather than as the creation of a political system within which Iraqis could pursue their struggles peacefully.

Banking on civil war

The Democratic party recently launched an attack on Mitt Romney, accusing him of ignoring reality.  And what reality might that be, you may well ask?

Romney completely ignores the number one foreign policy issue in this campaign: the war in Iraq. Worse, Romney reiterates his misleading rhetoric about "violent, radical Islamic fundamentalism," declaring that "their goal is to unite the world under a single Jihadist caliphate" and "collapse freedom-loving nations like us." But, as critics have pointed out, Romney's ill-informed and dangerously oversimplified outline of the threat is "misleading" and completely ignores the reality on the ground in Iraq and in the Muslim world, including the facts that Shias and Sunnis are "fighting a civil war in Iraq" and many of the groups Romney typically cites "have not targeted the United States." [Boston Globe, 5/27/07; Texas Monthly, 8/07]

This is not new, this idea that there is an Iraqi civil war going on.  Democrats have been promoting it for quite some time now.  Make no mistake, there was a close call.  After al Qaeda bombed of the Golden Dome of the Al Askaria mosque in Samarra in February 2006, a bloody wave of sectarian violence followed, pushing Iraq towards the brink.  But earlier this year when al Qaeda staged a repeat performance by blowing up the remaining minarets, the expected new round of sectarian violence failed to materialize.

In retrospect, it may be safe to say, al Qaeda's second attack on the Al Askaria mosque was launched in desperation.  Rather than stoking sectarian reprisals, al Qaeda has given Iraqis strong incentive to set aside their differences and and join together against a common enemy -- al Qaeda.  In fact, this past weekend Ammar al-Hakim, a leader from Iraq's largest Shiite party paid a visit to the Anbar province, where he delivered a message of unity to Anbar's Sunni sheiks.

"Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen," al-Hakim, who is being groomed to take over the helm at the Supreme Council, told his hosts in the provincial capital Ramadi, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad.

"Today, we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis," said al-Hakim, son of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, who was diagnosed with cancer last May and has been receiving chemotherapy treatment in neighboring Iran.

"We stand together in one trench to defeat Iraq's enemies," al-Hakim said, with his host, leader of the Anbar movement Ahmed Abu Risha standing next to him.

The movement's founder and Abu Risha's brother, Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was killed in a bombing on Sept. 13.

Al-Hakim later led officials from his party and dozens of Anbar sheiks in prayer, a significant display of religious unity.

Apparently Democrats cling to the civil war narrative as their rationale for demanding that troops be withdrawn from Iraq.  They have their narrative, but those elusive facts to back it up continue to escape them.

Fatwa Against Violence

I've been on Bud McFarlane's mailing list ever since I got his permission to republish an editorial of his that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  The column described a conference of Iraqi religious leaders that took place in Baghdad this past June that was organized by Canon Andrew White, an Anglican priest who has spent the last ten years in Iraq.

On the last day of the conference the delegates pledged to reconvene as soon as possible. A final settlement will likely take some time. But current plans call for a second meeting to be held in Cairo in August. The irony of this possibly historic work is that it is operating on a shoestring. Mr. White has organized a nonprofit in the U.S. and is now trying to raise the fairly modest sums needed to keep this trialogue going. If you'd like to know more about his efforts, please send me a note.

I sent him a note.  I asked his permission to post the editorial, and since then I've been among those getting updates on progress toward that second meeting to be held in Cairo in August.  It happened this past week.  Here is the text of the agreement that was reached.

By the Mercy of Allah

Thanks be to God and Peace be Upon His Prophet and His Family and Friends

On the date of 22^nd August 2007, in Cairo, Egypt in two continuous meetings, the present situation in Iraq has been discussed with all its problems and complexities. After long discussions all those meeting have decided it is necessary to begin a process of engagement including the highest level of religious leaders as soon as possible. This engagement will focus on reducing violence, and working together for peace, the ending of terrorist violence and the disbanding of militia activities in order to build a civilised country and to work in the framework of law. Those listed have committed to:

1                    To form a preparatory committee  to bring in the recommendations of the above

2                    To work toward the spreading of the Spirit of Unity and brotherhood

3                    To commit  to meeting together every 15 days

4                    To actively engage with other influential and proactive religious leaders with the highest qualifications in order to issue a comprehensive (Sunni and Shia) Fatwa against violence

Sheikh Dr Ahmed Al Kubasi

Ayatollah Ammar Abu Ragheef

Sheikh Fateh Kashif Al Ghittah

Sheikh Dr Abdul Latif Humayeem

Sheikh Mustapha Al Jabory

It may seem a modest achievement.  But according to Mr. McFarlane, Sheikh Ahmed al Kubaisi whose name is among those who signed on, is Iraq's senior Sunni religious leader.  His Friday sermons, which are broadcast each week from Dubai, reach an estimated 20 million people.  His word carries weight, so it is not unreasonable to believe something will come of this initiative.

Iraqi reconciliation

Bud McFarlane, former national security advisor to Ronald Reagan, has been closely involved with the work of Canon Andrew White,an Anglican priest in Iraq.  The purpose of their work has been to sponsor meetings among the Iraq's leading clerics with the goal of bringing about reconciliation among the country's Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds.  Yesterday I received this from Mr. McFarlane, announcing that a planned reconciliation conference in Cairo is a go. 

Friends,

I am writing to confirm that Andrew White has gotten the commitment of the relevant leaders from each of the three communities of Iraq -- Sunni, Shia and Kurdish -- to join us in Cairo next week, Tuesday through Friday for an intense three days at fashioning a concrete Reconciliation Work Program. We have deliberately restricted attendance at this conference so as to avoid polemics and focus on concrete measures to which we hope all will commit.

The selection of attendees is coming together well. To quote Andrew, "These people coming are the single most important Sunni leaders, the top of the top, and the Shia leaders are very close to Sistani including his chief of staff. They have the ultimate religious influence and no agreement (in the parliament) means anything without their backing."

To me political reconciliation means reaching consensus on a fair sharing of political and economic power -- such things as cabinet portfolios, an oil bill that shares the national wealth fairly and so forth. I will be taking a draft of the oil law of Norway (which is similar to Alaska's) which you may know allocates some of the revenue from oil sales to a national fund (now standing at $500 billion in Norway) and the balance distributed pro rata to each citizen. It has been phenomenally successful.

We would appreciate your prayers

Best regards,

Bud

Robert C. McFarlane
Chairman
McFarlane Associates Inc.
2300 Clarendon Blvd (Suite 306)
Arlington, VA 22201