Friday, March 23, 2007

Joe Biden and Michael Savage Agree on Iraq Plan

Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith’s “The End of Iraq “ appears to be a fair book. Although a Clintonista, Galbraith knows the main players in the Bush administration and has worked with them. He also knows the Kurdish leaders and their situation.

The book details the incompetence of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration. According to the book the neocons relied on ideology instead of qualified staff to implement and plan post war Iraq. They thought that nation-building would be easy.

The book goes over, what eveyone knows that, the main problem in the country is in a power struggle between the Sunni and Shiite, which the Bush administration never took into consideration until recently, but finally have started to recognize by asking the ruling government to bring more Sunni into the governing of the country.

Galbraith’s solution to the civil war is Democrat Joe Biden’s plan, which conservative talk show host Michael Savage and Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback also support.

The plan "would maintain a unified Iraq by decentralizing it and giving Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis breathing room in their own regions - as provided for in the Iraqi constitution."

Reidar Visser,on the other hand, a Middle Eastern scholar at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs doesn't think the plan will work:

“Galbraith recognizes – at least implicitly –that the Shiites are not such a united bloc, and that several statelets might well materialize through a process of federalization, with the United States quite powerless to affect the turn of events. (He seems to voice some preference for a single Shiite state; presumably this would form a stronger counterweight to Iran than several statelets, p. 219.) The consequence, of course, is that, in terms of formulating a comprehensive policy alternative, Galbraith’s “plan” is not really all that sophisticated. It differs little from the more standard demand for immediate US withdrawal, except for the barely disguised call for putting more arms into Kurdish hands (p. 215) and the prospect of erecting a permanent US military base in Kurdish territory – this would apparently do service as a deterrent against what Galbraith candidly describes as the danger of carbon copies of Taliban-era Afghanistan and revolutionary Iran evolving in Sunni and Shiite areas as side effects of his plan. In other words, this is basically a “let’s get out and hope for the best” initiative.”


Visser appears to think that best solution to the problem is the Iraq Study Group plan.

The Iraq Study Group: Regionalisation Not Balkanisation
1. By Reidar Visser (http://historiae.org)
6 December 2006
In a remarkable rejection of partitionist winds that have blown through America over the past year, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) in its report of 6 December 2006 recommended a final big push for the Iraqi national reconciliation process, with the collective effort of regional powers as a potential catalyst.
As far as state structure issues are concerned, partition (or any kind of unconstitutional federalisation, whether “from above” by Iraqi elite politicians or on the basis of foreign advice) was apparently never taken seriously by the ISG. Already prior to the release of the report, a few members of the ISG working groups had complained to the press that they had felt marginalised during the process and that their proposals never truly came on the agenda. The report itself rather brusquely dismisses the prospect of “devolution to three regions” (p. 43), citing arguments that for once are almost identical to those of the Bush administration: practical infeasibility and the dangers of greater regional chaos. Elsewhere, the report mostly shuns the federalisation question, with the implicit message that the ISG envisages this process to stay on track according to the constitution: outside Kurdistan, federal decentralisation is optional not mandatory, and if it is to be done, it will start by initiatives “from below” in the Iraqi governorates, not by Baghdad politicians or by outsiders with “plans” for Iraq.
Instead, the report advocates a serious attempt to get the national reconciliation process back on track, especially as regards re-inclusion of the Sunnis. To facilitate this, it proposes new initiatives at several levels. Perhaps most significantly, there are proposals to work for greater regional momentum that could be conducive to a more peaceful Iraq. The ISG advocates the creation of an “international support group” for Iraq that would include neighbouring states, which in a collective forum might be able to transcend some of their narrow interests linked to their particular protégées inside Iraq. Importantly, active steps to progress in the wider Arab–Israeli conflict and the Palestine issue are recognised as a central pillar for improving the regional atmosphere.
The ISG also suggests that the Iraqi government itself is not doing enough to drive the national reconciliation effort forward. It focuses on the need for rapprochement with the marginalised Sunnis, and introduces several new ideas about how to achieve that. These include a suggestion for United Nations support in the constitutional revision process, a rather outspoken criticism of the current Iraqi constitution’s allotment of undiscovered “future” oil fields to the regions instead of to the central government (apparently the criticism is also directed against regional control of the oil sector as such), international arbitration over Kirkuk, and a delay of the Kirkuk referendum (pp. 65–66.) There is also a more general “talk-to-everyone-but-al-Qaida” attitude throughout the report.
Many of these proposals are quite radical in that they explicitly challenge the current version of the Iraqi constitution. But at the same time they also serve as alternatives that could receive consideration in the constitutional review process. Some of these suggestions have earlier been floated in international NGOs and by figures working in the United Nations system. It is likely that the driving forces behind the 2005 constitution (chiefly the two big Kurdish parties and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI) will feel threatened by some of the recommendations in the report. On the other hand, these suggestions should appeal to a large silent majority of Iraqi nationalists of both Shiite and Sunni backgrounds, as well as to regional powers worried about Iraqi decentralisation spinning out of control.
In the current situation, regionalisation and multilateralism generally come across as good ideas, although the United States should not underestimate the desire of regional powers to keep them engaged, mired down in Iraq. The proposed overtures to regional powers in turn reflect a failure of United States policy in the Middle East in two areas. Firstly, inside Iraq, it relates to a communications problem. The ISG report explicitly acknowledges this (p. 14), asserting that the United States is “unable” to talk to the most important Shiite figure (the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani), and “does not talk” to another important political leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. This has led to sole reliance on the Shiite party that best understands how to deal with Washington – SCIRI – which happens to be the party with the most long-standing and systematic ties to Iran, and which is also the author of the Shiite federalism proposal that most infuriates the Sunnis. But SCIRI account only for some 23% of the deputies within the big pro-Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), and their elevation to a pre-eminent contact point reflects a failure on the part of Washington to engage other partners among the Shiites. This has created some remarkable contradictions in US policy. There was something distinctly Trojan about the way in which pro-Iranian SCIRI leader Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim was invited to Washington for high-level talks only days after a leaked memo by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had advocated a robust strengthening of US forces along the border with Iran to physically protect Iraq against Iranian influences.
The second issue that has precipitated a turn to regional powers relates to overall US policy in the region. Importantly, the ISG recognises the inter-relationships between Iraq and broader regional issues. Until there is a minimum of consistency in the US approach to democracy and human rights issues across different countries in the Middle East, it will remain unable to conduct an ideological foreign policy and will rely on compromises with regional states. This also affects the situation in Iraq, where many parties are reluctant to talk to the United States precisely because they are unconvinced about Washington’s overall vision for the region. Until the US becomes more energetic in solving the Arab–Israeli conflict – chiefly by speeding up the process towards an independent Palestinian state within borders approximating the pre-1967 situation and with an honourable settlement for the 1948 refugees – this problem of scarcity of local pro-democracy partners will remain.

The Code is Broken
The Unified Moonbat Theory Revealed
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I’m a confirmed critic of the idea of partitioning Iraq. I am not alone. I find company in pundits as varied as Anthony Cordesman and Christopher Hitchens. But the best analysis of the reasons why partitioning Iraq is wrongheaded comes in a review of Peter Galbraith’s End of Iraq.
The reviewer, it turns out, actually identifies a Unified Moonbat Theory that takes in all the Iraq plans offered by the Democrats and demolishes them.
Read on.
Galbraith and his book have become very influential. For those who wonder where Joe Biden got his ideas look no further. It’s all there. And Galbraith was even Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Croatia when the Dayton Accords, again so favorably reviewed by Biden, were hammered out.
In his review, Reidar Visser, a Middle Eastern scholar at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, explains that partitioning Iraq is based on a lot of fallacious assumptions.
Galbraith is at pains to render Iraq as an “artificial” and highly fissile construct. Indeed, he accuses his political opponents of “a misreading of Iraq’s modern history” (p. 206). But as soon as he moves beyond his particular area of expertise – the Kurdish north – the narrative becomes less convincing and the arguments more strained. For instance, Galbraith on two occasions reiterates the now widespread but highly erroneous notion that current ethno-religious divisions in Iraq strongly correlate to the old administrative organization of the Ottoman Empire: Mosul was supposedly “Kurdish”, Baghdad “Sunni”, and Basra “Shiite”…
In reality, however, Mosul was essentially a mixed-race province, whereas Baghdad, though home to a large Sunni community, was probably the largest Shiite province of the Ottoman Empire – with its borders extending as far south as today’s Muthanna governorate and with all the rural territory surrounding the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala solidly Shiite, Baghdad was actually far more of a Shiite point of gravity than was Basra (which politically was Sunni-dominated). This in turn means that there was never any such close fit between ethno-religious and administrative maps as that suggested by Galbraith, and that Iraq has in fact a far longer record of ethno-religious coexistence than he seems prepared to admit…
Galbraith’s “Iraq was just cobbled together” thesis is similarly trite and equally misleading: it is true that for some thirty years between the 1880s and 1914 there was administrative separation between Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, but before that there had been frequent intervals of administrative unity between some or all of these areas (especially Basra and Baghdad) – as was the case under the Ottomans and Georgian mamluk rule in the early nineteenth and eighteenth century as well as during long periods of the classical Islamic age (and even under a succession of Mongol rulers after 1258, if more flimsily so)…
The idea of coexistence in Iraq is “absurd” charges Galbraith on pp. 100–101. The decisive proof? Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union all fell apart. But what about other possible comparisons, such as Lebanon – which descended into ethno-religious mayhem and saw extensive internal displacement of its population from 1975 to 1990, only to rise again as a unitary “mosaic”-like state? Today’s sectarian violence in Baghdad is certainly reminiscent of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, where talk of partition and confederations materialized in some circles at particularly gloomy junctures, only to dissipate later on….
At last, Galbraith recognizes – at least implicitly –that the Shiites are not such a united bloc, and that several statelets might well materialize through a process of federalization, with the United States quite powerless to affect the turn of events. (He seems to voice some preference for a single Shiite state; presumably this would form a stronger counterweight to Iran than several statelets, p. 219.) The consequence, of course, is that, in terms of formulating a comprehensive policy alternative, Galbraith’s “plan” is not really all that sophisticated. It differs little from the more standard demand for immediate US withdrawal, except for the barely disguised call for putting more arms into Kurdish hands (p. 215) and the prospect of erecting a permanent US military base in Kurdish territory – this would apparently do service as a deterrent against what Galbraith candidly describes as the danger of carbon copies of Taliban-era Afghanistan and revolutionary Iran evolving in Sunni and Shiite areas as side effects of his plan. In other words, this is basically a “let’s get out and hope for the best” initiative.
There it is. Let’s get out and hope for the best. That is what all the Democrat plans have in common from John Murtha’s pathetically addled concept of establishing an “over the horizon” presence in Okinawa to Joe Biden’s mindboggling unity-through-division scheme.
Murtha’s plan is merely a pell-mell dash for Kuwait and thence to parts West. After getting out he will hope things go well. Biden will repudiate the constitution, divide the country into ethnic cantons, run for Kuwait and points West and then hope for the best.
None are focused on success. All are focused on bugging out and hoping against hope something less than a disaster will result.
One does not have to believe things are going well in Iraq to see that their plans are nothing short of a sure formula of a geopolitical and human tragedy that will equal that of the Vietnam scenario they have tried so hard to recreate.

2. IRAQ WARSIraq Partition Becomes Fashionable Policy In Washington


by Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Washington (UPI) May 02, 2006
Partitioning Iraq has become a new, fashionable policy in Washington, but it would easier said than done. The idea has been gathering steam in various think tanks over the past year and it took center stage this weekend when Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, advocated it.
Biden spelled out his ideas in article with Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in the New York Times Monday.
Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Monday published a CSIS paper criticizing the practicality of the idea. "Iraq does not have a neat set of ethnic dividing lines," he wrote.
"There has never been a meaningful census of Iraq that shows exactly how its Arab Sunnis, Arab Shiites, Kurds and other factions are divided or where they are located. Recent elections have made it clear, however, that its cities and 18 governorates all have significant minorities, and any effort to divide the country would require massive relocations."
Also, partitioning Iraq may well make the United States far more enemies than friends in the Middle East. Partition would mean giving effective independence to the roughly five million Kurds in northern Iraq. But this idea is anathema to neighboring Iran and Turkey, nations that both have large Kurdish minorities.
Relations between Turkey and the Kurds are particularly fraught. At least 30,000 people were killed through the 1990s in n uprising across the Kurdish-populated regions of eastern Turkey. Although Turkey is a member of NATO and traditionally one of America's most loyal and powerful allies in the region, relations have deteriorated in recent years. The Turks are especially incensed at U.S. support of the Kurds in Iraq. And there is widespread popular anger in Turkey over threats to the Turkoman minority in northern Iraq from local Kurdish militias.
Major, moderate, pro-American Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and the Gulf emirates are likely also to be furious at the Untied States if it partitions Iraq. Baghdad was the seat of the Sunni Muslim Caliphate during the most glorious era of its history and Iraq in modern times too has always been seen as Arabs their most powerful military nation and the one that guards the eastern flank of the Arab world. Partitioning Iraq could therefore give an enormous boost to anti-American passions from Morocco on the Atlantic coast to the Gulf States and Oman by the Indian Ocean.
Also, partitioning Iraq, Cordesman argued, could be tantamount to giving the most fierce anti-American and anti-Western Islamists permanent control of the Sunni Muslim minority in central Iraq. The Sunni Muslim-majority regions of Iraq have no oil of their own and are landlocked. They would be isolated impoverished and bitter if a three-way partition is imposed. "Neo-Salafi Sunni Islamist extremist groups with ties to Al Qaida already have come to dominate the Sunni insurgents. If Iraq divides, either they will dominate the Iraqi Arab Sunnis, or Arab Sunni states like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia will be forced to do so," Cordesman wrote.
Nor is there any guarantee that the 15-million-strong Shiite majority in Iraq would stay unified or largely pro-American if partition was enforced. "The Shiite south is also divided, with the Shiites in Basra talking about their own area separate from many other Shiites who would control the oil in the south," Cordesman wrote.
Partitioning Iraq would certainly boost Iran's influence in the Shiite community by removing Kurds and Sunni Muslims as political counterweights within the same society. Iran, furthermore, has been concentrating on building up its influence and support for armed militias in the south, where the oil is.
Partitioning Iraq, far from fostering an atmosphere of peace and stability that would allow the country to develop its enormous oil resources, may lead to so much instability and conflict that Iraqi oil cannot be effectively exploited for years or decades to come, Cordesman argued.
"Once the nation effectively divides, so does its major resource, and in ways that make the territorial losers in non-oil areas effectively dysfunctional," Cordesman wrote. "The central government cannot preside over a divided nation and hope to control oil and the nation's infrastructure and export facilities at the same time. This leaves the 'losers' with little choice other than further conflict."
Cordesman concluded that partitioning Iraq would create "a violent power vacuum in an already dangerous region." This result, he argued, "is not a strategy, it is simply an abdication of both moral responsibility and the national interest."
The White House Monday clearly indicated its position on partition. Spokesman Scott McClellan first noted it was a question for the Iraqis to decide, but added "a partitioned government with regional security forces and a weak central government is something that no Iraqi leader has proposed, and that the Iraqi people have not supported."
"The United States remains firmly committed to the vision for the future of Iraq that was outlined in the United Nations Security Council resolution 1546, which called for a federal, democratic, pluralist and unified Iraq in which there is full respect for political and human rights."
Source: United Press International

posted by Fred Martinez @ 2:02 PM