The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

Now for our regular feature, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages.

Turning first to the Clowns as we usually do, we start with a repeat winner: Sen. Lindsey Grahamcracker, who so frightened himself by coming perilously close to breaking with Tweetie-pie over the latter's abandonment of the Kurds in Syria, that within a couple of days he was in awe at The Great Orange One's leadership and wisdom.

Grahamcracker said Tweetie-pie plans to use US air power over a demilitarized zone occupied by international forces - after, that is, Turkey had completed its ethnic cleansing in northern Syria, creating a Turkish "safe zone," because we must "protect Turkey from elements of the Kurds that they consider to be terrorists," said the man who a couple of days earlier was calling for sanctions against Turkey.

What's more - oh yes, there's more -

You've heard how we are "protecting" the Syrian oil fields in the eastern part of the country, because of course we get to decide what happens to and with them. Grahamcracker says "we are on the verge of a joint venture between us and the Syrian democratic forces" - the very people we just betrayed - "to modernize the oil fields" and give the revenue from them to the Kurds.

"I'm increasingly optimistic," he said to laughter from the circus crowd. "This can turn out very well."

Meanwhile journalist and author Chris Hedges notes that "The withdrawal of Iraq from the northern Kurdish areas following the 1991 Gulf War created a de facto Kurdish state, the third this century. But Turkey remains determined to destroy it. If history is any guide, the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq will be as short-lived as the other autonomous enclaves briefly carved out by the Kurds over the last century."

Oh and as a footnote: The Pentagon is planning to send tanks and armored vehicles into eastern Syria as part of "protecting" those oil fields, which will require troops to operate and maintain the vehicles, as well as more troops to protect the bases from which they operate. At least we have our priorities straight.

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Next up and standing as a symbol of many others, we have James Bagnell of Edmonton, Alberta.

A painted portrait of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg appeared on a section of a downtown "free wall" in the city, an area where people are encouraged to do art or make comments.

Bagnell's "comment" was to deface the portrait by spray painting the message "Stop the Lies. This is Oil Country!!!" over the teen's face.

He was seen by a CBC reporter, who asked him why. "We don't need foreigners coming in and telling us" what to do, was the answer.

Showing that he's up to date with his rightwing memes, Bagnell said climate activists are "intolerant" because they are calling for change and Thunberg is a child who is just "doing what she's told," and doesn't know better but who at the same time "should go back to her country and try to make her country better," where apparently she is a fully mature, informed, and independent agent.

Bagnell, who insisted that of course he's concerned about the environment - I bet some of his best friends are environmentalists - said Thunberg should "Just shut up until you have solutions."

Of course, we do have solutions, primary among which is stopping the use of fossil fuels. It's just that clowns like Bagnell don't want to hear about them.

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Speaking of clowns, here's a collection of them: the Christian Right. That's an oxymoron if ever there was one and with the death of Elijah Cummings, some of them proved that the emphasis clearly should be on moron.

"Christian" fundamentalist Stacey Shiftlett insisted that Trump was sent by God himself to govern the US and that Cummings helped lead a “demonic attempt” to remove Trump from office. "I believe that God had had enough," Shiftlett said, "and God moved.”

Yeah, just like with Ananias and Sapphira.

Meanwhile, "Christian" fundamentalist Dave Daubenmire denounced Cummings as an “enemy of the cross” and went on to say, “I’m glad he’s gone. I bet he’s not pro-choice now. I bet he’s not pro-homo now.”

Radio host Jesse Lee Peterson declared “if you notice, John McCain, he dead. Charles Krauthammer, he dead. And Elijah Cummings, now he dead. They all didn’t like The Great White Hope" - which is how he refers to Tweetie-pie, no joke - "they went against him, they talked about him. Now, they all dead. That’s amazing.”

“Don’t mess with The Great White Hope," Peterson intoned. "You see what happens. Don’t mess with God’s children.”

I swear these people are genuinely sick. Clowns, but sick.

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Mike Pence

I should be outraged by this but the image of it is just too comical.

On October 21, Vice President Mike Not-Worth-a-Farthing addressed the opening ceremony of the 70th International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC.

He made no announcements about national space policy or international cooperation in his remarks, but he did say this:

Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, America is leading in space once again. He believes, as I do, that’s it’s America’s destiny to be the leader amongst nations in our adventure into the great unknown.

Graciously, as befits someone speaking from such a high perch, Not-worth-a-farthing added that our Glorious Leader of Great and Unmatched Wisdom would condescend to allow other "freedom-loving" nations to assist us - "freedom-loving" being defined as sufficiently pro-corporate.

He was reported to have gotten "a lukewarm reaction" from the diverse international audience.

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

We start this time with Five Things Noted in Passing. Every time I pull out five items I think worth noting but which aren’t going to get a lot of time. So let’s go.

A survey released in September by the Commonwealth Fund found that 58 percent of US small business owners, "small" being defined as fewer than 500 employees, support Medicare for All.

As the Commonwealth Fund pointed out in its overview, small businesses, which make up 99 percent of US employers and create 66 percent of new private-sector jobs, have been harder hit by rising health care costs than large corporations, because they don't have the same economic clout in negotiating with the private insurance industry. Which is likely why, when the survey asked small business owners which of eight issues was the biggest challenge facing their business, "Cost of providing health care coverage to employees" came out on top.

So despite the claims of the nanny-nanny naysayers, small businesses have much to gain from a single-payer system - and many of those owners know it.

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Fun fact, from a calculation someone did: If you came to America in 1619 and made $1 million every day for the next 400 years, and put it in a chest in your backyard, today you would have a few hundred million dollars less than Jeff Bezos.

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Here's something to brighten your day.

The UK's first Chick-fil-A is going to close just six months after it opened.

The Oracle, a shopping center located in Reading, England, decided not to extend Chick-fil-A’s lease beyond a six-month pilot period. A spokesperson for the mall said management had decided it was "the right thing to do," following community backlash against the fast food chain’s history of support of anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

Chick-fil-A tried some CYA, insisting that the company never intended for the Reading location to be open for more than a limited time and trying to imply the non-renewal was a mutual decision. The company claimed that having "pop-up locations" was part of a "long term strategy" to "expand our international presence" - but could not provide any plans for any future such "pop-up" sites.

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In the wake of Tweetie-pie's abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria, Frontier Alliance International, a nonprofit Christian organization that provides medical aid in the Middle East, planned to hold an event titled "A Night of Prayer for the Kurds."
However, the event was abruptly canceled by the hotel where it was scheduled to be held.

The administrator of Frontier Alliance International, Charlene Struebing, said hotel staff had said "they’ve gotten a lot of security concerns and they couldn’t accommodate enough security. I think it’s more related to people protesting our event than it was anything we were doing."

Considering that a DC police spokeswoman said that it had not "received any information regarding potential security threats or concerns with this event" and that who the hell would be protesting a prayer event makes me suspect there was another factor at play: the fact that the event to pray for the Kurds was to be at Tweetie-pie's DC hotel.

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A bit late but still definitely worth noting. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in April, for the first time ever, utility-scale renewable energy generated more power than coal. Renewables - hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass - provided 23% of total generation, with coal at 20%.
That may not persist month after month because coal power generation varies seasonally, but the clear trend can't be denied.

246.8 - Lovely little war: Navy SEALs involved in direct combat with Daesh

Lovely little war: Navy SEALs involved in direct combat with Daesh

I'm going to cover this just briefly because I want the central fact to stand alone.

On May 3, a US Navy SEAL named Charlie Keating IV was killed by Daesh militants during what was called an "extremely heavy, extremely intense" firefight with US forces and Kurdish peshmerga troops in northern Iraq about 20 miles north of Mosul.

According to military trainer Matthew VanDyke, at least 20 SEALS assisted the peshmerga in the firefight.

That is, US forces were actively engaged in direct combat with Daesh forces. Exactly how are they not the "boots on the ground" which we were told would not happen?

"Well," the answer comes back from our Nobel Peace Prize president, "they're because I say they're not." We just define them in a way that makes them something else.

Let me just ask my supposedly oh-so-progressive Democratic party friends: If this was President Donald Trump doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same arguments, would you sit still for it? So why the silence now?

I keep saying it because I keep having cause to: Watch this space.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/05/03/us-service-member-killed-in-northern-iraq.html

245.4 - Lovely Little War: Obama sending 200 more troops to Iraq

Lovely Little War: Obama sending 200 more troops to Iraq

And more news from our lovely little war in the Middle East.

The drumbeat to renewed overt US war in Iraq got a bit louder on April 18 with the announcement that Barack "I've got a Nobel Peace Prize and you don't" Obama is sending another 200 US troops to Iraq, troops that will be embedded closer to the front lines.

The additional troops will bring the total to over 4,000 and exceed the previously-declared "cap" on US troops in Iraq, but that presented no problem: Obama simply raised the cap.

There actually are hundreds more US forces in Iraq, but for various reasons they aren't counted in the total. The true number is thought to exceed 5,000.

The new forces are to be embedded as "advisors" - I can never help but remember that embedded "advisors" is how the Indochina War started - at the battalion level, significantly closer to the front lines than the division and brigade levels at which they had been previously.

In addition to the troops, the US is supplying $415 million to the Kurdistan Regional Government and setting up a third long-range rocket artillery unit, and has agreed to employ Apache attack helicopters and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, which are truck-mounted rocket launchers, to support Iraqi forces looking to take Mosul back from Daesh.

Of course, this is not nearly enough for some people. Sen. John McCan't, who never saw a war he didn't want to expand and blood he didn't want to shed, dismisses it as "grudging incrementalism" and says it just proves the need for a vastly increased death - excuse me, I mean military - excuse me, I mean "defense" budget.

I keep telling you to "Watch this space." Because it keeps getting filled in, little by little.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/04/us-sends-200-more-troops-to-help-iraq-fight-islamic-state/
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/us-pledges-more-troops-weapons-money-to-fight-isis-in-iraq
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/04/19/mccain-blasts-obama-s-anti-isis-troop-increase-as-grudging-incr/21346367/

226.4 - Boots on the ground in Syria

Boots on the ground in Syria

I said it last week. I said that, quoting myself,

The Obama administration, the Amazing Mr. O, our Nobel-Peace-Prize winning Prez, is considering a direct combat role, boots on the ground, for US forces in Iraq and Syria.

I reported that, quoting again, his

most senior national security advisers have recommended measures that would move US troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, including positioning some number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria.

Well, just two days after I did that show, last Friday, it came true: The US, lead by our peacenik in residence, is going to deploy Special Operations forces into Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria. Supposedly to "coordinate" but perhaps also to protect the Kurds from more attacks by our supposed ally Turkey, which has pledged to take a more active role in battling ISIS but has spent most of that time bombing the Kurds because it's afraid that if the Kurds get a foothold in northern Syria it may lead to increased demands for autonomy or even independence among Kurds in Turkey.

But the point I wanted to focus on here is the obvious one: These special forces are going into Syria. Boots on the ground. In Syria. Where they were never going to be.

This is so blatant a move that even the New York Times was obliged to call it "a huge shift" in policy.

The White House continued with its bold faced lying about what is going on, insisting it's just a small number of troops while at the same time insisting they will be "an important force multiplier" that will have "a real impact" but without having "a combat mission." And if you can follow the logic of that, you can be a White House representative. Actually you don't have to follow it, you just have to be able to say it with a straight face.

Again, even the New York Times was moved to pointedly note that

the definition of combat has changed several times since the United States began airstrikes against the Islamic State in August 2014.

In fact, the paper notes, "Special Operations forces have conducted several secret missions on the ground" including raids into Syria.

That is, Obama and his minions have been lying to us about fighting on the ground, they are lying to us about fighting on the ground, and they will continue to lie to us about fighting on the ground for as long as they can get away with it, which is likely to be until some sufficiently large numbers of Americans are killed that they can't be brushed away as accidents or isolated tragedies or the results of individual acts of heroism.

Even so, the lies are fraying because they are becoming so obvious. Recently, White House press secretary Josh Earnest, saying something only a presidential press secretary could say with any facade of dignity because they actually have none, asserted that sending Special Forces into Syria  does not represent any change in strategy and, swallowing whatever self-respect he had left, said that troops in Syria don't have a combat mission, but they could be in combat situations. Which strikes me like a burglar saying "I don't have a breaking-and-entering mission, but I could find myself in a breaking-and-entering situation."

But in one sense, the strategy does remain the same. Not the military strategy, but the domestic political strategy of heading off any opposition that can't be brushed off as the product of right-wing rejection of anything Obama does, heading off opposition by making the US role in the carnage as invisible, as seemingly sanitary, as, most importantly, painless for us as possible. The pain suffered by others? Well, they, after all, are "others."

There was some bitter humor to be found in all this. A "senior defense official" quoted by CNN said that Obama has approved a current cap of less than 50 troops in Syria - but more could be sent. So there is a cap. Unless there isn't. Which shouldn't be a surprise, considering this president has blown through his own declared limits on US forces in Iraq, the time frame for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now the promise of no "boots on the ground" in Syria. It seems the only "cap" around here is the one on Donald Trumps' pointed head.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/world/obama-will-send-forces-to-syria-to-help-fight-the-islamic-state.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/world/middleeast/isis-is-target-of-turkish-bombing-raids.html?_r=0
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/30/politics/syria-troops-special-operations-forces/index.html?eref=rss_politics
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article39271314.html

164.5 - Iraq: some comments

Iraq: some comments

I'm going to spend some time, probably the rest of the show, talking about Iraq. It's actually a hard topic to cover on a weekly show like this, because the flow of events can be such that whatever I say will be passe by the time you hear it.

So, instead of some sort of up-to-the-minute overlook, herewith some perhaps disjointed observations on the overall topic of Iraq.

To start with, though, we have to consider what is going on as it is described to you by the mass media: The forces of a radical fundamentalist Muslim group called ISIS - which stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - have swept through a significant portion of western Iraq, as the government army just ran away. Those forces now control the border crossings into Syria and Jordan and are threatening the capital city of Baghdad.

Now, that is in a broad sense true, but it's not entirely true, and the way it's not entirely true is significant: The forces are actually a range of Sunni militant groups, of which ISIS is the most prominent and probably the most numerous. But it is by no means the only. That can be important for what happens in the future and I will come back to it.

It's also not entirely true that the army simply ran away. There was some resistance, but the army in the area was composed of a combination of Sunnis and Shiites. The Sunnis were largely unwilling to go into battle against other Sunnis and the Shiites wound up thinking "why should I risk my life to defend Sunni towns when my Sunni comrades won't do it themselves so I'm getting out of here." And as often happens in war, retreat turned into panicked flight.

But the way to get a grip on real thing that's going on to realize about what's going on can be found by a comparison of two maps.

The first map comes from I think NBC and it displays where the militants have made their military gains in these weeks.

The second map displays the outcome of the Iraqi parliamentary elections in 2010. The dark blue areas were won by Sunni political parties; the yellow areas were won by Kurdish political parties; the green areas were won by Shiite political parties; and the light blue areas were won by Sunni-Shiite coalition political parties. The little light blue area sort of sticking up, almost surrounded by dark blue, is Baghdad.

Comparing those two maps tells a real story. All of the militant gains have come in heavily, even overwhelmingly, Sunni areas.

The fact is, we are not seeing some outside force sweeping a new caliphate into existence, we are seeing a Sunni uprising against a Shiite-dominated, highly sectarian government in Baghdad.

Our fundamental failure in understanding Iraq has been our refusal to recognize the extremely deep and sharply sectarian divisions that exist and have existed all along. Iraq is a sort of artificial nation, one whose borders were set by the League of Nations in 1921 for the benefit of western nations and without regard either to natural, ethnic, or cultural boundaries.

Our federal government shows some signs of recognition of this, as usual, too little too late, but there are reports that US is "increasingly exasperated" with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who over the past three years, since US troops pulled out, has stopped doing all the things that lead to the cooling of sectarian tensions, the reduction in sectarian violence.

Nouri al-Maliki

He stopping providing payments to Sunni tribes, stopped providing patronage to Sunni groups while favoring Shiite ones. He started persecuting Sunni politicians, jailing them, even killing them through death squads.

It's not that this is a surprise or previously unknown. Over a year ago, in the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I warned that "al-Maliki is consolidating his personal power on the road toward a dictatorship."

Two months after that, I described how Maliki, had been "engaging in an increasing crackdown on political opponents," including police raids on peaceful Sunni protest encampments.

And in January of this year, I noted the violent arrest of a Sunni member of parliament on bogus terrorism charges and the violent destruction of the lrest of those encampments. At that time, I said:

[T]here has indeed been a resurgence of violence in Iraq, including in the capital of Baghdad. Over 8,000 people were been killed in sectarian violence in Iraq in 2013, the highest total since 2008. But blunderbuss tactics such as Maliki is employing are less likely to bring an end to such violence than they are to intensify it, as other Sunnis take up arms....

As negotiations between government officials on the one hand and Anbar provincial council members and tribal sheikhs on the other fail, Iraq stands now on the edge of a renewal of outright civil war.

Fareed Zakaria, a CNN journalist who never found an international situation he couldn't grossly oversimplify, still did manage to make a solid point when he said that what's happening now in Iraq

was inevitable in the sense it was predictable because we’ve seen this movie before. This is exactly what happened in '04, '05, and '06 when the Shia government in Iraq essentially started persecuting the Sunnis, purging them from office, disempowering them in various ways, and the Sunnis started fueling and funding insurgency. That's what created the civil war in Iraq.

And now, years later, doing the same damn things is leading to the same damn result: creating another civil war.

But of course, it's only now, now with disaster (from our point of view) at the door, only now we are pressing Maliki to make some political overtures to the Sunnis in order to create political opposition to ISIS among the Sunnis. For his part, Maliki is stalling, posturing, and pontificating, figuring that if things get bad enough, we will save his butt.

Meanwhile, while US is flying 30 or more warplane or drone missions over Iraq daily, they are merely watching the militant advance and military officials even directly deny rumors of a single drone strike.

As Time mag notes,

the U.S. military generally "sends messages" by attacking. Now it is sending messages by not attacking. And its target this time around isn’t the enemy, but its purported ally running the country.

Bluntly put, the US is dragging its feet about defending Malaki’s government, taking what Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, called "a measured, deliberate approach to help us and the Iraqis get better eyes on the situation." He added that the teams going to Iraq "will provide their findings within the next two to three weeks," and after getting and considering those reports the brass will decide what to do next. The whole purpose is to force Maliki to make concessions as a condition for expanded US assistance.

In other words, the US and Maliki are playing a sort of political chicken. The questions are who blinks first and how many die both before and after that time.

Because people are dying. The UN estimates that more than 1,000 people have been killed in Iraq in June, a figure the UN human rights office said "should be viewed very much as a minimum." Seventy-five percent of the dead were civilians.

And it may get a good deal worse. Clear signs of a return to sectarian reprisal killings are appearing in Baghdad similar to the dark days of 2006-07 when most every morning revealed victims, sometimes dozens of victims, murdered in the night for the crime of believing in the wrong version of Islam.

So what happens now? First, it's safe to say that the Sunni forces will not have it so easy from here on out, especially if they stand by their declared (at least by ISIS) plans not only to take Baghdad but to advance to Shiite holy cities such as Najaf. If they do, they are going to be finding themselves up against well-armed, well-trained Shiite militias with combat experience, who will be defending, in essence, their own turf, not someone else's.

There's another issue about those Sunni militants, which is that ISIS has a crucial weakness. As I noted at the top, ISIS is the most prominent and very likely the largest of the various Sunni groups - but with maybe 8000-10,000 fighters in Iraq, ISIS simply does not have the numbers to take and hold multiple urban centers. It is totally reliant on its support from other Sunni groups and from the local population, which still sees them as the answer to repression by the Shiite-dominated central government.

But ISIS has a record of violence, extremism, absolutism, and ruthlessness such that even al-Qaeda disavowed them and in Syria they are as busy fighting other rebel groups as they are Assad's forces. ISIS has repeatedly gained and then lost local support and it's easy to imagine the same thing happening in Iraq. So there is a real question of how long the Sunni militant coalition, for lack of a better term, can stay together.

That's where the hope for a political settlement lies, in that this is not a battle of Iraq against an invading army of fanatics, but a battle of politically-entrenched Shiites versus disaffected Sunnis, Sunnis who could, the thinking goes, be brought back into the fold with some concessions, some gestures in their direction.

My own sense, however, is that the US belief that a new power-sharing agreement in Baghdad would soothe the anger among the Sunnis is hopelessly naive. Because if once bitten is twice shy, what is twice bitten? As Zakaria said, we've seen this movie before. Why would Sunnis believe any promises from Maliki or his government about a new power-sharing agreement? Why should they believe them?

What may come out of this - after the bloodshed that always seems to be required in such matters before people come to their senses - is what others have predicted, even advocated, before: an Iraq that exists less as a nation than as a confederation of three Iraqs: one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Kurdish.

I know not talked about the Kurds. They are an important part in what happens to Iraq in the future and deserve a full consideration, which I have not given them here. But I am going to have to save that for another day.

Rather, I'm going to wrap up by saying that, who knows, maybe things will work out in Iraq because we have evidence that miracles do happen.

Last week, someone said this about Iraq:

Not one more life. Not one more dollar, not one more airplane, not one more bullet, not one more Marine, not one more arm or leg or eye. Not one more. This must end now. From the beginning, most people on the left were against going into Iraq. I wasn’t.... Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have.

The person who said that was Glenn Beck.

Sources cited in links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iraq
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/16/iraq-badlands-might-be-inevitable/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/03/left-side-of-aisle-101-part-4.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2013/05/left-side-of-aisle-107-part-5.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/01/1403-bad-news-iraq.html
http://time.com/2919534/pentagon-sending-a-message-to-iraq-by-dragging-its-boots/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/24/iraq-deaths_n_5525024.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/middleeast/sectarian-violence-appears-to-spread-to-streets-of-baghdad.html
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/16/opinion/lister-isis-iraq/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/24/kurd-leader-iraq_n_5526344.html
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/06/17/leery-and-battle-tested-kurds-watch-as-isis-routs-iraqi-army/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/17/glenn-beck-iraq-war_n_5505424.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

Interesting footnote to the preceding, Number 1

According to Monday Morning (Lebanon) for the week of September 6, Falah Mustafa, head of foreign relations on the Kurdistan Ministers Council, has rejected a statement from the Iraqi Oil Ministry,

which described as illegal an agreement recently signed between the regional government and a German energy firm.

“We will not wait on orders from a ministry that has no production and is as unsuccessful as the Oil Ministry of Iraq, which wasted billions of dollars without providing any electricity and energy services during all the past years”,

Mustafa said.

Talks on the allocation of Iraq’s natural resources are deadlocked, and Baghdad refuses to recognize contracts which the Kurdish regional government, based in the northern city of Arbil, has signed with foreign oil companies.

A lack of recognition which the regional government appears determined to ignore. It continues to amaze me how much of the mainstream coverage of events in Iraq refers to the Sunni-Shiite divide without even mentioning the Kurds and their always-fragile relations with the central government.

Happy half-anniversary

Updated Updated again Today is September 7. Today, that is, marks six months since the elections in Iraq and there is still no government. And no real expectation that there will be one soon. As if often true, the map tells the tale.

The March 7 elections were inconclusive except in demonstrating the clear and strong ethnic divisions that still exist in Iraq. Iraqiya, a largely secular coalition headed by Iyad Allawi, a Shiite and a former former prime minister, but which draws its main support from the predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq, won 91 seats. That group was closely trailed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-led State of Law grouping, which got 89. The Iraqi National Alliance, or INA, which is also Shiite, won 70 seats and Kurdish parties obtained 57, with most of those, 43, going to the Kurdistan Alliance. If the very fact that you can identify major political groupings in terms of ethnicity and religion doesn't make the point, the map clearly shows just how marked those divisions are, just how ethnically segregated Iraq is.

Note that as a result of the scattered outcome, there is only a single combination of two groupings that would hold a majority of 163 seats in the 325-seat parliament: Allawi's plus Maliki's. Now consider first that the two men are bitter rivals. Then consider that Allawi insists that, having gotten the most seats, he should be allowed to form a government (with himself as prime minister) but Maliki has refused to step aside and appears determined to remain PM. Consider next that each has not only a domestic but also a foreign power base: Maliki is backed by Iran and Allawi by most Arab states. And consider finally that while the two sides have engaged in supposed negotiations about forming a coalition government, that appears to be largely for show and that relations are so hostile that in the last week of August Iraqiya broke off negotiations for a few days, demanding an apology from Maliki for calling it a "Sunnite" bloc in a TV interview.

Add to that bath of testosterone reports of fractures within the other Shiite grouping, the INA, and fractures within those fractures, and you have a six-month impasse

[t]hat has held up the appointment of other key officials [besides prime minister] and the seating of the government. Parliament has only met once, in June, since the election.

You also have a population that increasingly wonders why it bothered voting as conditions deteriorate. Unemployment is estimated at anywhere from 15 to 30 percent. There have been riots and even bloodshed over severe shortages of electricity as people complain they are getting one hour of electricity every five hours, or maybe two hours out of six.

US and Iraqi officials insist production of electricity has improved and blame the shortages on people snapping up power-hungry consumer goods, in effect arguing the problem exists only because things are so much better in other ways. The claims about electricity generation, however, are bogus because they are making a false comparison, comparing today with right after the 2003 invasion - that is, right after Iraq had experienced a decade of crippling economic sanctions following a war in which its infrastructure had been a primary target. It's true that generating capacity in now nearly double what it was in 2003 - but it is still one-third below where it was in 1990, even as demand has increased.

An additional consideration that people often forget is that when the electricity goes down, so do water treatment plants, increasing the risk of spreading disease. That is a real challenge to a health care system which the ICRC described in July as "still struggling to cope." There are only half as many doctors in Iraq now as there were in the 1990s and the shortage of nurses is even worse.

While health-care facilities have been rebuilt in most urban centres, facilities in rural and remote areas remain in dire condition. Facilities already coping with a poor supply of electricity or water frequently also have to deal with unreliable sewage or air-cooling systems and with inadequate solid-waste disposal. Equipment is often old and poorly maintained, and sometimes is not operated correctly. ...

Frequently, minimum standards of nursing, sterilization and waste management are not respected owing to a lack of resources. ... The number of beds in specialized services such as intensive care and dialysis units is insufficient, and shortages of trained nurses and paramedical staff oblige hospitals to rely on relatives to provide the patients with care.

So while it can be said that things have improved since 2003, that is scant comfort. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, human rights consultant Michael Otterman said that

there are currently 4.5 million displaced Iraqis languishing on the outskirts of Iraqi cities and scattered throughout nearby Jordan and Syria. This represents the largest urban refugee crisis in the world.

Thousands more are fleeing to Syria every week, many with scant hope of ever returning home. (Link via Juan Cole.) One of those refugees, a pharmacist named Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi, told Medea Benjamin that

I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college.... I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything - electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, Otterman writes, in Iraq itself

basic services are still in disarray. According to the Pentagon, only 20 percent of the population of Iraq has access to sanitation, 30 percent to health services, 45 percent to potable water, and only 50 percent to more than 12 hours of electricity per day.

And yes, violence is increasing. Assassinations are on the rise, and despite the best PR efforts by the US military, the agency which earlier famously said "we don't do body counts" and openly admitted to making no attempt to track civilian casualties, to minimize the deaths by dismissing the "unofficial" figures coming from Iraqi government agencies in favor of its own "trusted" but unspecified sources, everyone knows it. In fact,

rarely a day goes by without some loss of life, and spectacular attacks such as a nationwide onslaught of bombings and shootings [in late August] that killed 56 people still happen with disturbing regularity.

And while Veep Joe Biteme brags that it's "much safer" in Iraq now, Nuri Hadi, an Iraqi political analyst, properly reminds us that

[t]he recent violence in Iraq, to some extent, looks less devastating mainly because the bloodshed peak during 2006 to 2007 was so hellish and notorious.

Even the New York Times was moved to note that security has "improved"

to levels that many of those who proclaim this war over would consider murderously dangerous in their own countries.

To make it worse, Hadi noted that

we have to admit that a large part of the insurgent groups in Iraq are directly or indirectly linked to political parties participating in the political process,

bringing us right back to the same political impasse, continuing in large part because whether out of desire to advance its own interests or fear of the consequences of another grouping advancing theirs (or both), no faction can see a real advantage in any available compromise.

Today, AFP is reporting that Maliki has gained the upper hand in his drive to keep his position by having won the support of the US, which wants to avoid further delay in establishing a governing coalition and has convinced almost all the Arab states to withdraw their support of Allawi. If that's true, it would be an ironic development because remember, the main foreign backer of Maliki is Iran - so this would put the US and Iran on the same side. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

An event that could be seen as confirmation of that report is that yesterday, a senior official of the Iraqiya coalition said that

Iraqis face two choices: An Iraqi government on the basis of electoral rights or a pro-Iranian government.

That is, we get to form the government or Iran is in charge. Which could easily be read as a last-ditch attempt to head off a de facto US-Iran united front on behalf of Maliki. (Sidebar: The National Council of Resistance of Iran, from where the above quote comes, is a sort of Iranian equivalent of Ahmed Chalabi's notorious Iraqi National Congress except that it wasn't invented by the Rendon Group. Even so, I have no reason to doubt they quoted the official accurately since it serves their purpose.)

However, the only source the AFP cites is an unnamed "senior State of Law official" who makes assertions about what Joe Biteme and Kurdish regional president Massud Barzani told Maliki in private, all of which assertions work to the advantage of Maliki. And at about the same time as the AFP article, Reuters was reporting that

[a] resolution to the impasse appears as distant as ever

as both inter- and intra-party squabbles and splits complicate any attempts at a solution with sufficiently wide acceptance. The article lays out several different scenarios of how things could develop, involving several different personalities, some of which are clearly more likely than others and several of which involve Maliki being dumped by his own coalition so that it can gain the support necessary to form the government.

In the end, few expect the Shi'ite majority to sacrifice their unity. The power Shi'ites gained after the fall of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein is simply too precious.

The only question may be just what form that unity will take and just who will be the unifier. But despite that, there is still another hurdle: Remember that even combined, the two Shiite blocs have 159 seats: still four short of a majority. In Iraq's fractured political (and ethnic) landscape, the idea of a minority government is laughable. So someone is going to have to make up that difference. And whoever that is will have real bargaining power in a future government. A State of Law/INA government could try to gain those seats either by getting the Kurds on board or by picking up the necessary support from one of the minor parties holding the 18 seats the four big blocs do not.

But forming a government without Iraqiya, that is, establishing a ruling coalition created with the support of both the US and Iran which effectively excludes the Sunnis and which oversees a still-broken, still-suffering, still-violent nation is a sure recipe for pushing Iraq back over the abyss of civil war. Forming a government without the Kurds would simply promote a fracturing along different lines. And forming a government without the Shiite blocs, while mathematically possible, is unthinkable - especially as Shiites are the majority of the population and control the most seats. It's another recipe for disaster.

And once again we're back to the same impasse. Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds all must be part of a new government. And there is no clear arrangement that would not involve a hell of a lot of hard swallowing on the part of at least some of them. I have been both right and wrong often enough before to advance predictions with some trepidation, but I can't help but fear that six months may just be the opening act.

Ghassan Attiyah, a commentator and political scientist, lamented "Maybe Iraq is finished." I want to argue that he is clearly too pessimistic, but right now, I can't.

Footnote: What, you ask, would be the US's preferred outcome because even though Iraq is "sovereign" everyone knows damn well it isn't? As the Reuters article suggests, it would be a coalition of Iraqiya, State of Law, and the Kurds, with Maliki as PM and Allawi in some prominent role. Assuming all the Kurdish groupings joined in, the coalition would have 237 seats, a comfortable majority. One reason for this preference is that this arrangement excludes the INA, which includes the supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, who are regarded as "unpredictgable" and who

are fiercely opposed to the U.S. presence, and might demand either a speedier pullout or guarantees U.S. forces are not allowed to remain beyond their end-2011 withdrawal date.

Oh, and one other thing:

Oil majors investing in Iraq's oilfields may also prefer this solution - the Sadrists are the main critics of contracts the companies signed with the outgoing government.

But that can't be important because the war was never about oil. Was it?

Updated with some more about refugees.

Updated again to include Attiyah's observation and as long as I was doing an update, to properly identify Iyad Allawi as being a former prime minister of Iraq.

But what about the elections?

The Iraqi provincial elections scheduled for March 7 were originally envisioned as a a clear step on the high road to true democracy in Iraq. Instead they have become the symbol of just how fragile both the political process and the by-comparison-with-previous-years stability are in a nation still defined by its internal divisions.

Even the date itself expresses that: By Iraq's constitution, the elections were supposed to be held no later than January 31. But as political wrangling and arguing over the arrangements chewed up month after month on the calendar, that date became impossible to meet - and so the Constitution was ignored. As an indication of just much this has been "make it up as you go along," the elections are just eight days before the end of this parliament's term, so some kind of ad hoc caretaker government will have to be cobbled together until a new governing coalition can be assembled.

The campaign itself - the official start of which was delayed by five days because of legal issues about candidates' eligibility - has been marked by violence.

At least two candidates have been killed. Bombings have struck at least four party headquarters in Baghdad, as well as a candidate’s home in Ramadi. In Maysan, in southern Iraq, gunmen opened fire on a candidate hanging posters for Ahrar, a party led by a cleric who favors a secular democracy, killing one of the candidate’s aides....

But overshadowing even the violence has been the issue of Baathism - or, more properly, the single-minded focus of the campaign of the ruling Shiite coalition on the supposed (and basically mythical) threat of its return. Iraqi journalists with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) expressed how

[a] quick study of the election posters recently plastered up along a street in downtown Baghdad gives an insight into the political campaign agenda ahead of a nationwide ballot on March 7.

In the space of a city block, campaign banners read, "There is no place for Baathists", "Revenge to the Baathists who mistreated you", and "No return of the Baathist criminals". ...

Only one poster along the road promises something different. "We will work to solve the unemployment problem", proclaims a lonely placard nearly lost on a wall plastered with strident rhetoric.

The prevalence of anti-Baathist sloganeering is not confined to the streets. Television, radio and print media have run daily coverage of the campaigns against the previous regime’s party, and prominent politicians have engaged in one-upmanship over who has the hardest line against the party....

The campaign could be seen as a particularly strident combination of "law and order" (or lawn ordure, if you prefer) and "the terrorists are coming!" campaigns in the US and one that at least some Iraqis see as merely an attempt to distract from the government's failure to deliver on its promises - but it's one which has succeeded in its goal of frightening and so mobilizing pro-government Shiite voters.

There are other effects which are more immediate and more than merely rhetorical: The anti-Baathist campaign was the direct source and justification for the decision by the Accountability and Justice Commission to ban over 500 candidates from the parliamentary elections, most of them on the grounds of a claim they had some connection to Saddam Hussein's old, now illegal, Baath Party.

Some 171 appealed their exclusion. On February 3, an appeals court overturned the decision of the Commission, saying there was not enough time to determine the facts before the election. However, just two days later, under enormous political pressure from both the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and, it appears, the US, it began hearing appeals. Only 26 candidates ultimately prevailed, leaving 145 out. Among the excluded, notably, were Saleh al-Mutlaq and Dhafir al-Ani, two leading candidates of the Iraqiya list, a coalition of Sunni parties. Both Mutlaq and Ani are secular Sunnis and both are current members of Parliament.

So strident is the anti-Baathist campaign that when US officials expressed concern about the election situation, fearing that if it appeared illegitimate to Sunnis it could reawaken large-scale sectarian violence, the main Shiite bloc, the National Iraqi Alliance,

accused the United States of interfering in Iraqi domestic politics and of plotting to bring the Baath Party back into prominence as the "neo-Baath,"

reports Juan Cole.

The court's decision essentially endorsing the Commission's findings lead to a boycott of the election by Mutlaq's Iraqi National Dialogue Front. That development, coupled with the informal agreement between the two main (and supposedly competing) Shiite blocs that they will unite in forming a new government after the election, has lead to the understandable - and justifiable - suspicion among Sunnis that the Commission had acted as it did in order to blunt the potential influence of the Iraqiya list and maintain Shiite dominance in the government.

Adding to the suspicion is the fact that the head of the Accountability and Justice Commission is Iraq's very own Comeback Kid: Ahmed Chalabi.

Still,

Sunnis and many secularists in the Shiite community are so eager to overturn the dominance of the Shiite religious parties that have controlled Iraq's government for five years that it is unclear whether Mutlak's boycott call will have weight with many people.

Juan Cole, for his part, suggests that a boycott would not have the same "disastrous" effects as the boycott of national elections in January of 2005 did.

I don't think that catastrophe can now be repeated[, he said]. ... The current elections instead have Iraqi provinces as the electoral unit. Thus, the largely Sunni provinces of al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Ninevah will return a lot of Sunni members of parliament even with a boycott (the resulting members of parliament just would not represent that many people).

I'm not as sanguine about this as Professor Cole because the issue isn't really the number of Sunni members of Parliament but the public sense - especially among Sunnis - of the legitimacy of the elections, which in this case could be affected more by turnout than by results. At the same time, the decision of the Iraqiya coalition to proceed with campaigning likely indicates the idea of a boycott is not catching on.

Even so, as recently as last fall, a time when there was still hope that the elections could be held in January, there were some new political alliances claiming to favor nationalist agendas, raising the hope that, in the words of an IWPR report from the time, "the country may be inching away from sectarian politics."

That hope has been shown to be false, as the New York Times reported from Nineveh earlier this month.

What is striking is how faithfully Iraqis expect to vote by identity, despite campaign appeals to national unity.

Issues - basic services, economic development, security - all seem to stem from identity as much as politics. “First ethnicity, second political party,” was how the leading Kurdish official here, Khasro Goran, put it.

The new Parliament will include 31 members from Nineveh, and Mr. Goran expects the main national Kurdish coalition to win 10 seats - based not on polls, but on the estimated percentage of Kurds in the province.

And as the ruling forces in the Iraqi government continue to fan the flames of fear in their campaign to maintain their dominance, those ethnic divisions intensify and the shadow of resurgent violence spreads. This from the Washington Post this past Wednesday.

The Mashhadani family, which is Sunni, has lived in Hurriyah[, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in northwest Baghdad,] for 40 years, save two years when family members were forced to flee. ...

On Jan. 23, Omar Mashhadani sat on a flimsy mattress in his living room, waiting to watch a soccer game on television. There was a knock at the door.

When Omar answered, he was shot at least three times.

His brother, Jassim, and his mother, Nadima Taha Yasseen, rushed toward the front door. Omar limped into his brother's arms, the Iraqi flag on his green jersey soaked in blood.

No one came to the family's aid. No one helped load Omar into the minibus that took him to the hospital. No men came to pay condolences after he died last month; they were too afraid to openly mourn his death.

His name - Omar - marked him as Sunni. Marked him, apparently, for murder.

It was only one killing[, the Post said,] but it unleashed the demons of a bitter and perhaps unfinished past. ...

The death and the aftermath were reminiscent of the prelude to the sectarian war, which began in late 2005 with a smattering of killings and threats and culminated with 100 bodies a day being dumped in the streets of the capital. With the imminent departure of American forces and fierce competition for power ahead of general elections on March 7, many here say sectarian strife is reigniting.

A senior U.S. military official who has spent years in Iraq said he fears that as the drawdown begins, American forces are leaving behind many of the same conditions that preceded the sectarian war.

"All we're doing is setting the clock back to 2005," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a stark assessment.

As the Post observes, "the violence goes both ways": Note that several of the attacks I mentioned on Friday were against Shiite pilgrims on their way to Karbala. But the execution-style killing of Omar Mashhadani has a special resonance. Even more than the bombings of pilgrims, it has the rank smell of what David Neiwert adroitly (if not altogether originally) labels "eliminationism." It says in a special way, a very personal way, that you are "other." That "you are not welcome here." That even though you have lived here for decades, you do not belong. You are "not us."

[T]hrough the narrow streets, in the low-slung homes that were cleansed of Sunnis before a few trickled back, the fear is palpable. Sectarian graffiti sprayed on walls in 2006 and 2007 have been scrubbed or scribbled out. But now, new tags are appearing. At one Sunni mosque, security forces quickly removed a spray-painted message.

"Death to Baathists and Wahhabis," it said, referring to Saddam Hussein loyalists and followers of a fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam. Days later, another was sprayed across the wall. The message was clear: "Death to Sunnis."

The elections will happen on schedule. The votes will be counted, the winners declared, and after a fair amount of complaining, wrangling, maneuvering, and accusing, a new government will emerge. Iraq will go on. But none of it will remove the meaning of that graffiti or head off more of the same, the graffiti of gunfire, tit for tat, retaliation to counter-retaliation to counter-counter retaliation. Indeed, by its embrace of fear of the dark threat of the "other" as a campaign tactic, Maliki and his supporters have pushed the country onto a dangerous path.

Let's be as generous as we can and suppose that it was just a campaign tactic, one solely intended to win votes rather than to produce tangible actions. If that's true, if they want to contain the fear and forego the force, they will need to say so, clearly and explicitly. And soon.

If they don't, we will know their true intent.

Ok, so? Yes? Iraq?

During the health care debate, those of us who favored actual national health care were often admonished to not let the "perfect" be the enemy of the "good." The rejoinder was that neither should we use "supposedly better" as a cover for "still bad."

That same answer applies to Iraq. Things are "better" than they were but they are "still bad." First, it should be acknowledged that

2009 was characterized by the lowest levels of violence in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

(Link via Newshoggers.)

This was due to a combination of factors, including the Anbar Awakening and the related Sons of Iraq movement, the dismantling of Shiite militias, and Iran's reduction in support to militants. None of which, I can't help but note, had anything to do with the "surge" - no, not even the Anbar Awakening, which was prompted by Sunnis getting fed up with the brutality of the self-proclaimed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia née al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had always been seen as every bit as much of an outsider as the US. Nonetheless and whatever the combination of causes, the result has been an end to large-scale fighting that in turn has led to almost a 50% drop in deaths in 2009 as compared to 2008.

However,

Iraq has more casualties from terrorist attacks than any other country in the world.

In 2009, Iraq Body Count recorded an average of 13 deaths a day from such attacks, which continue to occur in all parts of the country and most especially in areas with mixed populations. The idea that ethnic and religious tensions are largely a thing of the past is true only to the extent that Iraq has been ethnically cleansed - more accurately, ethnically segregated - and the various ethnic and religious groupings simply have less contact than they used to.

Then add this: Maplecroft is a company that provides risk analyses for corporations that wish to do business in line with the UN's Principles for Responsible Investment. As part of that, it issues an annual "Terrorism Risk Index," ranking nations based on a combination of the likelihood of terrorist incidents and the likelihood of them causing mass casualties.

According to their listing, Iraq is the place in the world where you are most at risk of a terrorist strike. (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Lebanon round out the top five.)

According to the TRI[, the company says,] even though the terrorist situation in Iraq has improved, the frequency, scale and human impact of attacks still makes it the most extreme risk country for terrorism, with nearly 4,500 civilians killed in 2009.

So yes, things are "better" - but then again, skin cancer is "better" than lung cancer but that doesn't mean it's a desirable or healthy state.

This year has started off offering more of the same. Juan Cole reports that Iraqi officials say that

196 non-insurgent Iraqis were killed in political violence in January, 135 of them civilians and the others police or soldiers. ... The total of wounded this January was 782, 620 of them civilians.

That is a total which February is on track to meet or pass.

February 1: At least 56 people were killed and 144 wounded in Baghdad by a female suicide bomber targeting Shiites taking part in an annual religious pilgrimage to Karbala. She entered a tent where women pilgrims could get water and set off the explosive before she could be checked.

The attack was described as one "that Iraqi officials had predicted but could not stop,"

underscoring the ability of insurgents to outmaneuver the country’s security forces, seemingly at will.

Two more attacks - one with a grenade, another with a roadside bomb - later struck still more pilgrims in southern Baghdad, wounding 16.

February 3: More than a score of people were killed and more than 100 wounded in Karbala in another bombing aimed at the Shiite pilgrims arriving in the city. As is often true, the details surrounding the blast are unclear; only the dead are a certainty.

Local officials said the attacker drove a motorcycle, pulling a cart laden with explosives, and detonated the bomb by remote control after parking in a crowded area. However, an official at the Interior Ministry said that it was a suicide bombing, with the attacker steering a minibus rigged with explosives into a crowd....

Several smaller attacks were also directed at pilgrims this week. In Baghdad ... three separate bombings killed one pilgrim and wounded nine, according to security officials.

In Karbala ... militants attached a bomb to a car belonging to a military official and killed three people, according to the officials. Thirteen pilgrims were wounded.

February 10: A "frequently-attacked" oil pipeline in Rashidiya, just north of Baghdad, was bombed again, cutting oil production at the Dora refinery in the capital by half. It was unclear when the pipeline would be fixed.

Also on Wednesday, a roadside bomb killed two policemen and wounded four west of Baghdad, the police said.

February 16: A string of bombs targeting Iraqi army patrols and police around Mosul killed at least four people.

February 17: Reuters reported that

[f]our Christians have been killed in the last four days by gunmen in Iraq's turbulent north, weeks ahead of an election in which the minority group's vote could be a factor in a Kurd-Arab tussle for power.

Bombings and shootings are recorded almost daily in the violent northern city of Mosul, where a struggle for territory and power between Arabs and Kurds has hampered effective policing and been exploited by al Qaeda. ...

With Iraq's March 7 parliamentary vote looming, a spike in attacks against Christians could be a sign of voter intimidation by factions in the bitter Kurd-Arab dispute, or another attempt by al Qaeda to derail the election.

While some of the violence as the election approaches could be chalked up to the latter cause, in this case I think it unlikely: Tensions remain high in the north of Iraq, where Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish interests and communities mingle - and attacking a minority group seems a poor way to intimidate the majority into abandoning the elections. Either factional intimidation or straightforward, non-election-related ethnic violence - which many fear is returning after having subsided for a time - seems considerably more likely both here and in many of the other cases. Contrary to the tendency of the US media, not every drop of blood shed in Iraq should be attributed to al-Qaeda.

(Sidebar: Yes, I know most Kurds are Sunni Muslim but they largely think of themselves as "Kurdish" rather than "Sunni" and so are a separate community with their own interests that may and do diverge from those of Sunni Arabs in Iraq.)

February 18: Two dozen people were wounded by a car bomb near a police building in Mosul.

Also on February 18: At least 13 people were killed and more than two dozen wounded when a suicide bomber struck a police checkpoint near government offices in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. As the BBC noted,

[u]ntil 2007, the Sunni insurgency was strong in Anbar province.

Local Sunni tribes and their followers then turned against the militants and began co-operating with the Iraqi government and US forces.

But after a period of relative calm, the province is again suffering from mounting violence.

But hey, why should any of that concern us? That would only detract from the "Roaring Success!" meme of what is now officially "Operation New Dawn" - disturbingly enough, also the name of the operation that pretty much leveled Fallujah in 2004 - as US forces in Iraq drop below 100,000 for the first time since the invasion. I mean, after all, only six Americans were killed in Iraq in all of 2010!

And that's the only thing that really matters, yes?

Now we are six

And as clever as clever, or so we tell ourselves.

Last Thursday, of course, marked the sixth anniversary of the insane, murderous, maddening, invasion of Iraq. It was also a crappy week for me personally (and not only for reasons already mentioned), but I still feel a sense of failure for not having mentioned it at the right time. In one rather skewed way, I suppose that could be regarded as fitting, since pretty much everything about the war has been and still is a failure and wrong. Wrong logically, ethically, morally, politically, practically, and pretty much every other relevant -ly.

But wait, how can that be? How can that be true in the face of what we see and hear every single day in the media, every single time the word "Iraq" is breathed by any of our oh-so devoted officials and oh-so wise pundits, which is that We've won! Victory! Or, if you prefer the more modest version, Success! Who am I to blow against the wind? Where do I get off talking about "wrong?"

Well, the fact is that Iraq today remains what it has been pretty much since our invasion: a nation devastated by death and in a state of economic collapse. Start with the fact that the "official" unemployment rate of 18% soars to 28% if you include part-time workers who want full-time work, according to the Iraq Labour Force Analysis report released by the UN in January.

Among its findings: 28% of males ages 15 to 29 are unemployed, 17% of women have jobs, and most of the 450,000 Iraqis entering the job market this year won't find work "without a concerted effort to boost the private sector."

And that situation could easily get worse due to the way oil prices fell over the last year, as oil provides 90% of Iraq's income. As one direct result of lower oil prices, Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani has frozen the hiring of 66,000 new members of the security forces - and it also casts grave doubt on the ability of the government to carry though on a promise to find civilian employment for some 100,000 Sunni insurgents who laid down their arms.

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross marked the anniversary of the invasion by releasing a statement saying that "millions of civilians are still facing hardship every day."

Even with improvements in the security situation[, the agency said in a separate report,] basic services such as water, electricity and medical care still cannot meet the needs of the population. Job opportunities are scarce and salaries are not enough to live on. For an average Iraqi earning around 70 US dollars per month, prices of goods are too high. In addition, such a person often has no access to health care. Many children, rather than go to school, try to support their families by walking between rows of cars to sell items such as cigarettes, fruit or sweets to drivers stuck in the capital's traffic jams.

On March 8, Oxfam released the results of a survey of Iraqi women which reflected and to some extent quantified that hard reality, revealing that a majority of those surveyed reported that

access to most services, including drinking water and electricity, was worse or the same in mid-2008 as it was in 2006 when levels of insecurity in Iraq were higher. A quarter of the women surveyed - 24 per cent - had no access to clean water. Nearly half of those who did have access to water - 48 per cent - said it wasn’t suitable for drinking.

And nearly 70% said access to water either had not improved or had even gotten worse over the past two years. In fact, even the Iraqi Environment Ministry admits that as of now, 36% of Baghdad's water supply is not safe to drink - and in a bad month that can rise to 90%.

Nearly half of those surveyed by Oxfam said their income had dropped since 2006 and another 30% said it was no better. (Amnesty International said a year ago that "more than four in 10 [Iraqis] live on less than a dollar a day.") Nearly half also said that access to quality healthcare had become more difficult. A third of those surveyed said they had electricity for three hours or less a day and two-thirds had it for no more than six hours a day; over 80% said that was either worse or no better than two years earlier.

Looking at the results, Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs declared that "a whole generation of Iraqis are at risk."

And there is not a great deal of conviction among Iraqis that this is going to change any time soon.

Many Iraqis are sceptical that local governments will deliver on their promises, despite improvements in security that have raised expectations of a better life[, reported the Institute for War & Peace Reporting on March 11].

Iraqis interviewed by IWPR in several provinces listed runaway unemployment, entrenched corruption and faltering reconstruction as the biggest challenges ahead. Having lived in survival mode for years, many said they were eager to see development - but had little hope that provincial leaders elected a month ago would deliver it.

Which is likely a wise expectation, since in its most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, Transparency International, a group focused on government and economic corruption, lists Iraq as being essentially tied with Burma as the second most corrupt nation on Earth, exceeded only by Somalia.

Yet despite all that, the trumpets are now blaring across the media the single, drum-it-into-your-head meme that We've won! Victory! What is the basis of this success? What is it that outweighs the misery, justifies that carnage, overrules the hunger? Why, it's that violence is down! That is the single metric employed. Not even that violence has stopped or peace has come or even the cold peace of "security." Just less violence.

But, truth be told, yes, violence is down, significantly. As Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone, wrote in February,

[m]ost Iraqis I talked with on the eve of the first provincial elections being held after 2005 told me "security is better." ...

Indeed, security is "better," compared to my last trip here, when the number of attacks per month against the occupation forces and Iraqi collaborators used to be around 6,000. Today, we barely have one American soldier being killed every other day and only a score injured weekly. Casualties among Iraqi security forces are just ten times that number.

Such good news! We've won! Victory! But then, of course, he had to go and spoil it all:

But yes, one could say security is better if one is clear that it is better in comparison not to downtown Houston but to Fallujah 2004.

Compared to days of multiple car bomb explosions, Baghdad today is better.

Which is a pretty damn low bar. As I've often said in various contexts, skin cancer is better than lung cancer - but that doesn't mean that skin cancer is a good thing. And it certainly isn't a measure of good health any more than "less violence" is a measure of "success," particularly when you include the price tag of that "success." Dahr Jamail again:

[T]he capital city of the country is essentially in lock-down and prevailing conditions are indicative of a police state. ... [T]he government is exercising rigid and repressive controls over [the] social ... economic ... and political life of the citizenry.

By definition, a police state exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and in today's Iraq, we have plenty examples of both.

Baghdad is a city of ever-present and everywhere-present troops with guns, but all of who still can't dispel the "omnipresent" fear that "anywhere, anytime, a bomb could be detonated." And it is a city, perhaps most particularly, of walls. All around, there are the walls. Some of them 20 feet high.

Baghdad's walls are everywhere, turning a riverside capital of leafy neighborhoods and palm-lined boulevards where Shiites and Sunnis once mingled into a city of shadows separating the two Muslim sects.

The walls block access to schools, mosques, churches, hotels, homes, markets and even entire neighborhoods - almost anything that could be attacked. For many Iraqis, they have become the iconic symbol of the war. ...

Indeed, new walls are still going up.... They could well be around for years to come, enforcing Iraq's fragile peace and enshrining the capital's sectarian divisions.

Psychic walls enforced by physical walls.

Outside Baghdad, the physical walls are not present but the psychic walls are. Iraq remains less a single nation than a collection of three regions: Baghdad and the south dominated by Shiites, the center and west by Sunnis, the north by Kurds. The much-promised, much-predicted "political reconciliation" remains promised and predicted rather than practiced. The signs of underlying tension remain. In a long article in the New York Review of Books last fall, Peter Galbraith of the Center for Arms Control ran through the overlapping conflicts, but this is a summary:

1. The central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pretends to be some sort of Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish coalition but in fact is dominated by a Shiite coalition of religious parties, including Maliki's own Dawa party, committed to making Iraq into a Shiite Islamic state.

2. Sunnis, who clearly fear that possibility and still feel they're not getting their due in governance, are backing the Sunni militia known as the Awakening, which arose - with ample US support in guns and cash - when the Sunnis started to regard the foreign insurgents, the ones who adopted the name "al-Qaeda in Iraq," as a bigger threat than the US. That militia, lead by Baathists, now numbers some 100,000 and is potentially a strong force in its own right - which worries the Shiites, who see it as a threat to their own control.

3. Shiites also have their own internal divisions to worry about: Although Moqtada al-Sadr's rivals "outfoxed" him by using him to gain control of parliament, then dumping him, before Maliki sent Iraqi troops to oust Sadr's Mahdi Army from much of Basra and to make inroads in Sadr City, "al-Sadr has not been defeated and has significant residual support." (That support was demonstrated last Friday when "thousands" of his followers turned out in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of the invasion by demanding an end to the US occupation. A bigger test will come in a couple of weeks; there has been a call for a bigger demonstration on April 9, the anniversary of the fall of Saddam's regime.)

4. Meanwhile the Kurds, who had something of an alliance of convenience with the Shiites, are facing a central government that appears determined to marginalize them, "contain [them] politically and geographically." In early September, Maliki sent troops into a Kurdish town, deliberately picking a fight with the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia. That confrontation was defused, but when Iraq's defense minister proposed acquiring F-16s for the Iraqi air force, the Kurdish deputy speaker of the parliament protested, expressing fear that the planes' most likely target would be Kurdistan.

It was very likely that suspicion about - fear of - the intentions of the Shiite-lead central government that lead Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish regional government, to say last month that

[t]he United States must resolve policy snags between Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq before any troop pullout,

even suggesting that violence could erupt in the region otherwise. The US military is concerned enough about the rising tension that it has been acting as a mediator and there are plans to "flood the zone" with US troops if things start to flare up between the peshmerga and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army.

Another recent sign of the continuing divisions came with the visit to Iraq by Iranian politician and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

[W]hile Rafsanjani and other Iranian leaders enjoy close ties with senior Shia and Kurdish officials[, IWPR reported last week], many Sunni Arabs accuse Tehran of meddling in Iraqi affairs and instigating the sectarian violence which crippled the country after the US-led invasion in 2003. ...

Iraqi vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, a prominent Sunni, snubbed Rafsanjani, refusing to attend his welcoming ceremony.

Hashemi’s Iraqi Islamic Party issued a statement saying Rafsanjani was “unwelcome” while the German news agency DPA reported that protesters in the largely Sunni province of Anbar called Rafsanjani a “killer of Iraqis”. ...

Usama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni member of parliament from the secular Iraqiya coalition, opposed Rafsanjani’s visit and said the red-carpet welcome was “too much” for the controversial figure. ...

Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the Sunni-led National Dialogue Front, said the Iraqi government should break off relations with Iran until it becomes more democratic.

Okay, so let's sum up: We have poverty, unemployment, lack of clean water, shortages of electricity, inadequate health care, continuing ethnic and religious divisions both spiritual and physical with a constant undercurrent of threat of renewed civil war - not to mention that, as ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger noted, "indiscriminate attacks continue to leave dozens of people killed or injured on a daily basis," something the daily news can confirm.

Quoting Dahr Jamail one last time:

As a succinct summary after a week's stay, I have this to offer: The situation in Iraq has not changed except to worsen. What the passage of four years of occupation during my absence has brought to the people of Iraq is greater displacement, more economic degradation, extreme desperation, untreatable sickness and a near-total loss of hope.

That, friends, is what is being sold to us as "success" simply and solely because Baghdad 2009, while still one of the most dangerous places in the world, is not Fallujah 2004. A damn low bar, indeed.