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Iraq Votes: Can Non-Sectarian Parties Gain?
By Robert Dreyfuss
This is the last of the three-part series on Iraq's provincial elections, scheduled for tomorrow.
After four years under a government dominated by Shiite religious parties with close ties to Iran, Iraqi voters are ready for change, says Aiham Alsammarae. An American citizen who returned to Iraq in 2003, and who served as Iraq's electricity minister from 2003-2005, Alsammarae is a fierce, secular Sunni nationalist who is working with Iyad Allawi, the secular Shiite former Iraqi prime minister, to elect candidates in Saturday's provincial election who represent a turn away from ethnic and sectarian identity politics.
"I don't want to underestimate the religious parties," Alsammarae says, referring to the Islamic Dawa party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim. "But our analysis is that over the last four years the religious parties tried everything and proved that they are not successful leaders. They couldn't deliver what they promised. They could not do anything right."
(26) CommentsJanuary 30, 2009
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Iraq's Elections: ISCI's View
By Robert Dreyfuss
This is the second of a three-part series in advance of Saturday's provincial elections in Iraq. Today I report on an interview with a leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). Tomorrow I'll provide an account of an interview with a leader of Iraq's secular, nationalist bloc.
Karim Almusawi is the Washington representative of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). On Monday, I interviewed him in his office in downtown Washington about the upcoming elections in Iraq.
SCIRI was founded in Iran in 1982, and its military wing, the Badr Brigade, was originally a division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which helped to install SCIRI as a powerful part of Iraq's ruling elite, SCIRI and Badr have used both religion and paramilitary force to consolidate their influence in Baghdad and the south, and there have been widespread reports of Badr-led assassination teams carrying out hundreds of killings of opponents, including former Baathists.
(51) CommentsJanuary 29, 2009
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Iraq's Election: What to Watch For
By Robert Dreyfuss
The following is an election guide to Saturday's provincial elections in Iraq. Tomorrow and Friday I will report on interviews with two spokesmen for opposing sides of the vote.
On Saturday, January 31, Iraq will conduct its first elections since 2005, when Iraqis went to the polls to select both their national parliament and provincial councils. This time, the election will decide only the provincial councils in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Still, the election is likely to be a turning point for Iraq. Which way it turns -- toward greater democracy, or toward further instability and a return of violent resistance -- depends on what happens on Saturday.
It's not a pretty picture. The elections promise to be marred by violence, fraud, intimidation, vote-buying and bribery, bloc voting by tribes and ethnic constituencies, and undue influence by Shiite clerics.
(22) CommentsJanuary 28, 2009
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Gaza War Pushes Arabs to the Brink
By Robert Dreyfuss
Anger is boiling over in the Middle East over Gaza, and -- exactly as I predicted -- the result of the war has been to boost radicalism throughout the region, to strengthen the terrorist-inclined fanatics of Hamas, and to enhance the muscle of terrorist-inclined Israelis, including far-right parties such as Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and, of course, Likud's bombastic Benjamin Netanyahu.
You probably didn't know that the reason the Bush administration, in its last days, reversed course on Gaza is because they feared that US embassies in the Middle East might be stormed by angry crowds if they did nothing. You'll remember that, after weeks of supporting Israel's invasion of Gaza, the United States suddenly reversed course and allowed the UN Security Council to pass a unanimous resolution demanding a ceasefire. (The United States didn't vote yes, but it abstained -- rather than threatening its oft-used veto.)
Speaking on January 14 at the New America Foundation, the outgoing US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilizad said explicitly that the United States feared a violent explosion in the region, including the seizure of US embassies by angry mobs, if the United States continued to block action by the UN. A central concern, said Khalilzad, is that mosque leaders all over the Middle East would mobilize the anger and direct it against the United States.
(165) CommentsJanuary 25, 2009
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Afghan Escalation: No Decision Yet, Says Gates
By Robert Dreyfuss
I had a chance today, at a news briefing at the Pentagon, to ask Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, about plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I pointed out the contradiction between President Obama's campaign pledge to add "two or three brigades" of troops and the US commander's determination to add 30,000 troops, two or three times as much as Obama had promised to add.
Significantly, in their answer, Gates and Mullen stressed that no decision has yet been made about adding troops. That's important, because it opens a window -- yes, it's a small one -- for opponents of expanding the Afghan war to persuade the White House that it's not a good idea.
Here's the transcript of my exchange with Gates and Mullen:
(115) CommentsJanuary 22, 2009
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Obama and the Middle East, Part V
By Robert Dreyfuss
This is the last of a five-part series on Obama's Middle East. Parts I-IV dealt with the war on terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The first thing that Barack Obama has to understand about Iran: there is no hurry.
The hawks outside the administration, and a few of those who might be inside -- notably, Dennis Ross -- will say that the situation is a crisis. They will argue that Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon that will change the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. And they will ring the Holocaust alarm bells that Iran will use the A-bomb to obliterate Israel. None of this is true. Obama has years to deal with Iran.
(36) CommentsJanuary 20, 2009
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Obama and the Middle East, Part IV
By Robert Dreyfuss
This is the fourth of a five-part series on Barack Obama's Middle East. Part V, on Iran, will appear Monday.
Chances are fair to middling that a ceasefire in Gaza, ending Israel's three-week blitzkrieg there, will take hold before Barack Obama is sworn in as president on Tuesday. But, either way, the war has pushed the Palestine issue to the very top of Obama's agenda for first days and weeks in office. If there is any silver lining from the carnage in Gaza, it's that Obama's team can't avoid the issue, even if they'd wanted to before the crisis erupted.
But in talking to Washington insiders, virtually everything about how Obama will approach the Arab-Israeli dispute seems up for grabs -- or, at least, Obama's people aren't talking. Obama, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, and other officials have said that they won't let the problem sit on the back burner for years, as past administrations have done. And they certainly won't abstain from engagement altogether while giving one-sided support to Israel, as the Bush administration did, from the get-go, by isolating the PLO, refusing to meet with Yasser Arafat, supporting Israel's bloody invasion of the West Bank, its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and, of course, winking at the current attack on Gaza.
(165) CommentsJanuary 16, 2009
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Obama and the Middle East, Part III
By Robert Dreyfuss
This is the third in a series of posts on Barack Obama's Middle East dilemmas. The topic for Part I was the war on terror, and Part II was Afghanistan. Tomorrow, Part IV will cover the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Part V will be Iran. Today: Iraq.
Iraq is not stable. The "surge" didn't work. The US-Iraq "Status of Forces Agreement" is only a piece of paper. The country is plagued with violence. Key political actors in Iraq are bolstered by paramilitary armies, including the Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army, and the Sons of Iraq ("Awakening") movement. Vast numbers of Iraqis are unemployed. Industry has collapsed, and basic services -- electricity, water, gas, sanitation -- are intermittent or nonexistent. The army and police are corrupt and infiltrated by militias, and the army's loyalty is suspect. Most of Iraq's political movements are backed by or have ties to one or more of Iraq's neighbors. Baghdad is a warren of blast walls and walled-off enclaves, reeling from years of ethnic cleansing, and Iraq's provincial capitals are rife with intrigue, with many of them -- Kirkuk, Mosul, Baquba, Basra, for instance -- perched at the bring of outright civil war.
That's the Iraq that Obama is inheriting from the decider.
(99) CommentsJanuary 15, 2009
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Obama and the Middle East, Part II
By Robert Dreyfuss
This is the second part of a five-part series on Barack Obama's Middle East. Yesterday, Part I covered the so-called War on Terror. Today, in Part II, the subject is Afghanistan and Pakistan. The series will continue all week.
During the last three months of 2008, I spent a lot of time interviewing many of Barack Obama's advisers on Afghanistan and Pakistan. To summarize their collective view: the war in Afghanistan cannot be won militarily. Instead, it will require a combination of military power, state building, training of the Afghan National Army, economic support and development aid, regional diplomacy (including Iran, India, and Russia), and negotiations with "reconcilable" elements of the Taliban-led insurgency. But, they argue, it is impossible at present to conduct useful talks with even moderate components of the Taliban, because the Taliban believes that it is winning the war. Thus, Obama's advisers say, a military surge is necessary not to "win" the war in Afghanistan but to stabilize the situation and to convince the Islamist insurgent leaders to come to the bargaining table. (Take a look at my piece in The Nation, "Obama's Afghan Dilemma.")
It is a dangerously flawed strategy. And it is one that could unravel Obama's presidency.
(69) CommentsJanuary 14, 2009
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Obama and the Middle East, Part I
By Robert Dreyfuss
The Middle East looms large for Barack Obama, and in Washington it's clear that the seething arc of crises from Gaza and Lebanon through Iraq and Iran into Afghanistan and Pakistan won't let Obama ignore the region from Day One. Starting today, and continuing for the rest of this week, I'm presenting a series of pieces about Obama's Middle East. Today, we start with the so-called War on Terror. Tomorrow, I'll deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Thursday, Iraq. On Friday, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon. And on Monday, Iran.
Perhaps the area where Barack Obama can make the quickest, and most effective, pivot from the administration of George W. Bush is with the so-called War on Terror.
For seven years and four months, the United States has been engaged in a monumentally flawed and destructive campaign that President Bush described as an all-out effort against terrorism and terrorist groups of "global reach." It includes two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, a lethal counterterrorism effort waged by the CIA and the Pentagon's Special Forces units, and a global effort to expand US military and intelligence ties to countries throughout Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
(45) CommentsJanuary 13, 2009
Robert Dreyfuss
A chronicle of America's adventures in foreign policy and national security.
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