By SwopaMar 20 2006 - 12:55am Backsliding from his latest hiatus -- with his third post in a week, and second in two days -- Billmon tells us he's been reading George Packer's The Assassin's Gate:
Just now I came across this passage, describing the furious hotel-room struggle waged at a pre-war meeting of Iraqi exiles in London:
Chalabi was flying in from Tehran after cutting a deal with the Kurdish and Shiite parties to form a provisional government in spite of the Americans. Then the Sunni delegates revolted over their scant numbers. Khalizad, an Afghan-American who understood the bazaar nature of regional politics, brokered the horse trading. Sunnis and independents were added, watering down the Shiite numbers. You could easily have ripped that passage from a New York Times article on the latest political negotiations in Baghdad. Same faces, same factions, same issues, same conspiracies, same cynical manuevers, same tired lies. Billmon is so right, you'd almost swear someone slipped him an advance copy of tonight's New York Times:
Iraqi officials announced Sunday that they had agreed to form a council of the country's top politicians to make policy on security and economic issues in the new government. The council, which will include the prime minister and president, is an attempt to include all the country's major factions in decision making at a time of rising sectarian tensions.
. . . The main Shiite political bloc, which is expected to hold the most executive power in the new government, had opposed formation of the council, while the Kurds, Sunni Arabs, secular politicians and the Americans had pushed for it.
Because of the way the council will be set up, the Shiites, who constitute the largest political bloc in Parliament, will have an effective veto over council decisions.
Furthermore, the prime minister or president will be able to override any decisions they disagree with if the decisions conflict with the executives' constitutional authority, Iraqi officials said. The Financial Times gets a quote that shows how Team Shiite thinks things turned out:
“What has been decided was exactly the same proposal that the UIA put forward from the very beginning... The decisions are not binding... [rather] recommendations,” Shia negotiator Hussein al-Shahristani told the FT. In other words, in order for them to get an agreement at all, the religious Shiites got the other factions to accept a mere fig leaf instead of real power-sharing -- just as in the Packer excerpt cited by Billmon, and in the forming of the appointed puppet interim governments, and in the writing of a constitution, etc., etc.
The result never changes because of the relative clout Iraq's demographics give each group. It's like they're playing the same hand of poker over and over, with each side always holding the same cards as the time before.
By SwopaMar 19 2006 - 8:00pm I sensed political motivations a few days ago when Iraq's minister in charge of death squads internal police claimed that his department had broken up a supposedly massive al-Qaeda plot to attack Americans inside their highly protected "Green Zone" in Baghdad. Allow me to apply the same suspicions to this report from Knight Ridder today:
Iraqi police have accused American troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid last Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals and blew up the house, the document said.
A U.S. military spokesman, Major Tim Keefe, said that the U.S. military has no information to support the allegations and that he had not heard of them before a reporter brought them to his attention Sunday.
. . . Accusations that U.S. troops have killed civilians are commonplace in Iraq. . . . But the report of the killings in the Abu Sifa area of Ishaqi, eight miles north of the city of Balad, is unusual because it originated with Iraqi police and because Iraqi police were willing to attach their names to it. Unusual? Perhaps not any more, given this passage from the Washington Post tonight:
Clashes between U.S. forces and suspected insurgents, and fresh allegations of American troops killing noncombatants, marked the third anniversary Sunday of the start of the American-led invasion of Iraq.
In Duluiyah, a stretch of farms along the Tigris River about 45 miles north of Baghdad, soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division's 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team battled insurgents, the U.S. military said in a statement.
. . . A top police official, as well as a resident who claimed he saw the fighting, said U.S. troops also shot and killed a family of three during house-to-house searches after the firefight.
"I saw corpses on the ground that I believe were of armed men who had clashed with the American forces" and with the Iraqi army, said Ahmad Hashem, the resident. "Then the American soldiers appeared and started searching homes. They raided a house which was close to my home and killed a man named Ahmad Khalaf Hussein, his wife and his 10-year-old son." I won't even begin to guess whether these allegations are true, exaggerated, or entirely false -- as I said yesterday, I consider official U.S. and Iraqi government statements to be equally unreliable.
But I think it's safe to say that the sudden bull market in such accusations against U.S. troops isn't because they just started slaughtering civilians recently. Instead, it's far more likely that the Team Shiite-governed Iraqi police -- faced with political pressure as evidence of their death-squad activities grows -- have suddenly found it convenient to start blaming the Americans for doing the same thing.
By SwopaMar 16 2006 - 11:40am It's always a fine day at Needlenose when I can be more cynical than anyone else over some news report from Iraq. This morning, I noted that Matt Yglesias and Jim Henley were musing about the troublesome implications of this item by the Associated Press:
Security officials foiled a plot that would have put hundreds of al-Qaida men at guard posts around Baghdad's Green Zone, home to the U.S. and other foreign embassies as well as the Iraqi government, the interior minister told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
A senior Defense Ministry official confirmed the plot, and said the 421 al-Qaida fighters involved were actually recruited to storm the U.S. and British embassies and take hostages. Several ranking Defense Ministry officials have been jailed in the plot, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, said the al-Qaida recruits were one bureaucrat's signature away from acceptance into an Iraqi army battalion whose job it is to control the gates and main squares in the Green Zone. The plot was discovered three weeks ago.
. . . "The 421 were supposed to be in control of the entrances to the Green Zone and internal squares. I mean they were going to be in charge of security in the Green Zone in the future," Jabr told the AP. "They were going to carry out operations. Most of them are wanted terrorists" using false identification. Coming at a time when the U.S. is pressuring Team Shiite to surrender control of the interior ministry (and the death squads within it), this is quite a propitious moment for Jabr to announce that his men had saved Americans from a catastrophic attack, isn't it?
The AP, to their credit, considered this possibility as well, noting toward the end of the article:
Jabr's disclosures, which could have been seen as a political ploy to divert criticism, were confirmed by the top Defense Ministry official, a Sunni, who described it in even more dramatic terms. I'm still not able to shake off my skepticism, though -- any Sunnis in the current government were appointed as fig-leaf members of the Shiite coalition, and this official may still be operating in that capacity.
After all, it's likely that one of the things Team Shiite has learned from their erstwhile American benefactors is the occasional value of promoting dramatic actions when their political stock is low...
By SwopaMar 15 2006 - 6:47pm Earlier today, Reuters presented a grand-prize nominee in the "You know things are getting bad in Iraq when..." competition:
Iraqi Shi'ite religious leaders' restraining influence on militia groups is waning fast and senior clerics fear they are dragging Iraq into civil war, a source close to the clerical authorities said on Wednesday.
Sounding the most urgent note of alarm yet from the Marja'iya, the religious establishment led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior source told Reuters: "People are paying less and less heed to the Marja'iya every day because of how sectarian killings are affecting Shi'ite public opinion."
. . . "The Marja'iya is still calling for restraint but there is a great worry and fear that people are responding less because of continual pressure every day from the killing and slaughter," the source close to the Najaf religious establishment said.
. . . The source close to the Marja'iya said senior clerics were more worried about a generalised rage by Shi'ites in a country where virtually every household has an automatic rifle than it was about organised militias like the Mehdi Army, the Badr movement and other pro-government organised armed groups.
"The issue is not the Mehdi Army or the others. It goes beyond that now. There is huge tension among the Shi'ite public and we're worried the situation could get out of control," the source said. "We fear we're reaching this point." If Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and company fret that they're losing their grip on the reins, then it's really time to worry.
Then again, this could simply be a diplomatic way of further rationalizing Sistani's intentions to beef up his separate militia as a counterbalancing force against the gunmen loyal to SCIRI and Moqtada al-Sadr. Although I guess that's not especially encouraging news either, if the grand ayatollah is concerned about defending himself from his Shiite brethren...
By SwopaMar 13 2006 - 12:43pm Following up on a theme I tacked onto deftly wove into my previous post, the New York Times last week explained in some detail how Team Shiite hijacked Iraq's new death squads internal police:
The United States faces the possibility that it has been arming one side in a prospective civil war. Early on, Americans ceded operational control of the police to the Iraqi government. Now, the police forces are overseen at the highest levels by religious Shiite parties with militias, and reports of uniformed death squads have risen sharply in the past year.
. . . The units believed to be most plagued by militia recruitment and sectarian loyalties are the police paramilitary forces, which have a total of 17,500 members, the American military says. . . .
The paramilitary forces are divided three ways — the commandos, the public order brigades and a mechanized brigade that will soon be shifted to the army. Matthew Sherman, a former Interior Ministry adviser, said Shiite parties were especially keen to seize control of those forces because they can operate anywhere in the country and have great autonomy.
. . . "The Shiites were beheaded by the security forces before, and we are not ready to be beheaded again," said Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Badr Organization, the Supreme Council's Iranian-trained militia. "We can relinquish any part of the government except for the security forces."
. . . For much of last year, the Second Public Order Brigade had a particularly bad reputation. It was accused by many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs, of detainee torture and illegal killings. Its ranks were filled with men recruited from eastern Baghdad who were loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who had led two rebellions against the Americans.
. . . In contrast to the public order brigades, the police commandos, an 8,300-member force that was founded in 2004 under a Sunni-led Interior Ministry, are more diverse, American commanders said. Many came from the old Iraqi Army, which had an officer corps dominated by Sunni Arabs, and from the domestic security services, which Saddam Hussein used to terrorize the population.
. . . Mr. Sherman, though, said the commandos also have significant numbers of Shiites loyal to the Supreme Council. Maj. Gen. Adnan Thabit, a Sunni Arab, is the head of the commandos in name only, he said, having ceded control to Shiite partisans. "They've just taken a more kind of political bent over the past 10 months or so," said Mr. Sherman, the former Interior Ministry adviser. Just to connect a couple of dots here, you can guess that the description of former Saddamite thugs as providing "diversity" is a key reason why the Team Shiite government isn't much interested in giving up control of the ministry. Especially when any new proprietors might be inclined to investigate the extracurricular activities of the current Sadr/SCIRI-loyalist thugs.
It's a real-life example of the hypothetical problem Stephen Biddle analyzed in Foreign Affairs this month:
Handing the fighting off to local forces . . . in a communal civil war . . . throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq's Sunnis perceive the "national" army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids.
. . . On the other hand, the harder the United States works to integrate Sunnis into the security forces, the less effective those forces are likely to become. The inclusion of Sunnis will inevitably entail penetration by insurgents, and it will be difficult to establish trust between members of mixed units whose respective ethnic groups are at one another's throats. Segregating Sunnis in their own battalions is no solution either. Doing so would merely strengthen all sides simultaneously by providing each with direct U.S. assistance and could trigger an unstable, unofficial partition of the country into separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish enclaves, each defended by its own military force.
. . . Iraq will eventually need capable indigenous security forces, but their buildup must follow a broad communal compromise, not the other way around. Unfortunately, even if the Bushites were to realize that point now (and there's no sign that they have), it's too late -- we can't sustain our already-insufficient supply of troops beyond the next few months. Having overseen the polarization of Iraq's factions for three years, and helped to set the "dirty war" in motion in our flailing attempts to manipulate them, we'll have no choice but to retreat and watch them tear the country apart even further.
By SwopaMar 12 2006 - 1:23pm  
From the Associated Press today:
Car bombs — one detonated by a suicide attacker — and mortar rounds ripped apart two markets Sunday in a Shiite slum in Baghdad, killing at least 41 people and wounding 140. . . .
Smoke billowed into the air and fires continued to burn after the huge explosions, which demolished many stores at one of the busiest shopping times, at dusk.
. . . As crowds rushed to assist the victims, mortar shells slammed into nearby homes. Police defused a third explosives-laden car in the same area, al-Mohammedawi said.
It was the second major attack targeting members of the Shiite majority in less than three weeks. The Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the mostly Sunni city of Samarra triggered a waive of reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques and clerics that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.
. . . Sadr City is a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia was blamed for many reprisal attacks against Sunnis after the Shiite shrine bombing — even as he appealed for calm. Militiamen armed with automatic rifles took to the streets after Sunday's attack and sealed off the neighborhood. If the destruction of the golden-domed mosque in Samarra was intended to blow a hole in Iraq's political process by galvanizing Shiites in general against any hint of compromise, this particular slaughter lays down the gauntlet in front of Moqtada, who has based much of his popularity on being the unyielding champion of Sadr City's Shiites. Can he afford to make a Sistani-esque plea for patience and restraint? If not, will he strike back politically, or through violence -- or both?
By SwopaMar 7 2006 - 10:15am 
From the Associated Press this morning:
Iraq's Shiite prime minister declared Tuesday he won't be blackmailed into abandoning his bid for a second term, and the Kurdish president bowed to Shiite pressure to delay calling parliament into session until a deadlock is resolved over who should lead a unity government.
. . . Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari suggested that the current standoff over his nomination had grown out of a personal dispute with President Jalal Talabani, who is at the center of a campaign by Kurdish, Sunni and some secular Shiite politicians to deny him a second term.
"No one can make bargains with me by enlarging personal disagreements," al-Jaafari told reporters at his office. "Dr. al-Jaafari will not be subdued by blackmail. Dr. al-Jaafari is not violating the constitution. I am not moody, and I am not personalizing the constitution." He then added, "And I am not talking to myself... why do you always say that I'm talking to myself?!" And then excused himself, saying he had some taxidermy to catch up on.
P.S. Please feel free to suggest captions for the picture above.
By SwopaMar 7 2006 - 2:07am reports this morning:
The Iraqi army is investigating how a gunman managed to kill a senior Iraqi general in an attack that has fuelled concern about the new, U.S.-trained Iraq military's cohesion in the face of brewing sectarian conflict.
"It is a very strange incident and raises many questions," an official in the Defence Ministry press service said on Tuesday after the commander of all Iraqi troops in Baghdad died from a bullet to the head while in a patrol convoy on Monday.
Another Iraqi general told Reuters it was an assassination that needed inside information and proved the army, recruited by U.S. officers over the past two years, had been infiltrated by factional militia groups ready to turn on fellow soldiers.
. . . The former U.S. commander in Baghdad said the killing of Major General Mubdar Hatim al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Muslim who commanded the 10,000-strong 6th Division in Baghdad, could be part of a move to establish Shi'ite control of the capital.
. . . The general was wearing body armour, the ministry official said. He opened the door of his four-wheel drive vehicle and a single bullet struck his head as he was putting on his helmet.
"The gunmen had very precise information," he said.
. . . Senior U.S. officers have complained about efforts by the Shi'ite-led government to impose commanders in the city in the face of U.S. objections about their competence. You know your army is in trouble when you're worried about infiltration from both insurgents and within the government -- and each is equally dangerous.
By SwopaMar 6 2006 - 1:02pm 
Hiiiii... I'm baaaaack!!
From the Associated Press today:
Iraq's president said Monday he would convene the new parliament for the first time next week, beginning a 60-day countdown for lawmakers to elect a new head of state and sign off on a prime minister and Cabinet.
After nightfall, nine key Shiite parliamentarians rushed to an emergency meeting at President Jalal Talabani's Baghdad home to try to change his mind about forcing a showdown in the deepening political crisis and further inflaming sectarian tensions.
. . . A leading member of al-Jaafari's Dawa Party, Ali al-Adib, said parliament's main Shiite bloc would request the session be postponed until there was agreement on who should occupy the top government positions. Okay, I think that's all more or less par for the gridlocked course. This is the part of the story that worries me:
Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr predicted a "quick solution" to snarled attempts to form a government.
Emerging from a meeting in the Shiite holy city of Najaf with secular Shiite parliamentarian Ahmed Chalabi, al-Sadr said: "All obstacles to forming a national unity government soon will be resolved."
Chalabi, the one-time Pentagon favorite as Iraq's post-Saddam Hussein leader, said al-Jaafari deserved the opportunity to form a government.
"Dr. al-Jaafari should be given a chance. ... It is to the benefit of all parties to keep the (Shiite) Alliance strong and unified," Chalabi said. Is Chalabi going to be some kind of emissary to the Kurds to negotiate a solution? What kind of payback will he be expecting from Team Shiite once a deal has been made?
Update: The Sadr/Chalabi team gets results, it would seem from this AP follow-up:
Iraq's president failed in a bid Monday to order parliament into session by March 12, further delaying formation of a government and raising questions whether the political process can withstand the unrelenting violence or disintegrate into civil war.
. . . Talabani was mistakenly counting on the signature of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite, who lost his own bid for the prime minister's nomination by one vote to al-Jaafari. Talabani had in hand a power of attorney from the other vice president, Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni, who was out of the country.
The Shiite bloc closed ranks and Abdul-Mahdi declined to sign, at least for now. In an emergency meeting with Talabani on Monday, seven Shiite leaders rejected the president's demand for them to abandon al-Jaafari's nomination.
. . . There were reports that al-Sadr had threatened to order parliamentarians loyal to him to boycott a Sunday session if Abdul-Mahdi, the Shiite vice president, had signed the Talabani order to convene the legislature. Stay tuned to this channel for further developments...
By SwopaMar 5 2006 - 2:00pm An incisive story from Megan Stack in the Los Angeles Times today:
Two years ago, doctor Riyadh Adhadh cursed the U.S. soldiers who had overrun his homeland, toppled the Sunni-dominated government and tormented prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A member of the city council, he loudly demanded that American troops leave Baghdad.
Last week, his Sunni Arab neighborhood under attack by Shiite militiamen, Adhadh found himself huddled over the telephone in panic, begging the U.S. Embassy to send American soldiers.
. . . Many Sunnis hold a substantial grudge against the United States for launching the invasion and remain distrustful of its designs on Iraq. But the alternative — abandonment in a Shiite-dominated country — is even less appealing. And so even an irritating foreign presence is looking to many Sunnis like a layer, however thin, of protection.
. . . "We would refuse the withdrawal of American forces during this period," said Salman Jumayli, spokesman for the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni bloc in parliament. "They have to fix what they destroyed … [and] guarantee that no sect will dominate the other sect and no party will dominate another party."
The sectarian violence that raged across the country these last weeks was the latest chilling reminder to Sunnis of their vulnerability. Naturally, there's a mirror-image effect to this development:
Meanwhile, Iraq's Shiite majority, which initially cheered the arrival of the Americans, has grown far stronger and is quickly losing enthusiasm for foreign soldiers and diplomats.
"The reality is that the Americans have switched position a little bit. They seem to be siding with the Sunnis, and the Shia are not happy," said Saad Jawad, a moderate Shiite politician. "Certainly in our areas there is no need for American soldiers." What's changed after two and a half years of the Shiites using U.S. troops as a buffer against the Sunni insurgents? Basically, they've used our goal of "standing up" an Iraqi army as a way to quietly incorporate their militias into the official security forces:
Many Sunnis believe that if a civil war erupts, Iraqi police brigades would devolve into Shiite militias and government weapons would turn against Sunnis.
Brig. Gen. Mudhir Moula, a secular Shiite who is a senior official in the Defense Ministry, expresses a similar fear.
. . . The Interior Ministry has arranged its security forces to ensure that their sect would dominate in case of civil war, he said.
"They're a lot stronger than the Ministry of Defense. This is the reality, let's be honest."
Recently, Defense Ministry soldiers and police commandos from the Interior Ministry each staged raids on the same neighborhood at the same time. The soldiers ended up surrounding a group of commandos and detaining them. Negotiations for their freedom went on for days. Now you see why the U.S. is trying for a goal-line stand to keep Team Shiite from dominating the new Iraqi government and retaining control of the Defense and Interior ministries. Because having accomplished their mission, the Shiite factions are dangerously close to saying, "So long, American suckers, we'll take it from here."
Update: Quote of the day from (not surprisingly) Whatever It Is, I'm Against It, who writes:
The alliterative Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, went on tv today as part of the Bush administration’s efforts to stave off “civil war” in Iraq. I used quotation marks there because the Bushies haven’t a clue how to stop actual civil war and so have focused all their might and main on trying to stop people using the words “civil war.”
By SwopaMar 3 2006 - 11:48pm I'm long overdue to write about Plamemania -- or, really, anything other than Iraq -- but I just can't help myself, I guess. (I do have a couple of Plame posts in the mental hopper and due to burst out soon, though, so be patient.)
Anyway, Paul McGeough raises an interesting possibility in the Sydney Morning Herald about the recent jockeying to prevent current Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari from continuing in office for the next four years:
The Kurds claim to have cobbled together an alliance of politicians of all persuasions that would outnumber the religious Shiites and deny them government unless al-Jaafari is dropped. It's a long shot. The Kurds have worked in alliance with the religious Shiites for the past year, but they claim to be disenchanted by the rise within the Shiite alliance of the young firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr.
However, there is a subtext to the Kurdish revolt. Al-Jaafari has point-blank rejected a key Kurdish demand -- that they be given control of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk. The implication is that they have in mind an alternative Shiite delegate who as prime minister would hand them Kirkuk. If so, the break-up of Iraq into three autonomous statelets may be more advanced than is generally understood.
If Kirkuk is ceded to Kurdistan, the oil-rich Shiite south is likely to press for greater autonomy, leaving the Sunnis in the shell of a religiously and ethnically mixed central belt with so much power devolved to the regions that Baghdad will be a capital in name only. The most-discussed "alternative Shiite delegate" is Adel Abdul Mehdi of SCIRI ... the party that is also the most adamantly in favor of provincial autonomy. Meanwhile, Jaafari is prominently supported by al-Sadr, whose power base is in Baghdad and (quite possibly for that reason) is fiercely against giving outlying regions more independence.
So maybe that is the underlying issue here. Obviously, Jaafari's recent in-the-Kurds'-face trip to Turkey would be part of this mix as well.
By SwopaMar 3 2006 - 11:05am 
"I'm gonna be a star, Adel, just you wait and see..."
Of all the horrors that have been inflicted on the Iraqi people over the past few years, this isn't very high on the list, but still (from the Los Angeles Times):
Faced with parliamentary insurrection, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari is doing what politicians have done throughout the ages: He's going straight to the people.
On a recent television show, a couple pleaded with Jafari for help in caring for their two blind daughters. With equal parts efficiency and benevolence, he immediately promised money and medical treatment.
Overwhelmed by gratitude, the father fainted.
The segment, which aired on state-controlled Al Iraqiya television, is just one of many recent go-getting public appearances by the interim prime minister. Faulted for being ineffectual and lacking in magnetism, the dour Shiite Muslim theologian has lately dominated the media with a show of strength and effectiveness —- even trading his usual crumpled beige outfits for crisp blue suits.
When thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last week after one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines was bombed, Jafari swiftly went on television announcing tougher security measures and the arrest of suspects.
His ostensible popularity among regular Iraqis has received extensive coverage on state TV. Al Iraqiya has broadcast several segments showing Jafari supporters chanting his praises during demonstrations. On a new satellite channel backed by his Islamic Dawa Party, it's all Jafari all the time. Then again, I guess it's better than what else has been gracing the airwaves over there...
By SwopaMar 2 2006 - 4:22pm In its recurring role as the house newspaper for the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, the New York Times reports this morning:
In a move that could redraw Iraq's political map, leaders of Iraq's Kurdish, Sunni and secular parties are considering a plan to ask the country's largest Shiite bloc to withdraw Ibrahim Jaafari as its candidate for prime minister in the new government.
One political leader said the parties would send letters in the next day or two asking the Shiite bloc to reverse its decision to retain Mr. Jaafari as prime minister. If the Shiites refuse, the parties will form their own umbrella bloc, large enough to block the Shiites' choice and let them put forth their own candidate, said the leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because delicate negotiations over the issue were in progress. noted the deadly irony of the situation last night:
I think that given the parlous security situation in Iraq, it is absolutely crazy to be playing these political games. In the wake of the destruction of the Askariyah Shrine in Samarra, you want to go to the Shiite community and say, 'you cannot have your choice of prime minister and there is going to be a tyranny of the minorities'? Oh, that will calm things right down. It's not really surprising, though -- the U.S.-backed scheme to unseat Jaafari demonstrates the same mix of cynical, behind-closed-doors bullying and naive self-delusion that has marked the Bushites' thinking since American soldiers toppled Saddam's statue in Baghdad. After three years of miscalculating their way into a corner, they realize that once a permanent Shiite government is in place, the dwindling U.S. ability to influence events will probably vanish entirely ... so, being both too brazen and too cowardly to admit defeat, they're going to try to win everything back in one roll of the dice.
Thus we get the objectively ludicrous stance that the near-majority party cannot exclude anyone from its governing coalition, but much smaller factions have the unilateral right to veto selections for the most powerful offices. Unfortunately, Prof. Cole also relates a newspaper report from the region that, Team Shiite isn't backing down:
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has, according to al-Zaman, been intervening behind the scenes to keep the UIA united.
Although earlier the Fadhila or Virtue Party was cited as an element within the UIA that might bolt, taking its 15 seats with it, its leaders appear to have reconsidered. Al-Zaman says that Virtue staged a demonstration in Nasiriyah on Wednesday demanding of the Kurdistan Alliance that it not attempt to sideline the will of the nation (which had made the UIA the biggest bloc). As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the threat of massive demonstrations against the Americans (and whoever can be tarred as their puppets) remains the trump card in this game. The emotions released by those protests, if they occur, could be the last push Iraq needs to fall the rest of the way into the abyss.
By SwopaFeb 27 2006 - 6:31pm Analyzing Iraq's descent into chaos, Eric Martin at American Footprints suggests a possible meaning of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's last week that "if [the government's] security apparatuses are not able to offer the required security, then the faithful must be able to do it":
Sistani is laying the groundwork for justifying an increase in number and armament of his own personal militia in an attempt to counterbalance challenges to his authority from al-Sadr -- whose Mahdi Army has its own means of "influencing" events. I had thought of that statement as a political endorsement of Team Shiite's effort to incorporate its partisan militias into the army and police. But I think E-Mart raises a valid point; Sistani may realize that there's an arms race going on and he doesn't want to get left behind.
Or, perhaps more to the point, when SCIRI's Badr Brigades and Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army have it out once and for all, Sistani probably doesn't want to be too dependent on the mercies of either side.
By SwopaFeb 24 2006 - 7:15pm 
From Agence France Presse today (although I should note it hasn't been picked up elsewhere so far):
The bombing of a revered Shiite shrine which sparked a wave of violence in Iraq was the work of specialists, Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar said Friday, adding that the placing of the explosives must have taken at least 12 hours.
"According to initial reports, the bombing was technically well conceived and could only have been carried out by specialists," the minister told Iraqia state television.
Jaafar, who toured the devastated thousand-year-old shrine on Thursday a day after the bombing which brought down its golden dome, said "holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives."
"Then the charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance," the minister added.
To drill into the pillars would have taken at least four hours per pillar, he also estimated. I don't want to get too far out on a limb analyzing a one-off story quoting a minister whose agenda (if any) I don't know, but it does seem clear that blowing the entire dome off the Samarra shrine wasn't some amateur lob-and-run job.
So, who was guarding the mosque when the explosives were being laid? I genuinely don't know. But whether they were Sunnis or Shiites, it's hard to imagine how they weren't complicit in the shrine's destruction.
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To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.
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