This is just awful and unacceptable news about Iraq and Maliki

[TayTay]

Professor Padraig O'Malley from UMass held reconciliation meetings with factional leaders from Iraq. This was detailed in this article in the Boston Globe on http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/04/25/bringing_iraqis_to_the_table/">April 25, 2008.

Under a deep shroud of secrecy, a chartered flight took off yesterday from Baghdad, carrying with it the dreams of a visionary University of Massachusetts professor and perhaps the prospect of reconciliation among some of the rival religious and political groups in Iraq.

Padraig O'Malley, the irrepressible academic, author, and peacemaker, has put together an extraordinary guest list for the trip from Iraq to Helsinki: 36 Iraqi leaders from across the country's sectarian divide - Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. They are set to spend the next three days talking, in heavily guarded privacy, about how to bring peace, or at least the possibility of political reconciliation, to a nation at war with itself.

It is the second such gathering of Iraqis O'Malley has organized as he takes on the bloody deadlock in that country, just as he previously forged unlikely dialogue between adamant enemies in Northern Ireland and South Africa. And he has high hopes for the weekend sessions, which will take place at an undisclosed location in Finland's capital.

"This is the most powerful group of Iraqis ever gathered outside of Iraq to talk about peace and finding a way forward together," O'Malley said in an interview on his cellphone just moments before boarding the plane. His conversation with the Globe was the first public disclosure that the meeting would come off as planned.

Sounds great, right? Now comes the horrifying and heartbreaking part. Mr. O'Malley had an OpEd in the http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/14/a_matter_of_loyalty_in_iraq/">Boston Globe today (July 15th) that details what happened when he brought this negotiation to Baghdad.

THE HELSINKI talks on Iraq concluded July 5 in Baghdad with the public disclosure of the agreement — 17 principles defining the framework for conducting future negotiations among parties and 15 mechanisms to monitor compliance with the principles. There are 37 signatories to the agreement; among them some of the most powerful political figures in Iraq representing every shade of political opinion. What they will do with the agreement is in their hands. If they do not develop the structures to give teeth to the monitoring mechanisms, it is likely that the agreement will become a meaningless piece of paper.

Akram Al Hakim, the minister of National Reconciliation, invited us, the co-conveners, as well as the Northern Ireland and South African facilitators to Baghdad to celebrate the agreement. What should have been an event of celebration became one that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki used to violate every principle of democracy we have been given to believe has taken firm hold in Iraq five years after Saddam’s fall.

His office issued an order: The event was not to take place. His officials ordered the ministry of reconciliation to stop all preparatory work, including printing copies of the agreement. Had we not taken the precaution of having it printed and copied and carrying it to Iraq, there would have been no agreement to distribute to the Helsinki participants, the media, or Parliament.

Maliki’s office ordered the Al-Rasheed Hotel, the only hotel in the Green Zone, to cancel the use of a facility and the catering service that the ministry had reserved. When the co-conveners stepped in and said that we would pick up the expenses, Maliki’s office was unequivocally dismissive.

I believe that Sen. Kerry, in a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in April said that he was hearing from people on the ground that Iraq was awaiting the arrival of one or two "strong men" who would pretty much pick up where Saddam Hussein left off. Sen. Kerry asked at that hearing if that is what our soldiers should be fighting and dying for? I think we have that strong man, I think it is Al Maliki and I think we should be asking the Bush Admin and the McCain campaign that question: Is propping up Maliki worth our cost blood and treasure?

The SFRC hearing from 4/2/08 is available at C-Span here: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=204670-1

It is a searchable video. Click the box to enable transcripts and enter Kerry. Or advance the tape to about 1:20 into the hearing. Listen to what Sen. Kerry said. Padraig O'Malleys' OpEd today certainly seems to be confirmed the Senators suspicions.

[TayTay]

1. Partial Transcript from April SFRC hearing

KERRY:
If I told you that three generals sat here this morning and told us that it is inevitable, in their judgment, that troops are going to draw down, do you agree with that?

ROSEN:
I do, certainly. I think that's the unanimous opinion of most Americans.

KERRY:
Do you all agree?

SAID:
It seems to be the mood in this country to withdraw. I'm not saying that this would be the right thing for Iraq.

BIDDLE:
Withdrawal is the policy of everyone, including the administration. I mean, the question is how far and how fast.

KERRY:
Let me sort of probe that a little bit for a second. Assuming that there is an inevitability to that and that the current levels of troops have proven to be inadequate to maintain -- we know we're coming back to the level we were at last year when the violence rose, the surge, by definition, was temporary. It ends this summer. That's over.
So we're facing a reality here, and the reality is there are going to be less troops. We can't sustain at this current level, according to our own military. There'll be testimony tomorrow to that effect. It's been in the newspapers lately.
Everybody reads the newspapers, so the bad guys know was well as we do that we're under that stress and they can play to that, incidentally. It's not a very good way to manage security or any other choices, but that's where we are.
In that light, is it also inevitable that, the fundamental forces driving the divide between Sunni and Shia and the Kurd issues, that there will be sectarian violence of some level no matter what we do? Is that inevitable?

SAID (?):
Yes.

KERRY:
Mr. Biddle?

BIDDLE:
I think the level of sectarian violence can get down to the point where it will no longer be on the front pages of American newspapers, which it actually did over the whole course of the last six to eight months.

KERRY:
By what means, absent political reconciliation and fundamental differentials (ph)? By what means?

BIDDLE:
By the means of the local bilateral cease-fires that we've seen over the course of the last six to 10 months.

KERRY:
By bilateral cease-fires. So we're going to have to buy out each individual group and each individual group will in essence be empowered within their own little area.

BIDDLE:
I think our payments to them is actually a secondary...

KERRY:
Well, leave the payments out. Just take the reality, they're going to have powerful within their own area, highly decentralized.

BIDDLE:
Absolutely.

KERRY:
So that works completely contrary to the fundamental strategy of the administration, which is to have a central government of Iraq, Iraqi national identity and a functioning national government.

BIDDLE:
The explanation of our policy that the president continues to make, as he did, for example, in describing Maliki's defensive in Basra, would not be the one I would choose, for example. I don't think stability in Iraq through top-down reconciliation is realistic.
I don't think that means that stability is impossible. I do think that mechanism is unlikely.

KERRY:
But that stability is only going to be maintained so long as we're there, as a tampening-down force.

BIDDLE:
And that's precisely the heart of the primary prescription I would offer to the committee. Now, the question of how many troops we keep there, and for how long, and with what mission...

KERRY:
So you're in the 100 years war school?

BIDDLE:
No, no. I'm not, for a variety of reasons.

KERRY:
Well, where do you draw the line?

BIDDLE:
Well, I think you draw the line the much the way we've drawn it, for example, in the Balkans.

KERRY:
Ad hoc, or what?

BIDDLE:
Well, the objective, I think, if we're going to take a bottom-up approach as opposed to a top-down approach is we're going to try to keep the violence down, keep the country stable, long enough for very long-term, slow political processes to...

KERRY:
Can the United States support 10 to $12 billion a month until that happens?

BIDDLE:
I would hope and assume that as our mission transitioned out of war fighting and into peacekeeping, both our casualties and our expenditures and our troop count could all come down. Could any of them come down to zero in Iraq without the violence escalating? I think that's very unlikely.

KERRY:
Mr. Said.

SAID:
I think a significant level of troops could be drawn down within two years if -- and I don't think there's a dichotomy between a bottom-up and a top-down approach. I think the bottom-up approaches have to coalesce into a national approach.

KERRY:
But you talked about people conceivably coming to power and rising to the surface here that would not necessarily be either our choices or particularly pleasing to us.

SAID:
Yes.

KERRY:
And that smacks of what I've been hearing from certain sectors, that we may even see the appearance of a strongman, one strongman, two, one in Shia, one in Sunni -- is that what you're talking about?

SAID:
I'm talking about definitely Iraq looking more like Russia under Putin, or...

KERRY:
Is that what our troops ought to be doing? Is that what they were sent over there to die for and we're paying for?

SAID:
It will be better than Saddam Hussein. Putin is better than the Communist party in the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan is better than it was under the Soviet Union. And the most important thing is that Iraq will not become a hotbed for Al Qaida, will not become a source of instability...

KERRY:
Well, is there any circumstance -- this Al Qaida thing, I haven't met an Iraqi who has suggested to me that if we weren't there Al Qaida would find any rationale to exist. They hate them. They don't want foreign jihadists on their territory. Particularly if we weren't there, one or the other is going to fight to run the show, Sunni or Shia.

[beachmom]

2. It seems, as was predicted by many Iraq history experts, that Iraq must be ruled by an iron fist.

The only thing we have changed is the religion of that fist -- from Sunni to Shi'ia. You know one of the great rules in strategic management, is that when a project has failed you cut your losses and end it. It is imperative that Obama becomes president. He is a cold pragmatic realist. He will know exactly what and who Maliki is, and withdraw troops, leaving behind us the idealistic but wrong minded arrogance of the great dreams of the neoconservatives. They will soon be marginalized in the Republican party as well. And Iraq will be "manageable" -- the police state will come up from the militias and create order. The Sunnis will have their place in the Triangle (they were already ethnically cleansed considerably already from Baghdad); perhaps Maliki will tell them that if they behave, he will leave them alone. But what I am suggesting is a BEST CASE scenario. And we're going to have to live with it.

[TayTay]

3. It is hard not to read it as that.

The treatment of the peace delegation just starkly brings home the point that Maliki is the iron fist in Iraq now and nothing will get done without his approval. AT least in the area of Iraq that he controls. He doesn't control about 2/3rds of the country, after all.

McCain and all the others who are telling people how great the surge is and how much progress has been made have to answer the question: What happens when we stop paying the militias? What happens in Iraq when the US "pay for peace" money stops?