President Obama's Shoes

Responding to the instantly famous "shoe attack" Bush quipped, "That’s what happens in free societies – people try to bring attention to themselves.”

No, Mr. Bush, that's what oppressed people do when their lives are being destroyed and people like you aren't listening.

"In Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City, thousands rallied to demand the reporter's release: "Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head." They called the reporter a "hero."

"I’m sure many Iraqis want to do what Muntazer did. Muntazer used to say all the orphans whose father were killed are because of Bush," his brother, Udai al-Zaidi, told Reuters Television.

Dividing the Spoils

Joe Biden's proposition in 2006 to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions arrived in Baghdad virtually DOA after having won hands-down support in the U.S. Senate. As Biden laid out in an Op-Ed to the NYTimes, the notion that the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites would each be responsible for their own laws, administration and security was hardly radical, after all, the Iraqi Constitution already provided for a federal structure in which "the provinces combine to form regional governments."

His argument ran thus: [Iraq] was already heading toward partition:"The Sunnis, who until recently believed they would retake power in Iraq, are beginning to recognize that they won't and don't want to live in a Shiite-controlled, highly centralized state with laws enforced by sectarian militias. The Shiites know they can dominate the government, but they can't defeat a Sunni insurrection. The Kurds will not give up their 15-year-old autonomy."

Ironically, there are many in Iraq who believe that the Senate's approval of the Biden proposal actually helped to quell the sectarian violence that had been rising exponentially, as more and more tribes and neighborhood gangs sought revenge. Even the Kurds who already enjoy de facto autonomy were said to "oppose" the “Biden plan”.

“We don’t support establishing federal regions on a sectarian basis. For example our region is not ethnic, it contains Kurds and non-Kurds. The regions should be established on a geographic basis,” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman.

Ezzet al-Shabender, a member of parliament from the secularist Iraqi List of former prime minister Ayad Allawi, credited the broad-based disgust triggered by Biden’s proposal for helping Iraqi politicians bury their differences.

“His project was the reason behind the unity of many political blocs that once differed in viewpoints,” he said, comparing it to the Balfour Declaration, a 1917 British note that backed the creation of Israel andis regarded across the Arab world as the ultimate colonial injustice.

Indeed one wonders, now that Obama has Biden as his chief-counselor, whether the original neocon plan to divide up Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, is to be continued under a Democratic face. It certainly seems that way to the Iraqis, most of whom viewed the Senate resolution with near-apoplectic outrage.

"The Iraqi government categorically rejects the resolution. Iraq is not a US property," said a spokesman for the Sunni-led National Dialogue Front. The Association of Muslim Scholars, which calls itself the political arm of the Iraqi armed resistance, stated, "The Senate's adoption of [the] resolution…is not shocking, because [partitioning the country] was one of the objectives behind the invasion of Iraq."

Indeed, from Richard Perle to David Wurmser, who recently resigned as Vice President Cheney's chief Middle East adviser, the neoconservatives who pushed for the war eagerly embraced the notion of redrawing the map of the region, and it didn't stop at Iraq's borders.

Map of an imaginary reconstituted Iraq, published by the Goals For Americans Foundation. Note the placement of Mosul, the biggest city of north-western Iraq, in the middle of the “Kurdish Republic”. Another version is available here, with Najaf located approximately in the marshlands north of Basra instead of in central Iraq

The wild-card in all this remains Iran which has gained the most from Bush's poorly planned invasion. There is little doubt that if such a partition were put into effect the Shia region would be Iran's closest ally and Iraq would cease to exist as an Arab state. Stranded without direct access to the country's oil one need not be a pessimist to see the Sunnis, sandwiched between Kurds and Shia, becoming like the Tamil Tigers , prompting more chaos. In fact a mere cursory reading of Sri Lankan history suggests that all the ingredients: regional, religious and ethnic division are there waiting to be exacerbated. This is the heavy price of "divide and conquer". Replace Iraq for "Sri Lanka" and Sunni and Shia for "Buddhist and Hindu" or "Sinhalese and Tamil" you have a tendentious state where the region's powerbrokers depend on constant turmoil.

"The Tigers need a ‘Sinhala Sri Lanka’ (as opposed to a pluralist Sri Lanka) to justify the creation of Tiger Eelam; the Southern extremists need Tigers and their quest for Tiger Eelam to justify ‘Sinhala/Buddhist Sri Lanka’. Co-existing side by side these two opposing but mutually dependent extremisms endeavour to expand themselves and wipe out the middle ground, thereby destroying the environment necessary for the survival of the democratic Tamils and the centrist Sinhalese."

Which is why for all the bloviating in the Western press about Iraq "descending into violence" once the U.S. army leaves we rarely hear from Iraqis themselves. If Obama wants to escape the indignity of being beaned with a pair of dirty shoes I "hope" that for a "change" the new president will listen to patriotic Iraqi voices such as these:

Haytham Hashim: “[Any] Iraqi federal system should be demarcated in a spirit free from racism and sectarianism..."

Nuha Zaki: “I think the concept of regions is a bad idea, especially in the current situation ... we should do our utmost to combat sectarianism and make Iraq return to its past as a unified country and a unified people from north to south. The establishment of regions will lead to barriers that will have consequences for such areas as the economy and trade,”

Abu Usama: “Iraq, the Land of the Two Rivers, was from the days of the monarchy a centralised state from north to south, and when the republic was declared, the late leader Abd al-Karim Qasim held on to every square inch (dharra, literally, “atom” or “tiny particle”) of our dear fatherland of Iraq. But today we live under fire of the loathsome occupation which is aimed at splitting Iraq into races and sects… Not everything that is workable in the West may be in harmony with Arab and Muslim Iraq.”

But then, bringing hope and democracy to Iraq was never why we went there.

Killing For Oil? Tragedy, Comedy or Farce?

Less than a fortnight after the Iraqi parliament agreed on a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq's cities by mid-2009 and withdraw from the country altogether by the end of 2011 a suicide bomber kills 55 people dining in Kirkuk.

Official reports say Arab tribal leaders were lunching with members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and were there to discuss ways of defusing tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen in the oil-rich province.

Cui Bono?

Mere hours after the fatal blast Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for Iraq's Shia-dominated government led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, announces that some residual U.S. forces will be needed for at least 10 more years. Curious since before the vote in parliament the Maliki government had been insisting that its military would be ready to take over security by the summer of 2009.

The SOFA agreement (without which any continued U.S. military presence would be in violation of international law) had only been achieved after drastic compromise. The Sunni Arabs seeing themselves as the vulnerable (oil-free) minority under a Shia-Kurdish government were determined to wring major concessions as a condition for their support (such as the release of Sunni political prisoners being currently detained by U.S. troops). And despite the ongoing ethnic and tribal tensions, most Iraqis remain firmly nationalistic so that anything less than the assurance of a complete American withdrawal would have doomed the Sadrists along with the current government in Iraq's upcoming provincial elections.

So Who Gets To Be Rich?

“We believe that oil and gas belong to the Iraqi people, to all the Iraqi people,” Wael Abdul Latif, an independent member of the Iraqi parliament and a former magistrate.

Good luck with that...

Iraqi oil dispute bubbles to the surface December 09. 2008 9:26PM UAE

Iraq has put the squeeze on private investors by saying it will not give preferential treatment to Kurdistan crude. Nabil al Juran / AP Photo

Prospects for settling a protracted Iraqi feud over regional oil development have once again receded, following an apparent breakthrough last month over negotiations to export crude from the country’s autonomous Kurdistan region.

Late last month, in a surprise visit to the north-eastern regional capital of Erbil, the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al Shahristani, agreed in principal to allow two recently discovered oilfields in Kurdistan to be connected to the state-owned pipeline that exports crude from northern Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

That constituted a major concession that seemed to break a deadlock in oil discussions between Iraqi central authorities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The snag is that Baghdad last week made clear that it still planned to treat Kurdistani crude developed with private-sector investment in the same way as oil from state-owned fields.

It is both perverse and all too common to hear the Iraqi conflict described in terms of Islamic terrorism or sectarian strife, but just as in the tragedy that occurred in Mumbai, the antipathies of race and religion are merely the nurtured fuel being fed to the oil-war's consuming fire.

Ironically, just as the ill-conceived Iraq invasion has contributed to the United States becoming fiscally bankrupt, the fight for Iraq's resources has left the country's infrastructure so badly damaged, its leadership so steeped in corruption, its greedy occupiers will be hard-pressed to profit.

"While Iraq's oil industry will continue to face problems with security in 2009, the country's crumbling production and pipeline systems are more likely to disrupt crude exports"
-- the London-based Exclusive Analysis (EA).

"[T]he two 50-km subsea oil pipelines that transport the crude to the terminals are at imminent risk of failing due to severe corrosion and vulnerability to rupture"
--October report from the U.S. Congress.



There are but fine lines between comedy, tragedy and farce.