Category: Iraq

This is worth yelling louder:

Iraqis say Basra quieter after British troop pullout

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) – Residents of Iraq’s southern city of Basra have begun strolling riverfront streets again after four years of fear, their city much quieter since British troops withdrew from the grand Saddam Hussein-era Basra Palace.

Political assassinations and sectarian violence continue, some city officials say, but on a much smaller scale than at any time since British troops moved into the city after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Via mcjoan.

In a recent post, I excoriated Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for her statement on not funding the Iraq Debacle. But as mcjoan notes, one has to wonder who is calling the shots in the House. After all, Pelosi voted against the war and championed John Murtha for the #2 slot in the House leadership. The question to ask – is Steny Hoyer the actual Dem leader in the House?

Internal tensions erupted yesterday among House Dem leaders over Rep. David Obey's threat to block war funding without withdrawal timetables and his suggestion of a war tax, The Hill reports. . . .  “It’s hard to believe you could pick a worse time to do something to divide the caucus than the day Democrats and Republicans come together on both an Iraq bill and in sending the children’s health bill to the president,” a Democratic leadership aide told the paper. “The timing of this announcement made no sense.”

I'm told, however, that there's a bit more to these tensions than meet the eye. House insiders say they think that this anonymous dumping on Obey came from the office of House Dem leader Steny Hoyer. Hoyer is a big proponent of the new House Iraq bill being sponsored by Dem Rep. Neil Abercrombie that was voted on yesterday and passed overwhelmingly. Because this measure lacks a binding withdrawal timetable, others in leadership — like Pelosi — are cool to the idea, insiders point out.

. . . “The dumping on Obey likely came from Hoyer, who was much more enthusiastic about the moderate — read: toothless — Ambercrombie legislation than the rest of leadership is,” a House insider tells me.

Steny Hoyer, like Rahm Emanuel, has been awful on Iraq and obviously he seeks to torpedo the not funding without a timeline idea. It looks like he and Rahm Emanuel are the problem.

With the publishing of today’s Washington Post poll, I believe the Netroots is at a crossroads. The poll shows Senator Hillary Clinton with a huge lead in the race for the Democratic nomination.  Left blogs have spent an inordinate amount of time on horserace blogging, with a great deal of attention paid to national polls.

Focus on personalities, horseraces and the ins and outs of campaign finance, with many leading bloggers doing their best Charlie Cook imitations, has crowded out focus and activism on issues. Like Iraq. Like not funding the Iraq Debacle.

When the Netroots came to be, it was because of issues, not personalities and political campaigns. Howard Dean and Wes Clark were not supported because of who they were, but because of where they stood and what they said. It was because of the issues.

I have been saying for some time that the Netroots has failed in 2007 on Iraq and in general. That failure is manifest now. Concentrating on the elections of 2008, it has had zero impact on the discussion of issues outside the campaign. Even the impact it has had, like on Hillary Clinton’s position on Iraq, has been pooh poohed.

I have long said it – pols are pols, and will do what they must to get elected. The Netroots needs to realize that its goals on issues do not revolve around particular politicians, but around particular policies and issues. In the fevered coverage of the 2008 campaign, the issues and policies of 2007 have been left behind by the Netroots. And to what end? This wrongheaded thinking now reaches a crossroads. Which road will the Netroots travel from here on out? Let’s hope it is the road that focuses on issues, not personalities. 

On October 27th, United for Peace and Justice is organizing 11 coordinated demonstrations in Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough (no event details are listed for Jonesborough), Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle. (In Los Angeles, this protest is being coordinated with A.N.S.W.E.R)

This is a WesPAC site dedicated to stopping the rush to war in Iran.  You can send a form email (and we all know I always do what Wes♥Clark tells me to).  The campaign is apparently a joint venture by Wes’s Securing America and the Vote*Vets PAC.

This image is from AfterDowningStreet, not WesPAC or VoteVets, but I’m putting it here anyway…

The Green Party of Michigan’s Stop the War Slate is coordinating anti-war leafletting at polling places on election day.

Google ‘stop the war’ and you will get 146,000,000 options…. 😉  Or go directly to a place like DemocracyRising or the Iraq Moratorium site and find millions more ways…

Sweet Jeebus.

Impeachment is off the table. Defunding is off the table.  And now, it seems that even raising taxes to pay for the war is now off the table. 

Sure, Raising taxes can be scary. Any potentially politically unpopular decision can be scary. But, that’s kinda what leadership is all about.

(Admitting to some timidity – this is my first effort!)

On the weekend of September 1, 2007, a group of leaders from both the Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis met in Finland, at an undisclosed location at closed meetings to discuss and draft peace principles with leaders of Northern Ireland and South Arica, utilizing protocols similar to peace settlements of those countries.

The meeting was sponsored by the Finnish Crisis Management Initiative [CMI] and the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts and, although, the British and American authorities knew of and sanctioned this meeting, they were prohibited from having presence there.

Tom Hayden, in an article published in The Nation said,

Chairing the closed meetings near Helsinki were Martin McGuinness, the former Irish Republican Army commander, lead negotiator with the British, and now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, and Roelf Meyer, former leader of the pro-apartheid National Party in South Africa’s peace negotiations. The Irish delegation also included former IRA hunger striker Leo Green, minister Jeffrey Donaldson, former Stormont speaker Lord Alderdice, and former loyalist paramilitary leader Billy Hutchison. South African participants included ANC leaders Mac Maharaj and Rashid Ismail, key participants in the military and political negotiations in South Africa. [Read more “here.

Names of the Iraq delegations’ have not been released but reportedly included six Sunni and nine Shi’a who signed a statement of principles. About thirty Iraqis were present, including Akram al-Hakim, minister of national reconciliation for the Baghdad government, representatives of Moktada al-Sadr, Sunni leader Adnan al-Dulaimi, and Humam Hammoudi, the Shi’a chairman of the Baghdad parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

Did you see anything in the media giving us knowledge of this important meeting?

It appears that the Iraqis were enthusiastic about this meeting.

The Iraqis saw former military enemies–McGuinness and Hutchison, for example, or South African apartheid leaders and ANC guerilla commanders–chairing meetings together on how sharply divided communities can coexist.

The key question for the Iraqis, who are circulating the draft at home, is whether the major parties believe their armed strategies have reached a stalemated point of no return, or whether one side [and foreign sponsors like the US and UK] still hopes for a military victory. In South Africa and Northern Ireland, secret peace discussions were initiated while the wars were proceeding, but eventually grew into the peace processes as the rival parties concluded that armed struggle [or military occupation] had reached its limits.

There were notable highlights at the meeting.

when Irish and South African representatives told stories of how their militarized strategies ultimately led to stalemate and the prospect of endless war. “The most remarkable impression on the Iraqis was McGuinness, once evil incarnate to the Protestants”, who now sits as vice-minister to First Minister Ian Paisley, the right-wing fundamentalist preacher trained at Bob Jones University who swore that the Catholic Church was the “whore of Babylon.” A meaningful peace process “only emerged in both countries when all parties agreed that those who adhered to violence had to be brought into negotiations, and that those parties adhering to violence had accepted that violence could never lead to accommodation. One could see Iraq heads nod in agreement.” [Padraig O’Malley: September 24 op-ed piece in the Boston Globe]

The so-called “Helsinki principles” which were agreed to, with each Iraqi signatory praying “In-sha’Allah” as they signed their names, are very general and appear utopian, but so were the early framework agreements in Ireland and South Africa. Most importantly, all parties agreed to continue the discussions towards a settlement.

A set of 12 principles were mapped out in order to start work toward a nationally mutual effort toward a permanent peace.

Among the points were:

Aside from promising to resolve political differences peacefully, the agreement commits the Iraqi parties to consider the creation of a disarmament commission, and the formation of a group to deal with the legacy of Iraq’s past.

They also seek an end to international and regional interference in Iraq’s affairs(emphasis mine)

This to me is the most positive and dynamic effort I have heard of with regard to the Iraq catastrophe.  I’m not sure how we can keep tabs on progress, but going to sources outside the U.S. is probably the answer.

While I feel strongly about this, I am also concerned about the extent to which the Bush Administration will attempt to derail these negotiations, since I firmly believe that they have no interest in there being peace in Iraq!  They have continually funded the Sunnis (the Al Qaeda in Iraq), the Shi’ites and other factions ensuring the continuation of strife throughout the country. The reasons?  I’m sure you have a very good idea!

Joining the Idiot Liberals, and separating himself from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) promised to not forward any bill from his committee that funds the Iraq War without a date certain to end it:

“I would be more than willing to report out a supplemental meeting the President’s request if that request were made in support of a change in policy that would do three things.

— “Establish as a goal the end of U.S. involvement in combat operations by January of 2009.”

— “Ensure that troops would have adequate time at home between deployments as outlined in the Murtha and Webb amendments.”

— “Demonstrate a determination to engage in an intensive, broad scale diplomatic offensive involving other countries in the region.”

“But this policy does not do that. It simply borrows almost $200 billion to give to the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, and Justice with no change in sight.

“As Chairman of the Appropriations Committee I have absolutely no intention of reporting out of Committee anytime in this session of Congress any such request that simply serves to continue the status quo.”

Not funding after a date certain. Good idea Congressman.  Welcome to the fight. We “Idiot Liberals” have been waiting on you for the past seven months.

Chris Dodd’s campaign is based on one major issue – that the leadership we will want in our next President is demonstrated by the leadership a candidate shows now on the major issues of the day. The biggest issue is, of course Iraq, and Chris Dodd is fighting to insure a Democratic Congress does not fund the Iraq War without a date certain for ending the war. This fight is attracting notice in Iowa:

Yepsen: 1st-tier Dems’ timidity on Iraq may create opening

Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd is the longest of long-shot candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. But he doesn’t seem too agitated about that. He’s an experienced politician. He knows how the caucus game often breaks late. Because of his 33 years of experience in Congress, he also knows something about U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq.

He does get agitated about that, particularly when the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination appear to be in no big hurry to get out. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all declined in last week’s debate to say they’d have U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term – in 2013. “I was stunned, literally stunned” to hear them say that, Dodd said in
an interview for last weekend’s Iowa Press program on Iowa Public Television. “It was breathtaking to me that the so-called three leading candidates would not make that commitment. That’s six years from today.”

“The one issue that gave us the majority in the House and Senate last year was Iraq. It’s the dominant issue in the country. We’re spending a fortune, $10 billion a month. Reconciliation is no closer today. I think for anybody out there wondering whether or not Democrats get this at all, or not … to stand up and say six years from now, I will not make the commitment that U.S. forces will be out of Iraq, I found breathtaking.”

Chris Dodd is showing leadership now.

subtitled: America, the militia with corporate sponsorship.

We all know that Blackwater is made up of American militia members, often addicted to crystal meth, known for their racial hatred and itchy trigger fingers.  We also know that Exxon and other oil firms have been using Blackwater for some time now.  So I say let a few guys from Exxon and all of Blackwater stay to guard their precious oil and let everyone else come home.  This is the Exxon War after all, so let’s let a few tweakers go down in flames in Iraq and bring back our honorable soldiers.

Now let’s take a look at a few other corporate sponsors of the Exxon War below the fold.

This is an attempt to unmask the paucity of thought implied in political “realism” as typically portrayed on DKos and elsewhere.  It concludes with a plea for “unrealism” in politics.  Realism has punted in Iraq, civil rights, health insurance, and education; can we expect it to do any better with climate change?

(crossposted @ DKos)

At Talk Left, Miss Devore wrote in response to a comment pooh poohing not funding the Iraq Debacle:

great idea

let’s just accept we have to continue a criminal pre-emptive war, whereby we are visiting unimaginable suffering upon people. let’s just say it’s an out-of-control frat party. ok, mebbe a million dead, another 2M displaced, an entire country trashed.

and you worry about Pelosi being fragged?

You don’t seem to get the arrogance.

the Senate supported partitioning Iraq.

you go and sit on some other country telling you what your bidness should be.

At pff, sabrina wrote:

. . . If ending the war is, as he claims, his primary reason for being involved, he could have joined forces with all the other blogs who really were working for the same thing, and saying the same things he was. . . . I would join forces with anyone (with the exception of a very few) and set aside all  former feelings about them temporarily, if together we could force this govenrment to stop this war. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) So would I. I ask both of them what they suggest we can do. I am prepared to work with anyone to try and end the Iraq Debacle. I’ll be reading both of them where they write for suggestions.

I hope they see this diary and respond with their best ideas.