At 21:52 19/05/2005 -0400, you wrote:
Hi, Keith,
Watch for info on the building activity for the new US Embassy to be built in Iraq on paper already the most expensive US embassy in the world. It will be a good indicator of US administration thinking.
I'll look out for this with great interest. But I doubt whether this will proceed. The Green Zone would not be defensible if there were a Shia uprising. That the Bush administration can't find a suitably senior officer to become the Ambassador speaks eloquently to me.
Meanwhile, things will continue to deteriorate for the US occupation force. The Sunnis and Shii will hold the line and contain the potential for violence, despite, as I see it, the provocations that are being aimed at both. There may be tribal troubles (especially the Takritis) and the press will continue to try and force fit what they see into the Shii-Sunni dichotomy model, irrelevant as it may be.
IMO, the Kurds remain the jokers in this pack. One month I think they are in the process of blowing it, but then they pull back and I think they will be sensible. There must be quite a debate going on within the Kurd groups. Id love to be a fly-on-the-wall.
So would I! But, so far, the Kurds are sitting pretty, I'd have thought. They have very little terrorism there, except for the occasional terrorist incursion. The longer they stay quasi-independent the more difficult it is going to be to incorporate them into any form of future Iraq. They are learning the ways of democracy all on their own. Also, they've been teaching their children Kurdish for something like 12-15 years now. As this generation enters adulthood, it will be, if anything, more Kurdish than they've been since the Ottomans but this time a more mature, less tribalistic and more Westernised Kurdism. There's only one fly in the ointment as regards their economy and this is that they don't have an outlet to the sea for effficient trading purposes.
Keith
Cheers,
Lawry
From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 11:43 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: 737. Civil war in Iraq goes up a notch
737. Civil war in Iraq goes up a notch
Although Islam sprang away from Medina in Saudi Arabia as soon as Muhammad died in AD 632, it soon divided into two main schisms, the Sunnis and the Shias. The Sunnis took their religion far from the typical nomadic terrain of central Saudi Arabia into distant places in the world outside, while the Shias tended to concentrate in the agricultural areas immediately around the outskirts of Saudi Arabia -- along the eastern coastline and in Iran and the southern parts of Iraq where grain had been grown for millenia.
Besides the theological differences which grew between the Sunnis and the Shias, the different patterns of settlement also had effects on the structure of their religious organisation as they developed over centuries. As is typical in all intensive agricultural societies, a deeply hierarchical form of organisation emerged in which there were several grades of leadership -- the ayatollahs. In Iraq, for example, there is a Grand Ayatollah, four "ordinary" ayatollahs underneath him, and other grades lower still, and obedience to higher auhtority by the laity is strictly maintained.
On the other hand, the Sunnis, while professing a fiercer brand of Islam were, in a strange way, more "democratic" with few leaders above the imams of the local mosque. The obedience of the flock is rather towards their own local imam, not to some distant hierarchical chief. In Saudi Arabia, where the Wahhabis are the Arabian brand of the Sunnis this horizontal form of governance has had the effect that the reformist members of the royal family governance have had little success in bringing about reform from the top dowwards. They are not only resisted by the imams within the capital city, Riyadh, but by the many thousands of imams who control the mosques elsewhere in Saudi Arabia.
In Iraq, the "horizontal" Sunni organisatin has had a different effect (which may yet emerge in Saudi Arabia). This is of the development of many different cliques within Sunniism, each headed by local clerics rather than senior figures. While Saddam Hussein exercised a blanket repression of ostentatious religious activity, these schisms expressed themselves very little more than fierce pride in belonging to one mosque or another. Lay Sunnis in Baghdad would not attend their local mosque, as did Sunnis, but would shop around until they found a cleric whose particular views, religious and political, were more in tune with their own.
Since the American occupation, however, and the removal of Saddam, the hitherto peaceful sub-schisms within the Sunnis has bounded forth into several quite religio-political bodies, ranging those which favour terrorism of the American forces (and the Shias, if necessary) and those which are more moderate. Some of the leaders of the latter sort have, in fact, albeit after much reluctance, joined the Transitional Iraqi government even though the general turnout of Sunnis in the January election was very low.
It is quite apparent now that the Transitional government has had great difficulties in forming itself and, from Condoleeza's comments made during her recent visit to Baghdad, the Bush administration badly wants to see one or two members of the extremist Sunni bodies joining the government even though these were the very organisations which waged terror on moderate Sunnis, preventing many of them from voting in the election.
That's how Iraq seems to be standing now. Hitherto, whenever mass killings have been reported, they have always been of Shias -- usually those who are queueing at army and olice recrutment centres. To my knowledge there have been no mass killings of Sunnis by Shias. This seems to have occurred yesterday for the first time, with the killing of 15 Sunnis as reported in the Financial Times below and the Iraqi police (presumably composed mainly of Shias) are being blamed.
The one-sided civil war in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shias started not long after the American occupation. So far, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani has been able to restrain the Shias from responding. He was even able to bring back a Shia fire-brand, Moqtada al-Sadr from the brink of raising a mass revolution of Shias. But the latest incident, while a relatively small one on the total scheme of things in the last two-and-a-half years, might well be of such a different character that the frustration of the Shias might not be able to be restrained by Sistani any longer. If this is happened, then the Green Zone in Baghdad could be over-run.
It is significant that since Negroponte's return as Ambassador from Baghdad two months ago, no other replacement has been appointed by Bush -- or, perhaps more acurately, no other senior State Department official is now willing to take up this prestigious advancement in his or her career. One wonders, in fact, just how many State Department officials are now in the embassy. Even in Negroponte's time, it was only half-full. My guess is that it is steadily reducing to a skeleton staff now, and that Bush's options for Iraq are now becoming vanishingly small.
Keith Hudson
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IRAQ SUNNI BLAME POLICE AND SHIA FOR KILLINGS
Steve Negus
Baghdad -- Iraq's leading Sunni religious organisation yesterday accused the Iraqi police and a Shia Islamist party of assassinating some 15 Sunni, including pro-insurgent clerics, in an escalation of sectarian tension.
"This is state terrorism by the Ministry of Interior," said Hareth al-Dhari, secretary general of the Association of Muslim Scholars, standing before a funeral congregation at the Umm al Qura mosque alongside representatives of other Islamic groups, with the coffin of one of the killed sheikhs in front of him.
The body of Hassan al-Naimi, along with those of 14 other Sunni including at least four prominent clerics, was found on Tuesday dumped in empty waste ground in various parts of Baghdad. About 50 bodies, both Sunni and Shia, have been discovered in and around the capital since Saturday. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, prime minister, has vowed to use an "iron fist" to crack down on sectarian violence, which many Iraqis fear heralds the outbreak of wider civil war.
Mr Dhari said Mr Naimi had been taken from his mosque on Monday night in the district of al-Shaab by uniformed troops of the Wolf Brigade, a police commando unit, accompanied by members of the Badr Brigade militia loyal to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri).
Mr Naimi was "one of the best and most upright men, well known for resisting the occupation", Mr Dhari said.
Other association clerics have said Wolf Brigade commandos gunned down another sheikh, Hamid Mukhlaf al-Dulaimi, on Monday night as he was sleeping on the roof of his home.
Mr Dhari called for the resignation of interior minister Bayan Jaber, a Sciri member who took over the post two weeks ago, and said that the association would pull out of the political process and begin to "defend ourselves" if the killings did not stop.
"We will take revenge on the Brigade of shame," chanted hundreds of dem- onstrators outside the mosque.
An Interior Ministry spokesman could not be reached for comment but the head of the Wolf Brigade denied they had arrested the murdered Sunni. "We don't have these names, we never arrested these people and we have no relation to this case," said the brigade's commander, who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Walid.
The Wolf Brigade, although it contains a high proportion of Sunni officers, was on the frontlines of the counterinsurgency effort in the northern city of Mosul over the winter, where it tracked down insurgent cells affiliated with the puritan Salafi trend of Sunni Islamism. The police commandos, which recruit from military officers associated with Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, are said to be among the most effective units under the Iraqi government's control but have been accused of human rights abuses.
Financial Times -- 19 May 2005
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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