Iraq Coverage: All Warlords All the Time

I imagine your Demon isn’t the only one out here in American TV-land who is suffering from a mighty boob-tube cathode-ray hangover today after watching C-Span coverage of General Petraeus & Ambassador Ryan Crocker on how “well” *ahem* the surge is working. I, too, gorged on the feast of ink sprayed over the topic by the likes of the New York Times & the Washington Post.

Somehow I thought it was important to be well-informed–4 years after , by the way, Bush made his bizarre landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath a big, bright “Mission Accomplished” banner. (Er, yeah.)

So, was anybody actually surprised at what Petraeus & Crocker had ti say? Media types asked each other the same thing, & the answer, uniformly, was “no.” The illustrious guests hedged their bets, careful not to promise anything, but were upbeat enough to say, more or less, “we should stay.” Petraeus recommended a drawdown of 30,000 troops, which, conveniently enough, Bush will announce to the country on Thursday.

Apart from interesting arguments how the the state of Iraq was assessed (a bullet in the back of the head is a sectarian execution, a bullet in front is merely some sort of crime, & the fact that ethnic cleansing has killed or driven away all opposition in an area is a good thing), missing from all the intense coverage & yet to be articulated, I believe, has always been & continues to be a clear definition of success. Else how will we know when we’ve reached it?

And still, something seemed to be missing in this blitz of highly moderated “fairly happy news” on Iraq, & not just the certain goof-isms of a highly inarticulate George (we have to presume that was no accident, & a perhaps the clearest measure yet that George knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Americans think he can’t be trusted at all to give the straight scoop there ~ damn those invisible WMDS & mobile bio-warfare labs, & Dick Cheney still seems to think a 911 highjacker had connections with Saddam Hussein).

Fortunately, I stumbled across an analysis from indie news organization Alternet that went a long way toward explaining things I had a hunch were missing from the “official news” portrayal & which also does a better job of who’s fighting who & for what reasons. The additional fault lines by which the problem should be understood have to do with nationalists vs. separatists.

“This week, we’ll be buried under a crush of analysis about an Iraq that’s being ravaged by a religious civil war — an incomprehensible war between “militants” of various stripes and “the Iraqi people.” But Americans will be poorly served by the media’s singular focus on Iraq’s “sectarian violence.” It obscures the fact that sectarian fighting is a symptom — a street-level manifestation — of a massive political conflict over what kind of country Iraq will be, who will rule it and who will control its enormous oil wealth.

“And it obscures the great irony of the American project: that in that defining conflict over the future of the country, the Bush administration, with the support of Congress, has taken the same side as Iran’s hardliners and the same side as the Sunni fundamentalist group called al Qaeda in Iraq. All are working — separately, but towards the same ends — against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis, who polls show want a united, sovereign country in control of its own resources and free of meddling by Washington, Tehran and other foreigners.

“Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died violent deaths since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many of them as a result of the civil conflicts that have pitted Iraqi against Iraqi. But those conflicts have nothing to do with the differences that distinguish the different branches of Islam — Iraq isn’t struggling with a religious civil war.

“Iraqis are fighting over fundamental questions about the future of their country. They’re fighting over whether it will have a strong central government or be a weak confederation of semiautonomous states, over how soon and to what degree it will be independent of foreign influence, over who will control its massive energy reserves and under what terms they will be developed — all of these things are tangible, concrete issues that are crucial in determining Iraq’s future.

“We refer to this central political conflict as one between Iraqi separatists and nationalists. Loosely speaking, separatists favor a “soft partition” of Iraq into at least three zones with strong regional governments, similar to the semiautonomous Kurdish “state” in Northern Iraq; they are at least willing to tolerate foreign influence — meaning Iranian, U.S. or other powers’ influence, depending on which group one is discussing — for the foreseeable future; they favor privatizing Iraq’s massive energy reserves and ceding substantial control of the country’s oil sector to regional authorities.

“Nationalists are just the opposite: They reject any foreign interference in Iraq’s affairs, they favor a strong technocratic central government in Baghdad that’s not based on sectarian voting blocs and they oppose privatizing Iraq’s oil and natural gas reserves on the extraordinarily generous terms (to the oil companies) proposed by the U.S. government and institutions like the IMF. They favor centralized control over the development of Iraq’s oil and gas reserves.”

Continue reading: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62042/

I also have to say, that of all the television news coverage I’ve seen ob the issue, Anderson Cooper on CNN is the most rigorously honest about pointing out the hype & the errors so far — & I also have to remark that I’m really afraid that the American decision to arm warlords to rout Al-Queda is going to come back to bite us in the ass someday, royally?

Anybody here remember that it was also America that armed a bunch or rag-tag freedom fighters in order to force Russia out of Afghanistan. Excellent training, as it turned out, for future Taliban fighters.

Not to mention that we’re arming insurgents in Iraq who oppose the Maliki government we fostered there (but has apparently lost our confidence, not least because it doesn’t seem to want to push through an oil law which would privatize that resource as well as let American petroleum companies in on the fun in a big way).