Archive for the ‘Juan Cole’ Category
QuestionGirl June 22nd, 2008 - 11:46 am
Juan Cole reports on the reality in Iraq. It ain’t pretty. Excerpts from the piece:
By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids by US fighter jets and helicopter gunships on densely populated city and town quarters.
By the way, isn’t is a little odd that the death rate fell in the month of the Great Mosul Campaign? I conclude that either it can’t have been much of a campaign or someone is cooking the death statistics.
As for the displaced (i.e. homeless), they amount to a startling 5 million persons. There were 1.8 million internally displaced in January of 2007, and by December it had risen to 2.4 million. There are 2.3 million externally displaced, 2 million of them in Jordan and Syria.
In fact 5 million displaced persons is almost the entire population of nearby countries such as Jordan or Israel! 5 million is about the number of Jews in Israel, for instance. In absolute numbers, that is how many Iraqis are living in some other country or some other province, having lost their homes. Full article with links at Informed Comment
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QuestionGirl November 1st, 2007 - 9:16 am
With hundreds of U.S. diplomats protesting against a government move to force them to accept postings in war-torn Iraq, Juan Cole is calling for the close of the U.S. embassy in Iraq:
I don’t try to start an internet campaign very often, because the blogosphere has its own priorities and logic that are democratic and should not be forced. But here is a plea for everyone in the blogging world to help force congress to save our diplomats.
Bush is trying to Shanghai several hundred foreign service officers and force them to go to Iraq. They are protesting.
Now is that time for all Americans to stand up for the diplomats who serve this country ably and courageously throughout the world, for decades on end. Foreign service officers risk disease and death, and many of them see their marriages destroyed when spouses decline to follow them to a series of remote places. They are the ones who represent America abroad, who know languages and cultures and do their best to convince the world that we’re basically a good people.
The Jesse Helms Right always hated the State Department, because it is about compromise and finding peaceful solutions, whereas the US Right is about war, violence and imposing its will on people. But is is the State Department that, despite some lapses over the decades, generally embodies the best of what America is abroad.
The guerrillas in Iraq constantly target the Green Zone and US diplomatic personnel there with mortar and rocket fire. State Department personnel sleep in trailers that are completely unprotected from such incoming fire. At several points in the past year, they have been forbidden to go outside without protective gear (as if outside were more dangerous). The Bush administration has consistently lied about the danger they are in and tried to cover up these severe security precautions.
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QuestionGirl August 7th, 2007 - 7:33 am
From Salon.com
By Juan Cole
As Congress prepared to go on its August recess, Pentagon officials and White House backers were desperately spinning as a success this year’s escalation of U.S. troop levels in Iraq. A recent poll shows that there has been a 10 percent uptick in the proportion of Americans who think the so-called surge, first announced by President George W. Bush in January, is having a beneficial effect. But how accurate are the sunny pronouncements coming out of Washington? What would constitute a success for the surge, and how likely is it to be achieved?
The troop escalation was intended to calm down Baghdad and to give the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki breathing room to pursue a political reconciliation, especially with the Sunni Arab population. But the political goals of the surge are simply not being accomplished — and indeed, the political situation has deteriorated substantially.
Maliki has lost even the few Sunni Arab allies he began with; the Sunni Arab coalition, called the Iraqi Accord Front, that had actually been in his government has now had its cabinet ministers tender their resignations. He has not held further reconciliation talks with dissident Sunni Arab groups. The Sunni Arab guerrilla groups are thinking of forming an opposition political party in hopes of extending their efforts to topple his government into the political sphere. His relations with Sunni Arab neighbors are so bad that Saudi Arabia declined his request to visit Riyadh.
Developments on other fronts are equally grim. The Maliki government has lost the confidence of three other political parties, the Islamic Virtue Party (15 seats in parliament), the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr (30 seats), and just on Monday, the Iraqi National List led by former appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. All have pulled their ministers from his government. The government of the major province of Basra, source of Iraq’s petroleum exports and its major port, has collapsed. The governor, from the Islamic Virtue Party, failed a vote of no confidence by the provincial council, spearheaded by a rival Shiite faction, but he refuses to resign even though Maliki backed his removal. And if Basra collapses socially and with regard to security, it is unlikely that the Baghdad government can survive.
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QuestionGirl June 14th, 2007 - 9:22 am
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Samarra Fallout
Surge not Working
The Sadr Bloc in parliament [Sawt al- Iraq in Arabic] is threatening to suspend their participation in legislation in protest against the failure to rebuild and protect the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra. Often the Iraqi parliament, many of whose members live abroad, cannot get a quorum without the Sadrists (32 seats), who are more likely to be in Baghdad for votes. The Sadrists are blaming “the hidden hand of the Occupation” for the bombing (i.e. it is Bush’s fault.) If they really do suspend participation in parliament, it would probably mean that no benchmark legislation will be passed any time soon– not the petroleum law, not revision of the laws on de-Baathification, not constitutional amendments. Nada. Zilch.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called for “self-discipline” and “refusal to target innocents in reprisal” for the blowing up of the shrine’s minarets on Wednesday, according to the same report.
There appear to have been Sunni-Shiite clashes at mosques in the southern port city of Basra after Wednesday morning’s bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra. Some Sunni mosques were attacked elsewhere but a curfew in the northern cities probably forestalled some of that sort of retaliatory violence.
There was also a big labor demonstration in Basra on Wednesday by former workers at defunct Iraqi state-owned factories (petrochemicals, steel, etc.) who want the Iraqi government to revive these industries [in Arabic via Sawt al-Iraq]. The Bush administration shut down the state-owned factories as part of its plan to destroy Arab socialism, and appears to have believed that the magic hand of the market would miraculously start back up Iraqi industries. The bankruptcy of American laissez faire as a development tool is pretty obvious in the economic catastrophe that Bush visited on Iraq. This big labor demonstration will not be reported in the American press, which generally is pitched to be about and for people who make at least $80,000 a year.
To read full article with links visit JuanCole.com
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