Mediterranean Piracy on the Fourth

US hostages held in foreign country on Fourth of July, including a former Congresswoman, after having been captured in a naked act of piracy in international waters after the Americans attempted to respond to a crisis provoked by crimes against humanity, as detailed by Amnesty International.

Once upon a time, Americans would have had the guts to mind such a thing.

See also Paul Craig Roberts.

Gazans and other Palestinians under Israeli occupation do not enjoy "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and have not been able to "institute" a "government" of their own to secure those rights. The occupation authority that rules them does not derive its "powers" from the "consent of the governed" The occupation government has become destructive to these ends. I think we know what the American Founding Fathers would say the Palestinians need.


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Remembering Iran's Protests on the 4th of July

Remembering the protests in Iran in pictures and film on the occasion of the America Declaration of Independence:

Aljazeera English on "Mousavi and the Masses", part I:



Mousavi and the Masses," Part II:



Parnaz & Ashkan:




"The Owner of this Land":



And some relevant print reports:

LAT on one innocent man's 10 days in Iran's labyrinth of a prison system, just because he stopped to help a fallen protester.

A coordinated international response is building against Iran's plan to put Iranian UK embassy employees on trial.

Fareed Zakaria's (implicit reply to Bomber Bolton):

CNN: What about a military strike?

Zakaria: It would be bizarre to bomb Iran-- which means bombing Iranians -- now that we have seen the inside of that country. Moussavi and his supporters want a less confrontational approach to the world. So do many members of the establishment.

Moussavi attacked Ahmadinejad repeatedly for his aggressive foreign policy. So we now know the answer to the question, "Are there moderates in Iran?" Yes, millions of them.'

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Mousavi Said Calling for General Strike; Hard Liners Call for his Arrest

In what may be a major development, it is being alleged that Iranian opposition leader Mir Hosain Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard are calling for a general strike next week. Such a strike would be harder for the regime to forestall than crowds coming into the streets, and whether it has a big effect or not would be a way of measuring the support for the reformists in the country.

Predictably, hard liners in the Iranian parliament are calling for Mousavi to be arrested. As it is, seven members of what the regime calls "anti-government groups" from Tehran and Qazvin were arrested yesterday.

Not satisfied with having held an Egyptian-style election, some Iranian politicians apparently want to adopt the Burmese model. How do you say "Myanmar" in Persian?

A

Meanwhile, one price the regime will pay for phonying up the election results and violently repressing peaceful demonstrations is even greater diplomatic isolation. Although this LA Times piece questions whether sanctions will be tightened, I think that is also a possible outcome. Many Iranians are fearful that what was done to Iraq, in reducing it to a fourth-world country, will ultimately be done to Iran by the US/UNSC if things go on like this.

The 27-member European Union is intervening with Iran over the holding of British embassy personnel. This is a powerful intervention. One third of all Iran's trade is with the EU and it is Iran's number one trading partner. The EU imported 11.3 bn. Euros in goods from Iran in 2008 and exported 14 bn. Euros to Iran-- maninly "machinery and transport equipment (54.6%), manufactured goods (16.9%) and chemicals (12.1%). "


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Saddam, the FBI and Cliocide in Iraq

Joyce Battle (with help from Brendan McQuade) has posted twenty interviews of Saddam Hussein by the FBI to the National Security Archives at George Washington University, having done the hard work of FOIAing them.

In this pdf file, the FBI interrogator asks a lot of leading questions about al-Qaeda and Saddam shoots them down effectively.

In this pdf file, Saddam explains, "Hussein stated Iran was Iraq's major threat due to their common border and believed Iran intended to annex Southern Iraq into Iran. The possibility of Iran trying to annex a portion of Southern Iraq was viewed by Hussein and Iraq as the most significant threat facing Iraq. hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from a attack from Iran. Hussein stated he believed Israel was a threat to the entire Arab world, not specifically Iraq."

Aljazeera English reports on Saddam Hussein's fear of Iran (the reason he did not publicly admit to having destroyed his chemical and biological weapons), his distaste for al-Qaeda, and his toying with a new alliance with the US against Iran.



As a professional historian of the Middle East, I am appalled by these documents. They are very odd because the agenda for the interviews was clearly set by Cheney and they were intended to justify the Bush administration. The historical questions are naive and elicit no interesting new information. I can't think of anything in the documents that couldn't just have been found in Saddam's old speeches. And the blanked-out document is very suspicious; presumably the answers there reflected poorly on Bush or Washington or something.

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and a mass murderer. But to have him so shoddily and self-interestedly debriefed and then lynched by the Mahdi Army was a great disservice to history. It is the sort of thing we came to expect from the Bush administration, which oversaw the destruction of the entire twentieth-century historical record for Iraq, as well as crushing and destroying under tanks and helicopters entire libraries of ancient Iraqi civilization, a crime I have dubbed "cliocide."


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Cheney Worries about Wasting the Sacrifices made in Iraq on behalf of Big Oil

Dick Cheney reacted to the cessation of unilateral US patrols of major cities in Iraq, saying that he had concerns that the "insurgents" might launch more attacks and that “I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point."

First of all, Cheney didn't make any sacrifices in Iraq. He deferred his own military service five times because he 'had other things to do.' The 'sacrifices' were caused because he purveyed falsehoods to the US public in order to get up that war, hinting around that Saddam was in bed with Usama Bin Laden and telling senators that Iraq was two years away from having a nuclear bomb. So the sacrifices were of other people's children, and his role was merely that of an Aztec high priest cutting the heart out of the victims.

Second of all, from the dawn of time until 2003, there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. Iraqis are not essentially violent. Like all human beings, they deploy violence at some points to further political goals. Cheney launched a violent illegal war of aggression on Iraq. And Cheney created the "insurgency" by invidious policies that unfairly disadvantaged the Sunni Arabs in the new Iraq he helped midwife.

Third, Cheney's own administration (it was Bush-Cheney, remember Dick?) that negotiated the Status of Forces agreement under which the cessation of stand-alone US patrols of major Iraqi cities was scheduled for this summer. Cheney is trying to imply that this policy is that of the Obama administration!

Fourth, Cheney kept talking about 'liberating' Iraq and democratizing the Middle East. The patrols are ceasing precisely because the elected Iraqi parliament insisted on it! Cheney only likes democracy when it functions as an elective dictatorship for him and his cronies.

Fifth, Jason Leopold reviews the documentary evidence that Dick Cheney combined his energy task force with planning for an overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

Leopold writes,

' [An] April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world's second largest oil reserves.

"Iraq remains a de-stabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East," the report said.

"Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets . . . The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco. . . [the notorious crook] Ken Lay, then chairman of the energy-trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.'

And then Leopold adds is this:

'The New Yorker 's Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated Feb. 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's task force, which was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." [The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004]

By March 2001, Cheney's task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch.
'

In other words, what Cheney is really worried about is that a US military withdrawal from Iraq on the timetable his administration negotiated with the Iraqi parliament might lead to further instability of a sort that would keep the US oil majors from getting at Iraqi petroleum in a big way. His invocation of the 'sacrifies' made by other people's children on the basis of his hateful manipulations is the ultimate desecration.

For my own account of Cheney, Iraq and Big Oil, see


Engaging the Muslim World


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US Forces Launch Helmand Campaign; Pakistani Public turns Against Taliban but Still Rejects US Intervention

Some 4,000 US military personnel and 650 Afghan troops are launching an assault on Taliban positions in Helmand Province, with an aim to 'take, clear and hold' in emulation of the counter-insurgency tactics deployed successfully in some parts of Iraq. Helmand has been a particularly violent province in recent years, and is also the major poppy-producing area of Afghanistan. Past US/Afghan government forcible poppy eradication campaigns angered local farmers and probably contributed to the increased guerrilla activity. This policy of forcible eradication has now been abandoned, though drug interdiction efforts continue. I am not sure the people the US forces in Helmand will be fighting are actually 'Taliban' in the sense of being seminarians loyal to Mulla Omar of Quetta.

Presumably this campaign has been launched now in anticipation of the August 20 presidential elections, which President Hamid Karzai is widely anticipated to win. The elections will require more law and order in some southern, Pushtun provinces than has recently been the case.

A new poll by worldpublicopinion.org has found that the Pakistani public has turned against the Taliban in a big way, with 81% now seeing the Taliban in the Northwest of Pakistan as a critical threat to the country. This is up from 34% in September, 2007. And some two-thirds of Pakistanis view all religious militant groups in the country as a whole as a critical threat to it. This proportion is up from 38% in September of 2007, and it is a significant shift, since a lot of Pakistanis had view the religious militants as freedom fighters for the cause of Kashmir or the liberation of Afghanistan from Western occupation.

The bad news for President Obama is that the Pakistani public's souring on the Taliban has not resulted in higher favorability ratings for the United States. A majority does not trust Obama to do the right thing. Overwhelming majorities believe the US wants to divide and weaken the Muslim world, and 82% reject Obama's predator drone strikes on Pakistani soil. Some 79% want the war in Afghanistan ended now.

In other words, as religious nationalism appears to have declined in Pakistan (something visible in the parliamentary elections of 2008), other forms of secular nationalism have taken its place, no less anti-imperialist in character. Pakistan was born in a struggle to throw off two centuries of British rule in South Asia, and once you go through a thing like that, having Western troops actively intervening in a Muslim neighbor is just not welcome.

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Iran: Mousavi Remains Defiant; Journalists Held

Reuters reports that Iranian opposition leader Mir Hosain Mousavi is continuing to assert that the newly formed second-term government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is illegitimate. He called for a lifting of censorship and the release of the some one thousand Iranians arrested by security forces for participating in demonstrations against the allegedly stolen election. He was joined joined in this continued defiance of Supreme Leader Khamenei by his rival, Mehdi Karroubi and others in the reform camp. My guess is that they aren't far from a jail cell.

The regime is already conducting Stalinist show-trials, as in the case of Maziar Bahari, who recently appeared with me on Fareed Zakaria's GPS Sunday interview show. Please politely protest Mr. Bahari's detention and the coerced 'confession' to Mohammad Khazaee, Ambassador and Permanent Representative, email address: iran@un.int . While you are at it, demand the release of Greek journalist Iason Athanasiadis and the others listed by Amnesty International. If you can, it is best to write by land mail to: Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, Howzeh Riyasat-e Qoveh Qazaiyeh, (Office of the Head of the Judiciary) Pasteur St., Vali Asr Ave.,south of Serah-e Jomhouri,
Tehran 1316814737, Islamic Republic of Iran (Salutation: Your Excellency).

Another ayatollah, Jalaoddin Taheri, has issued a fatwa calling Ahmadinejad's election illegitimate and fraudulent. In 2002, Taheri, long a critic of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, resigned after thirty years as Friday prayer leader of the major city of Isfahan (sort of like being archbishop of Boston). More significant senior ayatollahs, such as Yousuf Sanei, have also shown discomfort with the way the elections were conducted.

Ali Reza Eshraghi explains why most clerical authorities in Iran are afraid of rocking the boat to much, and have more or less acquiesced in Khamenei's decision.

One fall-out of the widespread questioning of the probity of the election process is that Ahmadinejad has had to cancel a trip to Libya to appear at the conference of the African Union, since his being on the roster there had become controversial. Khamenei may win his battle to move the Iranian state further to the repressive Right for the moment, but it may well be a pyrrhic victory since it is likely to isolate Iran further from the international community and to set the stage for further unrest in the future.

Hard as it is to watch all this repression unfold, I agree with Eric Margolis that there is little the US can or should do at this point. Countries have their own developmental history, class structures, and political cultures, and foreign military or covert interventions on behalf of state-building and democratization have very seldom succeeded in modern history.(See Elizabeth Thompson's new study on democratization in the Middle East for USIP-- the pdf is here.) Not to mention that Bush-Cheney and the Neocons tied up the US military and intelligence apparatuses in another illegal war of aggression, which rather weakened US international legitimacy for such purposes. As with post-Tiananmen Square China, the US will just have to deal with the Iran that exists.

Here is the graphic novel of the past three weeks' events in Iran, in the style of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (she is not involved in this production).

Aljazeera English reports from the streets of Tehran on the aftermath of the massive protests against the announced outcome of the June 12 presidential elections.



Iran experts Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Abbas Milani, and Karim Sadjadpour discuss the aftermath of the election and its implications for U.S. foreign policy in the region at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. David Ignatius moderated the discussion.



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Coda: Final Dispatch from Tehran

This message was received by email from Tehran three hours ago. I have anonymized it and made a couple of orthographical corrections and am passing it on for what it is worth. - JC

And on the thirteenth day Michael Jackson died. Voice of America and BBC Persian are back up, if intermittently, and we crowd around like the rest of the world for the latest news. It is almost a relief. Being a full-time revolutionary is hard work, difficult to sustain. Seeing the non-stop coverage, the obvious distraction of his passing, we grimly joke that Michael was a martyr for the cause. At least he had the decency to delay his death until the worst violence had already passed.

Things are going back to their regular marks. In the afternoons the parks fill up again with old ladies and young couples. There's badminton and soccer for kids to play at night. Well-dressed men in jackets and dress pants exercise on the cardio equipment provided by the city. The scenes around the squares, lately the places of so much celebration and trouble, are almost back to normal. Traffic is back. A car flies towards Ariashahr Square, a young man with slicked back hair and aviator glasses leans out of the passenger window chest first. He removes his shades and turns his palms upwards, beseeching the ladies in the car next to him to pull over. Unimpressed, or maybe they're being coy, the girls pull away and race ahead of their pursuers. The two boys give chase. Cops and basijis hang around the circle but do nothing, what do they care...?

Every young person I see I wonder, What were you doing three weeks ago? Who were you then? I look for signs of subversion. A girl wears a green headscarf. A kid shifts gears in his Kia Pride with an arm encased in a green cast. What does it mean? Together, in a crowd, the color green added up to something. Alone, spread apart and without context, they are just moments of coincidence.

Television has become almost unbearable. Stories alternate between the mundane and the absurd. The evening news shows us parents waiting outside of testing halls where their kids are taking the Konkur, the once-yearly high stakes university entrance exam. This year, more than ever, the Konkur is an act of faith. For the less than half who get accepted and manage to finish their studies, one wonders what kind of job market will await them. A friend remarks, We've got to be the most educated unemployed in the world. Sometimes it seems that all we do is attend class, schooling has become the ultimate distraction.

The report on the Konkur ends and the next item is the case of Neda Khanom. Like Jim Garrison in JFK, the reporter shows us step-by-step how her death could NOT have been the result of a single gunman. The caliber doesn't match, it occurred on side streets, why is there footage of her before the incident, etc.. The reporter hints ominously at darker forces active inside of the country, that her death was no doubt a setup by a foreign power. Even by IRI standards, the report is breathtaking. Rather than hide the incident or pretend like it never happened, they try to play it to their advantage. There seems to be nothing beyond the pale, no outrage too great...We reminisce about better days, when the lying had enough truth in it that you could at least fool yourself into believing.

Khoobe, khoobe, bezar begand. Harchi bishtar, baytar. Good, good, let them say it. The more the better. Hamintor khatra siatar mikonand. They'll only darken the line separating the people from the government. We sit and plot, kitchen revolutionaries at work. It is late and the drink is loosening our tongues. What we need is leadership. What about Mousavi? Poor Mousavi, all alone...If only Khomeini were still around, he would have put all of these guys in their places!, this last bit said by someone who has never accepted the Revolution. At 10 the neighbors start up, Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar! We keep drinking, pressing our hands flat against the table and wondering if maybe they're letting us thrash around for a few weeks even as the screws tighten...

Still...I've written elsewhere that none of this was supposed to happen. It remains true. It is the people, the mellat, that has taken on the most creative and unexpected role in this drama. Their scenario remains the least predictable, and therefore most hopeful, of all of the actors, foreign or Iranian. Iran's conspirators clearly did not expect the population to show up in such defiant numbers after June 12 and the truth be told, neither did many of us...

We are told, Mellat e Iran ra nashenakhtim. The state says that the turnout and election results shows that the world and by implication the opposition didn't understand the Iranian people. Mellat e Iran ra nashenakhtim. We didn't understand the Iranian people, say certain analysts in Europe and the U.S.. The vote proves that Ahmadinejad is loved and the West once again didn't get the "true Iran."

Still...as the unrest continues, daily taking new forms---Iran's innumerable revolutionary, religious, and national holidays promise to be new sites of protest--it would appear that it is the state and its band of fellow travelers in the West that has failed to understand what has happened...

Cats are on the prowl in the kuchehs and sidestreets of Tehran. They've never had it better. A two-year effort by the city to outfit the capital with trash bins has gone to waste. In a few nights of protest practically every bin in the city has been kicked over, stomped on, melted into its primal elements. Neighbors have gone back to placing trash-filled yellow and black grocery bags at the end of the alley (sar e kuche) at night. The cats wait until no one is around and then show up sniffing, padding about, looking for their night's food.

Throughout the capital there are deep marks etched onto the asphalt, mottled grooves in the shape of a blocky "u" from where the bin fires burned hot against the pavement. The scars run at regular intervals across Tehran's many neighborhoods, sometimes in overlapping pairs or threes. It will be some time before these blemishes are repaired. Entirely new roads will have to be built...

(Dedicated to the geniuses at Nokia/Siemens)

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Death Toll in Kirkuk Rises to 33; Growing Arab-Kurdish Violence Threatens Stability of Iraq; 4 US Troops Killed

The casualty toll in the Kirkuk bombing on Tuesday has risen to 33, with about 100 injured.

Four US troops were killed in Iraq on Tuesday, as well, though the circumstances are still murky.

The Iraqi civil wars kicked off by the American invasion of 2003 continue. I'm sure a lot of observers think it is all one internal war, but it is not. It is multiple. Nor is the bombing relevant to the American withdrawal from the cities, as some press reports are implying, since there were never very many US troops in Kurdistan or the Iraqi north generally. (Though settling the Arab-Kurdish problem before they leave will be essential to a good exit for Americans).

A bombing like this in Kirkuk means something different than a similar event in Baghdad or in Shiite Nasiriyah in the south. A lot of the violence in the south is among Shiite militias; there are few Sunnis, and their freedom of movement is constrained (a Tikriti "r" is different from the "r" used in the south, and so the religio-ethnic difference can sometimes be heard; plus, Sunnis typically don't know the details of the lives of the 12 Imams sacred to the Shiites and so can fairly easily be caught out.)

A bombing in Baghdad typically indicates continued conflict between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, though my best guess is that Sunni Arabs are only 10-15% of Baghdad now, so that the bombings are more helpless raging revenge than effective guerrilla politics.

But in Kirkuk, even if it is the radical vigilantes ("Salafi jihadis" or what the US press calls 'al-Qaeda in Iraq') that are behind the bombing, it has a different significance. Kirkuk is the arena for a potentially epochal struggle between the Arabs (both Sunni and Shiite) and the Kurds (mostly Sunni, who do not speak Arabic as their mother tongue).

Tuesday's blast was the second major such attack in a week and a half, since 70 were killed in Kirkuk in a bombing just 10 days ago.

The Kurdistan Regional Government is a special federal region within Iraq, comprising what used to be 3 provinces that have now been conjoined into one administration. But the KRG is not satisfied with this territory. Its leaders what to annex large swathes of Iraq proper, including the oil-rich province of Kirkuk. The Kurds, who were favored by the Neocons and assisted on the ground by powerful American supporters such as Peter Galbraith and Brendan O'Leary, had an article put into the new Iraqi constitution demanding a referendum on the future of Kirkuk, to be conducted in that province, by the end of 2007. It never happened, because it was a sort of ultimatum, and military historians know that ultimatums usually kick off a war. Since the Kurdish authorities largely control the police and security forces in Kirkuk province (a legacy of the cooperation of the Kurdish Peshmerga paramilitary in helping the US take the city of Kirkuk in the 2003 war), the Kurdistan authorities have been in a good position to flood the province with Kurdish immigrants, some of them returnees who had been ethnically cleansed in the name of Arabization by Saddam Hussein, but some at least of whom are probably new to the province. So the Kurds would probably win a referendum.

But the Arabs and Turkmen, who together form at least a plurality, are die-hard against being dragooned into Kurdistan (remember, the practice in the KRG has been to erase provincial borders and meld the administration into one, which means that Kirkuk Arabs and Turkmen will be a tiny minority in the sea of a unified Kurdistan).

On Monday, 50 Iraqi members of parliament had entered a protest against the draft constitution for Kurdistan, which will be submitted to a referendum in the KRG, since it explicitly claims Kirkuk and parts of Ninevah and Diyala provinces and appears to endorse a Greater Kurdistan that would threaten Turkey, Iran and Syria as well as Arab Iraq. The new constitution is also being criticized by Kurdish secularists for making Islam the state religion and forbidding the civil legislature to pass laws contrary to sharia or Islamic canon law.

Kurdistan leaders are increasingly intolerant of press criticism, having on more than one occasion jailed journalists or confiscated runs of publications.

So the bombing is not just a manifestation of fundamentalist terrorism, though it may be that. It is political, and aims at achieving political aims, in a way that the random and ineffectual bombings in Baghdad no longer can hope to.

I am not sympathetic to movements coming out of 19th century romantic nationalism, which tend to reify ethnicity in an almost racist manner and posit essentialist connections between land and people (especially silly in those parts of the Middle East, such as Iraq, where a third to a half of people were pastoralists wandering around until the twentieth century). The Arab-Kurdish divide in Iraq is extremely unfortunate and economically irrational. If Iraq can ever reestablish security and develop the southern oil fields, which are enormous, Kurds will be drawn down south as workers in large numbers, and get spread around the country. The Kirkuk fields are old, water-logged and on the way to being worked out. Iraq's future probably lies elsewhere and therefore probably so does the future of Kurdish citizens of Iraq. Kurds would be wiser to forget about trying to control territory in the 19th century way and surrender to the messiness, ethnic mixing and multiple identities, and uprootedness of postmodern life. And nothing better exemplifies such postmodernism than the polyglot hydrocarbon states of the Gulf. If Kurds aren't careful they'll be stuck landlocked, with small resources, and surrounded by powerful local enemies fearful of their separatism, while Nepalis, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans get rich working in the oil economy of the Arab Shiite south of Iraq.

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With a Whimper, not a Bang; A Milestone on the Way to the End of American Iraq

T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of "Hollow Men" in 1926, "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper." He may as well have been talking about the war George W. Bush launched in Iraq in 2003.

The end of routine, independent patrolling of major Iraqi cities by US troops today is a major milestone in modern Iraqi history.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared Tuesday "National Sovereignty Day." Some 86 US bases have been closed in recent weeks (see the Jim Muir report). The LAT says that on Monday night, people in Baghdad danced in the streets, sang and set off (non-lethal) fireworks even in the midst of a dust storm.

Some Americans might find all this celebrating offensive. But the US public has mostly moved on, little interested in the foreign wars its armed forces are still fighting, and worried much more about the long-term consequences of the Republican Party's Ponzi-scheme economy of 2001-2008, the collapse of which has cost them or their family and friends their jobs. As in the 1930s, even celebrity gossip and the glitz of Hollywood are more present in people's minds than distant armies on the march. The public and the mass media mysteriously ignored the Afghanistan War right from 2002, and now Iraq is being given the same treatment, even though there are 130,000 or so US troops in Iraq and 38,000 in Afghanistan, and both contingents are still fighting and dying.

The end of US patrolling should neither be exaggerated nor downplayed as a turning point. Of course, US troops will still be in Iraqi streets from time to time, accompanying Iraqi forces. Special Operations teams will likely engage in surgical strikes in coordination with their Iraqi colleagues for years to come.

But there is an essential difference between such occasional interventions of a collaborative sort and routine patrols by a foreign military of densely populated urban areas in an Arab, Muslim country. The latter is viewed as a form of neo-colonialism by most Iraqis. The former could be welcome if it adds to law and order.

I was talking to a US military officer who had been in Baghdad in December, and he told me that he thought that Iraqi troops were now capable of patrolling independently, something he would not have said a year or two earlier. If they get into trouble, he said, they stand and fight. They still have poor logistical support. If the firefight lasts 5 hours rather than one hour, they might be in trouble because no one is bringing them ammunition and water. Az-Zaman writes in Arabic that the governor of Najaf remarked Sunday that US troops would still provide logistical support to Iraqi ones, despite the end of routine American patrols.

The Iraqi military has been setting up extra patrols and checkpoints in preparation for the cessation of American patrols. The az-Zaman article cited above speaks of some mysteries, including the incarceration of dozens of Iraqis in the provinces. And there is the sudden release of a major Mahdi Army militia commander. Is Washington trying to cut a deal as it leaves?

That the Iraqi military has experienced a sudden increase in efficiency is attested by relatively successful campaigns in 2008 against the Mahdi Army Shiite militia in Basra, Amara, Nasiriya, and Sadr City (East Baghdad). Security appears tangibly to have improved in the south in the aftermath. Still, of course the Iraqi police and other security forces have a long way to go toward professionalism.

Aljazeera English has video on the constant threat to police from guerrillas:



Of course, the operations in Basra and east Baghdad succeeded in part because the US air force gave the Iraqi military close air support. That is another way that the US is not just vanishing from Iraq. Iraq does not have an air force and will not have one for something close to a decade, and its government wants the US to act as a surrogate Iraqi air force for the time being. Note, however, that such air support can be proffered from al-Udeid base in Qatar. It does not require a base inside Iraq.

More US troops will be withdrawn, though Gen. Ray Odierno wants to have a big enough force in January to help provide security for the parliamentary elections that month. I think there is some fear that if US troops are not sufficient in number to help lock down the country for the elections, that paucity of troops may encourage Sunni Arab radicals to disrupt the balloting with massive car bombings. Moreover, there is a danger of Iranian hard liners trying to steal the Iraqi elections, as a repeat performance of what happened in Iran on June 12, by using petrodollars to buy votes for their hard line Shiite allies.

In the medium term, the bombings by Sunni Arab guerrilla groups who cannot reconcile to the Shiite- and Kurdish-led new government, will likely continue. It is not clear, however, that such bombings can actually undermine the new government or force a radical change. If they cannot, they are useless.

The end of major US combat operations, prematurely announced by Bush on the USS Lincoln in 2003, may finally be at hand. Iraq faces many challenges going forward. Corruption is almost crippling for reconstruction. There has been little political reconciliation. Guerrillas are still deadly, as are sectarian militias. An Arab-Kurdish struggle over oil-rich Kirkuk of some ferocity could break out at any time. Increasingly, however, these problems will have to be dealt with by the new Iraqi elite itself.

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