(More) trouble brewing
BBC News: Kurd oil deal alarms Iraqi Sunnis
News that a foreign firm has begun drilling for oil in Iraq’s Kurdish north has sparked new fears of secession among Sunni leaders.
Here’s the punchline:
At a ceremony to launch the drilling, Nachirvan Barzani, one of the Kurds’ two regional prime ministers, stressed the benefits to his community.
“The time has come that instead of suffering the people of Kurdistan will benefit from the fortunes and resources of their country,” he said.
“There is no way Kurdistan would accept that the central government will control our resources.”
My emphasis. I’m sure this will all work out ok, the shiny new constitution will tell them what to do…
“We need to figure out if this is allowed in the constitution,” said Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. “Nobody has mentioned it. It has not come up among the government ministers’ council. It has not been on their agenda.”
…
However, Helge Eide, managing director of Oslo-based DNO, said he believed Iraq’s new constitution gave the Kurdish north jurisdiction over certain drilling and oil exploration activities.
“That was clearly pointed out by Mr. [Nechirvan] Barzani,” said Eide, who attended the Zakho ceremony.
Glad we got that cleared up. You know, people can’t say they weren’t warned about this. The negotiation process for the constitution was driven to an arbitrary American timetable. When that deadline was breached the further negotiations and changes that were made were technically illegal and may even be challengeable in the courts. Not only that, according to an International Crisis Group report:
Key passages [of the constitution], such as those dealing with decentralisation and with the responsibility for the power of taxation, are both vague and ambiguous and so carry the seeds of future discord.
The full report is long but worth the read if you’re interested in such things. Seeds of civil war are planted in the constitution itself. If rampant sectarian death squads don’t light the blue touch paper, the constitution - hailed as the country’s saviour - may very well do it for them.
By the way, we’re not to call these people “insurgents” any more, Donald said so. They don’t have a “legitimate gripe” and Rumsfeld really doesn’t have anything better to do. He had “an epiphany” and decided their current epithet gives them “greater legitimacy than they seem to merit”. I like the seem. Donald Rumsfeld: bringing the anarchy to an end one semantic adjustment at a time.
You’ll have noticed that I’ve sourced a lot of links from Reuters AlertNet. If you want to get a flavour of the mayhem ensuing in Iraq right now, sign up for for 24 hours to the email service alerting of events in Iraq. You’ll be inundated with more emails than you can probably read.
In other news:
Dahr Jamail and Harb Al-Mukhtar: Where People Cannot Afford Their Country
Despite the allocation of billions of dollars of U.S. government money for “reconstruction”, Iraqis are struggling to exist amidst soaring prices, unemployment, a devastated infrastructure, and cuts in services.
Posted on December 1st, 2005 at 6:57 pm
| See also • You can’t handle the truth • …but at least they’re our bastards #4578 • …lay a little egg for me |
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Filed under Iraq |
Ha’aretz
Israel must prepare itself for the American withdrawal from Iraq. An American withdrawal, especially if it takes place without the United States achieving its main goals in Iraq, will certainly influence the strategic situation throughout the region. The American military deployment in the Middle East in the wake of the Iraq war is of unprecedented scope. Its forces are deployed on the flanks of Iran and Syria, opposite Lebanon and near Jordan and Saudi Arabia. As a result, Iran and Syria are behaving much more cautiously.
However, the American public is badly influenced by the events in Iraq and the losses suffered there, without any sign of a tangible solution approaching. That feeling has penetrated Congress, and members of the president’s own party are starting to talk about the need to develop an “exit strategy” from Iraq. President Bush’s popularity is at an unprecedented low. But Bush keeps reiterating that he will not order an exit from Iraq until the goals of the war are met.
Well-informed American sources say that senior Republican Party officials are already dealing with the question of whom to send to the White House when Bush’s term is over. They fear that the current situation will cause a Republican downfall in the next presidential elections, so they want to change the timetable for the withdrawal from Iraq. That will require them to change Washington’s strategic goals in Iraq gradually. It’s something the U.S. has done before, in Vietnam, as Henry Kissinger did.
American experts are already talking about it, saying that after the Iraqi elections a new government will be formed there with a different composition and more ministers from the Sunni community. With the Iraqi government’s agreement, the process of “Iraqization” of the war against “the rebels” will begin in 2006. Something similar happened during the war in Vietnam, known as Vietnamization.
In Iraq, there is talk that the process will enable the U.S. to pull its forces out of the cities in 2006. The U.S. military involvement in Iraq will mostly be aerial support, deployment on the Iraq-Syria border and logistical help. That will reduce the number of American troops there, and as a result, the numbers of American casualties.
America’s enemies will certainly exploit those changes to claim that Washington failed to achieve its minimal goals in the Iraq war. When defeated in wars in the past, the Arabs often managed to convince their people that they won. In any case, an unsuccessful American withdrawal from Iraq will certainly cause Iran to step up its involvement there, strengthen Hezbollah and further encourage terror against Israel.
Al-Qaida will also feel more confident in its attacks on moderate and pro-Western regimes like Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Palestinian extremists will draw encouragement from such a development. What doesn’t get done before the American withdrawal with regard to Israeli-Palestinian road map arrangements will be much harder to accomplish afterward. The results of various elections in the Middle East could also make things more difficult for the moderates.
In any case, Israel must assume that an American withdrawal from Iraq will take place in three years at the latest, when a new president enters office. It doesn’t matter if it is a Democrat or Republican. The new president will surely do everything possible to find a convenient formula for a withdrawal from Iraq. Therefore, Israel must prepare strategically for an American withdrawal and carefully examine what can be achieved in the realm of arrangements with the Palestinians.
Ohhhhhhhh, by the way Israeli security experts are advising the Kurds.