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Tag Archives: factional

Iraq – Animus, Instability, Repression – Challenging the State Concept

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars

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analysis, civil war, factional, Iraq, political psychology, politics, warfare

Across the Islamic Small Wars, one may wonder about the validity of the state concept in “states” barely holding it together across inchoate and uncooperative political campuses.

In some places, the answer to “Why can’t y’all just get along?” is “We all just don’t want to get along.”

That’s Iraq.

Let’s take this imagined internal dialogue two steps further:

“We believe that something has been taken away from us, and we can steal it back with vengeance.”

*

“We believe we can achieve something greater and can force it into existence.”

* * *

Part of what binds the contemporary functioning democracies of “the west” may be the experience of the corruption and tyranny of the feudal systems that preceded them.  The collective memory contains the inspired eruption of deeply repressed contempt and hatred for “ruling classes” and with it the smell and taste of blood spilled  in ways and in volumes that would today cast al-Nusra in Syria as the pale ghost of a minor devil.

In essence, all those pretty open democracies so peacefully gathered around the Mediterranean have been no strangers to sectarian warfare, mass beheading, industrialized death by every nefarious means available, and settlement, at times, through only the complete destruction of an armed foe.

Those Europeans “all get along” amid battle scarred landscapes and in the presence of cemeteries ranked with men too young for death because well they know how sickening nasty the war business can get, and they no longer want any part of it — and if they must be part of it, it’s going to be as short and violent and decisive an engagement as it may be made.

______

We may be entering an area, or may be already within one, in which great private interests, no less than in feudal days albeit with greater subtlety, arrange their political environments out of sight of constituted and official governments.

Mafia defined by greed becomes the true underlying or hidden governing model, and the units of analysis: families and clans of note with business interests attending.

The politicians have handlers, payoff masters, as it were.

Perhaps.

In the letting of contracts and jobs, it may appear that nepotism trumps merit, and it may be so.

How to tell?

Who are the auditors and where are they?

Where are the journalists who report with integrity?

What is to temper power?

Where is the state leader brave and canny enough to promote an open conversation while carefully reigning in the only the elements intending to destroy core democratic political process?

______

The New York Times reports that the United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq “to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.”

This happens in the context of the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis in 2013, the highest level of violence since 2008.

The President Who Lost Iraq « Commentary Magazine – 12/26/2013.

* * *

Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq told CNN that he was “shocked” to hear U.S. President Barack Obama greet al-Maliki at the White House on Monday as “the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant and democratic Iraq.”

Iraq’s leader becoming a new ‘dictator,’ deputy warns – CNN.com – 12/13/2013.

* * *

While Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been catching flak as another Washington-sponsored dictator in the making, one cannot assign to him the year-long uptick in sectarian tit-for-tat violence and terror even if assertions launched against him should prove true.  Example: 

Leaders of the popular uprisings in 6 Sunni provinces told me that the wave of terror which has claimed the lives of 7,000 people so far this year in Iraq is his responsibility, because he controls the military, the police, the intelligence services and all aspects of security in the country. Iraq is rapidly spiralling down towards a renewed insurgency and Maliki’s only response is to marginalise the Kurds, label the Sunnis as terrorists and turn a blind-eye to the systematic discrimination and violence against other ethnic minority groups.

European MEP in Erbil says “Maliki’s authoritarian policies are tearing the country apart” – CNN iReport – 11/27/2013.

Is the hearsay true?

Prove it — or call it slander.

What would the most balanced leader do if (setting out with a fair neutral force at his disposal) he were confronted with crimes against his constituents — all of them in representation — accompanied by accusation of sectarian preference in the operations of his government promoting attacks that in turn promote revenge?

Would he investigate the crimes as crimes only wrapped in political or religious cover and go on with the business of producing an institutionally open, responsive, and responsible government?

Or would he revert to the loyalty of his own and reconstruct a government built on deep wells of suspicion expressed in the application of tyrannical force against all suspected challengers not of his own affiliation?

* * *

“Regretfully, the Arab revolutions were able to shake the dictatorships but were not able to fill the void in the right way,” Mr. Maliki said. “So a vacuum was created, and al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were able to exploit it and to gain ground.”

Iraq’s Maliki Blames Rising Extremist Violence on Syria – Washington Wire – WSJ – 10/31/2013.

In the Arab world, deflections of responsibility inevitably produce harm.  They are part of lying (by omission: regulars here know the refrain: “to hide something; to get something”) as well as avoiding engagement with the values that in fact weaken the state in such a way as to make it a prize for factional contests through the usual means — intimidation, murder, terror — rather than a central forum for factional arguments in accord with Roberts Rules.

* * *

And the violence shows no sign of letting up. Suspected Sunni Islamist militants on Christmas day set off three bombs in the heavily Christian Dora district of the capital, killing at least 38, including 24 who died at the conclusion of a church service. Western regions of the country were on edge on Sunday after the Shia-dominated government’s security forces arrested a popular Sunni lawmaker and killed his brother and five guards in a raid.

International companies aim to set up shop in Iraq despite violence – FT.com – 12/29/2013.

The bungling, if it was that, doesn’t help in Iraq’s difficult environment — and is it possible to balance that “Shia-dominated . . . security force” with greater Sunni and Christian complements?

Beyond that, so one might urge: get over the sickness in the head that divides others in the world into those worthy of one’s respect and those deserving of contempt, and that to the extent that they may be slaughtered at will: God did not authorize the humans judging to make such judgments.

______

(Reuters) – Fighting erupted when Iraqi police broke up a Sunni Muslim protest camp in the western Anbar province on Monday, leaving at least 13 people dead, police and medical sources said.

The camp has been an irritant to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite Muslim-led government since Sunni protesters set it up a year ago to demonstrate against what they see as marginalization of their sect.

Fighting erupts as Iraq police break up Sunni protest camp | Reuters – 12/30/2013.

* * *

Iraq’s security forces have almost entirely abandoned the successful formula of population-focused counter-insurgency developed by the US-led coalition, instead falling back on counter-productive traditional tactics such as mass arrests and collective punishment.

BBC News – Analysis: Iraq’s never-ending security crisis – 10/3/2013.

* * *

The Iraqi government is now making many of the same mistakes the United States made back then: It is alienating the Sunnis and occupying their communities with a heavy-handed, military-led approach that doesn’t differentiate between diehard militants and the mass of peaceable civilians.

Yes, Iraq Is Unraveling – Foreign Policy – Michael Knights – 5/15/2013.

______

The phrase “weak government” may itself be weak.

If the potential strength of a coalition of the moderate (well representative of population overall and intent on peace) does not display in firm martial ability, it invites fracturing along the more parochial lines associated with private financial, psychological, and religious agenda.

In essence, the state as a political whole may prove too weak to restrain the restive energies inhabiting its body — it literally cannot contain itself — and it then fails as a reliable political element.

Autocratic attempts to contain latent fracturing through repression may work as presently suggested by the Egyptian narrative that has developed between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s still nascent, still potential democracy.

However, the same in Iraq, as the screws tighten, may isolate state authority and invite a civil contest so incoherent  with mixed factional motivations that the fighting cannot be resolved through compromise and accommodation — nor may it be won as the point of it becomes a continuous and ill-defined struggle beneath the delusion that there is something greater yet to be won when plainly there is not.

Peace is to be won first and foremost.

Without it, nothing else can be done.

# # #

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

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This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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