http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/15/strange-alignments/

First among the American concerns is a Shiite-led government that has been so dogmatic in its attitude that the Americans worry that they will be frustrated in their aim of cracking down equally on Shiite and Sunni extremists, a strategy President Bush has declared central to the plan.

“We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem,� said an American military official in Baghdad involved in talks over the plan. “We are being played like a pawn.�

The American military’s misgivings came as new details emerged of the reconstruction portion of Mr. Bush’s plan, which calls for more than doubling the number of American-led reconstruction teams in Iraq to 22 and quintupling the number of American civilian reconstruction specialists to 500. [Page A7.]

Compounding American doubts about the government’s willingness to go after Shiite extremists has been a behind-the-scenes struggle over the appointment of the Iraqi officer to fill the key post of operational commander for the Baghdad operation. In face of strong American skepticism, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has selected an officer from the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq who was virtually unknown to the Americans, and whose hard-edged demands for Iraqi primacy in the effort has deepened American anxieties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/world/middleeast/15baghdad.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

PatrickM you’ve got ‘em on the run. You are being subject to standard union meeting tactics for handling someone who looks like outdebating the union leadership on an issue.

er.. you called George Bush “progressive�. The thought police in here will never stand for someone being termed so unless they are a mouthpiece for the hard left.

Steve: Heh.

Mate, this bloke IS you bog standard Maoist HL total FW thought cop. Strewth. Next thing he’ll have you believing that Pol Pot was Jesus Christ.

Ironic that Nelson Mandela and the ANC led the way and yet the Left still treats the Iraqi elections with such disdain?

Did you read my earlier comment about a recent survey of public opinion, Barbara?

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/04/scourging-the-surge/#comment-311740

3% of Iraqis regard the Maliki government as having performed well. 3%.

And legitimate questions could be raised about the commitment to democracy of some in the AMC, including President Mbeki, if we’re honest about it. But the salient difference is that the AMC came to power in a vote that reflected years of negotiation and accommodation and was accompanied by a genuine process of national reconciliation, not the farce that has been visited upon Iraqis. The Soviet Union used to have a constitution – written by Stalin – that allegedly gave citizens more freedoms than in the US. The letter of these documents is nothing if not accompanied by the spirit. The fact that the electoral system was copied from South Africa doesn’t make the result anything approaching democracy – because the Sunni and Shia militias want to wipe each other out. Baghdad is undergoing violent ethnic cleansing – that’s the premise of the new surge strategy. Even the Bushies admit that.

As to Tawney, the fact that he wrote in the 20s means that he didn’t have the benefit of subsequent scholarship. The debate over the historical origins of capitalism is a complex one, but I honestly don’t think it’s got much relevance to this thread.

er.. you called George Bush “progressive”. The thought police in here will never stand for someone being termed so unless they are a mouthpiece for the hard left.

Significantly the Afrikaaner whites ruled/tyrannised the blacks from similar 15 to 20% minority position. This was why the Shiites and Kurds insisted on an SA style constitution that would ensure no minority could ever assume absolute power again and no majority could take absolute power over minorities unless it gained more than 66% of the vote.

In esssence, the Kurds and the Shiites ensured that coalition power sharing would be the norm not the rule in future.

Ironic that Nelson Mandela and the ANC led the way and yet the Left still treats the Iraqi elections with such disdain?

Beyond the fact that it gives you a good opportunity to be patronising and self-righeous, what is your interest in this discussion?

Mark – if you cannot support any particular force amongst the people you’ve at least got to define and support a process otherwise you are not dealing with anything in the real world at all.

The debate on troop levels (to ‘surge’ or not) revolves around how best can the change that has been unleashed, ready or not, be supported as it unfolds in the interests of the vast majority of the peoples’ of Iraq.

Is Iraq now a modernity project such that recognizably progressive westerners could sign up to defending it in 2007? Are there recognizable enemies to that project that ought to be opposed?

Mark has now delved deep enough into the question of democracy to come up with the answer that I had provided, (apparently without the question . ‘Who are our enemies who are our friends?’ Or as Mark puts it; ‘who constitute the people?’ He quotes the following approvingly;

Samuel P. Huntington makes this point well:
Individual authoritarian governments may rule and may have often ruled over people of diverse nationalities and cultures. Democracy, on the other hand, means that at a minimum people choose their rulers and that more broadly they participate in government in other ways. The question of identity thus becomes central: Who are the people? As Ivor Jennings observed, “the people cannot decide until someone decides who are the people�. The decision as to who are the people may be the result of long-standing tradition, war and conquest, plebiscite or referendum, constitutional provision, or other causes, but it cannot be avoided.

Indeed it cannot be avoided and has not been avoided in Iraq.

It is simply not important to agree on the method of launching the change that has occurred. That liberation/invasion is well in the past; as is the Iraqi struggle for a constitution, (though minor changes are always on the agenda). The elections that flowed from that constitution are no longer in any serious way doubted to be the free and fair expression of the general will of the population and thus a proportionally representative parliament has been established which has produced a government that is now just over six months old. This government appears to be heading for a reshuffle in the grand tradition of proportionally representative governments. The next elections are scheduled for late 2009 and there are no indications at the start of 2007 that these elections will not proceed as normally as they would in any other democracy.

We appear to agree that Saddam’s Baathists were intolerable fascists when in control of the whole of Iraq and I don’t think that anyone commenting here expects people from the remaining 98+% of the population, to put up with the Baathist dictatorship founded from a small minority of the Arab Sunni 20%.

It is both right to rebel against their rule and to continue the process through a struggle for a constitution and democratic elections.

We all should note that this is a supportable process, irrespective of the actual people that currently exist in Iraq.

Whatever the disagreements, about whether to put in more troops, (as requested by the elected Iraqi Government), in the so called ‘surge’, or to pull them out, these disagreements are not based on the established constitution that guarantees the current rights of the Iraqi peoples’ and provides for their proportional representation and the formal protection of minority rights. The process that brought about this constitution and the current representation is clearly democratic.

As with the United States of Jefferson, the formal democracy has to be made real as with the actual struggle to free Jefferson’s slaves. The U.S. was a democracy, where strange fruit hung in trees for centuries, till the 1960’s civil rights struggle produced a new society where a black woman named Condoleezza Rice is now a conceivable US Republican President.

But so far in Iraq there is nothing wrong with the process, nothing wrong with the formal product. The job now is to expose those politicians, those actual forces, that are not abiding by that constitution and then empower and enable the Iraqi Government to deal with them.

Criminals are excluded from the ranks of the people. They are denied the rights of the people and are confined in prisons. They retain human rights but not the rights of ‘the people’. Just as in the West.
Christine Keeler, through loss of focus and attempts at humor, tends to distort this;

‘Says it all really. Friends are people who agree with you and everybody else gets shoved up before a wall and shot.’

No Christine; everybody else gets treated with human rights even if ‘the people’ whose formation ‘cannot be avoided’, go to war with them. The Iraqi people are at war and will remain at war with Jihadis, Baathists and Shia death squads.

The revolutionary people then establish the laws of war. Thus we can decide who is in breach of those laws and punish them accordingly. Even when the top Nazis were executed they were treated under laws that maintained their human rights, and despite some minor shortcomings at the execution so was Saddam Hussein dealt with during this revolution.

Thus also soldiers from the ranks of the people who behave in a criminal manner lose their status as members of the people and are and ought to be treated as the criminals that they thus become, when they start ‘shoving others up before a wall and shooting them’.

Shoving the very few U.S. rapist-murders up against a wall and shooting them will not be a violation of the rights of those soldiers, but a defense of ‘the peoples’ rights to be free from all such thugs. These individuals are harming the war effort and deserve the harshest possible punishment for their crimes. There is no excuse for their behavior. That was the point being made about the deliberate abuses of captives at Abu Ghraib. Sanchez deserved to be severely punished for what he was involved in. It harmed the war effort enormously and many heroic Coalition and Iraqi soldiers and civilians have paid for this criminal behavior with their lives.

The reason the people who identify as left, are taking these extreme right wing positions (ie objectively defending Baathist rule; their failure to make any strategic war on Jihadis; no proposal to deal effectively with Shia death squads in Iraq; no respect for nor any unity with any Iraqi political forces especially those that are not secular etc), is because for them the all important issue is their view that Coalition troops fighting the enemy of all modernity in Iraq is wrong – period. They view the war as if the U.S. is rerunning its aggression in Vietnam where it was preventing free and fair elections! They cannot see current U.S. troops in the light of WW2 type heroes actually liberating the masses of Iraqis’.

Some pseudo-leftists accept a fight in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban but a great many do not even accept this, so there is no way that they are prepared to engage in the development of a strategy for victory. Thus they cannot say what strategic view they would have put forward after 9/11 smashed the old ‘realist’ views of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. And as we head toward the sixth anniversary of the event they are reduced to complaining about the lack of stability now evident in the region.

They have failed to understand that the war was all about setting off the process of region change and end up sounding like the phony pacifists that they are.

They even complain that the US ruling class had to be lied to by the ruling elite about WMD. How can people expect the US ruling elite to admit that they have been doing far more than tolerating dictators; they have been opposing democracy for the last sixty years and installing and propping up dictators etc

To ‘surge’ or not is just an irrelevant distraction for anti American pseudo-leftists. For them nothing can be done but pull all the troops out, and let the Iraqi peoples’ fight it out!

Trouble is they suspect that that would lead to a regional war as the Saudis and the Iranians and then the Syrians and the Turks got drawn in. Just as the al Qaeda sorts are already drawn in. That would be a correct suspicion, and is not going to happen while this administration is still in place.

Instead of coming up with a real plan of their own to defeat the three enemies of the Iraqi peoples and of all modernity, they denounce Bush for being dumb and this war for being fought in a cultural swamp where almost none of the forces are worth supporting.

Not to worry no one is listening to them and more troops are going to Baghdad.

patrickm

US President George W. Bush is said to be extremely upset by the results of a recent survey that explored the opinion of Iraqis three-and-half-years after the invasion. According to the survey, conducted jointly by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS) and the Gulf Research Centre, only five per cent of those questioned said Iraq is better today than in 2003. While 95 per cent felt the security situation was worse than before. The poll also revealed that nearly half of Iraqis favour an immediate withdrawal of the US-led forces; and 66 per cent felt the security situation would improve if the international coalition troops left.

Their “democratic government” has even worse poll numbers than Bush:

Full cooperation from the Iraqi government concerning the disbanding of all militias is essential for the success of the new plan. Yet, the survey of the ICRSS does not seem promising in this regard also. The poll found that between 84 and 91 per cent of Iraqis regarded the US-backed Nouri Al Maliki government’s performance as “very poor” in the implementation of promises, reconstruction efforts, dealing with sectarian strife, providing jobs and basic necessities. Only about 1.5-3 per cent of them rated the government’s work as “good”. This constitutes another major challenge for Bush’s new Iraq strategy.

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/01/06/10094619.html

I belive that the blood and treasure spent on installing an Islamist government in Iraq was necessary

is the same as saying

When the promise of utopian futures justifies any degree of transitional bloodshed, then argument is hopeless.

In particular, why is it ‘utopian’ to think that there is a chance that Iraq will develop into a genuinely democratic state?

if you’d like this thread to simply repeat your own opinions over and over, rather than being a place to debate people who disagree with you, just say so.

No David, that’s your schtick.

Really, Gummo?

I think I was debating Chris when I answered what he had to say.

I think I was debating when I agreed that majority rule does not necessarily equal democracy, which was ignored and misrepresented.

I think I was debating when I dicussed the relevance or otherwise of the ‘legality’ argument against the war.

I think I was debating when I gave a clear, straight answer to Mark’s challenge to supporters of the war to start explaining what victory might look like.

And I think that snide remarks (like calling Last Superpower ‘Lefties for Bonzo’), a refusal to back up assertions evidence when requested, and a refusal to actually engage with anything I say, are not debate, are your shtick, and are also the shtick of several others on this thread.

If you don’t think I am debating, please say why.

Sorry, I said that where?

I belive that the blood and treasure spent on installing an Islamist government in Iraq was necessary

If you believe you’ve been mischaracterised, David, perhaps you’d like to explain your support for the war succinctly.

Mismanagement (which has happened many times over in the Iraq war) does not, in itself, affect whether the war was justified or not.

The war wasn’t justified. The ostensible grounds for going to war – Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction – was a lie.

Not only was the war not justified, but its conduct, and the continuing conduct of the occupation – as at Abu Ghraib – the mismanagement – is in breach of combatants obligations to conduct war in a just way. It was obvious from the beginning, when the US introduced us to the term “collateral damage” that this was going to happen – the war would be conducted with complete indifference to the rights of non-combatants.

if you’d like this thread to simply repeat your own opinions over and over, rather than being a place to debate people who disagree with you, just say so.

No David, that’s your schtick.

When the promise of utopian futures justifies any degree of transitional bloodshed, then argument is hopeless.

Sorry, I said that where?

When the mismanagement is so bad as to cause terrible death tolls, then it shows the war was conducted without regard for the real welfare of the population.

But no-one here can force you to dismount your noble but legless nag, Teleological Tilting (2001 out of Fearmonger and Hegemonic Design).

When the promise of utopian futures justifies any degree of transitional bloodshed, then argument is hopeless.

The only way you can maintain it is by ignoring the complete collapse of Iraqi society since the occupation

What leads you to belive that Iraqi society has ‘completely collapsed’?

mismangement of the occupation which has included abuses such as Abu Ghraib.

Mismanagement (which has happened many times over in the Iraq war) does not, in itself, affect whether the war was justified or not.

Of course, if you’d like this thread to simply repeat your own opinions over and over, rather than being a place to debate people who disagree with you, just say so.

So much fatuous piffle – and it keeps on coming. I download the page for a leisurely peruse of the comments off-line and what do I find? Yet another tendentious comment from our local envoy from the happiest kingdom of them all.

Is there nothing this man isn’t willing to express an opinion on? Even if his opinion is based only on a set of questionable "key assertions" (give me propositions or even better facts), macho intellectual posturing of the “I’m tough enough to contemplate the sacrifice of human lives if it leads to democracy”.

You want analysis DJ? Start with a little work on your own analytical skills. Try acquainting yourself with the philosophical tradition of just war theory before you next repeat fatuous statements like this:

I belive that the blood and treasure spent on installing an Islamist government in Iraq was necessary, because the previous US policy – propping up dictators – led directly to September 11, 2001.

As Mark said, that’s an ethically facile position. The only way you can maintain it is by ignoring the complete collapse of Iraqi society since the occupation and the flagrant mismangement of the occupation which has included abuses such as Abu Ghraib. No analysis is needed to recognise facts.