US Backed paramilitaries already causing grief in Iraq

spongebob

Paramilitary elements of the Iraqi Coalition of National Unity decided to take over Najaf, a holy Shia city. There they started to loot and pillage with the backing or at least the benign neglect of US special forces it seems, story .Here in the FT

Another paramilitary group affiliated with the Iraqi National Congress took over the city of Amara until the CIA arrived and threatened to bomb them, see Here for that story.

The really really hard bit starts for the US now. Peacemaking.

M

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

TomF

I think when everyone in Baghdad has a swivel chair at home the looting will stop and things will settle-down.

daveirl

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Éomer of Rohan

And now it is my turn to agree with daveirl lol. I most certainly agree with the phrase 'and so it begins' because it was always a possibility that following the collapse of a centralising influence, each of the three major religions/cultures of Iraq might try and grad what they could in order to be in a good position come 'build government' time.
As to Tom F's comment about swivel chairs, somehow I think the converse will happen as happens in western societies; the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

Hobbes

Originally posted by daveirl
Just like stability returned in Afghanistan?

Obviously not enough swivel chairs in Afganistan.

Éomer of Rohan

Obviously not enough swivel chairs in Afganistan.

For a moment I thought you were serious there! You weren't, right?

Victor

Originally posted by TomF
I think when everyone in Baghdad has a swivel chair at home the looting will stop and things will settle-down.

Until individual houses / buildings start getting looted. Even banks and hotels have been looted.

spongebob

This ain'at in the Pentagon briefings. For those who think the Kurds are bad for splitting into 2 groups the Shai in Najaf alone already seem to have 3 armed groups vying for power as you can see Here . Saddams boys are hardly gone a week.

One group is under Al-Khazraji, a well known scumbag, former Chief of Staff under Saddam who disappeared from house arrest in Denmark les than a month ago. The US whisked him away from there and dropped him into Najaf.

It gets murkier and murkier, the US are probably trying to stop the Shia Clerics coming home to Najaf from exile in Qom, lest they have any radical 'Iranian' ideas.

M

Cork

Originally posted by daveirl
Just like stability returned in Afghanistan?

Communisit, Taliban or Saddam type dictatorships bring stability through fear.

But Peacemaking needs to start but there also needs to be justice - bring those responsible for tortune etc before the law.

The Corinthian

Originally posted by Cork
Communisit, Taliban or Saddam type dictatorships bring stability through fear.

But Peacemaking needs to start but there also needs to be justice - bring those responsible for tortune etc before the law.

Nice sound bite. Could you explain the relevance?

Cork

You had stability at a cost. The cost being that you were not allowed to speak out. Another cost may have been human rights.

The point that I was making. The ridding of Saddam from Iraq is a first step. Stability will come. Iraq has a long road before it. There is a need for democracy and rebuilding. Never again - Sould these people be inflicted with a brutal tyrant.

The Iraqis deserve better. But the ridding of Saddam is only the beginning.

bonkey

Originally posted by Cork
Communisit, Taliban or Saddam type dictatorships bring stability through fear.

But Peacemaking needs to start but there also needs to be justice - bring those responsible for tortune etc before the law.

All well and good, but the point about Afghanistan is that it has been "liberated" from a central oppressive regime (the Taliban). What this liberation has brought it is oppression by local warlords, or oppression by the new government who are mostly from what was generally termed the Northern Allieance...who were no better than the Taliban.

Afghanistan today is less stable and less controlled as a result of the freedom "we" brought them.

You can pontificate all you like about how these things take time, but the simple fact is that that has been done is return Afghanistan to the disfunctional and divided situation it was in pre-Taliban.

Is it any better? No, not yet. Will it be better? Well - if the western powers dont stick to their promises, all they have done is return Afghanistan to a condition ripe for another Taliban-esque group to do the same all over again in a few years when the rest of the world is saying "theres limits to what we should be expected to do" as our excuse for not doing what we promised we would initially.

Will Iraq suffer the same fate? That depends on whether the West has the interest, conviction, and long-term staying power to enforce a national solution.

jc

The Corinthian

Few will disagree that Saddam was a nasty piece of work. However, whether the Iraqis will be better off without him remains to be seen.

The Taliban, ironically, had broad support in Afghanistan - not because they were supported for who they were or what they stood for, but because of the alternative. One must remember that it was the Taliban that brought relative order to the majority of a country that had been in bloody anarchy ever since the Soviets pulled out.

This may not happen in Iraq - certainly circumstances are different - however, we’re still way off from any kind of Iraqi government that would be taken seriously by anyone (especially the Iraqis themselves). Furthermore, much of the region has now become far more destabilized, with Kurds and Turks in the north, Syrian and Iranian tensions with the US and a general feeling of discomfort (or in some cases rage) in the Arab world as a whole.

This all may still have a happy ending (and please don’t tell me this is the ending). However, the last year’s events in Afghanistan are anything to go by, this would be suspect. There the Taliban continue to operate, and perhaps more disturbingly, many former members of the northern alliance (effectively regional warlords) are conducting regular wars between each other. Much of this mirrors the events of the closing days of Soviet military occupation in Afghanistan, where the puppet communist Afghan government only remained in power in Kabul as a result of Soviet military backing. When the Soviets left, so did the Afghan government.

Add to this the question of this new Iraq’s international recognition (which will be slow in coming if the UN is told where to shove it by the US) and the inevitable build-up of local animosity and suspicion the longer US troops remain in Iraq (someone pointed out, in another thread, how British solders were welcomed by the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, when they first arrived - not a bad parallel) and is a replaced with a nostalgic feeling of “Saddam was a bastard, but at least he was our bastard”.

There is always a price to stability, law and order. Sometimes that price is what we would consider freedom (but then again freedom is not a black and white concept either - unless you are willing to accept only one definition of freedom and democracy). But what if the price to freedom is chaos, anarchy and death?

Sparks

You had stability at a cost. The cost being that you were not allowed to speak out. Another cost may have been human rights.

Please recall that despite their horrendous acts in the last 20 years, compared to the other midde eastern countries, Iraq was a haven of hellenic values, like women's rights and disestablishmentarianism.

BTW, it's a bit ironic, isn't it, that while there's a war against the only nation in the middle east that had even a scrap of a claim at seperating church and state, that there's a born-again christian in the white house and we're trying to put an invocatio dei in the new EU constitiution?

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Sparks
Please recall that despite their horrendous acts in the last 20 years, compared to the other midde eastern countries, Iraq was a haven of hellenic values, like women's rights and disestablishmentarianism.

What do you mean by "hellenic values"?

Sparks

Hellenic - Western.

Éomer of Rohan

Hellene is the ancient term for 'Greece' but with regards to womens rights and so on, he is absolutely wrong. Women has a much rights in Hellenic Greece as they did in Victorian England. Hellenic certainly does not mean western.

Sparks

Eomer is totally correct - if I had used the term hellenic in ancient greece I wouldn't have been talking about women's rights.
And if I'd mentioned democracy, I wouldn't have been talking about a system of government where you get to vote once every few years. And if I'd spoken of the Spartans, I'd have been talking about one of the most blood-thirsty and savage races ever to walk the earth (by our standards). And if I'd talked about sophistry, I would have been talking about the highest form of debate and scientific argument.

Of course I'd have been speaking english so noone would have understood a word I was saying anyway.

By all of which I mean that the term Hellenic today refers not to the original Greek way of life but the way of life whose roots can be traced back to that society's major contributions in politics and culture - what we call the Western world (although no-one's ever been able to explain to me - adaquately - what we're west of and why those further west of us are called the far east...). Over the course of two thousand years, the meaning of the term has drifted. Today, of course, we do this much faster - observe how it took only 42 days to googlewash the term "the second superpower". Anyway, I use the term Hellenic because terms like "West", "Middle East", "Far East" just seem rather ill-defined to me.

Éomer of Rohan

And if I'd spoken of the Spartans, I'd have been talking about one of the most blood-thirsty and savage races ever to walk the earth (by our standards).

If you are going to be sardonic in order to poke at me, at least get things correct. Spartans were not bloodthirsty. Far from it.

By all of which I mean that the term Hellenic today refers not to the original Greek way of life but the way of life whose roots can be traced back to that society's major contributions in politics and culture - what we call the Western world (although no-one's ever been able to explain to me - adaquately - what we're west of and why those further west of us are called the far east...). Over the course of two thousand years, the meaning of the term has drifted. Today, of course, we do this much faster - observe how it took only 42 days to googlewash the term "the second superpower". Anyway, I use the term Hellenic because terms like "West", "Middle East", "Far East" just seem rather ill-defined to me.

Look at the map of the world and consider history. The mediterranean has been the basis of almost every powerful civilisation in history and so is placed at the centre of the map of the world. We are Western Europe and form the 'west,' a term originally coined in the great schism over the Nicene Creed in the Christian Church. America was then inserted since she was the 'far west' and Russia was already termed the 'East' as was Asia Minor (the correct name for the middle east) and so China became the far east, and all the other countries in that region of course.

As to Hellenic meaning 'Western' I dispute that. The Romans had a greater effect on Europe than Greece ever did, considering the Greeks never even entered Britain for example. It is Cicero everyone knows, not Pericles or Archidamus or Sthenelaidas. 'Western' is entirely sufficient IMO.

bonkey

If this continues to descend into a "what does Hellenic mean" Punch and Judy show, then I'm locking the thread.

Who cares what it rightfully means - Sparks has already clarified what he meant it to mean.

Whether or not it is the correct term is about as relevant here as comments on spelling and grammar.

So let it go. All of you.

jc

Sparks

Eomar,
The spartans had many rather bloody cultural practises (killing the weakest children, training in the military from birth, formally declaring war on their slaves every few years and slaughtering them) so by our standards bloodthirsty is a valid description.
And I wasn't trying to be sardonic, I was trying to clarify what I meant since you asked.
(And the greeks had an enormous influence on the roman culture)

Back to topic....

The US military in Afghanistan says it has killed 11 Afghan civilians by mistake in an air attack
and here

General Franks to visit Afghanistan

A draft agreement on the purchase of Turkmen gas was submitted at a Tuesday meeting of the managing committee for the building project for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan- Pakistan gas pipeline in Manila

Less than an hour before the initial bombs and cruise missiles rained down on Baghdad in the first volleys of the Iraq war, the US military launched a major attack in its other war in Afghanistan. Pentagon spokespersons insisted that the timing of the attack was "a coincidence" and that planning for the operation had been going on for months.

Afghanistan was not a triumph, but a warning

As senior US officials promise to rebuild and democratise Iraq, citizens of that country might wish to consider the fate of nearby Afghanistan just one year after President George W. Bush compared US intentions there to Washington's post- World War II Marshall Plan for Europe.

As tentative steps are taken towards nation building in Afghanistan, women are calling for full participation in the formulation of the nation's new constitution.

NATO is looking at ways it might expand its role in Afghanistan, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said on Wednesday.


But it's not just Afghanistan that the fighting is going on in:
The United States will send more than 1,700 troops to the Philippines in the next few weeks to fight Muslim extremists in the southern part of the country, opening a new front in the fight against terrorism, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Sparks

Meanwhile, in Iraq...
Pro-Western Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei was assassinated in the holy city of Najaf in central Iraq.

A crowd rushed two Islamic clerics and hacked them to death in this holy city Thursday, witnesses said. An unknown number of people were injured

Kurdish fighters took the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk on Thursday as U.S. troops fought die-hard Saddam Hussein loyalists in Baghdad. In the holy central city of Najaf, Iraqi Shi'ite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei was stabbed to death in an attack in the Imam Ali Mosque, a member of his family foundation told Reuters.

The people of Hay al-Ansar, a district on the outskirts of Najaf, were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party rule when the city was seized by US forces last week. But they appear to be just as terrified, if not more so, of their new rulers - a little known Iraqi militia backed by the US special forces and headquartered in a compound nearby.

It's starting to sound like 1972 Belfast with a Jenin accent...