Iraq In Fragments

Because some of us are still paying attention.

• First the really good news: this report in the Guardian that Muqtada al-Sadr is going to urge his forces to completely disarm, and transform the organization into a political and social movement. This would be the greatest hope for stability in Iraq, although the final outcome may end up with Sadr in power. It seems to me that this shift goes hand-in-hand with this report that a tentative deal has been reached with the US on a status of forces agreement that would set a timeline of withdrawal of US forces from Iraq by 2010 or 2011, provided that conditions remain the same on the ground. Sadr's Mahdi Army had a goal of driving the Americans from the country, and with that on its way to being achieved, he is free to change his movement into one that is expressly political.

• When those political skills will be able to be used is unclear, as the Iraqi Parliament adjourned without agreement on a provincial election law, which pushes the next round of elections into next year, in all likelihood. This means that the politics is still at a complete gridlock in the country, with looming explosions like Kirkuk still unsettled. So the good news always comes with the uncertain and potentially catastrophic in Iraq.

• Parliament did provide $21 billion dollars in supplemental reconstruction funding for the country. However, that's just a portion of the projected $79 billion budget surplus that has resulted from oil revenues in Iraq (how sad that Iraq's economic future is brighter than our own?). I believe that we owe it to the Iraqi people to rebuild their country, but at the same time these surpluses in a government that has a poor track record on corruption invites concern.

• Back to the deal on a withdrawal timetable, which has not been announced in the US press, it's a complete contradiction of George Bush, who said this just yesterday:

"I talk to him all the time, and that's not what I heard," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post aboard Air Force One on the start of a trip to Asia. "I heard a man who wants to work with the United States to come up with a rational way to have the United States withdraw combat troops depending upon conditions on the ground, that's all."

That rational way happens to be a timetable remarkably similar to Sen. Obama's, and Bush apparently just signed onto it as well. Also in this reported deal, the US military cannot arrest Iraqis without government approval.

• A very strange argument was put forth by the axis of Pollack/O'Hanlon yesterday, that ethnic cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence in Baghdad, because casualties went up there in 2006. Yeah, that's what they call ethnic cleansing, guys. Meanwhile, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad visited Baghdad and cites the giant prison cell-like walls as a chief cause of security gains.

What I found contradicts all the official reports: Baghdad is a city where one street is at war with the next, where the people are more desperate than I've ever seen them. It has been transformed into a city of walls. There are twenty miles of walls slicing up the Sunni and Shia ghettos, each wall over 12 feet high. They are the main reason why the casualties have fallen, not because peace is on its way. In Adhamiyah, I meet a member of the Sunni militia, and he tells me, “I cannot move behind that square over there. If I did, I would be killed. It's a prison here.”

• Finally, there's no KFC in Fallujah. That I had to write a sentence that dippy just shows the complete dishonesty from the right wing about anything in Iraq.