Sadrists Plan Attacks on US Troops;
Security Guards will Not have Immunity;
24 Dead, 60 Wounded
The Sadr Movement is forging ahead with plans to create an elite special operations corps within the Mahdi Army, with the mission of hitting US troops.
Iraq has convinced the United States to drop the demand that private American security guards operating in Iraq be granted immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing in Iraqi courts. Such immunity is called "extraterritoriality" and it has often been an important issue in anti-colonial movements in the modern Middle East. Khomeini used the extraterritoriality granted US troops in Iran as one of the platforms for his overthrow of the Shah.
Guerrillas near Mosul deployed a truck bomb against a tribal leader who was fighting fundamentalist Sunni vigilantes, killing one person and wounding the sheikh and 24 others. About 7 persons were killed in political violence in Diyala Province on Tuesday, and a big bomb was set off in Baghdad aimed at a US convoy, which, however, missed its target and wounded several bystanders. Overall, at least 24 persons were killed and over 60 were wounded in political violence on Tuesday.
The UN special envoy to Iraq is casting doubt on whether provincial elections can be held in October, since parliament has still not enacted an elections law.
Al-Zaman explains in Arabic what the hold-ups are on the election law. It says that the big parties are now clearly trying to postpone the elections beyond their scheduled date in October. Three big issues remain to be resolved:
Al-Zaman says that Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi, the spiritual leader of the Fadhila or Islamic Virtue Party that is powerful in Basra and Nasiriya, accused the political parties of putting obstacles in the path of the provincial elections. He said, "I know that ballot boxes will not alone be decisive, because the powers that be will engage in fraud as much as they can."
Wounded Iraqi veterans feel "abandoned" by the government in Baghdad. They say that they receive only a fraction of their former salary once discharged for a debilitating injury, and are not provided proper health care.
The CEO of Total, the French oil major, says that his company is near to signing a Technical Service Agreement with Iraq to help with production at already-productive fields. But he does not think it is realistic that Total, which is partnering with Chevron in Iraq, will sign a new oil development contract this year or next. Iraq's parliament has still not enacted an oil law that would establish a legal framework within which foreign corporations can operate inside Iraq.
Robert Scheer argues that the Bush administration's quest for an Iraq oil pact debases the US.
Iraqi s who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib are suing private firms and individuals who, they allege, tortured them.
Hey, I think the Iraqis may be getting the hang of this rule of law thing!
Aljazeera International interviews Sy Hersh on Bush's covert operations inside Iran, intended to prepare for a war.
Barnett Rubin and Manan Ahmed on recent developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Rick Shenkman on American stupidity at Tomdispatch.com
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/02/2008 01:11:00 AM
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3 Comments:
The US has NOT agreed to lift the immunity of foriegn security staff in Iraq. Zebari is simply lying. He is desperate to maintain the US occupation without which he cannot stay in Baghdad.
He is trying to bend both the US and Iraq but has no cards to play. He thinks that he, with Chalabi and others, made the US invade and that he can do the trick again, but in reality they were just liars for hire acting for the neocons and their affiliates.
The Kurds have burned all the bridges with the rest of the Iraqis already and have no future without the US occupation. They will go back to what they had in the 1990's: nothing except US power over them.
Iraq has convinced the United States to drop the demand that private American security guards operating in Iraq be granted immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing in Iraqi courts.
There may be less to this than meets the eye.
Everybody knows that Team Aggression prefers that its SOFA with the International Zone régime should be an executive agreement rather than a treaty. No doubt that preference is mainly intended to prevent the Congress of the United States of America from madly supposing that it can have anything to say about such high matters of state, yet "executivity" has merits on the neo-Iraqi end as well. Any I. Z. régime generally well disposed to AEI and GOP and DoD could simply extradite Blackwaterite mercenaries who get themselves into trouble with indigenous law. Unless the invasionites have set up a completely new and different system in the former Iraq, prosecution is a matter of (Executive) discretion, no?
The mercs could still be prosecuted in absentiâ somewhere east of Suez, but so what? Fancy the Big Party’s Col. North worrying about a criminal prosecution at Tegucigalpa! I daresay he’d take it as a compliment. He would not be frightened.
Should an I. Z. régime not well-disposed (in its Executive branch) arise during the fifty or one hundred years of happy comradeship foreseen by J. Sidney McCain, Ollie's little brothers would be in jeopardy as individuals -- but surely their private-sector problems would be swallowed up in the breakdown of the unalliance as a whole?
Unless I miscalculate, then, both Legislative and Judiciary branches are irrelevant, and irrelevant both as to prosecution and nonprosecution. Civilian mercenaries of AEI and GOP can count on the substance of extraterritoriality as long as both states’ executives want them to have it, and as soon as one or the other does NOT want them to have it, "executivity" would almost certainly find some way of nailing their hides to the wall regardless of statutes or treaties or both. (Anybody can pull a Guantánamo.)
Happy days.
Re the oil thing:
My morning paper reports that the 'damn the environment, drill now' drumbeat has swung public opinion 10 points, pulling directly from environmental (GW) and carbon-energy conservation concerns.
Things like renewables, oil drilling, strip-mined coal and scarce Uranium converted to lovely Plutonium (yuck), will be fractional factors for 10-15 years. That's an expert guess at a best case development scenario, for technical, human and capital reasons.
What can be done today, by us citizens, is reducing energy use. That directly results in reduced oil imports, borrowing, and price spiraling. Moderating those trends is basic to a national energy-economic policy, not to mention defense strategy. Adam Smith, Newton and common sense come together- if we buy/sell oil inventory that we aint got, it will end badly.
Yet conservation it seems to have dropped out of the national debate on energy and defense policy. We want to talk about 100 mpg cars in 10 years, when getting from 20 to 30 mpg average is what we need this year.
A compelling case for conservation can be made from a buttoned down engineering and economic standpoint. Any business plan, any machine design, tries to do more for less, by reducing unnecessary or destructive activity. Energy was always expensive and limited in supply, one way or another. VW's sold like hotcakes when gas was .23/g.
We have been fighting a war to guarantee the ME oil supply of the world economy, while our 5% population comntinues to consume 25% of the world's oil. Go figure.
A debt counsellor would advise us to invest our borrowed energy dollar, put that to work for our children, who after all will remain liable for what we borrow.
Leadership for voluntary conservation is one way to get folks heads out of the currency-inflationary side of this problem, and into the nuts and bolts of figuring out how to reduce the waste of our valuable oil, making it available for things like growing and transporting healthy food that is affordable for all the kids.
How can conservation be dismissed as a greeny concern? It is either stupidity, or duplicity (AEI-Exxon) to do try and solve our oil addiction with more junk.
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