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The issue of security is becoming increasingly politicized ahead of March 7 polls. Sunni lawmakers were quick to question whether the lockdown ordered by the Shiite-dominated government on Tuesday was really necessary and emphasized the inconvenience it caused ordinary Iraqis who could not get to work or school.
“The government is trying to leave the citizens with the impression that there is a battle. They terrified and shocked the people,” said legislator Saleh al-Mutlaq. “We think that these measures are totally unjustifiable.”
Mutlaq has been banned from running in March’s parliamentary elections by the successor to the de-Baathification commission. [Update: see comments.] Some reports are raising fears that the Sunnis will again boycott the vote, as they did in 2005, but I don’t know whether that’s more than loose journalistic talk.
What I do know is that absolutely none of this will have any impact at all on American politics. Iraq is just… gone as an issue. I remember a tense car trip in North Carolina with some friends in mid-2008, worrying that a liberal presidency would be derailed by withdrawing from Iraq under fire. Instead, 1200 people died from extremist violence between January and December 2009 in Baghdad and no one in the U.S. cared. For all the heated fights of the past seven years about Iraq, it turned out the right was just as exhausted of Iraq-the-issue as the left was of Iraq-the-place. There are more U.S. troops in Iraq than Afghanistan, still, but because U.S. policy is to extricate ourselves from the war, Iraq is simply… absent from our discussion. I should really take “Iraq” down from my logo, because I’m certainly no exception.
It’s not that I really have an argument to make here. I suppose it’s ultimately a positive thing that the acrimony of the Iraq war is behind us, at least for now. And it’s not actually problematic that the U.S. can’t seem to pay attention to more than one war at a time, since the point of U.S. foreign policy, as a general proposition, should be to fight as few wars as humanly possible. But this American sense that a problem overseas is solved the moment American politics reaches an equilibrium about it — that’s just unhealthy and self-delusional. Iraq is Iraq is Iraq. It doesn’t end when we change the channel.
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Hey, very very minor thing, the decision actually wasn’t made by the successor to the de-Baathification commission — more like its remnants — parliament hasn’t yet approved commissioners for the replacement, so Ali Faysal al-Lami is operating in a kind of weird grey area in concert with the legislature.
Reidar Visser had a good post on the subject a few days ago.
Mutlak is planning to take the matter to court, on the grounds that Lami doesn’t have the authority to ban him from the election.
And totally agreed about the lack of U.S. interest on Iraq… U.S. casualties are down, and nobody cares anymore. Immensely frustrating.
Sorry, I had read something that gave me the impression this was the de-Baath successor
Maybe you could replace “national security. Iraq.” with “defense and foreign policy.” Same difference, broader implication.
But yeah, how about that, Iraq is the new Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is the new Iraq. Best of all, we didn’t learn the right lessons either time, and are just in the process of repeating the mistakes. Gotta love this business.
The reporting (even in Iraqi papers) has been pretty jumbled. The whole de-Baathification process is a mess…
The muting of the Iraq issue is consistent with a general toning down of criticism of the administration since Obama won the presidency. Others have noted, for instance, that the torture issue under Obama doesn’t carry the weight it did under the Bush administration. For instance, when the NY Times and WashPo reported the existence of a Special Ops black site at Bagram and of torture there, the left essentially gave a ho-hum and let the issue drop.
Then, there’s also governmental attempts to keep Iraq out of the news. Daphne Eviatar, whom I know you know, reported late last year how “DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.”
You don’t need to follow the crowd, Spence. You can continue to report on Iraq, and we need such reportage.
Much thanks, for instance, for today’s story. The U.S. would like to believe that everything in Iraq is now hunky-dory. But in fact, it’s still a clusterfuck. Also, in Britain anyway, the effort to make the war criminals who started this illegal war accountable for their misdeeds is still going strong.
It will be back on the radar screen when we start to pull out…
Then, we will see all the money and lost lives for what?
I hope I’m wrong.
The Iraq War didn’t make sense to begin with, and won’t make sense when
the fighting begins anew….
I don’t know if it’s really fair to say no one cared. You do hear a lot about Iraq – in conversations about Afghanistan. There, it is repeated over and over that we need to have the same “success” in Afghanistan that we have had in Iraq, and we need to have an Iraqi (yeah, success) style surge in Afghanistan, and we need to do all the successful things we succeeded with in Iraq, but in Afghanistan.
Like overseeing some geographic sectarian cleansing and creating a couple million or so refugees.
The big issue is that there is no one who wants to argue against it. Major Democrats don’t want to give the Obama administration room on Iraq and so as long as the withdraw happens they won’t be bringing it up. Republicans have made this myth that “The Surge!” changed Iraq into a shining, peaceful paradise and so bringing up the fact that its still a shitstorm doesn’t help. After the withdraw that might change but for now the idea is that all is sunshine and lollipops thanks to Republican leadership.
What is truly shocking is how little Iraq is covered by the blogosphere. Blogs that used to be all Iraq, all the time now dont mention it at all.
I strongly suspect that the reason we see so little mention of Iraq in blogistan is that at the moment, events in that country have jumped the narrative rails. I mean, what does a supporter of democracy for Iraq do when the democratically elected Dawa government tells the U.S. to please leave in two years and not let the door hit our collective a** on the way out? And it hasn’t fit into the notion that it’s a Vietnam replay for a while now.
Pretty much since the SOFA passed Iraq’s parliament, Iraqis have increasingly been in the driver’s seat. A lot of what’s going on doesn’t fit in with any simple narrative. “Ambassador Hill needs to try and pressure the Dawa government so that the Accountability and Justice Commission re-instates Saleh al Mutlaq!” doesn’t exactly fit on a bumper sticker.