Asia Times Special

Asia Times:
Heck of a job, Maliki!

By Sami Moubayed
Oct 21, 2006

DAMASCUS - This Friday marks exactly the 150th day of Nuri al-Maliki's tenure as prime minister of Iraq. Usually in democracies, the performance of a prime minister and his government is measured by the first 100 days in office. Even with the extra 50 days, Maliki has failed completely to bring security to Iraq.

He has failed to disarm the militias. And he has failed to bring about economic reforms, in addition to being unable to combat unemployment or prevent the immigration of Iraqi youth. The Ministry of Interior under Maliki is swarming with armed Shi'ite militias, just as it was under his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The Iraqi police have been infiltrated by militiamen, who are using official equipment and funds to kill other Iraqis in the Iraqi Army, controlled by the Sunnis. Death squads roam the streets, killing over 100 Iraqis per day. Under Maliki, the death toll has risen to over 3,000 Iraqis killed per month. On the anniversary of his 150th day in power, 50 people were killed in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baquba, and another 100 were wounded, while 33 unidentified bodies - all shot in the head, were found in Baghdad. Earlier in the week, 60 beheaded bodies were found.

Under Maliki, al-Qaeda has not been weakened by the death of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On the contrary, this month the group declared an Islamic republic in Iraq, proving that, if anything, it is not weaker but more determined to seize power and create a Taliban-like regime.

Under Maliki, according to a report in the London-based daily Al-Hayat, Iraqi men are carving tattoos on their bodies, with their home address and telephone number. This is so that if they are killed, mutilated or beheaded, police would be able to identify their bodies and send them back to their families for burial.

Although unconfirmed, some claim that the abundance of suicide bombers in Iraq under Maliki is a result of a trick carried out by the militias and the Ministry of Interior on ordinary Iraqi citizens. They offer young men well-paying, non-military jobs, which are quickly snapped up due to the terrible economic conditions, with no questions asked. While on duty, they are sent in a car to a certain location and told to call a certain person when they get there. The employee does not realize that his mobile phone is connected to a hidden car bomb. When he makes the call, his car explodes.

Despite the horrendous state of the country, US President George W Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been full of praise for Maliki. For his part, Maliki has been busy lately, making a high-profile visit to Najaf on Wednesday and meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Sistani, the wise man of Iraqi politics, had distanced himself from the political arena earlier last month, appalled by the fact that he was being overshadowed by younger, radical, military oriented leaders like Muqtada.

While Sistani stepped in to end two confrontations between Shi'ite insurgents and the Americans in 2004, he no longer can get the armed groups to lay down their arms, or think twice before gunning down an Iraqi Sunni. Civil war has erupted, and men like Muqtada who offer arms, money and protection gain larger audiences than Sistani, who has nothing for his visitors except words of wisdom on co-existence and phrases from the Holy Koran.

Sistani is greatly disturbed that politicians do not call on him anymore, and when they do, they no longer listen to what he has to say. Maliki's meeting him for consultation, then rushing out to meet Muqtada, only adds to Sistani's belief that his word is no longer final in Shi'ite politics.

It proves that to get things done, the prime minister needs the consent of Muqtada, the militia leader who helped bring him to power in May. Muqtada, after all, shares identical views with Maliki over the partitioning of Iraq, which both oppose, as well as on Iranian-Iraqi relations. Although Maliki has pledged to clamp down on the militias, he has done nothing to control, or even curb, the powers of the Mehdi Army that is run by Muqtada.

On Monday, government troops arrested one of Muqtada's top aides, Sheikh Mazen al-Saadi. This led to large demonstrations of 2,000 Muqtada loyalists in Baghdad, forcing authorities to immediately order his release, making the prime minister look silly. The arrest and rapid release of Saadi demonstrates just how powerful Muqtada really is and how unable - or unwilling - Maliki is to cross him.

It was Muqtada's support, after all, that brought Maliki to power and it was Muqtada's signal that ended the reign of Jaafari. Maliki's visit to Muqtada shortly after Saadi's release raises speculation that the purpose of the Najaf trip might have been to apologize for detaining such a senior Muqtada loyalist. It also gives credibility to the prime minister among hardline Shi'ites to have his picture taken with Muqtada, a man viewed as a Shi'ite nationalist and anti-American to the bone. Such publicity stunts greatly legitimize Muqtada as well, portraying him as a protege of the Iraqi government.

It also gives him political ammunition to use against his opponents in the Shi'ite community, mainly the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Instead of objecting to the prime minister's alliance with the rebel Muqtada, the United States is in fact encouraging Maliki to solidify his ties to him. As long as he has the backing of the cleric, the Americans believe, Maliki will remain legitimate in the eyes of ordinary Shi'ites.

On Wednesday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that that the US hoped Muqtada would cooperate with the Maliki government and play a constructive role in Iraq. This was shocking for Iraqi observers, because of Muqtada's anti-American history. Asked whether Muqtada was an enemy or ally of the US - or something else - Snow replied, from aboard Air Force One with President George W Bush, that Muqtada was "a factor in Iraq. He is somebody who obviously has adherents, and the most important thing, I think, if Muqtada al-Sadr wants to play a constructive role, is to make sure to cooperate with Prime Minister Maliki in dealing with militias."

Meanwhile, sources close to the premier told al-Hayat that Maliki was planning to "purify the Ministry of Defense" of sectarian elements. Meaning, he wants to disarm the Sunni militias who are affiliated with the ministry, so that they do not obstruct the agenda of the Shi'ite militias of the Ministry of Interior.

Al-Hayat added that Maliki had "began steps towards ridding himself from the militias". If this proves to be correct, then Maliki is taking steps that are too little, too late. Abdul Jalil Khalaf, an officer in Rasafa, explains to al-Hayat that the Iraqi Army is facing "great embarrassment" while carrying out its duties in Baghdad because it is being confronted by the police, who work for the Ministry of the Interior and are infiltrated by the Badr Organization, an Iran-backed militia headed by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and the SCIRI.

Khalaf adds that "residents in some districts complain [to us] that the police are requesting the assistance of the militias when exposed to attack". He points out that the army "refuses to interfere in many critical situations, such as sectarian confrontation, for fear of being accused of sectarianism or bias to one party or another".

Khalaf states that "the army is more acceptable to the Iraqi street than the police force because of the accusations from some parliamentary and governmental groups who say that the police are supporting the militias and are involved with the death squads". The officers in the army are often attacked by militiamen wearing police uniforms and driving cars from the Ministry of the Interior. Missiles are fired at Iraqi soldiers from districts supposedly under control of the ministry.

With all of this going on in Iraq, it is not surprising that there is a lot of talk about a coup being planned to oust Maliki. Rumor has it that the newly created Iraqi Army, along with former officers in Saddam Hussein's forces, will stage a coup to topple Maliki and replace him with a strong prime minister who is able to clamp down on the militias.

This prime minister would be pro-American, owing no loyalty to the militias as Maliki or Jaafari did. The name circulating is former prime minister Iyad Allawi. Rumors add that the US would initially denounce the coup in lip-service to democracy, but eventually cooperate with the new regime because it would bring security to Baghdad.

It all just shows how impatient everybody is with Maliki. The coup scenario is being actively discussed by Iraqis - almost as if they actually want it to happen.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ21Ak02.html

---

A coup in the air

By Robert Dreyfuss

The clock is ticking for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the hapless, feckless leader of the Shi'ite fundamentalist party al-Dawa. From Washington, London, Baghdad and other capitals come rumors that Maliki's government will soon be overthrown by a nationalist general or colonel or that he will resign in favor of an emergency "government of national salvation".

A coup d'etat in Iraq would put a period - or rather an exclamation point - at the end of the Bush administration's bungled experiment with democracy there. And it would open an entirely new phase in that country's post-2003 national nightmare. Would it result in the
creation of a Saddam Hussein-like strongman to rule Iraq with a heavy hand? Or would it force the warring parties (Sunni insurgents, Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias and Kurdish warlords) to intensify the bloody civil war that is tearing Iraq apart? No one knows.

As the carnage in Iraq reaches new heights of barbarism, what's clear is the utter uselessness of Maliki's government. It is simply incapable of staunching the bloodletting. Despite weeks of blunt warnings from US officials that time was running out for him, on Sunday the prime minister announced yet again that efforts to disarm Iraq's militias would be postponed. "The initial date we've set for disbanding the militias is the end of this year or the beginning of next year," he said, according to USA Today.

Still, whatever form it might take, a coup stands an excellent chance of making a horrible situation worse. Rather than toy with yet another misstep, the capstone in a seemingly endless series of errors in Iraq, the Bush administration - including the increasingly powerful "realist" anti-neo-conservative policy types now emerging in Washington - would do far better to start planning for a quick exit.

Despite the bloodbath fears that are constantly raised about an Iraq without American troops, a US exit need not consign that country to years of Rwanda-style ethnic slaughter or a Congo-style civil war. Even as it leaves, there are plenty of things the United States could do to ameliorate the state of post-occupation Iraq, including beginning real negotiations with the Iraqi resistance and launching diplomatic efforts to get neighboring countries, especially Iran and Syria, to stay out of the conflict.

Even though a military coup might seem to some desperate policymakers a tempting option, it's one of those quicksand ideas. In a paper just written for the Middle East Institute, the sagacious Wayne White - who headed the State Department's intelligence effort on Iraq until last year - specifically warns that it's time for the US to "back off" in Iraq:

A series of apparent US ultimatums and veiled political threats aimed at the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in recent weeks - especially Maliki himself - is but the latest example of excessive US involvement in the Iraqi political process.

But it is time that setting the overall direction of Iraqi politics must be left to Iraqis, for better or worse. Washington must recognize that it cannot orchestrate political success in that tortured land through still more heavy-handed political tampering. And stepping back from the Iraqi political fray is a prerequisite for any overall exit strategy.

Is a coup in the cards?
I first raised the possibility of a coup in an October 6 column, "Coup in Iraq?" for TomPaine.com. It followed a drumbeat of comments and statements from Bush administration officials, US military officers, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner and former Representative Lee Hamilton - co-chairman with James A Baker III of the Iraq Study Group - all of whom warned Maliki ominously that he had only a matter or weeks or months to get a handle on Iraq's paramilitary armies, militias and death squads.

The consequences for the prime minister of failing to do so were left unsaid, but the warnings were so explicit that Maliki spoke to President George W Bush this week about how he should interpret the barrage of deadline-like statements, and the president replied, according to spokesman Tony Snow, "Don't worry, you have our full support." (Think: Heck of a job, Maliki!) In fact, whatever consoling words the president might have had for him, the Iraqi prime minister has almost no reservoir of support left either in Washington or among US military commanders in Iraq.

Over the weekend, rumors began to fly thick and fast. In a piece headlined "Iraqis Call for Five-Man Junta to End the Anarchy", Marie Colvin wrote in the Sunday Times of London:

Iraq's fragile democracy, weakened by mounting chaos and a rapidly rising death toll, is being challenged by calls for the formation of a hardline 'government of national salvation'. The proposal, which is being widely discussed in political and intelligence circles in Baghdad, is to replace the Shi'ite-led government of Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, with a regime capable of imposing order and confronting the sectarian militias leading the country to the brink of civil war. Dr Saleh al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni politician, traveled to Arab capitals last week seeking support for the replacement of the present government with a group of five strongmen who would impose martial law and either dissolve parliament or halt its participation in day-to-day government.

Mutlaq, who is sympathetic to, if not affiliated with, the Iraqi resistance and its former Ba'athist leaders, explicitly called for Maliki to step down.

Colvin quoted Anthony Cordesman, an uber-realist, conservative US military analyst, claiming that there is a "very real possibility" Maliki will be toppled. "There could be a change in government, done in a backroom, which could see a general brought in to run the Ministry of Defense or the Interior."

David Ignatius - an exceedingly well-connected reporter at the Washington Post - wrote a column on October 13 citing Mutlaq as well, and suggesting that Iraq's own intelligence service (created, funded, and run by the Central Intelligence Agency - CIA) is involved:

The coup rumors come from several directions. US officials have received reports that a prominent Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, visited Arab capitals over the summer and promoted the idea of a national salvation government, suggesting, erroneously, that it would have American support. Meanwhile, top officials of the Iraqi intelligence service have discussed a plan in which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki would step aside in favor of a five-man ruling commission that would suspend parliament, declare martial law and call back some officers of the old Iraqi army.

Frustration with Maliki's Shi'ite-led government is strongest among Iraq's Sunni minority, which dominated the old regime of Saddam Hussein. But as sectarian violence has increased, the disillusionment has spread to some prominent Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians as well. Some are said to support the junta-like commission, which would represent the country's main factions and include former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi - still seen by some Iraqis as a potential 'strongman' who could pull the country back from the brink.

To be sure, Allawi - in London - denied any reports in an interview with Newsweek that he is involved in plotting a coup. "Total nonsense. To plot a coup, I don't sit in London," huffed Allawi, a long-time asset of the CIA and British intelligence. "I would be sitting in Baghdad trying to make a coup."

Allawi's denials aside, when I spoke to a former CIA officer with wide experience in the Middle East, far from pooh-poohing the idea he had this to say:

It's being talked about in Washington. One scenario is, the Iraqis do it themselves, some Iraqi colonel who's fed up with the whole thing, who takes over the country. And it would take the United States forty-eight hours to figure out how to respond, and meanwhile he's taken over everything. The other side of the coin is, we do it ourselves. Find some general up in Ramadi or somewhere, and help him take over. And he'd declare a state of emergency and crack down. And he'd ask us to leave - that would be our exit strategy. It's a distinct possibility. I've raised this with a number of foreign service and intelligence people, and most of them - remembering the days of the coups d'etat in the Middle East - say, "Hear, hear!"

And you know what? I think Rumsfeld would jump on this idea in five minutes.

Of course, no coup will happen at all - no general or colonel would dare try - without, at the very least, a wink and a nod from the CIA, the US military, or Khalilzad. And most likely, it would take significantly more than a wink, something like explicit support and promises of assistance.

But, according to my reporting, that is precisely what is being discussed in Washington, even among the inner councils of Baker's Iraq Study Group, the realist (that is, anti-neo-conservative) commission set up last spring to figure out what to do about Iraq.

Salah Mukhtar, a former top Iraqi official who served as Iraq's ambassador to India and then Vietnam in the period just before the US invasion of Iraq, is not a spokesman for the Iraqi resistance. But he is very well plugged in to the thinking of that country's insurgent leaders. When I spoke to him this week by telephone, he assured me the resistance was well aware that elements in the Bush administration might be planning a coup. According to him, the main focus of such a coup - even one fostered by the United States - would be to mobilize the Iraqi Army against the Shi'ite militias:

The increase in the volume of mass killing in Iraq is creating a willingness among the people to accept a military coup. I would say that 80% of Iraqis are willing to accept it, to accept anything that would help to crush the Iranian gangs [ie, the militias of the Shi'ite religious parties, such as the Badr Brigade and the Mehdi Army].

The United States is making contacts with some old Iraqi generals in Jordan. They are former Ba'athists. The United States is looking for people to topple the government of Maliki. Some of them are in Iraq, and some of them are based in Jordan. Some of them turned down the US offers, but some of them accepted.

If there is a military coup in Iraq, that coup will be [sympathetic to] the Ba'athists. If its leader is not pro-Ba'athist, there will be a second coup against that leader. So either way, it will result in a pro-Ba'athist government ... It would be a crazy move by the United States. It shows that they don't understand Iraq.

The unraveling of Iraq?
What does all this mean? As a start, it probably represents a belated Washington wish-list that contains quite a disparate, if not conflicting, set of ideas about the American future in Iraq. Some top officials are surely eyeing the possibility of a last-ditch effort to establish a government that would stabilize the country, put down the resistance, and create a secure environment for Bush's "victory" strategy in Iraq - even though that victory would have nothing to do with democracy.

Others in or around the administration are undoubtedly drawn to the idea of a coup, or at least of the forced removal of Maliki in some fashion because it would present a fig leaf for an American "redeployment" (read: withdrawal from Iraq). Under this scenario, the United States could exit as gracefully as circumstances allow, leaving behind a strong Iraqi central government that might still be an ally of some sort.

Indeed, as early as mid-August, a New York Times piece suggested that at least some officials in the White House had given up on the idea of democracy in Iraq and were ready to look at "alternatives":

Some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq's democratically elected government might not survive. "Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

Whatever fantasies officials in Washington or Iraq may harbor, however, a coup in Baghdad would by no means be a silver bullet to end Iraq's anarchy. Quite the opposite, it might just add to the bloody unraveling of the country. The problem is, as one experienced Middle East hand told me, "In order to mount a coup, you have to have a state. And there is no state in Iraq."

Iraq is utterly anarchic, a Mad Max world of clashing paramilitaries, gangs, warlords, sectarian fighters, death squads, criminal enterprises, government-backed mafias, and several hundred thousand army men, police, Interior Ministry commandos and special units like the Facilities Protection Service that are only loosely under the control of the central government. So how would a prospective coup-maker, even with Washington's fervent backing, impose his will on all that?

The answer is: he couldn't. If a coup happens, it will likely signal that the center of gravity inside Baghdad's Green Zone has shifted from the Shi'ite majority (and its religious parties, such as Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) to a more centrist, more pro-Sunni, less sectarian, less religious and less ideological bloc.

It might be seen as an attempt by the CIA and the US military to re-install a more Saddam-like regime in Baghdad, perhaps with the intent of undoing the damage that has been done to Iraq's unity and stability by the neo-conservatives. But like all too-clever-by-half strategies, this one would probably make things not better but a lot worse in a country that has already been torn to shreds by the US invasion and occupation.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, Tomdispatch, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report, at his website.

(Copyright 2006 Robert Dreyfuss)
(Used by permission Tomdispatch )

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ21Ak03.html

---

Endgame coming, ready or not

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - If Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki were inclined to bet his life on President George W Bush's latest assurances that there will be no timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq, he should probably give it a second thought.

While Bush, true to his self-image as an uncommonly firm leader in the mold of British prime minister Winston Churchill, is undoubtedly sincere in his determination to press ahead, political circumstances - not to mention the accelerating slide into an appalling civil war in Iraq - are clearly conspiring against him.

The signs of eroding support for Bush's "stay-the-course" strategy are virtually everywhere in Washington, where senior Republicans, such as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, are moving into open revolt against what they see as a rapidly deteriorating situation and Bush's bullheadedness in still believing that Iraq will somehow become a model for democratic transformation in the Middle East.

The increasingly likely prospect of the Democrats recapturing the House of Representatives, and possibly even the Senate, too, after the November 7 mid-term elections should also spur second thoughts on Maliki's part.

While ever-fearful of being tagged as "weak" on terrorism, it appears a strong majority of Democrats currently favor a year-long timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. That position, if anything, is winning them increased popular support and is one they may well be able to effectively impose on Bush when Congress, which controls the government's purse-strings, reconvenes in January.

Similar auguries are visible in London, Washington's closest ally in the " war on terror" and the biggest contributor of troops by far to the US-led coalition in Iraq. In a lengthy newspaper interview last week, Britain's new army chief, General Sir Richard Dannatt, echoed the arguments made over the past year by the Democratic Party's most prominent advocate of a swift withdrawal, John Murtha.

Britain should "get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems [in Iraq]," he told the Daily Mail, adding that the best that could be hoped for now was something less than the kind of liberal democracy envisaged by both Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Dannatt's views, according to a column by a former senior instructor at the Royal Military Academy and director of the Center for Foreign Policy Analysis, Paul Moorcraft, reflect the thinking of the "British military establishment".

The fact that Moorcraft's column was published on Monday in the staunchly pro-Bush Washington Times adds to the impression in Washington that even right-wing Republicans, despite their continued attacks on "Defeatocrats" for wanting to "cut and run", have reached a "tipping point" on the war.

Indeed, the Times' front page featured an article contrasting the optimistic assessments given by Washington's top commander in Iraq, General George Casey, earlier this year to his most recent briefings this month, particularly about the ability of the Iraqi security forces to take the place of US troops in any reasonable amount of time - Bush's central condition for a gradual US withdrawal.

The article noted that Casey had predicted early this year that he might be able to reduce US troops levels from 130,000 by as much as 30,000 by the end of this year. But Washington has actually increased troops to over 140,000 in recent months, a level that US Army chief Peter Schoomaker said last week may have to be sustained through 2010, an estimate that provoked real panic among Republican lawmakers who are ever more aware that the war is the single biggest negative they have to overcome to win re-election.

The recent increase in US troops was due above all to the increased violence in Baghdad, where the monthly death toll, as recorded by Iraq's Health Ministry, has risen steadily from over about 1,400 earlier this summer to more than 2,600 in September.
By increasing the US and Iraqi troop presence in the capital, US planners had hoped that the violence could be quickly contained, but that assumption has not been borne out.

"The US military had a two-stage program for security in Baghdad," Juan Cole, an Iraq specialist at the University of Michigan, told an interviewer on US public television Monday. "They were going to go in and make sweeps of the Sunni Arab districts and cut down on the guerrilla violence against the Shi'ites, and then they were going to use that as an argument to the Shi'ites that 'OK, now you have to give up your militias'."

"But this battle for Baghdad has already been going on since August, and there has been not only no reduction in attacks ... [but] the attacks have gone up! We've got 50, 60, 70 bodies showing up every day in Baghdad, bullets behind the ears," said Cole, who is calling for a "phased withdrawal of US troops".

Nor is the violence limited to Baghdad or the Sunni insurgent stronghold of al-Anbar province. Last weekend, a series of reprisal killings by Shi'ites and Sunnis left over 100 dead in and around Balad, about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad, in an area where US troops turned over security to their Iraqi counterparts just last month.

While most of the violence is now sectarian, US casualties have also been spiking, particularly since August when more troops were sent to help pacify Baghdad. Sixty-three US troops were killed in August; that rose to 74 in September. Nearly 70 have been killed in the first half of October, putting the month on track to be the deadliest in almost two years and adding to the pressure to bring the troops home.

All of these developments have created panic among the war's supporters, particularly neo-conservatives who were most enthusiastic about invading Iraq. In a cover article in this week's Weekly Standard, in which he warned, contrary to some critics, that "exiting Iraq ... would fan the flames of jihadism", Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute conceded that a "consensus is growing in Washington" on both the right and the left in favor of a "rapid departure".

At the same time, the neo-conservative New York Sun reported that the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a blue-ribbon task force created last spring by Congress to develop a bipartisan strategy on Iraq, was considering four basic options, two of which, including a "stay-the-course" strategy and an immediate withdrawal, had been ruled out by its members.

Of the two left, according to the Sun account, one, "Stability First", calls for continuing efforts to stabilize Baghdad, major new initiatives to coax Sunni insurgents into the political process, and a regional effort, including Iran and Syria - with which the administration has refused so far to deal directly - to cut off arms supplies to militias and help reduce the violence.

The second option, called "Redeploy and Contain", appears similar to a plan floated last year by the Center for American Progress and subsequently endorsed by most Democratic lawmakers. It calls for a gradual withdrawal of US troops to bases outside Iraq from which they could strike against terrorist targets in Iraq or elsewhere in the region.

The fact that the ISG's co-chair is former secretary of state and Bush family consiglieri James Baker, with whom Bush reportedly talks on a regular basis, is likely to give the final report, due out early next year, serious heft, particularly for a Congress, a military and top Republican strategists that are already desperate for a face-saving exit strategy, timetable included.

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ21Ak04.html

---

Turkey's post-modern identity crisis

By M K Bhadrakumar

Three apparently unconnected events last week brought to the fore Turkey's crisis of identity and highlighted the tortuous path of the country's bid for European Union membership.

The tangled relationship between Turkey and the European Union played out in three separate capitals on October 12. In Stockholm the Swedish Academy announced that Orhan Pamuk became the first Turkish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In Paris the French parliament approved 106 to 19 legislation making it a crime to deny that Ottoman Turkey committed genocide against Armenians during and after World War I. The same day, at a solemn ceremony in the Turkish capital of Ankara, some 260 soldiers wearing blue helmets set out for Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission.

Turks have a penchant for conspiracy theories. Many people in Turkey seem to view the choice of Pamuk for the Nobel award at this juncture as part of a Western political agenda to highlight Turkey's human-rights record.

To be sure, people opposed to Turkey's EU membership have used Pamuk to slander Turkey. Pamuk took pains to stress last December when the Turkish authorities were foolish enough to put him on trial for speaking out about the killings of Armenians, that it was "embarrassing" that his trial was "overdramatized" in the West, although his case was "a matter worthy of discussion".

In his article in New Yorker magazine, Pamuk insisted that his drama was not peculiar to Turkey. He said it formed part of a "new global phenomenon" as much visible in China or India. With the rapid expansion of the middle class, "these new elites - the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched bureaucracy - feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimize their newly acquired wealth and power.

"First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West. Having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism ... On the one hand, there is rush to join the global economy, on the other, the angry nationalism that sees true democracy and freedom of thought as Western inventions."

Thus, Pamuk concluded, "The intolerance shown by the Russian state toward the Chechens and other minorities and civil rights groups, the attacks on freedom of expression by Hindu nationalists in India, and China's discreet ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs are all nourished by the same contradictions."

Evidently, Turks who are incensed by Pamuk's outspokenness and hasten to question his patriotism, and the Westerners who use Pamuk selectively to debunk Turkey's credentials for EU membership alike do not grasp the point that he has a very large canvass and universality.

Nothing brings home Turkey's identity crisis more starkly than that President Ahmet Necdet Sezer has yet to send a congratulatory note to Pamuk. Actually, Turkey doesn't have to be so sensitive. Nobody today is claiming that Turkey is an intolerant repressive country.

True, the Turkish state is as strong as ever, but, as prominent commentator Mehmet Ali Birand pointed out, "It can't control every aspect of our lives. The NGOs [non-governmental organizations] no longer follow the commands of the state to the letter. They ignore them. When NGOs are up in arms, the state can do almost nothing. Especially if they are willing to confront police, nothing stops them."

What aggravates Turkey's crisis of identity is partly at least the ambivalence in the European mindset vis-a-vis Turkey. In comparison with Turkey's crisis of identity - between Islamism and Westernism, between tradition and secularism, between East and West - the European mindset, too, has a problem.

It has to pretend, being the "civilized world", that it is the inheritor of the Enlightenment and is redolent with discussion over the interlacing of cultures, while in reality it surreptiously harbors primeval passions as ancient as the Crusades.

There is no other way to describe the French parliament's new legislation. The point is that the goalposts are constantly being shifted on Turkey's EU membership. Other national parliaments in Europe may now emulate the French legislation. One more hurdle will then have appeared on Turkey's steeplechase. European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso told CNN on Tuesday, "Political reforms should be continued [in Turkey]; freedom of expression and religious rights should be fully adopted; the Ankara Protocol should be implemented; and, Turkish ports and harbors should be opened to the Greek Cypriots."

But all the same, Turkey's membership process in the EU will "take time", Barroso maintained. In another interview with the BBC over the weekend, Barroso said he was unsure how receptive the EU would be with regard to Turkey's membership in a timeframe of 10-15 years, even if Turkey were to fulfill all the EU criteria.

Right wing French Interior Minister and presidential favorite Nicolas Sarkozy has repeated in recent weeks that before deciding on further enlargement, the EU should first find an answer to the question of who is a European and who is not.

Sarkozy said Turkey deserved no better than "preferential partnership" with the EU - short of the full membership that Bulgaria and Romania were entitled to. The leader of the German Christian Social Union, Markus Soeder, added that Turkey's membership would pressure the EU "from all sides".

Again, following a visit to Paris on September 25, Barroso said the EU's accession talks with Turkey would be "conditional" in so far as the Nice Agreement only envisaged an EU with 27 member countries and "new mechanisms have to be determined for the fourth wave of enlargement to include Turkey".

Thus, in immediate terms, a hectic and stormy season lies ahead in EU-Turkey negotiations. The Turkish parliament appears set within the next week or two to legislate on the so-called ninth EU harmonization package. However, the EU's next progress report on Turkey's accession talks, due to be released on November 8, is bound to contain more negative aspects, including on freedom of expression and human rights and the highly sensitive issue of the opening of Turkish ports and harbors to Greek Cypriots.

Turkish diplomacy will be hard-pressed to navigate a course cutting across the rising tide of nationalist sentiments in the public opinion. A variety of factors - ranging from the EU's double standards, President George W Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", the Iraq war, the Palestine problem, the Kurdistan issue, the cartoon crisis and terrorist attacks in Europe, Pope Benedict XVI's history lessons - have accentuated Turkish nationalism in the recent past.

But within this widening gyre of nationalism, the Turkish elite finds itself divided into two distinct "worlds". On the one hand is the entrenched Kemalist vision of Turkey as an ally of the Western world; of Turkey, while being a majority Muslim society, not being an Islamic state; and at the same time, Turkey being secular and democratic both as a state and society. That is to say, Turkey should be Muslim and secular and democratic as a society, while being only secular and democratic as a state. A complicated thought indeed.

Life could have been simpler. The Indian elite, for instance, shamelessly left behind the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi - without any sense of remorse or atonement. To compound it further, the Kemalist vision tends to assume contradictory tendencies when it comes to Turkey-EU ties. On the one hand, it envisages Turkey with its economy and its large Anatolian middle class integrating with the Western economy and the country itself engaging in a process of integration with the EU. But on the other hand, it resists any perceived attempts of encroachment by supranational organs such as the EU.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), though an Islamist party that is antithetical to Kemalism, is engaged in a delicate process of staging a political maneuver into the vast reservoir of Turkish nationalism. It is a subtle political plan since nationalism is a deviation from Islam. The AKP has already tapped Turkey's limited base of religious electorate. And no potentials of growth for the party exist among the country's liberal opinion, which is devoted to a staunchly secularist outlook.

Much depends on the AKP's ability to poach into the nationalist parties' vote banks and to tap into the 4 million new voters, most of whom are susceptible to nationalist sentiments. The AKP's predatory skills, even under such brilliant leadership, will constitute a fascinating aspect of Turkish politics in the turbulent 12-month period ahead as the Islamist party lurches toward capturing the presidency and thereafter seeking a renewed parliamentary mandate, securing control thereby over the tallest pillars of constitutional rule in the country.

The implications can be profound not only for Turkey but for the entire Middle East. But, would the AKP be able to reconcile such a risky political course with its commitment to the EU accession drive? Two years back, the ideologues of the AKP government used to claim that it was striving to create a balance between freedom and security in Turkey. Broadly, this meant a more liberal democracy, a strengthening of the rule of law and the determined pursuit of EU membership. But in the past year or two, the public mood has changed.

Previously, something like 80% of Turks favored EU membership. The figure has now dropped to below 50%. Doubts, fears and adversarial sentiments have grown. The AKP, too, may come under pressure to begin acting as if it has lost its conviction in the Westernization project. Certainly, a robust kick-start is needed. But the prospect of a highly surcharged election year in Turkey and the EU's own deepening identity crisis following its catastrophic referendum exercise in drafting a constitution preclude this.

The EU could help by merely being seen not acting in a discriminatory fashion toward Turkey and instead taking a fair and equal stance to Turkey as to any other candidate country. The fact remains that the AKP government is keen to maintain the momentum of accession to the EU. As a matter of political expediency alone, AKP visualizes the EU accession (and Turkey's democratization agenda) guaranteeing the incremental advancement of civilian supremacy in Turkey's national life, which in turn ensures for it, as an Islamic party, a level playing field in Turkey's electoral politics.

The AKP, confounding pundits, has chosen to remain cooperative while swallowing many recent indignities from the EU member countries and institutions. It has held out the assurance that if need be, it is prepared to amend the Turkish Penal Code's controversial Article 301 regarding freedom of expression - with or without Pamuk.

Similarly, while strongly voicing its deep resentment over the French parliament's legislation on Armenian massacres, the AKP leadership has signaled that it has no intention to "match filth with filth". Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said, "This will be a great shame for France." Turkish indignation has been extraordinary in its controlled vehemence, its dignified outburst.

Again, Pope Benedict XVI's four-day visit to Turkey is going ahead as scheduled on October 28, despite the public outcry in Turkey over his poor grasp of political Islam. Benedict XVI will only be the third pope to visit Turkey in the history of Christendom. Least of all, the AKP government steered through parliament in Ankara on September 2 its controversial plan for troop deployment in Lebanon in the teeth of opposition from virtually the entire spectrum of domestic political opinion. On October 12, the first Turkish troop detachment departed from Ankara.

The AKP leadership no doubt estimates that among other things, Turkey's cooperation with the US's regional policies in stabilizing the Middle East are linked with its EU accession plans. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a key endorsement from the Bush administration during his visit to Washington on October 2. "It is in the United States' interests that Turkey join the European Union," the White House press release quoted Bush as saying to Erdogan.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ21Ak01.html