49 Comments

1. 

   Thomas on February 3, 2005 at 3:01 am

   In the spirit of article exchange I proffer the follwing:

   Beating a Dead Parrot
   Why Iraq and Vietnam have nothing whatsoever in common

   By Christopher Hitchens
   Slate

   There it was again, across half a page of the New York Times last Saturday, just as Iraqis and Kurds were nerving themselves to vote. “Flashback to the 60’s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam.” The basis for the story, which featured a number of experts as lugubrious as they were imprecise, was the suggestion that South Vietnam had held an election in September 1967, and that this propaganda event had not staved off ultimate disaster.
   I can’t quite tell why this article was not printed on the day before the Afghan or Palestinian elections, or at any of the times when Iranian voters overwhelmingly chose reform candidates but were thwarted by the entrenched reserve strength of the theocracy. But perhaps now is the moment to state the critical reasons why there is no reasonable parallel of any sort between Iraq and Vietnam.
   To begin with, Vietnam had been undergoing a protracted struggle for independence since before World War II and had sustained this struggle militarily and politically against the French empire, the Japanese empire, and then after 1945 the French empire again. By 1954, at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu, the forces of Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap had effectively decided matters on the battlefield, and President Eisenhower himself had conceded that Ho would have won any possible all-Vietnamese election. The distortions of the Cold War led the United States to take over where French colonialism had left off, to assist in partitioning the country, and to undertake a war that had already been lost.
   Whatever the monstrosities of Asian communism may have been, Ho Chi Minh based his declaration of Vietnamese independence on a direct emulation of the words of Thomas Jefferson and was able to attract many non-Marxist nationalists to his camp. He had, moreover, been an ally of the West in the war against Japan. Nothing under this heading can be said of the Iraqi Baathists or jihadists, who are descended from those who angrily took the other side in the war against the Axis, and who opposed elections on principle. If today’s Iraqi “insurgents” have any analogue at all in Southeast Asia it would be the Khmer Rouge.
   Vietnam as a state had not invaded any neighbor (even if it did infringe the neutrality of Cambodia) and did not do so until after the withdrawal of the United States when, with at least some claim to self-defense, it overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Contrast this, even briefly, to the record of Saddam Hussein in relation to Iran and Kuwait.
   Vietnam had not languished under international sanctions for its brazen contempt for international law, nor for its building or acquisition, let alone its use of, weapons of mass destruction.
   Vietnam had never attempted, in whole or in part, to commit genocide, as was the case with the documented “Anfal” campaign waged by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds.
   In Vietnam the deep-rooted Communist Party was against the partition of the country and against the American intervention. It called for a boycott of any election that was not an all-Vietnam affair. In Iraq, the deep-rooted Communist Party is in favor of the regime change and has been an enthusiastic participant in the elections as well as an opponent of any attempt to divide the country on ethnic or confessional lines. (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is not even an Iraqi, hates the Kurds and considers the religion of most Iraqis to be a detestable heresy: not a mistake that even the most inexperienced Viet Cong commander would have been likely to make.)
   No car bomb or hijacking or suicide-bombing or comparable atrocity was ever committed by the Vietnamese, on American or any other foreign soil. Nor has any wanted international gangster or murderer ever been sheltered in Vietnam.
   American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi “insurgents” are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of “people’s war” and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi “insurgents” are dismal riff-raff by comparison.
   Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi “insurgency” is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned. This could not be said of Ho Chin Minh or of the leaders and cadres of the National Liberation Front.
   The option of accepting a unified and Communist Vietnam, which would have evolved toward some form of market liberalism even faster than China has since done, always existed. It was not until President Kennedy decided to make a stand there, in revenge for the reverses he had suffered in Cuba and Berlin, that quagmire became inevitable. The option of leaving Iraq to whatever successor regime might arise or be imposed does not look half so appetizing. One cannot quite see a round-table negotiation in Paris with Bin Laden or Zarqawi or Moqtada Sadr, nor a gradually negotiated hand-over to such people after a decent interval.
   In Vietnam, the most appalling excesses were committed by U.S. forces. Not all of these can be blamed on the conduct of bored, resentful, frightened conscripts. The worst atrocities—free-fire zones, carpet-bombing, forced relocation, and chemical defoliation—were committed as a direct consequence of orders from above. In Iraq, the crimes of mass killing, aerial bombardment, ethnic deportation, and scorched earth had already been committed by the ruling Baath Party, everywhere from northern Kurdistan to the drained and burned-out wetlands of the southern marshes. Coalition forces in Iraq have done what they can to repair some of this state-sponsored vandalism.
   In Vietnam, the United States relied too much on a pre-existing military caste that often changed the local administration by means of a few tanks around the presidential palace. In the instance of Iraq, the provisional government was criticized, perhaps more than for any other decision, for disbanding the armed forces of the ancien regime, and for declining to use a proxy army as the United States had previously done in Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, and Greece. Unlike the South Vietnamese, the Iraqi forces are being recruited from scratch.
   In Vietnam, the policy of the United States was—especially during the Kennedy years—a sectarian one that favored the Roman Catholic minority. In Iraq, it is obvious even to the coldest eye that the administration is if anything too anxious to compose religious differences without any reference to confessional bias.
   I suppose it’s obvious that I was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the principles of the antiwar movement of that epoch still mean a good deal to me. That’s why I retch every time I hear these principles recycled, by narrow minds or in a shallow manner, in order to pass off third-rate excuses for Baathism or jihadism. But one must also be capable of being offended objectively. The Vietnam/Iraq babble is, from any point of view, a busted flush. It’s no good. It’s a stiff. It’s passed on. It has ceased to be. It’s joined the choir invisible. It’s turned up its toes. It’s gone. It’s an ex-analogy.

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2. 

   jareer on February 2, 2005 at 8:42 pm

   Excuse my ignorance?
   Is this election about choosing a president? or something else?

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3. 

   Arash on February 2, 2005 at 7:46 pm

   Oh well, let them have it! The central government in Baghdad only had a grip on the Kurdish region for less than 60 years. How can you develop a nostalgia for something that was hardly ever there? Nothing ever good comes of a coerced coexistence.

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4. 

   metalordie on February 2, 2005 at 6:40 pm

   Why I opposed the elections:
   Read the article reported by Reuters and on Aljazeera’s website. One thing to keep in mind is that BEFORE the elections Barazani and Talabani carefully avoided any mention of Secession and independence.
   Now, the cat is out of the bag. COngratulations Iraq. To all the heroes who voted – here is your democratic reward.
   Would American voters have been so ready to vote in November if they knew that California would become an independent country?
   This is part of the conspiracy against Iraq launched in 1972.
   From the book The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy or Division?
   By Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield
   Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
   ISBN: 1403963541
   Pages: 272
   “In a Washington Post interview in the summer of 1973, Barzani had deliberately dangled a tempting carrot in front of the United States… ‘If America will protect us from the wolves we would control the Kirkuk [oil] field and give it to an American company to operate.’” This of course angered the Baghdad government. The deal with the Kurds was broken and “full-scale hostilities looked inevitable and duly erupted in March 1974.” Hoping to weaken the central Baghdad government and punish it for the 1972 nationalization of oil, US and British intelligence units influenced Iran to deploy two full regiments in the north of Iraq.
   FROM REUTERS::
   Kurdish party says self-rule inevitable
   Wednesday 02 February 2005 7:29 PM GMT
   Kurdish self-rule is inevitable if not imminent, according to Kurdistan Democratic Party chief Masud Barzani.
   Commenting on an almost unanimous vote for independence in an unofficial referendum held on 30 January, Masud Barzani said on Wednesday that “when the right time comes it will become a reality”.
   “Self-determination is the natural right of our people, and they have the right to express their desires,” he added.
   Barzani heads one of the two main Kurdish groups which control Iraq’s northern Kurdish zone.
   The KDP leader was speaking three days after more than 1.9 million Iraqi Kurds – some 95% of those asked – voted for independence in an informal survey conducted by volunteers.
   Iraqi Kurds have long pushed for independence, but Turkey, Iran and Syria – all with substantial Kurdish minorities – oppose the establishment of Kurdish state on their borders.
   Volunteers
   The referendum was held on the day of Iraq’s historic elections on Sunday. Its organisers surveyed Kurds as they emerged from polling stations across northern Iraq.
   The volunteers handed out postcard-sized cards with two boxes printed on them next to two flags – one Kurdish and one Iraqi. The question ‘What do you want?’ was written at the top of the card and those polled were asked to tick one box.
   By Wednesday, more than 2.1 million Kurdish votes had been counted, according to organisers who are still awaiting results from the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk.
   Witnesses said some children filled them in and there was often no restriction on people taking more than one form.
   Although the survey was unofficial and not monitored by any independent body, many Kurds said its results were proof of a groundswell of support for the eventual creation of an independent Kurdish state.
   “We want to make sure that the Kurdish people do not suffer any more, and to show that Kurdish people have the will and ability to live in freedom,” said Shamal Hawizy, a senior member of the Kurdistan Referendum Movement.
   The movement, founded in October 2003, is funded through donations and assisted by Kurdish authorities, who paid for the referendum’s cost of around $150,000.
   Last year, the movement collected 1.7 million signatures calling for a petition demanding a similar referendum.
   Paul Bremer, who was in charge of Iraq’s provisional authority at the time, declined to meet Kurdish leaders to accept their petition and the referendum never took place.
   Kurds make up around 15% of Iraq’s population of 27 million. They are expected to emerge as a leading force when results are announced from Sunday’s national vote.
   Most Iraqis oppose Kurdish secession. The international community says it is committed to establishing a unified but federal Iraq in which Kurds have a degree of autonomy.
   “If you asked me whether in 10 years there will be an independent Kurdistan, I’d say yes”
   “The referendum is just a statement that a very large proportion of the Kurdish population up there wants independence,” one western diplomat in Baghdad said.
   “That feeling exists, and it would be silly to deny it, but Kurdish national leaders and Kurdish regional leaders understand that an independent Kurdish state now is not possible.”
   Others said the creation of such a state was only a matter of time.
   “When you have a democracy it’s almost impossible to hold people in a country that they hate,” said Peter Galbraith, a visiting former US diplomat familiar with the region.
   “If you asked me whether in 10 years there will be an independent Kurdistan, I’d say yes.”
   Reuters
   By
   You can find this article at:
   http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/350DA932-63C9-4666-9014-2209F872A840.htm

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5. 

   metalordie on February 2, 2005 at 8:24 am

   Islamic theocracy in the making?
   Another danger of the elections…not very democratic this, now is it? Can anyone say Algeria?
   Top Shiites push for an Islamic constitution
   Large vote turnout boosts aspirations of religious coalition
   Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe
   Wednesday, February 2, 2005
   Najaf, Iraq — Some of Iraq’s top Shiite clerics, emboldened by a huge Shiite turnout for their coalition of religious parties in Iraq’s elections, have begun advocating an Islamic constitution.
   The turnout for the top-finishing electoral list, a coalition of Islamist parties supported by the Shiite clerical establishment, has convinced leading clerics in Najaf that religious parties will have a majority in the National Assembly that will write Iraq’s next constitution, several of them said.
   The clerics of Najaf who orchestrated the Shiite coalition say they expect a constitutional debate between hard-line Islamists, who want Quranic law to be the constitution’s primary source, and moderate Muslims who want a milder form of religious law. This debate, they say, will dwarf any challenge from secular parties.
   Some members of the United Iraqi Alliance, the slate that includes Shiite political parties as well as independent Shiite figures, said they were not in favor of an all-clerical government. The list was put together at the behest of the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose tacit endorsement was crucial in rallying voters.
   Shiites, a majority in Iraq, were kept out of power by the Sunni- dominated government of Saddam Hussein. The power of the Shiite clergy and the political maneuvering room for Sunnis are among the unsettled issues as Iraqis await a final determination of the new national legislature, which will draw up a permanent constitution.
   An official of the United Iraqi Alliance said the list would capture more than 120 seats, or 44 percent of the 275-seat National Assembly.
   The first official returns from the voting, including an announcement of the turnout and some initial vote breakdowns, are likely to be released today, according to officials of the Iraqi election commission. Complete results are expected to take as long as another week, but preliminary skirmishing has already begun in the contest for prominent positions in the next transitional government.
   In addition to the political jockeying over seats in the new legislature and positions in the government, Iraqi leaders are also beginning to debate when to ask U.S. troops to leave.
   At a news conference Tuesday, interim President Ghazi Mashal Ajil al- Yawer said it would be “complete nonsense to ask the troops to leave in this chaos and this vacuum of power,” a position similar to that taken last week by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
   The commander of the new Iraqi army, Gen. Babakir Zebari, also weighed in, saying some withdrawals could begin within a year. “In six months, or maybe at the end of the year, the construction of the Iraqi army will be finished, and our forces will be capable of guaranteeing security,” he said.
   The leadership of the new elected government remains up in the air, but U. S. officials are counting on Islamists who oppose a direct role for clerics in government to prevail. The officials say Iraq’s Shiite clergy has supported democratic principles, including elections, and shown political restraint since the fall of Hussein’s regime.
   As the vote counting continues, minority Sunnis from regions across the country say they were shut out from casting votes Sunday — in some cases because of threats by insurgents, but in other places because of bureaucratic snafus and closed polling places in their neighborhoods.
   “Tens of thousands were unable to cast their votes because of the lack of ballots in Basra, Baghdad and Najaf,” al-Yawer, himself a Sunni Arab, said. Najaf is a mostly Shiite city, but Basra and Baghdad have substantial Sunni populations.
   In Baghdad, Maisem Khalil Yacoub and her husband Sabah al-Tayee said they walked fruitlessly from one closed election center to another for three hours in their Adhamiya neighborhood, at one point coming within 100 yards of gunfire, before they went home without having voted.
   “There has been injustice,” said al-Tayee, a 35-year-old Sunni Arab and a supporter of the Constitutional Monarchy Party. “This is a very obvious and unacceptable marginalization of the Sunnis’ role in the new government.”
   In the Kurdish north, an official said 64,000 people voted in the city of Hawija — but that 80,000 people wanted to. “Arabs have been pushed away from the elections,” said Ahmad Hamid al Obeydi, a member of the Iraqi Tribes Party. “We are targets, we are marginalized.”
   Borzou Daragahi and Delphine Minoui of the Chronicle Foreign Service and Chronicle news services contributed to this report.

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6. 

   metalordie on February 2, 2005 at 8:13 am

   One wonders if being here so much allows me any normal life at all.
   WENDY. Thank you for your last message. God Bless.

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7. 

   metalordie on February 2, 2005 at 7:13 am

   I think the healthy debate Natasha dreamed of has finally come.
   I am adding an article I came across below. It is a little high on the rhetoric but an interesting read nonetheless.
   The Iraqi Ballot, Translated
   by Hawra Karama
   I had the opportunity to participate in the long-awaited Iraqi elections this weekend. Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first time my opinion has mattered to the Iraqi state. It was actually the third. Saddam Hussein had asked us Iraqis in both 1995 and 2002 if we wanted him to be our leader.
   The question sounded rather silly, considering the amount of Iraqi, Iranian, and Kuwaiti blood on his hands. Nevertheless, in both referenda, Saddam’s approval ratings exceeded 99 percent. That statistic could not have been accurate, could it? Did the Iraqis really want even more years of crushing tyranny, war with neighbors, and ethnic cleansing?
   In retrospect, I could come up with dozens of theories on the shocking outcome of the two referenda. Maybe only Ba’athists participated in the polls. Maybe people were too afraid to say they didn’t want Saddam. Maybe the chads of those who did cast a “no” vote were hanging. In any case, I shouldn’t waste so much time analyzing the past. The bottom line is that there is no such thing as democracy under dictatorship. My time today is better spent taking advantage of democracy under foreign occupation.
   I hesitated before voting for reasons familiar to anyone who follows the news. But then I thought of the disappointment on the faces of my American guests if I did not accept the democracy they brought me. I didn’t want their feelings to be hurt. I didn’t want them to think that the residents of the Cradle of Civilization are not civilized. So I mustered the courage to go to the voting site nearest my house in Baghdad.
   Initially, I thought I was at the American embassy because there were so many American soldiers standing outside. I checked my registration slip. I did in fact have the correct address. So I took a deep breath and walked in. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Iraqi authorities had requested American troops’ presence because they needed help making Iraqi tea for the voters. Their desire was to make the democratic process feel as close to home as possible.
   A young soldier from Texas served me a cup of Iraqi hospitality. Then I nervously proceeded toward the voting booth. My heart was racing, and tears flooded my eyes as I thought of the price that was paid to make this moment happen. On a personal level, my niece had suffered severe burns on her arms and legs when bombs shook Baghdad in March 2003. My backyard was converted into a parking spot for an American tank. More broadly, over a hundred thousand of my countrymen had to be killed, and many more had to be wounded and disabled. Many American families had to mourn the loss of their loved ones in the military. The environment was sentenced to suffer for the next several centuries. Politicians in the White House and Parliament had gone out of their way just to ensure that my cup of tea had the right amount of sugar while I expressed whom I thought should hold the magic wand to make all my agony go away.
   I wiped my tears, pulled myself together, sipped the last drops in my cup, and went into the voting booth. By taking one quick glance at the ballot placed in front of me, I could immediately tell that this experience was going to be differentfrom its 1995 and 2002 predecessors. On those two occasions, I was asked only one question about one tyrant. “Do you want Saddam Hussein to be your president? A) Yes. B) No.”
   This election, on the other hand, gave me a variety of choices on numerous issues. Behold the multitude of questions I was asked:
   1. Do you prefer to be tortured by A) American soldiers or B) British soldiers?
   2. When occupying soldiers stop you in the street, would you rather be strip-searched A) with blindfold or B) without blindfold?
   3. When foreign soldiers enter your house in the middle of the night to arrest your husband and terrorize your kids, would you prefer that they A) knock or B) ring the doorbell? [This question seemed odd because I thought they knew we don’t have electricity and therefore the doorbells don’t work.]
   4. Which of the following CIA-paid Iraqis should represent you? [The list is too long to reprint here.]
   5. Do you want the foreign forces occupying your country to leave? A) No. [I imagine they had accidentally forgotten to print “Yes.”]
   To make sure our voices were being fully heard, some of the questions were open ended. Voters were actually allowed to write in their opinions on a number of issues. Observe:
   6. Which media outlet should hold the copyright to the pictures of your torture?
   7. The occupation has violated the sanctity of the holy sites in Najaf and Karbala and bombed many mosques in Baghdad and Falluja. Are there any other holy sites you believe the occupation has missed?
   8. Which American company do you believe should be awarded a monopoly on Iraq’s oil?
   After reading all the questions, I did the same thing I’d done in 1995 and 2002. I left the ballot blank and walked out.
   On my way out of the voting site, an American soldier handed me a sticker with the words “I voted” printed on it. He looked perplexed as I stuck it on his rifle and left.
   Born in Baghdad, Hawra Karama is an Iraqi-American antiwar, anti-racist activist.

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8. 

   metalordie on February 2, 2005 at 6:42 am

   Gosh, a foreign monarch? Hmmm…they tried that once before and it didn’t hold leading to the purge of ’58.
   I doubt with all the inflammation in Iraq now it would work.
   As for Turkey giving Kurds the right to speak Kurdish, thats a recent thing brought upon by EU pressure as you rightly pointed out.
   And Arash does touch on an important issue…the Kurds of Iran always felt more Iranian than the Kurds of Iraq felt Iraqi.
   And Arash, Norouz is celebrated by Arabs where I come from…

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9. 

   linda on February 2, 2005 at 6:32 am

   Arash and Thomas, that post was so filled with important information, and you guys focus on that sentence? Correct it and move on.
   I can see where metalordie is coming from. Almost everybody around the world people are talking about the situations in Iraq. Its always on the news, its even in entertainemnt. Its always the political discussion during dinner, or coffee, or at the office around the water cooler. and its great that so many people are talking about it. but at the end of the day, we can sleep peacefully, because it is not our home going through this torment and chaos. Please dont misunderstand what im saying you guys, feel free to talk about it. But sometimes, for an iraqi, there will always be that feeling of homeland and pride because they are physicaly and emotionally connected to it. We can learn a great deal from people like metalordie.
   I have heard many relatives of mine here, who are are so patriotic for the USA say, “If jordan was ever attacked for whatever reason, I would go down there and fight for it,” because they are Jordanian. And like I said, If anyone invaded the USA for whatever reason, I would not sit back on my butt and do nothing. I would get up and fight and protect the motherland, because i was born here, its my nationality.

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