Some of the turnout figures are not terribly optimistic, in terms of Sunni participation in the new government (as opposed to a continued terrorist insurgency and fomenting all-out civil war).
Shiites, who form about 60 percent of Iraq's estimated 26 million population, turned out in huge numbers to vote, eager to assume leadership after decades of oppression under deposed leader Saddam Hussein.
Many Sunni Arabs, estimated at 20 percent of the population, chose not to vote either out of fear of insurgent attacks or in support of a boycott call by their clergy.Turnout for the provincial council races in Baghdad — with large Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations — was 48 percent, officials said. Long lines were reported on election day in mixed and Shiite areas, but no polling stations opened in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah.
Some 71 percent of registered voters participated in balloting in Babil province, a mixed Shiite-Sunni area south of Baghdad and an insurgency flashpoint.
In the meantime, the violence continues largely unabated. Indeed, in a possible reversal of the infamous "flypaper" theory, Iraq may actually be starting to export terrorism to its neighbors.
As the insurgency continues in Iraq, the risk is that the country becomes a regional training ground for terrorists - as Afghanistan was in the 1990s - creating newly radicalized and experienced jihadis who return home to cause trouble in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere.
In fact, there's evidence it's already happened in Kuwait. In the past month, the tiny Gulf state has been rocked by a series of shootouts with Muslim militants, some of whom learned their craft by working alongside Iraqi insurgents.
"We found during the interrogations that about four of the suspects had learned how to make explosives in Iraq," says Col. Khaled al-Isaimi, who heads the Kuwaiti delegation at a four-day global counterterrorism conference which ends Tuesday in Riyadh. Some 40 terror suspects have been handed over to Kuwaiti prosecutors in the past month.
So we are essentially turning over sovereignty to the so-called "Sistani tsunami" and crossing our fingers. Much in this campaign has been a leap of faith anyway; this will just be the most recent culmination, yet another corner of triumph we have supposedly turned.
Yet, here is [Bush's] administration sounding sanguine about the sweeping electoral win of the slate blessed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. It is saying he won't establish mullahcracy in Iraq.
It doesn't know that. It is only hoping so. Only a handful of people know what Sistani really wants.
He won't allow any American near his home in Najaf, let alone take a phone call from Bush.
The ayatollah does not give speeches, or deliver Friday sermons. He rarely leaves his abode. He issues few statements and fewer fatwas. The latter tend to be metaphysical.
There's also the possibility that Ahmed Chalabi will have a high-profile role in the new government, Chalabi, of course, is the treacherous fool who got us into this mess with his promises of candy and flowers. So of course he deserves to be rewarded.
As the US attempts to railroad Kofi Annan on myriad corruption charges, more and more comes out about how the U.S. condoned Iraq oil smuggling as well. Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
The oil trade with countries such as Turkey and Jordan appears to have been an open secret inside the U.S. government and the United Nations for years.
The unclassified State Department documents sent to congressional committees with oversight of U.S. foreign policy divulge that the United States deemed such sales to be in the "national interest," even though they generated billions of dollars in unmonitored revenue for Saddam's regime.
Not only that, but evidently the Coalition Provisional Authority either lost almost $9 billion, or engaged in an incredible amount of palm-greasing and graft, which, in a country without a functioning banking system, is entirely possible. Much of this money, it turns out, was generated by oil production, which was supposed to be specifically earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction efforts.
Excerpt (all emphasis mine):
Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC's File on Four program that officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800 million was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4 billion was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has never been seen since.
The CPA awarded contracts to US companies without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible. As a result, the authority appears to have obtained appalling value for money. Auditors at the Pentagon, for example, allege that, in the course of just one contract, a subsidiary of Halliburton overcharged it for imported fuel by $61 million. This appears to have been officially sanctioned.
In November, the New York Times obtained a letter from an officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers insisting that she would not "succumb to the political pressures from the ... US Embassy to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for fuel than necessary." She was overruled by her superiors, who issued a memo insisting that the prices the company was charging were "fair and reasonable," and that it wouldn't be asked to provide the figures required to justify them.
Other companies appear to have charged the authority for work they never did, or to have paid sub-contractors to do it for them for a fraction of what they were paid by the CPA. Yet, even when confronted by cast-iron evidence of malfeasance, the authority kept employing them. When the Inspector-General recommended that the US army withhold payments from companies which appear to have overcharged it, it ignored him. No one has been charged or punished. The US Department of Justice refuses to assist the whistleblowers who are taking these companies to court.
What makes all this so serious is that more than half of the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition's sales of oil. If you think the UN's oil-for-food program was leaky, take a look at the CPA's oil-for-reconstruction scheme. Throughout the entire period of CPA rule, there was no metering of the oil passing through Iraq's pipelines, which means that there was no way of telling how much of the country's wealth the authority was extracting, or whether it was paying a fair price for it. The CPA, according to the international monitoring body charged with auditing it, was also "unable to estimate the amount of petroleum ... that was smuggled."
The authority was plainly breaching UN resolutions. As Christian Aid points out, the CPA's distribution of Iraq's money was supposed to have been subject to international oversight from the beginning. But no auditors were appointed until April 2004: just two months before the CPA's mandate ran out. Even then, they had no power to hold it to account or even to ask it to cooperate. But enough information leaked out to suggest that $500 million of Iraqi oil money might have been "diverted" (a polite word for nicked) to help pay for the military occupation.
Finally, when this is all said and done, and we get the troops back home, one hopes that they will be treated a little better than they have been thus far.
Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are now showing up in the nation's homeless shelters.
While the numbers are still small, they're steadily rising, and raising alarms in both the homeless and veterans' communities. The concern is that these returning veterans - some of whom can't find jobs after leaving the military, others of whom are still struggling psychologically with the war - may be just the beginning of an influx of new veterans in need. Currently, there are 150,000 troops in Iraq and 16,000 in Afghanistan. More than 130,000 have already served and returned home.Both the Veterans Administration and private veterans service organizations are already stretched, providing services for veterans of previous conflicts. For instance, while an estimated 500,000 veterans were homeless at some time during 2004, the VA had the resources to tend to only 100,000 of them.
"You can have all of the yellow ribbons on cars that say 'Support Our Troops' that you want, but it's when they take off the uniform and transition back to civilian life that they need support the most," says Linda Boone, executive director of The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
Then again, maybe they need to just get ready for the next campaign, be it Iran or North Korea. We'll know after the utterly incompetent Condoleezza Rice flips that Coin Of Freedom™. Knowing her, it'll land standing on end.
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