Will Iraq Pass Pact With the US

Shiite's allied with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and the Kurdish bloc in Iraq's ruling body made a key concession Wednesday to the largest Sunni Party in hopes of securing a big majority in a crucial parliamentary vote later in the day on a U.S.-Iraqi security pact.

Sunni Arab lawmakers have listed a host of demands, varying from sweeping political reforms to amnesty for prisoners who number about 16,000, and a national referendum on the pact, even if the parliament passed it; in exchange for supporting the proposed deal.

This proposed deal would let American troops stay in Iraq through 2011, meeting a longtime Iraqi demand for a clear timetable for their exit. The 275-member assembly is due to vote by a show of hands on the wide-ranging accord, which would require US troops to completely withdraw within three years and pull out from Iraqi cities by the end of June.

Maliki's Shiite bloc and its Kurdish allies hold enough seats to propel the pact through parliament, but Maliki needs Sunni votes to prevent sharpening the country's sectarian and ethnic divides. In addition, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has said the pact should have national consensus. Passage by such a thin margin would highlight a failure to achieve the consensus that Maliki seeks.

But the intensity of political maneuvering among Iraqi factions contributed to deep uncertainty about the outcome of a vote scheduled for Wednesday that will determine the status of some 150,000 troops in Iraq after years of war. One Shiite lawmaker said that the government could only count on 139 MPs to vote for the measure, which would mean that it would just barely pass if most of the 275 MPs attended the session. If it does pass, it will pass with a simple majority and not consensus.

It has been reported awmakers arrived at the parliament building for the planned vote in a session scheduled for 7 a.m. EST, but the session did not begin at the appointed hour and the legislators waited for a new time to be set. Fearing insurgent attacks, the Iraqi army and police deployed additional forces around the parliament building and the Green Zone entrance leading to it.

If the pact is not passed by the end of next month, it would leave U.S. forces without legal standing to be in Iraq unless the U.N. mandate authorizing their presence was extended. The mandate expires Jan. 1.

Iraq: The War Continues

The media has mostly dropped their coverage of the occupation of Iraq, but the war continues. Three bomb attacks in Baghdad killed at least 20 people. One of these attacks was a suicide bombing near an entrance to the U.S.-protected Green Zone.

These attacks come as Iraqi lawmakers prepare for a vote this week on a security pact with the U.S. and are seen by some as “a calculated show of insurgent defiance” towards the agreement.

The Iraqi parliament has postponed its vote on the proposed US-Iraq security pact from Monday to Wednesday. MPs had complained that there were not given enough time to study its provisions. It is still not clear how the Sunni Arab MPs will vote; without their support, the agreement would likely be seen as a joint Shiite-Kurdish conspiracy.

There is also evidence that the situation is tenuous with both the Sunni's and Kurds. Kurdistan continues to act as an independent country. It was revealed on Saturday that the Kurdish authority have been importing arms from Bulgaria without informing the central government in Baghdad.

Sunni Arabs in Iraq have considerable grievances against the Shia dominated government in Baghdad, though they may be willing to cooperate with it if money and works project flow to their regions. There is still some fear that the central government in Baghdad will not maintain payments to the Sons of Iraq, and Awakening Councils, who ended their insurgency and went on to the American payroll. Now that the Iraqi government has taken over these payments, any disruption or cancellation could lead to serious problems. At the same time the presidency council in Iraq is now criticizing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for building up tribal levies of Shiite Arabs into forces supporting the Prime Minister and his party. There are rumors in Iraq that these are militias that are loyal to the Da'wa or Islamic Mission Party. One of Da'wa's weaknesses has been that it does not have a powerful militia like the Sadarists, the Kurdish parties, or the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. This may play a role in strengthening his party against his Shiite rivals. Maliki has defended the Support Councils as a natural outgrowth of the Sahwa Awakening movement that began in the western province of Anbar in 2006, when the US allied with local Sunni militias to drive out Al-Qaeda.

There are some who look at this with hope. I don't, I see armed camps preparing for another war. Iraq still is in great danger of following the same path as Lebenon.

Satellite Images Show Ethnic Cleanout in Iraq

Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007. For a while now there have been people saying that ethnic cleansing had taken place in Baghdad, that Sunni Arabs were driven out of many neighborhoods by Shi'ite militants enraged by the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. Neoconservatives and Fred Kagen in particular called the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad a 'myth.' Fred Kagan has once more been proved wrong.

These satellite images gives strong evidence that the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis by Shiite militias accounts in large part for the fall in violence in Baghdad, not just the extra troops Bush sent, called the 'surge.' These satellite images were part of a study, published in the journal Environment and Planning A.

This is not the first time stories about the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. In December 2007, the Washington Post published the maps below, comparing the sectarian make-up of Baghdad’s neighborhoods in April 2006 and November 2007, and revealing the transformation of the city resulting from sectarian cleansing:


The Government Accountability Office, also stated in congressional testimony in October 2007 that sectarian cleansing was “an important consideration in even assessing the overall security situation in Iraq”:

We look at the attack data going down, but it’s not taking into consideration that there might be fewer attacks because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, particularly in the Baghdad area. […]

It’s produced 2.2. million refugees that have left, it’s produced two million internally displaced persons within the country as well.

And in August 2007, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization indicated that “the total number of internally displaced Iraqis [had] more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000″ since the surge started in February. Center for American Progress Iraq analyst Brian Katulis estimated that Baghdad, which once used to be a 65 percent Sunni majority city, “is now 75 percent Shia.”

Baghdad hs undergone drastic transformation and a great deal of suffering attended that transformation. And the sad fact is that some of the most intense and violent periods of sectarian cleansing took place under the aegis of the military escalation known as the Surge.