Tuesday, September 23, 2008

THIS JUST IN! FORGET THE ISSUES, CRIES BARACK!

BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
 
 
NOT EVEN IN THE WHITE HOUSE AND ALREADY LOWERING EXPECTATIONS!
 
 
OR MAYBE IT'S DUE TO HIS REFUSAL TO ADDRESS REAL ISSUES?
 
 
BUT TO BE SURE, WHEN A MCCAIN AD QUESTIONS ANYTHING ABOUT BARACK, HE WILL SHOW UP WHINING YET AGAIN AND ASKING WHY PEOPLE WON'T LET HIM FOCUS ON THE ISSUES.  JUDGING BY BARCK'S RECORD, HIS NEXT 'ISSUE' WILL BE TO 'EXPLORE' THE TYPE SOAP THE MCCAIN FAMILY USES.
 
 
 
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro (Morning Edition) reports on the growing tensions in Khanaqin, a city in Diyala Province (and, not noted by NPR, an oil rich area containing the Naft Khana oil field).  Garcia-Navarro notes that "Khanaqin is a disputed city that lies about 15 miles outside of the Kurdish provincial borders.  As far as the Iraqi government is concerned, it falls under the province of Diyala's control.  Last month the Iraqi government sent the Iraqi army into Diyala Province one of the most restive in the country to flush out al Qaeda in Iraq as part of that operation the Iraqi national security forces tried to move into Khanaqin but they were stopped by the Kurdish troops."  "Last month" is actually July 29th. During Saddam's rule, Kurds were expelled from Khanaqin and Arabs were brought in.  The illegal war changed that and now Arabs are expelled.  Garcia-Navarrot notes that "these days it's the Kurdish leadership that's been expanding its control since the US-led invasion in towns and cities outside of Kurdistan.  It's been deploying Kurdish forces and bankrolling local governments. Many Arab-Iraqis suspect that Kurds are trying to get control over an ever-widening swatch of land as a precursor to an eventual bid for independence. The Kurds deny it."  The report notes that the Iraqi military has been refused entry Khanaqin and that last week Abd al-Qadir al-Mufriji, Iraq's Defense Minister, and the US military's 2nd command in Iraq visited the region in an attempt to work out some understanding but none was reached and the Iraqi military is still refused entry and the Kurdish pesh merga patrol the city.
 
Khanaqin has been in the news before this month.  From the September 15th snapshot:
 
 
Saturday BBC reported, "A roadside bomb killed six Kurdish peshmerga fighters in Khanaqin town in Diyala province, north-east of Baghdad."  Sam Dagher (New York Times) observed that the Saturday bombing increased "tensions with the Iraqi government and local Arabs over the Kurds' presence in the area. The Kurdish presence in Khanaquin, and in other nearby areas, has been a growing source of tension. Kurdish forces have been moving the borders of their semiautonomous region in northern Iraq, in what they say is an effort to improve security. But the move has been viewed by many Iraqi and American officials as a threat to stability in areas that are already prone to violence." Amit R. Paley (Washington Post) reported before the bombing, "Kurdish leaders have expanded their authority over a roughly 300-mile-long swath of territory beyond the borders of their autonomous region in northern Iraq, stationing thousands of soldiers in ethnically mixed areas in what Iraqi Arabs see as an encroachment on their homelands. The assertion of greater Kurdish control, which has taken hold gradually since the war began and caused tens of thousands of Arabs to flee their homes, is viewed by Iraqi Arab and U.S. officials as a provocative and potentially destabilizing action."  An Iraqi correspondent for McClatchy (at Inside Iraq) reviews the benefits for the Kurds and wonders if "is it right to cause a state to collapse into entities to realize your dream?"  The correspondent notes how the Peshmerga appears to decide what they will do and which areas (Kurdish or non-Kurdish) they will 'patrol.'  Of oil-rich Kirkuk, the correspondent notes that Kurds compose only an estimated 40% of the city's population but have "taken control of it and the Pershmerga handle the security there".  Of the Iraqi Constitution, the correspondents notes that "the Kurds objected to the statement that read 'Iraq is an Arab state and part of the Arab nation' pointing out that there are other ethnic groups that would be offended.  So the statement was struck out -- as if by a magic wand disregarding the other constituents of the Iraqi population.  Arabs constitute 84% of the population."
 
The Washington Post's Amit R. Paley noted then (September 12th), "The face-off between the Iraqi army and pesh merga has stoked fears of Arab-Kurdish strife just as Iraqis begin to recover from years of sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis."  The Foreign Relations Minister of the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government), Falah Mustafa Bakir, disputed that in a letter to the Post published Sept. 18th where he maintained that "the city was peaceful until Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent Iraqi military forces there last month in an unwelcome and unnecessary provocation that sparked demonstrations by tens of thousands of residents.  This aggressive act caught the Kurdistan regional leadership by surprise, given that it occurred around the time that the KRG and other Iraqi parties had nearly reached agreement on a provincial election law, a key Iraqi benchmark.  Since then, the election law has stalled, and the KRG has negotiated with Baghdad for the redeployment of some Kurdish pesh merga forces, as noted in the article."  That's a curious re-writing of history.  The Iraqi military moved into Diyala Province on July 29th and the Kurdish lawmakers walked out of parliament over the issue of Kirkuk and provincial elections July 23rd.  From the July 23rd snapshot: "Turning to Iraq and starting with the latest in the provincial elections bill -- CNN reports it has been rejected today.  Yesterday, the Kurdish bloc in the Iraqi Parliament staged a walk-out over a bill regarding the alleged provincial elections that allegedly would take place October 1st. The walk-out means the already much postponed provinicial elections may be postponed further. . . .  Alissa J. Rubin (New York Times) focuses on the struggle for the oil-rich Kirkuk, 'The disagreement centered on the multiethnic city of Kirkuk, one of several areas in Iraq where there are competing claims over which province a city or district belongs in. The question for Kirkuk is whether it should be absorbed into the Kurdistan region -- a particularly charged question because the city sits on some of the largest unexploited oil reserves in the country. Both Arabs and Kurds lay claim to the area.  At bottom, the disagreement is also about the ethnic identity of Iraq and about Arab frustration with the Kurds. Although the Kurds are a minority, they have proved adept at turning the political process to their advantage, often to the chagrin of larger ethnic and religious groups'." The walkout took place the 23rd, the move into Diyala began the 29th.  At best Falah Mustafa Baker has his dates mixed up.  Possibly due to traipsing around DC last week insisting "The KRG is part of the solution, not the problem, in meeting these Iraqi benchmarks" to the administration, the Pentagon and the State Dept.  Last week, UPI reported that despite Massoud Barzani's denials (he's the Kurdish prime minister) last week that there were no intentions to take over Diyala Province, the week prior he "pointed out that 99 percent of the Khanaqin population had voted in favor of Kurdish parties in 2005, suggesting the area would be incorporated into Kurdistan once constitutional issues over the Kurdish territories were resolved."
 
From possible conflict between warring sides to known conflict.  Maggie Fox (Reuters) reported late Friday on a UCLA study which argues, via satellite imagery, that the small drop in Baghdad violence can be attributed not to the 'surge' (escalation of US troops) but to the ethnic cleansing/violence which created the Iraqi refugee crisis (resulting in more than 4 million refugees -- external and internal): "The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed."  The study is published in Environment and Planning A, [PDF format warning] John Agnew, Thomas W. Gillespie, Jorge Gonzalez and Brian Min's "Baghdad nights: evaluting the US military 'surge' using nighttime light signatures" which notes at the start:
 
In this commentary we attempt to intervene in a way that applies some fairly objective and unobtrusive measures to a particularly contentious issue: the question of whether or not the so-called 'surge' of US military personnel into Baghdad -- 30000 more troops added in the first half of 2007 -- has turned the tide against political and social instability in Iraq and laid the groundwork for rebuilding an Iraqi polity following the US invasion of March 2003.  Even though the US media attention on the Iraq war has waned, the conflict remains a material and symbolic issue of huge significance for both future US foreign policy and the future prospects of Iraq as an effective state.
 
They continue:
 
In this paper we use remotely sensed information, specifically nighttime light imagery of Baghdad and other cities in Iraq, and correlate this, as best possible, with group-based information on ethnic distributions and violence by neighborhood.  
Our purpose is to assess the degree to which the overall nighttime light signature of the city and its distribution across neighborhoods have changed during the period of the surge.  If the surge has truly 'worked' we would expect to see a steady increase in nightime light output over time, as electrical infrastructure is repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods.  The sistuation in other cities is used as a datum against which to compare the Baghdad trend.  Most of the other cities we examing have typically had much lower levels of ethnic intermixture and levels of violence than Baghdad.
 
And skipping further ahead:
 
The overall nighttime light signature of Baghdad since the US invasion appears to have increased between 2003 and 2006 and then declined dramatically from 20 March 2006 through December 2007 (table 1).  In other words, the period of the surge coincides with a decline in the nightime light of the city after an increase following the invasion and before the onset of the surge.  This result can be stated with a high degree of statistical confidence (Mann - Whitney U-test, P < 0.001).  The city as a whole, therefore, experienced a net decrease in its electricity output over the course of the surge.  This was not just temporary, and thus cannot be put down to military operations disrupting supplies, because the end date of 16 December 2007 is well after the most intensive military sweeps in the city."  
The second result is that the decrease in the nighttime light signature was not uniformly distributed across the city (table 2; figures 3 and 4). The neighborhoods of East and West Rashid int he southwestern section of the city have experienced the greatest decline in nighttime lights during the period of the surge.  These were historically mixed areas with a predominance of Sunnis, but between 2006 and 2007 they become highly segregated with signficant loss of total population (Jones, 2007).  The nighttime light intensity was also lower after the surge in Adhamiya (historically a Sunni area), Kadamiya (historically Shia), Rusfa, and Karada (historically mixed and/or Sunni neighborhoods).  However, there was no change or an increase in nighttime lights in Sadr City (one of the poorest areas of the city but overwhelmingly Shia), New Baghdad (heavily Shia), Karkh (Green Zone), and Al Mansour (historically mixed but by late 2007 heavily Sunni in its western periphery). This pattern of declines correlates closely with the map of ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing presented in the Jones Report (2007) (figure 5).  Must of this was concentrated in the western and southwestern sections of the city before and during the surge.
 
And skipping further ahead:
 
Our findings suggest that in these terms the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved but with a tremendous decline in the extent of residential intermixing between groups and a probable significant loss of population in some areas.  That is the message we take from the nighttime light data we have presented.  Furthermore, the nighttime light signature of Baghdad data when matched with ground data provided by the report to the US Congress by Marine Corps General Jones and various other sources, makes it clear that the diminished level of violence in Iraq since the onset of the surge owes much to a vicious process of interethnic cleansing.  This might resume if US forces withdraw.  But as the case we have made strongly implies, the massive residential segregation and population loss happened anyway even when US forces were present in increased numbers.  Perhaps they are not as central to events in Baghdad and Iraq as US government and popular opinion seems to believe.  They certainly have not been over the past two years.
 
Truest statement of the week II A note to our readers Editorial: Spending in an economic meltdown TV: Shrinkage and expansion Real Change vs. Small Change Arthur Krystal delivers a lesson in exclusion Cock Rock Hall of Fame Roundtable Coming Up Jerk off Artiste of the Week E-mails (Dona and Jess) Highlights
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