THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Nascent Iraqi Assembly Adjourns Until Weekend Amid Bickering
By EDWARD WONG

Published: March 29, 2005


BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 29 - Sharp ethnic and sectarian divisions emerged today during the second meeting of the constitutional assembly, as some members stood up and accused others of hijacking the political process and betraying the Iraqi people by failing to form a coalition government.

The heated arguments prompted the head of the assembly to ban reporters from the room and call for the assembly to reconvene next weekend, nine weeks after the Jan. 30 elections, in hope that the top members would be ready to fill some key government positions then.

Prominent assembly members also said in interviews that the delay in cobbling together a government could very well force the assembly to take an extra half-year to write a permanent constitution, pushing the deadline for a first draft well beyond the original deadline of Aug. 15. The elections for a full-term government at the end of the year would then have to be pushed back by six months, slowing the American-led process of implanting democracy here in the heart of the Middle East.

"Realistically, I think it's very difficult," Haichem al-Hassani, a leading Sunni Arab politician and a top candidate for the post of defense minister, said of the August deadline. "I think it's wishful thinking."

The afternoon meeting of the assembly, which descended into a shouting match, showed how the current negotiations to form a government could be poisoning the entire political process and fracturing the major political blocs, already divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.

In Washington, President Bush tried to soothe concerns that democratic process in Iraq was being jeopardized by the absence of an elected government.

"We expect a new government will be chosen soon and that the assembly will vote to confirm it," he told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. "We look forward to working with the government that emerges from this process."

In recent days, politicians here had said the assembly might be able to choose an assembly speaker and two vice-speakers at the meeting today. But those hopes were dashed on Monday when the leading candidate for speaker, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawer, the interim president, turned down the job. The main parties have agreed that a Sunni Arab should take the post and are now struggling over whom to nominate.

The second member to speak, Shatha al-Mousawi, a prominent member of the main Shiite bloc, stood up in her flowing black robes and asked the temporary assembly leaders why no one could settle on a candidate, implying that the Sunni Arabs were responsible for the delay.

"I demand the revelation of all details to the public and to all the members in order for the people to be aware of who is obstructing the democratic and political process," she said. "If you don't do that, then you are covering for the enemies of the Iraqi people."

A Shiite cleric, Hussein al-Sadr, took up the microphone a few minutes later and called for the assembly to start installing a government on Wednesday.

"People on the street are counting on us," said Mr. Sadr, a member of the Iraqi List, the slate formed by Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister. "What are we going to tell the people who went to vote on Jan. 30?"

As the shouting increased and more accusations flew, four prominent members of the assembly left the room - Dr. Allawi; his friend Hazem al-Shalaan, the defense minister; Sheik Yawer; and the public works minister, Nasreen Berwari, who is married to Sheik Yawer.

The 275-member assembly is charged with installing a government and writing a permanent constitution. Once the assembly puts in place a president and two vice presidents, called the presidency council, those officers will have two weeks to appoint a prime minister, who chooses a cabinet. The problem is that the transitional basic law approved in March 2004 and written under the direction of the Americans does not set a deadline for the appointment of the presidency council.

The main Shiite bloc, which has 140 assembly seats, and the main Kurdish bloc, which has 75, have been in heated negotiations to form a coalition, since a two-thirds vote of the assembly is needed to approve the government. The two sides have been at odds over a range of issues, from control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the role of Islam in the new government. In recent days, officials from the two groups have said conflicts between them and with the Sunni Arabs over several important ministerial posts, including that of oil minister, are stalling the talks.

The assembly meeting took place as reports emerged that three Romanian journalists had been kidnapped in Baghdad on Monday. Two of them, Marie Jeanne Ion and Sorin Miscoci, work for a television network, and the third, Ovidiu Ohanesian, writes for a daily newspaper. Romania has 800 troops in Iraq, though Romanian officials said the abductions were likely for profit and not motivated by politics.

In Kirkuk, a bomb explosion injured 16 people, police officials said. The attack took place as the 41-member provincial council met to try to appoint a provincial government. But the 15 Arab and Turkmen members stormed out, accusing the rest of the council, made up of Kurds, of trying to take over the city, according to a reporter for Agence France-Presse who was in the room.

In Baghdad, at about 1:15 p.m., shortly before the National Assembly meeting began, two mortar shells landed in the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the session was being held. There were no reports of injuries.

Many a true word spoken in jest, and that is closer to the truth than you perhaps know.
I do contest however, the assumption that those who oppose Bush crimes must be by your definition "liberal".

Also inaccurate is the "war was for oil" jibe. I am saying that the war was to prevent Saddam undermining the US economy by pricing his oil in Euros.
However the Oil Ministry building was the only bit of Baghdad, apart from the Green Zone palace, which was protected by the incoming invasion force.

Makes more sense when we look back on the aftermath of the war and the only thing the US Army bothered to secure were the oil fields. It's interesting to note the current beliefs of the right that Bush did it for the Iraqi People and to bring democracy to the Middle East, and to rid Iraq of Saddam. Pales in comparison to the oil, and our very high energy consumption.

If the oil disappears, our economy will be the first to tank.

I am not sure I accept that even the Bush adminstration could be so monstrous that they invaded a country for completely monetary reasons.

As for process of the government in Iraq, what in the world did they expect when they divided up the power so evenly between such oppossing sides but haggling. I just hope that the haggling don't turn into violence, I don't think it will.

I just hope that the Shites don't just given in to everything just so that they can get a government going. In my opinion the Kurds want too much with wanting their own army and control of the oil industry.

revel, Most of the experts on Iraq already voiced their concern that the divisions amongst the three tribes have been on-going for many decades, and it's not about to resolve so easily. If this doesn't work, there is sure to be civil war before any democracy takes on any footing.

I've encountered zero evidence that


I've encountered persuasive evidence that over the time period 2001 to the present, the US has taken various actions "to protect the dollar as the world's reserve currency." Invading Iraq is not one of those actions. In fact invading Iraq has probabily reduced protection of the US dollar.

I was mocking the use here of the fundamental logical fallacy that co-occurrence constitutes a causitive relationship, when I wrote: Increased CO2 in the atmosphere caused the Iraq invasion. It is obviously (or ought to be obviously) false logic to infer that the Iraq invasion was caused by invasion of the atmosphere by CO2, just because the invasion of Iraq co-occurred with invasion of the atmosphere by CO2. Likewise it is obviously false logic to infer a causitive relationship between euro-dollar conflicts and the Iraq conflict just because euro-dollar conflicts co-occurred with the invasion of Iraq.

Do you think all that good or bad?

That terrorist training camps were established in an area beyond the control of the Iraqi government is a fact.

That the Kurds who had de facto control over the area were prepared to deal with these terrorists is a fact.

That it was the US that ultimately hindered their move against these terrorists is a fact.

That the invasion and occupation of the entire country in the name of removing an isolated group of terrorists in an isolated area of Iraq was ham-handed and gross overkill, and that the invasion and occupation of the entire country in presumption that no more terrorists will establish there is asinine is an opinion of mine, and I am as entitled to express that as you are of the opinions you post here, ican.

That Powell said that the US asked a friendly security service to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi and providing information about him and his close associates, is one thing. That Baghdad had the wherewithal to actually carry out that task is another. Yet another thing is the very veracity of Powell's selfsame claim that the US asked a friendly security service to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi and providing information about him and his close associates. In the very same speech Powell alleged that the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and that this camp was located in northeastern Iraq. There was no "poison and explosive training center camp" in northeastern Iraq, nor is there evidence that there ever was a "poison and explosive training center camp" in northeastern Iraq. Given Powell's gross incompetence concerning threats to the US from Iraq, imminent or otherwise, any of his claims thereof must be viewed with, at best, skepticism, and at worst, utter mistrust and disbelief.

Justifying a war based on incompetence is asinine.

Quote, "Justifying a war based on incompetence is asinine." It should also be a crime to humanity, and those responsible should have to pay some penalty.

Yes. Crime. Quite correct.

Ican wrote:

….it is obviously false logic to infer a causitive relationship between euro-dollar conflicts and the Iraq conflict just because euro-dollar conflicts co-occurred with the invasion of Iraq.

I didn't infer any such thing. The word causative implies one thing follows as a direct result of another. The events are separated in time to allow cause and effect to take place. In no way would I be so stupid as to infer a causative relationship between two independent events solely on the grounds of co-occurrence. Indeed the fact that they occurred simultaneously would suggest there was no cause and effect. But the euro-dollar rivalry predates the invasion of Iraq by several years (and the fact that there is economic rivalry between the two currencies is undeniable). Secondly I said it was one source of pressure building for the invasion, and I provided a link as evidence to support this, though you dismissed it with a little application of your superior logic.
Third, we are not operating in a laboratory. We can't re-run history altering one variable at time. To establish an empirical relationship between two events it is necessary to set out the null hypothesis, devise and conduct a series of experiments to test it, and then accept it, or reject it with a measured degree of probability. Only a fool or maybe a dialectical materialist would think such procedures applicable to the world of politics.

Are you seriously asking me if I think another 1-2000 US servicemen killed in Iraq would be a good thing?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11145-2005Mar29.html

Dissent on Intelligence Is Critical, Report Says
Commission's Ideas Diverge From Planned Centralization
By Walter Pincus and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 30, 2005; Page A01


A presidential commission assigned to look into the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war will recommend a series of changes intended to encourage more dissent within the nation's spy agencies and better organize the government's multi-tentacled fight against terrorism, officials said yesterday.

In a report to be made public tomorrow, the officials said, the panel will propose more competitive analysis and information-sharing by intelligence agencies, improved tradecraft training, more "devil's advocacy" in the formation of national intelligence estimates and the appointment of an intelligence ombudsman to hear from analysts who believe their work has been compromised.

The report will also suggest the creation of a new national nonproliferation center to coordinate the fight against weapons of mass destruction, according to officials who have read the 700-page classified version of the report and declined to be identified because it has not been released. But unlike the trend toward greater centralization enshrined in a new intelligence law signed by President Bush, the report envisions the center as a facilitating body and urges the government to keep its specialists dispersed in various intelligence agencies.

The net result, according to officials, would be to move away from the intelligence community's tradition of searching for consensus, in favor of opening up internal debate and including a more diverse spectrum of views. The goal is to provide policymakers a fuller understanding of the state of the government's knowledge.

Bush appointed the panel, officially known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in February 2004 after initially resisting any further examination of the assessments that preceded his decision to invade Iraq.

Like other studies, the commission report offers a scathing review of the CIA for concluding that Saddam Hussein had secret weapons that ultimately were never found, while also taking aim at the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other agencies, according to officials. In addition, it examines the performance of intelligence agencies in Iran, North Korea, Libya and Pakistan, but the Iran and North Korea sections remain classified.

The White House, while refusing to disclose the contents of the report, embraced it as the authoritative account of what went wrong in Iraq. Bush was briefed on the report yesterday by aides who have reviewed it. The president will meet with the panel's co-chairmen, Senior U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), at the White House tomorrow and then join the two at a briefing for reporters.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan praised the report as "a very thorough job" and suggested that Bush would adopt many, though not necessarily all, of its ideas. "We will carefully consider the recommendations and act quickly on the recommendations, as well," he told reporters at his daily briefing. "They build upon the steps we've already taken to improve our intelligence-sharing and -gathering."

But McClellan offered no second thoughts about the Iraq war despite the intelligence failures documented in the commission report. "Saddam Hussein's regime was creating instability in the region, and we are better off with his regime out of power," he said.

In analyzing the preparation of Iraq intelligence, the commission singled out case studies that demonstrated faulty conclusions. Among those highlighted was the allegation that Iraq had built unmanned aerial vehicles that could be loaded with weapons of mass destruction and sent to attack the United States. The report noted that Air Force analysts expressed serious doubts about such a scenario, but were disregarded.

The panel also dissected the use of information from an Iraqi exile nicknamed "Curve Ball," a German intelligence source who was never questioned by the CIA but provided information on Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons production facilities. Curve Ball's assertions provided the basis for some statements by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the U.N. Security Council, but the information was later questioned by the Germans and eventually by U.S. intelligence.

The panel's conclusions and recommendations will be made public in a declassified version of the report that runs over 500 pages and is summarized in a 40-page overview, all of which will be posted on the Internet tomorrow, officials said. Some findings were reported yesterday in the New York Times.

The commission's plan for remedying the problems it found follows a reorganization of the intelligence community that Bush signed into law in December, a move also motivated by dissatisfaction with the misjudgments on Iraq. The legislation led to the recent nomination of longtime diplomat John D. Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence, charged with coordinating the government's 15 disparate intelligence agencies, and the commission offers him guidance on how to proceed once he assumes the job.

Among other things, the panel plans to recommend that the FBI move more quickly to modernize its computer systems and broaden access to its security information, and that the Justice Department create a new national security division, according to officials.

The changes to intelligence-gathering were meant to emphasize improving the quality of the analysis, officials said. Government specialists should be left in their jobs rather than moved to other fields, and intelligence analysis should be made into more of a career track, the panel concluded. Rather than smothering disagreement, analysts would be encouraged to explain why they reached different conclusions.



© 2005 The Washington Post Company

I asked: Do you think all that good or bad?

I'll parse it all for you.


Do you think that good or bad?


Do you think that good or bad?


Do you think that good or bad?

I did not ask: Do you think another 1-2000 US servicemen killed in Iraq would be a good thing?

Another question: Do you think the risk and value of successfully establishing in Iraq a democracy of the Iraqis own design is good enough to warrant risking "another 1-2000 US servicemen killed in Iraq?"

Good! Then we cannot rationally conclude that because we changed payment for Iraqi oil from euros to dollars after we removed Saddam's regime, and while we remain in Iraq, that our invasion was motivated in part to accomplish that change.

? We can't conclude that may have been part of the motivation?

It probably wasn't the causative factor for the invasion (there were lots of PNAC documents that spell that out, for sure) but I believe definately was a factor for the timing; and an important step to protect our economy in the minds of those in charge...

Cycloptichorn

Oh yeah? Go away and think about it some more.

It wasn't terrorists- they were elsewhere.
It wasn't WMD- they were absent.
It wasn't to remove a threat- there was no credible threat.
It wasn't to bring democracy, nor freedom, nor the benefits of female emancipation- because there are other more deserving cases which were ignored
It wasn't about anything else really.

What else could promote the big lie?
What else was worth alienating the whole world for?

Follow the money.

ican's coments are in blue

Those that judged our intelligence and decided that WMD were a causal reason for the war, enough to make it the primary factor in making the case for the war, acted incompetenly at the very least and criminally negligent at the most.

Justifying the war now by saying 'well, we THOUGHT there were WMD at the time' is justifying the war based upon incompetence of those judging the intelligence.

I know YOU don't say that's the reason we went to war, but it's how the case was presented to the American people and the UN.

Cycloptichorn