Echoes of Oslo

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• Reader Comments (5)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  What an extraordinary mess! Iraq’s history brings to mind various aspects of African history. When the European powers laid out the map of Africa in the 1880s to suit their own imperial/balance of power agendas, identity groups (tribes, religious communities) were suddenly separated by international borders, while blood enemies suddenly found themselves to be countrymen. Some of Africa’s modern difficulties stem from that 100+ years-ago event.

  Iraq’s case has its differences, but the international borders of that regions also hardly reflect the demongraphic groupings, with Iraq being a case-in-point. Little sense of community across demographic lines, to say the least. Shias and Sunnis have had bitter troubles for over 1000 years, and Kurds aren’t even Arabs.

  I’ll be damned if I know how it can play out without decades more of conflict, unless a brand new, unanticipated sense of identity can miraculously form among the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds.

  I’ve never met anyone from Iraq, I’d be curious to get their view of it all.

  Posted by Kuya on Aug 22, 2005 at 1:41 AM

  Wow. ITT has had many good articles on their website, but this has to be one of, if not THE, best article I have read to date. It is so full of substance and yet it manages to weave the complexities of post-invasion Iraq together in a clear and very insightful manner. Today I read in my local newspaper that in order to get the constitution put together, the Shias and Kurds locked out the Sunni delegates from the drafting conference. Not to mention the problems of Kurdish autonomy and federalism within the Sunni community. It appears that the presence of U.S. troops has not diminished the likelihood of civil war in Iraq at all. All those CIA estimated coming from Baghdad appear to be accurate in the end....

  Just like the author mentioned, it seems that the U.S. is going to get their permanent bases after all, Iraqi public opinion be damned. That region is just to strategically important to be left to the desires of the Iraqi people, according to the policy makers back in Washington.

  Like Kuya alluded to, Iraq is similar to those African colonies in that it is an artificial nation, whose borders were drawn by the British after it defeated the Ottoman Empire in WWI. No concern was made for the fact that this new nation threw together very different ethnic groups under one government. It seems that the Shias and Kurds prefer partition, but what does that leave the Sunnis?

  I can already smell the gunpowder and see the blood running in the streets....

  Posted by Liberal on Aug 22, 2005 at 2:30 PM

  This article has three parts; the religious far-right’s upcoming role in Iraq, the practical result as the actual goal of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the persistence of the neoliberal economic agenda embedded in the TAL and Iraq’s new constitution.

  The second part struck me like a thunderbolt.

  Destruction of Iraq and the residual chaos there have not come about as an unforeseen consequence of a failed policy. They were the goal to begin with. The Mad Max world in Iraq was the goal to begin with.

  The violence and the role of the U.S. presence in it raise another fundamental question barely touched upon by the discussions surrounding the constitution: What if the violence and chaos that have taken over Iraq (and which has become a similarly powerful dynamic in Palestine) are not merely the result of massive U.S. incompetence and ill-planning, but actually a structural necessity for the achievement of U.S. strategic aims in the country—that is, the retention of permanent military bases and the wholesale liberalization of the Iraqi economy?

  The idea of “sponsored” or “managed” chaos as a defining characteristic of contemporary neoliberal globalization has already been demonstrated by scholars working on Africa, the former Soviet Union, and other locations along the “arc of instability” that happens to contain some of the world’s most resource petroleum rich and politically unstable countries. The main thrust of this argument is that the coming “Age of Peak Oil” makes it strategically necessary for the United States to maintain a long-term military presence in Iraq, and thus have unrestricted influence over its vast oil. In an environment where the vast majority of Iraqis do not want either of these things, creating a situation of violence and instability becomes a logical, and perhaps the only feasible way, to secure them.
  

  This realization makes me think that, no matter how unreasonable from a human strategic point of view, the US/Israeli Axis is indeed about to attack Iran.

  Posted by John Francis Lee on Aug 27, 2005 at 11:51 PM

  The amazing thing about the two and one half year long U.S.occupation of Iraq is the fact that it created violent sectarian animosities that were long suppressed under Baathist rule.  US imperialism wishes to portray the Iraqi problem as one of ethnic divisions ala Yugoslavia yet it is the US occupation that has fostered and aggravated these divisions through a biased election process that helped the Shiites through a party list system that favored their numerical superiority.  In addition, the Occupying forces all but created a separate Kurdistan and is giving the Kurdish militias the right to act as the army of Kurdistan bypassing the newly created Iraqi army.  There is Kurdish massacres and expulsions of Sunni Arabs in areas of Kurdistan recently right under the US Army’s watch which makes the US complicit in an overt policy of ethnic cleansing. The US is using Shiite militias against the Sunnis in various areas of Iraq. The Shiite insurgent organizations such as the Badr Brigades and others are being used in Sunni areas to round up and kill military age Sunni males in the towns of the Sunni Triangle.  The US is clearly in the midst of creating a loosely federated, canton system for Iraq which will disenfranchise the Sunnis as much as possible and make them subject to physical encirclement and prone to political domination.  This has little to do with the Sunnis’ political advantages under the Baathists nor their alleged pro-Saddam sympathies.  This has to do with Sunni nationalism’s rejection of US imperialism’s Balkanization of the country and its take over of the core of the economy through massive corporate globalization which excludes most Iraqis and impoverishes a once advanced, proud, and dignified country.  The British-style divide and rule tactics which are taylored to imperialism’s objectives of foreign domination and regional integration of all the middle eastern economies based on transnational capital rather than local middle and working classes has brought on the current violent insurgency.  It is fight for justice and political independance.

  Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Sep 1, 2005 at 7:00 PM

  This is one of the best analyses of the social and economic implications of the US policies in Iraq in a short article.  It is certainly disturbing to learn that the neoliberalization of the country is actually dependent on the dissonance and resulting ‘Oslofication’ of Iraqi politics. I think this is the type of journalism that only independent media can get at.  Thank-you Mark Levine and ITT.

  Posted by Nate_Frentz on Sep 26, 2005 at 6:16 PM

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Also by Mark Levine

• To Leave or Not to Leave
  Parsing the plans for "victory" in Iraq
• Islam Needs Radicals
  
• Echoes of Oslo
  Iraq's Constitutional debate is a symptom of a country with an equally profound identity problem