Here's How to Lose in Iraq...

As if we hadn't figured it out, Nouri shows us how to lose in Iraq.

First, raid the offices of your political enemies. It worked on Sadr, ha? In 2004 and 2008, ha? Awakening Councils acting up, ha? Shut em down. The resultant street riot will, you know, give Americans an opportunity to earn the Bronze Star. Can't get that sitting on a base. Besides this, raiding your nominal allies has the added bonus of confusing the hell out of the Sun Young Moon falange. "A new boldness" among the armed groups is okay, right? We paid them to be bold...

All good, until someone starts blowing up children in Shiite neighborhoods. Then we're back to square one, only with fewer boots on the ground.
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More from the Life of Nouri...

Little Nouri is consolidating power. Today's NYT story on the arrest of 35 Interior Ministry officials includes a correction.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that one of the Iraqi officials arrested was Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, the ministry’s director of internal affairs.

Turns out WaPo read the first draft and just called up General Abu Raqeef to ask if he had hired a lawyer. Obv., 'Qeef was pissed:

When reached by telephone, Raqeef denied the allegation and said he was still in his job. He blamed disgruntled rivals inside the ministry for spreading rumors to discredit him." I fired many officers and sent some of them to face justice," Raqeef told the Washington Post. "Probably this is why they are trying to destroy my reputation."

Until we have details of the planned coup, names of the conspirators, when they met, where they met, how much money they had, and proof that Al Awda (The Return) is more than an acronym for Nouri's Al Dawa, probably we should file these stories under "Nouri Does the Putin."

GI's are out. Surely it would help Nouri going forward if Shiite militias acting as the military wing of Dawa were active again. And the quickest route to that happening is to diminish the power of the IM's Internal Affairs, chief of which is the "squeaky clean" Gen'l Abu Raqeef. Says Mr. Kazimi at the Hudson Institute:

He was arrested by U.S. troops not too long ago on trumped up charges, and I wouldn't be surprised if these latest accusations turn out to be more of the same.

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Show Me the Oversight...

Poor Nouri Kemal al-Maliki. All the problems he contends with on a basis daily. Iran, Turkey, the PKK, Muqtada al-Sadr, now two American administrations with separate demands and expectations, and those pesky Iraqi accountants...at least the accountants he can fire.

I'm particularly fond of the Times' surreptitious kick to the Iraqi balls, noting again and again the Iraqi "endemic corruption," -- how that's just how things are in "that part of the world." And the USG should know. We ourselves keep misplacing our collective wallet over in that part of the world.

In China, the penalty for bribery is death. This accords with my latent puritanical character. (There will be Virtue, or the Terror!) For the land that birthed Hammurabi to go soft on oversight is just a damn shame.

If fraud were not pie for Maliki, he wouldn't be firing his fraud monitors. Reckon it's time we got those poor Iraqi number-crunchers each a scimitar...
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Nouri al-Maliki preps for the big dance...kill the lights...

Last week, ethnographers at UCLA revealed evidence for the Balkanization of Iraq.

Our findings suggest that 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.

Analyzing patterns of light and darkness in the Baghdad night sky, they discovered that Shia areas of Baghdad remained unchanged, and Sunni and mixed areas were abandoned, leaving the city pacified by February 2007.

Ethnic cleansing -- which we've all known about via anecdotes -- turns out to be not the thing the surge was meant to end, but its core building-block.

'Bout a year ago, when the surge had begun and Sunnis were blowing each other up to figure out which among them would get guns from the al-Amriki tribe, Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin responded to an unhinged screed of mine, elucidating the reasoning behind the surge:

[...]unless every last ditch effort is made to temper the consequences of a pullout, the results will be even more horrible for Iraqis, the region and us than what you see now. And I don't mean some slogan of "they'll follow us home" - I mean total collapse in Iraq, even more bloody fighting, a return of Al Qaeda there in force and negative consequences for the rest of the region.

And the reasoning for extending the "surge" indefinitely rests on the same ground: we have to square this country away. This week we learned that between Sadr's truce and the complete ethnic partition of Baghdad, the country was pretty well squared away 18 months ago...

Which brings us to what the future holds...oil wealth, a speculative boom, rampant unemployment and a host of splinter-regions...this is Russia at the dawn of the Putin era. The combination of crony capitalism and a crackdown on opposition parties that Nouri al-Maliki has been overtly orchestrating for the past year is pure Putin, as the man says...so expect two Maliki versions of the Chechen war, arguments with Turkey, and an Iraqi Guggenheim branch, built by Shia oligarkii...
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Toll, Maliki : Terrorism is "so over"

It was weird to come back to work after the holiday weekend, thinking for days in a row that the whole world was not in fact on fire, only to discover that reports of peace breaking out in Iraq were greatly exaggerated...

My dear print edition of the Inquirer showed me two headlines, face-to-face, declaring the banality of events in Iraq: Maliki Declares Terrorism Over, and UAE Forgives Iraq Debt. Now, I already understand that Nouri al-Maliki is prone to speak in metaphor, or to ingnore nuances of tense. Maybe he meant, "Terrorism is so over," as in "passe"? So I ignored the piece. Looking to my left, I found the Emir of Dubai, a man who finds so few things in the world worth spending his money on he built islands instead, magnanimously forgiving Saddam Hussein's tiny debt. Did 'em a solid. Security not an issue, money comin' in. So I ignored that story too, failing utterly to catch the little bleeding blurb tacked on at the end:

A Kurdish party member was injured yesterday in an assassination attempt by a roadside bomb that killed seven people and wounded three others in Iraq's eastern Diyala province. [...]Also yesterday, a car bomb in the northern Shiite Baghdad district of Shaab killed six people and injured 14, including three police officers, according to police and medical officials.

Right. I'll accept the shame of not reading the whole news. My bad.

But the same death toll in Islamabad got play in the Inqy as the beginning of armageddon, using "blast" four times and hyping connections to last year's dispute over the Red Mosque. With no group claiming responsibility, the piece inserts a sheepish: "It was not clear if the events were linked, and a mosque official condemned the attack."

Again, I can hardly blame Chairman Toll for diminishing the footprint of Iraqi violence while exaggerating that of violence in Pakistan. These are AP stories. All he's doing is pulling shit in off the wire. No one is fabricating the news. No, that would take effort.

Sloth, not avarice, is the motivator. The news source for the fifth-largest city in the US can't send people overseas to actually get their own version of events. The editors of the Inquirer are too lazy even to concoct an individuated appraisal of what they pull off the wires. If, officially, Iraq Is Pacified And Our Next War Is In Pakistan, who is Bruce Toll to say no? Confronting conventional wisdom isn't part of the Inquirer brand. Leave that to the Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, July 6 -- A wave of attacks in Baghdad and areas north of the capital Sunday shattered a relative lull in violence, killing 16 people and injuring 15 a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared that Iraq's government had defeated terrorism.