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description=6 posts published by Reidar Visser during September 2007;

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iraq, the, and, in, to, partition, is, it, gulf, analysis, archive, for, september, 2007, archives, categories, meta, my, latest, book, on, amazon, com, twitter, updates, subscribe, recent, posts, us, senate, votes, softly, football, quotas, national, reconciliation, statoil, getting, wrong, surge, shiites, nation, building, of, that, would, be, truly, artificial, local, reactions, british, withdrawal, from, basra, sadrists, claim, victory,

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recent posts legality and constitutionality questions in iraq s reform push the federalism dimension in yemen s draft constitution federalism and decentralization in libya s constitutional proposals groundbreaking iraq supreme court ruling on the law on mp replacement after the rise of isis will iraq s shiites secede additional ministers approved for the iraq cabinet the controversial kurdish ministers in the new iraqi cabinet the iraqi parliament fails to approve new security ministers the iraqi parliament approves the abbadi cabinet haydar al abbadi is the new iraq pm candidate maliki the presidency and parliament in the iraq pm nomination battle pm nomination trouble in iraq iraq elects fuad masum as new president for the first time in iraq a large field of presidential candidates the iraqi parliament elects its new speakership archive for september 2007 the us senate votes to partition iraq softly posted by reidar visser on thursday 27 september 2007 17 30 note this slightly revised version was posted later on 27 september after the release of the official version of the senate amendment which contained certain changes to joe biden s original text on 26 september 2007 the united states senate voted 75 23 in favour of an amendment to the defence spending bill for 2008 that authorises the us government to encourage iraqis to find a federal solution to the internal conflicts in their country at least two different interpretations of the bill are possible first one may choose to highlight its comparatively insignificant character an amendment to the original text stressed that any political settlement should be consistent with the wishes of the iraqi people and their elected leaders if this is taken literally the amendment is meaningless the iraqis already have a constitution according to which those areas of the country that desire a federal status may seek one through specific mechanisms accordingly there is nothing the united states needs to do to achieve a state structure that is consonant with the wishes of the iraqi people in that sort of interpretation it does not make sense to speak about a new plan because the proposed course of action would demand no policy adjustments on the part of washington whatsoever however joe biden the bill s sponsor presumably thinks that he does indeed have a plan for iraq that is at least what he says when he promotes his presidential bid for 2008 it is therefore more logical to focus on the parts of his rhetoric that involve pushing the iraqis in a particular direction the key words in this regard are iraq s major factions present in all the early drafts of biden s amendment this means a giant departure from the iraqi constitution which assigns the right to form a federal region to the individual inhabitants of the existing governorates who may demand a referendum on a federal region if they can gather the support of a tenth of the electorate or a third of the governorate council members in each governorate in the projected federal entity instead the biden amendment introduced the idea of a us identification of major factions which is something different altogether who are these factions biden s colleague and co sponsor of the bill republican sam brownback made that perfectly clear during the senate debate they are the three main ethno sectarian groups of iraq the shiites the kurds and the sunni arabs this is one area where biden s ideas clearly violate the iraqi constitution any attempt on the part of the us to identify major factions would be a top down externally imposed solution on a matter in which the iraqis themselves have already designed bottom up mechanisms biden does not seem to appreciate the fact that federalist pioneers among the iraqis have always warned against federalism based on ethnicities in their opinion federalism based on geographical non sectarian criteria could conceivably serve as national glue conversely and with the exception of the kurds and the shiite faction that happens to be closest to iran iraqi supporters of federalism have always condemned ethno sectarian variants of federalism as a giant leap towards partition biden should be challenged to spell out very explicitly the modalities by which he expects the constitutional right to form small scale non sectarian regions to simply disappear and how he thinks the holy number three is to be arrived at perhaps he might then better understand how his actions are tantamount to abetting civil strife in today s iraq and represent a real step towards full partition has he even heard about the small scale non sectarian federal schemes that have been circulating in basra in the far south since late 2003 interestingly in the final version of the biden amendment the major factions language was eliminated which also meant that the biden plan in many ways was back to square one with no explicit language on ethnicity but also with fewer claims to originality however a remaining major problem in the amendment is that it severely distorts the iraqi constitution s provisions for federalism biden does not understand or does not want to understand that there is no imperative in the iraqi constitution for every part of the country to seek a federal status federalism is but one of two options governorates may also elect to retain their current status this is a feature of the 2005 constitution that is consonant with iraqi political history the drafters realised that the country has a long unitary tradition with widespread scepticism towards federalism among the population appreciating these political tensions they abandoned any idea of imposing federalism from above in fact leading iraqi politicians who drafted the 2006 law on implementing federalism have suggested that possibly no more than one or two governorates like for instance basra in the far south will seek a status similar to kurdistan when the federalism option formally becomes available in april 2008 scattered evidence from iraq s political process and from public opinion polls suggests that this anti federal scepticism persists since the constitution was adopted in 2005 there have been several suggestions for constitutional amendment by iraqi parties both shiite and sunni to limit federalism to ensure that no purely sectarian federal regions are allowed to develop the latest poll numbers south of kurdistan are not particularly supportive of biden s plan either with for instance 56 of shiites expressing the wish to abandon federalism altogether almost all sunnis agree with them on this and with the remainder divided between different federal projects only a small portion of which would correspond to biden s ethno sectarian visions again this is all in conflict with biden s idea of comprehensive total federalisation the senator should be more honest about these problems and should follow in the footsteps of his fellow pro partitionist michael o hanlon who openly asserts that only a minority of iraqis support any idea of soft partitioning or federalism based on ethnic groups and more fundamentally biden must understand the logical defect of his current argument he cannot claim authorship of a distinctive plan and at the same time maintain that he does not propose to impose anything on the iraqi people in fact the contradictions in this area are even worse in the final version of the amendment than in early drafts the text now stipulates that the proposed international conference on iraqi federalism should be based on the 2006 law for implementing federalism this in itself is contradictive in the extreme because the key point of the 2006 legislation is that federalism shall never be imposed from the outside or from above in a single conference but instead emerge gradually only in those parts of the country that wish to adopt a federal model of government furthermore who is to decide which iraqis will take part in the projected conference the maliki government this effectively brings back the question of how to nominate conference invitees and more fundamentally the basis ethnic versus non ethnic on which to define representativeness in any grand federal settlement of the kind envisioned by biden at the heart of this contradictive piece of legislation lie several more fundamental misunderstandings about iraq among the many biden plan supporters whose panegyrics adorn the senator s website and are construed as evidence of the plan s great potential take for instance henry kissinger s suggestion that a wiser course would be to concentrate on the three principal regions he actually seems to believe that these regions already exist similarly another prominent biden supporter david brooks recently used the story of the iraqi politician shadha al musawi as inspiration for an enthusiastic defence of ethnic federalism which was published in the new york times the only tiny problem being that musawi herself is an avowed enemy of the idea of a soft partition of iraq or consider sam brownback s recent exegesis of ottoman history delivered in the senate during the adoption of the biden amendment and reproduced here with added annotations in brackets i show my colleagues a map that i think is kind of interesting it is a map of iraq under the ottoman empire it is prior to the world war i divisions in iraq i think we ought to study history to keep from repeating past mistakes i think we are repeating history now because we have not studied it sufficiently so here is a map from 1914 this is fascinating you have the north ottoman sic which were called vilayets this is in the state of mosul the kurdish north it was actually mixed kurdish sunni arab christian turkmen yazidi you had the vilayet of baghdad the sunni area in iraq it was mixed and contained all the shiite holy cities you had the vilayet of basra the shia state it had fewer shiites than baghdad and was politically dominated by sunnis baghdad was the federal city a very effective city at that particular time this is pure nonsense there was no federalism in these parts of the ottoman empire baghdad did however have some supervisory functions for all the iraqi vilayets for instance in customs military affairs and justice again here is a three state solution that the ottoman empire put in place as a way of managing these different groups who do not agree with each other who do not get along again this suggests that brownback fully believes that basra was somehow more shiite and less sunni than baghdad whereas in fact all the vilayets of the ottoman empire in this region were sunni dominated all in all the biden amendment is an alarming but useful numerical indication of the level of support for an ethnic approach to iraqi politics in the us senate the supporters included presidential candidate hillary clinton as well as a reminder of the remarkable unfamiliarity among even elite us politicians with the finer points of iraqi legislation on federalism it does not bode well for the future that the potential successors to president bush seem to converge on a scheme that would be even more unpalatable to the muslim world than washington s current policy true bush invaded iraq and paul bremer weakened the country severely there are worrying signs that some in the state department like ryan crocker are already indistinguishable from biden by tirelessly encouraging sunnis to think in terms of federalism but if his partition plans were implemented joe biden would be remembered by muslims and arabs around the world in an altogether different way he would be considered alongside other historical personalities who routinely are being accused by middle easterners for having destroyed their region completely arthur balfour mark sykes and francois georges picot posted in iraq and soft partition us policy in iraq leverage issues comments off on the us senate votes to partition iraq softly football quotas and national reconciliation in iraq posted by reidar visser on wednesday 26 september 2007 23 59 english translation of an op ed originally published in norwegian in aftenposten oslo 26 september 2007 soon after the recent announcement that norway s egil drillo olsen is the new coach of iraq s successful national football team critical voices emerged in the norwegian media some suggested that olsen would effectively be collaborating with the us led occupation of iraq whereas others were concerned that he might be unable to navigate the ethno sectarian tensions of the country when selecting players for future matches olsen should not take this criticism too seriously in the first place it should be stressed that most iraqis regardless of their view of the americans see their football team as a legitimate symbol of national unity leading newspapers like al zaman al mashriq and al manara which frequently feature criticism of the maliki government and the united states all used big headlines to celebrate iraq s recent victory in the asia cup even harith al dari a prominent opposition politician with ties to the armed resistance described the performance of the iraqi squad as a victory for the entire nation purists may perhaps claim that no contact with iraq is permissible pending the withdrawal of foreign troops but those critics should appreciate the widespread affection for iraq s national team even among radical factions within the iraqi opposition another important point concerns the question of ethno sectarian quotas one important factor behind the popularity of the iraqi team is the fact that it emerged relatively unscathed from the fixation with quotas that dominated the first years of the us administration of iraq after 2003 true many iraqis value the way in which the national football team represents the ethno sectarian complexity of their country but perhaps more importantly and this is often overlooked in the west this representation is imperfect in mathematical and proportional terms strictly statistically speaking sunni arabs and kurds are under represented in the current line up nevertheless and maybe precisely for this reason the team remains enormously popular among members of the under represented communities this is the area where the americans committed one of their gravest mistakes during the early years of the occupation the insistence that iraqis should think of themselves primarily as sectarian citizens rather than as iraqis this way of thinking is entirely alien to iraqi political thought but it is an approach which was cultivated among members of the exiled opposition during the 1990s and which enjoyed something of a boom during paul bremer s administration in 2003 and 2004 bremer s idée fixe was that sectarian disproprotionality had always been the main problem of the old iraq and while overlooking long periods of peaceful coexistence in previous eras such as the monarchy and ottoman periods he insisted that the political affairs of the country be conducted with strict ethnic proportionality as the guiding princ...