Informed Comment

Al-Safir reports that 2 were killed and 14 wounded in a series of bombings extending over a two-hour period in Baghdad in the late afternoon on Thursday, which targeted Christians. The bloodiest attack took place in the district of of al-Ghadir in the center of the capital, where guerrillas attacked two Christian homes with bombs, killing two and wounding 5. The other five attacks, which took the form of roadside bombs, did not kill anyone, though they wounded a further 9 persons. Many Christians still live in al-Ghadir, though some number have fled because of the threats launched against them by Muslim radicals. Two bombs were detonated in West Baghdad, targetting the garden of a house owned by a Christian family. In the neighborhood of al-Barmouk, which wounded one person. The second targeted Christians in in the district of al-Khadra’, wounding two.

In Dora, in south Baghdad, a bombing wounded three Christians, and two more were injured by a bombing that targeted their home in al-Sayyidiya. Another bomb was set on Sina`a Street in Karrada, a shopping district in which is located Our Lady of Salvation Cathedral, which had been attacked on October 31 and its congregation massacred, with 41 killed. After that bloodbath, all the major churches in the capital had blast walls erected around them. Christmas celebrations were canceled and the only service was in honor of those Christians who had just been killed.

CNN has a video report by Jomanah Karadsheh

Last week, the threats from radicals had led most Iraqi Christians to commemorate Christmas in an unusually muted fashion, as ITN reported:

This column in al-Sharq al-Awsat ['the Middle East'] points out that Christians are relatively well treated in Jordan and Syria, from which there has been no great exodus, whereas they are leaving Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. The comparative perspective here is important as a way of fighting essentialism. The problem is not a Christian-Muslim struggle in the Middle East in any simplistic sense.

Syria’s Muslim, Allawi Shiite rulers, adopted the secular Baath Party, which downplays religious identity and so, relatively speaking, benefits Christians, who are about ten percent of the Syrian population. In neighboring Jordan, where Christians are also about ten percent, the Hashemite monarchy pursues a cultural policy of secular tolerance and religious traditionalism (as opposed to modernist fundamentalism). Both governments are relatively strong, and both have cracked down hard on fundamentalists and other radicals.

In Lebanon the Christian exodus was hastened by the Civil War of 1975-1989 and then by the political uncertainty thereafter, including the Israeli attack of 2006. Note that there has been little targeting of Christians qua Christians in Lebanon; the struggles are between political parties and clans. The Shiite party-militia, Hizbullah, has often had a close alliance with sections of the Maronite Christian community. Likewise, Christian Palestinians have left Gaza and the West Bank more because it is unpleasant to live under Israeli occupation than because they were attacked by Hamas.

As for Egypt, I’m not actually sure that there is significant Christian out-migration from that country. There are only about 340,000 Egyptian-Americans, and they are probably about evenly split between Christians and Muslims. Since there are 8 million or so Christians in Egypt, 170,000 just isn’t that many. In the 1990s, only about an average of 4000 Egyptians a year immigrated into the US. Only in the past five years has the annual average jumped to 10,000. Again, if that is approximately 5,000 Copts per year leaving Egypt for the US, it just isn’t all that significant demographically. Of course, some Egyptians do also emigrate to Europe, but I think those numbers are relatively small. Nearly 3 million Egyptian guest workers labor in oil states in the Middle East, but almost all of those come home once they save some money, and I don’t have the impression that Christians bulk large among them.

The Baath regime in Iraq was horrible for Kurds and Shiites, but it protected Chrisitans, and there were prominent Christian Baathists such as Tariq Aziz (Mikha’il Yuhanna). The current attacks on Iraqi Christians are not the operation of normal, everyday, Muslim culture in that country. Rather, the US overthrow of the secular Baath and the rise of fundamentalist Shiite and Sunni parties and militias removed the protection that Christians had enjoyed under secular nationalism. And, Iraqi Christians were unfairly tarred with the brush of Christian America’s occupation of that country, becoming politicized and made a symbol of collaboration in the absence of any real evidence for such a charge. The American occupation provoked the rise of radical cells intent on overturning the new, American-installed order, and they are scapegoating Iraq’s Christians as a soft target whereby to make their political points. But remember that these radical cells attack and kill far more other Muslims than they do the religious minorities. Remember, too, that many Iraqi Christians appear to settle in Syria and Lebanon once they flee Iraq– i.e. they are staying in the Middle East.

It doesn’t have much to do with mainstream Islam, which has made a place for Christians in the Middle East for nearly a millennium and a half. Rather, religion has been politicized in new ways by America’s muscular Christianity and its heavy-handed interventions in the region. And, in places like Egypt, local economic and status competition drives the conflict, as a side-effect of globalization. It should be remembered that in 1919-1922, during the Wafd Party’s campaign for independence from Britain, the Copts joined the freedom struggle and were lionized as symbols of authentic Egypt (being coded as direct descendants of the Pharaonic Egyptians).

All that said, for Iraqi and Egyptian Christians to be targeted by radical Muslim cells is very bad news and really could over time drain Iraq in particular of Its Christians, leaving it culturally and politically much impoverished and monochrome.

Posted in Iraq | Leave a Comment

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki made news this week with his interview in the Wall Street Journal, in the course of which he insisted that all US troops would be out of Iraq by January 1, 2012:

‘ WSJ: Some American officials have spoken about contingency plans being drawn now in Washington for the possibility that some American troops will stay after 2011. Do you know about these contingency plans, and do you need troops?

Mr. Maliki: I do not care about what’s being said. I care about what’s on paper and what has been agreed to. The withdrawal of forces agreement [Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA] expires on Dec. 31, 2011. The last American soldier will leave Iraq.

Secondly this agreement is sealed and at the time we designated it as sealed and not subject to extension, except if the new government with Parliament’s approval wanted to reach a new agreement with America, or another country, that’s another matter. This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration, it is sealed, it expires on Dec. 31 [2011]. ‘

Al-Maliki in specifying parliament as the body that would have to make any new agreement for US troops to come back to Iraq after that date was implicitly throwing cold water on the hopes of American officials in Washington that they might be able to just have the prime minister extend the warrant for foreign troops to remain in the country.

Nor is there any reason to think that is what al-Maliki would want. A US official in Basra wrote last January that “According to XXXXXXXXXX, the GOI [government of Iraq] is anxious to ‘get rid of all the white faces carrying guns’ in their streets…”

There are not 163 votes in parliament for an extension of the US troop presence, and any move in that direction would likely cause al-Maliki’s government to fall. Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers have 40 seats in parliament and are the leading party in the National Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalist parties, who have a total of 70 seats. They would pull out of al-Maliki’s government and likely return to militia activity were he to betray their expectations in that way. Al-Maliki’s own State of Law coalition, including his Islamic Mission Party (Da`wa) is certainly not going to plump for US troops to remain. It has 89 seats. Those two Shiite religious blocs have 159 seats between them. And, among the Sunni Arabs of the Iraqiya, there would certainly be at least 4 who opposed retaining US troops. Voila, 163. No parliamentary approval.

There is substantial doubt and deep-seated suspicion among many Americans that the US is truly getting out. The suspicion is justified, and there are certainly powerful political and military interests in Washington that do not want to leave.

But the likelihood is that the US military mission in Iraq really is rapidly winding down. Sometimes I hear people saying that the US will never abandon its hardened military bases, which are ‘permanent’ or ‘enduring.’ But there are no such things as permanent military bases. I grew up on army bases abroad, and not one of them still exists. In fact, I was among the military dependents forced out of France by DeGaulle in 1965-1966 when he took that country out of the military part of NATO and closed US bases. Kagnew Station in Asmara, Eritrea, where I spent some of my teenaged years, is a dim memory. Bases are usually the result of bilateral agreements, which can be abrogated (viz.: the Philippines).

In fact, the US military has been busily handing over former American or joint American-Iraqi bases to the new Iraqi military, and by August had closed 411 bases. At the web site of the US military in Iraq, where the wind-down is obvious. Just last month, the US announced the transfer of the Al Tib base on the Iranian border to the Iraqis. A base on the Iranian border was an important listening post for observing Iran and it was a significant site for interdicting smuggled weapons from Iran, and some in the US military would certainly have wanted to retain it as long as possible. But they had to turn it over to Iraqi commandos.

The signs of rapid and significant US military draw-down are everywhere. The NYT reported in early December that the number of Iraqis employed by the US military has fallen from 44,000 to only 10,500 since January, 2009. Over the past summer, of 2010, the number of contractors and grantees who are paid directly by the US government in Iraq fell by nearly a fourth.

I am beginning suspect that there really will be no US bases in Iraq a year from now. Some provision will likely be made for American trainers who will need to train Iraqi pilots and other personnel in the use of sophisticated military equipment. But we’re just not talking about a large number of people, perhaps only a few hundred, and they won’t go on military missions. The US Air Force will willy-nilly be Iraq’s air force for some years (Iraq has ordered US fighter jets and helicopter gunships, which will arrive in 2013, and it will take Iraqi pilots years to get up to speed on them). But close air support missions could be run from al-Udeid base in Qatar.

Others worry that the US will exercise political influence over Iraq for years to come. That likely influence is undeniable, but influence is not the same as domination. Iraq will seek a balance between US and Iranian demands, as it has been doing in recent years. Moreover, the wikileaks cables have revealed the remarkable degree to which the US government has been highly influential in, e.g. Australian politics, and if anything the US will have less leverage in Iraq than it does in Australia. No one is arguing that the peculiar, behind-the-scenes sort of American empire is ending with the withdrawal from Iraq. What is ending is George W. Bush’s departure into expensive and anachronistic games of direct imperial domination.

Posted in Iraq | 19 Comments