www.wearechristians.infoACN News: Wednesday, 6th of August 2014 – IRAQ
Give Solidarity a Face and Pray for Peace in Iraq
The international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) is inviting people from all over the world to express their solidarity towards Iraqi Christians and to give a face to their support. For this purpose the website www.wearechristians.info has been launched under the title: “We are all Christians in Iraq”. On the website, friends of this cause can leave their name and photo, via a mouse click, to show their support for the Christians in Iraq.
United with the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, this initiative accompanies the charity’s invitation to join their Global Day of Prayer for Peace in Iraq, happening today on the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. The invitation is addressed to “all people of good will”. Patriarch Sako writes: "To build peace we should be courageous! We need our brothers and sisters in the West to give us a moment of fraternal sharing, and help us to feel that we are one Church and one family. We need communion of heart and prayer with our faithful in this great event. May the Lord give us the strength to hold this great tragedy! May He preserve all hearts from hatred and violence!"
(Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako of Baghdad © Aid to the Church in Need)
The Prayer, written by Patriarch Sako can be found below. Please join us in prayer today for our suffering brothers and sisters in Iraq.
Lord,
the plight of our country
is deep and the suffering of the Christians
is heavy and frightening us,
therefore we ask you Lord
to assign our lives, grant us patience and courage
to continue to witness our Christian values
with trust and hope.
Lord, peace is the base of any life;
give us peace and stability
to live with each other without fear, anxiety,
with dignity and joy, glory to you forever.
† Louis Raphael I Sako
[Chaldean Catholic Patriarch]
The source of inspiration for the Global Day of Prayer and Peace for Iraq came from the Holy Father during the Angelus on the 27th of July, when Pope Francis said: “Please stop! I ask you with all my heart, it's time to stop. Stop, please!”
The prayer campaign was launched after the last remaining Christian families where forced to flee the city of Mosul in northern Iraq following dire threats from Islamic extremists in July this year.
The sudden departure of the Christians came after the Islamic State, formerly called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), issued an ultimatum calling on Christians and other minorities to convert to Islam or pay the jizya Islamic tax.
In the “declaration”, the Islamic State, which now governs a large swathe of land straddling northern Iraq and Syria, warned Christians and others that “if they refuse, there is nothing for them but the sword”.
The jihadists gave the deadline of 12 noon on Saturday 19th July.
Since the Islamic State seized control of Mosul in early June, the city’s last remaining Christians have effectively been forced out. For the first time in 1,600 years no Sunday Mass has been celebrated in Mosul.
Crosses, statues and other Christian symbols have been removed from the top of church buildings in the city and in some cases have been replaced by the Islamic State’s black flag.
In other instances, churches dating back to Christianity’s early days in the region have been ransacked, with ancient books, scrolls and other artefacts destroyed.
The militants have marked homes known to belong to minority faith groups. Christians’ homes have been labelled with the Arabic letter for ‘N’, referring to ‘Nazarenes’, an Islamic term for Christians.
Iraqi Christian media said imams in Mosul declared on loud speakers that Christians should leave or face death.
Editor’s Notes
Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need. ACN is a Catholic charity – helping to bring Christ to the world through prayer, information and action.
The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, Aid to the Church in Need’s Child’s Bible – God Speaks to his Children has been translated into 172 languages and 50 million copies have been distributed all over the world.
While ACN gives full permission for the media to freely make use of the charity’s press releases, please acknowledge ACN as the source of stories when using the material.
For more information or to make a donation to help the work of Aid to the Church in Need, please contact the Australian office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 7246 Baulkham Hills NSW 2153.
On Line donations can be made at www.aidtochurch.org
i will even if it's just me and my daughter but i'm taking the ferry in (to boston) and hoping there's a church in the city that's participating.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Tuesday, August 5, 2014. Chaos and violence continue, the Yazidis
remain vulnerable, how much does a chaotic Iraq hurt Barack's image, and
much more.
The UK Catholic Herald notes:
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has urged Catholics to answer a call from Church leaders in Iraq to take part in a universal day of prayer on Wednesday, the same day as the Feast of the Transfiguration.
Rt Rev Declan Lang, Bishop of Clifton and chairman of International Affairs at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, asked the faithful to pray “for an end to the violent persecution that threatens to extinguish the ancient Iraqi Christian community”.
What is the Bishop speaking of?
One more time, let's note Aid to the Church in Need's announcement on the Global Day of Prayer for Peace:
Many will be joining around the world to take part in the prayer. Meanwhile Yazidis, like the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, are being targeted as well. UNICEF notes:
ERBIL, 5 August 2014 – The reported deaths of 40 children from minority groups who were displaced from Sinjar city and district by armed violence are of extreme concern.
According to official reports received by UNICEF, these children from the Yazidi minority died as a direct consequence of violence, displacement and dehydration over the past two days.
Families who fled the area are in immediate need of urgent assistance, including up to 25,000 children who are now stranded in mountains surrounding Sinjar and are in dire need of humanitarian aid including drinking water and sanitation services.
Sinjar, a district of Ninewa in northwest Iraq with a population of at least 150,000 children - including many who are internally displaced - was taken over by the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) on Sunday.
Children are particularly vulnerable, and are most affected by the continuing violence, displacement and fighting in Iraq. UNICEF repeats its urgent call for all children in need to be protected and immediately provided with life-saving assistance to prevent further loss of life.
UNICEF calls all those who have influence to immediately grant children and women free and safe access to areas of refuge and respect the special protection afforded to children under international humanitarian and human rights law.”
About UNICEF
UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child, in everything we do. Together with our partners, we work in 190 countries and territories to translate that commitment into practical action, focusing special effort on reaching the most vulnerable and excluded children, to the benefit of all children, everywhere. For more information about UNICEF and its work, visit: www.unicef.org
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook
For more information, please contact:
Juliette Touma, on mission to UNICEF Iraq, Tel: +962 79-867-4628, jtouma@unicef.org
On the Yazdis, Loveday Morris (Washington Post) adds:
Humanitarian agencies said Tuesday that between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians remain trapped on Mount Sinjar since being driven out
of surrounding villages and the town of Sinjar two days earlier. But
the mountain that had looked like a refuge is becoming a graveyard for
their children.
Unable to dig deep into the rocky mountainside, displaced families said they have buried young and elderly victims of the harsh conditions in shallow graves, their bodies covered with stones. Iraqi government planes attempted to airdrop bottled water to the mountain on Monday night but reached few of those marooned.
Each day, things get worse in Iraq. In an essay for The London Review of Books entitled "Isis consolidates," Patrick Cockburn offers:
In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an hour’s drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people know what to expect if the murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture the city, but they take heart from the fact that the calamity has not happened yet. ‘We were frightened by the military disaster at first but we Baghdadis have got used to crises over the last 35 years,’ one woman said. Even with Isis at the gates, Iraqi politicians have gone on playing political games as they move ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
‘It is truly surreal,’ a former Iraqi minister said. ‘When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if they had not just lost half the country.’ Volunteers had gone to the front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric. But these militiamen are now streaming back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only large-scale counter-attack launched by the regular army and the newly raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on 15 July that was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. ‘They were using just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,’ the former minister said, ‘so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140 helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?’
Probably the money for the missing 139 helicopters was simply stolen. There are other wholly corrupt states in the world but few of them have oil revenues of $100 billion a year to steal from.
That's a look at Iraq today.
The prime minister is the chief thug Nouri al-Maliki. In 2006, Bully Boy Bush refused to allow Ibrahim al-Jafaari to have a second (non-consecutive) term as prime minister, arguing the 'new' Iraq (post 2003-invasion) was too young to survive a two-term prime minister, that it would be too easy to slip in a new Saddam that way. So the Bully Boy Bush administration began demanding the prime minister be Nouri -- who had passed several tests with administration officials (including Zalmay Khalilzad) and with the CIA (who felt his paranoia would make him very easy to control). And that's how nobody Nouri ended up becoming prime minister the first time.
Barack Obama was elected president in November of 2008. We're doing a very simplistic time line here. In 2010, Iraq holds elections. Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law loses to Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya.
Last week, Frontline (PBS) served up "Losing Iraq." One of the people they spoke with was Zalmay Khalizad. He's generally considered to be a neocon and he was a supporter of the Iraq War as well as the US Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
Zalmay Khalizad: Then at the same time, the Iraqi election was front and center. And once the Iraqi election had occurred, Mr. [Ayad] Allawi’s party, called Iraqiya, won more seats than Maliki’s party.
I felt the success of those two parties also showed political progress in Iraq, the waning of sectarianism and the rise of cross-sectarianism, because Iraqiya was a secular party that had a lot of Sunni support but had some Shia support as well. For it to go from 25 seats in the previous election to 92 seats in the 2009 election showed increased support for secular or cross-sectarian and less support for sectarian parties.
And Maliki, who had been the leader of a religious party, a Shia religious party by one of its leaders, adapted by establishing a new party called the State of Law, which had nothing to do with a sect as such, and he was the second largest party. He too moved away from being sectarian.
These two were the two biggest political forces, the State of Law and the Iraqiya, afterward. So government formation became a preoccupation of the administration as well.
[. . .]
Zalmay Kahlilzad: It would have been very important, in my view, to follow the constitution of Iraq in order to maintain support for the process and to show that being cross-sectarian pays off. It has political consequence.
And to ask Allawi to form the government, he may have or he may not have succeeded in forming a government. Although he was the largest bloc, he wasn’t the majority, and therefore he would have had to convince some Shia, Kurds and some of the Sunnis who had separate parties of their own to vote for him.
But that did not happen. Instead Maliki maneuvered, used the judiciary in a politicized way by getting a judgment from the court that said the bloc that even forms after the election, if it’s larger than the bloc that won the election, as they were before the election, can lead in forming the government. And we kind of bandwagoned with that, rather than pushing back and saying the constitution had to be followed.
And an even bigger mistake, in my view, was in retrospect, that once the government had been formed with Maliki leading, … the package that was part of the agreement on the staffing of the government — establishment of this new position of a senior group of a strategic council that Ayad Allawi was to chair — was never formed.
Some of the other agreements that were in place on policy issues did not occur, and we became much more disengaged after intense engagement in the formation of the government with a vice president and the president being hands-on, calling. Then we didn’t push, pursue, cajole to have these other elements also be implemented.
Then add to that the absence of a SOFA and total withdrawal and the deterioration of the region, all of this then impacted Iraq.
There are things I disagree with in the above (State of Law nonsectarian?) but in terms of a sweeping summary, it's better than most. The agreement he's speaking of is The Erbil Agreement -- the one giving Allawi a position over national security. For over eight months, Nouri refused to step down. In doing so, he brought the government to a standstill. The political stalemate set a world record at the time for the longest period of time between elections and the formation of a government.
Nouri would not have been able to pull that off without backing from the White House. Some point to Iran as well. And they did support Nouri. They did not, however, ensure his second term as prime minister. The White House did. The Parliament finally met (and named a president, a speaker and a prime minister-designate all in one day) the day after the US-brokered Erbil Agreement was signed.
The agreement was a contract -- a binding contract, US officials told the leaders of each political bloc. In writing, the leaders agreed to give Nouri a second term as prime minister in exchange for concessions from him -- such as Allawi's national security appointment, the Kurds wanted Article 140 of the Constitution implemented, etc.
Nouri didn't win.
There was no reason for him to be prime minister.
The legal contract was how the US government got people on board with a second term.
And then Nouri refused to implement it and the White House played dumb.
In 2011, he's not implemented it. By that summer, the Kurds, cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqiya are among those publicly calling for Nouri to implement the agreement.
We need to wrap this section up -- it's all prelude to another portion of the snapshot -- so let's big picture it.
Nouri does not keep his word. Not on The Erbil Agreement. Not on the White House benchmarks. Not on this, not on that.
I have called out Barack repeatedly here for refusing to stand up to Nouri. A friend who left the administration in 2013 tells me I'm wrong. Barack gave many firm words to Nouri over the years especially November 1, 2013.
Okay, I'm fine with being wrong on that.
The man who's all talk scolded the man who can't keep his word. And nothing ever followed because Nouri can't keep his promise and Barack thinks empty words solve everything.
Barack should have long ago made clear that if X isn't met then the US pulls support.
By not doing so?
Peter Sullivan (The Hill) notes the results of the latest NBC News - Wall St. Journal poll including, "Respondents rated Obama's handling of foreign policy even lower, with 36 percent approving, also an all-time low for the president." This a day after Connie Cass and Jennifer Agiesta (AP) reported on the latest AP-GfK poll which finds "38 percent find the situation in Iraq of pressing importance; 57 percent disapprove of Obama's handling of it."
Barack ran for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination on the lie that he was 'right' about Iraq. (Barack protested it before the war started. Once it started, he was supporting it. That's public record. I also knew this for a fact long before Boston in the summer of 2004 -- when Barack spoke to the New York Times. He had already told Elaine and I at a fundraiser that 'we're there now' so opposition to the war no longer mattered.)
He deserved your vote, he insisted, because he was right about Iraq.
Does he look right now?
He took over in 2009 as violence was dropping and all he's done is throw gas on a fire to keep it going and to make it grow larger.
Does he look right now?
Andy Piascik (Connecticut Post) observes, "True to his preference for violence over diplomacy, Obama has sent a strike force to Iraq which grows larger by the day."
Barack's 'superior judgment' never was all that and events on the ground in Iraq threaten Barack's very image and power base.
The ongoing failure that is the failed state of Iraq is a reflection on Barack and, as usual, the dim bulbs of the administration have somehow managed to repeatedly overlook that fact.
The public doesn't appear to be. The low marks Barack's getting have to do with his false advertising being revealed to be false.
This as AP misses the point. In a 'report,' they note that Nouri has offered to use Iraqi planes to bomb areas of and near the KRG to kill terrorists.
The AP wrongly says the news value here is the cooperation angle.
Wrong.
From yesterday's snapshot:
Tim Arango (New York Times) reports Iraqi state TV carried a statement from Iraq's military spokesperson Qassim Atta "The general commander of the armed forces, Nuri al-Maliki, has issued an order to the Iraqi air forces to provide air support for the pesh merga against ISIS." Arango notes that the statement did not seem so much hopeful (Baghdad and the KRG coming together) as it "seemed only to reflect the dire situation on the ground."
I'd argue Tim Arango's take is stronger. But that's not even why I'm calling AP wrong.
I'm calling it wrong because here's the news angle they -- and everyone else avoids: Nouri is helping terrorists!
What am I talking about?
The Kurdish cabinet members walked out of Nouri's Cabinet only weeks ago, or have we forgotten that?
Those of us who remember will recall that Nouri accused the Kurds of being in league with the terrorists. The Kurds, he insisted, were harboring the terrorists.
And yet now he's offering the Kurds air strikes?
The Kurds aren't terrorists (few people Nouri calls "terrorists" ever actually are).
But just weeks ago, Queen Drama Nouri was insisting publicly that the Kurds were harboring terrorists, in league with the terrorists, blah, blah, blah.
iraq
aid to the church in need
national iraqi news agency
the associated press
reuters
The UK Catholic Herald notes:
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has urged Catholics to answer a call from Church leaders in Iraq to take part in a universal day of prayer on Wednesday, the same day as the Feast of the Transfiguration.
Rt Rev Declan Lang, Bishop of Clifton and chairman of International Affairs at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, asked the faithful to pray “for an end to the violent persecution that threatens to extinguish the ancient Iraqi Christian community”.
What is the Bishop speaking of?
One more time, let's note Aid to the Church in Need's announcement on the Global Day of Prayer for Peace:
Many will be joining around the world to take part in the prayer. Meanwhile Yazidis, like the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, are being targeted as well. UNICEF notes:
ERBIL, 5 August 2014 – The reported deaths of 40 children from minority groups who were displaced from Sinjar city and district by armed violence are of extreme concern.
According to official reports received by UNICEF, these children from the Yazidi minority died as a direct consequence of violence, displacement and dehydration over the past two days.
Families who fled the area are in immediate need of urgent assistance, including up to 25,000 children who are now stranded in mountains surrounding Sinjar and are in dire need of humanitarian aid including drinking water and sanitation services.
Sinjar, a district of Ninewa in northwest Iraq with a population of at least 150,000 children - including many who are internally displaced - was taken over by the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) on Sunday.
Children are particularly vulnerable, and are most affected by the continuing violence, displacement and fighting in Iraq. UNICEF repeats its urgent call for all children in need to be protected and immediately provided with life-saving assistance to prevent further loss of life.
UNICEF calls all those who have influence to immediately grant children and women free and safe access to areas of refuge and respect the special protection afforded to children under international humanitarian and human rights law.”
About UNICEF
UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child, in everything we do. Together with our partners, we work in 190 countries and territories to translate that commitment into practical action, focusing special effort on reaching the most vulnerable and excluded children, to the benefit of all children, everywhere. For more information about UNICEF and its work, visit: www.unicef.org
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook
For more information, please contact:
Juliette Touma, on mission to UNICEF Iraq, Tel: +962 79-867-4628, jtouma@unicef.org
On the Yazdis, Loveday Morris (Washington Post) adds:
Unable to dig deep into the rocky mountainside, displaced families said they have buried young and elderly victims of the harsh conditions in shallow graves, their bodies covered with stones. Iraqi government planes attempted to airdrop bottled water to the mountain on Monday night but reached few of those marooned.
Each day, things get worse in Iraq. In an essay for The London Review of Books entitled "Isis consolidates," Patrick Cockburn offers:
In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an hour’s drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people know what to expect if the murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture the city, but they take heart from the fact that the calamity has not happened yet. ‘We were frightened by the military disaster at first but we Baghdadis have got used to crises over the last 35 years,’ one woman said. Even with Isis at the gates, Iraqi politicians have gone on playing political games as they move ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
‘It is truly surreal,’ a former Iraqi minister said. ‘When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if they had not just lost half the country.’ Volunteers had gone to the front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric. But these militiamen are now streaming back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only large-scale counter-attack launched by the regular army and the newly raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on 15 July that was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. ‘They were using just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,’ the former minister said, ‘so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140 helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?’
Probably the money for the missing 139 helicopters was simply stolen. There are other wholly corrupt states in the world but few of them have oil revenues of $100 billion a year to steal from.
That's a look at Iraq today.
The prime minister is the chief thug Nouri al-Maliki. In 2006, Bully Boy Bush refused to allow Ibrahim al-Jafaari to have a second (non-consecutive) term as prime minister, arguing the 'new' Iraq (post 2003-invasion) was too young to survive a two-term prime minister, that it would be too easy to slip in a new Saddam that way. So the Bully Boy Bush administration began demanding the prime minister be Nouri -- who had passed several tests with administration officials (including Zalmay Khalilzad) and with the CIA (who felt his paranoia would make him very easy to control). And that's how nobody Nouri ended up becoming prime minister the first time.
Barack Obama was elected president in November of 2008. We're doing a very simplistic time line here. In 2010, Iraq holds elections. Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law loses to Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya.
Last week, Frontline (PBS) served up "Losing Iraq." One of the people they spoke with was Zalmay Khalizad. He's generally considered to be a neocon and he was a supporter of the Iraq War as well as the US Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
Zalmay Khalizad: Then at the same time, the Iraqi election was front and center. And once the Iraqi election had occurred, Mr. [Ayad] Allawi’s party, called Iraqiya, won more seats than Maliki’s party.
I felt the success of those two parties also showed political progress in Iraq, the waning of sectarianism and the rise of cross-sectarianism, because Iraqiya was a secular party that had a lot of Sunni support but had some Shia support as well. For it to go from 25 seats in the previous election to 92 seats in the 2009 election showed increased support for secular or cross-sectarian and less support for sectarian parties.
And Maliki, who had been the leader of a religious party, a Shia religious party by one of its leaders, adapted by establishing a new party called the State of Law, which had nothing to do with a sect as such, and he was the second largest party. He too moved away from being sectarian.
These two were the two biggest political forces, the State of Law and the Iraqiya, afterward. So government formation became a preoccupation of the administration as well.
[. . .]
Frontline: So the 2010 election takes place. The United States
basically backs Maliki, is the one to sort of name the new government,
despite the fact that he had less seats. Is that important? Some people
say that’s a turning point, that if Allawi had been allowed to set up
the government, if Maliki had been pushed out of the prime minister
role, it might have allowed more of a chance for power sharing, more of a
secure Iraq moving forward, alleviating some of what happens afterward
that we’re seeing today.
Zalmay Kahlilzad: It would have been very important, in my view, to follow the constitution of Iraq in order to maintain support for the process and to show that being cross-sectarian pays off. It has political consequence.
And to ask Allawi to form the government, he may have or he may not have succeeded in forming a government. Although he was the largest bloc, he wasn’t the majority, and therefore he would have had to convince some Shia, Kurds and some of the Sunnis who had separate parties of their own to vote for him.
But that did not happen. Instead Maliki maneuvered, used the judiciary in a politicized way by getting a judgment from the court that said the bloc that even forms after the election, if it’s larger than the bloc that won the election, as they were before the election, can lead in forming the government. And we kind of bandwagoned with that, rather than pushing back and saying the constitution had to be followed.
And an even bigger mistake, in my view, was in retrospect, that once the government had been formed with Maliki leading, … the package that was part of the agreement on the staffing of the government — establishment of this new position of a senior group of a strategic council that Ayad Allawi was to chair — was never formed.
Some of the other agreements that were in place on policy issues did not occur, and we became much more disengaged after intense engagement in the formation of the government with a vice president and the president being hands-on, calling. Then we didn’t push, pursue, cajole to have these other elements also be implemented.
Then add to that the absence of a SOFA and total withdrawal and the deterioration of the region, all of this then impacted Iraq.
There are things I disagree with in the above (State of Law nonsectarian?) but in terms of a sweeping summary, it's better than most. The agreement he's speaking of is The Erbil Agreement -- the one giving Allawi a position over national security. For over eight months, Nouri refused to step down. In doing so, he brought the government to a standstill. The political stalemate set a world record at the time for the longest period of time between elections and the formation of a government.
Nouri would not have been able to pull that off without backing from the White House. Some point to Iran as well. And they did support Nouri. They did not, however, ensure his second term as prime minister. The White House did. The Parliament finally met (and named a president, a speaker and a prime minister-designate all in one day) the day after the US-brokered Erbil Agreement was signed.
The agreement was a contract -- a binding contract, US officials told the leaders of each political bloc. In writing, the leaders agreed to give Nouri a second term as prime minister in exchange for concessions from him -- such as Allawi's national security appointment, the Kurds wanted Article 140 of the Constitution implemented, etc.
Nouri didn't win.
There was no reason for him to be prime minister.
The legal contract was how the US government got people on board with a second term.
And then Nouri refused to implement it and the White House played dumb.
In 2011, he's not implemented it. By that summer, the Kurds, cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqiya are among those publicly calling for Nouri to implement the agreement.
We need to wrap this section up -- it's all prelude to another portion of the snapshot -- so let's big picture it.
Nouri does not keep his word. Not on The Erbil Agreement. Not on the White House benchmarks. Not on this, not on that.
I have called out Barack repeatedly here for refusing to stand up to Nouri. A friend who left the administration in 2013 tells me I'm wrong. Barack gave many firm words to Nouri over the years especially November 1, 2013.
Okay, I'm fine with being wrong on that.
The man who's all talk scolded the man who can't keep his word. And nothing ever followed because Nouri can't keep his promise and Barack thinks empty words solve everything.
Barack should have long ago made clear that if X isn't met then the US pulls support.
By not doing so?
Peter Sullivan (The Hill) notes the results of the latest NBC News - Wall St. Journal poll including, "Respondents rated Obama's handling of foreign policy even lower, with 36 percent approving, also an all-time low for the president." This a day after Connie Cass and Jennifer Agiesta (AP) reported on the latest AP-GfK poll which finds "38 percent find the situation in Iraq of pressing importance; 57 percent disapprove of Obama's handling of it."
Barack ran for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination on the lie that he was 'right' about Iraq. (Barack protested it before the war started. Once it started, he was supporting it. That's public record. I also knew this for a fact long before Boston in the summer of 2004 -- when Barack spoke to the New York Times. He had already told Elaine and I at a fundraiser that 'we're there now' so opposition to the war no longer mattered.)
He deserved your vote, he insisted, because he was right about Iraq.
Does he look right now?
He took over in 2009 as violence was dropping and all he's done is throw gas on a fire to keep it going and to make it grow larger.
Does he look right now?
Andy Piascik (Connecticut Post) observes, "True to his preference for violence over diplomacy, Obama has sent a strike force to Iraq which grows larger by the day."
Barack's 'superior judgment' never was all that and events on the ground in Iraq threaten Barack's very image and power base.
The ongoing failure that is the failed state of Iraq is a reflection on Barack and, as usual, the dim bulbs of the administration have somehow managed to repeatedly overlook that fact.
The public doesn't appear to be. The low marks Barack's getting have to do with his false advertising being revealed to be false.
This as AP misses the point. In a 'report,' they note that Nouri has offered to use Iraqi planes to bomb areas of and near the KRG to kill terrorists.
The AP wrongly says the news value here is the cooperation angle.
Wrong.
From yesterday's snapshot:
Tim Arango (New York Times) reports Iraqi state TV carried a statement from Iraq's military spokesperson Qassim Atta "The general commander of the armed forces, Nuri al-Maliki, has issued an order to the Iraqi air forces to provide air support for the pesh merga against ISIS." Arango notes that the statement did not seem so much hopeful (Baghdad and the KRG coming together) as it "seemed only to reflect the dire situation on the ground."
I'd argue Tim Arango's take is stronger. But that's not even why I'm calling AP wrong.
I'm calling it wrong because here's the news angle they -- and everyone else avoids: Nouri is helping terrorists!
What am I talking about?
The Kurdish cabinet members walked out of Nouri's Cabinet only weeks ago, or have we forgotten that?
Those of us who remember will recall that Nouri accused the Kurds of being in league with the terrorists. The Kurds, he insisted, were harboring the terrorists.
And yet now he's offering the Kurds air strikes?
The Kurds aren't terrorists (few people Nouri calls "terrorists" ever actually are).
But just weeks ago, Queen Drama Nouri was insisting publicly that the Kurds were harboring terrorists, in league with the terrorists, blah, blah, blah.
iraq
aid to the church in need
national iraqi news agency
the associated press
reuters
