Latest entry
- Mark Urban
- Wed 7 Jan 09, 08:32 PM
One question I've asked myself since coming here is why the West Bank has been so quiet during these twelve days of bloodshed in Gaza. I've been in Ramallah and Bethlehem gauging opinion - although I'm a little frustrated that covering the Gaza story has prevented me roaming further afield in the Occupied Territories, I have been able to form an idea about the complexities of Palestinian politics at this time of turbulence and high emotions.
Talking to Ayman Daraghmeh, one of the few pro-Hamas Legislative Council members who remains at liberty (the others have been jailed) I am surprised that even he does not advocate a Third Intifada in support of Gaza. What would the objective be ? he asked rhetorically. Better not to ask people to suffer in support of some ill defined objective, he adds.
There are though other reasons why the streets seem quiet, oddly so for someone who experienced fierce fighting in both Ramallah and Bethlehem during the early days of the Second Intifada. Some people, like Mustapha Barghouti, an independent who challenged Mahmoud Abbas for the presidency, argue that his former rival has been exercising too tight a grip on the streets for large scale protest to take off.
Continue reading "Bethlehem "
Recent entries
- Mark Urban
- Mon 5 Jan 09, 07:10 PM
On the Israel-Gaza border - Timing is a critical factor in war. Having chosen with great skill the moment to start its onslaught on the crowded Palestinian territory, there are signs that Israel's government does not quite know when it should end.
The launch of Israel's campaign, 10 days ago, could not have been better timed. It caught the world's political elites on holiday, unable to concert an effective response, even if they had been minded to, and it caught Hamas, which runs Gaza, on the hop too. Hamas had ended a six month ceasefire with Israel but the Islamic movement's leadership did not apparently reckon on such a swift response from its enemy - as a consequence a majority of those killed in the first few days of bombing were party members, security men, and police who had not been dispersed for their own safety.
America's upcoming change of administration also played a key role in choosing this moment. Those Palestinian factions or the Lebanese movement, Hezbollah, that might have been tempted to act elsewhere in solidarity with the people of Gaza have not so far done so. Some feel this may be due to their reluctance to get off on the wrong foot with the Obama Administration.
It is however a different electoral cycle - Israel's - that is now greatly complicating the decisions about how far to push this military action. Within the government of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert there are differing views. Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister and his successor as leader of the Kadima party, reportedly favours pushing on until the Hamas government in Gaza collapses. The Defence Minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak apparently favours more limited objectives of creating a longer term cease fire with the Hamas government. His Labour Party will be battling Ms Livni's at the polls next month.
So Mr Olmert will have to referee this disagreement among his Cabinet members. In the meantime, other factors in the timing equation will militate against open-ended action in Gaza. With stark reports of infrastructure collapsing within the strip as well as more than 540 dead at the time of writing, the growing cost of this offensive is creating ripples of outrage around the world.
Many Israelis don't care too much about that - or rather they put their own security first - but the longer this goes on the greater the possible damage to relations with the United States and the possibility that Hezbollah or one of its Palestinian allies will launch attacks across the Lebanese border. There are risks too that if the Israeli army becomes too much of a static target on the ground in Gaza, its losses through suicide bombing and other resistance may start to multiply.
So the key questions about timing are now those about when all of this destruction should stop. Given these pressures, Ms Livni's more ambitious ideas about toppling Hamas may get shelved. But rest assured that however this ends both she and Mr Barak will try to take the credit for the timing of the campaign in the first place.
- Mark Urban
- Thu 18 Dec 08, 06:00 PM
Year's end brings the inevitable navel gazing about how the world might have changed. Two things are very clear about 2008: that it will go down in history as a significant year because of the scale of the global financial crisis but also that 'the west' suffered more in this than the emerging economies.
In broad geo-political terms, power moved east in 2008. The USA or European Union will still wield considerable world influence of course. Equally, China, India and Russia have shown they are far from immune from global recession. But even taking all of this into account, the slow tectonic shift caused by growing western indebtedness and huge trade surpluses elsewhere has this year produced an earthquake in global power politics.
As for the plans to check the decline of the US or west more generally, stimuli like Barack Obama's proposed 'Green New Deal' are fine if they work as well as the 1930s un-green equivalent. If they do not, the new American administration or indeed the British government will simply have acted like debt consolidation companies -re-packaging ruinous personal or corporate losses into an ever larger national debt. This in turn will accelerate the decline of western societies..
Continue reading "Lessons from 2008"
- Mark Urban
- Mon 8 Dec 08, 06:40 PM
Monday's raids on a camp in Kashmir show that India, the US and Pakistan, which used its army to arrest 'more than a dozen' suspected militants at the site, seem to share a view about what happened in Mumbai. The authorities in Islamabad early demands for proof from India have given way to action based upon the assumption that Lashkar e-Taiba, a Kashmiri militant group, played a key role in organising last month's terrorist attacks on that city. This in turn will lead investigators closer to Inter-Services Intelligence - the ISI - the Pakistani military's organisation for gathering secret information, and one of the most written about but least understood intelligence agencies in the world.
The ISI helped to establish Lashkar e-Taiba, just as it played a key role in organising religious students (Taleban) to fight in Afghanistan. During the 1980s Pakistan's leaders wanted to foment trouble in neighbouring countries and these religious-based organisations were a useful tool in that policy. More recently Pakistani leaders have sworn that they would have nothing to do with organising Mumbai or the blowing up of the Indian embassy in Kabul earlier this year, but nobody who knows the region is completely sure that these events were unconnected with the ISI.
Having met a few serving members of the ISI, the impression they usually give is of serving military officers who are on secondment to military intelligence. In other words they seem no more religious, conspiratorial, or devious than any other service type one meets in the sub-continent, carrying out normal military duties.
There is though an odd duality about many of these people. Meeting one senior officer in ISI recently, I asked him some questions about insurgency in various parts of Pakistan only to have him shoot back at me, "and what efforts have you made to interview the Taleban?" It was a fair question. Was it born of an intelligence officer's curiosity about what 'the opposition' think? Or did he feel that organisations like the BBC do not give enough attention to the Taleban's point of view? Was it, in other words an expression of some form of sympathy for them?
Alas our conversation did not last long enough to get beyond my expressions of anxiety about how such an interview could be conducted without a high risk to myself and others or, indeed, whether he could facilitate it. I may though get in touch with him again to pursue this last question.
The view of some of those in Western organisations that liaise professionally with the ISI is that there is an, educated, politically-sensitive, senior management who have become de-coupled from some of the foot soldiers - the captains or majors who have trained insurgents or run sources in Lashkar e-Taiba or the Taleban. As if this is not already a problem, the ISI has indeed just been through one of its periodical management re-shuffles - something apparently designed to ensure its loyalty to the current army chief.
Some Pakistani observers buy this theory too - hence talk of 'elements within the ISI' still being loyal to the Taleban. It is however an organisation that runs on the basis of military hierarchy, and the New York Times reported today, apparently based on US intelligence briefing, that the CIA believes the ISI has been liaising closely recently with a senior Lashkar e-Taiba militant called Zarrar Shah. This suggests the military command structure must know something about these contacts.
The ISI might argue that penetration of these organisations - including paying some militants - is all part of the struggle for intelligence information. It is also probable that some of the recent US drone attacks on suspected militants in the tribal areas have relied upon intelligence provided by the ISI.
So how does one explain these contradictions: arresting Lashkar militants after years of supporting them? Sympathising with the Taleban while providing the Americans with intelligence needed to kill them? In the end, the ISI is part of Pakistan's impossible balancing act - trying to reconcile its need for cooperation with the west against its sympathy and sense of Islamic solidarity with many of those the Indians or Americans despise. We might marvel at some of the verbal gymnastics of a Pakistani politician trying to explain a recent American attack in the tribal areas but the ISI is different in that it attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable in secret and when it fails, the consequences can be quite terrible.
- Mark Urban
- Tue 2 Dec 08, 06:24 PM
The global honeymoon that accompanied Barack Obama's election was never going to last forever, but there are some people for whom it already appears to be over - even though the president elect will not take power until 21st January. The Illinois senator's desire to name his administration, in order to 'hit the ground running' has already been the cause of some political sniping, and so have his meagre foreign policy pronouncements to date.
The appointment of Rahm Emanuel in October as White House Chief of Staff nettled many. There were his former Republican opponents in the House of Representatives, who consider him abrasively partisan, but I am not talking about them. Put his name and 'Zionist' into Google and you will see what I mean. The brickbats are already flying on certain Islamic, 'progressive', and far right websites.
With the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the plot thickens for those who wish to imply that a good man - President-elect Obama - is surrounding himself with 'zionists' who will prevent any fresh thinking about Middle East peace. Ms Clinton is not of course Jewish, unlike Mr Emanuel, but she has been a two-term senator for New York state.
"She's had a certain position which has not been very friendly toward the Palestinians", said Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner General of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency on the Today programme this morning, adding, "we hope that there'll be a broader view once she comes into office". Ms AbuZayd's job involves daily dealing with the dismal humanitarian consequences of Israel's blockade of Gaza, so I'm not surprised she longs for a different US foreign policy in the region. But the implication from an international civil servant - who must get on with all the relevant players - that an incoming US Secretary of State is bringing too much political baggage to the job is unusual, to put it mildly. Is it not obvious that Secretary Clinton, representing the US national interest, will serve quite different political imperatives to Senator Clinton, representing one of the largest Jewish democratic constituencies in the world?
It was to be expected that extremists like al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri would write off President-elect Obama swiftly, calling him a "house negro", or, depending on which translation you follow, a "house slave". Similarly, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad already made a thinly veiled attack on Mr Obama during his speech at the United Nations in September.
The response to the appointment of the new foreign policy team shows something else. In the first place, the president-elect's campaign promise of change was always going to look less exciting once he put in place the people with the necessary political experience to run their departments. If you think Ms Clinton comes with political baggage - what about Robert Gates, who will switch from being President Bush's defence secretary for the past to years to the new president's administration?
Secondly, there are certain laws of political gravity that cannot be defied, whatever the brand of a new administration. The anti-American imperative is so central to certain ideologies - in this case militant Islam - that any Jewish appointees or appeals to Jewish voters will be used to argue the administration is pro-Zionist. It might turn out to be, but shouldn't everyone wait until the new president has been sworn in and set out some Middle East policies before jumping to that conclusion?
- Mark Urban
- Fri 28 Nov 08, 06:34 PM
Having followed the twists and turns of the US/Iraqi attempt to negotiate legal agreements governing the future presence of American troops in that country, I have been using any time I have left after reporting the Mumbai crisis to go through with a fine toothcomb the treaty finally agreed by Iraq's parliament on Thursday night. (You can download a translation of the full agreement here.)
First things first - it is quite an achievement that two countries locked in such a difficult relationship should have managed to achieve this treaty, something that even as recently as September senior officials did not think would be possible, prior to the expiry of the United Nations mandate for Coalition Forces on 31st December this year.
In the end two separate agreements, one on the future status of US forces, the other dealing with the strategic relationship between the two countries, have been rolled into one. It sets a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces "from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities" no later than 30th June 2009. Its statement that "all of the United States Forces shall withdraw from Iraqi territory no later than 31st December 2011" seems straightforward enough.
However, when one reads Article 27 of the agreement, headed "Deterrence of Security Threats", it is apparent that the two governments have kept open the possibility to respond to any threat to the security of Iraq by "diplomatic, economic or military measures, or any other measure, to deter such a threat". This is precisely the kind of open invitation for future security cooperation that many in Iran tried to thwart through their allies in Baghdad.
Article 27 furthermore also sets out, "cooperation in training, equipping, and arming the Iraqi security forces"; a task that experts predict might require the presence of many thousands of US 'advisors'.
All the same, the new agreement is not entirely the stuff of Iranian nightmares, because, among other things, it forbids the use of Iraq for attacks on neighbouring countries. Similarly, American military concerns have been accommodated to some extent, in severely limiting Iraqi legal jurisdiction over US military personnel.
In a key concession however, there is no suggestion that the US withdrawal should be 'conditions based', although it does suggest that it might happen faster than the 2011 deadline. This marks a cave-in on the part of the Bush Administration, US military commanders, and even some elements within the Iraqi coalition government - all of whom wanted to avoid rigid timetables. It is also very convenient for the new administration of Barack Obama since it sets a firm date for withdrawal, lets him accelerate that if he wants, but still allows Washington to reverse that process if, under Article 27, the two governments jointly agree on some future threat.
The agreement is then a key milestone that looks likely to reduce drastically the US profile in Iraq within months, and to eliminate that presence altogether within three years. It says this has been made possible by the, "dramatic and positive developments in the country" - a reference to the marked decline in violence in the past year.
In a sense though, the fact that the two sides have worked through their political differences, dealt with what are for many Iraqis such sensitive issues, and have done it all before the expiry of the UN mandate is perhaps the best testimony to date of political progress in Iraq.
- Mark Urban
- Fri 28 Nov 08, 02:15 PM
We journalists often regard press officers and media managers as the opposition. But one of the most striking things about the Indian authorities' handling of the Mumbai terrorist attacks has been their inability to put together any sort of joined up media plan.
Those reeling from the possibility that loved ones might be caught up in the mayhem can hardly have been comforted by the constant flow of speculation, rumour and outright misinformation that has surrounded these events. Different security chiefs have claimed four or five times that the Taj Mahal hotel had been cleared of terrorists, only to have explosions shatter any confidence of this fact soon afterwards.
Similar uncertainty has surrounded events at the Jewish centre. In each case the bangs or 'shooting' going on inside may represent no more than commandos room clearing with explosive entry devices and stun grenades. The terrorists may all be dead and not firing back at all.
What has been lacking in all this is a press briefing, once or twice daily, featuring security chiefs and the chief minister. If all of the kingpins in the operation had gathered in this way there would at least have been the sense that all agencies were agreeing to a certain view (for example that the terrorists all arrived by sea) or all declined to comment for the record on a particular allegation. Instead there has been a welter of rumours, many of them harvested by local journalists ringing their mates in the police or army.
I never thought I'd be longing for a system of briefing of this kind, but like many features of our own democratic system, it's one of those things you don't necessarily appreciate until you see what life is like without it.
- Mark Urban
- Thu 13 Nov 08, 08:51 PM
The idea of switching troops from Iraq to Afghanistan seems deceptively simple. In fact the problems of re-deploying Britain's over-stretched army will pose the main constraint on how many more soldiers can be sent if, as expected, President elect Barack Obama mobilises Nato countries to send reinforcements to Afghanistan.
Although ministers are still vague about the timetable of Britain's exit from Iraq, I have been told that it is intended that it will be complete by July 2009. The main period of withdrawal will be during May-June.
By the end of May, headquarters and support elements will have been run down and British combat troops will, for a few weeks, come under the command of an American general. During June the last of the UK battle groups should leave, and under current planning, all of them will be gone by July.
Currently there are around 4,000 servicemen and women in Iraq and 8,000 in Afghanistan. Current planning assumes no combat units would be left in Iraq after July, and even training teams limited to two small units - one working with the Iraqi navy and the other at their officer training school.
The timing of this drawdown is important because military chiefs feel that any reinforcement in Afghanistan needs to be in place in time for that country's elections in September. The MoD does not plan to send the same soldiers (except perhaps the odd truly unfortunate one...) from one theatre to the other, but it cannot mount a significant increase of the garrison in southern Afghanistan unless it can move key items of equipment from one place to the other.
Things are so overstretched in the Army, for example, that there are insufficient sets of up to date body armour to send even one more company (around 120 troops) to Afghanistan, without taking the gear from troops in Iraq. In addition to personal equipment, heavily armoured vehicles will need to be shipped from Iraq in time to be available for the reinforcements in Afghanistan.
These logistic considerations militate in favour of any decision to commit the reinforcement to be made early next year. That decision may follow a major review of the Afghan operation being conducted by US General David Petraeus, which is expected to report in February.
There is though still an argument to be had within the British government about whether switching troops in this way is desirable. Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief of Defence Staff, recently warned against any idea that troops taken from Iraq could easily be sent on other operations. Some senior army officers believe that the Army has been so stressed by 'running hot' on simultaneous operations there and in Afghanistan that it must bank the reductions in Iraq rather than sending more men and women to Afghanistan.
All of this makes it quite unlikely that the forces will simply shift 4,000 posts from operations in one country to the other. Instead, some of those involved in the process think that the Afghanistan commitment would be allowed to grow from its current 8,000 to a symbolically important 10,000. What kind of improvement the net reduction of 2,000 troops on operations would make, in terms of reducing the stress on the forces, is open to question.
- Mark Urban
- Wed 12 Nov 08, 06:48 PM
The Government is cutting its Defence Intelligence Staff, despite warnings that doing so could make a repetition of the Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction saga more likely. The Ministry of Defence is moving to eliminate 122 posts in the DIS, more than one fifth of its strength.
In 2004, an inquiry into the intelligence that led Britain into the Iraq war chaired by Lord Butler, former head of the civil service, argued that DIS should be strengthened. His report called the DIS "crucial", said it needed to be integrated "more closely" with the intelligence community in order to serve "wider national priorities". If that required more money from central funds, argued Lord Butler's team, "we would support that". The government said at the time that it accepted the Butler recommendations.
During the run up to the Iraq war, the DIS proved to be the only part of the government machine that seriously questioned the way that the case was being argued. Brian Jones, a senior defence intelligence analyst and key witness at the Hutton inquiry, has told Newsnight that the cuts show that lessons have not been learned from the Iraq saga. They have also been criticised by John Morrison, formerly Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence and advisor to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee. He has told Newsnight that the cuts are "extraordinary" and make a repetition of the mistakes in Iraq intelligence more likely. You can see more of their thoughts in the report at the end of this post.
Continue reading "Have we failed to learn lessons of Iraq WMDs?"
- Mark Urban
- Tue 11 Nov 08, 07:04 PM
Watching Gordon Brown's speech at the Guildhall in the City of London, it revealed an unmistakable concern about the effect global recession might have on America's willingness to provide global leadership.
Naturally the PM did not want to spoil the feel good that has accompanied Barack Obama's election, which he described as a, "source of hope and inspiration", words which earned him the only spontaneous applause of his speech. President elect Obama also makes a natural political bedfellow for Mr Brown in that he shares the 'progressive' agendas extolled under the vaulted ceiling of the Guildhall.
There were however repeated warnings against isolationism, and references to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Mr Brown said his "central argument" was that Britain or the EU and America "can and must provide leadership" in heading off the threat of a prolonged global slump. By why should he ever doubt it?
Continue reading "Global recession and global leadership"
- Mark Urban
- Tue 21 Oct 08, 03:32 PM
Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama may well be the final nail in the coffin of John McCain's presidential bid. Gen Powell, formerly Secretary of State under the current Republican administration described Sen Obama as the, "transformational figure" necessary for America.
When it comes to foreign policy, it is this notion of the Democratic contender representing a fresh start that counts for far more than the detail of his platform. His pledge, for example, to get American combat troops out of Iraq swiftly will in my view count for far less in determining the actual timetable than what the Iraqi government wants or the military advice the new President receives.
Instead Sen Obama, as the choice of so many foreigners, will provide the necessary break with an administration that could hardly have been less popular globally. In part this is about discarding some of the more extreme ideological positions of the Bush White House and in part it is about allowing those who habitually criticise the USA with an excuse to re-visit their anti-Americanism or at least park it for a while.
Gen Powell's endorsement is all the more remarkable given his professed deep friendship for John McCain. Few who have watched Sen McCain in recent years can fail to have been impressed by his sound judgement in foreign affairs: he favoured radical action on climate change years ago; he became an outspoken critic of Guantanamo Bay and the torture of Al Qaeda suspects long before most senators had the courage to do so; he backed the troop surge in Iraq when most were ready to concede defeat; and he started asking questions about whether the behaviour of the Russian government meant it should be excluded from the G8 economic forum months before this summer's war in Georgia put the issue centre stage.
Continue reading "Foreign policy challenges for next president"
- Mark Urban
- Wed 15 Oct 08, 06:26 PM
People in Whitehall are expecting the financial crisis to produce spending cuts in several departments. For the Ministry of Defence this promises to be another difficult episode in which prestigious projects may be axed or delayed and critics denounce it as a 'Treasury-led' exercise, i.e. one designed to produce savings rather than to re-think Britain's military needs.
Even before the recent stock market rollercoaster, many people at the MoD were expecting a bloody spending round. Projected equipment costs for the next ten years are said to be something like £35bn over the available budget, creating a huge gap that must be addressed.
Add to this that many senior officers are intensely frustrated that they have been operating for years outside the department's Defence Planning Assumptions - the tasks set out by the last major defence review ten years ago which the forces were financed to perform - and it is clear that some of the top brass would even welcome the chance to cut back commitments or equipment projects as part of a coherent rethink of what missions the forces are required to perform.
Now though the Government is girding itself for recession, with its plunging tax revenues and for a huge rise in its borrowing, these arguments have become more pointed in the corridors of MoD.
"All options are now on the table", reports one senior insider, meaning that prestige projects previously thought safe (such as the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers, future batches of the RAF's Typhoon fighter or the Army's plan for a future family of armoured vehicles) may now be cut back.
Those who would prefer the axe to fall upon the Royal Navy's Trident submarine replacement plan note ruefully that their new boss, Defence Secretary John Hutton, represents Barrow in Furness where Britain's nuclear subs are built.
In fact, the problems are so profound that constituency interest is hardly likely to prove decisive, and indeed that axing the Trident replacement plan would not in itself be enough.
Many Whitehall defence policy types would like there to be a full blown review in which the Defence Planning Assumptions are rewritten and the forces' duties redefined in keeping with these cash starved times.
People close to this debate tell me, however, that this type of exercise is not likely to happen. Both because the amount of MoD staff work required to do this could take anything up to 18 months, and the Government does not wish to cut defence in this way as it runs towards a general election. Many had hoped indeed to postpone a defence review until after the election (which must happen by June 2010).
Now the signs are that the public spending position is too desperate and the MoD too over-committed to leave things for that long. So stand by for a 'rethink' in the first half of next year.
The withdrawal of British combat troops from Iraq (expected in May-June next year) will allow commitments to be trimmed a little. At the same time something will have to give on the equipment budget leading to the inevitable 'hard choices' between future projects.
Some think this may have to be given a philosophical or policy gloss of a shift away from preparing for high intensity, inter-state conflict with its expensive weapon systems - and acceptance that 'stability operations' such as the Afghanistan deployment will define future equipment needs for many years to come.
The thinking therefore is moving towards a defence review by another name, something that will most likely produce howls of outrage from Conservative politicians because, they might argue, it has been based on the need to save money rather than on the right kind of military rethink.
In truth though, cutbacks in defence now seem inevitable, with all of the bad political waves that could create when the forces are fighting and dying overseas.
- Mark Urban
- Thu 25 Sep 08, 05:31 PM
Washington: Travelling between Baghdad, London, New York and Washington this past fortnight it has become clear that the issue of finding the right legal basis for American and British troops to remain in Iraq after their United Nations mandate expires at the end of this year has become a great deal more complicated than it appeared before - and this reflects the tug of war between Iranian and US influence in Iraq. Senior Iraqi officials have revealed to me that the entire future of the treaty is now unclear, "because people in our own government are not sure they want it".
This bombshell would appear to dash hopes in the US administration that a deal can be finalised before President Bush leaves office and creates the possibility - theoretically at least - that the entire US military presence in Iraq, around 150,000 troops, could be ordered out on 1st January 2009. Since, I am told, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does not want this, because he recognises that hard won recent security gains might well be lost, the Iraqi government is now working on a holding plan that involves asking the United Nations to extend its mandate for Coalition troops. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has therefore spent this week in New York engaged in difficult bilaterals with those countries - notably Russia - that might stand in the way of the UN Security Council renewing that resolution.
A few months ago, the two sides seemed to be edging towards agreement on two treaties; a Strategic Framework Agreement in which the US and Iraq would define the nature of their future military relationship and a Status of Forces Agreement which would set out precisely matters relating to the stationing of US personnel in Iraq, such as the vexed issue of their immunity from Iraqi law. The UK is negotiating a separate Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. At the start of the summer US officials were so optimistic that they could make progress in the talks that they said they hoped to sign agreements by the end of July.
While negotiators have not yet found the right language to bridge the differences over the immunity issue or the exact description of how US withdrawals will be phased, the whole venture has now been de-railed by political divisions within the Iraqi cabinet. While Kurdish and Sunni politicians believe strongly that Iraq must capitalise on recent security improvements, and needs continued US help to do that, some Shia ministers have been questioning the need for the entire treaty.
In his speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday President Mahmud Ahmedinejad of Iran referred to the treaties the US wish to negotiate as, "imposing colonial agreements on the people of Iraq... the occupiers, without a sense of shame, are still seeking to solidify their position in the political geography of the region and to dominate oil resources". The logic of Iran's stance seems clear enough then, that Iraq should show the Americans the door.
The effect however of scuppering these draft US/Iraq treaties could, perversely, be to extend the operations of US forces under the existing UN mandate, which gives them sweeping powers, such as the right to detain Iraqis without trial. This then is the cleft stick Iraq's government finds itself in: many within it, including apparently the Prime Minister, accept that they still need American help in some areas but their attempts to cut US troop levels and curtail their powers are now threatened by the possibility that they will have to extend the existing UN mandate rather than re-define the relationship. It would appear that Iran dislikes the idea of the US forging a long term strategic relationship with Iraq so much that it is prepared to see the perpetuation of the existing 'occupation' arrangements.
For its part the US government will have its own difficulties now, because following the tensions over Georgia this summer, it must now ask Russia not to veto any extension of UN Iraq mandate in the Security Council. Some believe the Russians simply won't cooperate, others that the Iraqis may sweeten them with promises of weapon and other contracts. If all else fails, US and UK diplomats apparently have the option of 'cut and pasting' the terms of the existing Security Council mandate into Memoranda of Understanding between themselves and Iraq - continuing in other words without a UN mandate, but with something that attempts to look like one !
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