Category: The Dish

Saddam In Shia Clothing?

In a lengthy retrospective on America’s complicated relationship with Prime Minister Maliki, Ali Khedery illustrates how that relationship began warmly, soured over time, and got us where we are today:

Maliki never appointed a permanent, parliament-confirmed interior minister, nor a defense minister, nor an intelligence chief. Instead, he took the positions for himself. He also broke nearly every promise he made to share power with his political rivals after they voted him back into office through parliament in late 2010.

He also abrogated the pledges he made to the United States. Per Iran’s instructions, he did not move forcefully at the end of 2011 to renew the Security Agreement, which would have permitted American combat troops to remain in Iraq. He did not dissolve his Office of the Commander in Chief, the entity he has used to bypass the military chain of command by making all commanders report to him. He did not relinquish control of the U.S.-trained Iraqi counterterrorism and SWAT forces, wielding them as a praetorian guard. He did not dismantle the secret intelligence organizations, prisons and torture facilities with which he has bludgeoned his rivals. He did not abide by a law imposing term limits, again calling upon kangaroo courts to issue a favorable ruling. And he still has not issued a new and comprehensive amnesty that would have helped quell unrest from previously violent Shiite and Sunni Arab factions that were gradually integrating into politics.

In short, Maliki’s one-man, one-Dawa-party Iraq looks a lot like Hussein’s one-man, one-Baath Party Iraq.

Eli Lake blames that relationship for the White House’s failure to take action when the ISIS threat emerged six months ago:

The problem for Obama was that he had no good policy option in Iraq. On the one hand, if Obama had authorized the air strikes Maliki began requesting in January, he would strengthen the hand of an Iraqi prime minister who increasingly resembled the brutal autocrat U.S. troops helped unseat in 2003. Maliki’s heavy handed policies—such as authorizing counter-terrorism raids against Sunni political leaders with no real links to terrorism—sowed the seeds of the current insurrection in Iraq.

But while Obama committed to sell Maliki’s military nearly $11 billion worth of advanced U.S. weaponry, he was unwilling to use that leverage in a meaningful way to get him to reverse his earlier reforms where he purged some of his military’s most capable leaders and replaced them with yes men. As a result of this paradox, the Iraq policy process ground to a halt at the very moment that ISIS was on the rise.

Recent Dish on Maliki’s role in precipitating the present crisis here and here.

The Central Plank Of Clinton’s Campaign?

Paid Leave

Tomasky argues that it should be paid family leave:

In a nutshell, it’s popular. A survey commissioned in 2012 by a pro-leave group found that respondents supported the idea by 63 to 29 percent. Democrats were of course strongly in favor (85-10), but independents were at a still quite favorable 54-34, and even Republicans weren’t against it—they were evenly split at 47-48.

Far from being hammered by the right over such a proposal, I think Clinton could turn the tables. What percentage of women are going to be against this? In the pro-leave group’s poll, it was just 23 percent.

Of course the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are going to go ape, but here we have facts, and the known facts suggest that in California paid leave has not been the nightmare that businesses feared. One study, by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, found that 89 percent of participating businesses reported a positive or no noticeable effect on productivity; 91 percent said the same about profitability and performance; 99 percent said the same about morale. Clinton will be able to find plenty of employers in California, and presumably New Jersey, who will sit in front of a camera for 30 seconds and testify that the law is just fine by them.

Cohn seconds Tomasky:

Of course, polling on an issue that hasn’t gotten much attention isn’t always reliable. Public sentiments could change if the Chamber of Commerce, which would spend heavily to fight such a plan, convinced Americans it would hurt the economy. And I plea totally guilty to political bias on this. I think paid leave is a great idea—an innovation that’s long overdue. But campaigns aren’t just about proposing what works politically. They’re also about laying the groundwork for a governing agenda. And while lots of people are skeptical that Clinton would take such a risk, if indeed she’s the nominee, I’m not. One reason is that she proposed such an initiative in 2007, the last time she ran for president.

A Country That Would Kill To Host The World Cup, Ctd

Even though Qatar’s 2022 World Cup arenas are being built on the backs of abused South Asian laborers (like everything else there and in other Gulf states), Justin Martin makes a counterintuitive case for letting Qatar keep the Cup:

Without its World Cup and the microscopes it attracts, Qatar would have less pressure over the next decade to improve civil liberties and basic human rights.

And what happens in Qatar doesn’t stay there. Other countries in the region pay close attention to Qatar’s domestic and diplomatic moves. The country is the wealthiest nation in the Arab Gulf and, by many metrics, the world. Doha is the Dubai of yesteryear, albeit with less hedonism, and Qatar has invested more proactively in its country’s education, healthcare, and publicly available research than other Gulf countries. Qatar’s English-language Doha News is one of the most independent and outspoken domestic news organizations in the Arab world. These positives are available for other nations in the region to see partly due to coverage of Qatar’s World Cup preparations. …

Human rights improvements in Qatar are afoot, but the country will not—cannot—become Sweden overnight. I am not saying that postponing civil liberties is ever acceptable, and yes, “justice delayed is justice denied,” but the paradox surrounding the push to relocate the Qatar World Cup is that doing so would both delay and deny the very progress critics claim to support.

Hillary, The Neo-Neocon? Ctd

Larison pooh-poohs (and rightly, I’d say) any future collaboration between a president Clinton and someone like Bob Kagan:

Clinton is as reliably hawkish as major Democratic politicians come, and I assume she wouldn’t be opposed to working with Hillary Clinton Awarded The 2013 Lantos Human Rights Prizeneoconservatives in the future on certain issues. That said, Clinton wouldn’t need to include neoconservatives in her hypothetical future administration, and they wouldn’t want to join. Her own party already has more than enough interventionists of its own, as her career and the careers of many of her allies and supporters attest. After all, why would she stir up controversy by bringing in neoconservatives when she can get very similar policy results and much better press by bringing on, say, Anne-Marie Slaughter and other liberal hawks? Supposing that a Paul nomination caused neoconservatives to endorse Clinton, that would be their ideologically-driven act of protest and not something that Clinton would feel any need to reward. Democratic partisans would spin such endorsements as “bipartisan” validation of Clinton’s foreign policy views, and they would find the display of Republican factionalism very entertaining at least until the election was over.

(Photo from Getty)

Quote For The Day II

“Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness. I beg your forgiveness, too, for the sins of omission on the part of Church leaders who did not respond adequately to reports of abuse made by family members, as well as by abuse victims themselves. This led to even greater suffering on the part of those who were abused and it endangered other minors who were at risk,” – Pope Francis.

She’s Just Not That Into Anyone

Julie Decker identifies as an “aromantic asexual woman, meaning I’m not sexually or romantically attracted to anyone.” It’s not an easy thing to explain:

“Sexual attraction is not something that is said verbally. It’s a vibe—something you communicate to me unconsciously. Sex is an instinct, not a choice.”

The above horrifying quote was uttered by a fellow I met when I was nineteen years old. There I was in college, uninterested in the sexual experimentation and freedom the away-at-university experience often brings, fairly inexperienced in my “career” as an outspoken asexual woman. Back in high school, I’d never developed any sexual or romantic attraction to anyone, but despite that I did date a couple of people. Peer pressure and consistent “you don’t know until you try it!” messages made me think I needed to investigate before I was sure I didn’t care for it, but what I was really looking for was a magic switch to shut everyone up. I wanted to fill the quota; I wanted to experiment “enough” to make everyone else agree that I’d given it a fair try and could legitimately be believed now.

That never happened. It turns out that for asexual people, there is no threshold we can cross that’s “enough”; if we are not converted by sex, then surely we did it wrong, or with the wrong gender, or with the wrong person, or ruined the experience by expecting to hate it. We find ourselves trying to prove a negative—a scientific impossibility—and ultimately either cave to expectations or live in defiance of them, secure in the hard-won knowledge that we are qualified to describe our experience and we deserve our boundaries respected.

Previous Dish on asexuality here.

This Is A Refugee Crisis, Ctd

Michelle Garcia turns to international law to argue that the Central American children pouring over the US-Mexico border deserve our protection:

A report released in March by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which deserves wider mention in the press than it has received, found that of a representative sample of 404 Mexican and Central American child migrants interviewed, 58 percent “were forcibly displaced because they suffered or faced harms that indicated a potential or actual need for international protection.” 

In other words, an unspecified number of these children could be eligible for refugee status, meaning refusing the children could be a breach of U.N. Conventions.

Honduras regularly ranks as the “murder capitol of the world.” Violence in El Salvador has in recent years rivaled the levels of the civil war period. The link between violence and displacement was recently explored by Insight Crime, which noted that about 2 percent of the population of El Salvador and Mexico have been driven from their homes in recent years. In El Salvador, “Out of these approximately 130,000 individuals, nearly one-third felt compelled to leave their homes two or more times.”

Apart from the tough standards to qualify for refugee status, a 2008 law extends protections to children fleeing abuse. Between those rules and the refugee and amnesty guidelines, immigration lawyers believe up to 80 percent of the unaccompanied minors from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala may be eligible for a Special Immigrant Juveniles visa, according to a Fox News Latino report.

Meanwhile, Marc Siegel worries that the children being detained at the border aren’t being screened rigorously enough for communicable disease, noting apparent cases of scabies, TB, measles and chicken pox:

A physician working to take care of any infected child must treat that child with compassion and appropriate medication. He or she should never provide substandard care or weigh in on the political issue of whether a child should be in this country or how he or she got here.

At the same time, immigrants in poor health or suffering from a communicable illness who enter this country illegally create public health risks. This is why we have such an extensive system for screening the health of legal immigrants in the first place before they are allowed in. It is not a political statement to say that the effectiveness of these screenings is being undermined if hundreds of thousands pass through our borders without them. Whatever the partisan arguments about how this crisis erupted, the most urgent question right now is how to prevent a public health crisis.

Previous Dish on the Central American refugees here, here, and here.

Just Your Standard Democratic President?

Jonathan Bernstein claims that “Obama has done no more or less than what any Democratic president in his circumstances would have done.” Chait takes exception:

It’s surely true that any Democratic president would have pursued health-care reform in 2009. But as the health-care bill dragged on, while it, Obama, and Democrats in Congress grew increasingly unpopular, many Democrats would have pulled the plug and tried to get out with a small, incremental bill. In late August of 2009, Jonathan Cohn later said in his deeply reported reconstruction of the bill’s passage that both Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled the. … Now, the logic of passage was always clear to those who paid close attention to the legislative dynamics, but not everybody did. If [after Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts] Obama had given up on health care, most analysts in Washington — and even many Democrats — would have deemed it a sensible, or even perfectly obvious, decision.

On most issues, Obama simply used his power the way any member of his party would have. On climate and health care, he bucked significant pockets of intra-party disagreement — not about policy goals themselves, which the whole Party shared, but of the prudence of accepting political risk to achieve them. And these two episodes where Obama’s own intervention proved decisive happen to be the two largest pieces of his domestic legacy.

I simply cannot imagine, for that matter, a Clinton backing marriage quality and military service with the same intensifying momentum as Obama, or a more liberal Democrat defending the NSA as strongly as Obama has. In some of these areas, perhaps, Obama is less an out-of-the-box Democrat than merely a Democrat of a certain generation. Which makes the looming ascendancy of someone well into her sixties seem such a strange leap forward into the past.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

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Ranj Alaaldin has the latest on the Kurds, who, in taking and holding Kirkuk against the ISIS onslaught, “may have won a historic battle for what has been described as both the crown jewel and Jerusalem of Kurdistan”:

It can now secure its economic independence from Baghdad. Control of Kirkuk also means the Kurds have the economic lynchpin for an independent state, should that be a desired option in the future.

Arab Iraq may still try to retake the province, but it is too focused on turning Baghdad and the Shia south into a fortress. Its preoccupation with Isis and the broader Sunni Arab insurgency means that, at best, Arab Iraq can hope the Kurds will still settle the status of Kirkuk through Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, which provides for a referendum on the status of the province. That would be wishful, as well as futile, thinking. Baghdad not only has a weakened hand, but the demographics in the province and realities on the ground considerably favour the Kurds.

Some might argue that the Kurds no longer share a border with an internationally recognised sovereign state but with a dangerous coalition of jihadists and unpleasant Sunni Arab militant forces. That misses the bigger picture.

The Sunni insurgency is occupied with powerful Shia enemies to the south; their resources are limited; they are divided among themselves and they lack the capacity to fight the experienced Peshmerga. Furthermore, Baghdad was never really in control of the Sunni Arab heartlands that border Kurdistan. Long before recent events, those heartlands constituted a safe haven for militants and jihadist groups. The threat is real, but nothing new for the Kurds.

Simon Tisdall considers how regional actors might respond to Kurdish statehood:

[O]il exports depend largely on a pipeline through Turkey, which opened this year. Faced by political developments in Irbil it dislikes, it would be an easy matter for Ankara to turn off the tap. Turkey has been fighting Kurdish insurgents in its south-east region for decades. It has always been assumed it would oppose Iraqi Kurdish independence, fearing a knock-on effect at home.

But that perception has gradually changed since 2003 amid heavy Turkish commercial investment in northern Iraq. High-level political contacts with the KRG are now routine, while Ankara’s relations with Baghdad have soured. It may be that Turkey will ultimately prefer a stable, friendly new border state free of extremists (of any hue) that is also an energy supplier and trading partner. “If Barzani does push for independence, he’s gambling that the Turks will concede that, one, KRG oil deals are more valuable than KRG statehood is dangerous, and two, that Kurds are still a valuable buffer zone vis-a-vis Iran,” said analyst Lee Smith.

Set against this prospect is the likelihood that, assuming he survives the civil war, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad will revert to his former anti-Kurdish policies. Iran, similarly fearful of domestic unrest, remains deeply hostile to Kurdish aspirations.

Meanwhile, Dov Friedman and Gabriel Mitchell investigate the sketchy Kurdish-Israeli oil transaction that came to light a few weeks ago:

If Israel received Kurdish oil with the intention of storing it, two scenarios are plausible. In the first, Israeli companies—with government consent—purchased the oil because the price was simply too good to pass up. Currently, Israel receives most of its 280,000 barrels-per-day from Azerbaijan, Russia, and some undisclosed sources. Since Kurdish oil arrived at a substantial discount—due to the Kurds’ eagerness to sell and the shallowness of the market—Israeli companies may have purchased and stored the oil for domestic consumption. If Kurdish oil develops into a reliable source, Israel gains negotiating power in its future energy contracts. And if Kurdistan’s relations with the Iraqi government continue to devolve—or if Iraq continues its descent into violent chaos—the Kurds may substitute access to Basra’s ports for an Israeli route to the Red Sea, via the Trans-Israel pipeline between Ashkelon and Eilat, and onward to the lucrative, energy-thirsty markets of Asia.

In the second scenario, the sale of Kurdish oil may be technically correct yet effectively misleading. Israel may be storing the oil because the Kurds have not yet found an end buyer. The money transferred to KRG accounts at Halkbank would then mean Israel has either informally loaned KRG money or Israel has assumed the liquidity risk of the Kurdish oil shipment. Both scenarios suggest that the Kurdish-Israel relationship has matured significantly.

Previous Dish on the prospect of an independent Kurdistan here.

(Photo: A peshmerga NCO directs soldiers to their guard posts at the headquarters in Khanaqin. By Matt Cetti-Roberts, from this photo essay on the Kurdish fighters.)