by Richard Gowan | Dec 1, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
For much of this year, Washington analysts have been extremely worried about what to do about the vast numbers of refugees flowing out of Iraq (about 2 million so far, or 7% of the population, and that doesn’t include internally displaced persons – IDPs). Daniel Byman of Brookings, who has led the charge on this issue with Kenneth Pollack, describes taking care of the refugees as a rare issue on which “morality and strategy come together in the Middle East“. I think we can take the morality part for granted, and the strategic case looks clear too: the outflow of people seems bound to cause economic and political instability in the region.
But yesterday’s New York Times raises an alternative problem: what if the refugees and IDPs come back? The few that have are frequently finding their homes occupied, which is proving especially incendiary when the returnee and occupier come from different religious or ethnic communities. Now, this sort of problem is familiar from so many recent conflicts – the Balkans alone – you might think there was a plan for this.
Or not:
Col. Cheryl L. Smart, who tracks the data on displaced Iraqis for General Petraeus’s command, said that the American military had been “very vocal” with the Iraqi government about the need to establish a system to adjudicate claims about property rights and to avoid using Iraqi troops to carry out “forced evictions.”
Colonel Rapp [another Petraeus aide] voiced the hope that confrontations might be avoided by building new homes for returning Iraqis instead of forcing all of the squatters to leave. “It is probably going to be resolved with new housing construction as opposed to wholesale evictions and resettlement,” he said.
“Whether they will remix is probably a multiyear, decade kind of issue,” he added, referring to the possibility of sectarian reintegration.
“The immediate return of I.D.P.’s will create tensions in that system, and we are concerned about it,” he said, referring to the internally displaced people in Iraq.
This raises a short-term question: if the Surge has created a sufficient degree of stability for some IDPs and refugees to return home, will their return undermine that stability, making it a self-defeating exercise? Answer: depends how many do actually come back.
Which points to a bigger problem. Morality would suggest that one wants to see a high level of returns (as we did in Bosnia but not in Kosovo), but what’s preferable in strategic terms: a high level of returns creating instability inside Iraq, or a low level of returns that leaves the risk of instability among its neighbors high? Take your pick.
A nasty PS: as Byman has pointed out, the refugees are likely to adopt radical politics abroad. So guess which Iraqi politician has been appointed to come up with a plan on returns: yes, it’s Ahmed Chalabi, player of Iraqi exile politics par excellence. Ouch.
by Alex Evans | Dec 1, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Wonkette has been pondering the just-out McKinsey study on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study, she says…
…kinda found that the biggest reductions could come from individuals reducing their own carbon footprints, and that there aren’t very many incentives to do so.
Yeah, you read that right. The biggest reductions wouldn’t come from carbon sequestration or moving to more sustainable energy forms, but from doing things like turning off your lights. With only modest costs and small amounts of innovation, we could reduce carbon emissions in this country by 28 percent in fairly short order. Of course, it would require actual, visible sacrifices on the part of consumers who don’t even bother looking at the “Energy Star” stickers when buying cheap computers because they don’t care, which means that the computer manufacturers don’t bother.
They recommend a public education campaign and tax credits and stuff. You know, the same stuff that hasn’t worked in the past.
Yup, that’s about the long and the short of it. Over to you in Bali, David…
by Alex Evans | Dec 1, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
The right wing blogosphere in the US is, needless to say, having a field day about the jailing of Gillian Gibbons over the teddy bear incident in Sudan – just look at what Michelle Malkin has to say (see also David’s survey of comments a couple of days ago).
But in fact, the whole incident is very much to the advantage of moderate shades of opinion – both inside and outside Islam. The sheer ludicrousness of the charge itself – a teddy bear, for heaven’s sake – combined with the manifestly absurd scale of the overreaction of the mob in Khartoum, has done much to unify opinion around a common sense position. Here’s the Muslim Council of Britain:
This case should have required only simple common sense to resolve. It is unfortunate that the Sudanese authorities were found wanting in this most basic of qualities. They grossly overreacted in this sad affair and this episode. Gillian should never have been arrested, let alone charged…
And a group of Muslim protestors staged a noisy demo outside the Sudanese Embassy in London today too. These kinds of reactions play well with non-Muslim moderates in the UK. Take this vox pop from Associated Press, for instance:
“One of the good things is the U.K. Muslims who’ve condemned the charge as completely out of proportion,” said Paul Wishart, 37, a student in London. “In the past, people have been a bit upset when different atrocities have happened and there hasn’t been much voice in the U.K. Islamic population, whereas with this, they’ve quickly condemned it.”
The reaction of moderate Muslims in Britain is being replicated internationally, too. In Canada, the Muslim Canadian Congress is organising a mail-in to protest Gillian Gibbons’ imprisonment, by asking its members to send tiny teddy bears to the Sudanese ambassador in Ottawa. Meanwhile, it hasn’t been lost on moderate media outlets in the Arab world like Gulf Daily News that Gillian Gibbons’ own comment from jail has been to stress “I don’t want any resentment towards Muslims”, according to her son John.
It all feels very different to the Danish cartoons story – which left moderates on both sides feeling bruised. While those extremists with an interest in increasing division (on either side – Khartoum mob, Michelle Malkin) naturally seek to polarise the debate as much as they can, this time the battle looks to be going the other way.
by Alex Evans | Dec 1, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
William Lind notes this week that the reason parts of Iraq have quietened down isn’t only because al-Qaeda have managed to alienate their own base through their tactics – “and for once we were wise enough not to get in the way of an enemy who was making a blunder” – but also because Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his militia to stand down. But, Lind continues, “…fighting the Americans is more likely to strengthen than weaken his hold on his own movement. So what gives?”
Lind notes that the New York Times has already suggested that the answer may be that Iran asked / told al-Sadr to do so. But, he continues,
If that is true, it bumps the same question up a level. Why are the Iranians asking their allies in Iraq to give us a break? I doubt it is out of charity, or fear, although elements within Iran that do not want a war with the United States seem to be gaining political strength.
Here’s a hypothesis. What if the Iranians had determined, rightly or wrongly (and I suspect rightly), that the Bush administration has already decided to attack Iran before the end of its term? Two actions would seem logical on their part. First, try to maneuver the Americans into the worst possible position on the moral level by denying them pretexts for an attack. Telling their allied Shiite militias in Iraq to cool it would be part of that, as would reducing the flow of Iranian arms to Iraqi insurgents and improving cooperation with the international community on the nuclear issue. We see evidence of the latter two actions as well as the first.
Second, they would tell their allies in Iraq to keep their powder dry. Back off for now, train, build up stocks of weapons and explosives and work out plans for what they will do as their part of the Iranian counter-attack. Counter-attack there will certainly be, on the ground against our forces in Iraq, in one form or another. In almost all possible counter-attack scenarios, it would be highly valuable to Iran if the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias could cut the Americans’ supply lines running up from Kuwait and slow down their movements so that they could not mass their widely dispersed forces. In John Boyd’s phrase, it would be a classic Cheng-Chi operation.
