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| Iraq |
| Amara, Iraq and 1929 Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| 2006-10-21 |
| Analysis by Bobby On October 20, the media reported insurgents had taken over police stations in Amara in Iraq, showing the police were no better than two years ago and the insurgents were, shall we say, resurging. End of sound bite. Fact: It was not al-Qaeda, not “insurgents”, not even the usual “sectarian violence”, just a simple gang war for local power. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard: Mahdi Army is Shi'ite - Badr Corps is Shi’ite Mahdi Army is loyal to al-Sadr - Badr Corps is loyal to SCIRI Mahdi Army is nationalist - Badr Corps is trained in Iran Mahdi Army is a militia - Badr Corps controls the police department Mahdi Army dominates the region - Badr Corps control the police department The play: 1. The Madhi Army assassinated a police official, trying to assert their power 2. The police and/or the Badr Corps kidnapped and/or arrested five guys, including a brother of Madi Army bigshot 3. The Mahdi army retaliated by attacking the police/Badr Corps in the police stations 4. News media ‘stringers’ show up, film at 11. 5. Media reports hopeless quagmire 6. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki sends in the Army, and the violence stops. note that today (10/21), according to the Jerusalem Post, “Iraq's main Sunni Arab party on Saturday strongly backed a fledgling agreement between Sunni and Shi'ite religious figures aimed at ending sectarian bloodletting.” Maybe a positive outcome from yesterday's violence? (A much longer, more detailed discussion of events, which is the basis for the above summary, is reprinted in the footnote below, for those with a longer attention span.) So what’s the point? A little perspective: The St. Valentine's Day massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al "Scarface" Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran. On the morning of Thursday, February 14, St. Valentine's Day, seven members of Moran's gang were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by five members of Al Capone's gang (two of whom were dressed as police officers). The massacre marked the end of Moran's power on the North Side, and his gang vanished into obscurity, enabling Capone to take over the area; however, the event also brought the belated and full attention of the federal government to Capone and his criminal activities. This was ultimately Capone's downfall, for it led to his conviction and imprisonment on the Volstead Act and income tax evasion charges in 1931. Did the press say the Chicago police were no good, and that the City of Chicago was hopeless and should be abandoned to the gangsters? I imagine some folks thought that. Did the press call for a new President of the United States because of a gang war in Chicago? I doubt it, although President Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was replaced by Herbert Hoover less than three weeks after the Massacre – on March 4, 1929. It was Inauguration Day; Hoover had been elected President in November, 1928. Again, you ask: What’s the point? The press is reporting inaccurately (see the footnote) and does not give any background. The press thinks every story is about the failure of something and is not interested in anything more complex, especially on the evening news. Saddam controlled this sort of activity by crushing one or both sides. Remember he drained thousands of square miles of marsh to punish the “Marsh Arabs”. Even such an enormous environmental catastrophe as that was not well reported. I read about it in Civil Engineering Magazine, in an article written by an Iraqi civil engineer who fled the country in 1991. There were no doubt other atrocities that were not reported at all, in this country. With Saddam in the slammer, Pandora’s Box has been opened, just like in Yugoslavia after strongman Tito died. The violence in Iraq pales compared to the genocide in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, and there are still thousands of NATO troops in the region. The point: The war in Iraq is not lost just because the press only reports failures. A bit of balance: The US State Department reports weekly to Congress on the war. (See the whole report at - http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/74934.pdf Earlier weeks are available, too.) This week they reported a total of 312,000 Iraqi police and army have been trained and equipped. The Iraqi Army has taken total control of Ramadi, the so-called “Hotbed of the Insurgency”. The “insurgents’ tested them a few days later with a complex, three-pronged attack. The Army repelled the attack with no losses. The average Baghdad resident gets 6 hours of electricity a day; for the rest of the country, it is 12 hours a day – not good, but better than last year. Oil production hovers quite close to the Iraqi Ministry’s goal of 2.5 million barrels a day, and Iraq is exporting about half that. The real point: Slanted, short-sighted, stupid press coverage really makes me angry. Footnote: From the leftist Juan Cole: “..Amara is the capital of Maysan province (pop. 770,000). Maysan province in general and Amara in particular support the nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Maysan and its capital are among the places to which the Marsh Arabs were displaced when their swamps were dried up by Saddam in retribution for the uprising in 1991, and they are often desperately poor and very tribal, and they seem to have joined the Sadr Movement en masse during the past 3 years. When the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) controlled the Interior Ministry in 2005 and until May, 2006, it used the ministry's national oversight of local police forces to infiltrate members of SCIRI's paramilitary, the Badr Corps, into the Amara police force. There is a bubbling low-level feud between the Sadrists in Maysan and the SCIRI police. So recently the Mahdi Army assassinated Qasim al-Tamimi, a police official who was also a member of the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps was formed in Iran and trained by the Revolutionary Guards, and is viewed by many in the Iraqi-nationalist Mahdi Army as the tool of a foreign power. Then the police arrested or abducted (when militia are in police, how could you tell?) 5 men, including the brother of a Mahdi Army leader in Amara. Then protests escalated into fighting, and the Mahdi Army took over several police stations and killed or wounded dozens of police/ Badr Corps militiamen. The Western press is mostly reporting this story backwards, as a pro-Iranian Sadr Movement taking over Amara. In fact, the Sadr Movement already dominated Amara politically, but the (Iranian-trained) Badr Corps had this unnatural niche in the police. It was Badr that had "taken over" the security forces in a largely Sadrist city. The Mahdi Army was attempting to align local politics with local power. Muqtada al-Sadr, the young spiritual leader of the Sadr Movement and the Mahdi Army, demanded that his men stop fighting and said that he washed his hands of anyone who disobeyed his orders, according to Aljazeera. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #2 Excellent post, Bobby. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-10-21 22:47 |
| #1 Yum! I do enjoy intelligent analysis, especially when it includes history I didn't know. Thank you, Bobby. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-10-21 19:45 |