MBC Persia

None of the bloggers I normally follow seem to have written about this. the Saudi MBC Group has released a Persian-speaking movie channel, MBC Persia, it was officially launched today today, after being on the air for almost a week now, the aim of the channel is simple: I got the privilege to witness George Clooney and The Soggy Bottom Boys singing "Man With Constant Sorrow" with Farsi subtitles. MBC Persia is the latest addition to the MBC channels, which include regular MBC, (mostly Arab talk shows, serials and movies), MBC-2 (American movies), MBC-4 (American news, talk shows and TV shows, al-Arabiya (The Saudi answer to al-Jazeera) and the recent MBC-Action (focusing on American Action movies and TV shows).
To me, the launch of this channel is very puzzling, sure, everybody loves American movies, and they are shown in even the most US-hostile territories (in 2000, we had to listen to a lengthy criticism of the Sahaf variety about the moral degradation of American society before viewing a pirated copy of American Beauty on Baathist state television) but this is a very concentrated dose of something else. why, under any circumstances, would the fiercely anti-Shi'i Wahabi Saudis look at Iranians as a target audience? The launch of this channel renders the intents and purposes of their sister channels, and their group in general, into the too obvious category. I still remember the way they marketed US news programs and talk shows with the launch of MBC-4 as "See what they see," why, exactly, do we need to see that? They are all part of a not-so-subtle marketing campaign of American culture into hostile territory. Don't hold your breath for the soft-power propagadnda of Farsi-subtitled Saving Private Ryan, it's just around the corner.

The Sadrist "Trend"

An excellent piece that says many things I want to say about the Sadrists, here are some portions I translated:

BY ALI BDAYWI.

The Sadrist Trend. A phrase often spoken by Sadrist current MPs, for the life of me I don't know why does Mr. Bahaa al-Aaraji and his fellow Sadrists love to say "Sadrist Trend" instead of "Sadrist Current." Actually, following the practices of the current, one finds out that it espouses a physically liquid form, Sadrists phrase their sentences in a way the matches the shape of the container, the phrase "Sadrist Trend" invokes oppression and a political victimization, this is especially apparent if it follows "targeting", as in "targeting the Sadrist Trend", a phrase seemingly glued to Mr. Bahaa's tongue. The olive branch distributed by Sayyid Muqtada's followers in sync with the battles of Basra fought by his army's members represents a symbol of the Sadrist double-standard modus operandi which favor maneuver and trickery.
The Sadrist Line, the term Mr. Bahaa prefers over the official title of the Sadrist Current, is an oratory maneuver as well, designed to say that the "Sadrist Trend" is a juridical and/or ideological line. It implies a peaceful point of view that seeks to establish a idea that in its core is quite concept-bankrupt, an ardent observer of "Sadrist Trend" publications can only find two or three words that fit the size of a 3.5 floppy disk: "Kicking The Occupation Out."

Logically we ask ourselves, is there any divine method by which we can topple Saddam's regime other than occupation? Theoretically and realistically, there was never an armed coup, or a popular uprising that managed to do that, thus the scenario we are forced to embrace would be the toppling of the regime by a US invasion that hands the government to the opposition, to create a pro-US democratic regime. Regardless of US intentions, or the political eligibility of those parties, what matters to Iraqi people are the circumstantial results of eliminating a tyrannical military rural rule that outlasted 30 years. In fact, the followers of the "Sadrist Trend" have no tangible idea of what occupation is, sure, they know how to handle an AK-47, but they understand murder more than they understand occupation, the theoretical backbone behind the Sadrist Line ideology. This is demonstrated by the first political sign of the rejection of occupation, the murder of Sayyid Abdulmajid al-Khoei as commanded by Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, based on legal documents and witnesses, this is a murder that is punishable by law, even if the family of the murdered dropped the case.

If the Sadrists had rejected the occupation since its early days, then this means one of two things: they either reject the toppling of Saddam's regime, or they reject the way the regime was toppled. What we saw was that the early Sadrist anti-occupation stance only served the remnants of the Saddamist resistance to America since the two coincided temporally. the early Sadrist resistance confused even populist Iraqi society and state institutions which collapsed due to major mistakes the Americans are to be blamed for. As soon as the ex-regime government Fedayeen and Foreign Fighters were quelled, the Sadrists broke out as if fighting for Hala and Raghad Hussein, what is that about? the direct enemy of Sadr II was Saddam Hussein. Saddam killed Sadr II, executed Sadr I and his sister Bint-al-Huda after she was raped. So why were the Sadrists so keen on fighting the Americans? More importantly, the Sadrists borrowed from the ex-regime the same mentality we need to put out of existence: belief in revolution, rifles and adoption of an ignorant community as a massive popular base, which runs contrary to the traditional Dawa party that favored more intellectual colorings.

the Iraqi people wanted to live in civillian clothes after Saddam, they wanted to bury the AK-47 they lived with for dozens fo years, the Iraqis wanted to be overjoyed, to end the legend of the Eternal Leader, however the Sadrists severely protected those leftovers of the past: ignorant men with no education, herd mentality, deliberate ignorance, Eternal Leaders, and Sadr Offices that issues dispatches for civilians.

Link: Arabic

April Glaspie: Assad smart, Saddam megalomaniac

April Glaspie, the US ambassador in Iraq who was accused of not warning Saddam enough before he invaded Kuwait, spoke to Dar al-Hayat, here are some things she said, some of which I've been saying here on this blog:

* Saddam's issue with Kuwait isn't just oil theft, he's just megalomaniac.His whole political career derived from overcoming the humiliation of his past . He came from nowhere, he was a self-made man...he grew up at a time when Iraqis believed understandably they were worthy of the leadership of the Arab world just as Egyptians are...it was not the party and what Michel Aflaq wanted, it was his own sense of becoming the leader of the Arab world, after all in his own thinking, it was he who stood against the ancient enemy and beat them back (his war with Iran).

i.e. Saddam's career was a desperately grandiose attempt at trying to be Gamal Abdul-Nassir.

* A very distinguished Iraqi Sunni professor at Bagdad University who was tortured by Saddam who got out of Iraq years before the war once said to me something which is perfectly obvious, but sometimes we tend to forget very obvious things. He said there is only one thing in the world that would make the general Sunni population ever get behind Saddam, because for every reason that we know they have been terrorized by him and that is if they though there was a real possibility of the Shiites taking control in Baghdad. That is perfectly obvious but for a diplomat it is important to remember.

true.

* The British with extraordinary technology of their time tried very hard, spoke more Arabic than the current coalition forces, were working within their old former mandate, they had all the maps they knew every place in Iraq from north to south and they could not do it. I think that the reasons that they could not do it are there for anybody to read and the same difficulties have emerged now.

very true, Iraq was built on a sectarian basis but America needn't entrench it : the Americans should have done their homework

* The difference between Hafiz and Saddam: Completely different, people around President Assad respected his power. Assad was the Eastern Mediterranean, a Levantine; he could be extremely charming which is interesting coming from a very disadvantaged background as he was in every way. He had a great deal of self confidence, he was charming, he could have been a Beirut hostess, he could be genuinely amusing, he always spoke Arabic although I knew from his pilot training he must know some English. Assad was much too subtle and smart to want people to say yes to him all the time. my life as a diplomat in Syria was as free as it would have been in Beirut, o doubt people were watching us and knew where we were but no Syrian would think twice about inviting me to their house, I never entered an Iraqi house except once and that was for a cultural event. Saddam when you were with him there was this huge tension in the air because everybody in the room from his own staff was afraid of him and I never heard him make a joke but if he would have, everybody would have laughed. It was a completely different aura. In Iraq, it was much more frightening.

Full interview (English) [a little difficult to read, pargraphs are stuck together and there are many grammar issues.]

Nir Rosen Congress Testimony

But the American ideologues who saw themselves as liberators needed an evil worthy of their lofty self image. To them the Baath party was a Sunni Nazi party that ruled Shiite Jews. They would de-Baathify just as their role models had de-Nazified. Sunnis were suspect of loyalty to the former regime and as a result the American military adopted a more aggressive posture in majority Sunni areas, resulting in clashes in places like Falluja that indeed led to the formation of a powerful popular resistance. Sunnis were weakened by the fact that Saddam, a Sunni himself, from attaining too much popularity or power, to avoid rivals.
That first month of Occupation there was enormous hope, but the looting created an atmosphere of pervasive lawlessness from which Iraq never recovered. The entire state infrastructure was destroyed and there were no security forces, Iraqi or American, to give people a sense of safety. They quickly turned to inchoate militias being formed, often along religious, tribal and ethnic lines.
Those same militias dominate Iraq today. This would have happened anywhere. If you removed the government in New York City, where I am from, and removed the police, and allowed for the state infrastructure to be looted and then you dismissed the state bureaucracy you would see the same thing happen. Soon Jewish gangs would fight Puerto Rican gangs and Haitan gangs would fight Albanian gangs.

The most powerful militias belong to Shiites who rallied around populist symbols such as Muqtada al Sadr. The Americans then fired the entire state bureaucracy, and for some Shiite leaders, this was an opportunity to seize control. While many Sunni clerical and tribal leaders chose to boycott the occupation and its institutions, many of their Shiite counterparts made a devil’s bargain and collaborated. The Americans maintained their sectarian approach, unaware that they were alienating a large part of Iraqi society and pitting one group against the other. Most of the armed resistance to the occupation was dominated by Sunnis, who boycotted the first elections, effectively voting themselves out of Iraqi politics. Radical Sunni militants began to attack Shiites in revenge or to provoke a civil war and disrupt the American project. Sectarian fundamentalist Shiite parties dominated the government and security forces and punished Sunnis en masse. By 2005 the civil war started. Later that year the Americans realized they had to bring Sunnis into the fold, but it was too late, the Shiites in power saw no reason to share it.

Probably a little exaggerated, but the point is that America designed its war as a sectarian war, a war that unwittingly and needlessly entrenched dangerous sectarian modes of thinking in the collective Iraqi consciousness [a good example is me, just trace the development of my sectarian awareness on this blog] while this sectarian divide has a long and turbulent history ; it needn't necessarily come to all this blood : Christians have persecuted Jews too, you know? America could have kept the bureaucracy and started nation-building from there, don't get me wrong, the problems of Iraq are all purely Iraqi problems, but I would never forget the words of the first US soldier I met: "Hey man, are you Sunni or Shi'i?", that was the first time I was asked this question. it is the arrogant American administration's neglect of the complex realities regarding post-Saddam Iraq that is still the first thing that must be blamed for all the bad things happening in Iraq.

Full testimony here.

Isn't this eerily familiar?

Some of previous American contributions to democracy in the Middle East, this is tragically funny:

"US and UK relations with Iran have a long history. Both states have been considered imperialist states by Iranians and have a long history of interference in Iran's internal affairs. In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Agreement between Russia and Britain divided Iran into spheres of influence, challenging Iran's moves toward independence. At the height of the Cold War, the administration of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a joint British-American operation to overthrow democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, in the pretext that his nationalist aspirations would lead to an eventual communist takeover. The information from CIA that became unclassified decades later proved that the only objective of this was to secure oil interests for the United States and Britain. The operation was code-named Operation Ajax. At first, the military coup seemed to fail, and the Shah fled the country. After widespread rioting -- and with help from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence services -- Mossadeq was defeated and the Shah returned to power, ensuring support for Western oil interests and snuffing the perceived and largely unfounded threat of communist expansion."

NOTE: If you're too stupid to figure it out (like the last time I posted a double-entendre post), the text tells the story in 1953, and the links tell it in 2003. you can just hover over the links to read what they really mean.

A good overview of Iraqi Kurdistan's "Democracy."

Is Iraqi Kurdistan A Good Ally?

Iraqi Review: Valley of the Wolves - Irak (Kurtlar Vadisi)

ex-Gilgamish once asked me to review this movie at the time of the Turkish incursions, I was willing to do so but the Turks didn't oblige by giving me the appropriate circumstances again, until today: They have launched a full-scale operation with a codename and all, so now is a good time to review the movie touted as the most expensive in Turkish cinema (10.2$ mil to make, made 26.7$, by comparison the most expensive Egyptian (and Arab) film took 4$ mil to make).

The movie shows its horrid premise as a nationalist propaganda piece right from the first frame, a Turkish officer writes to an old ex-Turkish intelligence friend about the shame and disgrace he felt when he was forced to walk out of their station somewhere in northern Iraq with a hood on their heads, which is based on an actual event apologized by Rumsfeld at the time called the Hood Event. Of course, the brave Turk takes annoying lengths in parading his pride and dignity before this takes place, after sealing the letter, he commits suicide, boo hoo.

the recipient of the letter is our brave hero, I forgot his name and I won't bother to look it up so I'll just call him Mr. Big Khasawi (Big Cojones), Abu Khasawi reads the letter, and instead of laughing his ass off at his pathetic pal who took his life for wearing hijab for five minutes ; he immediately hitchhikes to Iraq with 3 Turkish mofos to meet their destination, the super-villian Mr. Arrogant White Jesus Freak (played by Billy Zane, who's probably a registered democrat) who committed this horrible ass-rape of the great Turkish pride, which is only heard of in Turkey, of course.

I must admit that the only fun I had in this movie was watching the Americans get a share of their own poison, as an Arab who's frequently reduced to a stereotype in powerfully influential American films, I had the immense pleasure of watching the Americans here portrayed as nothing but cold, ruthless beasts with little regard for human life, the soldiers look dirty and sport funny degraded haircuts, there's also a Jewish doctor who specializes in stealing human organs (Yes, delicious guilty-pleasure anti-semitism! boo-hoo!) from corpses to sell them someplace else (too bored to concentrate where) and they're led by a glinting-eyes lunatic who believes in spreading the word of Jesus. Of course that stereotype is easier to refute than the Arabs in western media, but that's only because American culture is so recognizable ; it was really fun to watch Billy Zane holding children hostage like a lowly creature.

The problem is that the Turks don't stop there ; this film is an insult to everyone else as well, the Kurds are nothing but American stooges, while the others are helpless, idiotic sheep, only Mr. Khasawi seems to be holding his pants up as a human being. Just look at the picture, the amount of presence (and balls) this Turk has is just Subhan-Allah-unbelievable. The only other positive character is a religious sheik called Abdul-Rahman Kirkukli, an uber-respected sane-sage-in-crazy-world dude who persuades some pathetic Arab Jihadists about to behead a Western Journalism to drop their weapons and then teaches them the true meaning of Islam, it took me about 0.34 seconds to realize that this sheikh is Turkmen, and with a Turkmen named Kirkukli, the nasty Turkish intent is fully blazing here. I bet Barazani was pissed.

Even though Iraq and most of the Arab world was part of the Ottoman Empire for a long period of history, I must admit I know very little about Turks except for the Zagur chewing gums with collectible stickers we used to buy in our childhood (at the time they said it was an Israeli conspiracy and the gum caused sterility, well, I'll tell you if that's true when I get married), so I thought that this was a good chance to become familiar with the Pashas of yore and as a secular I wanted to learn more about the former Caliphate which did an 180 to secularism successfully, sadly, all I came out was the impression that Turks are flag-waving maniacs who think very smugly of themselves and believe they got the market cornered on the meaning of Islam. At the end of the film, the female hero, an Iraqi (Turkmen? her costumes are so weird, more like Indian if you ask me) whose husband was killed by the Piggy Americans and who wanted to become a suicide bomber meets with the Alpha-Male Khasawi who resuces her, together our zero-chemistry heroes kill the Nazionist Billy Zane but he kills the tender Iraqi before her Turkish savior gets to go all kissy on her. boo-hoo.

PROS: Americans look stupid. Thank you brothers in Islam. :D
CONS: Totally Turkish fist-pumping action flick, totally unbelievable in arrogance, at least Saving Private Ryan was believable.

I'd Rather Live The Lie

Noam Chomsky angry discourse on US politics and the disappearance of the subject of Iraq from the 2008 elections. While I don't agree with his rationale : Chomsky clearly blames the US for every crisis in the world, but it does ring true in many ways, especially his handling of the idiocy regarding the number of deaths, and how American hawks think they own the world and the Iraqi "unpeople"are just tools that can be magically made to do as required in the end.

There's no doubt in my mind that the US knew Saddam Hussein was just a tired, petty old geezer who just wanted to grow old and die in his private ranch, Iraq. They clearly have not a care for either Kurdish or Shia oppression and are probably cursing the day they listened to people like al-Chalabi, who explained to them that Iraqis are freedom-loving people with a clear sense of nationhood that only need to be rescued from the cruel dictator, and not a collection of sects still living in a medieval mentality where that dictator was the only force holding it together, a country where most of the population would listen to their God's representatives, the Ayatollahs, before anyone else. We all knew the stuff about WMDs were lies exacerbated as an excuse, however, fed up with living long days in backwardness, we [well, Kurds, Shias, and me with a few ignorant Sunnis who didn't know what Iraq really is] cheered for that lie because we thought Saddam was the only reason stopping us from a modern advanced country.


Today, after looking the ugly truth in the eye. I'd rather curl up and die in the comforting fact that Iraq will not be a modern country because my scapegoat, Saddam is suffocating it than realize the fact that a solid "Iraq" isn't there to exist in the first place.

John Kerry Explains Sunni-Shiite Unity Myth

This contains some grade-A bullshit, but there are also some very true points, everything colored in red is bullshit, and the valid points are in blue, my comments are in italic bold.

"I sat with the governor of Anbar, the sheikhs, and I asked this question to them I said point blank: Is there anything pressuring you or forcing you to make a decision tomorrow about reconciling between Shia and Sunni and he looked at me and smiled and said no, not really. They're all playing a game, they're jockeying for power, they're jockeying for the oil revenue, they're jockeying for the ultimate confrontation (Kerry was talking specifically about a confrontation in modern-day Iraq, although it serves to remind you how far off Sunnis and Shias are religiously and not just politically) which has come to either peacefully or not, you know, in another way, in this struggle between Shia and Sunni, which incidentally ladies and gentlemen goes back to 682, there's a wonderful book out there called the Shia Revival (Shia biased obviously) by Vali Nasr (Iranian) and it traces the history of this struggle. and it goes back really to when Ali (not Ali, his son Hussein) the grandson of the Prophet Muhammed, who was slaughtered in the desert, they cut off their heads, took their heads back to Najaf (actually Kufa, Najaf didn't exist, but we can forgive that cuz Kufa is now a city in Najaf province) and posted them and then they took them to Damascus. and you know, ever since then, there's been this struggle, and guess how many there were in the desert fighting with Hussein, 72, does the number 72 ring a bell with you? That was the beginning of martyrdom (hilarious) and the whole theory now that if you kill yourself you'll go to paradise, 72 virgins are waiting for you and so on and so forth, (tear-laughter!) that's where it all began. This fight has been going on for a long time folks and we just stepped in the middle of it. Only what we did, was uncork a corker, because we took 20% (Kerry makes it seem as if Sunnis were always 20%. Historically we don't know about Sunni-Shia distribution prior to the Mongol invasion, but southern Iraqi bedouin tribes only converted to Shiism 200 years ago, since then that rate has been growing - as compared to the 60% figure today, a British 1919 census put Shia population at 53%) of the population that used to run this county, and the 60% Shia that never could and now the 60% Shia have the ballet votes which you know they could never have achieved by the sword, and the 20% who were running the place for the past 1300 years (right but in a wrong context, the Sunni rule was often interrupted by Persian Shia intermissions (Buwyahids, Saffavids, and partly Today) and there's an importance in the fact that Shias were for most of their history after the occultation of Mahdi in a passive standby state until he re-emerges, hence the lack of resistance) are saying: wait a minute, something's wrong ; and that's what's going on. You can't resolve it with our military. "

Link (Real, scroll to 27 min)

Kissinger thinks (or at least he pretends to think) that Iran has dreams of rekindling old Persian dreams of domination. He also says Bush will be looked upon more favorably in less than 50 years. I agree with Kissinger in that a cut and run withdrawal of US forces from Iraq would greatly empower radical Islam, not to mention an official kick-start of the civil war, but I would further elaborate that it would empower both [Sunni] and [Shia] radicalism, two very different components with highly different, and mutually hostile, objectives.

This is going to be huge. For some reason I can't wait for the civil war to really begin, I'm tired of the fruitless Green Zone foreplay.

The Myth of The Surge

Listen to Nir Rosen, this guy has got it nailed:

But such political maneuvers don't really matter in Iraq. Here, street politics trump any illusory laws passed in the safety of the Green Zone. As the Awakening gains power, Al Qaeda lies dormant throughout Baghdad, the Mahdi Army and other Shiite forces prepare for the next battle, and political assassinations and suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence.

Review: Shooting War

This webcomic-turned-graphic novel about the Iraq War follows the misadventures of vlogger Jimmy Burns, after a freak coverage of an explosion in New York places him at the forefront of shock journalism, he is hired by an exploitative news network and sent to Iraq, where he finds himself submerged in a cesspool of "Jesus and Jihad maniacs" left and right.

I have heard of this one casually on TV, and I have so far read the unedited free eleven chapters online on the website, as an Iraqi, I came naturally expecting some gloss oversights in the depiction of my beloved Mesopotamia, after all, the comic would most likely not try to burden its intended audience with unnecessary details about the culture and nature of the conflict, and this being a comic book, exaggeration and tampering in favor of action and excitement is the norm, right?

Wrong. First of all, this is not a comic book ; it's a graphic novel. And graphic novels as such, exemplified by the Pulitzer-winning standards set forth by Art Spiegelman's Maus, stem from the their ability to present somber realism in an abstract perspective, indeed, the Iraq war is not devoid of elements worthy of a frenzy "clusterfuck" narration as the comic calls it, but rather unfortunately, this novel fails on the single most important area where it could count.

Like many tongue-in-cheek works about war (think Joe Haldeman's The Forever War), the only dialog this novel knows is one steeped in deadpan humor, the depiction of "Greenest Place of all of Muhammed's Green Earth" is dystopia as best as it can get, there are a lot of interesting depictions of developments in blogging, media, American presidency (John McCain), and Tom Cruise's personal life, this is all well and dandy so far.

Unlike the guys who wrote this comic, I've reserved an hour and researched them, the Internet says that Anthony Lappe, the main showrunner, claims he drew upon his experiences while he worked in the Iraq war zone, one thing's for sure, this Lappe guy doesn't get out much ; for a novel that's supposed to cut the bullshit to a minimum, this effort is laughable. Okay, so I might be willing to forgive the stereotypical condescending portrayal of every Iraqi with a traditional attire like some Gulf country, hell, even the commonplace Hollywod insult will go by me just fine ("Ice is civillization", declared proudly by the uber-cool Burns to a poor Iraqi receptionist, only he's wearing a Pakistani outfit :) ), add to that the only good Iraqi character is the educated Westernized woman, another ancient "compromise" character right out of the "hey, I didn't say you're all bad"; but this "scary smart" novel started to make me laugh for all the unintended reasons at the horribly ignorant and contrived plot ; apparently, as soon as he sets foot in Iraq, our hero is kidnapped by a terrorist group near Anbar, called the Swords of Muhammed, led by Che Guevara with a Keffiyeh, your run-of-the-mill megalomaniac ultra-villian, this is all okay, except for one huge error ; this group is Shiite! Har Har, okay, let's forgive this minor slip for the sake of the general drive, but by the time you are bombared by lines such as : "The Badr militia is going to target the Green Zone with Qassam rockets." You start to question the intelligence of all those comments that praise this "real as it gets" drama, okay, I'll be even more considerate of your South Carolina Teen ideas about the world and would accept all this if there was any good story in sight, but there's nothing here you haven't seen before, the only appeal of this story lies at its ability to depict reality, when you see that it's nothing but a random exploitation of current events written by somebody who clearly knows nothing about the topic, you only sigh and wonder if Americans will ever learn from their mistakes, this comic clearly commits the same error Dubya and his hungry compatriots it so loathes did, it think it knows everything. If that's all not bad enough, it is clearly Islamophobic, what is there to say about a comic which believes that both Shia and Sunni Muslims are a single monolithic entity that so feverishly wants to spread its religion over the evil West so that every woman and child are part of its holy jihad. Indeed, those stereotypes were as much contributed to by our beloved terrorists than it did by the west, but you'd hope for something much more real from this "all-out" novel than frustrated Sunni Moroccans recruited from France to carry out an operation for the Shiite Badr brigade with Iranian passports?! okay, so they are really part of the Swords of Muhammed group, unfortunately, that one is Shia too, and it operates in Anbar and condemns the massacres of Haditha, Najaf, and Falluja. So much for your clever twist, and novel.