'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Bush telephone, Iraq, militias

In many countries, "Bush Telephone" is a term used for the informal but rapid spreading of wild and crazy rumors.

I just read this AP story, by Jennifer Loven from Washington, that tells us that

President Bush spoke to seven Iraqi political leaders on Saturday in an effort to defuse the sectarian violence that threatens the goal of a self-sufficient Iraq free of U.S. military involvement.

The lucky recipients of these calls were PM Ibrahim Jaafari, SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim (here once again described as "the country's most powerful Shiite politician" - !), National Assembly president Hajim al-Hassani, Tariq al-Hashemi (of the main Sunni coalition, the Iraqi Accordance Front), Iyad Allawi, Pres. Jalal Talabani, and KDP head Massoud Barzani.

Loven wrote that a spokseman for Bush's National Security Council, Frederick Jones, told reporters,

"The president congratulated Iraq's leaders for their strong leadership and their efforts to calm the situation and for their statements against violence and for restraint"...

Bush "encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq's communities," Jones said.

... Bush pressed each of the leaders to find a way to restart U.S.-backed negotiations among Shia, Sunni and Kurdish leaders to fashion a permanent government. The largest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament [the Iraqi Accordance Front] said Saturday it will reconsider its decision to pull out of the talks if al-Jaafari follows through on promises that the government will act to ease the crisis.

"The president underscored his support for Iraq's efforts to build a government of national unity," Jones said.

Bush expressed his condolences for Wednesday's bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra and the cycle of retaliatory attacks that followed, Jones said.

...The White House chose to focus on the positive and disputed that there had been a resumption in violence [!].

I'd be really intrigued to know (a) How Bush knew what to say on these calls-- and what his mental picture was of each of the people he was speaking to; (b) what his mental picture is of the situation in Iraq today; and (c) how these seven hard-pressed Iraqi pols each reacted to the call he received.

On a related note, I see that since Wednesday, one "big story" in much of the MSM has become, "Gosh, look at how important those Shiite militias are!" People are writing this story with a real sense of "discovery" of this (perhaps to them) previously unknown fact.

Perhaps they should have been reading JWN more closely all along. In the days after the fall of Baghdad to the US invasion forces-- as today-- the most burning issue in most of Iraq was the complete absence of any sense of public security or personal safety... Back on April 12, 2003, I wrote here that,

People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form--whatever form it may be!-- of public order. {Okay, I was still using bold then... Sorry!]

The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so...

In the north-- and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense-- the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order...

In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.

Actually, the whole of that post makes eerily prescient reading today. (Also, this one, and this one from May 2003.)

I wrote the first of those three posts, I remember, while I was sitting in a hotel room in Arusha, Tanzania, on my mission to gather info about the international court established there for Rwanda... And now, here I sit in a hotel room in Jerusalem, gathering info for my upcoming pieces about the situation here in Israel/Palestine. But wherever I am, Iraq still somehow cries out for my concern.