WPR Blog | Commentary Week In Review

March 19, 2010

Browse by Regions and/or Topics Browse Regions & Issues

Commentary Week In Review

Guy Taylor | Bio | 08 Sep 2007

The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday. Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outlets worldwide, the column highlights notable op-eds on major issues from the past week.

The Stage Is Set

With the much anticipated September report due this week by U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the status of the Iraq war, there was little surprise last week's opinion pages were dominated by claims of what's gone wrong, what's gone right and what the U.S. should do now in Iraq.

Leading the charge was Madeleine K. Albright, who homed in on the first of those three, writing in the Sept. 6 Washington Post that in Iraq, "the list of missions that were tried on but didn't fit includes: protection from weapons of mass destruction, creating a model democracy in the Arab world, punishing those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and stopping terrorists from catching the next plane to New York. The latest mission, linked to the 'surge' of troops this year, was to give Iraqi leaders the security and maneuvering room needed to make stabilizing political arrangements -- which they have thus far shown little interest in doing."

The only option for improving things now is to pursue "coordinated international assistance," wrote Albright who compared Iraq to Eastern Europe and asserted that the "Balkans are at peace today through the joint efforts of the United States, the European Union and the United Nations -- all of which worked to help moderate leaders inside the region. A similar strategy should have been part of our Iraq policy from the outset but has never been seriously attempted."

Posing the question to herself of whether such an initiative is viable, Albright offered the following:

Perhaps. The United Nations has pledged to become more involved. Europe's new leaders -- led by Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Gordon Brown -- understand their region's stake in Iraq's future and seem willing to assist. The Saudi, Jordanian and Syrian governments all view Iraqi instability as a profound security threat. Turkish and Kurdish representatives recently signed an agreement to cooperate along their troubled border. Iran is the wildest of cards, but it would be unlikely to isolate itself from a broad international program aimed at reconciliation.

Al-Qaida In Iraq

Frederick W. Kagan aimed to counter Iraq war critics in an article published online from the Sept. 10 edition of The Weekly Standard, which focused on "al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)" and how to defeat it.

Kagan explained that "because the members of AQI are overwhelmingly Iraqis -- often thugs and misfits recruited or dragooned into the organization (along with some clerics and more educated leaders) -- it is argued that AQI is not really part of the global al Qaeda movement ... it is said, the war in Iraq is not part of the global war on terror: The 'real' al Qaeda -- Osama bin Laden's band, off in its safe havens in the Pakistani tribal areas of Waziristan and Baluchistan -- is the group to fight."

"Over the past four years, the war in Iraq has provided abundant evidence to dispute these assertions," wrote Kagan, who argued that:

AQI is not simply a local franchise of the global al Qaeda concept. Its leaders participate in the development of the global ideology ... It sends aid to the global movement and asks for and receives aid from it. In particular, it receives an estimated 40 to 80 foreign fighters each month, who are recruited by al Qaeda leaders throughout the Muslim world, helped in their training and travel by al Qaeda facilitators, and, once in Iraq, controlled by AQI. Finally, as previously noted, the non-Iraqis who are its principal leaders were part of the global al Qaeda movement before coming to Iraq. There should be no question in anyone's mind that Al Qaeda In Iraq is a vital and central part of al Qaeda, that it interacts with the global movement, shares its aims and practices, and will assist it as much as it can to achieve their common goals.

"AQI -- and therefore the larger al Qaeda movement -- has suffered a stunning defeat in Iraq over the past six months. It has lost all of its urban strongholds and is engaged in a desperate attempt to reestablish a foothold even in the countryside," argued Kagan, who asserted that "AQI can again become a serious threat if America chooses to let it get up off the mat."

The Partitioning of Iraq

A third take on Iraq was presented by Charles Krauthammer, who asserted in the Sept. 7 Washington Post that Washington has "not caught up to the next reality: Iraq is being partitioned -- and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up."

Krauthammer explained:

1. The Sunni provinces. The essence of our deal with the Anbar tribes and those in Diyala, Salahuddin and elsewhere is this: You end the insurgency and drive out al-Qaeda, and we assist you in arming and policing yourselves. We'd like you to have an official relationship with the Maliki government, but we're not waiting on Baghdad.

2. The Shiite south. This week the British pulled out of Basra, retired to their air base and essentially left the southern Shiites to their own devices -- meaning domination by the Shiite militias now fighting each other for control.

3. The Kurdish north. Kurdistan has been independent in all but name for a decade and a half.

"As partition proceeds, the central government will necessarily be very weak," Krauthammer wrote. "Its reach may not extend far beyond Baghdad itself, becoming a kind of de facto fourth region with a mixed Sunni-Shiite population."

He concluded that a breakup of Iraq "is not the best outcome, but it is far better than the savage and dangerous dictatorship we overthrew. And infinitely better than what will follow if we give up in mid-surge and withdraw -- and allow the partitioning of Iraq to dissolve into chaos."

A Few Others

Here's a short list of a few others among the more than a dozen op-eds on Iraq from the week:

The State of Iraq Update Chart
By Jason Campbell, Michael O'Hanlon and Amy Unikewicz in the Sept. 4 New York Times.
How I Didn't Dismantle Iraq's Army
By L. Paul Bremer III in the Sept. 6 New York Times.
The Least Bad Choice
By Roger Cohen in the Sept. 6 New York Times (TimesSelect).
Getting out of Iraq
By Jeff Danziger in the Sept. 4 Boston Globe.
The Tide Is Turning in Iraq
By Kimberly Kagan in the Sept. 4 Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
By Colin Kahl, Shawn Brimley in a Foreign Policy September Web Exlusive.

India's Middle Class Failure

India was another topic that reared its head last week, with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad's September 2007 Prospect Magazine article claiming that India's 200 million-strong middle class is largely uninterested in politics or social reform -- and until it begins to engage in such, India is destined to suffer from a lop-sided modernization.

A few excerpts from Ram-Prasad's indepth piece painted a picture of India often ignored by the English-language media:

The seven Indian Institutes of Technology rank near the top of global surveys, and job offers to graduates from the Indian Institutes of Management rival those to graduates of the famous US business schools; yet a third of the country is still illiterate. Three hundred million Indians live on less than $1 a day—a quarter of the world's utterly poor—yet since 1985, more than 400m (out of a total population of 1bn) have risen out of relative poverty—to $5 a day—and another 300m will follow over the next two decades if the economy continues to grow at over 7 per cent a year.

...

Ten years after the buzz caused by the nuclear tests, the middle classes take India's new status for granted; they simply assume it is India's due to be treated as the "equal" of the US and the rest, and move on to talk of economic opportunities. This commitment to their own idea of India and their central role in its economic rise makes the middle classes sure of themselves. But at the same time, their sense of citizenship is weak: they do not, on the whole, extend a sense of solidarity to the poor; they often do not acknowledge the role of the state in their own rise or its capacity to solve any of the country's problems; and they are, in general, politically apathetic.

...

Prosperous India has not yet provided sufficient social infrastructure to make the country less brutal for those at the bottom. This is partly because the state apparatus for tax collection was for a long time a shambles, and evasion the norm. (One welcome consequence of liberalisation and rapid growth is that the software and human resources for effective collection have improved.) But the economist Nimai Mehta argues that another reason for the poor fiscal performance of the state is the Indian people's ingrained preference for private rather than public provision, a pattern evident since colonial times.

Hyderbad's Terror

An alternative look at India was offered by Sudha Ramachandran, who wrote in the Sept. 7 Asia Times of a complex cocktail of realities emerging in the Indian economic powerhouse of Hyderbad, where massive success in recent years "has attracted engineers, scientists, management consultants and students like a magnet."

"Intelligence officials say its contribution to India's growing economic muscle is also its appeal to terrorists," wrote Ramachandran, who cited twin bomb blasts that tore through an amusement park and an eatery in Hyderbad on August 25 as the second example in three months of the city is being "targeted by terrorists."

"Hyderabad ranks third among Indian cities (outside strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast) in terms of the number of attacks it has sustained over the past five years," he wrote. "Since 2002, 14 blasts have killed 258 people in Mumbai, while Delhi has seen seven blasts claiming 142 lives in the same period. Hyderabad has witnessed four attacks since 2005, the first in October that year, when a suicide attack was carried out at the Special Task Force headquarters in the city.

Ramachandran claimed that Pakistan-based jihadist organizations such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) "regard Hyderabad as Muslim land (about 40% of the city's 7 million people are Muslim), belonging to the ummah (Islamic community) and in need of 'liberation' from 'Hindu rule,' and that the organization's laders "have been setting up sleeper cells in Hyderabad since 1995, according to intelligence officials."

"While Hyderabad's global profile was no doubt a factor for whoever masterminded the terror attacks, there are several other considerations that have made it an attractive target," he wrote. "Hyderabad's Old City, where a quarter of the city's population live in acute poverty, has pockets that are entirely Muslim and others with mixed Hindu-Muslim populations."

The Commentary Week In Review draws from links aggregated every weekday morning in WPR's Media Roundup, which you can receive by email for free by registering now .