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winterbadgerConfusion over who's making the decisions.
from the BBC.
Why is a political party, let alone one sponsored by the US and not popular among Iraqis, setting up the tribunal to try Saddam Hussein?
This report from CNN says the governing council, not the INC, set up the tribunal, but who knows which is correct?
And why does the US place so much faith in the INC, which is run by people who haven't lived in Iraq for decades? This is like the Allies putting Louis XVIII on the throne of France after they overthrew Napoleon.
A spokesman for the pro-American Iraqi National Congress has given details of the new tribunal being set up to try former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi National Congress has named a general director of the tribunal, seven judges and several prosecutors.
(snip)
"Lawyer Salem Chalabi was named president of the court," said Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Mr Chalabi is a US-educated lawyer and nephew of the head of the INC, Ahmed Chalabi.
During Saddam Hussein's rule, the INC was a fractious opposition group of Iraqi exiles. It has received funding from the US for much of the period since the 1991 Gulf War.
Within in Iraq, it has limited support and credibility, partly because it is so close to the American administration.
from the BBC.
Why is a political party, let alone one sponsored by the US and not popular among Iraqis, setting up the tribunal to try Saddam Hussein?
This report from CNN says the governing council, not the INC, set up the tribunal, but who knows which is correct?
And why does the US place so much faith in the INC, which is run by people who haven't lived in Iraq for decades? This is like the Allies putting Louis XVIII on the throne of France after they overthrew Napoleon.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-21 11:21 am (UTC)Really? Cool! One of my friends/colleagues is getting a graduate degree in international law; I'm sure he must read you pretty regularly.
Now I guess it depends on how you define the Governing Council. Right now it is a combination of the CPA and INC.
Not really. The Governing Council includes a *lot* more than the INC (http://www.cpa.gov/government/governing_council.html). The Kurdish leaders Talibani and Barzani are on the GC; there's a rep from SCIRI, a rep from the Iraqi Communist Party. I'm just disturbed by the appointment of Chalabi's nephew to run the tribunal, as it suggests that Ahmed Chalabi continues to have influence with the CPA out of all balance with his popular support or his value to the US.
The INC that exists now is not the INC of the early 1990s, an umbrella group that included all anti-Saddam dissident groups. That shrank and felt apart in the mid to late 90s. What's left is a "political party" built around Ahmed Chalabi and his personal clients.
The INC is not disliked *because* they're working with us. They're disliked because of who they are and what they stand for. Most people who actually had to live in Iraq during the Saddam era have contempt for Chalabi and the INC because they claim to speak for Iraqis while being a group of fat-cat emigres who didn't have to suffer the way others did. They've been sitting in Paris and London and New York dining on the Pentagon's tab and doing dodgy business deals that made them rich, while ordinary Iraqis lived through the first war, through the UN and US sanctions, and the constant attacks of the US military (which were intended to punish Saddam and his military-security apparatus, but which often ended up killing and wounding a lot of innocent bystanders).
The INC has cost us hundreds of millions of dollars, given us largely useless "intelligence"--which almost certainly led to the false expectations of WMD and a joyful, trouble-free postwar cakewalk of an occupation--and is wildly unpopular, while all too often we seem to give very short shrift to all the other opposition groups (other than the Kurds) that were originally contained under the INC umbrella as well as many others responsive to actual constituencies inside the country.
There've been alternatives for some time, and we've had a year to make direct contact with more. But Chalabi has the ear of Wolfowitz and Perle, and that's apparently what counts. If the handover of power on June 30 is just a coronation of Chalabi instead of the result of attmpts to create an actual representative council, it's going to be Ngo Dinh Diem all over again.
BTW, I think the analogy to the Tories is a bit flawed; the Tories (or Loyalists) were a faction in a civil war that supported the established government, not a group of expats who come home to rule on the back of an army of foreign invaders. I still think my French emigre analogy is a better fit :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-21 11:32 am (UTC)I think in this case we're both right. They're disliked for being fat cat collabotators who don't have any clue what the common man is like. ;)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-21 01:03 pm (UTC)