Iraq Handover has happened.

After the army of the new Second Republic started shooting at Parisian insurgents, Louis Phillippe, in exile, made some remark about how his troops had not been able to fire upon the people. An 'emergency law' enacted and enforced by a 'sovereign' Iraqi government has a better chance of being seen as legitimate than one issued by the coalition, given that most Iraqis would welcome more scurity.

BUSH: We'll answer a couple of questions.
Dick, you got a question? OK, why don't you ask it.
QUESTION: Mr. President, Iraq's new prime minister has talked in
recent days about the possibility of imposing martial law there as
a way of restoring security.
Is that something that you think a new, emerging government
should do, and particularly with the use of U.S. forces, who would
have to be instrumental in doing it?
BUSH: You know, Prime Minister Allawi has, you know, fought
tyranny. He's a guy that stood up to Saddam Hussein. He's a
patriot. And every conversation I've had with him has been one that
recognizes human liberty, human rights. He's a man who's willing to
risk his life for a democratic future for Iraq.
Having said that, you know, he may take tough security measures
to deal with Zarqawi. And he may have to. Zarqawi is a guy who
beheads people on TV. He's a person that orders suiciders to kill
women and children.
And so, Prime Minister Allawi, as the head of the sovereign
government, may decide he's going to have to take some tough
measures to deal with a brutal, cold-blooded killer. And our job is
to help the Iraqis stand up forces that are able to deal with these
thugs.

How long has Saddam got left to live now?

A leading British charity has accused American and British administrators in Iraq of failing to account for $4 billion in oil revenue. Christian Aid has
produced a report “Iraq: The missing billions”, to coincide with a US led international conference in Madrid aimed at securing money to rebuild the country.

Missing Billions

The reports co-authors, Dominic Nutt and John Davison spent two months working on their findings. The report reveals that billions of dollars of Iraqi oil
money, transferred to the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), has effectively disappeared.

Christian Aid has only been able to account for $1 billion of the total $5 billion raised from Iraqi oil sales.

John Davison said that serious questions need to be asked about the accountability of the CPA. ‘’This is money that belongs to the Iraqi people, and it’s
money that should be used to improve the lives of the Iraqi people. Who is deciding where this money is spent? There has to be a system in place that makes
people accountable and above suspicion of wrong doing,’’ said Davison.

We don't know that yet. People, and Americans especially, are too prone to only look at the short term.

To put it in footballing terms, this could be a 2-3 loss or this could be a 0-8 loss for the Iraqis. One outcome is prefereable to the other, IMHO. If Iraq becomes a permanent failed-state breeding ground for terrorists it will not be academic to the region or to us. It may well be ironic but that ain't gonna get electricity to hospitals and schools, give jobs, provide justice, etc...
If the country (understandably) broke up, the chances of a major regional conflict would escalate.

Re your Dad, whom else should try Saddam? The UN? The Arab League?

Yes, but instead of a big scary bald Italian guy taking no shit as the referee, we're stuck with a scary bald American like Cheney taking no advice from anyone. This sinks my hopes somewhat.

http://www.iht.com/articles/526920.htm

Ruling in the case of American-born detainee Yaser Esam Hamdi, Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor said the court has ‘‘made clear that a state of war is not a blank
check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.’’

Congress did give the president authority to hold Hamdi, a four-justice plurality of
the court said, but that does not cancel out the basic right to a day in court.

The court ruled similarly in the case of about 600 foreign-born men held indefinitely
at a U.S. Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The men can use American courts
to contest their captivity and treatment, the high court said.

x-post re the Gitmo stuff, it looks like sort of a mixed result for both sides, doesn't it?

What a fucking surprise for this court.

Of course the irony is that Iraq (which is Arabic for 'deeply rooted' haha) should perhaps not exist at all. The British put together three Ottoman provinces for convenience, having at first wanted Mosul only for the oil. An independent Kurdistan would destabilize both Iran and Turkey, though both probably deserve it as much as the Kurds deserve to have a homeland. The Sunni could glom onto Jordan or Syria. Given the hatred the Gulf and Arabian Sunni have for the Shia, the South would become a defacto protectorate of Iran.

as long as the coalition troops are there, acting with impunity vis-a-vis the new iraqi government, there is no sovereignty to be transferred. i am disappointed that all the news agencies, from fox to cnn to npr, talk about a "transfer of sovereignty." "transfer of nominal control" is more like it.

orbit: exactly.

im sure the kurds could give a shit about what goes on south of them, but they have their own issues with saddam fucking with the composition of their capital due to arab settlements in mosul as well.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/06/28/international/28letter.jpg

Personally I think it's an excuse to make the occupation more severe. They can say "it's not us, it's the, uh, Iraqis" like we did when they invaded Chalabi's house.

p.s. I keep using "we" when talking about the United States and it really pisses me off, I keep going back and correcting it

L. Paul Bremer arrived here almost 14 months ago with a seemingly limitless reserve of energy and a mission unparalleled in U.S. diplomatic history: to remake a nation by using near-dictatorial powers.

When he left Iraq on Monday after surrendering authority to an interim government, it was with a somber air of exhaustion. There was no farewell address to the Iraqi people or a celebratory airport sendoff. Instead of a festive handover ceremony on Wednesday, the date set for the transfer, an improvised event occupied five minutes on a Monday morning.

The secrecy and brevity of the ceremony were in keeping with the precarious future of the Iraq that Bremer built. Setting out with a vision to transform Iraq into a model of Western democracy and capitalism for the rest of the Arab world, he has left behind a country freed from a tyrannical past but also with grave security threats, a sputtering economy and an appointed government with little popular support.

The stealth of Bremer's final act was occasioned by security concerns that have bedeviled the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq. With insurgent activity far from contained by 138,000 U.S. troops, diplomats and reconstruction specialists have curtailed travel outside Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone. U.S.-funded projects, from repairing power plants to seminars on democracy, have been put on hold. Even Bremer, in his last months in the country, gave up the vigorous barnstorming he loved as occupier in chief.

Any public celebration of U.S. achievements here would have been a target not only for insurgents, but for questioning of Bremer and the CPA's unfinished business, from promises to double electrical power generation to training thousands more police officers.

Over the course of a five-minute ceremony in Baghdad, the country changed governments. But the violence threatening the American project to bring a stable democracy to Iraq continued; while the ceremony was being held in the capital, a roadside bomb exploded near a military convoy in this city 35 miles to the northeast.

The adjustments contemplated by U.S. military commanders over the next six months, a potentially volatile period before Iraqis elect a government, involve changes in tone more than substance. Taken together, commanders say, the changes will turn the 138,000 U.S. troops, the chief guarantors of Iraq's security, into something resembling a police force called in to assist the fledgling Iraqi police and national guard.

But military commanders acknowledge those changes will be difficult to impose on troops fighting a skilled guerrilla insurgency. Nighttime patrols and intelligence gathering by Army units stationed around the country are vital to the counterinsurgency effort, commanders said.

Local Iraqi officials have asked the U.S. troops to cease the provocative military patrols -- known as "reconnaissance by fire" missions because they are intended to draw insurgent attacks -- and remain on two bases outside the Baqubah unless needed. U.S. commanders here understand that if they refuse, they could undermine the new government's independence in the eyes of the ordinary Iraqis.

"We firmly believe this is going from a role of partnership and occupation -- but clearly occupation -- to one of partnership and support," said Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade . "To do a major operation, we will have to consult the civic authority. We could still make the kind of errors that push people toward the insurgency."

Iraq will have all the formal powers of a sovereign state: the ability to appoint and dismiss ministers; to allocate budgets; to conduct negotiations with foreign countries. But it is not clear what will happen if the Americans disagree with Iraqi decisions. Even though the United States has the leverage of troops and billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts, Iraqi complaints of American interference could embarrass an administration eager to prove to the world that Iraqis are now in charge.

A host of issues remain outstanding. Despite an agreement to consult on military matters, Iraq and the United States lack a formal accord governing the status of foreign forces and are relying on an American occupation directive covering several important matters.

American officials continue to hold Iraqi prisoners, among them Saddam Hussein, although the new Iraqi government has said it will take custody of him soon. How many other prisoners will be handed over is not clear.

And although Iraqi officials and legal scholars say that Iraq has the right to change the occupation-era rules, American military officials say that some of those governing military matters are binding. It is also not clear how Iraqi leaders would rescind other orders if they want to, since Iraq has no formal legislature.

Administration officials say the United States will have to exercise its influence tactfully and quietly.

Yet for all the quiet celebration of the moment, Mr. Bush's mission is far from accomplished. The transfer represents yet another new start for Mr. Bush in Iraq. It is the president's last, best hope of turning the page, of refocusing America and the world on the possibilities of remaking a broken nation, and of moving beyond the gruesome images of a star-crossed occupation. Several of his own advisers, in their more candid moments, admit they do not know whether that is still possible.

If Mr. Bush's accomplishments in Iraq are judged on the events of the past 14 months, he has clearly succeeded in only one of his tasks: dismantling a tyrannical government. The so-far fruitless search for unconventional weapons — the primary justification for invading Iraq — undermined his credibility, making what Mr. Bush described as a war of necessity appear to have been one of choice. His argument that a change of rule in Iraq would quell terrorism is similarly questioned, undercut by a rewritten State Department assessment that now concedes an increase in terrorist incidents. The attacks on American troops in Iraq were not part of the count.

And it will be years, or even decades, Mr. Bush himself says, before anyone knows if the war in Iraq plants any seeds of democratic reform in the Middle East.

Yet Mr. Bush is gambling that the transition of formal sovereignty to the Iraqis will change the dynamic of the American intervention in Iraq, and with it the terms by which the Bush presidency is judged, not only on Election Day in November but also by history. His aim is to push doubts about the wisdom of the war and the bitter occupation into the past, and turn attention to the issue of where Iraq goes from here. That task was further complicated Monday by the Supreme Court's repudiation of the administration's insistence that the president alone could determine the fate of enemy combatants captured in the fight against terrorism.

But Iraq's fortunes and Mr. Bush's own are inextricably linked, the polls strongly suggest. And so Iraq strategy and campaign strategy have become linked as well.

One senior White House official said the other day that as soon as Mr. Bush's team came to understand that the occupation was "detested" by Iraqis, Mr. Bush and his aides decided to turn over formal sovereignty as quickly as possible. The idea is to remove the American forces as a target and force the insurgents to face off against other Iraqis, in the hope that the Iraqi people themselves — to defend a nation they now control — will then rise to crush the enemy within.

This last paragraph is of interest, in that it seems to be the first (however couched in anonymity) acknowledgment that the White House realized how poorly they were being looked upon there.

Although he broke a habit of months in his last days here by giving a series of interviews to American reporters, his discretion, to the last, meant that Americans wanting to know his innermost thoughts on his tenure here will probably have to wait for the book.

In the interviews, including two meetings with The New York Times late last week, Mr. Bremer seemed intent on bolstering the flagging confidence of many here and in the United States that the American enterprise can recover from the blows of the insurgency and lead to the creation of a stable, democratically governed Iraq. That has been his mantra through the months that the war has worsened.

But for all his professed belief that matters will get better now that Iraq is governed by Iraqis again, an undercurrent of caution and uncertainty showed through at several points in the interview. "Of course," he said at one point, "the future, as Yogi Berra might have said, is hard to know."

Ironically, considering the criticism directed at Mr. Bremer for his decree last May disbanding Mr. Hussein's 400,000-man army, Mr. Bremer returned repeatedly to Iraq's critical need to build up its own armed forces. It is an undertaking that gained fresh urgency with mutinies and desertions involving one of the first battalions of the new army, many regional police forces and elements of the newly formed Iraqi Civil Defense Force under the challenge of the uprisings that exploded in April in Falluja and several cities across southern Iraq.

"I think we'll win the war, and we'll win it as we get more and more Iraqis standing up and fighting, and as we proceed on the second pillar, which is getting an Iraqi government," Mr. Bremer said. But later in the interview, asked whether he thought the American military commitment here could end with a Vietnam-like withdrawal, he replied: "You can certainly draw any kind of scenarios you want. I think it will all depend on what happens with security."

U.S. commanders on the ground say they plan to continue conducting patrols, raids and other operations unless the brass tells them otherwise. It is unlikely that the Americans will even consult the Iraqis if they have a chance to capture or kill major figures in the insurgency.

"Moving from an occupation force to a sovereign nation - we haven't done that very often," said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, operational chief of the U.S.-led foreign force in Iraq. "(There's) a whole lot of art involved with it."

"Each commander really likes his battle space to be his," Metz said. "And this is going to be really challenging because we're going to run a parallel effort, and we've got to coordinate between the two."

Even if U.S. miltiary officers are doing the same things now that sovereignty has been handed back to Iraqis, they might find it more complicated. Commanders who ran operations at will throughout the country now must navigate Iraqi political sensitivities -- without the benefit of any agreement spelling out their rights and responsibilities.

In the longer term, Monday's events also underscore the importance of another U.S. effort, which has been lagging -- properly training and equipping Iraqi security forces to take the place of Americans and other foreign troops. The success of that mission will help determine whether the new interim government can organize elections early next year, and hand power to a representative government.

Col. Robert B. Abrams, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, said he will continue coordinating with Iraq forces as he battles Shiite militiamen in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. But he does not expect to have to ask Iraqis for permission.

"It's not going to cramp my style," he said.

As for conservatism today, Mr. Buckley said there was a growing debate on the right about how the war in Iraq squared with the traditional conservative conviction that American foreign policy should seek only to protect its vital interests.

"With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago," Mr. Buckley said. "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

Asked whether the growth of the federal government over the last four years diminished his enthusiasm for Mr. Bush, he reluctantly acknowledged that it did. "It bothers me enormously," he said. "Should I growl?"

Last point is more general -- still, interesting stuff to hear.

So, dead pool on Saddam now?

Please for to explain 'deadpool'?

Oh good. I hope there is more of it. So is it via the website now or...?

Dead pool: taking bets as to the demise of known people, when and how or the like. Usually done with celebrities but in this case this seems much more rollicking, and the payoffs could be made in, oh, a week maybe?

VF not available on line.

Scene: said potential trial

AL-VYSHINSKY: "So, dog, justify yourself."

HUSSEIN: "Oh, you mean I can tell you about all those secret dealings with the US and everything now? Can I call in Rumsfeld as a witness?"

US CENTRAL COMMAND REPRESENTATIVE: *polite cough*

ALLAWI: "NO FURTHER QUESTIONS." *impales Hussein and then proceeds to wonder which one of his guards will betray him, then is blown up*

Not that I'm saying it *WILL* happen like this...

Oh, right. It never WAS our business.