Well, this isn’t exactly what we’d like to see…
BAGHDAD — A state of emergency was declared in the Iraqi capital on Saturday as protesters stormed Iraq’s parliament, after bursting into the Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, where other key buildings including the U.S. Embassy are located, in a dramatic escalation of the country’s political crisis.
Live footage on Iraqi television showed swarms of protesters, who have been demanding government reform, inside the parliament building, waving flags, chanting and breaking chairs. Some lawmakers were berated and beaten with flags as they fled the building while other demonstrators smashed the car windows. Others remained trapped inside rooms in parliament and feared for their lives, lawmakers said.
Baghdad Operations Command said all roads into the capital had been closed. A U.S. Embassy official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that staff were not being evacuated from their compound, which is about a mile away from the parliament building. Organizers of the demonstration urged protesters not to attack embassies.
The surge of protesters into the secure area, which is off limits to most Iraqis, was the culmination of months of street protests. Under huge political pressure, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has attempted to reshuffle his cabinet and meet the demands of the demonstrators, who have been spurred on by the powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. But he has been hampered by a deeply divided parliament, where sessions have descended into chaos as lawmakers have thrown water bottles and punches at one another.
Our Congress seems pretty dysfunctional to me, but I guess it could be worse.
Hmmm…Wonder how many people are secretly wishing for an Iraqi hostage crisis? That would probably the trigger that could vault Trump into the White House.
Don’t give them any more ideas than they already have. Their play (even if they merely exploited a serendipitous opportunity and hadn’t planned it) in 2012 was busted.
A good summary and review of several recent books on this fundamental issue of corrpution in Afghanistan, the US, and elsewhere.
The article leads with:
The Green Zone protestors fail the test of being radicals because while they recognize corruption in the Iraqi Parliament, they see it as resident in the Sunni members and not systemic and including Shia members as well.
Where are you getting that reading of the Green Zone movement? My understanding is that it is a Sadrist movement, and that though the Sadrists are Shi’ites, Muqtada al-Sadr has been building a Sunni-Shi’a oppositional alliance for some years now, demanding full Sunni rights; part of the Sadrist case against the Abadi government is that, like the Maliki government before it, it discriminates against Sunnis, refuses to integrate them into the army or provide government jobs, and when it conquers Sunni territory from ISIS occupies it like a Shi’ite colonial power.
Strongly opposed to the US and the old Baath movement alike and keeping a distance from Iran (Abadi’s puppet masters, who preferred keeping Muqtada in Qom and away from Iraq altogether), seriously attacking corruption and known for its devotion to bettering conditions of the poor since the assassinated Sadeq al-Sadr’s time, the Sadrist movement has long seemed to me like an essential part of any hope that Iraq will ever be a unified country and able to withstand American and Iranian meddling.
You may be correct, but whenever religion is a key component of a political party, either in power or in opposition, corruption always seems to live on even though those in power has shifted.
Booman writes:
Or better…
I would love to see “swarms of protesters…demanding government reform…waving flags, chanting and breaking chairs” in the <s>hollowed</s>…errr, ahhh…hallowed halls of Congress.
But of course…they would all be dead or arrested before they got within 500 feet of the entrance.
Successful cistern pissing on the level that it has reached in the U.S. (see Marie3″s comment) requires a truly effective <S>police state force</s>…Damn!!! I meant a truly effective “state of police force.”
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily Litella
P.S. However…if I ever take a tour of Congress I’m not drinking from the water fountains. Fer sure!!!
“I would love to see “swarms of protesters…demanding government reform…waving flags, chanting and breaking chairs” in the
hollowed…errr, ahhh…hallowed halls of Congress.”Was about to post something very similar.
Hey!!! What happened to the “strike” html thing?
Suddenly doesn’t
work?Ity works in preview…
AG
It only didn’t work in my initial post, I guess.
The mysteries of .html…
Chapter 1,000,001.
AG
Politico — Red carpet and beyond: An inside look at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
More interesting from The Guardian – White House correspondents’ dinner: star power, but according to who?
(Guess a decade later none of the reporters dared to bring along the woman that made scandal headlines in those years.)
Billmon is also contrasting the events in Baghdad and DC
A decent primer on Syria for confused Americans — Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria. They don’t hate `our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries–for oil. By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Good Lord, Larry Wilmore is bombing very badly with the audience at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
That’s because Larry’s doing the doing the right thing and delivering a lot of truth on behalf of us. Every time the correspondents groan in response to another joke at their expense, I laugh even harder.
Speaking of dysfunction, here’s Wilmore’s stuff tonight:
Feel free to name your favorite joke. He served a lot of insults so cold they were frigid. The middle fingers to Wolf and Joe were two of my favorites. Apparently he got Don Lemon concerned about his fee-fees…
http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/don-lemon-gives-larry-wilmore-the-finger-after-jokes-at-white-house-
dinner-1201764078/
…and the middle finger was returned.
And here’s the President tonight:
CNN took it on the chin a few times tonight. GOOD.
“…My approval ratings are going up. The last time I was this high, I was trying to decide on my major.”
The US has schemed for the entire time that it has been in Iraq to isolate the Sadrists, who are as close as Iraq has to a populist movement unaligned with the sort of jihadis that the US wants to defeat in the region.
I wonder to what extent this isolation is a result of Saudi diplomacy with the US.