That's a nice looking building. And nice to the neighborhood, Hasan Kanbolat (Today's Zaman) explained it "supplies electricity" to nearby residents.
The building is the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad. After Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spent days trashing the government of Turkey, Wednesday saw a rocket attack on the Turkish Embassy. No surprise, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari contacted Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to convey his condemnation of "the criminal act." No surprise, Nouri issued no public statement.
When it's time for trash-talk, you can't shut Nouri up. When it's time to act like a leader, Nouri's off on some toilet squeezing out another one of his brilliant plans.
As Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers' Miami Herald) reported, "No one has claimed responsibility for the Wednesday attack, in which assailants fired three rockets at the embassy. But the timing of the assault, just days after an acrimonious exchange between al-Maliki and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, raised suspicions that al-Maliki sympathizers were responsible."
Nouri and his surrogates in State of Law have spent a lot of time attacking another neighbor which, like Turkey, shares a border with Iraq. The government of Saudi Arabia, Nouri claims, is attempting to destroy his regime and replace it with "Ba'athists."
So that's two neighbors that share a border with Iraq. Want a third?
Iran. Saturday Saud al-Zahid (Al Arabiya) reported, "Commander of Iraqn's Quds Force, Brig. Gen. Qasem Soleimani has said that the Islamic Republic controls 'one way or another' over Iraq and south Lebanon and that Tehran is capable of influencing the advent of Islamist governments in order to fight 'arrogant' powers, ISNA student agency reported on Thursday."
Now that's an assertion that the government of Iraq should respond to.
Some did respond.
Alsumaria TV reported, "Iraqi Sadr Movement headed by Cleric Sayyed Muqtada Al Sadr rebuked, on Friday, Iranian Quds Forces Commander Qassim Suleimani for declaring that Iraq is subject to Iran's will and that there is a potential to form an Islamic government in Iraq. These statements are unacceptable, Sadr Movement argued assuring that it doesn't allow any pretext to interfere in Iraqi internal affairs." In addition to Moqtada's bloc, KUNA notes that Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari released a statement which includes, "Iraq has not and will never be affiliated to anyone and will not be a toy in others' game or a place to settle scores between different parties." So that's Moqtada's bloc and Kurdish Zebari and Alsumaria TV also noted Kurdistan Alliance MP Mahmoud Othman objected to the statements and termed them "a blatant interference in the affairs of Iraq." Iraqiya also objected. Aswat al-Iraq reported , Iraqiya spokesperson Maysoon al-Damalouji read a statement decrying the statement and calling on the government to issue a reply.
But the government is Nouri.
And Nouri?
He's busy posing for his yearbook picture. He just wanted to be prime minister to get his picture in the annual, not because he wanted to help the Iraqi people.
Nouri remains Iraq's biggest problem. Today the Associated Press quotes Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson stating, "Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism. Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy (in Iraq), the reality is that it left behind a budding police state."
Yes, the Nouri apologists like Reidar Visser will minimize reality and justify Nouri's actions. That's what pigs do. But the reality is that Nouri is a thug.
Even as the Vissars rooted for Nouri throughout 2010 (Reidar's BFF Nir Rosen announced at Thomas E. Ricks' bad blog that Iraq should keep Nouri as prime minister because they needed someone authoritarian as a leader -- Reidar and Nir should keep their fantasies in the bedroom), the reality about Nouri was already known. And it became only more known last week. At the end of the week, newspaper readers could catch Roy Gutman, Sahar Issa and Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reporting:
Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's security services have locked up more than 1,000 members of other political parties over the past several months, detaining many of them in secret locations with no access to legal counsel and using "brutal torture" to extract confessions, his chief political rival has charged.
Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite Muslim leader of the mainly Sunni Muslim Iraqiya bloc in parliament, who served as prime minister of the first Iraqi government after the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein, has laid out his allegations in written submissions to Iraq's supreme judicial council.
And the week started with a Guardian article by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad:
"Look," he added, "the system now is just like under Saddam: walk by the wall, don't go near politics and you can walk with your head high and not fear anything. But if you come close to the throne then the wrath of Allah will fall on you and we have eyes everywhere."
He described the arrest of the Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi's bodyguards who, it was claimed by the Shia-dominated government, had been paid by Hashimi to assassinate Shia officials. (Hashimi was on a plane heading to Kurdistan when government forces took over the airport, preventing him from leaving. After a standoff, he was allowed to fly but his men where detained.)
"Look what happened to the poor bodyguards of Hashimi, they were tortured for a week. They took them directly to our unit and they were interrogated severely. Even an old general was hanging from the ceiling. Do you know what I mean by hanging?"
In the constricted space of the car he pulled his arms up behind his back.
"They hang him like this. Sometimes they beat them with cables and sticks and sometimes they just leave them hanging from a metal fence for three days. They are torturing them trying to get them to confess to the bombing of the parliament."
Nouri's a thug. As Iraq's former Deputy Ambassador to the UN Feisal Istrabadi explained December 13th to Warren Oleny on KCRW's To the Point:
The critical mistake the Obama administration made occurred last year when it threw its entire diplomatic weight behind supporting Nouri al-Maliki notwithstanding these very worrisome signs which were already in place in 2009 and 2010. The administration lobbied hard both internally in Iraq and throughout the region to have Nouri al-Maliki get a second term -- which he has done. Right now, the betting there's some question among Iraq experts whether we'll ever have a set of elections in Iraq worthy of the name. I mean, you can almost get odds, a la Las Vegas, on that among Iraq experts. It's a very worrisome thing. What can they do in the future? Well I suppose it would be helpful, it would be useful, if we stopped hearing this sort of Happy Talk coming from the administration -- whether its Jim Jeffreys in Baghdad, the US Ambassador or whether it's the president himself or other cabinet officers. We're getting a lot of Happy Talk, we're getting a lot of Happy Talk from the Pentagon about how professional the Iraqi Army is when, in fact, the Iraqi Army Chief of Staff himself has said it's going to take another ten years before the Iraqi Army can secure the borders. So it would help, at least, if we would stop hearing this sort of Pollyanna-ish -- if that's a word -- exclamations from the administration about how swimmingly things are going in Iraq and had a little more truth told in public, that would be a very big help to begin with.