John Burns has another dyna­mite story from Iraq, detail­ing how Saddam’s free­ing of thou­sands of pris­on­ers from his net­work of gulags may have back­fired.
A street protests erupted and didn’t imme­di­ately dis­perse. Moth­ers demanded an account­ing of their sons from gov­ern­ment offi­cials. While calm was restored, often roughly, the ques­tion I’ve asked my peo­ple over there is whether this is the crack that might bring the whole regime down, but I’ve not yet heard from them.
The protests are unprece­dented and Wamid Nadhmi, a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity called them “very, very impor­tant and unusual” in the Wash­ing­ton Post (How did the Post get sources at Bagh­dad Uni­ver­sity, I won­der?) Other diplo­mats cau­tion that this might be an iso­lated event, how­ever.
I won­der. Nadhmi prof­fered a tan­ta­liz­ing idea that the protests weren’t spon­ta­neous. “To have a demon­stra­tion means there must be some sort of orga­ni­za­tions behind it,” he is quoted as say­ing.
We know there is an Iraqi resis­tance oper­at­ing out­side of the coun­try, but inside it? It’s pos­si­ble, and most likely prob­a­ble, that the United States is help­ing out local under­ground resis­tance move­ments. Could this have been their work?