Seven Red

I was wondering about the sudden appearance all over the US media of the Iraqi flag this week, the totally new Iraqi flag, again. Now, whenever they mention Iraq in the news, you see this new flag as the backdrop or graphic. Its key difference from the old flag is the removal of the three stars, and the Allahu Akbar written (totally weirdly) in Saddam Hussein’s handwriting. Instead, we get virtually the same flag, but with this teched-up-looking Kufic script: Iraq 2.0, get it? Here it is, folks:

Believe it or not, Iraq seems to have been operating all this time with the old Iraqi flag. Two years is a long memory in the Iraq debacle. If you can think back longer than that, you might remember the last attempt to change the Iraqi flag, which happened back in April, 2004 when the geniuses in the Coalition Provisional Authority came up with this doozy (supposedly chosen through a contest), because everybody knows Islamic countries are just dying to get themselves some pale blue and white flaggage…

Needless to say, the fanfare around that flag was as short-lived as its shelf life in Ramadi; it went away quietly, slinking into the closets and storage rooms of conservative think tanks like former CPA uber-liar Dan Senor, hopefully never to be heard of again outside of the beaming and completely painful personal monologues of media moron Campbell Brown. And so the Saddam flag lived on, tagged by the dead dictator, until just this week, when the Iraqi parliament OK’ed this new flag in order to have something to fly at an upcoming summit in the Kurdish region, where Saddam’s handwriting is apparently verboten. Our good friends in the Awakening movement are not so happy:

BAGHDAD — Officials in Iraq’s mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq’s new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.

“The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won’t raise it,” said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, “If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida.”

Yikes. We learn later in the article that none of this really matters, since this flag – which took painful negotiations to pass by a slim vote – is not even permanent and probably won’t end up being the permanent flag, which the parliament has to decide on at some later date. They just needed something to fly at the meeting. But we get the outline of some of the real social conflict that runs through the Awakening movement:

Suleiman of the Anbar Awakening Council, however, said he was angry that the parliament and government toiled away on a new flag rather than dealing with the country’s lack of services.

Which just goes to show that whenever it seems like a frivolous symbolic dispute, it’s really a material question of resources. The threat, however, is interesting. If the Awakening folks are comfortable with outright extortion over an issue like this, one wonders exactly how much the payoff regime is actually paying off, in both senses of the term.

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