There are 796 more reasons why the folks who declared the Surge a success should hang their sorry heads in shame. That is the number of Americans (52) and Iraqis (744) killed during the month of April in an uptick in violence that was going to occur sooner or later because the Surge has not been a “success” by any appropriate use of that term.
As I noted back on February 1 and has been noted by others far more sage than I am since then, war is not a linear thing, but rather something that ebbs and flows in stops and starts. This is especially true in Iraq, which is why the military gains of the Surge were not only temporarily, they were illusory.
Spencer Ackerman, one of those sage heads, references OODA, a jargony mouthful coined by Air Force Colonel John Boyd, to make the point. OODA stands for “Observation / Orientation / Decision / Action,” and the bottom line is that the combatant who can achieve a faster OODA than his enemy can disrupte his enemy’s OODA Loop:
Ackerman explains that:
“At the risk of saying something disputable, from 2003 to mid-2007, the insurgencies in Iraq had faster OODA Loops than the U.S. did. That’s not to say that there weren’t discrete tactical successes: there were, and lots of them. But those developments are coterminous with the concept of the Loop — you adjust and inflict pain on the enemy; but the enemy does so faster and more powerfully. Once Operation Phantom Thunder (the Surge) began in the late spring of 2007, lots of people on the right and on the fake-left declared, without using Boyd’s term, that Petraeus and Odierno had finally broken the enemy’s Loop.
” . . . what Petraeus and Odierno actually did — and it is not a small achievement — was disrupt the insurgencies’ Loops more than any other U.S. commanders were able to. They kept the insurgencies in a state of confusion for months and prevented successful orientation. But the rise in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties demonstrates that the insurgencies’ Loops have now closed. To cash it out, the U.S. military under Petraeus and Odierno bought as much calm as possible, and Iraq has been so horrific for so long that half the horror could seem like paradise to the hopeful American. But even with half-the-horror, no strategic goal was achieved. And no strategic goal can be achieved now that the insurgencies’ Loops have closed.”
Ackerman further notes that by any definition there cannot be victory in Iraq, only mitigation. To which I would add, 100 years of mitigation in John McCain’s case.
Please click here to read the rest of this roundup at Kiko’s House.
Now it’s Condoleezza Rice’s turn to take a hand in putting up the false front the Bush Administration is trying to construct and pass off as “victory.” She follows President Bush last September, Vice President Cheney and the war’s heir apparent, John McCain, last month in projecting a perception of peace with smoke and mirrors.
In a surprise trip last weekend, the Secretary of State was cheerleading “a coalescing of a center in Iraqi politics in which the Sunni leadership, the Kurdish leadership, and elements of the Shiite leadership that are not associated with these special groups have been working together better than at any time before.”
The “special groups” are militias of the Mahdi Army. If the central government continues to attack them, as it did ineptly in Basra this month only to be bailed out by US forces, al-Sadr is threatening “all-out war.”
While Rice hailed the coalescing, there were three rocket attacks–the first as she was meeting with Maliki at his office, another while returning to the Green Zone from a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talibani, a third that delayed a ceremony at which she unveiled a plaque commemorating civilian deaths in the Green Zone.
April 17th, 2008 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
American media attention was focused briefly, very briefly, on Iraq during and around the recent Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Capitol Hill, but, otherwise, the media are too busy sensationalizing every little development in the Obama-Clinton race to pay any sustained attention to the ongoing war and occupation, one that, according to the Republicans’ choice for warmonger-in-chief, could go on for, oh, another hundred years or so.
Blood is shed and people are dying, but — by Zeus! — there’s Obama bowling! — there’s Clinton chugging a beer!
The war, you see, is just too complicated for the media. It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The initial shock ‘n’ awe, they got, but the nuances of religious sectarianism and civil war and Middle East politics generally, well, not so much. It was fine when the U.S. was kicking ass, back when victory was at hand, or so it seemed, mission about to be accomplished, but it’s so hard to keep score now, so many years later, and how can you follow a war, how can you know who’s winning and by how much, without a scoreboard in The Situation Room? Just imagine John King with a magic map of Iraq, zooming in and out to give us all the latest death toll updates in real time. Ah, but there’s that attention span, too — and the media just don’t have one, much like so many of their consumers.
IRAQI SOLDIERS FLEE AFTER DESERTING TUESDAY NIGHT IN SADR CITY
How many more Americans will have to die before the folly of the Iraq war collapses in on itself?
Hundreds? Thousands? (Some 25 have died this month alone, a return to pre-Surge levels.)
Proving yet again that the Baghdad government is unwilling and unable to take advantage of the opening that the military phase of the Surge strategy provided, there has been another round of Iraqi army desertions during a crucial battle, this time in the Sadr City slum district of Baghdad.
The New York Times reports that:
“The retreat left a crucial stretch of road on the front lines undefended for hours and led to a tense series of exchanges between American soldiers and about 50 Iraqi troops who were fleeing.
“Capt. Logan Veath, a company commander in the 25th Infantry Division, pleaded with the Iraqi major who was leading his troops away from the Sadr City fight, urging him to return to the front.
” ‘If you turn around and go back up the street those soldiers will follow you,’ Captain Veath said. ‘If you tuck tail and cowardly run away they will follow up that way, too.’
“Captain Veath’s pleas failed, and senior American and Iraqi commanders mounted an urgent effort to regain the lost ground. An elite Iraqi unit was rushed in and with the support of the Americans began to fight its way north.
“This episode was a blow to the American effort to push the Iraqis into the lead in the struggle to wrest control of parts of Sadr City from the Mahdi Army militia and what Americans and Iraqis say are Iranian-backed groups.”
Are Iraqis beginning to feel better about the the U.S.-led occupation and the state of their nation? In our continuing effort to help answer that question, WORLDMEETS.US has translated this article from Iraq’s Azzaman newspaper. Fateh Abdusalam writes in part, “In the sixth year of the new dispensation and still looking for excuses to justify its policies, Iraq’s war-mongering government is isolated from Iraqis. … Iraq remains an ever-shifting Read the rest of this entry »
To everything/There is a season/And a time for every purpose, under heaven/A time to be born, a time to die/A time to plant, a time to reap/A time to kill, a time to heal/A time to laugh, a time to weep. — ECCLESIASTES 3: 1-8
The second and final day of Iraq progress report testimony before by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker is as easy to sum up as the first, with one conspicuous addition:
We have no long-term strategy.
We have no end-game plan.
We just need more Friedman Units, pretty please.
As well as:
The president would like you to help him kick the can down the road to 2009.
* * * * *
When the authoritative histories of the Iraq war are published in future years, as opposed to the comparatively quick-and-dirty accounts that have been coming out, they with resonate with these overarching themes:
* Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place and hands down is the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history.
* Had President Bush been as remotely competent in the conduct of the war as he was in co-opting the American public, his own party and his political opponents, many if not most U.S. troops may have been home in a comparatively short time span.
* While coward is a dreadfully-loaded word and its definition varies depending upon how it is applied, the president was a coward, wrapping himself in the flag while never asking for real sacrifice, never leveling with the American people and most notably being downright eager to dump the entire tragic mess into the lap of his successor.
April 9th, 2008 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
Testifying before Congress yesterday, General Petraeus said that progress in Iraq is “fragile and reversible” and, according to the NYT, recommended that “consideration of any new drawdowns of American troops be delayed until the fall, making it likely that little would change before Election Day… [He] refused under persistent questioning from Senate Democrats to say under what conditions he would favor new troop reductions, adding that he would not take the matter up until 45 days after a current drawdown is complete in July. His recommendation would leave just under 140,000 American troops in Iraq well into the fall.”
Three comments:
1) This may be good for Democrats in November. Scenes of troops returning home prior to the election would send a message that the war is going well and that the end is near. This way, if Petraeus gets what he wants, voters would go the polls with a clear-cut difference between Obama/Clinton on one side and McCain on the other. Obama/Clinton would be able to make the case that the war would go on indefinitely under McCain, while McCain would be forced to defend a war that is still going so badly that no troops can come home. (I am concerned about what is good for Democrats, but, needless to say, what is good for the troops, as well as for the U.S. generally, is for the war to end as soon as possible. The troops need to be brought home. The political calendar should not dictate when.)
2) This highlights a key tension for supporters of the war. On the one hand, they want to believe, and may actually believe, that the war, given the supposed success of the Petraeus-led, McCain-promoted surge, is going well enough for some troops to be brought home. On the other hand, they don’t want the war to be brought to what they deem to be a premature end. Which is to say, they talk up success and progress and victory even as they demand ever more war. There is no way out of this: According to this view, it is precisely the surge (more war) that has brought about progress. (It hasn’t.) But if the surge is ended and troops are brought home, all that has been gained (a modest and temporary improvement in overall security) could be lost, the progress reversed. In other words, to end the war, there must be more war, even though it is not at all clear that more war is actually doing anything to bring about the end. (In fact, the reverse is likely true: more war is prolonging the war.) Support for the war in these terms is simply absurd — not to mention reckless, destructive, and untenable.
3) The situation in Iraq is no doubt “fragile and reversible” — from bad to worse, not (as Petraeus suggests) from good to bad — but when will it not be? Iraq is nowhere close to being politically stable. If the U.S. means to stay in Iraq until the situation is no longer “fragile and reversible,” it will be there for a long, long time. Which is, of course, precisely what McCain the Warmonger thinks should happen.
April 9th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
In an earlier post Shaun Mullen suggests that what General David Petraeus says ultimately reflects the policy of the C-in-C, President George W. Bush. While agreeing with Shaun, I would like to add a few points.
First let’s jog our memory. I had written in an earlier post: “The Iraq mess is not of his making nor can he achieve a miracle on his own. But Petraeus is now familiar with the ground realities. The US troops can withdraw only when there is an international intervention strategy to save Iraq from another bloodbath. And the time begins now!!!”
I realize that in realpolitik any country that would like to give a shoulder to sort this bloody mess may also like to have its pound of flesh. But at the moment it looks unlikely that the Bush administration would seek international intervention in Iraq (maybe in the form of stationing UN forces in Iraq for a period of time once the US troops withdraw).
The other choice, and the US may just discover sooner than later that this is the only alternative, is to leave Iraq to its fate and just get out. But oh dear, I forgot about the oil!!! Stupid of me…to think that it is because of the safety of the Iraqi people that US forces continue to be there, and not for oil!!!
How time flies! Twelve months ago I wrote this post about General Petraeus. It appears to me as if I wrote it only yesterday. “Isn’t this a contradiction - on the one hand I oppose the continued occupation of Iraq by US forces, while on the other I praise this General? There are many reasons. Also, his recent interview with PBS News Hour has cleared any doubts about his professional standing.
“Here is a General, given a thankless task of trying to salvage whatever he can from the debris, explaining the ground reality without bringing into disrepute his Commander-in-Chief.”
Now let’s come to the present…with the General at the Capitol Hill. Even now Petraeus has not minced words…”We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel.” Read between the lines and the message is clear …“WE ARE GLORIOUSLY STUCK IN IRAQ”.More here…
Moureen Dowd writes at NYT: “The guardians of Iraq offer more of the same — a post-Surge Pause or consolidation and evaluation, as the general generically puts it — and no answers about how we can stop our ward from aligning with our enemy.” But why corner the “hands” of the US administration when we know that the “hands” move on the orders of the “head”. Ironically, no one wishes to put into dock the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. So why blame the “hands”?
While expert/intellectual discussions are welcome, there are two options before General Petraeus. Either to resign or, in keeping with the highest tradition of a man in uniform, obey the orders of the C-in-C sitting the White House. There is little else the General can do other than “stick to the script” agreed to by the High Command.
I concluded my last year’s post by these quotations: “War is too important a matter to be left to the military.” - Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) French statesman and journalist.
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” - Albert Einstein
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” - Albert Einstein
While none of this is surprising (and I hold Petraeus in the highest regard), it is deeply depressing that this is the best he can offer. It is the best that he can offer because that’s all that the White House has to offer.
It’s semi-annual Iraq progress report time for David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker. But, alas, there has been no progress beyond a return to 2005 death-toll levels, which merely has given Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki an opportunity to try to exterminate his chief political rivals, so the general and the ambassador desperately need a carrot or a bogeyman to appease the few restive senators and representatives among the fawning congressfolk to whom they will report.
You may recall that the duo dangled a carrot when they last checked in back in September.
While they both equivocated about whether the Al-Maliki government was making progress (of course it wasn’t), Petraeus was able to say that the number of troops in country might return to the 130,000 pre-Surge level by this summer.
Well, events on the ground, notably Al-Maliki’s recalcitrance, and statements from President Bush have effectively swept that wee glimmer of hope off the table, so Petraeus and Crocker need a bogeyman.
Anyone who takes a politician’s statements literally over and over again is either a hopeless optimist or a fool. Or likely both in the case of John McCain supporters upset over the cottage industry in misquoting his statement about being just fine with American involvement in Iraq for 100 years.
Back on January 3 at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, McCain said that he could see a 100-year American presence in Iraq like the U.S.’s presence in Japan and South Korea “where Americans are not being injured or harmed or killed.”
Good enough.
But to keep focusing on the contextual sleight of hand employed by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and a small army of pundits, Yours Truly included, in not taking McCain’s comment literally is to miss the larger and more important point: Dragging Japan and South Korea, let alone any other historic antecedent involving an American presence in a foreign country, into the Iraq quagmire is like a stripper wearing pasties to conform with a no-total-nudity law.
It is amazing that there are even any pro-war literalists left. Or maybe they’re just doing some really fine pharmaceuticals since what they have been told about the war by the White House has been one lie after another:
Americans were not greeted as liberators.
There were no WMD.
The troops were not home by Christmas 2003.
They were not properly trained or equipped to fight an insurgency.
There was a catastrophic civil war.
And the Surge has not been a success.
The truth is that the Surge has succeeded in lowering American and Iraq death tolls to 2005 levels through a combination of military smartwork and bribery while giving the Iraqi government ample opportunity to prove that it has no interest in trying to mend deep sectarian rifts as long as it is guaranteed a long-term American troop presence – in McCain’s case a presence rounded up to 100 years.
* * * * *
My own view of McCain has been a long, evolving and painful odyssey.
His father, John S. McCain Jr., was a beloved four-star Navy admiral and my commanding officer during the Vietnam War. His son’s exploits in combat, his capture, his heroic refusal to buckle under torture and his homecoming after five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton are deservedly the stuff of legend. And despite some differences on the issues that I care about, I was able to rationalize voting for him a year ago in what seemed then to be the unlikely event that he would be the Republican nominee and the Democrats ran another weakling against him.
That is until I started taking a close look at what McCain has been saying about the war since its outset.
T.E. Lawrence and John McCain are bona fide war heroes, but when it comes to Iraq, that’s where any similarity between the two men ends.
Lawrence (top photo), one of the most astute observers of Iraq and the Middle East of any generation, knew impending disaster when he saw it and warned three years after the British occupation of Iraq commenced in 1917 (bottom photo) that it:
“Is a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. The [British people] have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told . . . It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”
McCain, devoid of Lawrence’s nuanced insight and lacking his first-hand experience, offered a warning of another kind in a major policy speech last week:
“It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our national character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature withdrawal.”
The British occupation of Iraq, which when adjusted for population then and now involved about 10 times the number of troops the U.S. deployed for the Surge, ended with a whimper after four decades.
This is because the Brits didn’t belong there in the first place and never were able to understand the Arab mindset and historic sectarian enmities. The Americans also don’t belong in Iraq, and McCain, acting for all the world like an imperialist poobah, has famously remarked that it would be fine with him if America troops stayed in Iraq for 100 years.
This despite the reality that presence would be a fraction of the troops that Britain deployed and the opposition today is far better organized – and armed — and it is long past time for the Iraqis to pick up the pieces from a disastrous American occupation and cobble together some sort of confederation.
McCain may have trouble telling Shiites from Sunnis, but he does know one thing that Lawrence didn’t and it is an important but largely unspoken element of why the presumptive Republican nominee has made staying in Iraq indefinitely the centerpiece of his presidential campaign: Oil.
Although it at first may seem like a strange way to look at the latest round of bloodshed in Iraq, it’s all about Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki casting the first vote in that country’s much anticipated provincial elections.
The result is a troubling new chapter in the Forever War: Basra city and parts of Baghdad are under siege, the seven-month ceasefire called by Moqtada al-Sadr is history and Iraq has entered a perilous new phase that no amount of bribing by General Petraeus’s paymasters or speechifying by George Bush can change as U.S. troops get sucked into a maw that the White House and Pentagon were instrumental in creating in giving the prime minister no-strings-attached support.
Al-Maliki’s stalled offensive, which would have collapsed without U.S. air and ground intervention and eventually will, is all about politics, not national reconciliation. For Bush to call it “a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq” on top of the Pentagon’s contention that it is a “byproduct of the success of the Surge” is laughable in an Orwellian sort of way.
Here’s the real deal:
Provincial elections, one of the few Bush administration benchmarks for measuring Iraqi progress that have not been discarded as utterly unrealistic, are to be held on October 1.
The Madhi Army of Al-Sadr, the anti-America Shiite cleric, holds the keys to Basra and has since the British Army ceded its role as American helpmate because the number of casualties it was taking had become a public-relations nightmare for the Labor government back in London.
Al-Maliki desperately needs Basra, the oil-rich province on the porous border with Iraq, but the British are cowering in their barracks and there is no American military presence, hence the botched offensive on Basra city, the second largest in Iraq, where the 30,000-man Iraqi army and security forces find themselves surrounded by the Madhi Army, which has set up checkpoints and is now controlling access to the city.
Al-Sadr’s gunmen are thugs, but so are the gunmen belonging to the Badr Organization, the militia affiliated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which is joined at the hip with the prime minister.
Iran not only has a dog in this race, it has all the dogs in the form of close ties with Al-Maliki, Al-Sadr and ISCI, which makes Washington’s breast beating over the meddlesome Tehran regime so tiresome.
The seven-month ceasefire brokered by anti-American radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is, for all an intents and purposes, off. Times Onlinereports that neighborhood after neighborhood in Baghdad is being taken by militia gunmen, some with heavy fighting and others without a shot being fired.
Meanwhile, The Washington Postreports that U.S. troops have taken the lead in fighting in the capital.
* * * * *
One, two or three years (pick one) after the Iraqi army was ready to stand up so that U.S. troops could stand down, Shiite milita gunmen with comparatively meager weaponry and far fewer logistical resources still have the upper hand after three days of ferocious fighting in the key southeastern city of Basra.
Napoleon, as Daniel reminds us, famously remarked that “If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna!”
Methinks there are three reasons why Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s gamble is backfiring:
* White House and Pentagon claims that the Iraqi army has finally gotten its act together as usual have no basis in reality.
* As Fester notes here, even with tactical air support from the U.S. and U.K., the Iraqi force seems to be a little on the thin side.
* And most importantly, the militamen are fighting for their very existence while Iraqi boots are fighting their own countrymen, in many cases members of their own religious sect, for the political gain of the unpopular Al-Maliki.
Then there is Iran’s machinations in all of this, which range from big and evil to paltry and passive depending upon your view of the Tehran regime.
Mine is that the ayatollahs find themselves in the difficult position of having to both support and rein in Al-Sadr. who is the key player in this drama, not the prime minister and certainly not George Bush, who for all his bloviating has essentially tied his own hands because of years of wrongheaded policy making that determinedly put politics ahead of more practical concerns.
As it was, the president packed an extraordinary number of misstatements into his speech yesterday before yet another “safe” audience, chief among them that it “makes no sense” to divert troops from Iraq for the real War on Terror.
The question of the hour is what happens next. The answer is nobody knows, but here are a few scenarios:
* All hell breaks loose as U.S. ground troops are further drawn into the fighting, which has already taken out one of Iraq’s two major oil pipelines as it has spread from Basra and Baghdad to several other cities. As it is, they are now battling militants in and around the Sadr City slum in Baghdad.
* All hell breaks loose as Al-Sadr, who enjoys far more popularity than the prime minister among Shiites, calls for an end to the seven-month ceasefire against U.S. troops.
* All hell breaks loose as Al-Maliki’s already tenuous political situation is further undermined by the escalating violence and his ineffectual army and security forces.
My guess is that none of the above will happen in the short term because it may be in the best interests of Al-Sadr and Al-Maliki, who has extended by 10 days the deadline for militias to take bribes in return for turning in their weapons, to negotiate some sort of truce.
That, however, would only delay the day of reckoning that was bound to come after the prime minister failed to even make an effort to fulfill his end of the Surge bargain.
Photo by Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud/The Associated Press
Below is an excerpt of a translation of an article in the Saudi newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat by editor Tareq Al-Homayed that offers a fascinating insight into how the U.S.’s closest ally in the Middle East sees the outburst of violence in Iraq as the presidential race goes into overdrive.
Marc Lynch, who says he checked the accuracy of the excerpt compared to the original Arabic before posting it at Abu Aardvark, notes that Al-Homayed is hard wired to the Saudi royal family and his views probably reflect theirs:
“Muqtada al Sadr is a mighty but reckless force; he is not as intelligent as Hassan Nasrallah and does not speak the language of politics, however he was an important factor in enforcing the Iranian influence at the moment in which Saddam Hussein’s regime fell. Today, it appears that Tehran no longer needs al Sadr – so long as it has control over Iraq within the political framework.
“Nouri al Maliki’s regime, with its political prowess as opposed to the Sunni political crudeness, has managed to win over Washington – or neutralize it – as well as bring about American-Iranian rapprochement over the Iraqi issue. This was achieved whilst taking advantage of the political situation in Washington in light of US President George W. Bush’s weakness following the Democratic victory in Congress and at time when the US has entered into a state of political paralysis as a result of the upcoming elections.
“Iran no longer needs Muqtada al Sadr but rather wants a sophisticated model that is even more progressive than Hezbollah’s in order to take over Iraq. A government in control is much better than an opposition whose only possession and demands are the right to disrupt – such as the case in Lebanon.
“The importance of the ‘Knights’ Assault’ operation does not lie in American participation but rather in the outcome of Ahmadinejad’s most recent visit to Baghdad since it is impossible to target the Mehdi army – the same army that Muqtada al Sadr declares cannot be dismantled except at the orders of the Imam himself, and without Iran’s blessing.
” . . . Today at a time when Muqtada al Sadr receives a blow Iran remains tight-lipped, same as the Shiaa clerics and all this is because there is only one control button and it belongs to Tehran. Clearly the opportunity is convenient for Iran to tighten its grip on Iraq and to exploit the US desire for Iraq’s stability at any price before the US elections take place. After the elections a new US president will arrive at the White House to find himself/herself obligated to deal with a reality that enforces itself upon Baghdad. Even if people change in the next Iraqi government, it will still continue to orbit around Iran.”
To those of us who are up to our necks in the Clinton-Obama-McCain slugfest, the observations on American politics and how the outcome of the election may impact on U.S. policy on Iraq seems somewhat naïve. But recall that the American media makes sweeping pronouncements on the Middle East’s ever shifting tectonic plates all the time that probably strike Saudis, Iraqis and Iranis much the same way.
Now that the fog around the battle for Basra and upturn in violence elsewhere in Iraq is lifting a bit, we can conclude that:
* The Pentagon’s spin that the bloodshed is a consequence of the “success” of the Surge would seem to be silly on its face, but it isn’t.
* This is because the violence is the result of a carefully planned Al-Maliki government offensive to destroy the prime minister’s Shiite opponents in the advance of provincial elections in October.
This is especially important in Basra, the major city in oil-rich southeastern Iraq where government-militia clashes (photo) are in their third day, because it has been controlled by loyalists of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr since the British cut and run.
Since Tuesday, clashes in Basra and throughout Iraq’s Shiite heartland have left more than 100 dead and many wounded in Basra, Baghdad, Hilla, Kut, Karbala and Diwaniya.
This state of affairs yet again puts the Bush administration in the position of backing the wrong horse, as Eric Martin puts it, but I don’t think there are any “right” horses because political fault lines, even within sectarian interest groups, run so deep.
And while the militiamen are lightly armed, they are highly motivated. There would be no amount of Pentagon spin to explain away an end to Al-Sadr’s seven-month-old ceasefire against U.S. troops since the Surge was supposed to give Al-Maliki the breathing room to bring warring parties together, not an opportunity to crush his opponents with U.S. troops and air support.
Then there is a biggest reason why there will be a major American presence in Iraq indefinitely: Oil.
Saboteurs blew up one of Iraq’s two main oil pipelines near Basra today, severely reducing exports and pushing the price of crude up by more than a dollar a barrel.
UPDATE
In another by-product of the success of the Surge, the Iraqi government spokesman for the Baghdad security plan has been kidnapped and his three bodyguards killed.
A PERSONAL NOTE
There are an especially pernicious pair of bloggers who delight at bashing The Moderate Voice who shall remain nameless.
One of them accused me of “joyfully claiming vindiction” in my post yesterday on the upsurge in violence.
This is a libel on two counts:
First, there was nothing joyful in my noting I had predicted weeks ago that Iraq was a hiccup away from sliding back into cyclical violence because Al-Maliki has had no interest in using the military success of the Surge as intended.
Second, I am a Vietnam War veteran who bleeds for the men and women fighting their hearts out in this never ending war. Yes, it is possible to support the troops and not the war, something that this blogger is unable to comprehend because he is so determinedly small minded.
I invite skeptics to read my 18-installment series on the Triangle of Death abductions as well as many other deeply personal and joy-free posts on U.S. troops.
And so, it begins anew. Although the 7-month ceasefire hasn’t come to an official end, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is again picking up their arms, this time to battle American and Iraqi forces in the Shiite-dominated southern port city of Basra. Local members of ISCI (led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim) and Dawa (led by Nuri al-Maliki) have fled the area. The fighting has recently spread to Baghdad, and Sadr City appears to be coming apart at the seams.
The renewed fighting, and the apparent disintegration of Sadr’s ceasefire, could easily bring about the unraveling of the myth surrounding the surge’s success: that the relative calm is likely to endure. By most accounts, the drop in violence experienced during the last few months of heightened troop levels can be attributed to several factors: the buying-off of Sunni militiamen (who now make up the 80,000-strong Awakening Councils), better American counterinsurgency tactics, successful ethnic cleansing, and the self-declared ceasefire of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia. Of all of these factors, the last may well be the most significant.
If you look at the data, one of the most significant drops in violence occurred in August/September of 2007, directly after Sadr ordered his militia to lay low and put down their arms. At the time, the surge had been going on for several months and funding for the Awakening Councils had been ongoing for months longer. As Ilan Goldenberg notes, “the data seems to point to the fact that the Sadr Ceasefire more then anything else is what caused the drop in violence in the early fall.” Indeed, according to The Seattle Times, “U.S. commanders say the cease-fire played a key part in a 60 percent drop in attacks nationwide since the troop buildup ordered last year by President Bush reached its height in June.”
The apparent unraveling of the ceasefire, then, might well lead to a spike in violence, perhaps bringing us back to the high levels of 2006. If this occurs, our surge strategy will likely fall apart as the underlying strategic flaws become increasingly obvious. As a writer for Daily Kos argues, “if the surge had worked, Iraq would not find itself in today’s precarious situation, relying upon a radical cleric’s fragile ceasefire for [relative] stability.”
Now that the fog around the battle for Basra and upturn in violence elsewhere in Iraq is lifting a bit, we can conclude that:
