Ready to “start all over again” in Iraq? Ready to “get it right this time?” Ready to take the word of the American Enterprise Institute, NeoCon stronghold … and War Hawk John, McCain … that we have no choice … this is our destiny? Our mandate? Our duty as Christians and Americans?
Ready to pour more money into Iraq? Ready to offer up more sons and daughters? To pretend it isn’t a religious war between the Shiia v. the Sunni, and both of them v. the Christians? To ignore every other bleeding nation or bullying despot in order to prop up George Bush’s failed legacy?
NO NO NO! Make sure your Congressperson’s hear you when you scream it. Makes sure Biden has your support for speaking out, and Murtha knows you’re behind him. Make sure Pelosi and Reed have the wind of your letters and fax’s and emails under their wings.
Bush’s plan is a suicide mission. Just say NO!
Reports from MSM and potent op/ed’s.
Jude
New Bush Iraq Plan Presented by Neocon Think-Tank Today.
Troop Boost will be “Long and Lasting,” not a “Surge”
BuzzFlash
Fri, 01/05/2007
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) - the think-tank at the heart of the Neocon movement - is holding a presentation today on what should be the foundation of the new Iraq strategy President Bush is expected to unveil next week. Sens. Joe Lieberman and John McCain will also speak at the event on the topic.
Basically, this is the whole “surge” thing we’ve been hearing about. The only problem is that it is not a surge at all; it’s a lengthy boost. Frederick Kagan and Jack Keane, the authors of the AEI report, actually wrote an article last month explaining that “any troop increase must be large and lasting” (a short surge, of course, would “play into the enemy’s hands” and “virtually ensure defeat”).
Looking deeper into the study, the Kagan/Keane strategy is not a plan to move forward so we can leave, it’s a plan to start all over again from scratch. They actually advocate abandoning political development and Iraqi forces training to focus solely on what they call “clear and hold” by American forces of “critical terrain.” Only then, they say, can we start thinking about transferring control to Iraqis.
Solely under this plan will the 3000 American and countless Iraqi deaths thus far have been completely in vain. Worse, even more people will die. Even Kagan and Keane predict in their study “increasing casualties to levels higher than before the start of security operations” - and that’s in response to the fourth and final phase of their approach! Ironically, they even use the word “surge” to describe the rise in deadly violence they predict by extremists in the other phases. Those looking for Vietnam comparisons will find the prediction of an insurgent “Tet Offensive” on page 31 of the draft report.
The insanity of Bush’s acceptance of these ideas is that they are coming from the very people he listened to from the beginning that got us into this quagmire. After their predictable failure, nearly everyone else in the world - including even many conservative Republicans - knows we need to finally redeploy our combat forces. Yet Bush is giving the AEI Neocons a mulligan they sorely do not deserve and the voters resoundingly rejected last November.
Bush Plan for Iraq Requests More Troops and More Jobs
DAVID E. SANGER, NYT
January 7, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — President Bush’s new Iraq strategy calls for a rapid influx of forces that could add as many as 20,000 American combat troops to Baghdad, supplemented with a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis in projects including painting schools and cleaning streets, according to American officials who are piecing together the last parts of the initiative.
The American officials said that Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, formally agreed in a long teleconference on Thursday with Mr. Bush to match the American troop increase, made up of five combat brigades that would come in at a rate of roughly one a month, by sending three additional Iraqi brigades to Baghdad over the next month and a half.
Nonetheless, even in outlining the plan, some American officials acknowledged deep skepticism about whether the new Iraq plan could succeed.
They said two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force would consist of Kurdish pesh merga units to be sent from northern Iraq, and they said some doubts remained about whether they would show up in Baghdad and were truly committed to quelling sectarian fighting.
The call for an increase in troops would also put Mr. Bush in direct confrontation with the leaders of the new Democratic Congress, who said in a letter to the president on Thursday that the United States should move instead toward a phased withdrawal of American troops, to begin in the next four months.
Mr. Bush is expected to make the plan public in coming days, probably in a speech to the country on Wednesday that will cast the initiative as a joint effort by the United States and Iraq to reclaim control of Baghdad neighborhoods racked by sectarian violence. Officials said Mr. Bush was likely to be vague on the question of how long the additional American forces would remain on the streets of Baghdad. But they said American planners intended for the push to last for less than a year.
A crucial element of the plan would include more than doubling the State Department’s reconstruction efforts throughout the country, an initiative intended by the administration to signal that the new strategy would emphasize rebuilding as much fighting.
But previous American reconstruction efforts in Iraq have failed to translate into support from the Iraqi population, and some Republicans as well as the new Democratic leadership in Congress have questioned whether a troop increase would do more than postpone the inevitable and precarious moment when Iraqi forces have to stand on their own.
Congress has the power to halt the increases by cutting off money for Mr. Bush’s proposals. But some Democrats are torn about whether to press ahead with such a move for fear that it will appear that they are not supporting the troops.
When Mr. Bush gives his speech, he will cast much of the program as an effort to bolster Iraq’s efforts to take command over their own forces and territory, the American officials said. He will express confidence that Mr. Maliki is committed to bringing under control both the Sunni-led insurgency and the Shiite militias that have emerged as the source of most of the violence. Mr. Maliki picked up those themes in a speech in Baghdad on Saturday in which he said that multinational troops would support an Iraqi effort to secure the capital.
Some aspects of the plan were reported by The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
The officials would not say specifically whether the American troop increase would be carried out if the Iraqis failed to make good on their commitment to add to their own ranks, but they emphasized that the American influx could be re-evaluated at any point.
The American officials who described the plan included some who said they were increasingly concerned about Mr. Maliki’s intentions and his ability to deliver. They said senior Bush administration officials had been deeply disturbed by accounts from witnesses to last Saturday’s hanging of Saddam Hussein, who said they believed that guards involved in carrying out the execution were linked to the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia that is headed by Moktada al-Sadr, whose name some of the executioners shouted while Mr. Hussein stood on the gallows.
“If that’s an indication of how Maliki is operating these days, we’ve got a deeper problem with the bigger effort,” said one official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing internal administration deliberations over a strategy that Mr. Bush has not yet publicly announced.
The White House has refused to talk publicly about any of the decisions that Mr. Bush has made about his plan, which is tentatively entitled “A New Way Forward.” Even though speechwriters are already drafting Mr. Bush’s comments, several of the crucial elements are not finalized, officials warned. That apparently includes the exact amounts of money Mr. Bush will ask of Congress to finance the jobs program, or a longer-term job-training effort that will also be part of the strategy.
Mr. Bush has previously promised to remake American reconstruction efforts in Iraq, most notably in December 2005 when he said that the United States had learned from the failure of efforts to rebuild major infrastructure, mostly run by American companies. But subsequent efforts to focus on programs that would bring more immediate benefits to Iraqis have also faltered.
The details of Mr. Bush’s latest military, economic and political initiatives were described by several sources, including some who said they doubted it would work. The jobs program, noted one, “would have been great in 2003 or even 2004, but we are trying it now in a very different Iraq,” one in which the passion for fighting for sectarian control of neighborhoods may outweigh interests in obtaining employment.
The American officials who described the program included both advocates and critics of Mr. Bush’s new strategy, and included representative of three different executive branch departments. They would speak only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal deliberations about a plan that Mr. Bush had not yet announced.
The most immediate element of the new jobs program would amount to a major expansion of what is known in the military as the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which provides money to local officers to put civilians to work as a way of reducing resistance to the American presence in neighborhoods. While the effort has had some successes, they have largely been temporary. As a senior White House official noted in an interview recently, “You’d go into a neighborhood, clear it, try to hold it, and come back later and discover that it’s all been shattered.”
The new effort, officials said, would cost between a half billion and a billion dollars, some of which would be spent on other efforts to achieve stability and train Iraqis for more permanent jobs. Both the State Department and the Treasury Department have been brought into that effort.
The plan also calls for a more than doubling of the “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,” relatively small groups of State Department officials who are empowered to coordinate local reconstruction efforts, chiefly hiring Iraqi companies. For much of the first half of 2006, the State Department was engaged in a bureaucratic dispute with the Defense Department about how these teams would be protected, including exploration of a plan to hire private protective forces that a White House official said “was too expensive.”
Now those teams will be expanded and embedded with the combat brigades, officials said, in what would amount to the latest effort to demonstrate to Iraqis that the American forces in their midst were not simply occupiers.
Much of the plan described by officials seemed to be consistent with views supported by Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who will soon take over as the commander of ground forces in Iraq and who has been a strong advocate of an everyday American troop presence in neighborhoods.
Mr. Bush’s speech is widely expected to make the case that Americans needed to commit to greater national sacrifice as part of what Bush administration officials acknowledge amounted to a last-ditch effort to salvage the mission in Iraq.
But almost as soon as his speech is done, a series of hearings will begin on Capitol Hill that Democrats intend to use to pick apart the details of the plan, with lawmakers questioning administration officials about whether a troop increase of any size can succeed this late in the war. Those hearings will also likely focus on whether the expanded American military commitment is linked to Iraqi military performance, a point that Bush administration officials would not address directly.
As described by those officials, Mr. Bush is stopping well short of declaring that the beefed-up American force will be sent only to Baghdad and Anbar Province, the seat of the Sunni Arab insurgency, if the Iraqis also increase their own forces. But under the phased increase being contemplated, the reality is that every month between now and April or May, Mr. Bush will have a chance to decide whether to send an additional combat brigade into the country. “That’s our moment of leverage,” a White House official said.
Officials said a larger American troop commitment to Iraq also would be used to illustrate Washington’s increased resolve to deter adventurism by regional adversaries, especially Iran. Mr. Bush’s speech is expected to include talk of a new diplomatic initiative to shore up confidence among Washington’s Islamic allies in the region as well as to warn its adversaries, officials said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to begin that initiative almost immediately after the speech, leaving for the Middle East by next weekend.
Parallel to an enlarged Baghdad security operation, Mr. Bush has already signaled his desire to expand the number of American military trainers working with Iraqi security forces.
In a speech in Baghdad on Saturday, Mr. Maliki said he was going to renew his efforts to rid the Iraqi Army and other security forces of sectarian influences.
“I announce here that all parties and political organizations, without exception, are forbidden from practicing their activities among the armed forces,” he said during a speech given to mark Army Day.
In his speech, he mentioned the new Baghdad security plan, saying multinational forces would “support and back up our forces.” But he said little specifically about an increase in American troops. Officials familiar with his thinking have said privately that he opposes any measure that would delay giving his administration complete control over Iraq’s armed forces as soon as possible.
He once again tried to reassure critics of his administration that no outlaws could expect protection.
“The Baghdad security plan will not provide safe haven for all outlaws, regardless of their political or sectarian identities,” he said.
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington, and Marc Santora from Baghdad.
A New Commander, in Step With the White House on Iraq
Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times
Saturday 06 January 2007
Washington - The selection of Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus to serve as the senior American commander in Iraq signals an important turn in United States strategy.
As a supporter of increased forces in Iraq, General Petraeus is expected to back a rapid five-brigade expansion, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who has been openly skeptical that additional troops would help stabilize the country.
Having overseen the recent drafting of the military’s counterinsurgency manual, General Petraeus is also likely to change the American military operation in Baghdad. American forces can be expected to take up positions in neighborhoods throughout the capital instead of limiting themselves to conducting patrols from large, fortified bases in and around the city.
The overarching goal of the American military operation may be altered as well. Under General Casey, the principal focus has been on transferring security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces, so American troops could gradually withdraw. Now, the emphasis will shift to protecting the Iraqi population from sectarian strife and insurgent attacks.
Since his appointment was disclosed Thursday, General Petraeus has not spoken publicly about his plans for Iraq. But the doctrine he has advocated suggests that he will want all five of the combat brigades slated to go to Iraq as quickly as possible instead of waiting for them to be phased in.
Before the selection of General Petraeus, there was some doubt about whether the top Iraq commander would be an enthusiastic executor of the new strategy President Bush is preparing to unveil next week - one that could send 20,000 new troops to Iraq. Now, the White House will have an articulate officer to champion and shape that strategy, an important asset for an administration that has decided to buck the tide of public opinion by deepening the American military involvement in Iraq. While some Democratic lawmakers have insisted that any increase be limited to a few months, neither the While House nor General Petraeus would support such a deadline.
To many civilians, the military seems monolithic. But in fact, there has been a lively debate behind the scenes about the best way to achieve the United States’ objectives in Iraq - or at least to preserve a measure of stability as sectarian passions threaten to engulf the country.
At one end of the spectrum have been General Casey, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, and Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who is in charge of training Iraqi security forces.
They have advocated plans to hand over security responsibilities to the Iraqis while gradually reducing American forces and shrinking the number of American bases in Iraq, as conditions permit. Their argument has been that a lengthy expansion of American forces in Iraq will simply put off the day when Iraqis take more responsibility for their security.
Taking a different view, other officers have argued for sending more troops while stepping up economic efforts, the better to apply the military’s new counterinsurgency doctrine. Progress in stabilizing Iraq, they argue, will come only when the Iraqi public does not feel that it needs militias or insurgent groups to ensure its security, and when it concludes that its basic economic needs are being met.
Training and advising the Iraqi forces should continue to be an important priority, these officers have argued, but the Iraqis cannot be expected to shoulder the brunt of the security effort so quickly.
General Petraeus has been squarely in this camp, as was reflected in the military’s new counterinsurgency field manual.
The United States has sought to apply the basic lessons of counterinsurgency operations in Baghdad before - most notably during Operation Together Forward II, the second phase of an effort begun over the summer to reduce violence in Baghdad.
But that effort foundered when the United States and Iraqi authorities failed to marshal sufficient forces to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared of insurgents and militias, and when the Iraqis failed to follow through with the job and reconstruction programs that were intended to win over Iraqi citizens.
By all accounts, Mr. Bush plans to announce an expanded military and economic push. But the United States will still have to contend with the political realities in Iraq, including a Shiite-dominated government that has often seemed more sectarian than inclusive, and may not prove enthusiastic about a larger and more visible role for the Americans.
At 54, General Petraeus has a long Army record and a diverse array of contacts and supporters. Having earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, he invited experts from Harvard, nongovernmental organizations and policy groups to review an early draft of the counterinsurgency manual.
During the invasion, he led the 101st Airborne Division, which sought to emphasize economic and political reconstruction efforts in northern Iraq.
When L. Paul Bremer III, the second American civilian administrator of Iraq, formally abolished the Iraqi Army without announcing a plan to pay the former soldiers, General Petraeus approached one of Mr. Bremer’s aides and delivered a clear message. The decision to leave Iraqi soldiers without a livelihood was prompting angry protests and putting the lives of American soldiers at risk. Mr. Bremer later decided to pay the Iraqi troops.
In June 2004, General Petraeus was charged with training the new Iraqi Army, a position he held for more than a year. It is a mission that is critical to American efforts in Iraq but which is as yet a mixed success.
As the senior American officer in Iraq, General Petraeus will work with Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, a subordinate who has day-to-day command of the forces and who also supports a troop increase.
Instead of immediately confronting the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia led by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, the initial strategy is likely to be more subtle: by trying to tamp down sectarian killings, American troops - and the Iraqi forces they are partnered with - will try to reduce the population’s reliance on militias for security, making it easier for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to take the long-promised step of limiting the role of the militias.
Whether a modicum of stability can be achieved amid the violence and sectarian agendas in Iraq is uncertain at best. But General Petraeus seems determined to give the military’s new counterinsurgency plan its most ambitious field test.
CBS: Military Tells Bush It Has Only 9,000 Troops Available For ‘Surge’
ThinkProgress
A State Department official leaked word this week that President Bush is considering sending “no more than 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops” to Iraq. “Instead of a surge, it is a bump,” the official said.
This claim was bolstered last night by CBS’s David Martin, who reported that military commanders have told Bush they are prepared to execute a troop escalation of just 9,000 soldiers and Marines into Iraq, “with another 10,000 on alert in Kuwait and the U.S.”
The Washington Post reports today that “deep divisions remain between the White House on one side and the Joint Chiefs and congressional leaders on the other about whether a surge of up to 20,000 troops will turn around the deteriorating situation.” The Post also provides more context about an administration official’s recent claim that the escalation is “more of a political decision than a military one.”:
The U.S. military is increasingly resigned to the probability that Bush will deploy a relatively small number of additional troops — between one and five brigades — in part because he has few other dramatic options available to signal U.S. determination in Iraq, officials said. But the Joint Chiefs have not given up making the case that the potential dangers outweigh the benefits for several reasons, officials said.
Escalation backers have already begun distancing themselves from this plan. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said yesterday that not sending enough troops would be “worse than doing nothing.”
Full transcript:
REPORTER: The president is expected to give his speech on a new way forward in Iraq next week. CBS’s David Martin has learned military commanders told the President they could execute a ‘troop surge’ of 9,000 soldiers and Marines into Iraq, with another 10,000 on alert in Kuwait and the U.S. Two army brigades — about 7,500 troops — would go into Baghdad in an effort to control the violence, clearing neighborhoods and staying long enough for reconstruction projects to take effect. 1,500 Marines would go to the western province of al-Anbar, heartland of the Sunni insurgency. This, even though the Commandant of the Marine Corps was quoted as saying he did not see a need for more battalions. But aides say the President still hasn’t decided for sure on a plan.
TONY SNOW (CLIP): The President understands this is important and needs to be done right.
ANCHOR: And details for the President’s proposal on Iraq are still being hammered out, but Pentagon officials are sure the President will order more troops to Iraq.
More Troops for Iraq: Bush’s Next ‘Flight from Reality’
Most editorial pages are shockingly silent, but the commanders and the public are against it. This isn’t a new way forward, nor is it a recipe for victory, this famed war correspondent declares. What on earth is this president thinking?
Joseph L. Galloway
January 05, 2007
President Bush in a few days will present the results of his painful month-long examination of the options for continuing his mistaken adventure in Iraq, but there’s little evidence that he’s discovered any new way forward.
The word in the halls of the Pentagon and inside the Beltway is that The Decider will choose some sort of temporary bump in the numbers of American troops currently assigned to fight a war without end and without purpose.
Does anyone, including the President, really believe that another 10,000 or even 30,000 soldiers and Marines on top of the 140,000 now in Iraq are somehow going to make Baghdad more secure, or clean up the Sunni insurgents who control much of Anbar province?
This isn’t a new way forward, nor is it a recipe for the victory that the desperate architect of an unnecessary and costly war seems to believe is waiting out there to rescue his legacy. It’s no more than a continuation of George W. Bush’s urgent flight from reality.
The idea of so small a bump doesn’t even meet the suggestions of the only two outside advisers who promoted the idea of a surge of as many as 50,000 additional U.S. troops for at least 18 months –_ neo-conservative think tanker Fred Kagan and retired Army general Jack Keane. It doesn’t come close to the 100,000 more troops that Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona — who hopes to be his party’s nominee for president in 2008 — has advocated, nor does it satisfy the majority of Americans who no longer have any trust in Bush’s conduct of the Iraq war or those like-minded voters who turned Congress over to the Democrats in the November mid-term elections.
What on earth is this president thinking?
The word is that he’ll go on national television and promote the idea of sacrifice for the national good and victory in Iraq as somehow crucial to the global war on terrorism.
More of the White House line: Fight the terrorists over there rather than on the streets of New York and Washington, D.C.
More of what the late Harry S. Truman would have called horse manure.
The U.S . military commanders who a month or so ago told Congress and the public that no more American troops were needed in Iraq — that more Americans would in fact only take the pressure off the weak Iraqi government to make the necessary hard decisions — are being replaced.
Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, will retire ahead of schedule and be replaced by Adm. William Fallon, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command. The U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, will be replaced at the same time.
The Baker Commission’s recommendations for a new diplomatic initiative and preparations to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq will draw no more than lip service when the president speaks.
Their months of labor, a gift from the elder George Bush intended to provide his son some sort of cover for a strategic retreat from the disaster he’s created in the Middle East, will be ignored as an inconvenient truth.
Those who’ve sacrificed the most — America’s Army and Marine ground forces and their families — will be asked to continue bearing the burden and paying an even higher price in dead and wounded for a president’s ego and intransigence.
The very troops who will make up the temporary bump in U.S. forces in Iraq are those who’ve already paid that price over and over. They’ll be found by a sleight-of-hand maneuver: ordering units already tapped to return to Iraq to go there earlier than scheduled.
That isn’t even robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s robbing Peter to pay Peter.
George W. Bush believes that he can buy another couple of years of violent stalemate so he can hand off the disaster to whoever succeeds him in the White House on January 20, 2009.
How many more Americans and Iraqis must die to ensure that Bush’s parting words as he retreats to Crawford, Texas, will be: I never cut and ran. I stood tall. I kept America safe.
The problem with that scenario is that it, like all the others drawn by George Bush and Dick Cheney, is far too rosy. The way forward in Iraq is a spiral toward an even bloodier future, and the real decisions are the Iraqis’, not George Bush’s.
It’s too little, too late, Mr. President.
***
An E&P survey shows that newspaper editorials have been amazingly silent on the “surge.”
The Battle of the Surge
Simon Jenkins, HuffPo
01.05.2007
This is to be the week, we are told, when George Bush announces positively the last military assault on insurgency in Baghdad before losing patience and quitting. The so-called surge will supposedly correct the error of last year’s similar Operation Together Forward II. Without order in the capital the physical and political reconstruction of Iraq is impossible.
But since that order cannot, after all, be assigned to local Iraqi forces, the Americans must throw another 20-30,000 troops into the job instead.
I have not heard one remotely plausible game plan for this Battle of the Surge. Leaks have indicated that generals on the ground are opposed to offering the enemy yet more targets.
Pentagon chiefs of staff are opposed to such a cost in men and money for a transient boost in control on the ground. Public opinion and congress are overwhelmingly against the plan, which Republican Senator Chuck Hagel calls “Alice in Wonderland”. America’s puppets in Baghdad’s green zone will do as they are told but the only real enthusiasts are neo-con die-hards. They were well-represented on this page two weeks ago by Frederick Kagan, in a fantasy advocacy of the 2003 “clear and hold” strategy, which amounts to telling American soldiers to commit suicide.
Leaders contemplating defeat far from the front line are always tempted to order “one last push”. Thus did Hitler ordered the Battle of the Bulge, Nixon the bombing of Cambodia and Reagan the blasting of the Shouf villages to cover his retreat from Lebanon. Leaders must pretend to victory even in the jaws of defeat, or their soldiers will not fight. America has a million men under arms. Surely they are not to be beaten by a few hundred guerrillas in the suburbs of Baghdad. So bush will tell them to make one last heave, however pointless.
To such callousness to the lives of others, reason has no response. War is so awful that most people can understand it only through metaphor, as a football game or a business take-over or a pub brawl or, at best, some other war retrieved from history. The conflict in Iraq is beyond metaphor. It is the most dangerous, heart-breaking and hopeless that those who have witnessed war can recall. The risks taken by soldiers on the ground and the terrifying existence endured by ordinary Iraqis are worse than in anything I have witnessed. Independent reporting is near impossible. Military intelligence is non-existent. Bombers do not know where to bomb, soldiers whom to kill, generals when to negotiate.
Such government as exists under prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is unable to enforce any law or control any army. For Washington and London to tell him to “bring his militias to heel” is like telling a junior cop to arrest Al Capone. Large areas of Iraq are under the rough and ready control of local militias, either clerical fundamentalists or gangsters rich on stolen American aid. But the city of Baghdad (and half the non-Kurd population) is given over to armed gangsters, roadblocks, ghettos, nocturnal disappearances, mass killings and refugee flight. Three thousand flee to Jordan and Syria each day. A million Iraqis have fled the country since the American arrived, including an estimated 40 per cent of the professional class. Only the green zone operates as a working entity and its isolation is medieval, its inhabitants barely able to venture beyond its walls.
The idea that such a hell-hole can be policed back to normality with an extra 20,000 American troops is absurd. Such a force (which means barely 5,000 on patrol at any one time) would simply disappear into the fog. The anti-occupation insurgency is now entangled with the conflict between Shia and Sunni in and round Baghdad, claiming hundreds of lives each week and fought by paramilitaries mostly armed and supplied by America in what is a shambles of unaudited theft and fraud.
The only way in which more American troops might assert any control is “denying ground to the enemy” by laying waste to it. In Basra Britain’s contribution to law and order has been to flatten the chief police station. In Anbar province American counter-insurgency takes the form of wrecking villages from the air, as with Fallujah twice since 2003. According to a Times correspondent who reached Fallujah last week, the wrecked city is cut off from Baghdad and back in the hands of Sunni militias who intend to rename the hospital after Saddam Hussein. All Iraqis most crave is a local policeman they can trust not to kill them. America and Britain have failed to give them that and are unlikely to succeed at this late stage.
A shrewd analysis of the present state of play was given in last Friday’s Independent by the former Iraqi finance and defence minister, Ali Allawi. He concluded that “whatever project [the US] had for Iraq has vanished, a victim of inappropriate or incoherent policies”. The country is now moving inexorably away from Baathist secularism into control by Shia islamists in unstable coalition with Kurdish separatists. Formal partition is avoidable only with an acceptance of a ruthless regional autonomy so that Shia and Sunni alike can retreat to their tents and lick their wounds.
What should happen in Iraq has long played second fiddle to what is happening. Indeed they are barely on the same planet. To most observers on the ground there is no point in dreaming up regional conferences or international treaties to monitor a “future Iraq” as long as the present one is so unstable and blood-spattered. That will come only when the focus of personal security rises above the level of the family, the clan and the barricaded street at least to the tier of a city or province. That requires the province to have a coherent and disciplined police force to which local people give assent.
As Allawi points out, Iraq has passed way beyond such a force emanating from central government. Progress depends entirely on the split between Kurdish, Sunni and Shia zones being somehow replicated in constitutional devolution. As already recognised by the 2005 draft constitution, this must embrace not just fiscal and administrative separatism but military, judicial, religious autonomy. Without that autonomy, the Sunni minority will never trust a Shia-dominated federal government in Baghdad. It will remain in thrall to such fanatical imports as al-Qaeda, much as Catholic Ulster was in thrall to the Provisional IRA after the British occupation.
The likely fate of more American troops in Baghdad is to defend the surviving Sunni enclaves from Shia ethnic cleansing as it pushes westwards across Baghdad, supported by semi-official death squads. Of all ironies none would be more savage than that American soldiers leave Iraq after protecting Baathist Sunnis from a murderous onslaught by Shia irregulars in league with the police and army. Yet this is the most plausible outcome of the Battle of the Surge. Even now Sunnis pray that the nocturnal knock on the door is from an American marine rather than an Iraqi police uniform. The first may mean “rendition” but the second means mutilation and death.
It is conceivable that the surge strategy might eventually stabilise a “green line” of ethnic partition somewhere through western Baghdad, as in 1980s Beirut. Behind it each group could begin to find some security and normality, sufficient for their local commanders to meet and parley some division of the spoils of aid and oil revenue under provincial and then national authority.
If it comes to that no outsiders, regional or global, should be anywhere near them. Iraq’s next chapter must surely be left to Iraqis alone. Outsiders have made this country a byword for arrogant and incompetent interventionism unparalleled in half a century. The 2003 assault on Iraq was unprovoked and justified by no overriding threat to western interests. It was one gigantic whim, a whim to which the leadership of the British Labour government fully subscribed.
When Blair was asked at a private lunch before Christmas what he had done to restrain American policy in Iraq he looked baffled. “It’s worse than you imply,” he said with a smile. Restraint was not an issue because he fully agreed with the policy. We assume he also agrees with the surge strategy, about which he spoke to Bush on the phone on December 29. So it is no good the Blairites or Gordon Brown or Labour voters or the British people generally objecting to the impending bloodbath on the streets of Baghdad. It is being done in their name. They can hope only that it is the beginning of the end.
YOU WANT A WAR, DECLARE A WAR!
Richard Reeves
Fri Jan 5
NEW YORK — Now he tells us. It seems that former president Gerald Ford, in a few interviews embargoed until after his death, was telling reporters that he thought the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Well, almost everyone who can read or see knows that now.
No one can be sure what impact statements by Ford or others, patriotically keeping their mouths shut, might have had on the decision-making of President George W. Bush and his two most important warmongers, Vice President Richard Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It happens that each of them, Rumsfeld and Cheney, served as Ford’s White House chief of staff and presumably had a good deal of respect for him and his judgment.
The most widely publicized of the Ford interviews was by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, who wrote: “Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. ‘I don’t think I would have gone to war,’ he said.
“In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford ‘very strongly’ disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. …
“‘Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction. And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do …
“‘I can understand the theory of wanting to free people.’ But the former president said he was skeptical ‘whether you can detach that from the obligation No. 1, of what’s in our national interest. And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.’”
My old friend, historian Robert Dallek, calls that the “code of silence” of ex-presidents. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, they don’t criticize their serving successors. My late friend Mario Puzo, the novelist, called it “omerta” in “The Godfather.”
I don’t know enough about the Mafia to comment on Puzo’s definition, but I know Dallek is right. Keeping your mouth shut is part of the code of American “team” spirit. It has the same political roots as shouting down anyone who questions war-making by claiming he or she is not supporting our brave soldiers.
Brave they are, the men and women serving in Iraq, but you are not supposed to comment on why they should be killed and wounded there, or about what this fiasco is doing to the U.S. military. The credibility of and respect for the military are the second and third victims of this war, close behind the time-honored first casualty — that is, truth.
The rest of us are becoming a nation of wimps, pygmy cowards in the case of those who have power in Washington. If someone with actual political power — say Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania — stands up to say the emperor has no clothes, he suddenly finds his patriotism, judgment and even sanity questioned. How different is that from the old Soviet communism practice of locking away dissidents in insane asylums?
We are losing our freedom to patriotism and teamwork. Rugged individualism was another victim of our surrender to nakedness. There is no place for individualism on this team.
There is no place for the Constitution, either. As I remember from school, the Congress has the power and duty to declare war. Well, we have not declared war on anyone for the past 65 years. That must give great comfort to the families and descendants of all the men and women who were killed or were physically or mentally maimed in dozens of non-wars conducted from the safety of the bunker under the White House.
We’re pathetic, letting presidents lie us into war again and again and again. Now, we have a new loyal opposition, a Democratic Congress and a Republican president. The president, as we know, has his head set in concrete. That leaves it up to the Congress. If they want this war, they should declare war. Or, go home and practice the great Team America virtue of silence in the face of danger.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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