These items below contain several nuggets not making headlines on their own, but worth filing away, especially since proponents of this latest escalation say it will take two or three years to be effective. The stage is being set for much more than one last battle for a city, however.
Yesterday at Ft. Benning, Pres. Bush went to some length establishing that this new plan was a collaboration initiated by PM Maliki. However, that assertion contradicts previous reporting on how the generals in the field felt about additional troops, as well as Iraqi opinion. Indeed, previous reporting unearthed a November memo from NSA Hadley that shows Bush was already considering an escalation before the Iraq Study Group made its report. Another unrelenting supporter of troop escalation, besides Sen. McCain, is VP Cheney, whose opinion still seems to carry more weight than others. Also advising the president to be more aggressive, super hawk JD Crouch. See more about him, below. Despite the midterm election defeat and the growing impatience of Congress, Pres. Bush continues to listen to their advice because they tell him what he wants to hear, that victory is still possible, it just takes more shock and awe. Thats the only way only 21,500 troops could really hope to succeed against what has transpired in Iraq (there are other ways to achieve our objective see below) since Bushs premature Mission Accomplished and thats why the Eisenhower carrier strike group poised off the coast of Somalia (for the moment) is such a crucial piece of Bushs Last Stand. This plan depends on carnage to break the will of the insurgents. Bush even warned of that in his speech, saying we would see more bloodshed on our television screens. It will be a bloody spring in Baghdad, but mostly on the poor who have not fled the country. Thats not what Americans bought into with this Faustian bargain once before, and they shouldnt accept it twice. - kwc NYT Gordon, Rutenberg, Sanger A 2-Month Debate capped by the Big Push: A narrative pieced together from interviews with participants and from public testimony suggests that through much of the process, generals who had been on the ground in Iraq during the past year had favored that the new strategy begin with a substantially smaller force than the one that President Bush announced to the nation on Wednesday night. In the end, it was Mr. Bush who appeared to drive his commanders along to the conclusion that more troops were needed. White House officials were clearly sensitive on Thursday about any suggestions that the president countermanded his generals, and said his new plan had their full support. They said the generals sought and received assurances that the Iraqis would undertake political initiatives and end the practice of releasing militia figures who were friends of the government and captured by American or Iraqi forces." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12ticktock.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12ticktock.html> In Baghdad, Bush Policy Is Met With Resentment By John F. Burns and Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, January 12, 2007 BAGHDAD, Jan. 11 Iraqs Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bushs proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan. The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the governments response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war. Mr. Dabbagh said that the governments objective was to secure the eventual withdrawal of American troops, and that for that to be possible there had to be security for Iraqis. If this can be achieved by increasing either Iraqi or multinational forces, he added, the government, for sure, will not stand against it. Mr. Dabbagh suggested that much about the Bush plan depended on how circumstances in Iraq would evolve over the coming months an echo, in its way, of senior Bush administration officials. They have implied that they might halt the month-by-month inflow of additional troops if they think Mr. Maliki is failing to meet the political and military benchmarks Mr. Bush identified as the Iraqi governments part in making the new war plan work. The plan can be developed according to the needs, Mr. Dabbagh said. Then he added tartly, What is suitable for our conditions in Iraq is what we decide, not what others decide for us. The spokesmans remarks, and a similarly dyspeptic tone that was adopted by Shiite politicians with close ties to Mr. Maliki, pointed to the double-bind Mr. Bush finds himself in. Faced with low levels of public support for his new military push and a Democratic leadership in Congress that has said it will fight him over it, he also confronts the uncomfortable prospect of foot-dragging in Baghdad over the troop increases and the benchmarks he has set for the Iraqis. While senior officials in Washington have presented the new war plan as an American adaptation of proposals that were first put to Mr. Bush by Mr. Maliki when the two men met in the Jordanian capital of Amman in November, the picture that is emerging in Baghdad is quite different. What Mr. Maliki wanted, his officials say, was in at least one crucial respect the opposite of what Mr. Bush decided: a lowering of the American profile in the war, not the increase Mr. Bush has ordered. These Iraqi officials say Mr. Maliki, in the wake of Mr. Bushs setback in the Democratic sweep in Novembers midterm elections, demanded that American troops be pulled back to the periphery of Baghdad and that the war in the capital, at least, be handed to Iraqi troops. The demand was part of a broader impatience among the ruling Shiites to be relieved from American oversight so as to be able to fight and govern according to the dictates of Shiite politics, not according to strictures from Washington. What transpired, in Mr. Bushs speech on Wednesday night, appears to have been a hybrid: a plan that aims at marrying the Maliki governments urgency for a broader license to act with Mr. Bushs determination to make what American officials here see as a last-chance push for success in Iraq on American terms. And that, as Mr. Bush made clear on Wednesday, implies objectives that will be difficult many Iraqis say impossible to square with Mr. Malikis goals. The differences seemed clear on Thursday as Iraqis responded to Mr. Bushs speech. In the streets of Baghdad, reactions followed, broadly, the familiar pattern in a city that is more and more divided on sectarian lines. Many Shiites said Iraqs own security forces, which are predominantly Shiite, should be left to do the job of stabilizing the city, while many Sunnis, shocked by the violence of Shiite death squads in recent months, said they would welcome the Americans if they could rein the sectarian killing in. Mr. Dabbagh, the government spokesman, emphasized the parts of the Bush plan that best suited the Maliki governments political ambitions. He said the good thing in this plan is that it determines that responsibility should be transferred from the Americans to the Iraqis. This was a prime point with Mr. Bush, too, when he said that the role of American troops under the new plan would be to help the Iraqis secure neighborhoods in Baghdad, protect the local population and maintain security in areas that American and Iraqi forces have cleared. Within hours of Mr. Bushs speech, American commanders were meeting with their Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad to work out the details of a new command arrangement that would give Mr. Maliki a direct role in overseeing the new crackdown. The Iraqis named a commander for the operation, Lt. Gen. Aboud Gambar, a Shiite from southern Iraq who was a top general in Saddam Hussein s army until the American-led invasion in 2003. General Gambar will report directly to Mr. Maliki, outside the chain of command that runs through the Defense Ministry, which the Maliki government has long viewed as a bastion of American influence, and, because the defense minister is a Sunni, of resistance to Shiite control. General Gambar will have two deputies, one for the heavily Shiite east part of Baghdad, another for the mostly Sunni west part, and they will oversee nine new military districts, each assigned an Iraqi brigade. As details of the Bush plan became known on Wednesday, Iraqi officials said that the new arrangements would give Iraqis operational control of the new push in Baghdad. But Mr. Dabbagh and others were quick to pull back on Thursday, acknowledging that Baghdad would remain under American operational control at least until later this year. American officials noted that American officers would be assigned to General Gambars headquarters, that an American battalion would be twinned with each Iraqi brigade and that every Iraqi unit, down to the company level, would have American military advisers. If this fell a long way short of the plan for full Iraqi control in Baghdad that Mr. Maliki set out in November, his officials were at pains to say that the prime minister would decide the issue of most concern to the Iraqi leader: whether, and when, Iraqi and American forces would be allowed to move in force into Sadr City. That Shiite working-class district in northeast Baghdad is the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the most powerful of the Shiite militias, and the main power base of Moktada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army leader, whose parliamentary bloc sustains Mr. Maliki in office. Its been agreed that in order to succeed they have to consult, Mr. Dabbagh said a bland requirement as he stated it but some distance from the formula put forward at Washington briefings on the new plan. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, at a news conference on Wednesday, said that American and Iraqi troops would be free to go into all parts of Baghdad, including Sadr City and that one benchmark in the plan was that there would be no political interference with military operations or attempts to protect death squad leaders. That appeared to be an allusion to the past American experience with Mr. Maliki, who has consistently refused to sanction major offensives in Sadr City. On at least one occasion, he intervened to secure the release of a man captured by American troops and identified by American commanders as a death squad leader with links to Mr. Sadr. Mr. Malikis argument has been that the solution to the problem of militias, including Mr. Sadrs, must be political, not military, but he has simultaneously postponed any action on a new law to disarm and demobilize the militias. One of Mr. Malikis political allies, Sheik Khalid al-Attiya, who is deputy speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, said Thursday that he expected the benchmarks set by Mr. Bush to take 6 to 12 months to be met. With American commanders in Baghdad saying they hope to have the main parts of the city stabilized by late summer allowing American troops to be pulled back to bases outside the city as Mr. Maliki has demanded the Americans seem likely to run out of patience with Mr. Maliki long before Mr. Attiyas timetable plays out. A Shiite political leader who has worked closely with the Americans in the past said the Bush benchmarks appeared to have been drawn up in the expectation that Mr. Maliki would not meet them. He cannot deliver the disarming of the militias, the politician said, asking that he not be named because he did not want to be seen as publicly criticizing the prime minister. He cannot deliver a good program for the economy and reconstruction. He cannot deliver on services. This is a matter of fact. There is a common understanding on the American side and the Iraqi side. Views such as these increasingly common among the political class in Baghdad are often accompanied by predictions that Mr. Maliki will be forced out as the crisis over the militias builds. The Shiite politician who described him as incapable of disarming militias suggested he might resign; others have pointed to an American effort in recent weeks to line up a moderate front of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political leaders outside the government, and said that the front might be a vehicle for mounting a parliamentary coup against Mr. Maliki, with behind-the-scenes American support. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html> Transcript of Jan. 11 2007 Bush speech at Ft. Benning, Georgia http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070111-7.html <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070111-7.html> About JD Crouch http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1259 <http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1259> NYTs Sanger Plan B for Bush & Cheney? Aides hinted that the administration had already come up with a Plan B in case the latest strategy failed, with one saying there are other ways to achieve our objective. But he would not describe that strategy, or say if it involved withdrawal, containment or the breakup of the country into sectarian entities. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/world/middleeast/11prexy.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/world/middleeast/11prexy.html>
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
