http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick07132007.html
The Decider in Denial "Astonishingly, the report suggests that one of the successes in Iraq has been the spending of $10bn "for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis"." Bush's Optimism Impossible to Square with Reality in Iraq By PATRICK COCKBURN Counterpunch: Jul 13, 2007 Arbil, Iraq Scrambling to shore up crumbling support for the war in Iraq, President George Bush released a report yesterday claiming sufficient political and military progress to justify the presence of 170,000 US troops in the country. President Bush said he still believed victory in Iraq was possible. "Those who believe that the battle in Iraq is lost will likely point to the unsatisfactory performance on some of the political benchmarks," he said. "Those who believe the battle in Iraq can and must be won see the satisfactory performance on several of the security benchmarks as a cause of optimism." He added it was too early to say if his new strategy in Iraq was working. But in Iraq as in the US there is a sense that Washington is playing its last cards. "I assume the US is going to start pulling out because 70 per cent of Americans and Congress want the troops to come home," Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, said. "The Americans are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims." The report itself admits to a sense in Iraq that the US, one way or another, is on the way out more than four years after its invasion in 2003. It says that political reconciliation in Iraq is being hampered by "increasing concern among Iraqi political leaders that the United States may not have a long-term commitment to Iraq". The White House yesterday sought to suggest possible change for the better in Iraq by saying that there had been satisfactory progress on eight of the 18 goals set by Congress. Unsatisfactory progress is reported on six, unsatisfactory but with some progress on two and "too early to assess" on a further two. The picture it hopes to give--and this has been uncritically reported by the US media--is of a mixture of progress and frustration in Iraq. The wholly misleading suggestion is that the war could go either way. In reality the six failures are on issues critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on largely trivial matters. Thus unsatisfactory progress is reported on "the Iraqi security forces even handedly enforcing the law" and on the number of Iraqi units willing to fight independently of the Americans. This means that there is no Iraqi national army but one consisting of Kurds, Shia and Sunni who will never act against their own communities. Despite three years of training, the Iraqi security forces cannot defend the government. Set against these vitally important failures are almost ludicrously trivial or meaningless successes. For instance, "the rights of minority political parties are being defended" but these groups have no political influence. The alliance of Shia religious and Kurdish nationalist parties that make up the government is not keen to share power with anybody. This is scarcely surprising since they triumphantly won the election in 2005. There have been some real improvements over the past six months. Sectarian killings in Iraq have declined to 650 in June compared with 2,100 in January. So-called "high-profile" bombings, including suicide bomb attacks on Shia markets, fell to 90 in June compared with 180 in March. But it is doubtful if these are entirely or even mainly due to the US surge. The fall in sectarian killings, mostly of Sunni by Shia, may be largely the result of the Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr being told by their leader to curb their murder campaign. It is also true that last year, after the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, there was a battle for Baghdad which the Shia won and the Sunni lost. Baghdad is more and more Shia-dominated and the Sunni are pinned into the south-west of the city and a few other enclaves. As Sunni and Shia are killed or driven out of mixed areas, there are less of them to kill. Some 4.2 million people in Iraq are now refugees, of whom about half have fled the country. The real and appalling situation on the ground in Iraq has been all too evident this week. Thirty bodies, the harvest of the death squads, were found in the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday. The figure for Tuesday was 26 and, in addition, 20 rockets and mortar bombs were fired into the Green Zone killing three people. This was significant because they were fired by the Mehdi Army, who had been upset by criticism made on them by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. By way of gentle reproof they shelled his offices in the Green Zone. US and British claims of success in Iraq over the past four years have a grim record of being entirely sculpted to political needs at home. British ministers trumpeted the success of Operation Sinbad in Basra last year and early this one saying it would put the worst of the militia out of business. This year Basra is wholly ruled by these very same militias. Overall the "surge" has already failed. It was never necessary to wait for yesterday's report or a further assessment in September. The reason for the failure is the same as that for American failures since 2003. They have very few allies in Iraq outside Kurdistan. The occupation is unpopular and always has been. Economic and social conditions are becoming more and more desperate. There is in theory 5.6 hours of electricity in Baghdad every 24 hours but many districts get none at all. It is baking hot in the Mesopotamian plain, where temperatures even at night are above 40C. People used to sleep on the roof but this has become dangerous because of mortar bombardments. Oil pipelines are sabotaged by insurgents and punctured by thieves. "In just one stretch of pipeline between Baghdad and Baiji, we found 1,488 holes," the Oil Minister, Hussein Shahristani, told the Iraqi parliament, speaking of a important pipe that brings oil product to the capital from Baiji refinery. He added: "It doesn't function as a pipeline... it's more like a sieve." Gasoline is brought to Baghdad by truck but these are not allowed on bridges because they might be packed with explosives. In a further sign of how life is lived in Baghdad, clerics have issued a fatwa against eating river fish--previously a favourite food--because the fish gorge on dead bodies floating in the Tigris river. Astonishingly, the report suggests that one of the successes in Iraq has been the spending of $10bn "for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis". The danger of the false optimism in the report is that it prevents other policies being devised. In January, President Bush decided to in effect ignore the most important recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which were to talk to Iran and Syria and to disengage US troops. Instead Mr Bush sent reinforcements to Iraq, denounced Iran and Syria and added to the number of his enemies by threatening to clamp down on the Shia militias. But talking to Iran has always been essential to any solution in Iraq. "The Iranians can afford to compromise in Iraq but they cannot afford to lose," said one Iraqi observer. The more threatened they feel by the US over nuclear power or the possibility of air attack, the greater incentive they have to ensure that the US does not succeed in gaining control of Iraq. For most of the past four years they have not had to do much because the US has helpfully ensured its own failure by pursuing disastrous policies. Paradoxically, Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab states, actually supports the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It is run largely by their Shia co-religionists and political leaderswho were supported by Iran for years against Saddam Hussein. The problem here is that Washington has never been willing to accept that the great campaign it launched to overthrow Saddam Hussein has increased Iranian influence and put Shia clergy in black turbans in power in Baghdad as they have long held power in Tehran. The "benchmarks" in President Bush's report are trivial and prove nothing. They appear to be an attempt to pretend that the war is still winnable in Iraq up to the Presidential election in the US next year. These vain hopes of victory rule out compromises that the US still might make and are a pretence which many Americans and Iraqis will die unnecessarily trying to sustain. Benchmarks for progress Unsatisfactory * De-Baathification * Equitable distribution of oil among Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and other Iraqis * Providing Iraqi commanders with full authority * Even-handed law enforcement * Number of Iraqi units capable of operating independently * Ensuring that political authorities do not make false accusations against the Security Forces Unsatisfactory, but some progress * Reducing sectarian violence and eliminating militia control of local security * Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial councils, and a date for provincial elections Satisfactory * Constitutional Review * Legislation on semi-autonomous regions * Political, media and economic committees to support Baghdad Security Plan * Three Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad plan * Ensuring the security plan will not provide a haven for outlaws * Joint security stations across Baghdad * Minority parties' rights in the legislature * Allocating and spending $10bn for reconstruction Too early to assess * Enacting and implementing amnesty [Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.] *** From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Informed Comment - Jul 14, 2007 http://www.juancole.com/2007/07/pace-independent-iraqi-battalions-in.html Pace: Independent Iraqi Battalions in Decline by Juan Cole Gen. Peter Pace says that the number of Iraqi battalions (about 500 men) who can operate wholly independently of the US forces has fallen in the past year from 10 to only 6. He also says we should not worry about that statistic. He points out that the number of battalions who can be 'in the lead' on military operations has risen from 88 to 100. But presumably it has only really risen to 96, with 4 of the new 'in the lead' battalions having formerly been able to operate independently. In fact, the important figure is how many can operate independently. That means that they will go to the front when ordered, will actually fight, won't run away, and might actually accomplish something, even if there are no US troops anywhere nearby. Iraq apparently has about 3,000 troops of that description. My guess is that they are mostly Kurdish Peshmerga on loan from Kurdistan. I.e., Iraq probably has almost no Arab troops who would and could fight independently for the al-Maliki government, as opposed to cannon fodder pushed before US battalions and afraid of being shot as deserters if they turn tail. And this is the situation after 4 years! Some have asked me whether the most direct route to a US withdrawal is not to spend more money and effort training an Iraqi army that could operate on its own and would stand and fight. In my view, this ideal is unlikely to be attained. Most Iraqi troops are actually the equivalent of a local national guard. They will defend their neighborhoods, but most will not deploy to other parts of the country when ordered to do so. There is little evidence of them being willing to stand and fight on their own, except on a neighborhood level (i.e. Badr Corps Shiite militiamen in the police or army will fight Mahdi Army militiamen for control of a Diwaniya neighborhood, especially if they have US air support. But they have not shown that they are willing and able to fight Sunni Arab guerrillas effectively). Moreover, a lot of the reason for this problem is simply that most Iraqis don't much care for their new government and certainly are not willing to die for it. I saw this in Lebanon in the late 1970s. An army has to believe in its government in order to be reliably deployed. Lack of political will is fatal to military discipline. Iraq is fractured and so is its political will, so effective military intervention is very difficult. The population in the military is not different from the general population in this regard (except, in Iraq, in the case of the Kurdish Peshmerga). The political resolution has to precede the military resolution. That is why the Lebanon Civil War ended in 1989 with an act of political will, the Taif agreement. After that it was possible to rebuild the Lebanese military. ... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
