http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070821_the_real_iraq_progress_report/
The Real Iraq Progress Report By Robert Scheer Truthdig: August 21, 2007 The parade of political tourists to Iraq in recent weeks, during which easily impressed pundits and members of Congress came to be dazzled by the wonders of the troop surge, probably ensures that this murderous adventure will continue well into the next presidency-even if the Democrats win. For example, Kenneth Pollack, a top national security adviser in the Clinton administration whose 2002 book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," convinced many Democratic politicians to support the war, now finds renewed optimism after the surge. In a July 30 New York Times Op-Ed article, "A War We Just Might Win," which he coauthored after spending eight days in Iraq, Pollack gushed, "We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi army troops cover the countryside." So much so that a town 40 miles northeast of Tal Afar was the scene, on Aug. 15, of the deadliest attack of the war-a quadruple bombing left more than 500 dead and 1500 wounded, and most of the buildings in ruin. What about those "reliable" police officers and Iraqi army troops whose presence in the area Pollack found so reassuring? If Pollack was asked about that on any of the talk shows that routinely feature him as an expert, I have not found the footage. Other Democrats brought to Iraq for photo-op visits have similarly descended into total myopia. Take Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., who is suddenly more upbeat about the future U.S. role in the region: "If anything, I'm more willing to find a way forward," he enthused. Rep. Tim Mahoney, D-Fla., proclaimed that the U.S. troop surge "has really made a difference and really has gotten al-Qaida on their heels." Odd, then, that al-Qaida was blamed by the United States for that deadly attack near Tal Afar. In the past week, two Iraqi governors have been assassinated in incidents attributed to intra-Shiite violence that is dramatically on the rise. But not even this bloodshed stops yet another Democratic lawmaker, Brian Baird, D-Wash., from proclaiming that he will no longer support measures to set a deadline for troop withdrawal, because "We are making real and tangible progress on the ground." Contrast the rosy optimism of those day tourists with the assessment of seven active-duty soldiers coming to the end of their 15-month tour of duty on the ground in Iraq. They had an Op-Ed piece in the Aug. 19 New York Times entitled "The War as We Saw It": "To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press reports portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day." Get their article-excerpted quoting cannot do it justice-and hand it to anyone who prattles on about how "our" leaving Iraq will only make matters worse. "Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence," they wrote. "In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to retain dignity is to call us what we are-an army of occupation-and force our withdrawal." In the meantime, the seven soldiers urge that we let "Iraqis take center stage in all matters" and "let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities." The plea ends with "We need not talk about morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through." And sadly enough, they will continue to be sacrificed to a policy that makes no sense to them as well as to most other Americans. As their Op-Ed piece recounts, "one of us, Staff Sergeant [Jeremy A.] Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a 'time sensitive target acquisition mission,' on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive." But what about the next good man sacrificed to the whims of politicians and pundits? *** Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 14:52:06 -0400 From: All the News That Doesn't Fit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [NYTr] Shia power causing resentment in parts of Arab world sent by Simon McGuinness [Promoting a sectarian war within Islam has all the hallmarks of imperialist manipulation: motive, means, opportunity. It looks increasingly like John "Death Squad" Negropointe is the prince of darkness behind this plan, aided and abetted by devil incarnate, Dick Cheney. The sale of huge quantities of weaponry to Iran's neighbours is certainly not designed to avoid war. Perhaps the outline of a Plan B for Iraq is beginning to emerge - a regional conflagration which will lay waste to vast tracts of the Middle East and leave the USA, potentially, to inherit the oil. The sectarian warfare that the US media paints in Iraq (as opposed to legitimate insurgency against an illegal invader) could quite easily be manufactured by Negropointe and his henchmen with a few bombs here and a few bombs there. The US failure to prevent sectarian warfare could, like Britain's equally spurious efforts in northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s actually be hiding the running of death squads on both sides intent on fermenting the most outrage by inflicting the most heinous crimes against the other community. Remember 5 years ago Iraqis didn't even know which side of the sectarian divide their next-door neighbours stood on - it was of no importance. Now, thanks to the USA, it is a matter of life and death. Clearly a case of "Let's You and Him Fight". - SMcG.] The Irish Times _ Aug 67, 2006 http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2007/0807/1186424805606.html Shia power causing resentment in parts of Arab world Middle East: The Sunni-Shia fault line across the Islamic world is ancient, but today it is being deepened deliberately and dangerously. by Mary Fitzgerald , Foreign Affairs Correspondent. The people of Mu'tah were accustomed to seeing bands of Shia pilgrims tramping through the dusty streets of their town in the scrubby desert of southern Jordan. The nearby tomb of the Prophet Muhammad's cousin, Ja'far Al-Tayyar, slain there during a battle with Byzantine forces in the early days of Islam, is an important Shia shrine, drawing thousands of pilgrims every year for the holy day of Ashura. They would come from neighbouring Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf, Iran, and even as far away as south Asia. Then Iraq was invaded and everything changed. After Saddam Hussein was hanged, the dwindling number of pilgrims dropped even further. "This year you could count them on one hand," says the caretaker. "There are big tensions now because of Iraq. People are angry because of what happened to Saddam and maybe the Shia are afraid to come here as a result." Shia Iraqi exiles living in predominantly Sunni Jordan tell a different story. They tell of security guards preventing Shia from observing rituals and chanting at the shrine, warning them of deportation if they do. They tell of border officials asking if they are Sunni or Shia on arrival. They point out increasingly shrill newspaper articles, like the one in the pro-government daily Ad-Dustour warning of a conspiracy to spread Shiism from India to Egypt. Or mosques where clerics rail against alleged Shia perfidy and worshippers are handed pamphlets purporting to tell "everything you need to know about the Shia". Rumours abound of Shia proselytising and plans to build a mega-mosque for Shia, funded with Iranian money, on a prime piece of land in Amman. It's not just confined to Jordan, strained as the tiny kingdom is with almost one million Iraqi emigres. The empowerment of Iraq's Shia has bred resentment in many quarters of the Arab world, making Sunni regimes jittery and more fearful of their own beleaguered Shia populations. Iran's rising influence is also a huge factor. As tensions escalate between Tehran and Washington, concerns about Iran's intentions in the region have taken on a distinctly sectarian hue, with Sunni clerics and US-allied governments fanning animosities rooted in centuries of theological, political and ethnic rivalry. Three years ago Jordan's King Abdullah warned of the emergence of a "Shia crescent" across the region. In a television interview last year Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was blunt, saying: "Most of the Shia are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in." Earlier this year King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia denounced what he called Shia proselytising and attempts "to diminish [ the Sunnis'] historical power". The Sunni-Shia fault line is not new. Beginning with a 7th century dispute over who was entitled to succeed the Prophet Muhammad as head of the nascent Islamic empire, the resulting schism fed into another rift - now at the heart of the region's powerplay - between ethnically Persian Iran, which became Shia, and the Arab swathe of the Middle East, which became predominantly Sunni. An article written earlier this year by the editor-in-chief of Al- Ahram, Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, is typical of the rhetoric sweeping predominantly Sunni states. "Iran is active in spreading Shiism even in the countries which don't have a Shia minority . . . to revive the dreams of the Safavid," wrote Osama Saraya, referring to the Persian dynasty which ruled Iran for more than two centuries and enshrined Shiism as the state religion. "Is this about Shiism or Iran, or a mix of the two? It's not quite clear, and often the two are conflated in this upsurge of sectarian feeling," says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group. Iraq's vicious sectarian war, along with rising Sunni-Shia tensions in Lebanon and to a lesser degree in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, have made Muslims elsewhere more conscious than ever before of their own sectarian identity, says Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future. This is borne out in a recent Pew survey, which found that majorities in seven countries, including Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait and Tanzania, believe Sunni-Shia tensions are a growing problem for the Muslim world, and are not limited to Iraq. Near majorities in four other countries, including Turkey, agreed. Where this heightened sense of sectarian identity may lead is grounds for much concern, with some fearing that the Iraq war could spill into a wider Sunni-Shia conflagration. Washington's increasing bullishness towards Iran is another worry. "The danger is that the US is now coming in the middle of all this and encouraging it as a way of forming an alliance against Iran," says Vali Nasr, echoing suspicions raised by Shia clerics and Mahdi Akef, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world's most influential Sunni political movement. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves the US with some unlikely bedfellows - extremist Sunni jihadists whose loathing of the West is often surpassed only by their hatred for Shia, whom they consider heretics. Last January a Kuwaiti cleric influential in jihadist circles ranked Iran ahead of the US and Israel in a hierarchy of villains, decrying the "Safawi enemy that seeks the destruction of Islamic civilisation". The month before, a senior cleric in Saudi Arabia pronounced Shia "more dangerous than Jews and Christians". Manipulating sectarian tensions is a dangerous game, says Diaa Rashwan, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "Some regimes have allowed people to talk and write about the Shia like this, some have even encouraged it, but sectarianism is not something you can easily control. It taps into feelings that can turn very primitive and encourages fanatics on both sides. To encourage it is to play with fire." 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