The Way Forward? Divide the Sadrists

Once again, the White House is playing a short-term strategy in Iraq. Also, in spite of Al-Qaeda being nearly the sole focus for the past five or six months, Bush is now pulling troops off the AQ manhunt to crack down on "bad" Sadrists.

We've already seen that the strategy with Sunni terrorists has been compromised. When Bush proposed the surge in January, the plan was to have the Iraqi Army disarm or exterminate the sectarian militias with the U.S. providing a support role. Since the Iraqi Army seems to be perpetually in "training", and since the job proved far more complicated and difficult than Bush imagined it would be (big shock there, eh?), the plan was changed. And of course, this change was presented as "what we planned all along".

The "change" was to divide the Sunni terrorists into "good" and "bad" categories. The "good" terrorists were those who would join with the American troops to wipe out their rivals, while quietly being allowed to continue with their shakedowns, extortion, executions, kidnappings, and black market dealings. With the "bad" terrorists on their heels, these opportunities opened up even more as the competition thinned. One can only wonder how the Iraqi Army will deal with these entrenched "good" terrorists who oppose the government when the Army tries to regain control of the country. One also wonders about the consequences when these "good" terrorists stop co-operating or getting what they want from the arrangement. We will then have militias that know our troops' movements, weaknesses, intelligence, and locations as well as possessing the arms that we supplied them with. Since the police and military are heavily infiltrated by the militias, these forces are likely to be a liability, as well.

It should be noted that this "change" in strategy was the major feature of the surge, if not the only real one.

So what to do about the Shia insurgency, then? Let's try the same brilliant approach. What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, we'll divide the Sadrists into "good" and "bad" categories, and use them to do the job that the pathetic Iraqi military can't possibly even begin to approach. What's in it for the Sadrists? Pretty much nothing, of course. Since the Mahdi Army has "laid low" for much of the surge (with Bush taking credit for the corresponding small drop in violence), they now remain probably the strongest Iraqi force. They have no motivation to turn on their fellow Sadrists, since they have emerged as the major player and icon of resistance to the occupation. If they can wait out Bush, they will be the winners. Petraeus needs them, not the other way around. So far, all Bush is offering them is their choice of a slow death or a quick death. If Bush prevails, the Mahdi Army will be neutered and merely be an honor guard for a puppet government; the slow death. If they resist or remain "un-cooperative", then the plan will be to wipe them out; the quick death.
However, we've already seen how effective the "extermination" option was against the militias during the surge. The fact that Petraeus has to use this "good" Sadrist vs. "bad" Sadrists strategy only proves that the U.S. can't defeat them quickly and neatly. Sure, they can bomb, shell, and strafe neighbourhoods wholesale, all the while warning that withdrawal would lead to a huge civilian massacre. That would look pretty stupid, though, if we are merely there to kill off the civilians before the militias can do it.

And meanwhile, the heat will be off Al-Qaeda. Our "awakening" buddies will get slammed. The "good" terrorists will get bolder and more demanding of us. The infrastructure, economy, and political situation will continue to whimper and collapse. It will become much, much, harder to fake statistics, and Iraq certainly won't look more peaceful or stable to the domestic audience. The Iraqi government will ask us to leave, and we will lose the very last illusion of Iraqi sovereignty. And the "drawdown" of troops will have to be put on hold.

But of course, to Bush, the best possible outcome is the only likely outcome. That has been his approach for more than four years now. He's been wrong, excruciatingly wrong, for that entire time. His ill-conceived attempt for a quick fix will backfire simply because he lacks the ability to even conceive of a Plan B, much less the wisdom to see anything but a military solution to everything. In the end, the U.S. will be discredited in the Middle East as a clumsy aggressor and unreliable ally.


full story

US-IRAQ: Unable to Defeat Mahdi Army, U.S. Hopes to Divide It
Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (IPS) - Although the U.S. military command's frequent assertions that the primary threat to U.S. forces in Iraq comes from Iranian meddling, its real problem is that Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi army is determined to end the occupation and is simply too big and too well entrenched to be weakened by military force.

The U.S. command began trying to enter into a political dialogue with Sadr's followers in early 2006 and now claims that such a dialogue has begun, according to a Sep. 12 article by Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times.

And Gen. David Petraeus hinted in his Congressional testimony last month at the need to negotiate a deal with the Sadrists. Petraeus said it is impossible to "kill or capture" all the "Sadr militia" and likened the problem to that of dealing with the Sunni insurgents who have now been allowed to become local security forces in Sunni neighbourhoods.

But the George W. Bush administration is not prepared to make peace with the Mahdi army. Instead it believes it can somehow divide it if it applies military pressure while wooing what it calls "moderates" in the Sadr camp. Parker quoted an anonymous administration official last month as suggesting that there were Sadrists "who we think we might be able to work with".

A U.S. commander in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, told Parker last month that Sadrist representatives initiated indirect talks in late July, which were followed by Sadr's announcement at the end of August of a six-month hiatus in fighting.

But the proposal Frank made to the Mahdi army at a meeting Sep. 3 with both Sunni and Shiite community leaders suggests that Petraeus is on a short leash in negotiating local peace agreements. Frank proposed that the Mahdi army cease attacks for two weeks, and that the U.S. military would "consider reducing their raids in the district".

That was an offer that might have been expected from a newly installed occupation army rather than from one that has already admitted that it cannot prevail by using force and is bound to become weaker in the near future.

The U.S. command intends to increase the military pressure on the Mahdi army. Last week, Odierno announced that more military resources were being shifted from fighting against al Qaeda to operations against Shiite militiamen.

The idea of managing the Mahdi army problem by dividing it between "extremist" and "moderate" elements was integrated into the original "surge" strategy. Even before Petraeus took command in Baghdad last January, he and his second in command, Gen. Ray Odierno, had already decided to avoid a full-fledged military campaign against the Mahdi army.

Instead they adopted a strategy of trying to reach agreement with some of Sadr's followers -- perhaps including Sadr himself -- while targeting selected elements in the Mahdi army.

"There are some extreme elements, and we will go after them," Odierno said at a Jan. 7, 2007 news conference.

The strategy of making deals with "moderates" while attacking the "extreme elements" seemed to be given credibility when Sadr signaled in early 2007 that he was ordering the Madhi army to lie low and even to cooperate with the new U.S. Baghdad security plan.

As Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post reported last May, the U.S. command even released one of Sadr's aides, Salah al-Obaidi, from Camp Cropper after five months in detention, in the belief that he was a "moderate" who could help shift the balance within the Madhi army against those determined to carry out military resistance against U.S. forces.

But contrary to the self-serving assumptions of Petraeus and Odierno, Sadr was avoiding a confrontation with U.S. forces because he believed that the occupation had entered its final phase, in which the Bush administration would be forced to negotiate a settlement prior to military withdrawal, and that he had only to keep the Madhi army intact to emerge victorious over his Shiite rivals associated with the al-Hakim family.

Sadr aides told Raghavan that the Shiite cleric viewed the Democratic takeover of Congress and the struggle over Iraq policy as evidence that the final phase of the war had begun. His expression of willingness to cooperate with U.S. forces was aimed at positioning himself to be the main Iraqi interlocutor for the United States in the transition period.

Significantly, however, Sadr refused to deal with the Bush administration, believing that the Democrats would take a less bellicose posture toward his movement.

In any case, Sadr's hopes that the U.S. command might leave the Madhi army alone were dashed by the aggressiveness of U.S. sweeps in Sadr City and other Sadr strongholds in Baghdad, which began in January even before the arrival of additional troops. By mid-March, Sadr had already begun to backtrack on cooperation with the U.S. occupation troops.

Even as Sadr was returning to open opposition to the U.S. military, the U.S. command was pushing the line that the Mahdi army was "splintering" and that attacks on U.S. troops were coming only from "rogue" Mahdi army elements.

A U.S. military official in Washington told the Associated Press in late March that some Madhi army figures were "breaking away to attempt a more conciliatory approach to the Americans and the Iraqi government", while others were "moving in a more extremist direction".

The key individual in the alleged "extremist" breakaway faction was said to be Qais al-Khazali, who was Sadr's main spokesman in 2003 and 2004. Khazali and his brother, who had just been captured a few days before, were leaders of an Iraqi network which had apparently procured armour-piercing bombs and other weapons for the Madhi army.

In July, the U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, cited Khazali's alleged testimony under interrogation as supporting the command's argument that the Iranian Quds Force was creating a "Hezbollah-like" Shiite pro-Iranian force to do its bidding in Iraq.

But Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director for Regional Operations at the Joint Staff in Washington, had obviously not been consulted about the Khazali breakaway ploy. In a press briefing on Mar. 30, Barbero said, "[W]e assess that there are links between these brothers and Sadr's organisation."

Bergner's portrayal of the Khazali organisation as detached from Sadr's movement was an example of how the U.S. command embraces interpretations that serve its political-military objectives, even when they don't reflect its own intelligence judgments.

When the U.S. command carried out arrests of Mahdi army commanders or cell leaders last spring and summer, they invariably referred to the targets as "rogue" Mahdi army. In one such operation, U.S. and Iraqi troops captured the commander of what were called a "high-level rogue Jaysh al-Mahdi commander" of an "assassination cell" of more than 100 members.

But according to a New York Times report Jul. 28, both the head of the Sadr office in Baghdad and a Sadrist cleric preaching in nearby Kufa condemned the raid and called for the release of the detainees, indicating that they are still part of the Madhi army.

The "rogue" designation apparently referred to their resistance to the occupation, not to their relationship to the Mahdi army command.

The U.S. command's line that Iran is using Hezbollah operatives to train Shiite militias that had broken away from Sadr was further discredited when Sadr admitted in an interview with The Independent in August that his organisation has "formal links" with Hezbollah, has sent fighters to Lebanon for training and would continue to do so.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

Iraqi Army less ready than when the surge started

Fewer Iraqi army and police battalions are ready to operate independently than there were at the start of the year when Bush proposed the surge. The number of Iraqi troops "not ready" has more than tripled since the surge was proposed.

Yet the fundamental crux of the surge was that Iraqi troops would take the lead in kicking in doors and shutting down the sectarian militias. As Bush said the Jan. 10 speech in which he proposed the surge:

Now let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad's nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort, along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations — conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.
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Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

And Petraeus' withdrawal plan relies on the Iraqi troops stepping up to the plate, as well. If the plan fails, the result will be another stop-loss. The sole carrot that Petraeus' report offered would vanish. Republicans would be left with nothing but more scary talk, pictures of eagles, and accusations of treason. The best that the Republicans can hope for is a return to the situation that called for the surge in the first place. The White House has a pretty awful record of coming up with best-case scenario results.

Obviously, judging from his Jan. 10 address, Bush thought we could train the Iraqi military quickly enough to take over by the time the September report was due. Now, however, we are rebuked for ever thinking that this could have happened, that this is unrealistic, that it takes time to train the required number of troops.
Why, then, did we base the surge strategy on a fully-trained, fully-manned Iraqi military?

It takes nine weeks to train a U.S. marine. Nine months later, we have fewer Iraqi battalions ready than we had in January. Eh? The answer is that two battalions got killed since then. So this plan hinges on no more Iraqi military casualties? How realistic is that?

Bush said in his September report speech that by December, "our troops will shift from leading operations to partnering with Iraqi forces to eventually overwatching those forces." This is essentially what he said we would be doing in January when he proposed the surge. It failed. It failed, in large part, because the Iraqi military has failed. And now we are going to try using this failed Iraqi military once again to get our troops home.

And so wait we until March, when this whole plan will be trotted out again. Again the plan will be for the Iraqi military to take over for the U.S. troops. Again we will be told that we are "increasing training efforts". Again we will be told that it takes time to build the Iraqi military, and again no one will ask why we thought the Iraqi military would be able to take over if we also thought at the same time that we could not train those troops quickly enough to take over.

full story from the Boston Globe

Petraeus war plan is doubted

Data show Iraqi units unprepared

By Bryan Bender and Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | September 16, 2007

WASHINGTON - Despite his conclusion that Iraqi units can replace US combat troops who will return home by the end of the year, statistics produced by General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, indicate that there are now fewer Iraqi units that can operate independently than there were at the beginning of the year.

As a result, some US and Iraqi officials are skeptical that Petraeus's plan, which gives the Iraqis more responsibility as US troops leave, can actually work.

That plan, they say, is overly optimistic and could jeopardize the fragile gains made in recent months by the "surge" of 30,000 additional troops President Bush sent to Iraq earlier this year. The officials point to the persistent lack of readiness of the Iraqi Army and national police, as well as the fear that many members of the Iraqi forces are more loyal to their sectarian factions than to their own central government.

Iraqi forces "are not ready necessarily to hold areas by themselves that have been cleared out" by American combat troops, said Kenneth Katzman, Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service, an arm of Congress. "Whatever gains there were from the surge, I believe they will be eroded. Once US forces are thinned out, the insurgents will regroup."

Some in the US military even argued that the upcoming withdrawal of 20,000 troops, which President Bush announced in a nationwide speech Thursday night, should be postponed until the spring, when Iraqi units might be better able to take on more responsibility, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity and were involved in the deliberations.

The number of Iraqi Army and police battalions considered ready to conduct combat operations without help from the United States has declined from 15 at the beginning of the year to 12 this month, according to data that Petraeus provided to Congress last week.

Though the general was on Capitol Hill as part of two days of intense, high-profile hearings on the progress of the war, the readiness of Iraqi troops received scant attention from Petraeus or lawmakers.

At the same time, Pentagon assessments show that the number of Iraqi battalions considered "not ready" increased from 13 in November 2006 to 43 this past summer.

But the Petraeus plan, which Bush adopted last week, depends on a sufficient number of capable Iraqi units replacing at least 20,000 US combat troops that are set to return home beginning this month.

Bush said in his speech that by December, "our troops will shift from leading operations to partnering with Iraqi forces to eventually overwatching those forces."

Yet many American military officials now acknowledge that when Iraqi forces took the lead in 2006 in a series of operations known as Together Forward I and II, the strategy failed, in part because of abuses committed by largely Shia Muslim Iraqi troops against minority Sunnis and their inability to hold area cleared of insurgents.

"In Together Forward we cleared neighborhoods but had no strategy to hold neighborhoods," said retired Army General Jack Keane, who has been a key adviser to the Bush team on Iraq strategy and was an architect of the surge method. "It has been the problem for the last three plus years. We did the same thing in Fallujah and Samarra and we never had a strategy for protecting the population after we ran the bad guys out."

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Fred Kagan, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who was also an early proponent of the surge, said that the Petraeus-Bush plan could backfire.

"I think it is possible to reduce forces without jeopardizing our success, but I think we have to acknowledge that it is increasing our risks against the possibility of unforeseen developments," Kagan said.

But Keane said Petraeus and his commanders have assured him that there is a backup plan: stop bringing troops home if the violence increases.

"These forces will be redrawn based on conditions on the ground," Keane said. "If the enemy starts to act in ways we had not foreseen . . . the forces that were to be drawn down will not be drawn down."

Nobody knows for sure

The Administration, Petraeus, and virtually all war supporters keep on saying that the surge has only just started. This isn't exactly true. 3/4 of the troops were in place in June. It has been a phased deployment over the past 4 and a half months. During that time, there has not been a significant improvement, despite mouthings from the Administration's ventriloquist dummies about 'signs of progress'. The situation in Diyala has worsened, and the improvement in Anbar is not due to the surge, but rather to pitting one armed gang against another. Attacks on the Green Zone continue. The Iraqi military has not "stood up", sectarian deaths have increased, and Al-Qaeda is merely moving to wherever the surge isn't taking place. We call that being "on the run".
Still, we are told that it's far too early to pass judgment on the surge. Well, if we grant that, then why has the Administration seen fit to attribute any ephemeral signs of success over the past four months to the surge? Isn't it far too early to say that any 'signs of progress' are due to the surge?

In other words, it's too early to say the surge is a failure, but apparently it's been okay to say the surge is a success for the past few months, even though the troops have 'just arrived'.

Unwarranted optimism is thus okay, but sober skepticism is dangerous. "Nobody knows for sure if the surge will succeed or not", however we seem to "know for sure" there will be a bloodbath if we leave before we achieve "victory". We also "know for sure" that Al-Qaeda will "follow us home", too. How does that work? Isn't it "defeatist" to assume the worst possible outcome? Not if you support the President, but it is if you don't support the President. See how that works now?

Unwarranted optimism in military endeavours can be disatrous. Why didn't we optimistically send our entire fleet right into Japan and launch an amphibious assault immediately after Pearl Harbor? Nobody "knew for sure" that would fail, did they? The threat was certainly real to America, and failure in Japan would mean arguably worse consequnces for us. So why not employ wishful thinking and optimism in an immediate massive invasion? Because we would have been wiped out. But "nobody knows that for sure", do they? Would those opposing such a plan for an immediate invasion have been called "defeatists" and "surrenderists" who didn't want to "win"?
This entire war and occupation have been fought by only considering the best possible outcome and proceeding as if it were a forgone conclusion.

No, "nobody knows for sure" that the surge will fail. We do know that we tried a surge almost a year ago, though, and that didn't help. We do know that the surge has not had a dramatic effect over the past few months. Now, the addition of a few thousand more troops will somehow magically turn the tide, I guess.
Remember, the idea of the surge was to allow the Iraqi military to gain control by reinforcing them as the Iraqis launched a major operation to restore stability. The trouble is that Iraqi military forces are a no-show. The most important element of the surge, therefore, completely failed and has been failing for some time. Nobody knows for sure if the Iraqi military will "stand up" by next spring, either. Nobody knows for sure how shuffling Al-Qaeda from one province to another will defeat them, either. Nobody knows for sure if al-Maliki will be able to survive a no-confidence vote. Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqis have been killed in the violence. Nobody knows, but somehow it's okay to proceed as if everything will go our way and somehow it's bad to stop and ponder the minefield straight ahead of us.

One thing we can all be sure of, however, is that in September Petraeus will say that there has been 'some improvement' and that we need more time. We can be sure that Bush will give it to him. We can be sure that the sectarian militias will still be there. And we can be sure that neocons will be trotting out the same tired old arguments that they picked up from Fox News.

Back in January, Bush "believed" that al-Maliki would have control of all the provinces by November. Now Petraeus is talking about the spring of '08 as the time when we will have a "clearer picture" as to whether this will happen. Not that it will have happened, mind you, just a better idea how much more time it will take. Does this sound like a credible track record? A year ago Bush was all thumbs-up and optimistic, but things didn't work out like he thought they would. But now something has changed, this time his brilliant scheme really will work....because, in his own words, "it has to". That's so reassuring.

Crossing your fingers and hoping everything will come out okay is not leadership, and neither is it courageous.

Republicans take Mixon's remarks the wrong way

Republican bloggers, such as this one, see the recent remarks by Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. "Randy" Mixon that he needs more troops in Diyala as some kind of proof that the surge is working. These guys are really desperate for good news, so they have to spin it themselves. NBC reported on Mixon's remarks, in which he basically said he was being overrun. However, this key phrase was included in the report:

“Ironically, the recent surge into Baghdad drove insurgents and terrorist out of the capital and into Diyala province…”

Ok, there we have it, kids. Proof the surge is working. Yep, because the Bad Guys (whoever they are) are moving out of Baghdad and into another area where the heat isn't on, that means it's all worthwhile. This is pretty much what Petraeus himself has warned about: You apply pressure in one area, and the problem moves to another area (his "balloon" analogy). This is good news? It means that all we have to do is apply the 'surge' to the whole country and the "terrorists" will go someplace else. Where? Afghanistan, maybe? The U.S? Well, let's not use our critical thinking skills when we have a perfect opportunity to rail against "liberal media bias". It's taken us five months to scrape the troops up for this surge and we still don't even have all of them, but the blogger geniuses think we have 5 times more troops around that we can spare to duplicate this 'succcess' throughout Iraq. And let's not look at American troop casualties from the 'surge', either.
See, we just keep "winning". Of course, in the meantime Mixon is unhappy, with 61 casualties this year so far. And he's been asking for more troops since September, so if we have all of these extra troops around, why has he been waiting? Maybe Mixon is a traitor? Why else would he say things that 'embolden' the enemy? Why does this Major General hate America? Those are the kind of issues the Republicans want the media to explore, while showing lots of flags and eagles, too.
But let's look at the rest of Mixon's statement, rather than focussing on what NBC said:

"The level of violence began to increase before the surge," Mixon said, referring to the Baghdad buildup. "It has increased, of course, during the surge … [because] we are sure that there are elements, both Sunni extremist and Shia extremist, that have moved out of Baghdad."

Okay, so the situation was getting worse before the 'surge', he says. Now it's continuing to get worse. Mixon's casualties have tripled over last year's totals and we're not even halfway through the year yet. That sounds like success to Republicans. In fact, Diyala province is one of the major "success stories" pitched by neocon bloggers, like this one. Mixon also called the local government "non-functional" and the central government "ineffective", which is undoubtedly another mark of 'success" for Republicans. According to the LA Times, "Mixon was withering in his criticism of the Iraqi government, saying it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and compromised by corruption and sectarian discord, making it unable to assist U.S. forces in Diyala." Do those sound like problems that would be solved by more combat troops? Because that's all Bush has up his sleeve: more troops or less troops. Take your pick. This is what we get for $450 billion and counting.
The recent decline of sectarian violence has not come from the increase of U.S. troops, but rather from Al-Sadr making a political gesture to his foreign supporters (e.g. King Abdullah) to try to get a political resolution from the Iraqi Parliament. The Bush Administration, however, is putting al-Maliki on the spot to keep this kind of resolution from occurring, so once Al-Sadr gives up on his political options and turns the "violence faucet" back on, we'll see a flood of sectarian death. And this flood will probably come in the weeks before September when Bush will be making his pitch about "success" in Iraq. And the decline in sectarian death has been about the only bright spot in this "surge'. Bush's ill-considered gamble to force Iraqi politicians into doing his bidding will instead backfire into the collapse of the 'surge'. By then, too, thousands more Iraqis will have been through the torture centres that the Interior Ministry calls "prisons", and they won't come out whistling a happy tune, either.
The sad truth is that the surrounding countries are really trying quite hard to bring about a stabilisation in Iraq, but Bush's short-sighted agenda and penchant for throwing troops at every problem is seriously undermining their efforts. But we can always blame it on the "liberal media" and "surrenderists", can't we?