Bleak Assessment of Purge by US military

This is from Juan Cole's blog.
The solution to these problems seems to be more of the same: more troops for a longer period of time. I just wonder how long US citizens will put up with "their" government doing the opposite of what most of them want. There will no doubt be more casualties for the US and even an increase in the rate of casualties.
Cole's point about Russian weapons being mentioned is interesting. No doubt as the Cold War heats up again there will be more Russian meddling discovered!

A bleak internal US military assessment of the progress of the Bush/Kagan "surge" in Baghdad, revealed by the NYT on Monday, has been followed up on by CNN.. Here is what the Pentagon correspondent is saying:



' A top U.S. commander tells CNN that three quarters of Baghdad simply is not under the control of U.S. or Iraqi security forces. Brigadier General Vincent Brooks says just one quarter of Baghdad is in a controlled state. Brooks said control means U.S. and Iraqi forces are able to maintain physical influence over a specific area, preventing its use by the enemy.

It's been three months since the security crackdown began. More than 20,000 U.S. troops have poured into the city. But Brooks says there is still a crucial problem -- the lack of qualified Iraqi police.

In some areas, they are still loyal to death squads and militias. In other areas, there just aren't enough police. In neighborhoods such as Amiriyia and West Rashid, U.S. troops are still having to go back into those areas that they had cleared.

Attacks against U.S. troops in Baghdad are on the rise. Military intelligence officials are analyzing this video from the Islamic State of Iraq claiming to show Russian grenades being thrown at U.S. troops. Analysts say these grenades may be designed to burst into high temperature fires on impact. One official calls it a new threat. '


Funny how Iran agrees to meet with the US about Iraq, and then Russian President Vladimir Putin shoots his mouth off about missiles, and all of a sudden the deadly weaponry in Iraq is coming from Russia, not Iran.

Both reports underlined that US troops are just not present on a continual basis in the vast majority of neighborhoods. Among the bars to progress is that the Iraqi authorities have not

1. provided enough troops and policemen to man checkpoints and patrol neighborhoods, just as a matter of sheer numbers

2. provided enough security forces willing to take risks

3. provided even-handed security forces that won't protect other Shiites from the militias.

And, remember that quieting down Baghdad was supposed to give the al-Maliki government breathing space to make the deep political compromises that might end the insurgency by negotiation. None of that political work appears to have been done, and not only because just one-fourth of the capital has even begun to be pacified.