Dahr Jamail: The "success" of the surge.

Dahr Jamail interview: Iraq occupation in the eye of the storm



This is from this site. Jamail analyses the reasons why there is more relative peace in Iraq since the surge. The reasons have little to do with the surge but depend on tactical decisions by Sadr, alliances with former Sunni insurgents, ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, less military patrols and more airstrikes. Of course there is still considerable civilian carnage and people are returning to Baghdad because they have nowhere to go!


One of the few independent journalists to report from inside Iraq, Dahr Jamail spoke to Socialist Worker about the reality behind US claims of success in its ‘surge’

The US military are claiming that the “surge” of 30,000 troops in Iraq has stabilised the occupation. Is this true?

The propaganda campaign which is being pushed by most of the establishment media in the US has now assumed is that the so-called surge is working.

The line goes something like, “People are returning to their homes in Baghdad, fewer people are dying”, and so on.

It is true that their are fewer US soldiers are being killed – in May this year 131 US troops were killed, last month this dropped to 40 – but we’re not told why.

There are fewer military patrols being run, and the US has bought off much of the resistance in the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Anbar province in western Iraq and the capital Baghdad. Meanwhile rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has declared a ceasefire.

There has also been a huge escalation in the use of air strikes.

With Baghdad we need to consider the fact that one million of the six million who lived there have fled.

There is less violence in the capital because we’re seeing the endgame of the US-backed sectarian death squads.

“Sectarian cleansing” and the segregating of the mixed neighbourhoods is now largely complete.

There are some people returning to Baghdad now. But this has little to do with a new confidence among ordinary people.

As of 1 October 2007 Syria, the last country to allow Iraqis unrestricted entry, has imposed tough new visa restrictions.

So most folks who get to the Syrian border are turned back. They can sit in the desert in a refugee camp or return to Baghdad.

People are also returning from both Syria and Jordan because their savings are running out.

Since the “surge” was launched however, the number of displaced Iraqis has quadrupled.

There are now over one million who have been killed, three million wounded, over five million displaced, and four million in need of some emergency assistance.

That means that over half the population of the country are either displaced, wounded, in need of emergency assistance, or dead.

Why are sections of the mainly Sunni resistance now co-operating with the US?

Several tribal sheikhs, mostly in the al-Anbar province, have agreed to take US cash to order their fighters to stand-down.

This is the primary reason why there is less violence in al-Anbar. So resistance fighters are being paid, armed, and backed by the US military they were fighting a few months ago.

It is a classic example of divide and rule. The US is now arming and backing Sunni resistance groups, while supporting the predominantly Shia government in Baghdad. It is a ticking time bomb.

Why did Muqtada al-Sadr call a ceasefire?

His Mehdi militia had been heavily infiltrated by criminal gangs, and “foreign elements” which led to generating strife with rival groups.

He called a six month stand-down to rebuild his militia, to vet members, and weed out the undesirable elements.

That is why they are on ceasefire for the moment. The final straw for Sadr was when members of his militia attacked the rival Badr Brigades in the holy city of Kerbala and Baghdad a few months ago. He did not order the attacks and was struggling to keep control of his supporters.

The US is building a huge embassy complex in Baghdad. What does this tell us about their long term plans?

They plan to stay there permanently.

Look at the mega military bases they are building, look at the new embassy. It has the same infrastructure that we see in other US militarised areas around the globe like Japan, South Korea and Germany.

Both the US National Security Strategy and the Quadrennial Defence Review Report – which are the engines that drive US foreign policy – call for the military to protect “US interests” like oil, natural gas and the shipping lanes in the Middle East.

Until these priorities are changed, there will be no change in US policy for the Middle East and no withdrawal from Iraq.

What can we expect from the Democratic party if they win the next US presidential elections?

The top three Democratic presidential candidates for the 2008 presidential elections – Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already taken off the table the discussion of total withdrawal from Iraq until after their first term in office in 2013 – if they come to power, that is. So we can expect little change in US policy even under a new administration.

The mainly Kurdish region of northern Iraq has, up till now, been seen as a success story. Yet reports are emerging that ethnic tensions are building. What are the reasons behind it?

Primarily it is because of the Kurds want independence from Baghdad. This demand was made with the full knowledge of the US from the beginning of the occupation.

Now the Kurds are signing their own contracts with foreign oil companies, (mainly western oil giants), and are thumbing their nose at Baghdad in the process.

This has signalled to Turkey that the Kurds really are taking strides towards independence. This has been one of the prime motivators for Turkey’s aggression towards the Kurds as of late.

Part of this plan has been to force out other ethnic Iraqi groups from Kirkuk, their oil hub. They have been involved in removing Arabs, Turkomen, and other minorities from the city to make it more “Kurdish.”

This has included “sectarian cleansing” of mixed neighbourhoods by the US backed Peshmerga militia. This militia has been removing all signs in Arabic, and are only flying the Kurdish flag in the city. This has, needless to say, not helped to dampen sectarian tensions in the city.

How deep is the sectarian divide in Iraq, and how serious are moves to divide the country?

The sectarian divide is a result of the US policy to “divide and conquer”. We cannot underestimate the impact of the sectarian death squads – orchestrated by John Negroponte while he was US ambassador to Iraq and facilitated by colonel James Steele, the “Counsellor for Iraqi Security Affairs”.

Negroponte and Steele launched their death squads in November

2004 and controlled them through the Iraqi ministry of interior.

They funded, armed and backed them in a similar way that they ran death squads in Central America in the 1980s. This is the key element in the US plan to divide the country.

Then of course we have the overt attempts to stoke divisions. The White House has been praising Iraqi premier Nouri al-Maliki for his progress towards the “soft-partition” of the country.

What are your reports on life for ordinary people in Iraq?

There is no ordinary life. On all levels the basic infrastructure in Iraq is far worse than before the invasion.

Unemployment is between 60 to 70 percent, the average home has only up to five hours of electricity a day, there are ongoing gas shortages, and 70 percent of Iraqis do not have access to drinkable water.

Over half the medical workers have fled the country, and the situation in the hospitals is worse today than it was than during the punitive United Nations sanctions following the first Gulf War in 1991.

The occupation of Iraq is a complete catastrophe, and one could easily argue that is the result of a genocidal policy conducted by the current Bush administration, the former Clinton administrations,

and the Bush senior administration before that.

This is a bipartisan war against Iraq by successive US administrations that has spanned decades and resulted in the destruction of the country.

Iraq: Call an air strike

This is from the Information Clearing House.Escobar shows that in spite of the fact that there is less violence of some types in Iraq the situation is really not much improved if at all.
He correctly notes that one way of avoiding casualties is having less forays outside of bases and calling in air strikes whenever there fired upon, a tactic that increases civilian casualties.


Iraq: Call an air strike

By Pepe Escobar

"... the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers." - Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006

11/09/07 "Asia Times" -- -- Amid the George W Bush administration's relentless campaign to "change the subject" from Iraq to Iran, how to "win" the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite, now means - according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus - calling an air strike.

On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it's to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran's Khuzestan province.

With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and President General President Musharraf's new "let's jail all the lawyers" coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle - not to mention the interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though, still rules unchecked.

The Pentagon - via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad - is relentlessly spinning there's now less violence in the capital, a "sustainable" trend. This is rubbish.

Fil cannot even admit to the basic fact that Baghdad has been reduced to a collection of blast-walled, isolated ghettos in search of a city. Baghdad, from being 65% Sunni, is now at least 75% Shi'ite, and counting. Sunni and Shi'ite residents alike confirm sectarian violence has died down because there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be ethnically cleansed.

When Fil says the Iraqi forces are "much, much more effective", what he means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular Shi'ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards - Shi'ites themselves - roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the sidewalks are "worse than the Americans".

Violence has also (relatively) decreased because the bulk of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is still lying low, following his strict orders, even though they are being targeted by constant US air strikes on Sadr City.

The falling numbers of US deaths have also been subjected to merciless spinning. Yet already more US troops have been killed in Iraq in 2007 than in all of 2006. This temporary fall is not caused by a burst of Sunni Iraqi resistance good will - even though an array of groups has taken some time out to concentrate forces in these past few months on unifying their struggle (See It's the resistance, stupid Asia Times Online, October 17, 2007.)

Once again, Baghdad residents, who daily have to negotiate life in hell, reveal what's going on. Lately, as a Shi'ite businessman says, "We have not seen the Americans. They used to come to my neighborhood almost every day at night, with Humvees and Bradleys. They stopped at the end of September." This means less US-conducted dangerous "missions" in the Baghdad wasteland - with less exposure to snipers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - and more time spent in ultra-fortified bases.

The Pentagon even had to admit that sniper attacks, conducted by real pros, have quadrupled during the past year and could "potentially inflict even more casualties than IEDs". The US Department of Defense's Defense Advance Research Projects Agency had to rush a program using lasers to identify snipers before they shoot.

Anyway, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad now it inevitably means an air strike. Mega-slum Sadr City residents confirm the US keeps attacking alleged Mahdi Army "terrorist" haunts - but mostly from the air.

With the US corporate media operating virtually like a Pentagon information agency, the only news fit to print is that as of early this week there were 3,855 American dead in Iraq. But most of all - and never mentioned - there were 28,451 wounded in combat. And as of October 1, there were no less than 30,294 military victims of accidents and diseases so serious they had to be medically sent out of Iraq.

When in doubt, 'liberate' from the air
Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, revealed this week Iraq's security forces have set up 250 spy cameras across Baghdad - presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives. Atta has argued "the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working". That's more rubbish.

Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there's virtually no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming - they stick to base - fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora - but it will be back.

With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 - the year of Bush's "surge" - than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.

Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already occupies, civilians are the inevitable "collateral damage" of these attacks - families, women, children, assorted "non-combatants". The US Air Force does not even take responsibility - claiming the air strikes are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the mean streets of Sadr City.

The Pentagon talk of "precision strikes" and "reducing collateral damage" means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the "loser", according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.

But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus' "by his book" approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri al-Maliki "sovereign" Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the "fish" - who support the "sea" of the resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite - feel? 80% of them are unemployed anyway - and they merely struggle to survive as second-class citizens in their own land.

There's hardly any electricity, fuel or food in Baghdad - everything is rationed - for anyone who's not aligned with a militia-protected faction. The only other option is to flee. With at least a staggering 4.4 million, according to the United Nations, either refugees or internally displaced, options are dwindling fast. There may be as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Damascus, in despair, has tightened its visa rules: only academics and businessmen are now entitled. No less than 14% of the entire Iraqi population has been displaced - courtesy of the Bush administration.

Oh, but the Bush administration is "winning" the war, of course. Counter-insurgency doctrine rules that the enemy must be controlled with social, political, ideological and psychological weapons, and risks have to be taken so civilians can be protected.

The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not - he's just providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His master's voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of Mesopotamia and then call it "victory".

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

White House sees new backing from Congress over Iraq

This seems to be one of those optimistic spin articles so common in the Western Press. This is AFP stuff but who knows who Joshi is. Maybe a conduit from the White House sewer. Why one would take heart from a poll that says 49 per cent of Americans think the surge is not working is a bit puzzling and even that 54 per cent think the war is not lost is hardly a ringing endorsement of any policy.


White House sees new backing from Congress over Iraq by Jitendra Joshi
Sun Sep 2, 5:07 PM ET



WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush is gaining support among both wavering Republicans and anti-war Democrats for his embattled Iraq strategy, a top White House aide said Sunday.

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Speaking as Congress awaits a pivotal report on the progress of Bush's "surge" of nearly 30,000 more troops, new White House counselor Ed Gillespie said the deployment was curbing Iraq's rampant bloodshed.

During August, he told Fox News, the surge "has had the intended effect of helping to secure the population, and that is now translating into the goal of allowing for progress to be made on the political front in Iraq as well."

"And so I think that we hear from members of Congress from both sides of the aisle who have been over to Iraq during this August break who have come back and have seen this progress and have told their constituents about it."

US lawmakers will return from their summer break for a week of hearings and political theater to set the stage for Bush's critical progress report on the Iraq war, due by September 15.

In the week of September 9, war commander General David Petraeus and US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker will deliver their verdicts on the surge effort, in one of the most significant appearances in Congress for years.

This week, three hearings in Congress will examine a report by the Government Accountability Office, which reportedly says the Iraqi government has fallen woefully short of benchmarks for progress set by US lawmakers.

At stake is the fate of Bush's last-ditch strategy, announced in January, to deploy an extra 28,500 troops into Iraq, after a highly unpopular four-year war that has killed more than 3,700 US troops and tens of thousands of civilians.

The president wants to maintain the surge into early next year, but Democrats are set to try again to force him to bring most combat forces home by May. They insist that Iraqi authorities have failed to hold up their end of the bargain.

"The purpose of this surge was to give breathing room to acquire some political reconciliation. There is no political reconciliation," Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, a 2008 White House contender, told CBS.

"It doesn't matter how many troops we put there. Unless you have a political settlement, when we leave we're going to leave chaos behind. You'll find you have a regional war," he said.

The White House has taken heart from a UPI/Zogby poll last week that said 54 percent of Americans believe the Iraq war is not lost. But the poll also found that 49 percent of respondents said the surge strategy was not working.

Gillespie said the mood of some dissident Republicans would be clearer this week when Congress reconvenes.

"But my sense is that people agree that it would be premature to impose an artificial time line for withdrawal on our troops at a time when we are seeing progress being made," the White House counselor said.

"And a policy of premature, precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be the wrong policy and would have very dangerous consequences for the American people here at home," he said.

Late last month, influential Republican Senator John Warner broke ranks with the White House and called for Bush to pull some troops out of Iraq by Christmas, to pressure the Iraqi government into taking more responsibility.

Speaking on CNN Sunday, fellow Republican Senator Richard Shelby said Warner's call was "on the right track" but that "General Petraeus is the one to deliver that message."

"My own personal belief is that we will be withdrawing some troops," said Shelby, who had a close call on a visit to Baghdad last week when the C-130 plane his congressional delegation was travelling in came under rocket fire.

Shelby said that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki "didn't seem to have time to meet with" his delegation -- which included two other Republican senators and a Democratic representative.

"And I thought that was a bad sign in itself," he said, joining other US lawmakers who have been pressuring Maliki in recent weeks.

"We should send the strongest message in the world to the Iraqi government that if you are not going to do something, we're going to leave

The American Military's Lose-Lose Dilemma in Iraq

For those who might think that the surge is a success this article is a good antidote. The political situation is even worse with the parliament in recess and the main Sunni group leaving the government. The economic situation is dire with high unemployment, utilities that don't function, and an overburdened crumbing health care system. One person interview by a reporter (Nivat) said:
The Shi'ite man, who took Nivat around for her two weeks in Baghdad, in one of the more devastating quotes to come out of the capital in recent times, told her: "My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam's regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam's feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!"



The American Military's Lose-Lose Dilemma in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz

President Bush has called upon Congress, the American public, the Iraqi people, and the world to suspend judgment – until at least September – on the success of his escalation of the war, euphemistically designated a "surge." But the fact is: It has already failed and it's obvious enough why.

Much attention has been paid to the recent White House report that recorded "satisfactory performance" on eight Congressional benchmarks and "unsatisfactory performance" on six others (with an additional four receiving mixed evaluations). Fred Kaplan of Slate and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, among others, have demonstrated the fraudulence of this assessment. Cockburn summarized his savaging of the document thusly: "In reality, the six failures are on issues critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on largely trivial matters."

As it happens, though, these benchmarks are almost completely beside the point. They don't represent the key goals of the surge at all, which were laid out clearly by the President in his January speech announcing the operation:

"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."


The success of such "benchmarks" can be judged relatively easily. As President Bush himself put the matter: "We can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad's residents."

This was supposed to be accomplished through two major initiatives. Most visibly, the U.S. military was to adopt a more aggressive strategy for pacifying Baghdad neighborhoods considered strongholds for the Sunni insurgency. Occupation officials blame them for the bulk of the vehicle bombs and other suicide attacks that have devastated mainly Shi'ite neighborhoods. The second, less visible (but no less important) initiative involved subduing the Mahdi army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr – the largest and most ferocious of the Shi'ite militias – which occupation officials blame for the bulk of death-squad murders in and around the capital.

These changes should have been observable as early as this July. By then, as a "senior American military officer" told the New York Times, it would already be time to refocus attention on "restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods."

To judge the surge right now – by the President's real "benchmarks" – we need only look for a dramatic drop in vehicle and other "multiple fatality bombings" in populated areas, and for a dramatic drop in the number of tortured and executed bodies found each morning in various dumping spots around Baghdad.

By these measures, the surge has already been a miserable failure, something that began to be documented as early as April when Nancy Youssef of the McClatchy newspapers reported that there had been no decline in suicide-bombing deaths; and that, after an initial decline in the bodies discarded by death-squads around the capital, the numbers were rising again. (These trends have been substantiated by the Brookings Institution, which has long collected the latest statistics from Iraq.)

A more vivid way to appreciate the nature of the almost instantaneous failure of the overall surge operation is anecdotally by reading news reports of specific campaigns – like the report Julian Barnes and Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times sent in from Baghdad's Sunni-majority Ubaidi neighborhood, which was headlined: "U.S. troop buildup in Iraq falling short". It concluded ominously, "U.S. forces so far have been unable to establish security, even for themselves."

Or we might note that, instead of ebbing, violence in Iraq was flooding into new areas, just beyond the reach of the U.S. combat brigades engaged in the surge. Or perhaps it's worth pointing out that, by July, the highly fortified "Green Zone" in the very heart of Baghdad – designed as the invulnerable safe haven for American and Iraqi officials – had become a regular target for increasingly destructive mortar and rocket attacks launched from unpacified neighborhoods elsewhere in the capital. According to New York Times reporters Alissa J. Rubin and Stephen Farrell, the Zone has been "attacked almost daily for weeks."

Or we could focus on the fact that the long supply lines needed to support the surge – massive convoys of trucks moving weapons, ammunition, and supplies heading north from Kuwait into Baghdad – have become a regular target for insurgents. Embedded reporter Michael Yon, for instance, recently reported that, for convoys on this route, "it's not unusual to be diverted or delayed a half-dozen times or more due to real or suspected bombs."

In the end, though, perhaps the best indicator is the surging strength of the surge's primary target in Shi'ite areas. Since the surge plan was officially launched in mid-February, according to the Times' Rubin, the Mahdi Army "has effectively taken over vast swaths of the capital."

Twenty thousand more American combat troops are now in and around the capital. (The rest of the 28,500 troops the President sent surging into Iraq have been dispatched to other provinces outside the capital.) This has meant a tripling of American troops on patrol at any given time, but it has failed to produce either significantly "fewer brazen acts of terror" or progress in "restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods." So it can be no surprise that the surge has failed to generate "growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad's residents."

Why Don't U.S. Troops Try to Protect Shi'ite Markets and Mosques?

Why then has the surge failed? And so quickly at that?

This only makes sense when you explore the strategy utilized by the U.S. military to reduce the number of suicide bombers and the "multiple fatality bombings" they perpetrate. Terrorist attacks of this sort need four elements for success: an organization capable of creating such bombs; a pool of individuals willing to risk or sacrifice their lives to deliver the explosives; a host community willing to hide the preparations; and a target community unable to prevent the delivery of these deadly, indiscriminate weapons of massive destruction.

Virtually all of these attacks are organized by Sunni jihadists and, while the Brookings database shows that many of them are aimed at military or government targets, the majority of deaths occur in spectacular bombings of public gathering spots – "soft targets" – in Shi'ite neighborhoods. It might then have seemed logical for U.S. commanders to concentrate their increased troop strength on these obvious delivery areas, setting up checkpoints and guard posts that would scrutinize car and truck traffic entering highly vulnerable areas.

This strategy might indeed have worked if the U.S. were willing to form an alliance with local Shi'ite neighborhood defense forces. As it happens though, the Shi'ite communities in Baghdad are already well patrolled by the Mahdi army, whose street fighters have proven effective in either spotting alien vehicles or responding to reports from local residents about suspicious cars or people. However, enormous public spaces, filled with large numbers of non-residents and outside vehicles, require dense patrolling practices. The Mahdis have been able to generate such patrol "density" only in their headquarters community, Sadr City – the vast Shi'ite slum in the eastern part of Baghdad. There, where the Mahdis have a huge presence, there were almost no suicide attacks until late 2006 when the U.S. military began sending patrols into the community aimed at disarming, disrupting, or destroying the Sadrist militia. This forced them off the streets, opening the way for suicide bombers to reach their targets.

If the U.S. had decided to join forces with the Mahdis, augmenting their neighborhood patrols with a strong American presence in public gathering places, they might indeed have choked off all but a few of the most determined, resourceful, or lucky bombers. However, this strategy was not adopted, at least in part because it would have strengthened the Mahdis, a group that the U.S. military and President Bush had – until their recent fixation on al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) – repeatedly designated as their most dangerous enemy.

Instead, the surge has been forced to focus on the suicide-bomber "supply side." Lt. Gen Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations, told Barnes of the Los Angeles Times that the anti-bombing strategy was directed toward al-Qaeda in Iraq because they "are the ones that are creating the truck bombs and car bombs…. So we are going after the safe havens that allow them to build these things without a lot of interference." According to Barnes, the generals charged with implementing the plan endorsed the surge into Sunni neighborhoods because, "for the first time, they have enough forces to root out al-Qaeda fighters by entering havens where U.S. forces have not been for years."

Thus, the American strategy for preventing suicide bombings in Shi'ite communities involved flooding Sunni communities with huge numbers of soldiers.

Invading the Hotbeds of the Insurgency

Historically, to successfully "root out" groups like the al-Qaeda fighters requires an occupying force capable of enlisting the aid of large numbers of people within a host community. After all, those planning multiple-fatality bombings need a level of toleration, if not outright support or participation, from the surrounding community. If local residents are totally alienated from the effort, someone will either take direct action or contact the occupying authorities, who can then raid key locations, capturing or killing the plotters.

An attack on the "supply side" might therefore have been a viable option for the Americans, if the host community was hostile to the jihadists. In fact, such hostility does exist in many Sunni communities, including among insurgent groups that are the backbone of the fight against the American occupation. This hostility derives partly from a principled opposition to attacks on Iraqis – most of the 30 or so key insurgent groups have explicitly stated that they support armed force only against the American-led coalition forces, often exempting even Iraqi police and military units from attack. But the hostility also comes from distaste for the violently enforced demands of the jihadists that local citizens conform to their fundamentalist beliefs – including prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco consumption, as well as an insistence that men grow full beards and women wear headscarves.

As a result, a tactical alliance of convenience between the occupation and the nationalist Sunni insurgency against the AQI and other fundamentalist jihadists has been an option for the U.S. military since as early as the last months of 2004, when the U.S. refused an offer by insurgent leaders in Falluja to expel the jihadists if the U.S. would refrain from its pending attack on the city. The next year, during a major offensive in Western Anbar province, U.S. military commanders stood idly by – despite explicit calls for help – while local insurgents fought fierce battles with jihadists, telling embedded reporters that they were letting two equally objectionable enemies weaken each other. American commanders have repeatedly enunciated a general principle that they would never form an alliance with, or give aid to, any "Sunni group that had attacked Americans."

Starting in early 2007, this principle was apparently compromised in Anbar Province; by July, under the pressure of the failing surge, it was also being eroded in Baghdad. But these alliances with local militia groups of various sorts involve their own sets of problems. They only create further conundrums for U.S. strategists since, of course, they undermine the larger goals of the occupation. After all, the anti-al-Qaeda insurgents – not the jihadist car-bombers – are, by far, the major force in the insurgency and they are unremitting enemies of the occupation as well as of the Shi'ite and Kurdish-dominated central Iraqi government, which they view as an agent of either the American occupation or Iranian imperial designs.

Major General Rick Lynch, who was involved in negotiations with the Anbar insurgents, quoted them as saying, "We hate you because you are occupiers. But we hate al-Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more." Under these circumstances, any alliance can almost certainly only be temporary, strengthening as it does the chief antagonist to the American presence. The Independent's Cockburn summarized the situation this way:

"The US is caught in [a] quagmire of its own making. Such successes as it does have are usually the result of tenuous alliances with previously hostile tribes, insurgent groups or militias. The British experience in Basra was that these marriages of convenience with local gangs weakened the central government and contributed to anarchy in Iraq. They did not work in the long term."


In Baghdad, the U.S. chose – at least for the opening months of the surge – to hold the line against such an alliance with Shi'ite insurgents. Instead, they used the presence of al-Qaeda militants in Sunni communities as an invitation to attack the communities themselves, attempting to "root out" the insurgents, who have been their chief adversary all these years, while also capturing or killing the al-Qaeda activists responsible for the suicide attacks on Shi'ite neighborhoods.

But this dual strategy has no hope of capturing the support of local Sunni communities and, without such support, the U.S. has no choice but to adopt a grim, if straightforward, strategy of brute force in neighborhoods where its sources of information (and so targeting) are, at best, severely limited. The military has, in fact, taken such crude – and, in the end, self-defeating – tactical measures as erecting massive barriers around target Sunni communities to prevent their quarry from escaping; manning check-points at all entrances to capture suspects with weapons and explosives in their vehicles; and erecting outposts within these hostile communities to create a 24-hour quick-response presence. Worse yet, they have conducted knock-the-door-down, house-to-house searches looking for suspicious individuals, weapons, or literature – the sort of approach that, for years, has been known to thoroughly alienate the inhabitants of such neighborhoods.

This strategy insures that the failure of the surge is no passing phenomenon. It leads, first of all, to the brutal treatment of local civilians (of a sort recently documented by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian though the testimony of American military personnel in the Nation magazine) – at checkpoints, by patrols, and most strikingly during those home invasions. These assaults only generate further hatred of the occupation, which, of course, rallies support for the local guerrillas. As one soldier, who, earlier in the war, participated in such a midnight home invasion that terrorized a dozen members of an Iraqi family, recalled: "I thought of my family at the time and thought, 'If I was the patriarch of the family, if soldiers came from another country and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent too.'"

These localized applications of "overwhelming" force, when meeting sustained resistance, lead to the calling in of air power or, in some cases, artillery fire. A strategy guaranteed to kill and wound guerrillas and local inhabitants alike, destroy homes, generate more refugees, wreck local economies, and, in the end, create ghostly, uninhabitable former neighborhoods.

Ironically (but logically), while target communities have been crippled by such prolonged operations, both the insurgency and the jihadists have only grown stronger. The attacks swell the ranks of the insurgency, while a small but sufficient supply of embittered individuals become willing to sacrifice their lives to achieve some measure of revenge against the American occupation and/or its Shi'ite allies.

As for the tiny group of jihadist planners and bomb manufacturers, most escape targeted neighborhoods when under pressure, having harvested a new wave of bitterness to fuel a new wave of suicide bombings.

Meanwhile, Back in Sadr City…

In the Shi'ite areas, on the other hand, the Americans were providing an unprecedented opportunity for suicide bombers to breach Mahdi Army security. In the second prong of the surge, American patrols were sent into these Shi'ite communities to target local Mahdi Army leaders. While these operations did not add up to the full-scale invasions visited upon Sunni neighborhoods, they nonetheless tended to force Mahdi patrols off the streets, opening up such communities to jihadist suicide attacks.

Having relocated to new quarters (apparently on the outskirts of Baghdad), the jihadi leadership utilized newly recruited suicide volunteers to exploit this sudden vulnerability with a wave of attacks that sent the number of Shi'ite deaths from multiple-fatality bombings recorded in the Brookings database soaring from under 300 before the start of the surge to well over 400 in the months after it began.

And then came the death squads. Originally, they seem to have been organized from Shi'ite militia members by U.S. military and intelligence personnel and housed in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Modeled after the American-organized death squads in Central America in the 1980s, they were designed to murder suspected Sunni resistance leaders and therefore weaken the insurgency.

After the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006, they achieved partial or full independence from their American organizers and began targeting Sunni men in indiscriminate campaigns of torture and execution, justified by the argument that they were suspected of involvement in attacks on Shi'ite communities. Just as the car bombers see themselves as retaliating against American and Iraqi government atrocities in Sunni communities, the death squads see themselves as executing the jihadist perpetrators of attacks on their neighbors and their possible supporters.

When the surge began, the number of death-squad murders fell, evidently in part because the death-squad members hoped that American offensives in Sunni communities would significantly reduce suicide attacks. But as this hope was dashed, the number of death-squad killings began to rise again.

The Occupation Faces a "Lose-Lose" Dilemma

As this latest debacle developed, President Bush and his commanding generals began to argue – to Congress, American public opinion, the Iraqi people, and the world – that we must reschedule the benchmark moment. First, it was from July to September, and then from September to November, and soon after from 2007 to 2008, and lately from 2008 to 2009. Congress (which has temporarily suspended its debate on Iraq policy) and American public opinion (where Bush recorded an exceedingly modest uptick in "approval" recently) might well give the President a little more breathing room on the basis of these appeals.

But events on the ground in Iraq do not respond to Presidential appeals or the sunny testimony of generals. In Baghdad and surrounding provinces, the situation has already entered what might be thought of as post-surge reality. In part as a consequence of the surge strategy, ethnic cleansing in major neighborhoods of Baghdad may be nearing completion; meanwhile, in the north, the shaky relationship between the Kurds and Turkey is wavering on the brink of a hot war, while the Kurd-Turkmen-Arab cauldron in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk may erupt any time into a new Baghdad.

While all this goes on, desperate American military leaders have embraced, amplified, and expanded their anti-al-Qaeda-in-Iraq alliance with local guerrillas in al-Anbar Province – so much for dismantling Iraqi militias – and are lurching toward a new set of disasters. These may already be underway, starting with a confrontation between the American commander of the surge plan, General David Petraeus, and the head of an increasingly embattled and shaky Iraqi government, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. According to Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website, Maliki "fears that once the Sunni tribesmen have dispatched 'al-Qaeda,' they will turn on the largely Shi'ite government with their new American weapons." To prevent this, he "has considered asking Washington to pull the general out of Baghdad." For President Bush, who has visibly put all his eggs in General Petraeus' surge basket, this would be inconceivable, which means that the next crisis in Iraq policy – and probably several after that – is already underway.

As Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, put it, "The Americans are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.


Copyright 2007 Michael Schwartz