Under the headline, "A War We Just Might Win," the New York Times on Monday published an op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Kenneth Pollack, both referred to as critics of the way the Bush administration has "handled" the war in Iraq. (Pollack had, in fact, been a major cheerleader for the Bush administration's invasion in 2003.) After eight days in Iraq "meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel," the two claimed that "the debate in Washington was surreal," and that "[w]e are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms." The President's surge plan, as carried out by General David Petraeus, was, they added, working. Their carefully cobbled together formula for where it might take American forces went like this: It had "the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with." They concluded: "[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008." Of course, O'Hanlon's and Pollack's ideas about what "Iraqis could live with" and Iraqi ideas on the subject may turn out to differ somewhat.
Be that as it may, the Bush administration -- even though characterized in the piece as having "lost essentially all credibility" -- was desperate enough to treat the event as a glowing ray of sunlight in the gloom of night. According to Martha Raddatz of ABC News,
"The White House was thrilled with the op-ed piece because it concentrated on military progress and didn't say very much about the lack of political progress. This is what the President has been trying to push. The White House sent this op-ed piece out to the press corps, anybody that would read it today. They are hoping this buys them more time on the Hill for the surge to continue, but they've been hoping that for a long time."
On that very day, the Iraqi parliament adjourned for a more than month-long vacation without having passed a single major "benchmark" urged on its legislators by either the Bush administration or Congress ("'We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences between the political factions have delayed the laws,' Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told Reuters."); the major Sunni faction in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government was threatening to withdraw; and the Prime Minister himself was reportedly under challenge and in some danger of being ousted by members of his own party.
And that was just the accompanying political news. On the day of the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, a summary report on the humanitarian situation in Iraq by the international aid group Oxfam and about 80 other aid agencies, gave the concept of "sustainable stability" some grim meaning. In fact, the report -- which the administration did not rush to pass out to a single reporter -- added up to a functional definition of Iraq as a land in a state of unsustainable instability, a "nation" in which an estimated one million families are now headed by widows. From child malnutrition to "absolute poverty," large-scale unemployment to an almost blanket lack of effective sanitation, the Iraqis O'Hanlon and Pollack didn't meet with are in a hell on Earth. The Oxfam report estimates that almost one-third of the Iraqi population is "in need of emergency aid."
In fact, while Pollack and O'Hanlon met with the "known knowns" in the equivalent of Green Zone Iraq, a brave French reporter, Anne Nivat, spent two weeks living as an Iraqi in a Shiite neighborhood in "Red Zone" Baghdad. ("Only my contacts knew that I was a foreigner and a reporter.") She even went from Red Zone to Green Zone Iraq once to -- like Pollack and O'Hanlon -- have a meeting with General Petraeus. ("He met me in full combat gear. Between the first checkpoint and the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy, still based in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, a distance of about a mile, I was checked six times. I had come from the "red zone.")
From Nivat, you get a very different picture of "sustainable" Iraq, a place, it turns out, where you're lucky to get 1-2 hours of electricity delivered a day, while the temperatures soar to 130 degrees and those with small generators that can make electricity are "the most powerful people in every district." In one of the more upbeat aspects of her tale, Nivat describes the rise of a new job category, a "new breed of real-estate agents." They broker house or apartment exchanges between Sunnis and Shiites being ethnically cleansed from their present neighborhoods. The parties agree to exchange abodes "until the situation improves." The Shiite 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!"
In the meantime, of course, the Bush administration -- with a helping hand from O'Hanlon and Pollack -- continues along a path guaranteed not to create a newly sustainable Iraq, but to prolong Iraq's unsustainable instability for endless months, or years, or even decades to come. General Petraeus is now publicly talking about "a large contingent of [U.S.] troops in Iraq until the middle of 2009" with no end to the American occupation in sight. For all of them, from the President down to the pundits, the thing that must be -- and can't be -- sustained is what, in the Vietnam period, was known as "American credibility" and now might be thought of as an American position of dominance in the Iraqi heartland of the energy heartlands of the planet. This is a terrible imperial farce in support of a "surge" plan that, as Michael Schwartz explains, has already surged in directions too predictable and horrible for sustenance. Tom
Under the headline, "A War We Just Might Win," the New York Times on Monday published an op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Kenneth Pollack, both referred to as critics of the way the Bush administration has "handled" the war in Iraq. (Pollack had, in fact, been a major cheerleader for the Bush administration's invasion in 2003.) After eight days in Iraq "meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel," the two claimed that "the debate in Washington was surreal," and that "[w]e are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms." The President's surge plan, as carried out by General David Petraeus, was, they added, working. Their carefully cobbled together formula for where it might take American forces went like this: It had "the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with." They concluded: "[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008." Of course, O'Hanlon's and Pollack's ideas about what "Iraqis could live with" and Iraqi ideas on the subject may turn out to differ somewhat.
Be that as it may, the Bush administration -- even though characterized in the piece as having "lost essentially all credibility" -- was desperate enough to treat the event as a glowing ray of sunlight in the gloom of night. According to Martha Raddatz of ABC News,
"The White House was thrilled with the op-ed piece because it concentrated on military progress and didn't say very much about the lack of political progress. This is what the President has been trying to push. The White House sent this op-ed piece out to the press corps, anybody that would read it today. They are hoping this buys them more time on the Hill for the surge to continue, but they've been hoping that for a long time."
On that very day, the Iraqi parliament adjourned for a more than month-long vacation without having passed a single major "benchmark" urged on its legislators by either the Bush administration or Congress ("'We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences between the political factions have delayed the laws,' Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told Reuters."); the major Sunni faction in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government was threatening to withdraw; and the Prime Minister himself was reportedly under challenge and in some danger of being ousted by members of his own party.
And that was just the accompanying political news. On the day of the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, a summary report on the humanitarian situation in Iraq by the international aid group Oxfam and about 80 other aid agencies, gave the concept of "sustainable stability" some grim meaning. In fact, the report -- which the administration did not rush to pass out to a single reporter -- added up to a functional definition of Iraq as a land in a state of unsustainable instability, a "nation" in which an estimated one million families are now headed by widows. From child malnutrition to "absolute poverty," large-scale unemployment to an almost blanket lack of effective sanitation, the Iraqis O'Hanlon and Pollack didn't meet with are in a hell on Earth. The Oxfam report estimates that almost one-third of the Iraqi population is "in need of emergency aid."
In fact, while Pollack and O'Hanlon met with the "known knowns" in the equivalent of Green Zone Iraq, a brave French reporter, Anne Nivat, spent two weeks living as an Iraqi in a Shiite neighborhood in "Red Zone" Baghdad. ("Only my contacts knew that I was a foreigner and a reporter.") She even went from Red Zone to Green Zone Iraq once to -- like Pollack and O'Hanlon -- have a meeting with General Petraeus. ("He met me in full combat gear. Between the first checkpoint and the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy, still based in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, a distance of about a mile, I was checked six times. I had come from the "red zone.")
From Nivat, you get a very different picture of "sustainable" Iraq, a place, it turns out, where you're lucky to get 1-2 hours of electricity delivered a day, while the temperatures soar to 130 degrees and those with small generators that can make electricity are "the most powerful people in every district." In one of the more upbeat aspects of her tale, Nivat describes the rise of a new job category, a "new breed of real-estate agents." They broker house or apartment exchanges between Sunnis and Shiites being ethnically cleansed from their present neighborhoods. The parties agree to exchange abodes "until the situation improves." The Shiite 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!"
In the meantime, of course, the Bush administration -- with a helping hand from O'Hanlon and Pollack -- continues along a path guaranteed not to create a newly sustainable Iraq, but to prolong Iraq's unsustainable instability for endless months, or years, or even decades to come. General Petraeus is now publicly talking about "a large contingent of [U.S.] troops in Iraq until the middle of 2009" with no end to the American occupation in sight. For all of them, from the President down to the pundits, the thing that must be -- and can't be -- sustained is what, in the Vietnam period, was known as "American credibility" and now might be thought of as an American position of dominance in the Iraqi heartland of the energy heartlands of the planet. This is a terrible imperial farce in support of a "surge" plan that, as Michael Schwartz explains, has already surged in directions too predictable and horrible for sustenance. Tom
Under the headline, "A War We Just Might Win," the New York Times on Monday published an op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Kenneth Pollack, both referred to as critics of the way the Bush administration has "handled" the war in Iraq. (Pollack had, in fact, been a major cheerleader for the Bush administration's invasion in 2003.) After eight days in Iraq "meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel," the two claimed that "the debate in Washington was surreal," and that "[w]e are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms." The President's surge plan, as carried out by General David Petraeus, was, they added, working. Their carefully cobbled together formula for where it might take American forces went like this: It had "the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with." They concluded: "[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008." Of course, O'Hanlon's and Pollack's ideas about what "Iraqis could live with" and Iraqi ideas on the subject may turn out to differ somewhat.
Be that as it may, the Bush administration -- even though characterized in the piece as having "lost essentially all credibility" -- was desperate enough to treat the event as a glowing ray of sunlight in the gloom of night. According to Martha Raddatz of ABC News,
"The White House was thrilled with the op-ed piece because it concentrated on military progress and didn't say very much about the lack of political progress. This is what the President has been trying to push. The White House sent this op-ed piece out to the press corps, anybody that would read it today. They are hoping this buys them more time on the Hill for the surge to continue, but they've been hoping that for a long time."
On that very day, the Iraqi parliament adjourned for a more than month-long vacation without having passed a single major "benchmark" urged on its legislators by either the Bush administration or Congress ("'We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences between the political factions have delayed the laws,' Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told Reuters."); the major Sunni faction in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government was threatening to withdraw; and the Prime Minister himself was reportedly under challenge and in some danger of being ousted by members of his own party.
And that was just the accompanying political news. On the day of the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, a summary report on the humanitarian situation in Iraq by the international aid group Oxfam and about 80 other aid agencies, gave the concept of "sustainable stability" some grim meaning. In fact, the report -- which the administration did not rush to pass out to a single reporter -- added up to a functional definition of Iraq as a land in a state of unsustainable instability, a "nation" in which an estimated one million families are now headed by widows. From child malnutrition to "absolute poverty," large-scale unemployment to an almost blanket lack of effective sanitation, the Iraqis O'Hanlon and Pollack didn't meet with are in a hell on Earth. The Oxfam report estimates that almost one-third of the Iraqi population is "in need of emergency aid."
In fact, while Pollack and O'Hanlon met with the "known knowns" in the equivalent of Green Zone Iraq, a brave French reporter, Anne Nivat, spent two weeks living as an Iraqi in a Shiite neighborhood in "Red Zone" Baghdad. ("Only my contacts knew that I was a foreigner and a reporter.") She even went from Red Zone to Green Zone Iraq once to -- like Pollack and O'Hanlon -- have a meeting with General Petraeus. ("He met me in full combat gear. Between the first checkpoint and the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy, still based in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, a distance of about a mile, I was checked six times. I had come from the "red zone.")
From Nivat, you get a very different picture of "sustainable" Iraq, a place, it turns out, where you're lucky to get 1-2 hours of electricity delivered a day, while the temperatures soar to 130 degrees and those with small generators that can make electricity are "the most powerful people in every district." In one of the more upbeat aspects of her tale, Nivat describes the rise of a new job category, a "new breed of real-estate agents." They broker house or apartment exchanges between Sunnis and Shiites being ethnically cleansed from their present neighborhoods. The parties agree to exchange abodes "until the situation improves." The Shiite 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!"
In the meantime, of course, the Bush administration -- with a helping hand from O'Hanlon and Pollack -- continues along a path guaranteed not to create a newly sustainable Iraq, but to prolong Iraq's unsustainable instability for endless months, or years, or even decades to come. General Petraeus is now publicly talking about "a large contingent of [U.S.] troops in Iraq until the middle of 2009" with no end to the American occupation in sight. For all of them, from the President down to the pundits, the thing that must be -- and can't be -- sustained is what, in the Vietnam period, was known as "American credibility" and now might be thought of as an American position of dominance in the Iraqi heartland of the energy heartlands of the planet. This is a terrible imperial farce in support of a "surge" plan that, as Michael Schwartz explains, has already surged in directions too predictable and horrible for sustenance. Tom
The Benchmarks That Matter
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 Shiite 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia neighborhood defense forces. As it happens though, the Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shiite 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 The Benchmarks That Matter
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 Shiite 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia neighborhood defense forces. As it happens though, the Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shiite 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 The Benchmarks That Matter
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 Shiite 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia neighborhood defense forces. As it happens though, the Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shia 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 Shiite 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
Sunday, August 5, 2007
On Iraq
Here is an opinion on Iraq that counters the Op-Ed piece in the Times by O'Hanlon and Pollack. From TomDispatch:
Poll Watchers
OK , so Obama again put his foot into his mouth on foreign affairs. Do you think anyone except hard-core wonks are really watching or listening just yet?
In line with my opinion that the national polls only help candidates raise money, and that gaining the Democratic nomination really is like a steeplechase race, with each candidate having to encounter several hurdles, otherwise known as primaries, I took a look at the July polls by American Research Group. Some interesting results.
Fist, look at Iowa
Clearly, Clinton shows a significant lead. This has to be a major disappointment for Edward who has spent a lot of time and money in Iowa.
Now, lets move to the next state in the race, New Hampshire:
Bad news for Clinton! Hillary and Obama are statistically TIED!
Next up is South Carolina:
Whoa! Obama shows a slight lead.
Statistically insignificant, I'm sure. But my point is this: If you follow the primaries in sequence, the polls show that it may be harder for Hillary to get the nomination than she thinks, as Obama shows strength in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. The big surprise is Iowa, which had appeared to be in Edwards's corner.
In line with my opinion that the national polls only help candidates raise money, and that gaining the Democratic nomination really is like a steeplechase race, with each candidate having to encounter several hurdles, otherwise known as primaries, I took a look at the July polls by American Research Group. Some interesting results.
Fist, look at Iowa
Iowa
Likely Democratic Caucus Goers
Clinton 30%
Edwards 21%
Obama 15%
Clearly, Clinton shows a significant lead. This has to be a major disappointment for Edward who has spent a lot of time and money in Iowa.
Now, lets move to the next state in the race, New Hampshire:
New Hampshire
Likely Democratic Primary Voters
Clinton 31%
Edwards 14%
Obama 31%
Undecided 13%
Bad news for Clinton! Hillary and Obama are statistically TIED!
Next up is South Carolina:
South Carolina
Likely Democratic Primary Voters
Jul 2007
Clinton 29%
Edwards 18%
Obama 33%
Undecided 12%
Whoa! Obama shows a slight lead.
Statistically insignificant, I'm sure. But my point is this: If you follow the primaries in sequence, the polls show that it may be harder for Hillary to get the nomination than she thinks, as Obama shows strength in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. The big surprise is Iowa, which had appeared to be in Edwards's corner.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The Wicked Witch of D.C.
Someone should tell Dick Cheney that sometimes witches DO exist, and they need to be hunted. This from CNN's Larry King interview with Darth Vader:
Cheney: Congressional probe of attorneys' firings 'a witch hunt'
* Story Highlights
* Vice president sees no reason for Bush political adviser Karl Rove to testify
* Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "a good man," Cheney says
* Cheney says his office is part of both executive and legislative branches
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney Tuesday dismissed congressional investigations into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys as "a bit of a witch hunt."
"First of all, there's no charge," Cheney said. "What's the allegation of wrongdoing here? Frankly, there isn't any."
"They keep rolling over rocks hoping they can find something, but there really hasn't been anything come up that would suggest there was any wrongdoing of any kind," Cheney told CNN's Larry King, adding that he did not feel that Bush senior political adviser Karl Rove need testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the matter.
"The president feels strongly -- and I do too, I agree with him -- that it's important for us to pass on these offices we occupy to our successors in as good a shape as we found them. And that means protecting and preserving the integrity of those processes," Cheney said.
The interview with Cheney will air Tuesday night on "Larry King Live" at 9 p.m. ET.
Cheney added, "I think that an offer has been made" wherein senior officials would meet with members of Congress -- "but not under oath, not in public, no transcript, to discuss these issues."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy announced last week that he would subpoena Rove.
When announcing the subpoena on the Senate floor, Leahy said "we've now reached a point where the accumulated evidence shows that political considerations factored into the unprecedented firing of at least nine U.S. attorneys last year. Testimony and documents showed that the list was compiled based on input from the highest political ranks in the White House, including Mr. Rove and Mr. [Scott] Jennings."
Jennings is deputy director of political affairs at the White House.
Leahy also subpoenaed former White House counsel Harriet Miers and former Rove aide Sara Taylor to testify about what they knew about the attorney firings. The White House has also resisted allowing them to testify.
In the interview with King, Cheney also backed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has come under fire for his role in the firing of the U.S. attorneys. Gonzales also faces allegations that he perjured himself to Congress while testifying about a 2004 visit to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft while Ashcroft was hospitalized. VideoWatch Cheney defend Gonzales »
Gonzales testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that the 2004 meeting was not about a National Security Agency domestic surveillance program, a statement that was later contradicted by FBI head Robert Mueller.
A former government official familiar with the controversy told CNN Sunday, however, that the 2004 meeting was about a related data mining program, which Gonzales views as a separate program but others view as part of the domestic surveillance program.
"The attorney general may have been splitting hairs here," the former government official said. "He may be able to say 'the dispute' was not about the NSA monitoring program per se. But I would not have said what he said."
Asked whether he stands by Gonzales, Cheney said, "I do. Al's a good man, a good friend, on a difficult assignment."
Asked whether he is troubled by "the appearance of him not telling the truth," the vice president would not comment. "Well, I don't want to get into the specifics with respect to his testimony and the questions that were asked," he said. "I know Al on a personal and professional basis and I hold him in high regard."
Cheney also defended his claim that he works not primarily in the executive but in the legislative branch of government and therefore is not bound by the rules governing members of the executive branch.
Constitutionally, the vice president serves as the Senate president, with the power to vote in the Senate to break a tie. But unless a tie is in the offing, vice presidents in recent times have rarely presided over the chamber and have instead taken on a larger policy role within the administration.
"I have a foot in both camps, if you will," Cheney told CNN.
"As vice president, obviously, I'm next in line to succeed the president if something happens to him. I have an office in the West Wing of the White House. I advise the president, I'm a member of the National Security Council. Those are all executive functions granted to me basically by the president.
"At the same time, I have responsibilities under the Constitution for certain things on Capitol Hill. In the Senate, I am president of the Senate, I am the presiding officer in the Senate, I cast tie-breaking votes there. My paycheck actually comes from the Senate."
Cheney had made the claim in an attempt to show that he is not bound by an executive order concerning executive branch agencies.
Last month, Cheney's office asserted that it was not required to comply with a presidential order requiring executive branch agencies to report to the National Archives how many documents they classify or declassify.
Cheney's assertion led a key House Democrat to try to strip executive branch funding for the vice president's office.
Life in Iran
I don't know if you saw this story in the NY TIMES regarding the active and inaccurate rumor mill in Iraq, but this paragraph about Iran floored me:
The Iranian news media have gotten in on the act too, claiming that foreign forces have been fitting squirrels with miniaturized surveillance devices and sending them scurrying across the border to spy. Iranian news reports, monitored by the BBC, recently referred to 14 spy squirrels being captured by alert Iranian intelligence officials before the animals could take action against the nation.
Strange Bedfellows-Iran/Russia
I just came across this article by the famed Reut Institute that details some tensions between Russia and Iran. As you know, Russia, along with China, has vigorously opposed more stringent United Nations sanctions against Iran to stop that country's nuclear development.
Russia has developed a strange "push me-pull you" relationship with Iran with the goal of acting as a counterbalance to United States interests, and to keep its hand in the Gulf oil trade. On the one hand, Russia has supplied critical components to the Iranian nuclear effort. On the other hand, Russia has used various excuses (eg. Iran owes Russia money, there are technical issues that need to be resolved, etc.) to delay shipping nuclear material to Iran. One the one hand , Russia has just entered into an agreement to sell Sukhoi fighter-bombers and refueling tankers to Iran that could give Iran significant power projection capabilities throughout the middle east. What might be "the other hand" to this gambit? Might Russia decide to sell the airframes but claim a problem with the needed engines?
Let's see what Reut has to say:
I think the above cited MEMRI article is of such significance that it deserves to be quoted in full
Russia has developed a strange "push me-pull you" relationship with Iran with the goal of acting as a counterbalance to United States interests, and to keep its hand in the Gulf oil trade. On the one hand, Russia has supplied critical components to the Iranian nuclear effort. On the other hand, Russia has used various excuses (eg. Iran owes Russia money, there are technical issues that need to be resolved, etc.) to delay shipping nuclear material to Iran. One the one hand , Russia has just entered into an agreement to sell Sukhoi fighter-bombers and refueling tankers to Iran that could give Iran significant power projection capabilities throughout the middle east. What might be "the other hand" to this gambit? Might Russia decide to sell the airframes but claim a problem with the needed engines?
Let's see what Reut has to say:
Russia sells Iran fighter jets but not fuel for Bushehr
In dealing with the Iranian nuclear project, unofficial sanctions may be an effective political tool. Such sanctions are apparently more effective than official ones and may get around the difficulty of reaching consensus amongst a divided international community.
The Russian government decided to delay supplying fuel to Iran, essential for operating centrifuges in nuclear reactor of Bushehr. However, Russian security forces have agreed to sell Iran a large number of Sukhoi-30 fighter jets.
Russia's policy in the international arena reflects a number of strategic goals: Striving for a leading status in the international arena and hegemony in its near-abroad; challenging US global hegemony; as well as maintaining internal stability and territorial integrity.
On the surface, it appears Russia's security relations with Iran serve the above goals. However, recently, Russia has also been growing increasingly apprehensive regarding the Iranian nuclear project.
Publicly, Russia is unwilling to fully collaborate with the US on matters regarding Iranian sanctions. Russia does, however, in fact subtly complicate Iran's nuclear project.
Iran understands that Russia's delay in supplying with fuel is not only a 'technical' issue (as the Russians portray it), but also reflects a strategic change in Russian policy. This policy greatly frustrates Iran, as it complicates significant nuclear development of Bushehr. Additional unofficial sanctions, especially European and American, weigh heavily on the Iranian economy and cause internal agitation which may undermine the stability of the Iranian regime.
In light of the changes in the international-relations arena during the past year, and especially in light of the rise of China and Russia and the entanglement of the US in Iraq, the international community finds difficulty in maintaining a unified front regarding Iran. It may be that the most effective political tool facing the Iranian nuclear project is to promote unofficial sanctions by governments, businesses and other private actors. Such sanctions prove no less effective then official ones and may get around the challenge of reaching consensus amongst a divided international community.
Sources
* Katz and Keinon, Jerusalem Post, 7/30/07; full article
* Melman, Ha'aretz, 7/20/07; full article
* VOA News, 7/25/07; full article
* Mansharof, MEMRI, 7/12/07; full article
I think the above cited MEMRI article is of such significance that it deserves to be quoted in full
THE MIDDLE EAST MEDIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 370
July 12, 2007 No.370
The Crisis in Iranian-Russian Relations over Iran's Nuclear Project(2)
By: Y. Mansharof
The current crisis in Iranian-Russian relations focuses on two areas: a) the delay in the construction and activation of the nuclear reactor at Bushehr; and b) Russian proposal for an American-Russian radar station in Qabala.
Russia's suspicions regarding Iran's intentions have reached new heights, with Russian government representatives publicly accusing Iran of carrying out covert nuclear activity and of striving to obtain the capability to construct nuclear weapons.
In Iran, on the other hand, there are increasing calls to regard Bushehr as a litmus test for Iranian-Russian relations, alongside calls to complete the construction of the Bushehr reactor with the assistance of countries other than Russia - or, alternatively, to rely on Iran's independent capabilities. [1]
Also, high-level officials in Iran are claiming that the proposal made by Russian President Vladimir Putin to the U.S. at the G-8 summit in Germany in June 2007 - under which the U.S. would not deploy missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic for defense against Iran's ballistic missiles, but would instead use, together with Russia, the missile defense radar station located in Qabala, Azerbaijan - proves Russia's continued enmity towards Iran, which even surpasses the West's enmity towards it.
This paper will analyze the Iranian-Russian crisis as reflected in the Iranian media: [2]
Russia's Accusations
In early July 2007, Russian Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Mikhail Margelov declared that "Iran is persistently avoiding presenting clear and precise answers to the questions that it is being asked about [its] nuclear program... Accordingly, and in light of other signs, I sense that it is acting to achieve the capability to construct nuclear weapons... and is, at the most, five years away from its first nuclear test..." [3]
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak pointed out that "Iran's nuclear policy is very exasperating." [4] He accused Iran of carrying out covert nuclear activity and expressed support for the U.N. Security Council's sanctions resolution against Iran that followed the International Atomic Energy Agency's inability to confirm the nature of Iran's nuclear program. [5] Nevertheless, on June 20, 2007, during a visit to Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Russia would support additional sanctions against Iran only if the IAEA announced that it could no longer cooperate with Iran. [6]
The Delay in Russia's Completion and Activation of the Bushehr Reactor
The crisis in Iranian-Russian relations over Russia's completion of the Bushehr reactor, and its subsequent supply of nuclear fuel to Iran in order to activate the reactor, continues. According to statements by senior Russian officials, it appears that at this stage Russia has reservations about activating the Bushehr reactor, and is not willing to transfer the nuclear fuel required for its activation. Russia is making the activation of the reactor conditional upon Iranian cooperation with the U.N. Security Council and the IAEA.
During a visit to Iran, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Lusyokov said, "Implementing the Bushehr agreement is possible only if Iran obeys the principles of the NPT, cooperates with the IAEA, and is willing to return [all] nuclear fuel [to Russia] after its use." [7] Similarly, in early June 2007, the head of Russia's Nuclear Energy Organization Sergei Kiriyenko stressed that Iran had paid only part of the sum it had committed to paying for the Bushehr reactor construction. [8]
The Russian delegation that went to Tehran in early July 2007 for talks on the future of the Bushehr reactor returned to Russia with no answers. [9] Around the same time, Kislyak rejected Iranian nuclear engineers' claims that the reactor would be finished in September 2007, and that Iran expected to receive the promised nuclear fuel from Russia by then. He said, "[Setting] a period of two months [for the reactor to be activated] is not realistic." [10] Kiriyenko stated that it would be impossible for the reactor to be activated before 2008. [11]
As will be recalled, in spite of Russian senior officials' criticism and delays, in April 2007 Iranian Atomic Energy Organization deputy head Mohammad Saeedi promised that the reactor would nevertheless be under operation by March 2008. [12] In early July 2007, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini stated that "at present, 95% of the work in Bushehr has been completed, and the remaining issues [connected to the reactor] are already being handled." [13]
Iranian Reactions to the Russian Delays
In recent weeks, high-level Iranian officials have begun to criticize Russia's delays - at times in harsh language:
Kayhan: Russia is Acting to Prevent Iran from Going Nuclear
In a July 5, 2007 analysis titled "Russia's Place in the International System," the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is affiliated with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, wrote that Russia was exploiting global fears of Iran becoming stronger, and was acting to prevent it from going nuclear:
"...Russia's view... is that a strong Iran with nuclear capability cannot be tolerated in the region. This is because such a situation would upset the balance of power in the region - a development that is unacceptable for Russia, and is dissatisfactory for Iran's neighbors, especially her Arab neighbors. Under these circumstances, the Russians are making an effort to exploit the current conditions of consensus in order to restrict Iran's building of its strength..." [14]
Members of Iran's Parliamentary Committee for National Security and Foreign Policy Respond
In interviews from early June 2007, Iranian MPs who are members of Iran's Parliamentary Committee for National Security and Foreign Policy accused Russia of delaying activating the Bushehr reactor due to behind-the-scenes negotiations it is conducting with the U.S. Thus, they suggested three possible courses of action to resolve the crisis: Iran must use all means at its disposal to ensure that Russia meet its obligations regarding the completion and activation of the reactor; it must find other partners; or it must rely on its own capabilities.
In a July 6, 2007 interview with the ISNA news agency, Parliamentary Committee for National Security and Foreign Policy Vice-Chairman Mohammad Nabi Rodaki said: "If Russia intends to follow the American policy, Iran must reconsider its own policy vis-à-vis Russia... Ahmadinejad must show courage [in his dealings] with Russia... A definite timetable must be set, and if Russia fails to install all the remaining equipment in the Bushehr reactor [by the agreed-upon deadline], Iran will enter into negotiations with some countries that have announced their willingness [to cooperate with it]... Fortunately, there are many brokers able to sell the remaining equipment that Iran requires. If Putin and Russia fail to realize their commitments, we will utilize the assistance of these brokers... Countries [like] these [i.e. like Russia] have stabbed Iran in the back a number of times, and pursued a policy of saying one thing and [then] doing another. They promised to veto the recent sanctions resolution, but… the Security Council approved the sanctions...
"Russia must [decide:] It must either cooperate with Iran, or openly back America..." [15]
In a July 3, 2007 interview with the conservative news agency Mehr, committee member Elham Amin-Zadeh said: "...Unfortunately, Russia's behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Americans are the most important reason for the delay in activating the Bushehr reactor, and for their lack of cooperation in this matter... In meetings [with their Iranian counterparts], the Russians bring up pretexts such as technological and other issues - but under the current circumstances, and after years have passed since the date [set] for the activation of the Bushehr reactor, there is no justification for [such] delays and tardiness. Iran must play all its cards [to make] Russia carry out its obligations in this matter. The Bushehr reactor [will serve] a great many economic interests for Russia as well, and therefore, failure to implement it is likely to affect relations between the two countries." [16]
In a July 4, 2007 interview with ISNA, committee member Suleiman Jafarzadeh noted: "If Russia does not fulfill its obligations regarding the construction of the Bushehr plant, not only will it endanger its economic, nuclear, and political stature, but no country will trust it again... The Russians do not stand alongside Iran [in the matter of activating the reactor, even though] they know that the fate of their problems in regional issues is tied to the fate of Iran." [17]
Committee member Heshmatollah Falahat-Pisheh told ISNA on July 4, 2007, that "Russia has always exploited its relations with Iran - particularly in the nuclear sphere - in order to arrive at an arrangement with America [at Iran's expense]... The Russians want the Iranian nuclear issue to remain in crisis, so as to exploit it and to arrive at an arrangement with America... More than in the past, Iran must move ahead its [nuclear] plans towards independent [capability]..." [18] He added, "In light of the significant improvement in Iran's capability for building nuclear reactors, it is not worthwhile to introduce new players into this matter." [19]
In an interview with the Aftab news agency on July 4, 2007, committee member Hamid Reza Haji-Babai expressed Iran's disappointment and lack of confidence in Russia, stating, "Throughout the past years, Russia has shown that it is not a reliable and safe partner... With regard to the Bushehr reactor, we have had and we still have many problems with the Russians, and it is not clear [at all] whether they will have the Bushehr reactor ready even by the end of 2008. The completion of the reactor depends on global circumstances at that time... Russia is changing its policy to suit the conditions and needs of global politics, and of its [own] changing interests..." [20] He added that "the Russian government is taking evasive stances, and in general in its important relations on the international [level], it is not considered to be a government worthy of trust... The Iranian government must give the Russian government a serious reminder, and must take measures that will lead the Russians to see their interests as tied with those of Iran." [21]
Committee member Rashid Jalali told the conservative Mehr news agency on July 3, 2007, that "[Russia's] delays, and its violation of its obligations, prove that Iran must not be dependent upon the international community in producing nuclear fuel and in constructing nuclear reactors... If it transpires that there is no technical reason for these delays, Iran must sue Russia for damages, and must submit a complaint about it to the international courts." [22]
Committee member Hossein Sobhani-Nia told the Mehr news agency on July 3, 2007: "Russia's recurring delays show that they are not acting honestly [with regard to] their obligations to Iran, and this is clear to most senior [Iranian] regime officials... The Russian delays in activating the Bushehr reactor and in transferring the nuclear fuel will doubtless only make Iran more determined in handling its nuclear program and in [achieving] the nuclear fuel cycle." [23]
Committee member Javad Jahangirzadeh told Kayhan on July 8, 2007, that "the issue of the Bushehr reactor must constitute a basis for Iran's senior officials and foreign policy officials to [reach] a precise diagnosis [regarding whether to] stop or continue the cooperation with the Russians in various areas... With this conduct, the Russians will lose Iran's trust, which will lead to serious damage to its international prestige... [Iran] cannot select Russia as a reliable strategic partner for cooperation." [24]
Parliamentary Energy Committee Member Hossein Nejabat: Give the Russians an Ultimatum
Parliamentary Energy Committee member Hossein Nejabat told Kayhan that "the Russians must be given an ultimatum, and if they do not activate [the reactor] within the [specified] time, Iran will do the work, because 90% of the reactor is already built, and [Iran] will complain against Russia in the international forums... Behind the scenes, the Russians are cooperating with the Americans... and are making decisions under American influence and pressure. [25]
The Crisis Over the Russian Proposal for an American-Russian Radar Station in Qabala
The other focus of tension between Iran and Russia is the crisis over the Qabala radar station program. Under the compromise proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 summit in Germany in early June 2007, the U.S. will not deploy missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic for defense against Iran's ballistic missiles. Instead, it will use, together with Russia, the missile defense radar station located in Qabala, Azerbaijan. [26] Putin's proposal brought a harsh reaction from Iran, expressed in statements by numerous representatives of the Iranian regime.
Iranian Officials Respond
Parliamentary Committee for National Security and Foreign Policy member Heshmatollah Falahat-Pisheh told Jomhouri-ye Eslami, which is affiliated with the Qom religious seminaries: "Russia never was a strategic friend of Iran... In the past, it tried to sacrifice countries like Iran for its schemes and in order to achieve higher-level relations with America. [Regime] officials in Iran know this, and [therefore] Iran's strategy vis-à-vis Russia should be formulated in the same way." [27]
Falahat-Pisheh also said, "[Our] experience shows that the Russians were not, and still are not, credible in any of their stands... Considering that Iran's main motto is 'No to the East and No to the West,' we must protect our national interests, in a precise and clear way." [28]
Parliamentary Committee for National Security and Foreign Policy member Ali Ahmadi said to the ISNA news agency on June 16, 2007: "If we look at the history of Iran-Russia [relations], we will see that Russia's violent conduct [towards Iran] has been immeasurably worse [than the West's]. Examples of this are the [1813] Treaty of Gulistan and the [1828] Treaty of Turkmenchay, [29] and the conquest of northern Iran during World War II... Iran's past relations with Russia show that peace has not always prevailed between them. More important, the Russians do not want in their vicinity any country like Iran with nuclear technology." [30]
In addition, several MPs asked Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to submit an official protest to Russia regarding Putin's proposal. [31]
Iranian Press Reactions
Aftab-e Yazd: "Nothing Better Can Be Expected from Former KGB Spies"
A June 10, 2007 editorial in the reformist daily Aftab-e Yazd claimed that "nothing better can be expected from the former KGB spies [i.e. Putin]... Therefore, Iran had better regard Russia as a party to the negotiations rather than as a strong and committed ally, and take extra care not to let its interest fall prey to Russia's pursuit of profits. [32]
Jomhouri-ye Eslami: Putin's Proposal Will Endanger Geo-strategic Stability
In a June 10, 2007 editorial, the Iranian daily Jomhouri-ye Eslami argued that Putin's proposal was actually an invitation to the U.S. to spy on Iran on its very border, and that it undermines geo-strategic stability in a way that endangers Russia itself. It also stated that Russia was acting hostilely towards Iran, and continuing to turn its back on it - as it had done in the past, when it supplied Iraq with weapons in its war against Iran. Following are the main points of the editorial:
"...At the G-8 summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted a proposal to Washington that revealed his position of complete hostility to Iran, which cannot be tolerated under any circumstances...
"We strongly recommend to Putin that he carefully study the history... of Iran in the past 50 years... Thanks to the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. anti-Russian spy bases that operated in Iran [during the Shah's time] have been removed. Iran never demanded [anything in exchange] for destroying the American spy bases; but [instead,] for eight years [that is, during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war], the Kremlin provided means of warfare, modern weapons, and the most advanced weaponry of various kinds to the aggressor enemy [i.e. Iraq], which was making Iran the target of its savage attacks...
"After the U.S.S.R. fell apart, Iran tried to turn over a new leaf with Russia, and to establish friendly relations with it, while forgetting the bitter past of its relations with it...
"Putin's hostile and ill-considered proposal will make serious and irreversible changes in the regional and even the global geo-strategic reality, the ill-boding ramifications and results of which will also frighten Moscow and its other allies...
"How can Moscow justify this proposal, which will turn out to be a failure? How is it possible to trust the messages [regarding] Moscow's good will, and to see [these messages] as honest and responsible, while we can see that Moscow is now officially and publicly inviting our vengeance-consumed enemies [i.e. America] to position their espionage operations against Iran just beyond its borders? Really, how should this proposal be perceived, when Moscow is speaking out forcefully against America's hostile goals and plans to position a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, and is officially declaring that it [i.e. Moscow] will aim its missiles at Europe and at other American military targets, but at the same time is proposing to those same rivals [to conduct] joint espionage operations just beyond Iran's borders?...
"This proposal should be perceived as a hostile measure against Iran. The Kremlin should be reminded, in honesty, that Russia is unfortunately still untrustworthy, and that it is continuing with its hostility towards Iran while pretending friendship. Therein, there is also a possibility that what is being said [by Putin] is only a small part of a greater plan, the goals and details of which have not yet been, and will perhaps never be, revealed. It is very humiliating and shameful for Moscow and for the Kremlin leadership that a green light has been given to the American spies..." [33]
Resalat: Putin's Proposal is Another Strategic Mistake by Russia
In a July 2, 2007 editorial, the conservative daily Resalat noted that Putin's proposal to cooperate with the U.S. in operating the radar station in Qabala was a strategic mistake on Russia's part:
"...It seems that Russia's strategic mistakes in the international arena are endless... The mistake of proposing the plan for cooperation between the U.S. and Moscow in [operating] the Qabala radar station in Azerbaijan shows that the prevailing thought in Russia is one of blocking and preventing [any harm to Russian interests]. This kind of thinking is causing the Russians to act unnaturally and to be overly cautious in issues connected to the international arena... [34]
Tehran Times: Russia Is Sacrificing Iran in Order to Achieve Its Own Interests
In his June 13 column in the daily Tehran Times, which is affiliated with the Iranian Foreign Ministry, columnist Hossein Amiri wrote that Russia was sacrificing Iran so as to achieve its own interests vis-à-vis the U.S., and that in so doing, it was breaking its alliance with Iran, without any pangs of conscience. In the column, he also stressed the potential threat posed to Iran by the Qabala radar station, which can identify and intercept any ballistic missile fired from the area stretching from the Middle East to the Indian Ocean:
"…The Qabala radar station is a giant anti-missile radar system built by the Soviet Union in the Qabala region of Azerbaijan in 1985. The radar station has a range of up to 6,000 kilometers, and was designed to detect missile launches originating as far away as the Indian Ocean. The radar's surveillance covers Iran, Turkey, India, and the entire Middle East. It allows not only detection of the launch of a missile but also tracking of its entire trajectory, enabling an anti-missile system to intercept an offensive strike…
"One might ask if Russia has adopted this tactic with the intention of sacrificing Iran for its own interests. Even if the U.S. rejects the Russian proposal, Tehran will view the whole affair as an attempt to use Iran…
"However, by allowing the deployment of U.S. forces so near to the Iranian border, would Russia not be breaking its alliance with Iran? And doesn't this make it clear that Russia has no qualms about using Iran to neutralize the threats of the United States?" [35]
*Y. Mansharof is a Research Fellow at MEMRI.
[1] ISNA, July 6, 2007.
[2] For more on the roots of the Iran-Russia crisis, see MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis No. 338, "Russia's New Position on Iran's Nuclear Program Creates Iran-Russia Crisis," March 30, 2007, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA33807 .
[3] Aftab (Iran), July 1, 2007. On July 10, 2007, a Russian nuclear expert stated that "it will take Iran five to 10 years to create a [nuclear] bomb." Iran Daily (Iran), July 10, 2007.
[4] Aftab (Iran), May 29, 2007.
[5] Aftab (Iran), April 25, 2007; Sobh-e Sadeq (Iran), May 30, 2007.
[6] Aftab (Iran), June 20, 2007.
[7] Kayhan (Iran), May 17, 2007. On July 4, 2007, the Aftab website cited a report from the Russian media according to which Russian Nuclear Energy Organization deputy head Anatoly Kotlienkov had said that Russia would insist that nuclear fuel supplied to Iran is returned to Russia [after it use]. Baztab, April 4, 2007.
[8] Baztab (Iran), June 5, 2007. In addition, an unnamed senior Russian Nuclear Energy Organization source was quoted as saying that "recently, the Bushehr project is no longer considered by Russia to be profitable" and that Iran was not meeting its monetary obligations for the Bushehr reactor project. Aftab (Iran), May 26, 2007. Iran vehemently denies these accusations, as noted by Parliamentary Committee for National Security and Foreign Policy rapporteur Kazem Jalali, ISNA, July 6, 2007. For Iran's denials, see also MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis No. 338, "Russia's New Position on Iran's Nuclear Program Creates Iran-Russia Crisis," March 30, 2007, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA33807 . Another senior source in the Russian Nuclear Energy Organization noted that, since all legal preparations had been completed and all required technical permits for transferring the nuclear fuel to Iran had been obtained, there was nothing to prevent the continuation of activity at Bushehr except the approval of the Russian government. Baztab, June 5, 2007.
[9] Jomhouri-ye Eslami (Iran), July 3, 2007. On June 19, 2007, Aftab cited Russian media reports that Russia was unwilling to negotiate with Iran over the transfer of nuclear fuel or over a date for the completion of the Bushehr reactor. Aftab, June 19, 2007.
[10] Fars (Iran), July 7, 2007; Mehr (Iran), July 7, 2007.
[11] Aftab (Iran), July 4, 2007.
[12] IRNA (Iran), April 11, 2007.
[13] Jomhouri-ye Eslami (Iran), July 2, 2007.
[14] Kayhan (Iran), July 5, 2007.
[15] ISNA (Iran), July 6, 2007.
[16] Mehr (Iran), July 3, 2007.
[17] ISNA (Iran), July 4, 2007.
[18] ISNA (Iran), July 4, 2007.
[19] Kayhan (Iran), July 8, 2007.
[20] Aftab (Iran), July 4, 2007.
[21] Kayhan (Iran), July 8, 2007.
[22] Mehr (Iran), July 3, 2007.
[23] Mehr (Iran), July 3, 2007.
[24] Kayhan (Iran), July 8, 2007.
[25] Kayhan (Iran), July 8, 2007.
[26] According to Iranian media reports, Putin stated during his recent visit to the U.S. that the joint operation of the Qabala radar station was contingent upon America's retraction of its plan to position missile batteries in Eastern Europe. Aftab (Iran), July 3, 2007. On June 10, 2007, Aftab reported that the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, had welcomed Putin's proposal.
[27] Jomhouri-ye Eslami (Iran), June 10, 2007.
[28] Aftab-e Yazd (Iran), June 10, 2007.
[29] This refers to agreements through which Russia took control of the Caucasus, which was until then under Iranian rule.
[30] ISNA (Iran), June 16, 2007.
[31] Mehr (Iran), June 10, 2007.
[32] Aftab-e Yazd (Iran), June 10, 2007.
[33] Jomhouri-ye Eslami (Iran), June 10, 2007.
[34] Resalat (Iran), July 2, 2007.
[35] Tehran Times (Iran), June 13, 2007.
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