UPDATE!

The Iraqi Parliament is still on vacation!

God and Physics

Lovely little article in today's Science Times(so buy the NYTIMES. They need money-they shrunk the newspaper to save dough!)

August 7, 2007
Essay
What’s in a Name? Parsing the ‘God Particle,’ the Ultimate Metaphor
By DENNIS OVERBYE

We need to talk about the “God particle.”

Recently in this newspaper, I reported on the attempts by various small armies of physicists to discover an elementary particle central to the modern conception of nature. Technically it’s called the Higgs boson, after Peter Higgs, an English physicist who conceived of it in 1964. It is said to be responsible for endowing the other elementary particles in the universe with mass.

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as “the God particle” in the book of the same name he published with the science writer Dick Teresi in 1993. To Dr. Lederman, it made metaphorical sense, he explained in the book, because the Higgs mechanism made it possible to simplify the universe, resolving many different seeming forces into one, like tearing down the Tower of Babel. Besides, his publisher complained, nobody had ever heard of the Higgs particle.

In some superficial ways, the Higgs has lived up to its name. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on the so-called Standard Model, of which the Higgs is the central cog. Billions of dollars are being spent on particle accelerators and experiments to find it, inspect it and figure out how it really works.

But physicists groan when they hear it referred to as the “God particle” in newspapers and elsewhere (and the temptation to repeat it, given science reporters’ desperate need for colorful phrases in an abstract and daunting field, is irresistible). Even when these physicists approve of what you have written about their craft, they grumble that the media are engaging in sensationalism, or worse.

Last week a reader accused me of trying to attract religiously inclined readers by throwing out “God meat” for them.

It was not the first time that I had been accused of using religion to sell science. Or was it using science to sell religion?

Last year, I described the onset five billion years ago of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the cosmos, with the words “as if God had turned on an antigravity machine.”

More people than I had expected wrote in wanting to know why I had ruined a perfectly good article by dragging mythical deities into it.

My guide in all of this, of course, the biggest name-dropper in science, is Albert Einstein, who mentioned God often enough that one could imagine he and the “Old One” had a standing date for coffee or tennis. To wit: “The Lord is subtle, but malicious he is not.”

Or this quote regarding the pesky randomness of quantum mechanics: “The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice.”

With Einstein, we always knew where he stood in relation to “God” — it was shorthand for the mystery and rationality of nature, the touchstones of the scientific experience. Cosmic mystery, Einstein said, is the most beautiful experience we can have, “the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

“He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement,” he continued, “is as good as a snuffed-out candle.”

If we didn’t already have a name for the object of Einstein’s “cosmic religion,” we would have to invent one. It’s just too bad that the name has been tainted and trivialized by association with the image of a white-bearded Caucasian-looking creature who sits in the clouds attended by harp-strumming angels.

If Einstein were around today, he would likely be scolded every other time he opened his metaphor-laden mouth for giving aid and comfort to the creationists. Indeed, the architects of intelligent design have not been shy about interpreting his aversion to divine dice playing and a remark wondering if God had any choice in creating the world, as support for an intelligent designer. Einstein didn’t mean it that way, of course. He was only using a metaphor to wonder if it was possible to build more than one logically consistent universe. That’s a question that still provokes hot debate.

As it happened, Dr. Lederman’s book came out about the time that creationism was on the rise in this country, and “my colleagues gave me hell,” as he put it in a recent e-mail message.

Neither time nor criticism seems to have dimmed Dr. Lederman’s taste for metaphor or sense of humor. Only two weeks ago, he titled an article about particle physics “The God Particle, Et Al.” Well, O.K., he had a book to sell.

It’s not easy to stand up for a moniker as over the top as the one that Dr. Lederman used — one we are likely to hear again and again in the next couple of years as the generation-long hunt for the Higgs particle reaches a climax. But I have to applaud Dr. Lederman’s spirit. Historians have suggested that it was a mistake for the antiwar movement of the 1960s to yield the flag — a powerful symbol of patriotism — to the war’s supporters, and likewise I think it would be a mistake for scientists to yield such a powerful metaphor to creationists and religious fundamentalists.

The Higgs particle is not God, but as theorized it is a piece of the sublime beauty of nature that had Einstein figuratively on his knees. I can’t prove it, but I can’t help wondering if Einstein, a man with what the geneticist Barbara McClintock called “a feeling for the organism” — in this case the universe — was aided in his intuition by being able to personify nature in such a familiar and irreverent way.

Is there a God who worries about the flight of every sparrow? Einstein said that was a naïve and even abhorrent idea.

Do I believe the universe is a mystery? Absolutely. Is that mystery ultimately explicable? Intellectual empires from Plato to Einstein have been founded on that presumption, bold and optimistic as it is, and I wouldn’t advise betting against it.

In the meantime, I wouldn’t dream of depriving any future Einstein of his or her rhetorical or metaphorical tools.

Not to mention myself.

On Iraq 2

I've posted articles on Iraq that show both positive results (O'Hanlon and Pollak) and negative results(Schwartz)for American redevelopment efforts.

It is evident to me that neither the left nor the right has "the" answer. rather , the answer lies with that collection of tribes and interests we call "Iraqis". If they want Al Qeada there, it will be there. If they want a nation, it will be there, if they want to split into three separate tribal entities, it will happen. Except to the extent that we might be able to prevent the future processes that occur in Iraq from turning into a civil war, we are irrelevant.

Oh, the Iraqi parliament is on vacation.

On Iraq

Here is an opinion on Iraq that counters the Op-Ed piece in the Times by O'Hanlon and Pollack. From TomDispatch:

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

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

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.

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.