astralis

several comments regarding this article:

zakaria is right in that crushing the sunni insurgency (or even weakening it, as i don't think 21,500 troops is enough for eliminating it, given that it only returns the US to roughly the force structure present during the iraqi elections) without dealing with the shia will be a recipe for ethnic cleansing, especially once the US leaves the scene.

the problem here remains the shia militia. even if we were to seriously exploit the recent signs of a political break between maliki and sadr, and completely crush sadr as both a political and military entity, we would STILL be alleviating only the symptoms (albeit a very serious symptom). after all, there still remains the badr organization, and countless other smaller militias (and subsets of militias) with leaders even more extremist than sadr.

herein lies the problem: to achieve a political situation through military means, we would have to crush both the sunni insurgency AND the shia militia, which we simply do not have the force levels to do. we would then have to find- in the context of a democratic environment- political leaders whom believe in an unified iraq, free of sectarian tensions. this is something we have singularly failed to do up to this point.

one of the more depressing aspects which i've noticed about iraq is that we hold very few cards. our biggest trump card is the threat to withdraw from iraq, and thus take the mahdi army out from the sidelines and into the fight (against the sunni insurgents). this is something the madhi army (or any shia militia) would not be pleased about. the sunnis, after all, have demonstrated their ability in fighting against the US, for example. but if forced into the corner, the shia would probably call our bluff- they have numbers on their side, if nothing more, and with every passing day that the US arms and trains the police, and even sections of the army, the stronger they get.

given the lack of a good hand, so far we have banked upon maliki and what political leaders whom ARE in power to hold to a vision of an unified iraq. bush's plan relies very heavily on this hope. this makes foreign policy professionals and analysts very uncomfortable, as plans based upon little more than hope are likely doomed to fail.

this sentence in particularly already shows that behind the scenes...strings are already being pulled.

NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings, embedded with an American advisory team that took part in the fighting, reports that no more than 24 hours after the battle began on Jan. 6, the brigade's Sunni commander, Gen. Razzak Hamza, was relieved of his command. The phone call to fire him came directly from the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite.

Lt. Col. Steven Duke, commander of a U.S. advisory team working with the Iraqis, and a 20-year Army veteran, describes Hamza as "a true patriot [who] would go after the bad guys on either side." Hamza was replaced by a Shiite.

comments and questions on either my comments or the article welcomed!!

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16610769/site/newsweek/

We Might 'Win', But Still Lose
Lt. Col. Steven Duke says the Mahdi Army is 'sitting on the 50-yard line, eating popcorn, watching us do their work for them.'

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

Jan. 22, 2007 issue - Everyone seems quite certain that George W. Bush's new plan for Iraq is bound to fail. But I'm not so sure. At a military level, the strategy could well produce some successes. American forces have won every battle they have fought in Iraq. Having more troops and a new mission to secure whole neighborhoods is a good idea—better four years late than never. But the crucial question is, will military progress lead to political progress? That logic, at the heart of the president's new strategy, strikes me as highly dubious.

Administration officials have pointed to last week's fighting against Sunni insurgents in and around Baghdad's Haifa Street as a textbook example of the new strategy. Iraqi forces took the lead, American troops backed them up and the government did not put up any obstacles. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger concluded that the battle "looked like a successful test of unified [American-Iraqi] effort."

But did it? NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings, embedded with an American advisory team that took part in the fighting, reports that no more than 24 hours after the battle began on Jan. 6, the brigade's Sunni commander, Gen. Razzak Hamza, was relieved of his command. The phone call to fire him came directly from the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite. Lt. Col. Steven Duke, commander of a U.S. advisory team working with the Iraqis, and a 20-year Army veteran, describes Hamza as "a true patriot [who] would go after the bad guys on either side." Hamza was replaced by a Shiite.

Joint operations against Shiite militias are far less likely, and not only because of political interference from the top. Groups like Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army don't generally start fire fights with the Americans or attack Iraqi forces. Their goals are different, quieter. Another U.S. adviser, Maj. Mark Brady, confirms reports that the Mahdi Army has been continuing to systematically take over Sunni neighborhoods, killing, terrorizing and forcing people out of their homes. "They're slowly moving across the river," he told Hastings, from predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad into the predominantly Sunni west. If the 20,000 additional American troops being sent to the Iraqi capital focus primarily on Sunni insurgents, there's a chance the Shiite militias might get bolder. Colonel Duke puts it bluntly: "[The Mahdi Army] is sitting on the 50-yard line eating popcorn, watching us do their work for them."

So what will happen if Bush's new plan "succeeds" militarily over the next six months? Sunnis will become more insecure as their militias are dismantled. Shiite militias will lower their profile on the streets and remain as they are now, ensconced within the Iraqi Army and police. That will surely make Sunnis less likely to support the new Iraq. Shiite political leaders, on the other hand, will be emboldened. They refused to make any compromises—on federalism, de-Baathification, oil revenues and jobs—in 2003 when the United States was dominant, in 2005 when the insurgency was raging, and in 2006 when they took over the reins of government fully. Why would they do so as they gain the upper hand militarily?

Administration officials claim that this time things are different. The Maliki government, and the Shiite leadership more generally, understand that they must crack down on militias and compromise with the Sunnis. Why? In the words of one senior U.S. official—under instructions to stay anonymous—because Shiite political leaders understand they no longer have "unquestioning American support anymore, especially from Capitol Hill." This suggests that the administration finally understands that Bush's blank-check policy for the Iraqi government has proved totally counterproductive. The one action that might be forcing the Iraqi leadership to make some compromises has been the threat that Congress would force a withdrawal of American support. One month ago, the White House was criticizing Congress as being borderline treasonous for suggesting such a thing. Today its strategy in Iraq rests on the fruits of that assertiveness.

Over the past three and a half years, the dominant flaw in the Bush administration's handling of Iraq is that it has, both intentionally and inadvertently, driven the country's several communities apart. Every seemingly neutral action—holding elections, firing Baathists from the bureaucracy, building up an Iraqi military and police force—has had seismic sectarian consequences. The greatest danger of Bush's new strategy, then, isn't that it won't work but that it will—and thereby push the country one step further along the road to all-out civil war. Only a sustained strategy of pressure on the Maliki government—unlike anything Bush has been willing to do yet—has any chance of averting this outcome.

Otherwise, American interests and ideals will both be in jeopardy. Al Qaeda in Iraq—the one true national-security threat we face from that country—will gain Sunni support. In addition, as American officers like Duke and Brady have noted, our ideals will be tarnished. The U.S. Army will be actively aiding and assisting in the largest program of ethnic cleansing since Bosnia. Is that the model Bush wanted for the Middle East?

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

astralis

beware of the imagery in this article, like hitchens noted, it is far too vivid and has the tendency to get stuck in the mind

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The Iraq Jinx
How Bush is blowing our last chance.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007, at 12:12 PM ET

Of the raft of books about the calamitous mismanagement of the intervention in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn's little volume The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq is probably the most readable and certainly the only one that—even if only in the driest possible way—manages to be amusing. Cockburn has been covering Iraq for three decades, knows most of the players, provided several exposés of the Saddam regime, and displays exemplary courage in continuing to travel the country despite his polio (the subject of another excellent book of his in the shape of a memoir: The Broken Boy). Turning his pages, I got the feeling that I have sometimes had before: the slightly ridiculous but unshakeable sensation that there is some kind of jinx at work. One strives, in other words, to think of a blunder that could have been made and was not. Cockburn instances the farcical yet tragic case, in April 2004, of the new Iraqi flag.

It looked, he thought, like a beach umbrella: white with two parallel blue stripes, a yellow band, and a blue crescent. The blue stripes immediately reminded people in the street of the Israeli flag, and they were not mollified to be told that these supposedly represented the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Moreover, "hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men had fought and died under the flag in the Iran-Iraq war. I had often seen it used as a shroud to cover their cheap wooden coffins." True, for the Kurds it was a flag representing massacre and oppression, but their solution was not to fly it and instead to display their own. But for much of the rest of the population, an arbitrary decision to scrap and replace the national emblem was profoundly hurtful and insulting and had been made, moreover, without any consultation. It then turned out that the unappealing new design was the result of nepotism: One member of the Paul Bremer-installed Iraqi Governing Council had called his brother, an artist living in London, and told him to dream up a fresh flag. Nothing has been heard of the new banner since 2004, but many Iraqi insurgent groups can and do now wave the old one with additional patriotic zest.

An all-round foul-up, in fact, where the micro elements take on a macro proportion. This is why the callously bungled execution of Saddam Hussein was and is so important and why I rubbed my eyes on Monday when I read that the hangmen had been at it again and this time had managed to decapitate Saddam Hussein's hellish half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. During the long campaign to abolish the gallows in England in the 1960s, I learned (from a brilliant book by Arthur Koestler) more than you want to know about how the expression "hanged by the neck until dead" can conceal a number of horrors. A clean, long drop with the noose adjusted under the left ear and jaw can ensure an almost instant death. Incompetence or lack of professionalism will lead either to slow strangulation or to the distressing tearing off of the victim's head. Barzan al-Tikriti's head was wrenched off, ergo Nouri al-Maliki's eager Shiite noose artists have bungled it again, and (who knows?) perhaps deliberately.

The critical thing about the much-bruited surge is that it, too, belongs in the all-important realm of the symbolic. A few thousand extra troops in Baghdad and in Anbar are of scant use in themselves, unless they in some way represent a commitment to stick to Iraq no matter what. And if the Iraq to which they stick is in fact symbolized by Maliki's surly confessional regime, then the United States is not baby-sitting a civil war so much as deciding to take part in it. The president conceded as much when he said that new patrols in Baghdad would not be determined by sectarian calculations: Such an assurance would not be necessary if the contingency itself—or the symbolic perception of it—was not so strongly present in people's minds. In these conditions, it's almost perfect that the Democrats have been discussing a symbolic vote against the surge (you cannot beat these people for moral courage), while our new secretary of defense seems to believe that what the surge really symbolizes is a renewed determination to hand over to the Iraqis and start drawing down—as near to a flat contradiction in terms as you could wish.

During the war in Kosovo, I shared a flagon of slivovitz with an especially triumphalist Kosovar Albanian who exulted at what he was seeing. Decades of being pushed around and ground down by the Serbian supremacists and then, suddenly, "Guess what? We get to f--- the Serbs and to do it with Clinton's dick!" (That twice-repulsive image took up a horrible tenancy in the trashy attic of my mind, where it is still lodged.) Matters in Kosovo had been allowed to decay to the point where one either had to watch the cleansing of the whole province by Slobodan Milosevic or, yes, allow NATO and the U.S. Air Force to become, in effect, the air force of the Kosovo Liberation Army. On balance, the latter option was better, while the geographical and demographic scale of the problem was more manageable. Matters in Iraq have degenerated much faster and much more radically than that; now the Shiite majority wants to screw the Sunnis with Bush's (more monogamous, for what that's worth) member. The picture is hardly a prettier one.

A few months ago, I wrote here that the coalition potentially acted as a militia for those who didn't have a militia. I got quite good feedback for that formulation from American soldiers and from Iraqis, too. In large parts of Iraq, still, there are people who dread what might happen in the event of our withdrawal—people to whom in some sense we remain pledged. A surge of any size will be worse than useless if it loses us that moral advantage. In all the recent ignorant burbling about another Vietnam, it ought to have been stressed that there is just one historical parallel worth noting: the early identification of the Kennedy brothers with the Catholic faction in Saigon over the Buddhist one. This is one mistake that we can and must avoid repeating, and Maliki's regime, with its Dawa and Sadrist allies, should be made to know it.

Ray

I heard and saw the Iraqi Vice President, who is a Sunni, on BBC's Hard Talk.

He sounded optimistic, but was worried about Malliki's pro Shia stance and the activities of the Shia militias.

He also said that there was coexistence amongst the various sects in Iraq throughout its history and so he will be surprised if it did not work and the country has to be divided.

Stephen Sacher the interviewer, however, was rather easy on him unlike his usual self!

All the same, Good luck to Iraq!

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA