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Ground Truth in Iraq

By Larry Johnson on November 14, 2007 at 8:44 PM in Current Affairs

The Bush Administration is touting the drop in terrorist bombings in Iraq and declining U.S. casualties as proof that the surge is working, but the lack of political progress by the Maliki government in reconciling the warring parties is a stark reminder that the surge has failed and the surge is now over. We learned this week that the U.S. is starting to draw down its forces in Iraq and has ordered a brigade based at Fort Hood, Texas to head home. So, if the surge is working we are going to reverse the surge because we want the violence to increase? What is happening?

Let’s be clear about the situation on the ground–the sectarian rift between Sunnis and Shias continues and there is no sign of reconciliation on the horizon. In Baghdad the Shias continue to progress in purging Sunnis from mixed neighborhoods. Moreover, most of the U.S. casualties are concentrated in and around Baghdad. And we are not able to stop the ethnic cleansing that is underway.

Out west the U.S. commanders have finally paid attention to the intelligence and are paying former bombers to take up arms to defend their communities. As the Washington Post reported on Monday:

More than 67,000 people across 12 of Iraq’s 18 provinces are registered under the military designation Concerned Local Citizens, and 51,000 of those have been screened and had their names, fingerprints and other biometric data recorded by the U.S. military, Newton said. Such information is entered into a vast database that soldiers can use to help identify past criminal behavior, such as by matching fingerprints on a roadside bomb component. Eighty-two percent of the volunteers are Sunni and 18 percent are Shiite, he said. About 37,000 are being paid about $300 a month through contracts funded by the U.S.-led military coalition.

The Beatles were wrong. Not only can money buy you love but it can buy you some peace. A large portion of the bombings carried out thru June of this year were the work of people who admitted they were planting bombs for cash. They needed money. Now that the U.S. is paying out almost $12 million a month we have seen a dramatic decline in bombings.

Besides buying off the Sunni we have gotten an assist from Moqtada Al Sadr. He has shrewdly reined in his Shia militia and is avoiding confrontation with U.S. troops. The Newshoggers offers some details on this part of the story (and note the Newshoggers got this first, not Newsweek):

First reported over the weekend in Newsweek, U.S. commanders said the pullback of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has been a major factor in the decrease in Baghdad violence. They also said U.S. forces and Sadr’s forces now have a common enemy: so-called “special groups” that once were aligned with Sadr but have splintered from the main organization.

Those groups, Newsweek said, are allegedly funded through Iran, and al-Sadr has formed a new unit to go after the special groups — which are ignoring the ceasefire.

“We do applaud and welcome the efforts of Muqtada al-Sadr in his previous announcement of a ceasefire and what he is doing to try to bring those elements under control. We believe that what has happened (with respect to decreases in violence) can be attributed in part to those efforts.

“Those elements such as the special group, extremist elements, have in fact dishonored Sadr’s pledge of honor to bring about the ceasefire and become part of the process to move forward,” Boylan said.

But despite al Sadr’s cooperation, he is not relinquishing his ambition to run Iraq nor is he offering an olive branch to the Sunnis. While some U.S. officials want to play Mookie’s cooperative attitude as evidence that we are beating Iran on the frontlines, the real truth is that Al Sadr is serving his own interests and Iran is treading very carefully to avoid providing Washington any pretext or justification for military action. Tehran is calculating (correctly in my opinion) that it can bide its time and prevail in Iraq without having to bleed America dry.

Pat Lang offers the following insights on the state of play in Iraq:

It is now clear that the tactic of weaning tribal and village support away from Sunni insurgent groups is working quite well. With a minimum of babble about the “freedom agenda” the armed forces are going about the business of using existing local leadership and group identity to pit traditionalist and secularist Sunni potential against takfiri jihadist groups in western and central Iraq. Money, a recognized status as part of a winning combination, a certain amount of protection from the rapacity of the Shia run police, all of those things contribute to the ability of US commanders to attract the willing cooperation of tribal sheikhs, village mukhtars and provincial politicians. In Iraq tribal identity is so pervasive in much of the country that the influence of these networks of real or fictive kinship can not be ignored. In some cases the Dulaimi relationships of the leaders are clearly a major factor. Tribal groups like the Shammar, who stand outside that grouping should not be ignored either.

Diyala, Salahuddin and the area just south of Baghdad are proving to be fertile ground for application of methods of influence and control as old as the tribes themselves. It continues to be ironic that many in the US government think that they have discovered something “new” in these methods.

In these stories from the LA Times, the process of “cat herding” is well depicted as well as the resulting generation of combat power in defense of village and small town life. “Concerned Local Citizens” must sound amusing in Arabic.

All of this is to the good, and such developments can be seen as setting the scene for a gradual but steady withdrawal of US ground forces down to the short term residual force I have written of before.

BUT, will the government that we Americans largely created (purple thumbs and all) prove equal to the task of re-integrating all these Sunni Arab “ralliers” into the national body politic? If the government can do that, then there is likely to be a future for a united Iraq. If not, what? An inevitable military coup? De facto partition? It is not yet clear what that future will be..

This much I think is certain–U.S. influence in Iraq will shrink, not expand. It is simple economics. The United States cannot afford to continue to spend billions a month in Iraq while simultaneously trying to cut funding for child healthcare and education in the United States. It does not work politically. This means that Iraq will increasingly chart its own course forward. Over the mid-term–the next six to twenty four months–the defacto partitioning of Iraq will continue. Battles among sectarian factions will continue to rage sporadically. As the United States disengages the pragmatists on both sides of the sectarian divide in Iraq are likely to look for a common ground and will push for a truce that will allow some measure of normalcy to return to the blood soaked streets of Iraq. But the restoration of mixed neighborhoods, Shia-sunni marriage, and the return of the educated refugees appears to be a bridge too far.

  • http://www.food4humanity.org hoosierhoops

    Larry:
    The United States cannot afford to continue to spend billions a month in Iraq while simultaneously trying to cut funding for child healthcare and education in the United States. It does not work politically.

    So true..Even in high School we learned that politics is ‘ guns or butter. ‘

    Thanks for the great post.

  • Delia

    It’s going to be a fight every step of the way with Bush. He doesn’t want to give a penny for the well-being of this country or its people and there seem to be enough repubs still in office to back him up. Meanwhile the war budgets keep making it through.

  • Thinker

    I was hoping for an opportunity to present a winded deeply philosophical reply, but the subject matter does not afford [even with the most liberal interpretation].

    On the money side of things, certain cinical individuals argued that if the US gave every person in Iraq $4,000 instead of going to war, Saddam Hussein would of been the most popular person on the planet. People would have queued the streets to blow sincere kisses at the wascally old dictator. Instead the US has spent $1.5Trillion in place of the bargain $120Billion. Iraq is far far unsafer than it ever was. Even allowing for the devestation that Clinton heaped on the Iraqi people and blamed Saddam for, pound for pound the outcome could not have been worse. US hasn’t secured the asset. There is no stable regime in Iraq. Plus there is a civil war in progress with no end in site.

    “There’s another fine mess you’ve got us into” says it all.

    I think you are right, hoosierhoops. We are about to see a show down. Conscience versus credibility.

  • http://thumbsnap.com/v/78mn2yFc.jpg 1Watt

    This article lays out a good reason to get out of Iraq now:

    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK14Ak01.html

    But sums up by stating we’ll be there until 2017.

    • Yogi-one

      How refreshing to read a lucid analysis of the Iraq situation. I noticed that although the author was American, he was independent and had to get published in the Asia Times.

      The fact that you never read such clear-headed analyses in US newspapers is part of the problem. Look at this simple declaration of the completely obvious from the article:

      “The United States’ current Iraq debate has three key dynamics: a lame duck president looking to hand Iraq off to his successor, a conservative movement promoting fear over reason for perceived political gain, and a progressive movement frustrated by a lack of change in Iraq policy and vague positions about what to do.”

      No major metro newspaper I know of would have printed such a statement for the simple reason that it is too close to the truth, and doesn’t read like propaganda, disinformation, or a simple right vs left emotional screed.

      As long as the press actively takes the role of promoting disinformation, and disallowing simple unbiased analyses such as the one here, the situation will continue as outlined in the article like this:

      With a great deal of understatement, the GAO said: “US efforts lack strategies with clear purpose, scope, roles, and performance measures.” (In other words, the United States doesn’t know what it’s doing.)

      The author makes the point that

      There is a critical window of opportunity opening for the United States to withdraw and for Iraq to hold itself together and rebuild.

      What I think is doable, but it would still take a level of common sense that eludes Cheney/Bush, is to start treating the Iraqis like we treat the Saudis.

      I disagree with the author saying that there seems to be no clear purpose to the war in Iraq. Looking beyond the daily obfuscation of that purpose from the White House, the goal is very clear: be the dominant power with access to oil in the Middle East and have military bases set up to ensure the flow of oil and manage security for US interests in the region.

      I don’t agree with that agenda, I’m just saying that’s what it is. The Bushies just happened to choose a very totally blundering way to do it.

      Like Saudi Arabia, create them as an ally and support whatever government can bring stability (whether it’s secular or not, whether it’s a democracy or not, as long as there’s stability for us to pursue our interests).

      If we want access to the oil, and especially if we want to be the nation controlling access to the oil, we have to recognize that we have to work with what’s there, and that we cannot simply invade, completely destabilize an entire nation, and then just have everything magically work out.

      An additional problem comes with all the industries that make money off hot wars.

      I would suspect the main reason Cheney/Bush is so hot to create Iran as another Iraq, only bigger, is because they are invested in all the industries that stand to make billions of profits by creating another completely unregulated free-for-all similar to the one in Iraq. Yes, I mean disaster capitalism.

      There is a way to get access to the oil and have a stabilizing presence (not an exacerbating one) in the Middle East. Unfortunately, I think the current White House is unable to move in that direction.

      A Clinton White House may sense the political gains of that approach however. It could be that the reason why Hillary balks at promising a total withdrawal of forces there is because she sees that the more realistic solution may be to continue pursuing our geopolitical objectives in the Middle East, but using a lot more diplomacy and avoiding disastrous wars. This would be more consistent with US policy before the Cheney/Bush reign.

  • mudkitty

    Mr. Johnson…were it not for the fact that this year has been the deadliest year for American forces in the entire Iraq war, so far…

    Were it not for the fact that in WW2 WE, THE PEOPLE, DEFEATED HITLER, who, at the time, had the world’s most efficient army (marching across all of Europe, no less, and bombing London, no less) in less time than it’s taken to wage this Bush/Cheney Keystone Kops “war”…

    Were it not for the fact that, nowadays, up is down…etc.

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  • Montag

    There’s a good story that UN Peacekeeping troops called into Mozambique to end their Civil War had it easy. They weren’t called in the END the Civil War, because the two sides had already recognized their mutual exhaustion and done that. The UN were called in simply as a pledge of good faith to each other between the two sides. Similarly the U.S. government can’t dictate such a solution to the Iraqis and they’ll somehow have to arrive at a modus vivendi on their own.

    • Shirin

      “they’ll somehow have to arrive at a modus vivendi on their own.”

      Very true, and that will never, never, never, EVER happen as long as the Americans are there to stir the pot.

      Let’s be clear about something. The Americans are the CAUSE of this civil war, and they will never be a solution to it. Iraq has no history of serious, widespread, or protracted civil conflict in all its centuries of history prior to 2003.

      Let’s be clear about something else. Contrary to the popular portrayal by the U.S., the primary internecine conflict in Iraq is not sectarian, and never was. This is a battle for political power, and much of it is between separatists, who are generally working with the occupation (and Iran in the case of the Da`wa and The Party Formerly Known as SCIRI – whatever it is calling itself these days), and nationalists. These groups are not at all neatly divided based on whether they are Sunni and Shi`a. That is clearly apparent in places like Basra where the conflict is mainly among three Shi`a groups, two nationalist and one separatist/American and Iranian allied.

      And the final thing to be clear about is that it is that the withdrawal of the occupation is a necessary prerequisite for things to begin to calm down in Iraq. Sorry, Americans, but you are not the solution, you are the problem. Evidence? How about the recently revealed fact that the violence in Basra has declined by 90% since the British withdrew (of course, almost immediately after the British withdrew the Iraqis in Basra were saying that things had calmed down a lot and they felt a lot safer going out, but now that the British have provided actual numbers, maybe people will start believing it).

    • Shirin

      “they’ll somehow have to arrive at a modus vivendi on their own.”

      Very true, and that will never, never, never, EVER happen as long as the Americans are there to stir the pot.

      Let’s be clear about something. The Americans are the CAUSE of this civil war, and they will never be a solution to it. Iraq has no history of serious, widespread, or protracted civil conflict in all its centuries of history prior to 2003.

      Let’s be clear about something else. Contrary to the popular portrayal by the U.S., the primary internecine conflict in Iraq is not sectarian, and never was. This is a battle for political power, and much of it is between separatists, who are generally working with the occupation (and Iran in the case of the Da`wa and The Party Formerly Known as SCIRI – whatever it is calling itself these days), and nationalists. These groups are not at all neatly divided based on whether they are Sunni and Shi`a. That is clearly apparent in places like Basra where the conflict is mainly among three Shi`a groups, two nationalist and one separatist/American and Iranian allied.

      And the final thing to be clear about is that it is that the withdrawal of the occupation is a necessary prerequisite for things to begin to calm down in Iraq. Sorry, Americans, but you are not the solution, you are the problem. Evidence? How about the recently revealed fact that the violence in Basra has declined by 90% since the British withdrew (of course, almost immediately after the British withdrew the Iraqis in Basra were saying that things had calmed down a lot and they felt a lot safer going out, but now that the British have provided actual numbers, maybe people will start believing it).

  • Thinker

    More fine commentary, Yogi-one. However I disagree with your assessment of Clinton. He was critical. The Oklahoma template set up 911. An inhumane national security force – Waco on, hmmmmmm, Bush turf. Bombing the shit out of Iraq in the name of Saddam while the media slept.

    Many, many other tags, but I’ll leave that to Mr M whose far better than me at pointing things out. So that’s why Mrs Clinton has to take over in the natural progression of things.

    Bush I > Clinton I > Bush II > Clinton II

    Dummy war on Iraq > dummy moral crusade > real war in Iraq > real moral crusade.

    We are about to witness the new world order.

    • Yogi-one

      Yeah, good point. That’s my fear re the Clintons – they are just closet neocons in liberal costume. I can’t help but think Hillary craves all that exec privilege she is seeing the current White house exercise.

      I was trying to sound hopeful….but as they say, maybe I’ll feel much better if I just give that up, eh?

      • Thinker

        Reality has a nasty habbit of slapping those in denial right in the choppers.

        We are all a little in denial until reality pays us a visit. You’re cool Yogi-one.

        Mark my words, the war ain’t even started yet and the powers that be are up for a short sharp shock if they seriously believe they can push this new world order crap.

        The world is in pressure cooker mode. Time to release the steam, give a few real freedoms. Stoke the pot and watch that cooker explode. It could explode anywhere and at anytime, which could give new meaning to losing face.

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  • G Hazeltine

    Is there an underlying racism here? Iraqi’s eschew violence from political ambition, or because we pay them?

    This war did not start in 2003. It started in 1991 with the systematic destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, water, transportation, power, with the results the pentagon understood would occur. Epidemics of water borne disease, and massive deaths of children. Under Clinton and Hillary’s good friend Madeline ‘We think it (the death’s of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of children) was worth it” Albright’s sanctions the economy was wrecked and the middle class was broken.

    We destroyed their ecomomy, their social fabric, their museums, their libraries, their police, their army, their health system – and instituted a government based on sect which had no antecedant in Iraqi history. Five years of devastation, occupation, humiliation on top of 12 years of crushing sanctions.

    We didn’t destabilize Iraq. We destroyed it.

    And we wonder why there is violence. Well, Arabs tend to violence as we all know. Right?

    Or maybe not:

    “Coalition Soldiers In Iraq Are The Disease, Not the Cure

    Here at the Agonist a long running argument has been about whether or not a pullout of US troops would lead to even worse violence than exists now. My argument has been that while there might be a spike in violence, the Coalition pulling out is the prerequisite to fixing Iraq’s violence issues (and, for that matter, pretty much any of Iraq’s problems.)

    The data points continue to pile up that when the US or Britain leaves an area violence actually decreases. Here’s another such point:

    The British army says violence in Basra has fallen by 90% since it withdrew from the southern Iraqi city earlier this year. Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols. A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come under attack from militants in Basra, but the overall level of violence is down 90% since the British troops left. Britain is scheduled to return control of Basra province to Iraqi officials next month, officially ending Britain’s combat role in Iraq.

    Occupying a country, if you don’t do it properly, increases rather than decreases violence. A majority of Iraqis want the US out. Perhaps they have a good reason for that. Foreign occupation troops aren’t the solution to Iraqs problems. Nor is occupying Iraq any longer a solution to any problem the US has. It’s time to leave. Let the Iraqis deal with the aftermath. The “pottery barn” rule doesn’t apply when the owners and employees are all begging you to “just leave the shop, sir. We’ll pick up the pieces. No, no, you don’t own anything. Please, just leave the store. Please, oh arghhh! You broke something else. And something else! No! No! Just leave. Leave!!!”
    That’s the situation.

    Time for the US to just leave.”

    And while we are leaving, perhaps Moqtada as Sadr deserves a little more respect. Col. Lang seems to think so:

    http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/08/who-is-moqtada-.html

    • Shirin

      Yes, yes, a thousand times YEEEEEESSSSSSSS!

      Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. It is right on.

  • bob h

    Senator Huckleberry said that the surge was one of the greatest triumphs in American military history. Yes, surely it is another Inchon.

  • Shirin

    Mookie?! Larry, really, come on! This is not worthy of you. Next will you start using the term “muzzies” to refer to Muslims?

    Showing this kind of disrespect for your subject does not do you credit.

    And by the way, I am not a fan of Muqtada As Sadr really, but the choices are not good, and compared to the Malikis and Al Hakims who have simultaneously enslaved themselves to both Iran and Bush, at least he is a nationalist, and not beholden to any foreign entity bent on dominating Iraq.

  • G Hazeltine
  • Thinker

    Thankyou for your comments Mr Hazeltine, I could not improve on anything you have committed.