Author: Helena

It’s been a very Iraq-focused week here in Washington DC. Herewith, some quick notes.
Note 1.
Yesterday, the Prez made his appeal for support ( = congressional funding) of a plan– let’s not call it a “strategy”– whereby the number of US troops in Iraq would be rolled back to their pre-surge level of around 130,000 by next July.
Bottom line: if Bush gets what he wants, then he would have succeeded in “buying” himself an extra 18 months– between Dec 2006, when he desperately had to come up with some alternative to the Baker-Hamilton plan, and July 2008, when the situation will, he hopes, return to what it was in Dec. 2006.
In US political terms, this would buy him a very valuable period of time on the political calendar. It has also, to some extent, tied the Democrats in knots and revealed splits in the Democratic Party.
In US human terms, 773 US service members have been killed in Iraq so far this year. If that attrition rate continues through next July, then we could estimate that Bush’s time-buying “surge-then-desurge” maneuver would cost a total of 1,550 additional US families their loved ones’ lives.
In Iraqi political and human terms, the first 9 months of the “surge” up until now have been disastrous.
Note 2.
I was only able to watch a few portions of the hearings earlier this week, when Petraeus and Crocker appeared before large sessions of first the House and then the Senate. (Then, they worked the big MSM very intensively for what looked like nearly a full further day.)
The Senate hearings looked much more serious than the House ones. The Senators have a lot more self-confidence, authority, experience, and gravitas when they deal with witnesses– even witnesses as “august” (and cocksure) as David Petraeus.
I did see the great moment when our Senator, John Warner, leaned craggily forward and asked Petraeus whether he could truly say that what he was doing in Iraq was actually serving US national security, and Petraeus notably could not answer with any form of a “Yes.”
(Crocker looked like a scared apparatchik throughout the whole thing.)
Note 3.
As readers are all probably well aware, Bush’s big “buddy” in Anbar province, Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was killed there yesterday. Abu Aardvark had some interesting background material on Abu Risha on his blog on Tuesday.
Here on JWN, commenter Alex contributed some even deeper historical background about the Abu Risha tribe:

By the way, if you’re interested, the Abu Rishas are famous in history. This is what I wrote about them 20 years ago. Sorry if it is a rather long quote, but you will not find this on the internet.
“Abu Risha was the hereditary name of the shaikhs of the Mawali. The family had been founded by the legendary Hamad Abu Nu`air in the 15th century. The Mawali, who traced their descent back to an Umayyad prince, at that time were one of the most powerful tribes. The Abu Rishas founded a state which stretched from Qal`at Ja`bar as far as Haditha, with their capital at `Ana. European travellers from Cesare Frederici (1563) and Tavernier (1638) knew of Abu Risha, Amir of Ana, who called himself King of the Arabs.
`Ana was then the meeting point of roads from Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, to Aleppo, Tripoli and Homs. The Abu Rishas maintained a customs station at `Ana. According to Teixeira (1604), the customs charge in `Ana was 5 ducats per camel load for high-value goods such as spices or cloth, and 1 ducat per load for goods of lesser value such as dates. A small proportion of this was paid to the Turks. John Eldred (1583) gives the toll as #40 Sterling for a camel load.
The Ottomans appointed the Abu Risha as Bey of the Sanjaqs of Dair and Rahba (modern-day Deir ez-Zor), Salamiyya, `Ana and Haditha.
In return the Mawali provided military assistance. For the Georgian campaign of 1578, the Serasker obtained 3-4000 camels, forage for horses and other provisions from the Mawali. The reconquest of Baghdad by the Safavids in 1623 led to the installation of a Persian garrison at `Ana, but within two years it had been expelled by the Abu Risha shaikh, Mutlaq. Philip the Carmelite in 1629 saw the town half-ruined as a result. The Ottoman attempt to retake Baghdad in 1629-30 was supported by Abu Risha, but shortly afterwards Mutlaq changed sides, was removed from his position by Khusrau Pasha of Mosul, and replaced by another Abu Risha, Sa`d b. Fayyad. In the final recapture of Baghdad by the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV in 1048/1638-9, Abu Risha sent Bedouin cavalry and a supply train of 10,000 camels.
The inscription on the early Ottoman mausoleum at Jami` al-Mashhad contains a reference to Abu Risha, and has been identified as a mausoleum of the dynasty. The Ottoman period of the Islamic palace at Qal`at `Ana, excavated by the State Organisation for Antiquities and Heritage, may also be their work.
In the second half of the 17th century the Ottomans set up and deposed Abu Risha amirs frequently. When the long-distance trade declined, the Mawali became a robber tribe. In 1720 the Pasha of Raqqa, with help from Karaman and Aleppo, and at the same time the Pasha of Baghdad with support from Diyarbekir, Mosul and Shahrizor, planned to attack the Mawali; but this attack was not undertaken, perhaps because of the Persian war which began in 1723.
The power of the Mawali was broken by the `Anaza in the second half of the 18th century. A delegation of `Anaza were murdered while guests of the Mawali. It was said, Bait al-Mawali bait al-`aib – “The house of the Mawali is the house of shame”. As a result the Mawali were pushed away from `Ana, and moved into northern Syria, where they are to be found today.”

Note 4.
The buzzword that Petraeus and Crocker were seeking to get into circulation for how the “politics” of their approach in Iraq is supposed to work is that it’s a “bottom-up” approach. This reminds me unavoidably of the long-told story of Andrei Gromyko’s slight mis-stating of the well-known drinker’s toast of “Bottoms Up!” …As told, though not very effectively, in the third paragraph here.
Small update Saturday: That link broke. The short version of the story was that when Dean Rusk was the Secretary of State (early 1960s), there was a big state dinner in Washington for Gromyko. And when Gromyko made his toast, he addressed it to Rusk’s prim and proper wife saying “Up your bottom!”
Anyway, for some reason I have been reminded of this story every time I hear Petraeus on TV earnestly talking about having discovered a “bottom-up” strategy for Iraq.
Note 5.
Meanwhile, in terms of true grassroots organizing in Iraq, this item from the BBC looks to me like excellent news.
It has a picture of Iraqi nationalists standing with their national flags and anti-sectarianism banners atop one of the 20-foot-high concrete blast walls with which the occupation forces have been attempting to “quarter off” many of the neighborhoods of Baghdad.
Here’s the lead of the story:

Hundreds of Iraqis have staged a protest against the building of a dividing wall between a Shia district of Baghdad and a Sunni area.
Residents of the Shula and Ghazaliya districts waved Iraqi flags and chanted slogans rejecting both the proposed separation and the US occupation.
They demanded the government intervene to ensure the barrier is demolished.
The US military said the wall would reduce sectarian violence and stop the movement of weapons and militants.

What do you see when you see photos of citizens waving banners on top of walls imposed by outsiders and demanding that the walls be brought down? I see something to celebrate. But I’m thinking maybe the people who are running the occupation see it as a big potential threat to their extensive “quadrillage” ( = movement control) plan for Baghdad and potentially the whole of the country.
The word “quadrillage”, of course, comes de la langue francaise, where it was used to describe the counter-insurgency strategy the French used to such destructive but unsuccessful effect in Algeria and Vietnam. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, eh?

I did watch a bit of the Petraeus-and-Crocker show on C-SPAN this afternoon. Oh how handy for the administration to have this whole thing happening during the week of September 11, eh?
Today it was a joint hearing of the House Foreign relations and Armed Services Committes. I guess the main thing that struck me was the cock-a-hoop way that Petraeus preened his way around the hearing room, gladhanding everyone like a seasoned politician… Whereas Crocker looked anguished, concerned, and very uncomfortable.
Also, whenever the Congress members asked questions that were not specifically directed to one or other of the two “witnesses”, Petraeus jumped right in and answered them without even seeming to ask Crocker if he wanted to go first. Even when they were on clearly political (as opposed to more military) subjects.
It was alpha-doggist discourse-hogging of the first order. Fairly nauseating, all in all.
A number of the members of Congress who asked “questions” prefaced their orations (that were often light on interrogatory content) with lengthy statements about how they had met Petraeus on trips they’d made Petraeus to Baghdad, or Mosul, or wherever, and how heroic he had seemed to them then.
The US military, of course, has huge budgets for congressional relations, and relatively huge logistical capabilities within Iraq to greet and host visiting Codels (congressional delegations). Whereas the US diplomatic service… ? It’s chronically starved of funds and capabilities by comparison.
The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung had an interesting piece in today’s paper, in which she started off by noting the different way in which the two men had arrived in the US:

One arrived last week from Baghdad aboard a military aircraft, flanked by a bevy of aides and preceded by a team of advisers assigned a suite of Pentagon offices. The other flew commercial, glad that the flight was long enough to qualify for a business-class government ticket…

Here’s a little excerpt from the current draft of Ch.2 of my in-process book:

In early 2007, President Bush requested that, in the Financial Year 2008 budget (due to start in October 2007), Congress authorize the spending of $502.2 billion in the regular military budget, along with a “supplemental” sum of $141.7 billion for FY2008 to cover operations in Iraq and Afghanistan– for a stunning total of $643.9 billion. He meantime asked for just $10 billion for the many non-military activities carried out around the world by the State Department. The disproportion was clear.
The relevant Senate committees did not do any better. The Foreign Relations Committee approved the State Department budget request very quickly. But the Armed Services Committee planned to increase the total FY2008 military spending to $647.5 billion! It also proposed increasing the size of the active-duty Army and Marine Corps to 525,400 and 189,000, respectively—and once again, these increases were higher than those requested by the administration…

Ah! We so, so sadly need a new paradigm here… This militarism thing is just pathetic. (And very harmful, in so many different ways.)

The WaPo had an interesting big front-page article today, in which a large team of their good reporters was writing about evident differences of opinion on the surge being expressed in intra-administration discussions by Gen. Petraeus and his own immediate superior, Centcom Chief Adm. William Fallon.
Fallon– oh, did I mention that he’s Petraeus’s superior officer?– is reported as favoring a much faster and deeper drawdown of US troops from Iraq than Petraeus has been willing to think of.
The reportorial team, led by Peter Baker, writes this:

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago [it involved these two guys plus that master strategist George W. Bush ~ HC] masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops.
One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus’s team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men.
“Bad relations?” said a senior civilian official with a laugh. “That’s the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that’s one way of looking at it.”

Actually, whether the two generals get along well or not is not the central issue. The central issue is surely what on earth has happened to the integrity of the chain of military command?
The answer is, of course, George W. Bush. He has reached down deep inside Centcom, going past Adm. Fallon to establish a direct relationship with Petraeus and having Petraeus report directly to him and to Congress.
Of course, in terms of having a rational military/strategic decisionmaking process, this is a disaster.
Peter Baker and Co. wrote this about Fallon’s position:

Fallon, who took command of Centcom in March, worried that Iraq was undermining the military’s ability to confront other threats, such as Iran. “When he took over, the reality hit him that he had to deal with Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and a whole bunch of other stuff besides Iraq,” said a top military officer.

That, of course, is the important part of the whole story here. The prolonged and large-scale deployment in Iraq is actively harming Centcom’s ability to “deal with” these other areas. Indeed, it is harming the ability of the Army and Marines to do any sensible long-range force-planning at all… Fallon has responsibility for the whole of Centcom’s area of operations, whereas Petraeus has only to worry about Iraq (and about becoming Tony Blair’s replacement as Presidential Lapdog-in-Chief.)
The WaPo article also had this to say about Fallon:

Fallon was also derisive of Iraqi leaders’ intentions and competence, and dubious about the surge. “He’s been saying from Day One, ‘This isn’t working,’ ” said a senior administration official. And Fallon signaled his departure from Bush by ordering subordinates to avoid the term “long war” — a phrase the president used to describe the fight against terrorism.

Interesting.
I think that, to do their jobs properly, the Senate and House Armed Services Committees– and the US voters as a whole!– now need to hear from Adm. Fallon directly, and not just from his underling who has already, apparently, been suborned by the President.
It is bad enough that we have this huge, extremely lethal US military apparatus barging around the world taking unilateral offensive actions whenever and wherever the POTUS pleases. But how much more scary of a prospect is it if we cannot even be assured that that military has a single and recognizable chain of command?
Who does Gen. Petraeus report to? We need to know. We also need to hear, and give appropriate weight to, the views of the Centcom head.