Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

John Burns, who is the NYT’s “our man in the Green Zone” of Baghdad, has an important piece in Sunday’s paper that refers clearly to (un-named) US officers there complaining in his hearing that the troop levels at their command are far too low for them to be effective.
The piece also clearly indicates a growing realization among some top US officers that the war in Iraq is unwinnable.
Burns writes that earlier in the past week, the Pentagon had publicly offered a date for a reduction in the current troop levels “even earlier” than the October 1, 2006 date earlier requested by two Republican and two Democratic members of Congress in a letter to Prez Bush. But, Burns notes,

in recent weeks, American generals here have been telling Congressional visitors that the disappointing performance of many Iraqi combat units has made early departures impractical. They say it will be two years or more before Iraqis can be expected to begin replacing American units as the main guarantors of security.
Commanders concerned for their careers have not thought it prudent to go further, and to say publicly what many say privately: that with recent American troop levels – 139,000 now – they have been forced to play an infernal board game, constantly shuttling combat units from one war zone to another, leaving insurgent buildups unmet in some places while they deal with more urgent problems elsewhere.
… American commanders here have been cautioned by the reality that the Pentagon, in a time of all-volunteer forces and plunging recruiting levels, has few if any extra troops to deploy, and that there are limits to what American public opinion would bear. So the generals have kept quiet about troop levels.
Soldiers in the field, though, have not. Among fighting units in the war’s badlands – in Falluja and Ramadi, in Haditha and Qaim, in Mosul and Tal Afar – complaints about force levels are the talk of officers and enlisted personnel alike.

Burns writes:

Continue reading “‘Our Green Zone correspondent’ on troop levels, unwinnability”

I’m in Boston with Faiza of A Family in Baghdad this weekend. I’d originally been hoping that Susan of Dancewater could be with the two of us someplace, but that isn’t going to work out this time round. (I think she’s getting with Faiza later in the month.)
Anyway, being with Faiza is a blast. She’s as animated, informative, and talkative in real life as you’d expect from her blog.
More, later. We have a full day together today.

WaPo reporters Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru had a great piece in today’s paper. Shadid, who speaks Arabic, went along with one of the newly forming “Iraqi” fighting units, and Fainaru, who doesn’t went with the Iraqis’ American military “handlers”.
This is one little excerpt:

Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror.
“You might be riding home alone,” one soldier said to the other reporter.
“Is he riding in the back of that?” asked another. “I’ll be over here praying.”

Here’s another:

The [Iraqi] men are housed at what they call simply “the base,” a place as sparse as the name. Most of the Iraqis sleep in two tents and a shed with a concrete floor and corrugated tin roof that is bereft of walls. Some have cots; others sleep on cardboard or pieces of plywood stacked with tattered and torn blankets. The air conditioners are broken. There is no electricity.
Drinking water comes from a sun-soaked camouflage tanker whose meager faucet also provides water for bathing.
“This is the shower of the National Guard, Baiji Division,” said Tala Izba, 23, a corporal, as others laughed.
“Mines, car bombs and our duties, and then we have to come back to this?” said another soldier, Kamil Khalaf.
Pvt. Aziz Nawaf, 23, shook his head. “At night, I’m so hot I feel like my skin is going to peel off,” he said.
Almost to a man, the soldiers said they joined for the money — a relatively munificent $300 to $400 a month. The military and police forces offered some of the few job opportunities in town. Even then, the soldiers were irate: They wanted more time off, air-conditioned quarters like their American counterparts and, most important, respect. Most frustrating, they said, was the two- or three-hour wait to be searched at the base’s gate when they returned from leave.

Well, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be sticking around long. Here’s how that excerpt continues:

The [Iraqi] soldiers said 17 colleagues had quit in the past few days.
“In 15 days, we’re all going to leave,” Nawaf declared.
The two-dozen soldiers gathered nodded their heads.
“All of us,” Khalaf said. “We’ll live by God, but we’ll have our respect.”

And right up at the beginning of the piece, the reporters wrote about this:

An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army’s Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. “We have lived in humiliation since you left,” one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. “We had hoped to spend our life with you.”

I guess that’s what you get when all you try to do to enroll soldiers is to pay them (relatively) big bucks, rather than giving them a political vision that seems worth fighting for.
It strikes me that, given that the Iraqi units the US has been training seem to have dissolved away time and time again (as “Charlie Company”* seems on the point of doing), and given that the US forces themselves are in the midst of a massive recruitment shortfall… the only halfway workable thing to do at this point is to organize a complete US withdrawal from Iraq. As speedy and as honorable and in as good an order as possible.
That is one of the three key points Raed Jarrar is calling for, in this important Wednesday post on his blog Raed in the Middle.
Here are all his three points:

(1) Issue a Public Apology and hold responsibility for the destruction of Iraq…
(2) Announce A Schedule For Complete Military Pullout From Iraq; a full withdrawal that leaves no permanent bases behind. I think a timetable of one year is more than enough for all the troops to leave safely without being attacked by the resistance…
(3) Start fixing the mess caused by the war and occupation by both Paying Compensation And Bringing War Criminals To Justice…

That looks like an excellent, very clear list.
—-
* Over on Today in Iraq, I saw that Shirin commented that even just calling this unit in the “Iraqi” army “Charlie Company” showed an incredibly arrogant American mindset.

Somebody else agrees with my view that constitution-writing in Iraq is too weighty a matter to be rushed.
Today, the Crisis Group (formerly the International Crisis Group) came out with this report, titled, Iraq: Don’t rush the Constitution.
It took them a while to come to broadly the same conclusion I expressed back in this April 14 column in the CSM. And they don’t explicitly say, as far as I can see, that the next election in Iraq could be held on the basis of an Interim Constitution and thus need not await and be held hostage to the attainment of final agreement on a Permanent Constitution.
But still, the CG undoubtedly has a whole lot more weight in international affairs than I do. So it’s good to see them take even this partial step.

How many times have we heard announcements from “officials” in Iraq that Saddam Hussein is “about to be put on trial– any day now”?
The latest one came in this announcement today, made by Ibrahim Jaafari’s US-educated spokseman Laith Kuba.

Kuba told reporters that Saddam,

will go on trial within two months on charges of crimes against humanity, with prosecutors focusing on 12 “thoroughly documented” counts, including the gassing of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq.

He also said that, though it would be possible to bring “500” cases against Saddam, the Iraqi government will only bring 12 of the better documented charges against him.
These would all, Kuba said, be charges of “crimes against humanity.”
That AP article linked to above quoted Kuba as saying that, the attack with chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja would be one of the charges brought, but he “did not elaborate on the other 11.”
If the charges are indeed all to be charges of crimes against humanity, then that would indicate that they would all be charges connected with actions Saddam took against people within Iraq’s own national borders— the classic definition of crimes against humanity.
If the charges were to include actions undertaken against either Kuwait or Iran, then those would more likely be designated as “war crimes” or possibly “crimes against the peace”.
This latter category of atrocity, which concerns, essentially, the launching of an unjustified war, has not been prosecuted since the post-WW2 trials. But if it was applicable to Hitler and his generals, and to the Japanese generals and militarists, then why not to Saddam Hussein?
Oops, it might involve having Iran take part there as one of the two aggressed-against victims. Some one million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s 1980 aggression against their country. (That figure is far, far higher than the number of Kuwaitis who died as a result of his invasion of Kuwait nine years later.)
And oops, if launching an unjustified war that imposes terrible suffering on large numbers of people can be prosecuted these days, then how about the Bush administration??
So no. It seems that they’ve agreed for now to stick to the “safer” charges connected with the actions Saddam took against his own people.
Of course, the whole process looks irretrievably politicised at this point. Not just in the choice of “charges” brought.
But look who made this latest announcement??? Wouldn’t it really have been a lot better for the rule of law in Iraq if announcements like this had come from the Chief Prosecutor or someone in his office? Why on earth have them come from the Prime Minister’s spokesman?
Back in December 2003, shortly after Saddam’s capture by the US forces, I wrote here that,

No doubt about it: the trial of Saddam Hussein has many, many political aspects to it. It certainly won’t be the simple, gloating “victory lap for the Coalition” that many in the US media now think it may be.

And here we are, 18 months later, with that point now, I think, very well proven. (If you haven’t read that whole post there, you really ought to go back and do so.)
The whole process of “trying Saddam” is absolutely, inextricably political at this point. However, it is not the main priority for the Iraqi people. It’s a sideshow, grotesquely inflated for western audiences by an Iraqi administration seeking to curry western favors.
I think– and I’m relying on JWN’s Iraqi readers here to correct me if I’m wrong– that there are many, many tasks that are more important for Iraqis today than staging what will under even the very best of circumstances at this point be nothing better than a show trial.
Meanwhile, Saddam and his top henchfolk are being kept carefully in US custody, in a place where they can be prevented from releasing embarrassing details about things like the encouragement they received from the US, UK, and other western powers back in the 1980s as they upgraded their chemical weapons capabilities and launched a quite gratuitous war against Iran…
By the way, John Burns wrote in the NYT today that the total number of detainees being held as “suspected insurgents” in just the US-run detention facilities in Iraq has now rerached 14,000. That is a shockingly high number! Can you imagine the conditions in which most of those people are being held?
Burns also wrote that of those 14,000, only 370 were foreigners, “according to figures provided by the American command.”

Alert readers will have noted that last night I put the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter back up onto the JWN sidebar.
I did so for two main reasons:

(1) because of the continuation of the mayhem and massive civil strife that has plagued Iraq almost non-stop since the holding of the January 30 election, with almost no effective action having been taken by the occupying power(s) to end it, and
(2) because of the news that the Iraqi “Foreign Minister” was now openly asking for the aid of the principal occupying power in the complex and extremely important internal-Iraqi business of trying to craft a workable longterm Constitution for the country.

The fact that the government (or at least, the “Foreign Minister”) was doing this indicated very strongly to me that the government (or at least, the “Foreign Minister”) sees the government’s principal mandate as coming not from the millions of Iraqi citizens who braved the threats of terrorists and others to walk to the polls on January 30, but from the occupying power itself.
Sure, people associated with the Constitution-writing body could seek ideas from any number of different sources as they go about crafting the country’s new Constitutioon. Why not? But for the “Foreign Minister” openly and prominently to appeal for the occupying power’s help in this matter strikes me as extremely destructive of the idea of popular legitimacy, or, if you will, the “consent of the governed”.
This morning, the DDI counter stands at 125 days of democracy having been denied in Iraq, starting at the date of the January 30 election. As I’ve noted here previously, the clunky “TAL” machinery issued a long time back as a ukaze/fatwa by Ayatollah Bremer (remember him?) allowed for precisely 213 days to pass between that election and the August 15 presentation of a final draft for Iraq’s permanent Constitution.
58.7% of that time has now elapsed. The 88 days left– under the terms of the TAL– for these crucial deliberations are simply insufficient. Especially if these deliberations must continue to be held under conditions of terrifying civil strife.
Of course, if the government that was confirmed by Iraq’s elected National Assembly back in April took seriously the idea that it drew its main operating mandate from that act of (nearly) democratic political legitimization, rather than from the heavy breath of the occupying power down its neck, then it might rapidly come to the conclusion that it has no need to remain bound to Bremer’s clunky directive regarding how Iraq’s transition to national independence should be effected.
The government could propose its own path of transition, seek to build and retain Iraqis’ popular support for that path, and then negotiate with the occupying power from a position of unassailable political strength.
As part of that path, it might indeed (as I suggested in this mid-April CSM column) decide that fashioning a long-term, indeed “Permanent” Constitution in the country is far too serious an undertaking to be bound by the rigid deadlines of the (quite undemocratic) TAL– and certainly, far too serious to be held hostage to the need to bring about a speedy withdrawal of the occupation forces…
In that case– in Iraq as in South Africa in 1994– a decent national election held on the basis of an “Interim Constitution” could work just fine as a way to generate a nearly totally legitimate national government. And then, after a truly accountable-to-the-democratic-will national administration is in place in Iraq, it would still have plenty of time at its disposal, and also, a greatly enhanced climate of public security: both these factors would then greatly strengthen the ability of the country’s various political currents to engage in reasoned deliberations with each other over the terms of their ongoing, “permanent” political association with each other and the nature of their governing arrangements…
But I guess that only an Iraqi “government” that sees its primary mandate as having come from the Iraqi people, rather than from the barrels of US Army guns, would even consider challenging the dictates of the TAL in such a way.

Long-time JWN readers probably recall how much I hoped that the January 30th elections could provide a way for a credible, accountable-to-Iraqis administration to emerge inside Iraq, while also allowing a (relatively) violence-free way for the US administration to disengage from trying to control the affairs of that very troubled country.
It took a long time, after January 30, for the Iraqi parties to be able to reach agreement on the identity of the new Prime Minister and the make-up of the new government. While they dithered, I put up the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter onto JWN’s sidebar.
Then finally, in late April, Ibrahim Jaafari was sworn in in front of the new elected Assembly as PM (though it took a little while longer for him to name some of his ministers.)
I took the counter down.
Today, after reading this account of the new “Iraqi” Foreign Minister openly and imho ignominiously appealing for greater US aid in crafting an Iraqi constitution, I decided it is time for the DDI counter to go back up.
That link is to a piece by Robin Wright in today’s WaPo. She writes:

In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but deliberations have been slowed as Iraq still works on the composition of a constitutional committee.
With time running out for writing the constitution and then holding elections in December for a permanent government, Zebari warned that the United States has withdrawn too much, leaving the new government struggling to cope and endangering the long-term prospects for success.

She wrote that Zebari also asked the Bushies for help on three other counts:

— to ” to help bring the Sunni minority into the political process” (!)
— for ” additional staff and resources to accelerate the creation of a new Iraqi army and police force”, and
— to “speed up the confirmation of its new ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad”.

It is fact that the Bushies have been without an ambassador in Baghdad since March 17, when Amb. John Negrocontra hotfooted it out of the country. That’s eleven vital weeks that the massive US diplomatic mission there has effectively been rudderless. As Wright notes, the DCM position in Baghdad has also gone through a transition in the past month.
Now, I’m not going to argue that having a local US viceroy in place to tell the Iraqi politicians what to do (which is exactly the way that Jon Lee Anderson, writing recently in The New Yorker described Khalilzad behaving in Afghanistan) is necessarily desirable… But you would think, wouldn’t you, that the Bush administration would want to have an accountable chain of command in place in Baghdad to help it to manage the extremely strategically sensitive situation there?
Well, you might think that, if you thought they actually wanted to have some kind of an orderly transition there….
As it is, the disgracefully “AWOL/negligent” policy that Washington has been pursuing inside Iraq seems almost to have been designed to bring about a situation of ever greater instability and distrust within the country…. (Perhaps with the ulterior aim of turning round to a formerly accusing world and saying, “So! You see those Iraqis can’t govern themselves. That’s why we simply have no option except to stay there….” And on Wednesday the Security Council, to its great shame, seemed to buy into that argument when it renewed the “mandate” that it graciously gave the US-led forces forces in Iraq for a further –slightly indeterminate?– term.)
And the result of all these machinations?

Continue reading “Democracy truly denied in Iraq?”

It is, of course, quite possible that the US command in Iraq is so deeply ignorant and dysfunctional that it would send troops to arrest Muhsin Abdul-Hamid– the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party and one of the former rotating “Presidents” of Iraq under the CPA-created IGC– “by mistake”.
It is also entirely possible that this was the best way they could think of to bring him in for some important negotiations… And not a completely stupid way, either. This way, A-H is not tainted in the eyes of his constituency with having “talked” openly with the Americans. (Remember the negotiations the De Klerk regime had with Nelson Mandela, who was in their custody at the time… For a long time the “cover” they all used around those negotiations was that Mandela was discussing merely the improvement of the conditions of the political prisoners, rather than anything political… )
So who knows what was discussed during Abdul-Hamid’s day in detention Monday? If the Americans did make an overture to him to upgrade their political negotiations, then who knows how he responded? One day, we might all find out.

I’m busy teaching through the end of this week. It’s intense but good. Carry on your conversations here, friends! I feel very out of touch…

Y’all know what to do.
(As for me, of course I have lots of “great thoughts” on the topic germinating here. But iron self-discipline is keeping me on task with the book.)