Category: Iraq-2007-q2

Saturday’s NYT had an important article by David Sanger and David Cloud, who wrote:

The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.
It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.
The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.
The mission would instead focus on the training of Iraqi troops and fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while removing Americans from many of the counterinsurgency efforts inside Baghdad.

Until now, the President’s spokespeople have always steadfastly said that there is no “Plan B” in the event that the current (and still surging) troop “surge” should fail. To admit to having a Plan B, they have argued, would (1) be premature, at a time when the surge has not yet fully run its course, (2) be defeatist, and (3) give aid and comfort to “the enemy.”
However, after the Diyala attack of late April, the Mahmoudiya incident of May 12, and the even more recent pinch that the US supply lines in Iraq are experiencing, it has become painfully obvious that

(1) The kind of widely dispersed deployment inside Iraq that a textbook counter-insurgency campaign would dictate simply cannot be maintained at a casualty level that is acceptable to the US political system;
(2) The introduction of the further 20,000 or so troops still due to arrive in Iraq under the surge plan won’t make much significant difference at all;
(3) There is no strategic reserve from which the Centcom commanders can draw, in order to beef up the Iraq deployment any further; and
(4) Anyway, the kind of COIN prescribed in the latest, partially Petraeus-authored Army/Marines COIN manual really cannot be effectively waged in a country with the high level of technical expertise that Iraqis have– and a country, moreover, whose borders to states with very different agendas to that of the US are very permeable indeed. (See my earlier commentaries on the manual here and here.)

Bottom line: The COIN campaign that Petraeus now finds himself leading in Iraq is already a lost cause. The events of Diyala and Mahmoudiyah, and the thick stream of body bags now bringing dead US soldiers back to their home-towns here in the US prove that.
However, the White House is still for some reason bullheadedly insisting that we need to wait until September, when Petraeus himself can come back to Washington to give his ‘report card’ on the surge, before any alternative can be decided on… I guess Bush doesn’t want to be the one who said, “We tried but we failed.” (Anyway, why would anyone give any credence to a strategic judgment uttered by that brief part-time naval aviator/strutter… Evidently “David”– as Bush likes to refer to Gen. Petraeus– is being carefully groomed and prepped to come back and be the one to give the nation the “bad news” that in fact, we all know about already.)
But it certainly is interesting that even in the immediate aftermath of the (brief and evanescent) political “victory” that Bush won when he stared down the congressional Dems on the withdrawal-deadline issue last week, he and some of his key advisors were already not just continuing to plan out their ‘Plan B’, but also starting a strategic leaking campaign around it.
I imagine that Bob Gates, the eminently realistic man who is now the Secdef, has been having people from both the brass and the civvie sides in the Pentagon come to him and explain just how really disastrous some of these now-looming “Iraq catastrophe” scenarios could yet, any day, turn out to be.
Diyala was bad enough… and then, it almost immediately forced a radical shift away from the “live with the people” mode dictated by Petraeus’s (theoretical) COIN doctrine back behind truly massive– and politically quite self-defeating– fortifications.
Mahmoudiyah was bad enough– and indeed, it continues to be terrible for those most closely involved, since two of the US soldiers abducted there are still missing… And then, since Mahmoudiyah, the military has shown just how much it is prepared to get itself tied into enormous logistical knots to try to find the missing soldiers, thus providing a powerful incentive for others who might want to capture US troops alive, rather than simply kill them.
(Regarding which, I imagine a lot of people in the Pentagon are now wishing they hadn’t earlier been so cavalier in their bending of the rules that the Geneva Conventions lay down regarding the treatment of POWs. It would have been far better for everyone at this point if the US President could have voiced an eloquent– and convincing– appeal that the abducted soldiers should be treated in line with the Geneva Conventions.)
Anyway, my present conclusion– based on the Sanger/Cloud piece, as well as on various other pieces of recent information– is that the “majority party” inside the Bush administration now clearly seems to be preparing a policy of cut and blame, which is a version of “cut and run”.
Blame Maliki, that is. Last week, we got other “leaked” information that administration insiders had decided to “leave Maliki in place”, rather than continuing to mount various pressures against him. That fits in perfectly with a “cut and blame” policy. Because if the Bushites had maneuvered Maliki aside in some way– whether with Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, or Iyad Allawi, or anyone else, then in a sense they would have been under more pressure to “own” the political outcome of that. With a weakened, ineffective, and quite possibly corrupt Maliki still in place, they (might feel that they) don’t have to “own” anything.
(In this regard, I have to say that I find the whole question of “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government, as discussed earnestly and at great length within certain Washington policy circles, to be either irrelevant or actually immoral. First of all, it is the height of imperial arrogance for US politicians to argue that the government of Iraq should be in any way accountable to them and their expectations. Secondly, it is another height of arrogance for these US politicians even to imagine that they know what is best for the Iraqi people… Yes, of course it would be wonderful if the Iraqi government could clean up the death squads that may well be operating within its ranks, and to find a way to include the Sunnis effectively in the governance system, and to divide the country’s oil wealth in a transparent and fair manner… But why should any US politicians imagine that at this point it is appropriate to condition the reconstruction aid they give the Iraqis over the months ahead on the Iraqi government jumping through Washington-defined hoops on these issues, like a trained dog?)
Back to Sanger and Cloud. They write directly about the electoral-politics considerations that are behind the administration’s current interest in a workable Plan B:

Continue reading “Bushites and Iraq: Plan B and more realism?”

Yesterday, the Congressional Democrats gave up their previous insistence on writing troop-withdrawal deadlines into the legislation funding the Bush administration’s continued administration of the war in Iraq. Basically, the President has an override-proof veto. He’s already vetoed one version of the spending bill and had threatened to do the same if the bill came back with the withdrawal deadline/timeline still in it.
WaPo’s Shailagh Murray writes,

in the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override a presidential veto and could not delay troop funding.
The spending package, expected to total $120 billion when the final version is released today, would require Bush to surrender virtually none of his war authority…
Instead of sticking with troop-withdrawal dates, Democrats accepted a GOP plan to establish 18 political and legislative benchmarks for the Iraqi government, with periodic reports from Bush on its progress, starting in late July. If the Iraqis fall short, they could forfeit U.S. reconstruction aid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so disappointed with the outcome that she said she might vote against the Iraq portion of the package, which will be split into two parts when it comes before the House. “I’m not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable,” she said.

How should we look at this outcome? I am trying to do so in a way that puts front and center the interests of the Iraqi people, who have been so badly damaged by my government’s actions over the past four years.
Would it have been better if the antiwar folks in Congress had been able to attach a firm withdrawal deadline to the spending bill? Yes, I believe it would have. Even though the language they were seeking to attach was, I believe, language that only specified the date for the beginning of a withdrawal, rather than for its complete ending, it would still have sent a powerful message.
But now, the President and his Republican co-believers– many of whom have rapidly been growing disenchanted with the war– will really have to wholly “own” the way things go in the next few months in Iraq. The antiwar Democrats tried to work constructively with Bush. But since he refused to put in even the fairly cautious timeline language they wanted to put in, then the conduct of the war is now firmly back in his hands… And meanwhile, all of us antiwar people– of whatever political party– can work even harder to bring pressure to bear on the President– Bush, up until January 2009; or if necessary, after him the next one– to bring all the troops home in a speedy, orderly, and generous way.
And by the way, while we’re planning a strategy for this, let’s make sure that all of us give due weight to the need to involve the UN quite fully in all aspects of the diplomacy and modalities of the pullout. The US may well have been able to “get into” Iraq nearly completely on its own. But it seems to me pure folly to imagine that it can get out of Iraq in anything like an orderly and acceptable way unless it recognizes that the era of unilateral US action on the world stage– including in Iraq– is definitively over.
That need for a robust and constructive rapprochement between Washington and the UN is something that was missing from the Baker-Hamilton report. It has also been significantly missing until now from most of the congressional discussion on Iraq.
Now, with the President having once again asserted his strongly unilateralist tendencies, seems like a good time for the US public and our representatives in Congress to have this very necessary conversation about the relationship between our country and the rest of the world.

The WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson was the chosen leakee for this story, out of the Pentagon and the State Department that assures the increasingly skeptical US public that “Yes! Indeed those wise folks running our administration do have a strategy for Iraq that is broader than just the surge!”
Extreme skepticism is still, however, called for.
The “new strategy” that Tyson so breathlessly reported at the top of the WaPo’s front page has been fairly well summarized by Juan Cole as follows:

1. Back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki rather than trying to organize a new government.
2. Expand and build up the Iraqi Army, which is less purely sectarian than some other security forces in Iraq.
3. And then implementation of 3 points:
a. Protect the local population from the insurgents so as to allow them to become independent actors in civil society.
b. Increase capacity and efficiency of government ministries and their integraton with provincial administrations.
c. Purge Iraq’s government and security forces of “sectarian abusers,” replacing them with “Iraqi nationalists.”

The principal authors of this “new” strategy are the US’s much-lauded (by some people, not by me) military commander in Iraq, David Petraeus; the (ditto) US Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker; and Petraeus’s (ditto) “senior counterinsurgency adviser”, David J. Kilcullen. As Tyson describes it, Kilcullen basically put together the new plan with the help of a team comprised of, “about 20 military officers, State Department officials and other experts in Baghdad known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team.”
She wrote that “More than half a dozen people with knowledge of the plan” had discussed its contents with her. Most of these people had, she said, requested anonymity “because they were not authorized to speak about it to reporters.” But the team members whom she does quote by name, as giving details of the plan, include Kilcullen as well as the British scholar of Iraqi affairs Toby Dodge. So it seems quite clear that the leaking-in-Washington was part of Kilcullen’s deliberate strategy there.
(I note that Kilcullen is is the gung-ho Australian Army counter-insurgency “specialist” featured by George Packer in one of his recent pieces in The New Yorker… It really is notable that at this stage of the war the Bushites have run so low on their own supply of the relevant expertise– and remain so distrustful of the numerous never-consulted US experts on Iraq and the region– that they feel they need to import these British/Commonwelth types in to tell them what the heck they need to do.)
Pat Lang, over at his blog, notes percipiently that the new “Kilcullen plan” for what the US should do in Iraq seems in many ways to run counter to this plan, which was leaked to David Ignatius in, presumably, the same time period, and which David wrote about in his column in yesterday’s WaPo in these terms:

President Bush and his senior military and foreign policy advisers are beginning to discuss a “post-surge” strategy for Iraq that they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize may be unachievable within the time available.

David doesn’t name any of the sources for his column, or identify them in any way more specific than that they are “senior administration officials.”
Lang writes:

The difference in what is described in these two [WaPo texts] leads me to ask if the two visions of possible futures for America in Iraq are the result of significant disagreements over policy within the executive branch. If that is so, are the contending parties waging proxy-warfare in the press?
If it is not the case that these articles represent some kind of struggle, then the incoherence of substance and unreality of many of the arguments and positions in these papers may indicate a disintegration of thought that would be alarming.

My informed guess on this is that both of Lang’s explanations for what is happening are partly right. It seems clear there is an intra-administration “war through leaking to the WaPo”… Heck, that much seems quite evident, and is a very, very old Washington-insiders’ trick.
But it also seems clear to me that there is “incoherence” and “unreality” both between the two leaked plans and, indeed, within each of them taken on its own.
On Kilcullen and his alleged “expertise”, we need only look at this little quote from him, down near the bottom of the Tyson piece:

“Our notion of ‘reconciliation’ . . . is not necessarily where Iraqis are at right now,” said Kilcullen, explaining that the word has no equivalent in Arabic.

What a supercilious ignoramus! Of course Arabic has a word for “reconciliation’. Indeed, it has at least two very valuable words in this field– sulha for the process by which reconciling is achieved in traditional Arab societies, and sulh for the resulting state of being-reconciled…. So here is David Kilcullen, a man who makes a great point about really “knowing your enemy” and understanding any foreign culture in which you do counter-insurgency work. And he’s been working with the US military on Iraq-related things for how long now? But still, he makes this really elementary mistake and talks about these things in this really patronizing fashion…
Reminds of whichever other Bush administration flunky it was who said in a similarly supercilious way that “the French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur!”
Anyway, enough about Kilcullen and his pretensions to expertise… My bottom line for both these “plans” being (competitively) leaked around Washington is that while they have some good and constructive elements to them– especially inasmuch as they stress the importance of political rather than purely military ways to deal with the imbroglio in Iraq– still, they are both far too little, far too late.
Too little, how?
Primarily, because neither of them– nor indeed, most of the discussion on Iraq policy taking place in Congress these days– has gone nearly far enough to recognize that there really is no way for the US to avoid a disaster in Iraq that does not also involve committing to a much more international framework for defusing the current tensions in Iraq and starting to fashion a new security regime for the broader Gulf region.
Ignatius’s anonymous leakers did at least say that, “The post-surge policy would, in many ways, track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which senior administration officials say the president now supports.”
(Whew! If that’s so, wouldn’t it be, like, just about five months of bloodshed too late for Bush to have finally come around to that position??)
Baker-Hamilton did, of course, urge a noticeably more multilateral approach to Iraq than the almost undiluted US unilateralism that the administration has pursued until now… But even Baker-Hamilton did not go where I thought it– or any other workable plan– needs to go, which is to say that only the United Nations has the global legitimacy and reach that are now required to frame a workable de-escalation in Iraq, including an orderly US troop withdrawal from the country.
And too late, how?
People might take a good look at this little doc that fell into Pat Lang’s hands recently. It’s an unclassified, internal staff notice for the “US Mission in Iraq”, dated May 21, 2007. It’s on this topic:

Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, menu selections will be limited for the near future… [S]hould the food convoys be delayed further, DFACs will be required to serve MREs for at least one meal out of the day…

There’s some significant context to this problem. Throughout history, the distinctive topography of Mesopotamia has frequently stymied the commanders of foreign invading forces. When I first started thinking about what it would take to sustain a large-scale US occupation force in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion, it was immediately clear to me that the logistics of resupply would be a major, major challenge.
In Vietnam, after all, the US Navy more or less had command of the oceans and was able to maintain ports and depots all along South Vietnam’s lengthy coastline. But in Iraq? They have to bring everything in either through the bottleneck of Kuwait, or with much more difficulty along lengthy (and frequently unsafe) roads through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Turkey. Moreover, this is an army that (1) is absolutely not designed to “feed off the land” wherever it is, but relies on its own supplies for everything, up to and including bottled drinking water, and (2) likes to live well, even in the field… I note that the authors of this latest “MREs” memo felt they had to apologize that for many soldiers in the field, “Fresh fruits and salad bar items will… be severely limited or unavailable.”
More recently, when I’ve been thinking of the possible forms a “catastrophe” for the US force presence in Iraq might take, I’ve thought more in terms of a massively lethal incident of physical violence like the 1983 truck bomb in Beirut… or perhaps a huge crowd of unarmed protesters marching resolutly toward a US base somewhere and getting mown down by nervous perimeter guards, in large numbers, and in front of t.v. cameras…
But maybe we need to go back and look again at the possibility of very serious, near-catastrophic supply-chain problems. What if not just the salad-bar items but also the troops’ drinking water, fuel, MREs, and ammo start to run very low indeed?
Are we talking about the possibility of a “Siege of Kut” type situation developing for the US troops in Iraq?
In that WW1 engagement, some 23,000 British Empire forces– most of them, I believe, Indians– were killed and wounded before, finally, Gen. Townshend surrendered to the Ottomans. I sincerely hope that, if the US forces’ supplies run low, they won’t wait till they reach anything close to those kinds of casualty figures before they do the right thing and request the UN to help them negotiate an orderly exit from all of Iraq.
Until we see our leaders finally acknowledge that they can’t disengage from Iraq without U.N. help, extreme skepticism will still be called for. All these leaks about this “new” US plan or that one will just be political spin and window-dressing.

I’ve been really busy. No time recently, alas, to blog. I’ll resume as soon as I can. Meantime, this thread is for discussing Iraq.

Even with the ‘surge’, the present number of US troops in Iraq is quite insufficient to ensure the physical security of either the Iraqi people or the US soldiers and marines themselves.
This report from AP today makes this starkly clear. Building on information given by commanders in Baghdad, it once again spells out something I heard in the radio on, I believe, Saturday evening about the incident, Saturday, in which four US soldiers and one Iraqi interpreter lost their lives and three further US soldiers were, apparently captured by insurgents… Namely that there was a 56-minute gap between the time that neighboring units heard the explosions of the two Humvees holding the men and the time that help could be gotten to the spot where they’d been.
Other reports indicate that the eight soldiers were mounting some kind of a dawn patrol there when their vehicles were blown up.
I send my heartfelt sympathies to the families of all the soldiers (and the interpreter) concerned.
But in addition I’d like to note that for the higher-ups to order a small unit into a situation like this without ensuring that reserves are on hand to ensure adequate and timely reinforcement/rescue to them is to recklessly endanger the lives of US soldiers and their Iraqi support staff.
Might some people say that if the present troop deployment in Iraq is not big enough to ensure sufficient cover and back-up for all service members, then the deployment should be that much further increased in size?
It simply is not possible. The U.S. military is strained to break-point already.
This incident and the fallout from the Diyala incident of late April indicate that the US has no conceivable military “solution” to the challenges it faces in Iraq.
Under these circumstances, for the Bush administration to claim it needs until September before it can gauge the results of the “surge” policy and plan any alternative next steps at all is merely to sentence additional scores, perhaps several hundreds,- of US service members– and many times that number of Iraqis– to needless deaths between now and September.
The administration must act much faster than that to halt this ending of these people’s lives.
It could act today by declaring:

1. That it intends to bring all US troops out of Iraq by the end of October 2007; and
2. That it invites the UN to convene, at the earliest possible opportunity, an authoritative international gathering at which
(a) All Iraqi parties ready to commit to nonviolent participation in national politics would negotiate the form that this participation should take, under UN auspices; and
(b) The present government of Iraq, all of Iraq’s neighbors, and all permanent members of the UN Security Council would meet in parallel, and also under UN auspices, to negotiate the modalities of the previously announced US withdrawal from Iraq.

How fortunate humanity is that we have a body like the UN that– regardless of all its flaws– still embodies the important concept of the international rule of law and is in a position to help both the US citizenry and the Iraqi citizenry to find a way out of the present terrible imbroglio in which we all find ourselves.
President Bush could, as I noted, take the above two steps today. As I have also written any number of times over the past two years, he could and should have taken these steps a lot earlier than today. (See my writings on ‘How to Withdraw the troops from Iraq’ as linked to near the top of the JWN sidebar. In some of them, including this one, I argued that if the US has already, upfront, announced it intention of withdrawing from Iraq completely, then a majority of Iraqis will have a strong incentive not to interfere with that withdrawal as it happens.)
Today, we can see more clearly than ever before that the President’s reluctance to take such steps is needlessly costing the lives of Americans as well as of Iraqis.
BRING THE TROOPS HOMES NOW!

Juan Cole, IraqSlogger, and various other quick-off-the-mark interpreters of Iraqi political developments have made quite a big deal out of the political transformations that the group formerly known as SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) made at its national party meeting on Thursday and Friday.
For starters, it seems the revolution is over. Henceforth SCIRI will be known as SIIC, the Suprme Iraqi Islamic Council. In addition, these sources say, SIIC will drop the group’s previous unilateral religious orientation/allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Guide, Atayatollah Khamene’i and replace that with allegiance to Iraq’s very own (and significantly religiously different) Ayatollah Sistani.
Juan says, “The changes clearly are aimed at Iraqizing the party.” A commenter on his blog post there writes– in a way that I find generally convincing– that the new name actually chosen, al-majlis al-islami al-`iraqi al-a`la, “while undoubtedly Shiite has al-a`la after iraqi, so poetically appeals to an Iraqi nationalism. al-a`la is now the last word after Iraq”
Reidar Visser, however, is more cautious in his interpretation of the changes than either Juan, IraqSlogger, or their sources have been. In a commentary issued on his website today, Reidar seems to be commenting on the actual, 49-point public statement issued after the SCIRI/SIIC meeting, rather than on “advance spin” given regarding its contents by SIIIC officials who may well have desired to put their own spin on matters, rather than that of the party as a whole.
He writes:

The 49-point press release from the conference is noteworthy for at least two reasons.
Firstly, the document represents a notable softening of tone on the question of federalism in Iraq. In 2005 and 2006, SCIRI held a high profile in advocating the establishment of a single Shiite region of nine governorates from Basra to Baghdad. This region is not mentioned in the recent press release; instead there is general praise for the idea of federalism and emphasis on the need to follow the Iraqi constitution in this question, where after all a single Shiite region is but one of several possible outcomes (and, in fact, a rather unlikely one at that, given the complicated procedures for forming a federal region). Indeed, the explicit mention in the press release of “governorates” among the building blocks of the future federal Iraq suggests that SCIRI is now moving away from the view that the entire country should necessarily become subdivided into federal regions.
This coincides with an appreciable decline of propaganda in favour of the single Shiite federal region in early 2007, and with rumours of SCIRI members having second thoughts on the wisdom of any such large-scale federal entity – not least due to popular resistance from inside the Shiite community. Instead, forces close to SCIRI have begun re-exploring the old idea of several small-scale regions south of Baghdad…
The second important point related to the press release is illustrated by the stark discrepancy between leaked information to the press by SCIRI officials prior to the publication of the document, and its actual contents on one key issue: SCIRI’s relationship with Iran generally, and with that country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in particular. Some early media reports suggested that SCIRI were about to formally renounce their ties to Khamenei, in favour of greater emphasis on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. That sort of loud and clear renunciation would have been immensely helpful to the Iraqi political process, and, along with a more flexible position on federalism, could have helped the party emerge as a true moderating force in Iraqi politics. Accusations against SCIRI of “pro-Iranian” and “Safavid” loyalties could then have been more easily consigned to the realm of conspiracy theories.
Ultimately, however, no such clarification of the party’s role was included in SCIRI’s press release. The only mention of Sistani was in a non-committal statement that SCIRI “valued” the efforts (already construed in the Western mainstream media as a decisive “pledge”) of the higher clergy in Iraq, including Sistani. (This of course reflects the fact that SCIRI does not have a reciprocal relationship with the leading Iraqi ayatollah; they need him more than he needs them.) True, the language of the press release is admirable and politically correct as such, with a condemnation of all external meddling in Iraqi affairs. But the failure to clarify SCIRI’s relationship to Khamenei means that considerable ambiguity on this issue remains. After all, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (whose portrait dominated the conference room, alongside that of Sistani) is one of the few Shiite clerics in history to have made specific proposals (such as the ‘Aqidatuna booklet from the 1990s) for a greater Islamic union of Shiite countries like Iraq, Iran and Lebanon under the leadership of a single supreme leader (wali amr al-muslimin). Since 2003, SCIRI have simply toned down their pan-Islamic and pan-Shiite rhetoric, instead of elaborating an alternative framework where they explicitly could have redefined their views on the concept of a single supreme leader…
It is however interesting that the leaks prior to the publication of the SCIRI press release apparently came from SCIRI members who themselves were interested in marking some kind of break with Iran and Khamenei. This kind of desire among party members to stress their Iraqiness must have been the driving force behind some of the other points in the press release, such as the change of the name of the organisation to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (presumably SIIC). It is an anomaly of Iraqi politics that there should be no well-organised party to represent the current associated with Sistani and his moderate Iraqi nationalist Islamism. The latest statement by SCIRI does not in itself quite suffice to fill that gap, but it does serve as an interesting indication that an internal debate on issues such as Iraqi nationalism and federalism may be underway within SCIRI. And if there has in fact been a real change in SCIRI’s programme on these important issues, SCIRI would win many friends in Iraqi politics by making this public in a coherent and comprehensive fashion, for all the world to see, instead of publishing bland documents like their latest press release.

Back in early January, I wrote this post on JWN, in which I outlined what I described as the “Battle of the Narratives” being fought in Iraq. I introduced the post thus:

Weapons and armies and such things in the physical world are the tools; but what is really happening in Iraq– as in any civil war, war of insurgency, or similar lengthy inter-group conflict– is primarily a battle of narratives. What each of the parties is seeking to do, basically, is find a way to organize the widest possible coalition of followers around their particular version of “the Truth.”

At that point, the four narratives I saw as the principal contenders in the battle were:

1. The Bushists’ narrative— one that sought (at that time) to describe the battle in Iraq as one between alleged ‘moderates’ and alleged ‘extremists’;
2. The militant Sunni/Arabist narrative— that “describes the battle in Iraq as one of defending this eastern bulwark of the Arab (and Sunni) world against the looming power of the Shiites, all of whom are described in the more extreme versions of this narratives as somehow secretly either ethnically Persian or anyway controlled by Iran.”
3. The militant Shiite narrative— that “holds that the major threat to Iraq comes from the “Wahhabists”– a term that is used to describe either just the most militant of the Sunni activists or, in a more extremist version, just about all the Sunnis in Iraq;” and
4. The Iraqi nationalist narrative— that “holds, as a fundamental tenet, that the continued US occupation is the root cause of Iraq’s current woes and therefore has to end; and that, while there are many grievances between different groups inside Iraq, these can be resolved among Iraqis themselves.”

I still think that general description of the situation is helpful. That, even though in the four months since I penned that post the Bushists’ narrative has collapsed into almost complete incoherence. The main meme we’re hearing from Bush people here in the US these days is that “We have to fight the terrorists over there in Iraq otherwise we’ll have to fight them here in America.” Mohamed and Fatmeh Ordinary-Iraqi could certainly be excused for wondering why it is in their country and amidst its already deeply wounded communities that this battle has to be fought– and this even more so since life in the US has, by comparison, scarcely been dented by this battle at all.
And meantime, we’re seeing a steady draining of support from the military Shiite narrative to the Ireaqi nationalist narrative. SCIRI/SIIC’s change of posture– whether it is as extreme as Juan Cole and IraqSlogger claim, or only goes as far as Visser say– is one significant indicator of this. Moqtada Sadr has, of course, generally been the pioneer within the Shiite community of the Iraqi nationalist narrative. His people have been racking up significant political victories in the past few weeks.
In this report from Baghdad a few hours ago, AP’s Sinan Salaheddine gave several details of the new feistiness of the elected Iraqi parliament.
He wrote that earlier today (Saturday) the parliament took up the issue of the gigantic concrete walls the US military has been erecting in several areas of Baghdad, and passed by 138-to-88 in the 275-member house a resolution that explicitly opposed the erection of the barriers and called on PM al-Maliki to testify about various security issues.
This occurred,

in a raucous session that included debate on the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq, security raids and human rights abuses. Lawmakers interrupted each other and speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhdani struggled to maintain order.
“They (security walls) don’t protect residents because these areas are shelled by mortars and Katyusha rockets. … Will they build roofs too?” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. “We must build bridges between the different groups, not build walls to separate them.”
The resolution, voted on by a show of hands, passed 138-to-88 in the 275-member house. The president and his two deputies must unanimously approve the legislation for it to become law, or else it will be sent back to the house for re-examination.
Last month, al-Maliki, a Shiite, said he had ordered a halt to the construction in Azamiyah, but his aides later said he was responding to exaggerated media reports and that construction would continue.
The house was about to vote on another resolution, this time to ban American forces from Baghdad, when officials announced the house no longer had a quorum.

Oh yes, indeed, as I wrote here just a couple of days ago, those “pesky” elected Iraqi legislators seem to be edging seriously off the US reservation.

Just over two weeks ago, insurgents in Iraq’s Diyala province rammed an explosives-packed truck into the tall concrete blast walls that ‘surging’ US soldiers had put up to protect their new, small, neighborhood-style patrol base. The attackers pushed the heavy wall right over on top of the soldiers inside the base, killing nine and injuring 20.
The US military is a reactive, lesson-learning institution. Thus, in today’s WaPo we have this story telling us that for the ‘surging’ soldiers,

defending their small outposts is increasingly requiring heavy bulwarks reminiscent of the fortresslike bases that the U.S. troops left behind.
To guard against bombs, mortar fire and other threats, U.S. commanders are adding fortifications to the outposts, setting them farther back from traffic and arming them with antitank weapons capable of stopping suicide bombers driving armored vehicles. U.S. troops maintain the advantage of living in the neighborhoods they are asked to protect, but the need to safeguard themselves from attack means more walls between them and civilians.

If you want to see what the new outer ring of fortifications at a ‘patrol base’ now looks like, click on the photo in that story. They have apparently put huge tubs filled with sandbags right behind those high concrete walls, presumably to prevent attackers from once again tipping the walls over onto the US soldiers inside…
Evidently, all these fortifications and fortifications of fortifications, are severely hampering the achievement of what was supposed to be the main point of distributing the ‘surging’ soldiers more widely throughout Iraq’s populated areas– that was, to enable the soldiers to “be with the people”, both in order to keep tabs on them and to build up some friendly alliances with members of the Iraqi public.
That piece in today’s WaPo, which was by Ann Scott Tyson, tells us just how bad relations have even become between the US soldiers and the supposedly ‘loyal’ Iraqi troops who are in the patrol bases alongside them. Writing of one outpost in Sadr City she says,

U.S. troops staff guard towers on the roof 24 hours a day and, uncertain of the loyalties of their Iraqi counterparts, also stand sentry at the American section inside.

… So the surge is completely doomed not to work as planned. (You can read some of my earlier thoughts on that, here.)
Jonathan Weisman and Tom Ricks write in today’s WaPo that:

Congressional leaders from both political parties are giving President Bush a matter of months to prove that the Iraq war effort has turned a corner, with September looking increasingly like a decisive deadline.
In that month, political pressures in Washington will dovetail with the military timeline in Baghdad. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, has said that by then he will have a handle on whether the current troop increase is having any impact on political reconciliation between Iraq’s warring factions. And fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1, will almost certainly begin with Congress placing tough new strings on war funding.
“Many of my Republican colleagues have been promised they will get a straight story on the surge by September,” said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.). “I won’t be the only Republican, or one of two Republicans, demanding a change in our disposition of troops in Iraq at that point. That is very clear to me.”
“September is the key,” said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds defense. “If we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration.”

Meanwhile, I just also want to flag this significant piece that Peter Spiegel and Julian Barnes had in Sunday’s L.A. Times. The title is On Iraq, Gates may not be following Bush’s playbook As the president pushes for more time and money for the war, the Pentagon chief’s message has seemed to run counter..
The reporters have amassed some pretty shrewd pieces of evidence for this. Including this:

Gates was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended in its report last year that most combat troops withdraw by early 2008. Gates did not sign the report; he has said that formal deliberations did not start until after he left for the Pentagon. But several people who worked on the report said Gates was closely involved in early drafts and would have supported its eventual conclusions.
“Knowing how that group got along and how we shared our views, there remains no question in my mind that Bob Gates, had he not become secretary of Defense, would have supported those recommendations,” said Leon E. Panetta, a former Clinton White House chief of staff and a member of the Iraq panel.

It has long been my contention that last November’s replacement of Rumsfeld as SecDef by Gates marked an important turning-point in the Bush administration’s handling of the war. Gates looks like a canny, patient player of the bureaucratic game. Let’s hope he is also as canny (or at least, realistic) at grand strategy.

As I and others predicted back when Bush first proposed his plan to “surge” more troops into Iraq and to do so with a plan that would distribute them more widely throughout the country, that surge is now resulting in increased combat-related deaths of US soldiers– and also, most likely, of Iraqis as well. (Though that latter aspect doesn’t get reported much in the US MSM.)
This piece of good reporting from Sudarsan Raghavan and Tom Ricks in yesterday’s WaPo perfectly illustrates what has been happening. It tells how on Monday insurgent fighters organized and implemented a well-thought-out plan to attack an “outpost” in Sadah, in Diyala province, that had been newly set up as part of the US generals’ troop-distribution plan:

As U.S. soldiers fired a hail of bullets, the first suicide bomber sped toward their patrol base. Reaching the checkpoint, the truck exploded, blasting open a path for the second bomber to barrel through and ram his truck into the concrete barrier about 90 feet from the base. The second explosion crumbled walls and parts of a school building, killing nine American troops and injuring 20.

The reporters quoted military spokesman Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly as giving these details about the operations that a squadron from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Regiment had been undertaking in Sadah:

Four weeks ago, U.S. soldiers battled insurgents from town to town, eventually clearing them out, Donnelly said. Then, they set up the patrol base in an old school.
“The purpose was not to allow the enemy to come back,” Donnelly said. “Once we had this patrol base, we wanted to take the fight to the enemy, and to gain trust and confidence of the population. That’s what it takes to win this counterinsurgency fight.”
A U.S. military official in Iraq said a “T-wall” — concrete barriers around the outposts — was built “just a couple feet away” from the Sadah school building, which the official called a “giant” mistake. “Those [barriers] are really, really heavy. They crushed the building,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. Several soldiers’ remains were found beneath the rubble, the official said, adding that the attack was “devastatingly effective” and “very well-coordinated.”

So let’s step back and understand this. The guys from the 82nd Airborne (which is wellknown as very gung-ho, aggressive outfit… not well-suited or well trained to do ‘peacekeeping’ operations at all) fought their way through a number of other towns to get to Sadah, then they set up their “forward outpost” in what was described as “an old school.”
How old of a school, anyway? Maybe it was being used as a school until just a few weeks ago. Why would the US military imagine it would not offend local Iraqis to see US troops establishing a highly fortified military base in a school building– which would just about wreck any hopes that the school could be reopened for educational purposes any time in the foreseeable future?
Whose idea was it to use a school building for this?
And then, to protect themselves, the 82nd Airborne guys put into place these huge and heavy T-walls… and the insurgent planners figured that the T-walls’ weight could itself be used as a lethal weapon against the US soldiers inside.
(Operationally somewhat similar to Al-Qaeda’s use of fuel-laden US civilian airliners, and the design/engineering characteristics of certain high concrete buildings, to inflict 2,000 casualties in New York in September 2001. In both cases, the plan also depended on having operatives of steely self-control prepared to die in the course of the operation. The big difference was in the choice of target: civilians in New York; but in Sadah, Iraq it was members of an occupying military force.)
Raghavan and Ricks write this about these combat outposts:

Once housed in vast, highly secured bases, many [US troops in Iraq] now live in hostile neighborhoods inside isolated combat outposts, the linchpin of a counterinsurgency plan designed to wrest control of the capital and other hot spots from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
Military tactical experts say such combat outposts, where soldiers are expected to interact with area residents and gather intelligence about potential enemies, are the most effective way of preventing car bombings and other attacks in the long term. Paradoxically, this approach is making U.S. soldiers more vulnerable as they rely more than ever on the Iraqi police and army — and the support of the local population — for their safety.

The idea that from behind these massive blast-walls the troops in such outposts are supposed to venture out to “interact with area residents” in any constructive way at all is absolutely laughable… Or would be, if it this whole “surge” plan were not so tragic for everyone concerned.
Three key facts about the US army currently occupying Iraq absolutely prevent the current “surge” from having any helpful effect in de-escalating tensions and restoring a measure of calm to the country:

1. The vast bulk of the US military is not trained or oriented properly for anything like peacekeepings operations. They are trained and oriented as warfighters. Three weeks of quick “cultural awareness” seminars can’t reverse that entire mindset, which is heavily backed up by operating systems, norms and equipment, systems, ROEs, etc.
2. There are not nearly enough of them to do the job. This might sound paradoxical. But if there were more US Army troops on the ground, closely connected and able to back each other up, then they would not be strung out in isolated outposts like the one in Sadah, where the handful of troops inside are so isolated and vulnerable that they feel they need high concrete walls to protect them. Those walls have two effects: (a) they wall the outpost off fro,m any possibility of having constructive interaction with the Iraqi neighbors; and (b) as we saw in Sadah, they can themselves be used by insurgents with lethal effect.
3. These US troops are far too casualty-averse to do the kind of risk-taking, area-control tasks required for the “surge” plan to work.

Personally, as a US citizen, I am glad our soldiers are casualty-averse; and I’m glad that there are not more of them in Iraq than at present.
But in the circumstances– which also include an extremely high level of political fogginess about what the “surge” was supposed to achieve– this surge was doomed from before the time it was launched. It was yet another arrogant, lethal, and politically motivated roll of the dice by a commander-in-chief who back in November/December seemed to choose it merely as his own ill-considered alternative to the sober and diplomacy-focused recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.
It was as if President Bush, caught in a gunfight in a Western saloon, perhaps realized at some level that the fight was not then going in his favor, but was determined that if he had to exit the saloon he would do so with all guns blazing.
Because of that decision, the rate at which US soldiers are leaving Iraq in body-bags has risen. And the casualty rate among Iraqis caught up in all these localized gunfights throughout the country has doubtless also risen.
The surge was a lethal and tragic mistake.
In addition, when– as is absolutely inevitable– the time comes when the President realizes that he needs to find a way to negotiate the exit of the US troops from Iraq, the modalities of extricating these small groups of soldiers from all these widely distributed combat outposts will be even more complex than a simple withdrawal from a few massive bases would have been.
(For another WaPo story, on a combat outpost that got blown up by insurgents before the US troops could even move in, read this.)