Page 2 of 3 The myth of more in
Iraq By Michael Schwartz
or of the American occupation, and
therefore when the Americans seek to impose an
outside government and root out the insurgency's
military leaders, the cities explode. On hitting
the streets, American troops usually seek to
arrest or kill local militia leaders, while the
insurgents begin to set IEDs or mount sniper
attacks to prevent the US from controlling the
town.
Because the insurgents are usually
supported by many in the
community and US tactics are
generally destructive, American military
"successes" produce new insurgents, recruited to
avenge the deaths of friends and relatives. When
US forces withdraw, the city or town returns to
something like its previous status quo (with
insurgents once again playing the role of local
police) - but, of course, it's also more battered,
economically worse off, angrier, more on edge.
Thus, it is not surprising that the
increasing size of the "Iraqi" Army (whose troops
are integrated into the American command and
control structure) has only produced increased
violence. With more troops at its disposal, the
American command has entered more towns and
neighborhoods, thereby triggering more and longer
confrontations.
Ultimately these battles
will end only when the US stops trying to impose
an outside government on the cities that are
currently controlled by the local religious
leaders and their militias.
Fallacy
2: Once enough troops are brought into Baghdad,
sectarian violence will subside
This second application of the
myth of more follows the same sort of
straightforward logic as the first. A strong
military presence is assumed to be needed to
intercept, capture, disrupt, or disband Sunni
suicide bombers and Shi'ite death squads.
Roadblocks are established to search for
suspicious individuals - and massive
house-to-house searches are launched to find
hidden arms caches and apprehend suspects.
This is then expected to reduce the number
and ferocity of sectarian attacks. Baghdad,
however, is so vast and the number of sectarian
fighters so numerous that even the large number of
American troops transferred in from the heartland
of the Sunni insurgency, al-Anbar province, in
recent months and ever larger numbers of Iraqi
troops and police have not yet contained the
sectarian violence.
Here again, there is a
paradoxical problem. Though the logic of more
seems once again to make perfect sense, "Operation
Together Forward", distinctly a more-style joint
American-Iraqi operation devoted to suppressing
sectarian violence in Baghdad, has had the
opposite effect. Six months after the operation
started, the number of insurgent attacks in
Baghdad had actually increased by 26%, and the
number of violent deaths reported at the city
morgue had doubled, and then doubled again,
leading New York Times journalists Edwin Wong and
Damian Cave to report that "sectarian violence is
spiraling out of control".
Here again, the
paradox is explained only when you look at just
what those American troops and their Iraqi allies
were actually doing on the streets of Baghdad.
And, here again, we need to realize that, despite
their thuggish tendencies, the religious militias
- the major target of American military action -
are the forces of law and order in Baghdad's
otherwise lawless neighborhoods. They direct
traffic, arrest and/or punish common criminals,
and mediate disagreements among citizens. They
also protect the neighborhood from outsiders
intent on doing harm to local residents, including
US or Iraqi soldiers, suicide bombers, and death
squads.
When the American troops enter the
various sections of Baghdad, they drive the
militias off the streets and underground. Usually
this results in battles between
militia-members-turned-insurgents and the invading
force, but it also results in the suppression of
their enforcement and protection activities.
Local militia members cannot patrol the
streets for fear of being attacked by the invading
army - and the soldiers of that army have neither
the skills, nor the every-street-corner presence
to replace them. This makes the community not
less, but far more vulnerable to suicide bombers
and death squads.
This vulnerability is
all-too-vividly illustrated by the tragic events
associated with Operation Together Forward in Sadr
City, the vast Shi'ite slum and stronghold of the
Sadrist movement in East Baghdad. The dense
presence of the Sadrist militia, the Mehdi Army,
had made the city-within-a-city relatively
invulnerable to suicide car bombs, but this ended
in October when American troops sealed off the
area and set up checkpoints at key entrance and
exit spots in order to hunt down Mehdi Army
leaders they suspected of participation in death
squads as well as the kidnapping of an American
soldier.
Local residents told New York
Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise that the cordon
"forced Mehdi Army members who were patrolling the
streets to vanish," and set the stage for a
ferocious series of car bombings by Sunni
jihadists.
Even after the check points
were dismantled, American patrols kept the Mehdi
Army underground, opening the way for a
devastating, coordinated set of five car bombs
that killed at least 215 and wounded 257. Qusai
Abdul-Wahab, a Sadrist member of parliament, spoke
for most residents of the community when he told
the Associated Press that "occupation forces are
fully responsible for these acts".
At
about the same time and in a similar way, American
troops facilitated death squad attacks in the
nearby cities of Balad and Duluiyah, scenes of
intense sectarian tension. American troops
cordoned off the cities, seeking to root out Sunni
insurgents accused of slaughtering 17 Shi'ite
workers.
This drove the local Sunni
militia underground and soon afterward Shi'ite
death squads appeared. According to the Washington
Post, "A police officer in Duluiyah, Captain Qaid
al-Azawi, accused American forces of standing by
in Balad while militiamen in police cars and
police uniforms slaughtered Sunnis."
In
both cases, the logic is the same. The Americans
were unable or unwilling to divert their attention
from their primary target (Sadrist militia men in
Sadr City, Sunni insurgents in Balad), and so
opened the door for car bombers and death squads
to operate in relative freedom. This primary
commitment - to subdue the forces that oppose the
American occupation - ultimately translates into a
perverse formula in which more American forces
generate further sectarian violence.
American patrols in Shi'ite neighborhoods
immobilize the local defenses and make the
community vulnerable to jihadist attack; while
American invasions of Sunni communities are even
more
