WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush's
State of the Union address appears to confirm
other indications in recent weeks that he is not
merely sending more troops to Iraq to do more of
the same, but has adopted a new strategy of
fighting all three major Iraqi Arab
political-military forces simultaneously.
Bush hinted strongly that he has decided
to make Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army a major
military target of the increased US troop presence
in Baghdad, while continuing to wage war against
both
al-Qaeda and its Sunni extremist allies, on one
hand, and the non-jihadi Sunni resistance, on the
other.
Two weeks before the January 23
State of the Union speech, Lieutenant-General
Raymond Odierno, the No 2 US commander in Iraq,
told reporters he wanted to use most of the
additional 21,500 troops to launch a new military
push against both Sunni and Shi'ite militias in
Baghdad.
The new policy appears to have
been prompted by both the need to demonstrate to
the US public that the administration is doing
something different and to use force against a
presumed ally of Iran in the region. But it means
that the United States is now planning to fight
what is in essence a three-front war without any
reliable Iraqi Arab ally. Only the Kurds can be
counted on to cooperate with the US military in
such a war, because of their reliance on US
support for their aspirations for
quasi-independence.
In the speech, Bush
suggested that what he called "Shi'ite extremists
backed by Iran" were now an enemy equal in
importance to al-Qaeda. He presented the
"nightmare scenario" of the Iraqi government being
"overrun by extremists on all sides" if US troops
were to "step back before Baghdad is secure". That
would be followed, Bush said, by an "epic battle
between Shi'ite extremists backed by Iran and
Sunni extremists aided by al-Qaeda and supporters
of the old regime ..."
Bush referred
indirectly to the administration's new readiness
to take on the Mehdi Army when he insisted that
Iraqi leaders now have to "lift needless
restrictions on Iraqi and coalition forces, so
these troops can achieve their mission of bringing
security to all of the people of Baghdad". That
was a reference to an agreement that Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government reached with
Muqtada's organization last year that prohibited
US troops from going into Sadr City, the Baghdad
base of Muqtada's political-military organization.
One veteran military expert on Iraq,
retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, said
Bush's new policy is a "war against all" in Iraq
and called it "a blunder of Hitlerian
proportions".
Macgregor likened the policy
of fighting all three Iraqi anti-occupation forces
at once to Adolf Hitler's insistence on continuing
a two-front war against the Soviet Union and the
Allied powers during World War II, which is widely
regarded as having ensured the defeat of Nazi
Germany.
Macgregor is no stranger to
military planning in Iraq. He led combat troops in
destroying a brigade of Saddam Hussein's
Republican Guard troops in the most significant
tank battle of Desert Storm in February 1991 and
prepared a proposal for a limited-duration attack
on Baghdad at the request of a personal
representative of then secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld in autumn 2001.
"It is ideology
pushing violence to extremes," Macgregor said of
the latest turn in Bush's Iraq policy. "They are
trying to reverse the damage they have already
done to themselves by having built up a Shi'ite
state and army. But it is too late, and it is
bound to be counterproductive."
US forces
defeated the Mehdi Army of 2,000 men in Najaf in
August 2004. Since then, however, Muqtada has
emerged as the most popular and powerful figure in
Baghdad and the Shi'ite south, muscling aside the
previously dominant Badr Organization. The Mehdi
Army is now believed to be many times as large as
it was in 2004, and it has significant support
within the Iraqi security forces.
US
officers in Baghdad were telling reporters last
September that they opposed doing battle with the
Shi'ite militia. Colonel Joseph DiSalvo, commander
of the 3rd Infantry Division in eastern Baghdad,
told Tom Lasseter of McClatchy News Service in
December that it would be all but impossible for
the US military to defeat the Mehdi Army. "You'd
have to have more manpower than is feasible," said
DiSalvo.
The well-informed CNN Baghdad
correspondent Michael Ware has just reiterated
that warning about taking on the Mehdi Army. On
Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room last
Wednesday, he said US troops can no longer crush
the Mehdi Army. That army, Ware observed, "is much
more than just a force, it's a movement. And it
has mobilized the great disfranchised,
impoverished Shi'ite population". The Sadrist
"genie is out of the bottle", he warned, and "it
can't be put back in".
As a result of the
agreement between Maliki's government and
Muqtada's organization, the massive security
operations in Baghdad last year in essence
targeted Sunni insurgents based in Sunni
neighborhoods, passing over Sadr City and other
areas controlled by the Shi'ites. The Bush
administration's policy on Shi'ite militias was
limited to pressing Iraqi officials - especially
Maliki - to act against his main source of
political support. In effect the Bush
administration was tacitly aligning itself with a
Shi'ite-dominated regime that was dependent on
pro-Iranian political-military groups against the
Sunni resistance.
Bush strongly implied in
his State of the Union message, however, that his
administration can no longer count on the Shi'ite
Iraqi government and army as allies in a new war
against the militias. Significantly, Bush did not
even mention the prime minister by name in the
speech.
In the weeks before the speech,
Maliki was reported to have resisted targeting
Shi'ite sectarian militias in Baghdad and to have
opposed bringing US troops into central Baghdad.
He was said to have proposed last November that
Shi'ite forces take care of security within the
city, while US troops patrol the perimeter.
A little over a week before the State of
the Union address, New York Times reporter John
Burns quoted an unnamed US military official who
had been involved in negotiations with the Iraqi
government over security operations as saying, "We
are implementing a strategy to embolden a
government that is actually part of the problem.
We are being played like a pawn."
Also
missing from Bush's speech was the US
administration's past claim that the Iraqi army
stands above sectarian interests. That sectarian
Shi'ite character of key army units in the Baghdad
area has been increasingly revealed in recent
press reports.
An article by reporter
Nancy Trejos in the Washington Post on January 13
described the scene as Shi'ite soldiers belonging
to the Iraqi army's 6th Division, which is
responsible for security in central and south
Baghdad, celebrated the 86th anniversary of the
creation of the army.
They shouted
"Muqtada! Muqtada!" in the same breath as the five
major historical figures of the Shi'ite faith. The
Iraqi interpreter for the US advisers to the unit
remarked, "Sounds like the Mehdi Army is in the
tent."
The decision to fight all three
major anti-occupation forces simultaneously stems
from the US administration's failure to reach a
settlement with major Sunni armed resistance
organizations, even though they have turned
against al-Qaeda.
This in effect aligned
the United States with one side in the
Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian conflict, and encouraged
the Shi'ite leadership to view Sunnis as the
enemy. Instead of reversing that policy decision,
Bush is now adding another enemy to the list,
despite the fact that the Mehdi Army is also
violently opposed to al-Qaeda.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
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