Page 1 of
3 A war guaranteed to damage a
superpower By Patrick Cockburn
BAGHDAD and IRBIL, Iraq - At 3am on
January 11, a fleet of US helicopters made a
sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian
liaison office in the city of Irbil in northern
Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior
Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the
deputy head of the Iranian National Security
Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head
of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards.
What made the US raid so
extraordinary was that both men were
in
Iraq at the official invitation of Iraqi President
Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his
lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern
Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see
Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan
Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Irbil.
There was nothing covert about the meeting, which
was featured on Kurdish television.
In the
event, the US attack failed. It was only able to
net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison
office that had existed in Irbil for years,
issuing travel documents, and which was being
upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign
Ministry in Baghdad.
The Kurdish leaders
were understandably furious, asking why, without a
word to them, their close allies, the Americans,
had tried to abduct two important foreign
officials who were in Iraq at the request of the
Iraqi president.
Kurdish troops had almost
opened fire on the US troops. At the very least,
the raid showed a contempt for Iraqi sovereignty,
which the United States was supposedly defending.
It was three months before officials in Washington
admitted that they had tried and failed to capture
Jafari and Frouzanda. The US State Department and
Iraqi government argued for the release of the
five officials as relative minnows, but Vice
President Dick Cheney's office insisted fiercely
that they should be held.
If Iran had
undertaken a similar venture by, for example,
trying to kidnap the deputy head of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) when he was on an
official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then
Washington might have considered the attempt a
reason for going to war. In the event, the US
assault on Irbil attracted bemused attention
inside and outside Iraq for only a few days before
it was buried by news of the torrent of violence
in the rest of the country. The US understandably
did not reveal the seniority of its real targets -
or that they had escaped.
Multiplying
enemies The Irbil raid is significant
because it was the first visible sign of a string
of highly significant US policy decisions
announced by President George W Bush in an address
to the nation broadcast in the US a few hours
earlier on January 10. There have been so many
spurious turning points in the Iraq war - such as
the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the
handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in
2004, or the elections of 2005 - that truly
critical moments are obscured or underrated.
The true importance of Bush's words took
time to sink in. In the months prior to his
speech, the US seemed to be feeling its way toward
an end to the war. The Republicans had lost
control of both houses of Congress in the November
2006 elections, an unexpectedly heavy defeat
blamed on the Iraq war. Soon afterward, the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group of senior Republicans
and Democrats, led by James Baker and Lee
Hamilton, spelled out the extent of US failure
thus far, arguing for a reduced US military
commitment and suggesting negotiations with Iran
and Syria.
Bush did the exact opposite of
what the Baker-Hamilton report had proposed. He
identified Iran and Syria as America's prime
enemies in Iraq, stating: "These two regimes are
allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their
territory to move in and out of Iraq." Instead of
reducing the US commitment, Bush pledged to send
20,000 extra troops to try to secure Baghdad. In
other words, the United States was going to
respond to its lack of success in the conflict by
escalating both the war in Iraq and America's
confrontation with Iran in the Middle East as a
whole. The invasion of 2003 had destabilized the
whole region; now Bush was about to deepen that
instability.
The raid on Irbil showed that
the new policies were not just rhetoric. Iraqis
were quicker than the rest of the world to pick up
on what was happening. "People are saying that
Bush's speech means that the occupation is going
to go on a long time," Iraqi political scientist
Ghassan Attiyah told me soon after the president
had stopped speaking. Although the new US security
plan for Baghdad, which began on February 14, was
sold as a temporary "surge" in troop numbers, it
was evident that the reinforcements were there to
stay.
In April, the Pentagon announced
that it was increasing army tours in Iraq from 12
to 15 months. Without anybody paying much
attention, American officials stopped talking
about training Iraqi Army troops as a main
priority. This was an important shift in emphasis.
Training and equipping Iraqi troops to replace
American soldiers - so they could be withdrawn
from Iraq - had been the cornerstone of US
military planning since 2005. Now, the policy was
being quietly downgraded, though not abandoned
altogether.
Could the new strategy
succeed? It seemed very unlikely. The US had
failed to pacify Iraq between 2003 and 2007. Now,
with much of the American public openly
disillusioned with the war, Bush was to try for
victory once again. Common sense suggested that he
needed to reduce the number of America's enemies
inside and outside Iraq, but his new strategy was
only going to increase them.
The US Army
was to go on fighting the 5-million-strong Sunni
community, as it had been doing since the capture
of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for
US withdrawal was not being met. At the same time,
the US was going to deal more aggressively with
the 17 million Shi'ites in Iraq. It would contest
the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq
of the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia led by the
nationalist Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is
regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shi'ite
Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was also
more openly going to confront Iran, the most
powerful of Iraq's neighbors.
As with so
many policies under Bush, the new strategy made
sense in terms of US domestic politics, but in
Iraq seemed a recipe for disaster. Iran was easy
to demonize in the US, just as Saddam had been
blamed four years earlier for everything wrong in
Iraq and the Middle East. The New York Times,
which had once uncritically repeated White House
claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass
destruction, now ran articles on its front page
saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated
roadside bombs to Iraq that were killing American
soldiers.
There was no reference to the
embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just
such bombs in Baghdad and Basra. Above all, the
Bush administration was determined to put off
the
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
