Iraq 'surge' strategy shows
weaknesses By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - More than three months into
the implementation of President George W Bush's
"surge" strategy, skepticism over the likelihood
of its success is still running high in
Washington.
Except among
neo-conservatives, who have been the strategy's
most enthusiastic champions, most analysts believe
it is doomed to failure in the absence of major
moves - of which there have so far been virtually
none - by the Shi'ite-led government of Iraqi
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
to promote national reconciliation with the Sunni
minority.
But even while the addition of
thousands of US troops in Baghdad has reduced
sectarian killings there - a major goal of the
surge - violence outside the capital appears to
have increased.
Indeed, according to a
draft report by the Government Accountability
Office (GAO) obtained this week by the New York
Times, the number of attacks on civilian and
security forces across Iraq remained at roughly
the same level in March and April as at the end of
last year, before the surge got under way in
February.
The actual death toll from those
attacks, a growing proportion of which consists of
car and truck bombings in civilian areas, may
actually have risen compared with previous months,
according to some analysts who note that the
Maliki government last month stopped releasing
casualty figures. At the same time, US casualties,
a particularly sensitive indicator in Washington,
have clearly been on the rise.
In
accordance with classic counter-insurgency
doctrine, more soldiers are aggressively
patrolling areas from dispersed outposts, rather
than hunkering down inside fortified bases. But
the "surge" has also meant more targets for both
Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias - a
challenge that was illustrated dramatically late
last month when suicide attackers overran an
outpost in Baqubah, killing nine US troops, and
again last Saturday, when four soldiers were
killed and three others apparently captured in an
al-Qaeda ambush south of Baghdad.
Moreover, the fact that some commanders,
including Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, who
runs day-to-day operations in Iraq, are already
calling for the surge to continue through at least
next spring is seen as an implicit admission that
what progress has been achieved has come more
slowly than expected.
As presented by the
administration, the "surge", which added some
30,000 troops to the 135,000 already deployed to
Iraq when Bush announced the plan on January 10,
was designed to pacify Baghdad and regain some
degree of control over predominantly Sunni
al-Anbar province, a stronghold of the insurgency,
especially al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The surge,
which began in early February, is expected to
reach its full complement by the end of June.
By curbing sectarian violence in the
capital and going on the offensive against
al-Qaeda in Anbar, the surge's authors had hoped
to arrest Iraq's drift into full-scale civil war
and thus provide the security and political space
needed for "moderate" forces on all sides to forge
a consensus on key issues, such as the powers of
local governments, reversing de-Ba'athification,
the distribution of oil revenues, and the
disbanding of sectarian militias.
The
current US commander in Iraq, General David
Petraeus, has always stressed that the strategy
can only succeed if these issues are successfully
addressed by Iraqis themselves.
But
despite persistent pressure from Petraeus, the new
US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and a
series of visits by top-level administration
officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney,
who made a surprise trip to Baghdad late last
week, Maliki's government has been largely
unresponsive, while the Iraqi Parliament has been
depicted in Washington as increasingly
dysfunctional.
"We just don't see what we
need to see in terms of serious negotiations among
the principal parties," one Bush administration
official who has traveled frequently to Iraq said
this week. "Distrust has not diminished; if
anything, it has gotten worse."
Besides
the reduction of killings in Baghdad, which most
analysts attribute to Muqtada al-Sadr's orders in
January to his Mehdi Army to lie low and avoid
confrontations with US forces, the surge's
defenders point to Anbar as the brightest spot in
the strategy's implementation to date.
Not
only have government- and US-backed forces
regained control of Ramadi from al-Qaeda and its
local allies, but a new alliance called the Jihad
and Reform Front (RJF) with deep roots throughout
the province has mobilized against al-Qaeda in
effect splitting the insurgency.
As
encouraging as these developments appear to be,
some experts caution against optimism or depicting
them, as some neo-conservative analysts have, as a
consequence of the surge. According to Marc Lynch,
a specialist at George Washington University who
publishes the influential AbuAardvark.com blog,
the RJF's opposition to al-Qaeda does not
translate into support for US forces, and even
less so for the Maliki government.
Rather,
it remains at heart a nationalist movement
committed both to expelling US forces and fighting
Shi'ite domination, which it depicts as an
"Iranian" occupation.
"The most important
implication of the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda is
not that the 'surge' is working, or that the
insurgency is losing steam," Lynch wrote last
month in The American Prospect, although he added
that it may be more possible to enter into
negotiations with the nationalist Sunni movement
provided that Washington sets a firm commitment
for withdrawing its forces.
While the
Sunni split in Anbar may nonetheless be seen as an
advance, events elsewhere are not nearly as
positive. Growing intra-Shi'ite violence in
southern Iraq is a source of increasing concern,
and the commander in Diyala province, where
hundreds of reinforcements were sent in the face
of rising sectarian conflict two months ago,
appealed for yet more troops late last week.
And while killings in Baghdad itself may
be down compared with late last year, they have
been steadily creeping upward over the last two
months, according to published reports. Even the
super-protected "Green Zone" - the nerve center of
US operations and the Iraqi government - has
become increasingly insecure.
Two people
were killed and 10 more wounded by mortar fire
into the Green Zone on Thursday, the second day in
a row that it had come under fire. So dangerous
has the area become that the US Embassy warned all
residents this month to keep outdoor travel to a
minimum and "remain within a hardened structure to
the maximum extent possible and strictly avoid
congregating outdoors". Those who work outdoors
were ordered to wear bulletproof vests and helmets
at all times.
"In any other embassy, we
would have been evacuated," one State Department
staffer told McClatchy Newspapers this week. "They
are going to wait until 20 people die, then the
people back in Washington will say we have a
problem."
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