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3 US military has a lose-lose dilemma
in Iraq By Michael Schwartz
President George W Bush has called on
Congress, the American public, the Iraqi people
and the world to suspend judgment - until at least
September - on the success of his escalation of
the war in Iraq, euphemistically designated a
"surge". But the fact is: it has already failed
and it's obvious enough why.
Much
attention has been paid to the recent White House
report that recorded "satisfactory performance" on
eight Congressional
benchmarks and
"unsatisfactory performance" on six others (with
an additional four receiving mixed evaluations).
Fred Kaplan of Slate and Patrick Cockburn of the
Independent, among others, have demonstrated the
fraudulence of this assessment. Cockburn
summarized his savaging of the document thusly:
"In reality, the six failures are on issues
critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight
successes are on largely trivial matters."
As it happens, though, these benchmarks
are almost completely beside the point. They don't
represent the key goals of the "surge" at all,
which were laid out clearly by the president in
his January speech announcing the operation:
Our troops will have a well-defined
mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure
neighborhoods, to help them protect the local
population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi
forces left behind are capable of providing the
security that Baghdad needs.
The
success of such "benchmarks" can be judged
relatively easily. As Bush himself put the matter:
"We can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down
murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and
growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad's
residents."
This was supposed to be
accomplished through two major initiatives. Most
visibly, the US military was to adopt a more
aggressive strategy for pacifying Baghdad
neighborhoods considered strongholds for the Sunni
insurgency. Occupation officials blame them for
the bulk of the vehicle bombs and other suicide
attacks that have devastated mainly Shi'ite
neighborhoods. The second, less visible (but no
less important) initiative involved subduing the
Mahdi Army of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - the largest
and most ferocious of the Shi'ite militias - which
occupation officials blame for the bulk of
death-squad murders in and around the capital.
These changes should have been observable
as early as July. By then, as a "senior American
military officer" told the New York Times, it
would already be time to refocus attention on
"restoring services and rebuilding the
neighborhoods".
To judge the "surge" right
now - by the president's real "benchmarks" - we
need only look for a dramatic drop in vehicle and
other "multiple fatality bombings" in populated
areas, and for a dramatic drop in the number of
tortured and executed bodies found each morning in
various dumping spots around Baghdad.
By
these measures, the "surge" has already been a
miserable failure, something that began to be
documented as early as April when Nancy Youssef of
the McClatchy newspapers reported that there had
been no decline in suicide-bombing deaths; and
that, after an initial decline in the bodies
discarded by death squads around the capital, the
numbers were rising again. (These trends have been
substantiated by the Brookings Institution, which
has long collected the latest statistics from
Iraq.)
A more vivid way to appreciate the
nature of the almost instantaneous failure of the
overall "surge" operation is anecdotally by
reading news reports of specific campaigns - like
the report Julian Barnes and Ned Parker of the Los
Angeles Times sent in from Baghdad's
Sunni-majority Ubaidi neighborhood, which was
headlined "US troop buildup in Iraq falling
short". It concluded ominously, "US forces so far
have been unable to establish security, even for
themselves."
Or we might note that,
instead of ebbing, violence in Iraq was flooding
into new areas, just beyond the reach of the US
combat brigades engaged in the "surge". Or perhaps
it's worth pointing out that, by July, the highly
fortified Green Zone in the very heart of Baghdad
- designed as the invulnerable safe haven for
American and Iraqi officials - had become a
regular target for increasingly destructive mortar
and rocket attacks launched from unpacified
neighborhoods elsewhere in the capital. According
to New York Times reporters Alissa J Rubin and
Stephen Farrell, the zone has been "attacked
almost daily for weeks".
Or we could focus
on the fact that the long supply lines needed to
support the "surge" - massive convoys of trucks
moving weapons, ammunition and supplies heading
north from Kuwait into Baghdad - have become a
regular target for insurgents. Embedded reporter
Michael Yon, for instance, recently reported that,
for convoys on this route, "it's not unusual to be
diverted or delayed a half-dozen times or more due
to real or suspected bombs".
In the end,
though, perhaps the best indicator is the surging
strength of the primary target of the "surge" in
Shi'ite areas. Since the "surge" plan was
officially launched in mid-February, according to
the Times' Rubin, the Mahdi Army "has effectively
taken over vast swaths of the capital".
Twenty thousand more American combat
troops are now in and around the capital. (The
rest of the 28,500 troops the president sent
surging into Iraq have been dispatched to other
provinces outside the capital.) This has meant a
tripling of American troops on patrol at any given
time, but it has failed to produce either
significantly "fewer brazen acts of terror" or
progress in "restoring services and rebuilding the
neighborhoods". So it can be no surprise that the
"surge" has failed to generate "growing trust and
cooperation from Baghdad's residents".
Why don't US troops protect Shi'ite
sites? Why then has the "surge" failed?
And so quickly at that?
This only makes
sense when you explore the strategy utilized by
the US military to reduce the number of suicide
bombers and the "multiple fatality bombings" they
perpetrate. Terrorist attacks of this sort need
four elements for success: an organization capable
of creating such bombs; a pool of individuals
willing to risk or sacrifice their lives to
deliver the explosives; a host community willing
to hide the preparations; and a target community
unable to prevent the delivery of these deadly,
indiscriminate weapons of massive destruction.
Virtually all of these attacks are
organized by Sunni jihadis and, while the
Brookings database shows that many of them are
aimed at military or government targets, the
majority of deaths occur in spectacular bombings
of public gathering spots - "soft targets" - in
Shi'ite neighborhoods. It might then have seemed
logical for US commanders to concentrate their
increased troop strength on these obvious delivery
areas, setting up checkpoints and guard posts that
would scrutinize car and truck traffic entering
highly vulnerable areas.
This tactic might
indeed have worked if the US were willing to form
an alliance with local Shi'ite neighborhood
defense forces. As it happens though, the Shi'ite
communities in Baghdad are already well patrolled
by the Mahdi Army, whose street fighters have
proven effective in either spotting alien vehicles
or responding to reports from local residents
about suspicious cars or people.
However,
enormous public spaces, filled with large numbers
of non-residents and outside vehicles, require
dense patrolling
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