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US military has a lose-lose dilemma in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz
civilians (of a sort recently documented by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian
though the testimony of American military personnel in the Nation magazine) -
at checkpoints, by patrols, and most strikingly during those home invasions.
These assaults only generate further hatred of the occupation, which, of
course, rallies support for the local guerrillas. As one soldier, who, earlier
in the war, participated in such a midnight home invasion that terrorized a
dozen members of an Iraqi family,
recalled: "I thought of my family at the time and thought, 'If I was the
patriarch of the family, if soldiers came from another country and did this to
my family, I would be an insurgent too'."
These localized applications of "overwhelming" force, when meeting sustained
resistance, lead to the calling in of air power or, in some cases, artillery
fire. A strategy guaranteed to kill and wound guerrillas and local inhabitants
alike, destroy homes, generate more refugees, wreck local economies, and, in
the end, create ghostly, uninhabitable former neighborhoods.
Ironically (but logically), while target communities have been crippled by such
prolonged operations, both the insurgency and the jihadis have only grown
stronger. The attacks swell the ranks of the insurgency, while a small but
sufficient supply of embittered individuals become willing to sacrifice their
lives to achieve some measure of revenge against the American occupation and/or
its Shi'ite allies.
As for the tiny group of jihadi planners and bomb manufacturers, most escape
targeted neighborhoods when under pressure, having harvested a new wave of
bitterness to fuel a new wave of suicide bombings.
Meanwhile, back in Sadr City ...
In the Shi'ite areas, on the other hand, the Americans were providing an
unprecedented opportunity for suicide bombers to breach Mahdi Army security. In
the second prong of the "surge", American patrols were sent into these Shi'ite
communities to target local Mahdi Army leaders. While these operations did not
add up to the full-scale invasions visited on Sunni neighborhoods, they
nonetheless tended to force Mahdi patrols off the streets, opening up such
communities to jihadi suicide attacks.
Having relocated to new quarters (apparently on the outskirts of Baghdad), the
jihadi leadership utilized newly recruited suicide volunteers to exploit this
sudden vulnerability with a wave of attacks that sent the number of Shi'ite
deaths from multiple-fatality bombings recorded in the Brookings database
soaring from under 300 before the start of the surge to well over 400 in the
months after it began.
And then came the death squads. Originally, they seem to have been organized
from Shi'ite militia members by US military and intelligence personnel and
housed in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Modeled after the
American-organized death squads in Central America in the 1980s, they were
designed to murder suspected Sunni resistance leaders and therefore weaken the
insurgency.
After the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006, they
achieved partial or full independence from their American organizers and began
targeting Sunni men in indiscriminate campaigns of torture and execution,
justified by the argument that they were suspected of involvement in attacks on
Shi'ite communities. Just as the car bombers see themselves as retaliating
against American and Iraqi government atrocities in Sunni communities, the
death squads see themselves as executing the jihadi perpetrators of attacks on
their neighbors and their possible supporters.
When the "surge" began, the number of death-squad murders fell, evidently in
part because the death squad members hoped that American offensives in Sunni
communities would significantly reduce suicide attacks. But as this hope was
dashed, the number of death-squad killings began to rise again.
A lose-lose dilemma
As this latest debacle developed, Bush and his commanding generals began to
argue - to Congress, American public opinion, the Iraqi people and the world -
that the US must reschedule the benchmark moment. First, it was from July to
September, and then from September to November, and soon after from 2007 to
2008, and lately from 2008 to 2009. Congress (which has temporarily suspended
its debate on Iraq policy) and American public opinion (where Bush recorded an
exceedingly modest uptick in "approval" recently) might well give the president
a little more breathing room on the basis of these appeals.
But events on the ground in Iraq do not respond to presidential appeals or the
sunny testimony of generals. In Baghdad and surrounding provinces, the
situation has already entered what might be thought of as post-"surge" reality.
In part as a consequence of the "surge" strategy, ethnic cleansing in major
neighborhoods of Baghdad may be nearing completion; meanwhile, in the north,
the shaky relationship between the Kurds and Turkey is wavering on the brink of
a hot war, while the Kurd-Turkmen-Arab cauldron in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk
may erupt any time into a new Baghdad.
While all this goes on, desperate American military leaders have embraced,
amplified and expanded their anti-al-Qaeda-in-Iraq alliance with local
guerrillas in Anbar province - so much for dismantling Iraqi militias - and are
lurching toward a new set of disasters.
These may already be underway, starting with a confrontation between the
American commander of the "surge" plan, General David Petraeus, and the head of
an increasingly embattled and shaky Iraqi government, Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki. According to Juan Cole at his Informed Comment web site, Maliki
"fears that once the Sunni tribesmen have dispatched 'al-Qaeda', they will turn
on the largely Shi'ite government with their new American weapons". To prevent
this, he "has considered asking Washington to pull the general out of Baghdad".
For Bush, who has visibly put all his eggs in Petraeus' "surge" basket, this
would be inconceivable, which means that the next crisis in Iraq policy - and
probably several after that - is already under way.
As Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, put it, "The Americans are
defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."
Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology and faculty director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and
government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social
Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with
Clarence Lo). His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net.
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