US 'surges', soldiers die. Blame
Iran By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - When a top US commander in
Iraq reported last week that attacks by Shi'ite
militias with links to Iran had risen to 73% of
all July attacks that had killed or wounded US
forces in Baghdad, he claimed it was because of an
effort by Iran to oust the United States from
Iraq, referring to "intelligence reports" of a
"surge" in Iranian assistance.
But the
obvious reason for the rise in Shi'ite-related US
casualties - ignored in US media coverage of
Lieutenant-General Raymond
Odierno's charge - is that
the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr was defending
itself against a rising tempo of attacks by US
forces at the same time attacks by al-Qaeda forces
had fallen.
In his press briefing on
August 5, Odierno, the second-ranking US commander
in Iraq, blamed the rise in the proportion of US
casualties attributable to Shi'ite militias to
Iran "surging their support to these groups based
on the September report" - a reference to the
much-anticipated report by General David Petraeus
on the United States' own "surge" strategy.
Odierno claimed intelligence reports
supported his contention of an Iranian effort to
influence public perceptions of the "surge"
strategy. "They're sending more money in, they're
training more individuals and they're sending more
weapons in."
He repeated the charge in an
interview with Michael R Gordon of the New York
Times published on its front page on August 8
under the headline "US says Iran-supplied bomb is
killing more troops in Iraq". In that interview,
he declared of Iran, "I think they want to
influence the decision potentially coming up in
September."
What Odierno framed in terms
of an Iranian policy, however, can be explained
much more simply by the fact that the US military
mounted more operations on Muqtada's Mahdi Army
during the spring and summer.
The US
command has not provided any statistics on the
targets of its operations in recent months, but
news reports on those operations reveal a pattern
of rising US attacks on Mahdi Army personnel since
March.
Between April 26 and June 30, the
US command in Baghdad announced dozens of military
operations in Baghdad - the vast majority in Sadr
City - solely for the purpose of capturing or
killing Shi'ites belonging to what were called
"secret cells", a term used to describe Mahdi Army
units alleged to be supported by Iran.
In
July, the Mahdi Army resisted these raids in many
cases. On July 9, for example, US troops cordoned
off an area in Sadr City and began searching for
members of what the US command called a "criminal
militia" accused of planting roadside bombs.
According to the official military press release,
the US troops were "engaged by rocket-propelled
grenades and small-arms fire from numerous
locations".
In short, the rise in deaths
of US troops in Baghdad last month reflected the
increased pace of US operations against the Mahdi
Army and the Mahdi Army's military response.
Odierno conceded as much in the same press
conference: "Because of the effect we've had on
al-Qaeda in Iraq and the success against them and
the Sunni insurgency," he said, "we are focusing
very much more on the special groups of the Jaish
al-Mahdi [Mahdi Army] here in Baghdad."
The major briefing by the US command on
alleged Iranian support for Iraqi Shi'ite militias
in recent weeks appears to contradict Odierno's
claim that intelligence showed increased Iranian
assistance to those militias. Brigadier-General
Kevin Bergner told reporters on August 2 - after a
"surge" in Iranian assistance had allegedly taken
place - that the rate of training of militia
groups in Iran had remained stable for a long
time.
The transcript of the briefing also
shows that Bergner did not claim any recent
increase in financial assistance to the Mahdi
Army.
Odierno's reference to "sending more
weapons in" continued the practice of the US
administration to claim that Iranian officials
actually ship weapons to Shi'ite militias in Iraq,
despite the fact that no evidence of such a role
has been found after four years of trying.
Odierno told the New York Times that
explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) accounted
for one-third of combat deaths suffered by "US-led
forces" - including Iraqi and British forces -
last month. But he said nothing about the
proportion of total US troops killed or wounded by
them.
The administration of US President
George W Bush continues to assert that EFPs are
provided by the Iranian government, despite
numerous discoveries by US forces of workshops
manufacturing such devices in Iraq.
Odierno's charges are the latest addition
to an ongoing Bush administration narrative about
developments in Iraq that treats all Shi'ite
activity outside the Iraqi government as
reflecting Iranian policy.
Its central
theme of an Iranian policy to drive the US out of
Iraq by killing US troops, introduced in January,
has branched out into several sub-themes, one of
which is that Muqtada has lost control over the
Mahdi Army. The US command has been claiming it
has broken up into "rogue units" - also called
"special groups". Those "rogue units" in turn are
said to have become instruments of Iranian policy.
Although the Mahdi Army operates on a
highly decentralized basis, and some units have
been involved in sectarian activities that Muqtada
did not approve, the US military has never
produced evidence that a significant number of
units are no longer loyal to Muqtada.
The
"rogue units" line has been used to suggest that
those units that were loyal to Muqtada were
cooperating with the United States and to justify
US attacks on the Mahdi Army both in Baghdad and
in southern Iraq.
Petraeus claimed
publicly that Muqtada had agreed in talks with
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to the
deployment of US troops to Baghdad's Sadr City
district in return for assurances that searches
and raids would be conducted in a "respectable
manner".
Muqtada's spokesman in Parliament
said, however, that the understanding had been
that Iraqi forces would conduct searches and that
US troops would intervene only if they faced
resistance and that US troops had violated the
understanding.
At first, Muqtada's troops
stayed off the streets and did not resist US
troops. But in March, Muqtada's office denounced
the US troop deployment in Sadr City and called on
people to take to the streets in protest. And a
Shi'ite cleric loyal to Muqtada exhorted followers
at Friday prayers not to cooperate with the US
occupation of Sadr City.
On April 8,
Muqtada issued a statement urged the Iraqi Army
and police to stop cooperating with the United
States and told his guerrilla fighters to
concentrate on pushing US forces out of the
country.
Thus it requires no Iranian hand
to explain the escalation of the conflict between
the Mahdi Army and the US military that accounts
for the changing pattern of US casualties in
Baghdad.
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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