Hi. I edit AlterNet's Iraq coverage, and spend several hours each day following news of the occupation. Each week I produce this slightly snarky digest of important stories to help busy people keep up. I also put together a free weekly newsletter with plenty of great coverage, which you can sign up for here. Enjoy.
It was a frustrating week, as all of the commercial media decided to repeat the dubious claim that the "surge" resulting in some progress. Between that and the constant reference to "al Qaeda-linked gunmen," it's getting downright depressing to try to counter the propaganda.
Even discussing "Al Qaeda in Iraq" as if it's a serious military threat plays into the hands of those who want an open-ended occupation (it is obviously a serious threat to Iraqi civilians and security forces). Our sources in Baghdad say the group is now predominantly Iraqi, with just a handful of "foreign fighters" sprinkled in. They are just one among many Sunni insurgent groups, and only their tactics, their strict form of Islam and the fact that the pro-war set finds them a convenient way to confuse Americans into linking Iraq and 9/11 differentiates them.
The only thing that allows them to operate in Iraq is the open-ended presence of US forces. Their large-scale attacks on civilians have led them to be universally reviled by most Iraqis of every sect and ethnicity and from across the political spectrum. To the degree that they have any support at all -- and they certainly do -- it's based solely on their resistance to the occupation and on nothing even approaching a popular ideology. Within weeks or months of a complete US withdrawal -- or maybe of the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal -- members of al Qaeda in Iraq will be killed, if they're lucky, or captured if they're not.
And the surge is not working in any way, shape or form; the violence overall hasn't decreased -- but it may be shifting from one province to another. For instance, nobody knows for sure if the perpetrators of the multiple truck bombings that killed 400-500 Yazidi in Al-Qataniyah and Al-Adnaniyah last week -- in the boondocks where there are no US troops -- came from Anbar, but they came from somewhere.
More importantly, though, I'd just remind everyone that the "surge" was sold as a short term increase in troops to provide the security necessary for political progress to take place. It was never explained how, exactly, that political progress would follow the surge, but that was the pitch. Without political reconciliation, talk of short-term progress in one or another corner of Anbar is irrelevant and any reporter who suggests any positive impact overall is simply talking out of his or her ass.
The new National Intelligence Estimate -- or declassified portions thereof -- makes the not-terribly-bold prediction that the Iraqi government is going to get weaker and weaker in the coming year.
The much-anticipated referendum that will help decide the future of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk -- where, quietly, massive ethnic cleansing has taken place since the fall of Saddam -- continues to be postponed. Why? Because a whole new civil war is going to break out when the vote finally happens.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports: "The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups ..."
With the chaos unabated and the US political elite dazzled by the shiny object represented by Bush's surge, White House officials said they planned to announce a "gradual," mostly symbolic troop reduction to try to relieve some of the political pressure at home:
An administration official said that the goal of the planned announcement is to counter public pressure for a more rapid reduction and to try to win support for a plan that could keep U.S. involvement in Iraq on "a sustainable footing" at least through the end of the Bush presidency.
Let's be on the watch for this "sustainable" rhetoric-- especially from the Dem presidential candidates.
The bigger news out of DC this week is Bush's comparison of Iraq with Vietnam -- weren't only crazy hippies supposed to see parallels between the two? Bush's use of the analogy managed to offend Iraqis and Vietnamese alike, and proved yet again how tenuous his administration's grasp on historical analogs really is. In fact, our experience in Vietnam would suggest we leave, not stay.
Robert Hathaway, an Asian expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told Agence France-Presse "that despite the eight-year US military involvement and its heavy casualties in Vietnam, Washington was still unable to create popular support in the south for a government that was widely considered to be corrupt and unpopular."
South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 not because American forces had withdrawn, but because the South Vietnamese and their army simply did not care enough about their government to fight in its defense, he said. The North Vietnamese simply walked almost unopposed into Saigon.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung gave the views of the (still nominally communist) government, saying, "everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people."
Vu Huy Trieu, a veteran interviewed by the AP in Hanoi said: "Doesn't he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?" He added: "Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn't prolonged except Bush."
Bush's gloom-and-doom predictions for what might happen when US forces withdraw were based, in part, on the Killing Fields of Cambodia, a country that Bush may not know is not Vietnam. Joshua Marshall did a good job pointing out the fatal flaw in the analogy:
...didn't the killing fields happen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge rather than Vietnam? So doesn't that complicate the analogy a bit? And didn't that genocide actually come to an end when the Communist Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime? The Vietnamese Communists may have been no great shakes. But can we get through one of these boneheaded historical analogies while keeping at least some of the facts intact?
No, we can't.
In fact, Bush also invoked the occupation of Japan to justify staying the course, quoting MIT professor John Dower. The good professor's response?
"They [war supporters] keep on doing this," said MIT professor John Dower. "They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it's always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They're desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse."
That's pretty clear.
John Warner (R-VA), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee proposed this week that the US start drawing down troops by year's end. The proposal seems to be to bring 5,000 of the 160,000 troops home to send a message to the Iraqi government.
Warner has gotten on the bandwagon of blaming the Iraqi regime for the country's continuing woes. Earlier in the week, Carl Levin (D-MI), the foreign relations Committee Chair, called for PM Nouri al-Maliki's ouster if a stable government doesn't come to pass soon.
They're right, of course, but what's missing is crucial to understanding the US' position: the government of Maliki is desperately unpopular because it shares Washington's deeply unpopular goals -- it's a government led by Iraqi separatists who refuse to call for a withdrawal of US troops and who favor privatizing the country's oil wealth, and it is primarily for these reasons that it has little to no legitimacy. Maliki may be too "sectarian" to run a unity government, but anyone else who favored the policies that he -- and Bush, Levin and John Warner -- does would face the same irreconcilable differences. The political situation in Iraq is a mess and it's entirely structural at this point.
Anyway, despite his protestations, it's clear that Maliki will be the fall-boy that allows Americans to avoid confronting the disastrous results of US militarism. The Arab press sees through it a lot better than our own.
Update: Glenn Greenwald tells us of a coordinated campaign to discredit Maliki among DC law-makers by a high-power lobbying firm hired by former Iraq PM Iyad Allawi.
The big story out of Iraq this week is the anticipated departure of British troops from the southern provinces where they've operated since the invasion. British military leaders are fairly unified in their call for a rapid withdrawal, although Gordon Brown has pledged to wait for the White House's September progress report before coming to a final decision.
The senior commanding officer of British forces in Basra said this week that his forces were "useless" in terms of bringing stability to the region. As I've pointed out before, the Brits have already effectively withdrawn, with 5,000 of their 5,500 troops hunkered down near the Basra airport and the remaining 500 guarding the governor's palace.
A US official blustered that the Brits' withdrawal would be an "embarrassing and ugly retreat," but the embarrassment will be all Washington's, as the Brits redeploy about half of their troops to Afghanistan, where the country remains in chaos and the Afghanis are readying to harvest yet another all-time record opium crop. The withdrawal will A) illustrate that when Western forces disengage, the chaos remains at the same level or decreases, B) highlight America's dwindling "coalition" and, most importantly, C) focus some attention on Afghanistan, where things are not going well. The latter, of course, plays right into the mainstream Democratic critique of the occupation of Iraq -- that it diverted resources from the hunt for bin Laden.
If you didn't read the Independent's interview with Muqtada al-Sadr, you really should. Seriously -- a fascinating perspective from the most powerful politician in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the conflict between Shiite nationalists and pro-Iranian separatists continues. Last week, I wrote that the governor of the Southern Qadisiyah province was assassinated. This week it was Mohammed Ali al-Hassani, governor of Qadasiyah province who died in a roadside bomb attack. Both governors were members of SIIC, the pro-Iranian separatist party backed by the US, and both were likely killed by nationalists loyal to Sadr.
Meanwhile, the saber-rattling towards Iran, based entirely on unsubstantiated claims by military officials, continues. Juan Cole responded better than I could:
The US military hasn't found any Iranian trainers in Iraq or any training camps, but like Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, that you can't find them doesn't mean they are not there. What I cannot understand is why the Pentagon needs Iranians in Iraq as a plot device. The Iraqi Bad Corps, tens of thousands strong, was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and it has been alleged that some Badr corpsmen are still on the Iranian payroll. It is the paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, America's chief ally in Iraq. What would the IRGC know that Badr does not? Why bother to send revolutionary guardsmen when the country is thick with Badr fighters anyway (who have all the same training)? I think the US is just embarrassed because Badr is its major ally in Iraq, and Pentagon spokesmen are over-compensating by imagining Iranian training camps inside Iraq. What an idea. I mean, don't we have, like, satellites that would see them? Wouldn't they be visible on google earth? Every day the Pentagon b.s. about Iran gets more fantastic and frantic.
OK, onto some quick hits ...
Seattle Times:
A South Carolina defense contractor pleaded guilty Thursday to bilking the Pentagon out of $20.5 million over nearly 10 years by adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of shipping spare parts such as metal washers and lamps.
The parts were bound for key military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the story is reminiscent of the $600 toilet seats the airforce was caught purchasing during the Reagan years -- "In one instance, in 2006, the government paid C&D Distributors $998,798 in transportation costs for shipping two 19-cent washers. Charlene Corley, 47, co-owner of C&D Distributors, used the money to pay for luxury homes, cars, plastic surgery and jewelry."
Speaking of the wonders of the private sector, the Pentagon announced that only 1,500 of the 3,900 mine-resistant armored vehicles that were supposed to be delivered to the troops in Iraq will make it this year. Apparently, there were "shipping problems."
Shias organized by the Sadrists held a major demonstration to protest heavy-handed US tactics in Baghdad.
The other tower of Shiite spiritual guidance, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani also blasted the Iraqi government. According to Arabic press reports via IraqSlogger, the ayatollah said that the Maliki government was tangled up in "sectarianism" and that his fellow Shiite leaders "have filled my heart with puss." I assume something was lost in the translation, but...
Syria encouraged its Iraqi neighbors to demand a timetable for US withdrawal as a prerequisite for stability, prompting, perhaps, Joe Lieberman to write in the Wall Street Journal that "the road to victory in Iraq " -- whatever that means -- goes through Damascus. He hopes military confrontation won't be necessary, as he did publicly regarding Iraq while lobbying for the invasion.
Foreign Policy magazine released the result of its second survey of "more than 100 of America's top foreign-policy experts," which found that the foreign policy establishment isn't sold on Bush's surge as much as it seems they are:
More than half say the surge is having a negative impact on U.S. national security, up 22 percentage points from just six months ago. This sentiment was shared across party lines, with 64 percent of conservative experts saying the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all.
"Chemical Ali" -- Saddam Hussein's cousin who is accused of the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis following the first episode of the Gulf War in 2001, went on trial this week along with 14 co-conspirators.
Among those who won't face trial for the carnage are US leaders who first encouraged the Shiite uprisings that prompted Hussein's brutal crack-down and then did nothing to stop them despite controlling Iraqi airspace -- they let Saddam's attack helicopters fly to put down the rebellion -- and the presence of overwhelming US force in their bases a few miles from the worst of the killings.
Victor's justice.
Speaking of the Hussein family, The Independent followed-up on them this week.
Two of the most serious charges against the only officer to be tried for the abuses at Abu Ghraib were dropped this week because of a procedural error by prosecutors. The torture techniques certainly came from the top, and the penalties will pretty much be limited to the bottom.
Finally, the White House status report on Iraq -- still being called the "Petraeus Report" by most of the media -- may be delivered to Congress on September 11, a date that has no significance whatsoever and is entirely due to the whim of the scheduling Gods.
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