This Week's Enemy in Iraq
by Brandon Friedman
Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 08:10:37 PM PDT
Al Qaeda
Iraq
Al Qaeda in Iraq
Iran
Al Qaeda in Iraq
- Brandon Friedman's diary :: ::
Last week's violence in Basra and Baghdad has convinced the Bush administration that actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq, and has sparked a broad reassessment of policy in the region, according to senior U.S. officials.
Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday called Tehran's "malign" influence, the officials said.
The intensified focus on Iran coincides with diminished emphasis on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the leading justification for an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq.
In congressional hearings this week, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said the U.S. military has driven al-Qaeda from Baghdad, Anbar province and central Iraq, and he depicted the group as now largely concentrated in a reduced territory around the northern city of Mosul.
During their Washington visit, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker barely mentioned al-Qaeda in Iraq but spoke extensively of Iran.
With "al-Qaeda in retreat and disarray" in Iraq, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, "we see other obstacles that were under the waterline more clearly. . . . The Iranian-armed militias are now the biggest threat to internal order."
April 15, 2008 (four days later):
Bombings blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq tore through market areas in Baghdad and outside the capital on Tuesday, killing nearly 60 people and shattering weeks of relative calm in Sunni-dominated areas.
The bloodshed — in four cities as far north as Mosul and as far west as Ramadi — struck directly at U.S. claims that the Sunni insurgency is waning and being replaced by Shiite militia violence as a major threat.
Can these guys not get their stories straight? As I said a few days ago, the Bush administration has no idea who’s fighting who in Iraq, much less who we’re fighting in Iraq. Because remember, in both cases above, we’re talking about Iraqis killing each other. In Basra, the fighting was between the Iraqi government militia and the Mahdi Army militia. In Anbar today, the bombings were aimed at Iraqi targets. In neither case were American forces made the primary target of the violence.
At some point we’re going to have to realize that this has nothing to do with us--that this isn’t about Iranian arms flowing across the border, or about foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. Rather, this is an internal problem built up over decades that the Iraqi people will eventually have to face without the backing of 160,000 American troops. In the meantime, we will remain caught cluelessly in the crossfire.
Permalink | 39 comments