Three more American
soldiers have been killed in Iraq.
Professor
Juan Cole, who personally knows U.S. soldiers in the area, says he worries each time he hears of such attacks.
I just do have to remark that this incident is an alarming indication that the US is losing the battle for hearts and minds. Mosul is not in the Sunni Arab triangle where hostility has run high, though it does have a substantial Arab population, and a long-lived Muslim Brotherhood branch. But my impression from earlier reports was that progress had been made. I guess you can win hearts and minds or you can pound an Iron Hammer, but it is tough to do both.
Shortly after the moronically code-named Iron Hammer began, we started seeing expressions of “finally” and “it’s about time” at the rightwing blogwallows. And we started hearing how this effort was having the immediate effect of reducing the number of attacks. Then came this weekend.
Whatever effect Iron Hammer and its cousins have in the long run, there are three more dead Americans whose homecoming in “transfer tubes” will be shielded from the press and whose families President Bush will ignore, though he found time on his state visit to Britain to speak with selected families of some British service personnel killed in Iraq.
Meanwhile, we get yet one more claim that America will stay the course, not cut and run.
TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Stability and the creation government structures rather than an arbitrary timetable will determine when U.S. troops pull out of Iraq, a senior U.S. general visiting Saddam Hussein's hometown said Sunday.
"What we're committed to...is providing a stable environment inside of which the Iraqi people can have basic laws written, their constitution written, their elections held, their own army, police, security forces and border guards," said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He repudiated a New York Times report which said Washington was planning to keep 100,000 troops in Iraq at least through early 2006, saying it was wrong to fix hard numbers. …
He said that he did not believe U.S.-led occupation forces were losing support from peaceful Iraqis and insisted Iraq had made much progress since the ouster of Saddam in April.
All of those efforts at “providing a stable environment” have run into big obstacles. Perhaps the most successful arena is in training police. But, as the
Los Angeles Times’s Nicholas Goldberg points out in Sunday’s Opinion section, this effort is fraught with tremendous risks beyond the kind of car bombings that took place in Baquba yesterday.
Goldberg
writes:
BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein's police were not known for their respect for the law or for their adherence to basic principles of human rights. Torture was routine, and death in custody was common.
But in the new Iraq, that's all supposed to change. On the dusty campus of the national police academy in Baghdad, dozens of clean, well-pressed American soldiers are already offering instruction to a ragtag batch of Iraqi police recruits, schooling them in the fundamentals of what's known as "democratic policing." …
Creating a civil, professional police force is part of America's optimistic plan to build a better Iraq, one in which Iraqis — sooner rather than later — will govern themselves according to the basic precepts of democratic society. As part of the "Iraqization" of the conflict, says U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, 25,000 police officers will be trained by the end of the year — police officers who, presumably, won't beat or murder their suspects and who will stand for the rule of law. "In the end, as in every country," Bremer said in a recent briefing, "security here will depend on a professional police force."
But occupying a country is a tricky business, and building a civil government in a place as deeply riven, unstable and historically undemocratic as this one is particularly complicated. In the murky moral morass of Iraq, even this simple, seemingly unassailable plan to modernize the police raises troubling questions.
The problem is this: Even as we're teaching them to build a friendly, nonthreatening police force, we're also planning to teach Iraqis the darker art of counterinsurgency to help them win the battle against the Hussein loyalists and the jihadis who are threatening the country. "Of course we are establishing a special unit for counterinsurgency, and the U.S. and South Africa will help us train them," said Brig. Gen. Ahmed Kadhim Ibrahim, the national police chief. …
On the face of it, training Iraqis to take over the fight against the insurgency seems like a good idea. But history suggests that we should proceed carefully. This is a road we've been down before, with very mixed results.
For those of us familiar with the U.S. role in Central America, “mixed results” has a sour stink to it. There, not a few soldiers and police who received special U.S. training turned out to be the worst progenitors of terror, torture and murder.