Sabrina Tavernise and Qais Mizher of the New York Times report on the brutal battle for power and oil in Basra Iraq.
BASRA, Iraq — Politics, once seen as a solution to the problems of a society broken by years of brutal single-party rule, has paralyzed the heart of Iraq's south.
This once-quiet city of riverside promenades was among the most receptive to the American invasion. Now, three years later, it is being pulled apart by Shiite political parties that want to control the region and its biggest prize, oil. But in today's Iraq, politics and power flow from the guns of militias, and negotiating has been a bloody process.
"We're into political porridge, that's what's changed," said Brig. James Everard, commander of the British forces in Basra. "It's mafia-type politics down here."
Basra is deep in the Shia heartland. The Sunnis and Zarqawi can not be blamed for its descent into Hobbesian barbarity.
Some local people say British actions have helped to fuel the violence. But others say the British have not been tough enough, allowing criminal and factional elements to thrive.
"They should have moved against these people earlier," said Hassan, a teacher. "Now it's too late."
British commanders disagree. They say those behind the recent attacks on their troops are on the back-foot now, after a series of raids netted major finds of weapons and bomb-making materials. The main threat, these officers say, comes from "rogue elements" in local Shia militia groups - particularly from the Mehdi Army, loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr.
Saddam Hussein would have taken family members of trouble makers captive and killed some of them. Then the troublemakers would have had to ask themselves whether they wanted to see their whole families wiped out.
Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund For Peace have published a an international failed states ranking. They place Iraq at number 4 behind Sudan, the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ivory Coast. Iraq comes out worse than number 5 Zimbabwe on a 10 point scale (higher is worse) by the indicators "Group Grievance" (9.8 versus 8.5), "Human Flight" (9.1 versus 9.0), "Human Rights" (9.7 versus 9.5), Security Apparatus (9.8 versus 9.4), "Factionalized Elites" (9.7 to 8.5), and "External Intervention (10.0 versus 8.0). Though Zimbabwe scores worse on several indicators including "Demographic Pressures", "Uneven Development" (guess they are referring to Chinese investments), "Economy", "Delegitimization of State", and "Public Services".
The full list of failed states shows nuclear and Muslim Pakistan at a worrisome number 10. Can you say "thermonuclear war"? Sure.
Try to stop the factions from fighting or let them have at it?
The situation in Basra raises a question: Does it make more sense to stay to try to quell increasing sectarian and terrorist violence, or leave and let Iraqis fight it out? British officials have talked of drawing down troops soon - while insisting that their mission has been more success than failure.
Their decision is likely to foreshadow the U.S. endgame in Iraq. Perhaps some uneasy calm can first be achieved. But right now, Basra seems more to reinforce Lawrence of Arabia's cautionary words in 1920 about British involvement in Iraq. Mesopotamia (as Iraq used to be known) was, Lawrence said, "a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor."
Yes, too late to escape with dignity. Not too late to escape though.
University professors, army officers, Muslim clerics, and community leaders have been targeted in assassinations in recent months. While some of the attacks are on Sunni Arabs and former Baath party members, others appear to involved internecine strife between militias aligned with rival factions and political groups.
As a result of the violence, security has been left in tatters, and even the presence of 8,000 British troops has not stopped the violence.
The violence increased rather than decreased after the new Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki declared a month-long state of emergency on 31 May. Within days of his announcement, at least 35 people were killed and dozens more injured in a bloody attack in the city public market and a shooting at a Sunni mosque.
Brigadier James Everard, the commander of British forces in Iraq's four southeastern provinces, says the Iraqis are not interested in freedom of speech.
To a large degree, the violence has resulted from a power grab by Shiite factions that had been left practically on their own to run the region while American and Iraqi officials in Baghdad have fought insurgents elsewhere.
"Freedom of speech, freedom of expression: it just hasn't quite worked out the way it was planned," Everard said. "They're not prepared to debate. They tend to do things at the end of a gun."
Liberalism doesn't hold much appeal in Iraq and the people aren't willing to fight for freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of religion. In fact, they are far more inclined to fight against than for those very Western ideals.
Conservative columnist John Derbyshire says he was mistaken for supporting the war.
We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson.
Since the Iraq war was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology? Here we are—we, the United States—in our fourth year of occupying that sinkhole, and it looks pretty much like the third year, or the second. Will the eighth year of our occupation, or our twelfth, look any better? I know people who will say yes, but I no longer know any who will say it with real conviction. It’s a tough thing, to admit you were wrong. It’s way tough if you’re a big-name pundit with a reputation to preserve. For those of us down at the bottom of the pundit pecking order, the stakes aren’t so high. I, at any rate, am willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support to this fool war.
Read his full essay.
The biggest tragedy of Iraq that gets the least press attention is the extreme loss of rights by women. Basra women claim they've lost the most.
BASRA - The women of Basra have disappeared. Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women's secular freedoms - once the envy of women across the Middle East - have been snatched away because militant Islam is rising across the country.
Our supposed allies the Shiites are terrible in their treatment of women.
In the British-occupied south, where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst.
Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death.
One Basra woman, known only as Dr Kefaya, was working in the women and children's hospital unit at the city university when she started receiving threats from extremists. She defied them. Then, one day a man walked into the building and murdered her.
We opened Pandora's Box. The lives of Iraqi women are worse for it.
Now, Basra is the only city in Iraq under emergency rule, evidence of how far the city has careened off course. Locals say death squads openly patrol the streets and a police official reached by phone reports that at least 400 assassinations in the past two months.
Residents describe a political climate that is a cross between Al Capone's Chicago and Medici Florence. Politicians, corrupt policemen, and gangs are all vying with one another to determine who will come out on top. Some Shiite politicians there - as well as US and British officers - also allege that some of the groups are being provided money and arms by Iran, whose border is just 10 miles away.
While death squads have been trolling the city for over a year, the pace of the killing has picked up, and the target lists appear to have expanded, residents say.
"It made more sense when it started out. They were killing Baathists and officers from Saddam's army,'' says Ghazi, a long-haul trucker who makes regular trips to Basra, and asked that his full named not be used. "Now they kill Shiites, Sunnis, tribal leaders, doctors, engineers - just about anyone who opposes them politically."
The whole article is full of more insights.
Democracy in Iraq leads to the winners handing out contracts to their allies while the defeated factions take up arms to fight against a corrupt spoils system that doesn't give them a cut of the action.
This official also alleges that a lot of the city's government contracts are being steered to tribes that backed Waili for the governorship, and that other tribes that haven't been getting the business have been taking up arms.
American soldiers died to make this possible.
Basra is getting ethnically purified into a pure (but still heavily divided) Shia city..
The proportion of Sunni Muslims in Basra has declined from 40% to 15%, after three years of forced immigration, said the chairman of a religious authority in Iraq.
The chairman of the official Sunni Endowment in Southern Iraq said militias had targeted Sunnis in the country's second-largest city.
Once all the Sunnis have left the Shias will focus more of their ambitions trying to force each other to submit.
With some factions in Basra threatening to cut off oil shipments to the nearby port the central government sees real money at stake in the fight for Basra and therefore the Iraqi central government has decided to try to take control of Basra.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Police set up roadblocks Thursday around the oil-rich southern city of Basra as a monthlong state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went into effect.
Basra Gov. Mohammed al-Waeli said army troops and police fanned out around Iraq's second-largest city as part of a crackdown on rampant violence that has increased in recent weeks as rival Shiite militias fight each other for power.
Think those army troops represent a neutral fair force that stands against all militias and death squads? That seems unlikely. Probably officers in the Iraqi army have allies among one or more of the competing militias. So the Iraqi army's intervention is going to help some factions and hurt others.
Remember when the Bush Administration was talking about how the US military would start to pull down troop levels in Iraq in 2006? All that talk has fallen by the wayside as the violence has escalated. The rest of the US Army's 3500 reserves in Kuwait have gotten shifted to Anbar Province in order to try to take back Ramadi from Zarqawi's followers who control the city.
Recently about 1,500 soldiers of the Army's 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, deployed from Kuwait into western Iraq to conduct operations. This is precisely why this force has been stationed in Kuwait -- to provide General Casey and General Chiarelli with a flexible force that could be employed when the tactical situations so dictate.
The US military in Iraq is too small to control the place.
RAMADI, Iraq - Whole neighborhoods are lawless, too dangerous for police. Some roads are so bomb-laden that U.S. troops won't use them. Guerrillas attack U.S. troops nearly every time they venture out - and hit their bases with gunfire, rockets or mortars when they don't.
Though not powerful enough to overrun U.S. positions, insurgents here in the heart of the Sunni Muslim triangle have fought undermanned U.S. and Iraqi forces to a virtual stalemate.
"It's out of control," says Army Sgt. 1st Class Britt Ruble, behind the sandbags of an observation post in the capital of Anbar province. "We don't have control of this ... we just don't have enough boots on the ground."
Bush doesn't want to admit that the US military isn't big enough to control Iraq. To fix that problem would reduce domestic spending cuts, tax hikes, and a huge admission of error. Not going to happen. He doesn't want to admit to mistakes on such an enormous scale.
Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reports that the US military has not weakened the Iraqi insurgency.
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon reported Tuesday that the frequency of insurgent attacks against troops and civilians is at its highest level since American commanders began tracking such figures two years ago, an ominous sign that, despite three years of combat, the US-led coalition forces haven't significantly weakened the Iraq insurgency.
In its quarterly update to Congress, the Pentagon reported that from Feb. 11 to May 12, as the new Iraqi unity government was being established, insurgents staged an average of more than 600 attacks per week nationwide. From August 2005 to early February, when Iraqis elected a Parliament, insurgent attacks averaged about 550 per week; at its lowest point, before the United States handed over sovereignty in the spring of 2004, the attacks averaged about 400 per week.
If you get depressed by reality and not like to read sad and tragic news presented in unvarnished form then my advice is to seek out the "Happy Talk" blogs. You probably can still find bloggers who see reasons for optimism in spite of the US military's belief that the insurgency is undiminished. Never mind that the Shias are forcing all the Sunnis to leave Basra. Never mind that Basra is under control of rival religious parties and organized crime groups. You can find happy talkers who will assure you that things are looking pretty rosy.
The Sunni sheiks in Ramadi say they are not in control and they are afraid of Zarqawi..
Last week, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad conceded, in answer to a question about Ramadi in an interview with CNN, that parts of Anbar were under insurgent control. Ramadi is the capital of the overwhelmingly Sunni province. The difficulties facing stretched-thin U.S. Marines in Ramadi suggest the continuing obstacles to a reduction of American forces in Iraq.
"We hope to get rid of al-Qaeda, which is a huge burden on the city. Unfortunately, Zarqawi's fist is stronger than the Americans'," said one Sunni sheik, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of insurgent retaliation. He was referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, an umbrella group for many of the foreign and local resistance fighters in Iraq. Local Sunni leaders often insist that the most violent insurgent attacks are by foreign fighters, not Iraqi Sunnis.
In Ramadi, "Zarqawi is the one who is in control," the sheik said, speaking to a Washington Post special correspondent in Ramadi. "He kills anyone who goes in and out of the U.S. base. We have stopped meetings with the Americans, because, frankly speaking, we have lost confidence in the U.S. side, as they can't protect us."
Some of the sheiks who tried cooperating with US forces are now dead.
I say we leave and let the Iraqis fight it out among themselves. The neocons need to reconceptualize. What we are seeing is street democracy. Hurray! We've established a teeming and vibrant democracy in the Middle East.
Update: Want to understand why the US intervention in Iraq is doomed to failure? See my post John Tierney On Cousin Marriage As Reform Obstacle In Iraq and click back and read the posts and articles linked to there. In a later post I listed a number of reasons why attempts to establish democracy won't work in the Middle East and in Iraq in particular. All those posts and linked articles are far more useful for understanding Iraq than the latest media reports. On top of all those reasons Iraq has an average IQ of 87. They are too dumb to make representative democracy work well. Liberal myths about human nature are costing us terribly in Iraq. We need to abandon the myths. The myths have gotten too costly abroad and at home.
Update II: The Rand Corporation analysts James Quinliven and James Dobbins and a variety of retired generals agree that to properly occupy Iraq would require forces at least 3 or probably 4 times larger than the current US forces there. Bush clearly doesn't want to try to pay the price to make our will prevail in Iraq. The US people wouldn't want to either if he tried. So what is the point in staying? Also see my post "History Of American Interventions Bodes Poorly For Democracy".
The US military feels it should crack down on some slavery-like conditions among its subcontractors in Iraq. If you aren't allowed to leave your job is it slavery or serfdom or what exactly?
BAGHDAD — The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had issued new orders to private contractors in Iraq to crack down on violations of human trafficking laws involving laborers brought from around the world to work at American bases and other sites.
An inspection completed in late March uncovered evidence that it was widespread practice among firms providing services to the military to take away their workers' passports to keep them in place, military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said.
The US military is bringing a small ray of Enlightenment era thinking to Iraq. As much as I admire and identify with the spirit that motivates their crackdown it seems so much like yesterday's Old Republic spirit for America rather than the proper Roman New Republic spirit sweeping our capitol. I think the US military is behind the curve on where the US Senate and White House are leading our country and the world. Keep reading for the big picture.
"Increasing expenditures in theater ... jeopardize our ability to maintain public support as the costs associated with our operations continue to rise," wrote Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, in a memo issued last summer and exclusively reported by UPI.
One of the few areas with flexibility in cost is the labor. Companies competing for KBR subcontracts routinely shop the world for the lowest-paid workers to fill positions at U.S. facilities -- cooking, cleaning and maintaining the physical infrastructure of the bases for 140,000 U.S. service members.
In some cases, workers are paid a pittance by Western standards. UPI reported in December that some food service employees from Sierra Leone were paid less than 50 cents an hour for their year-long contract. The workers were contractually prohibited from discussing the terms of their contract and their pay with outsiders but UPI obtained a copy of the employment contract.
Aren't you thrilled? This creates possiblities. I see a solution to our problems with Iraq. See if you can think of it before I tell you.
Here's a crucial hint: the problem with Iraq is the people.
Who are we fighting in Iraq? Ahmed S. Hashim attempts to answer that question in his excellent Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Cornell Univ., $29.95). The result is probably the be st book to appear so far on the U.S. occupation -- a genuine insider's account arguing that the U.S. mission is failing and is likely doomed. In exploring the Iraqi insurgency, Hashim, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College who has done two tours advising the military in Iraq, goes a long way toward explaining why Iraq is drifting toward civil war.
"U.S. intelligence . . . is remarkable for the consistency with which it has been wrong" about the insurgency, writes Hashim, who speaks Arabic and is steeped in U.S. intelligence reports. Contrary to the official U.S. view that the insurgency is built largely around foreign jihadists and Baathist "dead-enders" keen to restore the old dictatorship, Hashim argues that the rebellion is broadly based in Iraq's Sunni Arab community and draws considerable strength from the tribal structure of Iraqi society.
Hint: Are the people a constant? Or are they a variable?
The US military needs to think more out of the box. The Marines and Army are split over what strategy to follow in Iraq.
HADITHA, Iraq — In the region around Qaim, a northwestern Iraqi town near the Syrian border, Marines are fanning out from their main base and moving into villages as part of a new strategy to root out insurgents who enter the country here.
The troops have set up 19 small base camps throughout the area and begun routinely patrolling insurgent hot spots north of the Euphrates River. The deployment follows a strategy favored by a new generation of counterinsurgency experts: disperse, mingle with the population and stay put.
But the shift comes as the Pentagon appears to be moving the overall U.S. military effort in the opposite direction across much of the country. Army units are being concentrated in "super bases" that line the spine of central Iraq, away from the urban centers where counterinsurgency operations take place.
These are two pretty well known approaches that one would expect to emerge from military minds approaching Iraq as a military problem. But I see a totally different way to approach Iraq. As my inspiration I take my hat off to Senators Martinez and Hagel for their terrible Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) which could bring in 66 or 73 or more million immigrants to the United States in the next 20 years. The original unamended version of their bill could have brought in 100 to 200 million.
Well, thinking about those big numbers of immigrants points the way toward how for solve the Iraq problem: Use massive immigration of US government contractors to make the Sunnis a very small minority in the Sunni Triangle. Marginalize them. Make them the former dominant population on their own lands. This is an affordable proposition. For 50 cents an hour the cost per worker per year would be only $1000 per imported worker. Here's the beauty of that fact. Iraq is about 20% Sunni Arab (rough number and estimates vary). Well, with 26 million total that is only 5 million Sunnis (and if I'm off my a couple million it does not invalidate my conclusion). At 50 cents an hour and $1000 per worker per year we could bring in an equal number of foreigners for only $5 billion per year! That's less than we spend in a month! This solution ought to appeal to the Open Borders crowd in the US Senate.
For a few months of our operational costs in Iraq we could bring in 15 or 20 million people from really poor countries and pay them to build a replacement society in the Sunni Triangle. We could drive down local salaries so far the Sunnis would flee into Jordan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and other places in the region. This idea ought to appeal to Bush. To keep the momentum building American companies could set up factories there and employ imported labor with no minimum wage laws or need to provide government-subsidized health care. The US military would defend their investment
Some of the foreign workers could get paid to to build barriers around Sunni towns. Seeing the barriers going up lots of Sunnis would flee. The ones who stay behind would be told they could leave only get to leave if they agreed to leave Iraq.
I know what you are saying: I wish I had thought of that.
How can any supporter of the CIRA legislation in the Senate or in the White House object to this plan? We'd only be doing to Iraq what our leaders want to do to America.
After a British helicopter crash in Basra the Shias in the area got violent.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A British military helicopter crashed in Basra on Saturday, and Iraqis hurled stones at British troops and set fire to three armored vehicles that rushed to the scene. Clashes broke out between British troops and Shiite militias, police and witnesses said.
Police Capt. Mushtaq Khazim said the helicopter was apparently shot down in a residential district. He said the four-member crew was killed, but British officials would say only that there were "casualties."
...
The crowd chanted "we are all soldiers of al-Sayed," a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.
I interpret this as a sign of growing power for Sadr and decreasing power for older and more restrained Shia cleric Sistani. That does not bode well for the continued presence of US and British troops in Iraq.
The Shia youths threw Molotov cocktails at the Brits sent to try to rescue any crash survivors.
BASRA, Iraq -- A fiery melee erupted after a British helicopter apparently was shot down over a wealthy residential neighborhood of this southern city Saturday, in the latest sign of souring relations between Iraq's majority Shiites and the U.S.-led multinational forces in the country's south.
...
By the time the smoke cleared and an all-night curfew was imposed in parts of the city, at least four Iraqis lay dead and 20 others had been injured either in the crash or the ensuing skirmishes between Molotov-cocktail-wielding youth and British soldiers.
The chopper crash and riot marked a nadir in relations between Britain's 8,500 soldiers in Iraq's south and Basra's Shiite population, which was oppressed under Saddam Hussein's regime and initially welcomed the U.S.-led invasion.
The Brits travel a lot in helicopters because ground travel around Basra is too dangerous.
We rely very heavily on helicopters in the south of Iraq to minimise travel by road and successful militant missile strike would be a very serious problem for us,' said one recently retired British senior army officer. 'It could push up casualties significantly.'
Okay, Basra is very far from the Sunni Triangle and Fallujah. It is deep in the Shia heartand. Yet the Brits avoid travelling on the ground, a British helicopter was probably shot down by a rocket, and when the Brits showed up at the crash a hostile crowd quickly grew and turned violent. Will the Shias rise up against the coalition forces? The US military is not big enough to handle such a turn of events.
Does George W. Bush believe his own lie?
Bush briefly noted that he sat in a California church yesterday near a "mother and stepfather" who were "grieving" for their son who had been killed in Iraq.
He went on to say: "I also want to let you know that before you commit troops that you must do everything that you can to solve the problem diplomatically. And I can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max and would have committed troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq, knowing what I know today."
...
Later, Bush said: "I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free."
Bush is such a brazen liar. He even used a scene in a church and the grieving parents of a soldier who died in Iraq as a setting to make his lie sound more credible. How shameless. He never meant for a diplomatic solution to work with Saddam's Iraq. He wanted a war. For evidence see my post "Bush Never Wanted A Diplomatic Solution With Iraq". Bush started to plan for the war 3 months after the 9/11 attack. Bush put himself in a position where Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors couldn't be given much time because Bush had troops nearby he couldn't keep in position for a long period - at least in his thinking. So Bush set in motion events that made war the best option in his mind. George Tenet's "slam dunk" claim about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction makes Tenet one of the worst CIA chiefs since his statement helped make this debacle possible.
What's scary is that he may really believe that everyone has a desire for freedom put there by God Almighty. Never mind the copious quantities of evidence to the contrary. Even never mind the fundamental Christian belief that we are very flawed and sinful creatures. The beliefs he's chosen to make part of his own faith make him immune to mere empirical evidence offered up by the "reality-based community".
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
My guess is Bush believes quite a few of his lies.
A good article by John Ward Anderson and Bassam Sebti of the Washington Post Foreign Service outlines the problems and failures trying to rebuild Iraq.
BAGHDAD -- On the southern outskirts of Baghdad, a sewage treatment plant that was repaired with $13.5 million in U.S. funds sits idle while all of the raw waste from the western half of Baghdad is dumped into the Tigris River, where many of the capital's 7 million residents get their drinking water.
Adjacent to the Karkh sewage plant is Iraq's most advanced sanitary landfill, a new, 20-acre, $32 million dump -- also paid for by the United States -- with a liner to prevent groundwater contamination. It has not had a load of garbage dropped off since the manager of the sewer plant was killed four months ago. Iraqis consider the access roads too dangerous, and Iraqi police rarely venture into the area, a haven for insurgents who regularly lob mortar shells across the city into the Green Zone less than six miles away.
Lawlessness causes destruction and enormous amounts of waste.
A quarter of the completed water and sanitation projects are not operating.
For example, the report said, "as of June 2005, approximately $52 million of the $200 million in completed large-scale water and sanitation projects either were not operating or were operating at lower capacity due to looting of key equipment and shortages of reliable power, trained Iraqi staff, and required chemicals and supplies."
What waste.
A reservist in the US Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Col. Otto Albert Busher III, says that Baghdad easily needs $3 billion in water and sewer repair.
Busher estimated that between 40 percent and 60 percent of the purified water that leaves Baghdad's treatment plants never makes it to city taps because of leaks in the system.
"You're looking at a couple of million dollars of lost water per day," he said. And because the water network was built 25 years ago with brittle cement pipes that have a 20-year life, every time a bomb explodes in Baghdad, the water system is damaged.
Even tanks rumbling on the streets crack the pipes -- and not just water pipes, but sewer pipes that run alongside. Contamination of fresh water by sewage "happens on a daily basis," Busher said.
Just in Baghdad alone that's over $700 million in water lost per year plus sickness caused by the mixing of fresh water with sewage.
Read the whole thing. The Bush Administration underestimated by orders of magnitude the job the United States was taking on by invading Iraq. The US military was and still is too small to handle security properly. Therefore the oil fields are producing less, lots of stuff gets built and then destroyed or stolen or workers get scared away. Projects take longer. The disorder and dysfunction encourages the insurgents and provides them more support.
Meanwhile the neoconservatives want to invade Iran. Imagine the scale of the mess that will result from that. Where will the troops come from? Or will they decide to do a massive air campaign?
But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.
"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.
Bush and Blair did not expect the Iraqis to start fighting each other.
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
What are they telling each other now? That the Shias are soon going to stop using their power in the Iraqi government to do killing and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis? That things will get better?
Why did Bush invade Iraq? Just to score what he thought would be an easy political victory to bolster his domestic popularity? He wasn't mainly concerned about the supposed WMD threat.
The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.
The thing that bothers me most about Iraq is that we have to wait and watch the tragedy play out. Too many people do not want to admit how bad things have gotten and therefore we have to watch as things get even worse. The Shias are behaving increasingly worse. Shia religious parties have control of the government and they are in no mood to try to restrain the Shia militias and Shias in the intelligence services who are busy exacting revenge on the Sunnis.
The liberals do not want to say just how bad things are in Iraq because to explain why things are so bad would involve giving up on liberal myths about the universal appeal of liberal democracy and the capacity of every population to have a liberal democracy. On the right too many defend Bush out of partisan loyalty. How sad.
In 3 years more reporters have died in Iraq than died in the entire period of the Vietnam War.
On Monday, the multinational group Reporters Without Borders said 86 journalists and news assistants have been killed in Iraq since U.S. forces crossed the border from Kuwait three years ago. By contrast, the group said, 63 journalists were killed in Vietnam during the 22-year period of the war there. (Related: Read the report)
The reporters in Vietnam took many fewer precautions. Baghdad is far more dangerous than Saigon was in the 60s. That's a real problem. The reporters can't go to places to talk to people to find out the real story in many cases.
Most of the killed reporters have been Iraqis and Western reporters rarely get killed. (PDF format)
The overwhelming majority were men (92 per cent). Seven women journalists have been killed since the start of the war. The average age of those killed was 35.5. The youngest (Ali Abrahim Aissa) was 21 and the oldest (Shinsuke Hashida) was 61.
Iraqis have been the worst hit. 77 per cent of the journalists and media assistants killed in Iraq in the past three years have been of Iraqi nationality. The proportion of Iraqis has risen. They represented 66 per cent of all the journalists killed until May 2005. The visiting foreign reporters to have died in Iraq were nearly all killed in the first days of the war, in March and April 2003. The most recent case was in August 2005, when American freelance writer Steven Vincent was killed in Basra. Since then, all the media professionals killed in Iraq have been of Iraqi nationality.
While 77% of the killed were Iraqs 11% were from other Arab countries, 8% from Europe, and only 5% from the United States.
The higher Iraqi reporter death rate is probably due to less money spent on keeping them alive.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, US and British journalists have not been the worst hit by this war. This has clearly been due to the radical security measures adopted by most of the US and British news media operating in Iraq. As the war progressed, these media have reinforced their security provisions even more.
Armoured vehicles, bodyguards and very few excursions. Journalists have had to adapt their work to these constraints. In the great majority of cases, the only contact with the local population is conducted by Iraqi employees. Large swathes of Iraqi territory are no longer covered by the foreign press.
The international news media would be unable to maintain a presence in Iraq if they did not make these concessions. There were very few privately-owned security companies in Baghdad in 2003 but now they are flourishing. At least 20 are currently operating in Iraq.
Western media rely heavily on Iraqi freelancers for reporting. Some complain that this slants the coverage. But given the splits within Iraqi society it is hard to say how the coverage gets slanted. Are most of the stringers Sunnis or Shias? Related to the old regime or the new regime or to militias?
The Military Times polled active duty readers of their newspapers (not the military as a whole) and found Bush is down to a 54 percent approval rating among the military personnel polled.
Support for President Bush and for the war in Iraq has slipped significantly in the last year among members of the military’s professional core, according to the 2005 Military Times Poll.
Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent, among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers. Though support both for President Bush and for the war in Iraq remains significantly higher than in the public as a whole, the drop is likely to add further fuel to the heated debate over Iraq policy. In 2003 and 2004, supporters of the war in Iraq pointed to high approval ratings in the Military Times Poll as a signal that military members were behind President Bush’s the president’s policy.
73% expect the US to succeed in Iraq. I wonder what they define as success. I'm expecting corruption and a democratic Shia theocracy which has warmer relations with Iran than with the United States and which will be just as hostile toward Israel as Saddam Hussein was.
The military trusts its own officers more than the President and the President more than Congress.
• 58 percent agreed that President Bush had their best interests at heart, down 11 percentage points from a year ago.
• 64 percent agreed that senior uniformed leaders had their best interests at heart, down six points.
• Congress saw the most dramatic drop: Just 31 percent agreed Congress looked out for their best interests, less than half the number a year ago.
The military holds the press in even lower regard.
I wonder what the longer term trend will be in terms of the military's trust in civilian institutions.
A Christian Science Monitor article argues that US influence in Iraq is declining for multiple reasons.
As the weight of the Shiite Islamist victory in Iraq's election is still being calculated, US influence in the country - in reconstruction, security, and politics - is steadily receding.
While a diminished US role in Iraqi affairs was inevitable, the speed of the retreat raises some risks to the establishing of a stable, US-friendly Iraq. The Shiite parties that dominated the vote in December have closer affinity to Iran than to the US. At the same time, the Bush administration is planning sharp cuts in reconstruction aid, a major point of leverage in Iraqi affairs.
The Shias in Iraq know all the Sunni Arab governments do not like seeing Shias running Iraq. So that'll drive the Shias even more toward the Iranians.
But what alliances will the de facto Kurdish state form? They are landlocked. Will they build alliances with Syria? Iran? Are friendly relations with Turkey out of the question?
The Washington Post reports that the Bush Administration is going to greatly cut rebuilding in Iraq. Much of the reconstruction budget got shifted toward security and other needs.
BAGHDAD -- The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.
A decline in the aid budget means a decline in money available to temporarily buy loyalties. This might cause an increase in the size of the insurgency.
The US government shifted much of the allocated $18.4 billion toward building up the Iraqi military, providing security on reconstruction projects (about 25% of their costs), to build prisons, and for other expenses. So the US probably didn't even spend half
The Iraqi economy was doing better before the war by some important measures.
Oil production stands at roughly 2 million barrels a day, compared with 2.6 million before U.S. troops entered Iraq in March 2003, according to U.S. government statistics.
The national electrical grid has an average daily output of 4,000 megawatts, about 400 megawatts less than its prewar level.
The article reports that more than $1 billion earmarked for electricity was shifted to fund police and security. The US government originally expected to achieve 6,000 megawatts of capacity. Read the full article for more details.
American democracy operates on ignorance.
More than four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, many U.S. adults still believe some of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, which have now been discredited, according to a new Harris Poll. For example:
However, all of these beliefs and others have declined sharply since the questions were asked in February 2005. For example:
As recently as February 2005 47% of the American public believed Saddam had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. The ignorance of the masses is appalling. Never mind all the news reports about Saudi hijackers and an Egyptian leader. In February 2005 44% of the public believed Iraqis were on those airplanes. This illustrates the big problem posed by having a reckless president. Much of the American public is so dumb and ignorant that it can be easily fooled.
I have a hard time seeing democracy as a panacea for the world's ills because most countries in the world have lower average IQs than America and America's average is already low enough to make the poll results above possible. Granted, low IQ isn't the only cause of such ridiculous beliefs. But the believers in that particular set of myths listed above are probably on average dumber than those who do not believe the myths.
Even if the biggest cause of the results above isn't low IQ the alternative explanations are no more comforting about the electorate.
Thanks to Greg Cochran for the tip.
-Rice told interviewers late last month that the U.S. would not need to maintain current troop levels in Iraq "very much longer." Rumsfeld told radio talk show host Sean Hannity that the war would wind down over the next few years. But Bush, in his Naval Academy speech, gave no sense of a departure date. That, he said, would be decided by commanders on the ground and not "politicians in Washington."
-Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference last Tuesday that he would no longer use the word "insurgents," instead substituting "enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government." But Bush used insurgents the next day at the Naval Academy and it appeared 14 times in a 35-page accompanying document issued by the White House.
I'm surprised Bush is not just calling the insurgents "terrorists". After all, his official message on Iraq is that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror, right? Or did he change that while I was busy focusing on other matters? Is Iraq once more primarily about spreading democracy or maybe did WMDs make a come-back?
Dick Cheney's becoming like Spiro T. Agnew attacking all those nattering nabobs of negativism.
Cheney is popular with the party's conservative base. "Cheney has become the junkyard dog" on Iraq, said Stephen Hess, a political analyst who was a speechwriter in the Eisenhower and Nixon White Houses. "He's speaking out to hold the president's base, and he's not giving any quarter."
Well, on Iraq I'm negative. The US troop draw-down next year is going to happen because the US military is overextended and is running out of soldiers to rotate in. The partial withdrawal will be spun as a sign of progress whereas it is really a sign of overreach by an Administration that does not want to pay the political costs of proposing a draft.
Update Richard Clarke told Stephen Colbert that the new acronym for the enemy is "Elgis" or El-Gees" for Enemies of the Legitimate Government of Iraq. Fighting the Elgis is part of the Global War on Terror or Gwot. According to the Bushies we can't win the Gwot until we defeat the Elgis.
The US military plants stories in the Iraqi press.
WASHINGTON — As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.
The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.
Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year.
On the one hand the obvious argument is that all is fair in love and war. On the other hand the United States isn't exactly setting a good example about press freedom.
Not content to simply write stories for publications owned by others, the US military is investing in the growing Iraqi media market.
One of the military officials said that, as part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece.
Ahmad Chalabi's newspaper ran the stories as real news articles while other newspapers labelled the stories as advertisements or as sponsored stories. What do the Iraqi people think of such stories? Also, what's the quality of the stories?
The company doing much of this work is known as The Lincoln Group and was formerly known as Iraqex. Curiously, a site called Source Watch has an article about the Lincoln Group that puts their address on K Street in Washington DC which is the famous area for DC lobbyists.
The remaining support for the Iraq war is partly based on the lie about the connection to terrorism.
In June 2004, for the first time, more than half the public (54 percent) thought the US had made a mistake, a figure that holds today.
With Vietnam, that 50-percent threshold was not crossed until August 1968, several years in; with Korea, it was March 1952, about a year and a half into US involvement.
Why did Americans go sour on the Iraq war so quickly, and what can Bush do about it?
John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion at Ohio State University, links today's lower tolerance of casualties to a weaker public commitment to the cause than was felt during the two previous, cold war-era conflicts. The discounting of the main justifications for the Iraq war - alleged weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism - has left many Americans skeptical of the entire enterprise.
In fact, "I'm impressed by how high support still is," Professor Mueller says. He notes that some Americans' continuing connection of the Iraq war to the war on terror is fueling that support.
Some of Bush's remaining support comes from Republicans who are for whatever the Democrats are against. But some of the war's opposition comes from Democrats who against whatever the Republicans are for.
One reason the American public loses support for wars more quickly is that family sizes have dropped. During WWII my mother's mother had 3 sons in the war and 1 son at home. Plus she had 4 daughters. She could have lost a son and still had plenty of kids. She got lucky and none died. Even my B-17 squandron commander uncle was lucky to complete all his missions. But today far more common single child families who lose a son in Iraq have no kids left.
Also, as death from accidents and diseases has become more rare death seems more of an anomaly. People rarely lose children or young adult kids for any reason. Each death becomes more shocking due to its rarety.
Plus, it is hard to see how the Iraq war improves US security. It doesn't pass a basic plausbility test. If the threat of foreign terrorists to the US mainland was so great as to justify a war that costs the loss of thousands of US lives, the maiming and permanent damage of tens of thousands of more US soldiers, the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the negative reaction that this war has elicited abroad then wouldn't a threat that large also justify, say, large efforts to keep out and hunt down and deport illegal aliens from the Middle East? Wouldn't a threat that large also justify a huge curtailment of granting of visas to people from the countries where Al Qaeda recruits terrorists? The very asymmetry of the response between what the US will do to a country in the Middle East and what the US government won't do to protect us at home makes me think the Bush Administration is just plain lying about their shifting justifications for the Iraq war.
We also do not trust public institutions as much as previous generations did. The Bush Administration's numerous mistakes in the conduct of the Iraq war combine with the optional nature of the war to make people a lot more critical. 9/11 did not have to lead to the Iraq invasion the way the Pearl Harbor attack led to the total mobilization of the US economy in World War II. The very limited effects of 9/11 on US security and the small scale of the required response are demonstrated by the fact that the US did not fully mobilize the economy or institute a draft in response to 9/11. Support for the Iraq war required a dishonest conflation of the battle against Al Qaeda with Saddam's Iraq and a dishonest conflation of all types of "weapons of mass destruction" as somehow equivalent threats even though anthrax and chemical artillery shells pose little threat to the United States as compared to what a single nuclear warhead could do.
Parenthetically speaking, every time Bush tries to link the war in Iraq to Al Qaeda any impulse I have to forgive Dubya for his massive Iraq mistake gets thoroughly smashed. I despise anyone who insults my intelligence by telling me that sort of lie in an attempt to deceive me for his own benefit.
Update Bryanna Bevens points out that a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll puts Bush's disapproval rating on federal spending and immigration as even lower than on Iraq.
According to poll results, this is how 1066 people rated the President on policy matters:
(Disapproval ratings )
Terrorism 49%
Overall job approval 60%
The economy 61%
The situation in Iraq 63%
Controlling federal spending 71%
Immigration 65%The two issues with the highest disapproval rates were federal spending and immigration.
Hmm…Bush II has the lowest approval ratings of his career…65% of the people say they disapprove of his performance on immigration issues. It would seem to me that Americans are fed up with politicians who ignore the problems of illegal immigration and if Bush II was facing re-election, he would surely lose.
The public disapproves of Bush for a wide range of reasons. It is gratifying to see that immigration is one of them. Immigration has ceased to be a fringe issue.
Check out the Iraq Coalition Casualties web page. The October 2005 daily death rate of 3.19 is the 5th highest since the war began. The 4 higher months were January 2005 (4.7 daily death rate), April 2004 (4.67), November 2003(3.67), and March 2003 (7.67).
Factors that did not prevent such a high death rate include:
The enemy forces have improved faster than coalition forces have improved.
Civilian contractor casualties are also way up.
As the violence of the protracted war continues and some 75,000 civilian employees struggle to rebuild the war-torn nation and support the military, contractor casualties mount. Their deaths have more than tripled in the past 13 months.
As of Monday, 428 civilian contractors had been killed in Iraq and another 3,963 were injured, according to Department of Labor insurance-claims statistics obtained by Knight Ridder.
It took about 18 months from the start of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq to reach 1,000 U.S. deaths; it took less than 13 months to reach 1,000 more. A major reason for the surge, statistics show, is the insurgency's embrace of IEDs, together with the military's inability to detect them.
Think about that. The US casualty rate is higher. This is a very inconvenient fact for that minority of the US population who still support the war.
Nearly two thirds of combat deaths are from IEDs.
In the first six months of battle in Iraq, only 11 soldiers -- about 4 percent of the 289 who died -- were killed by homemade roadside bombs. In the last six months, at least 214 service members have been killed by IEDs, or 63 percent of the 339 combat-related deaths and 53 percent of the 400 U.S. fatalities, according to data complied by the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index.
A small task force launched in July 2004 and led by a one-star officer, Army Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, has been credited with developing various technologies to combat the IED threat -- such as equipping soldiers with electronic devices to detonate the makeshift bombs before they can damage U.S. military convoys. The task force has an annual budget of about $1.2 billion.
Yet the insurgents have been able to build bigger, more powerful bombs capable of shredding the armor of military vehicles and decimating five-ton trucks.
Some military officials complain that the Pentagon has made little progress getting the White House to pressure agencies such as the CIA, FBI and Department of Energy to devote more resources and full-time personnel to the anti-IED effort. One difficulty they cite is that a one-star general tends to wield little influence in the government hierarchy.
The US military has also been slow to acquire better armoured vehicles to replace Humvees. Even up-armored Humvees can't cut it against the better IEDs. But as IEDs improve even further with shaped charges and more potent explosives can any vehicle protect its occupants against them?
Maybe the IED problem is unsolvable. Or maybe it can't be solved with the current procurement practices and relationships between US government agencies. My solution: Declare victory and leave. Saves money. Saves lives. Leaves the Iraqis to decide among themselves whether the Shias or Sunnis will rule the Arab areas. We could guarantee a friendly government in the Kurdish area by simply supplying them with arms.
Here's the best news I've heard since the United States invaded Iraq. Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press has the scoop:
NAJAF, Iraq -- Iraq's top Shiite cleric is considering demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. and foreign troops after a democratically elected government takes office next year, according to associates of the Iranian-born cleric.
If U.S. officials and their coalition partners do not comply, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani would use peaceful means such as mass street protests to step up pressure for a pullout schedule, according to two associates of the cleric.
I see this as a positive development. The US could withdraw with assurances from the Shiites that the Shiites can handle the Sunni rebellion on their own. The war camp in the US could declare a victory for their strategy. They could support a US pull-out without having to admit huge mistakes in strategy. Their continued delusion could be a price worth paying to end the $6 billion dollars per month cost, the deaths of US soldiers, and the maimings and permanent injuries of US soldiers. It would also reduce the ability of Sunni extremists to mobilize recruits for jihad.
A call from Sistani would be hard for the United States to ignore.
Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiites who lectures on national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, Calif., said al-Sistani's intention to call for a withdrawal timetable has been an "open secret" for some time.
"He will not do it in an anti-American way, but in a pro-Iraqi way," Nasr said.
Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., said a public declaration by al-Sistani "will leave us without any legs to stand on in Iraq."
"But if we are made to withdraw prematurely, the country will plunge into civil war," said Hashim, who has visited Iraq several times since 2003.
George W. Bush ought to take this as an opportunity for "peace with dignity". He could claim that the US was not retreating and that the Iraqis have decided they can carry on without further US help. Declare success and withdraw.
Thanks to Greg Cochran for the tip.
Update: Modest proposal for British Prime Minister Tony Blair: Send a secret emissary to meet with Sistani's associates to relay a British request to be asked to leave Iraq. Blair needs a way out of Iraq. It has become a huge political liability for him. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani could save his political skin by providing him with the leverage he needs with the Americans to exit Iraq.
Check out this article from the Washington Post. Some National Guardsmen in Lousiana lost their homes in the hurricane yet were called up for catastrophe duty and now are getting shipped off to Iraq even though their families have no homes and their wives lost their jobs.
"It's hard," Sepulvado said amid the bustle of pre-deployment medical checks at his battalion headquarters in Gulfport. Nearly 70 percent of the members of his battalion had their homes damaged, with the homes of 115 destroyed or unlivable.
Soon after Katrina plowed through, Sepulvado was sent to work at Gulfport's Hope Haven, a home for abandoned children. As he and comrades ripped out walls and carpeting, repaired shingles and moved appliances, they worried about their own catastrophes. "I was kind of thinking, 'What am I doing here?' " he said. "Why are we doing this when we lost our own homes?"
Like others in his unit, Sepulvado waits for an insurance check, hoping to get his family--now living with parents -- settled before he deploys. His wife, like several other spouses, lost her job when her workplace was destroyed.
The US military is not big enough to fight in Iraq, handle a disaster at home, and let National Guard soldiers have time to take care of families when they lose their own homes.
The Iraq War will go down in history as an act of foolish and counterproductive overstretch. Hurricane Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans similarly sends a reminder that the middle and upper class populations of the United States have only tenuous control of the third world populations in American cities. We can not afford to send soldiers to control third world cities abroad when we do not have enough soldiers to control third world cities at home.
University of Maryland associate professor of politics Karol Soltan just returned from a trip to Iraq and found that the negotiations for the "constitution" really are negotiatons for a peace treaty between rival factions jostling for power.
"It's not like Philadelphia. They're not 13 relatively homogeneous states at little risk of fighting a civil war. They're trying to prevent an early-stage civil war from exploding. They've spent a lot of time trying to settle borders and generally diminish the potential for violent conflict. In effect, they're working out key provisions of a peace treaty. Constitution-making is much more difficult."
"I entered Iraq from the north and the first thing that struck me was the flag. It was the flag of Kurdistan at the border. There wasn't an Iraqi flag in sight. It felt like Kurdistan not Iraq. The Kurds have had de facto independence for a decade, and that's a real constraint on negotiators."
"In its current form, the proposed constitution looks decentralized enough to diminish the chance of a large-scale civil war in the short run, though in general things don't look good. Some legislative and enforcement provisions that might have helped long-term stability were dropped. Any effort to create a more centralized government will only make things worse."
The Kurds effectively have their own country at this point. My guess is that in the short term the Kurds will settle for de facto independence while refraining from an official declaration of secession. If they can get a cut of the oil money and autonomy they can avoid a confrontation with the United States over an officially declared secession. But the Kurds are biding their time and may yet secede once US forces withdraw.
Even the Shiite region has deep splits. Rival Shiite militias battled for a few days last week.
Trouble in the south began when supporters of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr tried to reopen his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, which was closed after the end of fighting there last year.
When Shiites opposed to al-Sadr tried to block the move, fights broke out. Four people were killed, 20 were injured and al-Sadr's office was set afire, police said.
That enraged al-Sadr's followers, who blamed the country's biggest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI, for the Najaf trouble.
Sadr's supporters recently demonstrated against draft constitution/peace treaty. If Sadr's Mahdi Army reconstitutes and the Sunnis reject the offered oil money sharing peace deal then the civil war will just continue on.
Sadr's enemies want him banished.
NAJAF, Iraq -- More than 1,000 Shiite Muslim demonstrators clashed last night with supporters of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, leaving at least seven people dead and dozens wounded, according to officials at a local hospital.
Waving banners demanding the "expulsion of the outsiders," the crowd gathered near the Shrine of Ali -- a holy site for Shiites -- to call on the provincial governor to banish Sadr's Mahdi Army. Many residents of Najaf blame Sadr for heavy damage the city sustained during a Mahdi Army uprising against U.S. forces a year ago.
On the bright side some Sunnis in Ramadi defended their Shiite minority against Zarqawi's warriors.
BAGHDAD, Aug. 14 -- Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers.
Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said.
Iraq is now effectively broken up into a set of mini-states controlled by rival militia warlords. But if the central government can maintain control of the oil money it can use the power to hand out oil money to buy some allegiances. The crucial role of oil money in buying allegiance of factions to the center means that Ahmad Chalabi's control of the oil fields means Chalabi might be in the position to decide whether Iraq remains a single country.
Update: I have a basic question with regard to the constitution/peace treaty: Do the people who are negotiating the peace treaty represent enough of the warring factions to make a peace treaty that will end most of the fighting? At minimum, will the deal at least bring enough of the right warring factions onto the side of the government so that government money could go toward funding these factions to go suppress the other factions that continue to fight?
In other words: Is a negotiated peace even possible at this stage?
I see one problem with the "oil cash for peace" formula: Iraq's oil production is still lower than it was under Saddam. Does current production supply enough money to hand out to buy loyalty to a peace deal?
Iraqi oil production bounces around as facilities get blown up and repaired. But assume 2 million barrels per day of production (I'm being optimistic though not as optimistic as the Panglossian war camp). Also assume $60 per barrel (and I remember war hawks who claimed the war would lower the price of oil and thereby pay for itself). At that price we are talking $120 million per day or $43 billion per year. Divided over a population of 26 million people that works out to about $1653 per person per year.
Could that amount of money buy peace? Some of the money goes toward subsidizing food prices, electric prices, gasoline prices, and assorted government services including the military. Some goes to assorted corrupt officials whose Swiss bank accounts are no doubt swelling. Does that leave enough money to buy peace? Do the people in power possess the skill and motives to use the money to buy peace? I'm skeptical.
Working for the Knight-Ritter newspapers Tom Lasseter continues to write a series of insightful and depressing reports from Iraq. Regular ParaPundit readers will not be shocked to learn that when Lasseter went out on patrols with US advisors and the Iraqi Army he found the Iraqi Army is not ready to fight the insurgency.
Three weeks of patrols and interviews in restive Anbar province suggested that Iraqi security forces will need years of preparation before they're ready to take charge of the complex and violent tribal areas of western Iraq. President Bush has said repeatedly that U.S. troops will withdraw only when Iraqi troops are ready to take over.
Many of the Iraqi troops were in poor condition, unable or unwilling to complete long foot patrols without frequent breaks. They often didn't know what to do in complicated situations, standing back and letting American Marines and soldiers take the lead.
Some of the Panglossian war hawks like to cite figures like how many schools we built. Well, imagine you have the choice of either living in a city with lots of new schools or in a city with a police force. Which would you choose?
Hit, a city of 130,000, has no police force. North of Hit, in Haditha - near the site of attacks that killed 20 Marines this month - the police chief handed over all the patrol cars to the Marines in January.
"He said, "We can't protect these anymore,'" said Maj. Plauche St. Romain, the head intelligence officer for the Marine battalion that oversees Haditha, Haqlaniya and Hit. "He turned in the uniforms and (armor) vests, too."
That police chief was assassinated in April.
Want to know what passes for seasoned troops in the Iraqi Army?
During a recent operation in Haqlaniya, a squad from the Iraqi Intervention Force, one of the more seasoned units in Iraq's army, swept through neighborhoods looking for insurgents. One of the soldiers was so overweight that he had trouble putting on his flak vest.
During a raid on a suspected insurgent hideout, the Iraqis discovered they'd forgotten their bolt cutters. Instead of sending someone back to get them, they tried breaking a lock off an outside gate with the butts of their AK-47s. By the time they were through, they'd made so much noise that everyone in the neighborhood was aware of their presence on what was supposed to be a stealth operation.
When they arrived at their second objective, still without bolt cutters, the men wanted to use grenades to breach the door.
Their supervisor, U.S. Army Capt. Terrence Sommers, stepped in and said they'd risk hurting themselves and would give away their position to insurgents.
The Bush Administration "exit strategy" relies on having a bunch of clowns take over the fighting. The Bush Administration is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
The article also reports on US military advisors who have no interpreters and hence no way to communicate with Iraqi units they supposedly advise. Read the whole article. The mind boggles.
If you want to know how bad things are going in Iraq read all these articles in full.
After a recent meeting with local tribal sheiks in Fallujah, Marine Lt. Col. Jim Haldeman walked to the back of the room and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
The gathering was supposed to be an exercise in civic empowerment but quickly degenerated into the Iraqis demanding that they get identification cards designating them as sheiks, which would bar local security forces from arresting them on the streets.
"All of these guys are f------ muj," Haldeman said, using the Arabic term for "holy warriors," mujahedeen, which American troops frequently use to describe the insurgents.
Haldeman figures they all want to slit his throat.
The battle in the Sunni heartland's Anbar province has become a war of attrition and US officers do not expect to win. (same article here)
After repeated major combat offensives in the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, and after losing hundreds of soldiers and Marines in Anbar during the past two years -- including 75 since June 1 -- many U.S. officers and enlisted men assigned to Anbar have stopped talking about winning a military victory in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland. Instead, they're trying to hold a handful of population centers and hit smaller towns in a series of quick strikes designed to temporarily disrupt insurgent activities.
"I don't think of this in terms of winning," said Col. Stephen Davis, who commands a task force of about 5,000 Marines in an area of some 24,000 square miles in western Anbar. Instead, he said, his Marines are fighting a war of attrition. "The frustrating part for the [ American] audience, if you will, is they want finality. They want a fight for the town and in the end the guy with the white hat wins."
Neoconservatives will be angered to learn that the US Marines call their enemies "Mujahedeen" rather than the more derisive "terrorists". You can see an example of that above where Lt. Col. Jim Haldeman calls them "muj". The neocons can't very well blame leftist BBC editors for this choice. So how can they explain it? A leftist US officer corps and leftist enlisted grunts?
Instead of referring to the enemy derisively as "terrorists," as they used to, Marines and soldiers now give the insurgents a measure of respect by calling them mujahedeen, an Arabic term meaning "holy warrior" that became popular during the Afghan guerrilla campaign against the Soviet Union.
Lasseter has spent enough time in Iraq the last couple of years to see the decline in the security situation as his editor notes.
Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter made regular trips to Fallujah in the summer and winter of 2003, interviewing tribal sheiks and residents before the town fell to insurgents. He wrote extensively about the brewing unrest in the region and the misunderstandings and conflicts between residents and the U.S. military units stationed there. During that period he was able to walk freely throughout the town with a translator. He was last in Fallujah without military escort in early 2004 when insurgents overran the downtown police station. After men repeatedly pointed AK-47s at his chest and face, and threatened to shoot him, he decided not to return except with U.S. troops. Insurgents took over the town that April. He reported on troops in Ramadi last summer and wrote about the scaling back of patrols there and low morale among troops. He returned to Anbar province in November, when U.S. troops retook Fallujah in the worst urban combat since Vietnam. Lasseter spent three weeks in the province this month embedded with Marine and Army units in Haqlaniya, Haditha, Hit, Ramadi and Fallujah.
"It doesn't do much good to push them out of these areas only to let them go back to areas we've already cleared," said Lt. Col. Tim Mundy, who commands the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Marine Regiment. Mundy, 40, of Waynesville, N.C., whose battalion is based in Qaim, added: "We're successful at taking some of his equipment and killing some insurgents, but the effectiveness is limited because we can't stay ... we go back to camp and then we get reports that they've come back in."
- In Fallujah, a city that Marines and soldiers retook from insurgents last November in the heaviest urban combat since Vietnam, fighters have begun to return and renew their intimidation campaign.
"As we all know, we have mujahedeen operating in small squads throughout the city," Marine Sgt. Manuel Franquez said before leading a patrol in Fallujah last week, using an Arabic term that means "holy warrior."
One interesting point: The Rand Corporation analysts James Quinliven and James Dobbins argued before the Iraq war that peacekeeping operations need 1 soldier per 50 troops. Therefore the US should have built up a force of a half million soldiers to handle Iraq. It could be argued that the US really only needs to deploy that big of a force in the Sunni Triangle and indeed a disproportionate portion of US troops are deployed there. But the war in the Triangle suggests that even the 50 to 1 ratio understates the size of a force needed. The US is not engaged in "peacekeeping" so much as a counter-insurgency war. The ratio of troops to populace needed might be much higher than the Rand result suggests.
The US military is not going to put down the insurgency. At the same time, Iraqi Shia soldiers have very little motivation to do what the US military lacks the forces to do. The war in Iraq will continue while an increasing portion of the American public gradually learns of the futility of our presence there.
If the Panglossians were correct and the insurgency was on the wane then US casualty would fall. US casualty rates are up near levels seen in some of the worst months since the war began. If the insurgents had shifted their attention way from the Americans and toward the Iraqi government forces then US casualty levels would drop. The levels have not dropped. If the US improvements in tactics and equipment were happening faster than the insurgents improved their methods then the US would again experience a drop in the casualty rate. Again, this has not happened. Iraqi government forces deaths have tripled this year without any decrease in US deaths.
If you want a reality check on Panglossian claims about how the Iraq war is going the place to go is the page Iraqi Coalition Casualties. The rosy view of strengthening Iraqi military forces and a dwindling insurgency runs up against US casualty rate figures by month. As the time of this writing the coalition death rate per day so far in August 2005 is 3.05. That surpasses every month in the chart except March 2003 (7.67), November 2003 (3.67), and April 2004 (4.67). Well, how to square that with the rosy scenario?
One argument is that the insurgency is shrinking in size while simultaneously becoming more sophisticated. This might be true. But if the Panglossian war hawks are correct then a few other factors ought to be causing a decline in US casualties: A) the increase in the size and capabilities of the Iraqi military, B) the hardening of US bases and vehicles, and C) improvements in intelligence about the insurgents. Why aren't these factors lowering US casualties?
If (as some war hawks claim) the insurgency really has shifted its attention toward softer targets such as Iraqi civilians and Iraqi government soldiers then why haven't US casualty rates plummeted? Could it be that the insurgency has grown more capable and has simultaneously kept US casualty rates up while also raising casualty rates of Iraqi government soldiers and civilians?
Now, perhaps good news awaits right around the corner. In a few months attrition of the insurgents combined with factors that work in our favor ought to cause a gradual decline in US casualties. But then again, the use of shaped charges to up the lethality of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could spread much more widely in the insurgency and the gains made by use of quite expensive better armored of vehicles could get cancelled out by relatively cheap improvements in IED design. Also, the continued rise of militias who are partitioning Iraq could lead to larger scale civil war and more attacks on US troops. Also, the Iraqi military could continue to fight the way most Arab armies fight: poorly due to reasons familiar to long time ParaPundit readers such as the practice of cousin marriage.
The long standing question in my mind: "Unilaterally Withdraw From Iraq Or First Partition?" But that question has been morphing of late: Will the partitioning of Iraq by the Iraqi militias survive the US withdrawal or will a new ruthless strongman arise to put Iraq back together again?
A Washington Post article reports that reality is sinking in for the Bush Administration on Iraq. Another dream bites the dust.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
Some of the Bushies realize they need to shed their false beliefs.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
American soldiers have been fighting for Islam and for an Islamic republic. Does this make US soldiers into Jihadists?
"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. "That process is being repeated all over."
The Bush Administration is slow to learn from empirical evidence. They have their dreams. They are very fond of their dreams. Reality sinks in only very slowly. Lots of people are dying to provide them with lessons in the real world. Read the whole article.
This reminds me of