We are just keeping a lid on Iraq - a leaky lid.
EVEN if American and Iraqi forces are able to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are still three worrisome possibilities of new forms of fighting that could divide Iraq and deny the United States any form of “victory.”
One is that the Sunni tribes and militias that have been cooperating with the Americans could turn against the central government. The second is that the struggle among Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and other ethnic groups to control territory in the north could lead to fighting in Kirkuk, Mosul or other areas.
The third risk — and one that is now all too real — is that the political struggle between the dominant Shiite parties could become an armed conflict.
How long will we have to pay before we can all admit that we've tried long enough? At what point can our elites admit that a large fraction of the Iraqi people - and not just some relatively small group of terrorists - are the cause of the fighting between factions in Iraq?
What are we seeking to prove at this point other than that we have enough willpower to stand up to whoever might threaten us? Really, what is the point of a US presence in Iraq?
A New York Times piece reports that the Bush Administration has had to lower its expectations about political progress in Iraq aimed at reconciling the major factions.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 — With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.
These factions don't want to be reconciled. The Shias don't want to give anything to the Sunnis. The Sunnis don't want to submit to majority rule because majority rule is Shiite rule. The Kurds just want to run their semi-seceded zone as an unofficial Kurdish republic.
Keep in mind: The democratization faith is irrational. Democracy is not a universal balm. Sometimes groups have irreconcilable differences. They can either divorce or one faction can brutalize the other faction into submission. Sometimes dialog is not the road to a happy ending.
The Shiites feel less need to bow to American pressure because improvements. I bet the Shiite leaders feel they can simply rule as elected rulers of the majority since the Sunnis are looking defanged.
There have been signs that American influence over Iraqi politics is dwindling after the recent improvements in security — which remain incomplete, as shown by a deadly bombing Friday in Baghdad. While Bush officials once said they aimed to secure “reconciliation” among Iraq’s deeply divided religious, ethnic and sectarian groups, some officials now refer to their goal as “accommodation.”
"Accommodation". I think that's a code word for partial but unofficial partition.
Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, who has spent a lot of time in Iraq and even wrote a book about it, says the Sunnis and Shias might just be holding back until US troop levels go down.
Kingston, Ontario: Mr. Ricks: Here's a two-part question. Do you think that the success in reducing violence in Iraq is because of a decisive breakthrough against the insurgency, or are the insurgents just biding their time? And do you have the sense that the Americans have any control at all over the political process in Iraq, or are the Iraqi factions just pursuing their own strategies? Thanks.
Thomas E. Ricks: Well, that's the big question. Are the warring sides standing down until Uncle Sam gets out of the way?
The Sunnis have largely stopped fighting while they seek to cut a deal to get a place at the table in post-Saddam Iraq. And the Shiites have stopped fighting the Americans for at least six months, they say -- and why not? With the Sunnis standing down, Uncle Sam would be focusing all his firepower on the Shiites.
But what if the Sunnis get sick of waiting? And what happens when U.S. forces start declining in number next year?
Ricks observes that the current level of violence only looks good because it is compared to what came immediately before the surge. We are currently at a level of violence similar to the 2005 period and that was considered pretty bad at the time. It is like oil prices. If oil goes back down to $70 per barrel some will point to that price and argue that worries about oil demand outstripping supply are unfounded. I guess we should have let Iraq get far worse before surging so that the amount of improvement possible could have been much larger.
Ricks also reports that US commanders in Iraq see the Shiite leaders as the biggest threat to the goals that the US wants to achieve in Iraq.
CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq -- Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.
In more than a dozen interviews, U.S. military officials expressed growing concern over the Iraqi government's failure to capitalize on sharp declines in attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but "it's unclear how long that window is going to be open."
Suppose the US unsurges in mid 2008 and the level of violence goes back up again. Then what is the point of staying? I think we should have left a few years ago. I can think of far more useful ways to spend a few billion dollars a week that don't even cost hundreds or thousand of American lives and which don't leave tens of thousans of others with permanent damage to mind or body.
The decrease in bombs isn't leading to political reconciliation. The Shias fear the Sunnis will regain power in a more peaceful Iraq.
CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq -- Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.
In more than a dozen interviews, U.S. military officials expressed growing concern over the Iraqi government's failure to capitalize on sharp declines in attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but "it's unclear how long that window is going to be open."
Missing an opportunity? That's so not how the Shia leaders see it. Writing in Asia Times Syrian political analyst Sami Moubayed reports that the Shias fear that Sunnis are going to join the military in large numbers to get control of it.
One reason could be a last-minute decision by Shi'ite leaders to get Shi'ite young men into the armed forces - regardless of their political affiliations - to prevent these posts from being filled by Sunnis under pressure from US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates, operating under the principle of former US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, has insisted on bringing Sunnis back into senior government and military posts.
One the one hand, militias are being absorbed into the army. On the other hand, 1,500 Iraqis are returning to Iraq per day (according to the London-based al-Hayat) from Syria. That too is troubling the prime minister and Muqtada since most of those returning in large numbers are Sunnis. This comes after Syria decided to implement restrictions on visas to control the 1.5 million-plus Iraqi community in Syria. If al-Hayat is correct and this pace continues, in nearly four years all Iraqis will be out of Syria and back in the civil war arena in Baghdad.
Moktada al Sadr's Mahdi Army are joining the Iraqi military in large numbers as a way to make the Iraqi military even more Shia than it already is.
Maliki and Muqtada fear a rebirth of Iraqi Sunnis at the expense of Shi'ites. This explains 18,000 Shi'ites being formally authorized to hold arms by joining the Iraqi army. This explains why Maliki is becoming bolder in turning his back on the Accordance Front. Recently, he received a list of 16 names earmarked to replace those of the Accordance Front in government, put forward by the Iraqi Awakening Council in Ramadi. Most prominent on the list was Sheikh Hamid al-Hayes, ex-Anbar Awakening president and current head of Iraq Awakening.
Sadr on the inside is going to work against granting the Sunnis much political power. Sadr wants the Sunnis to submit to Shia rule.
The US might have temporarily succeeded in reducing the return on fighting in the streets. But the Sunnis still haven't reconciled themselves the Shia rule. Plus, the Shias (accurately I think) see the Sunnis as more dangerous to Shia rule when the Sunnis are inside the government. So why should the Shias try to reach out to the Sunnis as top US officers would like to see them do? That reaching out would put Sunnis closer to the levers of governmental control.
By the way, the second article above reports a huge surge of Sunni Iraqis returning to Iraq from Syria. At the same time this is happening liberal writers such as Fred Kaplan and Daniel Byman at Slate are arguing we need to let in a huge flood of Iraqi Muslim refugees. I say we also all sign up for "Getting hit on the head lessons" in advance so that we get into the spirit of it.
I'm so glad I do not work as the press secretary for President Bush. I couldn't stand to justify the twists and turns and contradictions of George W's policies in the Middle East. Um, since the United States has taken on a missionary war to spread democracy around the world out the barrel of a gun shouldn't the US accede to the wishes of democratically elected Shias to not ally the US with not-democratically-elected Sunnis?
BAGHDAD, Oct. 2 -- The largest Shiite political coalition in Iraq demanded Tuesday that the U.S. military abandon its recruitment of Sunni tribesmen into the Iraqi police, saying some are members of "armed terrorist groups" and are engaged in killing, kidnapping and extortion under the guise of fighting the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The statement by the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite bloc of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is the most direct rebuke to a policy that U.S. military officers hold up as one of their most important achievements over the past year.
The United States is ignoring the wishes of the Shia majority. Does the Bush Administration now believe that thwarting the desires of the majority is sometimes morally acceptable policy? My guess is they've lost some of their faith in democracy but aren't keen to go on record about this. They claim moral legitimacy for their crusade based on the moral superiority of democracy in all cases. Their public profession of faith in democracy as the universal balm for stopping terrorism makes their current Iraqi policies a bit difficult to reconcile with their faith.
Make friends to live a safer life. The Brits made a deal with Shia cleric Moktada's rocking Mahdi Army to ensure a fairly safe British withdrawal.
Basra, Iraq - The last contingent of British soldiers based in the center of this southern city will leave by Friday, says a senior Iraqi security official, adding that a deal has been struck with leaders of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army to ensure their safe departure.
As they pull back to a base outside Basra, the British will leave a vital provincial capital in the throes of a turf battle between Shiite factions – one that Mr. Sadr's militia appears to be winning.
Is Sadr on a roll, headed for rule over the Shia zone in Iraq? Or will his militia fragment as soon as they near total dominance?
The Iraqi "central" government (i.e. the Green Zone government that the US continues to back) is going to try to take over once the Brits leave. But the Mahdi guys seem like they have the numerical advantage.
The Iraqi official says the palaces will be handed over to an Iraqi force dispatched from Baghdad and will not be given to the controversial provincial authority, which is embroiled in a power struggle between rival Shiite political parties. This 3,000-strong Iraqi force will consist of two Army battalions and elements from the Ministry of Interior's commando unit.
The Mahdi Army, which according to one estimate, numbers about 17,000 in Basra and is divided into about 40 sariyas (company-size military unit), is the strongest among its rivals in the militia-infiltrated police force and it has influence over vital sectors such as health, education, power distribution, and ports.
Damien Cave of the New York Times describes the incredibly fragmented and divided nature of Iraqi society.
In part, of course, Iraq remains a place pocked by violence and fear, which makes compromise difficult. But more important, say Iraqi political commentators and officials, Iraq has become a cellular nation, dividing and redividing into competing constituencies that have a greater stake in continued chaos than in compromise.
In most areas, for most Iraqis, the central government today is either irrelevant or invisible. Provinces and even neighborhoods have become the stages where power struggles play out. As a result, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — or elements of each faction — have come to feel that they can do a better job on their own.
When I refer to the central government as the "Green Zone government" I'm only partly exaggerating. It has little influence over large swathes of Iraq. Even the central government is broken up into factions with different ministries under the control of different parties and militias.
The overstretched US military can lower Iraqi deaths in limited areas. But the US military can't maintain its current level of deployment in Iraq. Some time in 2008 US forces are going to go way down. Then what happens?
What could change by the time US forces start go withdraw? More thorough ethnic purging. The fewer Shias and Sunnis living near each other will mean fewer opportunities to kill each other. Also, the local competition between militias might resolve with clear winners. Less competition for control should also lower the level of violence.
Of course, an ethnically purged nation dominated by regional militias isn't the vision that the Bush White House wants us to imagine Iraq is headed for. But if Iraq continues to head in that direction and the violence drops we can expect the Bush White House to mendaciously claim credit for the drop in violence. Will our leaders then lie their way out of Iraq declaring success the whole way? Tricky Dick "Peace With Honor" Nixon would approve.
As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.
There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.
The pretty lies about human nature (e.g. everyone loves freedom) which our intellectual elites have enshrined as virtues come at big costs. The Iraq Debacle is one of those costs. Our immigration policy is another of those costs. The lies have gotten too costly. We should abandon the lies and the damaging policies they are used to justify.
My own curiosity about the world and my desire to understand it overwhelms any impulse I have to go along with the mythologies promoted by our intellectuals. I refuse to believe the nonsense that passes as conventional wisdom among the talking heads. Plus, I do not have sufficient intellectual resources to make sense of the world if I also have to reconcile what I see with what I'm supposed to believe. Some smart people find the time, motivation, and mental energy to rationalize some sort of consistency between their beliefs and the conflicting evidence of their senses. But I prefer to ditch the false beliefs in order to free up mental resources and apply those resources to better puzzle out what really is true.
Back in the year 2000 if you would have asked me where the neocons fit on the political spectrum I would not have placed the neoconservatives on the Left. After all, they placed themselves on the Right and they drew parallels between themselves and right-wingers who are big on a strong military. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion I figured that surely the neocon rhetoric about democracy in Iraq was just marketing gibber to sell the war. I figured the neocons were sufficiently realistic to have some secret plan about how to keep some Baathists in the Iraqi military and wouldn't base real policy on the idea that Jeffersonian Democracy has a place in Iraq. But I greatly overestimated both the intellectual abilities of the neocons and their grasp on reality.
Today my take on the neocons has changed. I see them as leftists because they share left-wing assumptions about human nature even as they make conservative arguments when those arguments help them advance their goals. Yet as Lawrence Auster points out, the neocons continue to flatter themselves that they are fighting against unrealistic views of human nature and defending society against the Left.
Neoconservatives, as I have observed a thousand times, refuse to respond to arguments from their right. Their self-concept is that they are in a heroic war against the left. Since the left sees them as extreme right-wingers and excludes them, as PBS excluded Gaffney's movie, the neocons see themselves as being as far-right as any reasonable person can possibly be, and thus they cannot conceive that their own position is actually a liberal position open to legitimate criticism from conservatives. Therefore they automatically and rudely dismiss any criticism from their right as crackpottery, as Gaffney dismissed mine.
And that, as I said, is the landscape of mainstream American politics when it comes to Islam: on one side, the anti-American, pro-jihadist left, and on the other side, the deluded, neocon "right," which imagines that it is defending America from its jihadist enemies, but in reality is legitimizing and empowering jihad by telling people that the vast majority of Muslims are moderates whom we should welcome into our country.
I think Muslim immigration is a great litmus test for whether someone really is willing to put defense of our society ahead of promotion of a foolish Panglossian view of human nature. On immigration in general and on Muslim immigration in particular the neocons show their true stripes. They are liberal universalists who really believe that all the peoples of the world can get converted into liberal democrats.
Neocons defend the war in Iraq as a necessary battlefield in their Global War On Terror (GWOT). Never mind that a war against a tactic makes no sense. Never mind that the Muslims are not militarily formidable. The neocons present only 3 choices as tactics against the Muslims: 1) Kill the Muslims, 2) Capitulate to the Muslims; and 3) Reform the Muslims. They pose as humane by choosing option 3 over option 2 and they pose as tough guys by choosing option 3 over option 2. But in doing so they willfully ignore another option altogether: 4) Demographic Containment. In a nutshell, keep the bulk of Muslims out of non-Muslim countries.
Larry Auster labels containment as separationism. By whatever name, the idea is simple enough: The Muslims can only come to Western nations if we let them. But the neocons want us to believe that only a small extremist element in Islam is a problem for the rest of us. To believe otherwise would require an admission that liberalism does not hold universal strong appeal to all the peoples of the world. The unconservative neocons do not want us to entertain that idea and therefore won't even mention policy proposals based on that idea. Their failure to do so tells us they really want us to believe a ridiculous faith in human nature.
New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise, whose reports from Iraq I have very much liked, is leaving after spending about half her time there since the invasion. Tavernise says she's lost touch with many people who have left Iraq or died.
A PAINFUL measure of just how much Iraq has changed in the four years since I started coming here is contained in my cellphone. Many numbers in the address book are for Iraqis who have either fled the country or been killed. One of the first Sunni politicians: gunned down. A Shiite baker: missing. A Sunni family: moved to Syria.
I first came to Iraq in April 2003, at the end of the looting several weeks after the American invasion. In all, I have spent 22 months here, time enough for the place, its people and their ever-evolving tragedy to fix itself firmly in my heart.
The middle class moderates have left and the extremists remain.
The moderates are mostly gone. My phone includes at least a dozen entries for middle-class families who have given up and moved away. They were supposed to build democracy here. Instead they work odd jobs in Syria and Jordan. Even the moderate political leaders have left. I have three numbers for Adnan Pachachi, the distinguished Iraqi statesman; none have Iraqi country codes.
She says a year ago Iraqis would get angry if you asked them which sect they belong to. But now they often introduce themselves with their sect identification. She relates anecdotes of Shias who are consumed with hatred of Sunnis.
She still finds potential for optimism.
For those eager to write off Iraq as lost, one fact bears remembering. A great many Shiites and Kurds, who together make up 80 percent of the population, will tell you that in spite of all the mistakes the Americans have made here, the single act of removing Saddam Hussein was worth it. And the new American plan, despite all the obstacles, may have a chance to work. With an Iraqi colleague, I have been studying a neighborhood in northern Baghdad that has become a dumping ground for bodies. There, after American troops conducted sweeps, the number of corpses dropped by a third in September. The new plan is built around that kind of tactic.
I think this is too little too late. Too many have been killed and the killings have left bitterness, mistrust, and hatred in their wake. The ethnic cleansing has emptied whole neighborhoods. I also think this US troop surge attempt goes up against a backdrop of even pre-war conditions that overwhelm attempts to maintain order. But the Shia Iraqi government officials are not on-board with the US strategy anyway.
But the odds are stacked against the corps of bright young officers charged with making the plan work, particularly because their Iraqi partner — the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — seems to be on an entirely different page. When American officials were debating whether to send more troops in December, I went to see an Iraqi government official. The prospect of more troops infuriated him. More Americans would simply prolong the war, he said.
“If you don’t allow the minority to lose, you will carry on forever,” he said.
I happen to agree with the Iraqi Shiites who think this way. As long as the Sunnis have any doubt whether the Shia government will last the Sunnis will keep on fighting. Tavernise sees this attitude as a product of their abuse by Saddam. But I think that's a misunderstanding.
The remarks struck me as a powerful insight into the Shiites’ thinking. Abused under Mr. Hussein, they still act like an oppressed class. That means Iraqis are looking into a future of war, at least in the near term. As one young Shiite in Sadr City said to me: “This just has to burn itself out.”
I was just watching a C-SPAN rebroadcast of a speech by historian Niall Ferguson about his recent book War of the World which attempts to explain why the really big killings of humans occurred in the 20th century. He's come up with what he calls his "E" rules: Ethnic disintegration, Economic volatility, and Empire collapse. Think about central and eastern Europe where the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires collapsed. The collapses left ethnic groups living under the rule of other ethnic groups in many new countries. The Great Depression added to the economic volatility. Massive killings and population shifts ensued and not just by the Nazis.
Well, Ferguson says that the Middle East has 5 times the economic volatility of the United States. Within the Middle East Iraq has been hit far harder by economic problems due to the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, followed by a crushing military defeat that included massive damage to economic infrastructure. Then the sanctions and declining oil production added to the woes and the Iraqis suffered a big decline in living standards. Now the civil war keeps the economy in bad shape and cycles of revenge between groups that do not trust each other have brought Iraq to a point that makes it extremely difficult to fix. I think the best solution is to help the Shias and Sunnis move away from each other.
The Times also has an excellent 6 minute MP3 of Sabrina Tavernise relating observations about her experiences in Iraq. Worth a listen.
Mark Santora of the New York Times spent a couple of days embedded with an American training on patrols with Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad. Santora found the Sunnis see the Iraqi military as agents of Shia ethnic cleansers and high level Iraqi government officials as obstructors of military operations that might hurt the standing of their factions.
BAGHDAD, Dec. 27 — The car parked outside was almost certainly a tool of the Sunni insurgency. It was pocked with bullet holes and bore fake license plates. The trunk had cases of unused sniper bullets and a notice to a Shiite family telling them to abandon their home.
“Otherwise, your rotten heads will be cut off,” the note read.
The soldiers who came upon the car in a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad were part of a joint American and Iraqi patrol, and the Americans were ready to take action. The Iraqi commander, however, taking orders by cellphone from the office of a top Sunni politician, said to back off: the car’s owner was known and protected at a high level.
For Maj. William Voorhies, the American commander of the military training unit at the scene, the moment encapsulated his increasingly frustrating task — trying to build up Iraqi security forces who themselves are being used as proxies in a spreading sectarian war. This time, it was a Sunni politician — Vice Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie — but the more powerful Shiites interfered even more often.
George W. Bush's coming big surge of US troops into Iraq will just train more Shias to fight Sunnis. The Shias will receive their training as soldiers in the Iraqi government. They will then proceed to use their skills and equipment to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. Some will do this while acting as Iraqi soldiers. Others will leave the Iraqi army and attack Sunnis in cooperation with the Shias who dominate the Iraqi security services. We call this "nation building".
“I have come to the conclusion that this is no longer America’s war in Iraq, but the Iraqi civil war where America is fighting,” Major Voorhies said.
Major Voorhies sees the obvious. Our soldiers are tasked with pretending there is a non-sectarian middle in Iraq that has control of the Iraqi central government. The idea is that if we just provide enough support and training to those officially part of the central government then the central government will become the more powerful middle against the sects and factions all around it. But there's no non-partisan center in Iraq. There's no objective and impartial civil service staffing the ministries. We are dealing with tribes motivated by clan loyalty which is sustained by the practice of cousin marriage.
American soldiers working with (predominately Shiite) Iraqi soldiers do searches for weapons in the Sunni Ghazaliya neighborhood of Baghdad. The Mahdi Army are battling to push out and kill the Sunnis in Ghazaliya. The net effect of US involvement is to help the Shias disarm the Sunnis so that the Shias can kill and push out the Sunnis when the Americans are not around.
“Anyone leaving Ghazaliya will get killed because they know you are Sunni,” said Fadhel A. Zaidan, who had lived in nearby Huriya for 50 years. “Now the Americans are taking our weapons, and when they leave, the Mahdi militia will attack.”
Mr. Zaidan has it right. Of course, some of those weapons are used to kill Americans. Though Shias are probably more often targets, both in defense and offense. The article reports that dozens of dead bodies are found on the streets of Baghdad every day. My guess that most of those dead are Sunnis. I'd be curious to know what the trend is in the ratio of Sunni to Shia dead. Probably rising.
American commanders say they are aware of this danger. In part, that is why residents are allowed one AK-47 and two cartridges.
The United States is effectively fighting on the side of the Shia majority against the Sunni minority. Never mind that Shias kill US soldiers just like Sunnis do.
If we were honest about the net effect of our actions we could at least help the Sunnis move away from the Shias so that fewer Sunnis would die in the process. But America's ruling elite and talking heads aren't up for that level of brutal honesty.
Writing for the Christian Science Monitor Anne Bobroff-Hajal joins the too short list of writers who appreciate the problem that consanguineous (cousin) marriage poses for the US intervention in Iraq.
All too often, the US carries out foreign policy with little comprehension of the societies it confronts. This can lead to unintended - often destructive - results.
One central element of the Iraqi social fabric that most Americans know little about is its astonishing rate of cousin marriage. Indeed, half of all marriages in Iraq are between first or second cousins. Among countries with recorded figures, only Pakistan and Nigeria rate as high. For an eye-opening perspective about rates of consanguinity (roughly equivalent to cousin marriage) around the world, click on the "Global Prevalence" map at www.consang.net.
But who cares who marries whom in a country we invade? Why talk to anthropologists who study that arcane subject? Only those who live in modern, individualistic societies could be so oblivious. Cousin marriage, especially the unique form practiced in the Middle East, creates clans of fierce internal cohesiveness and loyalty. So in addition to sectarian violence in Iraq, the US may also be facing a greater intensity of inter-clan violence than it saw in Vietnam or the ferocious Lebanese civil war.
She gets it right about Westerners being oblivious. Middle Eastern societies are fundamentally different. Bonds created by marriage practices make them different. Western small family units and atomized individuals can feel loyalty toward a whole nation. Leftists who imagine themselves as more enlightened even want us to shift our loyalties toward the whole world (which is a few steps beyond the biological limits of how the human mind works). But the Iraqis have very strong loyalties which are far more local, loyalties that make Western style societies and governments unachievable by Iraqis or other Arab societies.
Here's a sentence that covers a lot of ground:
The US can't deal with a problem it doesn't recognize, let alone understand.
That does not just apply to Iraq. How about education and immigration? Left wing intellectuals have decided to deny and ignore human nature when facts about human nature suggest limits on what can be achieved through social engineering. Even though the Soviet Union has collapsed and New Soviet Man was a tragic failure the desire to radically rearrange social orders and habits has lived on. The Iraq debacle is a result of both liberal and neoconservative beliefs that a New Liberal Man could be created in Mesopotamia.
Anthropologist Stanley Kurtz has described Middle East clans as "governments in miniature" that provide the services and social aid that Americans routinely receive from their national, state, and local governments. No one in a region without stable, fair government can survive outside a strong, unified, respected clan.
Kurtz knew well before the war that Middle Eastern family structures posed a huge obstacle to efforts to create proper nation-states in the Middle East. See my post Consanguinity prevents Middle Eastern political development. Journalist Charles Glass who was held hostage (and escaped) in Beirut during the Lebanon civil war wrote a book whose title captures the essence of what Middle Eastern governments are like: Tribes With Flags. We can not change Middle Eastern political behaviors unless we stop the practice of cousin marriage. Well, that's a very tall order for social engineers and would take generations to accomplish. But our policy makers are either ignorant of this or find the facts too inconvenient to acknowledge.
Bobroff-Hajal has even read Steve Sailer's Cousin Marriage Conundrum essay for which I've included a link here:
The flip side of favoring relatives is that, as Steven Sailer observed in The American Conservative in 2003, it leaves fewer resources "with which to be fair toward non-kin. So nepotistic corruption is rampant in countries such as Iraq."
Be sure to click through and read if if you haven't already.
How many of the deaths in Iraq are caused by clans attacking other clans?
I have been struck since early on in the Iraq war by how little Americans know about the groups the US so vaguely labels "insurgents." US ignorance is now further camouflaged by the label "chaos." I wonder whether, if US citizens took the time to "know thy enemy," they would learn that there are many forms of logic in the layers of Iraq's so-called chaos. I wonder if the almost daily discovery of 40, 50, or even 60 Iraqi bodies, kidnapped and tortured before being murdered, are clans battling one another.
Yes, some of the violence is inter-clan violence. Here are some examples:
Remember in October 2006 when Sadr's militia rushed into Amarah? At first glance the press reports gave the impression that the fight was a Mahdi Army challenge to the government. But the Amarah fighting was a tribal clash.
BAGHDAD, Oct. 20 -- Members of the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia headed by firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, briefly took over the southern Iraqi city of Amarah and battled with the local Shiite police before withdrawing on Friday, in a bloody feud that illustrated deepening rifts within Iraq's largest sect and the growing turmoil in the south.
As many as 25 people, including 10 policemen, were killed in street fighting and mortar attacks that raged in Amarah, a predominantly Shiite city about 190 miles southeast of Baghdad, from midday Thursday until about 2 p.m. Friday. The militia attacked the headquarters and two stations of the city police department, which is reportedly aligned with the Badr Brigades, an arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite religious party.
Each side blamed the other in a cycle of retaliatory clashes with tribal overtones.
...
In Baghdad, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Abdul Karim Khalaf Kinany, said the clashes were not driven by intra-Shiite conflict, but by tribal differences.
"The clashes in Amarah were not between the police and the Mahdi Army," he said. "Police had in fact interfered to settle a tribal dispute between the tribe of the police officer, the head of the intelligence division . . . and the tribesmen of the suspects who were arrested by the police on suspicion of carrying out the assassination."
What percentage of the deaths in Iraq are due to inter-tribal violence?
A little later, Sheik Fawzi Kaabi entered. Everyone in the room stood. "Take your rest," Aidani said afterward.
Kaabi, a stout man in a head scarf checkered white and black, is 46, but said he should be 460: "Every year has become 10 years because of the problems." Kaabi, called "the judge" by a friend, had come to mediate another dispute.
Men from Aidani's tribe had killed three people from the Abadi, a neighboring tribe, although the circumstances were in dispute. A death these days costs between 20 million and 25 million Iraqi dinars, or $13,300 to $16,600. Each person in the tribe is expected to contribute, effectively an insurance policy. But Aidani was resisting, pleading his case that the neighboring tribe had refused to pay blood money earlier.
"We're on standby," the sheik warned, with the mildest bluster.
He said no more. Everyone understood it meant sending his armed men to settle it another way.
"It's like a serial," the sheik said after Kaabi left. "It never has an ending."
This is not remotely like America. But the neocons fantasized Iraq would rapidly Westernize as soon as Saddam fell. What fools.
The International Crisis Group (ICG) has written a response to the Iraq Study Group in which the ICG calls for greater changes in US policy toward Iraq and the Middle East.
Slowly, incrementally, the realisation that a new strategy is needed for Iraq finally is dawning on U.S. policy-makers. It was about time. By underscoring the U.S. intervention’s disastrous political, security, and economic balance sheet, and by highlighting the need for both a new regional and Iraqi strategy, the Baker-Hamilton report represents an important and refreshing moment in the country’s domestic debate. Many of its key – and controversial – recommendations should be wholly supported, including engaging Iran and Syria, revitalising the Arab-Israeli peace process, reintegrating Baathists, instituting a far-reaching amnesty, delaying the Kirkuk referendum, negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. forces with Iraqis and engaging all parties in Iraq.
Engaging all parties in Iraq? Does that count every neighborhood militia? How about every criminal gang? The country is so fragmented that engaging all the factions isn't practical.
The ICG thinks a multinational group could get all the Iraqi factions to make an agreement that will bring peace to Iraq.
But the change the report advocates is not nearly radical enough, and its prescriptions are no match for its diagnosis. What is needed today is a clean break both in the way the U.S. and other international actors deal with the Iraqi government, and in the way the U.S. deals with the region: in essence, a new multinational effort to achieve a new political compact between all relevant Iraqi constituents.
The Shiites want an outcome where they are in charge. The Sunnis want an outcome where the Sunnis are not under the Shias and preferably one where the Shias are under the Sunnis. Given that the US is for democracy (amounts to majoritarian rule by Shias) the US is against the Sunnis getting satisfaction. How can such huge differences be reconciled? The stakes are too high in their minds.
The International Crisis Group says political leaders in Iraq are becoming warlords. That's true. Each ministry has its own guards who are involved in ethnic cleansing.
A new course of action must begin with an honest assessment of where things stand. Hollowed out and fatally weakened, the Iraqi state today is prey to armed militias, sectarian forces and a political class that, by putting short term personal benefit ahead of long term national interests, is complicit in Iraq’s tragic destruction. Not unlike the groups they combat, the forces that dominate the current government thrive on identity politics, communal polarisation, and a cycle of intensifying violence and counter-violence. Increasingly indifferent to the country’s interests, political leaders gradually are becoming warlords. What Iraq desperately needs are national leaders.
In spite of what Mick Jagger has sung, you can't always get what you need. National leaders? Iraq has one of the highest cousin marriage rates in the world. As a result loyalties heavily focus on the extended family (tribe) and one's sect of Islam. There's no room left over for feelings of loyalty toward a national government. The ICG and ISG do not explain how we can get the Iraqis to stop feeling the pull of tribal loyalties or how we are going to get them to adopt political beliefs that are incompatible with the political beliefs taught by Islam.
The International Crisis Group exaggerates the extent to which neighboring countries are driving Iraq into chaos. I think the Iraqis do not need any help to make that happen.
As it approaches its fifth year, the conflict also has become both a magnet for deeper regional interference and a source of greater regional instability. Instead of working together toward an outcome they all could live with – a weak but united Iraq that does not present a threat to its neighbours – regional actors are taking measures in anticipation of the outcome they most fear: Iraq’s descent into all-out chaos and fragmentation. By increasing support for some Iraqi actors against others, their actions have all the wisdom of a self-fulfilling prophecy: steps that will accelerate the very process they claim to wish to avoid.
The countries that are supporting the Sunnis do not want a united Iraq if that means democratically united under Shia rule. Are the Sunni countries more worried about Iraq's fragmentation or Iraq's unification under Shia rule?
The ICG correctly points out one problem with the Bush Administration's approach: Support for the Iraqi government really amounts to support for a few factions that have control of pieces of the national government. Many other factions (militias, gangs, political parties) aren't on the inside and so support for the current members of government amounts to support for some factions against other factions.
Two consequences follow. The first is that, contrary to the Baker-Hamilton report’s suggestion, the Iraqi government and security forces cannot be treated as privileged allies to be bolstered; they are simply one among many parties to the conflict. The report characterises the government as a “government of national unity” that is “broadly representative of the Iraqi people”: it is nothing of the sort. It also calls for expanding forces that are complicit in the current dirty war and for speeding up the transfer of responsibility to a government that has done nothing to stop it. The only logical conclusion from the report’s own lucid analysis is that the government is not a partner in an effort to stem the violence, nor will strengthening it contribute to Iraq’s stability. This is not a military challenge in which one side needs to be strengthened and another defeated. It is a political challenge in which new consensual understandings need to be reached. The solution is not to change the prime minister or cabinet composition, as some in Washington appear to be contemplating, but to address the entire power structure that was established since the 2003 invasion, and to alter the political environment that determines the cabinet’s actions.
Sadr's militia has splintered. His party did well in the last election and he has control of a few government ministries. Yet he doesn't control as many militia fighters as he used to since the militias have splintered. Though if a new election was held his party would probably gain Shia voters due to his image of protector of Shias from Sunnis.
Do these ICG people understand the implications of Iraq's tribal structure and sectarian splits? Might the US government officals ignore consanguineous (cousin) marriage in their public pronouncements about Iraq while carrying out policies which are based on an understanding of tribal society? Based on experience watching the Iraq debacle so far I find that unlikely.
One of the options left for the Bush Administration to try in Iraq is to tilt in favor of the Shias. Shia leader and Iran ally Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim wants the US to kill more Sunni insurgents.
"The strikes they are getting from the multinational forces are not hard enough to put an end to their acts, but leave them (to) stand up again to resume their criminal acts," said Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) after White House talks with President Bush. He spoke at the U.S. Institute for Peace, a U.S. government-funded foreign policy institute.
Using the terms Shiites use to describe al-Qaida and the Sunni insurgents, Hakim called for tougher U.S. military action. "Eliminating the danger of the civil war in Iraq could only be achieved through directing decisive strikes against the Taqfiri terrorists and Baathist terrorists in Iraq," he said.
SCIRI runs the Badr Brigade militia. By contrast, Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who runs the Mahdi Army, didn't want Prime Minister Maliki to meet with Bush in Jordan recently.
Hakim is fading. If a new election was held analysts think Sadr would gain and perhaps become able to form a government without either Dawa or SCIRI. It would appear that al-Sadr's willingness to send his militias out to kill Sunnis (many of those killed just being Sunnis and not insurgents) while his party holds 6 cabinet positions has made him very popular among the Iraqi Shiites. So obviously the Iraqi Shiites put the willingness to kill Sunnis ahead of closer ties with Iran.
But Hakim's support in Iraq is ebbing, and there's talk in Baghdad of a new coalition to replace Maliki that would include neither Maliki's Dawa party nor Hakim's SCIRI.
If the neocons are correct in arguing that Iranian influence in Iraq is too great and a big threat then the US government should support new elections. SCIRI would go down to defeat and Iran's influence would decline. But my guess is that the neocons have greatly exaggerated Iran's influence in Iraq. The Iraqis do not need outside agents spurring them on to kill each other. They can get all worked up to do that on their own.
If the Badr Brigade had a larger roll in the death squad killings the neoconservatives would be touting this as proof that Iran is the real culprit. But the relative restraint (at least by Iraqi standards) of the Badr Brigades doesn't support that interpretation.
What I want to know: Will either the Badr Brigades or the Mahdi Army soldiers become willing to go into the Sunni Triangle and put down the Sunni rebellion against Shia rule? If they are just as unwilling to do that as the regular army Shia then I do not see how Iraq can be kept in one piece. If Iraqi soldiers will only fight for their own neighborhoods and towns then partition seems a more likely outcome as US forces are withdrawn.
US military people in Baghdad have become more outspoken about the need for a crackdown on the Shiite militias. Shiites in the Iraqi government continue to veto moves against the Shia militias. The US military officers also believe a move against the Shia militias in Sadr City would be pretty horrible in terms of the death tolls of soldiers and civilians.
According to US officers interviewed by the Guardian, the decision not to confront the major source of the death squads was supported initially by the US because of fears of a full-scale battle with the militia in Sadr City.
"We are talking Berlin in '45 or Stalingrad," said one officer. "That is the conundrum. There is an unwillingness to tackle the problem head-on, but also a recognition that if we don't tackle the militias, death squad activities can only grow."
Instead, a decision was reached to try to bring political pressure to bear on the Sadr organisation, whose parliamentary bloc is crucial in supporting Mr Maliki's government, to bring its militia - illegal under the Iraqi constitution - into line. But with growing doubts over how much the Sadr organisation's leader, the firebrand preacher Moqtada al-Sadr, actually controls the factions within Jaish al-Mahdi, concerns are now growing about the wisdom of that policy.
"There are fractures politically inside Sadr's movement, many of whom don't find him to be sufficiently radical now that he has taken a political course of action," said a senior coalition intelligence official who spoke to reporters in Baghdad.
I've previously reported on the splintering of Sar's Mahdi Army as factions refuse to go along with his relatively more moderate stance. The idea of coopting Shia factions and getting them into the government runs up against the desire of most of the actual gunmen to keep shooting.
The Iraqi government has made lists of people who are unarrestable no matter what they do.
U.S. military leaders described various hindrances as they attempt to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad, including "no-touch lists" that prohibit them from arresting politicians and other high status individuals, and off-limits areas inside Baghdad that the U.S. military must avoid without permission from the Iraqi government.
U.S. military officials said they are also constrained by their desire to see the Iraqi government use the current sectarian conflict to prove its ability to rule fairly, without regard to narrow sectarian interests and without significant U.S. interference.
"There's a political piece to this to see if they deal with these guys," said a high-ranked U.S. military official in Baghdad who requested anonymity in order to maintain relationships with the Iraqi government. "I won't deny the fact that there is corruption and problems in some of the ministries, but it's got to be dealt with and it ought to be dealt with by the prime minister and the folks inside his government."
The corruption isn't going to be dealt with. We are talking about Iraq here, not Finland. But why should we care? Most Iraqis support attacks on US troops. Think about that. Why not leave and let the Shias and Sunnis battle it out?
Here's another deal coming out of the Iraqi government that won't help.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki emerged with the four-point plan after talks with the top Sunni and Shiite leaders in his government, trying to prevent a crisis over rising tensions between the two Islamic sects.
Under the plan, local commissions will be formed in each district of Baghdad, made up of representatives of each party, to oversee security forces’ efforts against violence, al-Maliki said. A central committee comprising all the parties will coordinate with the armed forces, he said.
Representatives of each party will meet while militias of each party go out and kill people on the opposing party.
Now that so many other strategies for Iraq have failed I'm curious what the Bush Administration will tout as its next strategy du jour. Will they just keep recycling old strategies like training? I have advice for them if only they'd listen: Use bribery and cash incentives. For a small fraction of the $2 billion per week currently spent in Iraq we could bribe a lot of factions. We could offer big cash prizes for doing things we want them to do and not doing things we do not want them to do.
Soldiers going AWOL? No problem. Offer big chunks of cash to each soldier who shows up on time for some sweep of a neighorhood or operation to round up some insurgents. Offer cash awards for reductions in killings in an area. Offer cash awards for capture of militia leaders. Pay for performance.
But I have an even better idea: Leave.
I do not want to write about Iraq. It is a tragedy. It is a debacle. It is a horror. But we should not ignore it or simply listen to whatever politicians are saying about it. We need to watch the events in Iraq. The hospitals are no longer safe for Sunnis to use.
In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq's Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.
As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.
These women who are giving birth outside of hospitals aren't doing that because they are insurgents. The Shia death squads are obviously not discriminating enough to only target real Sunni insurgents.
People in the democratically elected Iraqi government (which is of course an ally of the US government against the insurgencies) are probably involved in killing the hospital patients.
According to patients and families of victims, the primary group kidnapping Sunnis from hospitals is the Mahdi Army, a militia controlled by anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that has infiltrated the Iraqi security forces and several government ministries. The minister of health, Ali al-Shimari, is a member of Sadr's political movement. In Baghdad today, it is often impossible to tell whether someone is a government official, a militia member or, as is often the case, both.
If you are American or British your tax dollars support that regime. People world over support it when they buy gasoline.
The Mahdists claim they are killing people who are themselves killers. But I suspect they are not so discriminating.
Before Feb. 22, when the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra unleashed a wave of sectarian killing and retribution, U.S. authorities and others believed the primary force behind Shiite death squads was the Badr Brigade, the militia of another large Shiite organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But since the bombing, the Mahdi Army appears to have taken the lead in extrajudicial trials and executions, according to Joost Hiltermann, a project director in Jordan for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
For suspected enemies taken by the Mahdi Army, the outcome is swift, with guilt and punishment already determined, the commanders said.
"If we catch any of them, the takfiris, Saddamists, bombers, we don't hand them over to police. He could be freed the next day," the Sheik said.
Bush pretended (or was he deluded) that Iraq has something to do with the war on terrorists who want to attack Westerners. But Osama Bin Laden was supported by wealthy Wahhabi Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, not from Iraq. Bin Laden got his recruits from many countries but mainly Saudi Arabia. Bush still wants us to believe we are fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq. But mostly we are fighting Sunni and Shia groups that hate each other even more than they hate us.
Iraqis who do not die in sectarian violence have to figure out how to afford food.
Fuel and electricity prices are up more than 270 percent from last year’s, according to Iraqi government figures. Tea in some markets has quadrupled, egg prices have doubled, and all over the country the daily routine now includes a new question: What can be done without?
Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, who was held captive by Sunni insurgents before finally being freed, reports that the Sunni insurgents see Shiites as greater enemies than the Americans and they didn't even see the Shias as Muslims.
could also see that Shiites were high on their list of enemies. Once, when attempting to explain the historical split between Sunnis and Shiites, Abu Nour, the leader of my captors, stopped himself after he referred to "Shiite Muslims."
"No, they are not Muslims," Ink Eyes said. "Anyone who asks for things from people that are dead, and not [from] Allah, he is not a Muslim."
He was referring to Shiites appealing to long-dead Islamic leaders to intercede with God, asking for miracles such as curing the sick. It's a practice similar to that of Catholics praying to saints.
But after the Feb. 22 bombing of the Askariya Shrine, and rampant Sunni-Shiite killing, nearly every captor I came into contact with would tell me about their hate for Shiites first. Abu Nour now simply referred to them as "dogs."
The Shias and Sunnis need a divorce. They distrust and hate each other too much at this point. Separate them. It is the most humane thing we could do. Then leave. Or leave now.
The New York Times reports that roadside bombings surged to a record high in July 2006 in Iraq.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found.
The Times reporters opine that what is going on in Iraq is a dichotomy.
The report’s contents are being widely discussed among Pentagon officials, military commanders and, in particular, on Capitol Hill, where concern among senior lawmakers of both parties is growing over a troubling dichotomy: even as Iraq takes important steps toward democracy — including the election of a permanent government this spring — the violence has gotten worse.
Since it is the essence of a liberal always to be surprised and “troubled” at a real world that does not fit liberal expectations, only liberals could regard the co-existence of “democracy” and violence in Iraq as a “troubling dichotomy.” It’s only a troubling dichotomy if you assume, like the whacked-out Bushites, that having elections and forming some kind of government (a government that depends for its existence on the U.S. military) means that you have “democracy,” and that this “democracy” means that the enemy has been defeated and that all men will now live in peace, each under his own vine and fig tree.
Gotta agree with Larry here. Why would democracy bring peace people among people who are not liberal and who see any election that they lose as an election that will bring to power people who will totally shaft the losers.
Larry points to an essay he wrote in April 2004 where he argued that creation of a monopoly on the use of force is the basic requirement for the establishment of a democracy.
What has gone wrong? As I've been saying since last summer, the erection of a new government in Iraq presupposes the first law of all governments, that it have a monopoly on the use of force. Yet instead of focusing on the need for such a government and on the practical requirements for creating such a government, we've been pouring most of our energy and hopes into creating the mechanisms of democratic elections—imagining, in excited reverie, that the cart of universal rights and democratic proceduralism could pull the horse of sovereign national existence.... Thus we not only lack a policy aimed at victory in Iraq, we have not even had a national debate aimed at formulating such a policy. We have had a parody of a debate, in which the Left mindlessly screams, "Bush lied," and the Right stolidly replies, "Stay the course."
My guess is victory was never an option for the US in Iraq. A strategy that could produce victory would require a level of brutality that the US elites and populace could not stomach. An occupation of Iraq that utlized the level of brutality needed to rule in Iraq is just beyond the pale in the minds of people who live in Western coutries today.
Back to the New York Times article: It ends with a real doozy:
“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.
“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”
Wow! Some of the Bushies realize that Iraq may be a lost cause. Hey, there's this guy held in custody in some Iraqi jail who knows how to run a dictatorship in Iraq and who knows how to maintain order. He could stop the sectarian violence very quickly, albeit with a brief period where the killings would surge much higher as he reestablished his previous monopoly on the use of force.
July was the deadliest month for civilians since the war started in March 2003, figures show.
During the month, 3,438 Iraqis were killed -- 1,855 because of sectarian or political violence and another 1,583 from bombings and shootings. Nearly 3,600 Iraqis were wounded, the official said.
Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases.
Scores of Kurds have fled their homes in the northern frontier region after four days of shelling by the Iranian army. Local officials said Turkey had also fired a number of shells into Iraqi territory.
Iraq provides a shocking glimpse into that condition which Thomas Hobbes argued was the state of man before government: war of all against all. Iraq has not decayed to that level. Tribal and religious royalties create larger bonds that prevent a complete breakdown of all order in Iraqi society. Yet Iraq's state is a sobering reminder of what man can become absent a higher authority.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Iraq also brings to mind another line from Thomas Hobbes: Hell is truth seen too late.
Another record breaking month in Baghdad.
BAGHDAD, Aug. 9 -- Figures compiled by the city morgue indicated Wednesday that the number of killings in the Iraqi capital reached a new high last month, and the U.S. military said a new effort to bring security to Baghdad will succeed only if Iraqis "want it to work."
The Baghdad morgue took in 1,815 bodies during July, news services quoted the facility's assistant manager, Abdul Razzaq al-Obeidi, as saying. The previous month's tally was 1,595. Obeidi estimated that as many as 90 percent of the total died violent deaths.
Will the big shift of US forces into Baghdad and the increased tempo of patrols for the forces already there decrease the August death toll? Or will the Shias and Sunnis figure out how to sneak and around and kill each in spite of more US troops on the streets?
WASHINGTON - Two senior U.S. generals told Congress on Thursday that growing sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims threatens to plunge Iraq into civil war.
"I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war," said Gen. John Abizaid, the chief of U.S. Central Command. The top American military officer in the Middle East was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff and thus the top general at the Pentagon, agreed with the assessment.
"I believe that we do have the possibility of that devolving to a civil war, but that does not have to be a fact," Pace said.
You have to figure their private assessments could be even more bleak.
"We can provide support, we can help provide security, but they must now decide about their sectarian violence," Pace said. "Shia and Sunni are going to have to love their children more than they hate each other."
I'm counting on them to hate each other more.
I get the sense that the Bush Administration is trying to lower expectations far enough that if civil war breaks out people won't be shocked.
Asked about the generals invoking the specter of "civil war," White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said aboard Air Force One: "I don't think the president is going to quibble with his generals on their characterizations."
A leak of the final diplomatic cable of the outgoing UK Ambassador to Iraq, William Patey, shows that Patey thinks civil war in Iraq more likely than not.
Mr Patey wrote: "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.
"Even the lowered expectation of President Bush for Iraq - a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror - must remain in doubt."
Talking about the Shia militias blamed for many killings, Mr Patey added: "If we are to avoid a descent into civil war and anarchy then preventing the Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army) from developing into a state within a state, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon, will be a priority."
Lawrence Auster has pointed to the significance of the huge shift in position of war hawk Ralph Peters toward the view that Iraq is going to slide into full civil war. The hawks are starting to worry about what happens to their reputations should the decay in Iraq continue. Things aren't going to plan and defense of what Hillary Rodham Clinton just referred to as "happy talk and rosy scenarios" has gotten embarrassing.
Update: Nancy A. Youssef of the McClatchy Newspapers says the Iraqi workers at the Baghdad bureau agree Iraq is already in a civil war.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, told Congress on Thursday that the violence in Baghdad "is probably as bad as I have ever seen it," and went on to say that the country could be headed toward civil war.
Nearly all of the dozen Iraqis who work for McClatchy Newspapers' Baghdad bureau - evenly split between Shiite and Sunni Muslims - reached that conclusion long ago.
Their observations have trickled out day by day in the scores of conversations colleagues have with one another about their lives and difficulties.
Read the full article for stories of killings and ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods.
Can we build a handbasket big enough to fit Iraq into? If not, how is it going to hell? The latest killing spree was carried out by Sunnis trying to play catch-up with the Shia killing squads.
BAGHDAD, July 17 -- Masked attackers with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks slaughtered at least 40 people in a crowded market area south of Baghdad on Monday, hurling grenades to blow up merchants at their counters and shooting down mothers as they fled with their children, witnesses and authorities said.
The military-style assault on unarmed civilians in the mostly Shiite city of Mahmudiyah lasted 30 minutes and was vicious even for a country besieged daily by bombs and coldblooded attacks. At one point, the assailants entered a cafe and shot dead seven men -- most of them elderly -- while they were having tea, said Maythan Abdul Zahad, a police officer. He said the gunmen stepped on their victims' heads to keep them still.
Which Shia militia can do the best job exacting revenge? The Mahdis or the Badrs?
Iraqi security forces didn't treat this latest attack as an opportunity to shine.
Survivors said Iraqi soldiers let the heavily armed, highly visible attackers pass through a checkpoint near the marketplace. Witnesses described Iraqi security forces largely leaving the civilians to their fate, although survivors gave conflicting accounts as to whether Iraqi police, soldiers or Shiite militiamen had tried to fight off the attackers.
US forces deny survivor accusations that they saw what was going on and did nothing.
The Sunnis have so many reasons to kill Shias that they can't make up their minds what caused them to go on a killing spree.
In statements, Sunni insurgents gave different explanations for why Mahmudiyah was targeted -- some saying that it was because Sadr's Mahdi Army militia had allegedly driven Sunni vendors from the market a week ago, others saying it was because of the recent killing of a Sunni cleric. A written statement in the name of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq said the attack targeted local leaders of the Mahdi Army.
A report from the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) claims the civilian death rate in Iraq has been steadily rising.
According to the report, 2,669 civilians were killed in May and 3,149 were killed in June. Those numbers combined two counts: from the Ministry of Health, which records deaths reported by hospitals; and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, which tallies the unidentified bodies it receives.
The report charts a month-by-month increase in the number of civilians killed, from 710 in January to 1,129 in April. In the first six months of the year, it said 14,338 people had been killed.
I'm betting the July death toll will surpass June. How about you?
Are all these deaths a necessary prelude to serious negotiations between the factions? Or will the desire for revenge continue the ratcheting up of the civil war?
Gulf War I is starting to look like the mother of all battles. The Turks are ready to cross over into Iraq to hunt down Turkish Kurdish guerillas.
Turkish officials signaled Tuesday they are prepared to send the army into northern Iraq if U.S. and Iraqi forces do not take steps to combat Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there - a move that could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States.
Turkey is facing increasing domestic pressure to act after 15 soldiers, police and guards were killed fighting the guerrillas in southeastern Turkey in the past week.
That's not good.
The small Turkmen faction in Iraq would welcome Turkey's intervention.
Iraqi Turkmens, targets of a series of attacks recently, complain their safety in Iraq is not guaranteed, lamenting that Turkey is not sufficiently interested in their grievances.
Amman/Brussels, 18 July 2006: Unless the international community acts soon to resolve mounting tensions in Kirkuk, the result could well be yet another violent communal conflict in Iraq, risking full scale civil war and possibly outside military intervention.
Iraq and the Kurds: The Brewing Battle over Kirkuk,* the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the dangerously neglected looming conflict in and around the northern Iraqi city. The struggle is equal parts street brawl over oil riches; ethnic competition over identity between Kurdish, Turkoman, Arab and Assyrian-Chaldean communities; and titanic clash between two nations, Arab and Kurd.“Notwithstanding all the other crises on decision-makers’ plates right now, the stakes here are too high for the international community to stand by, allowing yet another element in the Iraq equation to slip into chaos by default”, says Gareth Evans, Crisis Group President.
Do you suppose oil production could rise while the civil war escalates?
The U.S. Secretary of Energy says it may take about six months to restore Iraq's oil output to pre-war levels of 2.5 million barrels a day.
We need to develop technologies that will replace and obsolesce oil.
Shia dominate the Iraqi government's military.
RAMADI, Iraq - Their televised graduation was supposed to be a moment of national celebration: A class of 1,000 Sunni Arab soldiers emerging from basic training would show Iraqis that the country's worsening religious divide was not afflicting the national army. Two months later, only about 300 of them have reported for duty, U.S. officials say.
...
The 1,000 graduates were part of a program to recruit 6,500 Sunnis from restive Anbar province. But with two classes of enlistees trained, only 530 soldiers have been added to the ranks, said Lt. Col. Mike Negard, a spokesman for the U.S. training command.
So the Iraqi Army is heavily weighted toward the Shia. Many of those Shia maintain their loyalty toward Shiite militia groups which they were members of before joining government forces. Even Shia soldiers who haven't been members of militia see the Sunnis as their enemies. The Shia militias in Baghdad are bigger than the Sunni insurgency. Plus, the Shia-dominated army strongly sympathizes with the Shia militias.
Writing for the Daily Telegraph Aqeel Hussein describes how Shia militiamen at a roadblock who were trying to decide whether to kill him killed a Sunni driver. The Iraqi soldiers a half mile away were indifferent to the existence of Shia militia killing Sunnis so close by.
"As they were talking to me I saw a young man dragged out of a BMW car and pushed into the side street," he said.
"He was Sunni, you could tell from his accent. He was forced to kneel on the ground and a Kalashnikov was placed against his head.
"The man was pleading for his life but the fighter, who had his face covered, was shouting 'You are a Sunni, you are a terrorist and you should die. Sit down now'. The next moment I heard the gun go off and there was blood everywhere. It was a few metres away."
After being released he drove to the Iraqi army checkpoint to warn them but his pleas were greeted with indifference by the soldiers on duty.
"I told them the Mahdi army are killing Sunnis in Jihad City. One of the soldiers said 'Oh really' and he was laughing. They didn't move, I couldn't believe it. You could here gunshots as we were talking."
Many of the recruits to Iraq's fledging armed forces are drawn from al-Sadr's militias.
The creation of a national Iraqi army, the Bush Administration's ballyhooed solution to the Iraq war, is feeding the process of ethnic cleansing. The article describes Baghdad's Highway 60 as the first clear conventional front in the civil war. Sunnis and Shias bombard each others' neighborhoods across Highway 60 using mortars. The neighborhoods are now sufficiently ethnically purified to allow them to fire with confidence knowing only members of the opposing group will get killed.
James Hider of the Times of London reports on the rapid decay of Baghdad.
The previous night I had had a similar conversation with my driver, a Shia who lives in another part of west Baghdad. He phoned at 11pm to say that there was a battle raging outside his house and that his family were sheltering in the windowless bathroom.
Marauding Mahdi gunmen, seeking to drive all Sunnis from the area, were fighting Sunni Mujahidin for control of a nearby strategic position. I could hear the gunfire blazing over the phone.
We phoned the US military trainer attached to Iraqi security forces in the area. He said there was nothing to be done: “There’s always shooting at night here. It’s like chasing ghosts.”
In fact the US military generally responds only to request for support from Iraqi security forces. But as many of those forces are at best turning a blind eye to the Shia death squads, and at worst colluding with them, calling the Americans is literally the last thing they do.
West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.
Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighbourhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.
How far can the Shia militias go with their drive against the Sunnis? How rapidly will it play out? US forces are too small to do much to slow this process. Could the US military ally itself with the Sunnis to defend the Sunnis? At this point I bet the Sunnis in Baghdad would welcome a powerful ally even if it was the United States. Or would that unleash such a hostile Shia response that the Shia government would teeter?
Some Sunnis think the Shias are trying to drive all Sunnis out of Baghdad. Certainly not a few Shia militiamen would be happy to achieve that outcome.
Most Iraqis believe that it is already here. “There is a campaign to eradicate all Sunnis from Baghdad,” said Sheikh Omar al-Jebouri, of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni parliamentary group. He said that it was organised by the Shia-dominated Interior Ministry and its police special commandos, with Shia militias, and aimed to destroy Mr al-Maliki’s plans to rebuild Iraq’s security forces along national, rather than sectarian, lines.
The article recounts an episode where Iraqi police drive up to a mosque and start blasting away at it with machine guns. The Shias might well succeed in driving the Sunnis out of Baghdad. The Shias have more militia fighters and control of the government's military and more supplies.
The current death rate makes the times of Saddam Hussein look relatively peaceful.
A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.
Flights from Baghdad to Damascus have gone from 3 to 8 per week while the bus trips to Jordan through dangerous Anbar province have gone from 2 a day to as much as 40 and 50 a day. Keep these facts in mind when the Iraqi government quotes ridiculously low estimates for the number of refugees.
As the ethnic cleansing proceeds and neighborhoods become more purely one ethnic group or another the civil war will take on more of the characteristics of a fight for territory with clearer front lines. The Sunni Al-Karakh neighborhood might get overrun by Shia militia.
Shi'ite groups are trying to "conquer" the Sunni Al-Karakh neighborhood in western Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki said according to the daily online newspaper Al-'Arab.
Figure that the Christians and Kurds are going to continue to flee to northern Iraq. That'll leave the numerically more superior and better equipped Shias to duke it out with the Sunnis for control of Baghdad. If the Shias can capture Sunni neighborhoods then they will be able to purge the Sunnis and gradually make Baghdad into a Shia city.
The compassionate thing for the United States to do is to build housing in the Sunni Triangle for Sunnis who are getting forced out of Baghdad. If we can only admit to how bad the situation is in Iraq and how much worse it is going to get we could respond in ways that alleviate some of the pain and that reduce the death toll.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former US ambassador, has written a book arguing for the break-up of Iraq entitled The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The Times of London has an excerpt of Galbraith's book.
How could a divorce be carried through? Arab Iraqi leaders have told me privately that they accept Kurdistan’s right to self-determination. Some seem to prefer that Kurdistan should leave, having grown weary of its refusal to make any concessions to a shared state. With settled borders, the split between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq could be more like Czechoslovakia’s velvet divorce than Yugoslavia’s wars.
Turkey — with many Kurds living within its borders — has long been considered the chief obstacle to Kurdish dreams for an independent state. Turkish attitudes have evolved significantly, however. Some Turkish strategic thinkers, including those within the so-called “deep state” comprising the military and intelligence establishments, see a secular, pro-western and non-Arab Kurdistan as a buffer to an Islamic Arab state to the south.
If the Shi’ite south forms a region, it can set up a theocratic government and establish a regional guard. Iran will be the dominant power and the Bush administration has no ability, and no intention, of countering Iran’s position there.
How much worse will Iraq have to get before the happy talker supporters of the Bush Administration snap out of their dreams? Reality on the ground in Iraq keeps getting uglier.
Update: An Iraqi doctor told the BBC 10,000 people are leaving Baghdad each week.
Over the past two days the conflict between Sunnis and Shias has really come out into the open. It was there before, but more hidden. Many people are leaving Baghdad for neighbouring countries or for the north, Kurdistan. A friend of mine who has a travel agency says at least 10,000 people are leaving the capital every day.
I'd like to know whether a larger proportion of Sunnis or Shias are fleeing Baghdad. 10,000 per week would work out to over a half million a year. In 2003 Baghdad was estimated to have a population of about 5.77 million. So it could lose a tenth of its population by next summer if the 10,000 a week estimate is correct and current trends continue. One estimate puts Shias as a majority in Baghdad. If they are a majority then that majority and their much larger military forces give them the advantage in the battle for Baghdad.
Sunday's massacre in Jihad - three miles from the airport and the US military's sprawling Camp Victory - shows how Baghdad's seemingly random violence is spreading hatred and institutionalizing atrocity.
Tensions in the area - which is mostly Sunni but, unusually for suburbs west of the Tigris, still has many Shiites - have been running high all year. Until recently, the violence had been confined to assassinations of Shiite residents in ones and twos, notes slipped under doors warning Shiite residents to move or else, and roadside bombs.
But, recently, Shiite residents have been getting organized into their own militias, with the help of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, according to two residents of the area - one a Shiite, the other Sunni. Since the Askariya shrine bombing on Feb. 22, locals deemed to be salafiyah - a rigid Sunni ideology that has much in common with the Wahabbism of Saudi Arabia - have been taken away at night and murdered, though not as often as Shiite residents, they say.
After a recent string of explosions at Shiite mosques and Hosseiniya (Shiite prayer halls) to the west of the river, local Shiites have reportedly mounted their own intimidation campaign, with notes slipped under doors and murmured promises of revenge for future attacks.
A trend to watch for: Will the more powerful Shia militias manage to stop the ethnic purging of Shias from any neighborhoods in Western Baghdad? Will the Shias turn the tables on the Sunnis of Western Baghdad and even manage to purge Sunnis from any of those neighborhoods? The al-Jihad neighborhood in the west side of the Tigris River might be the place to watch to look for trends in the fight between Sunni and Shia groups battling for control of Baghdad.
Update II: When Sunnis call the Interior Ministry for help they are treated like terrorists.
Saleh Muhammed, an Amiriyah resident, told a Post special correspondent that he dialed 130 into his cellphone, Baghdad's emergency number. "The Mahdi Army has attacked Amiriyah," he told the Interior Ministry dispatcher.
"The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you," said the dispatcher at the ministry, which is controlled by a Shiite party and operates closely with militias. "They are people doing their duty. And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army? Is it written on their foreheads?" He hung up the phone.
The whole article is worth reading. Both a Sunni and a Shia legislator say the civil war has begun. Says a Sunni legislator ""The parliament cannot reach practical solutions because their minds are concerned only with their sect and not the interests of the nation." Tribalism and consanguineous marriage make Iraq ungovernable by Western style democracy. Unfamiliar with consanguineous marriage's ramifications for politics? See my post John Tierney On Cousin Marriage As Reform Obstacle In Iraq and read the other posts and articles I link to from there.
Update III: I saw this one coming. Edward Wong and Dexter Filkins of the New York Times report that Many Sunnis want the US military to protect them from the Shia militias.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 16 — As sectarian violence soars, many Sunni Arab political and religious leaders once staunchly opposed to the American presence here are now saying they need American troops to protect them from the rampages of Shiite militias and Shiite-run government forces.
By accident the US military and the Shia militias have become a more brutal equivalents of the "Good Cop, Bad Cop" routine. Imagine Sunni clerics calling out to not shoot because the Americans are coming.
In Adhamiya, a neighborhood in north Baghdad, Sunni insurgents once fought street to street with American troops. Now, mortars fired by Shiite militias rain down several times a week, and armed watch groups have set up barricades to stop drive-by attacks by black-clad Shiite fighters. So when an American convoy rolled in recently, a remarkable message rang out from the loudspeakers of the Abu Hanifa Mosque, where Saddam Hussein made his last public appearance before the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
“The American Army is coming with the Iraqi Army — do not shoot,” the voice said, echoing through streets still filled with supporters of Mr. Hussein. “They are here to help you.”
Sheik Abdul Wahab al-Adhami, an imam at the mosque, said later in an interview: “Look at what the militias are doing even while we have the American forces here. Imagine what would happen if they left.”
Unfortunately the US military isn't big enough to protect all the Sunnis from the Shia militias. But if the Sunnis were moved to areas further away from the Shias then providing protection wouldn't be as difficult.
The Sunnis are trying to reach an agreement with the central government that all Iraqi government raids on mosques and private homes will be accompanied by American forces. Too many of the raids are conducted by Shia militias on killing sprees.
Sunni Arab leaders in the strife-ridden neighborhood of Dawra recently secured an explicit agreement with Shiite-led commandos based there that says the Iraqi forces will not raid a Sunni mosque or private home without being accompanied by American forces. A new brigade of Iraqi forces has just moved in, and the Sunnis are likely to try to reach the same agreement with them.
The United States is enmeshed in a very complicated web in Iraq. This turn of the Sunnis toward the US for protection might seem like good news. But the Shia militias could respond to US efforts on behalf of Sunnis by launching more attacks on US forces than Sunni insurgents currently carry out.