Progress in The Surge

McCain's War in Iraq goes on. Patrick Cockburn, who has been one of the best Western reporters on the war, writes in Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad? The Independent 02/15/08:

In the US and Europe, the main measure of whether the war in Iraq is "going well" or "going badly" is the casualty figures. The number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed went down to 39 US soldiers and 599 Iraqi civilians in January. The White House is promoting the idea that the United States is finally on the road to success, if not victory, in Iraq.

On the back of this renewed optimism about the war, Senator John McCain, the premier hawk among the Republican candidates for the presidency, has been able to revive his foundering campaign and is set to be his party's nominee. Despite the scepticism of many US journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper newsrooms in New York and Washington (in London they are more sceptical) have largely bought into the idea that "the surge" – the wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006 – has succeeded.

But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

Of the capital city, he reports:

For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.

And he explains that there has been some political improvement in Iraq because in 2007 the much-discussed Sunni Awakening Councils made fighting Salafi extremists (loosely known as Al Qa'ida in Iraq) a higher priority than fighting the Shi'a government. According to Cockburn, "the Sunni community could also see that, although its guerrilla war was effective against the US, it was being defeated by the Shia who controlled the Iraqi government and armed forces after the elections of 2005." (my emphasis)

It's important to recognize that the relative reduction of violence in Baghdad is largely the result of successful ethnic cleansing:

The "surge" – the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad – has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory [in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad] of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.

Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim [a Sunni forced out of his home] can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.

"People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible." (my emphasis)

But the McCain escalation of 2007 has strengthened the Sunni guerrillas, as well. The Surge didn't do a more thorough job of fighting Sunni guerrillas, it partnered with them. It produced a short-term result favorable to the US, at the cost of making long-term reconcilation between the Sunni and Shi'a more problematic:

The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government. ...

In his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of the 80,000 Awakening Council members – also labelled "concerned local citizens", as if they were respectable householders who have taken up arms against "terrorists".

The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the "terrorists" of yesterday.

Even the police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal, the brother of Abu Marouf, cheerfully explained that until he was promoted to his present post in December 2006 he was "fighting the Americans". Abu Marouf is threatening to go back to war or let al-Qa'ida return unless his 13,000 men receive long-term jobs in the Iraqi security services. The Iraqi government has no intention of allowing this because to do so would be to allow the Sunni and partisans of Saddam Hussein's regime to once again hold real power in the state. (my emphasis)

And this is the war in which Maverick McCain wants the United States to stay for 10,000 years!

It's true, as advocates of withdrawal have consistently pointed out - though war fans accuse war opponents of never doing so - that there is a real possibility that the civil war will intensify if the Americans withdraw. The best chance to minimize that - and "best" has long since come to mean the least bad among bad alternatives - is to set a near (6-12 months) deadline for full withdrawal of US troops and mercenaries, and use the time to try to bring the warring parties together diplomatically. It's unlikely to work. But the McCain plan of endless war certainly won't. Cockburn reports:

All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they are supported by American military power. Al-Qa'ida is wounded but by no means out of business. Four days after I had seen Abu Marouf, who was surrounded by bodyguards and maintains extreme secrecy about his movements, al-Qa'ida was able to detonate a bomb in a car close to his house and injure four of his guards.

Protestations of amity between Shia security men and Awakening members should be treated with scepticism. My friend, the intrepid French television reporter Lucas Menget, filmed a Shia policeman showering praise on the Awakening movement. He introduced two of its members, declaring enthusiastically to the camera: "You see, together we will defeat al-Qa'ida." Back in his police car, the policeman, lighting up a Davidoff cigarette and shaking his head wearily, explained: "I don't have a choice. I was asked to work with these killers."

Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge". It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth". (my emphasis)

Cockburn's final verdict on McCain's War: "It has destroyed Iraq."

Tags: iraq war, patrick cockburn