Peter Galbraith, the Iraq War and Kurdish oil

Jamie Galbraith in his book The Predator State (2009) talks about Chinese economic policies and is careful to disclose that he himself once worked as an economic consultant to the Chinese government.

His brother Peter, on the other hand, has been one of the most prominent advocates of an independent Kurdistan in one form or another. And until now, he had not disclosed the nature of his own business ties with oil companies doing business in Kurdistan. Farah Stockman has the story in Galbraith helped Iraqi Kurds keep rights to fields Boston Globe 10/15/09.

I've always been reserved about Peter Galbraith's criticisms of the iraq War just because he was so insistent on an independent Kurdistan, which it hardly seems to me is in the interest of the United States to encourage:

Some analysts said yesterday that Galbraith stood to gain personally from language that he helped draft for the Iraqi Constitution when he was advising Kurdish leaders during negotiations with Iraqi and US officials in 2005. They said his business ties should have been publicly disclosed at the time.

"Galbraith has been such a central person to the shaping of the Iraqi Constitution, far more than I think most Americans realize," said Reider Visser, a historian of southern Iraq and who edits the Iraq-focused website, www.historiae.org. "All those beautiful ideas about principles of federalism and local communities having control are really cast in a different light when the community has an oil field in its midst and Mr. Galbraith has a financial stake."

Galbraith said in a telephone interview that Kurdish leaders knew of his oil interests, but he was not under any obligation to tell the US and Iraqi officials involved in the negotiations.

According to Stockman's report, Galbraith and his son Andrew set up a company called Porcupine, which entered into a partnership with the Norwegian oil company DNO:

Two days after Porcupine was established, the Kurdistan Regional Government signed a contract to develop Kurdistan’s first oil field with DNO, ushering in a potential economic windfall for the semiautonomous region. DNO eventually struck oil, and currently owns a 55 percent stake in the Tawke field.

But Iraq's central government has refused to accept the legality of its agreement, creating a heated standoff that has stopped the flow of oil from Kurdistan in recent days.

The Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv (DN) broke the story this past weekend: Sparket toppdiplomat i omstridt dobbeltrolle 10.10.2009:

Samtidig ligger han også i krangel med det bergensbaserte oljeselskapet DNO International ved voldgiftsdomstolen i London, skriver Dagens Næringsliv lørdag.

- Jeg kan ikke si noe om dette fordi jeg ønsker ikke å komme i juridiske vanskeligheter, sier Galbraith som la på sprang da DN oppsøkte ham i Bergen, torsdag.

Dokumentasjon DN har innhentet viser at den fremtredende diplomaten i flere år har hatt fem prosent eierskap i det store oljefeltet Tawke i Kurdistan. Med dagens oljepris kan feltet inneholde olje verd nærmere 200 milliarder kroner. Galbraith har i flere år fungert som sentral rådgiver for de kurdiske lederne i Irak.

Toppdiplomaten spilte en nøkkelrolle i utformingen av Iraks grunnlov og bidro til å sikre den kurdiske regionen stor grad av selvstendighet. Nå viser det seg at Galbraith hadde eierinteresser i et av de største oljefeltene i Kurdistan.

Sorry, I don't know Norwegian so I can't translate it. Although Norwegian is close enough to German that I could at least find the story and pick out a relevant passage. And I've never blogged a story in Norwegian before, so I figured I would take the chance. :)

Helena Cobban has also written about the Galbraith/DNO deal at her Just World News blog: NYT studiously ignores Galbraith-DNO link 10/13/09; More on Galbraith; Boston Globe runs the story 10/15/09. I should emphasize that there is no allegation that Galbraith broke the law in his oil dealings. But Helena spells out why keeping that arrangement secret was so problematic:

In 2003-05, when Galbraith was rushing round Iraq and the world arguing passionately for a radical form of Kurdish separation from the central Iraqi state, he was not in fact on the US government payroll. He had been, in late 2002, when he taught at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. But in the 2003-05 period, he was presenting himself as (a) a constitutional affairs specialist, and (b) an adviser to the Kurdish leaders, who was providing his advice to them on a contract or sometimes even "expenses-only" basis because of the depth of his commitment to their cause.

In all the articles he published in the US media in and since those years, arguing for the radical devolution of Iraqi governmental powers to the country's various ethno-sectarian groups (including the Kurds), not once do I recall having seen it say in the tag-line that he had business interests related to the topics he was writing about.

She links to this post by Reidar Visser, Galbraith Confirms Oil Interests in Kurdistan 10/15/09, which provides information from a later DN article about him. Visser writes:

Just to confuse matters somewhat, in the Norwegian press today, a press release from Porcupine has been reproduced, to the effect that Porcupine “confirms the existence of a contractual relationship to DNO” while at the same time saying the company “does not have and has not had any third party interests in DNO’s PSA in Iraqi Kurdistan”. However, Dagens Næringsliv today also reproduces a full document from 2006 explicitly showing Porcupine listed as a 5% partner in the Tawke oilfield project. The document relates to the approval of expenses for test drilling.

This could involve some legalistic double-talk playing on the fact that the Iraqi government doesn't recognize the DNO arrangement with the Kurdistan regional government as legally valid.

I would note here that Galbraith recently resigned from a UN post in Afghanistan in disagreement about how the election fraud there should be handled. I have no actual reason to think so. But I can't help but wonder whether his public criticism of the Karzai government at a time when the US is trying to put the best face on that corrupt election may have something to do with the press getting hold of this story.

I'm sorry to see this news about Galbraith's oil dealings. Although I disagreed with his enthusiasm for Kurdish independence/autonomy, I had assumed that he was expressing good faith opinions. This casts an unfortunately cloud over his credibility.

Here are some of my earlier posts referencing Galbraith and his commentaries on Iraq and Iran. His evaluation that the Iraq War made Iran relatively much stronger is still accurate. But now you have to wonder how his formulation of the issue may have been shaped by a desire to emphasize the problematic nature of the relationship between Iraq's Shi'a regime and Iran to make the prospect of an independent Kurdistan more desirable from an American point of view. It's really too bad he concealed his business dealings on Iraqi Kurdish oil in this way.

Peter Galbraith on the Iraq War 02/27/07
Peter Galbraith on Iran and Iraq 09/19/07
Hersh's latest on expanding the Iraq War to Iran 10/02/07

Galbraith is also the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006) and Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies (2009). His most recent article for the New York Review of Books is Is This a 'Victory'? 09/25/09; 10/23/08 issue, in which he critices Republican Presidential candidate John McCain because he "has said nothing about how he would protect Iraq's Kurds, the only committed American allies in the country". Several paragraphs of the article are devoted to the Kurds. They read much less credibly now that I know that when his article was published he had had a financial stake in Kurdish autonomy/indepdence for years:

In early September, al-Maliki sent Iraqi troops into Khanaqin, a dusty Kurdish town on the Iranian border northeast of Baghdad. While technically not part of the Kurdistan Region, the Kurdistan Regional Government has administered Khanaqin since 2003. The forces of the Kurdish Peshmerga army, who liberated the town from Saddam that April, have provided security. It is widely expected that Khanaqin will formally be incorporated into the Kurdistan Region as part of the process specified in Article 140 of Iraq's constitution for determining Kurdistan's borders. By sending Arab troops to Khanaqin, al-Maliki deliberately picked a fight with the Kurds, who have been the Shiites' partner in governing Iraq since 2003.

Iraq's Kurds have had a very large part in post-Saddam Iraq. Iraq's president, deputy prime minister, foreign minister, and army chief are all Kurds. The Peshmerga fought on the US side in the 2003 war and is the one indigenous Iraqi force that is reliably pro-American. Iraqi Kurds are secular, democratic, and pro-Western. Both militarily and politically, they have supported US policy, even when they have had reservations about its wisdom.

In recent months, al-Maliki has tried to marginalize the Kurds. In ordering troops to Khanaqin, he did not consult Jalal Talabani, Iraq's Kurdish president, and he did not involve General Babakir Zebari, the Kurd who supposedly heads Iraq's army. In order to bypass Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister, al-Maliki has appointed his own "special envoys." [my emphasis]

Tags: peter galbraith, iraq war

Hersh's latest on expanding the Iraq War to Iran

Seymour Hersh reports on the Cheney-Bush administration's current war planning for Iran in Shifting Targets: The Administration's plan for Iran in the New Yorker issue dated 10/08/07 (accessed 09/30/07). He reports that Dick Cheney's current approach is no longer a massive bombing campaign on a wide variety of Iranian targets but the new emphasis is "on 'surgical' strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq." As Hersh notes, after years of agitation on the topic of Iran's nuclear program, Cheney's new approach means that what was previously "a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism".

Hersh explains the shift as follows:

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Reality, in other words, has been strongly reasserting its claims on Middle East policy.

I find the comment about public opinion especially intriguing. We know that Cheney and Bush have contempt for the opinions of the American public on matters of war and peace, except when they agree with Cheney's plans. Hersh also reports a couple of paragraphs later in the article:

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, "Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives." The former intelligence official added, "There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, 'You can't do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.' But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President."

Even dictatorships have to take some account of public opinion. So I have no doubt that managing public perceptions is a major concern of Cheney and Bush. But I would be curious as to just how public opinion against war with Iran gets filtered to Cheney and Bush in a way that causes them to change their planned course of action significantly.

Despite the uncertainty on that point, I do think it's very significant that even though many war critics are rightly disgusted right now at the timidity of Congressional Democrats in asserting their Constitutional role in the matter of military attacks on Iran, the public opposition to the Iraq War is somehow having the effect of restraining even Cheney and Bush in some way in this matter.

But we shouldn't fall into the current Republican habit of imagining that such issues exist almost exclusively in the form of domestic American politics. Even though it might be politically less difficult at first to have a more limited attack, it isn't necessarily the militarily optimal approach. Don't get me wrong. I'm opposed to expanding the war to Iran.

But one of the risks is the Iranian retaliation. If the US overtly attacks Iranian territory, we have to assume Iran will counter-attack in some way. A more limited strike would presumably leave Iran with a much greater capability to retaliate, a retaliation likely to be directed against American soldiers in Iraq.

We also have to remember. This is Dick Cheney and George Bush running this show. Apart from all issues of justification for war, if they expand the war to Iran, they will screw it up. Hersh lays out some of the risks as follows:

He [a recently retired C.I.A. official] added, "The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through."

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack "by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years."...

A limited bombing attack of this sort "only makes sense if the intelligence is good," the [Pentagon] consultant [on counterterrorism] said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing "will start as limited, but then there will be an 'escalation special.' Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike planning."

The surgical-strike plan has been shared with some of America's allies, who have had mixed reactions to it. Israel's military and political leaders were alarmed, believing, the consultant said, that it didn’t sufficiently target Iran's nuclear facilities. The White House has been reassuring the Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program. "Our theory is that if we do the attacks as planned it will accomplish two things," the former senior official said. (my emphasis)

Any time the Cheney-Bush administration is going to do something major like this and the viability of the action "only makes sense if the intelligence is good", we have good reason to worry.

The Iraq WMD fraud certainly makes our allies more concerned about following the American lead, understandably so. Hersh reports that Gordon Brown's government in Britain is interested in continuing down the same road that the pathetic Tony Blair took by supporting the Cheney-Bush administration in attacking Iran. But even they are worried about the intelligence claims, according to Hersh:

The revised bombing plan "could work - if it's in response to an Iranian attack,” the retired four-star [American] general said. "The British may want to do it to get even, but the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added, "a widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was sold a bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the war against Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s office and says, ‘We have this intelligence from America,’ Brown will ask, ‘Where did it come from? Have we verified it?’ The burden of proof is high." (my emphasis)

Hersh discusses an incident where British commandos seized a big shipment of weapons coming across the Iranian border into Afghanistan, though it wasn't clear whether it was officially sanctioned by the Iranian government:

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.” (my emphasis)

Not surprisingly, less submissive allies are even more skeptical of US intelligence claims from the Cheney-Bush administration:

The French government shares the Administration’s sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program, and believes that Iran will be able to produce a warhead within two years. France’s newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a stir in late August when he warned that Iran could be attacked if it did not halt is nuclear program. Nonetheless, France has indicated to the White House that it has doubts about a limited strike, the former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the French government have concluded that the Bush Administration has exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they believe, according to a European diplomat, that “the American problems in Iraq are due to their own mistakes, and now the Americans are trying to show some teeth. An American bombing will show only that the Bush Administration has its own agenda toward Iran.”

Another important point in Hersh's article is the indication of how strongly Dick Cheney intends to make sure that the expansion of the war into Iran happens:

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.” (my emphasis)

Another grim indicator in Hersh's report is this:

And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002” - the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency.

It's also important to recognize how drastic would be the contradiction between attacking Iran and our current posture of supporting the pro-Iranian, Shi'a-dominated government of Iraq:

Iran has had a presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the purpose of its current activities there are in dispute, however. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, when the Sunni-dominated Baath Party brutally oppressed the majority Shiites, Iran supported them. Many in the present Iraqi Shiite leadership, including prominent members of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, spent years in exile in Iran; last week, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to the Washington Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had “improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any “proxy war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against it. The crux of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is that its decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam has empowered Iran, and made it impossible to exclude Iran from the Iraqi political scene. (my emphasis)

Peter Galbraith emphasizes the same point in Mission accomplished - for Iran Salon 09/24/07:

In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned would be a disastrous consequence of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. [He refers to the Badr Organization, the militia of SIIC, the lead party in the Iraqi government.]And while the president contrasts the promise of democracy in Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in southern Iraq.

Iran's role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq's central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it supported - by then established as the government of Iraq -- as much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the United States nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the U.S. and Iran want to see the central government strengthened.)

Since 2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official in Iraq's Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq's daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq's production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi army. With the United States supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason to invest its own resources.

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most far-reaching. (my emphasis)

An overt military attack on Iran would be a very, very bad idea.

Tags: bush, cheney, iran war, peter galbraith, seymour hersh

Peter Galbraith on Iran and Iraq

Peter Galbraith has a long piece on Iran in the upcoming 10/11/07 New York Review of Books, which appears also at TomDispatch for 09/18/07. (NYRB puts its articles behind subscription after a few weeks, so TomDispatch is a more permanent link.) Galbraith is reviewing Trita Parsi's new book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007).

Galbraith has a been a partisan of Iraqi Kurds, which one should keep in mind in his analyses of the Iraq War. But he's very well-informed about that war and makes perceptive observations about a central dilemma in the Cheney-Bush Middle East policy. Iran and the United States shared perceived common interests in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime in Iraq.

Yet the administration still manages to see Iran as the central bogeyman in the Middle East. The German journalist Peter Scholl-Latour entitled a 2005 book that dealt largely with the Bush policies in the "war on terror" and the Iraq War, Weltmacht im Treibsand. Bush gegen die Ayatollahs (World Power in Quicksand: Bush Against the Ayatollahs). He explains that even though Bush's military actions have been directed primarily against Sunni targets (Saddam's regime, the Taliban, Al Qa'ida), that the administration's outlook is dominated by its perceptions of radical Islam stemming from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its strategic perception that Iran is the root of America's problems in the Middle East.

Galbraith describes this central problem well with relation to the Iraq War:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran's allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini's army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, which is home to most of the kingdom's Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The U.S. Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia's oil is under the Eastern Province.

America's Iraq quagmire has given new life to Iran's Syrian ally, Bashir Assad. In 2003, the Syrian Baathist regime seemed an anachronism unable to survive the region's political and economic changes. Today, Assad appears firmly in control, having even recovered from the opprobrium of having his regime caught red-handed in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Lebanon, Hezbollah enjoys greatly enhanced stature for having held off the Israelis in the 2006 war. As Hezbollah's sponsor and source of arms, Iran now has an influence both in the Levant and in the Arab-Israeli conflict that it never before had. (my emphasis)

And he observes that the foolish optimism of the neocon ideologues - and their soulmates in war like Dick Cheney - had a ludicrous expectation of the effect the conquest of Iraq would have on Iran:

The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western." Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality.

Galbraith also points out that the lead party in the current Iraqi government is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), previously called Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and that it has far closer affinities with Iran than "Mookie's boys", Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM). He writes:

The United States cannot now undo President Bush's strategic gift to Iran. But importantly, the most pro-Iranian Shiite political party is the one least hostile to the United States. In the battle now underway between the SIIC and Moqtada al-Sadr for control of southern Iraq and of the central government in Baghdad, the United States and Iran are on the same side. The U.S. has good reason to worry about Iran's activities in Iraq. But contrary to the Bush administration's allegations - supported by both General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in their recent congressional testimony - Iran does not oppose Iraq's new political order. In fact, Iran is the major beneficiary of the American-induced changes in Iraq since 2003.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, iran, iran war, peter galbraith

Peter Galbraith on the Iraq War

Peter Galbraith, an advocate of a "three-state" solution for Iraq, i.e., separate Sunni-Arab, Sunni-Shi'a and Kurdish states, writes on The Surge New York Review of Books 02/15/07 (03/15/07 edition):

At best, Bush's new strategy will be a costly postponement of the day of reckoning with failure. But it is also a reckless escalation of the military mission in Iraq that could leave US forces fighting a powerful new enemy with only marginally more troops than are now engaged in fighting the Sunni insurgency. The strategy also risks extending Iraq's civil war to the hitherto peaceful Kurdish regions, with no corresponding gain for security in the Arab parts of the country.

Until now, US forces in Iraq have been fighting, almost exclusively, the Sunni Arab insurgency. Bush's new plan calls for the US military to initiate operations against the Mahdi Army (and related militias) as well, a measure that could mean US forces will become embroiled in all-out urban warfare throughout Baghdad, a city of more than five million. In addition, the Mahdi Army has members throughout southern Iraq, in the Diyala Governorate northeast of Baghdad, and in Kirkuk. While many Shiites do not support al-Sadr (the Mahdi Army has had armed clashes with the Badr Organization belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, or SCIRI, one of the two main Shiite parties), the Mahdi Army is a formidable force comprising as many as 60,000 armed men. With Bush ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran, the Iranian government may see a broad-based Shiite uprising against the coalition as its best insurance against a US military strike. It has every incentive to encourage—and assist—the Mahdi Army in organizing such an uprising. Iran has sufficient influence with Iraqi Shiite groups—including SCIRI—to ensure at least their neutrality in a clash with the Mahdi Army. ...

George W. Bush has said he will leave the problem of Iraq to the president elected in 2008. Rather than acknowledge failure in Iraq — and by extension a failed presidency — Bush has chosen to postpone the day of reckoning. It is a decision that will cost many American and Iraqi lives, will leave the United States weaker, and will prolong the decline in American prestige abroad caused by the mismanaged Iraq war. And it will not change the truth that the President so desperately wishes to escape: George W. Bush launched and lost America's Iraq war. (my emphasis)

Tags: iraq, iraq war, peter galbraith