Death squads, the special ingredient in The Surge

This anniversary week of the invasion of Iraq, it's worth remembering what was involved in The Surge, which is currently widely assumed among the punditocracy to be successful, model counterinsurgency.

Mona Mahmood et al, reported in Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres Guardian 03/06/2013::

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

The Guardian provides a 51-minute documentary on the story, James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq - video 03/08/2013, for which embedding is unfortunately not currently available.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks reports on the story in Horrifying Iraq Torture - Pentagon's Complacency Revealed 03/07/2013:

Jim White comments on the Guardian story in Guardian Lays Out Details of How Petraeus Organized Death Squads in Iraq Emptywheel 03/07/2013

Another of the Guardian pieces is by Murtaza Hussain, How the US exported its 'dirty war' policy to Iraq – with fatal consequences The Guardian 03/08/2013, who looks at the phenomenon of the US exporting the worst of its misdeeds in Latin American to the Middle East:

Most chillingly, a veteran of the United States' "dirty war" in El Salvador was reported to have been brought in to personally oversee the interrogation facilities. As described by Iraqi officials this program was condoned at the highest levels of the US military and utilized "all means of torture to make the detainee confess … using electricity, hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails". The alleged involvement of a senior participant of the American intervention in El Salvador is, indeed, particularly odious given the legacy of institutionalized torture and murder which characterized US military involvement in that country.

At the now infamous School of the Americas, thousands of Latin American "special forces" were explicitly trained in torture techniques by US handlers. Many of those SOA graduates took their new training home to El Salvador, where they waged a war that killed an estimated 80,000 Salvadoran civilians. Similar "trainees" were sent out in the thousands to kill and maim on behalf of US interests in wars from Honduras to Guatemala. In the latter alone, US-supported death squads murdered over 50,000 civilians suspected of holding sympathies with leftist rebels. The creation and patronage of locally trained militias to wreak havoc among subject populations in pursuit of American military objectives is a tactic that seems to have been adapted to the present day with great effect – most notably in Iraq.

On a summer night 2008, armed paramilitaries broke into Hassan Mahsan's home in Baghdad's Sadr City district and put a gun to his young daughter's head. Demanding he reveal the location of a suspected insurgent, the men threatened to kill his daughter in front of the family before dragging Mahsan off for interrogation and telling his wife "he is finished". The paramilitaries were members of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF), an elite counterterrorism force referred to as "the dirty brigade". Believed to be trained and guided by US military advisers at every level of its organizational hierarchy, the ISOF has been structured so as to place it outside the confines of normal oversight for such organizations. Operating today essentially as a private paramilitary force for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the ISOF has also been described as a "local ally" of the United States in the country – a euphemism for an asset utilized for covert special operations.

The sooner the United States stops glorifying war - if that's even imaginable - the better off we'll be.

Tags: iraq war, surge

Obama's secret plan to end the Afghanistan War?

Stephen Walt in Obama's Afghan drop-in Foreign Policy 03/29/10 found himself dismayed by Obama's description of US war aims in a speech he gave on his visit to Afghanistan. So Walt hopes what he's really doing is actually not what he indicated in that speech:

So I found myself hoping (perhaps naively) that this was all a bit of blue-smoke-and-mirrors, and that he's actually planning to follow the same script in Afghanistan that Bush followed in Iraq. It won't be identical in every detail, but the basic logic would be similar. Here's how it goes:

First, announce an escalation of the U.S. effort (aka a "surge"), but set a rough deadline for it and quietly put new emphasis on "political reconciliation." (Done). Next, bombard the media with lots of evidence of progress, such as Taliban "strongholds" seized, al Qaeda leaders killed or captured, Taliban leaders arrested in Pakistan, etc., so that people think the surge is working. (Now underway). Third, arrange a diplomatic settlement that requires the phased withdrawal of U.S./ISAF troops, even if their departure is on a rather lengthy timetable. The Iraqi equivalent was the Status of Forces agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in the fall of 2008; in Afghanistan, it would probably entail some sort of negotiation between the Karzai government, the Taliban, and various other warlords (whether by a loya jirga) or some other device (Maybe underway too?). Finally, start removing the "surged" forces more-or-less on schedule-and ahead of the 2012 election cycle-so that you can claim to have avoided the quagmire that critics warned about back in 2009 (Remains to be seen).

It's not the ideal thing that critics of the Afghanistan War have to hope that the President is not really telling the truth about what his war goals are. But as a rule, a devious plan to end a war is far superior than a devious plan to start one. Walt's comment is also a valuable reminder that The Surge in Iraq in the end became an excuse to just declare victory and at least start taking the US forces out. Whether a McCain Administration with a vision of 100 Years War in Iraq would have continued to draw down the force levels in Iraq as Obama has is another question.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, surge

Afghanistan Surge (4)

Tom Engelhardt writes about the new counterinsurgency ideology in Victory at Last! Monty Python in Afghanistan TomDispatch 12/03/09

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was dusted off from the moldy Vietnam archives and made spanking new by General David Petraeus in 2006, applied in Iraq (and Washington) in 2007, and put forward for Afghanistan in late 2008. It has now been largely endorsed, and a major escalation of the war -- a new kind of military-led nation building (or, as they like to say, “good governance”) is to be cranked up and set in motion. COIN is being billed as a “population-centric,” not “enemy-centric” approach in which U.S. troops are distinctly to be "nation-builders as well as warriors."

Juan Cole talks about how unrealistic the assumptions of the Afghanistan Surge are in Obama's surge: Has the president been misled by the Iraq analogy? Salon 12/01/09:

But Afghanistan is not very much like Iraq, and the Washington consensus about its supposed end-game success in Iraq is wrong in key respects. Are think tank fantasies about an Iraq "victory" now misleading Obama into a set of serious missteps in Afghanistan?

Cole notes that the Iraqi army is now playing a more active role in fighting insurgents, which of course was one of the goals of Iraqi policy. But notice what he says is that "the new Iraqi army is now capable of patrolling independently and is willing to stand and fight against popular militias, albeit with U.S. supplies and close air support." (my emphasis) Being reliant on US supplies and close air support and not unambiguously good for the Iraqi Army. If they rely on a style of fighting that requires the kind of close air support that the US is currently providing but the Iraqis don't have the capability to replicate, that calls into question the ability of the US to ever leave.

He also notes that Prime Minister Maliki's government has successfully fought Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, but also that Iran played a major role in encouraging Muqtada to stand down his militia.

Robert Perry in Explaining the Drop in Iraqi War Dead Consortium News 12/01/09 also warns about the dangers in wishful thinking about the results of the 2007 Surge in Iraq:

The prevailing wisdom in Washington is that President George W. Bush’s decision in early 2007 to “surge” troops in Iraq – a policy implemented by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus of the Central Command – led to the decline in Iraqi violence. Therefore, the thinking goes, a “surge” should be tried in Afghanistan.

However, there’s an opposite way of reading the same data – that Bush’s “surge” increased the Iraqi violence in late spring 2007, including a spike in U.S. casualties, and that only a political-military decision to pull back from offensive operations that summer began the gradual reduction in the killing. That drop has grown dramatic since mid-2009 when U.S. forces withdrew to bases on the edge of the cities.

If one reads the data that way – seeing a correlation between fewer American troops on patrol and less overall violence – Obama’s Afghan decision could be viewed as likely to increase the disorder in Afghanistan, not tamp it down.

In another article describing the continuing influence of the neocons on US war policies, Obama Pleases the Neocons Cosortium News 12/03/09, Perry writes:

Most importantly, the neocons exploited the superficial impression in 2007-2008 that Bush’s “surge” of about 20,000 additional U.S. troops in Iraq was what brought about a decline in violence there.

Though the neocons sold the “surge” myth to Washington insiders, many military analysts considered the troop increase as only one element – and possibly only a minor one – compared to the buying off of Sunni insurgents in 2006, the de facto ethnic cleansing of many Iraqi neighborhoods, and the unilateral decision by anti-American Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr to demobilize his militia. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Rising Cost of the Iraq Surge.”]

Nevertheless, the “surge” myth allowed the neocons to insist that they had been right after all, even if there may have been some bumps along the way.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, surge

Iraq War: warnings against complacency

David Petraeus of The Surge: "Progressive" hero?

British Middle East expert Toby Dodge writes that Despite the optimism, Iraq is close to the edge by Toby Dodge The Observer12/21/08:

I have been travelling back and forth to Iraq for the last seven years. I witnessed the violent aftermath of the invasion in the spring of 2003 when looting and lawlessness descended into an all out insurgency. I returned in 2007 to see a country in the midst of civil war. On my last trip to Iraq this year, the population was holding its breath, waiting to see if the internecine strife had finished or simply stalled while all sides rearm. ...

With an end to the occupation in sight, both Bush and [British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown are attempting to put the best possible gloss on a military adventure that has seen 178 British and 4,209 Americans troops killed and anything between 90,000 and 650,000 Iraqi deaths.

Anglo-American declarations of progress and stability need to be treated with caution. Even today, Iraq is far from peaceful; an average of 500 people are murdered each month, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Baghdad at the end of 2008 is a deeply divided city. Neighbourhoods that were religiously and ethnically cleansed by the wave of violence that engulfed the city before 2007 are now fortified by row upon row of concrete blast walls. ...

Bush and Brown are loathe to use the term "civil war" to describe what took place in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 but this is exactly what happened. [my emphasis]

An escalation in violence or a return to civil war is not a reason to delay US or British withdrawal. Virtually all parties, with some possible exceptions among the Kurds, are demanding that the US leave. Both the specific conditions in Iraq and past experiences in places like Algeria when the French left strongly suggest that there will be some increase in conflict when US forces are withdrawn, if not before. There will be lots of debts to settle among hostile parties. And the approach that became part of The Surge that involved arming Sunni militias to fight "Al Qa'ida" has already made long-term sectarian reconciliation even more problematic than it was before. But the United States needs to get itself out of this disaster, sooner rather than later.

Paul Flieder reports in German for Die Zeit about his experiences in Iraq in Ein Monat in der Hölle (A Month in Hell) 17.12.2008. His grim description of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, as well as other parts of the country, are consistent with Dodge's warnings.

These are good reminders, when liberal Web publications are producing stuff like this article from Rachel Kleinfeld, Petraeus the Progressive: The surge in Iraq is a success, and we must claim it as our own Democracy Journal Winter 2008. Yes, you read that title right. And the "we" refers to Democrats. And it isn't an Onion-style joke. Kleinfeld is ignoring the solid reporting on this situation and trying to put a pro-Democratic spin on a Republican faith-based version of The Surge. She writes of the period of The Surge, when Petraeus the Magnificent arrived on the scene:

During that time, Iraq metamorphosed from killing fields to a functioning society. Robinson makes a strong case that these changes would not have taken place without the shift to counterinsurgency strategy, and that the strategy would not have worked without the extra manpower of the surge.

It may sound counterintuitive, but for progressives, Petraeus’s victory is our victory. His strategy bucked traditional ideas, lauded by many conservatives, that we could win by outgunning and outmanning the enemy. Instead, Petraeus incorporated insights, such as the importance of legitimacy and privileging civilian life in order to gain hearts and minds, that progressives have been promoting for years. However progressives feel about the decision to enter the Iraq War, we should own its success.

That's just sad.

Her version of The Surge could have been written by a Pentagon PR office. Something like that had to have been a major source for this stuff. I won't belabor a silly article too much. But her treatment of the Sunni Awakening is typical. She portrays it as a brilliant triumph of "progressive" counterinsurgency masterminded by Petraeus the Great. She seems completely oblivious to the fact that by arming and backing Sunni militias against the Salafi extremists that Petraeus the Awesome likes to call "Al Qa'ida", her "progressive" hero Petraeus was trading short-term gains in reducing violence against long-term intransigence in national reconciliation.

And while she rattles off peppy boilerplate, she doesn't seem to have noticed that a huge part of the reduction in violence was due to the fact that the Shi'a won that round of the civil war, in particular by successful sectarian cleansing of Baghdad, along with the creation (over years, not just in The Surge) of millions of refugees. When you run out of handy enemies to kill because they are either dead or gone, it tends to reduce violence, at least in the short run.

Declaring it as successful counterinsurgency is not even premature. It's just plain foolishness, based on dishonest claims by apologists for the Cheney-Bush administration like Petraeus the Conqueror.

And when she writes neocon-style slimebag polemics like this: "Unwilling to grant Bush a political victory, many progressives rationalized away their belief in principles such as preventing genocide" - you have to wonder why a journal pretending to be liberal and/or Democratic is printing her crap at all. Praising the alleged success of The Surge, a success based on the Shi'a Arabs winning that round of their civil war against the Sunni Arabs, and then accusing the "many progressives" (unnamed of course!) of being indifferent to genocide really is Cheney-level cynicism.

Tags: iraq war, petraeus, surge

Walls in Iraq

A big part of the alleged success of The Surge of 2007-8 came from the establishment in Baghdad of neighborhoods that had undergone sectarian cleansing along Shi'a-Sunni lines. And part of The Surge strategy was to construct a system of walls in Baghdad that reinforce the separate sectarian characteristics of neighborhoods. While it has played a role in reducing violence in the overall context of the American approach, it makes sectarian reconciliation even more of a challenge. And sectarian reconcilation was supposedly the political goal of The Surge.

Steve Neva in "Walling Off Iraq: Israel's Imprint on U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine" Middle East Policy Fall 2008 looks at this aspect of a phenemenon that I don't see discussed very much in the US commentary on the Iraq War, which is great extent to which American counterinsurgency (COIN) approaches in the Middle East are influenced by Israel's approach.

This always concerns me when I hear about it. Because Israel was founded in 1948 and has had conflicts with the Palestinians ever since. That conflict entered a new stage in 1967 with the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. That was 41 years ago. And there is no end in sight to Israel's conflict with Palestinian terrorism. I'm not exactly sure what kind of "success" that represents.

Neva writes:

Although overall measurements of violence in Iraq may have numerically declined, Iraq has become increasingly caged within an archipelago of isolated ethnic [more accurately, sectarian] enclaves surrounded by walls and razor wire and reinforced by an aerial occupation.

He expands on the point:

Yet, while the military touts its increased use of embedded anthropologists and “human terrain systems” teams as examples of this new culture-friendly approach, the cornerstone of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq today is less about cultivating human relationships or political solutions than about limiting and imposing them, primarily through concrete walls backed by increased violence from the skies above Iraq.

This surge in walls and enclaves suggests that the primary “lessons of history” being followed by the U.S. military’s actual counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq today derive less from Malaya, Algeria or Vietnam, than from Israel’s urban-warfare laboratory in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip over the past decade. [my emphasis]

Now, obviously, there's nothing wrong with learning from Israel's experiences. But given what we're seeing in Iraq, I have to wonder how much our military's COIN experts are taking into account the downsides of the Israeli experience.

Neva also points to the plausible likelihood that the strategy of targeted assassination by aerial strikes that we've seen practiced by the Cheney-Bush administration not only in Iraq but in Pakistan, Somalia and Syria is also heavily influenced by Israeli practices, if not by any demonstrated long-term net benefit:

[Israel] has erected hundreds of miles of separation walls and high-tech fences and over 400 checkpoints across occupied territory that enclose Palestinians within an archipelago of enclaves in order to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

This strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, backed up by frequent airborne assassinations and strikes.

It seems to me that it's important to recognize that, official rhetoric aside, Israeli policy in the West Bank has in practice been build around a model of permanent occupation and a willingness to continue such "low-intensity" (i.e., counterinsurgency) operations indefinitely. It's already been going on for 41 years. As Neva describes it:

The United States continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel’s responses to
unconventional war have never been well developed or very successful. It was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice. Its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel is arguably more insecure now than it has ever been.

Is that really the optimal model for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the various other countries against which this administration has been making strikes predicated on the aerial-assassination strategy? (Just to be clear, when I refer to targeted assassinations, I mean air strikes aimed at killing particular individuals, like the one that alleged successfully targeted Rashid Rauf in Pakistan early today their time.)

Neva gives the immediate background of this desire to copy Isreal's approaches of dubious long-term success:

[N]ew U.S. military deployments in Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti and then in the Balkans in the early 1990s provoked a longer-term recognition that the future of war was likely to include unconventional and counterinsurgent warfare, and a growing strategic desire to find a way to “win” such conflicts.

In this context Israel emerged as a default model for how to directly fight insurgencies, especially after the “Black Hawk down” debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in Third World “battle spaces.” In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis, Israeli advisers were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state-of-the-art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. At that time, the United States had an almost dreamy regard for Israel’s military acumen: lightning victories on the battlefield, ruthless pursuit of enemies, and intelligence agencies worthy of great deference. [my emphasis]

Nava points out that despite the seemingly enlightened talk from our generals that counterinsurgencies can't be solved by military means - a line that also serves as an alibi for the military's failures - Israeli and American COIN strategies in practice seem to assume the opposite:

Behind the use of Israeli-style walls and enclaves in Iraq there appears to be a deeper U.S. embrace of a new post-Vietnam strategic doctrine regarding counterinsurgent warfare that bears many similarities with Israel. It is based on the
belief that violent insurgencies against foreign military occupation can actually be
defeated through shifting military tactics rather than through a political solution that addresses the root of the insurgency, namely an end to foreign occupation.

Which is a strategy that makes sense if it's aimed at implementing a foreign policy like Israel's in the West Bank oriented toward an essentially permanent state of violent conflict. And in practice, the Israelis see that state as something very much like "winning".

But that's not how the famous COIN doctrine of our Savior-General Petraeus is being passed off to the American public. It is consistent, though, with Cheney's original idea of a permanent occupation of Iraq with the ability to use bases in Iraq as jumping-off points for applying "regime change" in other Middle Eastern countries.

With our generals now hinting at a "surge" (aka, military escalation) in Afghanistan of as many as 20,000 troops, these aspects of the Savior-General's COIN strategy need to be examined closely.

And in the broader sense, this has implications for long-term US military planning. On the one hand, given actual experience of the last two decades especially, it makes sense to maintain a higher level of COIN capability than our glorious generals did prior to 2001. But on the other, if that COIN capability is based on a deeply flawed approach, that could wind up doing a lot more harm than good. Especially if we go looking for wars in which to apply those mistaken COIN appraoches.

Tags: counterinsurgency, coin, iraq war, steve neva, surge

Iraq War: Back on the front page

At least it was on Sunday's Washington Post, right there on A-1: Self-Sufficiency Still Eludes Domestic Security Forces by Mary Beth Sheridan and Ernesto Londoño 11/09/08.

The White House was successful in getting the war off the front page on most days. The Surge definitely accomplished that. But now that the election is over and it's soon to be President Obama's problem, I expect to see a lot more page 1 stories. Military officers who want to impede the withdrawal in some way, outgoing Bush officials and others can now be expected to leak their concerns about how badly things are going.

The stab in the back: First World War, German edition

And the Republicans will be doing everything they can to hang the failure of their merry Mesopotamian adventure on Obama and the Democrats. So they now have an incentive to highlight the bad news that they've been calling war critics unpatriotic for years now for having been paying attention to all along. I guess if your definition of "patriotism" is "supports the Republican Party", that's perfectly consistent.

On the other side, Democratic officials may feel some need to stress that proverbial good news as a way to reassure the public in the face of Republican criticism that they aren't being reckless and irresponsible in the withdrawal.

It's a temptation I hope they can resist for the most part. The war has been going for what will be six years in March. And as the Post article points out, the goals for training enough Iraqi police keeps receding into the distance like a desert mirage. (Although they don't quite put it that way.)

It's clear now that there's little reason to be concerned about an "Al Qa'ida" (Salafi extremist) takeover in Iraq. There is virtually no constituency for it. And the Sunnis have shown they will eliminate those who try. That's one of the keys to the alleged success of The Surge.

But there is a strong likelihood of the resumption of civil war after we leave, or even while we're withdrawing. So happy talk from the new administration about how good conditions have become in Iraq would wind up being counter-productive. And those like Juan Cole who actually know something about Iraq seem to think a blowup over the oil supplies of Kirkuk is virtually inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.

None of that changes what the US needs to do: get US troops out on a rapid schedule - I would prefer one year rather than the 16 months Obama has talked about - and organize a diplomatic offensive like the one the "Hamilton-Baker" Iraq Study Group called for to prevent an all-out regional war from breaking out as the US withdraws.

The Democrats and war critics generally also need to pay close attention to how the stab-in-the-back narrative unfolds as we withdraw from Iraq. At this point, we can see how the narrative runs up until now. Things were going badly from 2003-6, though the Republicans attacked anyone who was saying that at the time in the nastiest ways, insisting that we were piling up victory after victory and soon the capital-v Victory would come. Then the legendary General Petraeus came in and did The Surge and everything was really, really wonderful this time.

And we know the end of the narrative: the war was almost won - why, Sarah Palin said so herself! - and then the Democrats came in and surrender to the Enemy. What we don't know yet are the details of the intermediate steps in the narrative.

The prevalence of the stab-in-the-back narrative among the officer corps and in Republican mythology about the Vietnam War has done a great deal of harm. It affected military assumptions in ways that contributed to the fiascoes in Iraq and also Afghanistan. And it had seriously poisonous political effects.

War critics need to do what we can to deconstruct the new stab-in-the-back narrative as it's in the process of being created. That process has been well underway since early 2005 already. The legend of The Surge has become a major part of it now.

The Post article gives some glimpses of how flawed the Legend of The Surge really is. For instance:

The blast walls around Kadhem's station stand as symbols of continuing U.S. efforts to strengthen the Iraqi security forces so they can keep order by themselves. The U.S. government has spent more than $20 billion on building a new Iraqi military and police force, and both sides report considerable progress. But the Iraqi units still depend heavily on Americans for training, logistics and other assistance. [my emphasis]

For all the talk of Petraeus' innovative counterinsurgency brilliance, in fact the Iraqi security forces are still largely sectarian militias with uniforms. The American training of the Iraqi forces, to the extent that it's taught them how to be more than sectarian death squads, has left them so that they are still dependent on US forces for logistics, continued training, transport and weaponry.

Here's another hint:

But the national police, with about 42,000 officers, are still well short of the projected goal of about 100,000 and cannot yet cover the country. They do not operate in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north and have failed to reach an agreement to absorb the Kurdish police force, U.S. and Iraqi officials say. Iraq also has tens of thousands of local police officers.

"We don't have air cover to help us to implement our missions. We need more transportation. We need arms. All these things right now are covered by the coalition forces," the chief of the national police, Lt. Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, said in an interview.

The Iraqi security forces training sounds an awful lot like the training of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). They are trained to rely heavily on American air power. And they don't have their own air power.

In fact, the country has virtually no air force. How does a country surrounded by potential foes defend its borders with no air force? That was part of the open secret all along. Cheney and Bush expected US forces to stay indefinitely. McCain was ready to leave them there for 10,000 years, as he once said. They basically expected that the US would handle any actual external defence needed.

Read realistically, the Post article illustrates once again what a complete disaster Cheney and Bush created with this totally unnecessary war in Iraq.

But politically, the Republicans now have an incentive to spin reports like this as reasons why leaving in 16 months would be a terrible idea. And that will eventually become part of their new stab-in-the-back narrative.

Tags: iraq war, stab-in-the-back, surge

Iraq War "success" and The Surge

I've been very disappointed in general in the way that Obama's campaign has downplayed the Iraq War. Not only because it's a winning issue and a good way to distinguish himself clearly from McCain on foreign policy. But because this war is the greatest strategic disaster in the history of American foreign policy (so far, if McCain gets elected).

Patrick Cockburn in Iraq: Violence is down – but not because of America's 'surge' The Independent 09/14/08 reviews the reasons for the reduction in violence in Iraq since 2007. Stress should be on reduction, because conditions are still very violent there. The recent disturbances in Bolivia that threaten to set off a civil war there are like routine daily occurrences in Iraq. Cockburn says bluntly, "Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world." His reasons for what improvement there has been, an improvement that McCain attributes exclusively to The Surge, include:

• The Shi'a won the sectarian war in Baghdad. They didn't drive the Sunnis out of the city altogether. But the neighborhoods are more homogeneous religiously.

• A large number of Iraqis (4.7 million) are refugees, both in and out of the country, having left their homes to get away from the violence. Both that and the results of the sectarian war in Baghdad effectively means there are not as many people left to kill.

• Sunni insurgent leaders shifted their focus from fighting Americans to fighting Salafi extremists ("Al Qa'ida in Iraq", or AQI). This is one factor that the Americans did not initiate but did play a key role in encouraging. The US has been paying former Sunni insurgent groups to fight AQI instead of the US. This bribery worked in the short run, at the expense of strengthening local warlords and militias and thus making national unification even more difficult. Presumably, this is much of what Cockburn has in mind when he writes, "General Petraeus has had a measure of success in Iraq less because of his military skills than because he was one of the few American leaders to have some understanding of Iraqi politics."

• Iran backs the Shi'a government of Iraq under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Iran also persuaded nationalist Shi'a militant Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army (JAM) to stand down on fight Americans. For now. "It is very noticeable," Cockburn writes, that in recent weeks the US has largely ceased its criticism of Iran." A state of affairs he attributes in part to "an implicit recognition that US security in Iraq is highly dependant on Iranian actions". That's also an encouraging sign for US policy, and I hope it continues in that vein.

Cockburn notes the grim oddity of current discussion and reporting on the war in the United States:

In Mosul, Iraq's northern capital and third largest city, with a population of 1.8 million, the government was trumpeting its success only a few months ago. It said it had succeeded in driving al-Qa'ida from the city, while the US said the number of attacks had fallen from 130 a week to 30 a week in July. But today they are back up to between 60 and 70 a week. Two weeks ago, insurgents came close to killing Major-General Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, with a roadside bomb.

The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media. The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it. US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air. When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size. The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America's military adventure there is finally coming good. [my emphasis]

The implication of Cockburn's analysis is that if McCain becomes President and takes seriously his own rhetoric about the magic results of The Surge, that could not only lead him to actions that would inflame anti-American sentiment in Iraq but to adopt reckless policies in Afghanistan.

It's also important to note that part of the short-term reduction in violence has also been due to the effectiveness of death squads who have been assassinating resistance leaders, a program modeled on the infamous Phoenix program in the Vietnam War. Tom Hayden writes about the Iraqi death squads in Woodward book reveals extra-judicial killings in Iraq San Francisco Chronicle 09/15/08:

The silence so far toward Bob Woodward's reporting of secret extra-judicial killings by American forces in Iraq shows a worrisome collapse of public debate about the war.

During the Vietnam War, by contrast, revelations about torture, tiger cages and the Phoenix program were headline news that sent protesters into the streets and produced congressional hearings. William Colby, then leading pacification efforts in Vietnam, testified that the Phoenix program killed 20,587 Vietcong "suspects," while Sen. William Fulbright suggested it meant indiscriminate killings of anyone resisting the U.S. and Saigon governments. ...

Now the Woodward book reports a series of top secret special operations, launched in May 2006, to "locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups," a campaign that may have been the greatest factor in reducing the violence in Iraq. President Bush told Woodward that the secret program was "awesome." Derek Harvey, the top intelligence adviser to Petraeus on the secret operations, told Woodward that the "lightning quick" assaults gave him "orgasms.".

Orgasms? Is this what we've come to?

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, patrick cockburn, surge, tom hayden

The Afghanistan War and "The Surge" in Iraq

Josepb Stiglitz warns that At All Costs, We Must Avoid a 'Surge' in Afghanistan Alternet.org 09/13/08. He begins by looking at the problem that, in my mind, was largely created by the inadequate efforts by the Democrats both Presidential and Congressional to keep the Iraq War as a central issue in the 2008 campaign:

The Iraq war has been replaced by the declining economy as the most important issue in America's presidential election campaign, in part because Americans have come to believe that the tide has turned in Iraq: the troop "surge" has supposedly cowed the insurgents, bringing a decline in violence. The implications are clear: a show of power wins the day.

It is precisely this kind of macho reasoning that led America to war in Iraq in the first place. The war was meant to demonstrate the strategic power of military might. Instead, the war showed its limitations. Moreover, the war undermined America's real source of power -- its moral authority. ...

To be sure, the reduction in violence is welcome, and the surge in troops may have played some role. Yet the level of violence, were it taking place anywhere else in the world, would make headlines; only in Iraq have we become so inured to bloodshed that it is a good day if only 25 civilians get killed.

This doesn't mean that the Iraq War has become more popular. Only that the Republicans have been able to, shall we say, put lipstick on the pig and convince a significant number of people that the end is in sight. Which it will not be if McCain is elected President.

In particular, the Democrats have failed to articulate the real results of The Surge. And that affects the unfounded optimism about the Afghanistan War:

The belief that the surge was successful is especially dangerous because the Afghanistan war is going so poorly. America's European allies are tiring of the endless battles and mounting casualties. Most European leaders are not as practiced in the art of deception as the Bush administration; they have greater difficulty hiding the numbers from their citizens. The British, for example, are well aware of the problems that they repeatedly encountered in their imperial era in Afghanistan.

America will, of course, continue to put pressure on its allies, but democracy has a way of limiting the effectiveness of such pressure. Popular opposition to the Iraq war made it impossible for Mexico and Chile to give in to American pressure at the United Nations to endorse the invasion; the citizens of these countries were proven right.

But back in America, the belief that the surge "worked" is now leading many to argue that more troops are needed in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

If the US under either McCain or Obama tries to escalate the war by simply adding more US troops and escalate the bombing of villages and assassination-by-drone tactics, which is turning the Afghan public even more intensely against the Americans, that the European NATO contingents will either leave entirely or restrict their operations to very limited areas, clearly delineated from the areas where the American approaches are being applied.

Two world wars and the collapse of the British and French colonial empires have given European leaders - and apparently the European publics, too - an understanding that pulling out of wars in which the costs have become much greater than any possible benefits isn't shameful or dishonorable: it's good sense and good policy.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, joseph stiglitz, surge

Mission accomplished in Iraq at last?

Don't worry, be happy - and just what are you smoking in that pipe, dude?

Jo Fish at FireDogLake came up with a great euphemism, "Wire Service that Must Not Be Named" for the A********* P****. It was a kooky idea of them to try to stop people from even linked to their stories. But I'm beginning to wonder if they weren't just embarrassed to have some of their stuff highlighted for a wider audience.

For instance, here is a McCain campaign press release credulous article, As insurgency fades, fragile peace unfolds bylined to Robert Burns and Robert Reid 07/27/08, this version from the Orlando Sentinel.

Mission is finally accomplished in Iraq, according to this article. No kidding:

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point at which the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

It's not the end of fighting; it looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

The combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, curbing illicit weaponry from Iran, boosting links between Baghdad and local governments, integrating former insurgents into government jobs and rebuilding the economy. Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaeda holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance has all but ceased. (my emphasis)

First, I need to repeat my obligatory comment every time someone announces Glorious Victory in Iraq: Great news! Let's have the troops home by Christmas!

Let's also recite the reality-based reasons for the reductions in violence. The goal of the surge was political reconciliation including a series of major compromise that have not been achieved. So, by the terms on which it was originally presented to the public, The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation, is a failure.

But there have been reductions in violence, from the more horrific to the less horrific. Yes, the increase in US troops had a role. I guess that's what the Wire Service that Must Not Be Named means by "a perilous peace". But so did other things. There was the Sunni Awakening, in which Sunni tribal leaders started fighting against the Al Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI) group, whose connections to the Al Qa'ida that pulled the 9/11 attacks is pretty tenuous from what we've seen in the public record. Our Savior-General Petraeus decided to use a variation of the buy-off-the-local-warlords strategy that we've been using in Afghanistan, which has resulted in an exceptionally weak central government, the massive growth of narco-trafficking, and an escalating war in that country. In other words, the US military made an effective truce with and provided funds to many of the Sunni guerrilla ("terrorist") groups that oppose the heavily pro-Iranian Shi'a government in Baghdad which we support. This Awakening process began months before The Surge was even announced, and had very little to do with the increase in US troops. But strengthening these Sunni militias makes the long-term political reconciliation more challenging, not easier.

Muqtada al-Sadr's JAM (Mahdi Army) has observed a ceasefire for most of 2007 and 2008. There seems to be little evidence that it has lost power or influence. On the contrary, it's a more formidable political force than in was in 2004 when it clashed openly with the US occupation forces for the first time.

The level of killing has also been affected by five million refugees leaving places where they were more likely to be killed by sectarian and tribal enemies to place where they were less likely to be killed. About half of those are internal refugees, the other half external, mostly in Syria and Jordan. See Helena Cobban's Iraq: Provincial elections and displacement 07/23/08 for how the refugee problem affects the provincial elections, which were recently postponed until likely sometime in 2009.

Then there was the effective completion of "ethnic cleansing" in Baghdad itself. The A********* P**** has a euphemism that is a new one to me, "neighborhoods purged of minorities":

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006. That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital.

The Iraq War has gone on for so many years that there are some well-established traditions connected with it. Election-year optimism about how well things are going is one of them. Then there's the late-year predictions that huge drawdowns will occur the following year.

With both Obama and the Iraqi government demanding that the withdrawal of American troops should start in 2009, the latter may actually come true this time. If Obama gets elected and the antiwar movement succeeds in bringing enough pressure to bear on his administration.

Tom Hayden discusses the Iraqi withdrawal demand Maliki Endorses Obama Timeline in Huge Blow for McCain, Bush Huffington Post 07/19/08.

For a less happy-face view of the current state of affairs in Iraq than that of the Wire Service that Must Not Be Named, check out Bob Dreyfuss' Iraq: Poised to Explode The Nation Online 07/27/08:

Despite the Optimism of the Neocons, which has pushed mainstream media coverage to be increasingly flowery about Iraq's political progress, in fact the country is poised to explode. Even before the November election. ...

There are at least three flashpoints for an explosion, any or all of which could blow up over the next couple of months. (Way to go, Surgin' Generals!) The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq's Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa ("Awakening") movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, robert dreyfuss, surge

Nir Rosen on the Iraq War

Colonial war, Cheney-Bush style (the severed head is from an American ally)

Nir Rosen has a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone about a recent visit to Iraq and about the alleged "success" of the McCain escalation, The Myth of the Surge 03/06/08 issue; accessed 02/24/08). The photo by Danfung Denis featured above appears in the print edition, but not at this writing in the online collection. The caption says:

Violence in Iraq is on the rise again - and much of it is aimed at the Awakening, Sunni fighters who have abandoned Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans. At right, two U.S. soldiers pose with the severed head of an Awakening member - a U.S. ally - who was decapitated by Al Qaeda. (The soldiers were later reprimanded for their behavior.) The killing was intended to send a clear warning: Those who aid the Americans are marked for death. (my emphasis)

That image conveys better than any of the other photos in the print or online editions the sense that Rosen's article gives, of the American soldiers in a hopelessly hostile environment, with little hope of achieving anything like the Success and Victory that our Republican war fans tell us is withing grasp, someday, maybe 100 years from now, maybe 10,000.

It's particularly notable that these soldiers are mocking the dead, severed head of someone allied to the United States, killed for collaborating with them. It's hard to imagine that this level of distrust, contempt, and total lack of respect isn't conveyed to our Iraqi allies as well as enemies of the moment.

That photo, by the way, is the kind that makes our Republican war fans crazy. They don't want to see anything that shows the genuine ugliness of war, or that presents any member of the US forces as anything other than a comic-book heroic warrior.

Acceptable war imagery for Republicans: the sergeant is saying, "Keep movin', you lunkheads!! Nobody lives forever! So git the lead out and follow me! We got us a war to win!"

Despite the admiration it will no doubt inspire in some of our superpatriots, disrespecting the dead or using body parts as trophies is a violation of the laws of war. Although this is presumably more like to be done to the corpses of enemies rather than allies. H. Wayne Elliott writes in Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), "Dead and Wounded":

In 1967 a U.S. Army sergeant in Vietnam posed for a photograph. The photograph, later published nationally, showed the sergeant holding the decapitated heads of two enemy corpses. The soldier was court-martialed and convicted of "conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline." There were other reports of U.S. soldiers cutting the ears and fingers off the enemy dead. Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, denounced the mutilation of dead bodies as "subhuman" and "contrary to all policy and below the minimum standards of human decency." Not only is the mistreatment of dead bodies "contrary to all policy," it is also a violation of the laws of war.

The caption to the Rolling Stone photograph above says the soldiers were "reprimanded", which is not the same as a court martial. Maybe our generals consider the "minimum standards of human decency" to have sunk since 1967?

Rosen's article is one that really needs to be read in full to appreciate the effect. He gives several accounts of his interactions with the Americans and the allied Sunnis ("Sons of Iraq" is the name that the US has suddenly started using, apparently just a week or two ago). What's impressive, and depressing, is how little understanding in either the linguistic or psychological sense the American soldiers have, or can really be expected to have under these situations. But saying that is not meant to let our infallible generals off the hook for their neglect of things like Arabic language skills.

Here's one account that gives some of the flavor (one of the Awakening members with whom Rosen talks is named Osama):

As [First Lt. Shawn] Spainhour talks to the sheik at the mosque, two bearded, middle-aged men in sweaters suddenly walk up to the Americans with a tip. Two men down the street, they insist, are members of the Mahdi Army. The soldiers quickly get back into the Strykers, as do Osama and his men, and they all race to Mahala 830. There they find a group of young men stringing electrical cables across the street. Some of the men manage to run off, but the eleven who remain are forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wear flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit take their pictures one by one. The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist - they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. "I bet there's an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

As the soldiers storm into nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the Americans come up to me, thinking I am a military translator. They look bemused. The Americans, they tell me in Arabic, have got the wrong men. The eleven squatting in the courtyard are all Sunnis, not Shiites; some are even members of the Awakening and had helped identify the Mahdi Army suspects.

I try to tell the soldiers they've made a mistake — it looks like the Iraqis had been trying to connect a house to a generator - but the Americans don't listen. All they see are the wires on the ground: To them, that means the Iraqis must have been trying to lay an improvised explosive device. "If an IED is on the ground," one tells me, "we arrest everybody in a 100-meter radius." As the soldiers blindfold and handcuff the eleven Iraqis, the two tipsters look on, puzzled to see U.S. troops arresting their own allies.

When you read accounts like this, you realize just how [Cheney]ed we are in Iraq. (my emphasis)

I know it's not news that Cheney and Bush are fools over this thing. But one of the many ways in which that's true is that after convincing our media clowns that The Surge has tamped down violence, if they had had any sense of responibility or even good sense at all, they would have taken the opportunity to declare Mission Accomplished once again and start large-scale and fairly rapid withdrawal of American troops.

But they didn't. Aside from their geopolitical and oil-industry ambitions, I really do think that they must have no clue at all how to extricate the US from this situation. Nor do they give any convincing impression of actually caring.

This article really gives a good picture of what the arming and training of the Awakening Councils/Sons of Iraq means. And how it bought short-term cosmetic gains at the price of making long-term peace a more distant goal:

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups."

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.

"We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future." (my emphasis)

This is what happens when men like Dick Cheney, George Bush or John McCain are allowed to run the government.

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, nir rosen, surge

The Maverick and the Republican "conservatives"

The Maverick embraces his Dear Leader, 2004

That bold Maverick McCain addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference this afternoon. That's the gathering where last year Mad Annie Coulter fired up the faithful by calling John Edwards a "faggot". A number of prominent conservatives have complained that the Maverick isn't sufficiently loyal to the Party line, which incidentally (or maybe not so incidentally) plays right into the endless depiction of McCain as some kind of moderate by his adoring fans in the press corps.

Before I get into the rightwing grumbling over the Maverick, has anyone else noticed that Joe Lieberman has been showing up standing loyally beside McCain lately when he gives victory speeches? The Senate Democrats probably think they have little choice but to accept Lieberman as part of their voting majority in organizing the Senate. But, good grief, if the man is campaigning for a Republican Presidential candidate even during the primaries, it's silly to regard him as any kind of Democrat any more. Given their difficulty in getting any innovative, non-Cheney-approved legislation through the Senate anyway, I have to wonder whether accepting him as part of the majority even now makes sense. If the Dems pick up a couple more Senate seats in the fall - or even one more in the Mississippi special election to fill Trent Lott's vacated seat - there will be even less reason to allow Lieberman to pose as a Democrat. Because he obviously isn't. The Dems are at least not allowing HoJo to be a "super-delegate" at the party convention (Lieberman No Longer a Super Delegate Capitol Watch 02/06/08).

This suspicion of the right wing against their presumptive Presidential nominee Maverick McCain is very strange. I hate when Pat Buchanan agrees with me, but he's right in saying that the Maverick as President "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."

A couple of useful looks at this dustup within the Christian Republican Party are McCain seeks to assuage wary conservatives by Joe Garofoli San Francisco Chronicle 02/07/08, and Hating on McCain by Joe Conason Salon 02/07/08.

Garofoli hits what I think is the bottom line on this faction fight among the Reps:

Talk show host and conservative commentator Mike Gallagher wrote Wednesday in the TownHall.com blog that "a lot of my friends and colleagues are in a foul mood over John McCain's Super Tuesday success."

"But what should really fire them up is the possibility of a Democrat in the White House in 2009," he wrote. "And I would respectfully suggest to the 'I'll-never-vote-for-McCain' crowd that you are threatening to hand the November election over to the Democrats on a big, fat silver platter."

Why should prominent conservatives be harshing on McCain? In some cases, looking for reasons is probably useless. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, was off the wall even before he pickled his brain in OxyContin. Conason also predicts with good reason that most Republicans won't experience much trauma in getting behind the Maverick as their nominee:

Certainly there will be many elected officials, bureaucrats, officeholders and assorted pork-choppers who will fall into the McCain ranks without much protest, out of personal interest or partisan loyalty. If conservatives could persuade themselves to accept Romney's professions of the true faith despite his record of support for abortion rights and gay rights, then why not believe McCain when he promises supply-side tax cuts?

And, as Conason also explains, plain old fanaticism and wingnut paranoia are also likely at work to some extent.

I realize that the image of Maverick McCain is one that has been repeated for years by our sad excuse for a press corps. Most of whom luuu-uuv that living saint, Staight-Talking McCain. Listen to the reporters on TV, blathering about St. McCain's "straight talk" and his "Maverick" nature.

The bold Maverick has one of the most conservative, pro-Bush voting records in the Senate. He panders to the Christianist right, including embracing their anti-science, anti-evolution pitch. He supports continuing the Cheney-Bush tax cuts (aka, tax subsidies) for the wealthiest citizens, because the heart and soul of the Republican Party is to make sure that the wealthiest people who materially benefit the most from what the United States has to offer should be free of the terrible burden of paying taxes to support their country.

McCain gave his adoring fans among the TV talking heads a chance to pimp his Maverick image by his anti-torture bill. But that was a joke from the start, though our pathetic press corps wouldn't think of reporting that. Torture was illegal when Cheney and Bush and Rummy started it in 2001. Why would anyone think that outlawing it again would make any difference to these scoundrels? Then when Bush signed the bill with a signing statement saying he had no dadgum intention of obeying it, the bold Maverick said he was just fine with that. And, of course, the Straight Talker happily voted to approve to retroactively indemnify many of the torturers. Although they can still be prosecuted under international law, if necessary. No McCain Presidency will prosecute those or any other torture cases unless their hand is forced somehow. And if the Congress can't force Bush's Attorney General to even investigate instances of torture in which the administration openly admits to using the drowning torture (waterboarding) that has been generally recognized as torture since at least the days of the Spanish Inquisition, it's unlikely they would be able to force McCain either.

The Maverick supports Cheney and Bush on telecomm amnesty for illegal spying, supports the illegal spying program generally, is fine with Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of (Republican) Presidential power, will do nothing to stop Republican voter-suppression maneuvers (a direct continuity between today's Republicans and "Old South" segregationists), is totally on board with Supreme Court Justices like Roberts and Alito (one McCain Supreme Court appointment and you can kiss Roe v. Wade goodbye), supports Republican administrations defying Congressional subpoenas and exercising a blatantly partisan and often plain dishonest political prosecution policy, and thinks preventive wars are just dandy.

McCain was the chief Congressional advocate of The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation, whose main function has been to strengthen the Sunni militias that are fighting against our allied Shi'a-dominated, pro-Iranian government in Baghdad's Green Zone. Just within the last few weeks, fighting between government (aka Shi'a partisan) forces and the supporters of some whacko apocalyptic cult produced fighting in 75% of Basra, in the south where the British have, uh, successfully pacified everything. That's a key port facility for oil exports and a key location on the exit route for American troops leaving Iraq.

And, of course, the point of The Surge - to produce political reconciliation - has gone nowhere, to put it mildly. Oh, yeah, now the Turks are regularly bombing northern Iraq and conducting cross-border raids. And the air war in Iraq and Afghanistan escalated dramatically in 2007. The Iraq War is almost exclusively urban combat. Gee, when you drop a 2,000-lb bomb on a building in the middle of a crowded city, think there might be some civilian causalities? Have you ever heard the bold Maverick McCain express the slightest reservations about fighting a guerrilla war this way?

And what's the Maverick's solution to this? Keep fighting forever. He said he was fine if the US stayed in Iraq for 100 years. When a reporter later challenged him on it, he said 1000 years or even a million years (!!!) would be fine with him.

Speaking of which, you wouldn't know it listening to the Chris Matthewses expounding their man-crushes for the Maverick. But listen to one of his speeches at some length sometimes. I heard a long excerpt of him campaigning in Florida, I think it was, and he sounded downright dingy. And that dull roar you hear in the background when he speaks? That's the sound of bombs falling on Teheran. And Damascus. And Lord only knows where else.

Tags: iraq war, joe lieberman, mccain, mccain escalation, surge

Evaluating "The Surge", aka, the McCain escalation

Pat Lang doesn't think much of what The Surge has accomplished in The "Surge" and its results Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008 blog:

Yes, more troops made possible a more complete application of Petraeus' revival of counter-insurgency methods and that was a plus, but that does not mean that the increased number of troops would have produced a similar result without the basic change in strategy.

In addition, the Sunni Revolt against the takfiri jihadis lies at the very heart of what has changed in Iraq. That revolt reached the point of "critical mass" at a time in which many people succeeded in convincing the American command in Iraq that predestination might be a feature of religious thought for many Americans but the idea of redemption as a possibility for insurgents would probably be a better operational approach. This serendipity (revolt plus counter-insurgency methods) made the difference this year in Iraq, not more infantry. Once again, the additional infantry were useful, but only that.

It is reasonably said by some that none of this matters because the underlying social and political causes of the internal problem in Iraq have not been solved. That is true, but I haven't given up on the possibility yet.

He also links to this article, Bush: Iraq force reduction is on track by James Gerstenzang Los Angeles Times 01/13/08. Our Dear Leader continues to hide his own decisions behind Savior-General David Petraeus:

Administration officials have spoken for several weeks about their goal of reducing troop levels by five brigades by July, from a high of 20. That would bring the number of U.S. troops in Iraq below 140,000, from the 158,000 in the country at the end of December. There were about 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq a year ago when Bush announced he was sending more.

Bush told reporters that, about the reductions, he had told Petraeus, "If you want to slow her down, fine; it's up to you."

Tags: iraq war, pat lang, surge

The Surge: based on false dogma? And justified by false claims?

Michael Schwarz, building on Juan Cole's Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2007 (Informed Comment blog 12/26/07), talks about the scam behind The Surge's propaganda in The Top Eleven Myths about Iraq, 2007 Huffington Post 01/04/08:

I want to add one myth to his list, the one I find most galling and least debunked: that the surge has led to the pacification of large parts of Anbar province and Baghdad. Quiescence and pacification are simply not the same thing, and this is definitely a case of quiescence. In fact, the reduction in violence we are witnessing is really a result of the U.S. discontinuing its vicious raids into insurgent territory, which have been - from the beginning of the war - the largest source of violence and civilian casualties in Iraq. These raids, which consist of home invasions in search of suspected insurgents, trigger brutal arrests and assaults by American soldiers who are worried about resistance, gun fights when families resist the intrusions into their homes, and road side bombs set to deter and distract the invasions. Whenever Iraqis fight back against these raids, there is the risk of sustained gun battles that, in turn, produce U.S. artillery and air assaults that, in turn, annihilate buildings and even whole blocks.

The "surge" has reduced this violence, but not because the Iraqis have stopped resisting raids or supporting the insurgency. Violence has decreased in many Anbar towns and Baghdad neighborhoods because the U.S. has agreed to discontinue these raids; that is, the U.S. would no longer seek to capture or kill the Sunni insurgents they have been fighting for four years. In exchange the insurgents agree to police their own neighborhoods (which they had been doing all along, in defiance of the U.S.), and also suppress jihadist car bombs.

This reinforces the sectarian divisions among Arab Sunnits, Arab Shi'a and Kurds and makes national political reconciliation - the alleged goal of The Surge when Cheney and Bush rolled it out a year ago - even less likely to be achieved.

In The dogmas of war: A rigid counterinsurgency doctrine obscures Iraq’s realities Armed Forces Journal (n.d., accessed 01/04/08), Lt. Col Gian Gentile also cautions that the assumptions of The Surge are deeply flawed:

Counterinsurgency experts have tended to rely heavily on two historical cases: the British in Malaya in the late 1950s, and the French in Algeria in the 1950s as expressed in the writings of one of its participants, the French officer David Galulla. Derived from these two historical cases into lessons learned by the counterinsurgency experts is the operational method of establishing combat outposts in areas of a country controlled by insurgents with the primary purpose of providing security and protecting the people.

In fact, this “right” way, as defined through history, was effectively and brilliantly put into practice two years ago in Iraq in the northern city of Tal Afar by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment under Col. H.R. McMaster. It revolved around the operational method of establishing large numbers of combat outposts manned by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers throughout the city, while simultaneously isolating the city with a surrounding sand berm.

But now, a “right” way to conduct counterinsurgency operations in Iraq has become the only way. Our new operational approach in Iraq is applying, without apparent question or deep analytical thought, these historical counterinsurgency lessons and those from experience in Tal Afar and Ramadi.

Arguably, this operational approach is too little and too late. It does not take into account the reality of conditions on the ground in Baghdad: the fact that there is a civil war and that 25,000 additional combat troops are not enough to solve militarily what is essentially a political problem. To replicate Tal Afar in Baghdad would require 120,000 American troops. The recent surge in sectarian killings in Tal Afar should also teach us that there are limits even for the “right” way to conduct counterinsurgencies. Yet, we are so confident of our newly released counterinsurgency doctrine — a doctrine that was built on the writings of lessons learned by the counterinsurgency experts — that we apply it dogmatically in Baghdad. Dogma means adhering to a set of principles and tenets and applying them in an overpowering way without considering alternatives. This is what we have come to in our current operational approach in Baghdad.

Tags: gian gentile, iraq war, michael schwarz, surge

The secret of The Surge

Rosa Brooks summed it up pretty well last week in The walls around Bush's Iraq strategy Los Angeles Times 12/20/07.

Over the last year, sectarian cleansing has often occurred with reluctant American connivance. Our troops have watched helplessly as neighbors have driven out neighbors, and the walls that U.S. troops build help freeze the new sectarian boundaries in place. In Washington, the administration still speaks of a unified Iraqi central government and "national reconciliation," but in practice, we've gained a respite from violence in part because we've given up on reconciliation and accepted sectarian segregation as the new status quo.

In other words, for all the early rhetoric about benchmarks, "political progress" and reconciliation, the truth is that most Washington insiders accept that we're heading toward a different and much grimmer version of Iraq. As Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group comments: "Iraq is moving in the direction of a failed state, with competing centers of power run by warlords and militias. The central government has no political control whatsoever beyond Baghdad, maybe not even beyond the Green Zone."

We used to say we wanted freedom and democracy. But these days, we'll settle for more warlords, more segregation and fewer bodies. (my emphais)

Anthony Cordesman has out a new analysis of the status of the Iraq War, Progress in Iraq: The December Report on Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (Center for Security and International Studies) 12/20/07. He highlights the current Department of Defense (DOD) definition of success in the Iraq War: "The strategic goal of the United States in Iraq remains a unified, democratic and federal Iraq that can govern, defend and sustain itself and is an ally in the war on terror."

He looks at what it would take to achieve that goal. One thing is something that is hard to see as anything other than an open-ended US troop commitment, in practice:

The US needs to maintain a strategic relationship with Iraq that provides stable support for Iraqi security, accommodation, economic development, and the creation of effective governance over a period of at least three to five more years. This does not mean maintaining current US force and aid levels, or not making US support conditional on a realistic level of Iraqi progress. It does mean understanding that 2008 cannot be a decisive year in building stable accommodation, only a beginning.

So, great. After six years of war (March 2003 will be at the sixth anniversary0, we will finally reach the beginning - if we're lucky.

I have to give Cordesman credit. Given his grim prognostications, it takes some real vision to keep optimism about achieving some kind of victory, as he is. Or at least this optimistic: "There are ... strong indicators that the glass has gone from one that was mostly empty [at the end of 2006] to one that is at least half full."

He also points to the need for Iraqi political reconciliation. Due to the developments that Brooks' column highlights, that possibility at the national level faces even greater obstacles now than before The Surge. Juan Cole writes at his Informed Comment blog in Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2007 12/26/07:

The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has for the moment lost the support of the Sunni Arabs in parliament. The Sunnis in his cabinet have resigned. Even some Shiite parties have abandoned the government. Sunni Arabs, who are aware that under his government Sunnis have largely been ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, see al-Maliki as a sectarian politician uninterested in the welfare of Sunnis.

Then there's the issue of basic governmental services. Cordesman writes:

Iraq governance remains weak at every level and ineffective at many. There is no agreement on a political structure that can lead to the creation of effective local and provincial governments, define Kurdish autonomy and the form federalism will take, or shape the tangible political structure of accommodation and differences in governance by major sect and ethnic group and in mixed areas. This process will take at least several years to develop and reach some level of stability. (my emphasis)

Remember that business of developing the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) about which we used to hear promises all the time? Cordesman sees that as vital, and writes:

It is unclear that real progress can be made in these areas before far more progress is made in accommodation, and it may well be three to five more years before a reasonably stable mix of police, courts, and a heavily "federalized" rule of law can emerge. (my emphasis)

In other words, another five years to get there. If everything goes well.

He also points to the need for economic development, which is going terribly slowly because of all the other problems.

Cordesman points out in a restrained but unmistakable way the secret of The Surge which the Rosa Brooks column addresses when he writes that "the unplanned Sunni uprising against Al Qa'ida that has been the real key to the successes of the last several months."

Here, "Al Qa'ida" refers to the radical Salafist groups that call themselves "Al Qa'ida in Iraq" (AQI), whose affiliation with Osama bin Laden's central Al Qa'ida group is fairly tenuous.

The "unplanned Sunni uprising" refers to anti-American Sunni militias with whom the Americans started actively collaborating in attacking AQI. While doing so, the Sunni militias have not been focusing on killing Americans and have focused less on civil war against the Shi'a. But there is little reason to think that the Sunni militias have given up their intention to fight the American occupation and the Shi'a.

Pursuing this course of allying with the Sunni militias against AQI would make more sense as part of an immediate exit strategy. But as part of an indefinite commitment to American troop presence, it reinforces the power of local Sunni militias who will later turn to fight the Americans and the Shi'a, and makes the establishment of a functioning national government more difficult. As Joost Hiltermann says in the quotation above, it pushes Iraq more in the direction of being a failed state for a protracted period.

Another way to put it is that the short-term "success" of The Surge was achieved by accepting in practice for 2007 that Iraq is a failed state and that the US military had to work with what it had. Again, that would mean one thing as part of an exit strategy. But as part of an effort that requires American combat troops to fight for 5-10 years more, it makes the political problems in Iraq more intractable.

Tags: anthony cordesman, iraq war, juan cole, mccain escalation, rosa brooks, surge

Both sides equally to blame?

Our Savior-General David Petraeus

Charles Peters, the founder of Washington Monthly magazine, gives us a pristine example of fake "fairness" in The Case For Facing Facts Newsweek 12/03/07 issue.

In a world where the Republican Party is trashing science in the name of "creationism", anti-abortion obsessions, and industry propaganda minimizing the effects of global climate change, Peters writes:

The problem is one that I have seen cripple our political life again and again and that seems to grow steadily worse. Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty. Neither side wants to face facts that don't fit its case. (my emphasis)

"Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." Heaven forbid that a columnist in Newsweek accuse conservatives or Republicans of denial of reality without "balancing" it. "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." Brilliant.

As an example of Peters' own reality-testing in this column, let's start with this:

Conservative and liberal rigidity joined to create a tragic end to the war in Vietnam. Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong; in fact, a significant number of them did not want to live under the communist North. The Nixon administration could not admit that South Vietnamese leaders were too inept to prevail. This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit. In our chaotic departure, we abandoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who could only escape across the South China Sea in boats so rickety that many did not survive. Many of those who could not flee languished for years in North Vietnamese prisons and "reeducation camps." (my emphasis)

What.A.Load.Of.Crap. It's hard to believe an adult would write something like that for other adults to read.

First of all, it was the Ford administration that was in power at the time of Saigon's fall in 1975. Ford's chief of staff was a guy named Don Rumsfeld, and his main assistant was Dick Cheney. Gee, they didn't plan ahead? They believed their own propaganda? Gosh, who would have guessed.

Peters' pseudo-balanced argument is, "This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit." What does this even mean? He is particularly referring to plans for evacuating supporters from Vietnam, so it's not very clear how anyone outside the incumbent Republicans administrations could have done much concrete planning for such a thing. But the broader implication that war critics had given no thought to the implications of the US exit is plainly not the case, as a couple of hours in Internet archives or with hardcopies of contemporary publications could have shown.

Peters doesn't indicate what he thinks would have been an appropriate policy for handling the problem he addresses. The idea was that the South Vietnamese government could fight and survive on its own. Just how would the US have offered a policy in 1975 of facilitating massive emigration by government officials and ARVN (South Vietnamese) soldiers without prompting a massive flight that would have undermined the tottering Thieu regime even more quickly?

"Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong." In what alternative universe was that? Peters is sensible enough not to attach any names to that little fantasy. But the statement is batty on the face of it. As an example, Radical America for Jan-Apr 1974, a New Left journal, which meant it's producers considered themselves leftists and not liberals, was devoted to a long paper, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam", a study of Vietcong organizing in the Mekong Delta. And, amazingly enough, thanks to the wonders of the Internet and the archiving activities of Brown University, the whole darn thing is available online. If you read the first two paragraphs of the Introduction, you'll see that the editorial position expressed there was explicitly sympathetic to the National Liberation Front (NLF/Vietcong), which was not the position that liberal opponents of the war took.

And yet, even in the second paragraph, the editors explain to their readers that the view that the NLF "consisted of resistance fighters of super-human proportions, enjoying the unwavering support of the people" - for the maybe two dozen people in the US who actually thought that - was not so, because even "some of them defected from the NLF along the way".

The point of this somewhat obscure example being that no one over the age of 13 thought that "every South Vietnamese" was "a closet Viet Cong"! And yet there it is in a respectable column by a respectable writer in respectable Newsweek, "Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong." I repeat: What.A.Load.Of.Crap.

Yes, our Establishment press is that broken.

Here are a couple of present-day examples from his column illustrating his case that "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." One is on abortion, where he writes, "Too many pro-lifers and pro-choicers seem determined to ignore the other fellows' [sic] points as they cling to their own rigid positions."

I don't normally nitpick over gender neutrality or lack thereof in common phrases. But in this case, it's probably indicative of the shallowness of Peters (or maybe his Newsweek editor) on this particular point that he refers to the abortion debate as one between the "fellows".

The point he's making is a vapid one. Abortion and women's right to choose have been actively debated for decades. Abortion was a national issue during the Presidential campaign of 1972, the year before the Roe v. Wade ruling. It's not an issue of sporadic visibility. It's one on which people have well-established positions, and the public attitudes on abortion have actually been stable for a long time. Both sides are familiar with the arguments of "the other fellows" on the abortion issue. This is an issue on which people differ on a matter of basic policy. It's a real difference, not a matter of insufficient manners or attentiveness on both sides.

Theoretically, there could be some actual common ground on which pro-choice and anti-abortion groups could unite, such as sex education and measures to care for women and girls in difficult circumstances who prefer to carry their babies to term. I'm not familiar with the specific instances, but I understand that feminist groups have proposed such joint action on occasion. But regardless of who proposed what to whom, the fact is that the anti-abortion movement is mainly composed of politicized white Christian fundamentalists, aka, Christianists, who also generally oppose sex education in the public schools, except for the proven-ineffective and often plain dishonest "abstinence-only" version. A lot of them are opposed even to the idea of parents provide sex education for their own children. (Do they think the kids will learn it from reading the Bible? Do they think that stories about sex in the Bible fit the fundamentalist model?)

The anti-abortionists are also generally opposed to any kind of family planning services for adults that include even information about abortion, unless it's the exaggerated and dishonest fundi brand of propaganda against abortion. The Cheney-Bush administration, in line with the desires of the Christianists, has consistently voted in the UN and other international forums with the Vatican and conservative Islamic governments against practical family planning programs and against measures to bolster women's' rights.

So where's the common ground? Peters doesn't tell us. It's just that, "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty."

And, hey, if you can't find a vaguely plausible-sounding parallel, just compare two different things, because liberals and conservatives must be equally guilty of whatever. Peters writes:

I have yet to find a conservative who acknowledges that our lowest unemployment rates since World War II have come in years when we had the highest income-tax rates, but it is a fact. And I have yet to hear a liberal express regret that it was not one of our own who had the courage and imagination to challenge Soviet leaders "to tear down this wall."

Say what? What a goofy comparison. Peters maybe should have explained why John Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech doesn't count in that latter point.

Ostensibly, there is a policy point in Peters' essay. He is saying that the US should plan to make provision to get people out of Iraq who would be subject to retaliation for having worked with the Americans.

But the real purpose seems to be to use the phony "balancing" to trash liberals, even though conservatives in his balancing formula are theoretically equally bad in everything. Because his first three paragraphs aren't concerned with his pseudo-balancing act at all:

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared.

Giving Gen. David Petraeus his due does not mean we have to start saying it was a great idea to invade Iraq. It remains the terrible idea it always was. And the occupation that followed has been until recently a continuing disaster, causing the death or maiming of far too many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

Still, the fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications? (my emphasis)

The premise, of course, is factually false. Congressional war critics like Jack Murtha and Jim Webb have been in the news recently stating that The Surge has had short-term military benefits in reducing violence. But both they and other war critics have also reminded the Cheney-Bush administration that the whole point of the military surge was to create time and space for political reconciliation. And that political reconciliation is plainly not happening. Why does Charles Peters not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications? (To borrow his wording.)

Even those like Juan Cole who have pointed out the exaggerations and distortions in the claims of reduced violence have also noticed that the overall level of violence has receded to something like 2005 levels, which seemed pretty bad at the time. They've also pointed to the role that ethnic cleansing in Baghdad and other places has played in reducing the immediate level of violence. But I haven't come across anyone denying that The Surge had any effect.

Still, anyone of any ideological persuasion looking at the situation and having the persistence to get past the lazy "press corps" conventional wisdom of the day can see that The Surge has scarcely brought the Iraq War closer to a peaceful resolution, much less created a situation where Cheney and Bush are willing to declare victory and get our forces out of Iraq, the way even the British are doing. (Actually, the Brits, having had plenty of experience losing colonies, aren't so fixated on claiming that an obvious disaster is a Great Victory.) The American alliance with local Sunni warlords, which war fans celebrate as "reconciliation at the local level", is especially problematic in that regard.

The editors of The American Prospect summarize some of the key concerns well in a single-paragraph item, Up Front: Who Did What? Dec 2007 issue (behind subscription at this writing but they make it publicly available later).

In an editorial in the Nov. 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, [neocon hack] Fred Kagan celebrated the success of the surge, a plan he helped devise, in routing al-Qaeda from safe havens throughout Iraq. Since the surge bore no relation to the tribal revolt that has resulted in al-Qaeda's recent defeats, this is a bit like Captain Ahab claiming victory as Moby Dick lies dying of lung cancer. Truth be told, the revolt was unforeseen by any of the surge's proponents, and had begun to weaken al-Qaeda before the surge forces themselves were even in place. Then there's the conundrum that empowering Sunni militias against al-Qaeda has also undercut the U.S.' strategic goal of a unified, centrally governed Iraq. Still, allowing for the facts that it wasn't really us who did it and that what got done has a downside as well as an up: We did it! (my emphasis)

Why does Charles Peters not want to face these facts, let alone ponder their implications? He concludes his essay by chanting the Republican Party line about our Savior-General Petraeus. Peters tells us that the Savior-General "has taught us how to deal effectively with insurgencies." Mission accomplished, dude!

And the American Prospect editors are plainly recognizing the (limited) success of The Surge in that passage: "allowing for the facts that it wasn't really us who did it and that what got done has a downside as well as an up: We did it!"

But you won't get that from Peters' essay. It serves to mainly tell readers, look how vested those Democrats are in a narrative of retreat and defeat. Which just happens to be the Republican prowar polemic of the moment. But look! Even the liberal Charles Peters says it!

As Bob Somerby so often puts it, if we didn't have a press corps like the one we have, you couldn't invent them.

Tags: abortion, authoritarianism, charles peters, establishment press, iraq war, mainstream media, mainstream press, mccain escalation, surge, vietnam war