10 US Troops Killed, Dozens of Iraqis
While US politicians were mesmerized by the Iraq Study Group report, the Iraqis went on with their bloody civil war. See the next entry for the hyperlink.
AFP reports on responses to Baker-Hamilton by Iraqi politicians. The main concern seems to be a) that the US will pressure them using threats of withdrawal and b) that the US will actually withdraw and leave them embroiled in a civil war.
Iraqi guerrillas killed 10 US troops on Wednesday, among the largest one-day totals in the past three years.
Reuters reports major civil war violence in Iraq on Wednesday. The usual daily harvest of some 60 bodies showed up in the streets of the capital, and there were several deadly mortar attacks and bombings.
Iran is already pledging a lot of help to Iraq, whether it ends up talking to the Americans or not.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/07/2006 12:30:00 AM
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"Iran is already pledging a lot of help to Iraq, whether it ends up talking to the Americans or not."
Somebody please tell the State Department. I, for one, am more than a little bit disgusted to hear them prattle on about how Iran is causing trouble in Iraq.
Iran promises $1bUSD in aid, Iran delivers electric power to Iraq, an Iranian cleric (Sistani) has been the a voice of restraint and moderation for most of the occupation, Ahmedinejad (sp), nutcase or not, wrote an letter to Bush/America where by comparison, he is positively sanguine and Bushistas are raving loonies...
I have printed the URL for this blog on index cards. Whenever I hear someone question US policies, I hand them a card.
Dear Professor Cole,
More from my Iraqi friend. (Needless to say I was on the blower to him like a shot this morning to discuss the Baker "development.)
And - an aside - BBC Radio 4 had that bone locker full of poison Richard Perle on this morning...gasbagging away as usual. Why anybody would pay any attention to what he has to say - let alone invite him to say it on your flagship news programme - given what he's helped to bring about as a key "influencer" is beyond me, beyond the pale, really. Everybody who reads this blog should drop a line to the BBC complaining in the strongest possible terms. That man is Typhoid Mary - he needs to be quarantined from the public discourse from here on out.
Anyway, my Iraqi friend had this to say. And I've set it out here in his words, but without quotation marks.
1) There is a solution. The solution is to leave. At once. Today's murders are a result of yesterday's murders. If a Sunni is killed his family and friends don't go to the police - the police quite possibly were the murderers - they go to a Sunni "Godfather"...and, well, one thing leads to another.
2) If you don't have any friends you better leave. The Americans don't have any friends there. There's no benefit - and forget a silver lining, there isn't one - that's going to come to them if they stay there. What they're going to get if they stay there is all bad. It's already all bad and it's going to get worse.
3) The U.S. has backed the wrong side. They've backed the losers. Iraq does not have Shi'ite written on it. It does not have Islamic country written on it.
Iraq is Iraq. Just as Morocco is Morocco. To see Iraq - as the Islamic primitives and the neocons do - as a country with Arabs in it and Morocco as a country with Arabs in it, etc. and there's no real difference between them is completely wrong-headed.
4) The problem in Baghdad is the Shi'ite community. If I were in power there I would clear them out. Before they came there people in Baghdad didn't wear Arab dress, they wore western clothes. A guy - Mohammed - comes out of the desert sands of Arabia on a camel in the 6th century - what does he have to do with me? I'm an Iraqi - my history goes back much much further than the 6th century - this character out of the 6th century has no history to speak of and he wants to efface my much older, enormously rich history. And the other thing is, I live in the 21st century. What he can tell me about here and now. My problems have to do with electricity and modern plumbing and Microsoft - this man on a camel in the 6th century has nothing to say to me.
(Me - Tupharsin speaking now - I don't know what my friend's "ethnic-religio" background is, though I think we can safely assume that he's not Shi'ite. For about a year now I've had a strong hunch that he's Kurdish; after my chat with him this morning I wonder. Could he be a Sunni? And as is clear from the above, he's not averse to Realpolitik. The which may, at least in part, stem from his time in the Iraqi army, as an ordinary soldier - doing his "national service" bit - and going awol and basically walking out and making it to the Kurdish part and ultimately to Iran and managing on that trek to never say the wrong thing in the wrong accent to the wrong interlocutor. Bottom line: the man's a survivor. Okay, back to A's comments...in his words.)
5) The Sunni-Kurds "opposition" is a myth. There have always been a lot of Sunnis in that part of Iraq. And there are a lot more now. And they're welcome up there.
6) In terms of oil Iraq is the most important country in the world. The oil in Saudi Arabia is concentrated in a tiny, Shi-ite dominated area. It's easy to disrupt. The same for Kuwait. It's a postage-stamp size country. Whereas in Iraq oil production is much more widespread. You don't stop the flow by knocking out just a few installations.
(Me again, Tupharsin speaking here. My friend wound up our talk by repeating what he said to me a few days ago...about "small doses of defeat". He said, "every time they kill an American soldier - yesterday they killed ten marines - at the weekend they killed 13 American soldiers - it's a small dose of defeat. What those small doses add up to is a big defeat. Most people can do that arithmetic. Have already done it. Baker's certainly done it. Bush can't - or won't - do it.")
In order to solve any problem, you have to understand the problem. Re: Iraq, it seems Americans in general still do not understand. On NPR last night, Red State blog was quoted as saying they had had 9,000 hits yesterday, all opposing the Baker report and all supporting inserting another 150,000 combat troops into Iraq immediately so that we can go ahead and win.
I do not know where we would scrap up another 150,000 combat troops and their support hierarchy, even if we sent in the Boy Scouts since the escalationists don't support a draft and have no intention of volunteering themselves. (they don't understand that most of the traditional pools of recruit prospects have wised up the last 3 years)
The most worrisome aspect is whom should we defeat? We don't have a Jodl or Tojo to sign a surrender document and there must be at least 25 major militias and groups, that may or may not coordinate and the British colonial solution of "piling up Fuzzie Wuzzies to the sky" is not an option in today's world, no matter how bloodthirsty our armchair strategists are. (I am in favor of those advocating such widespread horror having to spend a year digging graves and working in hospitals assisting the victims of their strategies)
The underlying truth is that Iraq belongs to the Iraqis and an imposed democracy is no democracy.
The rest of the world understands what we are doing so the only ones we are fooling at this point are ourselves.
The ISG report warns there is no magic formula. Unfortunately, the course it recommends may offer less than a 30% chance of success.
The Report departs less from the present official view than some people suggest. It warns of the possibility of civil war, but does not use those words to describe the present situation. It calls for milestones instead of benchmarks. It says the US should use embeds and special ops, but withdraw combat troop--and repatriate their equipment for repair and redeployment. Over and over again, it pleas for national reconciliation. Money is the carrot. The only stick is to take away the stick. Both Bush and the ISG gamble that the Iraqi forces will, sooner or later, "stand up" and handle counter-insurgency on their own.
Will it work? Murphy's Law gets insufficient attention, especially since Murphian principles seem so rife in Iraq already.
Prediction: the US embeds will end up as hostages, rather than advisors, as the mass of US forces depart. They will not be able to command the Iraqi forces to suppress militias. The militias will remain in charge of the Facilities Protection forces. The Health Ministry will remain bastions of sectarian patronage. The US will not be able to deliver air support of the Iraqi Army because target selection will be too contentious and suspect. The police will remain weak and corrupt. The Green Zone ministers and block leaders will dither and back stab. Kidnappings, killings, and violence will continue. Syria and Iran will ask for deals that Israel will veto. Hamas and Hezbollah will continue to agitate.
These predictions cover only what is likely. There is little assurance that other events or contingencies won't make things even harder. Who was worried about New Orleans in August, 2005? What was on people's minds on 9/10?
All this may vindicate Murtha's original call to exit ASAP. However, the political beneficiary may turn out to be McCain, who will reap the Rambo vote in 2008 by crowing that the Dems "lost Iraq" by refusing to increase US forces or nuke-fry all the ali-badies. Whoever takes office in 2009 will face a dastardly mess in any case.
How nice if all this were wrong!
The only hedge against calamity will be if, for some reason, Maliki is right that he will succeed if given a freer hand in scurity matters. Time will tell whether this is is more than mere whim.
Amy Goodman interviewed Antonia Juhasz on Democracy Now about the Iraq Study Group report, James Baker and their suggestion to privatize the iraqi oil industry.
Simon
La Luchita
Best of the Bad Options?
Step 1. Cheney resigns.
Step 2. Jeb replaces Ch. as VP.
Step 3. W. resigns.
Step 4. We all hope that Jeb really is the smart one.
I would just like to amplify a bit the comments from John Koch to the effect that "The US will not be able to deliver air support of the Iraqi Army because target selection will be too contentious and suspect." True in part, but not the whole story.
I spent many nights out on a mosquito-infested river as interpreter/translator with Vietnamese sailors of the now defunct Republic of Vietnam because our local American "Seahawk" helicopter detachment would only trust another American calling for help should our base get overrun. Our pilots did not particularly interest themselves in what their rockets blew up but only that they themselves didn't get lured into an ambush, shot down, and killed. Like the Clinton bomber pilots who blew up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan: one building, "bad wedding," or "safe house," blows up just like any other one to the American "air support" providers in Iraq today.
Of course, the Vietnamese sailors back then could have overpowered me and thrown me over the side into the river any time they liked, but since I always brought along hotdogs, dried noodles, and some cans of Sterno heater to boil water in my steel helmet liner (aptly nicknamed a "pot"), I made sure these starving little men looked at me more like a meal ticket than a meal. Since we all agreed that none of us wanted to find ourselves conscripted and abused by our two uncaring governments, we managed to survive as best we could through a little mutual understanding, self-help, and sympathy.
In the Iraq of today, though, I would of course -- as John Koch says -- have wound up a beheaded and castrated hostage corpse POW in no time at all. It doesn't seem to me that much sympathy or mutual understanding applies -- even among the abused and betrayed victims of the various "governments" involved.
I cannot believe that my Lunatic Leviathan government has done all this shit again. It just beggars the imagination how people so damned stupid and belligerent could have ever effected the neoconservative coup that brought the likes of Sheriff Dick Cheney and Deputy Dubya Bush to power in America. The phrase "Mayberry Machiavellis" hardly does justice to the cruel carnage these credulous clowns have created and want to continue.
It must be a little frightening for the Iraqi army troops to contemplate that they are faced with fighting all real factions in the Iraq civil war in order to support a virtual faction - the central government. While our troops are gung-ho no matter who they are fighting in Iraq, its got to be a little different for Iraqi soldiers to kill countrymen of their own sect, tribe, family, region, etc.
The ISG seems to think its just a matter of training to get Iraqi troops to attack anyone their imbeds tell them to. Of course if they are reluctant to kill countrymen of the imbeds choice, the imbeds can always call in airstrikes. I doubt that the Iraqis will be given that authority, and the ISG did not suggest giving them their own airpower (Strange, since we aggressively sell fighter jets to any country with a runway and a few bucks to spare.)
While using the word recocilliation quite often in their report, the ISG has laid out a plan for a heck of a lot more violence - police, army, militias, insurgents, and criminal gangs all going at it.
Me - Tupharsin speaking now - I don't know what my friend's "ethnic-religio" background is, though I think we can safely assume that he's not Shi'ite.
I'm willing to bet Sunni, although this has a lot more to do with being Iraqi than Sunni. I've heard Iranian Shi'ites express the same disgust with religious fundamentalism (far more ancient culture, tainted by alien, primitive religion, etc.). The idea is more pervasive than one might imagine -- think Bertrand Russell.
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