Odierno: Thousands of US Troops will Remain in Cities
Gen. Ray Odierno said Saturday in Baghdad that non-combat US troops would remain inside Iraqi cities after June 30, 2009, in a training and mentoring capacity. The security agreement concluded between Washington and the Iraqi government appears to call for all US troops to be deployed to bases outside the cities by the end of June.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadrist bloc in parliament had opposed the security agreement on the grounds that it would legitimize the foreign military occupation of Iraq and that its provisions would not be honored by the US. Ahmad al-Masoudi, said that "The agreement is determined to bestow legitimacy on the American presence in Iraq." He added, "Nothing will change when the agreement comes into effect" on Jan.1. He said, "The attacks on the Iraqi people will continue."
Al-Masoudi told Aswat al-Iraq, "the US has large ambitions in Iraq,and it won't be easy for it to back down from them."
On Saturday, the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki characterized the comments of government spokesman Ali Dabbagh on the need for US troops in Iraq for up to a decade as merely Dabbagh's personal opinion. Al-Maliki insists that Iraqi troops will be able to keep order in the country by the deadline for the withdrawal of US troops, now set at 2011.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that secular parties in Basra are expressing fears that the holy month of Muharram, which overlaps with the Jan. 31 provincial election date, will be exploited by Shiite religious parties for electoral gain.
The US military remains confident that the Sunni Arab Awakening Councils or Sons of Iraq will be successfully absorbed by the Iraqi government. Al-Maliki has pledged to induct 20,000 of the nearly 100,000 such fighters into the Iraqi security forces and police. The rest will be given desk jobs. The Iraqi government has begun paying the salaries of about 50,000 of them. Shiite Iraqis and the al-Maliki government are suspicious of many of these Sunni Arab guerrillas because many had been Baathists or part of the insurgency before 2006 and so some have a good deal of Shiite blood on their hands.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/14/2008 12:39:00 AM
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8 Comments:
Dabbagh is Maliki's spokesman. How can he express personal opinions contradicting his master's?
Dabbagh's other big idea, an EU-like pact has also been dismissed by Maliki, saying that Iraq will have bi-lateral agreements. How can this idiot retain his job?
The regional pact cannot possibly have freedom of movement of people because Iran, and to a lesser degree Iraq, have tens of millions of unqualified unemployed people who would swamp the Gulf states. Dabbagh also upset the Gulf states by presenting the Iraqis as a super race "with great assets" who would lead the pact.
A more rational pact makes perfect sense, and should concentrate on encouraging trade and building projects that tie the countries into a shared future based on cooperation, instead of todays primitive competition for power and territory. Such a pact will need sophisticated leaders from all the countries, not deluded idiots like Maliki and Dabbagh.
What most likely will happen in Iraq, in my opinion, is that Obama will keep a heavy military presence in/near Iraq as long as he can, for the same reasons Bush as done it: to keep the situation from devolving 'on his watch' and to keep the doors open for US companies wanting to do business there, and to keep US bases there. Meanwhile the US and Iraq government will continue to kick the can down the role on the real issues of political reconciliation in Iraq, which will in turn necessitate keeping US troops there longer, and on and on the merry-go-round goes.
The Troops Withdrawl (not security) Agreement makes a clear distinction between "combat" troops who must leave the cities by midsummer, and "all" troops who must leave the country by the end of 2011. So the non-combat troops staying in cities is part of the Agreement.
The fuss being made by the western propaganda (aka MSM) is part of the concerted effort to weaken, dilute, discredit ..etc. the Agreement (which has maddened the masters-of-the-world imperial fantasists who expect the rest of the world to obey them.)
The "noise" tactics work well in the US, but have no chance in Iraq which is outside this "noise" zone and has the full authority over any changes.
I saw this announcement by Odierno about troops in the NY Times this morning. Why does no one seem at all concerned that a member of the military is making an announcement like this?
Interesting piece in the WSJ about soft power and democracy building. Problem is of course, that things like microloans work really well under peaceful, stable conditions. They're not so effective in wartime.
Reminds me of my reading about pacification programs in Vietnam. Good programs, but the US spent more on B-52 bombings for a single month than it did on pacification programs for the year.
On the issue of the withdrawal of US troops from cities, etc., Article 24 of the SOFA (in the translation that I have) states:
“Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq
All United States combat forces shall withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities….
The adjective "combat" opens the hole that the Pentagon will drive their trucks through. - Unless this is not the official version of the SOFA....
"The US military remains confident that the Sunni Arab Awakening Councils or Sons of Iraq will be successfully absorbed by the Iraqi government."
The US military is nothing if not confident. It may be the greatest source of confidence in the free world. Unfortunately, like many military establishments before it, it's confidence is sometimes misplaced. In general, military confidence should always be considered in context.
Yet another semantic shift?
One certainly can reinterpret the terms of SOFA in whatever way he wants. However, SOFA is not an op-ed, but a military-political document, and the conflict in Iraq is far from over.
Most importantly, current stabilization has all ear-marks of neoconservative maneuvering. That is, under the cover of abstract rhetoric, it is just a hack conceived for short-term factional benefits.
So, it is all too easy to predict how just in a few months things will start falling apart and the GOP propaganda machine will blame the dems for losing the liberation war that was almost won.
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