[Texgreen] Details about the failure of the surge in Iraq

[Roger Baker]

You sure won't read this good an analysis in the New York Times -- Roger

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<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH03Ak04.html>

Middle East, Aug 3, 2007
	
US military has a lose-lose dilemma in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz

President George W Bush has called on Congress, the American public,  
the Iraqi people and the world to suspend judgment - until at least  
September - on the success of his escalation of the war in Iraq,  
euphemistically designated a "surge". But the fact is: it has already  
failed and it's obvious enough why.

Much attention has been paid to the recent White House report that  
recorded "satisfactory performance" on eight Congressional benchmarks  
and "unsatisfactory performance" on six others (with an additional  
four receiving mixed evaluations). Fred Kaplan of Slate and Patrick  
Cockburn of the Independent, among others, have demonstrated the  
fraudulence of this assessment. Cockburn summarized his savaging of  
the document thusly: "In reality, the six failures are on issues  
critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on  
largely trivial matters."

As it happens, though, these benchmarks are almost completely beside  
the point. They don't represent the key goals of the "surge" at all,  
which were laid out clearly by the president in his January speech  
announcing the operation:

     Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis  
clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local  
population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are  
capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

The success of such "benchmarks" can be judged relatively easily. As  
Bush himself put the matter: "We can expect to see Iraqi troops  
chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing  
trust and cooperation from Baghdad's residents."

This was supposed to be accomplished through two major initiatives.  
Most visibly, the US military was to adopt a more aggressive strategy  
for pacifying Baghdad neighborhoods considered strongholds for the  
Sunni insurgency. Occupation officials blame them for the bulk of the  
vehicle bombs and other suicide attacks that have devastated mainly  
Shi'ite neighborhoods. The second, less visible (but no less  
important) initiative involved subduing the Mahdi Army of cleric  
Muqtada al-Sadr - the largest and most ferocious of the Shi'ite  
militias - which occupation officials blame for the bulk of death- 
squad murders in and around the capital.

These changes should have been observable as early as July. By then,  
as a "senior American military officer" told the New York Times, it  
would already be time to refocus attention on "restoring services and  
rebuilding the neighborhoods".

To judge the "surge" right now - by the president's real "benchmarks"  
- we need only look for a dramatic drop in vehicle and other  
"multiple fatality bombings" in populated areas, and for a dramatic  
drop in the number of tortured and executed bodies found each morning  
in various dumping spots around Baghdad.

By these measures, the "surge" has already been a miserable failure,  
something that began to be documented as early as April when Nancy  
Youssef of the McClatchy newspapers reported that there had been no  
decline in suicide-bombing deaths; and that, after an initial decline  
in the bodies discarded by death squads around the capital, the  
numbers were rising again. (These trends have been substantiated by  
the Brookings Institution, which has long collected the latest  
statistics from Iraq.)

A more vivid way to appreciate the nature of the almost instantaneous  
failure of the overall "surge" operation is anecdotally by reading  
news reports of specific campaigns - like the report Julian Barnes  
and Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times sent in from Baghdad's Sunni- 
majority Ubaidi neighborhood, which was headlined "US troop buildup  
in Iraq falling short". It concluded ominously, "US forces so far  
have been unable to establish security, even for themselves."

Or we might note that, instead of ebbing, violence in Iraq was  
flooding into new areas, just beyond the reach of the US combat  
brigades engaged in the "surge". Or perhaps it's worth pointing out  
that, by July, the highly fortified Green Zone in the very heart of  
Baghdad - designed as the invulnerable safe haven for American and  
Iraqi officials - had become a regular target for increasingly  
destructive mortar and rocket attacks launched from unpacified  
neighborhoods elsewhere in the capital. According to New York Times  
reporters Alissa J Rubin and Stephen Farrell, the zone has been  
"attacked almost daily for weeks".

Or we could focus on the fact that the long supply lines needed to  
support the "surge" - massive convoys of trucks moving weapons,  
ammunition and supplies heading north from Kuwait into Baghdad - have  
become a regular target for insurgents. Embedded reporter Michael  
Yon, for instance, recently reported that, for convoys on this route,  
"it's not unusual to be diverted or delayed a half-dozen times or  
more due to real or suspected bombs".

In the end, though, perhaps the best indicator is the surging  
strength of the primary target of the "surge" in Shi'ite areas. Since  
the "surge" plan was officially launched in mid-February, according  
to the Times' Rubin, the Mahdi Army "has effectively taken over vast  
swaths of the capital".

Twenty thousand more American combat troops are now in and around the  
capital. (The rest of the 28,500 troops the president sent surging  
into Iraq have been dispatched to other provinces outside the  
capital.) This has meant a tripling of American troops on patrol at  
any given time, but it has failed to produce either significantly  
"fewer brazen acts of terror" or progress in "restoring services and  
rebuilding the neighborhoods". So it can be no surprise that the  
"surge" has failed to generate "growing trust and cooperation from  
Baghdad's residents".

Why don't US troops protect Shi'ite sites?
Why then has the "surge" failed? And so quickly at that?

This only makes sense when you explore the strategy utilized by the  
US military to reduce the number of suicide bombers and the "multiple  
fatality bombings" they perpetrate. Terrorist attacks of this sort  
need four elements for success: an organization capable of creating  
such bombs; a pool of individuals willing to risk or sacrifice their  
lives to deliver the explosives; a host community willing to hide the  
preparations; and a target community unable to prevent the delivery  
of these deadly, indiscriminate weapons of massive destruction.

Virtually all of these attacks are organized by Sunni jihadis and,  
while the Brookings database shows that many of them are aimed at  
military or government targets, the majority of deaths occur in  
spectacular bombings of public gathering spots - "soft targets" - in  
Shi'ite neighborhoods. It might then have seemed logical for US  
commanders to concentrate their increased troop strength on these  
obvious delivery areas, setting up checkpoints and guard posts that  
would scrutinize car and truck traffic entering highly vulnerable areas.

This tactic might indeed have worked if the US were willing to form  
an alliance with local Shi'ite neighborhood defense forces. As it  
happens though, the Shi'ite communities in Baghdad are already well  
patrolled by the Mahdi Army, whose street fighters have proven  
effective in either spotting alien vehicles or responding to reports  
from local residents about suspicious cars or people.

However, enormous public spaces, filled with large numbers of non- 
residents and outside vehicles, require dense patrolling practices.  
The Mahdis have been able to generate such patrol "density" only in  
their headquarters community, Sadr City - the vast Shi'ite slum in  
the eastern part of Baghdad. There, where the Mahdis have a huge  
presence, there were almost no suicide attacks until late 2006 when  
the US military began sending patrols into the community aimed at  
disarming, disrupting or destroying the Sadrist militia. This forced  
them off the streets, opening the way for suicide bombers to reach  
their targets.

If the US had decided to join forces with the Mahdis, augmenting  
their neighborhood patrols with a strong American presence in public  
gathering places, they might indeed have choked off all but a few of  
the most determined, resourceful, or lucky bombers. However, this  
strategy was not adopted, at least in part because it would have  
strengthened the Mahdis, a group that the US military and Bush had -  
until their recent fixation on al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) - repeatedly  
designated as their most dangerous enemy.

Instead, the "surge" has been forced to focus on the suicide-bomber  
"supply side". Lieutenant. General Raymond T Odierno, the commander  
of day-to-day US military operations, told Barnes of the Los Angeles  
Times that the anti-bombing strategy was directed toward al-Qaeda in  
Iraq because they "are the ones that are creating the truck bombs and  
car bombs ... So we are going after the safe havens that allow them  
to build these things without a lot of interference".

According to Barnes, the generals charged with implementing the plan  
endorsed the surge into Sunni neighborhoods because, "for the first  
time, they have enough forces to root out al-Qaeda fighters by  
entering havens where US forces have not been for years".

Thus, the American strategy for preventing suicide bombings in  
Shi'ite communities involved flooding Sunni communities with huge  
numbers of soldiers.

Invading the hotbeds of the insurgency
Historically, to successfully "root out" groups like the al-Qaeda  
fighters requires an occupying force capable of enlisting the aid of  
large numbers of people within a host community. After all, those  
planning multiple-fatality bombings need a level of toleration, if  
not outright support or participation, from the surrounding  
community. If local residents are totally alienated from the effort,  
someone will either take direct action or contact the occupying  
authorities, who can then raid key locations, capturing or killing  
the plotters.

An attack on the "supply side" might therefore have been a viable  
option for the Americans, if the host community was hostile to the  
jihadis. In fact, such hostility does exist in many Sunni  
communities, including among insurgent groups that are the backbone  
of the fight against the American occupation. This hostility derives  
partly from a principled opposition to attacks on Iraqis - most of  
the 30 or so key insurgent groups have explicitly stated that they  
support armed force only against the American-led coalition forces,  
often exempting even Iraqi police and military units from attack.

But the hostility also comes from distaste for the violently enforced  
demands of the jihadis that local citizens conform to their  
fundamentalist beliefs - including prohibitions on alcohol and  
tobacco consumption, as well as an insistence that men grow full  
beards and women wear headscarves.

As a result, a tactical alliance of convenience between the  
occupation and the nationalist Sunni insurgency against the AQI and  
other fundamentalist jihadis has been an option for the US military  
since as early as the last months of 2004, when the US refused an  
offer by insurgent leaders in Fallujah to expel the jihadis if the US  
would refrain from its pending attack on the city.

The next year, during a major offensive in Western al-Anbar province,  
US military commanders stood idly by - despite explicit calls for  
help - while local insurgents fought fierce battles with jihadis,  
telling embedded reporters that they were letting two equally  
objectionable enemies weaken each other. American commanders have  
repeatedly enunciated a general principle that they would never form  
an alliance with, or give aid to, any "Sunni group that had attacked  
Americans".

Starting in early 2007, this principle was apparently compromised in  
Anbar province; by July, under the pressure of the failing "surge",  
it was also being eroded in Baghdad. But these alliances with local  
militia groups of various sorts involve their own sets of problems.  
They only create further conundrums for US strategists since, of  
course, they undermine the larger goals of the occupation. After all,  
the anti-al-Qaeda insurgents - not the jihadi car-bombers - are, by  
far, the major force in the insurgency and they are unremitting  
enemies of the occupation as well as of the Shi'ite and Kurdish- 
dominated central Iraqi government, which they view as an agent of  
either the American occupation or Iranian imperial designs.

Major General Rick Lynch, who was involved in negotiations with the  
Anbar insurgents, quoted them as saying, "We hate you because you are  
occupiers. But we hate al-Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even  
more." Under these circumstances, any alliance can almost certainly  
only be temporary, strengthening as it does the chief antagonist to  
the American presence. The Independent's Cockburn summarized the  
situation this way:

     The US is caught in [a] quagmire of its own making. Such  
successes as it does have are usually the result of tenuous alliances  
with previously hostile tribes, insurgent groups or militias. The  
British experience in Basra was that these marriages of convenience  
with local gangs weakened the central government and contributed to  
anarchy in Iraq. They did not work in the long term.

In Baghdad, the US chose - at least for the opening months of the  
"surge" - to hold the line against such an alliance with Shi'ite  
insurgents. Instead, they used the presence of al-Qaeda militants in  
Sunni communities as an invitation to attack the communities  
themselves, attempting to "root out" the insurgents, who have been  
their chief adversary all these years, while also capturing or  
killing the al-Qaeda activists responsible for the suicide attacks on  
Shi'ite neighborhoods.

But this dual strategy has no hope of capturing the support of local  
Sunni communities and, without such support, the US has no choice but  
to adopt a grim, if straightforward, strategy of brute force in  
neighborhoods where its sources of information (and so targeting)  
are, at best, severely limited. The military has, in fact, taken such  
crude - and, in the end, self-defeating - tactical measures as  
erecting massive barriers around target Sunni communities to prevent  
their quarry from escaping; manning check-points at all entrances to  
capture suspects with weapons and explosives in their vehicles; and  
erecting outposts within these hostile communities to create a 24- 
hour quick-response presence. Worse yet, they have conducted knock- 
the-door-down, house-to-house searches looking for suspicious  
individuals, weapons or literature - the sort of approach that, for  
years, has been known to thoroughly alienate the inhabitants of such  
neighborhoods.

This ensures that the failure of the "surge" is no passing  
phenomenon. It leads, first of all, to the brutal treatment of local  
civilians (of a sort recently documented by Chris Hedges and Laila al- 
Arian though the testimony of American military personnel in the  
Nation magazine) - at checkpoints, by patrols, and most strikingly  
during those home invasions.

These assaults only generate further hatred of the occupation, which,  
of course, rallies support for the local guerrillas. As one soldier,  
who, earlier in the war, participated in such a midnight home  
invasion that terrorized a dozen members of an Iraqi family,  
recalled: "I thought of my family at the time and thought, 'If I was  
the patriarch of the family, if soldiers came from another country  
and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent too'."

These localized applications of "overwhelming" force, when meeting  
sustained resistance, lead to the calling in of air power or, in some  
cases, artillery fire. A strategy guaranteed to kill and wound  
guerrillas and local inhabitants alike, destroy homes, generate more  
refugees, wreck local economies, and, in the end, create ghostly,  
uninhabitable former neighborhoods.

Ironically (but logically), while target communities have been  
crippled by such prolonged operations, both the insurgency and the  
jihadis have only grown stronger. The attacks swell the ranks of the  
insurgency, while a small but sufficient supply of embittered  
individuals become willing to sacrifice their lives to achieve some  
measure of revenge against the American occupation and/or its Shi'ite  
allies.

As for the tiny group of jihadi planners and bomb manufacturers, most  
escape targeted neighborhoods when under pressure, having harvested a  
new wave of bitterness to fuel a new wave of suicide bombings.

Meanwhile, back in Sadr City ...
In the Shi'ite areas, on the other hand, the Americans were providing  
an unprecedented opportunity for suicide bombers to breach Mahdi Army  
security. In the second prong of the "surge", American patrols were  
sent into these Shi'ite communities to target local Mahdi Army  
leaders. While these operations did not add up to the full-scale  
invasions visited on Sunni neighborhoods, they nonetheless tended to  
force Mahdi patrols off the streets, opening up such communities to  
jihadi suicide attacks.

Having relocated to new quarters (apparently on the outskirts of  
Baghdad), the jihadi leadership utilized newly recruited suicide  
volunteers to exploit this sudden vulnerability with a wave of  
attacks that sent the number of Shi'ite deaths from multiple-fatality  
bombings recorded in the Brookings database soaring from under 300  
before the start of the surge to well over 400 in the months after it  
began.

And then came the death squads. Originally, they seem to have been  
organized from Shi'ite militia members by US military and  
intelligence personnel and housed in the Iraqi Ministry of the  
Interior. Modeled after the American-organized death squads in  
Central America in the 1980s, they were designed to murder suspected  
Sunni resistance leaders and therefore weaken the insurgency.

After the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra on February 22,  
2006, they achieved partial or full independence from their American  
organizers and began targeting Sunni men in indiscriminate campaigns  
of torture and execution, justified by the argument that they were  
suspected of involvement in attacks on Shi'ite communities. Just as  
the car bombers see themselves as retaliating against American and  
Iraqi government atrocities in Sunni communities, the death squads  
see themselves as executing the jihadi perpetrators of attacks on  
their neighbors and their possible supporters.

When the "surge" began, the number of death-squad murders fell,  
evidently in part because the death squad members hoped that American  
offensives in Sunni communities would significantly reduce suicide  
attacks. But as this hope was dashed, the number of death-squad  
killings began to rise again.

A lose-lose dilemma
As this latest debacle developed, Bush and his commanding generals  
began to argue - to Congress, American public opinion, the Iraqi  
people and the world - that the US must reschedule the benchmark  
moment. First, it was from July to September, and then from September  
to November, and soon after from 2007 to 2008, and lately from 2008  
to 2009. Congress (which has temporarily suspended its debate on Iraq  
policy) and American public opinion (where Bush recorded an  
exceedingly modest uptick in "approval" recently) might well give the  
president a little more breathing room on the basis of these appeals.

But events on the ground in Iraq do not respond to presidential  
appeals or the sunny testimony of generals. In Baghdad and  
surrounding provinces, the situation has already entered what might  
be thought of as post-"surge" reality. In part as a consequence of  
the "surge" strategy, ethnic cleansing in major neighborhoods of  
Baghdad may be nearing completion; meanwhile, in the north, the shaky  
relationship between the Kurds and Turkey is wavering on the brink of  
a hot war, while the Kurd-Turkmen-Arab cauldron in the oil-rich city  
of Kirkuk may erupt any time into a new Baghdad.

While all this goes on, desperate American military leaders have  
embraced, amplified and expanded their anti-al-Qaeda-in-Iraq alliance  
with local guerrillas in Anbar province - so much for dismantling  
Iraqi militias - and are lurching toward a new set of disasters.

These may already be underway, starting with a confrontation between  
the American commander of the "surge" plan, General David Petraeus,  
and the head of an increasingly embattled and shaky Iraqi government,  
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. According to Juan Cole at his Informed  
Comment web site, Maliki "fears that once the Sunni tribesmen have  
dispatched 'al-Qaeda', they will turn on the largely Shi'ite  
government with their new American weapons". To prevent this, he "has  
considered asking Washington to pull the general out of Baghdad". For  
Bush, who has visibly put all his eggs in Petraeus' "surge" basket,  
this would be inconceivable, which means that the next crisis in Iraq  
policy - and probably several after that - is already under way.

As Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, put it, "The Americans  
are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology and faculty director of the  
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University,  
has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on  
American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical  
Protest and Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative  
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail address is  
Ms42@optonline.net.

(Copyright 2007 Michael Schwartz.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)