colinh9
26 May 2008, 02:31 PM
I noticed this article was Pre-surge. Anything after?
Yeah no problem. Here's one from Oct 2007, then another from May 2008. Trust me there are plenty of these publications, I can keep them coming if you'd like.
After the surge
Gary Dorrien. The Christian Century. Chicago: Oct 30, 2007. Vol. 124, Iss. 22; pg. 8, 2 pgs
THE WEEKLY death tolls in Iraq have recently decreased-for four reasons: The U.S. troop "surge" has restricted the flow of explosives into Baghdad; ethnic cleansing has been completed in many areas; the Mahdi Army has suspended its attacks; and the U.S. is co-opting Sunni insurgents. Thus the Bush administration has been able to claim military progress and thereby to put off attempts to end the war.
But all of these factors are temporary or have perilous long-term consequences. Iraq is so thoroughly ripped apart by insurgent and sectarian violence that even Yugoslavia cannot be used as an analogy. There is no military solution to the insurgency or the civil war. And the hope of a unity government in Iraq is more remote than ever before.
General David Petraeus used the surge's five extra combat brigades to build a military ring around Baghdad and cut off the supply of ammunition to insurgents, sectarian fighters and foreign terrorists. This measure reduced attacks in the city and diverted violence to surrounding areas. At the height of the insurgent and sectarian violence in early 2007, Iraq was averaging approximately 1,800 attacks per week; the average by midsummer was 1,000. According to Iraq's Interior Ministry, 2,318 civilians were killed in August and 1,654 in September. These numbers represent reductions of approximately 30 percent from the early months of 2007.
Bush officials called the escalation a surge because they knew it would have to be temporary. The U.S. lacks the forces to sustain it. There are other problems with calling the surge a success. The high death tolls of a year ago reflected vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in many areas that are now completed, at least until an all-out civil war erupts. The Mahdi Army-the main anti-American Shi'ite militia group-suspended its attacks in August after it had a dangerous clash with the Badr Organization, the Shi'ite militia group that dominates the Iraqi army and police force. The current lull in violence will end as soon as the Mahdi Army resumes the murderous business for which it exists.
Petraeus's risky deal with Sunni tribal sheiks was sharply contested in the military before Petraeus's strategy prevailed. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni Arab insurgent group led by foreign terrorists, has alienated Sunni tribal sheiks by bombing marketplaces and killing Iraqis indiscriminantly. Last spring Petraeus, hoping to capitalize on the alienation, began giving weapons to tribal police forces and other militia groups in Anbar Province that promised to use them against foreign terrorists. Attacks on American troops went down after the policy was instituted, so this summer Petraeus rolled the dice in the entire Sunni triangle of Baghdad, Ramadi and Tikrit, an area that includes Samarra and Fallujah, despite the opposition of the Maliki government.
Officially the U.S. says that it will not give arms to individuals who are known to have killed Americans; off the record officials acknowledge that, of course, we rarely know who the insurgents are anyway. The very groups that the U.S. has been fighting for the past four years are now getting U.S. weapons if they promise to use them against foreign terrorists.
Co-opting the Sunnis has bought some relief for U.S. forces, helping to reduce American deaths in August and September to 84 and 63 respectively. But this scheme is obviously loaded with peril. Trying to co-opt insurgent groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare. The French, the British and the U.S. tried it, respectively, in Algeria, Malaya and Vietnam. In each case the weapons given to insurgent groups ended up being used against the forces providing them. Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, explains the mentality of the Sunni militants he is trying to co-opt: "They say to us, 'We hate you because you are occupiers, but we hate alQaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.'" (In this lexicon, Iraqi Shi'ites are Persians.)
So the U.S. is arming Sunni insurgents in the hope that they will spend most of their time killing people in the middle group, even as they profess to hating Shi'ites most of all. The Shi'ite-dominated government, naturally, has pleaded against this scheme. Last July during a video conference, Prime Minister Maliki implored Bush to terminate the policy and fire Petraeus. He also threatened to arm Shi'ite militias with government funds in response; Bush told Maliki to calm down. In public Maliki's top political adviser, Sadiq Rikabi, is more plaintive. There are too many militias already, he says, so "why are we creating new ones?" (Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail, "Iraq: A Nail in Maliki Government's Coffin?" Inter Press Service, August 3; New York Times, August 11).
The answer is that the U.S. mission in Iraq is that desperate. Military leaders who lost the argument with Petraeus are already leaking "I told you so" comments to the media. For two years many Shi'ite leaders sat back, bided their time, gave lip service to a unity government, thwarted any real attempt at one, and trusted the Americans to kill off their Sunni enemies. But the Americans failed, and civil war erupted. Today the Shi'ites and Kurds see total victory within their grasp. Sectarian killings have doubled in Iraq over the past year, and the danger to U.S. troops by Shi'ite militias has soared. According to U.S. Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, Shi'ite militias launched approximately 75 percent of the successful attacks on U.S. forces this summer, often using weapons supplied by Iran. Shi'ite factions are less inclined than ever to make any political deals. Maliki explained to Admiral William Fallen this summer: "There are two mentalities in this region: conspiracy and mistrust."
Achieving a unified Iraqi democracy is a fantasy under these conditions. Even a cynical, thuggish settlement is out of reach as long as the major factions and players are consumed with sectarian agendas. Iraq cannot get to a decent outcome as long as the Sunnis remain a hostile minority, Shi'ite leaders exclude the Sunnis from governing, Shi'ite militias dominate the army and police force, and militias on all sides continue to proliferate. President Bush warns: "For all those who ask whether the fight is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control larger parts of the country." But that is exactly what is happening now-with the tacit consent of the very government that Bush wants to prop up with more blood and treasure.
The Baker-Hamilton Commission called for the U.S. to pull back, leaving air, ground and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain and other bases in the Middle East while maintaining some residual U.S. forces in Iraq to fight terrorism and stabilize the Kurdish region. While the Republican presidential field is standing by the president s policy of escalating the war and delaying the inevitable withdrawal of forces, the Democratic candidates are offering variations on the Baker-Hamilton strategy. Hillary Clinton essentially adopted it last spring, which required a major change of position for her. Barack Obama wants to leave a residual force in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqi forces. John Edwards envisions leaving a residual force to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and deal with any violence that spills into neighboring nations. In the second tier of Democratic candidates, Bill Richardson supports an immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq that leaves a good deal of military equipment behind, Dennis Kucinich supports an immediate and total withdrawal that would take up to a year to accomplish, and Joseph Biden wants American troops to stay until Iraq can be separated into three regions.
The U.S. should be planning how to get out of Iraq. It should make it clear that it is leaving; that the U.S. will offer asylum to all Iraqis endangered by their cooperation with U.S. forces; and that the U.S. will provide massive economic assistance for all humanitarian work undertaken by the United Nations, NATO, other governments and international agencies. Thus far the U.S. attitude and record are not encouraging. Sweden has accepted over 20,000 Iraqis seeking asylum in the past year; the U.S. has taken in fewer than 900.
The U.S. has two strategic objectives in the Persian Gulf: to protect its allies and secure its oil interests. It can do both of these things without stationing troops on the ground. Both strategic objectives are best secured by maintaining a strong naval presence in the Indian Ocean and some naval forces in the Persian Gulf so that ships can get through the Strait of Hormuz. That can be done by stationing forces in the Indian Ocean and at bases outside the Middle East. In other words, the U.S. could go back to the policy it had in the 1980s.
Lullaby of Baghdad
Paul Starr. The American Prospect. Princeton: May 2008. Vol. 19, Iss. 5; pg. 3, 1 pgs
IS REDUCED VIOLENCE IN IRAQ-REDUCED, THAT IS, from its peak in 2006-a sign that the United States is finally on the road to victory? Or is U.S. strategy in the war, as Steven Simon argues in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, "stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism" and consequently making Iraq ungovernable? In other words, is the Bush administration purchasing shortterm stability in Iraq-and a lulled electorate at home-at the cost of a deepened and prolonged conflict?
There's no doubt that the "surge" in U.S. forces (now being drawn down to 140,000 troops) has bought the administration political relief. News coverage of the fighting has dropped, and congressional Democrats have been stymied in efforts to end the conflict. (I'm writing just before Gen. David Petraeus' congressional testimony.) Perhaps most important, although a majority of the public continues to believe that invading Iraq was a mistake, those who favor the war such as Sen. John McCain have been bolstered in their determination to fight on until victory.
The war's supporters say that whatever the earlier mistakes, the surge and the new bottom-up counterinsurgency strategy have improved security and put al-Qaeda in Iraq on the run. In this view, it would be a disastrous error to quit the war just as the tide has turned.
But a variety of analyses tell a different story. In early April, the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace released a report by experts on Iraq concluding, "Political progress is so slow, halting and superficial, and social and political fragmentation so pronounced, that the U.S. is no closer to being able to leave Iraq than it was a year ago. Lasting political development could take five to ten years of full, unconditional U.S. commitment to Iraq."
But didn't the surge reduce attacks and casualties? Actually, the number of attacks has stabilized at about 570 per week (before spiking in March), and much of the reduction came from three other developments. In early 2007, even before the surge, violence began falling because the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was mostly finished, and it dropped further after the Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr declared a cease-fire by his Mahdi Army on August 28.
The third development-the decision of Sunnis in Anbar and some other areas to abandon the insurgency and join sahwa or "Awakening" groups to fight the foreign jihadists-has been widely heralded as the war's biggest turnaround. But, as Simon argues in his Foreign Affairs article, the U.S. decision to pay and equip these tribal groups strengthens the centrifugal tendencies weakening the Iraqi state. America now funds the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Sunni sahwa, and the Iraqi security Forces heavily infiltrated by the Badr militia. Our money and arms flow not just to the three major sectarian groups but to contending factions and strongmen within each one.
Current policy, retired Gen. William E. Odom told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 2, "has placed the United States astride several civil wars. And it allows all sides to consolidate, rearm, and refill their financial coffers" at American expense. And the U.S. Institute of Peace report warns, "Empowering the Awakenings-often composed of former insurgents and leaders stridently opposed to the Iraqi government-carries with it a major risk of blowback."
Some analysts hope that even with a weak state, a stable equilibrium will emerge among the warring sects, tribes, and militias, but that hope goes against the historical record and widely held expectations in Iraq that the contest for power will be settled by violence. The United States now finds itself in the bizarre role of arming rival factions to stop a civil war.
And the contradictions don't stop there. The president has defined victory in Iraq as the creation of a state that will be an American ally, while the Iraqi government we are supporting has close ties to Iran and is unlikely ever to oppose it.
But what about staying in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda? General Odom answered that question in his Senate testimony: "The concern ... about a residual base left for al-Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al-Qaeda if we leave Iraq. The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites, like the Iranians, detest al-Qaeda."
That is as much of a victory as we are likely to get when, sooner or later, we face up to the limits of our power and recognize that American forces cannot be tied up indefinitely trying to prevent Iraqis from killing one another. Enough of the lullaby of Baghdad. Americans need their own Awakening.
- PAUL STARR
Yeah no problem. Here's one from Oct 2007, then another from May 2008. Trust me there are plenty of these publications, I can keep them coming if you'd like.
After the surge
Gary Dorrien. The Christian Century. Chicago: Oct 30, 2007. Vol. 124, Iss. 22; pg. 8, 2 pgs
THE WEEKLY death tolls in Iraq have recently decreased-for four reasons: The U.S. troop "surge" has restricted the flow of explosives into Baghdad; ethnic cleansing has been completed in many areas; the Mahdi Army has suspended its attacks; and the U.S. is co-opting Sunni insurgents. Thus the Bush administration has been able to claim military progress and thereby to put off attempts to end the war.
But all of these factors are temporary or have perilous long-term consequences. Iraq is so thoroughly ripped apart by insurgent and sectarian violence that even Yugoslavia cannot be used as an analogy. There is no military solution to the insurgency or the civil war. And the hope of a unity government in Iraq is more remote than ever before.
General David Petraeus used the surge's five extra combat brigades to build a military ring around Baghdad and cut off the supply of ammunition to insurgents, sectarian fighters and foreign terrorists. This measure reduced attacks in the city and diverted violence to surrounding areas. At the height of the insurgent and sectarian violence in early 2007, Iraq was averaging approximately 1,800 attacks per week; the average by midsummer was 1,000. According to Iraq's Interior Ministry, 2,318 civilians were killed in August and 1,654 in September. These numbers represent reductions of approximately 30 percent from the early months of 2007.
Bush officials called the escalation a surge because they knew it would have to be temporary. The U.S. lacks the forces to sustain it. There are other problems with calling the surge a success. The high death tolls of a year ago reflected vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in many areas that are now completed, at least until an all-out civil war erupts. The Mahdi Army-the main anti-American Shi'ite militia group-suspended its attacks in August after it had a dangerous clash with the Badr Organization, the Shi'ite militia group that dominates the Iraqi army and police force. The current lull in violence will end as soon as the Mahdi Army resumes the murderous business for which it exists.
Petraeus's risky deal with Sunni tribal sheiks was sharply contested in the military before Petraeus's strategy prevailed. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni Arab insurgent group led by foreign terrorists, has alienated Sunni tribal sheiks by bombing marketplaces and killing Iraqis indiscriminantly. Last spring Petraeus, hoping to capitalize on the alienation, began giving weapons to tribal police forces and other militia groups in Anbar Province that promised to use them against foreign terrorists. Attacks on American troops went down after the policy was instituted, so this summer Petraeus rolled the dice in the entire Sunni triangle of Baghdad, Ramadi and Tikrit, an area that includes Samarra and Fallujah, despite the opposition of the Maliki government.
Officially the U.S. says that it will not give arms to individuals who are known to have killed Americans; off the record officials acknowledge that, of course, we rarely know who the insurgents are anyway. The very groups that the U.S. has been fighting for the past four years are now getting U.S. weapons if they promise to use them against foreign terrorists.
Co-opting the Sunnis has bought some relief for U.S. forces, helping to reduce American deaths in August and September to 84 and 63 respectively. But this scheme is obviously loaded with peril. Trying to co-opt insurgent groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare. The French, the British and the U.S. tried it, respectively, in Algeria, Malaya and Vietnam. In each case the weapons given to insurgent groups ended up being used against the forces providing them. Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, explains the mentality of the Sunni militants he is trying to co-opt: "They say to us, 'We hate you because you are occupiers, but we hate alQaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.'" (In this lexicon, Iraqi Shi'ites are Persians.)
So the U.S. is arming Sunni insurgents in the hope that they will spend most of their time killing people in the middle group, even as they profess to hating Shi'ites most of all. The Shi'ite-dominated government, naturally, has pleaded against this scheme. Last July during a video conference, Prime Minister Maliki implored Bush to terminate the policy and fire Petraeus. He also threatened to arm Shi'ite militias with government funds in response; Bush told Maliki to calm down. In public Maliki's top political adviser, Sadiq Rikabi, is more plaintive. There are too many militias already, he says, so "why are we creating new ones?" (Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail, "Iraq: A Nail in Maliki Government's Coffin?" Inter Press Service, August 3; New York Times, August 11).
The answer is that the U.S. mission in Iraq is that desperate. Military leaders who lost the argument with Petraeus are already leaking "I told you so" comments to the media. For two years many Shi'ite leaders sat back, bided their time, gave lip service to a unity government, thwarted any real attempt at one, and trusted the Americans to kill off their Sunni enemies. But the Americans failed, and civil war erupted. Today the Shi'ites and Kurds see total victory within their grasp. Sectarian killings have doubled in Iraq over the past year, and the danger to U.S. troops by Shi'ite militias has soared. According to U.S. Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, Shi'ite militias launched approximately 75 percent of the successful attacks on U.S. forces this summer, often using weapons supplied by Iran. Shi'ite factions are less inclined than ever to make any political deals. Maliki explained to Admiral William Fallen this summer: "There are two mentalities in this region: conspiracy and mistrust."
Achieving a unified Iraqi democracy is a fantasy under these conditions. Even a cynical, thuggish settlement is out of reach as long as the major factions and players are consumed with sectarian agendas. Iraq cannot get to a decent outcome as long as the Sunnis remain a hostile minority, Shi'ite leaders exclude the Sunnis from governing, Shi'ite militias dominate the army and police force, and militias on all sides continue to proliferate. President Bush warns: "For all those who ask whether the fight is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control larger parts of the country." But that is exactly what is happening now-with the tacit consent of the very government that Bush wants to prop up with more blood and treasure.
The Baker-Hamilton Commission called for the U.S. to pull back, leaving air, ground and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain and other bases in the Middle East while maintaining some residual U.S. forces in Iraq to fight terrorism and stabilize the Kurdish region. While the Republican presidential field is standing by the president s policy of escalating the war and delaying the inevitable withdrawal of forces, the Democratic candidates are offering variations on the Baker-Hamilton strategy. Hillary Clinton essentially adopted it last spring, which required a major change of position for her. Barack Obama wants to leave a residual force in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqi forces. John Edwards envisions leaving a residual force to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and deal with any violence that spills into neighboring nations. In the second tier of Democratic candidates, Bill Richardson supports an immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq that leaves a good deal of military equipment behind, Dennis Kucinich supports an immediate and total withdrawal that would take up to a year to accomplish, and Joseph Biden wants American troops to stay until Iraq can be separated into three regions.
The U.S. should be planning how to get out of Iraq. It should make it clear that it is leaving; that the U.S. will offer asylum to all Iraqis endangered by their cooperation with U.S. forces; and that the U.S. will provide massive economic assistance for all humanitarian work undertaken by the United Nations, NATO, other governments and international agencies. Thus far the U.S. attitude and record are not encouraging. Sweden has accepted over 20,000 Iraqis seeking asylum in the past year; the U.S. has taken in fewer than 900.
The U.S. has two strategic objectives in the Persian Gulf: to protect its allies and secure its oil interests. It can do both of these things without stationing troops on the ground. Both strategic objectives are best secured by maintaining a strong naval presence in the Indian Ocean and some naval forces in the Persian Gulf so that ships can get through the Strait of Hormuz. That can be done by stationing forces in the Indian Ocean and at bases outside the Middle East. In other words, the U.S. could go back to the policy it had in the 1980s.
Lullaby of Baghdad
Paul Starr. The American Prospect. Princeton: May 2008. Vol. 19, Iss. 5; pg. 3, 1 pgs
IS REDUCED VIOLENCE IN IRAQ-REDUCED, THAT IS, from its peak in 2006-a sign that the United States is finally on the road to victory? Or is U.S. strategy in the war, as Steven Simon argues in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, "stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism" and consequently making Iraq ungovernable? In other words, is the Bush administration purchasing shortterm stability in Iraq-and a lulled electorate at home-at the cost of a deepened and prolonged conflict?
There's no doubt that the "surge" in U.S. forces (now being drawn down to 140,000 troops) has bought the administration political relief. News coverage of the fighting has dropped, and congressional Democrats have been stymied in efforts to end the conflict. (I'm writing just before Gen. David Petraeus' congressional testimony.) Perhaps most important, although a majority of the public continues to believe that invading Iraq was a mistake, those who favor the war such as Sen. John McCain have been bolstered in their determination to fight on until victory.
The war's supporters say that whatever the earlier mistakes, the surge and the new bottom-up counterinsurgency strategy have improved security and put al-Qaeda in Iraq on the run. In this view, it would be a disastrous error to quit the war just as the tide has turned.
But a variety of analyses tell a different story. In early April, the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace released a report by experts on Iraq concluding, "Political progress is so slow, halting and superficial, and social and political fragmentation so pronounced, that the U.S. is no closer to being able to leave Iraq than it was a year ago. Lasting political development could take five to ten years of full, unconditional U.S. commitment to Iraq."
But didn't the surge reduce attacks and casualties? Actually, the number of attacks has stabilized at about 570 per week (before spiking in March), and much of the reduction came from three other developments. In early 2007, even before the surge, violence began falling because the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was mostly finished, and it dropped further after the Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr declared a cease-fire by his Mahdi Army on August 28.
The third development-the decision of Sunnis in Anbar and some other areas to abandon the insurgency and join sahwa or "Awakening" groups to fight the foreign jihadists-has been widely heralded as the war's biggest turnaround. But, as Simon argues in his Foreign Affairs article, the U.S. decision to pay and equip these tribal groups strengthens the centrifugal tendencies weakening the Iraqi state. America now funds the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Sunni sahwa, and the Iraqi security Forces heavily infiltrated by the Badr militia. Our money and arms flow not just to the three major sectarian groups but to contending factions and strongmen within each one.
Current policy, retired Gen. William E. Odom told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 2, "has placed the United States astride several civil wars. And it allows all sides to consolidate, rearm, and refill their financial coffers" at American expense. And the U.S. Institute of Peace report warns, "Empowering the Awakenings-often composed of former insurgents and leaders stridently opposed to the Iraqi government-carries with it a major risk of blowback."
Some analysts hope that even with a weak state, a stable equilibrium will emerge among the warring sects, tribes, and militias, but that hope goes against the historical record and widely held expectations in Iraq that the contest for power will be settled by violence. The United States now finds itself in the bizarre role of arming rival factions to stop a civil war.
And the contradictions don't stop there. The president has defined victory in Iraq as the creation of a state that will be an American ally, while the Iraqi government we are supporting has close ties to Iran and is unlikely ever to oppose it.
But what about staying in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda? General Odom answered that question in his Senate testimony: "The concern ... about a residual base left for al-Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al-Qaeda if we leave Iraq. The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites, like the Iranians, detest al-Qaeda."
That is as much of a victory as we are likely to get when, sooner or later, we face up to the limits of our power and recognize that American forces cannot be tied up indefinitely trying to prevent Iraqis from killing one another. Enough of the lullaby of Baghdad. Americans need their own Awakening.
- PAUL STARR