Patrick Cockburn: Iraq is a country no more. Like much else, that was not the plan

The death rate in Baghdad has fallen, but it is down to ethnic cleansing

Sunday, 16 March 2008

'It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam," a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein said angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, might briefly venture into the city.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the US and the Iraqi governments claim that the country is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Mr Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armoured cars, each with three machine-gunners on the roof, raced out of the Green Zone through a heavily fortified exit, followed by sand-coloured American Humvees and more armoured cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bullet-proof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have been carrying Mr Maliki.

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Police and Army Getting Sidelined

Inter Press Service
By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail*

BAQUBA, Jan 21 (IPS) - New military operations in Diyala province north of Baghdad have exacerbated a growing conflict between U.S.-backed Sunni fighters on the one hand and Iraqi army and police forces on the other.

The U.S. military commenced a large military operation Jan. 8 in the volatile Diyala province. Seven U.S. battalions led an offensive to push out fighters affiliated with 'Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia' from the area.

In the current operation, U.S., Iraqi, and local fighters have faced no serious resistance. U.S. military commanders admitted shortly after operations began that anti-occupation fighters were likely tipped off, and fled the area. But the operation has thrown up conflicts within the ranks.

"The military forces comprise the coalition forces, Iraqi police and army, and the popular forces (commonly called Kataib)," political analyst Akram Sabri told IPS in Baquba, capital of Diyala province. "It was found that the local forces are more truculent fighters who can always be relied on. This has made the coalition forces increasingly reliant upon these fighters to the extent that they will one day likely be joined to Iraqi police and army."

The Kataib Sabri speaks of are what the U.S. military calls "concerned local citizens". Most are former resistance fighters, now being paid 300 dollars a month to stop attacking occupation forces and to back them instead.

The groups, which the U.S. military claims are 82 percent Sunni, are viewed as a threat by the government in Baghdad led by U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The PM has said these groups will never become part of the government security forces. But while seen with suspicion at many places, these forces are also being welcomed in some.

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Success in Iraq? Not for Iraqi Women

Alternet.org Blog posting

Posted by Siun , Firedoglake at 4:22 AM on December 26, 2007.

"Let's make sure all of our candidates know that we are not distracted by the bright shiny surge success chatter. "

Reporters and too many politicians continue claiming that happy days are here again in Iraq. Golly, that surge has been soooo successful - and things are going just swell. In fact, US soldiers have even been told to treat approaching Iraqi civilians as ... civilians!

"Effective immediately, assume all civilian vehicles are friendly," it read.

The order admonished soldiers throughout Iraq to yield to civilian drivers, allow vehicles to pass, and avoid firing their weapons as they escorted convoys of concrete barriers, generators, water and food to U.S. military outposts.

And talk is growing of not only withdrawing the "surge" troops in 2008, but perhaps more:

Gen. George Casey, the Army's chief of staff and the former senior commander in Iraq, has been particularly frank about the state of the Army.

"We're deploying at unsustainable rates," General Casey said three weeks ago during remarks to an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The Army agreed to a buildup of troops a year ago with the understanding that it was temporary, he said. "We can't sustain that. We have to come off of that, and we're working that very hard."

In the rush to distract voters from the real issues of the Iraq occupation, I suspect we will hear more tales of success and improvement in Iraq.

Yet for Iraqis, conditions continue to spiral down.

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Drift to War

October 2007 - Paul Rogers Oxford Research Group

There was a decrease in US military casualties in Iraq during October. A decline in civilian casualties was also claimed by the US military authorities but other agencies, including Iraqi government sources, were less positive. These other reports were more plausible given the huge increase in the use of air power by the US military – there were more than three times as many air strikes in the first ten months of 2007 as in the whole of 2006.

In any case, even if the security situation in Iraq was showing some small sign of improvement, attention shifted a thousand miles to the east where even the violent conflict in south east Afghanistan was overshadowed by political developments in Pakistan.

The return of the former Prime Minister Benzir Bhutto had been expected to see a consolidation of power in the hands of General Musharraf in combination with Mrs Bhutto and her party. In the event, a suicide bomb attack on her motorcade on the day of her arrival indicated the problems that would be faced and Mrs Bhutto returned to her residence in Dubai before the end of the month.

As the security situation in the border districts with Afghanistan deteriorated, General Musharraf endeavoured to take direct control of the country, leaving the US attempts to broker a Musharraf/Bhutto coalition in disarray. By the end of the month it looked highly unlikely that the forthcoming elections would be held, especially as many key members of opposition political parties were being detained by security forces on behalf of the Musharraf regime.

Further Sanctions against Iran

In the United States, the situation in Pakistan caused concern but this scarcely impinged on the 2008 presidential election campaign. Indeed, it was the issue of Iran that became steadily more prominent during the course of October, with the Bush administration announcing a further round of sanctions at the end of the month. These appeared to pre-empt further international discussions and, on the surface, appeared mainly directed at Iran’s presumed nuclear weapon programme. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice concentrated on this, saying that “the international community cannot just sit idly by until we face unpalatable choices. A nuclear weapon in the hands of the Iranian regime would be deeply destabilizing in the world’s most volatile region.” Read article

Iraq Divided: Why they fight

September 28, 2007 5:11 p.m. PT

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

The fact that the Senate on Wednesday voted in favor of a measure -- albeit a non-binding one -- that would divide Iraq into sectarian regions shows how out of touch our well-meaning lawmakers are with what Iraqis, who make up what President Bush repeatedly refers to as a sovereign, democratic nation, want.

Fortunately, there are those who know the hearts of Iraqis, such as Raed Jarrar, a political analyst and consultant to the D.C.-based American Friends Service Committee's Iraq Program. In a recent piece he co-wrote for alternet.org, Jarrar said that those defining the civil war within Iraq as a religious conflict alone miss the point. Iraq's war is over control of the country and its energy supplies, not over Allah.

Jarrar writes, the "Bush administration, with the support of Congress, has taken the same side as Iran's hardliners and the same side as the Sunni fundamentalist group called al-Qaida in Iraq. All are working ... against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis." Indeed, a poll conducted by Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland show that the majority of Iraqis (61 percent) want a stronger central government, a wish supported even by Kurds, who already have their own region.

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The War as We Saw It

Op-Ed Contributors

By BUDDHIKA JAYAMAHA, WESLEY D. SMITH, JEREMY ROEBUCK, OMAR MORA, EDWARD SANDMEIER, YANCE T. GRAY and JEREMY A. MURPHY
Published: August 19, 2007 New York Times

Baghdad

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

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Insurgents form political front to plan for US pullout

Leaders of Iraqi groups say attacks will go on until Americans leave
The Guardian | Seumas Milne in Damascus | Thursday July 19, 2007


Insurgents from the 1920 Revolution Brigades training at Beiji, north of Baghdad.

Seven of the most important Sunni-led insurgent organisations fighting the US occupation in Iraq have agreed to form a public political alliance with the aim of preparing for negotiations in advance of an American withdrawal, their leaders have told the Guardian.

In their first interview with the western media since the US-British invasion of 2003, leaders of three of the insurgent groups - responsible for thousands of attacks against US and Iraqi armed forces and police - said they would continue their armed resistance until all foreign troops were withdrawn from Iraq, and denounced al-Qaida for sectarian killings and suicide bombings against civilians.

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Saving Iraq

The Nation| article | posted June 27, 2007 (web only)
Robert Dreyfuss

Last week, a fierce critic of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq went, perhaps, a bridge too far. Pauline Baker, president of the Fund for Peace, flatly predicted that there is no hope for Iraq, other than its collapse and fragmentation. Upon issuing a report that described Iraq as the second most unstable "failed state" after Sudan, Baker told the Washington Post, "We have recommended...that the administration face up to the reality that the only choices for Iraq are how and how violently it will break up."

And she's not the only one. Many opponents of Bush's adventure in Iraq, from left to center-right, have thrown up their hands. Most notorious, Senator Joe Biden, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Ambassador Peter Galbraith have written off Iraq, either predicting or encouraging its breakup into mini-states. Countless others have concluded that ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq have hardened into permanent hatreds. And there are those who--sadly or gleefully, depending on their point of view--declare definitively that Iraq was never really a nation. Instead, they say, it is an artificial creation that never existed except in the minds of British imperialists like Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell.

Such sentiments are being challenged by a nascent bloc of Iraqi nationalists who, against all odds, are working to put together a pan-Iraqi coalition that would topple the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Maliki's ruling alliance includes separatist Kurdish warlords and Iranian-backed Shiite fundamentalists, both of whom want to carve out semi or wholly independent statelets. Although it has not yet jelled, Maliki's opposition--which includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as well as Christians, Turkmen and others--is within striking distance of creating a functioning parliamentary majority. Read more

A Culture of Atrocity

Truthdig.com Posted on Jun 18, 2007 By Chris Hedges

AP Photo / Karim Kadim

Mohammed Saleem, 18 months old, and four family members were killed when U.S. forces opened fire on their vehicle in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood in June 2004 during fighting between Americans and followers of a radical cleric.

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—to murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

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Iraqi Lawmakers Pass Resolution That May Force End to Occupation

By Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted June 5, 2007.

While Washington lawmakers play procedural games with an out-of-control executive branch, Iraqi legislators are working to bring an end to the occupation of their country.

While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush's permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament -- now representing a majority of the body -- continue to make progress toward bringing an end to their country's occupation.

The parliament today passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the U.N. mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure.

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Curfew Begins to Choke Samarra

Inter Press Service

Ali al-Fadhily*

SAMARRA, May 22 (IPS) - At least 10 residents have died as the result of a curfew imposed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, local doctors say.

Residents in this city of 300,000 located 125km north of Baghdad have been struggling to find food, water and medical supplies. Vehicles have been banned from entering or leaving the city since May 6.

The Iraqi government and the U.S. military imposed a strict curfew on the city that day after a suicide car bomb killed a dozen police officers, including police chief Abd al-Jalil al-Dulaimi. Samarra has been a hotspot of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq since close to the beginning of the occupation in March 2003.

After the attack, U.S. and Iraqi forces encircled the city and sealed off all entrances with concrete blocks and sand bags.

Local people told IPS that the main bridge in the city has been closed, ambulances have not been allowed to reach people, and residents are facing an increasingly dire situation.

"We are being butchered here by these Americans," Majid Hamid, a schoolteacher in Samarra told IPS. "People are dying because we lack all of the necessities, and our government seems to be so happy about it." Read complete article posted on Dahr Jamail's website

Iraq: A Blueprint for Peace

Iraq: A Blueprint for Peace

by Karen Button

Beirut - “The US talks about withdrawal after bringing Iraqi security forces up to speed, yet has paid militias, allowed mercenaries, and, with few exceptions, ignored the blatant abuses and torture committed by Iraqi forces. They have ignored rampant corruption within all ministries, the most egregious resulting in a medical crisis and a judicial joke. They have also committed their own atrocities, ensuring that the new Iraq is riddled with violence, fear, and contempt for the occupying forces.”

Thus starts a new peace plan entitled Planning Iraq’s Future: A detailed project to rebuild post-liberation Iraq. The 250-page book was written over the past two years by 108 Iraqis that consciously included Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Assyrian Christians, Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, and other minorities. Two-thirds of the Iraqis still reside inside the country, the other third, outside. Read complete article

The last thing the Middle East's main players want is US troops to leave Iraq

By Hussein Agha. The Guardian, Wednesday April 25

Across the region, ordinary people want the Americans out. But from Israel to al-Qaida, political groups and states have other ideas

Overt political debate in the Middle East is hostile to the American occupation of Iraq and dominated by calls for it to end sooner rather than later. No less a figure than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, arguably the United States' closest Arab ally, has declared the occupation of Iraq "illegal" and "illegitimate". Real intentions, however, are different. States and local political groups might not admit it - because of public opinion - but they do not want to see the back of the Americans.

www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2064685,00.html

Give Us Some Real Political Leaders

By Ali al-Fadhily. Inter Press Service

BAGHDAD, Mar 15 (IPS) - Many Iraqis are now looking to local political leadership to fill wide gaps in a fractured government that is failing to provide security and basic needs.

"Iraqis feel lost amongst too many political currents that blew their country away with their narrow sectarian and personal interests," Mohammad Jaafar, a Baghdad-based politician formerly involved in the interim government told IPS.

"I am ashamed to say that I am or even was an Iraqi politician after all the damage to our country that we caused. It is entirely our fault and there is no question about that." Read article