[NYTr] The surge: A Bloody Failure

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Independent - August 7, 2007 
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2841425.ece

The surge: a special report 

by Patrick Cockburn 

It was supposed to mark a decisive new phase in America's military
campaign, but six months after George Bush sent in 20,000 extra troops,
Iraq is more chaotic and dangerous than ever. In a special despatch,
Patrick Cockburn reports on the bloody failure of 'the surge' 

The war in Iraq passed a significant but little remarked anniversary
this summer. The conflict that President George Bush announced was in
effect over on 1 May 2003 has now gone on longer than the First World
War. Like that great conflict almost a century ago, the Iraqi war has
been marked by repeated claims that progress is being made and that a
final breakthrough is in the offing. 

In 1917, the French commander General Robert Nivelle proudly announced
that "we have the formula for victory" before launching the French
armies on a catastrophic offensive in which they were massacred. Units
ordered to the front brayed like donkeys to show they saw themselves as
being like animals led to the slaughter. Soon, the soldiers broke into
open mutiny. 

On 10 January this year, President Bush announced that he too now
believed he had the formula for victory. In an address to the American
nation, he announced a new strategy for Iraq that became known as "the
surge" . He said he was sending a further 20,000 US troops to Iraq. With
the same misguided enthusiasm as General Nivelle had expressed in his
plan, President Bush explained why "our past efforts to secure Baghdad
failed" and why the new American formula would succeed: in the past, US
and Iraqi troops had cleared areas, but when they moved on guerrillas
returned. In future, said Bush, American and allied troops would stay
put. 

As if the US was not facing enough enemies in Iraq, Bush pointed to Iran
and Syria as the hidden hand sustaining the insurgency. "These two
regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to
move in and out of Iraq," he said. "Iran is providing material support
for attacks on American troops." 

He added in his State of the Union address on 23 January that "Shia
extremists are just as hostile to America [as al-Qa'ida], and are also
determined to dominate the Middle East". The implication was that US
troops were going to move into areas such as Sadr City, home to two
million Shia Iraqis, in pursuit of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi
Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. 

Six months after the surge was actually launched, in mid- February, it
has failed as dismally as so many First World War offensives. The US
Defense Department says that, this June, the average number of attacks
on US and Iraqi forces, civilian forces and infrastructure peaked at
177.8 per day, higher than in any month since the end of May 2003. The
US has failed to gain control of Baghdad. The harvest of bodies picked
up every morning first fell and then rose again. This may be because the
Mehdi Army militia, who provided most of the Shia death squads, was
stood down by Sadr. Nobody in Baghdad has much doubt that they could be
back in business any time they want. Whatever Bush might say, the US
military commanders in Iraq clearly did not want to take on the Mehdi
Army and the Shia community when they were barely holding their own
against the Sunni. 

The surge is now joining a host of discredited formulae for success and
fake turning-points that the US (with the UK tripping along behind) has
promoted in Iraq over the past 52 months. In December 2003, there was
the capture of Saddam Hussein. Six months later, in June 2004, there was
the return of sovereignty to Iraq. "Let freedom reign," said Bush in a
highly publicised response. And yet the present Iraqi Prime Minister,
Nouri al-Maliki, claims he cannot move a company of soldiers without
American permission. 

In 2005, there were two elections that were both won handsomely by Shia
and Kurdish parties. "Despite endess threats from the killers in their
midst," exulted Bush, "nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to vote
in a show of hope and solidarity that we should never forget." 

In fact, he himself forgot this almost immediately. A year later, the US
forced out the first democratically elected Shia prime minister, Ibrahim
al-Jaafari, with the then US Ambassador in Baghdad, Zilmay Khalilzad,
saying that Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, and doesn't accept that
Jaafari should form the next government". 

Fresh US initiatives in Iraq seemed to succeed each other about every
six months. Just as it was becoming evident in the US that the surge was
not going anywhere very fast, there came good news from Anbar province
in western Iraq. The Sunni tribes were rising against al-Qa'ida, which
had overplayed its hand by setting up an umbrella organisation for
insurgents called the Islamic State of Iraq. In Sunni areas, it was
killing rubbish collectors on the grounds that they worked for the
government, shooting women in the face because they were not wearing
veils, and trying to draft one young man from each family into its
forces. Sunni tribal militiamen backed by the US fought al-Qa'ida in
insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi, and attacks on American troops
there fell away dramatically. 

The US administration could portray this as a fresh turning-point. It
had always pretended that the insurrection in Iraq was conducted largely
by al-Qa'ida. In reality, Anthony H Cordesman, an Iraqi specialist at
the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, points
out that al-Qa'ida's attacks make up only 15 per cent of the total in
Iraq, although they launch 80 to 90 per cent of the suicide bombings. 

As with many a development in Iraq portrayed as a sign of progress by
the White House, the recruitment of Sunni tribal militias by the US is
not quite what it seems. In practice, it is a tactic fraught with
dangers. In areas where they operate, police are finding more and more
bodies, according to the Interior Ministry. Victims often appear to have
been killed solely because they were Shia. The gunmen from the tribes
are under American command, and this weakens the authority of the Iraqi
government, army and police – institutions that the US is supposedly
seeking to foster. 

A grim scene showing Sunni tribal militiamen in action was recorded on a
mobile phone and later appeared on Iraqi websites. It shows a small,
terrified man in a brown robe being bundled out of a vehicle by a group
of angry men with sub-machine guns who cuff and slap him as he cowers,
trying to shield his face with his hands. One of his captors, who seems
to be in command, asks him fiercely if he has killed somebody called
"Khalid" . After a few moments he is dragged off by two gunmen to a
patch of waste ground 30 yards away and executed with a burst of
machine-gun fire to the chest. 

It is a measure of the desperation of the White House to show that the
surge is having some success that it is now looking to these Sunni
fighters for succour. Often they are former members of anti-American
resistance groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigade and the Army of
Islam – Bush has spent four years denouncing these groups as murderous
enemies of the Iraqi people. To many Iraqi Shia and Kurds, who make up
80 per cent of all Iraqis, the US appears to be building up its own
Sunni militia. So, far from preventing civil war (a main justification
for continued occupation), the US is arming sectarian killers engaged in
a murder campaign that is tearing Iraq apart. 

The White House says it is too early to know if the surge is succeeding,
and that it will wait for a security report due next month from General
David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq, and the US
Ambassador to the country, Ryan Crocker. But the new strategy was never
going to turn the tide in Iraq. Its main advantage for Bush is that it
puts off the moment when failure has to be admitted, a potentially
disastrous confession for Republicans standing for election next year.
If an American withdrawal can be postponed until after the poll, then
the neo-cons can blame the Democrats for a stab in the back, pulling out
the troops at the very moment when victory was almost in their grasp. 

I was in Baghdad in January, when Bush made his State of the Union
speech outlining his plans for the surge. Iraqis were pessimistic from
the beginning about its chances of success. A friend called Ismail
remarked gloomily: "An extra 16,000 [sic] US troops are not going to be
enough." A Sunni, he had recently fled his house in the west of the
capital because he was frightened of being arrested and tortured by the
paramilitary police commandos – like most Sunni, he regarded them as
uniformed Shia death squads. 

Baghdad was paralysed by fear. Drivers were terrified of being stopped
at impromptu checkpoints where they might be dragged out of their cars
and killed for belonging to the wrong religion. Conversation was
dominated by accounts of narrow escapes. Most people had at least one
fake ID card so they could claim, depending on circumstance, to be
either Sunni or Shia. This might not be enough; some Shia checkpoints
had a list of theological questions drawn up by a religious scholar that
they would use to interrogate people. 

It was extraordinary how little control the US forces and the Iraqi army
exercised over the very centre of the capital. There was black smoke
rising from Haifa Street, a two-mile-long Sunni corridor just north of
the Green Zone, which US forces had repeatedly invaded but failed to
secure. When a helicopter belonging to the security company Blackwater
was shot down or crash-landed in the al-Fadhil district in the centre of
Baghdad, the survivors were executed by insurgents before US forces
could get to them. 

**** 

TSectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni began in August 2003 when
al-Qa'ida suicide bombers started targeting Shia civilians. It escalated
over the next two years, but it was the bomb that destroyed the Shia
shrine at Samarra on 22 February 2006 that unleashed a Shia pogrom in
Baghdad in which 1,300 Sunni were killed in days. 

A struggle for the capital was waged between the two sects for the rest
of the year, and by January 2007 the Shia had largely won it. My
surviving Sunni friends were terrified that the Mehdi Army, often used
as a catch-all phrase to describe Shia militiamen of all descriptions,
would launch a final "battle of Baghdad" to wipe out the remaining Sunni
enclaves. 

A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated
its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside
Kurdistan, it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and
Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently
examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and
reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were
high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US,
which were passed on or sold to insurgents. 

US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda, even
as the ground is giving way beneath their feet. In Baquba, a provincial
capital north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders praised
their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link.
Chiding media critics for their pessimism, the generals claimed: "The
situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are
some rumours circulated by bad people." Within hours Sunni insurgents,
possibly irked by these self-congratulatory words, stormed Baquba,
kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office. 

The surge got under way in February, and from the beginning the sceptics
seemed to be in the right. Its most positive impact was that Muqtada
al-Sadr decided not to risk an all-out military confrontation between
his Mehdi Army and the US army. He sent many of his senior lieutenants
out of Baghdad, stood down his men and disappeared, either to Iran, as
the US claimed, or to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf, according to
his followers. 

The Sunni bore the brunt of the surge in Baghdad. Districts like
al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad were sealed off. But this probably achieved
less than was intended, because Adhamiyah is a commercial district in
which half the people who work there live elsewhere. Joint security
stations were set up in every neighbourhood manned by US and Iraqi
forces, but these posts seem ineffectual and tie down troops. 

There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian
leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding. US
embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John
McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast
improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when
standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as
a mute contradiction of the Senator's assertions. When Vice-President
Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving warning of
incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to
prevent them booming out of every television screen in America. 

By the end of May, I found it a little easier to drive through Baghdad,
but the danger was still extreme. I sat in the back of the car with my
jacket hanging inside the window so it was difficult for other drivers
to see me. We were pulled over by an army checkpoint. A soldier leaned
in and asked who I was. We were lucky. He looked surprised when told I
was a foreign journalist, and said softly: "Keep well hidden." 

Back in my hotel, I phoned an Iraqi friend in the Green Zone who was
close to the government. "Be very careful," he warned. "Above all, do
not trust the army and police." There was an example of what he meant a
few days later when a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying 40 uniformed
policemen arrived in the forecourt of the Finance Ministry. They entered
the building and calmly abducted five British security men, who have not
been seen since. The kidnappers may be linked to a unit of the Mehdi
Army. 

The surge has changed very little in Baghdad. It was always a collection
of tactics rather than a strategy. All the main players – Sunni
insurgents, Shia militiamen, Iraqi government, Kurds, Iran and Syria –
are still in game.

One real benchmark of progress – or lack of it – is the number of Iraqis
who have fled for their lives. This figure is still going up. Over one
million Iraqis have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) since the
Samarra bombing, according to the Red Crescent. A further 2.2 million
people have fled the country. This exodus is bigger than anything ever
seen in the Middle East, exceeding in size even the flight or expulsion
of the Palestinians in 1948. A true sign of progress in Iraq will be
when the number of refugees, inside and outside the country, starts to
go down. 

**** 

The surge was never going to bring Iraq nearer to peace. It always made
sense in terms of American, but not Iraqi, politics. It has become a
cliché for US politicians to say that there is a "Washington clock' and
a " Baghdad clock", which do not operate at the same speed. This has the
patronising implication that Iraqis are slothful in moving to fix
problems within their country, while the Americans are all
get-up-and-go. But the reality is that it is not the clocks, but the
agendas, that are different. The Americans and the Iraqis want contrary
things. 

The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War. It wanted to be rid of
Saddam Hussein in 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him;
something the Shia were bound to do in fair elections, because they
comprise 60 per cent of the population. Worse, the Shia coming to power
would have close relations with Iran, America's arch-enemy in the Middle
East. 

This was the main reason the US did not press on to Baghdad after
defeating Saddam's armies in Kuwait in 1991. It then allowed him
savagely to crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured
14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces. 

Ever since 2003, the US has wrestled with this same problem.
Unwittingly, the most conservative of American administrations had
committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the
minority Sunni Baathist regime. 

The Bush family has always been close to the Saudi monarchy, but George
W Bush dismantled a cornerstone of the Sunni Arab security order. This
is why the US and Britain opted for a thoroughgoing occupation of Iraq
after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They put off elections as long as they
could. When elections were held in 2005 and voters overwhelmingly chose
a Shia-Kurdish government, Washington tried to keep it under tight
control. 

"The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by
the Baath disappearing, but it is unsuccessful," says Ahmed Chalabi, out
of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq. "
Now the Americans and British want to disengage, but if they do so the
worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass: Shia control and
strong Iranian influence in Iraq." 

The hidden history of the past four years is that the US wants to defeat
the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish government to
win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps
it weak with the other. 

The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget,
but by the CIA. Iraqi independence is far more circumscribed than the
outside world realises. The US is trying to limit the extent of the
Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the
struggle for Iraq, Washington is ensuring that this bloodiest of wars
goes on, with no end in sight. 

The real death toll 

More lies have been told about casualties in Iraq and the general level
of violence there than at almost any time since the First World War. In
that conflict, a British minister remarked sourly that he suspected the
military authorities of keeping three sets of casualty figures: "One to
deceive the Cabinet, a second to deceive the people and a third to
achieve themselves." 

The American attitude to Iraqi civilian casualties is along much the
same lines. The Baker-Hamilton report drawn up by senior non-partisan
Democrats and Republicans last year examined one day in July 2006, when
the US military had reported 93 attacks on US and Iraqi forces.
Investigation by US intelligence agencies revealed that the real figure
was about 1,100. 

The Iraqi government has sought to conceal civilian casualty figures by
banning journalists from the scenes of bombings, and banned hospitals
and the Health Ministry from giving information. In July, AP reported,
2,024 Iraqis died violently, a 23 per cent rise on June, which was the
last month for which the government gave a figure. 

This is almost certainly an underestimate. In a single bombing in the
district of Karada in Baghdad on 26 July, Iraqi television and Western
media cited the police as saying that there were 25 dead and 100
wounded. A week later, a list of the names of 92 dead and 127 wounded,
compiled by municipal workers, was pinned up on shuttered shopfronts in
the area. 

The US military began the war by saying that it was not keeping count of
Iraqi civilians killed by its troops. It often describes bodies found
after a US raid as belonging to insurgents when the local Iraqi police
say they are civilians killed by the immense firepower deployed by the
American forces. Almost the only time a real investigation of such
killings is carried out is when the local staff of Western media outlets
are among the dead.