Check out Spencer Ackerman on how the Battle of Basra reveals the limits of what the surge has or can accomplish.
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Surge No Further
03 Apr 2008 08:33 am
Comments (25)
OK, time to have that cup of coffee. The Battle in Basra, not the surge, was my reference above.
The surge is just a nonsense domestic political ploy. We all know it does nothing to address the underlying intractable political situation, but is meant to provide cover for Republican politicians this fall.
There is no Iraq war anymore, just the surge. When the true believers get done arguing the details of the surge, we will move on to the topic of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Bush's ability to frame debates in this country amongst the punditocracy and media continues to amaze me.
I shouldn't be, but I'm astonished at the failure of Americans (especially the media and the Democrats) to ask some basic questions and draw some basic conclusions about this.
1. Did Cheney approve the Basra attack? Almost certainly. Was it his idea all along? The timing of his visit to Iraq suggests that it might have been. No one's talking about this.
2. What about Fred Kagan's confident statement a couple of days before the attack: The Civil War Is Over. Why isn't everyone ridiculing Kagan now, the way he ridiculed people who believed that the civil war was going to continue? Why didn't Kagan's career as a talking head end the day the attack began?
3. What about Bush's statement that the Basra attack was "a defining moment for a free Iraq"? Seemingly, what got defined in Basra was the extreme weakness of the central government and their lack of authority even over their own troops. Shouldn't someone be asking Bush about this?
4. What really happened? As more detail comes out, it seems that the failure of the offensive was even worse than first reports had it. The mere fact that Maliki failed at what he tried to do, after making grand statements about his intentions, should have crippled him permanently. But it seems that the battle was worse than a standoff and could have ended up being much more disastrous than it was.
As I've said many times, it's at times like this I wish that the U.S. had a two-party system. For example, if we were in the middle of a Presidential campaign right now, just hypothetically speaking, you'd expect one of the candidates from the opposing party to comment on our Presidents most recent utter disaster, on the emptiness and falseness of his speeches about Iraq, and about the incompetence of Cheney's apparent intervention in Iraqi policy-making.
But there are no magic ponies in the U.S. any more than there are in Iraq.
NYTimes:
Iraqi security forces fanned out into the suburbs and ports of Basra on Wednesday, as life in that southern city slowly began to return to normal, with government offices reopening and residents venturing more confidently into the streets.Witnesses said that Iraqi forces now controlled central Basra and its northern border, and that they had begun moving into militia strongholds north of the city.
Yep, certainly looks like Sadr won and the elected Iraqi government lost this battle.
Witnesses said that Iraqi forces now controlled central Basra and its northern border.
How much of the city is that?
They say lots of things.
Al, are you claiming Maliki crushed the Mahdi army and made them give up their weapons? Or have we returned to the status quo and Maliki gave up is effort to disarm the Mahdi army? I believe it is the latter. What do you think?
And perhaps you'd like to make a prediction now as to the results of the October elections in the south. Will Maliki or Sadr will be strentghtened?
You don't understand, Al. Sadr is a patriot and a hero to anti-colonial working class heroes everywhere because he's anti-US. Never mind the fact that every time things get hot in Iraq he's off to Qom and he can't seem to get his own people to follow his orders.
Maliki, on the other hand, is a powerless Quisling because he's willing to work with the US. Never mind that he was in Basra rather than Iran during the recent dustup, his party has been competing and winning in free elections, and represents a working consensus of the adult Shi'ite leadership.
You've got to get with the program, Al. Iraq was a paradise before we came and messed things up, and as soon as we leave the electricity will come back on, the water and oil will flow, and everyone will live happily ever after. Can't you see?
He [Sadr] can't seem to get his own people to follow his orders.
That was one of the main things in question before the attack. The outcome was the opposite of what you say. Maliki's people deserted, but not Sadr's.
Never mind that he was in Basra rather than Iran during the recent dustup.
That seems to make a big difference to you, but it apparently didn't to the Iraqis.
The people who have been running the American war in Iraq are very much like Al and Powell. They think that winning a war is just like selling a line of bullshit to the American people -- war as a form of advertising. But you can win elections with spin, all right, but you can't win wars that way.
tell us how the economy's fundamentally strong, Al! Tell us how the Iraqi civil war is over, Robert!
I've decided Al no longer knows what he's talking about on the issue of Sadr.
Al: Calm restored, yes. But still no winners or losers.
Robert Powell apparently doesn't worry about the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis as the result of the war he obviously supported. Has your precious surge raised these dead?
And do you really think that the United States had nothing to do with Saddam's depredations prior to the invasion? You do recall he continued to be an ally even after it was proved he used poison gas on his own people and started a war that slaughtered nearly a million people?
It was the oil wells in Kuwait, not the suffering of the Iraqi people, we went in to defend. And your only defense for this abomination of a foreign policy is snark? Shame on you.
Al: Calm restored, yes. But still no winners or losers.
Um, AKBY, it was Matthew who claimed that there was a winner (Sadr) and a loser (Maliki). I am not claiming there is - as I've said before, I don't think we'lll know until the fall elections.
Matthew's simplistic analysis that Sadr is the winner is belied by the fact that Maliki's Iraqi government troops are the ones out on the streets of central Basra.
So again, you post claiming to oppose my position, but you end up supporting my critique of Matthew.
it was Matthew who claimed that there was a winner (Sadr) and a loser (Maliki).
Okay, you're right. However, if you don't like the way Matt frames the issues, why do you do the same:
The only thing that's clear is that Matthew and the rest of the extremist left want al Sadr to win. They want the elected Iraqi government to lose, because (as with Matthew's Somali position) they are against liberal internationalism.
I'm sensitive to the "winners and losers" and "winning and losing" rhetoric....from all sides.
From Spencer's article: ""The planning was not done under our auspices at all," an anonymous U.S. military commander told McClatchy."
This just isn't true. Maliki may not have informed the US of his true intentions, but he cannot move his troops without US involvement. And US troops were involved in supporting the operation from day one.
A much more likely scenario is that Dick Cheney went behind the US military's back to set this up with Maliki. So the US military was not aware of the true intent and extent of Maliki's move.
But Bush and Cheney were.
It's extremely well-documented that Sadr doesn't have effective control over significant elements of his "organization". I think Maliki is today, as in the past and likely future, exercising better control over his forces. End of the day, if you're evaluating the data with a political skew, you're going to miss the important bits. I'm betting against Sadr in the upcoming elections.
epistomology et al apparently didn't worry about the many more Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis and assorted others who were killed by Saddam in complicity with the UN, or those likely to be killed in the future by that regime had it remained in power. Spare us from the sanctimony of the ignorant.
Al is a moron: "Matthew's simplistic analysis that Sadr is the winner is belied by the fact that Maliki's Iraqi government troops are the ones out on the streets of central Basra."
Sadr ordered his troops to stand down after the Iranians negotiated a ceasefire. Almost all of his people obeyed the order.
His people left the streets = meaning they aren't standing around with their guns and mortars openly. It's not like they aren't there or don't still have those weapons.
The fact that the Iraqi security forces can now patrol the streets means nothing, just as it means nothing that US forces can patrol the streets. As one article the other day put it, Sadr's forces don't need to be on the street. Their presence is felt everywhere.
If Sadr decides the security forces are once again arresting his people, he will order them to resist - and the same thing that happened last week will happen again - the security forces will get their asses handed to them.
This is common sense that a simplistic moron like Al can't comprehend. Just because the Sadr people aren't standing there waving guns in the faces of the security forces, Al thinks they lost. He doesn't know the meaning of the word "ceasefire". It doesn't mean anybody lost - it means they stopped shooting each other for their own reasons.
What matters is that security forces DID NOT WIN - that means Sadr DID. When you're an insurgent fighting the government, when you do not lose, you win. This is Guerrilla War 101 - which Al is too stupid to comprehend.
Maybe Al needs to read this:
Bomb mars show of force in Basra
Roadside Bomb Strikes Iraqi Military Convoy During Show of Force in Basra
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=111732
Money Quotes:
Mahdi Army officials in Basra said they tolerated the government move in compliance with the Iranian-brokered deal between the radical Shiite cleric and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had promised a "final and decisive battle."
The militia warned, however, that it would fight back if security forces resumed large-scale raids and arrests without warrants.
A Mahdi Army spokesman known as Abu Liqa al-Basri said Iraqi forces raided some houses in Hayaniyah, then withdrew to a single main street.
He said people were moving freely in the sprawling area and gunmen were keeping a low profile. But he accused the Iraqi security forces of creating a "crisis of trust" by violating al-Maliki's order not to detain people without warrants.
"Al-Maliki's orders are the safety valve," he said. "If the Iraqi army continues in its provocative raids, the consequences will be bad."
AP Television News footage showed Iraqi commandos on foot guarding the convoy nervously as the Humvees drove through the streets before dispersing after about an hour.
Al-Sadr called in his cease-fire order for the government to stop "illegal and haphazard raids." Officials said al-Maliki had agreed that arrests should only be made with warrants.
The gunmen did not to surrender their weapons and several Basra neighborhoods appeared to remain under militia control — developments that left al-Sadr in a position of power.
"Spare us from the sanctimony of the ignorant."
Does us a favor, Powell - spare us yours.
I think Maliki is today, as in the past and likely future, exercising better control over his forces. End of the day, if you're evaluating the data with a political skew, you're going to miss the important bits. I'm betting against Sadr in the upcoming elections.
Neither of them is exercising very good control of their forces. This via Juan Cole:
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday honored the militias of the parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, i.e. the Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. They were singled out for having fought alongside government security forces, and some 10,000 of them were inducted into the latter.
The induction of Badr Corps fighters (the paramilitary of ISCI) and those of the Da'wa Party into security positions came in the wake of the firing of thousands of officers and troops who had refused to obey orders to fire on the Mahdi Army militiamen in Baghdad and the southern provinces. They were accused of mutiny.
If al-Zaman's reporting is correct, the scale of the mutiny is breathtaking, and helps explain why government troops did so poorly against the Sadrists-- the hearts of the thousands of them were simply not with the fight.
More at: www.juancole.com
And those thousands of police and soldiers, now out of a job, of course immediately went to work for Sadr.
So Maliki has furthered the infiltration of the militias into the Iraqi military - where, if the US attacks Iran, they will be used against the US forces in Iraq - and at the same time increased Sadr's forces by thousands.
Nice work, George and Dick!
Robert Powell:
epistomology et al apparently didn't worry about the many more Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis and assorted others who were killed by Saddam in complicity with the UN
Spare us from the sanctimony of the ignorant.
Under our tutelage Saddam slaughtered at least half a million before we turned on him. The Iraq war has killed about 250,000 more. All the Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis Saddam killed without our helped amounted to what? A few thousand. Mission accomplished, if your goal is slaughtering Muslims.
Spare us the crocodile tears of the heartless, Robert Powell. I suspect you care more about American electoral politics than Muslim lives lost.
Thanks to epistemology for an excellent example of the sanctimony of the ignorant.
In the first place, there's not a shred of evidence to support the scurrilous charge that Saddam was "under our tutelage". Ba'athist Iraq was a client state of the Soviet Union, and the recipient of tens of billions of dollars worth of their military hardware--everything from small arms to tanks, rockets, and the latest military aircraft. It's true that we didn't shed any tears when Saddam attacked Khomeini's Iran when it was in a virtual state of war with us, but the total amount of assistance Iraq got from us at a point in the war when it looked like Iran might win amounted to about four-tenths of one percent of the foreign military assistance to Iraq between 1973 and 1990--some spare parts and ammunition, satellite imagery of Iranian positions, and a photo opportunity for Saddam with Rummy. Big deal. We also sold Hawk anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.
Second, your figures are full of holes. It's generally accepted that Iraq's unprovoked invasion of Iran cost about a million lives. Ditto the UN embargo according to the UN itself-some say only about half that, so take your pick. The massacres of the Kurds, and later the Shi'ia are hard to get exact numbers on too, but all credible estimates in both cases are in the hundreds of thousands. There's also controversy about the figures of Kuwaitis massacred or disappeared (Kuwait says 300,000, but this is probably high), and the Marsh Arabs, but they were also big numbers by every reasonable calculation. Then there's the routine toll of the generalized repression in that totalitarian police state over nearly three decades, and the probability that the longer it stayed in power the more the regime was going to run up the score.
Of the perhaps 250,000 Iraqis killed since 2003, by far the greatest number of them were killed by terrorists, including other Iraqis. The number also includes a significant number of the terrorists themselves, whom we killed deliberately. Best guess on the "collateral damage" fatalities we caused is around 40,000--for comparison, we killed about 60,000 French citizens in driving the Germans out of Northern France.
We certainly bear significant responsibility here, and I don't take it lightly. But there's a world of difference between putting our own lives on the line fighting to free and protect innocent Iraqis, and killing them like flies by remote control while playing along with the dictatorship that was starving and massacring them as we did after 1991.
My goal is the same as it's been since 1990--an Iraq that's reasonably stable, reasonably democratic, at peace with its neighbors, and pumping oil. Whatever you "suspect" should be based on more facts and less random speculation.
Robert Powell:
You say
In the first place, there's not a shred of evidence to support the scurrilous charge that Saddam was "under our tutelage".
and then provide more than a shred by describing both our motivation for and complicity in supporting Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. Perhaps I’ll sit back and let your conscience wrestle with itself. You admit we provided Saddam with
spare parts and ammunition, satellite imagery of Iranian positions, and a photo opportunity for Saddam with Rummy.Yes. We supplied targeting data from our satellites to Saddam when we knew he was lobbing poison gas on his enemies. That’s a scurrilous charge. Unfortunately for our reputation, it is true. And claiming that Rumsfeld was in Iraq shaking Saddam’s hand as a photo op is just plain silly. You seem knowledgeable enough to know that’s not true. And you didn’t even mention the Tanker War. After Iraq recklessly began attacks on Iranian oil transport through the Persian Gulf, one reckless attack even hitting a US ship killing 37 members of our military, we attacked Iran, not Iraq.
Yes, we not-so-secretly supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Surely you don’t disagree with this.
As for your figures regarding excess Iraqi deaths from this war: Anyone who cites the number 40,000 (Bush already has a press secretary, don’t bother auditioning) while citing the figure 300,000 when discussing the number of Kuwaitis killed by Saddam, needs to get his nose out of right wing blogs and soak in some information from the real world. The Lancet figure of anywhere from about 200,000 to 600,000 has the virtue of being based on real data and open methodologies. Even McCain admitted (last week on Letterman) that there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. And these numbers are EXCESS over what were dying under Saddam. Ending the embargo, not starting war, would be the proper response to the suffering of the Iraqi people under the embargo.
Saddam’s Iran-Iraq war dead can hardly be a pretext for this war when we encouraged him. Likewise with the marsh Arabs and Kurds who were slaughtered thanks to the previous president Bush’s urging their uprising. We didn’t stop Saddam when he was doing his slaughtering, we just picked up when he slacked off. Our hands are terribly bloody.
But it is a credit to you that your conscience bothers you enough to invent numbers like this to make it look as if this war, that you clearly supported, was a humanitarian gesture for the benefit of Iraqis.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: The most terrifying words in the language are: I’m a neocon with an army, and I’m here to liberate you.
It is absurd to suggest the four-tenths of one percent of Iraq's foreign military assistance which we provided between 1973 and 1990 was somehow "tutelage". I opposed the "tilt towards Iraq" at the time, but it was hardly significant militarily. Iran used US weapons too, and had a lot of them left over from the Shah. Iraq, which even had Soviet military advisers for years, was "under our tutelage" about as much as communist East Germany.
On the casualty numbers, please be advised that everybody not locked in the anti-American echo chamber knows the Johns Hopkins study was errant propaganda. See Meagan's article on this subject in the current issue. There is tons of evidence showing the body count under Saddam was exponentially higher than since 2003. But if you really want to believe the US is evil in all it says and does, go ahead. Just don't expect anyone to take these lies seriously outside the lunatic fringe.
War is a terrible thing, Robert Powell. Calling people lunatics will not change the opinion of the world today or in the future: the Iraq war killed hundreds of thousands unnecessarily, and displaced millions more. Your trying to cast it as a humanitarian effort to protect Iraqis is laughable.
Unprovoked, immoral war is the lunacy. It is to your everlasting shame that you are unable to admit your error in supporting it.
"War is a terrible thing."
No shit. This one was started by Saddam Hussein in 1991. Appeasement of aggressive, genocidal totalitarianisms is also a terrible thing, and one that usually leads directly to war.
Going along with a humanitarian nightmare that killed many times more Iraqis than the invasion according to the UN officials who ran it, and refusing to admit your error in supporting it, is to your everlasting shame.
Robert Powell:
You exaggerate Saddam's threat. Surprise. And when he was a genocidal maniac, ie, during the Iran-Iraq war, the United States supported him.
But not THAT much, is your defense. Weak.
Comments closed April 17, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Ambassador Crocker says in the NYT today that he learned of the surge on March 21. VP Cheney was there the 19th (?). Was this "defining moment", as Pres. Bush called it, just coincidentally begun just after Cheney left?
Or have the neocons learned nothing about planning and executing military operations?
Posted by epistemology | April 3, 2008 8:49 AM