Iraq In Fragments

• Residents in Baghdad had full electricity during Saddam's reign (other areas of the country had less). After massive bungling by the Coalition Provisional Authority, who normalized electricity production all over the country even though the biggest demand was easily in Baghdad, and after four-plus years of war, Baghdad now can count on "only an hour or two a day" of electricity. And you think Baghdad's residents feel like they're being liberated? I'm sure they feel like this is deliberate. And the fact that the US government will stop measuring this indicator doesn't inspire confidence.

• The US Embassy in Iraq: proudly built with forced labor. This is confirmed by some whistleblowers during a House Oversight Committee hearing.

• The one bit of good news out of Iraq recently is that the national soccer team reached the finals of the Asia Cup. This united Iraqis, who poured out into the streets to celebrate. Which is when suicide bombers decided to strike, killing 55. This is deplorable and tragic.

• The enemy of my enemy...

U.S. forces in Iraq are striking a variety of "handshake agreements" with Iraqi insurgents and militia groups, sometimes resulting in the release of fighters detained for attacking coalition forces, U.S. military officials said in several recent interviews.

Such informal deals mark a significant tactical shift in the Iraq war and represent a potentially risky effort to enlist former U.S. foes in the battle against hard-line militants. Despite a White House report last week concluding that a formal amnesty initiative would be "counterproductive" for Iraq today, U.S. military officials in Iraq believe that successful counterinsurgency campaigns almost always involve some form of forgiveness as a means to ending the fighting and achieving political reconciliation.

This has always worked SO WELL in the past (see Hussein, Saddam and Qaeda, Al).

• The political situation is going swimmingly - as long as you're talking about an individual who can't swim:

Despite the high stakes here, the Iraqi parliament appears to be deliberating at a pace to rival plodding legislative bodies around the world.

Thursday's session, the 50th of the year, convened half an hour late.

A bell rang in the Convention Center in the fortified Green Zone reminding members to take their seats and raise their hands for roll call (the electronic system is broken). It showed 145 in attendance. That dropped to 137 as some members walked out after the first vote. The speaker on occasion has dismissed parliament for falling below the quorum of 100 legislators, but on Thursday, they proceeded. The opening Muslim prayer and 275-name roll call took half an hour, a quarter of the time, in what turned out to be a roughly two-hour session.

Not that the American ship of state is so lightning fast, and not that quick democracy is in any way automatically good democracy, but do you get the feeling that these members of Parliament weren't even given so much as a small briefing on how to run things? It would certainly fit in with the overall level of atrocious planning.

• There's going to be another September report from the Government Accountability Office, and I'm guessing this one will be far more revelatory than the one administered by General Petraeus. And far more honest.

• Finally, Richard Engel gave a really incredible report this week, which challenged the biases that Americans have about this war being all about our goals, and how our ignorance about the region is a key indicator for why we are failing:

The perception portrayed by the White House and Iraqi government in Baghdad—and commonly reflected in the news media—is that the violence in Iraq is a fundamental struggle between two opposing teams: Freedom Lovers and Freedom Haters [...]

While there are certainly elements of truth to this narrative, the reality in this fractured country is much more complex.

This is a country that doesn't really exist, has been held together by arbitrary British lines on a map and strongman, and where passions go much deeper than the point of our involvement.

As pilgrims marched by our Baghdad bureau on their way to Karbala, I could hear them chant: "Kul yom Ashura! Kul ard Karbala!" or "Every day is Ashura! All land is Karbala!" Simply put, they were saying, everyday and everywhere in Iraq, Shi'ites are reliving Hussein's battles in Karbala. There was no talk of democracy or the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein or the U.S. troop "surge," or other subjects that dominate the Iraq debate in the United States. Instead, it is apparent that many of Iraq's Shi'ites believe they are fighting a different war from the one many in the United States see their troops engaged in here, and for different reasons.

Many Sunni groups in Iraq are also fighting a war that seems to have little in common with the official U.S. and Iraqi characterization of the conflict. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and its allies recently formed an umbrella group they call Dowlit al-Islam, or the Islamic State in Iraq. After the group claimed responsibility for bombing the Iraqi parliament building in Baghdad's Green Zone in April, the group issued an Internet statement explaining its motivation. The group said the suicide bomber who attacked parliament's cafeteria and killed one lawmaker was motivated to kill "the traitors and collaborators" who had sold out to a "Zionist-Persian" conspiracy to control Iraq. From what they wrote, they seem to believe they are fighting Israel, Iran and their agents, not the U.S. mission to bring democracy to Iraq.

These visions of war are just two of the competing power struggles that U.S. troops in Iraq are trying to quell; the reality is there are many wars within the war.

This is well worth reading. One of our biggest mistakes historically is failing to understand the situation on the ground in other countries when we burst in and try to influence them. I wish somebody with political power would author a speech in praise of KNOWLEDGE as the reall "intelligence" capability we need to bolster.