Toward Hopefulness In Iraq?

This incursion into Sadr City appears to have been net with little resistance. And the Basra operation does appear to be improving, with the Iraqi security forces performing well.

I'm not quite as hopeful as Kevin Drum about this; the Sadrist elements may have just melted away just like insurgency elements have dozens of times, and in the long-term multiple problems (like resolving Kirkuk, bringing those armed Sunni groups into the government, Maliki's poor leadership) remain. Indeed, even in this "good news," the Sadrists are claiming that Maliki's forces are breaking the cease-fire, there are ominous warning signs.

But I'm not averse to broadcasting good news from Iraq, and indeed I seek only the best possible outcomes. An Iraqi security force that can sustain itself and carry out missions on its own is key to our eventual exit. However, you have to understand that these operations are intended to take out political rivals to Maliki, as much as they're talking about "thugs" and "criminal elements." I do think that rooting out Sadrists in Basra and Sadr City might make the lives of Iraqi citizens easier, but if the militia members making their lives horrible were allies of Maliki we wouldn't be seeing these actions at all. So it's hard for me to give sanction to one set of suppression as opposed to another.

Let's see where this goes instead of playing armchair generals.

Bring It On II

The first time a Bush Administration official dared the Iraqi insurgency to attack Americans, they did, with devastating consequences that reverberate to this day. In a show of sound judgment, they went and did it again (h/t Newshoggers):

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Rice, in the Iraqi capital to tout security gains and what she calls an emerging political consensus, said al-Sadr is content to issue threats and edicts from the safety of Iran, where he is studying. Al-Sadr heads an unruly militia that was the main target of an Iraqi government assault in the oil-rich city of Basra last month, and his future role as a spoiler is an open question.

"I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr's latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it's all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that's the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he's in Iran."

Don't think for a second that it wasn't intentional to have Rice do this, either. At Abu Ghraib and other detention camps the rationale behind stripping prisoners and forcing them to walk around naked was that such humiliations at the hands of women would be even worse in their culture. This is the same "Arab Mind" garbage that these guys have been using as a template for years.

Never mind the absurdity of the statement - Condi shows up in Baghdad, behind fortified Green Zone walls, one day a year, and she's talking about someone ELSE sending minions to their death while they're in calm and comfort? - but this is a death warrant for many of our troops. Maliki wants to hold power and is inciting this conflict while he has American troops and air support on his side so that he can vanquish the Mahdi Army before the elections. But it's an open question whether he has the popular support to carry this through - he certainly didn't in Basra. Which means that Americans will end up on the front lines, and now that Condi has attempted this little humiliation game, Sadr has all the impetus he needs to stage a massive rebellion based on nationalist fervor. Brandon Friedman puts it best.

Again, we have yet another member of the Bush administration who--in a ham-handed effort to help our "allies"--is actually placing our own troops in more danger. I don't think there's any question that this echoes George W. Bush's provocative invitation for terrorists around the world to descend on Iraq when he declared, "Bring'em on" in July 2003. And we all know how that worked out.

But it's not just about Rice's dismissive, provocative tone, either. It's also this continuing, obnoxious Bush-brand of hypocrisy that the whole world sees: If Sadr had said the same thing of Rice--that she's a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat who sends others to fight her own battles--the Bush administration would freak out. And that fact isn't lost on Iraqis.

As Rice is one who will not have to stay and fight the Mahdi Army side-by-side with our troops, I suggest that she keep her mouth shut if she's not going to say anything helpful. Because statements like these are certainly not.

Gen. Petraeus didn't approve of the attack in Basra because he understood it could blow up into a popular uprising. The focus on "special groups" and "criminals" was an effort to cast the battle away from Sadr and his militia. Maliki completely bungled that, and now Rice stomps in with this pathetic schoolyard taunt that's going to do incredible damage. The next several days in Iraq will be incredibly tense. It's April 2004 all over again.

And look what happened WHILE Rice made this statement.

Warning sirens sounded at least twice while Rice was inside the temporary embassy, housed in a beat-up Saddam-era palace. She did not visit the site of a new fortified U.S. Embassy set to open in a few weeks.

They call that a metaphor.

The Petraeus/Crocker Hearings: Armed Services

Max Bergmann and Ilan Goldenberg are liveblogging the Petraeus-Crocker hearings. Apparently I missed St. Maverick McCain's opening statement (he's the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee) and A Man Called Petraeus' opening statement. Ambassador Ryan Crocker is speaking now. Apparently Petraeus talked about largely peripheral issues like Al Qaeda in Iraq and this new boogeyman, Iranian "special groups," which were apparently responsible for all the violence in Basra. Except:

Q Hi. This is Courtney Kube from NBC again. Late last year, General Pace mentioned that -- before he left as chairman, mentioned that there was evidence that Iran had provided some weapons, munitions in Afghanistan. Have you seen any evidence of that in the past few months? Can you update us on any developments there?

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: No, there's not been any military significant aid that we've seen in the last couple months. Earlier, there had been a couple of things that had come across, and again, whether that could be linked to any coordinated effort by any governments was not able to be determined. But that has not happened in the last couple of months, and it's been militarily insignificant overall.

Focusing on Iran and AQI instead of the larger problems in Iraq is completely myopic. Intra-Shiite tensions are on the rise Shiites are fleeing Baghdad, and the Mahdi Army cease-fire which has been the cause of much of the security gains in the country is in danger of dissolution. Iran is probably more entwined with the Iraqi security forces themselves than any "special groups," anyway. And the Sunni-Shiite civil war, exacerbated by Maliki's hiring of 10,000 Badr Brigade members when he told Sunni Awakening groups there were no jobs. Sectarian violence and conflict is the problem in Iraq, so Petraeus and Crocker are answering different questions.

The question and answer period should be interesting. Obviously you have every Presidential candidate among those doing the asking. But the key question will be whether the Democrats buy into the Petraeus frame of whether or not we're "winning" or if they step outside that frame and ask the key questions of whether our presence there makes America safer. Tom Dispatch puts this best.

When it comes to Iraq, though, the Bush administration's cakewalks never seem to turn out as planned. The renewed violence of these last weeks in Iraq, and the prospect of more to come, gives war critics ample ammunition for a counterattack. The Democrats, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, may find it irresistible to assault the general, and the President, with every argument they can muster in the hearings this week. However, a recent report suggests they may resist that impulse and treat the impact of the surge as an irrelevant issue.

Let's hope that report is right, because a debate focused on military success or failure is a trap, with Petraeus's testimony as the bait. After all, no debate in Congress will really be about the level of violence in Iraq. "Has the surge worked?" is just a symbolic way of asking: "Would you rather believe that America is a winner or a loser?" And in any battle over patriotic symbolism, the Republicans always seem to have the bigger guns.

So the Democrats would be smart to refuse the bait and insist that this is not an old-fashioned World War II- style conflict, where force can produce a clear-cut winner. Then they could refocus the debate on two crucial truths: We have no right to be in Iraq; the sooner we get out, the sooner we can begin to heal the terrible damage the war has done to us here at home.

Some of the best questions I've seen have come from some of our Democratic Congressional challengers. They could give someone like Carl Levin some pointers, although he just KILLED Gen. Petraeus on Basra, getting him to admit that it was inadequately planned, and therefore Levin railed that it was "unacceptable" to have American forces involved.

A protestor yelling out "bring them home" was applauded in the hearing room as he was escorted out. Cokie Roberts told me Americans want to win, though, so that must have just been some hippie.

What Now In Iraq?

Even though a cease-fire between Shiite groups has been established, that hasn't stopped Commander Maliki.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi soldiers rolled through a Shiite militia stronghold in Basra on Wednesday, drawing scattered bombs and bullets that wounded a camera operator for a U.S.-funded TV station and narrowly missed the commander of government troops in the city.

Followers of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr accused the army of violating an Iranian-brokered agreement that ended last week's fighting, which erupted in Basra and quickly engulfed Baghdad and major cities of the Shiite south.

Those complaints raised concern that fighting could flare again as the Iraqi government and Shiite militias maneuver for control of Basra — the country's oil capital 340 miles southeast of Baghdad and a major commercial center of 2 million people.

Iraqi troops met no significant resistance as a dozen-vehicle convoy drove Wednesday into the Hayaniyah district of central Basra, scene of fierce clashes last week with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters.

Troops set up checkpoints and searched a few houses before leaving the neighborhood after a couple of hours, witnesses said.

To me that signals that this cease-fire won't hold, especially after Maliki rented all those Iranian-backed Badr Brigade and ISCI militia to join the Iraqi security forces. This makes a mockery of the least well-known Kagan's article in the WSJ today, calling for a new Iran-Iraq war, when that would involve the Iraqi Army going after itself.

It's extremely unclear where the United States goes from here, outside of getting out. The military has proven itself incapable of bringing disparate factions in Iraq together or holding down violence. They are witness to events rather than controlling them. The Iraqi Army has proven themselves incapable of any major offensives or dealing with the tribal militias. Iran is clearly the victor and the nation with the most influence on all Shiite groups in the country.

Next week David Petraeus will appear before Congressional committees, and while I'd rather hold a policymaker responsible to answer these questions, Mother Jones has a good number of questions from national security experts that ought to be asked. There are some more questions here and they provide a good understanding into how the non-Bush-apologists in the national security community see Iraq and what our options are (note: they're limited).

Surely Knows More

This foreign policy ignorance from John W. McCain is becoming epidemic. He contradicted himself in CNN soundbites about the importance of Muqtada al-Sadr in the space of a couple weeks. He doesn't know what he's talking about and he'll say anything to make himself look like an authority. Joke Line has even another instance, quoting McCain as saying Basra was "not a problem" and that it was a good idea for the Iraqi Army to attack the Sadrists. Of course, he closes with this:

McCain surely knows more about the military than Barack Obama does--and Obama certainly needs to learn more--but McCain's carelessness and oversimplification, and wrong analysis, when it comes to the situation in Iraq puts him in a surprisingly vulnerable position.

"Surely"? He's been wrong about virtually every foreign policy issue for the past decade and beyond. Where is there any evidence that he knows jack-all about the military outside of abstract concepts like "honor" which box him into a reactionary, imperialist worldview? The guy thinks we should have never left Vietnam and that we only lost because we "lost the will to fight", and he's carried that anti-reality position forward to Iraq. What's lost in his "100 more years" comment is that he actually believes that the Iraq debacle is in any way analogous, and can ever be analogous, to Germany or Japan or South Korea. First of all, any "insurgency" in those under countries ended at the moment of surrender. Second, there is a historic "allergy," as Wes Clark put it tonight, to American troops stationed in the Middle East in anything more than a highly specialized capacity. Our basing in Saudi Arabia was a linchpin for fundamentalist rage and terrorist violence. McCain has refused to learn from history for 40 years.

The best thing that can be said about McCain's foreign policy is that once in a while he'll agree with you no matter who you are, since he's flip-flopped so many times that he's been alternately right and wrong. He even said that Iraq is nothing like Korea back before he had to make the analogy to cover for his 100 years comment, which is clearly working, and clearly applicable, so I hope you'll all write it on a signpost and put it in front of your house.

The cognitive dissonance we're up against in trying to get the traditional media to confront their own misperceptions about McCain is thicker than the strongest border fence that the Bush Administration has to waive environmental and land management laws to build. I watched Rachel Maddow tonight take apart McCain apologist Joe Scarborough, showing that Mr. Maverick voted against the Bush tax cuts and now wants to make them permanent, voted for comprehensive immigration reform and now says he wouldn't vote for the same bill, and all sorts of other panders to the right-wing base. And Morning Joe just wouldn't have any of it. He just wouldn't budge, lest his head exploded as his belief of McCain failed to match reality. Scarborough is a Republican and still an operative, but this is true across the traditional media. The media's free ride for McCain isn't likely to stop just because Rachel Maddow tells the truth. It's going to take a coordinated, citizen-led effort to force the truth into the debate.

Return On Success

So Bush today scolded the nattering nabobs of negativism on Iraq and claimed that the country is making good progress toward political reconciliation.

As if on cue, news came out that two Americans had been killed in rocket attacks inside the Green Zone, the city of Baghdad is under a weekend curfew, per MSNBC all Green Zone personnel has been told to stay inside fortified areas, and the Iraqi Army may have "faltered" in Basra:

Iraq’s Prime Minister was staring into the abyss today after his operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen.

With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.

Saboteurs also blew up one of Iraq's two main oil pipelines from Basra, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city which provides 80 per cent of government revenue, a clear sign that the militias — who siphon significant sums off the oil smuggling trade — would not stop at mere insurrection.

Or, as Bush would put it, "good progress".

It's time more than ever for leading Democrats to speak up on the war. The country is in flames.

UPDATE: New York Times:

During a briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday, a British military official said that of the nearly 30,000 Iraqi security forces involved in the assault, almost 16,000 were Basra police forces, which have long been suspected of being infiltrated by the same militias the assault was intended to root out [...]

Though American and Iraqi officials have insisted that the operation was not singling out a particular group, fighting appeared to focus on Mahdi-controlled neighborhoods. In fact, some witnesses said, neighborhoods controlled by rival political groups seemed to be giving government forces safe passage, as if they were helping them to strike at the Mahdi Army.

Even so, the Mahdi fighters seemed to hold their ground. Witnesses said that from the worn, closely packed brick buildings of one Mahdi stronghold, the Hayaniya neighborhood, Mahdi fighters fired mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, automatic weapons and sniper rifles at seemingly helpless Iraqi Army units pinned on a main road outside, their armored vehicles unable to enter the narrow streets [...]

A Basra newspaper editor who asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals said most residents despised the Mahdi Army and welcomed the assault. But he said it was obvious that the central government had not consulted with local commanders in planning the assault, citing the inability of the armored vehicles to fit through city streets. But support for the assault already seems to be eroding in several neighborhoods, as militiamen retained control of their strongholds and residents were confined in their homes. “The Mahdi Army is still controlling most of these places,” the editor said. “The result is negative.”

Col. Abbas al-Tamimi, media officer for the 14th Iraqi Army Division operating in the city, said he expected the fighting to escalate. “The gunmen have heavier and more sophisticated weapons than we have,” he said.

Fill 'Er Up

That's the thing about attacking a popular militia group in the most oil-rich city in the country, they have options:

Saboteurs blew up one of Iraq’s two main oil export pipelines in southern Iraq on Thursday, a Southern Oil Company official told Reuters.

”This morning saboteurs blew up the pipeline transporting crude from Zubair 1 by placing bombs beneath it. The pipeline was severely damaged,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

This will probably stall 1/3 of all oil exports out of Basra. And the Mahdi Army made intimations that this would be their next move, so this is obviously a result of the Maliki invasion.

Meanwhile, Baghdad is so safe that a spokesman for the security plan has been abducted. And the battles have widened to the entire Shi'a region between Baghdad and Basra. The Mahdi Army "opened fire on civilians in downtown Baghdad," which doesn't seem like the actions of a group under cease-fire. After all the "success" of the surge, we're back to open warfare on the streets of Iraq. Tell me again how we're winning?

...Apparently Bush said in a speech today that "the groundwork had been laid for political reconciliation." Only the ground is covered in oil from the blown pipeline and the blood of martyrs, I guess.

Today's Horror Show In Iraq

The cover of this "Battle of Basra" story in the mainstream media has been nauseating. It's being spun along the same familiar lines that has characterized the entire conversation on Iraq in this country. First of all they're focusing on Basra, when the unrest has spread all over Shia strongholds in the country. At least 70 deaths have been reported nationwide, including many in Sadr City in Baghdad.

Second of all, this is being called an "Iraqi mission" with "minimal support" from the United States. Air support is NEVER minimal. Air strikes are POUNDING various cities, with 10 civilians dead in airstrikes in Tikrit and American planes firing on residential areas of Sadr City. I know that Nouri al-Maliki is playing dress-up by traveling to Basra to personally direct the fighting, but believe me, there is PLENTY of US support.

Third of all, this is being seen as a test for the Iraqi security forces and not what it is, essentially an intra-Shiite sectarian battle for power. Maliki is trying to eliminate a rival, and invading a major population center in order to do it.

And now, the question: How will the U.S. media portray this? As the Iraqi Army cleaning up a renegade militia in Basra? Probably. But the Iraqi Army in Basra is mostly composed of another renegade militia--the Badr Corps, an organization founded by Iran and answerable to ISCI--the Shi'ite faction led by the Hakim family, Sadr's great rival. There are no heroes here. The Sadr movement is populist, nationalist, anti-Iranian, in favor of a strong central government...but it's also anti-American and oriented toward a stricter Islamic state than the current Maliki government is. The Hakim family's movement is both pro-American and pro-Iranian. It is federalist, rather than nationalist, in favor of a weak central government with a strong Shi'istan in the south (which would be heavily influenced by Iran).

What Klein doesn't mention is that the Badr movement is far more hollow than the Mahdi Army, which has a mass of popular support. We know that his cease-fire is one of the main reasons for security gains in Iraq. If he halts it, our troop numbers really aren't going to matter - hundreds more are going to die. The New York Times has a good in-depth piece today.

It is not clear how responsible the restive Mahdi militia commanders are for stalling progress in the effort to reduce violence. In recent weeks, commanders have protested continuing American and Iraqi raids and detentions of militia members.

If the cease-fire were to unravel, there is little doubt about the mayhem that could be stirred up by Mr. Sadr, who forced the United States military to mount two bloody offensives against his fighters in 2004 as much of the country exploded in violence [...]

“We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army,” said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. “The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us,” he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization.

“They are trying to finish us,” the commander said. “They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri.”

Let's go a little in-depth ourselves about SCIRI. As said before, they are very pro-Iranian and theocratic. With the tentative agreement to hold provincial elections in October, their survival is predicated on keeping their majorities in Basra and southern Iraq, instead of losing control to the Sadrists. This is a clash for political power being waged by force, and it's not some new idea but a sustained effort.

It is no secret that America's main ally in Iraq (and Iran's), the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), is likely to lose ground to the more popular Sadrist current in the upcoming provincial elections (the Sadrist current boycotted the 2005 round). Absent some extracurricular activities to level the playing field that is. As Cernig noted quoting an AP article on Friday, ISCI, whose Iran-trained militia (the Badr Corp.) has heavily infiltrated Iraqi Security Forces, has been moving aggressively (in tandem with US forces) to help overcome what it lacks in popular appeal.

A Sadrist member of parliament alleged that the crackdown in Kut and elsewhere in the south was part of a move by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party and [ISCI] to prevent al-Sadr's followers from winning control of key southern provinces in provincial elections expected this fall.

"They have no supporters in the central and southern provinces, but we do," Ahmed al-Massoudi told the AP. "If the crackdown against the Sadrists continues, we will begin consultations with other parliamentary blocs to bring down the government and replace it with a genuinely national one."

We know that the deadlock over provincial elections was broken with the possible aid of Fourthbranch Cheney, who was in the region last week, and just days later this offensive is launched. Spencer Ackerman plays this out a bit more.

As long as Maliki is in the prime minister's chair, and as long as we proclaim the Iraqi government he leads to be legitimate, Maliki effectively holds us hostage. "I need to go after Sadr," Maliki says. "The situation is unacceptable! In Basra, he threatens to take control of the ports, and in Baghdad, he's throwing my men out of their checkpoints. Would you allow the Bloods or the Crips to take over half of Los Angeles?" And as soon as he says that, we're trapped. It simply is not tenable for Petraeus to refuse a request for security assistance from the Prime Minister to deal with a radical militia.

Now, some Iraq-watcher friends of mine point out that this is absurd. "Sadr is, of course, a thug," they say, "but he's a nationalist. And he's far less beholden to Iran than the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq or Maliki's Da'wa Party -- both of whom we're supporting! And most importantly, Sadr remains perhaps the most popular figure in Shiite Iraq. Petraeus can do business with him. This doesn't make any sense!" And they're right. It doesn't. But as long as we sponsor the Iraqi political process -- and a Sadrist doesn't actually become premier himself -- this will keep happening.

The US military is being used as the muscle in an internal political fight, and thousands will be killed in the exchange. Imperial occupiers always get this wrong, picking sides based on expediency and always winding up angering large groups of the public. And yet John McCain continues to believe this is somehow a central front in the war against terror. That's absurd. Our troops are pawns in Iraq. Our real fight against extremism is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We're being played as fools in Iraq.

Cease-Fire Ceased

Sorry to write a post that includes the words "Obama" or "Clinton" only in passing.

Thought you should know that the Mahdi Army cease-fire is over and we are back to facing a full resistance on multiple fronts in Iraq.

You know, maybe that's something you should look into.

The Mahdi Army's seven-month-long cease-fire appears to have come undone.

Rockets fired from the capital's Shiite district of Sadr City slammed into the Green Zone Tuesday, the second time in three days, and firefights erupted around Baghdad pitting government and US forces against the militia allied to the influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

At the same time, the oil-export city of Basra became a battleground Tuesday as Iraqi forces, backed by US air power, launched a major crackdown on the Mahdi Army elements. British and US forces were guarding the border with Iran to intercept incoming weapons or fighters, according to a senior security official in Basra [...]

"The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," said one Mahdi Army militiaman, who was reached by telephone in Sadr City. This same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store.

There is no question that the Sadrist cease-fire has contributed to, if not become the sole cause, of the so-called "security gains" in Iraq. Its unraveling will absolutely raise the levels of violence in Iraq.

And nobody seems to care. Certainly not in the barbecue-stained media. Not even in the blogosphere, for the most part. Hundreds if not thousands of people are going to die in a very short period of time if the Sadrist campaign of "civil disobedience" becomes a civil war. You would think SOMEONE would manage to raise a peep about that.

I mean, I know that John W. McCain thinks we're succeeding in Iraq, and "I don't care what anybody says." And certainly the media has been seduced into this notion as well, neglecting to even cover it on days when the official US casualties aren't a round number. But you'd think SOMEBODY would worry about this. Especially because it's about to be used as a pretext to attack Iran, as if they're the only ones to blame for this latest unrest:

After rockets hit the Green Zone Sunday, US commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus said the weapons had been provided by Iran.

On Tuesday, Rear Adm. Greg Smith, spokesman for US-led multinational forces in Iraq, blamed the elite Quds units of Iran's Revolutionary Guards for supplying the 22 107-mm and 122-mm rockets that hit the heavily fortified area of Baghdad that is home to the US Embassy.

"We believe the violence is being instigated by members of special groups that are beholden to the Iranian Quds Force and not Sadr.... Although we are concerned, we know that very few Iraqis want a return to the violence they experienced before the surge," he says.

Admiral Smith says US and Iraqi forces were facing two distinct enemies in Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Iranian-trained and supplied special groups. But he adds, "AQI is still Iraq's No. 1 enemy."

I guess Admiral Smith didn't get the McCain memo. But it's absurd to suggest that the Mahdi Army is a proxy for Iran when the central government rolled out the welcome mat for Ahmadinejad and is made up of a bunch of Iranian exiles.

Siun at FDL has much more. A sampling:

With upcoming provincial elections likely to show serious losses for both Maliki’s Dahwa party and Hakim’s SIIC and growing support for Mahdi associated representatives, it’s not surprising that Cheney and our occupation allies were deep in talks last week – nor is it surprising that we now see a dramatic push by green zone forces on Basra where Sadrist forces had been gaining power where Hakim's SIIC used to have considerable power.

With Maliki personally overseeing a green zone force of 15,000 or more, supported by air strikes (US or British is not known), a major attack has been launched in Basra and the results so far are chaos, growing civilian casualties, and curfews have now been imposed on six provinces.

Shia militias and national forces are converging on Basra, the country's second-largest city, perhaps to dismantle the Sadrist forces and give Cheney's friend al-Hakim the ability to win provincial elections. Rockets are hitting the Green Zone every day. Sadr City is surrounded. The US is going to use massive air power to try and keep a semblance of control on the country but it's not entirely likely to work.

You'd think that'd be in the news, or something...

Renewable Energy Vote Sails Through House

The House of Representatives did something good today, moving on another key part of their agenda from the 2006 elections. Don't let the headline "House OKs New Taxes on Big Oil Companies" fool you - they eliminated subsidies for the oil industry and put the money into encouraging renewable and sustainable energy technologies. This is clearly the right thing to do. Oil companies, which collectively made $123 billion dollars in revenue last year, don't really need additional subsidies and tax breaks for taking our natural resources out of the ground. The Republican spin is astounding; they say that the bill "unfairly targets companies that already pay more taxes than U.S. manufacturers." Yeah, that because it makes about 10 times the money as most US manufacturers. You can see the roll call on this bill here. This should be a roll call vote that Democratic challengers go back to again and again in the fall. In California, practically every House Republican, including Brian Bilbray, David Dreier, Mary Bono Mack, Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert, and Gary Miller, voted "No," while Dan Lungren wisely didn't vote. When gas hits $4 a gallon in the spring, this vote will have even more resonance. The Senate came 1 vote short, actually Mary Landrieu's vote, of passing this last year. They need to make sure that Landrieu understands that her vote is the price for supporting her in a tough re-election battle.

And don't weep for the oil companies; they're about to sweep into Basra, where they'll work side by side with militia members who enjoy shooting at American troops. True patriots, they are.

Iraq In Fragments

• Guess what, so the post-surge is going to be surgier than the pre-surge, with 140,000 troops in Iraq by July as opposed to 130,000 last January. As recently as a month or so ago, the expectation was to be under 100,000 by the end of the President's term. This must be because we're winning so completely that we have to leave additional forces to bask in the success.

• Other signs of success include the desperation of an insurgency changing tactics, killing several dozen at a time, a legal system where witnesses disappear and cases splinter and hitting the Green Zone with rockets.

• The different regions of the country present different challenges. In the south, Shiite militia groups have basically taken over Basra and are clashing for power from street to street. This is the civil war within the civil war.

“Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership. He spoke of the militias in an antechamber of his downtown mosque, his voice barely above a whisper. “These cars were given to the political parties. There are supposed to be 16,000 policemen, but we see very few of them on the street, and most of the ones we do see are militiamen dressed as police.”

• In the Kurdish north, dozens are dying daily from Turkish raids against PKK rebels. The Kurdish peshmerga forces have 60,000 massed inside Dohuk province just waiting to strike if the Turks delve too far into Kurdish territory. This is actually a second war front that's been raging for five days, and it ought to be a great concern.

In Baghdad, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie declared at a news conference Monday that the fighting could have "very serious consequences."

Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani warned Turkey against any expansion.

"The operations are still limited operations, and the government has expressed its concern," Bolani said. "If the operation is widened, definitely Iraq will defend its sovereignty and territory."

He said the United States should do more to encourage the Turks to withdraw. U.S. troops "are the greatest force on the ground. They have certain obligations," Bolani said. "They could do more."

Once again, our policy of standing in for the Iraqis instead of forcing them to take responsibility for their own security is coming back to hurt us. We're supposed to now police another war inside the fractured nation.

• All of the ordnance that we've been dropping - six times as many bombs in 2007 as in 2006 - has clearly led to increased casualties, which is why we've stopped counting legitimately.

The report on the increase in bombing comes just after the World Health Organization released the findings of a study which put the number of civilians killed in Iraq between the invasion in 2003 and 2006 at about 151,000. That figure was almost instantly accepted by some supporters of the war who have been eager to discredit reports of much higher civilian deaths.

It's a controversial field. When Gen. David H. Petraeus testified before Congress in September that the escalation of the war in Iraq was going well, he used a graph indicating that the number of civilians killed since the invasion in 2003 until August 2007 was about 37,500. Two days after this testimony, a British opinion polling company released the results of its own study which put the number of civilian deaths between 1 and 1.2 million, 32 times the Pentagon figure.

• And as the wingers continue to maintain that the surge is a success, the truth is coming to light that it's a failure.

Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its "de-Baathification" campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and "only" 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium.

You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them.

Iraq Strategy: No Sudden Movements

As the House begins the first step toward funding what seems to be endless war, it's time once again to take a look at the facts on the ground in Iraq. And they're pretty much the same as they've been. We know that any security successes, fragile though they may be, are largely attributable to the ethnic cleansing that the surge was designed to create. With the sects almost entirely separated, by neighborhood as well as by blast walls like the cities are medieval fortresses, sectarian strife has gone down because of the homogeneity of the populations.

But whether or not you want to characterize walling off Baghdad into a series of separated, segregated neighborhoods while the government remains dominated by a sectarian clique and unable to actually govern in vast swathes of the country (areas where rival cliques rule through force) as "success" this is the new reality.

The question is what, if anything, follows from that. Iraq might go back to falling apart at the seams if we leave. On the other hand, it might go back to falling apart at the seams even if we stay. The extent of our impact on the situation isn't clear. What is clear is that the political causes of the conflict are still in place, which is why the violence continues to persist, albeit at a lower level.

We've reached this uneasy stasis where the only solution that we know won't crack everything to hell is if we stay right where we are and make no sudden movements. The political will for such fear of chaos masquerading as strategy is very low and will only get lower. There is no plan to pacify areas by anything other than physical structures, when what is needed is an emotional and political pacification.

We aren't even entirely sure what stability actually looks like in the areas that have been handed over to Iraqi control.

As British forces finally handed over security in Basra province, marking the end of 4½ years of control in southern Iraq, Major General Jalil Khalaf, the new police commander, said the occupation had left him with a situation close to mayhem. "They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world," he said in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV.

Khalaf painted a very different picture from that of British officials who, while acknowledging problems in southern Iraq, said yesterday's handover at Basra airbase was timely and appropriate.

But it's not like the UK has some better option out there. Their presence was fueling the insurgency and drawing nothing but gunfire. As much as we'd like to tout successes in places like Fallujah, they are coming at the cost of personal freedoms and economic prosperity. You can't wall off an entire country and expect it to survive.

al-Fadhily says Fallujah is under "siege," Totten says nonsense, there's actually just a "hard perimeter around the city manned by Iraqi Police who prevent non-residents from bringing their cars in." I agree that's not a siege: in fact, it's a pretty normal situation -- for walled cities of the Middle Ages.

The rest of it's pretty much like that. al-Fadhily says "seventy percent of the city was destroyed during Operation Phantom Fury." Totten counters: "I saw much more destruction in nearby Ramadi than I saw in Fallujah." If you're beginning to wonder if Totten is a liberal plant, he eventually does stick in the sort of good-news nuggets his audience goes for: the old standard Marines-distributing-food-and-schoolbooks, of course, as well as more fashionable, cutting-edge leading indicators, e.g. "Solar-powered street lights" and "Low-interest microloans."

We've reached the point with this war where what ordinary people would regard with horror and revulsion is perceived by its fans as great news.

I think that we have to start looking at Iraq in terms of sustainability. As I noted, it's not sustainable just to keep a lid on a cauldron until Bush leaves office. Even his own advisors understand that, particularly with the other forgotten war slipping into catastrophe.

With violence on the decline in Iraq but on the upswing in Afghanistan, President Bush is facing new pressure from the U.S. military to accelerate a troop drawdown in Iraq and bulk up force levels in Afghanistan, according to senior U.S. officials.

Administration officials said the White House could start to debate the future of the American military commitment in both Iraq and Afghanistan as early as next month. Some Pentagon officials are urging a further drawdown of forces in Iraq beyond that envisioned by the White House, which is set to reduce the number of combat brigades from 20 to 15 by the end of next summer. At the same time, commanders in Afghanistan are looking for several additional battalions, helicopters and other resources to confront a resurgent Taliban movement.

But the President can't do that because he knows that a sudden movement like a rapid drawdown in troops might provoke the mess that he's essentially pre-planned through empowering opposing forces. In the end, Afghanistan may be able to be saved, but Iraq is an unsustainable conflict in the long term, and our presence or absence really doesn't have much input in the final outcome.

The Posting, It Will Be Light

I'm getting ready to hop a redeye out to Philadelphia for the Thanksgiving holiday, so posting will be sporadic between now and then. In the meantime, here are a few flights of fancy.

• This is awesome. At the same school where the infamous "Don't tase me, bro" incident went down, Alberto Gonzales was heckled by a student in an Abu Ghraib jumpsuit and another holding a sign saying habeas corpus. Neither of those protesters were tortured or held without charges after being led away by police, AFAIK, so perhaps things are looking up.

• The big story is this excerpt from Scott McClellan's forthcoming book, which apparently blames Bush, Cheney and Rove for forcing him to lie about White House official's role in the outing of Valerie Plame, but somehow I think these will generate a lot more heat than light. I bet that McClellan offers little more in the book itself (that's the report, anyway), and will demur at any attempts to get him to testify before Congress about the issue. Chris Dodd is calling for investigations, but it's like, just throw it on the pile. It's clear that practically everyone in the White House committed crimes by illegally releasing the identity of Plame to reporters. That has been proven time and again. It came out in the trial. So far nobody has been held accountable, and we're four years gone from the outing. I want to be optimistic, but can't be.

• Troops leave, violence drops. It's really a simple formula. Worked in Basra, would work in the rest of Iraq. But we stay, accomplishing approximately nothing of substance instead of turning the country into a series of armed encampments.

OK, gotta go. Enjoy.

Iraq In Fragments

• Apparently, those damn bookkeepers are to blame for the loss of hundreds of thousands of AK-47s which could be in the hands of insurgents. You may recall this excuse from when Paul Bremer used it to explain the missing $8 billion dollars of reconstruction money. Maybe they should hire some better number crunchers! David Petraeus peddled this line on Alan Colmes show; I guess that means he's ready for tough, biting interviews now.

• Iraqi oil unions are claiming that their voices are being suppressed in exactly the same way Saddam Hussein suppressed them back in the 1980s.

Iraq's new constitution, passed in 2005, enshrines "the right of forming and joining professional associations and unions", and promises that "this will be organised by law".

But since no such legislation has been passed, campaigners say the oil ministry is simply reverting to Saddam-era laws that banned unions.

Freedom.

• Basra is a complete mess, as competing Shiite factions have filled the vaccuum created when Great Britain left and are battling for supremacy. Some may read this as an ominous sign of what may come if and when the United States leaves the country. I say that it may well be the case. But somebody has to explain to me how the military PRESENCE has stopped chaos from happening, before I start worrying about the absence.

• Dolschtoss rears its ugly head again, this time from some winger retired Air Force Colonel who's only been to Iraq on a dog-and-pony show.

• Apparently, Robert Gates figured out that Shiites and Sunnis don't often like one another.

• Finally, the Center for American Progress has put together the ultimate Friedman Unit handbook, a compendium of every "we've got 6 months left to win this thing" statement ever made about Iraq, some of which begin as early as July 2003. Fine work by CAP.

UPDATE: Thers lays it out, and this is why I can only view Iraq in fragments nowadays, because the big picture is too horrific to contemplate.

I'm not sure how much more clearly it can be put. The situation in Iraq is impossible. The Surge cannot last forever -- all it can do is postpone the inevitable. We can push down the cork for only so long: the bottle is going to blow, sooner or later.

The fundamental dynamic in Iraq is sectarian violence. The best case scenario is a culturally repressive Shiite theocracy with generally friendly relations with Iran hopefully tempered to some degree by latent nationalism, a suppressed and resentful Sunni minority who can only be suppressed militarily but will still probably always have access to weapons, and an essentially autonomous Kurdish state that avoids war with Turkey and Iran only by virtue of constant ingenious international brinksmanship and a shitload of luck. Finally, as the Sunnis will always be aggrieved and furious, they will always be tempted to turn to... international terrorist organizations who can supply them with weapons. If Al Qaeda in Iraq is ejected tomorrow, something similar will eventually be invited back in.

And you know what the United States can do about this?

Sweet fuck-all.

The lieutenant colonel's op-ed that provided Thers' launching pad can be viewed here. I can't wait to see the Bush apologists claim that the soldier made it all up.

All Spin Zone

Within moments of the British announcement that they're pulling out of Iraq, Vice President Cheney (who is bravely supporting his closest confidant and friend by spending the final portion of his trial halfway around the world) stepped to the microphone to claim that this was wonderful news, that it shows that Basra and the southern portion of Iraq is stable and secure enough to hand over to the Iraqis.

Nobody then asked that, if the southern part was stable enough for the British to leave, why couldn't their forces be moved to Baghdad where help is needed?

And then came this report:

Britain’s decision to pull 1,600 troops out of Iraq by spring, touted by U.S. and British leaders as a turning point in Iraqi sovereignty, was widely seen Wednesday as a telling admission that the British military could no longer sustain simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The British military is approaching “operational failure,” former defense staff chief Charles Guthrie warned this week.

“Because the British army is in essence fighting a far more intensive counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, there’s been a realization that there has to be some sort of transfer of resources from Iraq to Afghanistan,” said Clive Jones, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Leeds, who has closely followed Britain’s Iraq deployment.

“It’s either that, or you risk in some ways losing both,” he said. “It’s the classic case of ‘Let’s declare victory and get out.’ “

Shiites have been engaged in intra-faith massacres down there, and the British garrison was getting shelled nightly. They're doing what WE should be doing: moving the emphasis away from the intractable civil war in Iraq, and fortifying forces in Afghanistan, where troops are actually fighting Taliban and Al Qaeda enemies.

So trying to call the fact that the British garrison was forced out of Basra "a good thing" and "part of the whole plan" is deeply dishonest.