The Civil War Acceleration Program

Oh goody, let's pay and arm more Iraqis with sectarian viewpoints and little interest in reconciliation.

Young men armed and paid by the U.S. military took to the streets of the Iraqi capital's Sadr City area for the first time Wednesday to guard their neighborhoods, part of a new strategy designed to recruit former Shiite militiamen to American-created security groups, U.S. officials said [...]

Toting AK-47 assault rifles for a $300-a-month salary, the young men are viewed by U.S. officials as the best way to address a dearth of security forces in Sadr City, the site of bitter clashes this spring between U.S. forces and militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The officials hope the initiative will lead some militia supporters away from violence by paying them to protect the area.

But even officers helping to create the program acknowledge there is risk in supplying weapons to men who may have recently encouraged violence against U.S. troops. "Are these guys all going to be lily-white angels? No," said Maj. Byron Sarchet, information operations officer for the brigade responsible for Sadr City. "We need to tread lightly."

There's something unsettling about an armed Shiite, likely to be a Mahdi Army sympathizer or even a member, maintaining order through the barrel of a gun saying "We are here to protect our neighborhood and make sure the militias don't take control." Uh, that would be the DEFINITION of a militia member. And setting this up so that young unemployed Shiites have loyalty only to their paycheck portends disaster. It also is another way in which Bush is trying to force a permanent presence in Iraq. If we stop paying these patrols, chaos will ensue. So we must stay, and keep paying.

Here's a taste of how this could blow up in our faces:

Not all Iraqis agree. Lt. Col. Yehiye Rasul Abdullah, commander of the Iraqi army battalion in Jamila, recoiled at the idea of working with supporters of Mahdi Army fighters who killed his soldiers.

"Those who have contributed to the spilling of Iraqi blood, we will never accept them," he said after coming to check on the guards.

So when the Iraqis do send the US military packing, what is going to become of all these heavily armed foes of the government and the government security forces who hold them in contempt?

It's like we're shaking up a bunch of soda bottles and just waiting for them to explode.

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.

Here Comes Your 19th Nervous Breakthrough

I was told yesterday that Muqtada al-Sadr's militia made a major concession yesterday by letting Iraqi security forces to enter Sadr City and arrest anyone found with heavy weapons. Clearly Sadr backed down to the Maliki government and ceded control of the rebel stronghold, right?

Then I read the whole story:

The al-Maliki government and the Sadrists pulled back from the brink in Sadr City on Saturday. PM Nuri al-Maliki had demanded that the Mahdi Army militia that serves as the Sadrist paramilitary give up its arms and dissolve itself. The compromise simply states that the Iraqi security forces would be allowed in to Sadr City to search for suspected medium and heavy weapons. The implication is that the Mahdi Army may continue to exist and may keep its light weapons (e.g. AK-47s), though it has to pledge not to walk with them in public.

The siege of Sadr City is to be lifted and the major roads in and out of it are to be unblocked, according to the agreement.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the agreement stipulates that the government should have a court order to come into Sadr City. Arrests of rogue commanders had to to be based on warrants and not just 'indiscriminate.' There is nothing in the agreement about the Mahdi Army disarming altogether, as Nuri Al-Maliki initially demanded.

This represents the Maliki government stepping back from the brink instead of forcing a confrontation as they've been demanding for weeks. They're trying to change the subject by announcing a campaign in Mosul, but in truth Maliki blinked, knowing that he had no popular support for continuing the offensive in Sadr City. Sadr's militia remains in place, the Iranians remain the power brokers in Iraq (they were instrumental in managing this compromise), and the Maliki government must retreat and huddle close with the US military forces keeping their leverage.

Meanwhile, those Iranian weapons found in Iraq? They're not Iranian weapons.

There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner's introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word "Iran," or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen [...]

Iraqi officials also have accused Iran of meddling in violence and had echoed the U.S. accusations of new Iranian-made arms being found in Basra. But neither the United States nor Iraq has displayed any of the alleged arms to the public or press, and lately it is looking less likely they will. U.S. military officials said it was up to the Iraqis to show the items; Iraqi officials lately have backed off the accusations against Iran.

A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.

Maybe they can grab a military "analyst" to go on the teevee and make the assertions Pentagon spokesman can't, because they're not true.

The Iraq Treadmill

After a day of top-of-the-fold headlines that the Iraqi military had captured the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq (and all by themselves, too, see they can police their own country, only not enough for us to leave for the next 100 years), it turns out, and you're not going to believe this, that wasn't true.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, has not been captured, a senior U.S. military official told CNN on Friday.

Iraqi authorities said Thursday that al-Masri had been captured in Mosul.

U.S. military officials were surprised about the report of Abu Ayyub al-Masri's capture -- first reported by Iraqi media and picked up by The Associated Press. And intelligence officials said they were skeptical, even though Iraqi officials said al-Masri was already in U.S. military custody.

Left unsaid here is how AQI is a marginalized force inside Iraq, and virtually immaterial to the long-term stability of the state. The real problem, based on where military airstrikes are targeted, are those civilians in Baghdad slums.

See, we've been laying siege to Sadr City for the last month, first building walls so the population can't leave and then bombing the hell out of it, forcing a crisis where the population must leave.

So let's recap the scene: the US military and its Iraqi "allies" are laying siege to a sprawling neighborhood in Baghdad housing roughly 2.5 million Iraqis, launching air strikes, artillery attacks, tank shells and other assorted ordnance, shutting down hospitals and bombing others, cutting off the supply of food and walling off entire sectors of the embattled region, causing a refugee crisis by their actions - and now actually pursuing a policy with the intent of creating a larger refugee crisis!

For what reason: because a majority of residents in these regions support a political movement, and militia, that oppose our presence. Can't have that. Because we have to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq to safeguard the Iraqi people. After all, whose gonna set up the tents in the refugee catch basins we so magnanimously helped set up to receive the overflow from our relentless assault on political movements that would make it harder for us to stay in Iraq. To safeguard the Iraqi people.

Aside from, you know, eliminating American casualties, leaving Iraq would surely reduce Iraqi casualties and the attendant tensions that arise from those casualties. We hear constantly about the consequences of defeat, but they cannot be worse than creating pointless refugee crises in Baghdad. When you're staying in the country just to fight elements who want you to leave the country, there's a kind of circular logic to the whole thing.

The Totally Awesome Iraq War

How do I count the ways:

• Iraqi soldiers are arresting Iraqi policemen and accusing them of being in league with the Mahdi Army and Shiite militias. This of course calms fears that the Iraqi security forces are dysfunctional and operating as arms of the central government's power-aggrandizement scheme.

• Our strategy in defending the Iraqis continues to be bombing the crap out of them and putting up giant walls to trap civilians in the areas we bomb, but it's OK because we're destroying Sadr City in order to save it, and anyway we have gated communities here in America so what's the diff between that and walling up Iraqis unwillingly?

• Combat fatalities in Anbar Province, supposed to be the model of security and stability, are edging up, suggesting that the fragile peace among former Sunni insurgents and the military is not holding, or Al Qaeda militants are not as "on the run" as we keep boasting.

How many times do we have to keep noting the constant ebb and flow of events in Iraq before we realize we're providing nothing of value to the long-term stability of the country?

Fighting Our Allies, Actually

There's really a cross purposes going on with respect to our relations with Iran. On the one hand, the Cheney faction in the White House clearly wants to bomb them. They've been imputing all sorts of negative actions to them inside Iraq, and today we learned that the military has constructed an attack plan and sent a second aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the planning is being driven by what one officer called the "increasingly hostile role" Iran is playing in Iraq - smuggling weapons into Iraq for use against American troops.

"What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq," said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

And yet...

Iran is intervening on the side of the Maliki government that America backs in their fight against Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army. Sadr spokesmen are tying Iran to the United States, saying both want to control Iraq. An Iranian general who commands the Quds Force is a powerful maneuvering force inside Iraq, and he's in cahoots with senior Iraqi leaders and the security forces. Even while Americans are charging the general with malign influence, he's backing the same folks we're backing.

So we're going to go to war with Iran because they're supporting the same politicians that we are in Iraq?

Incidentally, the Iraqis have stepped into this fight on the side of IRAN. And I think this passage shows how much of a tangle this whole thing is.

Baghdad says it agrees with the United States that Iran has continued to supply weapons to anti-government militants in southern Iraq, including arms with markings indicating they were produced this year. On the other hand, the Iraqi government seems eager to send a message to the Bush administration to back off threats of military action and allow Baghdad to pursue diplomatic solutions more quietly with Tehran.

"We are worried about any escalation between the United States and Iran for a simple reason: We are the weakest party in this game," said Sadiq Rikabi, an advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. "Our policy for our neighbors is to go to them, face to face, speak with them in a planned, frank and direct way about any problem."

In recent days, Iraq's government has followed the United States in stepping up claims that new Iranian-made weapons have been found in the southern city of Basra. The allegations appear to come at a convenient time for both the Shiite-led Iraqi government and its ally, the United States.

With Baghdad still suffering the violent aftereffects of Maliki's offensive against Shiite militias last month, Iranian interference would help explain why Iraqi and U.S. forces have been unable to bring the fighting to a standstill. In the latest clashes, four U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in two separate rocket and mortar attacks in Baghdad.

At the same time, Iranian involvement allows U.S. officials to deflect blame for the fighting from radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, whom they are counting on to sustain a frayed but officially intact truce he called in August for his Mahdi Army militia. Though privately many soldiers here say the Mahdi militia is involved in the current fighting, publicly, the allegation is that "special groups" who have broken away from Sadr and receive training and aid from Iran are causing the troubles.

So the US can keep firebombing Sadr City, killing scores of civilians, while blaming it on the Iranians, and the Iraqi government can keep up the fiction to maintain needed US support while double-dealing with Iran at the same time. What a bunch of kabuki theater.

It's be nice if the Democrats running for President remembered there was a world out there and called out these tactics in the Middle East. There is no reason for us to be intervening in the internal political struggles between Shiites inside Iraq. And especially when the goal is to gin up a war with Iran that would be catastrophic in TWO countries, as Iraq would melt down as a consequence as well.

The Sadr Coalition

Maybe this is just me, but I found this somewhat important.

About 50 leaders representing a variety of Iraqi political blocs took to Baghdad's Sadr City on Sunday, a stronghold of fiery religious leader Muqtada al Sadr, to protest the U.S.-led siege of that area.

The leaders promised to work together with Sadrists to remove insurgents and weapons in the area. But they also had six other demands of the government, including that it immediately suspend military activity in the city, supply basic services to residents and prioritize peaceful solutions over military conflicts.

"Whatever point the crisis reaches we will keep our efforts to put an end to it," said Ahmed Radhi, a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni Muslim bloc. Radhi said the leaders formed a committee to meet with Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to solve problems plaguing Sadr City.

The Accordance Front recently returned to the government, which signaled hope among a few that there actually is a center taking hold in Iraq. This demonstration dampens that outlook. The Maliki government is trying to disband the Sadrists but this shows that Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are opposed to it. And since Sadr himself has called for an end to fighting among Iraqis and a movement toward the "liberation of ourselves and our lands from the occupier," and since the Green Zone, the symbol of the occupiers, is under near-constant attack, I'd say there's a far different consensus taking root.