A Stop To Staunch The Bleeding In Iraq

The President completed the Turkish leg of his European tour today, and then made an unannounced visit to Iraq to discuss various issues with government leaders and meet with troops.

This comes on the heels of another car bomb in the Baghdad area, a day after a separate set of bombings killing 33. I know what I'd tell Nouri al-Maliki if I were the President - you need to end the belligerence against the Sunni Awakening groups, because they are either returning to the insurgency or allowing AQI to operate more freely. Sectarian violence is rising in the same proportion as the tension between the Awakening forces and the central government who lied to them rises. The Sunni groups need to be paid and integrated into the security apparatus. The absence of this will cause lots more carnage. This is a diplomatic problem and not a military one, and that's what I'd emphasize to Maliki - your people are dying and our military will not be used as your personal protection force.

Drawing A Straight Line

The ruling Shiite government gained responsibility for paying the Sunni Awakening forces. They stiffed most of them and even started arresting some of the Sunni leadership. And then...

A series of six car bombs exploded in or near Baghdad on Monday, killing more than 30 people and wounding scores more, according to witnesses and the police.

Three bombs struck markets in predominately Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad, but there did not appear to be any obvious pattern to the attacks. The blasts began shortly after dawn and continued in disparate parts of the city into the afternoon.

Um, I think there IS an obvious pattern to the attacks.

The spike in attacks in Iraq seems to me to be DIRECTLY attributable to the tension between the Shiite ruling government and the Sunni Sons of Iraq. While this guest poster at Informed Comment claims that the disputes in Iraq are about control of resources and power, that seems to me a distinction without a difference. Right now, Maliki and the Shiites are in power, and the Sons of Iraq/Awakening forces are dependent upon them. And they certainly have back channels to what's left of the insurgency, and the increased fighting represents another stage in that power relationship. It does nobody good to turn Iraq into the forgotten war that Afghanistan used to be. The Maliki government needs to be pressured into meeting their responsibilities to keep the country secure and stable, and having a US Ambassador in place would maybe help. So stop grandstanding, Senate GOP. People's lives are at stake.

Unrest In Iraq

Shiite pilgrims were attacked in Baghdad yesterday, killing 20, and earlier this week four US soldiers were killed in Mosul. Let's be honest about this. While the elections are encouraging in that most factions in the country are re-entering politics, we should not see Iraq as peaceful even if it serves ends of a quicker American exit.

And in fact, I don't think it does. Americans must leave as per the status of forces agreement, and the longer they linger the more they become targets. Iraq is not always going to solve its problems peacefully in the near term, but since the surge did nothing for political reconciliation, clearly military forces cannot impact that. US commanders are trying to slow-walk withdrawal, offering 19-month and 23-month pullout plans in addition to President Obama's preferred 16-month plan, but that neglects the reality on the ground. We've already left - it's just a matter of manifesting that physically.

Decision Made

There was a fairly substantial portion of today's Obama press conference assigned to Iraq, compared to its near-total drop from the headlines in the months leading up to the election. The President-elect was asked if he still planned to withdraw all US combat forces from the country within 16 months. This was his reply:

“I believe that 16 months is the right time frame,” said Obama, noting that he has ‘consistently” said he will listen to the recommendations of his commanders on the ground.

Obama noted that during the presidential campaign he promised to “remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months with the understanding that it might be necessary, likely to be necessary, to maintain a residual force.” Obama then said that the status-of-forces agreement passed by the Iraqi Parliament last week means that “we are on a glide path to reducing our forces in Iraq.”

It kind of stuns me that the press still doesn't seem to understand that the SOFA agreement mandates a full withdrawal from Iraq, and any President who accepts the agreement would necessarily have to leave in 3 years. Obama never gave an end date for the removal of residual forces, but he's now been supplied with it. And if the Iraqi public votes by referendum against the SOFA, that 3-year timeline will be cut in half and the American forces will have to leave in 18 months. This has all been done for Obama, Bush signed it, and now he's resigned to implement it, and he doesn't have a whole lot of wiggle room though he's trying to make some for himself.

Americans are still targeted in Iraq. NPR's Ivan Watson just missed becoming the victim of a car bombing yesterday. There are still plenty of elements unhappy with the outlay of three years in the SOFA who are striking back with suicide attacks. Iraq is not a safe place or a stable one. But the question of American involvement is on the downward side. I'm not saying we're above breaking our word or an international agreement, but I get the impression that Obama isn't at all unhappy being constrained by this agreement. He wants to transfer forces to Afghanistan anyway, and this is the best way to do it.

Ramming Convoys

One of these days this kind of suicide attack is going to strike its target more directly, and more than 1 US soldier will die. The Marine barracks in Beirut is essentially the parallel. How many more chances are we going to take?

A U.S. military spokesman says that a suicide car attack on a U.S. military convoy in Afghanistan has killed 20 civilians and a coalition soldier.

Lt. Cmdr. Walter Matthews says the bomber attacked the convoy Thursday in the Bati Kot district of the eastern Nangarhar province.

Ajmal Pardes, an Afghan health official, says 74 civilians have been wounded in the attack.

The attack happened as the convoy was passing through a crowded market.

And our solution, for some reason, is to send more targets troops into the war zone.

I should also remind everyone that there was no history of suicide attacks in Afghanistan until the war in Iraq, which was basically insurgent college.

Tales Of The War On Terror

So Congress isn't buying the neat little bow that the FBI tried to put on the anthrax case.

WASHINGTON — A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that “important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case.”

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

“My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army’s biodefense laboratory who worked on anthrax vaccines. “There are some very serious questions that have yet to be answered and need to be made public.”

I'm looking forward to that hearing.

In addition to letting potential domestic terror suspects go free, you'll be pleased to know that the Bush Administration, an equal opportunity bungler, has done the same with foreign terror suspects:

A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.

But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.

The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.

In a case of a buried lede, the Times story later gets around to mentioning that the Bush Administration's jumping of the gun, authorizing arrests in Pakistan of people connected to the plot for nakedly political reasons prior to the 2006 midterm elections, cut short the investigation and put Scotland Yard in a situation where they didn't have enough evidence to convict. London had to roll up the plotters before they were ready to present full evidence.

George Bush - politicizing terror, making sure nobody is held responsible since 2001!

Time for a change.

Iraq's Truth Bursts At The Seams

A country may be credibly thought to be still at war when it can't hold a mass gathering without dozens of deaths.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Four female suicide bombers and a gunman killed at least 70 people and wounded almost 300 others during a string of attacks in central Baghdad and Kirkuk on Monday, officials said.

In Baghdad, three suicide bombers detonated their explosives in three locations within 30 minutes of each other. The attacks killed at least 32 people and wounded 102 others, most of them Shiite pilgrims, an Interior Ministry official said.

It was the second day attackers have targeted Shiite pilgrims taking part in an annual march to one of the Shiites' holiest shrines.

On Sunday afternoon, seven pilgrims were gunned down in a town south of Baghdad.

About 150 miles north of the capital, another suicide bomber ran into a crowd of protesters at a Kurdish political rally, a police official said. After she detonated the explosives she was carrying, gunmen began firing into the crowd from different directions, the official said.

Every time there's a pilgrimage, security cannot be maintained. And yet, in this country discussion is shut down, because the surge has unquestionably worked. That's not what you hear from folks like the former Iraqi Prime Minister:

In a briefing before members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday, (Iyad) Allawi answered questions from members of he subcommittee on international organizations, human rights, and oversight. When asked by Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the subcommittee's ranking member, for Allawi's "assessment of of what's come of the surge," Allawi all but said, not much.

Reminding Rohrabacher that the original objective of the surge was to create a safe environment for a process of national reconciliation, Allawi said, "Now, militarily, the surge has achieved some of its goals. Politically, I don't think so."

Allawi rattled off a laundry list of perils that still confront the Iraqi people: internal displacement of large numbers of people, millions of refugees outside Iraq, security forces he described as sectarian militias dressed in national uniforms, no enforcement of the national constitution, which he described as a "divisive" document.

It's pathetic that only an Iraqi can speak the truth, that the surge hasn't worked at accomplishing its stated goals, and the challenges that the Iraqis still face are immense. But of course, the costs of war have been hidden, both in treasure and in human lives. So the outcomes of the surge have been hidden as well. The entire war has been stage-managed, and yet Americans STILL have turned against it (thanks in no small part to the power of alternative media). There needs to be a sustained effort to get at the continued truth of what's happening in Iraq, instead of making political ploys based on shared assumptions.

A Couple Horrible South Asian Bombings You Should Know About

The looming Pakistani election (it'll start in a matter of hours) has provoked renewed violence, with 37 dead as a suicide bomber ran his car into a Pakistan People's Party (Bhutto's party) rally and blew himself up. This is part of the parallel conflicts in Pakistan; the Islamists hate the PPP, but the PPP's main rival is really Musharraf, who is desperate to hold on to power, even though we've deluded ourselves into thinking that Musharraf is going after the Islamists. It's extremely complicated.

Meanwhile, today saw the worst suicide bombing in Afghanistan since 2001:

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a large crowd gathered at a dogfighting festival just outside this city in southern Afghanistan, killing some 80 people and wounding nearly 100 more in the country’s worst single bombing since 2001.

According to witnesses and officials, the bomber killed a local police chief, Abdul Hakim Jan, a number of his guards and scores of villagers attending the event in the district of Argandab, just north of Kandahar city.

The governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khaled, said the dead numbered 80 and the wounded over 90. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Kabul, Dr. Abdullah Fahim, said the Kandahar hospital had received 67 bodies. But some families had taken bodies straight home for burial from the scene of the blast, he said.

The Taliban is claiming that they didn't even do this, and the implications of that are staggering. Could there be other insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan with this kind of capacity.

Very sad.

Iraq: Violence Still Rages

For a country that is apparently so clean you can eat off its streets, and where more schools have been painted than ever, violence sure seems to keep happening in Iraq.

A female suicide bomber killed 10 people in Iraq on Wednesday, the latest in a string of suicide bombings that has seen a major strike nearly every day of the past week despite an overall decline in violence.

The woman blew herself up with an explosive vest at a checkpoint of neighborhood patrol volunteers in Baquba, capital of the restive Diyala province. Twenty-eight people were wounded including some women, police said.

The attack came the day after a bomber detonated his explosive vest in a tent crowded with mourners at a Baghdad funeral. Police raised the death toll from that strike to 34, making it the worst in the capital in six months.

Look, a lot of the impact of violence like this is how it affects the psyche of the people, and clearly Iraqis in Baghdad feel a little safer, in part because they've been led to believe that the occupation forces may leave soon. But these gains are reversible. And they're more likely to reverse if political progress remains stalemated. We're still in a very uneasy situation.

Good Thing That State Of Emergency Has Been Lifted

Since the terrorist threat in Pakistan is obviously in its last throes.

More than 30 people were killed on Friday in a suspected suicide bombing at a mosque in northwest Pakistan, where a former interior minister was offering Muslim Eid festival prayers, police said.

Former interior minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, who belonged to President Pervez Musharraf's government, was at the mosque at the time of the attack but it was unclear if he was the target. He said he escaped unharmed but his son was injured.

"More than 30 people have been killed in the blast," Feroz Shah, a senior police official at Charsadda district, in North West Frontier Province, told Reuters. "We still don't have an exact figure."

Militant Islam was never the reason for the imposition of martial law, and nothing has been done to decrease that threat in any meaningful way during that martial law. And in the meantime, while the government lost all credibility inside the population due to the hijacking of any vestige of democracy, they're also dealing with their very own Abu Ghraib:

Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies, apparently trying to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system, have quietly set free nearly 100 men suspected of links to terrorism, few of whom were charged, human rights groups and lawyers here say.

Those released, they say, are some of the nearly 500 Pakistanis presumed to have disappeared into the hands of the Pakistani intelligence agencies cooperating with Washington’s fight against terrorism since 2001.

No official reason has been given for the releases, but as pressure has mounted to bring the cases into the courts, the government has decided to jettison some suspects and spare itself the embarrassment of having to reveal that people have been held on flimsy evidence in the secret system, its opponents say [...]

In one case, a suspect tied to, but not charged with the 2002 killing of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist, was dumped on a garbage heap, so thin and ill he died 20 days later. He, like one other detainee, was arrested in South Africa several years ago and released in Pakistan this year.

You think that's not driving the militant strain? You think that's not a recruiting tool?

One of the positive steps Congress took before breaking for the holidays was to restrict military aid to Pakistan and condition it to the restoration of democratic institutions. If we can't control our government at home, maybe at least we can stop funding one that's imitating it.