Old Hickory's Weblog

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create "Palestine". I checked the date - no, it was not 1 April - but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.

Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region - he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail - is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

In fact, this enthusiasm for putting more Americans in uniform (and for increasing overall military spending) reflects the persistence of a second consensus to which leading Democrats and Republicans alike stubbornly subscribe.

This second consensus consists of two elements. According to the first element, the only way to win the so-called global war on terrorism, thereby precluding another 9/11, is to "fix" whatever ails the Islamic world. According to the second element, the United States possesses the wherewithal to effect just such a transformation. In essence, by employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.

The underlying problem is that the basic orientation of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been flat wrong. Bush's conception of waging an open-ended global "war" to eliminate terrorism has failed, disastrously and irredeemably. Simply trying harder — no matter how many more soldiers we recruit and no matter how many more Muslim countries we invade and "liberate" — will not reverse that failure.

[P]residential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)

Finally, the June 2007 report may not openly say so, or try to deny the fact, but the US is now losing in Iraq. The pace of this defeat can easily be accelerated over the next six months by continued Iraqi failures at conciliation and growing unwillingness to sustain the war by the US Congress and American people. The facts on the ground can change to the point where the US may be forced into a rushed withdrawal, have to try to ameliorate displacement and separation and/or sectarian and ethnic cleansing, or deal with a level of humanitarian disaster it can now say it will ignore but not be able to ignore if it actually occurs. (my emphasis)

The latest Department of Defense report on "Measuring Stability in Iraq" attempts to put a bad situation in a favorable light. It does not disguise many of the problems involved, but it does attempt to defend the strategy presented by President Bush in January 2007 in ways that sometimes present serious problems. More broadly, it reveals that the President’s strategy is not working in any critical dimension. (my emphasis)

A Kurdish struggle for autonomy and control of the north, displacing Iraqi Arabs, Turcomans, and other minorities, and seeking control of Kirkuk, Iraq’s northern oil resources, and the territory along the ethnic fault line in the north extending westward towards Mosul. Increased violence by displaced Sunni insurgents – including Al Qaeda - against Iraqi Kurdish civilians and politicians, concentrated in Mosul.

Victory [sic] in Iraq requires success in armed nation-building – a process that can extend over a decade or more – not simply the defeat of the most violent elements in an insurgency. In fact, efforts to bring local security in a narrow area like Baghdad have almost certainly done more harm than good. They have focused toomany resources on one limited task and created a "center of gravity" that cannot have major importance without a far more effective national government and progress towards national conciliation. (my emphasis)

The US is often the first to call for transparency and integrity in the reporting of other governments. It has never provided transparency or integrity in its reporting on the war in Iraq. It has downplayed the growth of the insurgency and other civil conflicts. It exaggerated progress in the development of Iraqi forces, and has reported meaningless macroecomic figures claiming "progress" in the face of steadily deteriorating economic conditions for most Iraqis outside the Kurdish security zone, and does so in the face of almost incredible incompetence by USAID and the Corps of Engineers.

Perhaps most significantly, the US government has never openly discussed or analyzed its failures in not planning for stability operations or conflict termination, in creating an electoral process that polarized Iraqi politics around inexperienced sectarian and ethnic leaders and parties, and in creating a constitution that helped divide the nation without resolving any of the key issues it attempted to address. The same is true of US actions that blocked local and regional elections, allowed de-Ba’athification to remove many of the nation’s most competent secular and nationalist leaders and professionals from power, and failed to act on plans to disband the militias before transferring power from the CPA. (my emphasis)

It seems likely that, in retrospect, this lack of transparency and integrity will come back to haunt the US. More honesty, objective self-criticism, serious effort to develop credible strategies and operational plans might well have prevented all of Iraq’s current civil conflicts and problems from reaching anything like their current scale. In fact, if the US loses in Iraq – as seems all too possible – its primary enemy will not have been Al Qa’ida, but the US government. (my emphasis)

In the first hours of the American military assault, after midnight early Monday, helicopters flew two teams of American troops and a platoon of Iraqi scouts so they could block the southern escape routes from the city. Stryker armored vehicles moved along the western outskirts of Baquba and then down a main north-south route that cuts through the center of the city.

By the time dawn broke on Tuesday, the insurgent sanctuary in western Baquba had been cordoned off. Then, the American forces established footholds on the periphery of the section and slowly pressed in. "Rather than let the problem export to some other place and then have to fight them again, my goal is to isolate this thing and cordon it off," said Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division.

Officers are hoping that local residents and even former insurgents who have splitwith Al Qaeda may quietly help the American troops pick out insurgents. American troops have already begun to work with more than 100 Iraqis on the eastern side of the city — a group American soldiers have nicknamed the "Kit Carson scouts." (my emphasis)

This American counterinsurgency operation has some of the firepower associated with conventional war. American forces have already fired more than 20 satellite-guided rockets into western Baquba. Apache helicopters have attacked enemy fighters.

Warplanes have also dropped satellite-guided bombs on suspected roadside bombs and a weapons cache, which produced spectacular secondary explosions after it was struck. M1 tanks have maneuvered through the narrow city lanes. The Americans have responded to insurgent attacks with mortar fire. (my emphasis)

American helicopters dropped leaflets last night urging the residents to stay in their homes. The hope was to keep civilians off the streets while American forces began to close in on the insurgents. The appeal appeared to have little effect, though, as large groups of civilians mingled on the streets Tuesday and some students even sought to go to the local university.

The presence of so many civilians on an urban battlefield affords the operatives from Al Qaeda another possible means to elude their American pursuers. If the insurgents do not manage to sneak out, some may hide their weapons and try to blend with the city’s residents. (my emphasis)

On Tuesday afternoon, a Stryker company tried to blaze a path through the road believed to be full of buried bombs by firing a line-charge, a cable festooned with explosions. The hope was that the explosion would cut the wires that the Qaeda fighters use to set off the blasts.

After a delay in getting the line-charge to detonate, the weapon went off. There was a resounding thud and the skies over Baquba were smeared by a spiraling mushroom cloud.

The US offensive in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, is intended to root out Salafi Jihadi forces among the Sunnis that have come to dominate entire neighborhoods and entire towns in the province, which lies between Baghdad and Iran. But most of the forces involved seem to be American and Shiite (the 2,000 'paramilitary police' mentioned are surely from the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council [SIIC], the leading Shiite party with links to Iran). Diyala has a Sunni majority, and a lot of the problems in thatprovince began politically in the first place because SIIC has dominated it politically. In the short term, this operation may 'pacify' Baquba. But likely it will inflict tremendous damage on the city, will cause a lot of the 300,000 or so inhabitants to flee and become refugees, and will likely not change the political situation, which is Shiite dominance of Sunnis along with some Kurdish separatist plans for parts of the province. Falluja had 2/3s of its buildings destroyed and tens of thousands of its former inhabitants are living in tent cities in the desert with bad water, and Falluja is still not secure--kidnappings, shootings, mortar attacks, even car bombings are all still taking place there and in its environs. (my emphasis)