Big Thread O' Iraq (with bonus Iran!)

[Fifthfiend]

White House confirms Bush-Maliki to meet
(AFP)

WASHINGTON - The White House Friday reiterated that President George W. Bush would meet Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki in Jordan next week amid a sharp rise in Shia-Sunni violence Friday.

As Vice President Dick Cheney took off on a trip to Saudi Arabia on Friday, the White House said there would be no change to Bush’s planned summit with Maliki even as a top Shia cleric said he would pull his faction out of the Baghdad government if the meeting takes place.

“Securing Baghdad and gaining control of the violent situation will be a priority agenda item when President Bush meets with Prime Minister Maliki in just a few days,” said White House spokesperson Scott Stanzel.

The spike in violence in Iraq Friday left at least 202 dead in a wave of bombings in the Shia neighbourhood of Sadr City, the deadliest attack since the war began in 2003.

Apparent revenge efforts by Shia militias left dozens more feared dead in attacks on Sunni mosques in Baghdad.

Separately a triple bomb attack in the northern town of Tal Afar killed 23 people and wounded 45 others Friday, according to police.

The White House condemned the attacks by both sides.

“These ruthless acts of violence are deplorable. It is an outrage that these terrorists are targeting innocents in a brazen effort to topple a democratically elected government. These killers will not succeed,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

How to quell the violence will likely be the focal topic in talks that Cheney holds with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, and the Bush-Maliki meeting on November 29-30 in Amman.

Cheney could ask Abdullah to use his influence to help foster reconciliation between warring factions in Iraq, and also press for Riyadh to come through with its promised reconstruction aid.

But Friday’s violent surge has added urgency to both trips. A few hours before the attack on Sunni mosques in Baghdad, the political group of Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, whose base is in Sadr City, threatened to quit the national unity government if Maliki meets Bush.

But Stanzel confirmed that the meeting will take place despite the threats by Sadr’s allies. Bush and Maliki are also to see Jordan’s King Abdullah II, as pressure mounts for all of of Iraq’s neighbours to help contain the daily bloodshed.

With US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also due to visit the region soon, the top-level travel reflects the seriousness of the situation on the ground in Iraq, as does Bush’s stated openness to potential policy change there.

The rising violence, a surge in US casualties in Iraq, and the victory of opposition Democrats in Congressional elections on November 7 have piled pressure on Bush to change US policy in Iraq, if not to begin withdrawing troops — something Bush has steadfastly refused to commit to.

But after an October that was the bloodiest month for Iraqi civilians — according to the United Nations — and one of the bloodiest for US troops since the March 2003 invasion, the latest anti-Shia attack and counterattacks will only elevate the pressure on the president to change course.

Stanzel said Friday that the violence is “clearly aimed at undermining the Iraqi people’s hopes for a peaceful and stable Iraq.”

He added that “the United States is committed to helping the Iraqis.”

It remains unclear, however, what resources Bush and Cheney can marshal to stop the country from plunging into all-out civil war.

Bush has started a comprehensive review of his Iraq policy. Two reports are expected in the coming weeks — one from the administration and another from a high-powered independent panel — which could play a big role in decisions on strategy and US troop levels.

The worsening situation in recent months also raises questions about US trust in Maliki and, specifically, his ability to end attacks by militia.

So far, Bush has publicly stood by Maliki, but his confidence seems to be increasingly in doubt.

November 22, 2006
Bush, Maliki to meet as Iraqi deaths hit new high
By Claudia Parsons

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush will meet Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan next week with grim new statistics showing record numbers of Iraqis were killed last month and many more fled the country.

A U.N. report put civilian deaths in October at 3,709 -- 120 a day and up from 3,345 in September. Nearly 420,000 moved to other parts of Iraq since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra triggered a surge in sectarian attacks.

It said as well as those displaced within Iraq, nearly 100,000 people were fleeing to Syria and Jordan every month -- proportionally equivalent to a million Americans emigrating each month, depriving the U.S. economy of a city the size of Detroit.

The meeting between Bush and Maliki in the Jordanian capital Amman, a much safer venue than Baghdad, will follow a weekend visit to Iran by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and this week's landmark visit to Iraq by Syria's foreign minister.

They will be the first lengthy talks between Bush and Maliki since Bush pledged a new approach on Iraq after his Democratic opponents took control of the U.S. Congress.

A month ago the two spoke to ease mutual irritation over how much the other was doing to halt violence.

They agreed to draw up plans for accelerating the training of Iraqi forces and the transfer of responsibility. Maliki said Iraqis could take charge in six months, half the U.S. estimate.

A joint statement on the Nov. 29-30 summit said: "We will focus our discussions on current developments in Iraq, progress made to date in the deliberations of a high-level joint committee on transferring security responsibility and the role of the region in supporting Iraq."

American politicians, notably Democrats pressing for troop withdrawal, are frustrated that, after six months in power, Maliki has failed to disband militias loyal to fellow Shi'ites.

With Bush's allies urging him to reach out on Iraq to U.S. adversaries in Tehran and Damascus, Washington reacted coolly to the flurry of regional diplomacy seen with Syria restoring full relations with Iraq and Talabani saying he would visit Iran.

FRESH IDEAS

According to the U.N. bimonthly human rights report, Baghdad was the epicentre of the violence, accounting for nearly 5,000 of all the 7,054 deaths in September and October, with most of the bodies bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds.

Sectarian attacks were the main source of violence, fuelled by insurgent attacks and militias as well as criminal groups.

"Entire communities have been affected to various degrees and, in some areas, neighbourhoods have been split up or inhabitants have been forced to flee to other areas or even to neighbouring countries in search of safety," the report said.

The report said that ethnic and religious minorities, such as Christians, were being targeted along with professionals such as academics, lawyers, judges and journalists.

It also raised questions about the sectarian loyalties and effectiveness of Iraq's 300,000-strong U.S.-trained security forces ahead of next week's meeting between Bush and Maliki to discuss speeding up the handover of security control to Iraq.

"There are increasing reports of militias and death squads operating from within the police ranks or in collusion with them," it said. "Its forces are increasingly accused of ... kidnapping, torture, murder, bribery ... extortion and theft."

Militias were also reported to be forcibly evicting people from their homes. One such is Waleed Jihad, who lives in a tent in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, 330 km north of the Baghdad home he was forced to leave by Shi'ite militias.

"I'm living in a tent because we are practising democracy in a jungle, where the mighty kill the weak," said Jihad, 37, a Sunni Arab from the Shi'ite stronghold of Kadhimiya where, he said, gunmen gave him a 48-hour ultimatum to get out of town.

Following the Republicans' defeat at Congressional elections this month, Bush has said he is looking for "fresh perspectives" on Iraq. Next month he is expected to receive recommendations on Iraq from a bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and the Pentagon is conducting its own review.

(Additional reporting by by Aseel Kami, Mussab Al-Khairalla, Ross Colvin and Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad, Matt Spetalnick on Air Force One and Edmund Blair in Tehran)

Couple things -

Baghdad is so unsafe that it's own supposed President has to conduct his meetings in another country? If they were looking for a way to make Maliki look like a puppet, then congratulations.

In that vein, Sadr's played his card in a pretty timely manner, in that whatever Maliki does, it'll be like hanging a sign over his office indicating who really runs the Iraqi government, whether that person is Sadr or Bush.

That bit about the "comprehensive review" of Bush's total lack of an Iraq policy would be hilarious, if it weren't for all the people dying.

I dunno. Your thoughts?

[notasfatasmike]

I don't think I need to say this, as it should be apparent, but the situation in Iraq is so unbelievably screwed up right now, I often don't even feel like I know how I should react anymore. The country is decending into outright civil war, and I really don't think there's anything anyone can do about.

I don't think it's a bad thing for two leaders of a foreign power to meet, though; Sadr's apparent assertation that it's wrong to do so (or at least if the other foreign power is America) shows an unwillingness to work with the international community that is disappointing, if not particularly surprising. I don't think Maliki meeting with Bush is necessarily a sign that Maliki is Bush's puppet (although given my opinion of Bush, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush thinks he is); it more depends on whether or not Maliki blindly goes along with what Bush says, or if he trys to work cooperatively with his government, who should take precedence in the first place.

I can understand Sadr's anger against Bush, though; if it weren't for his bull-headed, warmongering administration, they wouldn't be stuck in this civil war right now. Yeah, Saddam was a douchebag, granted, but are constant road-side bombings and "militias and death squads consisting of police officers" really a whole lot better?

[Fifthfiend]

Also, there's this:

U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself
By JOHN F. BURNS and KIRK SEMPLE

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, corrupt charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many of the insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says that $25 million to $100 million of the total comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid to save hundreds of kidnap victims in Iraq, the report said. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by senior American officials as including France and Italy — paid Iraqi kidnappers $30 million in ransom last year.

A copy of the report was made available to The Times by American officials in Iraq, who said they acted in the belief that the findings could improve American understanding of the challenges the United States faces in Iraq.

The report offers little hope that much can be done, at least soon, to choke off insurgent revenues. For one thing, it acknowledges how little the American authorities in Iraq know — three and a half years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein — about crucial aspects of insurgent operations. For another, it paints an almost despairing picture of the Iraqi government’s ability, or willingness, to take measures the report says will be necessary to tamp down the insurgency’s financing.

“If accurate,” the report says, its estimates indicate that these “sources of terrorist and insurgent finance within Iraq — independent of foreign sources — are currently sufficient to sustain the groups’ existence and operation.” To this, it adds what may be its most surprising conclusion: “In fact, if recent revenue and expense estimates are correct, terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq.”

So that's worked out pretty well for us.

EDIT: As an update - President Smart Guy is acting real smart again.

Bush Blames Al Qaeda for Wave of Iraq Violence
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JOHN O’NEIL

TALLINN, Estonia, Nov. 28 — President Bush today said Al Qaeda was to blame for the rising wave of sectarian violence in Iraq, which he refused to label a civil war. Mr. Bush said he would press Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, during meetings in Jordan later this week to lay out a strategy for restoring order.

“My questions to him will be: What do we need to do to succeed? What is your strategy in dealing with the sectarian violence?” said Mr. Bush. “I will assure him that we will continue to pursue Al Qaeda to make sure that they do not establish a safe haven in Iraq.”

The remarks, made at a press conference here with President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, were Mr. Bush’s first on the situation in Iraq since a series of bombs exploded in a Shiite district of Baghdad last Thursday, killing more than 200 people. The bombing was the deadliest single attack since the American invasion.

The following day, Shiite militiamen staged a vengeful reprisal, attacking Sunni mosques in Baghdad and in the nearby city of Baquba.

The growing cycle of violence have prompted warnings from world leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah and Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, that the country is at the brink of civil war.

But Mr. Bush, who heads to Jordan on Wednesday for two days of meetings with Mr. Maliki, dismissed a question about whether a civil war has indeed erupted.

“There’s all kinds of speculation about what may or may not be happening,” he said, adding, “No question about it, it’s tough.”

Mr. Bush also had harsh words for Syria and Iran, and reiterated his stance that he does not intend to negotiate directly with them to enlist their help in ending the violence in Iraq. He said he would leave such talks to the government of Iraq, “a sovereign nation which is conducting its own foreign policy.”

The president acknowledged that there were high levels of sectarian violence in Iraq, but he put the blame for the disorder squarely on Al Qaeda.

“There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by Al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal,” Mr. Bush said, adding that he planned to work with Mr. Maliki “to defeat these elements.”

Referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq who was killed by American forces over the summer, he added, “The plan of Mr. Zarqawi was to foment sectarian violence.”

Mr. Bush’s remarks are at odds with statements made in recent weeks both by American military commanders and by Mr. Maliki.

While American military and intelligence officials credit Al Qaeda’s attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February with having sparked waves of sectarian violence, more recently the officials have consistently described a more complicated picture. Earlier this month, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples of the Defense Intelligence Agency characterized the situation before Congress as an “ongoing, violent struggle for power.”

That assessment was more in line with Mr. Maliki’s declaration after the recent bombings that such attacks are “the reflection of political backgrounds” and that “the crisis is political.”

In a televised briefing in Baghdad today, the senior spokesman for the American military in Iraq said that the already high levels of violence in the capital were likely to increase in the coming weeks in reaction to last week’s bombings.

In addition, the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that mortar and rocket attacks between Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods were on the rise. A mortar attack followed the bombings last Thursday, and had been part of an attack earlier that day on the Health Ministry, which is controlled by Shiite parties. Shiite militias responded with their own mortar attacks, he said.

General Caldwell described Al Qaeda as having been “severely disorganized” by American and Iraqi efforts this year, but said it is still “the most well-funded of any group and can produce the most sensational attacks of any element out there.”

He summarized the continuing violence in Baghdad this way: Shiite militias conducting murders and assassinations in the city’s Sunni western section, and Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda staging “high visibility casualty events” in the city’s predominantly Shiite east.

General Caldwell declined to say that the country was engulfed in a civil war, saying that Iraq’s government continues to function and that the conflict did not involve “another viable entity that’s vying to take control.”

The question of whether the fighting constitutes a civil war has becoming an increasingly sensitive one for the Bush administration, as Democrats cite agreement among a wide range of academic and military experts that the conflict meets most standard definitions of the term.

General Caldwell conceded that struggles for political and economic power were taking place on many levels throughout the country, including fights among Shiite groups seeking dominance in the south and among Sunni elements in Iraq’s west.

“The political parties need to start reining in their extremist elements,” he said.

At the same briefing, a spokesman for the Air Force said that the body of the pilot of an F-16 jet fighter that crashed northwest of Baghdad had not been found at the crash site. The spokesman said that it could not be determined from the position of the ejection seat whether the pilot had been able to get out before the crash, and said that DNA tests were being conducted on blood found at the scene.

Mr. Bush’s agenda today and tomorrow is supposed to focus on the spread of democracy in the Baltic nations and on Afghanistan, which will top the agenda at a N.A.T.O. summit in Riga, Latvia, where he arrived after his visit to Tallinn — the first trip to Estonia ever by a sitting United States president.

The alliance has committed 32,000 troops to Afghanistan, but many nations have imposed restrictions on the activities and deployment of their troops that N.A.T.O. commanders say are hampering the mission. Mr. Bush is expected to press for the lifting of those restrictions.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Estonia and John O’Neil reported from New York.

It's a real shock this guy can't even safely enter Iraq anymore.

[notasfatasmike]

It's unsurprising that Bush would claim Al-Qaeda was somehow behind the violence in Iraq; his black-and-white worldview doesn't allow for anything else. There's no way the fine, upstanding people that we "freed" are going to fight among themselves! It's not like there's any cultural or religious differences between them! They're Iraqis, a completely homogenous group! Although he probably wouldn't use the word homogenous. You know, because "homo" is hidden in it.

I just can't believe the utter incomptence involved in the planning of this war. It's like the people planning had no concept of the intricacies of the Middle East in general or Iraq in particular. The train of thought seems like it was "SADDAM=BAD. GET RID OF SADDAM=FIXES ALL PROBLEMS." It's neo-conservative, PNAC arrogance from beginning to end.

[Fifthfiend]

The thing with the Great Man approach to politics is somehow there's always another Great Man right behind the last Great Man. Take out Saddam? Job well done!-Oh now what's this some guy named Zarqawi making a ruckus? Zarqawi dead? Hooray! Oh wait what's this now, who's this Sadr fellow we keep hearing about? 'Cutting the head off of the serpent' isn't the best strategy when you're trying to stop a tidal wave.

And speaking of Al-Sadr, I suspect Maliki's question to Bush will be "what's your plan for keeping me from getting shot in the back of the head by Moqtada al-Sadr?" followed up with "And let me assure you that I'm a lot less worried about Al Qaeda than the roving bands of Shia death squads that, by the by, constitute the larger part of what passes for my 'government's' military."

... On a tangental note, but what really gets me is the talk from McCain and such about how what we really need is twenty thousand more troops in Iraq. I mean completely setting aside the issue of where are you going to find twenty thousand more people to send to Iraq, what exactly is there that twenty thousand more troops are going to accomplish, that a hundred and twenty thousand previously have been unable to do? I mean to be totally honest, I suspect the best you're going to do is increase numbers to the point where they pose enough of a threat that the Shia and Sunnis will stop shooting at each other long enough to shift their focus back to shooting at our guys. At this point opposition is so entrenched, you could probably put a million men under arms in that country, and accomplish nothing but forestalling the inevitable.

EDIT:

Slaughter in Iraq soon seems to be part of normal life
A special dispatch by Patrick Cockburn on his journey through a country being torn apart by civil war
Published: 28 November 2006

Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.

A new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month when police commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.

Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call "the Saigon moment", the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring. "They say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles," the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."

It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was recently stopped at a supposedly fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border and four American security men and an Austrian taken away.

...

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad, neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, I phoned a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought of the verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next-door neighbour's house. I am more worried about staying alive myself than what happens to Saddam."

Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families. "I love my husband but my family has forced me to divorce him because we are Shia and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, a mother, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's family] are insurgents ... and that living with him is an offence to God." Members of mixed marriages had set up an association to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity". All three Iraqi communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - see themselves as victims and seldom sympathise with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its gruesome discoveries.

...

A local tribal leader called Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal Afar told me of a man from there who went to recover the tortured body of his 16-year-old son. The corpse was wired to explosives that blew up, killing the father so their two bodies were buried together.

...

[Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul] added that 70,000 Kurds had already fled the city because of assassinations. It is extraordinary how, in Iraq, slaughter that would be front-page news anywhere else in the world soon seems to be part of normal life.

On the day I arrived in Mosul, the police had found 11 bodies in the city which would have been on the low side in Baghdad. I spoke to Duraid Mohammed Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, whose office is decorated with pictures of smiling fresh-faced young men who turned out to be his son and four nephews, all of them killed by insurgents.

His own house, together with his furniture, was burned to the ground two years ago. He added in passing that Mr Goran and he himself were the prime targets for assassination in Mosul, a point that was dramatically proved true the day after we spoke when insurgents exploded a bomb beside his convoy - fortunately he was not in it at the time - killing one and wounding several of his bodyguards.

For the moment Mosul is more strongly controlled by pro-government forces than most Iraqi cities. That is because the US has powerful local allies in the shape of the Kurds. The two army divisions in the province are primarily Kurdish, but the 17,000 police in Nineveh, the province of which Mosul is the capital, are almost entirely Sunni and their loyalty is dubious.

One was dismissed on the day of Saddam's trial for putting a picture of the former leader in the window of his car. In November 2004, the entire Mosul police force abandoned their police stations to the insurgents who captured £20m worth of arms.

"The terrorists do not control a single district in Mosul," is the proud claim of Major General Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani, the bullet-headed police chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them to fight me face to face." But the situation is still very fragile. We went to see the police operations room where an officer was bellowing into a microphone: "There is a suicide bomber in a car in the city. Do not let him get near you or any of our buildings." There was a reason to be frightened. On my way into Mosul, I had seen the broken concrete walls of the party headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two big Kurdish political parties. In August, two men in a car packed with explosives shot their way past the outer guard post and then blew themselves up, killing 17 soldiers.

The balance of forces in Nineveh between American, Arab, Kurd, Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated even by Iraqi standards. Power is fragmented.

Sayid Tewfiq, the Shia tribal leader from Tal Afar, resplendent in his flowing robes, admitted: "I would not last 24 hours in Tal Afar without Coalition [US] support." "That's probably about right," confirmed Mr Goran, explaining that Sayid Tewfiq's Shia Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes. Earlier I had heard him confidently invite all of Nineveh provincial council to visit him in Tal Afar. Nobody looked enthusiastic about taking him up on the offer.

"He may have 3,000 fighters from his tribe but he can't visit most of Tal Afar himself," said another member of the council, Mohammed Suleiman, as he declined the invitation. A few hours before somebody tried to assassinate him, Governor Kashmula claimed to me that "security in Mosul is the best in Iraq outside the Kurdish provinces".

It is a measure of the violence in Iraq that it is an arguable point. Khasro Goran said: "The situation is not perfect but it is better than Anbar, Baquba and Diyala." I could vouch for this. In Iraq however bad things are there is always somewhere worse.

It is obviously very difficult for reporters to discover what is happening in Iraq's most violent provinces without being killed themselves. But, at the end of September, I travelled south along the Iraqi side of the border with Iran, sticking to Kurdish villages to try to reach Diyala, a mixed Sunni-Shia province north-east of Baghdad where there had been savage fighting. It is a road on which a wrong turning could be fatal.

We drove from Sulaimaniyah through the mountains, passed through the Derbandikhan tunnel and then took the road that runs beside the Diyala river, its valley a vivid streak of lush green in the dun-coloured semi desert.

The area is a smuggler's paradise. At night, trucks drive through without lights, their drivers using night-vision goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are carrying - presumably weapons or drugs - and nobody has the temerity to ask.

We had been warned it was essential to turn left after the tumbledown Kurdish town of Kalar before reaching the mixed Arab-Kurdish village of Jalula. We crossed the river by a long and rickety bridge, parts of which had fallen into the swirling waters below, and soon arrived in the Kurdish stronghold of Khanaqin in Diyala province. If I had any thoughts about driving further towards Baghdad they were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of the yard of the local police headquarters, of the wreckage of a blue-and-white police vehicle torn apart by a bomb.

"Five policemen were killed in it when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah two months ago," a policeman told me. "Only their commander survived but his legs were amputated."

Officials in Khanaqin had no doubt about what is happening in their province. Lt Col Ahmed Nuri Hassan, the exhausted-looking commander of the federal police, said: "There is a sectarian civil war here and it is getting worse every day." The head of the local council estimated 100 people were being killed a week.

In Baquba, the provincial capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and Kurds. The army and police were divided along sectarian lines. The one Iraqi army division in Diyala was predominantly Shia and only arrested Sunni. On the day after I left, Sunni and Kurdish police officers fought a gun battle in Jalula, the village I had been warned not to enter. The fighting started when Kurdish police refused to accept a new Sunni Arab police chief and his followers. Here, in miniature, in Diyala it was possible to see Iraq breaking up. The province is ruled by its death squads. The police say at least 9,000 people had been murdered. It is difficult to see how Sunni and Shia in the province can ever live together again.

In much of Iraq, we long ago slipped down the rapids leading from crisis to catastrophe though it is only in the past six months that these dire facts have begun to be accepted abroad. For the first three years of the war, Republicans in the US regularly claimed the liberal media was ignoring signs of peace and progress. Some right-wingers even set up websites devoted to spreading the news of American achievements in this ruined land.

I remember a team from a US network news channel staying in my hotel in Baghdad complaining to me, as they buckled on their body armour and helmets, that they had been once again told by their bosses in New York, themselves under pressure from the White House, to "go and find some good news and report it."

...

An expert on the politics of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The most dangerous error in the Middle East today is to believe the Shia communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran." But that is exactly what the Prime Minister does believe.

The fact that the largest Shia militia in Iraq - the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr - is anti-Iranian and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored. Those misconceptions are important in terms of practical policy because they give support to the dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could only frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then all would come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon would inevitably fall into line.

...

The commander of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was almost fired for his trouble when he made the obvious point that "we should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem."

A series of opinion polls carried out by the US-based group WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end of September show why Gen. Dannatt is right and Mr Blair is wrong. The poll shows that 92 per cent of the Sunni and 62 per cent of the Shia - up from 41 per cent at the start of the year - approve of attacks on US-led forces. Only the Kurds support the occupation. Some 78 per cent of all Iraqis think the US military presence provokes more conflict than it prevents and 71 per cent want US-led forces out of Iraq within a year. The biggest and most menacing change this year is the growing hostility of Iraq's Shia to the American and British presence.

It used to be said that at least the foreign occupation prevented a civil war but, with 1,000 Iraqis being killed every week, it is now very clearly failing.

It was always true that in post-Saddam Iraq there was going to be friction between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds. But Iraqis were also forced to decide if they were for or against a foreign invader.

The Sunnis were always going to fight the occupation, the Kurds to welcome it and the Shia to co-operate for just so long as it served their interests. Patriotism and communal self-interest combined. Before 2003, a Sunni might see a Shia as the member of a different sect but once the war had started he started to see him as a traitor to his country.

Of course Messrs Bush and Blair argue there is no occupation. In June 2004, sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom Reign," wrote Mr Bush. But the reality of power remained firmly with the US and Britain. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said this month that he could not move a company of soldiers without seeking permission of the Coalition (the US and Britain). Officials in Mosul confirmed to me that they could not carry out a military operation without the agreement of US forces. There is a hidden history to the occupation of Iraq which helps explain why has proved such a disaster. In 1991, after the previous Gulf War, a crucial reason why President George HW Bush did not push on to Baghdad was that he feared the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be followed by elections that would be won by Shia parties sympathetic to Iran. No worse outcome of the war could be imagined in Washington. After the capture of Baghdad in 2003, the US faced the same dilemma. Many of the contortions of US policy in Iraq since then have been a covert attempt to avoid or dilute the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.

For more than a year, the astute US envoy in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, tried to conciliate the Sunni. He failed. Attacks on US forces are on the increase. Dead and wounded US soldiers now total almost 1,000 a month..

An Iraqi government will only have real legitimacy and freedom to operate when US and British troops have withdrawn. Washington and London have to accept that if Iraq is to survive at all it will be as a loose federation run by a Shia-Kurdish alliance because together they are 80 per cent of the population. But, thanks to the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the future of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations but on the battlefield.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn is published by Verso.

The toll of war

* US troops killed since invasion - 2,880

* UK troops killed - 126

* Iraqis who have died as result of invasion - 655,000

* Journalists killed - 77

* Daily attacks on coalition forces - 180

* Average number of US troops killed every day in October - 3.5

* Strength of insurgency - 30,000 nationwide

* Number of police - 180,000

* Trained judges - 740

* Percentage of Iraqi population that wants US forces to leave within 12 months - 71 per cent

* Hours of electricity per day in Baghdad in November - 8.6 (pre-war estimate 16-24 hours)

* Unemployment - 25-40 per cent

* Internet subscribers - 197,310 (pre-war 4,500)

* Population with access to clean drinking water - 9.7 million (12.9 million pre-war). Percentage of children suffering malnutrition - 33 per cent

To relate this back to the specific originating topic, a lot of this underscores the tension around the Bush/Maliki visit and Sadr's ultimatum. The Sadrist faction walking out of the Iraqi Parliament is a move that could be the culmination of a whole collection of enmities that have had three long, bloody years now to entrench themselves. It also gets at why I continue to argue that the situation is only made worse every moment our armed forces continue to operate in Iraq. Our presence is the single greatest polarizing element both between the Shia and Sunni factions and between the populace as a whole and any government which might hope to lay a claim to national legitimacy. To whatever extent our forces even can keep a the lid on the violence, it's the lid on a pressure cooker, guaranteeing that when the explosion finally comes, it'll be that much bigger.

[Tydeus]

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

The thing with the Great Man approach to politics is somehow there's always another Great Man right behind the last Great Man. Take out Saddam? Job well done!-Oh now what's this some guy named Zarqawi making a ruckus? Zarqawi dead? Hooray! Oh wait what's this now, who's this Sadr fellow we keep hearing about? 'Cutting the head off of the serpent' isn't the best strategy when you're trying to stop a tidal wave.

Yup. The Great Man theory is slightly more accurate and effective when people are fighting (physically or otherwise) over political ideology. Killing Kennedy, for instance, could have damn well determined to a large degree our involvement in Vietnam. But, when it's all about ethnic/religious conflict? Well, if you're going to try to solve the problem by killing individuals, then you're going to need to kill just about every single Iraqi.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

And speaking of Al-Sadr, I suspect Maliki's question to Bush will be "what's your plan for keeping me from getting shot in the back of the head by Moqtada al-Sadr?" followed up with "And let me assure you that I'm a lot less worried about Al Qaeda than the roving bands of Shia death squads that, by the by, constitute the larger part of what passes for my 'government's' military."

Yup.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

... On a tangental note, but what really gets me is the talk from McCain and such about how what we really need is twenty thousand more troops in Iraq. I mean completely setting aside the issue of where are you going to find twenty thousand more people to send to Iraq, what exactly is there that twenty thousand more troops are going to accomplish, that a hundred and twenty thousand previously have been unable to do?

Yup.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

I mean to be totally honest, I suspect the best you're going to do is increase numbers to the point where they pose enough of a threat that the Shia and Sunnis will stop shooting at each other long enough to shift their focus back to shooting at our guys. At this point opposition is so entrenched, you could probably put a million men under arms in that country, and accomplish nothing but forestalling the inevitable.

Whoa, there. A million men? That is a lot of men. I wouldn't be so sure that 1,000,000 soldiers wouldn't be able to do anything to remedy the situation. They could, for instance, guard oil pipelines/fields/refineries/whatever, in order to cut off oil-smuggling funds. They could replace the Shia death-squad that goes by the name "Iraqi Security Forces." They could hunt down every shipment of weapons that they can get intel on. They could devote soldiers to every report of kidnapping. They could force the Shia militias into out-and-out battle, and make examples of them (and Sadr), not to mention that disbanding them by force would disrupt lines of supply/funding, and would destroy what little organization Iraqis have left. They could make Iraq safe enough for non-military folks to come on in and start building a country.

Basically (to introduce into this thread a point from the NYPD thread), they could break the rules of Iraqi society. They could muster such an epic crackdown as to make ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq seem like college-football rivalries. Fifth -- you mention that a shitload of soldiers would be able to divert Shia and Sunni attention towards themselves. However, you say it as though this would be insignificant, even a detriment to progress in Iraq. In fact, it would be tremendously useful. It would mean that we had broken Iraq's rules -- left them in tatters, if even that.

See, you can't really create something new until you destroy the old. Think how art has progressed through the ages -- each truly new movement has been derided for breaking the established rules. The impressionists, the cubists, abstract artists, all derided, all forged a new art by breaking utterly with the old. The naturalists of the Renaissance (and onward for a century or three) notably, were not similarly derided. After all, they were really just reviving the Greek and Roman naturalistic style of art. There was precedent. Music has followed a similar path, as has literature. Think how much we would be missing if not for the invention of the novel! A break from stale treatises and epic verse, the directness and evocative power of the novel has given us innumerable cultural achievements.

Politics has also progressed in the same manner. From the ashes of the Roman Republic was born the Roman Empire. A phoenix cliché, I know, but so throughly true. Rome could not have survived without becoming an empire. It needed the unified rule, the direction, the abililty to act, quickly and decisively. Indeed, the decay of Rome may be viewed as an ignorance of the rules. Julius and Octavian established the rules, as the Imperator, and then Emperor, respectively.

Julius established an executive far more powerful than any consul that came before him. His Triumvirate was more aligned with the Tribunes and Dictators of the earlier years of the Republic. Notably, the Gracchi, followed by Sulla, eroded the Republic's foundations, essentially beginning the process of destruction, laying the road to empire with the stones of the Senate house. Anyway, Julius created the Triumvirate, establishing that as the order of things to come. He then established a means of contest when he defeated his fellow Triumvirs on the battle field, leaving only Julius as Imperator. Octavian followed in his footsteps, forming a Triumvirate of his own after the death of Julius. And like Julius, he defeated his fellow Triumvirs. But he then broke with the father of the empire by declaring Rome as such -- an empire. He established a new method of succession, by birth. And whereas Julius had established conquest as a cornerstone of the Empire, so Octavian added bureaucracy.

And after those two rule-breakers were gone, none truly followed in their footsteps, nor broke with them in a way that created something new. Tiberius was a natural bureaucrat, but did not acknowledge the roots of his Empire, which was founded in blood. He did not establish a new order of things -- he kept the legions, the generals, even pursued war when he absolutely had to, but refused to strike first blow and the final alike. He ignored Julius' rule. Gaius (Caligula) ignored the precedents of both Julius and Octavian, merely acting in the mad pursuit of immediate gratification and worldly pleasure. He was, by the rule of Julius, deposed. But Claudius was like Tiberius -- never a soldier. He was also far more inept than the plotting, secretive, diplomatic Tiberius. He ignored Julius' rule, and observed Octavian's only in the most rudimentary sense. Nero was like Gaius before him.

Finally, once again finding strength in the rules of Julius, Rome found a competant, effective emperor by way of civil war. And so that civil war kept the next two (Trajan and Hadrian) in line before it all decayed again. Diocletian revived the Empire from its deepest despair by dramatically restructuring it -- forging new rules as he broke old ones. Unfortunately, Constantine was not capable of following in such great footsteps. And so the Empire decayed as it became Christian -- a religion that was the antithesis of everything Julius and Octavian achieved.

Now that I've shown how destruction and creation are inextricably bound, I think I can with some confidence put forth the theory that only by a destruction of all things Iraqi may we ever remake it in our image. Again, to point to Rome, see what Julius did to Gaul. He broke them. He was such a threat that the normally warring tribes united against him, and he routed them, personally riding into battle with his 40,000 legionnaires against the barbarian horde, 300,000 strong. And after the initial conquest? They would have returned to their old ways, but Julius would not let them. He garrisoned legions in their home, and built edifices of Roman life among them. Aqueducts, roads, sewers, Senates, peace, stability, prosperity, hope, freedom. Yes, freedom. They may have been absorbed into an empire, but the Gauls, as individuals, were given so much more freedom to be, to do more than they ever could have before Rome. By the end of the first century A.D., Gauls were serving in Rome itself as Senators. They were no longer Gauls. They were Romans.

And so this is the only way that we could ever succeed in Iraq -- erase that suite of rules and laws that is collectively known as "Iraq" and replace it with the rules and laws of America. Is that the right thing to do? Well, probably not back when we first invaded, but now that we're there, and we've created a society in which there is ignorance of all but a few, bloody rules, we must destroy it. We've created a monster. We tore down what laws and rules Saddam gave to Iraq -- order, rule of law, tyranny, bureaucracy, stability, oppression. The problem is, we left all the ancient rules intact -- hatred, bigotry, tribalism, fanaticism, paranoia, revenge. We must finish what we started. Wipe the slate clean, and forge new rules for the Iraqis. And, well, 1,000,000 troops could probably do that.

[Fifthfiend]

...Without for now getting into a detailed response to the above, I'll just note that the bit about a million men was at least somewhat of a turn of rhetoric, and tentatively grant that yes, if you found a million trained soldiers somewhere that you could put in Iraq, properly equipped and under unified, competent leadership, you might possibly - though I do continue to emphasize that even this is something I would by no means take for granted - be able to make a difference for the better in Iraq. And as soon as anyone finds all of those things, I'll gladly take another look at the issue.

As for sending another twenty thousand, that's just some people trying to kid themselves real hard.

[Tydeus]

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

...Without for now getting into a detailed response to the above, I'll just note that the bit about a million men was at least somewhat of a turn of rhetoric, and tentatively grant that yes, if you found a million trained soldiers somewhere that you could put in Iraq, properly equipped and under unified, competent leadership, you might possibly - though I do continue to emphasize that even this is something I would by no means take for granted - be able to make a difference for the better in Iraq. And as soon as anyone finds all of those things, I'll gladly take another look at the issue.

Well, of course it wouldn't be guaranteed, because you can't ever guarantee anything that involves a nation's worth of people. As Machiavelli would say, you can only trust yourself. Making guarantees that depend upon others is foolhardy.

The problem with waiting to take another look at the issue is that that way, no one will ever find those things necessary to success. As an electorate, we have to demand that the government secure those tools which can possibly result in success. Of course, that would require a willingness to make sacrifices, because not only would we need a draft, but we'd need to be willing to accept lots of American casualties, becuase our troops would need to be a great deal more active and out-going while occupying Iraq. So, yeah, it'll never happen. Iraq is fucked. It doesn't have to be that way, but it will be that way, mainly because the American people are by-and-large pathetic, coddled barbarians and have lost sight of anything but themselves.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

As for sending another twenty thousand, that's just some people trying to kid themselves real hard.

Yeah.

[Fifthfiend]

1. A warning:

the American people are by-and-large pathetic, coddled barbarians and have lost sight of anything but themselves.

I mean this is a pretty clear-cut one, it's not okay to write off three hundred million people as pathetic coddled barbarian narcissists. Yes you said "by-and-large," no that still doesn't make it okay.

Just so that's said.

2. Responding to your earlier argument re. the breaking of nations - Roman antiquity seems a frightfully poor comparison to modern-day Iraq. If you want to talk about peoples being broken, well, the nations of Western Europe went to some lengths to break the people of Africa. The legacy of that has been about a hundred years of warfare and genocide. The Soviet Union tried to break Afghanistan, how did that work out? With the Soviet Union breaking itself, with the side benefit of paving the way for Afghanistan's entrenched radical theocratic regime. The British took some pains to break the people of India, the result there rebellion, religious partition and fifty years of warfare over Kashmir. Speaking of the British, I can think of one sleepy little Middle Eastern nation they spent thirty or so years trying to break, now remind me, how exactly did that one work out for everybody?

Whatever the power of revolutionary movements generated from within a society or the imperatives of conquest for empires of old, in the modern world there are hard limits on the capability of any external entity to impose its will on an independent nation-state in anything like a beneficient capacity. An occupying army won't be able to 'break' ethnic/religious tensions in Iraq because the uniform effect of armed occupation is to exacerbate and entrench such divisions.

[Tydeus]

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

1. A warning:
I mean this is a pretty clear-cut one, it's not okay to write off three hundred million people as pathetic coddled barbarian narcissists. Yes you said "by-and-large," no that still doesn't make it okay.

Hmmmmm...how can I backtrack out of this one? :P Uhhh...got it! OK, so, when I said "pathetic," I actually meant that in terms of pathos, as in they are consumed with feelings, and not rational thought. Yeah, that's it.

Seriously, though, I apologize.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

2. Responding to your earlier argument re. the breaking of nations: [snip] If you want to talk about peoples being broken, well, the nations of Western Europe went to some lengths to break the people of Africa. The legacy of that has been about a hundred years of warfare and genocide.

Well, again, I was using "break" in a specialized way, which I think I went to some trouble to define, but I will explain how that pertains to the colonial rape of Africa, and how such abuse was not in fact a true iteration of destruction/creation.

First of all, the goals of the Romans, and at least our (America's) publicly-stated goals in Iraq are very similar -- make them like us. Don't rape their country for resources and slaves, or treat them like cattle, but rather enlighten them, bring them out of their religious and ethnic divisions, and replace their old value sets with new ones, specifically, ours. This is what the Romans did to Gaul. See, the Romans conquered only in part for plunder -- just as big a motivator, if not a far greater one (considering how the Gauls had previously sacked Rome, a couple centuries prior to Caesar) was safety. They were afraid of the Gauls, reasonably or not. They wanted safer borders, and they wanted to permanently eliminate a hostile nation. How do can you ever possibly do that? Make them your own. If you can beat them, make them join you. Rome invested a tremendous amount of blood and gold in Gaul, without any immediate net monetary return, and the people of Gaul benefited accordingly. They were given running water, sewers, roads, peace, stability, etc. (I already listed all this in my last post, I think). The Romans invested money and human life to improve the quality of life for the Gauls, and, by way of more Roman citizens (and therefore more soldiers), safer borders, and a greater tax pool, it improved the Roman quality of life as well, but only in the long run. Romans didn't see any benefits really for at least a good 30 years. It really took about 50 before Gaul became totally Romanized. Also, whereas Romans were settling like crazy in Gaul, most African countries didn't get settled by Europeans. South Africa is pretty much the only exception, but even in that case, the emigrating whites were coming to South Africa to become a permanent oppressor class, whereas Romans who settled in Gaul were generally more salt-of-the-earth kind of people. Ex-soldiers, mostly, living off of their pensions on beautiful, fertile farmland in what today is Provence. Not a bad deal, actually. Anyway, the Romans brought their culture, their gods, their politics with them, and tried to bring Gauls into the fold, tried to make the Gauls equals. It was completely and utterly different from European colonialism. It would be more analagous to France or Britain going to Africa and conquering what little military resistance cropped up, and then saying: "OK, so, we're going to modernize the crap out of your ass-backwards country [I'm not saying they were ass-backwards, but I'm trying to replicate the somewhat arrogant attitude of the Romans], until you people are educated enough, and invested enough in our culture to be our fellow citizens, with all the rights and freedoms and priviliges and comforts that that status entails. You know, like, indoor plumbing, and no more microscopic worm larvae in your water that grow to three feet or longer in your body before popping out of festering sores."

But, that's not what the Europeans did. If you'll remember, my definition of "breaking" required that something be created afterwards. The problem with the European atrocities of colonialism is that they never created anything. They just ignored all the rules of the societies they conquered. Ignored, because they never set up any new rules to take the place of those they ignored. Yes, they had laws, and yes, people got punished for ignoring laws and rules that the Europeans instituted, but I mean at a deeper, cultural level, Europeans did not create. They merely corrupted, cheated, starved, and left the cultures they conquered to twist in the wind. Rome conquered African nations, too. Only, when they did it, they made them Romans. The result was prosperity and stability. Do you see the distinction I'm trying to make here?

It's not some quirk of the modern world that conquest must always turn out this way -- it's just a matter of the conquerors' goals. Do you want to rape a people and their land for plunder, and nothing else? Well, then it's not going to turn out well for either of you in the long run. Do you want to change their very way of life, bring them a new, more enlightened, more powerful, more progessive culture that, say, doesn't endorse genocide or genital mutilation (well, the Romans didn't endorse genocide anyway. We're kind of more lax about it than they were. Honestly, the Romans were, in some ways (not all! obviously not all!), far more humane than modern nations today. They didn't stand for that kind of bullshit.)? Well, then things will turn out well for both of you, in the long run.

All the Europeans did was break down the preexisting power structures of the nations they conquered. They didn't endeavor to really make the conquered peoples citizens of the empire -- merely tools, resources. The result was nothing held back the savagery that every culture buries beneath its laws and customs. So, when the Europeans left, and took their imposed laws with them (that's another thing -- the Europeans did create some laws, in a technical sense, but they were always the Europeans' laws, and never became the laws of Africa. By contrast, Roman laws became the laws of Gauls. The Gauls appreciated the laws, enforced them, valued them, even edited them and added to them.), there was nothing left to stop the despair of every-man-for-himself that every culture attempts to quell. Indeed, the whole idea of culture itself is to prevent the Hobbesian nightmare from becoming reality.

Gauls, after a half-century, were fit to be called Roman. And so they were. They were Romans. We still consider them part of the Roman empire, Roman citizens to this day. We refer to them as Gauls to be ethnically specific, but they were Roman, in a cultural, legal, and spiritual sense. Of course we would never call Algerians "French." And that, fifth, is where Europe went so terribly wrong, and broke only one thing -- the hope of a continent.

The whole point of my Roman lectures is to provide Rome as the counter-example to such murderous European imperialism. No, colonialsim -- it isn't even fit to bear the name "imperial," which comes from a nation and template so completely antithetical to European atrocities.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

The Soviet Union tried to break Afghanistan, how did that work out? With the Soviet Union breaking itself, with the side benefit of paving the way for Afghanistan's entrenched radical theocratic regime. The British took some pains to break the people of India, the result there rebellion, religious partition and fifty years of warfare over Kashmir. Speaking of the British, I can think of one sleepy little Middle Eastern nation they spent thirty or so years trying to break, now remind me, how exactly did that one work out for everybody?

Again, I would say that none of this was truly "breaking" nations. Since there was nothing to replace the broken rules, it cannot be considered true destruction. If you kill off crabgrass, but don't make your lawn healthy and full in order to monopolize any resources that crabgrass might otherwise find to subsist on, then the crabgrass will merely come back. All true destruction is performed as the prologue to creation. Otherwise it's just ignorant and self-serving.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

Whatever the power of revolutionary movements generated from within a society or the imperatives of conquest for empires of old, in the modern world there are hard limits on the capability of any external entity to impose its will on an independent nation-state in anything like a beneficient capacity. An occupying army won't be able to 'break' ethnic/religious tensions in Iraq because the uniform effect of armed occupation is to exacerbate and entrench such divisions.

This I addressed above, also. Basically, yeah, that's the way it turned out, but that's becuase of the motives for conquest. Europe's were heinous, and self-serving. Rome's were self-serving, but served all of humanity at the same time; after all, Rome's goal was to become synonymous with "humanity." That, to me, is a great goal.