from TomDispatch.com, via Truthout:
A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower
By Patrick Cockburn
TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 08 May 2007
What the Bush Administration has wrought in Iraq. At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting which was featured on Kurdish television.
In the event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad. The Kurdish leaders were understandably furious asking why, without a word to them, their close allies, the Americans, had tried to abduct two important foreign officials who were in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi president. Kurdish troops had almost opened fire on the American troops. At the very least, the raid showed a contempt for Iraqi sovereignty which the U.S. was supposedly defending. It was three months before officials in Washington admitted that they had tried and failed to capture Jafari and General Frouzanda. The U.S. State Department and Iraqi government argued for the release of the five officials as relative minnows, but Vice-President Cheney's office insisted fiercely that they should be held.
If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war. In the event, the US assault on Arbil attracted bemused attention inside and outside Iraq for only a few days before it was buried by news of the torrent of violence in the rest of Iraq. The U.S. understandably did not reveal the seniority of its real targets - or that they had escaped.
Multiplying Enemies The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war - such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 - that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.
The true importance of Bush's words took time to sink in. In the months prior to his speech, the U.S. seemed to be feeling its way towards an end to the war. The Republicans had lost control of both houses of Congress in the November 2006 elections, an unexpectedly heavy defeat blamed on the Iraq war. Soon afterwards, the bipartisan Iraqi Study Group of senior Republicans and Democrats, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, spelled out the extent of American failure thus far, arguing for a reduced U.S. military commitment and suggesting negotiations with Iran and Syria.
...(snip)...
A Security Plan Lacking Security I was in Baghdad soon after Bush had spoken. I had never known it to be so bad. My driver had to take a serpentine route from the airport, driving along the main highway, then suddenly doing a U-turn to dart down an alleyway. He was trying to avoid checkpoints that might be manned by Police Commandos in their mottled uniforms who often acted as Shia death squads. The journey to the al-Hamra Hotel in Jadriyah, a district built in a loop of the Tigris river, took three times as long as normal. In the following days, I could see Mehdi Army checkpoints, civilians with guns and a car slewed across the road, operating almost within sight of the heavily guarded July 14 Bridge that leads to the Green Zone.
The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled - even in the heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army, supported by Iraqi army troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who ruled it.
Sometimes, U.S. commanders persuaded themselves (and embedded journalists) that they were making progress. On this occasion, I looked up and read a long, optimistic article about Haifa Street in an American paper, claiming there were signs that "the tide was turning on Iraq's street of fear." It was no longer an arrow pointing at the heart of the Green Zone; rebel leaders had been arrested or killed; large weapons caches had been discovered; insurgent attacks were less intense and less frequent; Iraqi troops were at last being effectively deployed. Having finished reading the piece, I was reflecting on whether or not the U.S. military and its local allies were at last achieving something on Haifa Street when I glanced at the piece and realized, with a groan, that it was dated March 2005, almost two years earlier.
...(snip)...
The war in Iraq that started in 2003 has now lasted longer than the First World War. Militarily, the conflicts could not be more different. The scale of the fighting in Iraq is far below anything seen in 1914-18, but the political significance of the Iraq war has been enormous. America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.
At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.
The U.S. occupation has destabilized Iraq and the Middle East. Stability will not return until the occupation has ended. The Iraqi government, penned into the Green Zone, has become tainted in the eyes of Iraqis by reliance on a foreign power. Even when it tries to be independent, it seldom escapes the culture of dependency in which its members live. Much of what has gone wrong has more to do with the U.S. than Iraq. The weaknesses of its government and army have been exposed. Iraq has joined the list of small wars - as France found in Algeria in the 1950s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s - that inflict extraordinary damage on their occupiers. ....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050907E.shtml 
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