How Lost the War Is

[marmar]

from the NY Review of Books and TomDispatch, via AlterNet:


How Lost the War Is

By Peter Galbraith, The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch. Posted July 19, 2007.



Neither the President nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.





1.

On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now achieved: with the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq's eighteen provinces.

In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.

Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgement that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in Ripley's Believe it or Not.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While General Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, Mowaffak al-Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds -- approximately six million people, or some 20% of Iraq's population -- to chart their own course.

On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.

Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by it does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies -- usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/57286/

[bemildred]

1. Excellent piece. nt

[Rydz777]

2. Yes, an excellent piece. The sham of turning Kurdistan over to

"the Iraqi government" in a ceremony without flags is just one more example of the length to which the Bush regime goes in painting a delusional picture of what is going on. Then, after constant repetition, they may begin to believe their own lies. Out NOW.

[marmar]

3. "they may begin to believe their own lies"

I absolutely think that's the case. Repeat a lie long enough, and eventually even the liar starts to believe it.

[Jim__]

4. To even begin to understand the hatred between these factions ...

is to begin to understand the difficulties involved in trying to get a peaceful solution.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Moqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.

People with that type of history can only come together because they decide that the fighting and the hatred is no longer possible. No one can tell them to "get over it."

Bush is a fucking fool.

[JPZenger]

5. NPR: US Troops Seeing a New Type of Opponent

NPR had an interesting story this morning about Iraq. A company of US soldiers was occupying an outlying area of Iraq. They were hit by expert sniper fire and extremely high powered explosives that blew apart a heavily armored vehicle. Then the US turned the site over to 60 Iraqi police. As soon as the US troops left, well-trained squads wearing black and with their faces covered killed almost all of the Iraqi police.

The US troops said they had not seen this situation before - where the insurgents were operating like a well-trained military force, operating in coordinated squads.