The Myth of the Surge (Rolling Stone) & Five Years Later (Foreign Policy In Focus)

[G_j]

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18722376/the_myth_of_the_surge

The Myth of the Surge

Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq

NIR ROSEN - Rolling Stone

Posted Mar 06, 2008 8:53 AM

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs. The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama's, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

"The Mahdi Army was killing people here," Osama says, pointing to a now-destroyed Shiite mosque that in earlier times had been a cafe and before that an office for Saddam's Baath Party. Later, driving in the nearby district of Baya, Osama shows me a gas station. "They killed my uncle here. He didn't accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him." Under siege by Shiite militias and the U.S. military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance. Others turned to Al Qaeda and other jihadists for protection.

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

~~much, much more~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5071

Five Years Later

Emily Schwartz Greco | March 14, 2008

Editor: Erik Leaver

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

As the Iraq War enters its tragic sixth year, it's becoming hard to imagine a time when the United States won't be entrenched in this quagmire any more. In fact, John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, says "it's fine" with him if the U.S. military remained in Iraq for a century. Really? How did we get so deeply into this mess?

Back in 2002 and 2003, the mainstream media wasn’t fully united behind the initial invasion. However, the nation’s editorial boards leaned toward military action, even if many of them lamented how the diplomatic circumstances prevailing in the middle of March 2003 weren't ideal. Overall, influential U.S. pundits failed to express the kind of universal disapproval of the fateful invasion that might have discouraged the Bush administration from moving forward with this boondoggle.

Foreign Policy In Focus predicted this war would be a colossal disaster before it began. We knew that Iraq's reconstruction and democracy-building would fail, before President George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished." We knew this military operation would make the United States and the rest of the world less safe.

Here's a summary of some of our analysis published on our site and elsewhere when the invasion was looming and soon afterward. We've juxtaposed these comments with quotes from more mainstream analysts, as well as newspaper editorials.

Read. Reflect. Do what you can to end the Iraq War.
....more.....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Supersedeas]

1. thanks for the links - k&r

[G_j]

2. Kick