The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has not publicly opposed the American troop increase, but aides to Mr. Maliki have been saying for weeks that the government is wary of the proposal. They fear that an increased American troop presence, particularly in Baghdad, will be accompanied by a more assertive American role that will conflict with the Shiite government’s haste to cut back on American authority and run the war the way it wants. American troops, Shiite leaders say, should stay out of Shiite neighborhoods and focus on fighting Sunni insurgents.
“The government believes there is no need for extra troops from the American side,” Haidar al-Abadi, a Parliament member and close associate of Mr. Maliki, said Wednesday. “The existing troops can do the job.”
It is an opinion that is broadly held among a Shiite political elite that is increasingly impatient, after nearly two years heading the government here, to exercise power without the constraining supervision of the United States. As a long-oppressed majority, the Shiites have a deep-seated fear that the power they won at the polls, after centuries of subjugation by the Sunni minority, will be progressively whittled away as the Americans seek deals with the Sunnis that will help bring American troops home.
These misgivings are broadly shared by Shiite leaders in the government, including some whom Mr. Bush has courted recently in a United States effort to form a bloc of politicians from the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that can break Mr. Maliki’s political dependence on the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He leads the Mahdi Army, the most powerful of the Shiite militias that are at the heart of sectarian violence in Iraq.
Now, let me see if I have this straight: The Bush Administration is clinging to its little fantasy of a unity government in which Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd sit together and sing Kumbaya together, while he send additional troops to prop up a Shiite prime minister who is allied with and dependent on the very Shiite religious leader who also heads the militias that American troops are fighting. In other words, Nouri al-Maliki is Moqtada al-Sadr's bitch -- and we are sending MORE troops to fight al-Sadr's guys. Is that about the sum of it? Jesus H. Christ, Bush might as well just take 20,000 more troops and line them up and shoot them himself; at least it would be faster.
Steve Gilliard weighs in:
Bush's plan is a fantasy, a dangerous one which also provokes Iran to no good purpose.
1) While the Iraqis made a lot of promises and big talk, remember ONE thing. Moqtada Sadr hung Saddam Hussein. Not the government, and they had to go along. So any threat from Maliki should be taken as a threat from Kerensky to tell Lenin that Trotsky needs to control the Bolsheviks
2) Sadr has already manuvered his way past Washington's coup and had brutally demonstrated his power
3) There is no effective Iraqi government to impliment any program. No matter how much money you give to them, they will either steal it or not use it.
4) While Maliki talks unity government, his plan for securing Baghdad basically means attacking Sunni neighborhoods.
5) Sadr fully expects a surge. Fully. According to NPR, he's handing out grenades to every home and drafting every swinging dick between 15 and 45.
People think Bush can flatten Sadr City with airstrikes like they did Fallujah, but that is impossible. People fled Fallujah and turned it into a battleground. So you had minimal risks of killing whole blocks of people. The US could also surround Fallujah.
Sadr City is a whole different story.
Sadr can not only tie down US forces in Sadr City, his supporters and their criminal allies can cut the supply lines to Baghdad. US air power is extremely limited and could be counter productive. The people of Sadr City have no place to go. They will defend their homes. If you turn some of them into rubble, you repeat the mistake the Israelis made last year.
The constant talk of the Iraqi Army joining in this may be the winter's most brutal surprise. If they don't defect, they may not show up. This is a plan of bailing wire and duct tape. Bush gave a speech which should have scared the crap out of people, and I think did. The pundits, unarmed, treat this plan seriously, and mention increased casualities.
What they aren't telling you is that if the US gets sucked into urban combat with both the Shia and Sunni, we will have a disaster on our hands. Not only more dead and wounded, but US forces hampered by the supply line attacks and the desertion of the Iraqi Army.
Odierno and Petraeus take the Iraqis at their word. They are fools.
We will not get the Iraqi support promised. And Americans will die because of that.
Anyone who is tempted to think that this represents a genuinely workable plan, a sea change in Bush Administration thinking, should remember that a year ago, Bush announced what he called a "Strategy for Victory in Iraq:
Speaking to the midshipmen at the Naval Academy in late November 2005, the president declared in a confident tone, "Coalition and Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy, cleaning out areas controlled by the terrorists and Saddam loyalists, leaving Iraqi forces to hold territory taken from the enemy, and following up with targeted reconstruction to help Iraqis rebuild their lives."
As a portrait of reality, that ranks up there with "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Suffice it to say that a limited number -- a very limited number -- of Iraqis have been able to rebuild their lives. Bush himself said Wednesday night with uncharacteristic albeit belated honesty, "The violence in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made."
And Juan Cole is just as scathing:
To listen to Bush's speech on Wednesday, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied large swathes of Iraq with the help of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That the president of the United States can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is shameful.
The answer to "al-Qaeda's" occupation of neighborhoods in Baghdad and the cities of al-Anbar is then, Bush says, to send in more US troops to "clear and hold" these neighborhoods.
But is that really the big problem in Iraq? Bush is thinking in terms of a conventional war, where armies fight to hold territory. But if a nimble guerrilla group can come out at night and set off a bomb at the base of a large tenement building in a Shiite neighborhood, they can keep the sectarian civil war going. They work by provoking reprisals. They like to hold territory if they can. But as we saw with Fallujah and Tal Afar, if they cannot they just scatter and blow things up elsewhere.
And the main problem is not "al-Qaeda," which is small and probably not that important, and anyway is not really Bin Laden's al-Qaeda. They are just Salafi jihadis who appropriated the name. When their leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed, it didn't cause the insurgency to miss a beat. Conclusion: "al-Qaeda" is not central to the struggle. Izzat Ibrahim Duri and the Baath Party are probably the center of gravity of the resistance.
Bush admitted that the Sunni guerrilla destruction of the Askariyah (Golden Dome) shrine at Samarra set off an orgy of sectarian reprisals. But he does not seem to have actually absorbed the lesson here. The guerrillas did not have to hold territory in order to carry out that bombing. They just had to be able to sneak into a poorly guarded old building that Bush did not even know about and blow it up. The symbolic and psychic damage that they did to the Shiites was profound. Blowing up hundreds of worshippers on Ashura had not had nearly this impact, since the damaged shrine was dedicated to the hidden Twelfth Imam or Mahdi, the Shiite promised one. Many religious Shiites in Iraq are now millenarians, desperately waiting for the Promised One to reveal himself and restore the world to justice. The guerrillas hit the symbol of that hope.
[snip]
Bush could not help taking swipes at Iran and Syria. But the geography of his deployments gives the lie to his singling them out as mischief makers. Why send 4,000 extra troops to al-Anbar province? Why ignore Diyala Province near Iran, which is in flames, or Babel Province southwest of Baghdad? Diyala borders Iran, so isn't that the threat? But wait. Where is al-Anbar? Between Jordan and Baghdad. In other words, al-Anbar opens out into the vast Sunni Arab hinterland that supports the guerrilla movement with money and volunteers, coming in from Jordan. If Syria was the big problem, you would put the extra 4,000 troops up north along the border. If Iran was the big problem, you'd occupy Diyala. But little Jordan is an ally of the US, and Bush would not want to insult it by admitting that it is a major infiltration root for jihadis heading to Iraq.
[snip]
This strategy may have some successes here and there. It won't win the day, and I'd be surprised if it did not collapse by the end of the summer.
This plan is the same One Percent Doctrine that Dick Cheney and the neocons used to justify this war in the first place -- that if something, in this case the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has a one percent chance of being true, you proceed as if it were 100% true and verified -- in other words, if it has "truthiness"®, you run with it. In this case, if escalating our presence in this sectarian civil war has a one percent chance of being successful, you proceed, because not doing anything, or complete withdrawal, has a zero percent chance of being successful, and then the country collapses when we leave. The problem is that the country is going to collapse whether we leave today or we leave tomorrow.
Now, if you want to talk about instituting a military draft, rescinding the tax cuts, rationing gasoline and sending an additional 150,000 troops, then maybe we can talk about making a last push to salvage something about the biggest fuckup in George W. Bush's lifetime of fuckups. But sending another 20,000 troops like the soldier Mike Lupica mentioned yesterday who are already exhausted from previous tours, not only cannot be effective, but arguably constitutes a commander-in-chief committing genocide against his own military.
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