Okay, so it’s a big deal for cable news that Jay Leno — at this very moment! — is testifying for Michael Jackson’s defense, but eight U.S. soldiers have been killed in the last 24 hours, along with over 50 Iraqis (130 wounded), and the A.P. reports that 20 prominent Iraqis have been assassinated in the past month.
Meanwhile, Tom Engelhardt berates the return of the “body count” as a “shorthand way of measuring success” and Knight-Ridder reports that the U.S.’s Operation Squeeze Play in Baghdad is (my words) a PR disaster … below:
From Knight-Ridder, “Troops round up suspected insurgents” — this is an exceptional article that is worth reading in its entirety:
Bystanders were also apparently caught up in the dragnet, however. Some Iraqis said that while Operation Squeeze Play took some insurgents off the streets, it’s also likely to fuel the same cycle that has hounded the American presence for two years: angering moderate Iraqis while giving insurgents a friendlier environment in which to carry out attacks.
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Raad Mutlek, a Sunni Muslim, was sitting in a candy shop in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib neighborhood on Monday. He was filling in for the shop’s owner, his cousin, who was detained the day before during Operation Squeeze Play.
“They came here and detained people randomly,” Mutlek said. “The families of the innocent people who have been detained will seek revenge.”
Mutlek’s brother, Yass, who had been listening to the conversation, stood up and walked out to stretch his legs. An Apache helicopter was circling overhead. A moment later, he hustled back in.
“Look,” he said, nodding toward the street, “the Americans are coming back.”
He paused and then hurried off, looking for a safe place.
“One Shiite politician,” reports KR, “warned that the raids could lead to more problems”:
However, KR reports, “[t]he U.S. military said the raids accomplished their mission.”
“Iraqi army, Iraqi police and coalition forces are continuing to meet with good success in operations designed to cripple and defeat terrorism,” said Sgt. 1st Class David Abrams, a spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division, which played a major role in Squeeze Play. “A good part of that success comes from the cooperation of the Iraqi people, who have been providing valuable information which leads us to terrorist activity in their neighborhoods.”
The numbers, KR notes, tell a different story:
Many U.S. military officials in Iraq expect the fight to drag on for years.
“It’s far from over,” said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq.
Much of the early rhetoric by U.S. officials in Iraq about defeating the insurgency has been replaced by the Bush administration’s goal of training Iraqi forces to carry on the fight so that U.S. forces can withdraw. Operation Squeeze Play was the largest joint Iraq-American effort in the capital to date.
“Modern-day insurgencies last about nine years,” said the senior military official, who cited restrictions on military personnel talking to the press as his reason for insisting on anonymity. “I hope we’re not here for nine years.”
“The fight is intractable in part because the U.S. military has used force and not diplomacy,” KR quotes Abdul Ahmed, a political science analyst at Baghdad University, as saying in an interview highly critical of the overwhelming emphasis on military might in Iraq.
“It’s very easy to use your machine guns … but it is very difficult to pursue a political solution,” he said. “They should take some time to go to Ramadi, to Mosul, to find a peaceful way because violence only pushes the people away from you. … The United States negotiates with North Korea. Why can’t it negotiate with the Iraqi insurgency?”
Had the Americans taken a softer approach, said al Ameri, the Shiite politician, perhaps loyalists to former dictator Saddam Hussein would have had a harder time operating and Iraq wouldn’t have become such a magnet for foreign Sunni jihadists.