Michael Schwartz has periodically produced assessments of the occupation of Iraq for TomDispatch. It is now a month since Bush gave his speech announcing the “new” “surge” strategy, and the escalation was actually initiated the day before, in an offensive on Baghdad’s Haifa Street. So it is already possible to assess the results of the surge policy, and Schwartz does that in a new piece.
The results are the same as they were with earlier offensives: an increase in sectarian violence, as militias are prevented from policing areas under their control; and residents fleeing their neighborhoods. Only now there are two new developments: heavier use of air power, and the Shia-dominated Iraq army ethnically cleansing Sunnis from Sunni neighborhoods.
Baghdad Surges into Hell: First Results from the President’s Offensive
Even before the Americans arrived on Haifa Street in January as the vanguard of the new Bush strategy to pacify Baghdad, previous experience strongly suggested that the effort was doomed to failure. A month later, that expectation has certainly been fulfilled.
Unfortunately, there are some genuinely new, grim elements to the battle for Haifa Street; elements that threaten to make the coming Baghdad-wide “surge” dramatically more damaging than its predecessors. To begin with, there is the far greater application of American airpower; bombing runs and high caliber assaults from helicopter gunships have dramatically increased the death and destructiveness of the still ongoing battle, rendering much of Haifa Street an unlivable graveyard.
Added to this is the systematic and largely successful effort of the Sunni jihadists to expel the Shia minority from the area, an effort triggered by the initial American incursions. And then, overlaid on top of the cleansing of the Shia minority, came the contrary cleansing of the Sunni majority; engineered by the Iraqi military that arrived in the neighborhood with the Americans, and conducted their own purge with the support or acquiescence of the U.S. military.
The Haifa Street battle sadly shows that Bush’s new strategy will measurably increase the violence in Baghdad above already intolerable levels. With more troops at their disposal, American generals will try to pacify many more neighborhoods like Haifa Street and cities like Tal Afar that need “to be brought back under Iraqi security control.” And when they do this, they will bring the same mix of horror that they brought to Haifa Street, including brutal air power, house-to-house searches and fighting, sectarian violence, massive dislocation, and ethnic cleansing.
Like the other campaigns initiated by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, this new strategy will make things measurably worse.
In the poll below, note that I do not include the question of whether Dems will be able to stop the surge. The surge has already started, even if troop levels are increasing slowly.