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(The Independent) Aug. 7 – It was supposed to mark a decisive new phase in America’s military campaign, but six months after George Bush sent in 20,000 extra troops, Iraq is more chaotic and dangerous than ever. In a special despatch, Patrick Cockburn reports on the bloody failure of ‘the surge’
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US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda, even as the ground is giving way beneath their feet. In Baquba, a provincial capital north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders praised their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link. Chiding media critics for their pessimism, the generals claimed: “The situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people.” Within hours Sunni insurgents, possibly irked by these self-congratulatory words, stormed Baquba, kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.
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There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator’s assertions.
When Vice-President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America.
“The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by the Baath disappearing, but it is unsuccessful,” says Ahmed Chalabi, out of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq. ” Now the Americans and British want to disengage, but if they do so the worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass: Shia control and strong Iranian influence in Iraq.”
The real death toll
More lies have been told about casualties in Iraq and the general level of violence there than at almost any time since the First World War. In that conflict, a British minister remarked sourly that he suspected the military authorities of keeping three sets of casualty figures: “One to deceive the Cabinet, a second to deceive the people and a third to achieve themselves.”
The Iraqi government has sought to conceal civilian casualty figures by banning journalists from the scenes of bombings, and banned hospitals and the Health Ministry from giving information. In July, AP reported, 2,024 Iraqis died violently, a 23 per cent rise on June, which was the last month for which the government gave a figure.
This is almost certainly an underestimate. In a single bombing in the district of Karada in Baghdad on 26 July, Iraqi television and Western media cited the police as saying that there were 25 dead and 100 wounded. A week later, a list of the names of 92 dead and 127 wounded, compiled by municipal workers, was pinned up on shuttered shopfronts in the area.
The US military began the war by saying that it was not keeping count of Iraqi civilians killed by its troops. It often describes bodies found after a US raid as belonging to insurgents when the local Iraqi police say they are civilians killed by the immense firepower deployed by the American forces. Almost the only time a real investigation of such killings is carried out is when the local staff of Western media outlets are among the dead.
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August 2 – The quotation in the Financial Times attributed to Danielle Pletka, the Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), was a stunner. “If we …begin to sanction foreign companies through more stringent sanctions in the Iran Sanctions Act, I think there will be serious repercussions for our multilateral effort.”
Whatever would possess AEI and Pletka, who personally has been one of the most prominent and enthusiastic cheerleaders of the rapidly spreading state divestment movement against companies doing business in Iran, to offer a cautionary note about adopting unilateral sanctions, let alone stress the importance of preserving multilateral unity with limp-wristed European allies in dealing with a charter member of the “Axis of Evil”? Judging from its provenance at what must be considered Neo-Con Central, it certainly couldn’t be common sense.
In fact, Pletka’s observation probably reflects growing tensions between AEI’s corporate contributors, many of whom are represented on its board of trustees, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hard-line neo-conservative views of its foreign-policy fellows, such as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Joshua Muravchik, and Pletka herself; academic advisers, such as Gertrude Himmelfarb, Eliot Cohen and Jeremy Rabkin; and its board chairman Bruce Kovner.
As one of the four co-founders of the AEI’s twin, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in September, 1962, my experience suggests that the apparent conflict between the funders and the funded at AEI reflects in part the difference between the dollar bottom line of the funders and the ideological bottom line of AEI’s professional foreign policy geeks. The funders are tacticians, whereas the funded view themselves as strategists with a different time frame. In fact, perhaps without knowing it, the corporate funders may have a sounder strategy for the future of civilization.
The blindness of both those who fund the NeoCons and those NeoCons who are funded is evident in the current rage of the oil industry executives over the nearly unanimnous support by Iraqi politicians of the current “stalling” in approving the future ownership of Iraqi oil.
The question is, whether the meltdown of Iraqi society and economic inrastructure can be a precursor of paradigmatic revolution, as suggested in my recent article in The American Muslim.
From a really long-range global perspective of what is in the enlightened interests of America, the latest good news in the Iraq oil imbroglio is the growing Iraqi insistence that the law on sharing revenues among Iraqis must come before the broader law on sharing revenues with foreigners.
Info Robert D. Crane
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Following orders of the White House to send trained soldiers into war instead of a mission to secure peace always leads to atrocities. In Vietnam the troops fought a guerilla in the jungle and rural areas, in Iraq the military leaders knew they would fight a guerilla in Baghdad and large civilian areas. Yet Bush and Cheney with no military service themselves, have no empathy or regard for human live of the US men and woman called to arms, nor the innocent Iraqi civilians caught in OUR PROCLAIMED WAR.
With the number of innocent deaths in Iraq due to the allied occupation, Abu Ghraib et al., not many if any of our soldiers should be called a hero. The German leaders responsible for atrocities during WWII were held to account at the Nuremberg trials. Bush and Cheney set aside the rules and Geneva conventions in order to have torture and these atrocities performed on a large scale IN OUR NAME, the American people, who democratically elected Congress and the President. Yet impeachment is off the table because Congress by and large bears the same responsibility. The Iraq war is a dead end street and in historical terms will be the end of America: the Land of the Free as many of our fellow citizens of the world see it.
Iraq is an act Congress is incapable to clean up, unless there is a revolt by the American voter.
≈ Cross-posted from Steven D’s diary — What TV News Won’t Report About Iraq ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The Sunday Times, UK
Americans doubt `General Betraeus’ over troop surge