Informed Comment

I want to weigh in as a social historian of Iraq on the controversy over whether the "surge" "worked." The NYT notes:

The problem with this debate is that it has few Iraqis in it.

It is also open to charges of logical fallacy. The only evidence presented for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from political violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs in the second half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That apocalyptic violence was set off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February of 2006, which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war.) What few political achievements are attributed to the troop escalation are too laughable to command real respect.

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February, 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as John McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra US troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation beginning winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.

Aside from defining what proponents mean by the "surge," all kinds of things are claimed for it that are not in evidence. The assertion depends on a possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption. Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent earthquake in China was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters. That is just superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am referring.

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.

This MNF graph courtesy of Think Progress makes the point:


As Think Progress quoted CNN correspondent Michael Ware:


Of course, Gen. Petraeus took courageous and effective steps to try to stop bombings in markets and so forth. But I am skeptical that most of these techniques had macro effects. Big population movements because of militia ethnic cleansing are more likely to account for big changes in social statistics.

The way in which the escalation troops did help establish Awakening Councils is that when they got wise to the Shiite ethnic cleansing program, the US began supporting these Sunni militias, thus forestalling further expulsions.

The Shiitization of Baghdad was thus a significant cause of falling casualty rates. But it is another war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to find Shiite militiamen in their living rooms.

In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement. There were typically only 10,000 US troops in al-Anbar before 2007 as I recollect (It has a population of a million and a half or so). If the number of US troops went up to 14,000, that cannot possibly have made the difference.

The Mahdi Army militia of Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr concluded a cease-fire with US and Iraqi troops in September of 2007. Since the US had inadvertently enabled the transformation of Baghdad into a largely Shiite city, a prime aim of the Mahdi Army, they could afford to stand down. Moreover, they were being beaten militarily by the Badr Corps militia of the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and by Iraqi security forces, in Karbala, Diwaniya and elsewhere. It was prudent for them to stand down. Their doing so much reduced civilian deaths.

Badr reassertion in Basra was also important, and ultimately received backing this spring from PM Nuri al-Maliki. There were few coalition troops in Basra, mainly British, and most were moved out to the airport, so the troop escalation was obviously irrelevant to improvements in Basra. Now PM Gordon Brown seems to be signalling that most British troops will come home in 2009.

The vast increase in Iraqi oil revenues in recent years, and the cancellation of much foreign debt, has made the central government more powerful vis-a-vis the society. Al-Maliki can afford to pay, train and equip many more police and soldiers. An Iraq with an unencumbered $75 billion in oil income begins to look more like Kuwait, and to be able to afford to buy off various constituencies. It is a different game than an Iraq with $33 bn. in revenues, much of it pre-committed to debt servicing.

Senator McCain was wrong to say that US or Iraqi casualty rates were unprecedentedly low in May.

Most American commentators are so focused on the relative fall in casualties that they do not stop to consider how high the rates of violence remain. Kudos to Steve Chapman for telling it like it is.

I'd suggest some comparisons. The Sri Lankan civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils has killed an average of 233 persons a month since 1983 and is considered one of the world's major ongoing trouble spots. That is half the average monthly casualties in Iraq recently. In 2007, the conflict in Afghanistan killed an average of 550 persons a month. That is about the rate recently according to official statistics for Iraq. The death rate in 2006-2007 in Somalia was probably about 300 a month, or about half this year's average monthsly rate in Iraq. Does anybody think Afghanistan or Somalia is calm? Thirty years of North Ireland troubles left about 3,000 dead, a toll still racked up in Iraq every five months on average.

All the talk of casualty rates, of course, is to some extent beside the point. The announced purpose of the troop escalation was to create secure conditions in which political compromises could be achieved.

In spring of 2007, Iraq had a national unity government. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet had members in it from the Shiite Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadr Movement, the secular Iraqi National list of Iyad Allawi, the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, the Kurdistan Alliance, and the two Shiite core partners, the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party and the Islami Supreme Council of Iraq.

Al-Maliki lost his national unity government in summer, 2007, just as casualties began to decline. The Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadrists, and the Iraqi National List are all still in the opposition. The Islamic Mission Party of al-Maliki has split, and he appears to remain in control of the smaller remnant. So although the Sunni IAF has agreed to rejoin the government, al-Maliki's ability to promote national reconciliation is actually much reduced now from 14 months ago.

There has been very little reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite. The new de-Baathification law which ostensibly aimed at improving the condition of Sunnis who had worked in the former regime was loudly denounced by the very ex-Baathists who would be affected by it. In any case, the measure has languished in oblivion and no effort has been made to implement it. Depending on how it is implemented it could easily lead to large numbers of Sunnis being fired from government ministries, and so might make things worse.

An important step was the holding of new provincial elections. Since the Sunni Arabs boycotted the last ones in Jan., 2005, their provinces have not had representative governments and in some, Shiite and Kurdish officials have wielded power over the majority Sunnis Arabs! Attempts to hold the provincial elections this fall have so far run aground on the shoals of ethnic conflict. Thus, the Shiite parties wanted to use ayatollahs' pictures in their campaigns, against the wishes of the other parties. It isn't clear what parliament will decide about that. More important is the question of whether provincial elections will be held in the disputed Kirkuk Province, which the Kurds want to annex. That dispute has caused (Kurdish) President Jalal Talabani to veto the enabling legislation for the provincial elections, which may set them back months or indefinitely.

There is also no oil law, essential to allow foreign investment in developing new fields.

So did the "surge" "work"?

The troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential. That the troops were used in new ways by Gen. Petraeus was more important. But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by accidentally turning it into a Shiite city, as Shiite as Isfahan or Tehran, and thus a terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement could not hope to fight effectively.

It is Obama who has the better argument in this debate, not Senator McCain, who knows almost nothing about Iraq and Iraqis, and overestimates what can be expected of 30,000 US troops in an enormous, complex country.

But the problem for McCain is that it does not matter very much for policy who is right in this debate. Security in Iraq is demonstrably improved, for whatever reason, and the Iraqis want the US out. If things are better, what is the rationale for keeping US troops in Iraq?

Labels: Iraq

Madhavi Bhasin writes in an IC Guest Editorial:

My Salon column, , "Obama is saying the Wrong things about Afghanistan," , is now available online.

Excerpt:

Read the whole thing.

See also Barnett Rubin's recent essays on Afghanistan at ICGA.

And at the same site, don't miss Farideh Farhi's analysis of the Iranian negotiations with the US and Europe over its civilian nuclear research program.

It is not looking good for the holding of provincial elections in Iraq this year.

First the high electoral commission warned that if enabling legislation was not passed by the end of July, it would push them back from October to Dec. 22.

Now, the contentious issue of the province of Kirkuk may have delayed them further. Kirkuk has Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. The Kurds wish to annex it to their Kurdistan Regional Government, seeing its oil wealth as potentially key to an independent Kurdish state in the future. The annexation is opposed by Arabs and most Turkmen. It is also opposed by Turkey.

Sunni speaker of the house, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, authorized a secret vote on what to do about Kirkuk Province (also called Tamim). S


Courtesy al-Zaman

ome had argued that Kirkuk should vote like any other province. But the parliamentarians voting on Tuesday, according to the LAT's Ned Parker, passed a "provision" that "called for a committee to be set up to review the problems in Kirkuk and take interim steps until local elections are scheduled, including apportioning power in the provincial government equally among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens."

The secret ballot had been opposed by the Kurdish MPs, who staged a walk-out, along with some Shiite allies. When this provision was passed, they warned of blood in the streets in Kirkuk. (Actually, that development would not reflect well on the Kurds, since they would be turning to violence over a measure passed by a majority of the quorum in an elected parliament.)

It is widely expected that President Jalal Talabani with use his power of veto against the bill.

Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that the Kurdistan Alliance with 58 seats in parliament has been a key pillar of support for the al-Maliki government. Were the Kurds to be deeply angered, they could pull out of his de facto coalition, leaving him much weakened. The tiff with the Kurds comes only days after the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front finally rejoined the government.

Kirkuk sees regular political violence. On Tuesday, McClatchy reports, "On Monday night, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Kirkuk city. Two policemen were killed( including the deputy of Irouba police station Colonel Khabat Aziz) and 5 others were injured."

First there was going to be a status of forces agreement between the US and Iraq, which would be ratified by the Iraqi parliament and would grant the US long-term bases. Private security guards and US troops would be immune from Iraqi law. US commanders would launch operations at will, would decide who a terrorist was, and would arrest and imprison Iraqis at will.

Then al-Maliki went to Iran for consultations. And Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani forbade a giveaway of Iraqi sovereignty. And the Sadrists began demonstrating every Friday. Then the US launched a unilateral operation in al-Maliki's home town and killed his cousin.

So the private contractors won't have legal immunity. And the agreement will be just for a year, not long-term. And it won't be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, so it is just a vague agreement between two executives. It won't stipulate long-term arrangements, but its interpretive context will be one in which the Iraqi leadership has expressed a desire for US troops to leave in 2010. It isn't clear if US troops will have legal immunity or whether they will have full freedom of action or whether they will be able to arrest and incarcerate Iraqis at will.

And now, it won't be signed by the deadline of July 31.

You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again. The Iraqis want out from under the UN but don't want to recognize that the American presence detracts from their sovereignty. D'oh.

No provincial election law again on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe not.

The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like . . . a legislative calendar.

John McCain thinks that Iraq and Pakistan have a common border.

[Hat tip to Think Progress.]

Hey, everybody, ask McCain if he'll pull out US troops by 2010 if that is what the Iraqi government says it wants.

McCain keeps boasting about being "right" about the "surge" and saying Obama was "wrong."

Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!

Guerrillas used a tractor bomb to kill 7 persons and wound 8 others in Diyala Province near Iran, where there is a lively contest for power among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

Reuters reports other recent political violence in Iraq:

Labels: Iraq

Senator Barack Obama is in Iraq for consultations with American military commanders and Iraqi leaders.

Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.

That is, the Iraqi death toll is actually still worse now than the last time Obama was in Iraq! (See the bombings and shootings listed below for Sunday). The hype around last year's troop escalation obscures a simple fact: that Obama formed his views about the need for the US to leave Iraq at a time when its security situation was very similar to what it is now! Why a return to the bad situation in late 05 and early 06 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren't for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn't be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.

The troop escalation, which actually allowed the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis of Baghdad and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the country, has largely been pushed as propaganda by the White House and the AEI. Here's an example of how their propaganda works. As is usual with news it does not like, the Bush administration attempted to muddy the waters this weekend regarding the interview of PM Nuri al-Maliki with Der Spiegel in which he expressed approval of Barack Obama's plan to get US troops out of Iraq within 16 months of next January. Al-Maliki told Der Spiegel in response to a question about how long US troops would be in his country,

Ali al-Dabbagh, who is usually described as al-Maliki's spokesman but actually seems to work for the CENTCOM or Pentagon Middle East command, was trotted out to make vague statements about Der Spiegel's having mistranslated or misinterpreted what al-Maliki said. This denial was issued through CENTCOM! When the original demand came from al-Maliki for a timetable for US withdrawal, it was al-Dabbagh who reinterpreted it as a 'time horizon.' Al-Dabbagh was contradicted by National Security Counsellor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, who seems actually closer in this thinking to al-Maliki. My guess is that al-Dabbagh has been recruited by some agency in Washington, DC, to explain away al-Maliki's statements whenever they contradict Bush's.

Der Spiegel stood by its story. The text of Der Spiegel's statement is here. It turns out that the translator involved works for al-Maliki, not for Der Spiegel, and so presumably knew what the prime minister's words meant in Arabic. And for the piece de resistance, it turns out that Der Spiegel has an audiotape of the Arabic of the interview, which they leaked to The New York Times. Sabrina Tavernise and Jeff Zeleny write:


But you see, it does not matter that al-Maliki actually said what he said. It does not matter that Der Spiegel can prove it. All that matters is that the Goebbelses around Bush and Cheney have managed to muddy the waters and produce doubt, taking the hard edge off the interview. Even AFP, the usually skeptical French wire service, asserted that al-Maliki had "denied" the accuracy of the Der Spiegel interview! Of course, al-Maliki has done no such thing. CENTCOM ventriloquising al-Dabbagh engaged in the denial, and a very vague one at that.

That is the way propaganda works, to obscure the truth and ensure it can be denied. Some wingnut even tried to pressure me to retract the little sentence I had written on the affair yesterday, on the grounds of "al-Dabbagh's" mendacious and ridiculous assertions. Our information system is so corrupt and easily manipulated that even a clumsy ploy can obscure the truth and bully the journalists.

Aljazeera International reports on the conflict between Obama and McCain on a timetable for US troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Over the weekend, the Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front rejoined the al-Maliki government. It had left last summer over accusations that al-Maliki ignored Sunni sensitivities, refused to speak to his vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, coddled Shiite militias that ethnically cleansed Sunnis, and kept tens of thousands of Sunnis in prison without charges or due process. As Xinhua notes, al-Hashimi's Iraqi Islamic Party, one of three components of the Iraqi Accord Front coalition of Sunni parties, will face great competition in the provincial elections from the US-created Awakening Councils, which are paid and armed by the US military.

Speaking of this fall's provincial elections, the country's elections commission announced Sunday that they might have to be postponed, given that Parliament has still not passed the enabling legislation. The election law is mired in debates over the mixed province of Kirkuk in the north, and whether it should hold provincial elections along with the other provinces. The province is claimed by the Kurdistan Regional Government, which wants to annex it, even though the Turkmen and Arab populations do not want to join semi-autonomous Kurdistan (where the state schools are no longer Arabophone).

Al-Zaman writing in Arabic says that the new date has been set as December 22. It is official: The provincial elections in Iraq will not occur in time to affect the US presidential race. E.g., if the Sadrists sweep to power in many Shiite provinces, that could have been a factor in the US polls. Not going to happen.

A new airport, funded in important part by Iran has opened at the Shiite holy city of Najaf. It will likely bring millions of pilgrims from Iran, Pakistan, India and elsewhere to the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. American authorities worried about Iranians in Iraq may as well just lay back; with millions going in and out, tracking them is going to be rather difficult.

Catch Tomdispatch.com on professional warfighters and on the Pentagon's fuel consumption.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

Labels: Iraq

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama held consultations Saturday in Kabul with Afghan government officials. He discussed the rapidly deteriorating security situation in the country. I heard him on television at one point pledging to defeat the Taliban.

Aljazeera is showing footage of him addressing US troops who are going wild for him, and shooting hoops in the base gym. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of Iraq, endorsed Obama's plan for a withdrawal US troops from Iraq. Although al-Maliki said he was not choosing up sides in the presidential race, it seems clear that he'd be much more comfortable with Obama.

CBS reports on the trip, which included a stop at the provincial eastern Pushtun city of Jalalabad. I was impressed that Obama got out of the capital.

Violence against NATO troops in Afghanistan is up 40% in 2008 over 2007, and more civilians were killed in the first half of 2008 than in all of 2007. AP has more.

The Observer's editorial on the situation in Afghanistan points out that the poppy crop this year will be a bumper one, that the Afghanistan government is riddled with corruption, that billions in foreign aid have made little difference (and that they may have been embezzled), and that more foreign troops in the country is unlikely to be the solution.

Remnants of the old Taliban met recently. They are making a united front in the Pushtun areas against outsiders.

Foreign radical vigilantes have been flooding into Afghanistan.

Check out Barnett Rubin's recent entries on Afghanistan.

The USG Open Source Center translates a report in Dari Persian on a parliamentarian and two close observers from Afghanistan who entertain the severest doubts about Barack Obama's plan to send more US troops to Afghanistan.

Afghan Observers Sceptical of Senator Obama's Plan To Send More Troops
Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran External Service
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

An Afghan parliamentarian has criticized one of the US presidential candidates for his plan to deploy more troops in Afghanistan. Elaborating on his foreign policy this week, Barack Obama said that as president, he would send two more US combat brigades to the Afghan theatre.

According to a report (source indistinct) from Kabul, Afghan MP Kabir Ranjbar asserted on Friday that increasing the number of US and other foreign servicemen would not help Afghanistan at all.
Wahid Mozhda, another Afghan political observer, has also warned that the Obama's plan to deploy up to 10,000 additional troops will worsen the situation in Afghanistan. This Afghan observer states according to this plan, the US is trying to resolve the problem through military measures, which is obviously not an effective strategy.

In addition, Mr Fahim Dashti, a journalist and observer, has said that the US government officials have decided to increase troops in Afghanistan, at a time when they have failed to defeat remnants of the Taliban and Al-Qa'ida in this country. Fahim Dashti says sending additional US and other foreign troops to Afghanistan will cause more problems in the long term, because it may antagonize the people's anti-American feelings. The Afghan analyst accentuated that countries like the USA should organize and equip the Afghan native forces, including the national army and police, as soon as possible if they really want to put an end to insecurity in Afghanistan.

(Description of Source: Mashhad Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran External Service in Dari -- Iranian government-run radio)