 |
March 04, 2006Abizaid Fingers Al-Qaeda for Shrine BombingAbizaid speaks: Iraq can expect more bombings like the one at a Shiite Muslim shrine that set off fighting between Shiites and Sunnis, the chief of the U.S. Central Command said Saturday. I agree with Abizaid that Zarqawi and his fellow-travellers (likely including various hard-core Baathists) were probably somewhat surprised how significant the uptick in sectarian violence was. And that therefore, as Abizaid predicts, that they will be very focused on pulling off similar attacks on (mostly Shi'a) religious shrines in the coming weeks and months. That said, at least according to General Casey (hat tip: Michael Pecherer, one of B.D.s most insightful commenters), it appears accounts of around 1,300 killed in the aftermath of the shrine bombing may have been inflated. (Note to commenters: I'm not saying the death of some 350 civilians wasn't an immense tragedy and a very significant event in terms of the growing sectarian tension in Iraq. But it does appear accounts of the extent of the loss of life may have been inflated somewhat, as were reports about how many mosques were damaged by militia attacks and the like). Does this mean the Iraqi Army stepped up to bat in a big way, and proved their stripes some? Frankly, I think Abizaid and Casey are (very understandably) putting the best gloss on that issue by saying, as they do, that the Iraqi Army put in a pretty good show all told. This is arguably true, but only to a fashion. American backup was critical in places like Baghdad, and some predominately Shi'a Iraqi Army units did let Mahdi militia types pretty much have their way at certain junctures. Regardless, I suppose regular readers know that I'm still pretty skeptical of the state of the Iraqi Army all told. Putting aside the 'wholly independent' nonsense (the faux story/outrage of a few weeks back that the one Iraqi Army unit declared capable of operating fully independently, ie. at Level I, could no longer do so), I continue to be concerned about the realer issue: that the state of play re: Level II/III (ie, can take the lead with some manner of U.S. back-up, or operate well jointly with US forces) is significantly more fragile than some bloggers and Pentagon sources would have it. This major training and equipping effort, if it is done right, really right, will likely take 3-5 years yet. UPDATE: Somewhat related (albeit re: Iraqi police forces, rather than army), a poignant query here. Comments
I hate to state the obvious but if destruction of Shiite holy sites will ignite a civil war and the sites are currently undefended, why not defend them? I suppose it is possible that since Iraq is the seat of Shiism perhaps the sites are too numerable to defend all of them. How about the most important? This must be obvious to our military commanders as well so I would assume there is a reason for not defending the sites. Presumably they can't defend everything (mosques, oil sites, infrastructure, etc) so they are prioritizing limited resources. The only conclusion I can come to is that this is yet another example of how poorly planned the occupation has been and that we never had enough troops to adequately manage the occupation. Posted by: robertl at March 5, 2006 01:18 AM | Permalink to this comment
Roberti's comment suggests a very interesting strategy. Why not invite Sadr and his gang to guard the Shia holy sites? Why not publicly place that responsibility on him by saying that the American military has the capacity but not the sensitivity to perform this holiest of tasks and that his organization is best suited for the task. Perhaps Sistini could be encouraged to support this idea. How could Sadr refuse? And if he fails, he will be immeasurably weakened and if he succeeds, he will be in direct conflict with the Al Qaida operatives. Am I being too clever here? I like this idea. thanks greg, by the way. I think it is a remarkable service that you perform here and I am very honored to participate. Michael Posted by: Michael Pecherer at March 5, 2006 05:44 AM | Permalink to this comment
Why should we believe anything Casey says, any more than foreign partisans of the war? I can certainly believe him when he says he's going to keep paying iraqi publications to publish reports favorable to US forces, and that we're attempting a layered approach to border security, but why would we believe him about mosques or civilian casualties or the behavior of iraqi troops and police? Disinformation about such things is an important part of the war effort.
Am I being too clever here? I like this idea. the idea is great, if one wishes to pursue the Murtha exit strategy.... But the reason that the Samarra shrine was blown up was because the US insisted that the militias disband, and that all security functions in Iraq be performed by "official" security forces. providing protections for shrines, however, involves far more than hiring security guards. it means controlling the neighborhood -- and the city, and the district, and the province, and the country. *********** BTW, I'm with J Thomas on the question of "why should we believe a word that Abizaid or Casey or anyone affiliated with the US occupation of Iraq has to say about this war. After THREE FUCKING YEARS OF LIES isn't it about time that even Greg develop a little bit of skepticism? Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 5, 2006 02:07 PM | Permalink to this comment
Luka, I don't pretend to know and am not going to opine on the intentions behind the destruction of the Samarra shrine. In considering the MO, whereby there were no suicide bombers and there was apparently an effort to spare life, there is certainly a possibility that this deed is the product of some complex scheme perpetrated by actors whose motivations are more complex and far from obvious. The civil war, however, did not come close to materializing. A public shaming of Sadr into protecting the shrines certainly does not include the broad sweep that you suggest and certainly does is not a subscription to Mr. Murtha's proposal. I see it as a device to force Sadr and company into the open and to force upon him a responsibility that will bring him into conflict with both the elements that perpetrated this deed and the Zargawi/AQ elements. It is one thing to spout all kinds of criticisms and platitudes, it is quite another to perform. If Sadr undertakes to protect these shrines, the performance of his militia will be very much out in the open and will invite challenges from other Shia factions. This, perhaps, will lead to a sorting out of the Shias. If under his guard, any of these shrines is destroyed, he looks impotent. If he is successful, it starts to look as if he may have been responsible for Samarra. I don’t see how he can win. The best way to destroy the credibility of this fellow among the Shia is to force him to perform this thankless task. As for both of the above posts, accusing everyone of lying all the time may feel good to the partisans, but it doesn't give us much to work with. Casey has been a straight shooter all along and at least from what I can discern from his statements, he is reserved and careful and I have seen nothing to indicate that he is dishonest. I find it interesting that time and time again when the troops on the ground are interviewed, we get a very different story than pervades the media. I am not saying that I am gung ho for the war. I have always had reservations and there have been plenty of missteps. But I am a student of history and have read scores of books on the Civil War, WWII and Korea. There were plenty of missteps in those conflicts that took tens of thousands of American lives. If this cranky chorus was present then (and it was to some extent, particularly during the Civil War), and effective, this would be a very different country (countries) and we might well be conjugating German verbs. Finally, this blog is read all over the world. Let us take the high road and watch our language. Issues of the gravity that we are confronting are not resolved on the playground. Michael
Here is a column by a NY Post reporter embedded with the 101st about the vaporous civil war. Compare this to Casey's statement and you will see that they are consistent. www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/64677.htm Michael Posted by: Michael Pecherer at March 5, 2006 10:06 PM | Permalink to this comment
Michael.... under the Iraqi constitution, Sadr's militia is illegal (as are all of the militias). In other words, your whole theory is dependent upon the abandonment of the "framework" that the US occupation of Iraq exists in. And BTW, Sadr is not the only figure with a militia. The Kurds have them (two different factions), there are at least two other Shia factional militia (Dawa and Sciri), and supposedly al-Sistani himself has authorized his own militia (if that's the case, Iraq is at civil war, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.) One final point. Please don't refer me to "what the troops are saying"--- it is clear that they are being subjected to one of the most intense propaganda efforts ever.... The recently released Zogby poll included one simple fact that I found absolutely scary --- 85 percent of those surveyed believe that the US's main mission in Iraq is to retaliate against Saddam Hussein for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. if our troops in Iraq believe this is true, its virtually impossible to consider any "support" of any policy or action from the troops to be considered relevant. They are operating under false pretenses.
Accounts differ about the deaths after the mosque bombing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030302222.html Washington Post claims their reporter did visit the morgue and look at bodies. They claim that there is a concerted effort to underestimate reporting of deaths. So who's right? Who do you believe? Is there a strong effort to falsify news from iraq? Clearly, yes. But that isn't enough to say that particular reports that make the US presence there look bad, are correct. Just because the people you'd normally trust are liars, doesn't mean that the people who disagree with them are telling the truth. We're left with very little reliable information. My best suggestion is to talk privately with soldiers back from iraq, promising you won't quote them in any way that lets them be identified. In my experience, the majority of soldiers don't know much. They mostly stay on base and do their jobs. Remember that our tooth-to-tail ratio is a very good 1:2, which leaves 2/3 of them as "tail". But the story I get universally is that wherever we go where there are sunnis, the sunnis fear us as the Enemy. And we mostly don't go places there are shias unless there are sunnis too. And two different guys told me they got an offer to come home early if they published reports saying how great things are going there.
I don't have to think that Casey is a serial liar to be skeptical of his body count. Quite frankly, what makes you think he would be in a position to know anything than what he is told by the Shiite thugs running the government? And they have every incentive to push those numbers as far down as they can. If you're a student of history, Mike, you know as well as I that body counts in guerilla wars, wildly inaccurate casualty counts are the norm. They're used as political weapons and political footballs. Do you *really trust al-sadr to report correctly how many Sunnis he's wiped out? Come on. get serious.
Pecherer's suggestion is hilarious in both its ineptitude and naivete. Are you sure you didn't used to work for the CPA? Hilarious how the article by Peters wonders where the civil war is, then mentions the murder of a Sunni mullah in the recent violence. Also, WTF are gunners doing conducting patrols? Are we still that short of infantry even in the 101st? Posted by: tequila at March 6, 2006 12:00 PM | Permalink to this comment
Michael
Then you break off into comparisons of the US Civil war with Operation Iraqi Freedom. And lose any credibility you may have bankrolled. Posted by: Davebo at March 6, 2006 03:27 PM | Permalink to this comment
No, I have never worked for the CPA and my skin is quite thick. I have spent a long career resolving significant problems that others felt were intractable. If you read my post you will see that I did not compare the Civil War to Operation Iraqi Freedom. I mentioned these wars to illustrate how the best of planning often doesn't materialize in this context. How these references erode my credibility escapes me, but credibility is in the eyes of the beholder. In both of those wars, intensely planned actions disintigrated right from the beginning and my references were to illustrate that war is a messy business that generally doesn't go according to plan. Perhaps the most intensively planned attack in US history was the Normandy invasion, yet the first about 2,000 that attempted to get to Utah beach never made it to the water's edge, mostly due to planning errors. The first Manassis or Bull Run in the Civil War was over planned and turned into a disaster that lasted for years. This is the way that war goes. You are correct Luka that the presence of these private militias is not legal under the new constitution. However, they are a fact of life and we have three approaches to getting rid of them. Negotiation, and that won't work. Attack them, and that would be nuts. Coopt them by manipulating them into untenable positions. My suggestion is to attempt that manipulation with the Sadr bunch which I feel are the most dangerous and it could be done by adroit PR and coordination with the elected government and possibly Sistini, who doesn't seem to like these folks. I haven't heard any other suggestions yet and criticisms are just that, not very useful for action. I have spoken with a number of returning marines. Officers, all. They are the children of my friends. They seem very knowledgeable as to what is going on and all have seen combat. They paint a very different picture from what I generally read in the MSM. Senior Tequila. Quesas tiene un idea major?? Michael Posted by: Michael Pecherer at March 6, 2006 10:45 PM | Permalink to this comment
Mike, Actually, I think your suggestion is a fairly decent one... although I suppose one weakness is that it's essentially already happened/happening, so I don't know if I can give you points for originality. The problem is, of course, that the next time a Shiite shrine blows up, Al-Sadr will claim that it happened because he's not being allowed to 'take the fight to the shiites'. Investing Sadr even further into the holy war is not a boon for stability. What the US really needs to do is start working to split the Syria-Iran alliance, an inherently unnatural and weak thing, until it can force one side to put the clamps on their pawns. Bush won't do that though, because he's too blinded by simplistic viewpoints. Just because Casey's not a serial liar, that doesn't mean his numbers are right. I don't buy this right-wing talking point that the media is making up a civil war that doesn't exist. Posted by: glasnost at March 7, 2006 03:01 AM | Permalink to this comment
Why should we believe anything Casey says, any more than foreign partisans of the war? As a rule, if General Casey told me it was raining I'd stick my hand out the window. However, the iron law of mass casualty events is that the initial reports are always exaggerated. Later reporting of cases we can verify almost always shows actual casualties of 10-35% of the initial reports. Consider the WTC atrocities; the Loma Prieta earthquake (1989?); and most recently and remarkably, Katrina. Now if there's independent reporting on the bodies - which people will notice Ralph Peters did not stoop to doing himself, it being faster, easier and more fun to criticize others for supposedly not doing it - then Casey is a big lying lie-teller person. And it's strange that we spend three years saying we don't track civilian casualties and then have a specific, lower number to hand when something like this comes up. Nevertheless, 350 seems like a plausible climbdown from 1300. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 7, 2006 06:03 AM | Permalink to this comment
Michael, Yes, I do have better ideas --- none of which involve handing over enormous legitimacy, patronage power, and religious authority to the most anti-American Shia faction in the entire country against the will of all the other Shia factions and the tiny remaining secular middle class that remains in Iraq. First off, get the militias off the streets. Any Sunni mosques seized by Mahdi Army, get Iraqi Army or even U.S. troops in front of. Begin a systematic comb-out of all-militia units in the police force. Obviously you cannot get rid of all the militiamen, but you have to start breaking up those units which constitute >50% Badr or Mahdi Army. Start with the Special Police Commandos and move outwards. If this results in a drop in the overall size of your force and rise in the tempo of violence, that's the price you have to pay in the short term. Nothing will spur this civil war on faster than militia forces in government uniform. Try and co-opt Mahdi Army or Badr militia with public works jobs rather than police ones. Increase pay, fire foreign contractors, whatever it takes. The Mahdi Army is not a genuinely coherent organization but a network of supporters of the al-Sadr legacy pulling in the unemployed, the angry, and the desperate --- many of these may prove amenable to government compensation. End local recruitment and training of police. This is nothing more than a patronage mill for local militias and tribes. Keep it in places where it has created effective forces, but it can't continue in places like Basra, Maysan, or Mosul where apparently the entire police force has been coopted by a single Sunni tribe. Enforce mixing of Kurd/Shia/Sunni recruits in basic training, make it longer, and for God's sakes get the police and Army something better than pickup trucks to ride around in. Our best case scenario at this point is to build at the very least a national army and the core of a national police force before we leave. Whether or not these two institutions can hold the country together is doubtful, but it's the best hope we and the Iraqis have at this point. It's been done before, if not quite in as bad circumstances. Posted by: tequila at March 7, 2006 03:19 PM | Permalink to this comment
Tequila, I think your scheme is ambitious and makes a lot of sense. I don't have a clue where the authority to implement these suggestions will come from. To accomplish the reconstitution of the police and to create the kind of public works program that would accomplish these ends would, I believe, require a quality and effectiveness of organization within the society that does not exist and probably won't exist for some time. I suspect that the militia members are motivated by money in part, but certainly ideology plays a big role. Sadly, I am beginning to think that these various factions will have to fight it out and that true constructive progress is not going to occur without the "last man standing" effect." The sectarian tensions have been around too long and I just don't see how they can be dissipated. The most unfortunate aspect is that there appears to be a sectarian "middle class" (term used advisedly) that if given the opportunity, would develop the institutions that are necessary to support a democracy. They apparently represent a minority and I rather expect they will ultimately join their expatriot cousins. J. Thomas's three state solution may be the only viable approach. Michael Posted by: Michael Pecherer at March 7, 2006 05:20 PM | Permalink to this comment
It might be hard to co-opt the Mahdi army because it's membership joins on a spiritual connection as well as monetary. Putting Sadr in charge of that particular shrine might give him the idea that he should be in charge of other shrines, perhaps Sunni ones. We already saw what it was like when he controlled the Hussein shrines in Najaf, he tortured and killed people who disagreed with him and used it as a base to launch other power-grabbing moves. I still disagree with Greg that the AQ was behind the recent shrine bombing. I think the ex-Baathists and the rest of the Sunni's were starting to see that they wouldn't fare well in a civil war, before it happened; and now they didn't fare well in the 2-3 day one that erupted after the bombing. More and more, the [religious] Shi'ites want the whole pie, only to be held back by squabbling amonst themselves over who gets the biggest piece. I think this was Sadr's move on establishing more points of power for himself. All this will drive the Kurds and [Arab] Sunni's together. Unfortunately, I too fear that no peace will come until everyone's 'got the fight out of them.' Posted by: ElamBend at March 8, 2006 07:52 PM | Permalink to this comment
|
|
About Belgravia Dispatch
Gregory Djerejian, an international lawyer and business executive, comments intermittently on global politics, finance & diplomacy at this site. The views expressed herein are solely his own and do not represent those of any organization. More About the Author Email the Author Recent Entries
Lunch w/ the FT...
Robert Strange McNamara Biden on Israel/Iran Mea Culpa (Part II) Something of A Mea Culpa Search
The News
Financial Times
New York Times Wall Street Journal The Economist The Times The Spectator Daily Telegraph The New Yorker Washington Post New Criterion New Republic National Review The Atlantic The American Conservative Harpers The Week The Guardian Weekly Standard The Nation Real Clear Politics Le Figaro Le Monde El Pais Pravda The Blogs
Across the Aisle
Marc Ambinder American Footprints The American Scene Bainbridge Jack Balkin Becker-Posner Balloon Juice Steve Clemons Juan Cole The Corner Crooked Timber Cunning Realist Democracy Arsensal Daniel Drezner Washington Monthly James Fallows Glenn Greenwald Nikolas Gvosdev Huffington Post Mark Kleiman Joshua Landis Daniel Larison Marc Lynch Josh Marshall Progressive Realist Obsidian Wings George Packer Gideon Rachman Andrew Sullivan Katrina vanden Heuvel Volokh Conspiracy Steve Walt James Wolcott Matthew Yglesias Foreign Affairs Commentariat
Law & Finance
Barron's
Bloomberg Bull and Bear Wise Calculated Risk Marketwatch Contrary Investor Corporate Counsel Blog DealBreaker Deal Lawyers Blog Financial Sense Forbes Fortune Hussman Funds Bruce MacEwen Barry Ritholz Nouriel Roubini Safe Haven SCOTUS Blog Seeking Alpha The Street 10b-5 Daily Yahoo Finance Think Tanks
Security
Books
American Scholar
LRB NYRB NYT Book Review Paris Review TLS Granta Grand Street Arts & Letters Daily TNR's The Book The City
Curbed
Eater Gothamist NY Magazine NY Post NY Press New York Observer Tribeca Trib Vanishing NY Village Voice Epicurean Corner
Archives
Syndicate this site:
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
||||
