July 11, 2006

Losing Baghdad?

WaPo:

In al-Jihad, the residents who remained a day after the deadly rampage said they looked out onto ghostly quiet streets as Iraqi police and soldiers enforced a daytime curfew and cordoned off the neighborhood.

"It has been quiet since yesterday -- we have not heard a single bullet," said Hayder Emad, 26, a resident. "The people were running in the streets trying to buy what they need and hurrying back."

Ali Muhsin, 58, said his neighbors grabbed guns and stood sentry on their roofs, fearing another onslaught by militiamen. He sent his son to a town south of Baghdad to live with relatives and called him Monday to warn him not to return.

"I fear that someone will kill him," he said.

Muhsin said he worried that the Mahdi Army, controlled by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, remained close by. The area is not controlled by the Iraqi army, he said. "The security forces are not capable of maintaining security."

The killing on Sunday began as early as 7 a.m., residents said, but American troops did not respond until nearly four hours later, a U.S. military spokesman said. At a briefing for reporters Monday, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said that "at the time that this occurred, we were not in that exact location."

"And we responded when asked to by our [Iraqi] counterparts. When the request came in for additional forces to move there, we had some and we moved them there in concert with when we were asked to move," he said.

U.S. troops found 14 dead Iraqis in the neighborhood but not the "30 or 40 or more that was in the reporting that we heard going on," Caldwell said. An Iraqi police officer said that 57 corpses, plus those of three policemen, were taken to Yarmouk Hospital after the violence. Caldwell did not place blame for the killings on the Mahdi Army, but he acknowledged the problem of what he called "illegal armed groups."

"The civilians clearly are taking a heavy hit at the activities of these illegal armed groups through murder, intimidation, kidnappings, and everything else," he said. "And those are the groups that we're going after."

Mahdi Army officials denied involvement in the mass killings in al-Jihad. One militiaman said recent raids by Iraqi and U.S. troops against Mahdi Army mosques and homes had angered the group. He said that in his Baghdad neighborhood of Shula, Iraqi army and police are working with the militia to establish checkpoints and monitor streets, mosques and public markets.

"We don't think any stranger can attack Shula," said Ghazi Ahmed, the militiaman.

In some Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad, religious leaders went door to door seeking volunteers to join self-defense groups and promised to distribute AK-47 assault rifles to those who didn't have them. Mahmoud al-Obaidi, a cleric at the al-Abaz mosque in Amiriyah, canvassed the neighborhood asking for one male volunteer from each household. He told residents to be ready to mobilize if mosques broadcast " Allahu Akbar " -- God is Great -- three times. [emphasis added]

I repeat, at the risk of sounding like a broken record: if our current strategy is merely to respond to requests by a barely functional Iraqi Army to send reinforcements after horrific killing sprees in the capital city of the country (with half-day time lags, to boot), we are risking dismal failure. Recall, Iraq was meant to serve as model of an Arab democracy being midwifed by the world's reigning superpower in organized, coherent fashion. Rumsfeld's "just enough troops to lose" doctrine has instead turned the capital city into an anarchic zone where people are forced to form vigilante style self-defense groups to protect themselves against mass carnage. Will we see a material change in strategy, or will this detestable incompetence and display of American impotence go on and bloody on? With Rumsfeld still in office, the answer seems clear, doesn't it?