blueollie

A solidier's View of Iraq and American Adventurism.

by doug30044 [Subscribe]

Sat Aug 26, 2006 at 10:45:32 PM PDT

I have something to say. I, like Condi Rice, am a student of history. But unlike Condi, the history I study is not "grand." I graduated from the United States Military Academy
many, many years ago. When I was there, I was permitted to take a few electives and I choose mostly history electives--history electives that had something to do with war, warfare, military history, and the causes and military execution of conflict. If this subject happens to interest you, West Point is a great place to study,
Warfare has changed in the last 30 years. No longer can a "non-superpower" nation cozy up to the U.S. or USSR just to piss the other one off. But warfare today is not without precedent. Lessons can be learned and more importantly, mistakes can be studied--and if you are not stupid--not repeated.

[...]

The most important point to start with for any discussion of Iraq is simply this: The
people who live in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East are not like you and me! They
have a different culture and set of beliefs and that culture and belief set is not going to
change anytime soon.
The second most important point from which to start the discussion can be expressed as a question: What idiot told you that Iraq was a nation?? When the Prophet Mohammed died, the followers of Islam split into two parts. The main body decided that one of the members of Mohammed's tribe/extended family group was to become the Islamic leader. These people became the Sunnis. A smaller part of the Islamic community decided that leadership passed to one of Mohammed's close relatives and that leadership would remain with the Prophet's family. These followers became the Shi'ites. While this is certainly a simplification of about a hundred years worth of wrangling and battles, it holds the gist of the situation. Further, you have to remember that all of this took place about 1200 years ago. Regardless of the fact that it happened 1200 years ago, the Sunnis still regard the Shi'ites as infidels and the Shi'ites still regard the Sunnis as bloodthirsty oppressors.
The first Islamic followers were Arabic. Arabic is an ethnicity. Arabs are organized into
tribes. A single, individual Arab simply cannot survive in the harsh climate of the middle
east. Tribes are often heavy with members of one family but the leader of the tribe is most often "the biggest and the badest" without regard to parentage. When Mohammed died, the Sunnis followed the biggest and baddest. The Shi'ites opted for the family member. Even this religious division started primarily over tribal politics. Interestingly, while this was the situation in the middle east 1200 years ago, it is still the situation in the middle east today with only minor exceptions. If you visit Iraq, visit the countryside first. Tribes still run the show. Each community is a loose grouping of families that have been grouped together for centuries. If you visit a big city like Bagdad, you will find Sunni
neighborhoods where relationships have existed for centuries and which do not allow the
infidel Shi'ite household to live. Likewise, you will find Shi'ite neighborhoods with no
Sunni residents.
This last week I had to laugh at the tragedy of the "evil Sunnis" from rooftops gunning
down the worshipful "Shi'ite pilgrams" making their pilgrimage to the Shi'ite mosque to
quietly worship. At least, that is the way the American press reported the story. Give me a break!! First of all, Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhoods are very well defined and
everyone knows where Sunni turf begins and Shi'ite turf ends. These "Shi'ite Pilgrims" were making a deliberate incursion onto Sunni turf and knew that they would draw a response. Proof, you ask? If they were peaceful pilgrims, where did the return gunfire come from? The young Sunni Bravos were on their rooftops boasting to each other that they were "protecting their neighborhood and families from the infidel Shi'ites." The Shi'ite pilgrims were making the same tribal border incursion that they have been making for the last 1200 years. [...]

Michael Schwartz: '7 facts you might not know about the Iraq War'
Posted on Monday, August 21 @ 09:40:24 EDT
This article has been read 2421 times.

---

Michael Schwartz, TomDispatch

With a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon holding, the ever-hotter war in Iraq is once again creeping back onto newspaper front pages and towards the top of the evening news. Before being fully immersed in daily reports of bomb blasts, sectarian violence, and casualties, however, it might be worth considering some of the just-under-the-radar-screen realities of the situation in that country. Here, then, is a little guide to understanding what is likely to be a flood of new Iraqi developments -- a few enduring, but seldom commented upon, patterns central to the dynamics of the Iraq war, as well as to the fate of the American occupation and Iraqi society.

1. The Iraqi Government Is Little More Than a Group of "Talking Heads"

A minimally viable central government is built on at least three foundations: the coercive capacity to maintain order, an administrative apparatus that can deliver government services and directives to society, and the resources to manage these functions. The Iraqi government has none of these attributes -- and no prospect of developing them. It has no coercive capacity. The national army we hear so much about is actually trained and commanded by the Americans, while the police forces are largely controlled by local governments and have few, if any, viable links to the central government in Baghdad. (Only the Special Forces, whose death-squad activities in the capital have lately been in the news, have any formal relationship with the elected government; and they have more enduring ties to the U.S. military that created them and the Shia militias who staffed them.) [...]

2. There Is No Iraqi Army

The "Iraqi Army" is a misnomer. The government's military consists of Iraqi units integrated into the U.S.-commanded occupation army. These units rely on the Americans for intelligence, logistics, and -- lacking almost all heavy weaponry themselves -- artillery, tanks, and any kind of airpower. (The Iraqi "Air Force" typically consists of fewer then 10 planes with no combat capability.) The government has no real control over either personnel or strategy. [...]

3. The Recent Decline in American Casualties Is Not a Result of Less Fighting (and Anyway, It's Probably Ending)

At the beginning of August, the press carried reports of a significant decline in U.S. casualties, punctuated with announcements from American officials that the military situation was improving. The figures (compiled by the Brookings Institute) do show a decline in U.S. military deaths (76 in April, 69 in May, 63 in June, and then only 48 in July). But these were offset by dramatic increases in Iraqi military fatalities, which almost doubled in July as the U.S. sent larger numbers of Iraqi units into battle, and as undermanned American units were redeployed from al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, to civil-war-torn Baghdad in preparation for a big push to recapture various out-of-control neighborhoods in the capital. [...]

4. Most Iraqi Cities Have Active and Often Viable Local Governments

Neither the Iraqi government, nor the American-led occupation has a significant presence in most parts of Iraq. This is well-publicized in the three Kurdish provinces, which are ruled by a stable Kurdish government without any outside presence; less so in Shia urban areas where various religio-political groups -- notably the Sadrists, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Da'wa , and Fadhila -- vie for local control, and then organize cities and towns around their own political and religious platforms. While there is often violent friction among these groups -- particularly when the contest for control of an area is undecided -- most cities and towns are largely peaceful as local governments and local populations struggle to provide city services without a viable national economy. [...]

5. Outside Baghdad, Violence Arrives with the Occupation Army

The portrait of chaos across Iraq that our news generally offers us is a genuine half-truth. Certainly, Baghdad has been plunged into massive and worsening disarray as both the war against the Americans and the civil war have come to be concentrated there, and as the terrifying process of ethnic cleansing has hit neighborhood after neighborhood, and is now beginning to seep into the environs of the capital.

However, outside Baghdad (with the exception of the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, where historic friction among Kurd, Sunni, and Turkman has created a different version of sectarian violence), Iraqi cities tend to be reasonably ethnically homogeneous and to have at least quasi-stable governments. The real violence often only arrives when the occupation military makes its periodic sweeps aimed at recapturing cities where it has lost all authority and even presence. [...]


6. There Is a Growing Resistance Movement in the Shia Areas of Iraq

Lately, the pattern of violence established in largely Sunni areas of Iraq has begun to spread to largely Shia cities, which had previously been insulated from the periodic devastation of American pacification attempts. This ended with growing Bush administration anxiety about economic, religious, and militia connections between local Shia governments and Iran, and with the growing power of the anti-American Sadrist movement, which had already fought two fierce battles with the U.S. in Najaf in 2004 and a number of times since then in Sadr City.

Symptomatic of this change is the increasing violence in Basra, the urban oil hub at the southern tip of the country, whose local government has long been dominated by various fundamentalist Shia political groups with strong ties to Iran. When the British military began a campaign to undermine the fundamentalists' control of the police force there, two British military operatives were arrested, triggering a battle between British soldiers (supported by the Shia leadership of the Iraqi central government) and the local police (supported by local Shia leaders). This confrontation initiated a series of armed confrontations among the various contenders for power in Basra. [...]

7. There Are Three Distinct Types of Terrorism in Iraq, All Directly or Indirectly Connected to the Occupation

Terrorism involves attacking civilians to force them to abandon their support for your enemy, or to drive them away from a coveted territory.

The original terrorists in Iraq were the military and civilian officials of the Bush administration -- starting with their "shock and awe" bombing campaign that destroyed Iraqi infrastructure in order to "undermine civilian morale." The American form of terrorism continued with the wholesale destruction of most of Falluja and parts of other Sunni cities, designed to pacify the "hot beds" of insurgency, while teaching the residents of those areas that, if they "harbor the insurgents," they will surely "suffer the consequences."

At the individual level, this program of terror was continued through the invasions of, and demolishing of, homes (or, in some cases, parts of neighborhoods) where insurgents were believed to be hidden among a larger civilian population, thus spreading the "lesson" about "harboring terrorists" to everyone in the Sunni sections of the country. Generating a violent death rate of at least 18,000 per year, the American drumbeat of terror has contributed more than its share to the recently escalating civilian death toll, which reached a record 3,149 in the official count during July. It is unfortunately accurate to characterize the American occupation of Sunni Iraq as a reign of terror.

The Sunni terrorists like those led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have utilized the suicide car bomb to generate the most widely publicized violence in Iraq -- hundreds of civilian casualties each month resulting from attacks on restaurants, markets, and mosques where large number of Shia congregate. At the beginning of the U.S. occupation, car bombs were nonexistent; they only became common when a tiny proportion of the Sunni resistance movement became convinced that the Shia were the main domestic support for the American occupation. (As far as we can tell, the vast majority of those fighting the Americans oppose such terrorists and have sometimes fought with them.) As al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, these attacks were justified by "the treason of the Shia and their collusion with the Americans." As if to prove him correct, the number of such attacks tripled to current levels of about 70 per month after the Shia-dominated Iraqi government supported the American devastation of Falluja in November 2004.

The Sunni terrorists work with the same terrorist logic that the Americans have applied in Iraq: Attacks on civilians are meant to terrify them into not supporting the enemy. There is a belief, of course, among the leadership of the Sunni terrorists that, ultimately, only the violent suppression or expulsion of the Shia is acceptable. But as Zawahiri himself stated, the "majority of Muslims don't comprehend this and possibly could not even imagine it." So the practical justification for such terrorism lies in the more immediate association of the Shia with the hated occupation.

The final link in the terrorist chain can also be traced back to the occupation. In January of 2005, Newsweek broke the story that the U.S. was establishing (Shiite) "death squads" within the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, modeled after the assassination teams that the CIA had helped organize in El Salvador during the 1980s. These death squads were intended to assassinate activists and supporters of the Sunni resistance. Particularly after the bombing of the Golden Dome, an important Shia shrine in Samarra, in March 2006, they became a fixture in Baghdad, where thousands of corpses -- virtually all Sunni men -- have been found with signs of torture, including electric-drill holes, in their bodies and bullet holes in their heads. Here, again, the logic is the same: to use terror to stop the Sunni community from nurturing and harboring both the terrorist car bombers and the anti-American resistance fighters.

While there is disagreement about whether the Americans, the Shia-controlled Iraqi Ministry of Defense, or the Shia political parties should shoulder the most responsibility for loosing these death squads on Baghdad, one conclusion is indisputable: They have earned their place in the ignominious triumvirate of Iraqi terrorism.

One might say that the war has converted one of President Bush's biggest lies into an unimaginably horrible truth: Iraq is now the epicenter of worldwide terrorism. [...]