Iraqi War

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The US estimates there are 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Iraq.

At the beginning of the war in Iraq, oil traded for about $30 a barrel. It now trades at $142.

So in 2003, Iraq’s oil was worth $3.36 trillion (About 3 months of US GDP)
In 2008, Iraq’s oil is worth $16.13 trillion (More than 1 year of US GDP of $13.13 trillion. The US accounts for a quarter of total global GDP)

Ireland’s GDP is variously reported around €200 billion a year. It would take Ireland more than 65 years of GDP at current levels to match US GDP for one year. It would take more than 80 years to equal the current value of Iraqi oil.

The war is thought to have cost up to $1 trillion. The US consumes about 21 million barrels of oil a day. At current consumption levels Iraq would provide the US with oil for 5,333 days, or nearly 15 years.

I’m not drawing any conclusions or making any assessment, I just think the figures are interesting.

I am enjoying David Smith’s latest embed diary from Iraq. Today he writes about an entrepreneur, Dr Moayad Hamad, in the Dora district of Baghdad:

Hamad, wearing an expensive watch, and smoking cigarettes despite his old profession, is the new breed of Iraqi entrepreneur. Captain Russell Matthews, Warrior battalion, 10th Mountain Division, told me: “He’s probably not been seen here before. The entrepreneur becomes leader, taking the place of the sheikhs. The sheikhs are trying to find their own in a world that’s changing around them.”

Later I walked with Matthews up what the Americans call “Airplane Road”. Chickens sizzled in flame ovens, smiling couples walked hand-in-hand, shoppers sought fruit or mobile phones or a haircut, and grandmothers pushed children on swings in one of Hamad’s new parks. Remarkably, Baghdad felt a good place to be. But the question that Hamad - and others I spoke to - don’t want to contemplate is what will happen when the Americans leave. “They must stay forever!” said one. Not likely, President Obama. The US is in danger of creating a culture of dependency here.

Things seem to be going well in Iraq of late. Tom Friedman asks why Rice isn’t not on the diplomatic offensive combined with the military surge. He is hinting at what I suspect - there’s a real chance that the insurgency is simply holding fire until the surge has run its course.

Is she just keeping away from the Iraq mess to save her image, or does she know that the Iraqi politicians will not and cannot seize this moment to reach a grand bargain, because making big public concessions to one another is still extremely dangerous in a country like Iraq. It is an invitation for assassination.

Robert Kaplan meanwhile writes about building tribal loyalties from the ground up, not imposing democracy from the top down.

Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq, according to civilian and military officials briefed on the case.

Is it so hard to believe?

Warning: graphic content. This video appeared in the film No End in Sight, and had been going around YouTube for a while.

In case you missed it. The best documentary on the war I have seen thus far. Almost two hours long, John Ware looks at the lack of post-war planning. The documentary was broadcast on BBC1 last month.

I like the use of the word quagmire.

Rummy needs to resign.

My goodness indeed.

When referring to the number of troops that went into Iraq, Rummy said: “I guess history will make a judgment on that”.

How long do we have to wait before history kicks in? It’s well over three years since the invasion. Can we not at least start to speculate about whether the number of troops was too low? Does Rumsfeld believe history can look back in three, ten, twenty or fifty years from now, and then make a judgment?

I don’t think so.

I think three years is plenty of time to see that the number of troops was too low. By putting things on the long finger and saying ‘history’ will decide, he is simply saying ‘ask me when I am no longer Defence Secretary’.

The exchange today at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. [via Steve]

SEN. CARL LEVIN: Do you agree, General, that — with the ambassador from Britain to Iraq that Iraq is sliding towards civil war?

GEN. ABIZAID: I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.

Is there a sudden realisation in Washington that thing’s aren’t really going that well in Iraq?

No doubt a word that will live in the memory of the Marine Corps for some time to come. It appears the evidence backs the story that Marines deliberately shot civilians.

Steve Clemons believes the war is now deflating America’s purpose. Senator Max Baucus’s nephew was also killed in July.

CNN are showing a video of the airstrike that has apparently killed one of the most wanted men in the world, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Whether or not his death will affect the overall insurgency remains to be seen. It could be just as likely that his successor will carry on as ever, though without the same propaganda effect Zarqawi had, having evaded capture for so long.

Incidentally, the notorious US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, will be on Newsnight tonight, discussing the death of Zarqawi, and probably his recent run-ins over the comments of Mark Brown.

Do you still believe the Bush administration?

Click here.

At that meeting, Drumheller says, “They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.”

What did this high-level source tell him?

“He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” says Drumheller.

“So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?” Bradley asked.

“Yes,” Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.

“It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us,” Bradley remarked.

“The policy was set,” Drumheller says. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.

But he says he was taken aback by what happened. “The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested,” Drumheller recalls. “And we said, ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said, ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.’”

Josh Marshall has it covered.
Plus C&L.

Jonathan Weisman at the Washington Post has an interesting article on the increasing cost of the war in Iraq. The rate of spending is enormous:

The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found.

One can imagine that if the disengagement happens as planned, the costs may peak at $100 billion a year.

Via Steve.

Joel Rayburn, a Major in the U.S. Army and from 2002 to 2005 taught history at the U.S. Military Academy, has an essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. In it, he draws historical comparisons between the British involvement in Iraq and the current American intervention.

In light of the recent Sunni-Shiite tensions in Samara, the historical context is quite interesting.

He starts with:

A number of pundits have recently noted the parallels between the United Kingdom’s experience eight decades ago and the United States’ today. The comparisons, however, have generally centered on the early and middle phases of both occupations. Too few have focused on the ignominious end of the United Kingdom’s reign in Mesopotamia and the lessons those events hold for the United States today. In fact, Washington’s current position bears a strong resemblance to London’s in the late 1920s, when the British were responsible for the tutelage of a fledgling Iraqi state suffering from immature institutions, active insurgencies, and the interference of hostile neighbors. Eventually, this tutelage was undermined by pressure from the British Parliament and the press to withdraw — forces quite similar to those in the United States now calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Building a better understanding of the United Kingdom’s mistakes — and of the consequences of that country’s ultimate withdrawal from Iraq — could thus help illuminate the present occupation and provide answers to when and how to end it. If the British record teaches anything, it is this: costly and frustrating as the fostering of Iraqi democracy may be, the costs of leaving the job undone would likely be far higher, for both the occupiers and the Iraqis.

And of the British context:

In 1920, a large-scale Shiite insurgency cost the British more than 2,000 casualties, and domestic pressure to withdraw from Iraq began to build. In the revolt’s aftermath, the war hero T. E. Lawrence led a chorus of critics in the press and Parliament denouncing London’s decision to continue the costly occupation. “The people of England,” Lawrence wrote, have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. … Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster….

“We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. … How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?” Although the London Times remained mainly supportive of the government’s policy in Iraq, other leading British papers, most notably the Manchester Guardian, echoed Lawrence’s call to end the occupation.

The result was what historians have called the “Quit Mesopotamia” campaign, which remained an issue in British politics until the end of the British mandate in Iraq in 1932. For more than a decade, a diverse collection of anti-imperialists, pacifists, Labourites, and Lawrence loyalists kept up a steady stream of criticism in the United Kingdom’s opposition press. The Quit Mesopotamia critics effectively tapped into the British sentiment against imperialism, which had become widespread after the end of World War I. The British public’s interest in maintaining a worldwide empire had waned; the working classes, which had sacrificed so much for the war, wanted their government to invest in the stagnant domestic economy, not in costly imperial adventures. Unlike their ally the United States, the United Kingdom experienced no economic boom in the Roaring Twenties, and unemployment steadily rose throughout the decade. British voters registered their disapproval of the Conservatives’ imperialist tendencies by voting the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald into power in 1923. Although that Labour government was short-lived (thanks to a scandal), the Conservatives got the message and in 1925 initiated a series of increasingly desperate measures to sell their Iraq policy to the public.

Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery led the rhetorical charge. In speeches in Parliament and before audiences throughout England, Amery blasted critics for their “reckless disregard … of the honour of their country.” Calls by British newspapers to pull out of Iraq only emboldened the country’s enemies, Amery said, and a “policy of scuttle” would expose the British to far greater dangers than those they would encounter while “fulfilling [their] obligations” to the Iraqi people. The London Times weighed in on Amery’s behalf on September 25, 1925, observing that the “cost of premature withdrawal” would probably be a Turkish invasion of Mosul.

Amery claimed that the situation in Iraq was significantly better than his critics realized. Returning from a fact-finding tour of the mandate in 1925, he said that Iraq’s development was proceeding well enough to promise the British a “substantial return” on their investment in that country. The whole Middle East was undergoing fundamental changes, he declared, and Iraq would soon be a model of development and democracy for the entire region. Besides, he said, Iraq was serving as “a splendid training ground” for the Royal Air Force (RAF), which since 1922 had been charged with defending Iraq and maintaining order there.

These arguments made little impression on the opponents of the occupation. The Labour Party accused the Conservatives of wanting to remain in Iraq for the sake of oil stockholders. “We should never get out of [Iraq] without wrenching something, such as the national honour or the interests of bondholders,” declared the senior Labour Party MP and future prime minister Clement Attlee in Parliament in 1926. “Therefore,” he said, “we had better wrench free at once.”

Nonetheless, Amery’s public defense of the occupation helped the policy withstand parliamentary challenges in 1925 and 1926, and the United Kingdom’s occupation looked set to continue indefinitely. In accepting the League of Nations mandate in 1920, the British government had committed itself to at least 20 years of guardianship of Iraq’s state and society, and when it signed the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1926, London promised to stick around until 1951 (or until an independent Iraq joined the league). Yet starting in 1925, the Conservatives began secretly looking for a way out. In 1927 — just one year after pledging to stay in Iraq for a quarter century — key ministers in Stanley Baldwin’s government proposed a pullout. According to Robert Cecil, a trusted Baldwin adviser, withdrawal from Iraq would be “a complete answer to those of our critics who allege that we are anxious to have a militarist or adventurous foreign policy. That charge has done us a great deal of harm already and may easily be fatal to our existence at the next election.”

Publicly, the Conservatives began to speak about the need to “reduce expenditure” in Iraq. In 1925, Sir Samuel Hoare, head of the Air Ministry and another close Baldwin adviser, acknowledged that “since the war we [have] spent a great deal in the Middle East, and the British taxpayer [has] asked whether the expenditure was worthwhile, and whether it could be reduced.” Returning from a trip to Iraq that year, Hoare announced that once the contested frontier near Mosul was settled with Turkey, the British could reduce their role in Iraq. As a government minister, Hoare could not have made this declaration without Baldwin’s approval; his statement therefore had the effect of an official promise to bring home some British troops. And indeed, the Conservatives soon made the promise a reality: by early 1927, the Baldwin government had pulled most British soldiers out of Iraq, leaving a few RAF squadrons and a battalion of Indian infantry to defend the country alongside a fledgling Iraqi army of only 9,000 men.

He continues:

…in March 1927, the Baldwin government proclaimed the Iraqi army capable of defending the country itself and withdrew the last battalion of British ground troops. Mere months later, southern Iraq came under attack by thousands of Wahhabi Ikhwan (”brothers”). The Ikhwan were a puritanical sect that had brutally conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1924. Like today’s insurgents under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Ikhwan were Salafi fighters who invaded Iraq from the desert to terrorize its Shiites (whom the Salafi consider apostates). For the better part of two years, starting in 1927, all that stood between the Ikhwan and the lightly armed Iraqi tribes was a small desert detachment of British-trained Iraqi troops under the leadership of Captain John Glubb, who would later head the Arab Legion in Transjordan. Only with great difficulty did Glubb obtain occasional air support from the overstretched RAF squadrons stationed near Basra and Baghdad.

British officials were slow to grasp the extent of the Ikhwan threat. The British high commissioner in Iraq at the time, Sir Henry Dobbs, declared the Ikhwan defeated in 1928. Acknowledging that the Wahhabi invaders had hurt Iraq’s economy by discouraging foreign investment, he informed the press that “the only grave injury done to Iraq … [has] been inflicted by wild reports manufacturing scare after scare.” In fact, although no official report was ever conducted, it is probable that the Ikhwan managed to kill hundreds of Iraqis. Dobbs’ assessment of the Ikhwan’s strength, meanwhile, was also wrong: the next year, they invaded again, in large numbers. Indeed, the Ikhwan continued to threaten Iraq until they were routed by the army of Ibn Saud in mid-1929.

During this same period, the resurgent Turkey of Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk) threatened Iraq from the north. Kemalist Turkey mounted an unsuccessful invasion of Mosul in 1922 and thereafter continually intrigued against Iraqi rule among the Kurdish tribes in the region. Like Iraq’s Sunni Arabs today, the Kurds of the mandate period represented a communal threat that consumed the attention and resources of the Iraqi state. With Turkish support, the Pesh Merga of the Barzani tribe and its allies were able to sustain an insurgency against the Iraqi government for almost four years. At one point, the Iraqi army was forced to deploy three-quarters of its strength in the Kurdish Sulaimaniya region in an attempt to put down the insurgents. In the spring of 1931, as the formal handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis approached, the British roused themselves to pacify the Kurds for good. For over a month, the RAF bombed Kurdish villages, finally forcing the rebels to capitulate.

The context helps us give an idea why Sunni Muslims are so dominant in present-day Iraq:

When the mandate actually ended in 1932, Iraq’s British-built institutions began, one by one, to collapse. With the occupiers gone, Iraq’s Sunni Arab elite used the army not to defend the state against foreign invaders, but to suppress Iraq’s Assyrians, Kurds, and Shiites. The Iraqi army of the 1930s was the most dangerous kind: it was easily the most powerful institution in the country, too strong to be checked by other groups and free from any real constitutional constraints, but it was also too weak to actually defend Iraq from outsiders. As the British-installed King Faisal lay dying in Switzerland in 1933, Iraqi troops massacred Assyrians in northern Iraq and returned to Baghdad as heroes. Army leaders then used their newfound prestige to meddle in the country’s politics, backing certain factions in parliament in return for the passage of conscription laws that bolstered the army’s strength but turned young Shiite men into a military underclass. By 1936, Iraq’s generals had gathered enough power to carry out a military coup, ending constitutional government and setting a precedent that would recur again and again.

At the same time, Iraqi society, the most ethnically diverse in the Arab world, came fully under the sway of Sunni Arab chauvinists. Typical of this development was the fate of Iraq’s educational system, which fell under the control of Sati al-Husri, a Syrian pan-Arabist who taught that Shiite Islam was heretical. Under his influence, the Iraqi government began to suppress Shiite religious holidays and practices — a policy that sparked large-scale Shiite uprisings in the mid-1930s. By the 1940s, Iraq, one of the least Sunni of all Arab states, had become a bulwark of what historian Elie Kedourie called “the Sunni spirit of domination.”

The coups following 1936 mostly involved the Sunni Arab officer corps. By 1939, Iraq’s military rulers had become openly hostile to the United Kingdom. When war broke out in Europe, Baghdad opened back channels to the Axis powers, and it finally offered up the country to Hitler in 1941. Faced with the prospect of an Axis stronghold on their line of communication to India, the British were forced to invade Iraq once again. As British troops approached Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers and police carried out a final act of official butchery, slaughtering hundreds of Iraqi Jews. There followed a second British occupation of the country that lasted until 1948.

Had the United Kingdom stayed longer the first time around, much of this mayhem could have been avoided. Continued British oversight would have prevented the Iraqi government from falling into the hands of military dictators, and the presence of a British force in the country would likely have restrained the Iraqi army from preying on Iraq’s minority communities. Since the British had opposed Iraqi conscription throughout the 1920s, it is safe to assume they would have continued to do so if the mandate had been extended, thereby removing a significant irritant from the relationships among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian communities. The typically pragmatic British political advisers would also have been unlikely to allow Sunni Arab supremacists to pervert Iraq’s public educational system.

These restraints could have helped Iraq develop into a more stable society, in which Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and other minorities would have somehow found a way to live together peacefully. Instead, these groups spent the next 70 years of Iraq’s independence with daggers drawn, each decade pocked by civil war.

Rayburn concludes by arguing that the US cannot afford to make the same mistakes as appear to have happened in the past -

Washington thus now finds itself facing roughly the same question that London faced between 1925 and 1927: Should it leave Iraq, or continue until its project there has truly fulfilled its aims? In the British case, both sides of the debate — the Quit Mesopotamia critics and the Conservative officials who minimized Iraq’s problems — apparently believed that the United Kingdom could leave Iraq without repercussions, regardless of whether the mandate had actually served its purpose. They came to assume that an independent Iraq would somehow muddle along — and that if it did not, the consequences would not affect the British.

Accordingly, the Conservative government succumbed to the political and media pressure to pull out. After 1925, as British officials continued to pay lip service to the original goals of the mandate, they privately began looking for ways to withdraw early, even though many of them recognized that chaos would ensue. To avoid a similar result today, the U.S. government and its allies must confront what the United Kingdom’s premature withdrawal achieved: namely, disaster both for Iraq and for its occupier. Having left the work of the mandate undone, the British were forced to return and attempt to finish the job nine misery-filled years later. The United States can ill afford to do the same.

Steve Clemons points to the first part in the serialisation of Sir Christopher Meyer, former British ambassador to the US. It looks like it might be explosive with regard to the Blair premiership. The Guardian has it as front page news. I liked this bit:

I told him [Wolfowitz] there had to be a strategy for building international support. What was needed was a clever plan that convinced people there was a legal basis for toppling Saddam. The UN had to be at the heart of such a strategy. One way was to demand the readmission of UN weapons inspectors into Iraq. If he refused, this would not only put him in the wrong but also turn the searchlight onto the security council resolutions of which he remained in breach. I also stressed the critical importance of making progress in defusing the violence between Israel and the Palestinians, to help carry Muslim opinion. Wolfowitz listened carefully, but he was noncommittal.

A similar list of conditions appears in another leaked document, drawn up following Tony Blair’s summit with Bush at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, a few weeks later in April 2002.

This Cabinet Office note recorded that Blair had told Bush that Britain would support military action “provided that certain conditions were met”. These conditions were that efforts were made to construct a coalition, that the Israel-Palestine crisis was “quiescent”, and that “options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through UN weapons inspectors” were exhausted.

He continues:

Then, in November 2002, came a breakthrough - the passage of UN Resolution 1441, demanding a full and final disclosure of all Saddam’s weapons. Saddam agreed to comply and the weapons inspectors went back in. There was a brief period of hope that Saddam could be disarmed peacefully.

Against a backdrop of intensifying military preparations, anxiety gripped the Bush administration. It feared a prolonged inspection process that failed to reveal Saddam’s WMD; troops going stale as they kicked their heels; allies going off the boil; and a once-and-for-all opportunity to be rid of Saddam slipping through American fingers. The issue of the moment became how to find the “smoking gun” that would justify action against Saddam - the irrefutable proof that he had weapons of mass destruction.

The risk was that, through impatience and excessive pressure on the weapons inspectors, America would shatter any international coalition for war before it had even got started. I no longer thought that, in the event of opposition to war from most of the UN security council, Bush would blink. Yet he would still have an agonising decision to take early in 2003. And if it was agonising for him, it would be doubly so for Blair.

The advice the British prime minister then gave the US president would never have been more important in my time in Washington. It could even be the swing vote for war or peace. The pendulum never swung back again. If the president had left himself any space to step back from war, he closed it down early with his state of the union speech on January 29 2003.

Even by Bush’s standards the speech was unusually messianic in tone. The destruction of Saddam was a crusade against evil to be undertaken by God’s chosen nation: “This call of history has come to the right people.”

Blair now paid one more visit to Washington. The meeting with Bush on January 31 2003 took place against a deeply unpromising background. Transatlantic relations were in a trough. British attempts to overcome France and Germany’s vocal opposition to war were sinking beneath the waves. The prime minister’s best hope seemed to be to ensure that we and the US went to war in the best possible company. To do this, he needed to secure Bush’s solid support for a second UN resolution, explicitly sanctioning military action.

Heck, read the whole thing.

Fascinating graphic. Watch it.

Al-Qaeda are now apparently claiming that they were the ones to snatch the Egyptian’s top diplomat in Iraq:

“We announce, al Qaeda in Iraq, that the Egyptian ambassador had been kidnapped by our mujahedeen, and he is under their control,” said a statement on an Islamic Web site linked to the group. CNN could not confirm the statement’s authenticity. The posting said al-Zarqawi is expected to issue a longer announcement soon.

Armor Geddon has posted a 60Mb video(the bottom one marked IED) of a patrol in Iraq, and how to deal with a suspected IED. Here is his account of the day.

Fred Kaplan with a good piece on the Downing Street memo:

The key passage of the memo—which lays down the minutes of a July 23, 2002, British Cabinet meeting and was obtained and published by the Times of London just last month—is also the one that’s gained the greatest notoriety:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

“C,” as is now well known, was the code name for Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British foreign-intelligence service. Most discussion of this passage has focused on its final sentence and the meaning of the phrase “fixed around.” But the most interesting part, for purposes of this discussion, is the second sentence: “There was a perceptible shift in attitude.” When Dearlove had been in Washington some time before, war was not a certainty; yet during this most recent visit, the whiff of gunpowder was distinctly in the air.

It would be useful to know the precise timing of Dearlove’s “recent talks in Washington”—and of his most recent visit before that. Still, if his perception (or, perhaps, his American source, who would have been then director of the CIA George Tenet) is to be trusted, the Bush administration seems to have firmly decided on war sometime in the late spring of 2002.

This inference is bolstered by an article that Nicholas Lemann wrote in the March 31, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, shortly after the war began. In it, he quotes Richard Haass—then the State Department’s director of policy planning—recalling a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, in the first week of July 2002:

Condi and I have regular meetings, once every month or so—she and I get together for thirty or forty-five minutes, just to review the bidding. And I raised this issue about were we really sure that we wanted to put Iraq front and center at this point, given the war on terrorism and other issues. And she said, essentially, that that decision’s been made, don’t waste your breath. And that was early July. … For me, it was that meeting with Condi that made me realize it was farther along than I had realized.

Austin Bay is detailing interesting times in Iraq. A bit to the right for some people, but interesting nonetheless.

This is a long and interesting take on some of the more ‘elite’ members of the Iraqi security forces.

General Adnan, as he is known, is the leader of Iraq’s most fearsome counterinsurgency force. It is called the Special Police Commandos and consists of about 5,000 troops. They have fought the insurgents in Mosul, Ramadi, Baghdad and Samarra. It was in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where, in early March, I spent a week with Adnan, himself a Sunni, and two battalions of his commandos. Samarra is Adnan’s hometown, and he had come to retake it. As the offensive to drive out the insurgents got under way, the only area securely under Adnan’s control was a barricaded enclave around the town hall, where he grimly presided over matters of war and peace, but mostly war, chain-smoking Royal cigarettes at a raised desk in the mayor’s office. With a jowly face set in a permanent scowl, Adnan is perfectly suited to the grim realities of Iraq, and he knows it. When an admiring American colonel compared him to Marlon Brando in ”The Godfather,” Adnan took it as a compliment and smiled.

Sad news indeed. Is it me or does it always come across as more tragic when it’s an air accident? Same goes for commercial airlines too, somehow I think one can more closely related to it.

Former blogger Salam Pax turned up at the manifesto launch for the Respect party and asked why Mr Galloway wanted the immediate withdrawal of occupying troops from Iraq. To which Galloway replied:

We are not going to agree on this. You are a supporter of the war. You are a supporter of the occupation and I am an opponent. Your family joined the puppet government.

Harry’s Place have more here. Eric the Unread puts it more graphically, and Norman Geras responds.

Update May 6th: Galloway has now had a run in with Jeremy Paxman - you can watch it here.

Following reports of ethic tensions, kidnappings, threats of mass-killings, it appears that the whole thing was exaggerated just a little. The NY Times reports:

Anyone in Baghdad this morning could have been forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of civil war.

Three Iraqi Army battalions had surrounded the town of Madaen, just south of the capital, where Sunni kidnappers were said to be threatening to kill hundreds of Shiite hostages unless all Shiites left the town. As the national assembly met, Iraq’s top political figures warned of a grave sectarian crisis. Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric issued a plea for restraint. Even the outgoing prime minister released a statement decrying the “savage, filthy, and dirty atrocities” in Madaen.

But as the army battalions arrived in Madaen, they saw streets full of people calmly sipping tea in cafés and going about their business. There were no armed Sunni mobs, no cowering Shiite victims. After hours of careful searches, the soldiers assisted by air surveillance found no evidence of any kidnappings or refugees at all.

By this afternoon, Iraqi army officials were reporting that the crisis in Madaen, which had been narrated in a stream of breathless television reports and news agency stories, was nothing but a tissue of rumors and politically motivated accusations.

The hysteria over Madaen was one vivid illustration of the way Iraq’s daily violence and sectarian tension, which are real enough, can be easily twisted into fantasy here. In a country where phones are unreliable and roads between cities often blocked, facts can give way to a fast-running engine of rumor. And most people have good reason to believe the worst.

Crazy stuff.

Dan Drezner has a good post on current efforts in Iraq, drawing from a number of sources. Encouraging stuff. I would have added John Simpson’s first column on the BBC site to the list too. He, as ever, has a good take on the situation.

Yet the basic problem remains: the Sunni population is as angry, resentful and resistance-minded as ever.

As the supporters of the invasion are finding two years on, you cannot step in, change the structure of a nation fundamentally and make everyone happy. There is a ferocious price to be paid, and on average two coalition soldiers and 20 Iraqi civilians pay it daily.

Or better yet, have a read of Husayn:

I dont care what your news tells you, what your television and newspapers say, this is how we feel. Despite all that has happened. Despite all the hurt, the pain, blood, sweat and tears. These two years have given us hope we never had.

All this while Yglesias raises the issue of having permanent military bases in Iraq:

…the elephant in the corner of American Iraq policy, the fact that near as anybody can tell the administration is still trying to finagle some kind of permanent military basing agreement in Iraq. That the administration has managed to hew consistently to this agenda without ever stating that this is one of their major policy goals is astounding, and that the American media is consistently unwilling to discuss the point is appalling. What’s even more astounding about it is that one regularly hears and reads in expert commentary that we ought to “make clear” that this isn’t what we’re doing. Apparently, it’s impolitic to note that Bush isn’t making it clear that we don’t want permanent bases because we do, in fact, want permanent bases.

Kevin Drum also weighs in on the issue.

Panorama was exceptional this evening. You can read the full transcript here. I can’t find a link to a Realplayer stream.

The Italians are now contradicting the US version of events in relation to the killing of Nicola Calipari. The other agent in the car has said that the car did come to a halt, but the car was fired on anyway. The investigation into the incident could take up to 4 weeks.

I have been following the huge coverage surrounding “Easongate”, and what he did or did not say about the US military targeting journalists in Iraq. For those of you unfamiliar with the news, and so big has the story been on all the top blogs, there is now a blog devoted entirely to the story. Eason Jordan is CNN’s top news executive, and made a speech at Davos where he claimed, and may have later retracted, that US soldiers had deliberately targeted journalists. Just about every US blog has something on it, and I would direct readers to my daily reads on the right for the latest.

It should also be noted that back on the 14th of March 2003, I blogged a story about the veteran BBC journalist, Kate Adie, making a similar claim on Irish radio. This was just before the war started. Her crucial claim is that a source she spoke to said that journalists would be ‘targeted down’. I have added emphasis below.

I will quote her exact remarks here. McGurk is the presenter with Adie on the phone from London:

Tom McGurk: “Now, Kate Adie, you join us from the BBC in London. Thank you very much for going to all this trouble on a Sunday morning to come and join us. I suppose you are watching with a mixture of emotions this war beginning to happen, because you are not going to be covering it.”

Kate Adie: “Oh I will be. And what actually appalls me is the difference between twelve years ago and now. I’ve seen a complete erosion of any kind of acknowledgment that reporters should be able to report as they witness. The Americans… and I’ve been talking to the Pentagon …take the attitude which is entirely hostile to the free spread of information. I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon, that if uplinks - that is the television signals out of… Baghdad, for example - were detected by any planes …electronic media… mediums, of the military above Baghdad… they’d be fired down on. Even if they were journalists…”

Tom McGurk: “…Kate …sorry Kate ..just to underline that. Sorry to interrupt you. Just to explain for our listeners. Uplinks is where you would have your own satellite telephone method of distributing information.”
Kate Adie: “The telephones and the television signals.”

Tom McGurk: “And they would be fired on?”

Kate Adie: “Yes. They would be ‘targeted down’, said the officer.”

Tom McGurk: “Extraordinary!”

Kate Adie: “Oh, shameless, he said, well he said, ‘they know this, they’ve been warned.’ This is threatening freedom of information before you even get to a war.

Kieran Healy writes a good post on the Iraqi elections, and loosely compares it to the foundation of the Irish State. [Via Dan]

Let’s hope that Sunnis will also be happy with the new assembly. Importantly:

Electoral officials estimated that up to eight million Iraqis voted - more than 60% of those registered.

Some other sources are giving figures as high as 72%

Just some random links to blogs from Americans in Iraq. Go take a look.

I have pointed to Armor Geddon before, but go back, great first hand accounts from an M1A1 Abrams tank commander.

I Should Have Stayed Home…is by two contractors working in Iraq.
Cigars in the Sand is an advisor on border security, interesting that the route between the Airport in Baghdad and the Green Zone is calledRoute Irish. Great photos too.
Matt Sherman has some great photos as well.

The Mudville Gazette has links to more Milbloggers.

Kevin Drum points to some statements Paul Wolfowitz made in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Among them:

Mr. Wolfowitz…opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, “wildly off the mark.” Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops.

….In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo.

He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

….Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. “I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high….Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. “To assume we’re going to pay for it all is just wrong,” he said.

Fred Kagan in the Weekly Standard on why Rumsfeld must go:

With more troops in Iraq during and immediately after the war, we would have been able to do the following things that we did not do:

* Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time still concentrated in combat units and had not yet melted back into the countryside with their weapons and their skills.

* Guard the scores of enormous ammunition dumps from which the insurgents have drawn the vast majority of their weapons, ammunition, and explosives.

* Secure critical oil and electrical infrastructure that the insurgents subsequently attacked, setting back the economic and political recovery of Iraq.

* Prevent the development of insurgent safe havens in Najaf and Falluja, or at least disrupt them at a much earlier stage of formation.

* Work to interdict the infiltration of foreign fighters across Iraq’s borders.

If the U.S. Army had begun expanding in 2001, we would have been able to:

* Establish reasonable rotation plans for our soldiers that did not require repeatedly extending tours of duty beyond one year.

* Avoid the need to activate reservists involuntarily.

* Dramatically reduce the frequency with which soldiers return from one year-long tour only to be sent immediately on another.

* Let the troops that would still have been overstrained know that help really was on the way.

The U.S. military did not do these things because of Rumsfeld’s choices. He chose to protect a military transformation program that is designed to fight wars radically different from the one in which we are engaged. He chose to protect Air Force and Navy programs that are far less urgent and under far less strain during the current crisis rather than augmenting the service carrying the lion’s share of the load. He chose to focus on high-tech weapons technologies that are virtually useless to the troops now in Iraq rather than providing them sooner with the basic requirements of their current mission–including armored Humvees, body armor, and a regular complement of armored vehicles. Even the deployment of Stryker light armored vehicles, which many now tout as a major contribution to the fighting in Iraq, was not Rumsfeld’s initiative, but that of General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki was the Army chief of staff whom Rumsfeld drove out of office, partly for correctly predicting that Operation Iraqi Freedom would require more than the handful of units that Rumsfeld and his staff were willing to send.

It is not that Rumsfeld’s decisions were without a rationale. The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America’s military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission. That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.

Update: Kevin Drum offers his two cents, Andrew Sullivan does the same

[via Insta} Tom Friedman answers my questions about Iraqis getting plain tired of terrorism.

It needs to be clear that these so-called insurgents are not fighting to liberate Iraq from America, but rather to reassert the tyranny of a Sunni-Baathist minority over the majority there. The insurgents are clearly desperate that they not be cast as fighting a democratically elected Iraqi government - which is why they are desperately trying to scuttle the elections. After all, if all they wanted was their fair share of the pie, and nothing more, they would be taking part in the elections.

We cannot liberate Iraq, and never could. Only Iraqis can liberate themselves, by first forging a social contract for sharing power and then having the will to go out and defend that compact against the minorities who will try to resist it. Elections are necessary for that process to unfold, but not sufficient. There has to be the will - among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds - to forge that equitable social contract and then fight for it.

In short, we need these elections in Iraq to see if there really is a self-governing community there ready, and willing, to liberate itself - both from Iraq’s old regime and from us. The answer to this question is not self-evident. This was always a shot in the dark - but one that I would argue was morally and strategically worth trying.

Because if it is impossible for the peoples of even one Arab state to voluntarily organize themselves around a social contract for democratic life, then we are looking at dictators and kings ruling this region as far as the eye can see. And that will guarantee that this region will be a cauldron of oil-financed pathologies and terrorism for the rest of our lives.

I found this article last week and thought it was worth a mention:

But a comparative analysis of U.S. casualty statistics from Iraq tells a different story. After factoring in medical, doctrinal, and technological improvements, infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966 - and in some cases more lethal. Even discrete engagements, such as the battle of Hue City in 1968 and the battles for Fallujah in 2004, tell a similar tale: Today’s grunts are patrolling a battlefield every bit as deadly as the crucible their fathers faced in Southeast Asia.

Economists like to quote statistics in “constant dollars,” where they factor in historical inflation rates to produce statistics that allow for side-by-side comparison. Warfare is more complex than macroeconomics, but it is possible to produce a similar “apples to apples” comparison for casualties across conflicts. In a recent article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Atul Gawande (a former Slate contributor) concluded that improvements to military medicine since Vietnam have dramatically reduced the rate at which U.S. troops die of wounds sustained in combat. The argument follows a 2002 study that tied improvements in U.S. civilian trauma medicine to the nation’s declining murder rate. While firearm assaults in the United States were rising, the murder rate was falling, largely because penetration wounds that proved fatal 30 years ago were now survivable. Thus, today’s murder rate was artificially depressed in comparison to the 1960s.

Gawande applied the same methodology to U.S. casualty statistics in previous wars, arriving at a “lethality of wounds” rate for each conflict. In World War II, 30 percent of wounds proved deadly. In Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War, this rate hovered between 24 percent and 25 percent. But due to better medical technology, doctrinal changes that push surgical teams closer to the front lines, and individual armor protection for soldiers, this rate has dropped to 10 percent for Operation Iraqi Freedom for all wounds. For serious wounds that keep a soldier away from duty for more than 72 hours, the mortality rate is now 16 percent. Simply, a soldier was nearly 1.5 times more likely to die from his wounds in Vietnam than in Iraq today.

This marks a new tactic by the insurge… terrorist murderers.

Insurgents lured Iraqi policemen to a house in west Baghdad and set off a huge amount of explosives, killing at least 29 people, seven of them police.

It’s estimated that 1 tonne of explosives were wired to the building. It does seem like alot of effort for the relatively small amount of casualties, especially since most of those killed were civilians. Are Iraqis not getting pissed off with this?

The US military is now saying that the attack in Mosul was a suicide one. This post by a US military chaplain in Mosul details the aftermath. A warning to readers, it does contain some graphic descriptions of injuries.

With this kind of first hand account, I am beginning to wonder what the world would be like without blogs.

That question by the US soldier directed to Don Rumsfeld spawned a flurry of interest by US media in the state of the campagin. MSNBC take this look at the current state of US military hardware.

The number of tanks requiring major repairs is up 600 percent. Before the war, some 300 Humvees a year would go through a major overhaul. Today that number has skyrocketed to 5,700 — a jump of nearly 2,000 percent.

“Our folks are in a constant cycle of repair, repair, repair to return this equipment to the force,” says Gary Motsek, with the U.S. Army Support Operations.

And the cost is staggering. Last year the Army got an additional $1 billion to pay for wartime repairs. This year the price tag is expected to climb to $9 billion.

Even then, it’s an increase in military spending that will extend well beyond the war.

“Should the war end today, it would take two years for the United States Army to replenish itself and bring its equipment back to proper state,” says Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Two years to replenish? Feck.

Foreign Policy(sub. only) have a web only piece on “The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2004″, coming in at number 10:

Around 800,000 U.S. military troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. On top of being overstretched, the general health of the military may be deteriorating. More than 9,300 servicemen and women have been wounded, and there have been more than 14,400 Army medical evacuations in Iraq. At 7 to 1, the ratio of wounded to dead is the highest of any conflict in recent memory; in Vietnam, it was around 3 to 1. Wounded soldiers today have a much better chance of surviving than in the past—improved medical technology and body armor enable soldiers to endure injuries that would have killed them in previous wars. Priceless lives are saved, but the human cost of debilitating injuries and the financial cost of treatment and rehabilitation may loom large in years to come. Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, calculates that if a 24-year-old married male soldier with one child were to develop post-traumatic stress disorder—a condition that, together with depression and anxiety, afflicts about 1 in 6 soldiers returning from Iraq, according to the New England Journal of Medicine—he or she could receive compensation payments of more than $2,400 per month for the rest of his or her life.

That could work out to be a good deal of money if US troops stay another few years. Or will they all be out by the second anniversary of the invasion?

Looks like the election campaign in Iraq has started in earnest - and to start it all off :

At least seven people have been killed and 30 injured in a bomb explosion in Iraq’s holy city of Karbala. The blast at the gate to a major Shia shrine, the Imam Hussein mausoleum, was the first serious attack in the city for several months. An aide to Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was said to be among the wounded. It came as campaigning for elections in January began and interim PM Iyad Allawi declared his candidacy.

Considering that Sistani’s aide was wounded, it might have been Sunni terrorists at work here. More attacks, perhaps even ’spectacular’ attacks are likely in the run up to election day. In relation to Dick’s recent post, any thoughts on where Iraq will be one year from now?

Madeleine Bunting believes Fallujah will be a bloodbath, but seems to make some strange suggestions:

The recent comment of one Falluja resident is strikingly poignant: “Why,” she asked wearily, “don’t they go and fight in a desert away from houses and people?” Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured a remarkable historical inversion. Once the city had been the place of safety to retreat to in a time of war, the place of civilisation against the barbarian wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment turned the city into a target, a place of terror.

I think it would be ever so convenient for Zarqawai and his thugs to be in a house out in the desert, but they are not. They are in Fallujah.

The problem with any victory for the US is that it will likely be a pyrrhic one.

Fallujah offensive begins, Iraqi troops seize main hospital.

Iraqi troops took control of the main hospital in the besieged city of Falluja, a U.S. pool reporter outside the city said Sunday. The operation marks the start of the planned offensive to retake the city, Pentagon officials said, but it remains unclear when the main assault on the city will begin

Update:

Fox reports:

U.S. forces stormed into western districts of Fallujah (search) early Monday, seizing the main city hospital and securing two key bridges over the Euphrates River (search) in what appeared to be the first stage of the long-expected assault on the insurgent stronghold.

An AC-130 gunship (search) raked the city with 40 mm cannon fire as explosions from U.S. artillery lit up the night sky. Intermittent artillery fire blasted southern neighborhoods of Fallujah, and orange fireballs from high explosive airbursts could be seen above the rooftops.

U.S. officials said the toughest fight was yet to come — when American forces enter the main part of the city on the east bank of the river, including the Jolan neighborhood where insurgent defenses are believed the strongest.

The initial attacks on Fallujah began just hours after the Iraqi government declared 60 days of emergency rule throughout most of the country as militants dramatically escalated attacks, killing at least 30 people, including two Americans.

Dr. Salih al-Issawi, the head of Fallujah’s main hospital, said he had asked U.S. officers to allow doctors and ambulances go inside the main part of the city to help the wounded but they refused. There was no confirmation from the Americans.

Was there not already a state of emergency in Iraq? Anyway, it’s been declared again, thanks to a high number of attacks. It is also due to the impending onslaught in Fallujah. The speech by Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, is worth noting - with thanks to Fox.

“This is America’s fight,” Sattler said. “What we’ve added to it is our Iraqi partners. They want to go in and liberate Fallujah. They feel this town’s being held hostage by mugs, thugs, murderers and terrorists.”

“God bless you, each and every one. You know what your mission is. Go out there and get it done,” Sattler said.

So too to Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent, Fox reports:

The coming battle of Fallujah would be “no different” than the historic fights at Inchon in Korea, the flag-raising victory at Iwo Jima, or the bloody assault to remove North Vietnamese troops who occupied the ancient citadel of Hue in the 1968 Tet Offensive.

“You’re all in the process of making history,” Kent boomed in a clarion voice. “This is another Hue city in the making. I have no doubt, if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done — kick some butt.”

This is a whole can of whoop-butt all combined here,” Kent said, surveying the Marines surrounding him.

A pumped-up crowd shouted a deafening “Hoo-rah” in response.

Is Fallujah make or break for the US strategy and occupation? When they do go in, they will have to win quickly and decisively, the Black Watch have been promised home for Christmas. If it drags out it could come to symbolise the entire US occupation - a disaster.

Krugman’s pre-election thoughts on the lost munitions at al-Qaqaa, and provides yet more food for thought:

The story of the looted explosives has overshadowed another report that Bush officials tried to suppress - this one about how the Bush administration let Abu Musab al-Zarqawi get away. An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an “NBC Nightly News” report from March that asserted that before the Iraq war, administration officials called off a planned attack that might have killed Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the mayhem in that country, in his camp.

Citing “military officials,” the original NBC report explained that the failure to go after Zarqawi was based on domestic politics: “The administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq” - a part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein - “could undermine its case for war against Saddam.” The Journal doesn’t comment on this explanation, but it does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that Zarqawi had been targeted before the war, administration officials denied it.

What other mistakes did the administration make? If partisan appointees like Goss continue to control the intelligence agencies, we may never know.

This isn’t speculation: Goss is already involved in a new cover-up. Last week Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times revealed the existence of a devastating but suppressed report by the CIA’s inspector general on 9/11 intelligence failures. Newsweek has now confirmed the gist of Scheer’s column.

The report, the magazine says, “identifies a host of current and former officials who could be candidates for possible disciplinary procedures.” But although the report was completed in June, Goss has refused to release it to Congress. “Everyone feels it will be better if this hits the fan after the election,” an official told the magazine. Better for whom?

What really happened on 9/11, or in Iraq? Next week’s election may determine whether we ever find out

.

Don Rumsfeld with something surprising today:

The actual words Mr Rumsfeld used in his comments on Monday to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York were: “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

He also said he had seen the intelligence “migrate in amazing ways”, without explaining what that meant.

His statement was in marked contrast to what he said in September 2002 when he described the evidence of a link as “bullet-proof.”

This comes at the same time as Paul Bremer saying that there were not enough troops on the ground after the invasion. Rummy seems to be getting tongue tied here, he was so certain 2 years ago, he stated as “fact”. His words. Now he is not sure. Does all this constitute a lie?

George A. Lopez, Director of Policy Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and David Cortright, President of the Fourth Freedom Forum and