How is that surge going anyway?

Lowrey's now famous National Review cover tells a great story. Pictures worth... well, never mind. It did arouse the imagination of the shattered of mind.

The truth is something altogether different. The US has found themselves in a delicate position, because no matter what the Bush administration is telling you, there was no "win". There was a buy-off and it's created a powder keg that is just about ready to blow.

Nir Rosen traveled to Iraq and found that the US solution to the "insurgency" was not to crush the insurgents, but to recruit them. And now they are literally payrolling both sides of a civil war.

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

At least 80,000 men across Iraq are now employed by the Americans as ISVs. Nearly all are Sunnis, with the exception of a few thousand Shiites. Operating as a contractor, Osama runs 300 of these new militiamen, former resistance fighters whom the U.S. now counts as allies because they are cashing our checks. The Americans pay Osama once a month; he in turn provides his men with uniforms and pays them ten dollars a day to man checkpoints in the Dora district — a paltry sum even by Iraqi standards. A former contractor for KBR, Osama is now running an armed network on behalf of the United States government. "We use our own guns," he tells me, expressing regret that his units have not been able to obtain the heavy-caliber machine guns brandished by other Sunni militias.

In the event you think these new "Awakening" groups are anything but mercenaries, think again. Even US forces know that these forces are loyal to one thing - the pay.

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups."

Who are these "volunteers"?

Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.

And how is all that working anyway?

With American forces now arming both sides in the civil war, the violence in Iraq has once again started to escalate. In January, some 100 members of the new Sunni militias — whom the Americans have now taken to calling "the Sons of Iraq" — were assassinated in Baghdad and other urban areas. In one attack, a teenage bomber blew himself up at a meeting of Awakening leaders in Anbar Province, killing several members of the group. Most of the attacks came from Al Qaeda and other Sunni factions, some of whom are fighting for positions of power in the new militias.

The same militias created by General Petraeus.

Here, street politics trump any illusory laws passed in the safety of the Green Zone. As the Awakening gains power, Al Qaeda lies dormant throughout Baghdad, the Mahdi Army and other Shiite forces prepare for the next battle, and political assassinations and suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. The violence, Arkan says, is getting worse again.

So, the US military now arms and pays both sides of the Iraqi civil war and claims to be in control. That's nice, except that the "Awakening" is the same body of people George Bush was calling "The Terraists". And their plans haven't changed.

The problem with all of this of course, is that the purpose of the "surge" was to put down the insurgency - not modify its operational structure. By choosing the latter course of action all the US has done is fuel an even worse situation. Worse though is that the US military role in Iraq is to support the central government. That role has been lost. John Robb describes it as a trashed doctrine.

This situation puts the US military in a difficult position, one that goes deeper than being caught on the horns of dilemma (as in: caught between supporting "former" insurgents or government forces). The improvised theory that led the US military to fund the insurgency (the "Awakening") has transformed the US Counter-Insurgency doctrine (COIN) -- a document was so carefully prepared and announced with such fanfare -- into a mere pile of paper. Why? Because we have abandoned the doctrine's binding assumption: that everything we do in counter-insurgency should increase the legitimacy of the host government. Essentially, the abandonment of our doctrine means that the US military is now completely adrift in Iraq without a counter-insurgency roadmap.

There is no real bright side to this picture, but I suppose you could now say that the US counter-insurgency in Iraq is now operating on the same plane as the Bush administration. Clueless.

So how's that Surge working again?

Let's call this a New Year's tradition. Start off the year by pointing out the obvious to some wingnut and there is no one better to start off with than Rich Lowry.

Here's how the winning is going.

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber detonated a vest loaded with explosives at a Shia funeral in Baghdad today, killing 28 people and wounding 33.

Police say the late afternoon explosion occurred in the capital's eastern Zayouna neighbourhood, a mixed Shia and Sunni district.

The funeral was being held for Nabil Hussein Jassim, a retired lieutenant-colonel killed in an earlier car bombing in downtown Baghdad's Tayaran Square.

That blast left at least 14 people dead.

It's going so well that bombers are killing people attending the funerals of people killed by bombers.

Meanwhile, in Jalula, a city about 130 kilometres north of Baghdad, the bodies of a Sunni policeman and four of his relatives were found hours after they were abducted from their home by gunmen.

The abductions occurred in Diyala province, where "al-Qaeda in Iraq" retains a presence and violence has persisted despite falling elsewhere.

The insurgents have long targeted police, and "al-Qaeda in Iraq" has repeatedly said it will aggressively target those who join security forces.

Hours later in the same province, a Shia man and his 16-year-old son where killed in a drive-by shooting, police said. The two were standing outside their home in Tahwelah, about 30 kilometres east of Baqouba.

I'm certain someone will be dumb enough to suggest that these are isolated incidents.

And, it would appear these isolated incidents have actually increased.

Late Monday, Iraq's government released statistics on the number of civilians and members of security forces it said were killed in 2007.

According to the health, defence and interior ministries, 16,232 civilians, 432 soldiers and about 1,300 policeman died in 2007. The year before, the ministries said that 12,371 civilians, 603 soldiers and 1,224 policeman were killed.

The government figures were roughly in line with a count by The Associated Press.

For 2007, The AP count found that 18,610 Iraqis were killed. In 2006, the only other full year an AP count has been tallied, 13,813 died.

The AP count — which includes civilians, government officials, and police and security forces — is compiled from hospital, police and military officials, as well as accounts from reporters and photographers. Insurgent deaths were not included. Other counts differ and some have given higher civilian death tolls.

It's time for some new art Lowry. The old stuff just isn't doing the job.

So, if the Surge is working....

And that point is clearly debatable as you will see, what happens when the troops from that operation are pulled out?

As Iraqi refugees begin to stream back to Baghdad, American military officials say the Iraqi government has yet to develop a plan to absorb the influx and prevent it from setting off a new round of sectarian violence.

Well, there is always the Baghdad neighbourhood watch program that was set up by General Petraeus' command. Two weeks ago it was reported to have 77,000 members.

The military also lowered its tally of how many Iraqis had joined neighborhood watch groups. The new figure for Concerned Local Citizens, as the military calls the volunteers, is 60,321. The previous estimate of 77,000 erroneously combined the number of volunteers who are currently serving with those who had expressed a willingness to join.

An over-estimate of 17,000 people? Think nothing of it. It happens all the time.

No. The thing that will set the pot to boiling over is this:

“All these guys coming back are probably going to find somebody else living in their house,” said Col. William Rapp.

I wonder what the good colonel believes that will lead to?

And who does the US have dealing directly with the flood of Iraqi returning refugees? Brace yourself.

Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite politician and former Iraqi exile who made common cause with the Americans against Saddam Hussein, has been charged with developing a plan to provide services.

Oh yeah! That'll work.

Colonel Rapp voiced the hope that confrontations might be avoided by building new homes for returning Iraqis instead of forcing all of the squatters to leave. “It is probably going to be resolved with new housing construction as opposed to wholesale evictions and resettlement,” he said.

Construction?! Yeah... no one's tried that yet.

The British Unsurge is working

Ian Welsh presents a good point that the presence of coalition troops in Iraq (and quite probably Afghanistan) is actually the disease, not the cure.

A case in point is the reaction of insurgent militias to the British withdrawal from the field in Iraq's Basra province.

The British army says violence in Basra has fallen by 90% since it withdrew from the southern Iraqi city earlier this year.

Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols.

A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come under attack from militants in Basra, but the overall level of violence is down 90% since the British troops left.

Britain is scheduled to return control of Basra province to Iraqi officials next month, officially ending Britain's combat role in Iraq.

This underscores the effect of two completely different strategies in dealing with the violence in Iraq. One being the US method of doing business, (beat them until we all bleed to death), the other being the British solution, (let's just back away and let them sort it out themselves).

The time has long past where we can continue to point fingers at the Bush administration and declare that the conditions in Iraq are a George W. Bush creation of his own making. We already know that and only a total idiot could argue otherwise. Our best hope is that someday, someone has the brass to haul Bush and his cohort into a court of law and charge them with waging aggressive war and all other associated crimes commensurate with the actions of a country attempting to expand beyond its direct control of peoples beyond it borders.

The so-called "Surge" is little more than an escalation. In order for it to be declared a success it requires attrition of insurgent militias on a scale which would leave them unable to regroup, re-man and re-arm. Few resistant insurgencies in history have ever been broken to the degree that they have been rendered totally inert.

The surge operation in Iraq, the concentration of troops intended to break the resistant militias, is faced with a problem the Bush administration is either unable or unwilling to comprehend. Even if General David Petraeus reaches a point where he can declare the operation a success, he must surely know that he can never win. Once the surge operation winds down, the militias will gear-up, unless Petraeus can assure everyone that absolutely none of the prime movers of those militias remain in place. The arithmetic is pretty basic.

The US modus operandi seems to have an associated message. Something along the line of, If you persist, we'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget.

The problem is, the resistant militias are aware of that lesson. They are prepared to continue anyway. Given the method of warfare the resistant militias employ, sending in more troops just enriches their targeting opportunities.

The long and short of it is, regardless of what Bush, Cheney, Gates and Petraeus think they are likely to accomplish, in the end there will still be groups of insurgents prepared to start the whole thing over again. The "Surge" will have the end result of having wasted lives, resources and riches for nothing more than achieving a delay in the inevitable. The factions that feed the insurgency will continue to vie for power.

The British have simply cut out the middle. With a longer history and some bitter lessons sewn onto regimental banners, they recognized that a persistent insurgency in Basra was not only something they could not defeat using typical patrol or cordon and search methods, but that employing those kinds of tactics was probably contributing to the problem. The very presence of the British army was the fuel which resistant groups needed to justify their campaign.

By removing themselves from the field, the British have reduced the opportunity for insurgent militias to strike and eliminated at least one vital reason for the existence of such groups. The British have employed a firefighting technique which always works. In the absence of overwhelming force (a principle which has never been applied in either the Iraq or Afghanistan occupations), find a way to eliminate one element of the tetrahedron which allows a fire to continue burning and the fire will go out.

While I hold no hope that the minds in the Bush administration can see anything beyond a misplaced belief that merely possessing the means to turn an entire country into a glass parking lot will cause them to eventually achieve dominion over Iraq, it's worth noting that they have yet to even try another method. While it is easily recognized that diplomacy and negotiation are beyond the intellectual and academic reach of the current US administration, at some point the realization that their current limited approach is only exacerbating the problem has to eventually hit home.

Having created the vacuum which allowed a resistant insurgency to flourish, they are now feeding it while, at the same time, attempting to quash it.

Of course, that methodology crawls up from the likes of vile Bush admin insiders like Michael Ledeen whose words are repeated as some form of holy mantra by the profoundly stupid.

The British method may not be perfect, but it is considerably more successful than the Bush method. So, why won't the US even attempt the British strategy? Easy. With depraved and penetratingly ignorant people in possession of an unearned and bequeathed journalistic platform saying things like this:

There is nothing we want to see happen in the Middle East that can be accomplished through talking around long tables festooned with bottled water and fresh fruit at Swiss hotels, that cannot be accomplished faster and more permanently through war. But there is plenty that cannot be achieved by such gabfests that can only be achieved through war.

There is little hope that the Bush administration, the prime audience of such remarkably hebetudinous thought, can see anything at the table beyond the water bottles and the fruit. Because they view all other persons at the table as culturally and militarily inferior. War works for the Bushs and the Goldbergs of this world because it requires a minimal expenditure of mental energy. And since they have very little to begin with, they can't afford to waste it on anything beyond the examination of their own navels.

Stating the obvious

I don't normally pay much attention to George Will. Since he "coached" Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential debate against Carter, in my eyes, George Will has been a Republican hack and a conservative lapdog.

I grant, Will has been critical of some Bush administration policies, but now, George Will is stating the obvious:

Before Gen. David Petraeus's report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus's standards of success.

Un huh! That's because, for those who were paying attention, "The Surge" was not in Anbar province. "The Surge" was to deal specifically with the security situation in Baghdad.

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Good question! There is also no satisfactory answer to the question: Why did the U.S. attack Iraq in the first place?

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

Excuse me. Lest we remind the pious Mr. Will that he was one of the drum-beaters for the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Next he'll be telling us he could see the whole thing coming all along and the US involvement in Iraq was bound to fail.

He's starting to sound like a phony Osama bin Laden video tape.

Is he a traitor yet?

"It's a joke." US soldier assesses "The Surge"

Here's what Bush's "surge" is accomplishing. Via LeDaro and ThinkProgress. The video provided by ThinkProgress is a segment of the ABC Nightline report provided by a journalist embedded with a group of US soldiers for two weeks. The words that seem to have caught everyone's attention is:

I challenge the President or whoever has us here for 15 months to ride alongside me. I’ll do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for 15 months. I’ll do 15 more months. They don’t even have to pay me extra.

Have no fear. That is never going to happen. The guy who ultimately made the decision to have that soldier there couldn't see his way clear to finish his military obligation in a unit not committed to combat. His advisers, most of his cabinet and most assuredly the cheerleaders at PNAC wouldn't come within a thousand miles of a combat zone without slipping in their own shit.

The one line that actually caught my attention however, was this one by Corporal Joshua Lake:

It's a joke. We'll have spent fourteen months "in contact". Basically, fighting all fourteen months.

Now there have probably been a few breaks, but there is no indication from what Lake says that there has been any significant rotation out of the combat area. His description of the situation he and his troops are facing is: four to six hours dealing with combat, improvised explosive devices, searches, etc. and then four to six hours off, which would be insufficient rest under any circumstances.

For months on end. If the unit's continuous "in contact" time was only twelve of those fourteen months, the number of days of combat exposure would have exceeded 350.

By comparison, in the 2nd World War the troops that landed on the beaches on D-Day, June 6th, 1944 and fought their way into Germany took 335 days. One of the longest continuous stretches of "in contact" time during that eastward campaign was 73 days, and that was considered excessive.

A number of studies have attributed increased combat exposure to increased risk of symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. What is also clear is that there is a direct correlation between combat exposure and later substance abuse, chronic unemployment, relationship breakdown and spousal abuse.

Corporal lake is absolutely correct. Bush's "surge" is a joke - for Bush and company. For the "boots on the ground" it is horror show and once they come home, it will get worse.

April 30th, 1975. Some people just can't get over it.

Apparently the civil servants in the US government, particularly the Commerce Department, still have lingering memories of the events which have long passed into history.

Heeding President Bush's recent appeal for government civilians to serve stints in Iraq helping with the embattled rebuilding mission, Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez sent an agency-wide memo last week imploring workers to sign up for a year in Iraq.

Just a year. That's three months shorter than the kids in kevlar. Apparently, however, the 39,000 employees of the Commerce Department just aren't into surge warfare.

Gutierrez noted that volunteers would work "under challenging circumstances with access to few amenities." On the bright side, he said, they "may" be eligible for overtime pay -- "35 percent hardship pay and up to 35 percent danger pay differentials."

Overtime pay! Wow! In Iraq, no less. And with the hardship pay and danger pay, well, one might expect a flood of volunteers.

Since Gutierrez sent the memo five days ago to all of the approximately 39,000 employees at Commerce, he has received 40 responses. The department would not say how many -- if any -- of those responses were "yes."

Perhaps they just need someone to set the example. Maybe, you know, a political appointee. Someone who has sworn the oath of fealty to Bush.

"All were interested in getting more information about the opportunity," Commerce spokesman Richard Mills said. "We've been pleased that department employees have helped in Iraq, and we expect that to continue." [...]

Mills, a politically appointed department spokesman, -- when it comes to the question of serving in Iraq.

"I'd just prefer not to comment about my own personal situation," he demurred.

Heh! Yeah.

Perhaps there are still people who remember the event at the Pittman Apartments, 22 Gia Long Street. The one that happened April 30th, 1975 at about 2:30 in the afternoon. You know...

THIS ONE.









(Photo: Hubert Van Es)