...now filtering out into public view cite sectarian violence (i.e., death squads) as the single biggest and most intractable impediment to what tattered remains there are of the American programme in Iraq, I'm pretty damned certain that their rise wasn't a deliberate plan. If it had been a deliberate plan, it'd have gone big right from the start - that's how this sort of tactic can actually put a lid on things, and there's enough "guys in the basement" that have seen the actual application of the strategy to know that (not least, the Iraqis know this - remember all that commentary of about a year ago from the Iraqi government bitching about how the US wouldn't let them take the gloves off - that notion's what that was about); gradualist approaches of the types that we've seen would be avoided as a deliberate strategy, because they have exactly the consequences that we're seeing (i.e., they make the problem worse, not better).

By the time the Americans leave, I'm guessing there won't be an India-partition style bloodbath. That'll be done - it's happening before your eyes in slow motion and may well be getting towards the back half of things right now, near as I can see. The scale of the population movements in Baghdad is much bigger than people know from the journalistic coverage, and from what I hear in various trade outlets, pretty much all the Sunnis in the South have bugged out. There's something like half a million Iraqis (mostly Sunni) in Jordan and hundreds of thousands in each of a number of other countries. Part of the reason for this is that these guys actually know the history of Partition better than we do - they've seen this movie before and know how it ends.

"At this moment, therefore, two distinct myths emerged, fuelled by the trauma of a shared experience and amplified by the existence of a hungry mass media eager to disseminate images of the world's first televised revolution." - Ali Ansari

January 9, 2007
Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush's New Iraq Team
by Dahr Jamail

As part of a massive staff shakeup of Bush's Iraq team last week, it was announced that John Negroponte, the current U.S. National Intelligence Director who has also conveniently served as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005 is being tapped as the new Deputy Secretary of State.

It is a move taking place at roughly the same time when Mr. Bush is to announce his new strategy for Iraq, which most expect entails an escalation of as many as 20,000 troops, if not more. Bush has already begun preparations to replace ranking military commanders with those who will be more supportive of his escalation.

The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, will likely be replaced by Adm. William Fallon, currently the top U.S. commander in the Pacific. Gen. George Casey, currently the chief general in Iraq, would be replaced by Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who headed the failed effort to train Iraqi security forces. Thus, those not in favor of adding more fuel to the raging fire are to be replaced with those who are happy to oblige.

Former NSA director and veteran of over 25 years in intelligence, retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell who happens to be an old friend of Dick Cheney (who personally intervened on his old buddy's behalf) will succeed Negroponte as national intelligence director. McConnell, willing to oblige his neocon pal Cheney, may prove more hawkish regarding Iran than Negroponte was.

The timing of this move is what should raise eyebrows, and for two main reasons. First, Negroponte is relieved of his job of intelligence director as the drums of war continue to be pounded by the die-hard neocons, and Negroponte wasn't playing quite loud enough to the Tehran tune. McConnell may well be able to carry a louder tune for his pal Cheney, which may come in the form of a sonata of manufactured intel to justify an attack on Iran, which is important since time is growing short for Cheney and Co.

Second and more immediate, the transfer of Negroponte into the State Department comes conveniently just as the announcement of the escalation of troops in Iraq is planned. Bush needs someone with experience in managing escalations and he needs look no further than this man. It is Negroponte who oversaw the implementation of the "Salvador Option" in Iraq, as it was referred to in Newsweek in January 2005.

Under the "Salvador Option," Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980's, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi'ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance.

Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiraled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq. Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today.

Under Reagan, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980's where he played a major role in U.S. efforts to topple the Nicaraguan government. The political history of John Negroponte shows a man who has had a career bent toward generating civilian death and widespread human rights abuses, and promoting sectarian and ethnic violence.

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that there were duelling (and maybe multiple) chains of command in the Iraqi desert, working to separate agendas driven by different ideologies, sometimes working to cross purposes, occasionally collaborating and occasionally knifing each other in the back.

My hypothesis is that there were some coherent units of various size operating there from 2003 onwards, their logistical support likely buried in the seethe of contractors, taking orders and reporting back via their own communications links. Units that weren't under CENTCOM's control (whether they were told about them or not I'm certain they would have become aware of them) but directly operated by the Boy Geniuses at the White House, or by a very short chain of cutouts. The reason for this would naturally be to take actions that CENTCOM could not be persuaded to see the brilliant overarching strategic insight of. Or couldn't be trusted with the secret of; from their POV, CENTCOM might be trustworthy with military secrets but not domestic political ones.

If that hypothesis is true (and evidence for that is obviously going to be indirect and circumstantial) then trying to discern "policy" when summing their actions with CENTCOM's would present real challenges.

and their hand-picked Maliki have given Sadr the green light to clean Sunni's out of Iraq. They have replaced Saddam with Sadr.

And I also think the reason for the ships off Iran is they want to ensure that Iran doesn't aid Sadr when then tell him he has to obey his new masters. Whether Sadr is aware of this I don't know...but if he wants to stay alive, he will temporarily fold.

What this administration never takes into account is that occupying troops, do have to leave at some point in time. All Sadr has to do is pretend he's their partner in crime. George Washington knew that a frontal assault on better trained troops was suicide. The thing to do...he bided his time and eventually his insurgents were able to show England they would not give up. England withdrew its troops and the United States was born. Ditto...Sadr is clever enought to have read history books and know that he has the fate of Iraq in his pocket.

Whether he will be able to control his army is questionable. Every man, woman and child in Iraq is now so beaten up that all they will think about is their own hide. They could easily turn on Sadr just as easily as they could kill American troops. Shiites far outnumber Sunni's--it's very high risk, and most likely a stupid move!!! But they've tried every thing else--they've been there years now! Bush desperately does not want to admit failure.

If Bush is successful at quelling the violence, Sadr will be the new dictator in Iraq. Bush is clutching at straws--he doesn't give a rat's petooty if Sadr is a dictator as long as he gets to pass his mess off to the next President.

... I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

( ... Link ... )

Not suggesting Jonah makes policy, or even Ledeen - although Ledeen's closer to where the rubber hits the road.

When your worldview is contaminated with that line of "reasoning", you make very bad judgement calls. Sometimes logic only goes so far because it assumes people act logically.

work, has the administration enraged what's left of the Sunnis and made the Shiites furious too? That's one way of uniting Iraq.

Read the rest of Juan Cole He notes a joint American-Iraqi (apparently American-led--see the picture) force invaded the offices of the elected provincial council of Wasit in the Shiite South and arrested two elected members of the council. They took away Qasim al-A'raji and Fadil Jasim Abu al-Tayyib without making any announcement of the charges.

This is sort of as though in the US, federal troops attacked the South Carolina State House and arrested the elected secretary of state and treasurer.

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Escher...there is no logic unless you're a neocon, with all plans that go awry.

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Dave,

It may not have been deliberate, but that was the end result.

All they can hope for now is they can box Sadr in, so Bush can declare his victory. And in a way, he did. He reduced the population of Sunni's in Iraq--most wealthy ones left and are now living in other countries.

Analysis Last Updated: Jan 17th, 2007 - 00:50:00

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Bush escalates war against Sunnis -- al-Sadr wins again!
By Nicolas J S Davies
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Jan 17, 2007, 00:46

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Like its predecessors, the new American campaign in Baghdad is billed as an effort to "restore security," targeting both Sunni resistance and Shiite militias. In reality, even George Bush is not reckless enough to open a second urban combat front against the Mehdi Army in Sadr City. Instead, the U.S. escalation plan perpetuates the failed policy of taking on the Sunnis first and leaving the Shiite opposition for later. This can only continue to strengthen Muqtada al-Sadr and Shiite opposition to the U.S. occupation.

In April 2005, the United States launched its campaign to "secure" Baghdad, using Iraqi Interior Ministry forces comprised mainly of Badr Brigades militiamen to launch a campaign of terror against predominantly Sunni neighborhoods on the West bank of the Tigris. These forces had been trained under the supervision of Iran-Contra figure James Steele, who was sent to Iraq as counselor for Iraqi Security Forces to U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, and they soon left a trail of thousands of tortured corpses from Baghdad to the Iranian border.

This brutal policy failed spectacularly to destroy Sunni resistance in Baghdad. In some ways though, the sectarian hatred and mistrust that it spread throughout the city served its purpose, as Shiites within and without the U.S.-trained "security" forces found reason to join the terror campaign against the Sunni population. But the goal of destroying the resistance was not met -- indeed, the Sunni resistance in western Baghdad only became stronger and better organized.

As Americans were reading in horror that the Baghdad morgue was overwhelmed with tortured, disfigured corpses, and the U.N. Human Rights Monitor issued a scathing report in September 2005, American officials joined the chorus of disgust at these atrocities, but claimed that this was all the work of "insurgents" who were obtaining police uniforms on the black market.

Eventually, though, these denials were unsustainable. Steven Casteel, the senior advisor to the interior minister, who had been instrumental in launching this policy and then protecting it by obfuscation, was quietly brought back to the United States. The new line in American rhetoric was to deplore the "sectarian violence" it had unleashed, and, increasingly, to identify the death squads with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army rather than the U.S.-trained Badr commandos working for the Interior Ministry, who were always the principal American weapon in this campaign.

Faced with the failure of this policy and ever stronger Sunni resistance, American policymakers might have been expected to try something different. Instead, in early 2006, U.S. forces began to provide greater direct ground and air support for the Shiite forces attacking Sunni enclaves in Baghdad. American support for this campaign has increased progressively with each newly announced operation: Together Forward; Together Forward II; do they dare call the new one Together Forward III?

The public relations exercises linked to these operations have repeatedly promised Americans at home that U.S. forces are targeting both Sunni "insurgents" and Shiite militias. The implication is that, whatever the details of the original "Salvador Option," as Newsweek called it, local Iraqis are now responsible for the "sectarian violence" gripping the capital, and U.S. forces are intervening to restore law and order to protect people of all sects.

American soldiers in Baghdad know perfectly well that they are fighting Sunnis, alongside Shiite forces with strong ties to militias, but the Western media have consistently failed to challenge the new American narrative. The Iraq Study Group acknowledged a 43 percent increase in violence in Baghdad in the course of the first two Operation Together Forwards, but attributed this to an inadequate effort to restore law and order, rather than a deliberate American escalation of the dirty war.

Like the previous fictional narrative of "insurgents disguised as police commandos," the new narrative of even-handed law enforcement has worn so thin that it has become transparent. Yet once again the American response has only been to escalate its public relations efforts along with the violence. American officials now sound so determined to take on the Shiite militias that Iraqi Shiite officials have had to come out and publicly reassure their supporters that the Americans don’t really mean it!

Finally, Monday, a U.S. military spokesman acknowledged what all Sunni Iraqis in Baghdad know only too well. Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl told a McClatchy reporter, "We’re not necessarily going after the militias if the militias don’t come after us. Our mission is not to take down the militias; that’s a function of the government."

Lt. Col. Bleichwehl neglected to mention that the "government" has appointed a Shiite general from Amara to lead this campaign. Amara was one of Muqtada al-Sadr’s first bases of support following the U.S. and British invasion. Britain suffered its worst casualties of the war there, and eventually declared victory and handed the whole province over to local officials allied with al-Sadr. The news that a general from Amara is going to lead the anti-militia campaign in Baghdad is all the reassurance the militias need that they have nothing to worry about, and was probably al-Sadr’s price for approving the new plan.

So, if they’re not going after the Shiite militias, what are the new U.S. forces going to do in Baghdad, and what will be the result?

There are three main forces vying for power in Iraq, the nationalist Sunni resistance, nationalist Shiite forces grouped around Muqtada al-Sadr, and American government and commercial interests with weak, usually self-serving, support from a small group of privileged former exiles in the Green Zone. The Kurds have no interest in challenging the other Iraqi groups in Baghdad, but will assist the Americans at a price, and the pro-Iranian SCIRI Party is also cooperating militarily with the Americans, while waiting for an opportunity to pick up the pieces of a broken Iraq at some point in the future with Iranian assistance.

The American strategy is and has always been to wage war almost exclusively against the Sunnis, knowing that this means leaving Sadr and the Shiite nationalists for later. When Bush uses the expression that "progress has been slow," which sounds like an odd characterization of this crisis, this is what he is referring to. In fact, progress has been so slow that, while the Americans and the Sunnis battled away in Anbar and the American-backed death squads fought the Sunni resistance in Baghdad, Muqtada al-Sadr has had plenty of time to consolidate his position as the de facto leader of Shiites all over the country.

So, the new American-Shiite assault on the Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad will just be an escalation of a campaign that has been under way since April 2005. In assessing its chances for success on these terms, it is worth noting that the total number of resistance and militia attacks per day in Iraq has more than tripled since this campaign was launched in 2005, with most of the increase taking place in Baghdad, and there is no reason to believe that this new escalation will suddenly have the opposite effect. The only way to succeed on these terms would be to achieve some sort of total victory over the Sunnis, which no serious analysts consider possible. This operation can therefore only be viewed as a desperate gamble for an unachievable victory, employing even greater violence than we have seen to date.

The response of Muqtada al-Sadr and his allies to the announcement of this escalation has been interesting. He has wisely ordered Mehdi militiamen in Sadr City to take off their traditional black uniforms, hide their weapons and do nothing to provide a pretext for a U.S. attack on Sadr City. As they have done up until now, his followers will keep a low profile and consolidate their position, while their two main competitors for power in Iraq, the Sunnis and the Americans continue to kill each other. Mehdi militiamen within the U.S.-backed Iraqi Army and Interior Ministry will of course continue to participate in the bloodletting alongside their American "allies."

In effect, both the Americans and the Shiite nationalists are doing a deal with the devil -- each other. Neither of them wants the other to end up as the victor in Iraq, but both are content to tolerate and use the other as long as they are both fighting the Sunnis. If the Americans declared war on al-Sadr, they would have to fight almost the whole population, Shiite and Sunni. And if al-Sadr unleashed his forces against the Americans, he could probably end the occupation, but only at the expense of a cataclysmic escalation of the war in which hundreds of thousands of his people would be killed.

But this mutual deal with the devil is a safer and much more productive policy for Sadr than for the Americans, as it appears to offer him a path to eventual victory. He has done much to earn the overwhelming support of the Shiite population by steering a careful path between armed resistance and collaboration for almost four years, and he has no reason to change course. The Americans, on the other hand, have worked themselves into a corner from which they can’t defeat the Sunnis, but their options are increasingly constrained by the political reality of Sadr’s power. This mutual deal with the devil has worked entirely in his favor, and there is nothing in the present plans that will change that.

For a real plan to actually end the war in Iraq, check out Congressmember Dennis Kucinich’s plan. It may not be realistic in every detail, but it is at least a plan that correctly identifies the responsibilities of the United States as the aggressor in this conflict and the necessary steps the U.S. government must take to give peace a chance: to withdraw its forces; restore Iraqi sovereignty; agree to pay reparations; and allow the international community to assist the people of Iraq in a legitimate process of reconciliation and reconstruction.

rather than talking about "beliefs".

To start the ball rolling, here's an article from last year by Max Fuller who appears to have done some extensive homework. Whether or not one backs all of Fuller's conclusions, it's undeniably an exhaustively footnoted and researched article.

"Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq"
by Max Fuller
Global Research, November 10, 2005

Discussion welcome.

by Andrew Cockburn:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2021233.ece

Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call "the Saigon moment", the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring. "They say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles," the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."

and his plan? If Im not mistaken Zellikow was employed by the State Department when he made up that report. He did not work in a vacuum and must have believed his ideas were not out to lunch!

My summary of Zellikow's ideas: Support the Shiites and the Kurds and abandon the Sunnis to militias in Iraq.

So far,...Sadr's militia is ignored. He told his militia to take off their black uniforms and lay low 'til the coast was clear to begin killing Sunnis again. Maliki wouldn't dare attack Sadr's militia, because he needs Sadr's support to keep his job.

Time will tell if the United States supports only Shiites and Kurds. It's possible that the violence in Iraq may preclude 3rd parties from any nation to materially influence the amount of bloodletting that is taking place.

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I've followed this topic fairly closely at my own blog (Needlenose) and wrote two years ago about the emergence of government-affiliated Iraqi militias in the wake of the Newsweek "Salvador option" article (see here and here).

But what most of you, including Ian, are missing is this: All that happened when our guy, Iyad Allawi, was prime minister. If the Americans were pulling all the strings in Iraq, he still would be. (Well, actually, Ahmad Chalabi would be -- even Allawi was a fallback choice.) But he isn't.

When the UIA (the religious Shiite slate) took power in 2005, they looked at the "special police commando" units whose creation we'd blessed and said, "Very nice -- now step aside, and let us show you how to do it." They kept the names of the units, installed their own commanders, and shifted the brutality into overdrive.

The Bushites' hands are very dirty, but the fact is that the death squads in Iraq have been out of their control for almost two years now. The notion that the U.S. is orchestrating all of the carnage there needs to get placed in the same obsolete conspiracy-theory pile as "Karl Rove is an evil mastermind who will make sure the GOP doesn't lose in 2006."