[NYTr] Escobar: Counterinsurgency means "call in an airstrike"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Asia Times Online - Nov 9, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak03.html


THE ROVING EYE

Iraq: Call an air strike

By Pepe Escobar

"... the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it
been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any
help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all
of it has been written by the losers." -Martin van Creveld, in "The
Changing Face Of War," 2006

Amid the George W Bush administration's relentless campaign to "change
the subject" from Iraq to Iran, how to "win" the war against the Iraqi
resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite, now means - according to
counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus - calling an air
strike.

On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in
southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called
Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to
prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it's to
control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border
targeting Iran's Khuzestan province.

With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and
President General President Musharraf's new "let's jail all the
lawyers" coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains
of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle - not to mention the
interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though,
still rules unchecked.

The Pentagon - via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in
Baghdad - is relentlessly spinning there's now less violence in the
capital, a "sustainable" trend. This is rubbish.

Fil cannot even admit to the basic fact that Baghdad has been reduced
to a collection of blast-walled, isolated ghettos in search of a city.
Baghdad, from being 65% Sunni, is now at least 75% Shi'ite, and
counting. Sunni and Shi'ite residents alike confirm sectarian violence
has died down because there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be
ethnically cleansed.

When Fil says the Iraqi forces are "much, much more effective", what he
means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular
Shi'ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards - Shi'ites
themselves - roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the
sidewalks are "worse than the Americans".

Violence has also (relatively) decreased because the bulk of Muqtada
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is still lying low, following his strict orders,
even though they are being targeted by constant US air strikes on Sadr
City.

The falling numbers of US deaths have also been subjected to merciless
spinning. Yet already more US troops have been killed in Iraq in 2007
than in all of 2006. This temporary fall is not caused by a burst of
Sunni Iraqi resistance good will - even though an array of groups has
taken some time out to concentrate forces in these past few months on
unifying their struggle (See It's the resistance, stupid Asia Times
Online, October 17, 2007.)

Once again, Baghdad residents, who daily have to negotiate life in
hell, reveal what's going on. Lately, as a Shi'ite businessman says,
"We have not seen the Americans. They used to come to my neighborhood
almost every day at night, with Humvees and Bradleys. They stopped at
the end of September." This means less US-conducted dangerous
"missions" in the Baghdad wasteland - with less exposure to snipers and
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - and more time spent in
ultra-fortified bases.

The Pentagon even had to admit that sniper attacks, conducted by real
pros, have quadrupled during the past year and could "potentially
inflict even more casualties than IEDs". The US Department of Defense's
Defense Advance Research Projects Agency had to rush a program using
lasers to identify snipers before they shoot.

Anyway, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad now it inevitably means
an air strike. Mega-slum Sadr City residents confirm the US keeps
attacking alleged Mahdi Army "terrorist" haunts - but mostly from the
air.

With the US corporate media operating virtually like a Pentagon
information agency, the only news fit to print is that as of early this
week there were 3,855 American dead in Iraq. But most of all - and
never mentioned - there were 28,451 wounded in combat. And as of
October 1, there were no less than 30,294 military victims of accidents
and diseases so serious they had to be medically sent out of Iraq.

When in doubt, 'liberate' from the air

Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan,
revealed this week Iraq's security forces have set up 250 spy cameras
across Baghdad - presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi
Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives.
Atta has argued "the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings
and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working".
That's more rubbish.

Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of
the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there's virtually
no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever
American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming - they stick to
base - fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from
Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora - but it will be back.

With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch
four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 - the year of Bush's
"surge" - than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there
had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes
than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.

Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely
dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already
occupies, civilians are the inevitable "collateral damage" of these
attacks - families, women, children, assorted "non-combatants". The US
Air Force does not even take responsibility - claiming the air strikes
are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the
mean streets of Sadr City.

The Pentagon talk of "precision strikes" and "reducing collateral
damage" means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights
disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus,
the "loser", according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book
on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.

But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus' "by his
book" approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a
cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri
al-Maliki "sovereign" Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the
mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the "fish" - who support
the "sea" of the resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite - feel? 80% of them are
unemployed anyway - and they merely struggle to survive as second-class
citizens in their own land.

There's hardly any electricity, fuel or food in Baghdad - everything is
rationed - for anyone who's not aligned with a militia-protected
faction. The only other option is to flee. With at least a staggering
4.4 million, according to the United Nations, either refugees or
internally displaced, options are dwindling fast. There may be as many
as 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Damascus, in despair, has
tightened its visa rules: only academics and businessmen are now
entitled. No less than 14% of the entire Iraqi population has been
displaced - courtesy of the Bush administration.

Oh, but the Bush administration is "winning" the war, of course.
Counter-insurgency doctrine rules that the enemy must be controlled
with social, political, ideological and psychological weapons, and
risks have to be taken so civilians can be protected.

The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not - he's just
providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His
master's voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of
Mesopotamia and then call it "victory".

[Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at
pepeasia at yahoo.com.]

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.