[NYTr] Iraq: New Reports Contradict Claims the "Surge" is Working

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Huffington Post - Dec 24, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/24/new-reports-undercut-clai_n_78196.html


New Reports Undercut Claims that Surge Is Working

by Max Follimer

New reporting from Baghdad and Washington has called into question the
frequently asserted claim that the military surge in Iraq is working.

In particular, journalists are beginning to point out that despite
security gains inside the Iraqi capital, there are concrete signs that
the "fragile" peace cited by Gen. David Petraeus over the weekend will
not hold once the Pentagon begins reducing troops numbers to pre-surge
levels.

Last week, McClatchy Newspapers published the findings of the
Pentagon's most recent quarterly progress report from Iraq.
Underscoring the lack of progress in bringing political stability or
national reconciliation to Iraq, Reporter Nancy Youssef wrote:

    Despite significant security gains in much of Iraq, nothing has
changed within Iraq's political leadership to guarantee sustainable
peace, a Pentagon report released Tuesday found.

    The congressionally mandated quarterly report suggests that the
drop in violence won't hold unless Iraq's central government passes key
legislation, improves the way it manages its security forces and finds
a way to reconcile the country's competing sects. It said none of those
steps has been taken.

    Although security gains, local accommodation and progress against
the flow of foreign fighters and lethal aid into Iraq have had a
substantial effect, more needs to be done to foster national,
'top-down' reconciliation to sustain the gains," the report said.

    The Pentagon report is the latest assessment circulating in
Washington as officials ponder whether the strategy of increasing U.S.
troop strength this year by 30,000 can be called a victory or whether
the drop in violence is a lull that will break once the United States
returns to last year's troop levels.

Youssef's reporting also cited concerns about the preparedness of Iraqi
security forces to take over from American servicemen. She wrote:

    The report also said that despite four years of intense U.S.
effort, the Iraqi security forces remain unprepared to operate
independently. It said that the ministries of interior and defense are
plagued by "deficiencies in logistics, combat support functions
and . . . by shortages of officers at all operational and tactical
levels."

    The report also raises questions about the future of so-called
concerned local citizens organizations, which U.S. military leaders
have credited with helping to quiet many of Iraq's contentious areas.
The U.S. pays the organizations' estimated 70,000 members to patrol
Iraq's streets, giving them jobs and, U.S. officials believe, less
incentive to join the insurgency.

    The report said the groups were "crucial to the counterinsurgency
effort." But it also warned that they could evolve into a militia
that's opposed to Iraq's central government, a fear shared by Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. The vast majority of the concerned
local citizens are Sunni Muslims. The government is dominated by
Shiites.

Over the weekend, an article by Damian Cave and Alissa Rubin in the New
York Times reiterated the concerns surrounding the Sunni patrol groups,
part of the so-called "Awakening" movement.

Rubin and Cave wrote:

    It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain
the seeds of a civil war -- in which, if the worst fears come true, the
United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces
arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives
and dollars have been spent. 

And further down in their article, Rubin and Cave reported:

    [I]t remains unclear what the Awakening will become and whether the
tribes will stick together or segregate. Nor is it clear whether Iraq's
government will ever meet the tribes' demands, which range from the
simple (more electricity, water and jobs) to the extreme (a wildly
disproportionate share of the seats in the Parliament).

    In interviews with more than a dozen sheiks in the province, along
with police officers, local leaders and imams, not one expressed any
trust in the government of Prime Minister Maliki. "They are working
only for the Shiites," said Mahmoud Abed Shabeeb, who acknowledged that
130 members of his tribe were policemen, paid by the Shiite-led
Interior Ministry in Baghdad. "Everyone knows that."

The New York Times and McClatchy have not been the only news
organizations to question the use of the Awakening groups. On his
influential Iraq blog, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole
pointed out that in some areas, members of the Awakening groups have
gotten into fire fights with local security officials. Cole wrote:

    The problems with the dual authority being established in Sunni
Arab areas-- with tribal Awakening Councils appointing themselves as,
often, vigilantes-- became apparent on Monday when a firefight broke
out in Bayji between Awakening members and local official police. There
really need to be new provincial elections in Iraq so that if any
Awakening members are actually popular, they can gain legitimacy at the
polls.

Cole also highlighted one of the other consequences of the surge: the
massive displacement of Iraqi civilians. On December 19, Cole wrote:

    The US troop escalation that began last February seems to be
implicated in the displacement of nearly one million Iraqis to Syria
between January and October of this year, adding to the nearly 450,000
that fled there in 2006. This is according to projections from a United
Nations weighted survey of nearly 800 refugees. Some 78% of those
interviewed in Syria said that they came from Baghdad....

    How the US 'surge' drove almost one million Iraqis to Syria last
spring and summer is a great mystery, and casts severe doubt on its
political success. A significant proportion of these one million Surge
Victims appear to have been Baghdad Sunnis, since from January of 2007
through July 2007 the US military admits that Baghdad went from being
65% Shiite to being 75% Shiite. Since another 500,000 left between July
and October, depending on what proportion of those were Sunnis, Baghdad
could now be even more than 3/4s Shiite. The Sunnis are not going to
take this lying down, and the 'surge' seems to me to have set the stage
for 1) a violent return of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs to
their usurped homes in Baghdad and 2) therefore a second Battle for
Baghdad as soon as the US forces in Iraq are too weak to prevent it.

On Sunday, Barack Obama told CBS' Bob Scheiffer that the surge has
simply brought Iraq back to the starting gate:

    [W]e have essentially gone full circle. We had intolerable levels
of violence and a dysfunctional government back in 2006. We saw a huge
spike in violence to horrific levels. The surge comes in, and now we're
back to where we were in 2006 with intolerable levels of violence and a
dysfunctional Iraqi government.

And John Edwards gave NBC's Matt Lauer a similar take on the surge:

    I think that there has been some decrease in the violence; there's
no question about that. But the fundamental question that's been there
all along -- and it was there at the beginning of the surge, according
to President Bush -- is whether there's been some political progress,
Matt.

    I mean, have the Sunnis and Shi'a actually made some progress
toward a political compromise or political reconciliation? And if that
hasn't happened -- and it clearly has not -- then there's been no
serious progress. That was the entire purpose of the surge.