Bush blunders towards more bloodshed in Iraq

Submitted by martin on 5 January, 2007 - 1:53

By Martin Thomas

George W Bush's "new policy" in Iraq is a recipe for more bloodshed on the lines of the assault on Fallujah in November 2004 - but also, so it seems more and more, a botched compromise which makes no sense from any angle at all.

Bush's basic line - a "surge" of 20,000 more US troops into Iraq, raising the numbers there to the highest level since 2003 - comes from right-wing wonks Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, the sort of people who believe that the USA could have won the Vietnam war with "one more push".

But Keane and Kagan have written: "Bringing security to Baghdad - the essential precondition for political compromise, national reconciliation and economic development - is possible only with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail..." - in fact, in their view, to make things worse. (Washington Post, 27 December 2006).

What Keane and Kagan see as needing at least 30,000 more combat troops - a nearly 50% increase on the 70,000 combat troops (140,000 total) currently in Iraq - is much more limited than Bush's stated objectives with his smaller "surge".

Keane and Kagan wanted 30,000 just for "clearing and holding the Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite neighbourhoods in the center of Baghdad". No attempt, for now, to reconquer the almost-all-Sunni province of Anbar, which includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi; no attempt to take on the Shia-Islamist "ultras" of Moqtada al-Sadr, who largely control the huge Sadr City district of Baghdad. Other right-wing writers who sympathise with Keane and Kagan, such as Reuel Marc Gerecht, have said publicly and emphatically that it is crazy for the USA to try to take on Sadr at the same time as the Sunni "resistance".

Keane and Kagan do not explain how their strategy would do anything other than heighten hatred of the USA among Sunnis, who would see the US troops acting as hired guns for a Shia-sectarian government, or how US troops could effectively "hold", i.e. police, Sunni neighbourhoods where almost everyone would hate them.

Yet Keane and Kagan seem sober and realistic as compared to Bush. Bush, with fewer troops (20,000 total, apparently, not 20,000 combat plus their back-ups) wants to subdue not only the Sunni areas of Baghdad, but also, apparently, Anbar province and the Sadr militia. Keane and Kagan do not claim that their "surge" could achieve results within less than 18 months; but the Bush administration has stressed that its surge is "temporary", and plainly feels a political imperative to show quick results.

According to the right-wing Wall Street Journal (2 January 2007), "senior military commanders believe the extra forces can be sustained in Iraq for only six to 12 months before logistical and manpower strains become untenable" - and that is without taking into account the political strains arising from the inevitable increase in US casualties.

Particularly chilling in the Bush administration's statements is a promise to shift US forces from "restrictive" to "permissive" rules of engagement. Translation: the administration thinks that US troops, who have already killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, have been too restrained. Now they will be given orders enabling them to kill more freely. The official US government background briefing on Bush's new policy admits that "Iraqis [are] increasingly disillusioned with Coalition efforts". Don't they wonder why?

According to Bush's speech: "This time, we'll have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighbourhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter those neighbourhoods..." I.e. Sadr City.

In a background briefing, a "senior administration official" said: "the militias have to be dealt with, because they are operating outside the law. He said very clearly that that includes the Shia militia... the Mahdi Army and Sadr have to be dealt with.. the commander will be free to go after those who act outside the law wherever they are in Baghdad... That would include Sadr City".

There must be many Iraqis in the Sunni areas who fear and dislike the Sunni-Islamist "resistance", and many in Sadr City who dislike Sadr's mini-Taliban. Bush's new "bring 'em all on" policy is likely to push them to rally behind their "own" communal militias.

Incongruously - and probably as a result of the final policy announcement resulting from long haggling between different points of view, none of them convincing - Bush's new policy includes, alongside its ultra-"hawkish" headlines, elements of the more "diplomatic" approach advocated by the Baker report.

Bush emphasises that progress on "benchmarks" will be required of Nouri al-Maliki's Iraqi government. This at the same time as he is effectively telling that government to abandon even the pretence of controlling its capital, and to step aside to let US troops do that for it; and he is announcing that those US troops plan to go to war against the faction in that government (the Sadrists) to which Maliki owes his election as prime minister! Bush is trying to combine two different possible US policies - to build up and sustain the Maliki government, as the best available; or to push it aside and remodel Iraq "from below" to create conditions for a "better" government - but reducing both to nonsense.

And if Maliki does not meet Bush's "benchmarks"? According to the US government's background briefing: "there is no indefinite commitment to US presence in Iraq... [it] works only if the Iraqis step forward and step up. And [Bush has] made it very clear that if the Iraqis do not do that, they will lose the support of the American people".

"Support of the American people" is an odd way of describing nervous, trigger-happy troops, with "permissive" rules of engagement, on Iraq's streets. But that is what Bush means. He is saying that if Maliki does not do what the USA wants, then Bush will withdraw US troops.

But using US withdrawal as a threat to make Maliki shape up is stupid, and not only because Bush obviously has no intention of carrying out the threat. The collapse of the Maliki government would trouble the government ministers much less than it would trouble the USA. The government ministers would mostly flee back to London, or some other city of exile, or retreat to an area of Iraq securely under their (Shia or Kurdish) control. The USA would be left with one of the world's most pivotal regions, the oil-rich Gulf, convulsed in all-out war and chaos.

And the workers and the peoples of Iraq? They lose out either way. Their only hope is the emergence of a secular and democratic pole within Iraqi politics, led by the labour movement, which can fight both the US/UK and the sectarian militias. Our duty is solidarity with the much-harassed Iraqi labour movement trying to do that.

Comments

Submitted by USRed on Mon, 15/01/2007 - 12:02

But it amazes me that you STILL oppose the withdrawal of US/UK troops from Iraq. Rhetorical excess aside, this Weekly Worker article on the AWL's position seems wholly spot-on to me:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/655/Awl.htm

Submitted by Clive on Tue, 16/01/2007 - 14:21

In reply to by USRed

The WW article blatently lies about what is said in Solidarity! It claims, for instance, that I don't notice that the government and occupation are one side of the civil war, when the article it refers to makes precisely this point...

I find the idea that anyone who is at all sympathetic to us, and followed what we actually say, would find this pile of typical CPGB lying tosh remotely 'spot on' very disturbing. It makes me feel - which is a feeling I repeatedly get in this debate - that someone, and it might be me, is suffering from some kind of cognitive disfunction. How can we be talking past each other this much?

Submitted by Pete on Tue, 16/01/2007 - 15:33

In reply to by USRed

To say our position is equivalent to 'oppos(ing) the withdrawal of troops' is a typical CPGB distortion and needs a bit of justification from you, USRed. The article that WW use as the basis for their attack makes clear that it is opposing the call for immediate withdrawal. It only uses the word 'withdrawal' once, and then it is preceded by the word 'immediate'. Peculiarly WW who are usually very keen on providing links to sources don't have one in their article.
In Sean Matgamna's article that WW attack, where is it even hinted that if the US/UK governments were planning a withdrawal, we would say 'No, you must stay'? Time and again we have explicitly said the opposite. And it says so again in the article that WW use and is linked above - 'So then, we should advocate that the occupation forces stay, perhaps that they should be numerically strengthened? No!'.
What we do oppose, is socialists calling for 'Troops Out Now' and either:
1) welcoming what will then happen as an opportunity to engage in denunciation policies, (something else to blame on Bush and Blair); or
2) in calling for 'Troops Out Now', indulging in fantasies as alternatives. And it is a fantasy at present to say that the Iraqi workers movement has a remote opportunity of taking power or even being able to significantly exploit the situation of an immediate withdrawal.
Ours is not an argument for the 'troops to stay' - it is an argument for the Troops Out Now brigade to engage with reality, and stop pretending that they are in the lead of a powerful internationalist movement that will determine when or how the troops are withdrawn. It is an argument for them to use whatever power they have to aid the Iraqi workers movement.

Submitted by sacha on Wed, 17/01/2007 - 16:06

There is a debate on Venezuela going on here, in which Arthur Bough raised a point about Iraq. My response:

Arthur,

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if a working-class seizure of power was on the agenda in Iraq, you'd support our position "100%". Which position? The refusal to call for "troops out now"? But if the Iraqi workers were in a position to take power, of course we could call for immediate US/UK withdrawal - both because the Islamists would not pose the same kind of danger and because the occupation would function primarily as a threat to the Iraqi workers, probably uniting with the Islamists to crush them.

Even if it wasn't a revolutionary situation but it was clear that the Iraqi entity and state would survive withdrawal, and the only fundamental conflict in Iraq was between the Iraqi government, backed by the occupation, and the workers, we would call for withdrawal.

You seem to have got things very much the wrong way round.

I'll let someone else take the thing about "progressive".

Sacha

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