More ’surge’ poppycock

Mike Whitney
Online Journal
Monday, Aug 4, 2008

The surge has failed. It helped reduce US casualties, but it hasn’t produced the political solution that the Bush administration wanted.

The Shia-led government, headed by Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, has demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. What more proof of failure does one need? One hundred forty-four of the 275 members of the Iraqi Parliament signed a letter calling for a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. Also, a recent poll conducted for British Channel 4, showed that 84 percent of Iraqis want the US military to “leave within a year.” Again, these are signs of failure not success.

The absence of violence is not proof of success, otherwise, Saudi Arabia and the People’s Republic of China would be lauded as model governments, but they’re not. They are repressive regimes and human rights abusers. The reduction in violence in Iraq is just a temporary lull in the ongoing struggle against foreign occupation. The Sunnis are regrouping under the auspices of the Awakening Council, but their long-range plans remain the same: to retake political power from the Maliki government and force the US to withdraw.

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The spinmeisters in the Western media have made a big deal out the pause in the fighting and used it as a sign of progress. Progress? Over one million Iraqis have been killed and over 4 million have been either internally displaced or become refugees due to the war. By what perverted standard does the media measure success?

What the surge really proves is that ethnic cleansing works. Baghdad was a city of roughly 65 percent Sunnis. Now it is nearly 75 percent Shia. They didn’t simply pack up and leave, they were driven out by Shia militias who were provided cover by the US military. The process was chronicled by numerous independent Iraqi journalists. Uruknet.info, one of the few web sites that closely follows developments in Iraq, provided daily accounts of the Shia militias attacks on the various districts in Baghdad as they were taking place. Most of the news was not reported in the Western media. The surge was created as part of a public relations campaign to disguise ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Now the Sunnis have been effectively purged from the capital. That’s not a “political solution,” it’s a war crime.

More importantly, the United States has helped the Shia militias win their war against the Sunnis. The Shia control Baghdad now and the Sunnis will never get it back. That is why they are moving on to the next phase of their strategy which is to pressure US troops to leave. The war has also strengthened Tehran and expanded its power in the region. The Maliki government treats visiting Iranian diplomats like they were royalty and is on friendly terms with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iran/Iraq friendship shifts the balance of power away from US/Israeli interests. The long-term consequences of this are still unknown, but it does not bode well for America’s energy needs.

The Shia have little experience running the government. That’s been the Sunnis role. That doesn’t mean they are incapable of leadership, it simply means that the Bush administration broke with traditional imperial policy to apply their own neocon theories. Normally, imperial powers remove as few of the political leaders as possible, so that the social systems keep functioning with as little disruption as possible.

Not Bush. Bush chose to raze the country to the ground; rip apart the social fabric, destroy the critical infrastructure, and spread chaos far and wide. Many of the intellectuals, scientists, teachers and government officials have either been killed or fled the country. It is an Iraqi holocaust equal to the 1948 purge of Palestinians from their homeland. Now, as author Nir Rosen says, “Iraq no longer exists.”

By handing over control of the government to the Shia, Bush has intensified the sectarian violence. The idea of creating a “Shia Crescent” in the Middle East is part of a crackpot theory cooked up in a Washington think-tank. Imagine if the Russians invaded the United States and decided that the path to political stability was to wipe out the government, disband the bureaucracy, and appoint inexperienced people from the poorer sections of the inner cities and barrios to run the country. This is the level of ignorance in the Bush administration. The strategy has cost the lives of over a million Iraqis. That’s a high price for ignorance.

Political analyst Steven Simon explains in great detail the ”fatal flaws” in the present Bush strategy in an article that appeared in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Here’s what Simon says in “The Price of the Surge,” “The surge has changed the situation not by itself but only in conjunction with several other developments: the grim successes of ethnic cleansing, the tactical quiescence of the Shiite militias, and a series of deals between U.S. forces and Sunni tribes that constitute a new bottom-up approach to pacifying Iraq. The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state. If anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against the central government and against one another. In other words, the recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

“Despite the current lull in violence, Washington needs to shift from a unilateral bottom-up surge strategy to a policy that promotes, rather than undermines, Iraq’s cohesion. That means establishing an effective multilateral process to spur top-down political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions. And that, in turn, means stating firmly and clearly that most U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq within two or three years. Otherwise, a strategy adopted for near-term advantage by a frustrated administration will only increase the likelihood of long-term debacle.

“The surge may have brought transitory successes, but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism. States that have failed to control these forces have ultimately become ungovernable, and this is the fate for which the surge is preparing Iraq. A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctably weaken the prospects for Iraq’s cohesion over the long run.” [Steven Simon “The Price of the Surge,” Foreign Affairs]

As Simon points out, Bush’s bottom-up strategy reinforces the three main elements (tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism) which are preventing a unified Iraqi state from emerging. This increases the likelihood that Iraq will continue to be a dysfunctional state that will pose a threat to its neighbors, the region and US interests. That implies that the surge is inherently counterproductive.

Simon puts it like this: “When it withdraws from Iraq, the United States will be leaving a country more divided than the one it invaded — thanks to a strategy that has systematically nourished domestic rivalries in order to maintain an illusory short-term stability.”

There was never the slightest chance that the US would succeed in Iraq. The project was doomed from the beginning. Contrary to optimistic reports in the media, the future of the occupation has never been more uncertain. The Iraqi resistance has undermined the ability of the US military to wage war. The US is presently facing serious challenges around the world, but it can’t address those problems because its army is tied down in Iraq. The world is drifting away from Washington and the trend appears to be irreversible. The superpower model of global government is beginning to crack.

Another way to measure success in Iraq is by looking at the US fiscal deficit which has skyrocketed to nearly $500 billion. This is due to the exorbitant costs of prosecuting an open-ended conflict in the Middle East. Americans are not confused by the rhetoric surrounding the surge; they know we are losing. They see evidence of defeat every time they pull up to a gas pump. Tell me: Is $4 dollar per gallon gas a sign of victory or defeat? This isn’t rocket science.

The individual battles and skirmishes in Iraq are irrelevant; what matters is that America’s ability to wage war has been greatly undermined. By the end of 2009, the troops will begin to withdraw or they will be left to fight with slingshots and bows and arrows. The housing market is collapsing, the financial system is in meltdown phase, and the country is facing the greatest funding crisis in its 232-year history. Don’t look for proof of America’s defeat in Iraq. Look for it at home. Look for it at the pawnshops, the homeless shelters, and the growing number of empty subdivisions which have turned into ghost towns. This is where one can see the true costs of the war; a war that was lost before the first bomb was dropped.

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4 Responses to “More ’surge’ poppycock”

1. Jason Says:
   August 4th, 2008 at 8:52 am

   Tell this to a Neo-Con, and they just blink and say “Bush told us the economy was ok.”

   Insanity.

   Of course this could be laying the ground work for the division of the country (Iraq), and thus is working perfectly in regards to the stated goals before the war started.

2. zephie Says:
   August 4th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

   the only reason they did “the surge” was to protect the green zone and convoys. they need to have an underlying amount of havac in order to justify our presence. plus with the twenty thousand more men and gear, just look at all the extra millions for our contracters and suppliers. and anyway americans still die everyday and kill everyday. oh and it costs money everyday.

3. Tony R Says:
   August 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

   The “Surge” had nothing to do with reducing violence in Iraq.
   Many of you may have noticed that the reduction in US casualties and civilians occurred about the same time the British moved over 200 SAS to Basra. As in Ireland during the “troubles”, the british fomented violence by supplying the IRA with weapons and explosives in order to keep levels of violence up and to justify the occupation.
   It would seem that the Neo-cons bowed to pressure and ordered a reduction in their program of ‘divide and conquer’.

4. dirtbag Says:
   August 5th, 2008 at 9:11 am

   we paid millions of dollars to the sadr shia and to the sunni tribes to stop fighting. we basically paid them to stop killing our troops and each other.