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US army concedes failure in Baghdad
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Steve Negus, Iraq Correspondent

Published: October 19 2006 19:00 | Last updated: October 19 2006 19:00

American and Iraqi efforts to improve security in Baghdad have failed to reduce bloodshed in the increasingly violent Iraqi capital, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq acknowledged on Thursday.

In an uncharacteristically gloomy admission, Major General William Caldwell said the recent surge in violence was “disheartening”. He said US and Iraqi forces would have to “refocus” security measures. The review was demanded by General George Casey, who commands the 140,000 US troops in Iraq.

Gen Caldwell did not specify how security methods might be refocused, but the unusually grim assessment seems in part intended to put pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take political steps that US officers have long said need to accompany military operations.

“In Baghdad, Operation Together Forward [launched in August to curb violence in the capital] has made a difference in the focus areas but has not met our overall expectations in sustaining a reduction in the level of violence,” Gen Caldwell told reporters.

At its launch, Operation Together Forward was to deploy more than 20,000 Iraqi security forces – including army and police – plus more than 7,000 coalition forces to tighten security in the capital. In July, General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, told US senators that reducing violence in Baghdad was the key to avoiding a full-scale civil war. Since those comments, the level of violence in Iraq, and Baghdad in particular, has continued to rise.

So far in October, 72 US troops – including a soldier killed in fighting near Balad on Thursday – and hundreds of Iraqis have been killed. Gen Caldwell said attacks on US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad shot up 22 per cent in the first three weeks of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

The increasingly pessimistic assessments from Iraq come as Republicans in Congress grow anxious that the Iraq war is going to cost them control of one, or both, houses of Congress in next month’s elections.

While the Bush administration insists that progress is being made in Iraq, privately they are frustrated with the apparent inability of the government of Mr Maliki to help clamp down on some of the sectarian killing perpetrated by death squads and Shia militias associated with members of the governing coalition.

Mr Bush on Wednesday made a comparison between Iraq and the Vietnam War when he said Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, “could be right” in writing that the violent situation in Iraq was the “jihadist equivalent” of the Tet offensive, which helped increase public opposition to that war. But a White House spokeswoman said Mr Bush was only trying to make the point that “the enemy is trying to affect the psyche of Americans”.

The US military wants Mr Maliki to stop protecting radical Shia groups such as the Mahdi Army militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In a virtually unprecedented criticism of the Iraqi leadership, Gen Caldwell said US forces had been forced to release Sadrist organiser Mazin al-Sa’edi on Wednesday, one day after his arrest on suspicion of involvement in violence, at the prime minister’s request.

Mr Maliki told USA Today that he had blocked a US proposal to conduct a large-scale operation against the Mahdi Army, saying the government did not intend to disarm militias until the end of this year.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1900891_pf.html

General Says Mission In Baghdad Falls Short

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 20, 2006; A01



BAGHDAD, Oct. 19 -- A two-month U.S.-Iraqi military operation to stem sectarian bloodshed and insurgent attacks in Baghdad has failed to reduce the violence, which has surged 22 percent in the capital in the last three weeks, much of it in areas where the military has focused its efforts, a senior U.S. military spokesman said Thursday.

The assessment by Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV followed a 43 percent spike in attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the capital since midsummer that has pushed U.S. military fatalities to their highest rates in more than a year. The military reported that three soldiers were killed in Anbar province west of Baghdad on Wednesday, bringing the number of U.S troops killed so far this month to 74.

Caldwell's appraisal of the Baghdad campaign known as Operation Together Forward was in stark contrast to reviews during the opening weeks. At that time, U.S. military leaders said the deployment of 12,000 additional U.S. troops in Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods was significantly improving security for residents.

The operation "has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence," Caldwell said Thursday at a weekly news briefing. Violence has risen in the areas where the U.S.-Iraqi operation has focused, because of counterattacks, he said.

"We're finding insurgent elements, the extremists, are pushing back hard. They're trying to get back into those areas" where Iraqi and U.S. forces have targeted them, he said. "We're constantly going back in and doing clearing operations."

Under the program, joint U.S.-Iraqi teams of soldiers and police entered dangerous Baghdad neighborhoods and used aggressive tactics to try to secure them, engaging with fighters, searching door-to-door and patrolling the streets. Teams then moved on to the next sector, leaving behind a fixed force that attempted to ensure gunmen would not return. The goal of the program was also to restore basic services such as trash collection.

Now, Caldwell said, "we are working very closely with the government of Iraq to determine how best to refocus our efforts. . . . It's clear that the conditions under which we started are probably not the same today. And so it does require some modifications of the plan."

Attacks on police and military units continued in many parts of Iraq on Thursday. Coordinated suicide car and truck bombings and mortar attacks on several police facilities and two U.S. patrols in the northern city of Mosul killed at least 12 Iraqis and wounded 30, local police and hospital officials said. There were no reports of U.S. casualties.

Later in Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber targeted a group of soldiers and civilians lined up outside a bank to cash their paychecks before the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr this week. The explosion killed 12 people and injured about 70. Three people were killed in a suicide car blast at a checkpoint west of Kirkuk early Thursday night.

In Baghdad, at least 19 people were killed and 31 injured in mortar attacks, suicide bombings and roadside bombings. News services reported at least 23 other killings Thursday in violence scattered around the country.

There are about 68,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad, and about 15,400 troops are taking part in Operation Together Forward. The campaign was launched in early August in response to attacks that were claiming as many as 100 lives a day in the capital. In September, 2,667 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry.

Without providing exact statistics, Caldwell said attacks had surged during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The four weeks of fasting ends in a few days with the beginning of the three-day festival of Eid al-Fitr. But Caldwell said the increase in attacks on U.S. forces also reflected the fact that more forces are patrolling Baghdad because of Operation Together Forward. The timing of the violence was also linked to the upcoming midterm elections in the United States, he said.

"The enemy knows that killing innocent people and Americans will garner headlines and create a sense of frustration," he said.

Caldwell said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has adopted Operation Together Forward as "the model which he is trying to take to clear the city of the violence and extremism." But the campaign is under intense counterattack, he said, because "if you want to in fact discredit the government and show they have an inability to bring security and safety to the city, you would in fact target the focus areas. We think that's exactly why it's occurring."

Maliki, who heads a government led by Shiite Muslim religious parties, has come under criticism recently for not doing enough to curb sectarian violence, particularly reining in the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by popular Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The force has been accused of slaughtering Sunni Arabs and forcing tens of thousand of them to flee their homes.

Caldwell also said that on Wednesday, at Maliki's behest, the U.S. military freed a Sadr official, Mazin al-Saidy, who had been detained the day before by U.S. forces in Baghdad on suspicion of being a member of the Mahdi Army and involvement in the killings of numerous Sunnis.

Caldwell said he did not know why Maliki had intervened to have al-Saidy released, but said it was not for the United States to "second-guess him."

"He is the prime minister of this nation, and . . . if he makes that decision, he has a lot of other information which we probably are not privy to," Caldwell said.

He said that as a condition of his release, Saidy signed a statement "promising to support the government of Iraq and disavow future acts of violence."

Washington Post correspondents in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baqubah contributed to this report.



© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Sydney Morning Herald

In the inferno, with no way out


October 20, 2006

Humiliation or getting dragged further in are the US choices now, writes Paul McGeough, chief Herald correspondent.

DEMOCRACY in Iraq is a meaningless term until after the civil war that is now tearing the country apart.

Only when Iraqis stop killing each other will they be able to decide the terms and conditions under which they are to live together - or not, as the case might be. It is an endgame that cannot be imposed by outsiders.

These days there is much squirming in Washington, London and Canberra as onion-like layers are peeled back to reveal the policy bankruptcy of the would-be king-makers who believed they could remake the world by invading Iraq.

Remember all the talk of Iraq as a democracy "beacon" or "beachhead" in the Middle East? Wasn't it supposed to be a bright, sunny day in the so-called Arab Spring?

Now we face the prospect of the US President, George Bush, getting serious advice that the best way out of the Iraq quagmire may have to include cutting in the dictators and theocrats of Damascus and Tehran on the Baghdad deal.

James Baker, a Bush family confidant and a former secretary of state who is heading a Congress-appointed search for a new strategy in Iraq, was deeply pessimistic in a speech in Houston on Tuesday: "There is no magic bullet … it's very, very difficult.

"Anybody who thinks that somehow we are going to come up with something that is going to totally solve the problem is engaging in wishful thinking."

But associates say Baker may recommend dialogue with Syria and Iran, sworn enemies of the President. It is a measure of the depth of the crisis that such a serving of crow pie would be even considered for the White House.

Sadly, the Americans are now having the debate that they should have had before they invaded Iraq. And the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Australia's John Howard are tap-dancing lest they be seen to have been duped when Bush - inevitably, some say - jumps the policy rails.

Under pressure to articulate the democratic prerequisites for a foreign withdrawal from Iraq, on ABC Radio's AM program yesterday, Howard set out a bald, minimalist position that seems to hinge on Iraq's democratic future - as opposed to its democratic present.

Interviewer Chris Uhlmann: "I thought at the outset of this war, one of the things being aimed for was a democratic Iraq?"

Howard: "Yes, it is; and that remains the objective. But before …"

Uhlmann: "But it is no longer necessary that Iraq be democratic before we withdraw?"

Howard: " … I think what we need is a situation where the Iraqis can provide security and that the democratic future of that country is reasonably secure."

THE DIFFICULTY with Iraq is that its system of government cannot be nursed along in isolation from the so-called war on terrorism.

That's where Bush, Blair and Howard botched it: by insisting that the invasion of Iraq was a necessary battle in the war on terrorism, they have made the outcome in Iraq an unavoidable measure of success or failure in the war on terrorism.

And for these three Western leaders, Iraq is a fiasco. The hopelessness of their case is this: they can withdraw any time they like, and leave the terrorists of the world to claim victory; or they can stay as mute, useless witnesses to the Iraqi bonfire which they ignited. There are a whole lot of halfway houses, but few if any in which they will find shelter from humiliation and embarrassment.

The civil war genie is out of the bottle in Iraq. Howard and others miss the point when they bang on about all being well once they have built the capacity of the new Iraqi security forces. It's not the ability of the raw forces to do the job that is in question, so much as the willingness of their political masters to issue orders that will be obeyed.

Let's be clear. The violence in Iraq is at such appalling levels because it is tolerated by Iraqi leaders. It's the same with the Iraqi elections. People come out to vote and the world obsesses about their courage and bravery. But little or no attention is paid to the strict ethnic and religious lines along which they voted and there is little questioning of what that means.

Their leaders get the red-carpet treatment when they turn up in Washington. "Ah," some commentators conclude, "all is well … they are democrats after all." But nothing is said when the Iraqis turn up more frequently to mesh with the nuclear maddies of the Axis of Evil in Tehran.

And despite each month's civilian body count proving the failure of the latest US-managed attempt to liberate Baghdad, there seems to be an inability in the corridors of power to grasp that we are observing the limits of American power. Democracy was to be the Western gift to the Iraqi people. So, have they been badly short-changed?

Spend enough time in Iraq and two truths emerge. Without for a minute arguing for a Saddam Hussein comeback, many Iraqis bitterly make the point that the ousted dictator could do what all the global forces mustered by Bush cannot do: impose law and order and deliver secure utility services.

As they ruminate over glasses of sweet black tea, they observe that in the absence of Saddam this was the war they had to have. But if Iraqis had been warned of this as an outcome of his demise, many would have settled for the devil they knew.

The politicians are loath to agree, but the scholar Anthony Cordesman, one of the most constant observers and analysts of the Iraq conflict, is satisfied that what is happening in Iraq constitutes civil war.

Iraqis knew that they had scores to settle. In the past year there has been more than a tenfold increase in sectarian violence. In the past three months alone, civilian casualties increased by 51 per cent. While a study by The Lancet which concludes that the Iraq death toll could be more than 600,000 sounds outlandish, other credible assessments put the toll anywhere between 44,000 and 128,000.

That's a lot of September 11 equivalents in a country where the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, thought the Americans would be welcomed as liberators and in which his former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, predicted this war would not cost the US a nickel because of all that Iraqi oil.

In his latest Iraq bulletin, Cordesman warns that Washington's analysis of the violence is selective and misleading - ignoring population distributions that constitute a clear measure of civil war and "grossly" understating the level of the conflict in their counting and definitions.

He also notes that US polling of Iraqi public opinion is misleadingly selective. Quoting a State Department poll that found 50 per cent to 90 per cent of some communities were concerned that civil war might break out, Cordesman observes tartly: "No one asked Iraqis how many felt they were already in a civil war."

The US-led invasion of Iraq sparked an insurgency - domestic and foreign - that didn't need Einstein to work out that the best way to paralyse the new Iraq and Washington's grand design was to provoke a civil war. But Bush misleads Americans in his harping on about the insurgents as the cause of the violence. His implication is that a single, mean-spirited force is working against the US. That is not the case.

Shiites and Sunnis are killing each other. Christians are under increasing attack. The Kurds are armed to the teeth in defence. The hideous killings and tortures are by Iraqis on Iraqis. The most miserable ethnic and religious cleansing is again Iraqi on Iraqi and at last count more than 150,000 people had been displaced.

Who will be exhausted first? Will the Shiites tire before every Sunni in the country is dead? Will their Sunni neighbours tolerate that? Will Sunnis who feel deprived of the power and resources they enjoyed under Saddam finally surrender to the reality of their small numbers under a Shiite majority? And if they don't, will Shiite neighbours, like Iran, help beat them into submission? Iraq is out of control.

Bush now agrees that perhaps the current violence is the Iraqi equivalent of the Vietcong's Tet Offensive which turned US public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Blair smacked down his top brass last week for daring to suggest the British military presence provoked rather than quelled violence in Iraq, but suddenly he, too, is talking of withdrawing.

And on Wednesday, the democratic minimalist John Howard emerged. But all are hogtied. They talk about the risk of chaos and human catastrophe if they dare to pull out, seemingly oblivious to the chaos and human catastrophe that is today's Iraq.

The best they can do is to send more body bags. Cordesman concludes: "Iraq is already in a state of serious civil war, and current efforts at political compromise and improving security at best are [only] buying time. There is a critical risk that Iraq will drift into major civil conflict over the coming months, see its present government fail, and/or divide or separate in some form."

Fine democracy, that.


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Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald.