Iraq Round-Up!

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:59 AM on August 17, 2007.

Let's talk "surge." The big story out of the US this week -- and one you should do whatever you can to bring to your friends' and neighbors' attention -- is that the big September report that all the pundits have been waiting for with bated breath will be called the "Petraeus Report" -- after the anti-insurgency guru -- but will in fact be written by the White House. It will be a political document, it will say that things are tough but getting better every day, it will call for US troops to be pulled out of some of the hotter areas -- and probably call for some troop draw-down for appearances' sake -- it will paint a dire picture of a larger withdrawal, and it will all be utter bullshit.

Petraeus told a group of visiting lawmakers that "success" in Iraq -- according to what criteria nobody really knows -- will require a US military presence for the next decade or so.

A couple of seemingly conflicting pieces of polling data this week are noteworthy: According to Gallup, twice as many Americans have a positive view of Petraeus than hold a negative one, and eight in ten say he's at least a "somewhat" accurate source of information about events on the ground. Editor and Publisher says that may make the report with his name on it go down easier, but I wouldn't be too sure. According to a CNN poll released this week, "53 percent of people polled said they suspect that the [September report] will try to make it sound better than it actually is," while "Forty-three percent said they do trust the report."

Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Undersecretary appointed by Reagan and now an analyst with the Center for American Progress, returned from a recent trip to Iraq and among his conclusions was this:

It would take nine to 12 months or longer to withdraw all U.S. troops, contractors and equipment safely from Iraq and phase out U.S. bases there, says a respected analyst after extensive talks with U.S. commanders and diplomats and Iraqi leaders in Baghdad.

Cordesman doesn't necessarily advocate a withdrawal -- I should make that clear.

Our British friends continue to gradually extract themselves from the mess Blair got them into. This week, a key panel in the House of Commons issued a report predicting that the "surge" would be ineffective. The MPs concluded what should be obvious to everyone:

We believe that the success of this strategy will ultimately ride on whether Iraq's politicians are able to reach agreement on a number of key issues.

Contrary to a lot of reporting -- stenography -- this week, the military situation hasn't improved in Iraq, but even if it had, the ebbs and flows of the multi-faceted civil war are irrelevant as long as there's no political reconciliation between the heavily-armed factions. The political situation in Iraq is as shaky as it has ever been, and that's all one needs to know to understand that the "surge" is and always was nothing more than a delaying tactic.

Speaking of the security environment, the big story out of Iraq this week was violence, specifically a series of four truck bombs that were detonated in an area of Northern Iraq with little to no government or US military control, killing at least 400, with the death toll expected to rise. The bombings targeted the Yazidi, a religious sect combining elements from Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It's likely that Sunni insurgents pushed out of Anbar and Diyala provinces by the presence of the highest number of US troops since the war began were responsible for the attacks. See Sam Dagher's article in our War on Iraq special coverage area for the fascinating and heartbreaking background to this story.

A powerful roadside bomb killed Khalil Jalil Hamza, the governor of Qadisiyah province, this week, along with the provincial police chief and two others. The southern province has been the scene of intense fighting between nationalist and separatist Shiite militias, a story that hasn't received as much attention as it deserves.

Dozens of armed gunmen in official uniforms and driving vehicles with Iraqi police markings kidnapped Abdel-Jabar al-Wagaa, a top deputy to Iraq's oil minister, in broad daylight this week. In special coverage, Ben Lando reports that al-Wagaa played a key role in the ministry. Two officials from the finance ministry who were kidnapped earlier this year in a similar raid are still missing and presumed dead.

A suicide truck bomber blew up a key bridge connecting Baghdad to the North of the country. Baghdad is intersected by the Tigris and a man-made waterway called the Army Canal, and the city's many bridges have become strategic choke-points for security services and insurgents alike. IraqSlogger issued a report this week on Baghdad's 43 key spans.

It's hard to conceive of the chaos that's happening every day in Baghdad, but IraqSlogger's report gives us a small taste:

Baghdad's residents know which bridges are controlled by extremist Sunni militants, and which are controlled by Shi'a militias, or by the security forces. These factors combine to make some spans into extremely crowded parts of Baghdad's transportation network, and others into virtual no-man's lands. Baghdad's residents follow these changing patterns each day.

It was a brutal week for US troops as well, with 22 fatalities during the past seven days.

US forces are also suffering from extreme fatigue; the number of suicides in the military last year was the highest since 1980, which the military says is largely a result of the incredible stress on marriages and other personal relationships caused by continuing redeployments.

That there are still legions of armchair warriors insisting that things are looking up in Iraq is simply offensive.

In Iraqi politics, yet another attempt to form some sort of unity coalition was launched this week, as the country's four major Shiite and Kurdish parties announced a new alliance. But the government refuses to yield to the (wholly legitimate) demands made by the nation's largest Sunni bloc -- the al-Maliki government is incapable of meeting them -- and that pretty much dooms the effort to failure. Abdul Kareem Samarrae, a Sunni lawmaker with the Iraqi Accordance Front, told al-Hurra television: "We have lost hope, frankly, that this coalition will be the ideal solution to the strangling political crisis that the country is going through… we think that this is merely a political cover for a government in its last few days or weeks."

Go surge.

From the Department of a Few Bad Apples, a marine was charged this week with the murder of an Iraqi soldier. The two were on guard duty together, the Iraqi lit a cigarette, which might have made them a target for snipers, the two got into an altercation and the Marine killed his Iraqi charge.

Another Marine was charged with killing two unarmed detainees during the siege of Falluja in 2004, a siege that yielded many, many independent reports of brutal war-crimes, all of which were routinely downplayed by the US media. In the incident in question, between five and ten unarmed prisoners were allegedly executed by Camp Pendleton Marines. Netroots hero Paul Hackett, who narrowly lost his race for an Ohio Congressional seat in 2004, is defending the Marine.

And in a third trial this week, an Army sergeant was charged with cracking an unarmed prisoner's skull with a baseball bat and then ordering -- "soliciting" -- other soldiers to follow suit.

This is the sixth week of the Iraq round-up, and each and every week there's been at least two or three murder trials for US troops. One can certainly say that the military is prosecuting these cases, and that's a good thing, but there are too many to dismiss as anomalies.

Casual brutality is a wholly predictable result of the strain of repeated deployments combined with continuous exposure to a propaganda machine that has 90 percent of US troops in Iraq believing that they're in Iraq to retaliate for the attacks of 9/11.

In commercial news, the latest spin from occupation authorities is that Iraqi manufacturers are gearing up for the Christmas season in the US.

Santa might be visiting Iraq this year to fill his holiday wish list, as Iraq's once-sagging textile industry gears up to export Iraqi-made clothing to the United States, a senior Iraqi government official said yesterday in Baghdad.

That perverse graph was sourced to the DoD.

Iran and Iraq agreed this week to build a pipeline between the two countries that would carry as much as 200,000 barrels per day from Southern Iraq to Iran.

The Iraqi government announced this week that it would auction off a concession for the country's cell phone service. Five bidders were hot for the business, none of them are household names.

In airline news, Sweden suspended commercial flights to and from Iraq after an incident last week in which someone took a shot at a Nordic Airways plane departing from the Kurdish zone. Nobody was hurt.

And Air New Zealand got in hot water with the awesomely progressive government down there for making a couple of charter flights ferrying Aussie troops to Iraq without notifying anyone in the foreign policy establishment. The NZ government has been strongly opposed to the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq from the start. In a true "neener, neener" moment, the Australian Ministry of Defense shot back by banning all military personnel from flying on any Air New Zealand flight for all of perpetuity.

What a tosspot.

A huge "back channel" arms deal was unearthed by Italian mafia investigators this week. The deal would have sent 100,000 AK-47s to Iraq, without the knowledge of coalition forces. The AP noted that "the purchase would merely have been the most spectacular example of how Iraq has become a magnet for arms traffickers and a place of vanishing weapons stockpiles and uncontrolled gun markets since the 2003 U.S. invasion and the onset of civil war." No word yet on whether Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney are going to push to bomb Italy.

Finally, Beau Biden, son of the Democratic Senator from Delaware is preparing to ship out to Iraq. The WashingtonPost.com headline writers called Joe an "anti-war Democrat," which must have been news to the White House.

You should check out Broadcasting and Cable's cover story about the news business in Iraq. It's a fascinating read.

Speaking of good reads, let me wrap up with some of the great stories we ran this week in the War on Iraq special coverage area that didn't fit onto the front page. Remember, you can get all of them delivered to your inbox weekly by signing up for my War on Iraq newsletter.

Massive Bombings Signal Rising Threat to Iraq's Ethnic Minorities Sam Dagher: Lacking protection from the Iraqi government, ethnic and religious minorities may look to defend themselves.

Murdered Reporter's Final Dispatch: Mosul's Christian Community Dwindles Sahar al-Haideri: Many of Mosul's Christians have gone abroad to escape the threat of violence, while others have sought refuge in the countryside around Mosul.

Ties to Iran Weaken al-Maliki's Government Further Ali Al-Fadhily: Maliki refuses to make the concessions necessary to bring his "unity" government back together.

Pregnant Women, Newborns Hit Hard by Iraq Violence According to doctors, dozens of women in Iraq each day face delivery difficulties caused by violence and the curfew that is preventing access to health care during the night.

Kidnapped Oil Official Had Key Role Ben Lando: Dozens of armed gunmen in uniforms and official vehicles kidnapped Abdel-Jabar al-Wagaa, a deputy minister and top assistant to the oil minister, in broad daylight on Tuesday.

Grab a story and dig a bit deeper. I'll have more next week.

Tagged as: iran, bush, iraq, cheney, iraq war, petraeus

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.