Beyond the Green Zone's 'Gated Community,' Bush's Surge Is Failing

By Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch. Posted May 5, 2007.

"Be careful," warned a senior Iraqi government official living in the Green Zone in Baghdad," be very careful and above all do not trust the police or the army." He added that insecurity in the Iraqi capital is now as bad as it was before the US security plan came into operation in the city in February.

The so-called 'surge', the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.

There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in reality death squad members. Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that the name Omar is used only by Sunni. Three days later the boy was found dead.

I was driving through central Baghdad yesterday. Our car was pulled to one side at an army checkpoint. I was sitting in the back seat and had hung my jacket from a hook above the window so nobody could easily see I was a foreigner. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was.

We were lucky. He merely looked surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly: "Keep well hidden." The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of dead bodies found in the street went down. This was mainly because the largest Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. But the Sunni insurgent groups escalated the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. The US was unable to stop this.

Now the sectarian body count is on the rise again. Some 30 bodies, each shot in the head, were found on Wednesday alone. The main new American tactic is proving counter-productive. This is the sealing off entire neighbourhoods either by concrete walls or barriers of rubbish so there is only a single entrance and exit. Speaking of Sunni districts like al-Adhamiyah a government official said: "We are creating mini- Islamic republics."

This is born out by anecdotal evidence. The uncle of a friend called Mohammed ­ it is in the nature of Baghdad that nobody wants their full name published ­ died of natural causes. The family, all Sunni, wanted to bury him but they were unable to reach the nearest cemetery in Abu Ghraib. Instead they went to one in Adhamiyah. As they entered the cemetery armed civilians, whom they took to be al Qaida from their way of speaking, asked directly: "Are any of you Shia?" Only when reassured that they were all Sunni were they allowed to bury their relative.

The failure of the 'surge' comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is wholly factionalised. For instance the two vice presidents, the Sunni Tariq al- Hashimi, and the Shia Adel Abdel Mehdi, may make conciliatory statements in public but one Iraqi observer notes that "Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia."

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Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in Iraq, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.

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