Webb was correct to point out that the only truly good news to
come from Iraq would be good news regarding the political landscape.
And there,
Iraq is still beset with problems. In recent days, parts of
northern Iraq have been invaded by Turkey, an ally of the United
States. In Baghdad, Sunni members of parliament staged a walkout to
defend their leader, whose bodyguards were implicated in fashioning car
bombs. Proposed legislation reducing sanctions against Sunni Arabs who
once belonged to the Baath Party nearly produced a riot in parliament.
Meanwhile, Britain and Australia, among Bush's few remaining allies
with combat troops in Iraq, are planning to depart in 2008, raising
questions about security in the key southern port city of Basra, the
major route for the country's lucrative oil exports.
What the
recent publicity about the "success" of the troop surge has ignored is
this: The Bush administration has downplayed the collapsing political
situation in Iraq by directing the public's attention to fluctuating
numbers of civilians killed. While there have been some relative gains
in security recently, even there the picture remains dubious. The Iraqi
ministry of health, long known for cooking the books, says that a few
hundred Iraqis were killed in political violence in November. However,
independent observers such as
Iraq Body Count cite a much higher number
-- some 1,100 civilians killed in Iraq in November. They reported that
bombings and assassinations accounted for 63 persons on Saturday, the
first day of December, alone.
Indeed, the "good news" of a
lull in violence is relative at best. In fact, Iraq's overall death
rate makes it among the
worst civil conflicts in the world. Even if one
accepted the official Iraqi government statistics, the average number
of Iraqi deaths directly attributable to political violence in the past
three full months has been around 700 per month. That pace, if
maintained, would work out to about 8,400 deaths a year. (I am citing
the kind of war statistics produced by passive information gathering
such as in newspapers. Using a more comprehensive public health study
such as the one that
appeared in the Lancet last year, which takes into
account deaths from criminal violence and insecurity generally, would
result in much higher numbers.)
In all of Northern Ireland's troubles
over 30 years, only about 3,000 persons are thought to have been
killed. In Kashmir since 1989, some 40,000 to 90,000 persons have been
killed in communal and guerrilla violence; if we take the higher
number, that's roughly 419 killed per month. Perhaps only Somalia and
Sudan witness killings on that scale, and no one would say that "good
news" is coming out of either of those places.
The current
"good news" campaign from the Bush administration regarding the troop
surge is only the latest in a long history of whitewashing the war
since the 2003 invasion. First, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
denied that there was massive looting following the fall of Baghdad.
Then he denied that there was a rising guerrilla war. Then, after the
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani maneuvered an unwilling Bush administration
into holding relatively free elections, the victory of Shiite
fundamentalists close to
Iran was obscured by the "purple thumb" good
news campaign. That is, the administration focused on the democratic
process and relative success of the voting, diverting attention from
the bad news that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
had taken over.
Later, it was good news when the Iraqi
parliament produced a theocratic constitution with all the weaknesses
of the U.S. Articles of Confederation, even though all three
Sunni-majority provinces rejected it in the subsequent referendum. What
was in the constitution was not important, only that it existed. The
Bush administration has heralded any number of such "milestones"
reached, but not whether they led to worthwhile results.
Obscured
by these "milestones" is that the orgy of violence in Iraq has
displaced 2 million persons abroad and another 2 million internally,
and left tens of thousands dead. But now the "good news" is that the
guerrillas appear not to have been able to keep up the pace of violence
characteristic of 2006 and early 2007, even if the pace they maintain
today is horrific.
Moreover, the relative reduction in
violence is artificial and probably cannot endure. Blast walls enclose
once posh Baghdad districts like Adhamiya, but although they keep out
death squads they also keep out the customers that shopkeepers depend
on. When a Baghdad pet market was bombed recently, it was revealed that
the US military had banned vehicles in its vicinity for some time, but
allowed cars to drive there again just a few days before the bombing.
Vehicle bans are effective, but not practical in the medium or long
term. When they end, what will prevent the bombs from returning?
Recent
political developments have been ominous on multiple fronts. On
Saturday, Turkey says it launched an attack inside Iraq on positions of
the radical Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which is on the U.S. State
Department list of terrorist organizations. The Turkish press reported
that 100 Turkish special operations troops went into Iraq. In short,
there was a small invasion. Turkey charges that PKK guerrillas have
conducted cross-border raids, killing dozens of Turkish troops. Turkey
is a NATO ally of the United States -- but the Iraqi Kurds are
virtually the only firm friends Washington has in Iraq, so the Bush
administration is now caught between the anvil and the fire.
In
Baghdad, politics are a mess. Critics of Bush's policy complain that
the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite
fundamentalist, has not reached out with sufficient vigor to Sunni
Arabs to seek reconciliation. In fact, the situation is far worse than
that.
The case of one Sunni Arab leader is emblematic: On
Saturday, the members of the Iraqi Accord Front in parliament staged a
mass walkout, charging that the U.S. military had put their leader,
Adnan Dulaimi, under house arrest. In Tikrit, a Sunni Arab city north
of Baghdad known as Saddam Hussein's hometown, hundreds of citizens
demonstrated on behalf of Dulaimi. The boycott ended on Sunday when
U.S. troops brought Dulaimi to the Al-Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone,
so that he could be safe enough to attend parliament.
The
bizarre dispute had begun Thursday night when U.S. forces were
investigating violence against members of the local "Awakening
Council," tribal fighters paid by the Americans to fight radical
jihadis. (This is the strategy the U.S. has used with some success in
the Anbar province.) U.S. troops traced the cars used in the attack to
Dulaimi's compound, then found a rigged-up car bomb nearby, to which
one of Dulaimi's guards had the key. The U.S. military detained some 40
of the Sunni leader's bodyguards, as well has his son, Makki.
On
Sunday, the Iraqi government charged that chemical tests showed that
seven of Dulaimi's bodyguards had been handling explosives. The most
charitable interpretation one could put on the evidence released so far
is that a terror ring was operating among Dulaimi's bodyguards without
his knowledge. If that were so, it would suggest a shocking lack of
judgment on his part. Or, as he himself suggested, it is not impossible
that the rogue guards were planning to assassinate Dulaimi himself;
several prominent Sunni Arab politicians have been attacked by their
own security guards.
But of the three possibilities -- that
Dulaimi or his son is actively implicated in political violence; that
unbeknownst to him, his mansion was being used for bomb making; or that
his household had been infiltrated by radical Sunni fundamentalists
intent on killing him -- none qualifies remotely as the type of "good
news" for which Bush's supporters are looking.
The bloc in
parliament that Dulaimi leads had withdrawn this summer from the
so-called national unity government of al-Maliki, with its six cabinet
ministers resigning. Al-Maliki for a while declined to accept their
resignations, then abruptly accused them of absenteeism and dismissed
them, depriving them of pensions and perquisites. Then he attempted to
appoint other Sunnis to his cabinet, from the tribal Awakening Councils
that are on the U.S. payroll, but parliamentarians complained that
these individuals had not been elected to office.
The Iraqi
Accord Front comprises Sunni Arabs who until recently had been willing
to serve in al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government. They have shown no
inclination to rejoin him. The tribal Awakening Councils in al-Anbar
Province and elsewhere have turned against the Salafi jihadis (
who
sometimes style themselves "al-Qaida," though they have no direct ties
to Osama bin Laden). But most of their members are still deeply
distrustful of the al-Maliki government, which they tend to view as
Iranian. (Iranians are also Shiites, but unlike Iraqis do not speak
Arabic.)
There are other signs that efforts toward political
reconciliation are failing miserably. A significant element in the
Sunni guerrilla movement around Mosul is the Izzat al-Duri faction of
the Baath Party, which also has support in Baghdad neighborhoods such
as Adhamiya. In a quest to mollify these guerrillas and their
sympathizers and bring them in from the cold, the Bush administration
has pressed the al-Maliki government to pass legislation softening the
decrees that excluded tens of thousands of former Baath Party members
from government employment. But when the cabinet presented such a bill
to parliament last week, deputies loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr banged their desks and disrupted the proceedings. Parliament
adjourned with shouting and scuffling. Indeed, there is some question
about whether a measure so repugnant to the Shiite and Kurdish blocs in
parliament has much chance of being passed.
In the deep south
at Basra -- in the past cited as a more stable part of the country --
aides of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraqi
Shiites, have complained of a wave of some 200 assassinations. Security
is not good in the city, with Shiite militias and tribal forces often
battling one another for control of petroleum smuggling. Basra Province
contains Iraq's only ports, and it exports most of Iraq's petroleum.
The main guarantors of security in Basra and surrounding provinces had
been the British, who are now leaving. By March, plans to diminish the
number of British troops will leave only 2,500 of them at Basra
airport, and some members of the British parliament are now worried
that those troops will become increasingly vulnerable to attack as
Britain's overall troop level dwindles. The 500 Australian combat
troops in southern Iraq will also leave by next summer, according to
newly elected Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
The lack of
virtually any good political news from around the country is what
drives the war boosters to cite death statistics. Obviously, the people
of al-Anbar Province are tired of their young men being blown up by
Saudi and Moroccan jihadis, and they have mobilized to stop the
foreigners. But no one is arguing that al-Anbar's roughly 1 million
predominantly Sunni citizens have suddenly become enamored of the
Shiite government in Baghdad. Nor has the strategy of using local
Awakening Councils to combat the so-called forces of al-Qaida been
nearly as successful in Diyala Province, which is mixed, with Sunnis,
Shiites and Kurds.
Obviously, if the U.S. military wants to
stop car bombings by banning vehicular traffic to certain markets, it
can do so, especially using thousands of extra troops concentrated in
specific areas. But although there has been a relative lull in violence
in the U.S.-reinforced Baghdad, the U.S. military acknowledges that the
Iraqi capital is still a very dangerous place. One question is whether
the violence will explode again when U.S. forces inevitably withdraw.
But the far more important question is this: How much longer can Iraq
limp along as a failing state before it really begins to collapse?
Writings 
Appearing on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia gave some needed perspective on the U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq. 
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