Today's NYT gives us an update on "the surge":
BAGHDAD, Feb. 19 — It looked like a scene out of a counterinsurgency training video. Dressed in crisp uniforms with a computer-generated camouflage of blue, gray and brown, Iraqi national police officers joined United States troops on searches late last week through relatively calm districts of Shaab and Ur in northeast Baghdad in the first large operation of the Baghdad security plan.
But appearances in Iraq can often be deceiving. At least two of the national police officers who turned out for the operation were moving ahead of the American troops not to lead the security drive but to warn the residents to hide their weapons and other incriminating evidence.Some policemen on the sweep advertised their Shiite sympathies. Infiltration by militias has always been a major problem for the Iraqi security forces, and particularly the police, viewed by many Sunnis in the capital as de facto Shiite militia fighters.
The much anticipated effort to wrest Baghdad streets from the control of militias and insurgents has been presented in news conferences and public statements as an Iraqi-led operation. Iraqi officials have been out front, announcing arrests, weapons finds and other details, as well as new decrees intended to halt two years of so-called sectarian cleansing. But on the streets, the joint patrols seemed little different from those of the past few years: A handful of Iraqis, acting at the direction of a larger group of Americans, opening drawers and closets and looking behind furniture as they searched for banned weapons or other contraband.
For the first few days of the operation, about 2,500 American troops took part, compared with about 300 Iraqi forces, a mix of police and Army personnel, military officials said. The original plan called for Iraqis to work with United States troops throughout the night to enforce curfews and otherwise ensure that the gains of the previous day were not lost. But they were shifted to buttress the day force.
It was a translator working with the Americans, interviewed a day after the fact, who had overheard the Iraqi police tipping off the Iraqis. “They were telling people in the neighborhood to hide your weapons from the Americans,” he said. The police were Shiites, he said, and inclined to favor others of their sect in the district, which is mostly Shiite but has a considerable Sunni population.
On another patrol, an American commander said, Iraqi residents told American soldiers that a national policemen had warned them to hide anything incriminating including paraphernalia about Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite militia leader whose forces are targets of the Baghdad crackdown.
“Families told us he was warning people before we’d come in, ‘If you have this or that, then hide it before they get here,’ ” said First Lt. Andy Moffit, who led a platoon through Shaab and Ur. The major problem with Iraqi forces is not their tactical skill, but their “loyalties and integrity,” he said.
On that score, he said, “We’ve still got years to go.”
Years to go? Are you kidding me? The Shi'a and Sunni split is a source of allegiance with roots that run over 1000 years deep. Iraq, by contrast, was created less than 100 years ago by people who weren't even from the region. If they aren't loyal to the country now, what makes anyone think they will be in 5 or 10 years? This is madness.
Personally, I don't and can't blame these people for being loyal to their family, their tribe, and their religion. It took one of the most brutal wars in human history for Americans to give up their allegiance to their individual states in favor of the nation. And that was after we the people had established the nation ourselves.
The next few paragraphs just prove this point:
Fearful of police ties to the militias, some residents questioned by the Americans about militia activity refused to say anything until the police were led out of the room.
Moreover, some Iraqi forces made little effort to hide their true allegiance. In one police truck an amulet stamped with the image of Imam Hussein, the revered Shiite martyr, swung from a rearview mirror. Next to it was a green Shiite flag, taped to the inside of the windshield. The truck’s radio blared chants heard during Ashura, a Shiite religious holiday.To many Sunnis the Iraqi forces remain little more than instruments of Shiite hegemony, and the Baghdad plan appears to have done little to change that view.
Again, it baffles me why this is not more obvious to people. Prior to the war, everyone agreed that Saddam was a brutal tyrant. Nevertheless, most of them also believed that once Saddam was gone the people he had brutalized would remain loyal to the nation he had held together through that very same brutality. Why?
When the Cold War ended, did the people of the Soviet Union remain loyal to the USSR? Of course not. Only force and repression had held it together, and once it was gone the country fell apart. Ukranians, to cite just one example, had been trying for centuries to get out from under Russian rule; thus it surprised no one when they moved to establish an independent state. And yet somehow in Iraq it was supposed to be a smooth transition, one that came complete with chocolates and flowers.
Why is it that the people who run this country know so little about the world?
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