Today's Iraq-related updates must begin with Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate. An excerpt:
The wars in Iraq (the plural is no typo) are about to expand and possibly explode, so it might be useful to have some notion of what we're in for....
The fighting in Basra, which has spread to parts of Baghdad, is not a clash between good and evil or between a legitimate government and an outlaw insurgency. Rather, as Anthony Cordesman, military analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes, it is "a power struggle" between rival "Shiite party mafias" for control of the oil-rich south and other Shiite sections of the country...Both sides in this struggle are essentially militias. Both sides have ties to Iran. And as for protecting "the Iraqi people," the side backed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (and by U.S. air power) has, ironically, less support--at least in many Shiite areas, including Basra--than the side that he (and we) are attacking....
Sadr, who may be Iraq's most popular Shiite militant and who controls several seats in parliament, gave Maliki the crucial backing he needed to become prime minister. However, largely under U.S. pressure, Maliki has since backed away from Sadr, who has always fiercely opposed the occupation and whose militiamen have killed many American soldiers (until last year, when he declared a cease-fire).
Maliki has since struck a close alliance with ISCI, which has its own militia, the Badr Organization, and whose members also hold much sway within Iraq's official security forces (though more with the police than with the national army). This alliance has the blessing of U.S. officials, even though ISCI--which was originally called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq--has much deeper ties with Iran than Sadr does. (ISCI's leaders went into exile in Iran during the decades of Saddam's reign, while Sadr and his family stayed in Iraq--one reason for his popular support. As Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, SICRI was created by Iran, and the Badr brigades were trained and supplied by Iran's Revolutionary Guard.)
Sadr's Mahdi army and ISCI's Badr Organization came to blows last August in the holy city of Karbala. This fighting--and his growing inability to control criminal elements within the Mahdi army--spurred Sadr to order a six-month moratorium on violence, which he renewed last month, against the wishes of some of his followers. (This moratorium is a major reason for the decline in casualties in Iraq, perhaps as significant as the U.S. troop surge and the Sunni Awakening.)
The fighting this week in Basra may be a prelude to the moratorium's collapse and, with it, the resumption of wide-scale sectarian violence--Shiite vs. Sunni and Shiite vs. Shiite.
To which Josh Marshall adds:
Fred doesn't say this, but I wonder myself if this isn't also an effort of Maliki (now allied with what used to be SCIRI) to crush the Sadrists while he still has the power of the US military behind him. Most accounts I've seen suggest that Sadr actually has more popular support than Maliki and his supporters, at least among the Shia population. It must not be lost on Maliki and his supporters that a Democrat may succeed President Bush and that that new president may be much less likely to prop up his government with American money and military might. So perhaps best to crush opponents now, with the help of the US military, in advance of that less certain future.
As an aside, President Bush is saying that Iran is, in the words of the Times, "arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces." Perhaps that's true. But it's hard not to note that the Badr Organization (formerly the Badr Corps), which Maliki has allied himself with, is the outfit that was actually created in Iran under the tutelage and financing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. So this at least seems like a rather partial take on what's occurring.
On to counterinsurgency pro Abu Muqawama, who follows up on last night's WaPo report that US troops are now taking the lead in the fighting:
There are obvious dangers here, but none more obvious than the fact that the U.S. is now doing Maliki's dirty work for him (and Iran, and ISCI, and the Badr Brigades) in the run-up to the provincial elections this fall. Now we know this is the prelude to this fall's provincial elections, so why the hell are we getting involved? If that Stryker platoon was just on patrol and started getting fired at and returned fire, okay, but that's not what JAM is saying happened:
Several Mahdi Army commanders said they had been fighting U.S. forces for the past three days in Sadr City, engaging Humvees as well as the Strykers. By their account, an Iraqi special forces unit had entered Sadr City from another direction, backed by Americans, but otherwise the fighting had not been with Iraqis. "If there were no Americans, there would be no fighting," said Abu Mustafa al-Thahabi, 38, a senior Mahdi Army member.If Abu Muqawama was leading one of those U.S. units into Sadr City past a bunch of Iraqi Army soldiers hanging out on the outskirts, he would not be happy. He would be asking himself a) why is he the one establishing the authority of the Iraqi state and not the Iraqi Army and b) why is he duking it out with a militia with broad popular support so that another Iran-backed political party can win a bigger share of the vote in the fall?
Now Iraqi Army units are calling for U.S. and UK military units to lend direct support in Basra as well.
In Lebanon, in September 1983, the U.S. lent direct support to what it assumed was a national institution, the Lebanese Army, in the battle at Souk el-Gharb. By doing so, it became, in the eyes of the rest of the Lebanese population, just another militia. The U.S. history in Iraq is more complicated, obviously, but what's happening now is the U.S. is throwing our lot in with ISCI in the upcoming elections. And all Abu Muqawama is saying is, there better be a whole lot of quid pro quo going on as well.
And as The Guardian is pointing out today, this really is all about the upcoming election:
Shiek Ali al-Sauidi, a prominent member of the Moqtada al-Sadr-led movement in Basra, said his men were being targeted not by the Iraqi government but by government militias loyal to the rival Supreme Islamic Council faction.
"They are a executing a very well drawn plan. They are trying to exterminate the Sadrists and cut and isolate the movement before the September local elections," he said in a telephone interview with the Guardian."The Sadrists are the only Shia resistance movement against the occupiers and we have wide popularity. We are going through a battle of existence we will fight to the end. We either survive this or we are finished." ...
Sauidi said the Mahdi army was well equipped for the fight ahead. "We have captured lots of their vehicles, machine guns and mortars. We have new RPGs we got from their supply trucks. Our fighters know how to use the side streets as their battle space."
As fighting between the Shia Mahdi army and Shia Iraqi soldiers continued, witnesses described the scenes in Basra.
A resident of the poor neighbourhood of Hayaniya said: "The situation is very difficult in Basra, all the side streets are controlled by the Mahdi army. Even if the army has lots of tanks, the Mahdi fighters are controlling the streets. The fighters are driving in captured Iraqi Humvees and waving new guns."
Let us be perfectly clear about this. We are allowing one group of Iraqis to use our military firepower to slaughter another group of Iraqis, and the group on whose side we are fighting is not the one with widespread popular support. They cannot win at the ballot box this fall, so they are using our bullets to settle the issue before the vote taxes place.
How many American lives will be ended for this? How many millions of dollars will be wasted in this?
And have I mentioned recently yet that just yesterday our president boldly declared "normalcy is returning back to Iraq?" If by "normalcy" he means a closer approximation to the hellish world his decisions have created, then sure. Otherwise? Otherwise he just needs to shut the fuck up.
All of which is a very long way to get to this last point. WaPo:
More than three dozen Democratic congressional candidates banded together yesterday to promise that, if elected, they will push for legislation calling for an immediate drawdown of troops in Iraq that would leave only a security force in place to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.Rejecting their party leaders' assertions that economic troubles have become the top issue on voters' minds, leaders of the coalition of 38 House and four Senate candidates pledged to make immediate withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of their campaigns.
"The people inside the Beltway don't seem to get how big an issue this is," said Darcy Burner, a repeat candidate who narrowly lost to Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) in 2006.
The group's 36-page plan does not set a specific deadline for when all combat troops must be out of Iraq. "Begin it now, do it as safely as you can and get everyone out," Burner said.
The starkest difference between the group's proposal, dubbed a "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq," and those embraced by many senior Democrats and the party's presidential candidates is that it rejects the idea of leaving U.S. troops on the ground to train Iraqi security forces or engage in anti-terrorism operations. The group instead calls for a dramatic increase in regional diplomacy and the deployment of international peacekeeping forces, if necessary.
One of the signatories, Donna F. Edwards, who bested Rep. Albert R. Wynn in his Prince George's County-centered district in the Democratic primary on Feb. 12, said the candidates are offering "real leadership." She also gave credit to "some in the Congress who are prepared to demonstrate the political will" to end the war, signaling that she disagrees with Democratic leaders who have been thwarted in their legislative efforts to reshape President Bush's Iraq policies.
The antiwar candidates include several challengers who are highly touted by Democratic leaders, including Burner and Eric Massa, who is running a second race against Rep. John R. "Randy" Kuhl Jr. (R-N.Y.). A few are running in Democratic-leaning districts and, should they win their primaries, are likely to win in November. Many more are, for now, longer-shot candidates running against veteran Republican incumbents.
Bring them home. We broke Iraq. All of us. Me. You. Your parents. Your children. It was all done in our names. We are all responsible. Worse still, there is no way we can fix it. We have shattered millions of lives, and there is nothing - not at this moment, at least - that we can do to atone for this mistake. We must begin to leave. No matter how noble it might seem, we cannot continue to compound our errors in the name of correcting the,
Bring them home. Bring them home now.
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