Like its predecessors, the new American campaign in Baghdad
is billed as an effort to "restore security," targeting both Sunni
resistance and Shiite militias. In reality, even George Bush is not reckless
enough to open a second urban combat front against the Mehdi Army in Sadr City.
Instead, the U.S. escalation plan perpetuates the failed policy of taking on
the Sunnis first and leaving the Shiite opposition for later. This can only
continue to strengthen Muqtada al-Sadr and Shiite opposition to the U.S.
occupation.
In April 2005, the United States launched its campaign to "secure"
Baghdad, using Iraqi Interior Ministry forces comprised mainly of Badr Brigades
militiamen to launch a campaign of terror against predominantly Sunni
neighborhoods on the West bank of the Tigris. These forces had been trained
under the supervision of Iran-Contra figure James Steele, who was sent to Iraq
as counselor for Iraqi Security Forces to U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, and
they soon left a trail of thousands of tortured corpses from Baghdad to the
Iranian border.
This brutal policy failed spectacularly to destroy Sunni
resistance in Baghdad. In some ways though, the sectarian hatred and mistrust
that it spread throughout the city served its purpose, as Shiites within and
without the U.S.-trained "security" forces found reason to join the
terror campaign against the Sunni population. But the goal of destroying the
resistance was not met -- indeed, the Sunni resistance in western Baghdad only
became stronger and better organized.
As Americans were reading in horror that the Baghdad morgue
was overwhelmed with tortured, disfigured corpses, and the U.N. Human Rights
Monitor issued a scathing report in September 2005, American officials joined
the chorus of disgust at these atrocities, but claimed that this was all the
work of "insurgents" who were obtaining police uniforms on the black
market.
Eventually, though, these denials were unsustainable. Steven
Casteel, the senior advisor to the interior minister, who had been instrumental
in launching this policy and then protecting it by obfuscation, was quietly
brought back to the United States. The new line in American rhetoric was to
deplore the "sectarian violence" it had unleashed, and, increasingly,
to identify the death squads with Muqtada al-Sadr�s Mehdi Army rather than the U.S.-trained
Badr commandos working for the Interior Ministry, who were always the principal
American weapon in this campaign.
Faced with the failure of this policy and ever stronger
Sunni resistance, American policymakers might have been expected to try
something different. Instead, in early 2006, U.S. forces began to provide
greater direct ground and air support for the Shiite forces attacking Sunni
enclaves in Baghdad. American support for this campaign has increased
progressively with each newly announced operation: Together Forward; Together
Forward II; do they dare call the new one Together Forward III?
The public relations
exercises linked to these operations have repeatedly promised Americans at home
that U.S. forces are targeting both Sunni "insurgents" and Shiite
militias. The implication is that, whatever the details of the original "Salvador
Option," as Newsweek called it, local Iraqis are now responsible for the "sectarian
violence" gripping the capital, and U.S. forces are intervening to restore
law and order to protect people of all sects.
American soldiers in Baghdad know perfectly well that they
are fighting Sunnis, alongside Shiite forces with strong ties to militias, but
the Western media have consistently failed to challenge the new American
narrative. The Iraq Study Group acknowledged a 43 percent increase in violence
in Baghdad in the course of the first two Operation Together Forwards, but
attributed this to an inadequate effort to restore law and order, rather than a
deliberate American escalation of the dirty war.
Like the previous fictional narrative of "insurgents
disguised as police commandos," the new narrative of even-handed law
enforcement has worn so thin that it has become transparent. Yet once again the
American response has only been to escalate its public relations efforts along
with the violence. American officials now sound so determined to take on the
Shiite militias that Iraqi Shiite officials have had to come out and publicly
reassure their supporters that the Americans don�t really mean it!
Finally, Monday, a U.S. military spokesman acknowledged what
all Sunni Iraqis in Baghdad know only too well. Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl told
a McClatchy reporter, "We�re not necessarily going after the militias if
the militias don�t come after us. Our mission is not to take down the militias;
that�s a function of the government."
Lt. Col. Bleichwehl neglected to mention that the "government"
has appointed a Shiite general from Amara to lead this campaign. Amara was one
of Muqtada al-Sadr�s first bases of support following the U.S. and British
invasion. Britain suffered its worst casualties of the war there, and
eventually declared victory and handed the whole province over to local
officials allied with al-Sadr. The news that a general from Amara is going to
lead the anti-militia campaign in Baghdad is all the reassurance the militias
need that they have nothing to worry about, and was probably al-Sadr�s price
for approving the new plan.
So, if they�re not going after the Shiite militias, what are
the new U.S. forces going to do in Baghdad, and what will be the result?
There are three main forces vying for power in Iraq, the
nationalist Sunni resistance, nationalist Shiite forces grouped around Muqtada
al-Sadr, and American government and commercial interests with weak, usually
self-serving, support from a small group of privileged former exiles in the
Green Zone. The Kurds have no interest in challenging the other Iraqi groups in
Baghdad, but will assist the Americans at a price, and the pro-Iranian SCIRI
Party is also cooperating militarily with the Americans, while waiting for an
opportunity to pick up the pieces of a broken Iraq at some point in the future
with Iranian assistance.
The American strategy is and has always been to wage war
almost exclusively against the Sunnis, knowing that this means leaving Sadr and
the Shiite nationalists for later. When Bush uses the expression that "progress
has been slow," which sounds like an odd characterization of this crisis,
this is what he is referring to. In fact, progress has been so slow that, while
the Americans and the Sunnis battled away in Anbar and the American-backed
death squads fought the Sunni resistance in Baghdad, Muqtada al-Sadr has had
plenty of time to consolidate his position as the de facto leader of
Shiites all over the country.
So, the new American-Shiite assault on the Sunni
neighborhoods of Baghdad will just be an escalation of a campaign that has been
under way since April 2005. In assessing its chances for success on these
terms, it is worth noting that the total number of resistance and militia
attacks per day in Iraq has more than tripled since this campaign was launched
in 2005, with most of the increase taking place in Baghdad, and there is no
reason to believe that this new escalation will suddenly have the opposite
effect. The only way to succeed on these terms would be to achieve some sort of
total victory over the Sunnis, which no serious analysts consider possible. This
operation can therefore only be viewed as a desperate gamble for an
unachievable victory, employing even greater violence than we have seen to
date.
The response of Muqtada al-Sadr and his allies to the
announcement of this escalation has been interesting. He has wisely ordered
Mehdi militiamen in Sadr City to take off their traditional black uniforms,
hide their weapons and do nothing to provide a pretext for a U.S. attack on
Sadr City. As they have done up until now, his followers will keep a low
profile and consolidate their position, while their two main competitors for
power in Iraq, the Sunnis and the Americans continue to kill each other. Mehdi
militiamen within the U.S.-backed Iraqi Army and Interior Ministry will of
course continue to participate in the bloodletting alongside their American "allies."
In effect, both the Americans and the Shiite nationalists
are doing a deal with the devil -- each other. Neither of them wants the other
to end up as the victor in Iraq, but both are content to tolerate and use the
other as long as they are both fighting the Sunnis. If the Americans declared
war on al-Sadr, they would have to fight almost the whole population, Shiite
and Sunni. And if al-Sadr unleashed his forces against the Americans, he could
probably end the occupation, but only at the expense of a cataclysmic
escalation of the war in which hundreds of thousands of his people would be
killed.
But this mutual deal with the devil is a safer and much more
productive policy for Sadr than for the Americans, as it appears to offer him a
path to eventual victory. He has done much to earn the overwhelming support of
the Shiite population by steering a careful path between armed resistance and
collaboration for almost four years, and he has no reason to change course. The
Americans, on the other hand, have worked themselves into a corner from which
they can�t defeat the Sunnis, but their options are increasingly constrained by
the political reality of Sadr�s power. This mutual deal with the devil has
worked entirely in his favor, and there is nothing in the present plans that
will change that.
For
a real plan to actually end the war in Iraq, check out Congressmember Dennis Kucinich�s plan. It may not be
realistic in every detail, but it is at least a plan that correctly identifies
the responsibilities of the United States as the aggressor in this conflict and
the necessary steps the U.S. government must take to give peace a chance: to
withdraw its forces; restore Iraqi sovereignty; agree to pay reparations; and
allow the international community to assist the people of Iraq in a legitimate
process of reconciliation and reconstruction.