Bleak Vision for Iraq's Future
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| Thu, 09-16-2004 - 10:55am |
CIA Analysis Holds Bleak Vision for Iraq's Future
by Douglas Jehl
WASHINGTON -- A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said yesterday.
The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, and the worst case is developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome is an Iraq whose political, economic and security stability would remain tenuous.
"There's a significant amount of pessimism," said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50 pages. The officials declined to discuss the document's key judgments -- concise, carefully written statements of intelligence analysts' conclusions.
The intelligence estimate, the first on Iraq since October 2002, was prepared by the National Intelligence Council and was approved by the National Foreign Intelligence Board under John McLaughlin, the CIA's acting director. Such estimates can be requested by the White House or Congress, but government officials said this one was initiated by the intelligence council under George Tenet, who stepped down as CIA director July 9.
As described by the officials, the pessimistic tone of the new estimate stands in contrast to statements by Bush administration officials in recent days, including comments yesterday by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who asserted that progress was being made in Iraq.
"You know, every step of the way in Iraq there have been pessimists and hand-wringers who said it can't be done," McClellan said at a news briefing. "And every step of the way, the Iraqi leadership and the Iraqi people have proven them wrong because they are determined to have a free and peaceful future."
President Bush, who was briefed on the new intelligence estimate, has not significantly changed the tenor of his public remarks on the war's course over the summer, consistently emphasizing progress while acknowledging that difficulties still lie ahead.
Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, criticized the administration's optimistic public position on Iraq yesterday and questioned whether it would be possible to hold elections in January as planned.
"I think it is very difficult to see today how you're going to distribute ballots in places like Fallujah and Ramadi and Najaf and other parts of the country, without having established the security," Kerry said in a call-in phone call to Don Imus, the radio talk show host. "I know that the people who are supposed to run that election believe that they need a longer period of time and greater security before they can even begin to do it, and they just can't do it at this point in time. So I'm not sure the president is being honest with the American people about that situation either at this point."
The situation in Iraq prompted harsh comments from Republicans as well as Democrats at a hearing into the shift of billions of dollars from reconstruction spending to security.
Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called it "exasperating for anybody looking at this from any vantage point." Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said of the overall lack of spending on reconstruction: "It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous."
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on any new intelligence estimate on Iraq.
Each of the officials who described the assessment said they had read the document or had been briefed on its findings. The officials included people who have been critical and people who have been supportive of the administration's policies in Iraq. They insisted they not be identified by name, agency or branch of government because the document remains highly classified.
The new estimate revisits issues raised by the intelligence council in less formal assessments in January 2003, the officials said. Those documents remain classified, but one of them warned that the building of democracy in Iraq would be a long, difficult and turbulent prospect that could include internal conflict, a government official said.
The new estimate by the National Intelligence Council was formally approved at a meeting in July by McLaughlin and the heads of the other intelligence agencies, the officials said.
Its pessimistic conclusions were reached even before the recent worsening of the security situation in Iraq, which has included a sharp increase in attacks on American troops and in deaths of Iraqi civilians as well as rebel fighters. Last week, Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, acknowledged that significant areas of Iraq, including Fallujah and Ramadi, remained effectively outside American control. He said it might be some time before Iraqi forces, with American support, can regain control.
Like the new National Intelligence Estimate, the assessments completed in January 2003 were prepared by the National Intelligence Council, which is led by Robert Hutchings and reports to the CIA director. The council is charged with reflecting the consensus of the intelligence agencies. The January 2003 assessments were not formal National Intelligence Estimates, which means they were probably not formally approved by the intelligence chiefs.
The new estimate is the first on Iraq since the one completed in October 2002 on Iraq's illicit weapons program. That document asserted that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but those findings, used by the Bush administration as a central rationale for war against Iraq, now appear to have been wrong. A review by the Senate Intelligence Committee that was completed in July has found that document to have been deeply flawed.
The criticism over the document has left the CIA and other agencies wary of being wrong again in judgments about Iraq.
Declassified versions of the October 2002 document included dissents from some intelligence agencies on some key questions, including the issue of whether Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. The government officials who described the new estimate on Iraq's prospects would not say if it included significant dissents.
Separate from the new estimate, Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued other warnings yesterday about the American campaign in Iraq, saying the Bush administration's request to divert more than $3 billion to security from the $18.4 billion aid package of last November was a sign of serious trouble.
"Although we recognize these funds must not be spent unwisely," said Lugar, the committee chairman, "the slow pace of reconstruction spending means that we are failing to fully take advantage of one of our most potent tools to influence the direction of Iraq."
Less than $1 billion has been spent so far.
During a hearing, Hagel said that the State Department request was "a clear acknowledgment that we are not holding ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning."
He went on to say that the request for redirecting the money "does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning, but it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."
The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware, was far more outspoken. "The window's closing, the window of opportunity," said Biden, among the harshest critics of Bush's policies in Iraq. "I think it's about ready to slam shut." "The president has frequently described Iraq as, quote, 'the central front of the war on terror,' " Mr. Biden went on. "Well by that definition, success in Iraq is a key standard by which to measure the war on terror. And by that measure, I think the war on terror is in trouble."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/191055_iraqintel16.html?searchpagefrom=1&searchdiff=1

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I read this in the paper.
>"Our actions have opened the door and made Iraq the 'battleground' between al Qaeda (and other terrorist organizations) and the U.S. to come in and undermine us."<
ITA!
New Iraq Attacks Are More Sophisticated.
http://daily.webshots.com/content/ap/current/h57115541.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The scale and sophistication of militant attacks in Iraq are steadily increasing, with coordinated strikes and complicated ambushes that increasingly hit their targets, officials and analysts said Wednesday.
The spike in bloodshed - more than 200 dead in four days - has stifled American hopes that the transfer of sovereignty and the prospect of a democratic vote in four months could take the steam out of the uprising and pave the way for a reduction in U.S. troops.
Instead, there are signs the Americans and their Iraqi allies are facing an enemy more determined than ever. Insurgents have learned from past mistakes and shifted strategy, cooperating more closely with each other and devising new ways to put their relatively simple arsenal to treacherous use.
"More thought is going into the execution of the attacks," said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia, which is trying to bring stability to a swath of northeastern Iraq.
Militants now follow up roadside bomb attacks with a deluge of rocket-propelled grenades instead of fleeing, or fire off mortar rounds to lure soldiers out of their base and into freshly laid mine fields, military commanders say.
In a July attack in Samarra, for example, militants detonated a car bomb and then hammered a military headquarters with a mortar barrage as troops fled the building. Five American soldiers died.
At least 47 people were killed in a car bombing in Baghdad on Tuesday targeting would-be police recruits, the deadliest single strike in the capital in six months.
"The enemy has been able to construct IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that are more complex, include more rounds in the form of a "daisy chain," and tend to have a higher lethality," said Maj. Neal O'Brien of the Army's 1st Infantry Division.
O'Brien also said that an increase in the use of car bombs in the last two months coincided with an influx of foreign fighters with the bomb-making know-how in July.
"They graduated to more coordinated attacks," he said.
On Sunday, militants in Baghdad struck the U.S.-guarded Green Zone - the seat of the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy - with their biggest mortar and rocket barrage to date, many of them showing signs of careful aim.
Hours later, guerrillas used a car bomb to disable a U.S. patrol on a main Baghdad thoroughfare before detonating a second car bomb that wrecked a Bradley fighting vehicle sent to assist the patrol. They then opened fire on the wounded crewmen as they fled the vehicle.
"The set of attacks that occurred over the weekend were definitely more simultaneous than in the past," said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, spokesman for coalition forces in Baghdad.
Analysts say the plethora of armed groups behind the insurgency are increasingly working together.
"As time goes on, various gangs get together and it does become more coordinated," said Judith Kipper, a Middle East expert at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations. "Groups start small, get know-how and become more lethal over time."
American commanders, however, insist the stepped-up attacks and the possibility of increased cooperation among militant groups are signs that the insurgents have realized time is running out for them with the onset of elections in January.
"There is a level of desperation associated with the anti-Iraqi forces, they absolutely don't want to see free elections and reconstruction projects work," Hastings said.
But the attacks have fueled a growing backlash against the United States and interim Iraqi Prime Minster Ayad Allawi.
"The situation is getting worse day after day and the American are still in the streets," said Kawakib Butris, 40, a supermarket worker in Baghdad. "This government didn't ensure the simplest things to us like security, electricity and other services."
In response to the growing violence, the Bush administration announced plans this week to divert about $3.5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds for security and the training of Iraqi forces.
NATO, however, moved close to an agreement on sending hundreds of military instructors to Iraq, with France and the United States narrowing their differences Wednesday over the mission to run a training center for the country's new armed forces.
The plan will likely entail the deployment of 200-300 NATO instructors to Iraq and would complement a much larger U.S.-led operation to build new Iraqi armed forces, which are expected to total 260,000.
Iraqi police and national guardsmen have been the focus of many of the recent attacks, creating a challenge for the United States and Allawi as they strive to strengthen the Iraqi security forces.
The ferocity of the insurgency has also raised new doubts about how effectively Washington and Allawi can carry off the elections - and whether they will be able to wrest control of rebel strongholds such as Fallujah and Ramadi in time to include the cities in the process.
A full-fledged assault may be the only way to restore state authority to Fallujah and Ramadi, even though such a get-tough approach risks alienating the population.
Iraqis, a mostly conservative people, have been deeply angered by some of the practices of the U.S. military, like raiding homes and detaining women, and their failure to restore security more than a year after Saddam Hussein was ousted. While viewing the Americans as infidels or crusaders who want to destroy Islam, many have been won over by what they see as the piety and devotion of Islamic-oriented insurgents.
In places like Fallujah, a hotbed of resistance west of Baghdad, the insurgents have endeared themselves to the local population by spearheading a religious revival and taking over some law enforcement tasks.
"I was very optimistic when the Americans entered Iraq ... but then I was so shocked by their practices that I even joined Fallujah residents in their war against them," said Haqi Esmaiel Ibrahim, 25, an accountant at a Baghdad stationery store. "Because of the bad security situation and kidnap cases, I had to make my two sisters quit school and stay at home."
The Americans recently launched a series of military operations and opened negotiations with religious and tribal leaders to retake several cities that have fallen into rebel hands, yielding some positive results.
U.S. troops ended their siege of the northwest city of Tal Afar on Tuesday, saying they had cleared it of militants after 12 days of fighting killed dozens of people. The siege ended soon after neighboring Turkey said it would stop cooperating with U.S. forces in Iraq if ethnic Turks continued to be harmed in the crackdown.
On Wednesday, militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at U.S. and Iraqi soldiers guarding a council building in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. The assault came just days after the Americans negotiated a deal with local leaders to enter the city without risk of attack.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/09/16/iraq.main/index.html
Of course we can believe the report.
C
Eclipsed
by William Greider
The presidential pageant has now risen full in the sky and is blocking out the sun. Until November, we dwell in a weird half-light, stumbling into spooky shadows but shielded from the harsh glare of the nation's actual circumstances. Down is up, fiction is truth, momentous realities are made to disappear from the public mind. The 2004 spectacle is not the first to mislead grossly and exploit emotional weaknesses in the national character. But this time the consequences will be especially grim.
The United States is "losing" in Iraq, literally losing territory and population to the other side. Careful readers of the leading newspapers may know this, but I doubt most voters do. How could they, given the martial self-congratulations of the President and relative restraint from his opponent? High-minded pundits tell us not to dwell on the long-ago past. But the cruel irony of 2004 is that Vietnam is the story. The arrogance and deceit – the utter waste of human life, ours and theirs – play before us once again. A frank discussion will have to wait until after the election.
Several Sundays ago, an ominous article appeared in the opinion section of the New York Times : "One by One, Iraqi Cities Become No-Go Zones." Falluja, Samarra, Ramadi, Karbala, the Sadr City slums of Baghdad – these and other population centers are now controlled by various insurgencies and essentially ceded by US forces. This situation would make a joke of the national elections planned for January. Yet, if U.S. troops try to recapture the lost cities, the bombing and urban fighting would produce massive killing and destruction, further poisoning politics for the U.S. occupation and its puppet government in Saigon – sorry, Baghdad.
Three days later, the story hit page one when anonymous Pentagon officials confirmed the reality. Not to worry, they said: The United States is training and expanding the infant Iraqi army so it can do the fighting for us. That's the ticket – Vietnamization. I remember how well General Westmoreland articulated the strategy back in the 1960s, when war's progress was measured by official "body counts" and reports on "new" fighting forces on the way.
But this time Washington decided the United States couldn't wait for "Iraqization," a strategy that might sound limp-wristed to American voters. The U.S. bombing and assaults quickly resumed. The Bush White House is thus picking targets and second-guessing field commanders, just as Lyndon Johnson did forty years ago in Indochina. Bush is haunted by the mordant remark a US combat officer once made in Vietnam: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Meanwhile, Bush's war is destroying the U.S. Army, just as LBJ's war did. After Vietnam, military leaders and Richard Nixon wisely abolished the draft and opted for an all-volunteer force. When this war ends, the volunteer army will be in ruins and a limited draft lottery may be required to fill out the ranks. After Iraq, men and women will get out of uniform in large numbers, especially as they grasp the futility of their sacrifices. Yet Bush's on-the-cheap warmaking against a weak opponent demonstrates that a larger force structure is needed to sustain his policy of pre-emptive war. Kerry says he wants 40,000 more troops, just in case. Old generals doubt Congress would pay for it, given the deficits.
Iraq is Vietnam standing in the mirror. John Kerry, if he had it in him, could lead a national teach-in – re-educate those who have forgotten or prettified their memories but especially inform younger voters who weren't around for the national shame a generation ago. Kerry could describe in plain English what's unfolding now in Iraq and what must be done to find a way out with honor. In other words, be a truth-teller while holding Bush accountable.
Kerry won't go there, probably couldn't without enduring still greater anger. His war-hero campaign biography inadvertently engendered slanderous attacks and still-smoldering resentments. Kerry, like other establishment Dems, originally calculated that the party should be as pro-war as Bush, thus freeing him to run on other issues. That gross miscalculation leaves him proffering a lame "solution" – persuading France, Germany and others to send their troops into this quagmire. Not bloody likely, as the Brits say.
Bush can't go near the truth for obvious reasons. If elected, he faces only bad choices – bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq, as Nixon bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, or bug out under the cover of artful lies. The one thing Bush's famous "resolve" cannot achieve is success at war. Never mind, he aims to win the election instead.
So this presidential contest resembles a grotesque, media-focused war in which two sides skirmish for the attention of ill-informed voters. Bush won big back when he got Iraq off the front pages and evening news with his phony hand-off of sovereignty and his chest-thumping convention. But then his opponents – the hostile insurgents in Iraq – struck back brilliantly and managed to put the war story back in the lead on the news (might we expect from them an "October surprise" of deadlier proportions?). In this fight, Kerry is like a bystander who might benefit from bad news but can't wish for it. Most combat correspondents, with brave exceptions, hesitate to step back from daily facts and tell the larger truth. Maybe they are afraid to sound partial.
The timing of events in Iraq does not fit propitiously with the election calendar. A majority has already concluded that it was a mistake to fight this war, but public credulity is not yet destroyed. A majority still wants to believe the strategy may yet succeed, that Iraq won't become another dark stain in our history books. During Vietnam, the process of giving up on such wishful thinking took many years. The breaking point came in 1968, when a majority turned against the war. LBJ withdrew from running for re-election. Nixon won that year with his "secret plan" to win the peace. The war continued for another five years. US casualties doubled.
This time, public opinion has moved much faster against the war, but perhaps not fast enough. People naturally are reluctant to conclude that their country did the wrong thing, that young people died for a pointless cause. If the war story does stay hot and high on front pages, a collapse of faith might occur in time for this election, but more likely it will come later. Nixon won a landslide re-election in 1972 with his election-eve announcement that peace was at hand, the troops were coming home. In the hands of skilled manipulators, horrendous defeat can be turned into honorable victory. Temporarily at least. When the enemy eventually triumphed in Indochina, Nixon was already gone, driven out for other crimes.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041004&s=greider
In late July, a report prepared for the President by his National Intelligence Counsel spelled out "a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq."1 According to the New York Times, "the estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms."2 But that didn't stop Bush and other members of the administration from telling the American people that Iraq was headed in the right direction.
On August 5, President Bush said, " on the path to lasting democracy and liberty."3 On August 24, Vice President Cheney told voters in Iowa that "We're moving in the right direction ."4 And this Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Iraqis were "working at making a success out of that country...And I think they've got a darned good crack at making it." 5
Sources:
"U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future," New York Times, 9/16/04.
Ibid.
"President Signs Defense Bill ," The White House, 8/05/04.
"Remarks by the Vice President and Mrs. Cheney Followed by Question and Answer at a Town Hall Meeting ," The White House, 8/24/04.
"Secretary Rumsfeld Town Hall Meeting at Ft. Campbell, Ky.," U.S. Department of Defense, 9/14/04.
http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df09172004.html
Published on Friday, September 17, 2004 by the Inter Press Service
From Bad to Worse in Iraq
by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over swift boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard records, Iraq is beginning to creep back onto the front pages, and the news is uniformly bad.
Consider some of the headlines in major newspapers that appeared on their front pages on Wednesday alone:
Wall Street Journal: ”Rebel Attacks Reveal New Cooperation: Officials Fear Recent Rise in Baghdad Violence Stems from Growing Coordination”.
Baltimore Sun: ”In Iraq, Chance for Credible Vote is Slipping Away”.
Philadelphia Inquirer: ”Outlook: The Growing Insurgency Could Doom U.S. Plans for Iraq, Analysts Say”.
Washington Post: ”U.S. Plans to Divert Iraq Money: Attacks Prompt Request to Move Reconstruction Funds to Security Forces”.
And then Thursday:
USA Today: ”Insurgents in Iraq Appear More Powerful Than Ever”.
New York Times: ”U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future: Civil War Called Possible -- Tone Differs from Public Statements”.
All of which tended to confirm the conclusion of the latest 'Newsweek' magazine's Iraq feature: ”It's Worse Than You Think”.
Against these stories -- putting aside the other headlines detailing deadly suicide and other attacks that have killed scores of Iraqis in the past week -- Bush's insistence in a campaign address to a convention of the National Guard Tuesday that ”our strategy is succeeding” appears awfully hollow, a point made repeatedly not only by Democratic, but by some Republican lawmakers at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday.
”It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing,” noted Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who has long been sceptical of administration claims that the Iraq occupation was going well. ”It is now in the zone of dangerous.”
Indeed, it is now very difficult to find any analysts outside of the administration or the Bush campaign who share the official optimism.
Consider the case of Michael O'Hanlon, a defence specialist at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Council aide who has been among the most confident of independent analysts of the basic soundness of Washington's strategy in Iraq.
”In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding,” he testified to a Congressional panel just 10 months ago. ”By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage.”
This week, however, O'Hanlon, who has developed a detailed index periodically published in the New York Times that measures U.S. progress in post-war Iraq, was singing an entirely different song at a forum sponsored by Brookings and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
”We're in much worse shape than I thought we'd ever be,” he said. ”I don't know how you get it back,” he conceded, adding that his last remaining hope was that somehow the U.S. could train enough indigenous Iraqi security forces within two to three years to keep the country ”cohesive” and permit an eventual U.S. withdrawal. ”A Lebanonization of Iraq” was also quite possible, he said.
His conclusion was echoed by his CSIS co-panelists, Frederick Barton and Bathsheba Crocker, who direct their own index that relies heavily on interviews with Iraqis themselves in measuring progress in reconstruction .
According to the five general criteria used by them, movement over the past 13 months has for the most part been ”backward”, particularly with respect to security which they now consider to be squarely in the ”danger” zone.
”Security and economic problems continue to overshadow and undermine efforts across the board”, including health care, education and governance, according to a report their project released last week. Among other things, it noted that despite a massive school-building and rehabilitation programme, children are increasingly dropping out to help their families survive an economy where almost half the working population remains unemployed.
The growing media chorus of despair actually began just one week ago, a few days after the brilliantly staged Republican convention in New York City had ended, when the U.S. military death toll in Iraq since last year's invasion topped the 1,000 mark, and the New York Times published a front-page article entitled ”U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq”.
Since then, a number of articles have featured the increasing violence of the insurgency, which is now mounting an average of more than 80 attacks on U.S. targets -- four times the number of one year ago and 25 percent higher than last spring, when the U.S. faced serious uprisings in both the Sunni Triangle and in the south.
Washington officials had predicted that attacks would increase sharply just before the transfer of sovereignty from the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to the interim government headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in late June and would tail off.
But, as noted by a front-page article in the Washington Post late last week, more U.S. troops were killed in July and August than during the initial invasion in March and April 2003. Injuries suffered by U.S. troops in August alone were twice what they were during the invasion.
The escalation in violence over the summer is now being attributed by administration officials to the insurgents' efforts to derail the elections, currently scheduled for January.
The increased violence -- particularly in Baghdad and the so-called ”Sunni Triangle” where Falluja, Ramadi, Baquba and Samarra, among other towns, are controlled by insurgents -- has created a serious dilemma for administration strategists who, on the one hand, reject the notion that there are ”no-go” areas for U.S. troops, and, on the other, want to keep U.S. casualties down and off the front pages and U.S. television sets, particularly before the November elections here.
As a result, they appear to have settled on a strategy -- bombing suspected insurgent hideouts from the air -- that further alienates the civilian population.
”I don't believe that you can flatten cities and expect to win popular support,” noted CSIS' Barton.
”This is the classic contradiction of counterinsurgency,” Steven Metz, a strategy specialist at the U.S. Army War College, told the Inquirer. ”In the long term, winning the people matters more. But it may be that in the short term, you have to forgo that in order to crush the insurgents. Right now, we are trying to decide whether we have reached that point. In Vietnam, we waited too long.”
Meanwhile, both independent and U.S. military analysts believe that the insurgency, which the administration still insists is made up only of Baathist ”dead-enders”, foreign ”jihadis”, and criminals, has grown from an estimated 5,000 people one year ago to at least 20,000 and possibly significantly more.
”The bottom line is, at this moment we are losing the war”, Col Andrew Bacevich (ret.) of Boston University told USA Today Thursday. ”That doesn't mean it is lost, but we are losing, and as an observer it is difficult for me to see that either the civilian leaderhsip or the military leadership has any plausible idea on how to turn this around”.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0917-01.htm
Link to Newsweek: It's Worse Than You Think
As Americans debate Vietnam, the U.S. death toll tops 1,000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5973272/site/newsweek
Fri Sep 17, 6:22 AM ET Add Op/Ed - USATODAY.com to My Yahoo!
With each passing day, the U.S. war in Iraq (news - web sites) is looking bleaker and the Bush administration's rosy scenario less convincing.
Just how bad the insurgency in Iraq has become was underscored by a classified intelligence report prepared for President Bush (news - web sites) in July and leaked this week. Its outlook for the country by the end of 2005 is tenuous stability at best, civil war at worst.
Certainty, the facts on the ground make the worst-case prediction seem plausible:
• Insurgents control three dozen cities and towns. While most are in the Sunni Triangle, where Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had enjoyed his broadest support, they're spreading and becoming the base for increasingly sophisticated and frequent attacks on U.S. and coalition forces. Those now average 50 a day.
• The number of insurgents, recently put at 5,000 by the Pentagon (news - web sites), now may be 20,000, according to various estimates.
• Deaths of U.S. troops have been climbing since the U.S. turned authority over to an interim Iraqi government on June 28.
In spite of these worrisome developments, the Bush administration continues to put an optimistic face on the situation. It cites progress in bringing democracy and prosperity to Iraq, and says it expects national elections to take place throughout the country in January with the help of 200,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops that will assume security operations in just a few months.
As the U.S. presidential election approaches, the administration has good political reasons to paint the best possible picture of Iraq - particularly since it has few good options for bringing the insurgency under control any time soon. But a White House that hides the truth about a worsening conflict from the American public only loses support for its mission. Vietnam showed that.
This week, even some Republican senators began breaking ranks with the administration's upbeat assessments of the war. Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), R-Neb., described Iraq as "beyond pitiful. It's beyond embarrassing. It's now in the zone of dangerous."
Not that the options for suppressing the insurgency are evident. This week, the administration began trying one. It moved to divert more than $3 billion from reconstruction to security and election planning. That's hardly likely to be enough. The United Nations (news - web sites), which is overseeing the elections, has little staff in the country because of the fighting, and it is struggling to recruit a needed 70,000 election workers. Many Iraqis are too fearful to sign up, as insurgents are targeting Iraqis working with foreigners.
Separate efforts to train Iraqi forces to rout the insurgents have yielded mixed results at best. By the Pentagon's estimate, 95,000 are ready, but not to the point where they can carry out the major offensives needed to flush out rebel enclaves.
One possibility - sending in reinforcements for the 160,000 coalition troops - risks a bigger Iraqi backlash, a dilemma the U.S. already faces in offensives underway to retake insurgent strongholds. And large-scale reinforcements aren't available.
While all of the options have downsides, the longer the administration denies the deepening crisis in Iraq, the longer the crisis will fester. That places U.S. troops in greater peril, risks turning Iraq into a terrorist haven and dims hopes of creating a viable government, much less a model of democracy in the Middle East.
By sticking with rosy scenarios during the Vietnam War, U.S. leaders only deepened the quagmire, soured public opinion and eventually retreated.
With so much at stake in Iraq, a U.S. pullout is not an option. But as civil war looms, sorting reality from wishful thinking is the best way to begin averting disaster.
Mission Still Not Accomplished
With U.S. control imperiled in Iraq, the military vows to oust the insurgents from their havens. Here's what it will take
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040920-695820,00.html
The U.S. military has been here before: caught in a conflict where the thing it does best—fighting—can't win the war. In Iraq today, brute force is a wasting asset, as Major General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, knows firsthand. On a hot late-summer day, his soldiers entered Baghdad's Sadr City slum to quell attacks from militiamen loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Chiarelli's troops came under fierce fire as dozens of rocket-propelled grenades (rpgs) pounded their vehicles, and roadside bombs blew the tracks off a tank. For four hours, the two forces battled until the outmatched gunmen melted into the shadows. "We killed folks. There's no doubt we did," says Chiarelli. He knew the fighting would soon resume, but he sent his men back into the same neighborhood to distribute food supplies and materials such as cement, nails and boards to repair homes. It was part of the military's mixed mission: to defeat the insurgents while trying to win the backing of Iraq's resentful citizens.
But these days even good intentions don't add up to much. Chiarelli last month had hoped to drain recruits from al-Sadr's Mahdi militia by hiring 15,000 Sadr City men to clean the district's filth-filled streets. When a truce between coalition forces and al-Sadr broke down, however, the work project collapsed. The state of the district helps explain, Chiarelli says, why "a guy in Sadr City feels there is no hope." There's sewage in his yard, he gets one hour of electricity out of six, and he has no job. "If someone offers him money to shoot an RPG at Americans," Chiarelli says, "I would imagine it's not a hard choice."
That kind of despair, 19 months after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, is adding fuel to the angry guerrilla insurgency that the Bush Administration acknowledged last week is out of hand. Important parts of the country, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers said, are controlled by rebels. Principal cities and major roads west and north of the capital are ruled by Sunni insurgents. Al-Sadr's men launch uprisings at will across the wide Shi'ite belt, and even parts of Baghdad are no-go zones for U.S. troops and the frail forces of the interim Iraqi government. All this has helped make the peace much bloodier than the war: last month anti-U.S. attacks climbed to 87 a day, more than double the rate in 2003 and the first half of 2004. The U.S. death toll since sovereignty was returned to Iraq on June 28 has eclipsed the number killed in the invasion, and the total tally just passed 1,000. The wounded number more than 7,000. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld estimates that coalition forces killed up to 2,500 suspected insurgents in August, but the will of the rebels shows few signs of cracking. Attacks on U.S. troops increasingly come in the form of direct fire from small arms and suicide bombs, the tactics of a more sophisticated and in-your-face foe.
The Bush Administration would prefer to avoid any bloody showdowns until after the U.S. presidential election in November, but it faces hard decisions now. The crisis on the ground imperils prospects for Iraq's national elections in January, the results of which could determine how quickly the U.S. can draw down its troop levels. For a legitimate vote to go forward, U.S. and Iraqi forces must soon wrest back control of the country. But there are no easy ways to do that.
With their overwhelming firepower, coalition troops could take any Iraqi city at any time, but the collateral damage would be heavy and the political costs high. "It's an inherent dilemma," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "If you don't go in, you've got a no-go zone" that cedes control to the enemy. "If you do go in," he adds, "you cause resentment and anger" that breed more support for the insurgency. Back inside the cities, U.S. patrols are a magnet for attacks, resulting in higher casualties and sparking the very violence they are trying to suppress.
What can Washington do? Since last spring, the Administration has bet on a tenuous strategy of trying to hang in long enough to train and equip an Iraqi force sufficiently strong to take over the job. But the U.S. dawdled for nearly a year before it got serious about training and equipping the Iraqis, and as a result, they are still not ready to take over primary responsibility for dispersing the insurgents and then policing the cities. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad says, "The training program is getting up to speed now." A trained Iraqi National Guard should total 145,000 by the end of December.
The Americans and their Iraqi allies face growing opposition. The Pentagon once assumed the insurgents numbered less than 5,000; now its analysts privately estimate there are 20,000 or more. The deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq, British Major General Andrew Graham, estimates there are 40,000 to 50,000 active insurgent fighters. While many Iraqi civilians bitterly oppose the guerrillas' violence, few openly side with the U.S. The risk of further inflaming public opinion has forced U.S. commanders to refrain from launching punishing assaults to take back insurgent-held areas. Even the U.S.-installed government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, sensitive to its lack of legitimacy, has been ambivalent about using American might in all-out offensives against fellow Iraqis.
For the time being, U.S. forces are stuck in place while the violence escalates. Some military experts who supported the war now believe the U.S. does not have a plan to win. To independent analysts like William Arkin, who maintains close ties to the Pentagon, the Administration is "completely lost at the tactical level." As more locales become sanctuaries for rebels, some military experts say the U.S. can't afford to stand by and wait for Iraqi forces to be trained to retake them. "We need a strategy now," says Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, "to force the insurgents from their holes." Some Pentagon officials privately say it was a dangerous mistake to delay taking back the no-go zones. "The longer we wait, the tougher it is going to be," a Joint Chiefs of Staff officer says. Some frontline U.S. commanders are also pushing hard for earlier action. But their superiors in Baghdad and Washington argue that waiting until Iraqi forces are ready will give the new government a better chance of sustaining control. Pentagon officials concede that heavy U.S. action before November could boomerang if things go badly, hurting Bush on the eve of the presidential vote. But they insist that the White House has put no brake on their decisions.
While they hold back on major offensives, Washington policymakers say their strategy is to mollify insurgents where they can and use muscle where they can't. The U.S. is letting Iraqi officials pursue negotiated solutions in some places, while American units apply measured military pressure to other resistance strongholds to keep insurgents off balance. Iraqi troops will be groomed to tackle big cities by first carrying out small-scale operations against insurgent villages. U.S. warplanes struck insurgent hideouts in Fallujah last week, and combined U.S.-Iraqi ground troops stormed the northern border city of Tall 'Afar to wipe out what the military called "a large terrorist element." And for the first time in months, U.S. forces rolled into the off-limits Sunni city of Samarra, after local sheiks cut a deal with insurgents who had become the de facto town rulers. In a small step forward, the Americans were allowed to install an interim mayor and a new police chief. But when U.S. forces departed, at least 500 armed guerrillas resumed their own patrols of the streets. Nevertheless, said a senior Pentagon official, "we have started eating away at these sanctuaries."
The U.S. may soon have to do a lot more. Leaving key cities to the militants much longer could cripple plans to hold national elections in January. The violence has already prevented the start of voter registration or public campaigning. Lieut. General Thomas Metz, U.S. ground forces commander in Iraq, said last week that the "cancer" of resistance would not delay the vote, but he suggested some of the hot spots might have to be excluded. That would compromise the election's legitimacy and alienate Sunni cities that were bypassed.
In the long run, pacifying enough of the country to allow for a U.S. pullback will require not just an effective military strategy but also a political one. The U.S. has failed in 19 months to get significant reconstruction work off the ground. Lack of security is partly to blame: kidnappings, killings and sabotage have driven out aid agencies and private contractors. The Bush Administration has managed to spend about $1 billion of the $18.4 billion Congress appropriated for reconstruction a year ago. And plenty more may be required to stabilize Iraq—a prospect that seems particularly dim in the midst of a presidential campaign in which neither candidate seems willing to call for more sacrifices from the American people or prepare them for the likelihood that the violence will get worse before it gets better. With so many tough decisions ahead, that may prove to be the biggest failing of all.
http://www.politics.co.uk/1/partypolitics/labourparty/howard_accuses_government_lacking_real_post-war_iraq_plan_6065414.htm
Conservative leader Michael Howard has accused the Government for going to war with Iraq devoid of a comprehensive plan to restore stability to the country.
He was responding to claims by the Daily Telegraph that Jack Straw had warned Tony Blair in 2002 that there could be major post-war chaos in Iraq.
The documentation leaked to the newspaper apparently shows Mr Blair was advised that any subsequent Iraqi government could be as undemocratic and dangerous as Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime.
Mr Howard told BBC Radio Four's PM that the documents show the Prime Minister had failed to exercise his influence in securing a "real" post-war plan.
"They prove yet again, what we've been saying for a long time, what we were saying long before the war, that there was a need for a real plan as to what should happen in Iraq after the war", he said.
Mr Howard stressed that during the run up to the war the Prime Minister was in a "powerful position" and could have insisted on such a plan.
However, the Tory leader observed: "He didn't insist on it and if there had been a proper plan I think many of the tragic difficulties that we've seen since could have been avoided."
The Prime Minister, speaking today at a news conference, said the reports about the memo had been exaggerated.
"Having read in the papers that apparently I was warned of the chaos that was going to ensue in Iraq, I actually got the minute Jack sent to me," he said.
"It didn't do anything of that sort. What it warned of was this - it is very important that we do not replace one dictator, Saddam Hussein, with another."
Mr Blair said he "totally agreed" with such sentiments.
The leaked documents have served to rile up criticism from the Opposition and bolster concerns haboured within Labour's own anti-war fraternity.
Former foreign secretary Robin Cook said the Prime Minister's case for war had now been weakened further by the exposure of the secret documents.
He slammed officials at Downing Street for ignoring advice which he said "spelt out that there was no legal justification for war".
Mr Cook also said the leaked documents prove there was "no convincing link" between Iraq and international terrorism.
But in a statement, the Foreign Office insists the memos demonstrate the standard course of diplomacy and advice to government.
"It should be no surprise that two and a half years ago the Government was thinking in great detail about Iraq. It would have been irresponsible if such a serious issue had not been the subject of very thorough consideration", the statement read.
"The security situation in Iraq is serious, but the country is on the path to a democratically elected government, on a timescale agreed on by the whole of the international community, we are determined it should succeed".
"There were indeed anxieties that, after Saddam, one dictator might be replaced by another," it said.
Nonetheless, the FO statement concluded saying "not only has that not happened", but Iraq is now "moving towards a democratic future".
Indeed the Iraq situation is bleak, and getting worse. Many have known this from the get go, but we never expected that this administration would blunder every opportunity. There is absolutely no way there is ever going to be a democracy, as we understand it in
Iraq. I used to think we should stay until the country was stablized, I no longer think this. Now, our presence exascerbates the problem, i.e., the country cannot be stablized until the US leaves. Relying on an election in January is folly, particularly if we want to dictate the outcome. This is a very tricky situation with strong ties to other nations in the region, thus diplomacy is essential. This is not a problem with a military solution.
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