Lounsbury: WP: Iraq situ, ah they think it's bad. Finally.

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April 18, 2004

WP: Iraq situ, ah they think it's bad. Finally.

Well, this article is important on a number of grounds. Among which, validating critiques.

Revolts in Iraq Deepen Crisis In Occupation
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20690-2004Apr17?language=printer

Some excerpts.

BAGHDAD, April 17 -- In the space of two weeks, a fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the U.S.-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

No, no everything is fine. Absolutely fine. Really. Turning the corner, a sign of success, reason why the "dead enders are lashing out.

Isn't that the story line. I hate to hear reality.

...

Now here is the important part:
U.S. officials said they are reconsidering initial assessments that the uprisings might be contained as essentially military confrontations in Fallujah, where Marines continue their siege of a chronically volatile city, and Najaf, where the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has taken refuge in the shadow of a shrine.

"The Fallujah problem and the Sadr problem are having a wider impact than we expected," a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said. In Baghdad and Washington, officials had initially concluded that addressing those problems would not engender much anger among ordinary Iraqis. "Sadr's people and the people of Fallujah were seen as isolated and lacking broad support among Iraqis," the official added.
Emphasis added.

The saddest part here is how the fuck they "concluded" such a thing. It strikes me they could only have concluded that a large military action against Fallujah and Sadr would not draw Iraqi sympathy if (a) they have no clue as to Iraqi nationalism, (b) have no decent intelligence, (c) do not understand the dynamics around them. In short, one could only conclude this if one really does not understand, at all, the environment.

This, this is what is causing Iraq to fail.

And it is failing.

Instead, the official said, "The effect has been profound."

Gee, you don't say.

What a motherfucking surprise.

The violence has brought the U.S.-funded reconstruction of Iraq to a near-halt, according to U.S. officials and private contractors.

Thousands of workers for private contractors have been confined to their quarters in the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad that also houses the headquarters of the U.S. occupation authority. Routine trips outside the compound to repair power plants, water-treatment facilities and other parts of Iraq's crumbling infrastructure have been deemed too dangerous, even with armed escorts.

Compounding the problem is a growing fear that insurgents will seek retribution against Iraqis working for private contractors and the occupation authority. Scores of Iraqis have stopped showing up for their jobs as translators, support staff and maintenance personnel in the Green Zone, even though there is a lack of lucrative employment elsewhere.

Pay attention to the last part. Let's call is a market signal of the reality of American positioning.

The security situation "has dramatically affected reconstruction," said another U.S. official in Baghdad. "How can you rebuild the country when you're confined to quarters, when only small portions of your Iraqi staff are showing up for work on any given day?"

Well, I guess that chances of me getting data are fucking low now. Idiots. Fucked Iraq and fucking my fucking project.

Among the firms that have restricted the movements of their employees are the two of the largest private contractors in Iraq: Bechtel Corp. and Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. The Research Triangle Institute, a North Carolina-based firm that has been helping set up city councils across Iraq, has sent 80 staffers -- about 40 percent of its non-Iraqi workforce -- to Kuwait as a precautionary measure.

Security concerns also have hindered the implementation of a &dol;6 billion, U.S.-funded wave of construction projects intended to help improve security by putting legions of unemployed young men to work.

"We want to offer people opportunities that compete with the financial incentives they get" from insurgent leaders, an American official said. "But it's a Catch-22. We can't start the work that's supposed to help improve security until security improves."

Everything is fine. Just keep saying that.

The insurgency also appears to be generating new alliances -- and tensions -- among the major sectarian and ethnic groups in Iraq.

The most visible leader of the resistance is Sadr, a firebrand whose appeal long appeared to be limited to the young, unemployed Shiites who made up his militia, the Mahdi Army. However, in a surprising development, his poster began appearing this month at Sunni mosques that previously showed little interest in his activities.

Such displays of unity have dampened fears of a clash between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority communities. But worries about a different kind of civil war have been generated by reports that Iraq's ethnic Kurds are fighting alongside U.S. Marines and against the insurgency.

Guerrillas coming out of Fallujah have complained bitterly that Kurdish militiamen known as pesh merga are deployed against them. The Kurds are members of the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, built from several exile-based militias that supported the U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. Commanders of another, overwhelmingly Arab Iraqi army battalion refused to fight alongside the Marines.

"Worse than pigs, thieves and tramps," read lines in a poem circulating on fliers in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq where Kurds are accused of pushing Arab families off land claimed by both groups. The fliers condemned the leaders of Iraq's two Kurdish parties. It is not known who produced the fliers, which were also seen in Baghdad.

The Kurdish leaders were condemned in chanting that followed Friday prayers at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad.

Let me make a prediction. In the long run, the Kurds are going to deeply regret that George Bush toppled Sadaam. Very deeply.
..

The American confrontations with Sadr and in Fallujah also have roiled the political landscape by further isolating members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council from the Iraqi population.

In the first few days after Sadr's militiamen clashed with U.S. forces and the Marines surrounded Fallujah, council members -- usually a publicity-hungry lot -- had little to say in public. Although most of them regard the insurgents and militiamen as just as much of a threat as U.S. officials do, few wanted to risk the fallout from condemning a cleric or advocating tough counterinsurgency measures.

But on Baghdad's streets, many Iraqis said they equated the silence with tacit agreement with U.S. policies. In their sermons, clerics lambasted council members, many of whom the Bush administration had hoped would emerge as Iraq's new leaders. At one mosque in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, where streets run with wet garbage, council member Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shiite physician who was recently named national security adviser, was derided as a traitor and "the minister of sewers."

The crises have helped boost the standing of more radical Shiite and Sunni political leaders. Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a Shiite tribal chief who led guerrilla attacks on Hussein's army in the 1980s and '90s in the southern marshes, gained stature in many Shiite neighborhoods after he suspended his membership in the council because of a disagreement with U.S. policy. Although U.S. officials selected Muhammadawi to sit on the council last summer, they have soured on him in recent months because of his support for an armed militia in southeastern Iraq.

Mohsen Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, has emerged as the council's most influential Sunni member because of his attempts to broker a peace deal in Fallujah. But Abdul Hamid had also been written off months ago by U.S. officials -- for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Sunni movement that is banned in several Arab nations.

"The politicians the Americans wanted to become popular have lost out to the guys the Americans didn't want to become popular," said an Iraqi adviser to the occupation authority. "It was exactly the outcome they did not want."

Emphasis added.

Is this a surprise? It should not be but rather it seems that effective Iraq policies are something too much to aspire to.

The fighting has clearly widened the chasm between the government appointed by the U.S. administration and Iraqi society. In Baghdad, ambulances and hospitals that report to the Ministry of Health took in the wounded from Fallujah but then spirited them to smaller, private hospitals and homes amid rumors that U.S. soldiers were sweeping through major medical centers arresting the injured.

"We must protect them -- we must," said Riad Mohammed Saleh, a receptionist at a public hospital in the capital's Yarmouk district. "We figure they are regular citizens."

The extent of popular support for the resistance is unclear. But in nationwide surveys taken before the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, a growing percentage of Iraqis said they saw the U.S. forces as occupiers, not liberators. The standing of the Americans was particularly low in the restive towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.

"Whenever the Americans increase their attacks on these areas, the people there become stronger and more willing to fight," said Sadoun Dulame, director of the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, an independent Iraqi research center. "I think if the Americans break into Najaf there will be a real problem, because they will be affected by the people of Fallujah."
.....

Finally

No less sobering, commanders said, were new reports of children playing roles in guerrilla attacks. In Baghdad Tuesday, a girl about 6 or 7 years old dropped an explosive from a highway overpass onto a convoy. A commander was killed in a similar incident outside Fallujah, when a convoy was ambushed after slowing for a girl leading cattle across a highway.

April 18, 2004

WP: Iraq situ, ah they think it's bad. Finally.

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