Wising up

But too little and too late.

Washington, June 22 (New York Times) - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, said Tuesday that the Pentagon had underestimated the violent tenacity of an insurgency that formed after Baghdad fell, and he acknowledged that the United States may be forced to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq for years to come. ...

Mr. Wolfowitz said Pentagon planners had not counted on the ability of a guerrilla-style resistance to form, operate and grow after the capture of Saddam Hussein and the arrest or killing of his top advisers.

"If you want to say what might have been underestimated, I think there was probably too great a willingness to believe that once we got the 55 people on the blacklist, the rest of those killers would stop fighting," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

I've noted this before in a different context, but it bears repeating: To the extent that Wolfowitz can be believed here, to that very same extent it indicates that the bozos behind the invasion of Iraq actually believed the hogwash they were slinging by the bucketful. The very crew that spends half its waking hours congratulating each other on their hard-headed, realistic view of the world actually bought into the rose-petal fantasies. I really don't know if seeing them as manipulative, cold-blooded liars or as incompetent boobs living in a haze of Walter Mitty daydreams is worse.

Apparently, however, that kind of willful blindness is not limited to White House planners. Writing in the Daily Star (Lebanon) for June 29, Kathleen Ridolfo, the Iraq analyst for Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, says

Iraqi Finance Minister Adil Abd al-Mahdi told the German weekly "Focus" in an interview published on June 21 that he expected militant attacks to end with the transfer of power. What was most worrying about his statement - and he is not the only Iraqi official to have made such predictions - was that it failed to acknowledge the agendas of militant groups operating in Iraq. There are more than 30 armed groups at the moment, and while their affiliations (secular and Islamist) and agendas (anti-coalition and anti-establishment) converge and diverge at times, one thing is clear: A majority of these groups will simply not cease their attacks now that power has been transferred to an Iraqi authority.

Ridolfo's analysis is muddled at times, as when she says that "one element of militancy in Iraq" is Saddam loyalists who are actually mostly "mere thugs," many of them former prisoners released in a general amnesty in October 2002, who have joined with Islamist groups such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. (So are thugs Saddam loyalists or are Saddam loyalists thugs and is the Mahdi Army actually full of Saddam loyalists who either are or aren't thugs?) Still, her pointed awareness that there are a variety of such "elements" with different agendas is welcome.

Both that awareness and the lack of it can be seen in the Christian Science Monitor's invaluable Daily Update on Terrorism and Security for June 28. It mentions recent coverage in the Asia Times and Time magazine on the nature of the insurgency - but each report looks at one facet of it as it that was the centerpiece of the resistance. (Links are taken from the CSM article.)

The Asia Times reports on the group that has until recently been the main force behind the insurgency, the Baathists - remnants of Saddam Hussein's former administration. In an interview last week with some of the members of that group (two former generals and a former colonel), the Times reports that these men believe the "big battle in Iraq" is yet to take place.

The objective was 'to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don't want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people,' say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. 'We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don't lack is volunteers.'

The Times also reports that these men claim the insurgency was planned before the US-led coalition attacked in March of 2003 ("The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war"). They say they do not have any weapons of mass destruction, but they do have access to almost "50 million conventional weapons." While they do take credit for the killing of several foreigners, the group's leaders said it was not responsible for either last October's attack against the Red Cross in Baghdad, or the bombing of the UN compound last year that killed more than 20 people.

Sidebar: That bit about planning the insurgency in advance sounds familiar. Who do I recall suggesting it? Oh, yeah! Me! Back on November 16:

Even Donald Rumsfeld has been forced by reality to admit that the insurgents "are going to school on us. ... They watch what takes place, and then they make adjustments," which can't be other than a sign of some kind of active coordination.

Admittedly, such coordination may have developed on the fly. It wouldn't be the first time that isolated groups of rebels have come together under a single umbrella to combine their strengths. But in this case it seems to have come about rather quickly and I still wonder: Is it possible that the sudden disappearance of direct military resistance to the invasion was actually a fallback plan for the leadership in the event the attack could not be successfully repulsed? A plan that involved maintaining a surreptitious command structure, waging a low-level guerrilla campaign, and gathering support as the occupation proved more and more unpopular and less and less manageable?

Yes, that's just speculation and yes, I have no actual proof and yes, whether a sophisticated resistance was spontaneous or preplanned doesn't really matter a whole lot. But I still wonder....

Getting back to the CSM's coverage,

Time magazine reports that a driving force behind the insurgency is the religious militants who want to turn Iraq into an Islamist state, and ultimately a "haven" for terrorists. These groups are often closely aligned with the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, and Time reports that most follow the strict Wahhabi strain of Islam. ...

Time reports that the goal of the Islamist insurgents is broader than just forcing the US to leave. They want Iraq to be the new Afghanistan: a place where the next generation of "jihadists" can be trained for Al Qaeda and similar groups.

Those two forces obviously have very conflicting, in fact antagonistic, goals. While they and most other forces share a common goal of ousting US (or, to be precise, coalition) forces, what lies beyond that is a recipe for continued, even increased, chaos, a chaos our presence helped to spawn and the explosion of which our continued presence can at best hope to delay but not prevent.

For example, Kirkuk, an oil-rich city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, remains a flashpoint for reasons unconsidered by either the Asia Times' or Time's articles. The Toronto Star for June 21:

Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters. ...

The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread human misery, with Arab settlers complaining of forceful expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowed and filthy refugee camps.

U.S. officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the centre of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or U.S. forces.

"The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, 'You don't own anything here anymore.'" ...

Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas. ...

U.S. military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.

As Ridolfo notes,

Iraq is rife with political turmoil on other levels. Inter-Shiite rivalries continue to ebb and flow, and sectarian violence is on the rise in Kirkuk. In the south, Karim Mahmoud, known as the "Lord of the Marshes" for his leading role in the Iraqi Shiite resistance to the Saddam regime in the marsh areas, allegedly ordered the killing of a local police chief for not doing enough to prevent attacks against British forces. Similarly, in a potentially dangerous development, an imam in Fallujah stands accused of ordering the killings in mid-June of six Shiites in the city. In addition, opposition armed militias, though ordered to disband nearly one year ago, have been reluctant to do so. As one analyst put it, there is no incentive to turn in weapons when a group expects it will need them in the future.

Ridolfo suggests that what Iraq needs is a strong leader but that there is no one who can command respect from all the various factions. For what it's worth, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi at least seems aware of that, as he tries to present himself as just that strong leader. He has already suggested the possibility of martial law, as the New York Times has noted:

Among the emergency rule provisions being considered are a curfew, a ban on public demonstrations, checkpoints to control public movement and changes to search and seizure laws, two cabinet members said in separate interviews on Sunday evening.

It remains unclear whether such measures would bring significant changes in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Under the United States-led occupation, occupation and Iraqi soldiers and security forces have been allowed to conduct raids without warrants, make arrests without charges, and hold suspects in detention indefinitely.

The political difference, however, is what matters here. There has been considerable fear that after June 30, things would get even worse. Allawi, by raising the possibility of martial law, is hinting that he will not allow that to happen - more precisely, that his government is strong enough to stop it. Further, in his address after the so-called transfer of sovereignty on Monday,

Allawi spoke forcefully for unity and reconciliation, calling on former Baathists, disbanded army troops, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians to merge in the name of a secure, just and multi-ethnic Iraq. He thanked all the right people, offering a hand of peace and prosperous future relations to the U.S.-led coalition, his Middle Eastern neighbours and the leading Shiite religious scholars of Najaf and Karbala, without whose sponsorship he is unlikely to survive, politically.

That from the Toronto Star for June 29, which went on to note that

[l]ong before the transition to nominal independence came to pass, many Iraqis had already signalled their skepticism toward the emerging government. A constituency for the new council, populated heavily by returning Iraqi exiles, Allawi included, does not yet exist. Trust must still be earned.

But on the streets of the upscale Mansour district yesterday, many Iraqis responded to the call to nationhood with a guarded enthusiasm that surprised even them.

Simply put, a lot - I would venture most - Iraqis want this new undertaking to work as advertised. They want the promises of security, jobs, elections, and a departure of foreign troops to be true. And they are prepared, at least for the short term, to suspend their disbelief and give it a chance.

A real question, though, is how much of a chance they're willing to give when so little progress has been made in reconstruction. In fact,

in a few key areas - electricity, the judicial system and overall security - the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new General Accounting Office report released Tuesday.

The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings:

- In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces.

- Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.

- The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts.

- The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.

- The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

(The full report, in .pdf format, can be found here.)

The GAO blames many of the problems on the insurgency, but there's only so far that can be run as an excuse, since, as the GAO noted, less than 1/4 of the money pledged for reconstruction has actually been spent and little enough of that on actual, you know, reconstruction. Even the money "about to be spent" will bring it to less than half the pledged total.

Iraq today is a fractured nation that is only pretending to be whole. It's people suffer from unemployment, lack of basic services, from violence; they live in fear of

roadside bomb ambushes; drive-by hijackings and ambushes; kidnappings; mortar and rocket bombardments; suicide car bombings; storming and dynamiting of Iraqi police stations; bombings of political party offices; simultaneous multiple bomb attacks nationwide; sabotage of infrastructure, notably oil pipelines; assassinations of government officials and political and religious figures;

the list goes on. There are "sometimes up to 60 or more attacks a day" against coalition troops, a rate actually greater than that back in November when the insurgency took hold. Women and especially teenage girls are particularly affected, their lives drawn in, their futures cut off by

creeping religious conservatism, lawlessness and economic uncertainty, [by] parents ... so rattled by reports of rapes and kidnappings that they keep their girls under closer watch than ever,

by an atmosphere that can make a girl dressed in pink an object for violence because of her clothes.

This is the Iraq we have created, the Iraq we have now "officially" bequeathed to those we claimed to be "liberating." An Iraq of economic crisis, of fear, of increasingly-murderous violence, of sectarian conflict, of barely-suppressed chaos. But still, amazingly enough and may the human spirit be praised for all our days, not an Iraq entirely without hope among its people. That hope is fragile and weak and it can easily turn - and in some has easily turned - to violent anger and despair. But it does exist.

Ask me what to do and I will say I don't know. (And as a parenthetical aside, I'll add that as an advocate of peace I'm fed up with hawks demanding that in order to object I have to specify our way out of a situation into which I would not have had us get.) I see no painless path, no safe route, certainly no rose-petal strewn roadway. There is one thing I believe: Most Iraqis do not want a radical Islamic state. And there is one thing of which I'm sure: By providing a common target and a convenient excuse, our military presence in Iraq is at best not helping and more likely is demonstrably harmful to the establishment of security and the emergence of a secular or moderate Islamic government - for it will only be after our departure that it will become clear how small the ranks of the radical Islamists really are, but as long as we stay those ranks will grow.

We have not helped. We are not helping.

Set the date and get out.