150 hostages and 19 deaths leave US claims of Iraqi 'peace' in tatters
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=630159
By Patrick Cockburn in Mosul
17 April 2005
Iraqi and United States-led forces were last night preparing to
launch a rescue mission for up to 150 Shia hostages held by Sunni
insurgents.
The threat by Sunni militants in the town of Madaen, south of Baghdad,
to execute the hostages unless Shias leave the area, intensified the
growing sectarian fears.
The upsurge in violence across Iraq in the past four days has left
claims made by the Pentagon that the tide is turning in Iraq and
there are hopeful signs of a return to normality in tatters.
At least 17 Iraqis were killed during the day and two US soldiers
were reported dead after a series of attacks.
Ironically, one reason why Washington can persuade the outside world
that its venture in Iraq is finally coming right is that it is too
dangerous for reporters to travel outside Baghdad or stray far from
their hotels in the capital. The threat to all foreigners was
underlined last week when an American contractor was snatched by
kidnappers.
When I was travelling in the northern city of Mosul this week, my
guards Kurdish members of the Iraqi National Guard said it was
too dangerous for them to travel with me in uniform in official
vehicles. They donned Arab gowns, hid their weapons and drove through
the city in a civilian car.
Most violent incidents in Iraq go unreported. We saw one suicide bomb
explosion, clouds of smoke and dust erupting into the air, and heard
another in the space of an hour. Neither was mentioned in official
reports. Last year US soldiers told the IoS that they do not tell
their superiors about attacks on them unless they suffer casualties.
This avoids bureaucratic hassle and "our generals want to hear about
the number of attacks going down not up". This makes the official
Pentagon claim that the number of insurgent attacks is down from 140
a day in January to 40 a day this month dubious.
US casualties have fallen to about one dead a day in March compared
with four a day in January and five a day in November. But this is
the result of a switch in American strategy rather than a sign of a
collapse in the insurgency. US military spokesmen make plain that
America's military priority has changed from offensive operations to
training Iraqi troops and police. More than 2,000 US military advisers
are working with Iraqi forces.
With US networks largely confined to their hotels in Baghdad by fear
of kidnapping, it is possible to sell the American public the idea
that no news is good news. General George Casey, the top US commander
in Iraq, said recently that if all goes well "we shall make fairly
substantial reductions in the size of our forces". Other senior US
officers say this will be of the order of four brigades, from 17 to
13, or a fall in the number of US troops in Iraq from 142,000 to
105,000 by next year.
The real change leading to the US troop reduction is probably more in
the US than in Iraq. The White House finds its military commitment in
Iraq politically damaging at home. The easiest way to bring the troops
home is, as in Vietnam, to declare a victory and full confidence in
US-trained Iraqi forces to win the war. These soldiers and police
supposedly number 152,000, but it is not clear who is being counted.
The figure may include the 14,000 blue-uniformed Iraqi police in
Nineveh province, the capital of which is Mosul, with a population of
2.7 million. But Khasro Goran, the deputy governor and Kurdistan
Democratic Party leader in Mosul, told the IoS that the police had
helped insurgents assassinate the previous governor.
Mr Goran said that when guerrillas captured almost all of Mosul on
11 November last year, the police had collaborated, abandoning 30
police stations without a fight. "They didn't fire on terrorists
because they were terrorists themselves," he said. Some $40m-worth
of arms and equipment was captured by the insurgents. It is a measure
of how far the reality of the war in Iraq now differs from the rosy
picture presented by the media that the fall of Mosul to the
insurgents went almost unreported abroad because most journalists
were covering the assault by the US marines on Fallujah.
Despite the elections on 30 January, the US problem in Iraq remains
unchanged. It has not been defeated by the Sunni Arab guerrillas but
it has not defeated them either. The US army and Iraqi armed forces
control islands of territory while much of Iraq is a dangerous
no-man's land.
After overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003 the US tried direct rule,
dissolving the Iraqi army and state. This provoked the Sunni
rebellion. By early 2004 there was a danger that part of the Shia
community would also rise up. Elections were promised. The victors
at the polls in January were Shia parties, mostly militantly Islamic
and often sympathetic to Iran. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence
Secretary, visited Baghdad this week to stop Shia radicals taking
over the Interior and Defence Ministries.
Iraq is now more sectarian. Sunnis boycotted the elections. The Kurds
and Shias triumphed. The interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, despite
heavy US support, got only 14 per cent. If the Shia hostages taken on
Friday are executed or Shias are forced to flee, then we are closer
to a sectarian civil war.
The Sunni insurgency is not going to go away. US generals say there
are only 12,000 to 20,000 guerrillas. But the real lesson of the past
two years is that, though many of the groups in the resistance are
fanatical or semi-criminal, they will still be sheltered by the Sunni
community.
If the new Iraqi government succeeds in establishing itself it will
be a largely Shia state with no more interest than the Sunnis in
retaining a US presence. Iraqis say they sense that the US wants Iraq
to be a weak state, and this they are bound to oppose.
This article linked from: http://www.antiwar.com/
.
|
