cockburn on iraq in 2007 (introduction to paperback version of his book):
At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American helicopters made a sudden swoop on the long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary is that both men were in Iraq at the official invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting which was featured on Kurdish television.
(...) In the event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad.
(...) If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the attempt a reason for going to war.
(...) The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George W. Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10. There have been so many spurious turning points in the war -- such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in 2004, or the elections of 2005 -- that truly critical moments are obscured or underrated.
(...) President Bush did the exact opposite of what the Baker-Hamilton report had proposed. He identified Iran and Syria as America's prime enemies in Iraq, stating: "These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." Instead of reducing the American commitment, Bush pledged to send 20,000 extra troops to Iraq to try to secure Baghdad. In other words, the U.S. was going to respond to its lack of success in the conflict by escalating both the war in Iraq and America's confrontation with Iran in the Middle East as a whole. The invasion of 2003 had destabilized the whole region; now Bush was about to deepen that instability.
(...) "People are saying that Bush's speech means that the occupation is going to go on a long time," the Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Attiyah told me soon after the President had stopped speaking. Although the new U.S. security plan for Baghdad, which began on February 14th, was sold as a temporary "surge" in troop numbers, it was evident that the reinforcements were there to stay.
(...) Training and equipping Iraqi troops to replace American soldiers -- so they could be withdrawn from Iraq -- had been the cornerstone of U.S. military planning since 2005. Now, the policy was being quietly downgraded, though not abandoned altogether.
(...) The U.S. Army was to go on fighting the five-million-strong Sunni community, as it had been doing since the capture of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was not being met. At the same time, the U.S. was going to deal more aggressively with the 17 million Shias in Iraq. It would contest the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq of the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia led by the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shia Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was also more openly going to confront Iran, the most powerful of Iraq's neighbors.
(...) Iran was easy to demonize in the U.S., just as Saddam Hussein had been blamed four years earlier for everything wrong in Iraq and the Middle East. The New York Times, which had once uncritically repeated White House claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, now ran articles on its front page saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated roadside bombs to Iraq that were killing American soldiers. There was no reference to the embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just such bombs in Baghdad and Basra.
(...) The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled -- even in the heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007, to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army, supported by Iraqi army troops, had been unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who ruled it.
(...) American commanders often genuinely believed that they were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis, including the local police, told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently claiming that they were winning the fight against the Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.
(...) The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some difference to security in the capital. The number of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and dumped in the street, went down from the horrific levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or of army and police units collaborating with them.
(...) A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market places. These did not stop and improved security measures made little difference.
(...) There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied.
(...) Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November 2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was so large as to make it difficult to control and impossible to eliminate them.
(...) Some American soldiers see that the problem is not about a few infiltrators. "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been assassinated or targeted for assassination is giving information or support to the insurgents," one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is already dead."
(...) A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped President Bush senior pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam after defeating the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991. After 2003, Washington was in the same quandary: If elections were held, the Shia, comprising 60% of the population that had been long excluded from power, were bound to win.
(...) At first, the U.S. tried to postpone elections, claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile with the Sunni -- though exactly how Shia and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main Sunni demand is a timetable for an American withdrawal, has never been clear.
(...) For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory (as I explain in my book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.
(...) Over the next three years, they paid $3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam Hussein that had failed disastrously. For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear." Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
(...) In the course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated into a dozen hostile cities at war with each other. There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the city like a poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be frightened of: Sunni insurgent groups; the Shia militias, Mehdi Army, and the Badr Organization; police and police commandos; the Iraqi army and the Americans.
(...) I was in contact with a Sunni family called al-Mashadani who lived in the west Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack by Shia militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced to leave his job when the repair yard was taken over by Shia militiamen. He stayed away and asked a Shia fellow worker to pick up his salary. This worked until the Shia militias found out what was happening and threatened to kill any Shia who passed on the salary of a Sunni.
(...) Nadia blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war that had engulfed her family. She says: "We were living together, Sunni and Shia, and there was no sign of sectarian differences between us in Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists." Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.
(...) America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.
(...) At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.