With the dramatic decline in the price of oil and the slashing of the budget for 2009, the prospects for integrating significant numbers of the sahwat into the security forces or otherwise accommodating them look bleak. To date, while the actual numbers are contested and public pronouncements by the government have varied, recent estimates suggest that only 5,000 of these individuals have been formally inducted into the security forces.[13] Furthermore, the outbreak of hostilities following al-Mashhadani’s arrest is still seen by many Sunnis in sectarian terms. A stepped-up and more comprehensive campaign against the sahwat could still trigger a broader sense of Sunni Arab grievance and a series of uncoordinated reactions that would catalyze a larger outbreak of destabilizing sectarian violence.

Most of us remember all too well the praise from the Bush administration lavished on the Awakening Groups, a Sunni militia comprised of former resistance fighters and al-Qaeda members (according to the US military), each member paid $300 per month of US taxpayer money. They grew in strength to 100,000 men. US aid to the Councils was cut off last October on the understanding that the members would be absorbed into Iraqi government forces. To date, less than a third have been given government jobs.

The voting shows that Mr Maliki and his Dawa party are stronger but the significance can be exaggerated. Although he fought a secular campaign, on important decisions Mr Maliki does not generally act without seeking the opinion of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The election has also been painted as a setback for Iranian influence but Mr Maliki is still going to keep close relations with Tehran while remaining on good terms with the US. One test of the success of the election will be how far the results are accepted by the losers.

Others might question Cockburn’s pessimism: from his base in Qom, Muqtada retains influence over a strong nationalist current in Iraq, and in August 2008, it was Sadrists who led protests against the ‘Status of Forces’ agreement between the us and the Maliki government, which was obliged to reject the treaty amid a wave of anti-Occupation sentiment. Muqtada continues to weave between the traditions of Iraqi nationalism and Shia communalism—ministering to his Shia working-class base while making sporadic appeals to Iraqi society as a whole. Whether he can help to forge a coherent political force that will reject any further accommodations with the occupiers remains to be seen. But Cockburn has given us a valuable portrait of an individual who is pivotal to the country’s future political arrangements—and more importantly, of the social forces that will sustain him as long as he continues to speak for them.

"success" in iraq:
All these assertions are blatantly false. More and more of Iraq has descended into warfare, the parliament is little more than a fight club on the rare occasions it meets, the government is verging on collapse, Iraqis aid U.S. forces only as a means to gain weapons to use against rivals, and the security forces are ill-trained, poorly equipped, and incompetent if not actively fighting the Americans.
(...) Genocide is a strong term, but that’s the on-the-ground reality: first, the counterinsurgency mainly targeted Sunnis, then, U.S. forces set up Shiite militias that have waged a death squad campaign against Sunnis, now, as even pro-war columnist Thomas Friedman concedes, the current strategy is based on fomenting a “Sunni-Sunni war.”

deepening divisions:
The Sunni, about 20 per cent of Iraq's 27 million population and the dominant community for hundreds of years, supported armed resistance to the US from the beginning. The Shia, 60 per cent of Iraqis, did not resist the occupation so long as they could take power through elections as they believe they deserved to do as a majority. This attitude to the US may now be changing. Only the Kurds, also 20 per cent of Iraqis, fully back the US presence. Ethnic and sectarian animosities in Iraq were always deeper than most Iraqis admitted but divisions have turned into chasms. There are fewer and fewer mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad. The Shia, probably three-quarters of the capital's population, are pushing back the Sunni into the south-west corner. Some 4.2 million Iraqis have fled their homes, becoming refugees either inside or outside the country according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

jockeying for power:
The US may have succeeded in toppling the Iraqi regime, but Iran succeeded in placing its allies in positions of power in Baghdad in the post-invasion phase. Iran won its influence in Baghdad not only through its political, sectarian, economic, military and intelligence presence in Iraq, but also through its skill at capitalising on the momentous bungling of the neo-conservative administration in Washington. In 15 years it reversed the outcome of the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988). From near military defeat it has now scored almost total political victory. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that Al-Maliki's visit was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Iraq-Iran war.
(...) All three parties appear to be operating on a tacitly agreed-upon premise: a compromise solution will only work if each party does what it takes to ensure that the other parties' worst nightmares do not come true. Riyadh's nightmare is that Iran will succeed in securing a large base of operations in the area of southern Iraq adjacent to the Saudi Arabian borders, within a stone's throw of Saudi oil fields. Tehran fears the emergence of a central government in Baghdad which owes its primary allegiance to Washington and which could eventually build up a strong enough army to threaten Iran again in the future. Washington is cringing at the spectre of a forced withdrawal without face-saving agreements and, therefore, having to sustain the internal and external fallout from an unequivocal defeat while Tehran is left to crow over its political victory in Iraq.

is iraq's government falling apart?:
While many Shia accuse Al-Maliki of incompetence for his failure to end attacks by Sunni factions, especially by Al-Qaeda, Sunni groups blame him for failure to crackdown on Shia extremists, such as the Al-Mahdi militia, which is charged with torture, assassinations and execution-style slayings.

al-sadr back in the public eye:
Al-Sadr said: "I say to our Sunni brothers in Iraq that we are brothers and the occupier shall not divide us. They are welcome and we are ready to co-operate with them in all fields. This is my hand I stretch out to them." Al-Sadr's call came a few days after Shia leaders from his east Baghdad stronghold met with Sunni tribal heads from western Iraq. Both sides promised to work together for national reconciliation and against extremism.
He said: "I received complaints from brother Sunnis and some Christians about the aggressions of the Nawasib. I am ready to defend them and will be a shield for them, although the occupier would not accept that." "I say that our houses and cities are open for them and that for Iraqis to kill Sunnis and Christians is a sin. What the Nawasib are doing to compel the Christians to embrace Islam is despicable."

fisk on clashes in lebanon's refugee camps:
And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
(...) Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. “Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn’t have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis,” he said. “It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can’t storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take.”
(...) And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.

iraq update (may 18th):
Meanwhile. although the Al-Adhamiya wall is nearing completion, the Iraqi parliament has passed a unanimous decision calling on the occupation forces to stop building it. "We know that our decision will be ignored, but we had to make the point for the record," an Iraqi parliamentarian who did not wish to be identified said. "The wall was built, ostensibly to protect Al-Adhamiya from attacks, but it will only serve to exacerbate factional segregation," he said. [a sovereign, democratic nation indeed!]
(...) In a rare sign of unity, the inhabitants of the Sunni neighbourhood of Al-Adhamiya and the Shia neighbourhood of Al-Kadhimiya staged a joint demonstration from Al-Adhamiya to Al-Kadhimiya, calling for the wall to be removed. However, the demonstration was barely covered in the media.
(...) On another front, 144 parliamentarians signed a petition calling upon the occupation forces to set a timetable for their withdrawal. The parliamentary spokesman for the Sadr Block, Saleh Al-Uqayli, said the petition was the idea of Al-Sadr supporters. "Those who signed the petition call themselves the Liberal Block. This is not a new parliamentary block, but only a group of parliamentarians who demand a timetable for withdrawal."
(...) At present, the Iraqi parliament is debating an oil law, but some argue that the law is designed to promote US interests. A source at the Probity Committee said that up to $1.5 billion have been lost due to wastage and mismanagement in the Iraqi oil sector. Foreign sources add that, since the beginning of the occupation, billions of dollars in oil revenues are believed to have vanished due to oil- related corruption.

iran, iraq, us:
The three-month-old US plan to regain control of Baghdad is slow to show results despite the arrival of four more US brigades. Security in the heart of the city may be a little better but the US and the Iraqi government are nowhere near dealing a knockout blow to the Sunn insurgency or the Shia militias.
(...) In an interview in Baghdad he laughed as he pointed that Iran and the US both genuinely support the present Iraqi government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Iranian stance contrasts with Arab states such as Saudi Arabia where the King refuses to meet Mr Maliki. "Ironically," says Mr Zebari, "the Iranian statement on majority rule in Iraq [at the conference on Iraq at Sharm el-Sheikh ten days ago] agrees entirely with what we and the Americans say."
(...) His words are a recipe for a long conflict. As soon as the US and Britain overthrew Saddam Hussein, the detested enemy of Iran, in 2003 Iranian influence in Iraq and power in the Gulf increased. When the Shia religious parties, sympathetic to the clerical regime in Tehran, won the parliamentary elections in Iraq in 2005 Iranian influence grew again. It has proved impossible for the US to reverse this trend which is of its own making.
(...) But it was noticeable in February that when al-Sadr told his Mehdi Army militia to hold back from attacking the Americans and stockpile their arms he was obeyed. Underestimating the Sadrist movement has been a repeated American and British mistake in Iraq since 2003. Another frequent error has been to believe that the Shia alliance, so powerful because the Shia are 60 per cent of the population, is always on the verge of collapse. Even the Sunni opposition to al Qaida may lead the insurgents to concentrate on shooting Americans rather than blowing up Shia street traders.
(...) Peace, when it finally comes to Iraq, will inevitably be the result of a package deal of which a timetable for a US withdrawal is likely to be a central part. Despite Mr Cheney's claim that the US still seeks victory in Iraq-American failure--going by its original high ambitions--has long been inevitable. Iran and Syria are important players in Iraq that cannot be ignored. The popularly elected Shia-Kurdish government cannot be remade at Americans and British request because it does not go along with their wishes.
(...) President Bush's strategy, announced in January, of confronting Iran and seeking to pacify Baghdad by sending US troop reinforcements is not working.

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.

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.

cockburn update (5/7):
The US and the Iraqi government are having some success in cultivating divisions between the fanatical partisans of al-Qa'ida in Iraq and the rest of the Sunni community. But overall, the five million Sunni community supports armed resistance to both the US and the Shia-Kurdish government.
(...) The Sunni rebellion that started in the summer of 2003 is too well established to be crushed. When insurgents are squeezed in one part of Baghdad, they move to another, or to a neighbouring province. The Kurds were able to destabilise Iraq for half a century despite suffering persecution and genocide, and Sunnis are well positioned to do the same.
(...) One casualty of the new plan is the authority of the Iraqi government. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, announced in Egypt that the construction of a wall around the Sunni district of al-Adhamiyah would stop, but without effect. An Iraqi army spokesman simply said that the Prime Minister had been misled. The Iraqi Defence Ministry is largely under American control - one senior Iraqi army official who obeyed a direct order from Mr al-Maliki late last year found himself jailed by US forces.
(...) The troops were said to have an order from the Shia-controlled Health Ministry to close the hospital, but the Americans insisted Naaman would be reopened. Although pro-resistance Sunni websites have claimed that 82 patients had been murdered, this has been impossible to verify.

iraqi unity? and al-adhamiyah:
Are the Americans interested in protecting Al-Adhamiyah, or in protecting other areas from fighters based in Al-Adhamiyah?
(...) The city of Kirkuk is being Kurdicised. Up until the occupation, ethnic Arabs mostly inhabited the city. Now the Kurds want to annex it to their province. Why is that? Because Kirkuk sits on a lake of oil, and the Kurds need to control the oil as part of their plan to secede from Iraq.
(...) Meanwhile, plans are underway to declare a Basra Province in southern Iraq, although no attempts at secession have so far been made.
(...) The Americans want to see Iraq divided; Kurdistan in the north, Basra in the south, and the Sunni triangle in the middle. But what does all this have to do with Al-Adhamiyah?
(...) The Kurdish government would be pleased to forge a close alliance with the Americans. Such an alliance would offer the Kurds protection from the Turks, the Iranians and the pan-Arab government that may emerge in central Iraq. The southern province would also rush into US arms, for more or less the same reasons. Iraq would thus be reduced to the same status as any of the Gulf states, just another group of sheikhdoms reliant on oil and foreign backing.
(...) Founded at the time of Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour, Baghdad was built on the opposite banks of the Tigris. The west bank of the river was known as Al-Karkh, the east bank as Al-Rasafa. Until recently, the centre of the city was divided equally between the two banks. The mausoleum of Abu Hanifa was in Al-Rasafa, and that of Imam Al-Kazem was in Al-Karkh, with the Imamayn (two imams) Bridge connecting the two. Al-Adhamiyah took its name from the words "Al-Imam Al-Adham", or Abu Hanifa, a leading Sunni doctrinaire. During the Ottoman era, Al-Adhamiyah had a reputation for rebellion that continued even during the communist tide of the 1960s. Since the fall of Baghdad, Al-Adhamiyah has been active in resistance.
(...) For the past four years, Al-Adhamiyah has been a hotbed of resistance. The Americans repeatedly declared the area "liberated" from the resistance. But when the Americans tried to send the Iraqi army -- the new one they had created -- to its first real test in Al-Adhamiyah, dozens of Iraqi and US troops were killed. After this, the Americans tried to send troops in dinghies across the river, but suffered further losses.
(...) So there you have it. Al-Adhamiyah is part of the US drive to restrain, not protect, the Iraqis. This quest is likely to fail, as it did repeatedly in the past. The days of the occupation are numbered.

on the surge (p. cockburn):
The so-called 'surge', the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.
(...) There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in reality death squad members. Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that the name Omar is used only by Sunni. Three days later the boy was found dead.
(...) The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of dead bodies found in the street went down. This was mainly because the largest Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. But the Sunni insurgent groups escalated the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. The US was unable to stop this.
(...) The failure of the 'surge' comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is wholly factionalised. For instance the two vice presidents, the Sunni Tariq al- Hashimi, and the Shia Adel Abdel Mehdi, may make conciliatory statements in public but one Iraqi observer notes that "Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia."
(...) A bizarre flavour has been given to Saadoun Street because the government has encouraged artists to paint the giant concrete blast barriers with uplifting if unlikely scenes of mountain torrents, meadows in spring and lake side scenes. Many of the pictures, all in garish greens, blues and yellows, look more like Switzerland than Iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr, for his part, is encouraging artists to paint the blast barriers with scenes illustrating the anguish inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US occupation.
(...) Entering the zone recently I was questioned and searched, at different stages, by Kurds, Georgians, Peruvians and Nepalese. No country in the world has such rigorous frontier procedures as what one American called "this little chunk of Texas." Living cut off in the zone it is impossible for the ruling elite of Iraq to understand the terrible suffering and terror beyond its gates.

sectarian situtation in lebanon:
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said the killing was carried out after "conspirators and outside powers" failed to drive his country into internal confrontation. "The recent killing is the same as what happened in 1975," Lahoud told IPS at the presidential palace in Beirut. "They want civil war here, but we won't allow it." The 1975 incident the President referred to occurred Apr. 13 of that year when unidentified gunmen fired on a church in the Christian east Beirut suburb Ain el- Rummaneh, killing four people, including two Maronite Phalangists. The Phalange is a large Christian militia. Hours later, Phalangists killed 27 Palestinian civilians in a bus in the same suburb. That was the trigger for the infamous 15-year Lebanese civil war, which left an estimated 100,000 dead, as many seriously injured, and nearly a million displaced from their homes.
(...) Many blame the current U.S.-backed government of Siniora and his allies like Saad Harriri and Walid Jumblatt for creating a difficult situation. "Outside forces helped create the current political tensions which may have led to these killings," 32-year-old English language teacher Raed el-Amine told IPS. "The pro-government groups are more responsible for this because they've focused more on disunity by playing the sectarian game."

al-qaeda in iraq:
The struggle between resistance groups and Al-Qaeda rose to surface when the Islamic Army, a prominent resistance group, issued a strong-worded statement condemning Al-Qaeda's actions and calling on Osama Bin Laden to personally intervene to rein-in Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
(...) Differences between Al-Qaeda's Islamic State in Iraq and the resistance have been simmering ever since Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia declared an Islamic state with Abu Omar Baghdadi named "prince of the faithful". That dramatic move, replete with an armed parade, was witnessed with alarm across the Sunni political community and the resistance alike. While staking its claim over the leadership and future of Iraq, it was not expected that Al-Qaeda would move so quickly into eliminating its opponents and demanding total allegiance.
(...) Sources close to both the Islamic Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigades say it is now obvious that Al-Qaeda is vying for unrivaled control over the resistance.
(...) Al-Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq, however, was deterred neither by alarmed reactions nor attempts to contact its leadership in Iraq. The Islamic Army broke its silence once Al-Qaeda's attacks against Sunni civilians, mosques, imams, and even "demanding money" from families in return for protection, became the rule, not the exception.
(...) Different resistance groups, especially Islamic- based groups, had initially accepted Al-Qaeda's role, which they saw as impressively efficient and painful for occupation forces. Salafi-based groups, like Ansar Al-Sunna, and some members of the other groups, embraced Al-Qaeda and hailed "the Muslim Mujahideen who came to liberate Iraq." Al-Qaeda was welcomed into the fold of the Majles Al-Shura (Consultative Council) that includes seven factions, though its attempts to control the council or impose its agenda were repeatedly rejected.
(...) A debate has been ongoing about targeting the Iraqi army and police, and Iraqis involved in the American-sponsored political process. In his Al-Jazeera interview, Al-Shammari rejected considering the Iraqi army, the police and Iraqis in parliament as legitimate targets. The same position is held by the 1920 Revolution Brigades and other Sunni leaders.
(...) According to informed sources close to at least two resistance groups, the Iraqi resistance, though engaging Al-Qaeda when forced to, is still seeking to avoid an all-out confrontation, even if Al-Qaeda seeks it. Nonetheless, the situation seems to be escalating on a daily basis, with many Iraqi nationalist activists who support the resistance fearing that "occupation forces are benefiting the most from Al-Qaeda's actions."

deconstructing the shia crescent:
This quadripartite alliance is not confined to Shia actors such as Iran and Hizbullah, but also incorporates the Sunni movement Hamas and a predominantly Sunni Syria, led by a secular Baathist state. Although many proponents of the Shia crescent theory insist, nonetheless, on counting Syria as a Shia state on account of its Alawite regime, such an attempt is an overstretch given the highly disputable classification of Alawism as Shiism among Shia clerical circles. In fact, it was not until 1973 that Alawites were deemed to belong to the Shia sect by Imam Musa As-Sadr, who did so as a political favour to President Hafez Al-Assad. The inclusion of Hamas and Syria in this alliance, means that it cannot be considered Shia or even Islamic in character and composition, but more accurately regional.
(...) The current Sunni-Shia rift is fundamentally a political one that has been fuelled by the ouster of Sunni leader Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the institution of an American-backed, Shia- dominated state. Sunni rage was further ignited by the Iraqi government's highly incendiary execution of Hussein in December last year. While Iran is not feared as a Shia power as such, its support for the Iraqi government and its alleged links with Shia death squads in Iraq has earned it the reproach of many Sunnis and soured Sunni-Shia relations overall. In a similar vein, the crisis in Lebanon between the Siniora government and the Hizbullah-led opposition, has been interpreted by some Sunnis in the region as a flagrant Shia-instigated power struggle which has derailed Hizbullah from its loftier campaign of resistance to Israel.
(...) Having said all this, the scope and intensity of sectarian tensions should not be exaggerated. Even in Lebanon, where the Sunni-Shia divide is only second to Iraq in its rancour, two-thirds of Sunnis do not support Sunni attacks against Shias in Iraq, while almost three-quarters of them do not view the Shia crescent as a reality, according to the findings of a Beirut Centre for Research and Information (BCRI) poll. In the region as a whole, Sunnis do not appear to be anywhere near as concerned as their leaders about Iran's rise as a regional powerhouse and its attendant sectarian implications.
(...) In this connection, Iran's right to nuclear power is supported by 61 per cent of Arabs, according to the results of the Telhami-Zogby poll, although half of all respondents in the survey suspect that Iran's nuclear programme is intended for weapons manufacture. For the majority of "moderate" Sunni Arabs then, a nuclear- armed Iran is a desirable counterweight to US and Israeli military dominance in the region.
(...) Support for Iran also owes itself in large part to its longstanding sponsorship of popular Islamist resistance movements in the region -- Hizbullah and Hamas. Although Arab regimes castigated Hizbullah for its abduction of Israeli soldiers in July 2006, with Saudi Arabia condemning Hizbullah's actions as "irresponsible adventurism", popular Arab support for the movement reached its zenith in last summer's war, given the scale of the Israeli offensive and the resistance's ability to defeat the militarily superior Israeli army. As a consequence, the stature of Hizbullah's secretary-general, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, was elevated to heroic proportions in much of the Sunni Arab world, earning him the title of the "new Gamal Abdel Nasser" for his showdown with Israel. In the Telhami-Zogby poll, Nasrallah was ranked the most popular leader by Arab respondents, while in a BCRI survey commissioned by Kuwait's Al-Qabas newspaper in December, Nasrallah emerged as Sunni Kuwait's preferred leader, with 40 per cent of Kuwaitis expressing their preference for him over other Sunni leaders.
(...) What facilitates the appeal of Shia Islamic actors like Iran and Hizbullah to an Arab Sunni audience is their embrace of the core principles of a once predominately Sunni Arabist movement. Arabist slogans such as resistance to occupation, the liberation of Palestine and the struggle against imperialism for regional independence, resonate well with the Sunni Arab street. While Hizbullah's Arab nationality somewhat mitigates its Shia identity, the notion of a Shia-Persian power becoming the standard bearer of Sunni Arab causes, appears more paradoxical. But judging from the level of Sunni Arab support for Hizbullah and Iran, it appears as though the perceived restoration of Arab pride and dignity that these two strategic players have bought about overrides national and sectarian considerations.
(...) In effect, the much promoted "Shia crescent" theory appears to be far less of a political reality, or widespread social concern, than a card played by "moderate" Arab regimes to whip up fears among their Sunni publics within the context of a wider, US-orchestrated campaign to enlist the support of Sunni Arab regimes in demonising and isolating Iran.
(...) . Arab alarmism is therefore not directed at the export of religious or cultural Shiism but, more significantly, at political Shiism as defined by its anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, pro-resistance identity. That the US supports Saudi efforts to play a more active role in resolving regional disputes, in a last ditch attempt to eclipse Iran's regional soft power, is indicative of the recognition by both parties of the extent of Iran's influence and appeal among Sunni Arabs. And it is precisely because Iran does not act like a Shia power, with distinctly Shia objectives, that makes it such a formidable challenge to the US and its Arab allies.
(...) On one side of the divide lie Arab regimes, such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as recently elected governments, all of which have earned their "moderate" epithets by dint of their alliances with the US and their moderation vis-à-vis Israel. Whether authoritarian or democratically elected, these governments are fully buttressed by the US, and are therefore widely accused of ceding their nation's sovereignty and lacking popular legitimacy. [VS.] On the other side of the divide sits the strategic front represented by Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, formed in response to the US- Israeli axis and thus essentially a reactive alliance. As a defensive front, whose central objective is to actively resist US and Israeli political intervention, security/intelligence infiltration, and military occupation with a combination of cultural, political and military means, the most suitable designation for this coalition of forces is the "resistance and mumanaa front".