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.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement. "Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

the fakery of general petraeus:
Unfortunately, the propaganda effort by the White House now underway may have a more malign impact than most propaganda exercises. It claims that victory is possible where failure has already occurred. It manipulates figures and facts to produce a picture of Iraq that is not merely distorted but substantively false.
(...) The truest indicator of the level of violence in Iraq is the number of people fleeing their homes because they are terrified that they will be murdered. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees the number of refugees has risen from 50,000 to 60,000 a month and none are returning.
(...) It is no longer possible to get medical treatment for many ailments because 75 per cent of doctors, pharmacists have left their jobs in the hospitals, clinics and universities. The majority of these have fled abroad to join the 2.2 million Iraqis outside the country.
(...) Interestingly, 46 per cent of Iraqis believe that full-scale civil war would be less likely if the US withdrew before civil order is restored. Some 35 per cent say it would be more likely to occur.

harvard's humanitarian hawks:Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge?
(...) It’s not that counter-insurgency Harvard-style has been effective, as proven by the continued suicide bombings, sniper activity and increasing casualties among US forces since the “surge” began. It is an academic formulation to buttress and justify a permanent engagement in counter-terrorism wars.
(...) If that is the limit of legitimate debate at Harvard, the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response.

achcar interviewed on developments in iraq and lebanon:That's what they tried to achieve through the "surge", chiefly through a lot of spin. But it very blatantly failed. The major goal was to create conditions through which they would change the political alignments in Iraq and set up a new alliance that would be close to the US and enable Washington to better manoeuvre in the country. Moqtada al-Sadr was a chief target of this whole operation and we can measure its failure by the way he is now back and very much prominent in the news, after having vanished for a while.
(...) The February 2006 Samarra attack [a devastating Sunni sectarian attack on the Shia mosque there] was a watershed in the Iraqi situation. That is when the image of al-Sadr turned from one of non-sectarian Arab-cum-Iraqi nationalist into one of leader of a Shiite sectarian militia. He is trying now to restore his previous image. He probably believes that the climate is right for a new attempt -- after over a year during which the Shiites let off sectarian steam very intensively in response to the sectarian attacks they had suffered.
(...) Well there are. Al-Sadr's new tone is generally welcomed by the nationalists –in contrast to the sectarians -- among Arab Sunnis. If you put aside the al-Qaida type of anti-US anti-Shiite fanatics, there are two types of forces among the Iraqi Arab Sunnis: on the one hand, those chiefly spurred on by sectarian and anti-Iranian views, which are close to the Saudis and willing to make deals with the US against the Shiites. And, on the other hand, those who consider the US as the main, most dangerous, enemy and who are therefore willing to make an alliance with anti-US Shiite forces -- provided (as the fear of Iran is common to all Sunnis) these are forces that they deem to be independent enough from Iran. That is the case of Moqtada al-Sadr. Although he has obvious links with Tehran, which backed him increasingly over the last few years, he retains a certain degree of political autonomy and is known to be fiercely independent. His followers don't shy away from making statements criticising Iran. For instance, criticising the recent meeting between Iranian and US representatives over the issue of Iraq as unacceptable meddling into Iraq's affairs -- as did various forces among the Sunnis.
(...) It can't be so simple. I have been describing what al-Sadr is trying to do. I didn't imply that he is going to succeed. He can certainly find a certain measure of success, but a major success allowing him to be the winner in this whole confrontation is quite difficult to predict at this point. He's facing quite difficult conditions. The Allawi operation is still going on. It is essentially an attempt at building a cross-sectarian political coalition using the lure of US support in order to topple the Maliki government and bring Allawi back to the helm as the "strong man" and saviour of Iraq. Although I wouldn't bet one penny on the success of this operation, you can't exclude it totally.
(...) What is certain though is that we will see crucial changes in the coming period. For the Bush administration, the ongoing "surge" is a double or quits operation. They are under intensive pressure in the US. Although we have seen how the Democrats have shied away from pressing forward the issue of a timetable for troop withdrawal -- the issue of Iraq is prominent in the presidential election and US public opinion has become much opposed to the continuation of the war.
(...) So I can't see any winning strategy or winning card for the US in Iraq. The question is not whether the US can achieve victory or not. The failure is already there and is fundamentally irreversible. The problem is how much further harm they can do to Iraq by trying to implement crazy schemes that are doomed from the start.
[lebanon]
(...) There are two kinds of "conspiracy theory" on this issue in Lebanon: on the one hand, the pro-US or "governmental majority" forces claim that "Fatah al-Islam" are manipulated by the Syrian services. They claim that the recent clashes were provoked in order to counter the international tribunal on the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri that Washington, Paris and London had just moved through the UN Security Council. On the other hand, you have those, many of whom refer to the article by Hersh, who claim that "Fatah al-Islam" has been manipulated by the governmental majority itself, and behind them the Saudis and the United States.
(...) It is known, for instance, that the key leader of "Fatah al-Islam" had been jailed in Syria previously -- so there is no solid ground to suspect that the Syrian regime stands behind his group, except for the fact that the situation flared up just after the UNSC voted on the international tribunal.
(...) It is true as well that this brand of Sunni fanatical fundamentalism is usually linked to Saudi sources, whether official or unofficial. It might well be that, at some point, the Hariri bloc had a relationship with such a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group, which adheres to an anti-Shiite sectarian tradition (and has eventually joined al-Qaida), with a view to a possible all-out confrontation with the Lebanese Shiites mainly represented by Hezbollah. But from that to infer that they are manipulating this group is also quite baseless.
(...) think that whatever ignited the confrontation, one thing is obvious: it has been immediately exploited for a very definite agenda. This was (1) to test the ability of the Lebanese army to confront other forces, starting with the easiest -- Palestinians, against whom Lebanese Shiite and Sunni soldiers alike can be united with no major risk of split along sectarian lines; and (2) to get the army to enter this Palestinian refugee camp in Northern Lebanon and take control of it under the pretext of fighting this group.
(...) This is why at some point Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, came out saying that he considered the penetration by the Lebanese army of the camp to be a "red line." Why did he say so, despite Hezbollah initially expressing its solidarity with the Lebanese army? Because he realised that this Palestinian camp has become a testing ground for the ability of the Lebanese army to implement a task that is part of UNSC Resolution 1559 (sponsored by Washington, London and Paris in 2004) calling for the disarming of both the Palestinian camps and Hezbollah. Nasrallah became aware that the battle of Nahr el-Bared is but a first step on a path that leads ultimately to the fight against his own forces. You can see that in the broad display of active solidarity with the Lebanese army in the ongoing confrontation: Washington is sending weapons and inciting all its allies to send whatever hardware the Lebanese army needs.
(...) The [general] situation is at a real dead end, which means that it is tense and dangerous. For months now, the country has been on the verge of a sectarian explosion, which could ignite new bloody fighting or even a new civil war.
(...) Hezbollah's strategy got bogged down completely. This is a result of the limitation inherent in their sectarian view of things, in their conception of power sharing among sectarian communities and existing power blocs. Through a series of clumsy positions, in which their alliance with the Syrian dictatorship played no minor role, they comforted the present sectarian division in this country between Shiites and Sunnis.
(...) Although at some point, it appeared at the beginning of the Israeli offensive last summer that there was a reduction in sectarianism, it soon came back very strongly. Hezbollah's sectarian nature made it easy for the Hariri camp to exploit Sunni sectarian feelings in very blatant ways. So the whole situation has got bogged down and the opposition has lost the political initiative that they had when they started their mobilisation at the beginning of last winter.
(...) The Shiite Hezbollah and Amal, the Maronite General Aoun and many other smaller forces. In sectarian terms, that means the overwhelming majority of the Shiites plus a sizeable fraction of the Christians in alliance against the majority of the Sunnis, plus the majority of the Druze and another fraction of the Christians. This is the configuration of forces in Lebanon as it stands now -- as sectarian as it used to be at the peak of the civil war.

the surge in history:
Military escalation was also LBJ's answer to unrelenting attacks by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese in an uncontrollable civil war -- an increase from 16,800 advisers in 1963 to 545,000 combat troops by 1968. But compare that with Bush's increase of about 28,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. If more than half a million troops couldn't succeed in Vietnam, is a total U.S. force of more than 160,000 likely to pacify Iraq? And what can be done when one escalation doesn't do the trick? The more you double down, Johnson and Nixon found, the harder it is to cut your losses.
(...) [the chronology of withdrawal] We do know that despite Nixon's and Kissinger's behind-the-scenes pragmatism, they continued the fighting for four bloody years -- punctuated by their Cambodian "incursion" in the spring of 1970, a U.S.-backed South Vietnamese offensive in Laos in 1971 and the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972. Throughout, they knew that victory was impossible but hoped that military pressure on Hanoi would force the North Vietnamese into what Nixon called "peace with honor" -- a deal that could end the United States' commitment while preserving its international credibility.
(...) Bush's political concerns are far less personal. He wants a Republican successor, but he faces no direct electoral retribution. No matter what happens in Iraq, his presidency will end in January 2009. That frees him up considerably to stay the course -- despite the unease that doing so is creating among the GOP's presidential candidates and among congressional Republicans who fear that Iraq will cost them the chance to win back the Hill.

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.

chris floyd on iraq:
So there you are. We have American casualties swelling with the still-rising wave of the Bush-McCain-Romney-Guiliani-Lieberman surge, with even more deaths expected as the escalation crests. We have American soldiers flung into the brutal service of the Bush Regime's criminal enterprise becoming more brutalized and criminalized themselves -- with thousands of troops admitting that they have beaten or despoiled innocent civilians, and tens of thousands embracing the torture of prisoners and rejecting the very notion that the people they have come to "liberate" should be treated with dignity and respect, according to the Pentagon's own examination of the fraying mental health of its forces. We have Iraqi citizens cowering in fear of the American-trained "security" forces of their own government. We have the ghetto-building campaign by the occupying liberators sealing whole quadrants of Baghdad into open-air prisons whose inhabitants are left to the tender mercies of the violent sectarians locked in with them, creating "mini-Islamic republics," as one Iraqi government official admitted to The Independent. We have literally millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes, eating the bitter bread of exile in foreign lands or else on the run from ethnic cleansing inside Iraq -- one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. We have a never-ending hellstorm of death and chaos, lies and looting, incompetence and arrogance -- and unfathomable, unendurable human suffering -- all of it spawned by the illegal, immoral and unnecessary war of aggression launched at the order of George W. Bush, and championed or countenanced for years by the "great and the good" of American society.

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.

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.

troop count (p. cockburn):
Ever since President George Bush announced that US soldiers would play a more active role in the war in a speech on 10 January, US casualties have been creeping up. Although it is the figure of 3,332 US soldiers dead since 2003 that is heavily publicised, many of the 24,314 wounded have suffered severe injuries that would have killed them in previous wars but they survive because of advances in medicine. US losses have been surprisingly steady over the past three years, with 849 soldiers killed in 2004, 846 in 2005, 822 in 2006 and 329 so far this year.

report from iraq (cockburn):
The attacks are likely to speed the return of the Mehdi Army in Shia areas to provide protection. It was stood down by its leader, the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as the US-Iraqi security crackdown began on 14 February. When Iraqi army soldiers and a US patrol entered Sadriyah after the bombing they were met with jeers and stones.
(...) The US security plan has never had the political as well as the military components essential to success. It should have encouraged more Iraqi groups to enter the political process and eschew violence. In fact it has done the opposite. The US has been pushing the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to break with Mr Sadr, who has a very large following among the Shia majority. Mr Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the government this week saying that Mr Maliki had failed to set a deadline for a US troop withdrawal. But the Sadrists are also angry that US and Iraqi government troops have arrested 800 of their men, including Sheikh Qais Khazali, one of their leaders. Mr Sadr reportedly believes the Prime Minister reneged on an agreement not to purse the Mehdi Army if it did not fight.
(...) The soaring number of people being executed by the government since the death penalty was reintroduced in 2004 is condemned in a new report by Amnesty International. It says that 270 people are under sentence of death and more than 100 have been executed, almost all of them since the start of 2006. The report says many of them only confessed under torture.

the surge, and game of chicken with iran (englehart):
In the meantime, while the Americans could point to a drop in Iraqi civilian deaths in the capital (along with a rise in American ones), overall Iraqi deaths throughout the country were, not surprisingly, surging as guerrilla operations and sectarian struggles simply shifted to places of less American strength.
(..) Meanwhile, a dangerous game of chicken is being played out at the edge of some cliff by the Bush administration and its Iranian counterparts – with kidnapped Iranian diplomats-cum-Revolutionary-Guards held somewhere in America's Iraqi prison mini-gulag, those British sailors taken hostage by Iranian Revolutionary Guards (and then freed), an American ex-FBI agent mysteriously missing in Iran, and the report from Robert Fisk of the British Independent that "the U.S. military intends to place as many as five mechanized brigades – comprising about 40,000 men – south and east of Baghdad, at least three of them positioned between the capital and the Iranian border. This would present Iran with a powerful – and potentially aggressive – American military force close to its border in the event of a U.S. or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities later this year."

iraqi reactions to the surge:
Some Iraqi legislators declared the U.S.-led plan to secure Baghdad a failure after an unprecedented suicide bomb attack on parliament Thursday capped a violent week in the capital.
(...) "The plan is 100% a failure. It's a complete flop," said Khalaf al-Ilyan, one of the three leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, which holds 44 seats in parliament. "The explosion means that instability and lack of security has reached the Green Zone."


(...) "If you add it all up, I don't see how you can conclude the surge is working," said Kenneth Katzman, an Iraq expert at the Congressional Research Service. "The confluence of evidence is that things are falling apart rather than coming together."
(...) Attacks in the Green Zone are rare. Visitors must pass through multiple checkpoints, usually manned by Iraqi troops, U.S. military personnel or private security contractors. The area is usually so secure that U.S. soldiers jokingly refer to it as "the ultimate gated community."

evaluating the 'surge' (albeit in a limited way):
The bridge and parliament bombings "are very calculated political messages that are meant to affect the morale of the government and its [international] backers. The claim that the security plan has sent insurgents scattering into the provinces has proven to be false," says Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies program at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.
(...) "You ask me to worry about what happened yesterday or this morning when we live our lives from minute to minute," he scoffs. He says nearly a quarter of the 106 new doctors in the class of 2007 are already leaving Iraq, with the remainder working hard to do the same.