Speaking of skeptical I have my doubts about the crackdown on anti-government forces in Basra:
BAGHDAD, March 27 — Supporters of hardline cleric Moqtada al-Sadr poured into the streets of the Iraqi capital on Thursday to protest an ongoing security crackdown against Sadr’s militia, while fighting continued in the southern city of Basra and new rocket attacks struck near the U.S. Embassy.
Thousands of demonstrators rallied in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, carrying a coffin decorated with a picture of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — a symbol of the political risks Maliki has run by ordering Iraqi security forces to move against Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other politically-backed armed gangs in Basra.
[…]
Wire service reports from Basra on Thursday said there were audible explosions every few minutes as fighting continued despite an ultimatum from Maliki that gunmen surrender their arms by tomorrow.
One of the main oil pipelines near the city, a key shipping hub to the Persian Gulf, was reportedly on fire after an explosion. Crude oil prices spiked back above $106 a barrel in response.
The operation underway in Basra has led to growing shortages of food, water and other basic necessities, as Iraqi forces — under Maliki’s direction and backed in places by U.S. and British intelligence aircraft — pressed their effort to reclaim full control of the city from a disparate collection of armed gangs, Sadr’s group paramount among them. With Friday’s deadline approaching there were no signs of surrender.
Politicians and analysts said that the Basra offensive is a risky gamble by Maliki. Failure could strengthen the militias, increase Iran’s ability to influence events in Iraq and lead to more reliance on the United States to bolster the central government. That, in turn, could slow U.S. troop withdrawals.
What I wonder about is what units are taking part in the crackdown? It wouldn’t, by any chance, happen to be the Iraqi Police Service? That’s the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s own private army and the Iraqi Interior Ministry has been the fiefdom of the Badr militia, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, just as the Ministry of Health has been the fiefdom of Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia.
The next step in securing Iraq once the foreign fighters and the Ba’athist restorationists there have either been subdued or enlisted must be to reduce the other forces that compete with the government. Is that what’s going on in Basra or is it just gang warfare with the U. S. military lining up on the side of one of the gangs?
James Joyner has a sobering commentary on the operations in Basra and notes (in reference to this as the next step in securing the country):
The problem with this analysis, at least from the vantage point of what has happened thus far, is that the operation has been a disaster. Reports on NPR this morning say the Iraqi Army is vastly outmanned and outgunned. Further, there have been cases — how many is unclear — of Iraqi soldiers taking off their uniforms and joining the enemy. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Update
I see that Anthony Cordesman, quoted at the Baltimore Sun’s The Swamp, has lent some support to my interpretation of events in Iraq above:
Much of the current coverage of the fighting in the south assumes that Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr militia are the “spoilers,” or bad guys, and that the government forces are the legitimate side and bringing order. This can be a dangerous oversimplification. There is no question that many elements of the JAM have been guilty of sectarian cleansing, and that the Sadr movement in general is hostile to the US and is seeking to enhance Muqtada al-Sadr’s political power. There is also no doubt that the extreme rogue elements in the JAM have continued acts of violence in spite of the ceasefire, and that some have ties to Iran. No one should romanticize the Sadr movement, understate the risks it presents, or ignore the actions of the extreme elements of the JAM.
But no one should romanticize Maliki, Al Dawa, or the Hakim faction/ISCI. The current fighting is as much a power struggle for control of the south, and the Shi’ite parts of Baghdad and the rest of the country, as an effort to establish central government authority and legitimate rule.
The nature of this power struggle was all too clear during a recent visit to Iraq. ISCI had de facto control over the Shi’ite governorates in the south, and was steadily expanding its influence and sometimes control over the Iraqi police. It was clearly positioning itself for power struggle with Sadr and for any elections to come. It also was positioning itself to support Hakim’s call for a nine governorate Shi’ite federation — a call that it had clear Iranian support.
The US teams we talked to also made it clear that these appointments by the central government had no real popular base. If local and provincial elections were held with open lists, it was likely that ISCI and Dawa would lose most elections because they are seen as having failed to bring development and government services.
Well, it’s clear that the militias have to be reduced, and also clear that (since several of the major militias remaining are loyal to people who are major political forces, and in government) reducing them will mean s piecemeal civil war. This will include desertions in both directions (as in the US Revolutionary War, which was a sort of remote British civil war), as well as very muddled and confused fighting. It also means that we will be backing the various militias in alternation to keep them at a roughly equal balance of power while we reduce the power of all over time. This will take a couple of years, will require very careful balancing, and will be bloody (though probably not for US troops, since we’ll not be heavily involved in the fighting unless something goes dreadfully wrong).
The idea is to oppose whomever is the biggest threat to the Iraqi constitutional system by supporting their armed opponents, switching that support as the “biggest threat” switches, without actually getting directly involved in the fighting. It’s a delicate kind of war, this petit guerre, but one that we’ve fought and won several times in our history (at least once on this scale, and with us as direct rather than indirect participants).
My major fear is that, by not explaining this (or much of anything about why we are doing what we are doing), President Bush has set us up for a loss of public support as people see the violence without the context, and that would mean precipitous withdrawal and almost certain failure, which in turn would mean more big wars for us in the future in the Middle East. Joyner’s lack of confidence is an example of this failure: Joyner (and NPR, less surprisingly) doesn’t understand the kind of war that has to happen if Iraq is to become secure. (In fact, for a good history lesson, go look at the early history of Israel.) If he did, he might be less worried.
The combination of a poisonous partisan political environment, lack of communication skills on the part of the president, and, I think, a disinclination to explain himself is one of the great hazards of our situation.
Jeff:
I think if you explained as clearly and eloquently as you like that we are playing one side against the other in a rolling civil war the American people would be ready — readier than they already are — to find the exit.
I doubt our competence to manage this situation. I doubt we’d be capable of stage-managing a war between Crips and Bloods, let alone this situation where Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia are also players, and where sides can shift faster than we can identify the main players or parse the competing alliances.
Someone needs to explain to me how it is that we have failed — spectacularly — to somehow manage the Hamas-PLO fight, or to manage the Taliban-Pakistani fight, but we’re going to whip out our scalpels and dissect this particular mess, reassemble everything neatly and tada! come up with something vaguely approximating a democratic ally. I get nervous when I hear that the military or the State Department are attempting subtlety. I don’t think we do subtle very well.
I guess it depends on how you phrase it. If you phrase it as you did above, then you are right. But you might have more success if instead you phrase it as something like:
“Over the past year, we have focused on defeating AQI and other foreign terrorists, and now the Iraqi government is looking past that fight to how to ensure a stable, peaceful society. The Iraqis have to have a secure government, without the constant challenges from private armies funded and trained by Iran and Syria, before we can leave. The Iraqis are tackling that problem now. Make no mistake: it’s a tough problem, and there are going to be casualties, violence, and a lot of confusion. But this enemy is a weaker one than the enemy we have been fighting, and this enemy has far less to lose.”
And so on. A lot of the time, it’s a matter of how you explain things. I agree that getting people caught up on thousands of years of history and the theory of military art is not going to happen, and will just disturb them in the process of trying, but that doesn’t mean that an understandable (and still true) explanation cannot be given, and we have failed to do that in any meaningful way on any campaign or operation since 9/11.
As to the delicate balancing act, I have a lot of confidence in our military’s ability to do just that, presuming the politicians don’t mess it up first by pulling out halfway there. On the State Department (and the CIA), though, I agree: we’d be doomed if they were the ones in charge of executing the main line of attack in our policy.
Jeff:
It’s tough to control the narrative when you’re sitting at 34% in the polls and the whole country is desperate for you to leave.