The Osterley Times: Why Iraq Could Blow Up in John McCain's Face

Patrick Cockburn, one of the very few journalists still reporting from Iraq from outside of the Green Zone, has published an article today which fatally undermines the oft heard right wing talking point that "the surge is working". Indeed, he goes as far as to say:

Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality.

Partly, this is simply down to the Iraqi authorities spinning the situation in a dishonest manner:

Cocooned behind the walls of the Green Zone, defended by everybody from US soldiers to Peruvian and Ugandan mercenaries, the government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki pumps out alluring tales of life returning to normal that border on fantasy. For instance, Brigadier Ata made his claim that there had been no sectarian murders or expulsions in the capital over the previous month on February 15, but two weeks earlier, on February 1, suicide bombers, whom the government said were al-Qa’ida, had blown themselves up killing 99 people in two bird markets in Baghdad, both situated in largely Shia districts.

So keen are the authorities to show that Sunni and Shia have stopped killing each other and overall violence is down that many deaths with an obvious sectarian motive are no longer recorded. “I think the real figure for the number of people being killed is about twice what the government says it is,” said one local politician. He had just sent the death certificates of the victims of sectarian killers to the military authorities, who were steadfastly refusing to admit that anybody had died at the time and place that the bodies were discovered.

However, there is no denying that overall violence in Baghdad has dropped, especially when compared to the three thousand dead a month of 2006. But the reasons Cockburn gives for this are not the rosy ones that Bush and Co continually put before us:

People stay inside their own Sunni or Shia ghettoes. [...] Overall the city the city is still frozen in fear.[...]

Baghdad is entirely divided between Sunni and Shia and the sectarianism is as deep seated as it was before fall in violence. In many areas, say Iraqis bitterly, “the killing stopped because there was nobody left to kill.” There are very few mixed neighborhoods left.

So the success that Bush is touting with his surge is the success of managing to turn Baghdad into Belfast in the seventies and calling that peace. The ethnic cleansing has now taken place and both communities live separately behind concrete walls. But the sectarian hatred remains deep.

There are many other measurements which undermine the Bush administration and Iraqi claims that peace is returning to Iraq. The most obvious of these are the immigration figures. Were peace returning to the region one would expect to see Iraqis returning to their country. That, despite Maliki's government claims, is simply not happening.

This explains why so few of the 2.2 million Iraqis who have fled abroad, mostly to Jordan and Syria, or the one million forced from their homes within Iraq, are coming home, despite the fact that many families exist miserably in a single rented room in Damascus or Amman.

Again, the Iraqi government has tried to prove the contrary. Last December it paid for a highly publicized convoy of buses to bring Iraqis home from Syria, the exercise geared to giving the impression that a flood of people was returning to peaceful Baghdad. Unfortunately, it never happened. Three months later, despite much tougher Syrian visa regulations, the flow is still out of Iraq. The latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees show that the number of Iraqis entering Syria from Iraq was 1,200 a day in late January “while an average of 700 are going back to Iraq from Syria.”

That's still an average of 500 a day going in the wrong direction. These figures simply don't spell out the new peaceful Iraq which we are being sold.

And Cockburn tells us that it was the battle for Baghdad following the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on February 22, 2006, which established the current demographic outcome which, more than any surge, has accounted for the reduction of violence in Baghdad.

It was a struggle which was won by the Shia with the Sunni, always a minority, being pushed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad or being forced to leave Iraq. They make up disproportionate number of the refugees in Syria and Jordan and many, particularly of the better educated, will never return. The Shia also suffered, but they outnumber the Sunni by three to one in Iraq as a whole and they now control 75 per cent of the capital. It was this crucial battle for Baghdad and central Iraq, which, far more than the Surge, has determined the political landscape of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

He goes on to describe the legacy of hatred and fear which now exists between even the most liberal of Sunnis and Shias, all of which makes the job of political reconciliation much more difficult.

But another major impact on the casualty figures has been the decision of the Sunnis to stop fighting both the Americans and the Shias and to side with the Americans against al Qaeda.

The US called the al-Sahwa fighters ‘Concerned Local Citizens’ and later ‘Sons of Iraq’, seeking to give the impression that they were simple tribal folk who had turned on al-Qaida. In reality they are the same Sunni guerrillas who have been fighting the US for five years.[...]

The present American strategy may look like smart politics back in Washington. It is better to pay Sunni gunmen $300 a month to guard the road rather than have them planting bombs in it to blow up American Humvees. The US is losing one soldier dead a day compared to three or four killed each day a year ago. Since American casualties are the main barometer by which the US electorate views success or failure in Iraq these are important figures in an election year.[...]

Probably the US cannot play this intermediary role for so long. At the end of the day neither Sunni nor Shia Arabs in Iraq want the US to stay. It would be very easy for any of the myriad armed groups in Iraq to launch an offensive and send American military casualties soaring [...]

The greatest success of the Surge has been in terms of public relations. Suddenly there is a perception in the US that ‘things are getting better in Iraq’, though they are better only in terms of the mass killings of 2006. In the struggle over who will hold power in Iraq in the future nothing is decided and fighting, just as ferocious as anything we have seen in the past, could erupt at any moment.

So the success of the surge is as a public relations exercise, although it has already succeeded fantastically in terms of it's real aim, which was to allow George Bush to hand this debacle over to his successor. Those are the only real terms in which this surge can be deemed a success.

However, as Cockburn points out, the mirage of a peaceful Iraq could come apart at any time.

Please click the title to read Cockburn's entire article. It's well worth reading.