Iraq's gov't won't sign U.S. occupation treaty

I don't know how much attention the MSM is giving this story, but it's pretty darn significant.  The U.S. occupation of Iraq could end on January 1, 2009 de jure -- when America's current status of forces treaty with Iraq expires -- if Iraq's government delays much longer on agreeing to U.S. demands for a new agreement thru 2011.

Iraq Asks U.S. to Reopen Talks Over Security Pact Changes

October 28, 2008  |  Associated Press

 

Iraq's government decided Tuesday to formally ask the United States to reopen negotiations on a proposed deal to keep American troops here past the end of the year. The U.S. suggested it may not be ready to offer more concessions.

 

That cast doubt on whether the agreement can win parliamentary approval by the end of 2008, when the U.N. mandate expires — and with it the legal basis for the U.S. military to operate in Iraq.

 

The U.S. has warned that without an agreement or an extension of the mandate, military operations would cease, including not only combat operations but also infrastructure projects and aid to Iraq's government.

 

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the decision to ask for more talks was taken after Cabinet members submitted amendments to the draft. They asked Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to present them to the Iraqi negotiating team.

 

Al-Dabbagh described the amendments as "essential" before the prime minister can submit the draft to parliament. Al-Maliki has said he won't submit the document to the 275-member legislature unless he is confident it can win overwhelming approval.

 

In Washington, White House press secretary Dana Perino said the Bush administration may talk to the Iraqis about their proposed amendments, but that "it will just be a very high bar for them to clear for us to change anything" in the agreement.

 

She said that U.S. officials have not seen the amendments list.

 

"It might be something we can work with, it might not," Perino said. "We have provided them with our best thinking on it, our best offer. We think that the door is pretty much shut on these negotiations."

 

For nearly two weeks, Iraqi politicians have been considering the draft agreement, which would keep U.S. troops in Iraq through 2011 unless both sides agree that they could stay.

 

The draft would also give the Iraqis a greater role in supervising U.S. military operations and allow Iraqi courts to try U.S. soldiers and contractors accused of major crimes off duty and off base.

 

But critics say the draft does not go far enough in protecting Iraqi sovereignty, and major Shiite politicians said last week that the agreement stands little chance of approval in its current form.

 

One option being floated privately is to ask the U.N. Security Council to renew the mandate for six months or a year until a way out of the deadlock is found. It is unclear whether Russia, China and other council members may raise their own demands and delay the process.

 

An official at al-Maliki's office said some of the amendments submitted in Tuesday's Cabinet meetings had been forwarded to U.S. diplomats in Baghdad. The official said the changes were mostly attempts to clarify parts of the text that the Cabinet found open to interpretation.

 

He said the changes were introduced in both the English and Arabic texts of the agreement. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not supposed to talk about the discussions.

 

Neither the official or al-Dabbagh elaborated on the changes. Some Iraqi politicians have complained that the parts dealing with Iraqi jurisdiction were unclear.

 

They also wanted clarification of the conditions under which U.S. troops might be asked to stay after Dec. 31, 2011.

 

The agreement, reached after months of tough negotiations, has stirred a political storm in Iraq, with most of the major political groups reluctant to take a clear position for or against the deal.

 

Only the radical group led by anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has taken a public stand on the agreement. The group, which holds 30 seats in parliament, has rejected it outright.

 

Al-Maliki has not publicly committed himself to the current draft.  [Whoa, that's something!  Al-Maliki is supposed to be our guy in Iraq. -- J]

 

Iraqi leaders have objected to what they describe as unjustified threats by senior American officials about what would happen if the year ends without an agreement or a new mandate.

 

"I don't think there are any Iraqis who think that they are ready to do this on their own, deep down," Perino said. "Iraq still has a lot of violence that they have to deal with. Our soldiers are the ones who are there to help them deal with it. And they're going to need our help for some time."

 

In violence Tuesday, four police officers were killed in a drive-by shooting in the turbulent northern city of Mosul, while three civilians were killed and 13 others wounded in a Baghdad car bombing, police said.

 

Also in the capital, another nine people, including four policemen, were wounded in two separate roadside bombs targeting police convoys.

Re: The real reasons behind improvement in Iraq

Too bad Robinson doesn't include herself among the "grown-ups" who need to discuss this decision; she ends the op-ed without giving any concrete advice, despite her extensive 10 months of experience in Iraq.  She does advocate some number of troops between 0 and 100,000 to remain in Iraq, for some unspecified period of time.  Wow, brilliant.  That's just the kind of "risk nothing" policy prescription that lands you a comfortable fellowship at conservative Johns Hopkins U. 

Sounds to me like the Sunnis and Maliki did things that were in their interest: The Sunnis gladly took U.S. cash in exchange for rooting out al Qaeda (which they would have done anyway); and Prime Minister Maliki gladly borrowed U.S. muscle to help cow his rival, Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army (whom he would have had to take on anyway).  We couldn't really "take advantage" of the competition between Maliki and Sadr, because Maliki knew that we wouldn't support Sadr, what with his close ties to Iran.  So Maliki was our only alternative, and he knew it.  That's not "competition" or playing both sides off one another, as Robinson claims, that's just plain choosing sides (Maliki's) in an internecine power struggle.  Let's hope Maliki was worth it.

That said, bribing people who can be bribed is SOP in counter-insurgency warfare.  It's cheaper and less bloody than killing them.  Again, let's hope we bribed the right people, and that they'll stay bought and not to shoot us in the back as we leave.

Finally, just because Petraeus and the U.S. army were proximate to these events, doesn't mean that they caused them.  I sense in Robinson another journalistic victim of "Embed Syndrome," who got starstruck by all her access to Petraeus himself.   

The upshot of this op-ed is just what every Administration mouthpiece has been saying for the past 5 years: Stay the course in Iraq, for some unknown period of time, at some undefined level of troops.  McCain couldn't have put it any better himself. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Date: Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 2:46 PM
Subject: Fw: the first disastrous steps taken by the U.S. occupation authority led by L. Paul Bremer -- disbanding Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and the old regime's security services -- had helped create the Sunni insurgency.
To:

 

 

How Petraeus Changed the Course in Iraq

 

By Linda Robinson

September 14, 2008 | Washington Post

 

Iraq still divides Democrats and Republicans like no other issue, as the campaign rhetoric of both parties makes abundantly clear. Liberals and conservatives can now more or less agree that Iraq is a much, much safer country than it was 18 months ago. But each side is peddling its own story about Iraq's extraordinary turnaround -- and both are wrong.

 

Many conservatives believe that the 2007 "surge" in U.S. troop levels directly produced the decline in Iraqi violence. Meanwhile, liberals argue that Iraq's warring Shiites and Sunnis spontaneously decided -- for their own internal reasons, unrelated to the surge -- to stop fighting. As is so often true of Washington debates, these arguments bear little relation to the reality of how Iraq actually pulled out of its death spiral, which is far more interesting than either partisan yarn. There was no single silver bullet, but rather a multifaceted strategy crafted and carried out by those in Baghdad -- not, despite recent claims, in Washington.

 

I came to this conclusion after reporting in Iraq for a total of 10 months since 2003 and after extensive interviews with Iraqi and U.S. leaders, as well as with troops in the most violent neighborhoods of greater Baghdad, the epicenter of the conflict. My biggest question was my simplest: How did Gen. David H. Petraeus do it?

 

My answer? Bottom line, for the first time since the war began, a U.S. leader decided to address the political motivations of the Iraqi combatants. Petraeus convened a study group that shrewdly analyzed the raging sectarian conflict, then came up with what he called "the Anaconda strategy" to address the underlying dynamic.

 

 

Petraeus and his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, realized that the first disastrous steps taken by the U.S. occupation authority led by L. Paul Bremer -- disbanding Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and the old regime's security services -- had helped create the Sunni insurgency. They produced a critical mass of angry men worried that the Sunnis who had run the old Iraq would wind up on the bottom in the new one. Those fears were soon realized: Bremer's occupation government pushed for a sequence of poorly planned elections that wound up entrenching the power of a Shiite-dominated coalition, which began a "sectarian cleansing" campaign against Iraq's minority Sunnis -- and tilted the country into a full-on civil war.

 

While policymakers back in Washington continued to be duped by sectarian-minded Shiite politicians, Petraeus and Crocker set about using all available levers -- including thinking about Iraqi politics -- to rectify the earlier, catastrophic U.S. blunders.

 

The extra surge brigades certainly helped, but the number of U.S. troops was far less important than the new ways in which they were used. The most important new tactical move still gets scant Beltway attention: Petraeus's initiative to reach out to the Sunni insurgency and its base. "We cannot kill our way to victory," he said.

 

On June 2, 2007, Petraeus gathered his commanders and told them to engage with influential Sunnis and insurgents and persuade them to stop fighting. "Tribal engagement and local reconciliation work!" he said. "Encourage it!"

 

The policy was carried out on the battalion level, using troops deployed in U.S. outposts and in joint security stations alongside freshly trained Iraqi forces. "Don't let our bureaucracy stop you, and don't let the Iraqi government stop you," Petraeus urged his young lieutenant colonels, whom he often invited to join him for five-mile fitness -- and advice-dispensing -- runs around Camp Victory, the main U.S. base.

 

He was right to turn to his battalion commanders. Baghdad was being engulfed in growing mayhem: ever-larger car bombs, lethal copper projectiles, homemade explosives packed into sewer pipes that burned U.S. soldiers alive. But the U.S. troops persisted. Over the summer of 2007, the Sunnis responded en masse to the new approach: By September, according to U.S. officials and my own reporting, 15,000 Sunnis had signed up to become checkpoint guards and neighborhood watchmen, paid and monitored by the U.S. battalions that were being so carefully coached by Petraeus. The Shiite government was not amused; the last thing it wanted was its former Sunni foes back inside the fold. Still, by year's end, 70,000 Sunnis -- comprising the vast majority of the insurgents and their support base -- had joined the new U.S.-backed effort. This policy -- battled by bureaucrats both in Baghdad and inside the Beltway -- changed the tide of the war.

 

As the Sunni insurgents switched sides, they passed vital intelligence to their U.S. partners and paymasters, which enabled Petraeus's forces to target Sunni holdouts, including diehards affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. soldiers also employed new techniques to control the Iraqi population and provide for its safety and to identify fighters hidden among the civilians. For the first time since the war began in 2003, a shareable, computerized biometric registry of military-age males was created. This led to the detention of fewer innocents and more bad guys. Meanwhile, car bombings fell off dramatically after U.S. forces erected concrete barrier walls along sectarian fault lines, including the markets that had been the scenes of some of the ghastliest atrocities.

 

Why were so many Sunnis -- insurgents and civilians alike -- ready to respond to the U.S. overture? Because they were getting desperate and saw Petraeus's outstretched hand as their best chance of surviving a campaign of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing led by the Shiites and fueled by neighboring Iran. The secular Sunnis' alliance with the jihadist insurgents had always been an uneasy marriage of convenience, and it broke up when Petraeus made a better offer.

 

Another major change over the past 18 months is also poorly understood: the decision of the Mahdi Army, the radical Shiite militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr, to largely stop fighting. Sadr, a young firebrand Islamist cleric, raised a militia of poor youths to take on U.S. troops, even as he backed his fellow Shiite, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, through political channels. Then last August, Sadr abruptly declared a ceasefire.

 

That move has been widely misinterpreted as a spontaneous, unilateral gesture; in fact, it came after months of military and political pressure. Iraqi special operations forces, backed by elite U.S. combat advisers, conducted near-nightly raids against the most extreme elements of the Mahdi Army. In March 2007, according to Petraeus's staff, the special ops units captured Qais Khazali, a member of the radical Lebanese militia Hezbollah and a Sadrist militia leader. Khazali, U.S. military officials said, provided details of extensive Iranian assistance to Khazali's henchmen. This information, together with two assassinations of provincial governors by Sadrist forces, rattled Maliki -- and began to turn him against Sadr, a fellow Shiite who had helped put the prime minister in office.

 

The final straw came on Aug. 27, when Sadr's militiamen attacked guards at the main Shiite shrine in Karbala as a million worshipers arrived in the city to mark a holy day. An apoplectic Maliki rushed to Karbala, and the resulting confrontation led Sadr (then in Iran) to back down and issue his ceasefire declaration. Maliki then launched an offensive in Basra this spring to break Sadrists' control of the city, the port and oil pumping station. The wedge between Maliki and Sadr widened when massive arms caches of recent Iranian manufacture were discovered, despite Iran's 2007 pledge to desist stoking Iraq's nascent civil war.

 

 

That said, the intra-Shiite competition for power will persist for years; the trick is to channel it into politics, not violence -- and to continue to make use of the competition between Maliki and Sadr.

 

Iranian influence in Iraq is also destined to continue, but it's a double-edged sword. Iraqi Shiite groups are wary of appearing to be Iranian puppets, which would hamstring their popularity with Iraqis. Nor do many Iraqi Shiites fancy a Tehran-style theocracy. As Sadr's militia has loosened its control over many Shiite neighborhoods, ordinary Shiites have sighed with relief, glad to be rid of the thuggish behavior and the religious strictures imposed by some militia leaders.

 

Another key factor in Iraq's turnaround has been Petraeus's willingness to use his leverage with Iraqi leaders. Behind closed doors, the U.S. commander has frequently gone to the mat with Maliki as part of a "good cop, bad cop" routine that he and the unflappable Crocker have perfected. The veteran ambassador provided diplomatic sangfroid and insight into the region's historical animosities; Petraeus provided the raw muscle to maneuver the Iraqi government into making concessions.

 

Petraeus waded deeper into the political mire than most other U.S. generals would have. In one of my interviews with him last year, he confessed to me that he had shown the "full range of emotions" and had even feigned anger in order to move Maliki away from sectarianism. On his first tour in Iraq, in Mosul, the general had learned that it was sometimes necessary to bang tables and twist arms.

 

Getting basic services to Sunni areas was one key effort that required constant browbeating. When Petraeus was told that an Iraqi ministry official had refused to visit Dora, one of many Sunni regions still without electricity, trash removal and other basic services, I heard him bark, "Tell him if he wants a blue badge for the Green Zone, he'd better get down here." Petraeus also pushed the Iraqi parliament to pass de-Baathification reforms and other crucial legislation earlier this year. And not least, the general repeatedly bucked pressure from his civilian and military superiors at the Pentagon to declare "Mission Accomplished" before he felt that it was.

 

Petraeus's willingness to grapple with Iraqi politics made all the difference. His replacements' tasks will be more than ever political, not military. The former Sunni insurgency hasn't yet been woven into the political, economic and security life of the country, and the extraordinary success of the past 18 months is likely to unravel if Petraeus's and Crocker's successors -- as well as the next U.S. president -- do not finish that crucial undertaking.

 

No, the Iraqis can't finish the job on their own now; at the same time, no, we don't need 100,000 U.S. troops to stay in Iraq and do it for them. It would be heartening if we could understand the real record of Iraq's turnaround -- and talk about its future like grown-ups.

 

lrobin43@jhu.edu

Krauthammer on Iraq: I Knew It All Along

This is Charles Krauthammer at his most smug and infuriating. Reading this I asked myself, "Are we talking about the same Iraq?" and, "Is he mentally retarded or just pure evil?"

I've inserted my comments into the body of this stinking beast….

Now We're Getting Somewhere
The Iraq debate comes to Earth.
By Charles Krauthammer
August 24, 2007 | Washington Post

After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.

In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster.

[I want to come up with an analogy that illustrates the profound absurdity of this statement, since Krauthammer is not the only one saying it. Even Hillary is uttering this nonsense. Saying that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the same time the government remains a disaster is like a dentist telling his patient, "Your surgery yielded considerable progress, although you still have no teeth." Somebody help me out, if you can do better!.... -- J ]

The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong Iraq-war critic. He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird (D., Wash.): Al Qaeda has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala, and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.

[Blowback, blowback, blowback. We're arming and funding Sunni ex-insurgents in exchange for their not shooting at us. Krauthammer calls that "switching to our side." What's to prevent them from switching back… Scout's honor? This risky strategy is bound to go south on us. At the very least it's pissing off the Shi'ite militias, who aren't getting free cash and weapons from Uncle Sam like the Sunnis are. To them, America is choosing sides in a civil war. – J]

As critics acknowledge military improvement, the administration is finally beginning to concede the political reality that the Maliki government is hopeless. Bush's own national-security adviser had said as much in a leaked memo back in November. I and others have been arguing that for months. And when Levin returned and openly called for the Iraqi parliament to vote out the Maliki government, the president pointedly refused to contradict him.

[This is what we call "the Washington narrative." The current Washington narrative is that the Iraqi government would be doing fine if it weren't for the "hopeless" al-Maliki. Don't you believe this baloney for a second! It is yet another blame & delay tactic: blame Maliki for the absence of political reconciliation; delay until the U.S. can install a more "effective" puppet leader. They're jerking us around – again! Don't let them delay and draw this thing out another 6 months, another 12 months, always blaming this or that, and promising that things will get better if we only do a, b, and c. That's what they've been saying for 5 years. Enough already! – J]

This convergence about the actual situation in Baghdad will take some of the drama out the highly anticipated Petraeus moment next month. We know what the general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are going to say when they testify before Congress because multiple sources have already told us what is happening on the ground.

[We knew what Petraeus and Crocker were going to say 6 months ago! "Well, we have good news and bad news, but more good news than bad, so we should stay in Iraq just a little longer." – J]

There will, of course, be the Harry Reids and those on the far Left who will deny inconvenient reality. Reid will continue to call the surge a failure, as he has since even before it began. And the Left will continue to portray Gen. David Petraeus as an unscrupulous commander quite prepared to send his troops into a hopeless battle in order to advance his political ambitions (although exactly how that works is not clear).

But the serious voices will prevail. When the Democratic presidential frontrunner concedes that the surge "is working" (albeit very late) against the insurgency, and when Petraeus himself concedes that the surge cannot continue indefinitely, making inevitable a drawdown of troops sometime in the middle of next year, the terms of the Iraq debate become narrow and the policy question simple: What do we do right now — continue the surge or cut it short and begin withdrawal?

Serious people like Levin argue that with a nonfunctional and sectarian Baghdad government, we can never achieve national reconciliation. Thus the current military successes will prove ephemeral.

The problem with this argument is that it confuses long term and short term. In the longer run, there must be a national unity government. [Wow, what a casual assertion. Please define the "longer run," because in the long run we'll all be dead, and I want to live long enough to see Iraq's unity government! – J] But in the shorter term, our assumption that a national unity government is required to pacify the Sunni insurgency turned out to be false. The Sunnis have turned against al Qaeda and are gradually switching sides in the absence of any oil, federalism, or de-Baathification deal coming out of Baghdad.

In the interim, the surge is advancing our two immediate objectives in Iraq: (a) to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq and prevent the emergence of an al-Qaeda mini-state, and (b) to pacify the Sunni insurgency, which began the post-liberation downward spiral of sectarian bloodshed, economic stagnation and aborted reconstruction.

[Are those really are two immediate objectives in Iraq? I can't be sure. Bush hasn't told us lately what our objectives are, except "getting the job done." – J]

Levin is right that we require a truly national government in Baghdad to obtain our ultimate objective of what O'Hanlon and Pollack call "sustainable stability." The administration had vainly hoped that the surge would provide a window for the Maliki government to reform and become that kind of government. It will not.

We should have given up on Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi Parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties or, as Pollack has suggested, new elections.

[Krauthammer casually tosses yet another rhetorical grenade into the debate…. Think about what he's really saying: America should decide who runs Iraq. If that's the case, then Iraqis don't have a democracy. It's that simple. If Maliki can be replaced on a whim by the U.S., then the Shi'ite cleric and militia leader al-Sadr is right: Maliki is just an "American puppet."

Also, his phrase "We should have given up on Maliki long ago" gave me a laugh. Again, how does Krauthammer define "long ago?" Does "long ago" mean before the 'surge' began in earnest on June 15, or before the 'surge' was announced in January, or some time after April 2006 when Maliki became prime minister? If Krauthammer was sure "long ago" that Maliki was hopeless and there could be no political reconciliation with him in power, then why in the world did Krauthammer support the 'surge' in January-February 2006, whose real objective was to give Iraq's politicians "breathing space" (Bush's words) to hammer out a political compromise? Wouldn't Krauthammer have known that the 'surge' would be a waste of time??

The point is that Krauthammer and most other war apologists have known all along the 'surge' would be a waste of time, blood, and treasure. What they want is to keep the Iraq occupation going as long as possible, and they'll use any pretext that's convenient. – J]

The choice is difficult because replacing the Maliki government will take time and because there is no guarantee of ultimate political success. [Man, do you remember when we could just roll in and take down the whole Iraqi government in like 2 weeks? Ah, the good old days! – J] Nonetheless, continuing the surge while finally trying to change the central government is the most rational choice because the only available alternative is defeat — a defeat that is not at all inevitable and would be both catastrophic and self-inflicted.

al-Sadr: Kill the occupiers, not Iraqis

al-Sadr calls for attacks on U.S. troops

By SAAD ABDUL KADIR, Associated Press Writer

Sun Apr 8, 9:09 AM ET

The renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr urged Iraqi forces to stop cooperating with the United States and told his guerrilla fighters to concentrate their attacks on American troops rather than Iraqis, according to a statement issued Sunday.

The statement, stamped with al-Sadr's official seal, was distributed in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Sunday — a day before a large demonstration there, called for by al-Sadr, to mark the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

"You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don't walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy," the statement said. Its authenticity could not be verified.

In the statement, al-Sadr — who commands an enormous following among Iraq's majority Shiites and has close allies in the Shiite-dominated government — also encouraged his followers to attack only American forces, not fellow Iraqis.

"God has ordered you to be patient in front of your enemy, and unify your efforts against them — not against the sons of Iraq," the statement said, in an apparent reference to clashes between al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi troops in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad. "You have to protect and build Iraq."

The U.S. military on Sunday announced the deaths of four American soldiers, killed a day earlier in an explosion near their vehicle in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. The province has seen a spike in attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces since the start of a plan two months ago to pacify the capital. Officials believe militants have streamed out of Baghdad to invigorate the insurgency in areas just outside the city.

Separately, a pickup truck loaded with artillery shells exploded Sunday near a hospital south of Baghdad, killing at least 15 people. The blast left a crater 10 yards wide, the Iraqi military said.

Three mortars sailed into houses in eastern Baghdad, sending six people to the hospital with breathing difficulties from a possible chemical agent, police said.

Doctors said the victims' faces turned yellow and they were unable to open their eyes. One hospital official said the chemical was chlorine, and that the victims were expected to recover.

Chlorine has been used in at least nine attacks in Iraq since January, mostly in bombings by al-Qaida in Iraq.

Thousands of Iraqis streamed toward the Shiite holy city of Najaf for a demonstration Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

Witnesses said thousands of residents of Baghdad's largest Shiite slum, Sadr City, boarded buses and minivans Sunday for Najaf.

"The faithful should participate in a demonstration in Najaf on April 9, demanding that the occupiers withdraw from our lands. They should carry or wear Iraqi flags," said a statement released by al-Sadr's office.

On Sunday, Iraqi flags flew from most houses and shops in Sadr City. Drivers and motorcyclists affixed them to their vehicles. Police escorted convoys of pickup trucks overflowing with young boys waving Iraqi flags, en route to Najaf.

Disengagement in Iraq, not withdrawal

To help Baghdad, let it fend for itself

Edward N. Luttwak

February 6, 2007 | International Herald Tribune

The sooner President George W. Bush can get his extra troops for a "surge" in Iraq, the sooner he will be able to announce that all U.S. troops are coming home because of the inevitable failure of the Iraqi government to "live up to its side of the bargain."

In fact, in the run-up to the surge proposal, it is unlikely that there was any real bargaining before Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was induced to issue promises — particularly in terms of government troops taking on Shiite militias — that he cannot possibly fulfill. Maliki, it seems, simply agreed to whatever was asked of him, to humor the White House and to retain American support for a little while longer.

For the Iraqi Army and police to disarm the Shiite militias, the prime minister would have to be a veritable Stalin or at least a Saddam Hussein, able to terrorize Iraqi soldiers into obedience. Maliki, of course, has no such authority over Iraqi soldiers — indeed he has little authority over his own cabinet, the members of which mostly represent sectarian parties with militias of their own.

Actually the situation is even worse than that, because only the Kurdish militias unfailingly obey their political leaders — one is the president of Iraq no less, Jalal Talabani — while, for the rest, it may be more true to say that Iraqi militias have political leaders to represent their wishes. The largest and most murderous of the Shiite militias, the Mahdi Army, which is invariably described as belonging to the truculent cleric Moktada al-Sadr, actually is divided under local commanders, some of whom obey Sadr some of the time. In sum, the most that Maliki can do is to not interfere when U.S. troops fight militias.

Nor can the Iraqi leader fulfill his other major promise: to lead a new effort to reconcile the warring sects of Iraq. He is not another Gandhi, but rather a leader of the fiercely sectarian Dawa Party. It is very much as a militant Shiite that he speaks out. It would be remarkable if Maliki could even reconcile with his Shiite rivals, let alone the Sunni insurgents.

Fortunately there is a promising, long- term policy waiting for Bush whenever he decides to call off his surge: disengagement. I don't mean a phased withdrawal, let alone total abandonment.

Rather it would start with a tactical change: American soldiers would no longer patrol towns and villages, conduct cordon-and-search operations or man checkpoints. An end to these tasks would allow the greatest part of the troops to head home. The remaining U.S. forces would hole up within safe bases in Iraq to support the elected government, deter foreign invasion, dissuade visible foreign intrusions, and strike at any large concentration of jihadis that should emerge. This would mean that U.S. personnel could not remain embedded in large numbers within the Iraqi Army. At most, the Americans would operate training programs within safe bases.

What would be the result of disengagement along these lines? First, it would not be likely to increase the violence afflicting Iraqi civilians. The total number of U.S. troops in Iraq is so small, and their linguistic skills so limited, that they have little effect on day-to-day security. Nor have they really protected Iraqis from one another.

Disengagement should actually reduce the violence. U.S. power has been interposed between Arab Sunnis and Arab Shiites. That has relieved the Shiite majority of responsibility to such an extent that many, notably the leaders of the Mahdi Army, feel free to attack the U.S. and British troops who are busy protecting their co-religionist civilians from Sunni insurgents. For many Arab Sunnis, on the other hand, the United States must be the enemy simply because it upholds the majority of the heretical Shiites.

Were the United States to disengage, both Arab Sunnis and Arab Shiites would have to take responsibility for their own security, as the Kurds have been doing all along. Where these three groups are not naturally separated by geography, they would be forced to find ways to stabilize relations. That would most likely involve violence as well as talks, and some forcing of civilians from their homes. But this is happening already, and there is no saying which group would be most favored by a reduction of the U.S. footprint.

One reason for optimism on that score is that the violence itself has been separating previously mixed populations, reducing motives and opportunities for further attacks. That is how civil wars can burn themselves out. In any case, it is time for the Iraqis to make their own history.