http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24098119-12377,00.html

A FORMER Pentagon adviser who was an early advocate of invading Iraq has been looking into entering the potentially lucrative oil business there, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

Citing documents outlining a possible deal and people close to the negotiations, the Journal said Richard Perle has been looking into drilling in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, near the city of Erbil.

A consortium led by Turkish AK Group International is working out a deal to drill there and a US representative for the company's chief executive told the paper that Perle is involved.

In an email to the newspaper, however, Perle said he was "not involved in any consortium'' involving the two Kazakh men the paper said he was working with on the deal.

A former top aide to US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Perle was chairman of the influential Defence Policy Board until February 2004 and one of the hardline backers of the US invasion of Iraq.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/92274/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/boost-for-obama-over-iraq-withdrawal-873769.html

Boost for Obama over Iraq withdrawal

By Patrick Cockburn
Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Barack Obama has paid his first visit to Iraq, just as the Iraqi government explicitly matched the Democratic presidential candidate's 16-month timetable for the removal of American combat troops.

Senator Obama met Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in Baghdad yesterday during his visit, which had become overshadowed by a row over the proposed pullout. Mr Obama did not raise his plan for withdrawal of US forces, the government said. But Mr Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said his government was "hoping that in 2010 combat troops will withdraw from Iraq". This time frame is similar to Mr Obama's.

The White House was clearly dismayed and embarrassed by an interview given by Mr Maliki to the German news magazine Der Spiegel in which he appeared to express agreement with Mr Obama's withdrawal plans. Mr Dabbagh later said in a statement distributed by the American military that Mr Maliki's words had been "misunderstood and mistranslated".

Der Spiegel stood by its version of what Mr Maliki said and said the translator for the interview was provided by Mr Maliki's own office and not by the magazine. In reality, Mr Maliki did say Mr Obama's 16-month plan "could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq".

Differences over American strategy in Iraq and the number of troops to be kept there is at the centre of the American presidential campaign. The Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, has argued that US forces should stay in Iraq until it has won a victory, although it is not clear what this victory would entail. He successfully relaunched his campaign to become the Republican nominee last year by claiming that the US was succeeding militarily. But it will be difficult for Mr McCain to denounce Mr Obama's plan as it is very similar to what the Iraqi government is demanding. Mr McCain said: "I'm glad that Senator Obama is going to get a chance for the first time to sit down with General David Petraeus and understand what the surge was all about and why it succeeded and why we are winning the war. I hope he will have a chance to admit that he badly misjudged the situation and he was wrong."

The weakness of Mr McCain's policy is that the fall in violence is attributable not only to the surge – the sending of US reinforcements – but to the Mehdi Army militia's truce ordered by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and to Iranian support for Mr Maliki. This makes the political situation in Iraq very unstable.

Mr Obama is visiting Iraq as part of a congressional delegation, but was not planning to give press conferences while there. Mr Dabbagh said: "Obama did not speak about anything which concerns the Iraqi government because he does not have any official [government] capacity."

The US is under pressure to send troops withdrawn from Iraq to combat the mounting Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

www.stratfor.com

Now for the Hard Part: From Iraq to Afghanistan

Related Special Topic Page

• U.S. Military Involvement in Iraq

By George Friedman

The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the development was the fairly casual way the report was greeted. It was neither praised nor derided. Instead, it was noted and ignored as the public focused on more immediate issues.

In the public mind, Iraq is clearly no longer an immediate issue. The troops remain there, still fighting and taking casualties, and there is deep division over the wisdom of the invasion in the first place. But the urgency of the issue has passed. This doesn’t mean the issue isn’t urgent. It simply means the American public — and indeed most of the world — have moved on to other obsessions, as is their eccentric wont. The shift nevertheless warrants careful consideration.

Obviously, there is a significant political dimension to the announcement. It occurred shortly after Sen. Barack Obama began to shift his position on Iraq from what appeared to be a demand for a rapid withdrawal to a more cautious, nuanced position. As we have pointed out on several occasions, while Obama’s public posture was for withdrawal with all due haste, his actual position as represented in his position papers was always more complex and ambiguous. He was for a withdrawal by the summer of 2010 unless circumstances dictated otherwise. Rhetorically, Obama aligned himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, but his position on the record was actually much closer to Sen. John McCain’s than he would admit prior to his nomination. Therefore, his recent statements were not inconsistent with items written on his behalf before the nomination — they merely appeared s o.

The Bush administration was undoubtedly delighted to take advantage of Obama’s apparent shift by flanking him. Consideration of the troop withdrawal has been under way for some time, but the timing of the leak to The New York Times detailing it must have been driven by Obama’s shift. As Obama became more cautious, the administration became more optimistic and less intransigent. The intent was clearly to cause disruption in Obama’s base. If so, it failed precisely because the public took the administration’s announcement so casually. To the extent that the announcement was political, it failed because even the Democratic left is now less concerned about the war in Iraq. Politically speaking, the move was a maneuver into a vacuum.

But the announcement was still significant in other, more important ways. Politics aside, the administration is planning withdrawals because the time has come. First, the politico-military situation on the ground in Iraq has stabilized dramatically. The reason for this is the troop surge — although not in the way it is normally thought of. It was not the military consequences of an additional 30,000 troops that made the difference, although the addition and changes in tactics undoubtedly made an impact.

What was important about the surge is that it happened at all. In the fall of 2006, when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, it appeared a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was inevitable. If Bush wouldn’t order it, Congress would force it. All of the factions in Iraq, as well as in neighboring states, calculated that the U.S. presence in Iraq would shortly start to decline and in due course disappear. Bush’s order to increase U.S. forces stunned all the regional players and forced a fundamental recalculation. The assumption had been that Bush’s hands were tied and that the United States was no longer a factor. What Bush did — and this was more important than numbers or tactics — was demonstrate that his hands were not tied and that the United States could not be discounted.

The realization that the Americans were not going anywhere caused the Sunnis, for example, to reconsider their position. Trapped between foreign jihadists and the Shia, the Americans suddenly appeared to be a stable and long-term ally. The Sunni leadership turned on the jihadists and aligned with the United States, breaking the jihadists’ backs. Suddenly facing a U.S.-Sunni-Kurdish alliance, the Shia lashed out, hoping to break the alliance. But they also split between their own factions, with some afraid of being trapped as Iranian satellites and others viewing the Iranians as the solution to their problem. The result was a civil war not between the Sunnis and Shia, but among the Shia themselves.

Tehran performed the most important recalculation. The Iranians’ expectation had been that the United States would withdraw from Iraq unilaterally, and that when it did, Iran would fill the vacuum it left. This would lead to the creation of an Iranian-dominated Iraqi Shiite government that would suppress the Sunnis and Kurds, allowing Iran to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. It was a heady vision, and not an unreasonable one — if the United States had begun to withdraw in the winter of 2006-2007.

When the surge made it clear that the Americans weren’t leaving, the Iranians also recalculated. They understood that they were no longer going to be able to create a puppet government in Iraq, and the danger now was that the United States would somehow create a viable puppet government of its own. The Iranians understood that continued resistance, if it failed, might lead to this outcome. They lowered their sights from dominating Iraq to creating a neutral buffer state in which they had influence. As a result, Tehran acted to restrain the Shiite militias, focusing instead on maximizing its influence with the Shia participating in the Iraqi government, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A space was created between the Americans and Iranians, and al-Maliki filled it. He is not simply a pawn of Iran — and he uses the Americans to prevent himself from being reduced to that — but neither is he a pawn of the Americans. Recent negotiations between the United States and the al-Maliki government on the status of U.S. forces have demonstrated this. In some sense, the United States has created what it said it wanted: a strong Iraqi government. But it has not achieved what it really wanted, which was a strong, pro-American Iraqi government. Like Iran, the United States has been forced to settle for less than it originally aimed for, but more than most expected it could achieve in 2006.

This still leaves the question of what exactly the invasion of Iraq achieved. When the Americans invaded, they occupied what was clearly the most strategic country in the Middle East, bordering Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Without resistance, the occupation would have provided the United States with a geopolitical platform from which to pressure and influence the region. The fact that there was resistance absorbed the United States, therefore negating the advantage. The United States was so busy hanging on in Iraq that it had no opportunity to take advantage of the terrain.

That is why the critical question for the United States is how many troops it can retain in Iraq, for how long and in what locations. This is a complex issue. From the Sunni standpoint, a continued U.S. presence is essential to protect Sunnis from the Shia. From the Shiite standpoint, the U.S. presence is needed to prevent Iran from overwhelming the Shia. From the standpoint of the Kurds, a U.S. presence guarantees Kurdish safety from everyone else. It is an oddity of history that no major faction in Iraq now wants a precipitous U.S. withdrawal — and some don’t want a withdrawal at all.

For the United States, the historical moment for its geopolitical coup seems to have passed. Had there been no resistance after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would have made Washington a colossus astride the region. But after five years of fighting, the United States is exhausted and has little appetite for power projection in the region. For all its bravado against Iran, no one has ever suggested an invasion, only airstrikes. Therefore, the continued occupation of Iraq simply doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2003.

But the United States can’t simply leave. The Iraqi government is not all that stable, and other regional powers, particularly the Saudis, don’t want to see a U.S. withdrawal. The reason is simple: If the United States withdraws before the Baghdad government is cohesive enough, strong enough and inclined enough to balance Iranian power, Iran could still fill the partial vacuum of Iraq, thereby posing a threat to Saudi Arabia. With oil at more than $140 a barrel, this is not something the Saudis want to see, nor something the United States wants to see.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear.

The United States obviously does not want to leave a massive force in Iraq. First, its more ambitious mission has evaporated; that moment is gone. Second, the U.S. Army and Marines are exhausted from five years of multidivisional warfare with a force not substantially increased from peacetime status. The Bush administration’s decision not to dramatically increase the Army was rooted in a fundamental error: namely, the administration did not think the insurgency would be so sustained and effective. They kept believing the United States would turn a corner. The result is that Washington simply can’t maintain the current force in Iraq under any circumstances, and to do so would be strategically dangerous. The United States has no strategic ground reserve at present, opening itself to dangers outside of Iraq. Therefore, if the United States is not going to get to play colossus of the Middle East, it needs to reduce its forces dramatically to recreate a strategic reserv e. Its interests, the interests of the al-Maliki government — and interestingly, Iran’s interests — are not wildly out of sync. Washington wants to rapidly trim down to a residual force of a few brigades, and the other two players want that as well.

The United States has another pressing reason to do this: It has another major war under way in Afghanistan, and it is not winning there. It remains unclear if the United States can win that war, with the Taliban operating widely in Afghanistan and controlling a great deal of the countryside. The Taliban are increasingly aggressive against a NATO force substantially smaller than the conceivable minimum needed to pacify Afghanistan. We know the Soviets couldn’t do it with nearly 120,000 troops. And we know the United States and NATO don’t have as many troops to deploy in Afghanistan as the Soviets did. It is also clear that, at the moment, there is no exit strategy. Forces in Iraq must be transferred to Afghanistan to stabilize the U.S. position while the new head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus — the architect of the political and military strategy in Iraq — f igures out what, if anything, is going to change.

Interestingly, the Iranians want the Americans in Afghanistan. They supported the invasion in 2001 for the simple reason that they do not want to see an Afghanistan united under the Taliban. The Iranians almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 and were delighted to see the United States force the Taliban from the cities. The specter of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan unnerves the Iranians. Rhetoric aside, a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and a transfer to Afghanistan is what the Iranians would like to see.

To complicate matters, the Taliban situation is not simply an Afghan issue — it is also a Pakistani issue. The Taliban draw supplies, recruits and support from Pakistan, where Taliban support stretches into the army and the intelligence service, which helped create the group in the 1990s while working with the Americans. There is no conceivable solution to the Taliban problem without a willing and effective government in Pakistan participating in the war, and that sort of government simply is not there. Indeed, the economic and security situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate.

Therefore, the Bush administration’s desire to withdraw troops from Iraq makes sense on every level. It is a necessary and logical step. But it does not address what should now become the burning issue: What exactly is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? As in Iraq before the surge, the current strategy appears to be to hang on and hope for the best. Petraeus’ job is to craft a new strategy. But in Iraq, for better or worse, the United States faced an apparently implacable enemy — Iran — which in fact pursued a shrewd, rational and manageable policy. In Afghanistan, the United States is facing a state that appears friendly — Pakistan — but is actually confused, divided and unmanageable by itself or others.

Petraeus’ success in Iraq had a great deal to do with Tehran’s calculations of its self-interest. In Pakistan, by contrast, it is unclear at the moment whether anyone is in a position to even define the national self-interest, let alone pursue it. And this means that every additional U.S. soldier sent to Afghanistan raises the stakes in Pakistan. It will be interesting to see how Afghanistan and Pakistan play out in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a theater of operations that lends itself to political soundbites.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/us/politics/19threat.html?_r=1&ei=5088&en=8932c0c3fd6ae8c1&ex=1366344000&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1208580197-yP732qamdJMcOMUVgTuuxQ&oref=slogin

McCain, Iraq War and the Threat of ‘Al Qaeda’

As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand “Al Qaeda” to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war there.

“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.”

Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks.

There has been heated debate since the start of the war about the nature of the threat in Iraq. The Bush administration has long portrayed the fight as part of a broader battle against Islamic terrorists. Opponents of the war accuse the administration of deliberately blurring the distinction between the Sept. 11 attackers and anti-American forces in Iraq.

“The fundamental problem we face in Iraq is that there is not a single center of gravity, as in the cold war, but a whole constellation of contending forces,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University. “This is much more fractionated than most people could imagine, with multiple, independent moving parts, and when you have that universe of networks, you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

The entity Mr. McCain was referring to — Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq — did not exist until after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The most recent National Intelligence Estimates consider it the most potent offshoot of Al Qaeda proper, the group led by Osama bin Laden that is now believed to be based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

It is a largely homegrown and loosely organized group of Sunni Arabs that, according to the official American military view that Mr. McCain endorses, is led at least in part by foreign operatives and receives fighters, financing and direction from senior Qaeda leaders.

In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

But some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.

The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and “they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a unified operating organization at all.”

In recent months, Mr. McCain has also been talking more about the threat posed by Iranian influence in Iraq, bringing him in line with American military officials, who in the wake of the Basra fighting seem increasingly convinced that Iranian support for Shiite groups now constitutes the primary security threat in Iraq.

Mr. McCain acknowledged those concerns on Tuesday night in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC when he said that “we now see the Iranians beginning to reassert an age-old Persian ambition, as you know, to increase their influence, particularly in southern Iraq.”

In talking about both threats, Mr. McCain tripped up last month on a visit to the Middle East, when he mistakenly said several times that the Iranians were training Qaeda operatives in Iran and sending them back to Iraq. Prompted by one of his traveling companions, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Mr. McCain corrected himself, saying that he had misspoken and had meant to say Iran was training “other extremists” in Iraq.

And Mr. McCain went beyond what he usually says and what his foreign policy advisers believe during a back-and-forth with Mr. Obama at the end of February. It began when Mr. Obama said at a Democratic debate that while he intended to withdraw American forces from Iraq as rapidly as possible, he reserved the right to send troops back in “if Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq.”

Mr. McCain seized on the remark. “I have some news,” he said at a town-hall-style meeting in Tyler, Tex. “Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base. They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.”

In general, Mr. Obama’s views track with those of many independent analysts. In a speech last August, he criticized President Bush by saying: “The president would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of Al Qaeda’s war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates Al Qaeda in Iraq — which didn’t exist before our invasion — and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan.”

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wants to begin withdrawing troops, has spoken of leaving some troops behind to fight Al Qaeda, deal with Sunni insurgents, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly help the Iraqi military. She warned last year of the dangers if Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda.”

Few, including Mr. McCain, expect Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, to take control of Shiite-dominated Iraq in the event of an American withdrawal. The situation they fear and which Mr. McCain himself sometimes fleshes out is that an American withdrawal would be celebrated as a triumph by Al Qaeda and create instability that the group could then exploit to become more powerful.

“Al Qaeda in Iraq would proclaim victory and increase its efforts to provoke sectarian tensions, pushing for a full-scale civil war that could descend into genocide and destabilize the Middle East,” Mr. McCain said this month. “Iraq would become a failed state. It could become a haven for terrorists to train and plan their operations.”

Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, said during a recent conference call with reporters that in the event of an American pullout, “you might not necessarily see a single entity taking charge.” But such a withdrawal could empower Shiite militias in the south and Kurds in the north, leaving Al Qaeda “free to try to impose its will” and lead to increased sectarian violence that “would be very likely to draw neighbors into the conflict,” he said.

While “it is absolutely incorrect to describe the Sunni insurgency in Iraq as driven by Al Qaeda, you can’t properly talk about Iraq without talking about Al Qaeda in Iraq” and its importance in the larger war against terror, said Reuel M. Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist at the Central Intelligence Agency who is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Bin Laden is a pretty good judge of the history of his own organization and its future, and he looks upon Iraq as the great battle, the make-or-break issue that will decide the fate of the ummah,” the global community of Islamic faithful.

When Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior military commander in Iraq, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Mr. McCain sought an endorsement of his focus on Al Qaeda. But General Petraeus responded with an evaluation more nuanced than the argument Mr. McCain typically offers on the campaign trail. Al Qaeda “is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago,” he said.

In response to another of Mr. McCain’s questions, General Petraeus replied, “The area of operation of Al Qaeda has been greatly reduced in terms of controlling areas that it controlled as little as a year a half ago.”

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/82051/

God, we love this guy -- he's the gift that keeps giving.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/81147/?page=entire

By Gary Brecher, The eXile. Posted April 4, 2008.

What happened in Iraq this week was a beautiful lesson in the weird laws of guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately, it was the Americans who got schooled. Even now, people at my office are saying, "We won, right? Sadr told his men to give up, right?"

Wrong. Sadr won big. Iran won even bigger. Maliki, the Iraqi Army, Petraeus and Cheney lost.

For people raised on stories of conventional war, where both sides fight all-out until one side loses and gives up, what happened in Iraq this past week makes no sense at all. Sadr's Mahdi Army humiliated the Iraq Army on all fronts. In Basra, the Army's grand offensive, code-named "The Charge of the Knights," got turned into "The Total Humiliation of the Knights," like something out of an old Monty Python skit.

Thousands of police who were supposed to be backing up the Iraqi Army either refused to fight or defected to Sadr's Mahdi Army. In Basra, the Iraqi Army was stopped dead and clearly in danger of being crushed or forced to retreat from the city. In Baghdad, Sadr's militia was rocketing the Green Zone non-stop -- not a good look for the "Surge is working" PR drive -- and driving the Iraqi Army clean out of the 2.5-million-strong Shia slum, Sadr City. And in every poor Shia neighborhood in cities and towns all over Iraq, local units of the Mahdi Army were attacking the government forces.

Then, after four days of uninterruptedly kicking Iraqi Army ass, Sadr graciously announces that he's telling his men to end their "armed appearances" on the streets. Makes no sense, right? It makes a ton of sense, but you have to stop thinking of formal battles like Gettysburg and Stalingrad and think long and slow, like a guerrilla.

If you want to know how not to think about Iraq, just start with anything ever said or imagined by Cheney or Bush. Our Commander in Chief declared a week ago when the Iraqi Army first marched into Basra, "I would say this is a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq." When the Iraqi Army fled a few days later, he suddenly got very quiet. But anybody could see how deluded the poor fucker is just by all the nonsense he managed to cram into that 15-word sentence. I mean, "the history of a free Iraq"?

But that's nothing compared to Bush's fundamentally wrong notion that there's even such a thing as a "defining moment" in an urban guerrilla war. Guerrilla wars are slow, crock-pot wars. To win this kind of war, the long war, takes patience. Trying to force a "defining moment" by military action is not just ignorant and idiotic, but risks further demoralizing your side when that moment doesn't happen, as it inevitably won't. What happens when you launch premature strikes on a neighborhood-based group like the Mahdi Army is that you just end up convincing their neighborhoods that the occupiers are the enemy, and the Mahdi boys -- local guys you've known all your life -- are heroes, defending your glorious slum from the foreigners and their lackeys.

By the time a homegrown group like Sadr's is ready to "announce itself" on the streets, it's put in years of serious grassroots work winning over the locals block by block. The Mahdi Army runs its own little world in the neighborhoods it controls. It distributes food to the poor, deals out rough justice to the local criminals, and runs the checkpoints that keep Sunni suicide bombers off the block. It's the home team, the Oakland Raiders times one million, for people in places like Sadr City. You can't eradicate it without eradicating the whole neighborhood -- or making it so rich that people don't need a gang. That's probably the only sure way to end guerrilla wars: make the locals so rich they're not interested in gang life any more. And that's not going to happen any time soon for the people crammed into places like Sadr City. Until then, the Mahdi Army is their team and they're sticking by it.

By attacking Sadr's neighborhoods this week, Maliki's troops pushed the Shia masses closer to Sadr; and by losing, they made the slum people prouder than ever of their home team. That's what you get when you go for a "defining moment" in guerrilla war.

To understand what happened this week, you need to zoom out to the big picture, see what Petraeus and Maliki thought would happen, and then forward it to what actually did happen. Iraq right now has four real zones of influence: Kurdistan, which is withdrawing and fortifying itself as fast as it can; the Sunni Triangle, bloodied by four years of fighting the US and ready to be bribed for a while; Baghdad, which is turning into a Shia-dominated city fast; and Basra, solidly Shia. The major action now is Shia vs. Shia.

The way Petreaus and Maliki saw it, they've dealt with the Sunni insurgency and now it was time to send the Iraqi Army south to take sides in the militia battles around Basra and do a little shock-and-awe on Sadr.

The Shia are divided into lots of factions; for example, Bush's guy Maliki leads the Dawa Party, a small group, small enough that he got to be leader because he didn't threaten either of the two really big, serious Shia groups: the Sadrists and the supposedly more moderate SIIC. Both those groups have the classic urban guerrilla division into political party and armed wing. The SIIC's armed wing used to be called the Badr Brigade, and still fights under that name down in Basra. But the core of the Badr forces now go by a fancier name: the Iraqi Army.

The Badr Brigade has an interesting history. During the Iran-Iraq War, it fought for the Iranians against Saddam, as a big (50,000-man) auxiliary unit. When the U.S. disbanded Saddam's army and the Sunni went insurgent, the Badr Brigade stepped smoothly into the power vacuum and became the core of the new Iraqi Army. So don't think of this as a real Western-style national army, drawn from all of Iraq's various groups or any of that crap. The current Iraqi Army is a Shia militia, loyal to the SIIC, that just happens to be willing to wear the uniforms we bought them. They're not really in it for "the nation," much less their American paymasters. They're there to use their new fancy weapons and big money to push the SIIC's agenda down everybody else's throats.

And like I have to keep saying over and over, the purely military hardware aspect of this sort of war is the least important factor of all. The Iraqi Army/SIIC militia had the weaponry on their side, and they still got their asses kicked by the Sadrists, because the Sadrists were defending their home neighborhoods, those stinking slums that mean the whole world to people who live there. Victory in insurgency is a matter of morale, and you build it slowly, the way Mao said, by helping the locals in their dull little civvie lives. Then, when the army comes to try to take you down, they don't have a chance, because you've prepped the neighborhood well, the locals are your eyes and ears, and it just plain doesn't mean as much to the government troops as it does to your cadre who were raised there. That's why Hezbollah's part-time amateurs were able to beat the Israeli professionals in 2006, and that's why Sadr was ahead of the game when he called the fight off this week.

Truth is, if any group comes out of this looking good, militarily or morally, it's the Mahdi Army and their leader, the fat man himself, "Mookie" as they call him on Free Republic: Moqtada al-Sadr. His people aren't saints; they have their own kidnapping/murder squads, a lot of them connected with the Health Ministry, which is a Sadr stronghold. But the Sadrists have consistently stuck with the urban poor, tried to form alliances with the Sunni (didn't work) and played a cool, calm, long-term game -- just like Hezbollah in Lebanon. In fact, the quickest way to understand Sadr is to think of Hezbollah's leader, Nasrullah. Hezbollah built its power by providing social services to the poorest Lebanese Shi'ites, and the Mahdi Army works the same way. Of course you could argue that they both got the idea from the old master, Mao himself, who consistently downplayed the macho combat stuff and insisted that the guerrillas should work with the civilians, doing the dull peacetime stuff like public health, building projects, food distribution.

Like Hezbollah, the Sadrists cooperate with Iran, but no way in the world are they Iranian puppets. In fact, it's the SIIC's military wing -- the core of the current Iraqi Army -- that has an embarrassing history of fighting for the Iranians against their own country, Iraq. But that doesn't mean they're puppets either.

When Iraqi Shi'ites want to insult each other, they accuse each other of being pro-Iranian, and it is an accusation. They buy the idea of an "Iraqi nation," as long as it's their gang running it. One thing you can absolutely count on in the Middle East is that every clan, every sect, is going to look out for itself. The middle-class Shia in SIIC/Badr Brigades are using us; the Sadrists are using Iran; but they're both out for their own communities. Sadr would probably have been willing to cooperate with the U.S., if Bremer hadn't pushed him into rebellion in 2004. So it's a mistake to think of any of these groups as having permanent alliances. They're practical people.

So are the Iranians. They really know how to play this kind of long, slow war. They can control exactly the level of chaos inside Iraq by feeding weapons and money in when they want to heat the place up, then withholding supplies when they want to cool it down. They're embedded with every militia, even the Sunni groups, and they use them like control rods in a nuke reactor. The way the ceasefire this week was arranged says it all: a bunch of big Shia politicians flew to Qom, Khomeini's hometown in Iran, and begged the Iranians to stop the shooting. They talked to Sadr, and Sadr agreed -- for good reason.

And that brings us back to today's story problem in "How to Think Like A Guerrilla." The question was, "If Moqtada S. is kicking ass all over Iraq, why does he call off his militia before they can win total 'Western-style' victory?"

If you've learned your lesson here, you should be able to answer that question now. Sadr called off his boys because:

1. The first job of a guerrilla army is to stay alive. That's much more important than winning a Western-style victory. The Mahdi Army is intact, ready for the next round. Mao said it best: "Lose men to take land, land and men both lost; lose land and keep men, land can be retaken." In other words, play for the long term and remember that your troops are your biggest asset. Never go for broke.

2. The next most important job of a guerrilla army is to maintain and grow its support in the neighborhood. Sadr has his own constituency -- and I mean that literally, since all the Shia groups are positioning themselves for elections this Fall. By calling off the fight, he spares his people further gore and destruction and comes off as the compassionate defender of the poor. Just in time for campaign season.

3. A guerrilla army facing occupiers with a monopoly on air power is committing suicide by going for total victory on the ground, seizing an entire city or district. Just ask the Sunni, who bunkered up in Fallujah and got slaughtered. By melting back into the civilian population, the Sadrists are now invulnerable to air attack.

4. After four straight days of failure by the Badr Brigade/Iraqi Army, the US was frustrated enough to start committing American ground troops to the assault on Sadr. That would have meant serious casualties for the Mahdi Army, as it did when they took on US forces in 2004. Not that they're afraid to die for their neighborhood -- Shias? You kidding me? -- but because it would be stupid to die fighting the Americans when everyone in Iraq knows the US just doesn't figure much in the long term.

Sadr's not afraid of us, he and his commanders just see us as a dangerous nuisance, like a chained pit bull they have to step around. Ten years from now, every player in the current game will still be playing this slow, shady game, except one: the Americans.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, basra, sadr, maliki

Gary Brecher's first book, "War Nerd," is due out on June 1. Pre-order now!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/18/2192361.htm?section=justin

Iraq invasion a success: Cheney

Posted 15 minutes ago

Carnage: Iraqi firefighters clean the site of the Karbala suicide attack (AFP: Mohammed Sawaf)

• Related Story: Female Iraqi suicide bomber kills dozens

US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavour" during a visit to Baghdad, on the same day a woman suicide bomber killed 40 people.

"If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavour ... and it has been well worth the effort," Mr Cheney, an architect of the invasion, said after meeting Iraqi leaders.

The Iraq war is a major issue in the US presidential campaign. Entering its sixth year this week, it has cost the United States $US500 billion. US Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton said the final bill could be $US1 trillion.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,000 US soldiers have been killed. The military said two more soldiers died yesterday when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle near Baghdad.

Shortly after Mr Cheney spoke, a woman wearing a suicide vest blew herself up in a cafe in the southern holy Shiite city of Kerbala, killing at least 40 people, police and health officials said. Bombs in Baghdad killed four and wounded 13.

Mr Cheney arrived as Republican presidential candidate John McCain was meeting Iraqi leaders as part of a Senate Armed Services Committee fact-finding mission.

"I was last in Baghdad 10 months ago and I sense, as a result of the progress that has been made since then, phenomenal changes in terms of the overall situation," Mr Cheney said after meeting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"This visit is important because it comes at a time when there's a great deal of progress taking place in Iraq," Mr Maliki said through a translator.

A poll of 2,000 people from across Iraq, commissioned by international broadcasters including the BBC and US network ABC, found rising optimism among them.

Mr Cheney said there had been a "remarkable turnaround" in security after 30,000 extra US troops were sent to Iraq last year to help quell sectarian violence that threatened civil war.

Despite the improved security, however, some 4 million Iraqis are still displaced, and the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report that millions were still deprived of clean water and medical care.

'Surge working'

Like Senator McCain, Mr Cheney is in Iraq as part of a wider visit to the Middle East. He was due to spend the night at a military base and will also visit Saudi Arabia, Jerusalem, the Palestinian territories, Turkey and Oman on a nine-day tour.

Both men have been staunch supporters of the US troop build-up or "surge". The US military says violence in Iraq has dropped by 60 per cent since last June, although it acknowledges an upsurge in attacks since January.

"The surge is working," Senator McCain told CNN in an interview in Baghdad, countering demands by Democratic presidential candidates Senators Clinton and Barack Obama for US troops to be withdrawn from Iraq as soon as possible.

Senator McCain and Mr Cheney did not cross paths during the day as the Vice-President held a series of meetings with Iraqi leaders. He travelled outside the US-protected Green Zone in a heavily armoured motorcade to visit Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and powerful Shiite political leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim.

"There is still a lot of difficult work that must be done, but as we move forward the Iraqi people should know that they will have the unwavering support of President Bush and the United States in consolidating their democracy," Mr Cheney said after meeting Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq's largest Shiite political bloc, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

Among the political issues Mr Cheney discussed with Iraq's leaders was a stalled hydrocarbon law, stressing that it was important to Iraq's national development, US ambassador Ryan Crocker said later.

The law would share revenues from Iraq's vast oil reserves, the world's third largest, but remains blocked because of reluctance to compromise among Iraq's political blocs.

- Reuters

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/14/2189264.htm?section=justin

No link between Saddam and Al Qaeda: Pentagon

Posted 16 minutes ago

A detailed Pentagon study confirms there was no direct link between Iraqi ex-leader Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda network, debunking a claim US President George W Bush's administration used to justify invading Iraq.

The US administration tried to bury the release of the study, limiting distribution of the report and making it available only at individual request and by mail - instead of posting it on the internet or handing it out to reporters.

Coming five years after the start of the war in Iraq, the study of 600,000 official Iraqi documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of former Saddam Hussein colleagues "found no smoking gun between Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda," said the study, quoted in US media.

Other reports by the blue-ribbon September 11 commission and the Pentagon's inspector general in 2007 reached the same conclusion but none had access to as much information.

"The Iraqi Perspective Project review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism" and "state terrorism became a routine tool of state power" but "the predominant target of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens," said a summary of the Pentagon study.

Mr Bush, US Vice President Dick Cheney and top aides have insisted there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, citing the alleged ties as a rationale for going to war in Iraq.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Mr Bush said in June 2004.