As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates
Violence Rises in Shiite City Once Called a Success Story
By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post
As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.
Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.
After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, British forces took control of the region, and the cosmopolitan port city of Basra thrived with trade, arts and universities. As recently as February, Vice President Cheney hailed Basra as a part of Iraq "where things are going pretty well."
But "it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.
For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.
"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
(Continued here.)
By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post
As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.
Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.
After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, British forces took control of the region, and the cosmopolitan port city of Basra thrived with trade, arts and universities. As recently as February, Vice President Cheney hailed Basra as a part of Iraq "where things are going pretty well."
But "it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.
For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.
"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
(Continued here.)
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3 Comments:
Anthony Cordesman discussed his latest trip to Iraq at the Center for Strategic and International Studies today. He said the Brits have lost Basra … and we are now on Plan I … long past Plan B.
He's branding al Maliki as a failure and supportor of the Shiite miltias.
Reporters were there so look for some reporting later today.
The Brits react to Cordesman’s comments with spinning that they are doing a good job
link but then blames the US strategy “"The Americans wanted to disband the existing security forces and we went along with that. We have suffered terribly since then, because that single move was the most destabilising act in the whole post-war operation."
I have lost count of how many British soldiers have died since they announced the pulldown, but it seems a couple of soldiers are killed every few days.
Today’s NYTimes editorial addresses Basra and the Wrong Way Out of Iraq .
While on the same page, one of their columnists writes about the Soviet Union’s Afghanistan entanglement. Due to the NYT firewall, here is a excerpt.
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[SNIP]
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 based partly on an intelligence failure analogous to our own in Iraq: [SNIP]
By 1986, the Soviets wanted to end the Afghan war, and tried some of the same approaches that we have tried or talked about: a new constitution, a new leader, a policy of “national reconciliation.”
These worked as well for them as they have for us.
Many Soviets just wanted to cut their losses and pull out. But other officials raised counterarguments that may sound familiar:
If we simply pull out, we’ll destroy our influence around the world for a generation. And if we leave, the country will fall apart, and there’ll be a bloodbath focusing on our friends. Muslim extremists will come to power, and it’s better to fight them over there than on our side of the border.
These were serious arguments, and there was truth to them. After the Soviets finally pulled out after nine years, ending what Izvestia called “the wound that would not heal,” Afghanistan did eventually collapse into a civil war that was worse than ever.
Yet in retrospect, it is also clear that the Soviets and Afghans alike would have been far better off if the U.S.S.R. had withdrawn earlier. Staggering on only delayed the inevitable, increasing their own casualties and empowering their enemies.
And that’s a lesson we should absorb in Iraq.
Gen. David Petraeus is doing an excellent job, but the surge isn’t about making streets safe. Rather its aim is to create political space for reconciliation — and in that respect the surge has failed.
Even in the Bush administration, everybody seems to recognize that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is incapable of achieving a reconciliation. So there’s talk of engineering a replacement of Mr. Maliki — but we tried that in Vietnam in 1963, and the Soviets tried that in Afghanistan in 1986. It didn’t work either time.
In the absence of realistic hope for reconciliation, let’s not drag things along as the Soviets did in the 1980s but bite the bullet as Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1987 and announce that we are headed for the exits.
There is a good argument for keeping a battalion in Kurdistan — the Kurds would love us to stay, and our presence would reduce the risk of a war between the Kurds and Turks. Moreover, in exchange for staying, we could wring concessions out of the Kurds that would reduce the risk of war in Kirkuk. Kurdistan is the one part of Iraq that is still hopeful, and we should try hard to keep it viable.
Some experts argue for keeping bases in western Iraq or southern Iraq as well. But unless local people are pleading with us to stay, our presence mostly serves to empower Moktada al-Sadr and turn him into Iraq’s most powerful politician.
Instead of spending billions in those places, let’s do more to help Jordan — which has been greatly destabilized by Iraqis pouring into that country. For humanitarian and strategic reasons alike, we should assure that refugee Iraqi children get an education and that Jordan doesn’t come apart at the seams.
There’s lots of talk about partitioning Iraq to reduce the violence, and it’s happening already — and that de facto partition is a crucial step to reduce the risk of genocide once we leave. But for the U.S. to embrace partition would be disastrous: We would be portrayed in madrassas around the world as the infidels who dismembered an Arab country to seize its oil and emasculate it on behalf of Israel.
An essential step is to work more closely with Iraq’s neighbors, including those we don’t like, such as Iran and Syria. These countries have as much interest in a stable Iraq as we do, and the moment Iran shoulders some responsibility for southern Iraq it will also risk instability in its despotic regime at home.
We also need to continue the push for progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace (and Israeli-Syrian peace). In the Middle East, there are dividends just for trying to achieve peace, even if the efforts fail, and that should be part of our Iraq recovery strategy.
[SNIP]
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Concisely stated …it’s a mess … and the solution resolves not in Iraq but with engaging its neighbors and addressing the Palestine / Israel / Syria / Lebanon situation.
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