In Iraq, safety is in the eye of the beholder
On How al-Anbar isn't that Safe and How its "Calm" is Artificially Produced
by Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Bush made a surprise visit to Al-Anbar Province on Monday, as part of his propaganda drive to get Americans to think we should stay in Iraq because "progress" is being made.
The debate over al-Anbar province is driven by the Bushies' desire to find any 'good news' to grasp at. Indeed, from 2003 forward, their criterion for objective reporting on Iraq was that it gave the 'good news.' When there obviously wasn't any good news, they started ignoring Iraq, as at Fox [Republican TV] Cable News.
Now the 'good news' appears (I swear to God) to be that you can "walk" in Iraq. That's the good news. The 8 billion people in the world walk every day, in most of the world's locales. Now it is an achievement to walk. That's good news of the highest order. Only, if you are American in Fallujah you might need a company of Marines with you so that you can . . . walk. (See below).
Is al-Anbar Province really paradise, as Bush suggested?
Al-Anbar residents killed 20 US troops in July. The total US fatalities in July were 79 according to icasualties.org, and some of those were presumably from accidents, etc. So al-Anbar, despite being reduced to the stone age, managed to kill a fourth or more of all US troops killed in combat in July. Al-Anbar is roughly 1/24 of Iraq by population. So it killed six times more US troops than we would have expected based on its proportion of the Iraqi population.
(More here. Juan R. I. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia, and has a regular column at Salon.com.)
by Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Bush made a surprise visit to Al-Anbar Province on Monday, as part of his propaganda drive to get Americans to think we should stay in Iraq because "progress" is being made.
The debate over al-Anbar province is driven by the Bushies' desire to find any 'good news' to grasp at. Indeed, from 2003 forward, their criterion for objective reporting on Iraq was that it gave the 'good news.' When there obviously wasn't any good news, they started ignoring Iraq, as at Fox [Republican TV] Cable News.
Now the 'good news' appears (I swear to God) to be that you can "walk" in Iraq. That's the good news. The 8 billion people in the world walk every day, in most of the world's locales. Now it is an achievement to walk. That's good news of the highest order. Only, if you are American in Fallujah you might need a company of Marines with you so that you can . . . walk. (See below).
Is al-Anbar Province really paradise, as Bush suggested?
Al-Anbar residents killed 20 US troops in July. The total US fatalities in July were 79 according to icasualties.org, and some of those were presumably from accidents, etc. So al-Anbar, despite being reduced to the stone age, managed to kill a fourth or more of all US troops killed in combat in July. Al-Anbar is roughly 1/24 of Iraq by population. So it killed six times more US troops than we would have expected based on its proportion of the Iraqi population.
(More here. Juan R. I. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia, and has a regular column at Salon.com.)
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Another perspective from An-Abar is offered by Tom Friedman. The Strib many times publishes his full column a few days after it appears in the NYT, but here is his reaction to a on-the-ground visit (not a Green Fog Zone apparition images controlled by the Military PR teams)
I saw many contradictory things on this visit to Iraq — too many to declare a definitive trend. So let me share three scenes that had an impact on me:
Scene 1: I went on a patrol that visited a U.S. Army platoon based in the Ameriya neighborhood of Baghdad, alongside the “Ameriya Knights,” who, as Gen. David Petraeus put it to me, “are not a rugby team.”
Ameriya is a Sunni neighborhood that had been home to doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Today it is a ghost town. It is chilling to see how much this city has been fragmented into little pieces. What were clearly upper-middle-class homes are almost all abandoned, and the streets are full of litter and rubble. This neighborhood first came under assault from Shiite militias, then from pro-Al Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis, who moved in on the pretext of protecting the Sunnis from the Shiites and then imposed a reign of Islamist terror on them.
The Ameriya Knights are predominantly secular Sunni boys from the neighborhood, who banded together to both drive out the pro-Al Qaeda forces — which took root here more deeply than I realized — and to protect their homes from Shiite death squads. They decided to work with the Americans because we threaten them — today — less than either the pro-Al Qaeda Iraqi Sunnis or the Shiites. Many looked like former Baathist army vets to me. They mostly wore jeans, each brandishing a different kind of weapon.
When I asked one of them, Omar Nassif, 32, why he had gone from shooting at Americans to working with them, he said, “I saw an Al Qaeda man behead an 8-year-old girl with my own eyes ... We want American support because we fought the most vicious organization in the world here ... I would rather work with the Americans than the Iraqi Army. The Americans are not sectarian people.”
At one point we took a walk around the neighborhood, trudging through the powdery dust in 126 degree heat. When I looked up, I saw a surreal scene — former Baathists insurgents, guns pointed in all directions, providing a security cordon around a senior U.S. officer. That is the good news and bad news from Iraq. Good news: the surge is tamping down violence. Bad news: the relative calm stems largely from a Sunni-Sunni war that has pushed mainstream Iraqi Sunnis into our camp to fight the jihadist Sunnis — rather than from any real Sunni-Shiite rapprochement.
Peace in Iraq has to be built on a Shiite-Sunni consensus, not a constant balancing act by us. So far, the surge has created nothing that is self-sustaining. That is, pull us out and this whole place still blows in 10 minutes. You’ll know there’s progress if Shiites or Sunnis do something that surprises you — actually reach out to the other. Up to now, though, all I’ve heard from them is either “I’m weak, how can I compromise?” or “I’m strong, why should I compromise?” No happy medium, no stable Iraq.
Friedman goes on in the column to discuss how other countries such as Russia, China, etc. are now flexing their muscle in other areas since we are preoccuped with Iraq; and also the heroic efforts of the Military Medical Teams.
Here’s an interesting update on Life in Fallujah .
I suppose it doesn’t sound bad once you are accustomed to showing your biometric identification badge (obtained from retina scans and finger-printing) and don’t need water (70% of Iraqis do not have access to safe drinking water) and are fortunate enough to have a job (unemployment, which affects probably more than 50% of the workforce while 43% of Iraqis suffer from "absolute poverty"). Is it any wonder that the residents in this city of 400,000 ask “why don't you come and live in this paradise with us?”
While US troop levels may be down, the US Military is using Female Search Teams on five day rotations to monitor for cross-dressers.
So is it too early to declare VICTORY and leave? Seems like all we are is a mercenary security force.
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