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3 Surge and destroy in
Iraq By Michael Schwartz
having disappeared, has slowly
grown again in strength. Fallujah is not pacified
and the Americans have never actually initiated a
real program of reconstruction there. In other
cities, with less comprehensive occupations, the
insurgency is even more robust, and there isn't
even talk of reconstruction.
US
implementation of this plan in Baghdad has already
begun, with a devastating offensive in the Haifa
Street area, near the
heavily fortified Green Zone,
which quickly escalated into the wholesale
destruction of the neighborhood. Once the initial
onslaught was over, the offensive devolved into a
case of Shi'ite ethnic cleansing; Sunni residents
who left during the heavy fighting are not being
allowed back in by the Shi'ite police and troops
who arrived with the Americans. We can expect a
regular diet of such clashes, possibly marked by
the liberal use of air power, guaranteed to
devastate neighborhoods, followed by sectarian
struggles over who will repossess the destroyed
buildings, usually resolved in favor of the
Shi'ite allies of the US troops.
The
second prong of the new policy - the creation of a
permanent US presence in insurgent strongholds -
is only now beginning to be implemented. Besides
the fact that the planned number of outposts (not
more than 50 in any published estimates) could not
hope to purge the city of Sunni insurgents, this
tactic will provide stationary targets for
guerrilla fighters - invitations for well-planned
attacks.
In Ramadi, where this strategy is
being implemented, there has already been a
successful car-bombing at the most important of
the US posts, and it seems likely that this is
only the beginning. We should expect reports of
various forms of attacks against these bases as
soon as the Sunni insurgents get their bearings
and develop their strategic plans.
The
bottom line We are looking at desperate
measures aimed at reversing the decline of US
power in the Middle East. In all three areas
designated by the surge plan, this desperation has
led to the consideration of, or even the embrace
of, more destructive strategies.
The
immediate results on the ground already look
disastrous in ways that - though they shouldn't -
invariably seem to catch US officials off-guard.
For instance, when they focus the limited forces
available to them on Baghdad, the guerrillas begin
to look for less well-guarded targets elsewhere,
as seems now to be happening in the city of
Samarra.
In addition, even the
so-far-modest US incursions into Shi'ite areas of
the capital have had the horrifying effect of
facilitating some of the most horrendous suicide
car-bombings yet recorded. One instance of this
was succinctly described by New York Times
reporters James Wong and Wassam Habeeb:
On February 18, just two days after
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called the
opening stage of the security drive a "dazzling
success", two bombs ripped through a market in
the New Baghdad neighborhood, where American
soldiers had been on patrol just minutes
earlier, killing at least 60
people.
The way a US patrol and a
car-bombing coincided was no accident. The New
Baghdad neighborhood, like almost all Shi'ite
communities in the capital, has been policed by
the Mehdi Army on an ongoing basis. Besides
enforcing all manner of local law, the Mehdis are
also vigilant about possible suicide bombers,
quickly recognizing strange people or vehicles
that enter their neighborhoods. At the same time,
wary citizens are also on the lookout, alerting
the local Mehdis whenever they see someone who
looks suspicious.
When the Americans come
through on patrol or - even worse - when they set
up permanent checkpoints (either US- or
Iraqi-manned), the Mehdis have to lie low, since
the Americans (or their Iraqi sidekicks) will
arrest or kill them. The community is then in
essence left unprotected and open to intruders.
The Sunni jihadis know this, and they also
know that the Americans (and their Iraqi
sidekicks) have neither the ability nor the
inclination to spot and interdict
suspicious-looking outsiders. So they target
precisely those Shi'ite neighborhoods that the
Americans are busy "pacifying". Very often, as in
the case of the New Baghdad bombing, they time
their attacks just after the Americans pass
through, and before the Mehdis can return to the
streets.
Since the surge policy began,
there has been a rash of these almost coordinated
bombings, including the sequential car bombs in
Sadr City that killed 215, the demolition of the
Baghdad booksellers' market that killed at least
38, and the attack on Shi'ite pilgrims outside
Hilla that killed at least 70. In each of these
cases, the bombings coincided with US patrols that
virtually "ran interference" (to use an
unfortunately appropriate US football term) for
terrorist attacks. And in each case, local
residents registered furious complaints that the
Mehdi Army had been forced to "stand down".
All of this is unsettling enough. Worse
yet, in the confrontation with the Sadrists, the
Bush administration appears to be edging toward
search-and-destroy operations that will rubble-ize
Shi'ite neighborhoods; in the confrontation with
Iran, it appears to be lurching toward a possible
air assault on a remarkably wide range of targets
inside that country, guaranteeing staggering
levels of civilian casualties; in the
confrontation with the Sunni insurgents, it is
already mobilizing its ground and air power with
the promise of the subsequent imposition of an
extreme form of martial law. The hallmark of all
these new strategies is the high level of
destruction and mayhem they promise.
There
is a larger pattern that should, by now, be clear
in these developments, and all that have come
before. The architects of US policy in the Middle
East tend to keep escalating the level of
brutality in search of a way to convince the
Iraqis (and now the Iranians) that the only path
that avoids indiscriminate slaughter is submission
to a Pax Americana. Put another way, US policy in
the Middle East has devolved into unadorned state
terrorism.
Michael Schwartz,
professor of sociology and faculty director of the
undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony
Brook University, New York, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and
on US business and government dynamics. His books
include Radical Protest and Social
Structure and Social Policy and the
Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).
His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net.
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