Latest Iraqi Resistance Stats posted by lenin

The Brookings Institution provides regular updates on all statistics from Iraq in its 'Iraq Index'. It collates a range of different sources, and it isn't necessarily as authoritative as the official Department of Defense reports. However, it is more consistent in what data it presents and generally omits the Bush administration editorials. The latest report, dated 5 May 2008, is here. Here are some of the key results pertaining to resistance attacks (click to enlarge):








I already addressed the reported the issue of the 'surge' and its effects here and here. I noted that the main causes of a reduction in all kinds of attacks were: a) a brief cessation of the war between Sadr and Badr fighters; the near exhaustion of the sectarian war; b) Sadr's ceasefire; c) the co-opting of Sunni fighters in huge numbers. I also pointed out that the Bush administration had only succeeded in reducing the rate of anti-occupation violence by the precise amount that it had increased during the escalations in 2006-7. The statistics above more or less confirm this picture. (Gilbert Achcar, in an interesting discussion of the political background to the 'surge', also reinforces some of these points). They also suggest that US troop deaths fell to a very low rate in December 2007, and have been rising ever since (don't be misled by the drop at the end of the third chart, as that is the figure for the first four days in May). It is currently at a seven-month high. They confirm that the 'foreign fighter' contingent remains puny, about 2,000 at most - in a total insurgency that was estimated to be about 200,000 strong as early as January 2005, that is at most 1% of the total. As the US has been putting 'Iraqi security forces' in the frontline over the past couple of years - the strategy of 'Iraqification' - they are bearing the greater brunt of deaths. Those same 'Iraqi security forces' are, according to this report, carrying out a large number of the patrols - over half at some points, apparently. The pattern of 'Iraqification' has been maintained in Basra and Sadr City recently. The US is backing up said 'security forces' with air strikes that have contributed to the hundreds of deaths (this may actually be more bloody in the end than Fallujah). Partly because of this, the main cause of deaths among US troops is IEDs, rather than gun battles. Even with that in mind, the main gain of the 'surge' - a reduction in attacks on occupation troops - has been reversing for several months now. If the Sadrist militias have held out well enough to cause the government to want another truce, then the other expected gain - using a window of opportunity to smash the main anti-occupation forces - is unlikely to materialise.

Labels: 'surge', iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

The Sadr City crackdown. posted by lenin

Muqtada al-Sadr's scheduled protest for 9 April (yesterday) was, of course, called off in a hurry, as refugees were fleeing the city under bombardment. The air attacks continue to mount up, the latest reported attack killing ten Iraqis - in a "militia stronghold", of course. Loud explosions are being heard all over Sadr City as violence across Baghdad 'spirals'. It isn't hard to see why this is happening. Sadr City is, as I mentioned, a vast, populous area, larger than Basra or Najaf. It is the key area of Sadrist resistance, the base from which the movement's strengths emanate. But why now? Previously, when Sadr has humiliated the occupiers and their local chumps, there has been a period of backing off and a brief, negotiated peace. This time, having watched Maliki fail, the US is upping the ante.

Well, although Maliki was indeed humiliated, and had to run to Iran for a settlement before begging for fifty of his armoured cars back from the insurgents, he seems to have been told by the US to get back down to it. Gen. Petraeus expects the Basra crackdown to last for another few months. So, as America bombs from a great height, "Iraqi forces" are sent in to do the ground work. Presumably, the reasoning is that if the Sunni north holds, there is no reason to hold back in Baghdad and the south. Of course, there were still hundreds of attacks even in the relatively peaceful months since September 2007, mainly in Baghdad and the northern provinces of Ninewah, Diyala, and Salah-ah-Din. And in fact the number of attacks in Ninewah increased by 17% between November 2007 and March 2008. So, we shouldn't too carried away by the claims for the 'pacification' of Sunni Iraq. Nevertheless, the obvious and quite dramatic decline in the overall reported attacks since the co-optation of 'Awakening Councils' and the Sadrist ceasefire at the end of August 2007 has probably given the US army leadership a shot of confidence. So now they're giving Sadr City a taste of what Fallujah, Tal Afar, al-Qaim, Haditha, Samarra and Ramadi have each got in different measures over the past three or four years. In riposte, the resistance is raising the rate of its assault, as seventeen troops have been killed since Sunday.

With the oil laws still not signed into law, with social forces embroiled in a politico-military struggle for the future control of Iraq, and with intransigent unions resisting US designs, they have no plans of getting out of Iraq any time soon. Indeed, as Seumas Milne revealed, they plan an open-ended military presence in the country. It has to be open-ended, of course. Even McCain's Hundred Year Reich is too limiting. Even the current supine political leadership in Iraq isn't going to completely go along with that, for fear of being swallowed up by an angry revolt. Suppose the Sadrists were to 'arrive' in the next elections, with control of much of southern Iraq and Baghdad? Suppose, then, the 'Awakening Councils' were to start plugging their American overlords again? They clearly intend to take the initiative while they have a window: as the troops selected to speak to embedded NYT reporters insist, this "has got to be done". And the US has lost faith in the capacity of its political allies in Iraq to do the job.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, sadr city, sadrists, US imperialism

Sadr's strange victory. posted by lenin

What did he have to do to win? Well, once again, he didn't start or provoke the fight. In fact, he had recently renewed his organisation's ceasefire, so anything short of his being decisively defeated is by default a victory for him. Maliki's stated goal was to disarm the Mahdi Army, and that clearly isn't going to happen. Maliki tried to use the 'Iraqi forces' in order to defeat the Mahdi, but found he couldn't. Some Iraqi police refused to fight, while others took their guns and went to fight for the other side. Basra was decisively in Mahdi control. In short order, Baghdad, Kut, Karbala, Nasiriyah, Hilla and several southern cities and towns were in revolt. Hassan Jumaa of Iraq's main oil union reported that there was a widespread popular revolt, and there is evidence that both the US and Maliki feared the development of a combined national revolt. While Maliki had pleaded with the occupiers to stay out of fighting, lest it be seen as a war of occupation versus resistance (and the Dawa Party will not look good in the upcoming elections if he is seen as the occupiers' puppet), it wasn't long before he had to call them in. Now, it looks like they're having to settle for an Iranian-brokered ceasefire that leaves Sadr's organisation intact and his political standing immensely enhanced. What's more, it seems the negotiations were instigated by Maliki's government: "We asked Iranian officials to help us convince him that we were not cracking down on the Sadr group", said an Iraqi official. From "worse than Al Qaeda" to "pwease lets be fwends" is a big shift. Sadr's order for his militias to get off the streets is a test of his control over the organisation, but it is hardly a white flag.

Consider the position of the occupiers in all this. There is now a story going round that US officials didn't know that the attack on Basra was coming. As Marc Lynch points out, this is hardly credible. It is highly unlikely that Cheney's recent visit to Iraq didn't involve some discussion of the Sadrists. Assuming what appears to be obvious, namely that this attack was ordered by the US, then what is the upshot? If the US is obliged to accept an Iranian-backed peace deal, it isn't because they were militarily defeated. The US was bombing from a great height, and could easily have destroyed Basra and its inhabitants and the Mahdi fighters. The fact that this is not Fallujah is not because of the superior rifle power or military training of Sadr's supporters. It is because of Sadr's currently unmatched political power.

All of this is evidence that the Sadrists are improving their act. Have a look at these snippets from Moqtada al-Sadr's recent interview on Al Jazeera:



Here, he positions himself as a leader of the resistance struggle and calls upon Arab states to lend the struggle political support. In reports of his wider remarks, he is said to have described the liberation of Iraq as the central strategic goal of the Mahdi, and predicted that the US will fall in Iraq as they did in Vietnam. Well, there's no doubt that this could happen, but for all that the similarities with Vietnam are rightly highlighted, there remains one staggering difference: there is no equivalent to the Viet Minh. There is not an organisation with the authoritative legitimacy, discipline, centralised power and political nous to even come close. The Mahdi cannot be that organisation, and of course Sadr is probably well aware of this, which is why he has been reaching out to Sunni resistance groups. Who could launch a Tet Offensive in Iraq today? That attack, a turning point which guaranteed the shortening of the American war, required a mass peasant army with fearsome self-control and a leadership with a sophisticated analysis of the domestic politics of the US and how the operation would impact on it. The army would not have been there for the fight had the Viet Minh not been able to offer a coherent strategy for national liberation and unite that with the declared goal of emancipating the peasantry. Any end to the American war in Iraq will result from the consolidation of a national federation of resistance groups with a singular political vision that offers something to the dispossessed Iraqi working class. Yet, for all the limits of Sadr's movement, he continues to rack up successes, to take his would-be terminators by surprise, and to consolidate his standing every time someone tries to take him down a peg or two.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, mahdi army, maliki, occupation, sadr, US imperialism

Extraordinary testimony from Iraq vet posted by lenin

Labels: iraq, occupation, specialist mike prysner, US imperialism

The re-division of Iraq posted by lenin

Re-territorialising the Middle East was a crucial goal of the Iraq war. It wasn't just to take control of the oil spigot, but to do so in such a way that the geographies of resistance to the US and Israel were converted into pliable subordinates or assets. I am not talking about the more extreme neoconservative fantasies in which practically the whole region is converted into a system of pro-American free market states. They expected dividends from the conquest that would weaken Islamist and nationalist opposition and strengthen pro-American currents in Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Not only that, but they would, by securing an alliance with Iraqi Kurds, be better placed to thwart wider Kurdish goals and strengthen the Turkish state. Transforming Iraq from a potentially powerful, large, Arab nationalist bulwark into a politically and spatially divided system of lily pads was an important component of this strategy. If it hasn't always been obvious that the US would engage in a bipartisan political strategy to divide Iraq into three effective mini-states, it was clear that US planners regarded the territorial division of the Middle East bequeathed by its colonial forebears as part of the problem. Perhaps they saw 2003 as being pivotal in the same way that 1918 had been.

At any rate, the Biden strategy has offered the occupiers a way out of the 'quagmire' that appears to be working, at least inasmuch as it reduces the problems that the US were faced with a year ago. By arming each side in the civil war that the US has helped create, using the Kurdish peshmerga as a counterinsurgency army, 'tilting' toward the Sunni 'Awakening Councils' and sponsoring the most sectarian elements in the south, the US has experienced a reduction in attacks on its troops and has seen less turmoil in the admittedly thin representative institutions that it has set up. Displacing a war of resistance into a domestic civil war has been useful in many ways, and enshrining sectarianism in brick and mortar gives it the appearance of an 'fact on the ground' of the kind that the Israelis like to establish. One manifestation of this was the announcement last year that there would be a new federal region set up, known as the 'South of Baghdad Region' encompassing all Shi'ite majority regions. Furious efforts were apparently under way to establish this, and it was due to start kicking in during April, when the US-driven federalist laws start to have effect. Under these laws, any area which wishes to be a federal region must have a referendum, with 50% turnout or more, and a simple majority in favour of the move. One would think that if they had pushed through the sectarian constitution in the first place, they could achieve the effective secession of the south. However, the resistance of Sunni and less sectarian Shi'ite groups such as the Sadrists may well have scuppered this plan (Who the hell do they think they are?). Further, it looks as if there may be competitors in the federalist field, with some pursuing a Basra region - if Basra opts out of the southern region, it won't happen. The new geographical units in which the occupied political economy of Iraq will be elaborated could this be a strong central state, three distinct regions based on ethnicity (hence the routine bouts of ethnic cleansing), or a cluster of micro-regionalisms. What will be unleashed in April, therefore, will be an intense political struggle. All of the ethnic cleansing, the sectarian political strategies, the death squads and kidnappings have been building up to this. How to best manage close-range US dominance? Who can profit most from it, and how? At what scale of political unit can one most easily exact rent in the process of occupation, and ensure advantages in the long run? There will be more blood, a great deal more, before those questions are answered.

Labels: biden, iraq, occupation, sectarianism, US imperialism

Afghanistan: accentuating the positive. posted by lenin

Guest post by redbedhead:


Don't worry, everything is rolling along as planned in Afghanistan. Our troops are winning hearts and minds, they¹re rebuilding, they're defeating the insurgency. Well, there¹s the small matter of Canadian soldiers beating the hell out of Afghan detainees, then covering it up and then, once it's discovered, of stalling the investigation for more than a year. And then there¹s those massive bombings. As was noted by Amir Attaran, an Ottawa law professor who blew the whistle on the abuse, "When the military is investigating the military, which is inconvenient for the military, is it any wonder that the military rags the puck?"

In fact the investigation took so long to get started that they can¹t even track down the detainees any longer. And the Afghan they hired to do so was assassinated by insurgents. Probably nobody else will be applying for his job. Nor can they go to the medical records of the detainees, many of whom were treated by Canadian doctors. Why? Oops, it seems that the medical records from that time period, well, they just disappeared. Can you believe these guys?

Well, then, no wonder the Tories don¹t see the big deal in handing detainees over to the Afghan authorities. The Tories don¹t discriminate ­ hell, if torture and abuse are good enough for us, well, it ought to be good enough for the Afghans police. Small problem though, Kandahar¹s head torture master, Governor Asadullah Khaled, just fired somewhere between 100-250 police for corruption. Or, maybe it has something to the assassination attempt on his life and the growing power of the Taliban in and around Kandahar. The firing was done without notice, even to Canadian troops, who found out by surprise. If it was an attempt to eliminate a Taliban base inside the police then it failed to dampen the vigour of the insurgent movement. Within a two day spread two enormous suicide bombs killed a total of perhaps 150 people, including the "auxiliary police commander", ie. warlord, of Kandahar along with 35 of his men who were watching a dog fight. With potentially 125 people dead, this was the largest suicide bomb attack in Afghan history.

The Taliban have been having a lot of success in recent months eliminating important political figures inside Afghanistan, it seems. Then on Monday, insurgents struck again, with a suicide car bomb attack on Canadian troops that killed 35 civilians. The Canadians, it seems, were warned that there was a suicide plot afoot and that they should stay on their base until local police rounded up the attacker. But the Canadians refused to heed the warnings ­ six of them, in fact - and now the governor, Khaled, is none too happy with the Canucks. Tory Defense Minister, Peter MacKay, has responded with the usual Tory line that everything is good and that the Taliban are on the run, saying that the bombings didn't indicate any increase in Taliban activity. He better hope not because last year was already a record year for suicide bombings in Afghanistan.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, canada, occupation

The danger of raising expectations and the native unwillingness to learn posted by lenin

Kermit Roosevelt opens his account of his involvement of the overthrow of Mossadegh with some remarks on how such a courageous and far-sighted decision turned into the ferment and revolt of 1979. The trouble, he concludes, is that by bringing in a modernising Shah, who did so much good for the country, they raised Iranian expectations well beyond what was reasonable, thus encouraging the rebellion. That's one fairly consistent theme in colonial ideology when it comes to explaining the ingratitude of the colonial subjects: throw the native a bone and he gets rather over-excited and starts clamouring for more than his due. Or, perhaps, as Charles Dickens explained after the Jamaican Rebellion, the native is of a low racial type, naturally indolent and disinclined to master his own very unfortunate circumstances, but forever demanding. Another typical response is to express grave regrets at the inability of the supposed beneficiaries of colonial rule to learn. "Very sadly, the inhabitants of this wilderness demonstrate an obdurate unwillingess to acquire the techniques of good government, sound finance, cultural sophistication and solid gender relations that we have tried to teach them. They are going half-mad, in fact, with fanatical passions that threaten to set them back for several millenia. We had better send in the gunboats." I think that summarises the British response to the Egyptian rebellion in the 1880s.

On this note, here is a headline from yesterday's New York Times: US Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law. You can forget the fact, if you like, that the US actually built up the present Iraqi administration almost from scratch, populated its departments with personnel from sectarian parties and death squads, parcelled out power on a sectarian-cum-patrimonial basis, drove a sectarian constitution, etc etc, and therefore any problems that 'Iraqis' might be having with the 'rule of law' are entirely down to the occupiers. That confounding hypocisy is now so typical, it's stereotypical. But so is the ideological structure into which it fits. I have not the time now, but - knowing the kinds of dreck I've just sighed over and tried to put out of my mind - I am certain that a careful sifting through the American press coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan over the last six years or so would yield dozens, if not hundreds of examples of this kind of colonial ideological pattern. The fact that this ideology is now professionalised through organisations like the NED and IRI, and that it has a professionalised lingo to boot - oh, you can imagine, 'exporting democracy', 'training country x in democratic practises', 'tutoring so-and-so in the rule of law', as if it was all a matter of step-by-step technocratic exercises rather than a pitch for hegemony - means that it has a faintly neutral air, despite its its invidious assumption that self-government is a cultural rather than political state. That is, of course, on purpose - but it shouldn't stop us from noticing the pedigree.

Labels: colonialism, imperialism, iraq, occupation, US imperialism

The other Cairo Conference posted by lenin

Western television viewers and newspaper readers would be hard-pressed to know too much about the Cairo process. Have you even heard of it? Well, for a while now, US negotiators, the Iraqi puppet government, and representatives of the Iraqi resistance, have been meeting in Cairo for talks. The blog missing links, which usefully translates stories in Arabic for English-speakers, has been covering this for a while.

Although many resistance groups are opposed to the process, and many of the same Baathists whom the US has been courting are not engaging, it does look like a serious diplomatic 'surge' (odd, is it not, how addictive these propaganda cliches are). Several groups are involved, including the Sadrists (whose strategy has always been somewhat opportunistic, a syncopated enterprise of resistance and collaboration, of nationalism and occasional sectarianism). Ibrahim Jafaari is now talking to the resistance. Jafaari, of course, was deposed as leader of the Dawa Party and as Prime Minister of Iraq last year when Bush pulled the plug on the old geezer, despite the fact that he was approved by the Assembly. There are rumours that this is because he admits to being partial to Noam Chomsky. That can get you into a lot of trouble. Anyway, he is now the front man for a US-led negotiation process.

Now, it seems to me that one obvious conclusion is that for all the talk of success in the last few months of 2007, there is absolutely no confidence on the US side that this is likely to be enduring. In fact, a recent increase in attacks suggests that the temporary lull in attacks on US troops, won through a combination of bribery in some areas, escalation in others, and decisively redirecting Sunni fire onto 'Al Qaeda' (which is the name any gang of petty ultra-sectarian thugs gives itself these days in order to look well-hard), is coming to an end.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, us troops

Confirmed: over 1 million violent deaths in Iraq posted by lenin

ORB has produced more research on deaths in Iraq:

Following responses to ORB’s earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the ‘urban results’ and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.

This is only an imprecise register of overall deaths, in no way as rigorous as the two Johns Hopkins studies (Lancet 1 & Lancet 2 for short). Until a further epidemiological survey is carried out, it's probably the best figure available. I would point out that the data provided [pdf] breaks down the sources of death in a fashion approximately similar to Lancet 2 [pdf]. Intriguingly, it has a separate category for "sectarian violence" to which it attributes only 4% of violent deaths. Perhaps this reflects the fact that much of what is reported as 'sectarian' violence is in fact the body count from paramilitary probes into communities by coalition appendages such as the police commandos. On the other hand, how is a 'sectarian' death by gunshot separable from an 'ordinary' death by gunshot? To put it a different way, gun-fire is a means of killing and sectarian violence is a mode of killing. The category doesn't belong in the same list and would probably invite confusion.

Aside from gunfire (40%), the biggest category of deaths is attributed to car bombings (21%). As I understand it, the more you break these figures down, the less accurate they become. If the overall figure is accurate to a 95% confidence level, that doesn't mean the figure for car bombings is accurate to the same level. However, all surveys register a high proportion of deaths from car bombings. If the trends in this survey hold, you are talking about 200,000 deaths from this tactic alone. If the trend in Lancet 2 holds, it would be closer to 130,000. Either way, it is spectacularly large and points to an intense war on various fronts that - even though car bombs draw more attention than other forms of death - is still airbrushed from general view. Both a weapon of state terror and the poor man's airforce, the weapon is effective, but also deadly. As Mike Davis put it, the car bomb is a weapon whose use is "guaranteed to leave its perpetrators awash in the blood of innocents", a "categorical censure" that applies "even more forcefully to the mass terror against civilian populations routinely inflicted by the air forces and armies of so-called 'democracies'". Not least because those air forces and armies are the instigators, originators and pioneers of the destruction of Iraq.

Labels: car bombs, death squads, iraq, iraqi resistance, lancet study, occupation

Getting away with murder in Gaza posted by lenin

It turns out that this is stupendously easy. The magic word is "Sderot". Poor old Sderot. Poor, wretched Sderot. Gaza is a place where "rage" boils and bubbles over, especially since the "Hamas takeover" (the failed Fatah putsch, in other words), and Sderot pays the price. Rockets, empty streets, fleeing mattresses, the dog not getting walked. Poor, miserable Sderot.




Gaza has been under Israeli siege for some time. It is starving. Aid can't get in, because of Israel's blockade. Israel continues to ravage the territory with air strikes. As usual, Israel's imposition of its preferred racial order in the Middle East regionally intersects with its domestic racial order. The daily massacres in Gaza coincide with the the internal campaign against the Bedouin of the Negev, the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and property, the 'Judaising' of annexed territory, the construction of segregated roads, all the usual. In the West Bank, a Fatah fiefdom since June, attacks are frequent. It doesn't matter how much Abbas connives - even his allies are not safe from Israeli assassination.




Gaza, elevated to the happy status of an open air prison since Israel's 2005 redeployment, a move designed to reproduce Israel's "Jewish-democratic character" (Israel can't absorbe too many Arabs, as its political and military leadership is often at pains to point out), is now in full lockdown. Long before Hamas was elected in 2006, Israel was busily establishing "facts on the ground" across Palestine, with repeated attacks to back them up, and with a feckless and increasingly coopted Fatah incapable of doing anything much about it. One notorious attack in Gaza was launched against a refugee camp. From 2000-2006, Israel killed 2,300 Gazans, mainly civilians (whom it deliberately targets). Ever since, it has been using a combination of Quartet-supported blockade and routine attacks to ramp up the terror and suffering. The imposed power cuts and fuel shortages have entailed a shortage of clean water, with predictable effects. The seige launched in mid-2006, with extensive use of human shields, power stations bombed, and hundreds killed, was eclipsed by an all-out war on Lebanon. But the attacks on Gaza didn't stop. A single Israeli bomb killed two families, eighteen Palestinians, in Gaza in November 2006. In the same month, the IDF distinguished itself with a public massacre of female demonstrators outside a mosque. Shells were deliberately fired at Palestinian homes. In 2006 and 2007, Israel killed 816 Palestinians, including 152 children. Almost every child in Gaza has witnessed shootings, attacks, had their homes bombarded. 99.4% of Gazan children suffer trauma. The response from Palestinian groups, even with the determined effort to inflict some damage after the murder of the Ghaliya family, has been pretty low-key. Qassam rockets, smarties-tubes packed with gunpowder and sherbert, pathetically inept devices that rarely hit their intended target, or even any target at all. Since Israel's strategy of promoting civil war culminated in the loss of Gaza, it has been threatening to attack the strip. This attack has now begun in earnest.

Oh, but the luckless Sderot happens to be located nearby, thus copping a few miserable Qassam rockets that leave potholes in the streets and damage the walls. Poor, woebegone Sderot.

Labels: fatah, gaza, hamas, Israel, occupation, palestine, sderot, zionism

The limits of humanitarianism. posted by lenin

About a month after bloggers noticed, the Washington Post has reported on the confirmation of a vast escalation in aerial attacks on Iraq. Of course, they have done so only after carefully filtering the information through Pentagon spokespeople, which means that they have seriously described the attacks as being directed at weapons caches, safe houses and bomb making facilities. Presumably, if they have intelligence that good, it would be a relatively simple matter to go and find the caches and bomb equipment and take them back to base - while also taking snapshots for the media to reproduce as part of the 'success' story. However, leave that aside. Far more problematic is the obligatory 'humanitarian' angle: yes, this aggressive new campaign by General David Petraeus is striking the insurgents hard, but what about the innocent? Thus:

The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population. The military assures that the precision attacks are designed to minimize civilian casualties -- particularly as Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy emphasizes moving more troops into local communities and winning over the Iraqi population -- but rights groups say bombings carry an especially high risk.

"The Iraqi population remains at risk of harm during these operations," said Eliane Nabaa, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. "The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area."

UNAMI estimates that more than 200 civilian deaths resulted from U.S. airstrikes in Iraq from the beginning of April to the end of last year, when U.S. forces began to significantly increase the strikes to coordinate with the expansion of ground troops.

...

Human rights groups estimate that Afghan civilian casualties caused by airstrikes tripled to more than 300 in 2007, fueling fears that such aggressive bombardment could be catastrophic for the innocent.

Marc Garlasco, a military analyst at Human Rights Watch who tracks airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the strikes carry unique risks. "My major concern with what's going on in Iraq is massive population density," he said. "You have the potential for very high civilian casualties, so you need really granular intelligence on what you're going to hit. But I don't think they're being careless."

Leave aside the fact that the numbers they give for civilian deaths are utterly risible, an unbelievably low estimate by any standards. Leave aside the fact that it is completely implausible that the strategy of aerial bombardment is only killing large numbers of 'baddies'. We know enough about US military strategy to know that they consistently carry out attacks which deliberately kill large numbers of civilians. Even Mark Garlasco knows this. The only question they see fit to ask is whether some civilians might be "caught in the cross-fire" as it were, and whether the planners are being "careless", (even where they admit half-way through the article that the bombings are partially designed to terrorise). And not only is this the automatic purview of the Washington Post, it happens to be shared by Human Rights Watch. I can think of other problems that might be raised, one of which is that those resisting the US forces militarily are no more in need of swift airborne death than those who are not directly involved in combat. The US, after all, has no business being in Iraq, much less razing the country to the ground in order to kill those who do not assent to them being there. But humanitarian discourse in this context admits no knowledge of the criminality of US-orchestrated mass violence designed to subdue the country.

Human Rights Watch distinguished itself during the attack on Lebanon with a set of spurious attacks on Hezbollah for allegedly deliberately targeting civilians with its rocket-fire. It later emerged that while Israel's claims that Hezbollah hid its rocket launchers among civilians were bogus, Israel had certainly located prime military targets right among its population centres. HRW blithely insisted that this made no difference to its claim that Hezbollah indiscriminately attacked civilians. The point isn't really that HRW and like organisations are inconsistent in their determination of criminality. On the contrary, they are consistently biased toward the purlieus of power when they systematically fail to acknowledge or take account of prior, ongoing aggression. In the almost exclusive emphasis on the civilian-military distinction (which matters, I make no bones about it), they reproduce an ideological formation which holds that the incineration, shredding and dispersing of those designated combatants is perfectly acceptable: even if there are other options; even if the war need never have taken place; even if the murder is being perpetrated by aggressors who have it within their power to terminate hostilities at any point.

It is easy to understand why the reigning ideology sets aside a substantial space for 'human rights' criticism, which can be incorporated provided it doesn't "go too far" or step outside its designated boundaries and offer what is invariably construed as "politicised" commentary (whereas omitting the salient facts is not at all politicised). Humanitarianism in action mandates the most extraordinary barbarism. Impeccable sources of moral jurisdiction, authoritatively coequivalent with the missionaries, the court clerics and the piritual advisors. They bear the ensign of opposition, and a purpose derived from a higher authority (natural rights), and all the while they consistently absolve. Is it any wonder the new imperialists spent the greater part of the 1990s refining the categories of humanitarianism?

Labels: barbarism, humanitarianism, occupation, US imperialism

Weird exchange posted by lenin

The Tory MP Edward Leigh gets up and asks the Prime Minister "what was the point of invading Iraq, and killing 150,000 [sic] Iraqis, only to leave Basra to the Shi'ite militants?" Gordon Brown replies by praising the troops and pointing out that "violence has declined considerably in the last few months". So, Leigh points out that the war has been an absolute disaster, and then wonders why we didn't stick with it. And Brown defends the war by saying that violence declined as soon as we stopped fighting it. Anyone would think their dialogue had been written by Bird and Fortune.

Labels: gordon brown, iraq, occupation, pm questions

Whatever happened to the Special Police Commandos? posted by lenin

On 29 May 2007, a convoy of forty men, some in Special Police Commando (SPC) uniforms, drove through the gate of the Iraqi finance ministry and kidnapped five British contractors, whose names are being withheld on the instructions of the Foreign Office. The next that was heard about it was a video message from a purported Shi'ite group, featuring a British man who said: "My name is Jason. Today is November 18 ... I have been here now for 173 days and I feel we have been forgotten."^[1] This was merely the latest of the exploits implicating the SPC, which Lt Gen David Petraeus built up before he was placed in charge of the occupation^[2]. Dr John Pace, the former human rights director for the UN mission in Iraq, wrote in a 2005 report of how the Special Police Commandos had carried out death squad killings^[3]. In early 2006, an attack on the al-Askari shrine was carried out by individuals in Special Police Commando uniforms.^[4] The ensuing communal violence has now resulted in de facto segregation, and residents say that the completion of this project (rather than the bloody 'surge') is responsible for a recent decline in violence.^[5]

By now it is reasonably well known that the SPC have been trained by the US army, and have carried out numerous death squad attacks. In one notorious incident, having murdered someone and dumped the body, they contacted the Baghdad morgue where the corpse ended up, demanding the metal handcuffs back on the grounds that they are too expensive to replace^[6]. Among elements said to be incorporated into the SPC were the Badr Brigades of the occupiers' allies, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (now renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council), and former Republican Guards^[7]. These are the shock troops chosen for the elite counter-insurgency unit whose purpose was "special operations" - a term that turns out to mean applying cordless drills to living human beings. (Quite why this part needs to be outsourced is not entirely clear: if soldiers can handle electrocuting, drowning, raping, ripping the skin off prisoners' bodies, 'Palestinian hangings' and so on, drilling holes in the body is surely not that much of a step up).

However, the management of these death squads has been partially privatised since their initiation in 2005. In a Department of Defense 'Bloggers Roundtable' back in September, Brigadier General David Phillips boasted that the Special Police Commandos are presently being expertly trained by a Virginia-based outfit called USIS under the direction of the US army^[8]. To an already shadowy world of unaccountable militias and illicit cashflows is added a further layer of mystery - governments lie and conceal, but are less efficient at it, and are the subject of considerably more scrutiny, than private companies. The role of USIS was briefly mentioned when Colonel Ted Westhusing died from an apparently self-inflicted wound, some time after receiving an anonymous letter alleging corruption, the murder of Iraqis by the commandos, and the direct involvement of USIS contractors in killings. One investigation by the LA Times suggested that the gun shot that killed Westhusing actually may have come from fellow contractors frightened that he would spill the beans^[9]. But the military has closed its case, and USIS is still employed.

Pace's revelations led to a number of commandos being fired, but the outfit continues to be responsible for atrocities and crimes. In September this year, robbers wearing police commando uniforms stole $550,000 from an armoured truck - one week after a US Committee led by retired Marine Gen. James Jones called for the disbanding of the commandos.^[10] Disbandment is unlikely, since the SPC is entrusted with relieving much of the burden from the US army. Checkpoints in parts of Iraq with a strong resistance presence are manned by this outfit. In Sammara earlier this year, one such checkpoint was targeted by a suicide attack, and five commandos were killed^[11]. Earlier, another SPC checkpoint in Diwaniyah was attacked, with two commandos killed.^[12]

The early advertising of a 'Salvador Option', drawn from the example of death squads in El Salvador, was an indication that the SPC's deadly operations would not exactly be shrouded in secrecy. Mainstream news reporters were quickly admitted to SPC buildings and were able to report on blood-spattered rooms and tortured screams. True, the media reliably showed little interest, and much of what was reported came through a few independent journalists, but I suspect that the information could have been much more tightly controlled than it was. More important was the element of 'plausible denial' (speaking in the broadest possible terms here), so that now it looks as if the US will put the SPC's behaviour down to its capture by entrepreneurial and sectional interests. Yet, it isn't as if this is an independent Iraqi body. It is funded, managed and trained by the US, populated by its closest allies and clients, driven by its agenda, operates where it is allowed with the means it is given. It takes its orders from the US army, and the Ministry of Interior that it operates from is riddled with US diplomatic and military advisors. In the circumstances of an increasingly occult occupation, with powers and funds devolved to all sorts of unaccountable and private bodies, it provides an excellent conduit for terror and black ops in Iraq. It is usually futile trying to second guess the way such bodies will operate in real time, but the main answer to the question in the title appears to be that they have achieved an extraordinary level of success on behalf of the occupiers; are now locking down the main arteries in and out of city centres on their behalf; and are probably therefore permitted a wide leeway for criminal activity and the pursuit of their own turf wars.

Footnotes
^[1] Raymond Whittaker, 'Forgotten hostages back in spotlight'; Iraq kidnap, The Independent on Sunday, 9 December 2007
^[2]Peter Maass, 'The Way of the Commandos', New York Times Magazine, 1 May 2005; 'Gangs of Iraq: Interview with General Petraeus', PBS Frontline, 11 October 2006
^[3]Andrew Buncombe and Patrick Cockburn, 'Iraq's Death Squads: On the Brink of Civil War', The Independent, 26 February 2006
^[4] Michael Howard, 'Iraq slips towards civil war after attack on Shia shrine', The Guardian, 23 February 2006
^[5]Ali al-Fadhily, 'IRAQ: RESIDENTS SAY SEGREGATION, NOT SURGE, DECREASED KILLINGS', Interpress Service, 13 November 2007
^[6]Kim Sengupta, ‘Operation Enduring Chaos’, The Independent on Sunday, 29 October 2006
^[7]See the testimony of Gerald F. Burke, Former Major, Massachusetts State Police and former Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Police, reproduced in full in ‘Veterans, Expert Testify About the Bush Administration's Conduct in War in Iraq’, US Newswire, 12 October 2006
^[8]'DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE BLOGGERS ROUNDTABLE WITH BRIGADIER GENERAL DAVID PHILLIPS, DEPUTY COMMANDING GENERAL, CIVILAN POLICE ASSISTANCE TRAINING TEAM', Federal News Service, 21 September 2007
^[9]T Christian Miller, 'Soldier's journey ends in anguish', Los Angeles Times, 4 December 2005
^[10] Lauren Frayer, 'Bandits in police uniforms steal US$550,000 from armored truck in east Baghdad', Associated Press, 13 September 2007
^[11]Amit R Paley, '2007 Toll A Record For U.S. In Iraq', Washington Post, 7 November 2007
^[12] 'Suicide bomber attacks Sunni office in Iraq', Agence France Press, 26 October 2007

Labels: iraq, occupation, special police commandos, US imperialism

Latest Iraqi Resistance Stats posted by lenin

The December 2007 report to Congress is here [pdf]. I keep wondering when we'll see the same for Afghanistan, because the information is - however biased by selection and interpretation - a useful antidote to the corporate media. The emphasis is, unsurprisingly, on the (temporary) success of the vicious counterinsurgency strategy over the last year. I daresay the strategy will have produced even bloodier results than in previous years, particularly given the dramatic escalation in the air war over the last year that I discuss below. There has, according to these figures, been a dramatic reduction in all kinds of attack, whether sectarian or resistance, against civilians or troops.

This is the culmination of a number of factors, and these should be a cause for some pain and some triumph. The first is clearly the successful strategy of coopting tribal elements in the 'Sunni triangle', which would once have been the main source of resistance attacks - they are attacking 'Al Qaeda' more and the troops less. The second is the successful strategy of bombing the place to smithereens - it is a weakness of the antiwar movement that we couldn't see this coming and stop it, and we bear some responsibility for it. The defiling of Iraqi cities has undoubtedly destroyed the base and core of several resistance outfits. The geographical mastery of the US, emphasised in news reports during the early months of the occupation, has borne fruit. They have regained a certain intelligence footing and a measure of the enemy that has enabled them to hit hard against the resistance. There should be no euphemism about this: while it isn't a story of long-term defeat, it is a set-back for the resistance. However. The third factor, and very important, is the culmination of success on the part of the southern resistance: it is widely acknowledged that the withdrawal of the British troops dramatically reduced violence in the areas it controlled. Recent surveys from the south of Iraq show that its residents deeply regret the occupation, despite it having been one of the less violent areas of the occupation, and one of the areas least likely to have benefited in any sense by the rule of the Ba'ath party. The occupation could be, and proved to be, much worse than Saddam (how about that, by the way?). The final factor is the success of the strategy of disintegrating Iraq along ethnic lines. People feel far more secure in their own neighbourhood than in anywhere else in the country - what would once have been their own country, from top to bottom. Balkanisation is a disgusting strategy, but isn't always an unsuccessful one. I'm afraid that the reduction in 'ethno-sectarian' violence is actually a result of succesful ethnic cleansig (although, who knows, perhaps the occupiers' death squads have been asked to tone it down a bit). At any rate, here are the relevant tables (click to enlarge as always):








Some reports refer to the resistance holding back and bunkering down during America's recent infliction of airborne death on Iraqi cities, and so one would expect an upturn shortly. But never forget that, as with Vietnam, they can always win if we don't tie one hand behind their backs. They can always inflict genocide, destroy the country, turn Iraqi communities to pink mist and brick dust, disperse chemicals that burn their flesh and lungs and sizzle their bones, send death squads in to drill holes in bodies, shred working class housing blocks with bullets and shrapnel - oh wait... well, let's say they can do much, much more of that.

Labels: bring da ruckus, iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

Mutiny posted by lenin

Democracy Now has the remarkable story of how a group of US troops in Iraq, having ust emerged from a powerful IED attack, rebelled agaist their military commanders and refused to go out on patrols on the grounds that their rage might end up producing a massacre. The unit in question is apparently that which has been hardest hit by the Iraqi resistance. The Army Times reporter interviewed by DN is full of sanctimonious crap about this sort of mutiny being encouraged by mental health professionals and the new ethical disposition of the US army, but it seems far more likely that these guys are sick to death of being put in dangerous and morally repugnant positions. It's happening with increasing frequency. There are two main factors bringing this about: the antiwar movement, and the Iraqi resistance. A stronger antiwar movement would weaken troop morale further, and strengthen the resistance. So there are no excuses: you know where to be.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

World Against War - International Peace Conference posted by left turn

Watch all videos from the conference here.

Labels: afghanistan, anti-war, cairo, conference, hezbollah, iran, iraq, occupation, palestine, peace, turkey

Collaborators posted by lenin

Or, harbingers of permanent civil war.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

"Your history, bourgeoisie, is written on this wall. It is not a difficult text to decipher." posted by lenin

Labels: Israel, occupation, palestine

All Sweetness and Light posted by lenin

You'd think that after killing over 1.2 million people, driving 4 million of them out of their country, and destroying said country in every respect, it would take a little bit more before they started bragging again. Yet, here we are. The worst year of a disastrous occupation, every sordid criminal aspect of a sordid epic crime peaking in the first half of the year - and they're bragging. 20,000 refugees are said (by the puppet government) to have retured, doubtless a staggering success. (Actually, it turns out even these figures are massively exaggerated). US deaths have decreased in the latter half of the year (in part due to a horrendous increase in the use of aerial attacks - who knows with what effect on the civilian population), and so we are once again in happyland, with happy shining Iraqis holding hands and bold US troops smoking out the remaining lurkers and riff-raff. Watching some of the news reports is like being exposed to the Laughing Policeman for half an hour. The laughing gas is pumped into every sitting room in the land, not to reverse the polls (can't do that), nor to get the GOP in again (have to rig the elections for that), nor even to get the flags waving again (who's got the energy after a day of overwork?). No, it's to soften the blow when the airstrikes hit Iran - well, we pulled Iraq back together, despite the ingratitude and intransigence of its population, why not Iran? In this light, it's worth considering the laboratory of repression that is Iraq: collective punishment, mass imprisonment, sniper terrorism, the usual. To which, Iraqis respond with increasing opposition to the occupation. All sweetness and light, a joy soon to be seen in Tehran and then - ooh, Damascus, Beirut, Pyongyang, wherever the liberation train takes a stop.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

Afghanistan: 54% Taliban coverage, and the Nato+ solution posted by lenin

The pro-occupation think-tank, the Senlis Council, has another report [pdf] out about Afghanistan. It reports that the Taliban has a presence covering at least 54% of the land mass in Afghanistan, and is closing in on Kabul. Missed by polls and media coverage, the report suggests that the Taliban are rapidly winning political credibility among those who hated them six years ago. The international combatants of 'Al Qaeda' are said to be bolstering the insurgency, but ordinary people are increasingly being won over. Part of the problem, the report says, is that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding despite massive cashflows into the country, with conditions worse than in the worst parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This is a map describing Taliban presence in parts of Afghanistan:



However, what's most intriguing is the Council's support for a very hawkish policy of the kind being pushed by the bipartisan imperialists in the US Houses of Congress. The proposal is simple: given that there is no intention of withdrawing, a huge boost in troop commitment has to be demanded of all NATO members, and the war has to be expanded into Pakistan. The Taliban is known to operate across borders, and the Pakistani army is reluctant to engage in battle with them for a variety of reasons. Clearly, part of the US pressure on Musharraf is aimed at his inability to be a reliable puppet, while Benazir Bhutto's rhetoric about 'extremists' is clearly intended to capture that vital Washington constituency. There have already been cross-border attacks, but would Bhutto or any future Pakistani government permit the US to operate extensively in Pakistan? Would such actions hinder or boost the popular movement resisting Musharraf's dictatorship? The report doesn't ponder on such questions, or the obvious answers.

Perhaps most importantly, the report states that 'foreign fighters' from across what Brzezinski calls the "global Balkans" including Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, are acting as force-multipliers for the Taliban insurgency. How much of this is real information and how much is 'intelligence' obtained through torture, or straightforward propaganda? Unlike other parts of the report, which comprises some independent research, much of this appears to be distilled from pro-imperialist think-tanks and Western newspapers. At any rate, though the report strikes a technocratic note, the context makes clear that the "Nato+" solution would constitute an aggressive strike to bring south Asia under US hegemony. When both Obama and Clinton make noises about potential aggression in Pakistan, we have to take it as a warning sign. This war may send the whole region up in flames.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, taliban, US imperialism