Juan Cole: A surge of phony spin on Iraq
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By Juan Cole
reposted at
http://majorconflict.blogspot.com/2007/08/power-of-positive-lying.html
originally from
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/08/07/surge/
and by Juan Cole
http://www.juancole.com/
Monday, August 6, 2007
Bush's backers are peddling a sunny view of the president's strategy
-- despite Iraq's political chaos and soaring death counts.
By Juan Cole
(Salon.com)
Aug. 7, 2007 | As Congress prepared to go on its August recess,
Pentagon officials and White House backers were desperately spinning
as a success this year's escalation of U.S. troop levels in Iraq. A
recent poll shows that there has been a 10 percent uptick in the
proportion of Americans who think the so-called surge, first announced
by President George W. Bush in January, is having a beneficial effect.
But how accurate are the sunny pronouncements coming out of
Washington? What would constitute a success for the surge, and how
likely is it to be achieved?
The troop escalation was intended to calm down Baghdad and to give the
government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki breathing room to pursue
a political reconciliation, especially with the Sunni Arab population.
But the political goals of the surge are simply not being accomplished
-- and indeed, the political situation has deteriorated
substantially.
Maliki has lost even the few Sunni Arab allies he began with; the
Sunni Arab coalition, called the Iraqi Accord Front, that had actually
been in his government has now had its cabinet ministers tender their
resignations. He has not held further reconciliation talks with
dissident Sunni Arab groups. The Sunni Arab guerrilla groups are
thinking of forming an opposition political party in hopes of
extending their efforts to topple his government into the political
sphere. His relations with Sunni Arab neighbors are so bad that Saudi
Arabia declined his request to visit Riyadh.
Developments on other fronts are equally grim. The Maliki government
has lost the confidence of three other political parties, the Islamic
Virtue Party (15 seats in parliament), the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-
Sadr (30 seats), and just on Monday, the Iraqi National List led by
former appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. All have pulled their
ministers from his government. The government of the major province of
Basra, source of Iraq's petroleum exports and its major port, has
collapsed. The governor, from the Islamic Virtue Party, failed a vote
of no confidence by the provincial council, spearheaded by a rival
Shiite faction, but he refuses to resign even though Maliki backed his
removal. And if Basra collapses socially and with regard to security,
it is unlikely that the Baghdad government can survive.
Administration supporters have been upbeat about the way in which some
Sunni Arab populations, especially in al-Anbar Province, have turned
against the foreign jihadi volunteers that were behind much mindless
violence. These jihadis, styled "al-Qaida" by the Bush administration,
however, were never the core of the insurgency. Politically speaking,
the Sunni Arab Iraqi opposition to the foreign volunteers does not
imply that the Sunnis are reconciled to the Maliki government. On the
contrary, the Arab press reports substantial support in al-Anbar for
the withdrawal by the Iraqi Accord Front from the Maliki government,
on the grounds that the prime minister heads a narrow Shiite sectarian
regime that holds thousands of innocent Sunnis in prison and has been
implicated in Shiite ethnic cleansing of Sunnis.
And what of the supposed "good news" on the military side of the
equation? Before July ended, a spate of wire service and newspaper
reports began appearing, saying that only 74 U.S. troops had been
killed by Iraqi guerrillas that month, the lowest total since November
and a sign that the surge was working. But the reporters and editors
who gave U.S. headlines such as "U.S. Death Toll in Iraq in July
Expected to Be Lowest in '07" (New York Times) were being assiduously
spun. Bush officials were undoubtedly pushing the information that
produced these headlines in an attempt to give Republicans in Congress
some good news to take back to their constituents during the August
recess.
In late July, CNN interviewed Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, war
propagandist-in-chief in Baghdad, about the casualty numbers,
reporting,
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commanding general of the Multi-National
Corps-Iraq, called the development in recent weeks "an initial
positive sign." "This is what we thought would happen once we get
control of the real key areas that are controlled by these
terrorists," Odierno said at a press conference. At the same time, he
said, "I need a bit more time to make an assessment of whether it's a
true trend or not."
Odierno's performance was unconvincing to anyone who knew the score.
He was speaking on July 24, well before the month had ended. By the
time all the casualties were counted and reported (not until early
August), icasualties.org was giving the July toll as 80, only one less
than in March, during the opening stages of the surge.
Worse, comparisons to previous months in the spring don't take into
account the searing summer environment. Baghdad in July is one of
those torrid colonial locales of which Noel Coward was speaking in his
1923 song when he wrote that only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in
the midday sun." The dip in casualties is always substantial in July,
since guerrillas usually prefer not to operate with heavy explosives
when it is 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.
And as a tally noted on Foreign Policy magazine's blog, the number of
U.S. troop deaths in July, compared with previous years of the war, is
anything but a turn for the better:
July 2003: 48
July 2004: 54
July 2005: 54
July 2006: 43
July 2007: 80
Meanwhile, the statistics for the hapless Iraqis themselves are no
less encouraging. According to icasualties.org, the Iraqi civilian and
military death toll from political violence in July 2007 was 1,690, a
25 percent increase from the July 2006 number, 1,280. (There was also
a 25 percent increase in Iraqi casualties in July 2007 over June 2007,
meaning the trend was going in the wrong direction any way you look at
it.) These statistics -- bad enough as they are -- are typically
understated by a substantial margin because passive tallying by media
outlets misses many deaths.
On CNN's "This Week at War" for July 28, Michael O'Hanlon of the
Brookings Institution said of Iraq, "I think we have reduced the
amount of violence overall, but not to the point where the psychology
has fundamentally changed, and Iraqi political leaders are not helping
much yet in this process."
But by what measure, exactly, have "we reduced" the "amount of
violence"? The continual reports of bombings and casualties in Iraq
can have a numbing effect, but consider this: Iraq's population is one-
eleventh the size of America's. If people were being killed on a
similar scale here, we would have seen more than 18,000 deaths in July
alone from bombings and political assassinations. (And this number
would not even count ordinary criminal homicides, which are common in
Iraq.)
Surely if the troop escalation has been working, then the number of
guerrilla attacks must be declining, right? But as recently as June,
according to a report by Reuters, daily attacks by guerrillas that
month hit an astounding all-time high of 177.8 per day on average.
That is, not since May 1, 2003, have there been as many attacks per
day as in June 2007, with a total of 5,334. May's total number of
attacks was similar, and year to year, the number of attacks in June
was 46 percent greater than in June 2006. About 18 percent of the
operations in June targeted civilians, and a slightly higher
percentage were aimed at Iraqi security forces. The remainder, more
than 60 percent, were aimed at U.S. troops (guerrillas launched 3,671
attacks on U.S. troops in June alone, up 7 percent from May).
Guerrillas pulled off numerous horrific bombings throughout July, many
of them in central Baghdad under the noses of the U.S. military
commanders. On a single day in late July, wire services reported
nearly 150 deaths from political violence throughout the country,
including three bombings in downtown Baghdad. Recent weeks have seen
worrisome political assassinations continue, roiling civil society.
Two senior aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani were cut down in the
Shiite holy city of Najaf, raising fears that the spiritual leader
(who is one of the few forces for peace in the country) might himself
be assassinated, sparking a blood bath. On July 10, guerrillas stormed
the home of Abdul Hamid Saleh, mayor of the major Sunni city of
Samarra north of the capital, and dispatched him. The head of Mosul's
election commission was shot to death. On July 26, gunmen in downtown
Baghdad rubbed out the general director of the Housing and
Construction Ministry. On the 27th, the head of the Lawyers Guild in
Basra was assassinated. Sectarian death squads execute an average of
20 residents of Baghdad every day, leaving their corpses in the
streets for police to find. The majority of the victims are Sunni
Arabs.
Some proponents of the surge may have rightly argued that an effort
to take on the guerrillas and militias will produce higher casualties
in the short term -- but some of them are also saying the strategy has
already begun working and is producing lower casualties and more
security for Iraqis, which is a blatant falsehood.
What has surged is not calm or political compromise, but rather the
number of guerrilla attacks, the number of U.S. troop deaths compared
to the same months in previous years, and the number of Iraqi
casualties. That some of the U.S. media and the U.S. public have
allowed themselves to be manipulated into thinking the "numbers" from
Iraq are a cause for optimism echoes the sloppy and wishful thinking
that got U.S. into this mess in the first place.
Iraqi access to electricity and even food and water has fallen, 2
million have been displaced internally and another million abroad
since April of 2003. That is not encouraging, to say the least. The
"national unity government" of Prime Minister al-Maliki is on the
brink of total collapse, as the bad news piles up.
Indeed, the power of positive thinking is an old American value. But
sometimes it causes people to fall for pyramid schemes, or even worse.