The REAL surge -- is the surge in public relations bull*** from Bush and the Iraqis

Why Iraq Could Blow Up in John McCain's Face
By PATRICK COCKBURN

In Baghdad the Iraqi government is eager to give the impression that
peace is returning. "Not a single sectarian murder or displacement was
reported in over a month," claimed Brigadier Qasim Ata, the spokesman
for the security plan for the capital. In the US, the Surge, the
dispatch of 30,000 extra American troops in the first half of 2007, is
portrayed as having turned the tide in Iraq. Democrats in Congress no
longer call aggressively for a withdrawal of American troops. The
supposed military success in Iraq has been brandished by Senator John
McCain as vindication of his prowar stance.

Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is
happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Cocooned behind
the walls of the Green Zone, defended by everybody from US soldiers to
Peruvian and Ugandan mercenaries, the government of prime minister
Nouri al-Maliki pumps out alluring tales of life returning to normal
that border on fantasy. For instance, Brigadier Ata made his claim
that there had been no sectarian murders or expulsions in the capital
over the previous month on February 15, but two weeks earlier, on
February 1, suicide bombers, whom the government said were al-Qa'ida,
had blown themselves up killing 99 people in two bird markets in
Baghdad, both situated in largely Shia districts.

So keen are the authorities to show that Sunni and Shia have stopped
killing each other and overall violence is down that many deaths with
an obvious sectarian motive are no longer recorded. "I think the real
figure for the number of people being killed is about twice what the
government says it is," said one local politician. He had just sent
the death certificates of the victims of sectarian killers to the
military authorities, who were steadfastly refusing to admit that
anybody had died at the time and place that the bodies were
discovered.

One day after Brigadier Ata claimed that there had been no sectarian
killings or abductions over the previous month, prime minister Maliki
himself went on a walk about in central Baghdad to demonstrate just
how safe things have become. But it was the precautions taken by
Maliki's bodyguards which were more revealing about the real state of
security in the city.

Maliki's brief venture onto the streets and out of the Green Zone took
place in the al-Mansur district of west Baghdad. This is an area of
big houses and many embassies, but has been heavily fought over by
Sunni and Shia in the past year. "I was in Mansur on Saturday
afternoon," an Iraqi friend told me, "when, at about 3.15pm, I noticed
a strange movement in the street, which was suddenly flooded by
soldiers in green uniforms, led by generals and colonels, who were
checking parked cars and all the buildings." Minutes later a large
convoy of vehicles appeared, with three US army Humvees in front and
behind, and, in the middle, five black armoured four wheel drives They
stopped in front of a famous ice cream shop called al-Ruwaad, but for
fifteen minutes nobody got out of the vehicles as soldiers searched
all the shops nearby. When officials and their guards did begin to
emerge Maliki was in the middle of them and began to walk around.

"Everybody was scared when they saw him because they thought his
presence might lead to an attack," reported my friend. "Some women
began to run away and I thought it was too dangerous for me to stay. I
heard that Maliki gave 500,000 Iraqi dinars [£200] each to a woman who
said her husband had been killed in a bomb explosion and a blind
beggar." Maliki also bought two suits from a well-known shop called
Mario Zengotti, which promptly shut down, the owner presumably
calculating that Baghdad is full of people who might kill him for
selling clothes to the prime minister.

Baghdad is 'better' than it was, but the improvement is only in
comparison to the bloodbath of 2006 when 3,000 people were being
killed every month. People stay inside their own Sunni or Shia
ghettoes. I drove one night through west Baghdad at 8 pm, sitting in
the back of a police car with a second military vehicle full of
heavily armed soldiers and police behind. Though I was driving in the
heart of the capital I saw only three civilian cars during a three or
four mile journey through a maze of military checkpoints and
fortifications. In Shia-dominated east Baghdad, where there has been
less fighting, there are more shops open but few customers. Overall
the city the city is still frozen in fear. The growth in the number of
checkpoints is not entirely good news because it has always been a
favorite tactic of kidnappers and death squads to set up fake
checkpoints to stop and identify potential victims. More reassuring is
the knowledge that the Mehdi Army militiamen, the military wing of
Shia clerics Muqtada al-Sadr's movement, who killed so many Sunni at
the height of the slaughter, are still abiding by a strictly-enforced
six month ceasefire on the orders of their leader. The killings have
not stopped but there are less of them.

Baghdad is entirely divided between Sunni and Shia and the
sectarianism is as deep seated as it was before fall in violence. In
many areas, say Iraqis bitterly, "the killing stopped because there
was nobody left to kill." There are very few mixed neighborhoods left.
Just beneath the surface the Mehdi Army still exists as a parallel
government in Shia areas, which means most of the city. A friend who
was trying to sell a large house for $300,000 had to pay a $25,000
bribe to government officials to get the sale registered. No sooner
had he paid this than the Mehdi Army demanded a further $15,000 for
the sale to go through, money he reluctantly paid on the grounds it
was too risky to refuse. Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in
the world. This explains why so few of the 2.2 million Iraqis who have
fled abroad, mostly to Jordan and Syria, or the one million forced
from their homes within Iraq, are coming home, despite the fact that
many families exist miserably in a single rented room in Damascus or
Amman.

Again, the Iraqi government has tried to prove the contrary. Last
December it paid for a highly publicized convoy of buses to bring
Iraqis home from Syria, the exercise geared to giving the impression
that a flood of people was returning to peaceful Baghdad.
Unfortunately, it never happened. Three months later, despite much
tougher Syrian visa regulations, the flow is still out of Iraq. The
latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees show that the
number of Iraqis entering Syria from Iraq was 1,200 a day in late
January "while an average of 700 are going back to Iraq from Syria."

Baghdad is now divided along sectarian lines like Beirut or Belfast.
The Surge, along with the Mehdi Army truce, the emergence of al-Sahwa,
the anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni movement, have all helped to freeze in place
the demographic outcome of the ferocious battle for control of Baghdad
which took place after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on
February 22, 2006. It was a struggle which was won by the Shia with
the Sunni, always a minority, being pushed back into a few enclaves,
mostly in west Baghdad or being forced to leave Iraq. They make up
disproportionate number of the refugees in Syria and Jordan and many,
particularly of the better educated, will never return. The Shia also
suffered, but they outnumber the Sunni by three to one in Iraq as a
whole and they now control 75 per cent of the capital. It was this
crucial battle for Baghdad and central Iraq, which, far more than the
Surge, has determined the political landscape of Iraq for the
foreseeable future.

The shooting may have died down for the moment, but the butchery of
2006 and early 2007 has left a legacy of hatred and fear. Even the
most liberal-minded Sunni and Shia no longer feel at ease in each
other's company. The history of one family from al-Khudat, a middle
class Sunni neighborhood in west Baghdad, explains why city is going
to remain divided. In this case the victims were Shia, but what
happened to them, and how they reacted to it, is typical of refugee
families elsewhere in Iraq. The family had lived in Khudat for thirty
years and were well liked by their Sunni neighbors. The father of the
family died two years ago leaving his fifty-five year old widow, Umm
Hadi, who had been a primary school teacher, along with four sons and
three daughters. Early in 2007 it became so dangerous for Shia in al-
Khudat that the family fled to Syria after asking the neighbors to
look after their house. Umm Hadi did not like it there. "We thought we
were just going for a short time," she says. "The Syrians mistreated
us and charged us a lot of money, so we decided to come back to
Baghdad at the beginning of 2008."

On Umm Hadi's return from Syria she and her family found that their
house had been taken by a Sunni family from al-Amel, another embattled
area, and they refused to leave. Umm Hadi and her sons, all grown up,
were too frightened to call the police or the Americans. Instead they
moved to Hurriya in north west Baghhdad, which once was mixed but is
now controlled by the Mehdi Army and the Shia. Hadi, the eldest
brother, who works as a carpenter was dispirited when asked on
February 1 what he intended to do. "We were so surprised," he said,
"that our house was taken and our dear neighbors allowed this to
happen. There is nothing we can do to force these people to leave
because they might retaliate by attacking me or my brothers or even
blow up the house." He was interrupted by his mother, Umm Hadi, her
face quivering with anger, who said she was not going to surrender so
easily. "It is true," said this former primary school teacher, "that
we are poor people, but that does not mean that we are weak. We can
call on our strong Shia arm [apparently referring to the Mehdi Army]
to get our house back. I have information that one of the sons of the
family that took it is working in a petrol station. It would be a good
message to send his dead body to them if they insist on staying." At
this point her sons interrupted their mother saying that she had
"suffered a lot since we came back to Iraq; she is a kind woman and
does not mean what she says." A week later, however, on February 8,
the father of the Sunni family who had taken their house, was found
shot dead in his car in west Baghdad.

Perplexity among non-Iraqis about what is going on in Iraq is stems
primarily from a failure to understand that ever since fall of Saddam
Hussein in 2003 there have been two wars being fought in the country.
One was between the US occupation forces and the Sunni, rulers of Iraq
down the centuries. This war had gone surprisingly well for the Sunni.
They had inflicted significant losses, now approaching 4,000 dead, on
the US army which, while not militarily crippling, were politically
unsustainable in America. But the Sunni were also fighting a second
war, this one against the Shia majority, and this war they were losing
badly. They had lost control of the Iraqi state machine with the fall
of the old regime. The elections of 2005 gave the Shia, in alliance
with the Kurds, control of parliament, the government, army and
police, though admittedly this was under partial American tutelage.
The Sunni came to regard the Interior Ministry as the headquarters of
the death squads. The Health Ministry was believed to have torture
chambers for Sunni in its basement. If this was not enough, the Sunni
were being squeezed by the murderous killers of al Qa'ida, who
slaughtered all who opposed them, and were seeking to set up a Taliban-
like enclave to be called the Islamic State of Iraq.

By the end of 2006 many Sunni leaders were coming to see that they
could not afford so many enemies. The non-al-Qa'ida Sunni guerrilla
groups were less fragmented than they looked, their common background
as Baathists, former military and security officers, and tribal
leaders, making it easier for them to make collective decisions. They
formed al-Sahwa, the Awakening movement, which was against al-Qa'ida
and allied to the Americans. It was also, though al Sahwa and the US
military played this down, either against the Iraqi government or not
under its control. The Americans themselves were surprised at the
speed with which the movement spread until there are some 80,000 al-
Sahwa fighters, armed and paid for by the US, which constitute a
powerful Sunni militia.

The US called the al-Sahwa fighters 'Concerned Local Citizens' and
later 'Sons of Iraq', seeking to give the impression that they were
simple tribal folk who had turned on al-Qaida. In reality they are the
same Sunni guerrillas who have been fighting the US for five years.
Their leaders have a very clear idea about what they are doing and
why. On 26 January I went to see Abu Marouf, whose full name is Karim
Ismail Hussein al-Zubai, the leader of 13,000 al-Sahwa fighters
between Fallujah and Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, a strategically
important area that has seen the heaviest fighting in the war. I
counted 27 checkpoints between central Baghdad and Abu Marouf's
headquarters in a half-ruined villa, hastily fortified with heavy
machine gun emplacements, down a rutted tracks running between
irrigation canals and reed beds near the village of Khandari. He
expressed anger with the Iraqi government for not giving him and his
men 'long term jobs in the security services' and the Americans for
not paying his men. He threatened to go to war against both in three
months unless his demands were met. A thin faced man in a brown suit
and a tie, he said he was a former security officer under Saddam and
later a fighter against the Americans. He would not say which
guerrilla group he belonged to, but he is believed to have been a
commander in 'the 1920 Revolution Brigades'. "If the Americans think
they can use us against al Qa'ida," he said, "and then push us to one
side they are mistaken." He expressed contempt for Nouri al-Maliki's
government as "the worst government in the world." Of the 13 divisions
in the Iraqi army most were Shia and half were made up of militiamen
controlled by Iran.

There is no doubt that these former Sunni guerrilla are very much in
control of the Fallujah as far south as an area which used to be known
as 'triangle of death' near Yusufiyah. The city of Fallujah itself,
scene of the climactic battle between Sunni fighters and US Marines in
November 2004, is run by police Colonel Feisal Ismail Hussain al-Zubai
who is Abu Marouf's elder brother. Like him he candidly admits that up
to the end of 2006, when he was appointed to his present job, "I was
fighting the Americans," he said. "If your country was occupied what
would you do?" Beside him on his desk is a picture of himself in
uniform as a young officer, along with other officers, in the Iraqi
army's Special Forces in which he served after 1983. He and his
brother use the word 'militia' to describe Shia-dominated
institutions. Asked why he had switched from fighting against the
Americans to fighting with them, Colonel Feisal said: "We decided
that, when we compared the Americans to the militia and al Qa'ida, we
should choose the Americans."

The present American strategy may look like smart politics back in
Washington. It is better to pay Sunni gunmen $300 a month to guard the
road rather than have them planting bombs in it to blow up American
Humvees. The US is losing one soldier dead a day compared to three or
four killed each day a year ago. Since American casualties are the
main barometer by which the US electorate views success or failure in
Iraq these are important figures in an election year. The lower
American casualties also reflect an important political change in
Iraq. The Sunni and Shia now hate and fear each other more than they
do the Americans. This puts the US in a stronger position because it
can control the balance of power between the two communities. Sunni in
Baghdad would prefer American soldiers to kick down their door in the
middle of the night than the Shia-dominated Iraqi army and police who
are likely to torture and kill them. In many ways the US position in
Iraq is like Syria's status in Lebanon, which resembles Iraq in its
ethnic fragmentation, between 1976 and 2005 when it partly occupied
the country. The Syrian army prevented the civil war escalating, but
also stopped anything being resolved between the different
communities.

Probably the US cannot play this intermediary role for so long. At the
end of the day neither Sunni nor Shia Arabs in Iraq want the US to
stay. It would be very easy for any of the myriad armed groups in Iraq
to launch an offensive and send American military casualties soaring.
With the rise of al-Sahwa, a powerful Sunni militia, the country is
more divided than ever. The Sunni now have their own private army as
do the Shia and the Kurds.

The greatest success of the Surge has been in terms of public
relations. Suddenly there is a perception in the US that 'things are
getting better in Iraq', though they are better only in terms of the
mass killings of 2006. In the struggle over who will hold power in
Iraq in the future nothing is decided and fighting, just as ferocious
as anything we have seen in the past, could erupt at any moment.

http://www.counterpunch.com/
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