Crikey

Downgraded from full scale catastrophe, Iraq has become just another foreign crisis, rarely worthy of the front page. In that sense, the US troop surge must be hailed as success. On its own terms, not so much.

The press coverage has focused on military successes (while ignoring the very Vietnam-like strategy of reducing US casualties through increased air strikes)

Yet the surge was advertised as a political intervention as much as a military one. Here’s President Bush announcing his plan:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

What were those benchmarks?

The Iraqi government was to take responsibility for security in Iraq’s provinces by November 2007. It promised to pass legislation fairly distributing oil revenue. It pledged to spend $10 billion dollars of its own money on infrastructure projects. It was supposed to hold provincial elections, and pass de-Baathification laws to allow Sunnis to re-enter political life.

A year later, none (count them) of those accountability measures has been met.

The deadline for Iraqi control over provincial security has crept steadily back: it’s now scheduled for July 2008. The oil laws are stalled, with the Kurds continuing to cut their own deals with foreign oil companies. Not only has the Iraqi government fallen entirely short of its own infrastructure targets, it’s provided incapable of spending the billions handed to it by the US. The provincial elections simply failed to happen.

As for de-Baathificaiton, the legislation was opposed by the very ex-Baathists it was supposed to assist. As Newsweek recently commented: “The complicated new law on de-Baathification has been, in the words of a senior Iraqi official, ‘a big mess, perhaps worse than if we had done nothing’.”

If anything, the past six months have brought heightened sectarianism to Iraq, with the falling levels of violence correlating with the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.

It’s not simply that Sunnis and Shiites have been driven into separate areas. As Andrew J. Bacevich explains:

By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents — an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops — U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: “We’re paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?”

In other words, there are short term solutions – and then there’s the effect of Balkanisation for decades to come.

Nonetheless, there’s one point on which Iraqis remain united. As Kevin Young explains:

Iraqis have consistently stated that the occupation is a destabilizing force in their country, that the situation would improve after a US withdrawal, and that the US has ulterior motives for staying in Iraq. Over the last four years, and in polls from a wide range of sources, Iraqis have been especially unequivocal on one point: that the US military occupation of their country produces more violence than it prevents.

But what would they know? They only live there.