Northman's Fury

The recent drop in casualties in Iraq is variously credited to different causes depending on political persuasion, with the "Surge" being the popular one for those who supported it, even if it morphed into something quite different during its implementation.

One of the other big reasons for the drop was the cease-fire declared by Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, and William Lind sees something quite ominous in that.

The Sunday, November 18 New York Times made passing mention of a possible clue. It suggested that the Mahdi Army and some other Shiites have backed away from confronting the U.S. because Iran asked them to.

If that is true, it bumps the same question up a level. Why are the Iranians asking their allies in Iraq to give us a break? I doubt it is out of charity, or fear, although elements within Iran that do not want a war with the United States seem to be gaining political strength.

Here's a hypothesis. What if the Iranians had determined, rightly or wrongly (and I suspect rightly), that the Bush administration has already decided to attack Iran before the end of its term? Two actions would seem logical on their part. First, try to maneuver the Americans into the worst possible position on the moral level by denying them pretexts for an attack. Telling their allied Shiite militias in Iraq to cool it would be part of that, as would reducing the flow of Iranian arms to Iraqi insurgents and improving cooperation with the international community on the nuclear issue. We see evidence of the latter two actions as well as the first.

Second, they would tell their allies in Iraq to keep their powder dry. Back off for now, train, build up stocks of weapons and explosives and work out plans for what they will do as their part of the Iranian counter-attack. Counter-attack there will certainly be, on the ground against our forces in Iraq, in one form or another. In almost all possible counter-attack scenarios, it would be highly valuable to Iran if the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias could cut the Americans' supply lines running up from Kuwait and slow down their movements so that they could not mass their widely dispersed forces. In John Boyd's phrase, it would be a classic Cheng-Chi operation.

I still hope that the professionals in the US military will dissuade the idiots in the White House from any adventuresome meddling in Iran, but there are some signs that military action may be forthcoming.

The above scenario is plausible, and something to think about.

Despite the fact that Iraq and U.S. officials have made water projects among their top priorities, the percentage of Iraqis without access to decent water supplies has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent since the start of the U.S.-led war, according to an analysis by Oxfam International last summer. The portion of Iraqis lacking decent sanitation was even worse -- 80 percent.

Now, though, some U.S. officials think they're about to make progress.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using more than $1 billion in reconstruction funds, is building massive water treatment plants in urban areas, including one in the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City.

Construction crews over the last three years, working there under heavy guard, have constructed a treatment plant that will produce an additional 25 million gallons of drinking water daily, enough for nearly 200,000 people. Miles of new water lines are also being installed, allowing 2 million of Sadr City's residents to tap directly into the new plant and existing water supplies.

In Nasiriyah, a $277 million water treatment facility is to be handed over to Iraqis in December. It is billed as the largest facility of its kind in Iraq and is designed to provide clean drinking water for an estimated half-million people in southern Iraq.

As many as 1,500 water treatment and sewage projects have been completed, with 150 more in progress, according to the corps of engineers.

Given the record of US reconstruction projects in Iraq, I'm not too hopeful the situation is going to improve. Hell, they say they've completed 1,500 projects while watching the situation grow steadily worse, with only 10% of that number now in progress.

However, if we ignore the fact that the Bush administration's policy of giving contracts to incompetent cronies generally dooms any and all reconstruction projects before they start, the idea of using the relative security the current lull has afforded them to try and get some rebuilding done is a very good one.

Granted, the original point of the surge was to create breathing space for the Iraqi government to come to some sort of power-sharing arrangement, but that wasn't going anywhere, and the current strategy of arming local groups to self-police is at cross purposes to it. The Iraqis are the only ones who can decide how the power will be shared and the US is stuck as observer, how ever much they like to pretend otherwise.

But while the US can't force the Iraqis into peaceful coexistence, they can affect the quality of life by actually accomplishing the reconstruction they've been promising since they blew everything up to begin with. Bring some actual, tangible, benefits to the Iraqis, and they may be less inclined to plant land-mines along your patrol routes.

Probably too late to make much difference, but unlike slaughtering their allies, rebuilding, at least, isn't going to hurt their chances.

Two stories from Afghanistan provide a very ugly confluence regarding our tactics in Afghanistan and how effective our leadership is,

The first is about our troops killing an Afghan civilian on Friday. The CanWest headline reads:

Canadian soldiers shoot Afghan civilian in self-defence, ISAF says

That alone should tell you there's a problem, since civilians are by definition supposed to be non-combatants. You can't defend yourself from someone who isn't attacking you.

Canadian troops shot and killed an Afghan civilian and wounded another, the International Security Assistance Force and Canadian military said late Friday.

. . .

ISAF said a taxi had approached a patrol convoy Thursday, and had ignored visual signs to stop.

"Warning shots were fired and the ISAF troops then carried on with their patrol," a news release late Friday said.

So they fired "warning" shots directly into the cab, killing and wounding its occupants, and drove on without stopping to see what effect their "warning" shots might have had.

This is not the first such incident, and the patrol was following what appears to be standard operating procedures. The reason this is so ugly, beyond the immediate deaths of innocent Afghans, is because when things like this happen, it makes the local population far more supportive of things like this:

Two Canadian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter were killed Saturday after the vehicle they were travelling in struck a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, a military official said.

And what truly rankles me is the crass stupidity of the military spokesperson:

"The area is fairly active in terms of insurgent activities," Juneau said. "However, you have to understand that the insurgents are desperate for a spectacular event or spectacular victory that would help them finish the fighting season on a high note.

"They haven't been very successful so far this season," he added.

I'll leave it to salvage whether or not he needs to add this to his desperation watch, but seeing our military spout the same tired talking points of the Americans in Iraq is as disheartening as the fact that our military seems to have decided to copy their tactics.

And given the fact that the Afghan insurgency has killed more coalition troops this year than any other since the US invaded in 2001, in a trend of steady increases, would Col. Juneau mind telling us just what he thinks "successful" would be? Guerillas win so long as they don't lose, and its pretty clear that the Afghan forces are far from defeated.

When our leadership is more interested in PR than proper strategy, there is no chance that things are going to turn out well.