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Tomgram: Gareth Porter on Standing Up an Army Bent on Revenge

Here are a few headlines from stories you probably didn't even see this week (and they could be multiplied numerous times over):

"Another day of bloodshed in Iraq"
"Senior Sunni official killed in Iraq"
"U.S. Private Contractors leaving Iraq"
"Three Civilians, Seven GIs Killed in Iraq"
"Twelve U.S. servicemembers killed in Iraq since Friday"

These usually turn out to be little more than humdrum news roundups, accounts of incidents that are so much a part of the norm as hardly to be news any more. Such generic tales of small human disasters are produced regularly by the wire services and, in papers all over the country, are cut down and stuffed away deep on their inside pages. Such sets of incidents also appear in our major papers as little paragraphs piled one atop another like so much news rubble at the back end of reports on what's really new in Iraq. (Check out, for example, Robert Worth's piece in the Tuesday New York Times, "Kurd to Preside at Hussein Trial, Set to Resume Today.")

Americans die repetitively in roadside bombings. A doctor, who worked at the Iraqi Health Ministry, is assassinated in a drive-by shooting. In Mosul, unknown gunmen kill Jasim Muhammad of the Kurdistan Democratic Party as he leaves his home. Seven truckloads of men dressed in Iraqi commando uniforms ("which are easily obtained in Iraq"), who may or may not belong to the government security forces, drive into a Sunni neighborhood in northwestern Baghdad, break into a mosque and homes, round up men, shoot 3, abduct perhaps 20, and the next day 16 dead bodies are discovered and believed to be "related to the abduction of Sunni Arab men in northwestern Baghdad." A senior official of a government department that manages Sunni mosques is shot to death by unidentified gunmen in a passing vehicle. (As with many murdered Shiite and Sunni clergymen, no one takes responsibility.) A member of Parliament, Jabir Khalifa al-Jabir, narrowly escapes assassination when gunmen open up on his car. His bodyguard dies and his son is reportedly injured. Police discover a body, blindfolded and handcuffed, in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, and a blindfolded, bound body dumped in the Euphrates River near the town of Musayyib with a single bullet wound to the head. A group of 35 Sunni Iraqis, who unsuccessfully applied for admission to the police academy in the capital, disappear while on a bus trip home; 23 bodies, believed to be from this group are found Sunday, another 8 Monday "in a field north of Baghdad." No one knows "whether they were killed by Sunni hard-liners opposed to the recruitment program or Shiite extremists who want to keep the rival sect out of police ranks." Two policemen are killed and eight wounded by a roadside bomb in the city of Baquba. Nine bodyguards, escorts working for an engineer employed by a cell-phone company, are ambushed and murdered in Baghdad. The engineer is kidnapped (as are two German engineers working on a crucial, much embattled oil refinery in Baiji -- and, as all the world knows, the kidnapped Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll remains missing and under the threat of death). And this very partial list doesn't begin to cover not just all the killings reported somewhere in the back columns or bottom paragraphs of press pieces this last week, but the many killings of Iraqis that make no paper or list or record of any sort. These fall below the radar screen even of the statistics of violence -- of the 34,131 attacks attributed to the insurgency in 2005 (an overall increase of 29% over the previous year and a doubling of roadside bombings), not to speak of the bloody "rules of engagement" that American forces employ, guaranteeing massive "collateral damage." Many of these unknown and barely recorded deaths are now attributable to increasingly fierce and bitter internecine communal struggles among Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish groups.

It is to this Iraq that Gareth Porter, author of Perils of Dominance, gives grim shape, making sense of at least a significant part of such rising levels of violence (and the Bush administration policies that have helped to shape them) in the piece that follows. As long as Washington remains determined to stay in Iraq in some form, every month is likely to be worse than the last and, in the end, departure itself may prove the final catastrophe. The last illusion for Americans is that, whatever the reasons for our invasion and occupation, we still remain part of the solution in Iraq rather than the motor for the problem itself. Tom

"Maybe they just need to have their civil war"
Fueling Sectarian Violence in Iraq
By Gareth Porter

Since last summer, the ad-jingle-style centerpiece of the U.S. mission in Iraq, as defined by George Bush, has been: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." In recent months, that "standing up" of Iraqi security forces to gradually replace American occupation troops has become even more important in administration pronouncements on the war. The objective is now accepted as self-evident wisdom in the mainstream media and among the punditocracy, the only question being whether it can be successfully accomplished. The Democratic Party leadership has not challenged this goal in any way, even as Democrats complain that it is simply not being done fast enough or effectively enough.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 1:12 AM