It's January 2008 in Iraq

That felt extraordinarily weird, reading that.

well, now I have family serving in Baghdad

So helpful:

As he listened to Mahami's demand, Capt. David Underwood reminded his superiors that Mahami's men -- all members of a U.S.-backed Sunni paramilitary movement called Sahwa, or "Awakening" -- were already buying arms with U.S. reward money for finding enemy ammunition dumps. "And as we confiscate weapons, we hand them to Saad Mahami," Underwood told Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top commander in the region, during their meeting with the Iraqi.

The United States is empowering a new group of Sunni leaders, including onetime members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, intelligence services and army, who are challenging established Sunni politicians for their community's leadership. The phenomenon marks a sharp turnaround in U.S. policy and the fortunes of Iraq's Sunni minority.

The new leaders are decidedly against Iraq's U.S.-backed, Shiite-led government, which is wary of the Awakening movement's growing influence, viewing it as a potential threat when U.S. troops withdraw. The mistrust suggests how easily last year's security improvements could come undone in a still-brittle Iraq.

"We feel we are more in control," said Safah Hassan, 28, one of Mahami's fighters. "The Americans have encouraged us to stand up for our society. We never thought this would happen."

anyone hear the Morning Edition feature today on these "Concerned Local Citizens programs"? Basically, we're giving pissed-off ex-insurgents $10 a day not to blow us up; hence, the decrease in violence.

"We need to understand that buying off your enemy is a good short-term solution to gain a respite from violence," (Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor) says, "but it's not a long-term solution to creating a legitimate political order inside a country that, quite frankly, is recovering from the worst sort of civil war."

That civil war has subsided, for now. It's diminished because of massive, internal migration, a movement of populations that has created de-facto ethnic cantons.

"Segregation works is effectively what the U.S. military is telling you," Macgregor says. "We have facilitated, whether on purpose or inadvertently, the division of the country. We are capitalizing on that now, and we are creating new militias out of Sunni insurgents. We're calling them concerned citizens and guardians. These people are not our friends, they do not like us, they do not want us in the country. Their goal is unchanged."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17899543

This is going to be such a fun year already.

That's the first Iraq story in months to freeze my blood.

So the idea behind the $10 per diem strategy is to get all the Sunni militias on the US payroll, temporarily freezing the bloodshed while arming said militias, run out the clock on the Bush presidency, and have fingers readily pointing when (presumably with a Dem administration) the checks stop coming and Iraq explodes all over again..

sounds like bingo

LEGACY

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16156

• March 2007: A poll sponsored by US, British, and German news agencies found that “(m)ore than seven in 10 Shiites—and nearly all Sunni Arabs—think the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq is making security worse” (6). A separate survey by the UK-based Opinion Research Business found that 74 percent of Iraqis (including 77 percent of Baghdad residents) expected the security situation in Iraq to improve (53 percent) or to stay roughly the same (21 percent) immediately following a withdrawal of occupation forces. Only 26 percent expected security to get worse (7).

• August 2007: A poll sponsored by news agencies in the US, UK, and Germany found that around 70 percent of Iraqis “believe security has deteriorated in the area covered by the US military ‘surge’ of the past six months…” Moreover, 67-70 percent “believe the surge has hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development” (8). When asked how much confidence they had in the US-led forces, 85 percent of Iraqis answered “not very much” or “none at all”—compared with 82 percent in February 2007, 78 percent in 2005, and 66 percent in 2004. When given a list of 14 individuals, groups, and factors influencing the level of violence in Iraq, 27 percent of Iraqis identified the US-led forces or President Bush as the single biggest culprits for that violence. Seventy-two percent said that the presence of US forces continued to make security worse, with another 9 percent saying it had no effect (9).

• October 2007: A poll by the US Defense Department found that 12 percent of Iraqis “had at least some confidence in the Multi-National Force to protect their families against threats”—evidently the most optimistic phrasing possible for such a dismal statistic. Curiously, the report also boasted of the “growing support of the local population” and marvelous improvements in security courtesy of the US surge (10).

Although the exact percentages have fluctuated from poll to poll, the major surveys of Iraqi public opinion since 2004 are very clear concerning the effects of the US presence in Iraq: Iraqis overwhelming believe that the continued occupation is an impediment to peace, and indeed, that it continues to create violence rather than quelling it. Among Iraqis the most generous view of the US presence is that it continually fails to improve security in Iraq—even after nearly a year of the much-vaunted “surge.”

With similar consistency, Iraqis have voiced strong opposition to the presence of occupation forces. In August 2005, 82 percent were “strongly opposed” to the occupation; in January 2006, 87 percent favored a timeline for withdrawal; a year later, in September 2006, 71 percent wanted a full withdrawal by mid-2007. Although these figures fluctuate somewhat, the March 2007 poll commissioned by US, British, and German news corporations presents a clearer picture of rising Iraqi opposition to the occupation over time. This poll found that 78 percent of Iraqis “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed the occupation, and then compares this finding to answers to the same question from February 2004 and November 2005. At the start of 2004, nearly one year after the invasion, 51 percent of Iraqis “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed the occupation; 21 months later, that figure had risen to 65 percent; by March 2007, it had climbed again to 78 percent. By August 2007, the percentage “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to the occupation had stayed more or less the same, increasing slightly to 79 percent (11).

This progressive rise in popular hostility toward the US-led occupation is confirmed by another crucial statistic: the percentages of Iraqis who approve of insurgent attacks on occupation forces. In January 2006, 47 percent approved of such attacks; by September 2006, the figure had risen to 61 percent; in August 2007, 57 percent continued to approve of such attacks, including 93 percent of Sunnis (12). The resentment of ordinary Iraqis toward the US goes a long way toward explaining how a small insurgency numbering fewer than 30,000 Iraqis and 800-2,000 foreigners has successfully prevented US-led and Iraqi government forces (which together total over 600,000) from establishing military dominance in Iraq for almost five years (13).

Thank god the troop surge has allowed the Iraqi parliment to make so many political breakthroughs. It makes the continuing sacrifice of our National Guard families seem more like a down payment on peace and stability for all Iraqis. (/heavy-handed sarcasm)

Why you cynic. Haven't you heard:

In the year since President Bush announced he was changing course in Iraq with a troop "surge" and a new strategy, U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves.

From Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to Army privates and aid workers, officials are expressing their willingness to stand back and help Iraqis develop their own answers. "We try to come up with Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," said Stephen Fakan, the leader of a provincial reconstruction team with U.S. troops in Fallujah.

In many cases -- particularly on the political front -- Iraqi solutions bear little resemblance to the ambitious goals for 2007 that Bush laid out in his speech to the nation last Jan. 10. "To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis," he pledged. "Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year . . . the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution."

Although some progress has been made and legislation in some cases has begun to slowly work its way through the parliament, none of these benchmarks has been achieved. Nor has the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki taken over security responsibility for all 18 provinces, as Bush forecast it would. Last month's transfer of Basra province by British forces brought to nine the number of provinces under Iraqi control.

In explaining the situation, U.S. officials have made a virtue of necessity and have praised Iraqi ingenuity for finding different routes toward the same goals. Iraqis have figured out a way to distribute oil revenue without laws to regulate it, Crocker has often noted, and former Baathists are getting jobs. Local and provincial governing bodies -- some elected, some not -- are up and running.

The Iraqis "are at the point where they are able to fashion their own approaches and desired outcomes," Crocker said in an interview, "and we, I think, in part recognizing that and in part reflecting on where we have been over the last almost five years, are increasingly prepared to say it's got to be done in Iraqi terms."

How to report on the Iraq war:

Hunker down in a hotel. Drink booze. Travel in well-armed convoy to Green Zone. Wait to go through checkpoint. Wait some more. Interview a brass hat. Write story based on the exact line of BS that HQ is selling today. Phone it in. Drink some more booze. Complain.

How to report on the Iraq war as a member of Congress:

Hunker down in a hotel. Drink booze. Travel in well-armed convoy to Green Zone. Wait to go through checkpoint. Wait some more. Interview a brass hat. Write story Deliver speeches based on the exact line of BS that HQ is selling today. Phone it in. Drink some more booze. Complain Give General Petraeus and President Bush all the credit.

otfm

The AEI goes, 'Uh, maybe Kurdistan is a problem or something.'

Glad you guys have an independent, democratically elected government. Now may we ignore it indefinitely please?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/world/middleeast/25military.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Also a not-exactly-news but good bit from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, featuring a classic punchline:

The Bush administration gave many reasons for the invasion of Iraq, but the satisfaction of Kurdish national desire was not one of them. Quite the opposite: the goal was, and remains, a unified, democratic Iraq. In fact, key officials of the administration have a history of indifference to, and ignorance of, the subject of Kurdish nationalism. At a conference in 2004, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated, “What has been impressive to me so far is that Iraqis—whether Kurds or Shia or Sunni or the many other ethnic groups in Iraq—have demonstrated that they really want to live as one in a unified Iraq.” As Peter Galbraith, a former American diplomat and an advocate for Kurdish independence, has observed, Rice’s statement was disconnected from observable reality—shortly before she spoke, 80 percent of all Iraqi Kurdish adults had signed a petition calling for a vote on independence.

Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurd­istan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.

Oh how nice:

Senior U.S. military commanders here say they want to freeze troop reductions starting this summer for at least a month, making it more likely that the next administration will inherit as many troops in Iraq as there were before President Bush announced a "surge" of forces a year ago.

There are about 155,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now, with about 5,000 leaving every month; the proposed freeze would go into effect in July, when troops levels reach around 130,000. Although violence is dropping in Iraq, commanders say they want to halt withdrawals to assess whether they can control the situation with fewer troops.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, will probably argue for what the military calls an operational "pause" at his next round of congressional testimony, expected in early April, another senior U.S. military official here said. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and top military officers have said they would like to see continued withdrawals throughout this year, but Bush has indicated he is likely to be guided by Petraeus's views.