Wait. Maliki has embarked on a highly risky strategy? All on his own?
Hell if I know what's going on over there, but since when has Maliki proven any kind of independence whatsoever? He's either sucking up to Bush, or he's shaking hands with Ahmedinijad.
Ugh. I wish our news media would try once in a while to tell us what's actually going on.
Is Kevin de Bruxelles right? Is Sadr's militia a big bunch of rabble? Or did he (Sadr) spend the cease-fire supervising training of his cadres?
I guess we get to find out.
Isn't Maliki the mayor of Baghdad? How can he expect to have a say in Basra?
Kevin may be mostly right about the Mahdi army, but then, if they outnumber Sciri militias by a large margin, it doesn't mean they're gonna be destroyed, unless there's massive direct US military involvement. SCIRI and Dawa guys may be better than a rabble, but I don't think they could compare with, say, Hezbollah. Besides, I indeed suspect they used these months to train a bit and be more effective fighters, if not good ones.
If Sadr isn't crushed but manages some kind of stalemate that goes on for long enough, the others might tire, because they're the ones in power who have something to lose in this fight right now. And massive Iraqi infighting won't look nice that close to US elections.
Then of course, I might talk out of my ass...
I think we have to analyse the current situation within the larger framework of the “surge”. The true aim of this political manoeuvre was to keep George Bush from being the first US president to unilaterally lose a major war. There were two goals to be accomplished; first was to negotiate peace with the Sunnis and the second was to destroy Sadr’s group.
The goal of war is not to win battles; it is to impose your will upon the other side. That is through the use of violence to give your enemy the choice of dying or submitting to laws you write. Ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the US had struggled to force the Sunnis to submit to our will. The Sunnis resisted by means of superior military discipline and skill. As 2006 came to a close, it was obvious that the US was not strong enough in Iraq to impose its will militarily on the Sunnis. Worse still, the US also had a serious disconnect on the regional vs. national level. Regionally the US supports the dysfunctional Sunni dictators against the only slightly more dysfunctional Iranians. But in Iraq the US was relying on Iranian proxies to fight Sunnis. As Bush saw the clock running out on his Presidency back in 2006 the answer became obvious: to admit defeat against the Sunnis and work on a peace deal with them.
But Bush risked further eroding his base by admitting defeat to the Sunnis so instead the surge was invented. Under the cover of increasing troops numbers, the US undertook negotiations with the Sunnis where they offered to supply them with arms and to stop making them submit to the Shia central government in exchange for the Sunnis going after the medieval Wahhabi nutcases within their midst. The Iraqi Sunnis were mostly secular anyway and hated foreigners so this was an acceptable deal for them. On the one hand they risked moral confusion by working with the Americans but on the other hand the Shia were their ultimate enemies and to have the US backing them against the Persians after any eventual US withdrawal would help compensate for the obvious Iranian help that the Shia were going to get after the US left. In any case the Sunnis will never let the US get comfortable enough to actually get troop numbers down to a sustainable size (30-50,000). So the Sunnis are pretty much in a win-win situation, they allow enough pressure to keep the US tied down to the rock with the vultures picking at our liver while at the same time getting arms and training for the ultimate battle for control of Iraq which will be against the Persians.
The second goal of the surge was not obtained because it meant either Sadr’s boys standing and fighting (and getting crushed) or the US and the central government taking the highly dubious step of just crushing the Shia slums Grozney-style. Sadr wisely decided against fighting a modern version of the Battle of Omdurman and faded away into the night. This move is standard guerrilla tactics. The goal of the invading power in an insurgency is to get the guerrillas to stand and fight. The great difference between the 19th and 20th centuries (and why colonialism ultimately faded away) was the widespread realization (popularized but not invented by Mao) of this simple truth that the weaker indigenous forces were not going to militarily defeat the invading power. The key is to wait them out while inflicting as much pain as possible and defeat them politically instead. This was the trajectory the Sunnis were on in Iraq, even though on occasion they did stand and fight, although in a limited fashion.
But now a year later Bush is more determined than ever to construct a firewall between his name and the word “defeat”. And to do this he needs two things; an oil law and provisional elections. It seems that the central government (the Iranian puppets Dawa and the SIIC) are demanding that the US help them finish off Sadr’s boys (at least in Basra) in return for them allowing the elections to go forward (Check out the blog “Missing Links”). Now whether the Iranian puppets are overestimating their own abilities is an open question. However for this question to be answered Sadr will have to stand and fight at which point the US will jump in to finish him off. Sadr’s best move is to again follow in Mao’s footsteps and take the “Long March”. His talk of sit-ins seems to be political preparation for him to again get his followers to fall back.
Does anybody NOT think this has to do with the visit of Darth Cheney to Baghdad? Seriously, wherever that fucker goes violence follows.
So now the speculation must begin exactly what message was delivered to the Maliki government. My best guess is that it had something to do with a strike on Iran.
An attack on Iran?
Man, I still don't see that happening, crazy as Cheney might be. What do you suppose the Sultan of Dubai had to say about that idea when Cheney was fishing from his yacht last week? All the Mideast client states have to be telling Bushco to cool it with the war talk.
Dubai dollars are propping up Citigroup; Dubai has been informed that if the USA hits Iran, Iran will see Dubai as complicit; ergo Dubai has some claim to Bush's ear when the war drums start to beat. Right?
But when has a rational explanation ever sufficed with these idiots.
All those Sunni Arab regimes were tacitly supporting the attempted Israeli smackdown of Hezbollah and were terrified when it failed. I can see more than a few of them supporting a limited attack on Iran just as they supported the invasion of Iraq.
Their fear of Shia and Persian influence is very real. Many of the regimes most fearful are those that are pro-Bush and based on the skillful terror applied to those that would dissent from their rule. Riyadh is quaking while Damascus is raking in war dollars from refugees. If you are an enemy of the US, you gotta hope McSame gets elected cause eight more years of this and you will be ruling the fucking world.
I am pretty sceptical that an attack on Iran is in the works. What I am sure about though is that this crackdown on Sadr by the Iraqi government, which is actually controlled by the Dawa and SIIC, has nothing to do with any potential attack on Iran. Remember Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just visited his puppets in Baghdad a few weeks ago. He would have given his permission for this move against Sadr at that meeting. We have to ignore the propaganda coming from US commanders about Iran controlling Sadr and remember that these two political parties running Iraq are totally in the control of Iran. The US links Sadr to Iran for domestic political purposes, covering Bush’s right flank in case some crazy Democrat got the bright idea to attack the whole Iraqi adventure as huge victory for Iran.
As I said a year or so ago on Steve’s blog; I think they would go after Syria and Hezbollah before going after Iran. By the way there is currently a US Navy expeditionary strike group in the eastern Mediterranean, not far from the Syrian coast.
Well, if there's a strike on Hezbollah in the works, that would help to explain the sotto voce stories about Hezbollah helping Sadr. And it would provide a sort of roundabout link to Iran for use later (like, say, October...).
But what on earth would an American "strike against Hezbollah" look like? We don't have the troops to spare for a ground invasion of Lebanon/Syria, and an air assault would presumably have about as much effect as the Israeli adventure last year.
So Maliki has a shaky strategy? Lest we FORGET, it is ALL based on the Bush Gang's shaky, lying, murdering "strategy". There's no fucking FOUNDATION for Maliki to build on...no NOTHING. If it fails it is NOT Maliki's strategy that fails, it is the Bush Gang's NON strategy. How many fucking generals have they burned through with this goddamned "war"?
Oh golly, do I seem angry?
Matthew Yglesias makes a good point, "The would-be imperial power has to back the "less popular local elements." The key thing is to find groups that are strong enough to hold on to power with external support, but too weak to come to be in a position to kick the ladder of external support away."
Gorilla Guides is reporting 'confirmation" British tanks are being used in Basra
here's the thing to remember about iraq. first and foremost: our current policy and strategy, along with the tactics are straight out of saddam's playbook. he armed local militias and paid them off to patrol and control the neighborhoods. he cleared whole cities and regions of insurgents and installed his own minions and pet militias. he bought peace in dyala province the same way that fucking acclaimed genius of REMFs petraeus is doing. so what has really changed in iraq? first off, five years into this we haven't gotten the damage from the invasion cleaned up. the water is not safe, not even for us, the electricity grid is fubar and not rebuilt.
after gulf1 saddamn's people had the electricty grid and the sewage system fixed and running in 41 days. they had already rebuilt 115 bridges and highways in less than two months.
what do we have working in iraq?
oil. the oil delivery system is running at about 60%. the 40% shortfall covers both system disruption and plain old looting.
of course, without a revenue sharing system, most of the iraqi share is going into swiss and cayman accounts and halliburton is making more off it than anybody in iraq.
basra is exploding right now. it is the only industrial point of shipping for iraqi oil. of course, anything that gets to sea still has to sail past hormuz which the iranians can close with conventional artillery, which they already have emplaced.
so, even with an acceptable flow of oil to the port. the ships got no where to go safely.
if we bomb iran the first thing that a reasonable military man would do is take basra, thereby totally choking off the only way to get the only thing in iraq worth fighting about to market.
own basra, own the nation.
muktada al-sadr fucking owns basra.
al-maliki and the "government" forces have fled their HQ there. they are beating feet back to bagdhad where al-sadr's people have declared a general strike, and have fought the americans to a standstill in sadr city.
shit meets fan, results as expected.
SURGETASTIC!
Good point Minstrel Hussain Boy.
What really points me into the direction of an Iranian strike were the comments made on this recent McCain trip, by McSame and two of his minions. It felt like going to war with Iran just became a new awful election strategy for the Republicans. We can all say its nuts, but these are the people that allowed the Kucinich impeach Cheney motion to be debated because they thought it would make the Democrats that supported it look crazy.
Yeah, in the Republican Party there is a whole lot of mutha fucking batshit insane crazy going on, and it's all gonna lead to something like bombing the shit out of Iran.
Wall Street, plus Pentagon, plus Gordon Brown and 4200 Brits, plus republicans running for office who don't want to have to explain $6 a gallon gas to the voters, plus every country in the middle east except Israel,
equals: no attack on Iran.
And, there is THIS going on.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/...26/
wiraq326.xml
It is highly unlikely that the "Iraqi Government" can suppress the militias in Basra without help,
and Bush and the warpimps are BEGGING Gordon Brown to send the Brits hunkered down behind the wire back into the streets of Basra, so that the American media won't be talking about an increase in OUR casualties at the same time McCain and the republicans are holding
5 0'clock follies pressers about how we're winning in Iraq.
Same old question;
Only; now the Brits are obviously thinking it, and rightly so:
"How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Brit troops dying to help John "Let's have more of the same!" McCain's candidacy?
Any thoughts, Bollox?
Gordon Brown won't want to turn out like the suddenly vanished Tony Blair. I really don't know a whole lot about him, but he doesn't seem to have that really creepy brown-nosing quality that Blair demonstrated everytime someone more powerful than him on the international stage was in the room.
So this means that the US air force and army helicopters just became the winged division of the Badr Brigades in Basra. The end result is just going to be a lot of dead people, and probably not too few of them will be Badr and SIIC militia members accidentally killed by the US military(they seem to do that a lot to Bush's newly minted Sunni Arab allies too).
Maliki is attacking Basra out of a position of weakness and not of strength. He is tying himself even closer to the occupation at a time when the very real possibility of full-scale Iranian intervention is nearby. Steve's old picture of his face plastered on Kerensky's is now more relevant than ever. The Sadrists are poor, uneducated, and as we have seen in the past can be ruthlessly corrupt. But they will stand up and fight over and over and over again. If there ever is another election in Iraq that is relatively fair, it will be interesting to see how a divided Shia vote would look like. I would certainly bet Sadr would get more votes than SIIC/Badr or Dawa.
Tanbark,
Gordon Brown is 'dead meat' if he even thinks about increasing troop strength around Basra. For fcuks sake, this is screw-up central...........SCREW-UP CENTRAL!
The best the British contingent can hope for is to head South and board the flight home from Kuwait.
This will go down as the ultimate, ultimate hubristic cock-up.
Fantastic fodder for historians, but not so good for those who have to suffer through the whole pointless waste of space that is.... 'Iraq'.
........... and I should add that England are 'dead meat' given their performance against France tonight. Thank god they didn't make it to Euro 2008. They'd be completely humiliated.
Gotta love footie 
Just a few observations:
A sure sign of whether Sadr is going to win this or not is whether he is able to counterattack the long government columns heading into Basra. The reason the US and Iraqi forces are surrounding Sadr City in Baghdad and other Mahdi Army strongholds is to protect against attacks on these exposed lines of communication.
The Iraqi Army strategy will be to surround the Mahdi Army strongholds in Basra and force them to use up the ammunition supplies before going in full force. They will obviously be looking to locate any ammunition depots as well. The key for the Mahdi Army is mobility. If they get surrounded it just comes down to a battle of wills and I don’t see Malaki backing off easily. Remeber Hama.
Unless I hear Iranian leaders strongly denouncing this operation then I tend to believe they strongly support it. I would not doubt if they have special forces imbedded with Iraqi Army units. This is a potential source of embarrassment for the Bush Administration but will Democrats pounce on it…?
This conflict in Basra is interesting to me because it is based purely on class lines. So often such conflicts get mixed up with race (USA) or religion (Northern Ireland). Here we have middle to upper class Arab Islamist Shia fighting poor Arab Islamist Shia.
I suspect Sadr has survived this long because the powers-that-be would prefer the poor to be led by an incompetent buffoon rather than some kick-ass Hezbollah types. I know this is often the way things work in the US. I could be wrong though, we will see in the coming weeks.
When the USA first ventured into Iraq, it was the Ayatollah Sistani who supposedly held the power.
Where is Sistani now? What has he done or what is he doing now? Is he still a factor in the calculations?
Where is Sistani now? What has he done or what is he doing now?
Just like the Iranians (in fact he is Iranian) if Sistani is not on TV denouncing this attack as a war crime then the reason is that he very likely has already given his permission for the attack to occur.
Bollox; you didn't like Becks getting a gimme hundreth cap? :o)
OT, but worth it. :o)
http://news.yahoo.com/
edcartoons...4gt5wKo7CMC_b4F
Good ol' Oliphant. :o)
Agree with kdb.
Gonna kill, kill, kill, kill, kill the poor...
Funny how that works out. That fellow Marx may have been on to something...
Bollox; you didn't like Becks getting a gimme hundreth cap? :o)
Tanbark, the whole Beckham "I want to be a Centurion" business was pretty painful to follow, but he certainly wasn't the worst player on the pitch last night.
Well, I didn't see the match, but I won't argue with you. I DID read that he sent in some crosses that had someone gotten onto them, could have made the difference.
OTOH; the write-up said the French were clearly the better side...and that was with some of their first-liners out.
See where Holland pulled 3 back (at least) against Austria? That was a surprise. Some of the Brit writers were already jabbing the Orange with THEIR loss, when it was at 3:1, Osterreich. :o)
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