"By late 2007, contrary to the official Iraq legend, the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration were both publicly crediting Iran with pressuring Sadr to agree to the unilateral ceasefire -- to the chagrin of Petraeus . . . . So it was Iran's restraint -- not Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy -- that effectively ended the Shi'a insurgent threat."
Another significant force limiting Iraqi violence was the provision of financial payments and weapons to the Sunni "Awakening Councils" -- a temporary tactic of arming and bribing some 80,000 Sunnis, many of them the very same people who had recently been attacking U.S. troops. According to journalist Nir Rosen, a leader of one of the militias that were on the payroll of the United States "freely admit[ted] that some of his men belonged to Al Qaeda. They joined the American-sponsored militias, he sa[id], so they could have an identity card as protection should they get arrested."
The United States was paying Sunnis to fight Shiite militias while allowing the Shiite-dominated national police to focus on Sunni areas. This divide-and-conquer strategy was not a reliable path to stability. And stability remains still elusive, to say the least.
During the "surge" in 2007, U.S. forces rounded up and imprisoned tens of thousands of military-age males. If you can't beat 'em, and you can't bribe 'em, you can put 'em behind bars. This almost certainly contributed to reducing violence.
But the biggest cause of reduced violence may be the ugliest and the least talked about. Between January 2007 and July 2007 the city of Baghdad changed from 65 percent Shiite to 75 percent Shiite. U.N. polling in 2007 of Iraqi refugees in Syria found that 78 percent were from Baghdad, and nearly a million refugees had relocated just to Syria from Iraq in 2007 alone. As Juan Cole wrote in December 2007,
-- this data suggests that over 700,000 residents of Baghdad have fled this city of 6 million during the U.S. 'surge,' or more than 10 percent of the capital's population. Among the primary effects of the 'surge' has been to turn Baghdad into an overwhelmingly Shiite city and to displace hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the capital."
Cole's conclusion is supported by studies of light emissions from Baghdad neighborhoods. The Sunni areas darkened as their residents were killed or ejected, a process that peaked before the "surge" (December 2006 - January 2007). By March 2007, -- with much of the Sunni population left fleeing toward Anbar province, Syria, and Jordan, and the remainder holed up in the last Sunni stronghold neighborhoods in western Baghdad and parts of Adhamiyya in eastern Baghdad, the impetus for the bloodletting waned. The Shia had won, hands down, and the fight was over."
Early in 2008, Nir Rosen wrote about conditions in Iraq at the end of 2007:
"It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what 'victory' looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily.
"House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded 'surge,' Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence."
This does not describe a place where people were being peaceful. In this place people were dead or displaced. U.S. "surge" troops served to seal off newly segregated neighborhoods from each other. Sunni militias "awakened" and aligned with the occupiers, because the Shiites were close to completely destroying them.
By March 2009 Awakening fighters were back to fighting Americans, but by then the surge myth had been established. By then, Barack Obama was president, having claimed as a candidate that the surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." The myth of the surge was immediately put to the use for which it had no doubt been designed -- justifying the escalation of other wars. Having spun a defeat in Iraq as victory, it was time to transfer that propaganda coup to the War on Afghanistan. Obama put the surge hero, Petraeus, in charge in Afghanistan and gave him a surge of troops.
But none of the real causes of reduced violence in Iraq existed in Afghanistan, and an escalation by itself was likely to only make things worse. In fact, that was the experience following Obama's 2009 and 2010 escalations in Afghanistan. The occupation drives the violence, and escalating the occupation escalates the violence. Murdering children from helicopters, whether part of a "surge" or not, inspires massive violent resistance. The U.S. already funds the Taliban, which does not buy its cooperation. The geography and the population of Afghanistan make incarceration and ethnocide very unlikely paths to reducing violence there. Staring into a black hole of endless worsening failure, the response of the U.S. military is to claim, year after year, that progress is just around the corner and that all we need is yet another surge.
Last Week, Rolling Stone magazine exposed the U.S. military's efforts to mislead its own officials, think tankers, and U.S. senators visiting Afghanistan. Failure, these visiting dignitaries were told, was success. Up was down. Black was white. Or it would be very, very soon, just as it always had been about to be very, very soon. Among the senators treated to this brain scrubbing or "psychological operation" were Democrats Carl Levin and Jack Reed, who quickly insisted that, as members of the first branch of our government with oversight of the military, they would proceed to fervently hope that the military would investigate itself. The Washington Post, for its part, appears not to have cared much for Rolling Stone's journalism. After all, journalism is what Wikileaks does. What is this, the 1970s? WaPo chose to publish Levin and Reed's oped, "The Surge Afghanistan Still Needs," with this opening paragraph:
"A now-discredited report in Rolling Stone alleged that U.S. military officials in Afghanistan used inappropriate information operations techniques to try to persuade us, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, to support additional resources to train more Afghan troops."
How was the report discredited? They don't say. It's true that the "Men Who Stare At Senators" have denied they did anything wrong, and that a military lawyer has declared crimes "legal," and super solemn experts have explained that lying to people isn't the same as brainwashing them. But nobody has attempted to prove that the lies were true or even to detail what they were, and no congressional investigation has arrived at any conclusions, because there hasn't been any. Levinreed, as we might name whatever staffer-editor team composed this conglomeration of sentences, rejects the idea that anything even "inappropriate" was done in an effort to persuade them to send more troops to kill and die, but they do not claim that such an effort is itself inappropriate. Inappropriate would be a teachers union using its members' money to negotiate more money for its members. The military funding massive PR efforts to lobby for more military money is only inappropriate if the lies are inappropriate. And what makes for inappropriate lies? Presumably lies that the senators didn't want to believe.
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