"The attached memo is from a person we have sent into Iraq from time to time essentially to work with the Iraqi police. He is smart, tough and a keen observer. Nonetheless, you have said you like 'texture,' and this is texture."He moves in and out of the country, goes out on patrols with the police and the special police commandos, and has been in a number of firefights in the country. I find his views interesting and stimulating, although his perspective, like anyone's, is limited.
"I would appreciate it if this were not circulated to anyone else."
Steele talks about a few other things in his email, so one could argue that Rumsfeld is saying that the points not included here were from Steele's limited perspective. Yet the fact that he doesn't comment specifically and directly on the all-important civil-war scenario suggests either that this scenario is something which Bush/Cheney are on board with, or that he was referring to the civil-war scenario with the "limited perspective" comment. If the latter is true, either Rumsfeld is saying "it won't happen" disingenuously, or he is saying that Steele doesn't understand that letting our enemies kill each other is a good thing. Is there a good reason why he didn't want this circulated to anyone else? (Edit) It seems that Rumsfeld may have released this because the NYT had already reported on Steele's public warnings about a civil war as well as the warning by the previous Sunni Interior Minister that the commandos could be made sectarian under Jabr.
More men kept entering the civil war in the period after insurgents, in the spirit of Zarqawi's letter, bombed the Shiite Al-Askari Shrine in Feb '06, turning the conflict more sectarian. However, the increase in civilian casualties according to Iraq Body Count's data is still a lot more gradual (occurring before and months after the bombing) than you might think if you supposed that the violence was simply due to anger over a destroyed mosque instead of an expanding cycle of reprisals.
There was a cable leaked by Manning, dated Oct 13 2006, about a conversation with the leader of the Badr Brigade on Sep 28. He says that he and even Sunni leaders want the Americans to stay at least another year to train and equip Iraq's security forces. He also concludes that the military and State Department disagreed on what to do about the Badr Brigade:
Al-Amri, who leads the Badr Organization, said that he had signed an agreement five months ago with representatives from MNF-I, the Prime Minister's Office, MoD, and MoI to integrate 1,117 Badr Corps members into the Iraqi army and other security forces at the officer level. Five months later no action had been taken, Al-Amri said, and MoD officials were telling him that the U.S. was objecting to moving forward with implementation. "I have concluded that delaying implementation of our agreement was a political decision of the U.S. Embassy," Al-Amri said.
So five months before September, two months after the Al-Askari Shrine bombing and seven months after Steele's email, Multi-National-Force-Iraq (i.e., the US military) decided that Badr should have that many officers in the Iraqi military, which had previously escaped Badr influence relative to the police.
The WP reported on a 2009 cable saying that "sources had indicated that Al-Amiri may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis" and that "One of his preferred methods of killing allegedly involved using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries". How could anyone have gotten indications that he personally ordered a massive yet fairly specific (not 1,000 or 3,000) number of Sunnis to be attacked and yet not succeed in getting the US to stop him, given how widespread the evidence was that the Badr Brigade was using the security forces to kill Sunnis? Maybe they raided a safehouse with documents to that effect after the surge. The paragraph with those quotes was marked S/NF (Secret, No distribution to Foreign nationals) by then-ambassador Christopher Hill, meaning it was more secret than the C (Confidential) marking for the other paragraphs in the cable.
Al-Ameri was given control over much of the fight against ISIS and would even have been personally named head of the Interior Ministry if the Obama administration didn't block him, prompting Haider Al-Abadi to appoint another Badr member. The Iraqi government clearly didn't want to change their treatment of Sunnis, so continued torture and extrajudicial killings were predictable.
The early NYT article towards the beginning on revenge killings in Basra mentions Thar Allah, or Revenge of God, instead of Badr. Thar Allah is believed to be linked to Iran as well. Max Fuller wrote an account similar to this essay about how the British allowed the Thar Allah to get revenge and run the security services in Basra. One of his earlier articles from 2005 has conclusions that I do not agree with, such as that the US used false-flag attacks.
Aside from the Saddam regime's crimes against Iraqi Shia, Iraqi Kurds, and Iran, one of the grievances of the Badr Brigade was the car-bomb assassination of SCIRI's leader, Mohammed Baqir Al Hakim, in front of a mosque in August 2003, which killed at least 95 Shia people. Kurdish intelligence officers claimed that Zarqawi's father-in-law was the suicide bomber. Whether true or just part of a propaganda campaign to blame everything on Zarqawi, the US didn't know this in 2004. We can also infer a few things about this. Zarqawi probably wouldn't have had the knowledge or explosives available, or perhaps even the idea, to target the leader of SCIRI if not for the mass firings in May, together with the fact that his brother (and successor) was picked by the US for the Iraqi Governing Council, despite being an exile who led the fight to create an Iran-style theocracy in Iraq from Iran.
Also, the Badr assassinationsstartedbeforeAugust (the Middle East Times doesn't archive stories that old, apparently). We can tell from the fact that Badr targeted even former pilots that this campaign was going to happen regardless of the August bombing, and was also totally unjustified. When the Pentagon saw Zarqawi's letter, the facts of that bombing should have been a warning that the threat in the letter was very real, and that there was absolutely no reason to believe that they would be able to kill their way through the threat. After all, they hadn't killed Zarqawi yet, but they hadn't yet empowered death squads to point of no return by Feb 2004.
"The Surge"When we declared a new strategy, "the surge", after Rumsfeld was fired following the 2006 midterms, civilian casualties were cut in half from July to September 2007, just before the 23% increase in troops was fully completed. The monthly IBC data suggest that violence halved in one month, but after looking at the weekly data, it turns out that general violence declined that amount over two months, because August 2007 included an outlier: unusually deadly simultaneous bombings against the Yazidis that killed 500 people (see its effect on the Ninewa weekly data). One month after the drop in civilian casualties, American casualties dropped similarly and also remained low.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
