Americans got bored or why the “surge” in Iraq worked

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Yesterday in Iraq, 32 people were killed by bomb explosions. I’m guessing most Americans won’t ever know that.

One of the three bombings was by a suicide bomber that attacked a coming-home party, reported McClatchy Newspapers.

A woman wearing a suicide vest blew herself up Monday at a coming-home party for an Iraqi police sergeant detained by U.S. forces for almost a year, killing 22 people and wounding 33, a high-ranking official said.

The party was thrown for Adnan Shukri al Timimi at his house, not far from the police station in Balad Ruz, a city 30 miles southeast of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province. Timimi was killed along with his parents and 11 high-ranking police officials, including the chief of the local station, said the official in the Iraqi-led Diyala Operations Center, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Also killed were at least eight children, some of them related to Timimi.

CNN casually called yesterday “one of the deadliest days in Iraq in weeks”. It wasn’t even front page news worthy. Really.

Maybe it was the most deadly day in weeks in total number of fatalities, since 34 people were killed on Monday.

Not like the car bomb in Dujail that killed at least 32 people and wounded 43 others only three days ago, according to the AP. The explosion was targeting a police station, but concrete barriers diverted the blast to a nearby medical clinic.

And certainly, not at all like the 2 people that were killed and 15 wounded earlier on that Friday when “a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a Shiite mosque farther north in Sinjar as worshippers left prayers at midday”. But then, at least 34 Iraqis were killed by explosions on Friday too.

Or the news, when Four employees of Sharqiya TV are kidnapped and killed while working on a popular show in Mosul, according to the LA Times.

“On Saturday, as the Sharqiya TV personnel homed in on a family reeling from losses suffered in a massive bombing, kidnappers zeroed in on them. Hours later, three journalists and their driver were found dead, shot in the head and chest and dumped on the outskirts of Mosul, a northern city that has become one of the most violent in Iraq… The abduction… was striking for its brazenness and brutality.”

Nine other Iraqis were killed by bombings on that day as well. And when six people were killed and 54 wounded when a suicide bomber blasted an outdoor market in Iraq, a week earlier, it certainly could not have been described as the deadliest day in weeks, because a week earlier, the LA Times reported a suicide bombing targeting police recruits in Diyala killed 28 people and wounded 45.

Why is this happening? How can day after day of deadly explosions in Iraq be the deadliest day in recent weeks and seemly each time it is the deadliest day in recent weeks? How is it that the American media doesn’t seem to pick up a trend of ongoing violence?

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post reported it wasn’t “just the surge” that is responsible for the apparant drop in violence. Woodward attributes some of the success to Gen. David Petraeus’s “counterinsurgency game plan” with better intelligence to “locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups”. According to Woodward’s super secret anonymous sources, “covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing” violence.

Woodward also credits the “Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces” and Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric, who “ordered his powerful Mahdi Army to suspend operations, including attacks against U.S. troops.”

But even with better intelligence and counter-insurgency efforts, the “Anbar Awakening”, and the Mahdi Army’s disengagement, Woodward missed one crucial bit to why the violence is down in Iraq. The violence in Iraq is down, in part, because the reporting of the violence in Iraq is down.

According to Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, America has gotten bored with Iraq and though Violence is down, it’s not because of America’s ‘surge’. Under reporting the many recent killings is part of a larger propaganda campaign to sell the simple story line that the “surge” has worked.

Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world. On Friday a car bomb exploded in the Shia market town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, killing 32 people and wounding 43 others. “The smoke filled my house and the shrapnel broke some of the windows,” said Hussein al-Dujaili. “I went outside the house and saw two dead bodies at the gate which had been thrown there by the explosion. Some people were in panic and others were crying.”

Playing down such killings, the Iraqi government and the US have launched a largely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that “things are better” in Iraq and that life is returning to normal. One Iraqi journalist recorded his fury at watching newspapers around the world pick up a story that the world’s largest Ferris wheel was to be built in Baghdad, a city where there is usually only two hours of electricity a day…

The perception in the US that the tide has turned in Iraq is in part because of a change in the attitude of the foreign, largely American, media. The war in Iraq has now been going on for five years, longer than the First World War, and the world is bored with it. US television networks maintain expensive bureaux in Baghdad, but little of what they produce gets on the air. When it does, viewers turn off. US newspaper bureaux are being cut in size. The result of all this is that the American voter hears less of violence in Iraq and can suppose that America’s military adventure there is finally coming good.

Mission accomplished. After five years of war, the American news media doesn’t have the financial stomach to cover news. Iraq is still too dangerous for a normal foreign news bureau – one that isn’t protected by mercenaries – so, the media has gone along with the hollow diagnosis that the “surge” has worked.

But just because Americans are evidently bored with all the Good News from Iraq™, doesn’t mean the news out of Iraq has ceased. Perhaps the only real difference in Iraq is that the media, for the large part, has stopped filing stories from Iraq like before.

Barely a murmur was made last week after George W. Bush announced that the number of U.S. combat brigades in Iraq will remain the same until after he leaves office, reported the Washington Post. Bush warned “progress in Iraq is still fragile and reversible.” No kidding. Of the 8,000 U.S. troops Bush say will leave Iraq in February, thousands of them will be redeployed to Afghanistan – another war Bush once declared to be won.

For all practical purposes, the “surge” is permanent at least until Bush leaves office and the Iraq he leaves behind is a ticking bomb. The reason why Bush’s Iraq withdrawal is so small is because gains are, too, McClatchy Newspapers reported last week. First there is the Iran canard. “Officials fear that Iran might reactivate the Shiite Muslim militias it’s armed and trained and that the Sunni group al Qaida in Iraq is trying to reestablish itself in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.”

Then, there is the Key U.S. Iraq strategy that is in danger of collapse, McClatchy Newspapers reported last month. The Iraqi government has been unable or unwilling to “absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who’d joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country’s security forces.”

The Shiite-led government has only allowed a “handful” of the 100,000 militia members into the Iraqi security forces and does not plan on taking any more. The Iraqi army has a tentative deadline of November 1, 2008 for the integration of the Sunni militias into the Iraqi force. After that, the remaining militias would be disarmed, and if they refused, arrested.

For right now the United States is paying the Sunni militias as part of the Anbar Awakening that Woodward credits with much of the success for the drop in violence in Iraq. The U.S. military has spent at least $303 million on their salaries, so far this year, and has 103,000 militia members on its payroll.

“All the Americans are doing is paying them just to be quiet,” said Haider al Abadi, a leading member of Maliki’s Dawa political party and the head of the economic and investment committee in the parliament. The Iraqi government, he said, can’t “justify paying monthly salaries to people on the grounds that they are ex-insurgents.”

Also yesterday, Defense War Secretary Robert Gates landed in Iraq for a change of command ceremony where Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno takes over from Petraeus. With Petraeus gone, the situation in Iraq will likely grow more tense. Odierno is in command of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, according to The Guardian. Odierno “was a relative latecomer to the hearts and minds counterinsurgency techniques of Petraeus.” In fact, during Odierno’s first stint in Iraq in 2003, “his division’s mistreatment of Iraqis and the heavy use of artillery appalled others within the country’s armed forces.” His “iron-fist strategy… alienated large parts of the population. Some argue that the behaviour of the 4th Infantry Division helped create the insurgency.” Now, he’s in charge of all U.S. forces in Iraq.

What Bush is leaving behind in Iraq is going to blow-up on us and the Iraqis. But since the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign has prevailed, the conventional wisdom is the “surge” has worked and violence in Iraq is down. That comparison is dependent to where the bar is placed. Is violence really down if dozens of people are dying from suicide bomb attacks every few days?

Even Petraeus said he would not use the word victory to ever describe Iraq. “It’s not war with a simple slogan.” Yet the “surge” has worked is a simple slogan and so is John McCain’s discredited rhetoric of “Victory in Iraq”.

According to Cockburn of The Independent –

If McCain wins the presidential election in November, his lack of understanding of what is happening in Iraq could ignite a fresh conflict. In so far as the surge has achieved military success, it is because it implicitly recognises America’s political defeat in Iraq…

If McCain supposes the US has won a military victory, and as president acts as if this were true, then he is laying the groundwork for a new war.

With Iran’s nuclear program as a sore spot, the failure to integrate the Sunni militias into the Iraqis security forces and America’s paying them to keep the peace, and with the return of Odierno to Iraq, that groundwork has already been laid.

By removing Iraq from our nation’s attention span, the real problems Bush is leaving with us will not go away just because many people are bored with it. Iraq isn’t a television show. We cannot just simply change the channel and make it go away because we want to watch America’s Next Top Model Vice President.