And an insider perspective to War #1

[welsh]

This is the ticket. Work a consultant for a war, and then publish a book on it. It's good someone is making a buck on this war beside the major corporations.

Fireblade- note- you can be an analyst of the war, consult for the government, make some money, and not join the CIA.

An informed book review for those who don't have the time, money or inclination to read (a book).

The Iraqi insurgency

What's really going on?

Feb 2nd 2006
From The Economist print edition

A grim view of the violence in Iraq from inside the American camp

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq
By Ahmed S. Hashim
Cornell University Press; 240 pages; $25.
Hurst; £20

AHMED HASHIM is well-placed to study the Iraqi insurgents and their opponents. An American of Turkish-Egyptian origin, he is a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and was an adviser to the American authorities following Saddam Hussein's fall, both in Baghdad and in hotbeds of violence such as Tel Afar, near the Syrian border. After many delays, his bleak appraisal comes out next month: it may well be the most detailed analysis yet of the insurgency and America's efforts to squash it.

Finally someone who can make sense of that mess?

For those who hope that Iraq will evolve into a benign democracy where the three main groups—Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds—rub along together, Mr Hashim's conclusions are glum. He sees no quick way to end the violence. The United States, he reckons, “sees the world in black and white rather than shades of grey”. It is “congenitally incapable of waging effective counter-insurgency”. Iraq is “headed towards the division of its peoples”. He sees no good guys coming to power at all.

Well that's a bummer. Whoops, we fucked up. Time to go home.
And leave the mess for someone else.

(Hey it's not the first time, ya know. And Euros, before you get all antsy- you've pulled this crap off too).

Mr Hashim's best chapters concern the insurgency's nature. Many analysts have tried to divide the fighters into Islamist and nationalist components, but Mr Hashim concludes that the core is a “successful fusion of nationalist and religious sentiment among Sunni Arabs”. He gives a thorough breakdown of about 20 noteworthy groups; some intelligence experts have listed more than 70 in all, but many of them elide into one another and change their names. No person or group has emerged so strongly that the new order must accommodate or defeat him or it. The insurgency's foreign element, he notes, is “minuscule”; of the first 8,000 suspected insurgents nabbed by the Americans, only 127 had foreign passports.

So... Cheney and Rumsfeld were wrong.... Again.
The American people were misled.... again.

Hey Vietnam-Iraq
Vietnam-Iraq

Oh no, Vietnam and Iraq are like different wars because they take place in different parts of Asia. One has commies and this one has muslims... or something.

Mr Hashim also contradicts the prevailing assumption that suicide bombings, of which there were more than 400 in the first two years after Mr Hussein's fall, have been conducted only by Islamists. “Martyr operations are the only effective weapon the resistance has” against the Americans, explains a secular-minded insurgent. In May last year, by the way, more suicide bombs went off in Iraq than during the entire Palestinian intifada against the Israelis since 2000. Most are now directed against home-grown Iraqi forces rather than against foreign troops.

How about that Israel! We got more suicide bombers than you, so stop being such a whiney bitch about the Palestinians and get your shit together, for God's sake!

Most depressing, for those who hope that a stronger Sunni representation in parliament would give a potential negotiating voice to the insurgents, Mr Hashim says that none of the MPs elected in the December ballot has any real influence with the fighters. The Association of Muslim Scholars, an informal group of Sunni clerics who tend to justify the insurgents' actions, are also a lot less powerful than is often assumed. “No Sunni political group or personality working legitimately in the political arena,” he writes, “has been able to reach out to the insurgents.”

Ah... so the insurgents are politically outside the game.

Like that will help...

One difficulty in addressing the insurgents, beyond killing them, is that their aims are so vague. Their sole unifying desire is for foreign forces to leave the country. Their chief ploy is to make the country ungovernable, not to take any of it over, although Mr Hashim mentions a clutch of towns that are or have been run by the insurgents. “If we do not hold authority in Iraq, then we'll allow no one else to hold authority,” one leader told him.

Which in a country like Iraq means the insurgents have the advantage, especially as the Americans seem to be doing a cock up job of it.

Although Mr Hashim expresses respect for several senior American officers with whom he worked, and argues that American counter-insurgency methods have become more effective in the past year, overall he blames American incompetence for making matters worse. Of the 600-800 Americans who ran Iraq for the first year of occupation, only 17 could speak Arabic, while the briefings he was given by Americans in authority were “amateurish, pathetic, shoddy and heavily politicised”.

Thus the problem... The war is a cock-up.
And this from a Naval War College consultant.

Elli will say- The Navy would say that...

If Mr Hashim lays much of the blame for the insurgency on American obtuseness, he has little faith in the ability or even desire of the three main Iraqi groups to accommodate each other. With a host of telling anecdotes picked up across the country, he illustrates the growing antagonism between them. Some of the most revealing passages describe relations among and between Sunni and Shia Arab groups, for instance between the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia firebrand who, he says, remains hostile to the more cautious and most powerful of Iraq's Shia clergymen, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. As for the Sunnis, few of them have begun to come to terms with their status as a minority group after centuries of supremacy over the Shias. Indeed, Mr Hashim quotes senior Sunnis vehemently denying that their co-religionists constitute a minority at all.

What they need to do is all get together, hold hands and sing "Kum-ba-ya?"

And smoke a lot of dope.

Sounds like a job for Ozrat.

So far, the vaunted elections have produced the beginnings of “ethnocracy”, not democracy. “Low-level civil war and ethnic cleansing are already taking place,” he writes. “The country is raising not a national army but distinct mini-armies and a host of official and unofficial militias.” However, despite the insurgents' immediate demands and the long-term hopes of virtually all Iraqis that the Americans and their allies will eventually leave, a precipitate withdrawal must, Mr Hashim asserts, be avoided, as it would prompt an all-out sectarian war, even bloodier than what exists already.

YOu know, this is exactly the reason why W's pappy, Bush 1 didn't invade Iraq. Because he knew it would turn into an ungovernable mess.

On the positive side, there is a strongman available who could control the entire region for the US. But unfortunately we are trying his for war crimes.

Oh Saddam, where are thou?

Let's see a couple thousand dead each year vs a civil war in Iraq?

The nearest he comes to offering a glint of hope is in a concluding discussion of the merits of a “soft partition”, akin to confederalism, whereby Iraq's three main groups agree to divide their territory, presumably with the oil-poor Sunni areas being given a fair dollop of national oil income. But for this to happen the Sunni Arab mindset, which still revolts at the prospect of Iraq's decentralisation, seeing it as synonymous with fragmentation, would have to undergo a drastic change. And that, says Mr Hashim, is not yet in the offing.

Could explain why the group that seems to be doing the best in Iraq is the Kurds.

Remember kids, strong walls makes good neighbors.
And the problem with the Sunnis and Shiites.

Want the book?

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq.
By Ahmed S. Hashim.
Cornell University Press; 240 pages; $25.
Hurst; £20

Oh George, George. Is this about where you are to reach up to the heavens, arms stretched and cry out, "Oh Lord Why have thou forsaken me?"

He never forsaked you because he never liked you, you fucking coke addled, alcoholic ass.

 

[Ozrat]

What they need to do is all get together, hold hands and sing "Kum-ba-ya?"

And smoke a lot of dope.

Sounds like a job for Ozrat.

Nah, they already have enough hashish as it is.

IMHO, if they want to attain 'peace' then they will still have to do it through a revolution (of a self-generated voluntary cultural/political nature as opposed to an imposed physical one).

Other than that, I've been isolated from daily news updates about Iraq for too long to be able to know who these names are and what they do or have done.

All the details change, but the paths remains the same. Kumbaya, circle of life or something.