The Success of the Surge
Anthony Shadid has a great story in The Washington Post that offers a microcosm look at the kind of compromises by which we’ve brought down the level of violence in Iraq. Specifically, he takes at Nadhim Khalil, the bossman of a Sunni Arab town called Thuluyah. I would say that these compromises have been worth making, but they really don’t look much like victory:
His zeal soon drew him into the ranks of an incipient insurgency, leading 30 armed men and meeting colleagues in Baghdad, where he sometimes sought shelter at the Um al-Qura mosque. He ventured to the Anbar province capital of Ramadi, towns in Diyala province, and across the border to Syria. The U.S. military jailed him twice: as prisoner No. 159705 when he spent nearly six months in the massive prison at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and as No. 200331 when he was incarcerated for a similar stint at Camp Cropper in Baghdad nearly two years later. By his count, U.S. soldiers searched his house 67 times. They occasionally brought dogs, he said, to inspect his mosque.
By August 2006, after a meeting in Homs, Syria, he had joined al-Qaeda in Iraq, a homegrown Sunni movement that U.S. officials say is led by foreigners and that embraced a radical strain of Islam.
Later, he abandoned that path. But he’s not really repentant about it, he’s practical. He’s a successful case of appeasement. And notwithstanding the extent to which he’s been successfully appeased, he’s not a cuddly pro-Western democrat:
But he still calls himself an Islamist, and to his followers, his words remain harsh.
“Our country is occupied and our bodies are torn apart, but we shouldn’t forget our families in Palestine,” he proclaimed in a sermon recently to an overflow crowd in his austere mosque, its white walls gouged by shrapnel from his assassination attempt.
“Those sons of monkeys, enemies of God and killers of prophets,” he declared, his voice rising in denunciation of Jews, “are killing our brothers and sisters in Palestine.”
The city has a city council. There’s also an organization of tribal elders. But real political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and he has it, the result of his command of a militia that wears “mismatched uniforms or civilian clothes” and is loyal to him rather than to the Iraqi state or the formal city government. The militia’s efficacy stems in part from the fact that the US military collaborates with them. This is all definitely better than what was happening before. But the irony of the conservative celebration of General Petraeus and the past two years’ worth of efforts in Iraq is the extent to which it goes against everything the right normally believes about the conduct of these things. We haven’t defeated an insurgent like Khalik — we’ve barely even co-opted him. Rather, we’ve agreed to help him gain power and in exchange his men don’t try to kill our men.
38 Responses to “The Success of the Surge”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
January 13th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Yep, but the reason George Bush bought him off is to buy time: i.e., to let Bush get out the door before Iraq turned to shit.
Now he’s Obama’s problem.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
don beat me to it.
this wasn’t about fixing iraq.
this was all about running out the clock for george.
anyone who thought differently hasn’t been paying attention.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
it’s a triumph, in other words, of what we used to call “appeasement”.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
So this guy shouldn’t be bought off? So Obama shouldn’t pull troops out?
I don’t follow.
“He heads the council that oversees the hundreds of armed men who deserted the insurgency for U.S.-funded units known as the Sons of Iraq, outnumbering the police and army unit stationed here. The mention of Khalil’s name — Mullah Nadhim, as he is known here — ensures passage through their checkpoints. He heads a council of tribal leaders that provides a channel to Maliki, who offered his hand in friendship in a meeting in Baghdad’s Green Zone.”
So if this guy starts shit, Maliki will fight him. Same with Sadr, who is a walking dead man. Are you guys saying since Iraq isn’t a demorcatic utopia yet, US troops should not leave but rather should stay to keep the Shia and Sunni from each other’s throats, or is just another excuse to badmouth Bush?
January 13th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
We haven’t defeated an insurgent like Khalik — we’ve barely even co-opted him. Rather, we’ve agreed to help him gain power and in exchange his men don’t try to kill our men.
Wait, you mean that the insurgency wasn’t defeated by the awesome and majestic power of TEH SURGE, but instead settled down after we stopped trying to kill them and started giving them cash money? As an informed viewer of cable news, I find that hard to believe.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
More pragmatically, I think it was about creating an environment where the Republican party had a shot at holding onto power. Case in point, McCain claiming during the debates (with a certain amount of media agreement) that we were winning in Iraq, Iraq was no longer an issue, the surge worked, etc. The republicans ultimately lost, but I think they did manage to somewhat reduce the salience of the Iraq issue (too bad they couldn’t do that for the economy).
January 13th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
ROTFL. This is what victory looks to the fucktards of the American right. It’s as if we went into Vietnam, and paid the North Vietnamese Army for taking over the South Vietnam provinces and purge the Vietcong.
Yep, here’s this guy Khalik, he’s a card carrying member of Al Quaeda, he had his own little private army, and he was in the quiet running things. Now he takes our money, which he uses to run his own larger private army and take full control, and he calls us dogs and sons of monkeys to our faces.
Makes you wonder how much money George W. Bush is secretly paying Osama Bin Laden for him not not hit America again. LOL.
I guess the lesson is, never let the Rightards run a war, because they can’t tell the difference between winning, and surrendering and presenting naked butt cheeks for cornholing.
And, ROTFL, sure, Maliki will squash him. Sure. These are the guys who kicked US forces all over the football field in Anbar and made US Marines their bitches. But Maliki, sitting in Baghdad is going to sort them out for us… suuuuuuuure.
And hey, you know the rightards are grasping at straws when they start dreaming of Mr. Satan himself, the pudge in black, Muqtadr Sadr coming to rescue them!
Honestly, this is such a colossal level of screw up that eventually America’s going to have to change its name just to avoid the embarrassment. Fubarland, or Dicktopia.
ROTFL
January 13th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
PS My previous point is not a great secret, obviously. Just a correction to the “Bush did it to personally evade responsibility” meme.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Wait, you mean that the insurgency wasn’t defeated by the awesome and majestic power of TEH SURGE, but instead settled down after we stopped trying to kill them and started giving them cash money?
And weapons! Don’t forget we gave them lots and lots of weapons!
And Viagra!
Hmmm. You know, Grenada’s been getting a little uppity again. Maybe we should go over there and squish em. That’s a war we know we can win! ROTFL
January 13th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Thank you. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell people back here since my tour ended.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Okay… so what was the point of the post?
That this guy was really bad and is now just pretty bad? Is it about the shifting USForces tactics? About making concessions?
I’m more than edified.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
“They occasionally brought dogs, he said, to inspect his mosque.”
That’s really offensive. We have devices that can sniff out weapons, we don’t need dogs to do it. Bringing a dog into a mosque is deliberately inflammatory. That kind of crap is why we lose wars.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
“Case in point, McCain claiming during the debates (with a certain amount of media agreement) that we were winning in Iraq, Iraq was no longer an issue, the surge worked, etc.”
I’m not going to second-guess Obama on his campaign strategy vis a vis Iraq, but man, did I wish that during one of the debates he said “Yes, John. The surge has reduced violence. But we are now financially and militarily supporting the very people responsible for the deaths of several thousand American soldiers. I would like you to explain to the family members of dead American heroes why you are in favor of forgiving and forgetting the crimes committed by these terrorists, and why you support rewarding their killing by giving them more powerful weapons and billions of American dollars?”
January 13th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Peter K.,
It’s a post looking at what has happened in the past, and how it matches up with what people predicted.
The conclusions to draw from this are not about Iraq itself, but about what to do the next time people like you work yourself into a lather at the thought of starting another war, and gullibly proclaim that it’s going to be so wicked awesome that the liberals, French, and UN will be made to look like fools.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Why is there a picture of Sidney Ponson in this story?
January 13th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
The Post also had an interview with Condi Rice, in which she actually had the gaul to bubble over about the Iraq government recognizing Christmas. This turns out to be a big rightwing meme. There was a photo op christmas ceremony, sponsored by the American military, in Baghdad this year. That, of course, the Christian community has fled Iraq, with the latest group streaming out of Mosul this October as they were ethnically cleansed, makes no difference to Rice or to the stenographers at the Post.
These people have no conscience. And, I think, from breathing the air in the bubble so long, no brain cell activity.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
This is yet another one of these situations where the right wing hawk nimrod brigade screams at liberals for being cowardly surrender monkeys, and then turn right around and trumpet as some AWSUM war-fighting VICKTREE something which, had it been Al Gore’s policy, would be sending them into paroxysms screaming for Gore’s impeachment for trading with the enemy.
January 13th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
he still calls himself an Islamist
Permit me to doubt that he calls himself an “Islamist,” a term made up by the US wingnuts and to the best of my knowledge, never used by real adherant of Islam
January 13th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
The conclusions to draw from this are not about Iraq itself, but about what to do the next time people like you work yourself into a lather at the thought of starting another war, and gullibly proclaim that it’s going to be so wicked awesome that the liberals, French, and UN will be made to look like fools.
Well thanks for putting words in my mouth but I never said it was going to be wicked awesome nor did I say it would make liberals, French and the UN look like fools.
It is good that a psychotic dictator is gone however.
Skeptic:
And, ROTFL, sure, Maliki will squash him. Sure. These are the guys who kicked US forces all over the football field in Anbar and made US Marines their bitches. But Maliki, sitting in Baghdad is going to sort them out for us… suuuuuuuure.
Yeah AQI beat the Marines so bad they gave in and hung up their holsters…. makes a lot of sense….
Compare with the North Vietnamese who didn’t give up and stayed the course until the job was done. (And look at Vietnam today! Kickin ass as a manufacturing base with labor cheaper than China’s!)
Al Qaeda in Iraq are wussies and stupid to boot, they pissed off the locals so much the natives acutally switched sides and sided with the occupation.
Are you really a peacenik twit, or just a bizarre sock puppet created to make them look bad?
Anyhow, the Washington Post peruaded me that maybe Obama shouldn’t pull out the troops. He did say he’d listen to the generals.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Yeah AQI beat the Marines so bad they gave in and hung up their holsters…. makes a lot of sense….
Goddammed right they did, beotch. The US had lost complete control of Anbar province, top to bottom. That’s on the record, go back and look it up.
The surge didn’t do a goddammed thing in Anbar province for the very simple reason that there was no surge in Anbar province. Again, go back and look it up. No extra forces were committed to Anbar. Troop concentrations focused on Baghdad.
Y’see, what happened in Anbar was that we lost. We lost completely and thoroughly. So, what happened next was, we started writing checks. And what do you know, the Baathists and others turned on their AQ allies and purged the crap out of them.
AQI was never the dominant force in Anbar, except in the minds of twitchy morons back home. The real forces were the ex-Baathists, people who had actual military and guerilla training, knew where all Saddam’s hidden arms caches were, and had organization and networks. AQI was never more than a ready source of convenient suicide bombers and assorted lunatics. The Baathists used them, and always planned on ditching them.
We didn’t win a goddammed thing, we just threw money at one faction making its play to purge rival factions and take over.
So now Anbar is under the control of guys like Khalid, and neo-Baathists, who are taking our money, taking our weapons, and planning on eventually taking the rest of the country. Which is why Maliki is not big on them.
So that’s the big ‘victory strategy’ in Anbar, getting on your knees and going up and saying “Oh please Mr. Khalid, we’re going to be leaving anyway, please take our money and be our friends.” Honestly, I’m surprised they’re not training the Marines to give blowjobs.
Are you really a peacenik twit, or just a bizarre sock puppet created to make them look bad?
‘Peacenik’ ROTFL, where you from, 1952? Ah, that was good for a laugh. And lucky for you, otherwise I could have been offended at some half baked retard who can’t tell the difference between getting boned up the ass and victory.
Let me spell it out for you: If you have to write checks to the enemy so they’ll be nice to you… well, that’s called Danegeld. It ain’t called winning.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I don’t know if it was the checks that were the big motivator, Skeptic.
The locals really did get sick of the dirty furrners trying to run the joint.
After we basically ceded the area to them, and pulled back to bases.
Hmmmmmm…odd, that. Perhaps there’s a lesson in there.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Geez, this is insurgency 101.
After you win against the foreign enemy, you purge your allies. They’re not useful to you any more, and they get in the way of running the place.
In this case, they’ve managed to get the foreign enemy to pay them to consolidate their grip on power. Which may end up meaning that we’ll have subsidized their campaign to take over the whole country – which is what Maliki is upset about.
ROTFL. At least we weren’t giving money to Sadr! Of course, maybe it hasn’t occurred to the Pentagon yet.
But we are supporting SCIRI and Dawa, the Shiite Theocratic parties that are in Iran’s pocket. So essentially, we’re indirectly funding Iran’s takeover.
Swear to God, future generations will look back and wonder. How could an entire country be so bone stupid.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
We were told we needed The Great and Powerful Surge to give Iraq’s government time to negotiate a lasting peace. Did that happen and I never heard about it?
January 13th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
It’s nice to see the true face of “The Surge,” and compare these stories to what we were actually told at the time Bush was trying to sell the concept to us. It was called “The Surge,” and not “Bribing Enemies to Stop Shooting for a While,” because the whole publicly advertised concept was that we just needed to adjust U.S. force levels in Iraq by 15% for about a year. Then everything would be fine.
Of course, this was absolutely insane, and so sane people opposed the idea. The television set was on fire, and Bush wanted to fiddle with the rabbit ears to get better reception. No one was willing to articulate the real strategy, which was to give mountains of case to friggin Al Qaeda operatives if they agreed to stop shooting at us.
And how about those 18 benchmarks that we were supposed to use to evaluate whether the surge was working? Out the window, of course. The Pentagon occasionally claims that “satisfactory progress” is being made on this item or that one, but the nature of a “benchmark” is supposed to be that it is _done_, not that you are working on it.
The real strategy now, although still no one will articulate it, is to hope things are quiet enough, for long enough, to extricate most of our combat forces. Then, when a coup puts a sort of younger Saddam into power, we’ll hope the world is busy looking elsewhere.
Mission accomplished.
January 13th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Cash. Mountains of cash. Not “case.” Grumble.
January 13th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
The real strategy now, although still no one will articulate it, is to hope things are quiet enough, for long enough, to extricate most of our combat forces. Then, when a coup puts a sort of younger Saddam into power, we’ll hope the world is busy looking elsewhere.
Well, we’ll see won’t we.
Also I thought the plan was permanent bases for stealing all the oil. Different anti-war people keep saying different things.
Skeptic:
AQI was never the dominant force in Anbar, except in the minds of twitchy morons back home. The real forces were the ex-Baathists, people who had actual military and guerilla training, knew where all Saddam’s hidden arms caches were, and had organization and networks. AQI was never more than a ready source of convenient suicide bombers and assorted lunatics. The Baathists used them, and always planned on ditching them.
…
So now Anbar is under the control of guys like Khalid, and neo-Baathists, who are taking our money, taking our weapons, and planning on eventually taking the rest of the country. Which is why Maliki is not big on them.
Well Kahlid is ex-AQI and he is the dominant one in that town. You’re confused in other words.
But we are supporting SCIRI and Dawa, the Shiite Theocratic parties that are in Iran’s pocket. So essentially, we’re indirectly funding Iran’s takeover.
Yeah the Theocratic parties who just made Christmas a national holiday. Haha then some peaceniks actually say Iran is not interferring in Iraq at all. You guys are confused.
And if you are right and Iran does take over, well then the Sunnis and your neo-Baathist pals will be cleansed from most of Iraq and will have nothing but oil-free Anbar.
But when Maliki went after Sadr on his own initiative (peaceniks were laughing at how weak he was, no they whine he’s a strongman), the Iraqis were actually surprised and disturbed at the extent of Iranian shenanigans in the South (and who can blame Iran for messing with the country next door?) I predict Sadr is dead not long after American troops leave. Either that or he flees to Iran.
But if it is as bad as you guys say, American troops should probably stay.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Peter K is probably the dumbest right wing retard on this blog, next to Al and SLC, of course.
Every time somebody make a perfectly clear post, he pops up and says that somehow it contradicts all previous posts. It’s the only debating strategy he knows how to play, which is true of most right wing fucktards – they’ve got one game plan and they run it no matter how stupid it makes them look.
A related simple-minded debating technique is to misunderstand perfectly legitimate words. For instance, when somebody says Iran benefits from the situation in Iraq of an Iraqi government controlled by pro-Iranian political parties, he implicitly assumes this means Iran will take over Iraq and cleanse the Sunnis. This ignores the realities on the ground that there are too damn many armed Sunnis to make that feasible at all. But nothing about changes the fact that Iran has benefited from the situation.
In the same breath, it’s obvious that now that the Shia have been armed and provided with some legitimacy in the government, it’s hardly likely that the Sunnis are ever going to put them back in the cage.
The moron thinks Sadr – who has supporters in the millions in Irag – is somehow going to die. Given that by all accounts he’s in Iran and has been for the last year or more, that’s not going to be easy to pull off.
Then he concludes US soldiers should stay if the left predicts that Iraq will fall apart again. That of course doesn’t follow at all. The whole point is that it’s both irrelevant to US security what the Iraqis do and also a fact that the US can’t do anything about it anyway short of exterminating the whole country (or at least either the Sunni or Shia).
Finally, he ignores – like all right wing fucktards ignore – the obvious fact that the war should never have been started anyway and that this is the conclusion the entire planet has come to, with the sole exception of right wing fucktards.
Stupid motherfucker.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Well Kahlid is ex-AQI and he is the dominant one in that town. You’re confused in other words.
Nah. It just means that in the local area the an AQI button man smelled the way the wind was blowing and jumped ship. Don’t mean that the Baathists weren’t taking over on the whole.
Yeah the Theocratic parties who just made Christmas a national holiday.
And who have purged most of the Christians out of Iran. ROTFL. What a maroon. Right wing talking points must be tattooed on your dick, given how you stare at it all the time. You must use a magnifying glass. LOL
And if you are right and Iran does take over, well then the Sunnis and your neo-Baathist pals will be cleansed from most of Iraq and will have nothing but oil-free Anbar.
Well, Baghdad has been ethnically cleansed already, and there are 4.7 million refugees. Do your own math.
February 27th, 2009 at 3:35 am
a man must do what he can do about buy wow gold
world of warcraft gold,
March 1st, 2009 at 5:11 am
viagra
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 1st, 2009 at 5:55 pm
cialis
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:21 am
buy viagra online
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:01 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:01 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 5:04 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right viagra