Al-Maliki's Nanny Posted by Patrick Barry

It now appears that the fraught operation in Basra last week was the brain-child of none other than Nouri al-Maliki (Cheney conspiracy theorists despair.)  According to a report in today’s New York Times, Maliki notified Ambassador Crocker on March 21 that he intended to travel to the Southern port city to personally oversee efforts directed at quelling the unrest there, but in his rush to become the hero of Basra, he seems to have forgotten something – a plan:

Instead of methodically building up their combat power and gradually stepping up operations against renegade militias, Mr. Maliki’s forces lunged into the city, attacking before all of the Iraqi reinforcements had even arrived. By the following Tuesday, a major fight was on.

Should we have expected anything less than a confused, slapdash effort from an Iraqi central government, riven by competing parochial interests and ineptitude, that has neither demonstrated the ability to act without substantial US support, nor even received any kind of meaningful pressure from the United States to do so?  The answer should be obvious.  In fact, given the nature of our endless commitment in Iraq, where neither signs of increasing stability, nor indicators of impending trouble do anything to change the Bush Administration’s thick-headedness, we should look forward to playing nanny whenever al-Maliki decides to embark on similarly ill-advised adventures.  Goodbye strategic calculus, hello moral hazard!

Comments

[Eric Martin]

Not so sure how you reached such a firm conclusion re: this:

It now appears that the fraught operation in Basra last week was the brain-child of none other than Nouri al-Maliki (Cheney conspiracy theorists despair.)

Why does that rule out Cheney green-lighting this action? Are you suggesting that if Cheney had consented to Maliki's plans there's no way Crocker wouldn't have known?

Are you saying that Cheney always communicates his plans with other members of the Bush administration - especially in the State Department? Cheney always lets the State Department in on his designs.

[Dan Kervick]

Sorry, but I continue to think these denials and scapegoatings are CYA bullshit, and that the Times article proves nothing other than the old adage that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. Gareth Porter wrote about this affair a couple of days ago. Here are the crucial passages from his column:

These suggestions that it was Maliki who miscalculated in Basra are clearly false. No significant Iraqi military action can be planned without a range of military support functions being undertaken by the U.S. command. On March 25, just as the operation was getting under way in Basra, U.S. military spokesman Col. Bill Buckner said "coalition forces" were providing intelligence, surveillance, and support aircraft for the operation.

Furthermore, the embedded role of the U.S. Military Transition Teams (MTTs) makes it impossible that any Iraqi military operation could be planned without their full involvement.

A U.S. adviser to the Iraqi security forces involved in the operation told a Washington Post reporter by telephone on March 25 he expected the operation to take a week to 10 days.

Operation Knights Assault also involved actual U.S.-Iraqi joint combat operations. U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner denied on March 26 that there were any "conventional" U.S. forces involved in the operation. Only on March 30 did the U.S. command confirm that a joint raid by Iraqi and U.S. special forces units had "killed 22 suspected militants" in Basra.

Some observers have expressed doubt that the Bush administration would have chosen to have Maliki launch such a risky campaign against well-entrenched Shi'ite militiamen in Basra until after the Petraeus-Crocker testimony had been completed. But that assumes that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon recognized the potential danger of a large-scale effort to eliminate or severely weaken the Mahdi Army in Basra.

In fact, the Bush administration and the Iraqi military were clearly taken by surprise when the Mahdi Army in Basra attacked security forces on March 25, initiating a major battle for the city.

For many months the Bush administration, encouraged by Moqtada al-Sadr's unilateral cease-fire of last August, had been testing Sadr and the Mahdi Army to see if they would respond to piecemeal repression by striking back. The U.S. command and Iraqi security forces had carried out constant "cordon and search" operations which had resulted in the detention of at least 2,000 Mahdi Army militiamen since the August cease-fire, according to a Sadrist legislator.

Resistance to such operations by the Mahdi Army had been minimal, and Bush administration officials attributed Sadr's apparent acquiescence to restraining Iranian influence and the decline of the Mahdi Army as a fighting force.

At the meeting with Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi July 24, Ambassador Crocker had held Iran directly responsible for what he called "militia-related activity that could be attributed to Iranian support." After the Sadr cease-fire, top officials of the Maliki government as well as rival Shi'ite party leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim had told U.S. officials that Iran had intervened to convince Sadr to end Mahdi Army fighting, presumably because of its desire to stabilize the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi regime.

In an interview with the Washington Post Dec. 23, David Satterfield, a senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and coordinator for Iraq, said the decline in the number of attacks by Mahdi Army militiamen "has to be attributed to an Iranian policy decision" and suggested that the policy decision had been made "at the most senior level" in Tehran.

Pentagon officials weren't sure why the Mahdi Army was not fighting back, but the Los Angeles Times reported Oct. 31 that they hoped both that the gradual decline in attacks would continue, and such a decline "means that Iran has heard their warnings." Two weeks later, Maj. Gen. Jim Simmons, a deputy to Petraeus, said the Iranian "initiatives and commitments" to withhold weapons "appear to be holding up."

Petraeus, meanwhile, was convinced that the ability of the Mahdi Army to resist had been reduced by U.S. military actions as well as by its presumed internal disorganization. His spokesman, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, declared in early November, "As we've gone after that training skill levels amongst the enemy, we've degraded their capability…."

Then came Sadr's announcement Feb. 22 that the cease-fire would be extended. That apparently convinced Petraeus and the Bush White House that they could now launch a large-scale "cordon and search" operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra without great risk of a military response.

That assumption ignored the evidence that Sadr had been avoiding major combat because he was in the process of reorganizing and rebuilding the Mahdi Army into a more effective force. Thousands of Mahdi Army fighters, including top commanders, were sent to Iran for training – not as "rogue element," as suggested by the U.S. command, but with Sadr's full support. One veteran Mahdi Army fighter who had undergone such training told The Independent last April that the retraining was "part of a new strategy. We know we are against a strong enemy and we must learn proper methods and techniques."

Last week a Mahdi Army commander in Sadr City was quoted by the Canadian Press as saying, "We are now better organized, have better weapons, command centers, and easy access to logistical and financial support."

The ability of Mahdi Army units in Basra to stop in its tracks the biggest operation mounted against it since 2004 suggests that Shi'ite military resistance to the occupation is only beginning. By making that point just before Petraeus' testimony, Sadr has posed a major challenge to the Bush narrative of military success in Iraq.

If a U.S. adviser to the Iraqi security forces told the Washington Post that he expected the operation to take "a week to 10 days", then we're talking about a short, intense operation, and not any gradual buildup and long-term effort such as US officials are now claiming was their real intention. US leaders were on board, and were calculating another of their famous cakewalks. Wrong again.

[Simmons]

God, when are the next Iraqi elections. We need to rig the polling for someone else next time.

Nah, just kidding. In all seriousness though, that guy has always been a failure. He just can't control the parliament as well as he should be able to.

[cheap coach handbags]

Thank you for your sharing! I like i very much!

[Franchises in Africa]

Looks like Nguyen Van Maliki has got some fantasy of independence to prove. The reality instead being, his militia are independent of competence, motivation, and leadership - now telegraphed to all internal enemies and allies alike. With of course the Slot Machine in Chief making all the rounds crowing up the (heck of a job) expectations. What I wonder about is if Cheney (after a thumbs up) even bothered to tell Petreaus about the rush into Cambodia.