Iraq - Bush & his dad, the surge, Saddam, Congress - all the ingredients for a continuing master class in fuckuppery remain firmly in place

1. Time for the Father to Chat with the Son -- by Garrison Keillor/Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

As the new Congress convenes today and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ascends to the rostrum, you have to wish them all well. These are the kids who got up in school assembly and spoke on Armistice Day and were captains of teams and organized class projects to do good works, a different breed from us wise guys who lurked in the halls and made fun of them, and in the end you want them and not us running your government. Yes, they had serious brown-nose tendencies and a knack for mouthing pieties, but you could count on them to do what needed doing. They were leaders. They weren't going to swipe the lunch money and buy a keg of suds.

You wonder, however, what this earnest bunch can do when things are so far out of whack as they are in Iraq. The gangland-style execution of Saddam Hussein was visible reality, a token of the bloodlust and violence that swirl around Iraq, where our forces are mired, sitting targets, aliens, fighting a colonial war in behalf of a Shiite majority that is as despotic and cruel as what came before, except messier.

Meanwhile, in Washington, memoranda are set out on long, polished tables, men in crisp white shirts sit at meetings and discuss how to rationalize a war that was conceived by a handful of men in arrogant ignorance and that has descended over the past four years into sheer madness.

Military men know there is no military solution here, and the State Department knows that the policy was driven by domestic politics, but who is going to tell the Current Occupant? He is still talking about victory, or undefeat. The word "surge" keeps cropping up, as if we were fighting the war with electricity and not human beings.

Rational analysis is not the way to approach this administration. Bob Woodward found that out. The President Bush who burst into sobs after winning re-election when his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., said, "You've given your dad a great gift," is so far from the President Bush of the photo-ops as to invite closer inspection, and for that you don't want David Broder, you need a good novelist.

Here we have a slacker son of a powerful patrician father who resolves unconscious Oedipal issues through inappropriate acting-out in foreign countries. Hello? All the king's task forces can gather together the shards of the policy, number them, arrange them, but it never made sense when it was whole and so it makes even less sense now.

American boys in armored jackets and night scopes patrolling the streets of Baghdad are not going to pacify this country, any more than they will convert it to Methodism. They are there to die so that a man in the White House doesn't have to admit that he, George W. Bush, the decider, the one in the cowboy boots, made grievous mistakes. He approved a series of steps that he himself had not the experience or acumen or simple curiosity to question and that had been dumbed down for his benefit, and then he doggedly stuck by them until his approval ratings sank into the swamp.

He was the Great Denier of 2006, waving the flag, questioning the patriotism of anyone who dared oppose him, until he took a thumpin' and now, we are told, he is re-examining the whole matter. Except he's not. To admit that he did wrong is to admit that he is not the man his daddy is, the one who fought in a war.

Hey, we've all had issues with our dads. But do we need this many people to die so that one dude can look like a leader?

The earnest folk in Congress are prepared to discuss policy issues, to plant their butts in hard chairs and sit through jargon-encrusted reports and long, dry perorations thereupon. They're trained for that. That's one good reason they're there and not you or me. But to address the war and the White House, you're talking pathology.

It's time for 41 and 43 to work something out, and they can't do it by way of James A. Baker III or Brent Scowcroft. Pick up the phone, old man, and tell 43 you love him dearly and it's time to think about sparing the lives of American soldiers, many of whom have sons too.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)


2. The Surge to Nowhere -- by Robert Dreyfuss/TomDispatch.com

Like some neocon Wizard of Oz, in building expectations for the 2007 version of his "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq, President Bush is promising far more than he can deliver. It is now nearly two months since he fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, installing Robert Gates in his place, and the White House revealed that a full-scale review of America's failed policy in Iraq was underway. Last week, having spent months -- if, in fact, the New York Times is correct that the review began late in the summer -- consulting with generals, politicians, State Department and CIA bureaucrats, and Pentagon planners, Bush emerged from yet another powwow to tell waiting reporters: "We've got more consultation to do until I talk to the country about the plan."

As John Lennon sang in Revolution : "We'd all love to see the plan."

Unfortunately for Bush, most of the American public may have already checked out. By and large, Americans have given up on the war in Iraq. The November election, largely a referendum on the war, was a repudiation of the entire effort, and the vote itself was a marker along a continuing path of rapidly declining approval ratings both for President Bush personally and for his handling of the war. It's entirely possible that when Bush does present us with "the plan" next week, few will be listening. Until he makes it clear that he has returned from Planet Neocon by announcing concrete steps to end the war in Iraq, it's unlikely that American voters will tune in. As of January 1, every American could find at least 3,000 reasons not to believe that President Bush has suddenly found a way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

What's astonishing about the debate over Iraq is that the President -- or anyone else, for that matter, including the media -- is paying the slightest attention to the neoconservative strategists who got us into this mess in the first place. Having been egregiously wrong about every single Iraqi thing for five consecutive years, by all rights the neocons ought to be consigned to some dusty basement exhibit hall in the American Museum of Natural History, where, like so many triceratops, their reassembled bones would stand mutely by to send a chill of fear through touring schoolchildren. Indeed, the neocons are the dodos of Washington, simply too dumb to know when they are extinct.

Yet here is Tom Donnelly, an American Enterprise Institute neocon, a co-chairman of the Project for a New American Century , telling a reporter sagely that the surge is in. "I think the debate is really coming down to: Surge large. Surge small. Surge short. Surge longer. I think the smart money would say that the range of options is fairly narrow." (Donnelly, of course, forgot: Surge out.) His colleague, Frederick Kagan of AEI, the chief architect of the Surge Theory for Iraq, has made it clear that the only kind of surge that would work is a big, fat one.

Nearly pornographic in his fondling of the surge, Kagan, another of the neocon crew of armchair strategists and militarists, makes it clear that size does matter. "Of all the ‘surge' options out there, short ones are the most dangerous," he wrote in the Washington Post last week, adding lasciviously, "The size of the surge matters as much as the length. … The only ‘surge' option that makes sense is both long and large."

Ooh -- that is, indeed, a manly surge. For Kagan, a man-sized surge must involve at least 30,000 more troops funneled into the killing grounds of Baghdad and al-Anbar Province for at least 18 months.

President Bush, perhaps dizzy from the oedipal frenzy created by the emergence of Daddy's best friend James Baker and his Iraq Study Group, seems all too willing to prove his manhood by the size of the surge. According to a stunning front-page piece in the Times last Tuesday, Bush has all but dismissed the advice of his generals, including Centcom Commander John Abizaid, and George Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, because they are "more fixated on withdrawal than victory." At a recent Pentagon session, according to General James T. Conway, the commandant of the U.S. Marines, Bush told the assembled brass: "What I want to hear from you now is how we are going to win, not how we are going to leave." As a result, Abizaid and Casey are, it appears, getting the same hurry-up-and-retire treatment that swept away other generals who questioned the wisdom on Iraq transmitted from Planet Neocon.

That's scary, if it means that Bush -- presumably on the advice of the Neocon-in-Chief, Vice President Dick Cheney -- has decided to launch a major push, Kagan-style, for victory in Iraq. Not that such an escalation has a chance of working, but there's no question that, in addition to bankrupting the United States, breaking the army and the Marines, and unleashing all-out political warfare at home, it would kill perhaps tens of thousands more Iraqis.

Personally, I'm not convinced that Bush could get away with it politically. Not only is the public dead-set against escalating the war, but there are hints that Congress might not stand for it, and the leadership of the U.S. Armed Forces is opposed.

Over the past few days, a swarm of Republican senators has come out against the surge, including at least three Republican senators up for reelection in 2008 in states that make them vulnerable: Gordon Smith of Oregon, whose remarkable speech calling the war "criminal" went far beyond the normal bland rhetoric of discourse in the U.S. capital, along with John Sununu of New Hampshire and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. In addition, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, less vulnerable but still facing voters in 2008, has questioned the surge idea. And a host of Republican moderates -- Chuck Hagel (NE), Dick Lugar (IN), Susan Collins (ME) -- have lambasted it. (Hagel told Robert Novak : "It's Alice in Wonderland. I'm absolutely opposed to the idea of sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly.") Even Sam Brownback, one of the Senate godfathers of the neocon-backed Iraqi National Congress, has expressed skepticism, saying: "We can't impose a military solution." According to Novak, only 12 of the 49 Republican senators are now willing to back Sen. John McCain's blood-curdling cries for sending in more troops.

Meanwhile, says Novak, the Democrats would not only criticize the idea of a surge but, led by Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, might use their crucial power over the purse. "Biden," writes Novak, "will lead the rest of the Democrats not only to oppose a surge but to block it." Reports the Financial Times of London: "Democrats have hinted that they could use their control over the budget process to make life difficult for the Bush administration if it chooses to step up the military presence in Iraq." A Kagan-style surge would require a vast new commitment of funds, and with their ability to scrutinize, put conditions on, and even strike out entire line items in the military budget and the Pentagon's supplemental requests, the Democrats could find ways to stall or halt the "surge," if not the war itself.

Indeed, if President Bush opts to Kaganize the war, he will throw down the gauntlet to the Democrats. Unwilling until now to say that they would even consider blocking appropriations for the Iraq War, the Democrats would have little choice but to up the ante if Bush flouts the electoral mandate in such a full-frontal manner. By escalating the war in the face of near-universal opposition from the public, the military, and the political class, the president would force the Democrats to escalate their own -- until now fairly mild-mannered -- opposition to the war.

However, it's possible -- just possible -- that what the President is planning to announce will be something a bit more Machiavellian than the straightforwardly manly thrust Kagan wants. Perhaps, just perhaps, he will order an increase of something like 20,000 American troops, but put a tight time limit on this surge -- say, four months. Perhaps he will announce that he is giving Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki that much time to square the circle in Iraq: crack down on militias and death squads, purge the army and police, develop a plan to fight the Sunni insurgency, find a formula to deal with the Kurds and the explosive, oil-rich city of Kirkuk which they claim as their own, un-de-Baathify Iraq, and create a workable formula for sharing the fracturing country's oil wealth.

By surging those 20,000 troops into a hopeless military nowhere-land, Bush will say that he is giving Maliki room to accomplish all that -- knowing full well that none of it can, in fact, be accomplished by the weak, sectarian, Shiite-run regime inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. So, sometime in the late spring, the United States could begin to un-surge its troops and start the sort of orderly, phased withdrawal that Jim Baker and the Carl Levin Democrats have called for.

Levin suggested as much as 2006 ended. "A surge which is not part of an overall program of troop reduction that begins in the next four to six months would be a mistake," said Levin, who will chair the Armed Services Committee. "Even if the president is going to propose to temporarily add troops, he should make that conditional on the Iraqis reaching a political settlement that effectively ends the sectarian violence."

That may be too much to ask for a Christian-crusader President, still lodged inside a bubble universe and determined to crush all evil-doers. And it may be too clever by half for an administration that has been as utterly inept as this one.

At the same time, it may also be too much to expect that the Democrats will really go to the mat to fight Bush if, Kagan-style, he orders a surge that is "long and large." Maybe they will merely posture and fulminate and threaten to… well, hold hearings.

If so, it will be the Iraqis who end the war. It will be the Iraqis who eventually kill enough Americans to break the U.S. political will, and it will be the Iraqis who sweep away the ruins of the Maliki government to replace it with an anti-American, anti-U.S.- occupation government in Iraq. That is basically how the war in Vietnam ended, and it wasn't pretty.

[Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam . He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, Tomdispatch, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report , at his website)]


3. How Bush and Blair Morphed a Monster Into a Hero
The Martyrdom of Saddam Hussein
By PATRICK COCKBURN/Counterpunch

It takes real genius to create a martyr out of Saddam Hussein. Here is a man dyed deep with the blood of his own people who refused to fight for him during the United States-led invasion three-and-a-half years ago. His tomb in his home village of Awja is already becoming a place of pilgrimage for the five million Sunni Arabs of Iraq who are at the core of the uprising.

During his trial, Saddam himself was clearly trying to position himself to be a martyr in the cause of Iraqi independence and unity and Arab nationalism. His manifest failure to do anything effective for these causes during the quarter of a century he misruled Iraq should have made his task difficult. But an execution which vied in barbarity with a sectarian lynching in the backstreets of Belfast 30 years ago is elevating him to heroic status in the eyes of the Sunni--the community to which most Arabs belong--across the Middle East.

The old nostrum of Winston Churchill that "grass may grow on the battlefield but never under the gallows" is likely to prove as true in Iraq as it has done so frequently in the rest of the world. Nor is the US likely to be successful in claiming that the execution was purely an Iraqi affair.

Many Iraqis recall that the announcement of the verdict on Saddam sentencing him to death was conveniently switched last year to 5 November, the last daily news cycle before the US mid-term elections. The US largely orchestrated the trial from behind the scenes. Yesterday the Iraqi government arrested an official who supervised the execution for making the mobile-phone video that has stirred so much controversy.

The Iraqi Shia and Kurds are overwhelmingly delighted that Saddam is in his grave. But the timing of his death at the start of the Eid al-Adha feast makes his killing appear like a deliberate affront to the Sunni community. The execution of his half-brother Barzan in the next few days will confirm it in its sense that it is the target of an assault by the majority Shia.

Why was the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki so keen to kill Saddam Hussein? First, there is the entirely understandable desire for revenge. Members of the old opposition to Saddam Hussein are often blamed for their past ineffectiveness but most lost family members to his torture chambers and execution squads. Every family in Iraq lost a member to his disastrous wars or his savage repressions.

There is also a fear among Shia leaders that the US might suddenly change sides. This is not as outlandish as it might at first appear. The US has been cultivating the Sunni in Iraq for the past 18 months. It has sought talks with the insurgents. It has tried to reverse the de-Baathification campaign. US commentators and politicians blithely talk about eliminating the anti-American Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and fighting his militia, the Mehdi Army. No wonder Shias feel that it is better to get Saddam under the ground just as quickly as possible. Americans may have forgotten that they were once allied to him but Iraqis have not.

When Saddam fell Iraqis expected life to get better. They hoped to live like Saudis and Kuwaitis. They knew he had ruined his country by hot and cold wars. When he came to power as president in 1979, Iraq had large oil revenues, vast oil reserves, a well-educated people and a competent administration. By invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, he reduced his nation to poverty. This was made worse by the economic siege imposed by 13 years of UN sanctions.

But life did not get better after 2003. Face-to-face interviews with 2,000 Iraqi adults by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies in November revealed that 90 per cent of them said the situation in their country had been better before the US-led invasion. Only 5 per cent of people said it was better today. The survey was carried out in Baghdad, in the wholly Sunni Anbar province and the entirely Shia Najaf province. It does not include the Kurds, who remain favourable to the occupation.

This does not mean that Iraqis want Saddam back. But it is clearly true that the chances of dying violently in Iraq are far greater today everywhere in the country outside the three Kurdish provinces than they were in 2002. The myth put about by Republican neoconservatives that large parts of Iraq enjoyed pastoral calm post-war but were ignored by the liberal media was always a fiction. None of the neocons who claim that the good news from Iraq was being suppressed ever made any effort to visit those Iraqi provinces which they claimed were at peace.

Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. It was not inevitable that the country should revert to Hobbesian anarchy. At first the US and Britain did not care what Iraqis thought. Their victory over the Iraqi army--and earlier over the Taliban in Afghanistan--had been too easy. They installed a semi-colonial regime. By the time they realised that the guerrilla war was serious it was too late.

It could get worse yet. The so-called "surge" in US troop levels by 20,000 to 30,000 men on top of the 145,000 soldiers already in the country is unlikely to produce many dividends. It seems primarily designed so that President George Bush does not have to admit defeat or take hard choices about talking to Iran and Syria. But these reinforcements might tempt the US to assault the Mehdi Army.

Somehow many senior US officials have convinced themselves that it is Mr Sadr, revered by millions of Shia, who is the obstacle to a moderate Iraqi government. In fact his legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Shia Iraqis, the great majority of the population, is far greater than the "moderate" politicians whom the US has in its pocket and who seldom venture out of the Green Zone. Mr Sadr is a supporter of Mr Maliki, whose relations with Washington are ambivalent.

An attack on the Shia militia men of the Mehdi Army could finally lead to the collapse of Iraq into total anarchy. Saddam must already be laughing in his grave.

(Patrick Cockburn is the author of ' The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq ', published by Verso in October.)


4. A Way Out of Iraq That Sidesteps Bush -- by Roscoe C. Born/ Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

A new year, a new Congress, a new milestone as U.S. deaths exceed 3,000: This is a decisive moment in the urgent matter of the chaos and carnage in Iraq. With the report of the Iraq Study Group completed (and seemingly shelved), and with President Bush closeted with his war advisers, the question raised in conversation, on television news and in the press is: What will Mr. Bush decide?

A Newsweek cover, for example, asks, "Will Bush Listen?" An op-ed by David Ignatius in The Washington Post ends with these words: "The man under the spotlight knows he will have to make this decision alone." The unexamined premise is that America's next course of action in Iraq depends entirely on the final judgment of one man, George W. Bush.

But the nation's next step is not the president's alone to decide. The more important question is: What will Congress decide? There is a way for Congress to swiftly stanch the flow of American blood in Iraq without a bitter, partisan debate over the causes or conduct of the war.

Although President Bush might have invaded Iraq even without congressional approval, he did seek and get that authority in "The Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq," passed by Congress in October 2002 and still in effect. That document presented 23 declarations of "fact," stated in "whereas" clauses, that, in the president's view, warranted his use of our military to invade Iraq. Congress agreed and authorized this war.

Now, regardless of whether those statements were at that time false or misleading, and putting aside any confrontations about the blame for the war, the fundamental "whereas" clauses that were the basis for war are now clearly wrong or no longer applicable. A few examples:

• "Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations."

That declaration, as we now know, was not true in 2002 and is not true today. Even if it had been true, the Iraqi regime that allegedly committed those offenses no longer exists. Today's Iraqi government poses no military threat to any other nation.

• "Whereas the current Iraq regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people."

The "current Iraq regime" referred to did use chemical weapons against its enemies and its own citizens. But the leader of that regime has been captured and hanged. Again, Iraq today poses no military threat to anyone.

• "Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law No. 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."

The United States has invaded Iraq and removed "the current Iraqi regime" from power and has promoted a series of efforts to create a democratic Iraqi government - all declared by President Bush to be successful.

Whatever motives led the president to ask, and Congress to grant, authority to use the U.S. military to invade Iraq, the justifications stated in whereas after whereas are not true today. Yet they remain on the books, still the official position of Congress.

So the vital decision is not President Bush's alone, and Congress should not wait to proceed on its own. Congress is morally obligated - now - to review its outdated joint resolution authorizing force against Iraq, and to undertake a new joint resolution declaring, in essence, "Whereas the purposes of the original authorization have been served; whereas the stated reasons justifying the authorization no longer exist; whereas the objectionable Iraqi regime has been removed and the new Iraqi regime poses no military threat to its neighbors or the United States; that, therefore, U.S. military forces are no longer authorized to remain in Iraq."

Far-fetched? Not in the least. Congress used this very procedure in 1993 to withdraw U.S. troops from Somalia.

Their orderly departure should begin as promptly as the military protocols for force protection will allow and be completed within six months of the passage of a new joint resolution.

It is important to note that this approach bypasses, for now, a divisive debate about Mr. Bush's war policies. If Congress wishes to examine the causes of this war, that is a separate matter that should not interfere with a rational review of a joint resolution that is obsolete.

(Roscoe C. Born, a Sykesville resident, was Washington editor of Barron's magazine and a reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau.)


5. A promising Iraqi province is now a tinderbox
Violence surged after U.S. forces handed security to the Iraqis. Now the Americans are stepping back in.
By Solomon Moore/LA Times

BAQUBAH, IRAQ — When U.S. forces killed the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, six months ago in a village near here, they hoped security would improve in this strategic province just north of Baghdad.

Instead, security has collapsed in Diyala province, which now ranks as one of Iraq's most troubled regions. Insurgent attacks have more than doubled in the last year. Violence has devastated the provincial police force and brought reconstruction to a virtual standstill.

Assassinations have claimed the lives of mayors, tribal chieftains, police officials and judges, including a Shiite Muslim member of the provincial council who was killed Tuesday. Many government officials here sleep on cots in their offices because driving home is too dangerous.

And Iraqi security forces have been implicated in so many abuses that the U.S. commander here recently gave his Iraqi counterpart an angry lecture, likening the Iraqi troops to an "undisciplined rabble."

U.S. and Iraqi officials interviewed in recent days blamed the sharp downturn on a combination of U.S. neglect and abuses by the Iraqi army. U.S. troops largely disengaged from security here for weeks at a time, they say, handing the reins to Iraqi forces who proved to be abusive and ineffective.

U.S. commanders are attempting a sharp change in strategy, hoping that a classic counterinsurgency campaign, combining reconstruction aid with a more active U.S. presence, can turn the situation around.

For now, insurgents here appear to have gained the upper hand. They demonstrated their freedom of movement last week by barreling a dozen trucks through the streets of Baqubah's Amin neighborhood, shouting militant slogans and brandishing machine guns and shoulder-fired rocket launchers.

The defiant show of force was similar to another insurgent parade caught on video by a U.S. aerial drone in November. Insurgents were seen hauling Shiite families out of their homes and executing them in the streets, U.S. military officials who reviewed the footage said.

Diyala is an area of fertile farmland, abundant water and untapped oil wells stretching north of Baghdad's suburbs and east to the Iranian border. Its population includes all three of Iraq's main religious and ethnic groups.

Of its roughly 1.8 million people, about 55% are Sunni Arabs. But because Sunnis boycotted elections two years ago, Shiites, who make up about one-third of Diyala's population, hold the majority of provincial council seats and control the local security forces. Kurds, mostly in northeastern Diyala, make up about 15%.

Until October, the main U.S. force in the province was the 4th Infantry Division. It largely followed the strategy laid down by top U.S. commanders in Iraq last year: Pull American forces back as much as possible and allow Iraqi troops to take the lead in fighting insurgents. U.S. officers here say that approach did not work.

"4th ID tried to keep a low profile after they handed over security to the Iraqi army, but that approach backfired," said an officer with the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, which now has responsibility for the province. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was criticizing another U.S. military unit.

Under the 4th Infantry's plan, Army convoys stayed on main roads and rarely ventured into Baqubah's dense neighborhoods, military officials said.

"Iraqis told us that 4th ID drove in here with their Humvees and told them, 'If you don't shoot at us, we won't shoot at you,' " the 3rd Brigade officer said. "So the insurgents actually took over this place."

Making matters worse, Iraq's Shiite-dominated government appointed a provincial commander who U.S. military officials say was handpicked by the Badr Brigade, a militia implicated in hundreds of death squad killings in Baghdad. The militia is linked to Iraq's largest Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Under orders from the Iraqi Ground Forces Command in Baghdad this fall, the commander, Brig. Gen. Shakir Hulail Hussein Kaabi, and his 5th Iraqi Division started a campaign of what U.S. officials now describe as abusive raids and detentions.

The problems were so serious that Col. David W. Sutherland, commander of the 3rd Brigade, took the unusual step of lecturing his Iraqi counterpart during a mid-December briefing at Forward Operating Base Warhorse near Baqubah.

"Six weeks ago, the people of Diyala and Baqubah were disgusted with the disrespect and disregard the Iraqi army had shown them," Sutherland told Shakir through an Arabic interpreter.

"Bullying an innocent person is unacceptable. Taking things from houses is unacceptable. Taking cars or things from cars is unacceptable," he said.

"Before we send an undisciplined rabble into this fight, I will pull the plug," Sutherland told the general. "We are soldiers, not barbarians."

Since taking command of Diyala in October, Sutherland has increased the number of U.S. advisors traveling with Iraqi units and required U.S. approval for any Iraqi operation, in effect rescinding Iraqi control of the 5th Division.

Sutherland said that several joint raids convinced him Shakir was willing to change his tactics and adopt a counterinsurgency doctrine of proportional force.

"In this culture, the more you kill, the more enemies you make. The more you treat with disrespect, the more enemies you make," Sutherland said. "And we were able to show [Shakir], not subjectively but objectively, how that happened and what it created."

American commanders won at least a partial victory in late December when the government agreed to replace Diyala's police chief. The chief, Ghassan Bawi, had been accused of tacitly or directly supporting death squads in the province, according to U.S. officials, who had lobbied for months for his removal. Like Shakir, Bawi was endorsed by the Badr militia, U.S. officials say.

Detainees reported kidnappings and torture at the hands of Iraqi policemen, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. One of Bawi's most infamous underlings is known as Cable Ali, after his favorite coercive tool.

In an interview, Shakir said he had changed tactics and now used more focused operations. But he clung to the view that his main targets were Sunnis, not Shiites.

"The nature of the target is that they are all Sunnis," Shakir said. "All these problem areas are all Sunni, so our operations are all in Sunni areas. There are actually no Shiites left, because 8,000 Shiites have been killed or displaced."

But the shift in strategy may have come too late.

Diyala's Sunni politicians refuse to attend provincial council meetings until Shakir is stripped of his command, and the governing body has been unable to reach a quorum for weeks.

"The people don't trust the government or the security forces," said Deputy Gov. Awf Rahoomi, a Sunni. "The Shiites in control of security are not professionals — they were appointed on a sectarian basis. This has caused people to put more faith in the armed groups, which have become more powerful than the government forces."

The U.S. has spent roughly $220 million toward reconstruction in Diyala, but as winter temperatures plunge, food transport, electricity generation and petroleum shipments are beset by chronic delays, when shipments occur at all. Most Baqubah shops are closed and most streets devoid of traffic. Sewers are dysfunctional, spilling sludge across the refuse-covered streets and contaminating the water supply.

Many Iraqi contractors now refuse to enter the province, fearing for their lives.

Baqubah's Government Center building is regularly attacked by insurgents, but still serves as a nighttime refuge for government officials afraid to return home at the end of the day.

"The Government Center has become something of a dormitory," said Kiki Munshi, a State Department official who leads the Provincial Reconstruction Team.

Munshi said poor security and government bureaucracy had brought reconstruction to a virtual standstill.

U.S. military officials also complain that poor coordination among the military, State Department officials and the Iraqi government continues to hinder projects.

At a recent meeting between various local ministry representatives and Diyala's mayors and other officials, the politicians complained that Baghdad was not responding to their needs.

The mayor of Khalis said food and clean water were scarce in his area.

"The Iraqi army and the coalition forces arrested a lot of workers for our water treatment project," he said.

Baqubah's mayor said the Iraqi army had confiscated several fuel tankers from Oil Ministry drivers. The mayor of Khanaqin said at least 2,500 families had come to his city to escape violence elsewhere in the province, overwhelming services.

The officials seemed unable to agree on whether poor security was preventing reconstruction or whether reconstruction failures had caused security to erode. It is a conundrum that U.S. soldiers in the field also face.

While on patrol a few days earlier, Capt. Christopher Conley parked his armored vehicle in a Sunni neighborhood to attempt to gather intelligence from a tribal sheik.

"I want the coalition to have a good relationship with your neighborhood," Conley told the elder tribesman.

"We would like to cooperate with you," said the wizened sheik, who identified himself as Abu Mohammed. "But I can promise you that it will come to nothing because of the situation here. All the jobless men. All the closed shops."

"I want to fix the security situation," Conley told him. "I have money to fix things, but no one will come to help because of security."

"If you ask me, no one is ready to hear you right now," Abu Mohammed said. "If security gets better, we'll do whatever you want."

(moore1@latimes.com)


6. Reporter returns to Baghdad to find it far different - and worse off -- by Hannah Allam/McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The tiny, dusty shops of Kadhemiya are treasure chests filled with agate, turquoise, coral and amber. I used to spend hours in this colorful Baghdad market district, haggling over prices for semi-precious stones etched with prayers in Arabic calligraphy.

That was just before I left Iraq in 2005, when rings from Kadhemiya were simply sentimental reminders of a two-year assignment here. When I returned to Baghdad last month, however, I found a city so dramatically polarized that sectarian identity now extends to your fingers. Slipping on a turquoise ring is no longer an afterthought, but a carefully deliberated security precaution.

A certain color of stone worn a certain way is just one of the dozens of superficial clues - like dialect, style of beard, how you pin a veil - that indicate whether you're Sunni or Shiite. These little signs increasingly mean the difference between life and death at the terrifying illegal checkpoints that surround the districts of Baghdad. In a surprise reversal, Shiite militiamen have usurped Sunni insurgents as the most feared force on the streets.

When I was last here in 2005, it took guts and guards, but you could still travel to most anywhere in the capital. Now, there are few true neighborhoods left. They're mostly just cordoned-off enclaves in various stages of deadly sectarian cleansing. Moving trucks piled high with furniture weave through traffic, evidence of an unfolding humanitarian crisis involving hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Iraqis.

The Sunni-Shiite segregation is the starkest change of all, but nowadays it seems like everything in Baghdad hinges on separation. There's the Green Zone to guard the unpopular government from its suffering people, U.S. military bases where Iraqis aren't allowed to work, armored sedans to shield VIPs from the explosions that kill workaday civilians, different TV channels and newspapers for each political party, an unwritten citywide dress code to keep women from the eyes of men.

Attempts to bring people together have failed miserably. I attended a symposium called "How to Solve Iraq's Militia Problem," but the main militia representatives never showed up and those of us who did were stuck inside for hours while a robot disabled a car bomb in the parking lot.

Then there was the Iraqi government's two-day national reconciliation conference, which offered little more than the grandstanding of politicians whose interests are best served by the fragmenting of their country. The message was: The south is for the Shiites, the north is for the Kurds, the west is for the Sunnis, and the east is open for Iran. Baghdad, the besieged anchor in the center, is a free-for-all.

On one of my first days back, I took a little tour with my Iraqi colleagues to get reacquainted with the capital. We decided to stay on the eastern Shiite side of the Tigris River rather than play Russian roulette in the Sunni west.

Even on the relatively "safe" side of the river, a dizzying assortment of armed men roamed freely. In the space of an hour, we encountered the Badr Organization militia, the Mahdi Army militia, the Kurdish peshmerga militia, the Iraqi police, interior ministry commandos, the Iraqi military, American troops, the Oil Protection Force, the motorcade of a Communist Party official and Central Bank guards escorting an armored van.

We drove through one of my favorite districts in hopes of visiting shopkeepers I knew. But they had fled, leaving behind padlocked doors and faded signs for shops whose names now seem ironic rather than catchy: "Nuts," "Ghost Music," "Once Upon a Time."

I asked my colleagues to arrange meetings with old Iraqi sources - politicians, professors, activists and clerics - only to be told they'd been assassinated, abducted or exiled.

Even Mr. Milk is dead. The grocer we called by the name of his landmark shop in the upscale Mansour district was kidnapped and killed, along with his son, my colleagues said. The owner of a DVD shop where I once purchased a copy of "Napoleon Dynamite" also had been executed.

So many blindfolded, tortured corpses turn up that an Iraqi co-worker recently told me it was "a slow day" when 17 bodies were found. Typically, the figure is 40 or more. When the overflowing morgue at Yarmouk Hospital was bombed last month, one of our drivers wearily muttered, "How many times can they kill us?"

Even the toughest of my Iraqi colleagues hit their breaking points after experiencing the indignity of being forced from their homes, the trauma of a bomb outside a doorstep, the grief for a cousin killed by a mortar, the shame of staying silent while a neighbor's house was torched.

My colleagues were fearful of the future when I left, but at least they went home every night to home-cooked meals and the bustle of domestic life. A few had even purchased land in the optimistic belief that 2006 would bring a measure of calm. Now, half the staff has sent their families to safer countries, and others plan to do the same. For them, there is no ivory-tower debate over whether they're living in a civil war.

On any given night, we have three or four Iraqi staff members camping out at the office. I find them surfing the Internet for visa applications to European countries, information on the U.S. green-card lottery, fellowship programs, political asylum eligibility. At night, they burn through phone cards to baby talk with their children in Syria or blow kisses to them from a Web cam.

I covered a day of the Saddam Hussein trial because I was curious to see the dictator in person. When I returned to the office, none of my Iraqi co-workers asked about their former president. They despise him, to be sure, but they shrugged and declared him yesterday's news, as irrelevant to their lives as the current crop of leaders cloistered in the Green Zone with no control over the anarchic landscape outside.

Survival is their chief concern, and it's reflected even in greetings. Local custom calls for a string of flowery salutations, but these days the response to "Shlonak?" - How are you? - is shortened to one word: "Alive."

Electricity is on for just a couple of hours a day in most districts. Gas lines stretch for block after block. Food prices are higher than ever, especially for fresh produce, which requires rural farmers to make the treacherous drive to Baghdad markets. The water is contaminated. Gunmen in police uniforms stage brazen mass abductions, evaporating faith in the Iraqi security forces.

Universities are in bad shape. Instructors have fled, mortars interrupt classes, and people have been kidnapped at the gate. With violence emptying campuses, the Iraqi prime minister issued an order this month that threatens expulsion or dismissal for students and teachers who don't come back to class.

On the drive back to our hotel from the Green Zone last week, I saw a group of adorable little girls in pinafores, knee socks and ponytails. They were walking home from a nearby elementary school, stepping over trash and yanking their skirts from barbed wire. I had my camera with me and asked the driver to stop so I could take a picture.

A year ago, I would have snapped away. This time, I hesitated.

Perhaps a guard somewhere would think I was a kidnapper and shoot at me. Perhaps a parent would come screaming and cause a ruckus over a suspicious foreigner in the neighborhood. But more than anything, I was stopped by the thought of the terrified looks on the girls' faces if a stranger holding a camera approached them.

In a country where there is so much fear, why add even a little bit more?

(Hannah Allam covers the Middle East and Islamic world as bureau chief in Cairo, Egypt. She recently returned to Baghdad on assignment, where she previously spent more than two years reporting on the war in Iraq as Baghdad bureau chief. She was named "Journalist of the Year 2004" by the National Association of Black Journalists. Knight Ridder recognized her war coverage with a Journalism Excellence Award in 2004 and the John S. Knight Gold Medal in 2005. The Overseas Press Club awarded Allam and two colleagues from the Baghdad bureau its Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper reporting from abroad in 2005. She joined the McClatchy Washington bureau's foreign staff in 2003.)