Baghdad Under Siege?

The most recent bulletin from GHQ at Ann Arbor includes the following commendation of a subordinate commander:

"Patrick Cockburn suggests that such actions are not random violence, but rather are part of a Sunni Arab strategy of surrounding and cutting off Baghdad.

"Cockburn is correct. The Sunni Arab guerilla movements have been attempting to cut off Baghdad for some time, and have at times successfully imposed a fuel blockade on it. So far the blockade has been staccato and not very successful. But if they really could blockade the capital, they could deprive the Iraqi police and army of fuel for their vehicles, and then execute them. This step could only come, of course, once the US begins withdrawing. Once that process starts, the Shiites had better start negotiating with the Sunni guerrilla groups, or else it wouldn't be long before the Green Zone fell."

Rear-Colonel Cockburn out in the field will be happy to know that the Gods of the General Staff consider that he provides a "correct" account of the strategic situation, which account runs as follows:


Baghdad is under siege / by Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, Northern Iraq

Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital.

As American and British political leaders argue over responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, the country has taken another lurch towards disintegration.

Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.

The Sunni insurgents seem to be following a plan to control all the approaches to Baghdad. They have long held the highway leading west to the Jordanian border and east into Diyala province. Now they seem to be systematically taking over routes leading north and south.

Dusty truck-stop and market towns such as Mahmoudiyah, Balad and Baquba all lie on important roads out of Baghdad. In each case Sunni fighters are driving out the Shia and tightening their grip on the capital. Shias may be in a strong position within Baghdad but they risk their lives when they take to the roads. Some 30 Shias were dragged off a bus yesterday after being stopped at a fake checkpoint south of Balad.

In some isolated neighbourhoods in Baghdad, food shortages are becoming severe. Shops are open for only a few hours a day. "People have been living off watermelon and bread for the past few weeks," said one Iraqi from the capital. The city itself has broken up into a dozen or more hostile districts, the majority of which are controlled by the main Shia militia, the Mehdi Army.

The scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict. An apocalyptic scenario could well emerge - with slaughter on a massive scale. As America prepares its exit strategy, the fear in Iraq is of a genocidal conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shias in which an entire society implodes. Individual atrocities often obscure the bigger picture where:

* upwards of 1,000 Iraqis are dying violently every week;

* Shia fighters have taken over much of Baghdad; the Sunni encircle the capital;

* the Iraqi Red Crescent says 1.5 million people have fled their homes within the country;

* the Shia and Sunni militias control Iraq, not the enfeebled army or police.

No target is too innocent. Yesterday a bomb tore through a party of wedding guests in Ur, on the outskirts of Sadr City, killing 15 people, including four children. Iraqi wedding parties are very identifiable, with coloured streamers attached to the cars and cheering relatives hanging out the windows.[A]

Amid all this, Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, has sought to turn the fiasco of Iraq into a vote-winner with his claim that the Iraqi insurgents have upped their attacks on US forces in a bid to influence the mid-term elections. There is little evidence to support this. In fact, the number of American dead has risen steadily this year from 353 in January to 847 in September and will be close to one thousand in October.

And there is growing confusion over the role of the US military. In Sadr City, the sprawling slum in the east of the capital that is home to 2.5 million people, American soldiers have been setting up barriers of cement blocks and sandbags after a US soldier was abducted, supposedly by the Mehdi Army. The US also closed several of the bridges across the Tigris river making it almost impossible to move between east and west Baghdad. Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, added to the sense of chaos yesterday when he ordered the US army to end its Sadr City siege.[B]

Mr Maliki has recently criticised the US for the failure of its security policy in Iraq and resisted American pressure to eliminate the militias. Although President Bush and Tony Blair publicly handed back sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004, Mr Maliki said: "I am now Prime Minister and overall commander of the armed forces yet I cannot move a single company without Coalition [US and British] approval."[C]

In reality the militias are growing stronger by the day because the Shia and Sunni communities feel threatened and do not trust the army and police to defend them. US forces have been moving against the Mehdi Army, which follows the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but he is an essential prop to Mr Maliki's government. Almost all the main players in Iraqi politics maintain their own militias. The impotence of US forces to prevent civil war is underlined by the fact that the intense fighting between Sunni and Shia around Balad, north of Baghdad, has raged for a month, although the town is beside one of Iraq's largest American bases. The US forces have done little and when they do act they are seen by the Shia as pursuing a feud against the Mehdi Army.

One eyewitness in Balad said two US gunships had attacked Shia positions on Sunday killing 11 people and seriously wounding six more, several of whom lost legs and arms. He added that later two Iraqi regular army platoons turned up in Balad with little military equipment. When they were asked by locals why their arms were so poor "the reply was that they were under strict orders by the US commander from the [nearby] Taji camp not to intervene and they were stripped of their rocket-propelled grenade launchers"[D]

Another ominous development is that Iraqi tribes that often used to have both Sunni and Shia members are now splitting along sectarian lines.

In Baghdad it has become lethally dangerous for a Sunni to wander into a Shia neighbourhood and vice versa. In one middle-class district called al-Khudat, in west Baghdad, once favoured by lawyers and judges, the remaining Shia families recently found a cross in red paint on their doors. Sometimes there is also a note saying "leave without furniture and without renting your house". Few disobey.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn is published this month by Verso.



Mil. Sci. is not my best or favorite subject, being devoted to _politique d'abord!_ personally, but I do recall a few accounts of memorable sieges, and none of them went to that tune that I recall. Col. Cockburn and Generalissimo Cole, who corrected Cockburn's paper, or rather, found it correct already, envision a siege directed against only a portion of the population of the embattled town. I daresay that scenario has in fact happened, for it is certainly not a logical impossibility, but perhaps it is not the best characterization of the actual situation at New Baghdad.

Cockburn and Cole may verbally agree on "siege," but they entertain strikingly different notions of the objectives of the besiegers. Rear-Col. Cockburn was not as explicit as he might have been, but I believe we are to understand the sentence

"The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital"

to mean that partition is the purpose, as well as the result, of those fighting on behalf of the former Sunni Ascendancy. Gen. Cole, however, takes for granted that their purpose must be to overthrow the Green Zone neo-régime altogether. The GZ itself unfortunately happens to be on the "wrong" or right or Sunni bank of the Tigris, but if the palaces and the proconsuls and the mercenaries and the invasion-language journalists could be transferred over to Sadr City or thereabouts, that would satisfy the besiegers as Cockburn seems to conceive them, they would not require to abolish it altogether. Of course the GZ writ would not run west of the river, but that is only to say that the future Intifadistan or Saddamistan would be on a par with the Kurdistan that has existed for more than a dozen years already. To be sure, Cockburn has no sooner said "partition" in his second sentence, than he says "disintegration" in his third, the one word suggesting that the process is deliberate, at least on the Sunni Ascendancy side, and the other that everything is happening in a mindless and uncontrolled,.even uncontrollable, manner. He goes on to adduce Bosnia, which does not clarify things much, and neither does that mysterious verb "implode" that our journalists have all become so fond of.

We need not insist on ascribing any definite theory of the besiegers' objectives to Rear-Col. Cockburn to distinguish him from Generalissimo Cole, however. It suffices that he does not see the Big Picture as they do at GHQ. To repeat,

The Sunni Arab guerilla movements have been attempting to cut off Baghdad for some time, and have at times successfully imposed a fuel blockade on it. So far the blockade has been staccato and not very successful. But if they really could blockade the capital, they could deprive the Iraqi police and army of fuel for their vehicles, and then execute them. This step could only come, of course, once the US begins withdrawing. Once that process starts, the Shiites had better start negotiating with the Sunni guerrilla groups, or else it wouldn't be long before the Green Zone fell.

To begin with, Cockburn said not a word about fuel, his "siege" was a matter of keeping people, Shiites and Crawfordites, bottled up inside, not of keeping refined petroleum products outside. Considering that half the people inside the bottle are those on whose behalf the campaign (if there is an organized campaign) is being carried out, cutting off the oil and gas for everybody is not necessarily the smartest plan, although of course that does not mean they mightn't do it. The colony does not exactly abound in military and political talent on any faction's side.

But on to the Big Picture! Gen. Cole is quite sure that the GZ is inexpugnable as long as the Republicans hang around, but will be at the mercy of the former Sunni Ascendancy as soon as they turn their backs. The first proposition is sound enough, but the second is dubious at best. This turning of backs would presumably leave the GZ pols with a good deal of access to money and air power from Crawford, advantages that nobody in sight is likely to bestow upon the Sunni Ascendancy, playing the role of North Vietnam in the Macnamara-Kissinger war. Even if Sa`udiyya or Jordan or Syria or Turkey suddenly went berserk and attempted to do so, they could not, of course, ever hope to match Crawford money and Crawford air power. The GZ is in all probability inexpugnable altogether. As usual nowadays, everybody involved seems to be very strong as long as she keeps strictly on the defensive: the Green Zone cannot be overthrown from the rest of "Iraq," but that bare minimum of security does not mean that the GZ pols are likely to start effectively ruling ever square centimeter that Saddam ruled any time soon.

Generalissimo Cole may in agreement with my estimate, actually. I have a sneaking suspicion that JC makes up military stuff like today's for extraneous and non-military reasons, in this case to twist the arms of M. al-Maliki and other Twelver politicians and compel them to be nicer to the Sunni Ascendancy folks: the former "had better start negotiating with the Sunni guerrilla groups" -- where "negotiating with" of course means "making concessions to."

But God knows best.

_____

[A] Cockburn evidently does not care to enter the O-How-Awful-To-Be-In-Iraq Purple Passage Contest, although he admits more local colour than is strictly required in a military dispatch.


[B] A siege within a siege, then? There are literary possibilities in that raw material as well, along Kafka or Borges lines. (These, too, are better neglected.)


[C] How come nobody else in the ranks of the invasion-language press caught that scrumptious quotation?


[D] Poor M. al-Maliki certainly deserves everybody's sympathy, trapped as he is under the unwieldy bulk of a demented and thrashing elephant, but decorum requires that we not move so far in that direction as not to sympathize with Marvin the ARVN also. Should the roof fall in altogether --as they fear at GHQ, in my view exaggeratedly --, Marvin has much less prospect of living happily ever after in London or Qom or Beirut than a thoroughbred OnePercenter like M. al-Maliki has.

Meanwhile the "sovereignty" and "independence" of neo-Iraq, attributes which lawyers and diplomats have traditionally considered to be absolute, can be equally violated at the Marvin level and the Maliki level, and in fact are being so violated, if Cockburn has his facts straight and Marvin is indeed not allowed out of the barracks compound with an RPG in his hands unless some Crawfordite or Crawford hireling okays it. M. al-Maliki can't move "his" companies around without GOP permission, and Pvt. Marvin can't move "his" grenade launcher around without GOP permission either. That plan is so consistent and konsequent that it sounds far too good to be true of the invasionite stumblebums. But those gentry do bitterly hate ever letting any instrument of power out of their own paws, so perhaps this is an exceptional case of non-stumbling?

Yet are Col. Cockburn's facts everything they should be? He's already insinuated that the Crawfordites rather enjoy watching the natives go to it without caring to join in themselves -- one may watch a Texas cock fight without wishing one's own mother had been a hen, after all. From a sportin' point of view, it would be reasonable to handicap one team, taking away Marvin's RPG when the local guerillas/terrorists/insurgents/Sunnis are not comparably equipped so as to make a better show.

That's an agreeable fantasy, but it is so at odds with the Rancho Crawford way of war, Shock-'n'-Awe and the like, that one hesitates to believe it on the word of a single witness, however sterling his character. The military logic is elusive as well: doubtless the Crawfordites prefer that cheap Marvins should take most of the casualties so that their own very expensive Joes don't have to, but why shouldn't Marvin get to take his RPG out on patrol? Are they afraid he might fire it in the wrong direction?