« Quick Links | Main | "Because They Don't Shoot at Us" »

Michael Totten's latest dispatch is excellent:

The American soldier sitting next to me flipped open his Zippo lighter and gloomily lit a cigarette. "Do you know why this base isn't attacked by insurgents?" he said.

I assumed it was because his area of operations, in the Graya'at neighborhood of northern Baghdad out of Coalition Outpost War Eagle, had been cleared of insurgents. Many American military bases and outposts in Iraq are attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists and Mahdi Army militiamen with mortars and rockets. War Eagle was quiet and had not been bombarded for months.

"We aren't being attacked because the Mahdi Army is in the next building," he said. "They don't want to hit their own people."

Read the rest, including this tidy summary of counterinsurgency:

"If someone sets up a mortar," said Lieutenant Colonel Wilson A. Shoffner, "we get phone calls from the locals before it is fired. We reached a tipping point here where we have more friends than the insurgents."

Totten also discusses the negative implications of Mahdi Army influence in the Iraqi Army and Iraq as a whole. I'll throw another wrinkle into the mix: Totten characterizes Moqtada al Sadr and his militiamen as destabilizers and a proxy for Iran, and in many respects, this is true. He also mentions that Sadr's men attack Americans to increase leverage in negotiations, which I'm sure is also true. But complicating that assessment even further is the example of a Sunni journalist who hated Iranian influence and pined for bygone days of Baath stability ... who also told me he regarded Sadr as a national hero, "a good man." The attacks on American forces not only serve as chits in rough diplomacy with the US and Iraqi government, but also as a macho standard around which the broader Iraqi culture rallies. Much as Saddam Hussein scored points in the Arab world for standing up to the Americans, so does Sadr, via the periodic sacrifice of his militiamen.

And a further complication is the decentralized nature of goons who identify as Mahdi Army but act outside of Sadr's control ...

As Totten notes:

Iraq is a bewildering country.

Posted by Bill at August 15, 2007 10:19 AM | TrackBack (0)

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.indcjournal.com/cgi-bin/mt/dafrules/tapaz.cgi/2970

Comments