Iraq: Setting the stage for the next, smaller, civil war

The alliance between Iraq’s two key political coalitions that was announced yesterday shores up the power of the Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad for the next four years. My guess–a wild crystal ball prediction, to be sure–is that we’re seeing what the government in Iraq will look like for not only the next four years, but for at least the next decade.

I doubt, too, if there will be much incentive for the Shiite government to start sharing more power with their Sunni rivals once the Americans leave. In fact, I expect the opposite–Maliki(or whoever else takes over) will likely continue to eliminate any political opposition, by both political(banning alleged Baathists etc) and martial(arresting, exiling, killing) means.

As the NYT points out:

That could intensify sentiment among Sunnis that despite voting in force, they remain disenfranchised in Iraq’s new democracy. “The fear is this alliance will have a sectarian color,” Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni allied with Mr. Allawi, said in a statement read by an aide after the announcement. “That is how Iraqis and the world will see it, whether we like it or not. This development will be a tragic step backward.”

The question is: how bad will the violence get? Will we get another “full blown” civil war, or will we just see a continuation of the low/high level conflict we’ve been seeing? I think the latter–the insurgency is weak, but they’re still capable of deadly attacks for many years to come. Ie, regular and significant acts of violence, or the equivalent of an Okalohoma city type bombing every few months.

Interestingly enough, if Maliki loses his job, one of the names being thrown around as the next prime minister is Mohammed Jaffar Sadr, radical Islamic cleric Moqtada Al Sadr’s cousin. I don’t know enough about Mohammed Sadr at the moment to say anything too intelligent. But it will be interesting to see how the Iraq War ‘victory’ crowd in Washington will spin the fact that the cousin of a radical Islamic cleric, who fought America tooth and nail during the seven years of occupation, represents a step in the right direction for U.S. ideals, democracy, and our strategic interest in the region.

The Iraq election debacle

Remember all those weeks back when Iraq held its election? On March 7th, to be exact. The geniuses in pundit-land decided to declare ‘Victory at Last.’ Meanwhile, a few skeptics pointed out the wishful thinking in such declarations.

Anyway, here we are, almost two months later, and the recount of 2.5 million votes has just begun. And, in another twist, Prime Minister Maliki’s team–the guys who wanted the recount in the first place–are already saying this recount isn’t going to be good enough for them, either.

But Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s election coalition, which had demanded the recount, said it should be halted because the elections commission was using improper procedures that would produce an inaccurate result.

What does this all mean? It means Maliki is going to try his best to hold onto power by almost any means necessary. It means that rather than being on a path to democracy, Iraq is likely on a path to some kind of quasi-dictatorship. It means, most importantly, that the clueless beltway crowd yet again preferred delusional thinking to reality.

Afghanistan: Pentagon says Karzai has little support

According to a new Pentagon report, only 1 in 4 Afghans support President Hamid Karzai in the districts considered strategically important. From McClatchy:

Opinion surveys, the report said, found only 24 percent of the people in those 121 districts sympathize with or support Karzai’s government, formed after the fraud-tainted August 2009 elections.

At the same time, more than half of Afghans blame the Taliban for the insecurity wracking the country, it said.

The report also cast doubt on the recent offensive in Marjah, says McClatchy.

“The insurgents’ tactic of re-infiltrating the cleared areas to perform executions has played a role in dissuading locals from siding with the Afghan government, which has complicated efforts to introduce effective governance,” it said.

Why does this report matter? Because it will surely be used as fodder for questions when Karzai visits the United States in two weeks.

Anyway.

I’m currently in Kabul, and I’ll be writing more on Afghanistan in the weeks ahead. But the Karzai/Obama relationship will certainly be a developing storyline…

The Volcano has left me stranded

Wanted to post a note: I’ve been on assignment in Europe, and thus have been caught in the great volcano catastrophe. While in the midst of rearranging my travel plans, blogging will be nonexistent to light for the next couple of days. Hoping to resume to a normal schedule by the end of the week. Thanks for stopping by.

Afghanistan: Fighting a war without context

From Alissa Rubin’s story in the NYT this morning, ”U.S. Closes Outpost in The Valley of Death”:

The near daily battles [in the Korengal Valley]were won, but almost always at the cost of wounded or dead. There were never enough soldiers to crush the insurgency, and after four years of trying, it became clear that there was not much worth winning in this sparsely populated valley.

Closing the Korangal Outpost, a powerful symbol of some of the Afghan war’s most ferocious fights, and a potential harbinger of America’s retreat, is a tacit admission that putting the base there in the first place was a costly mistake.

Military history is littered with instances of dumb and costly decisions that, in retrospect, have almost no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the war. The most famous examples are from Vietnam(fighting and dying for Hamburger Hill, or Hill 365, or whatever hill, became a symbol of the war’s pointlessness.) WWI has its fair share: Winston Churchill’s probing for a ‘soft underbelly’ in Turkey, or other slaughterhouses of the Western Front, where much of the killing had little or no value when all was said and done. The Korengal Valley looks like it’s going to fall into that category. 42 Americans, as well as scores of Afghans, were killed in the fighting there, according to the NYT, and now it’s being abandoned.

“It hurts,” said Spc. Robert Soto of Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry, who spent 12 months in the Korangal Valley from 2008 to 2009. “It hurts on a level that — three units from the Army, we all did what we did up there. And we all lost men. We all sacrificed. I was 18 years old when I got there. I really would not have expected to go through what we went through at that age.”

This particular news dovetails with the release of Sebastian Junger’s new book, ‘War,’ which is scheduled to be out next month. It’s about a platoon of soldiers Junger embedded with from 2007-2008. That platoon fought in the Korangal Valley. I just opened a review copy a couple of days ago and I haven’t finished reading it, so I’m going to refrain from writing too much. There are parts that are pretty compelling and very interesting so far–stuff I haven’t seen any other war reportage really get at, for sure.

But it’s also made me think about the idea of examing the experience of war devoid from the larger political context of the actual fighting, which is what Junger says he’s trying to do. (He says this in an interview in the latest Men’s Journal, which isn’t yet available online.) It’s looking at war from the narrow Band of Brothers, Blackhawk Down perspective–what matters more than politics or anything else is the dude next to you, the dude shooting at you, and the powerful emotional bonds(the excitement and the fear and the fun and the horror, alongside the shared psychological and physical trauma) that shape your experience.

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Certainly, there’s truth to this, and it’s an interesting thing to attempt from a literary perspective. At the same time, I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to pull off. I think viewing war through this lens misses something crucial: the politics and the larger context surrounding the experience of war are actually a critical component to the experience of war itself, specifically in how the combatants, as well as the victims, remember it and understand it and sometimes even experience it at the time.

As Spc. Soto tells Rubin:

During the period Specialist Soto served there half of his platoon was wounded or killed, according to the unit’s commanding officer. “It confuses me, why it took so long for them to realize that we weren’t making progress up there,” he said.

My point: From what I’ve read so far, Junger’s book is focused exclusively on a fight that was essentially meaningless in any big picture way. Korangal looks like it was a waste of American lives, of Afghan lives etc. Its meaning is that it’s meaningless, if that doesn’t sound too annoying. The reason for fighting then seems to me like it would be an important factor in evaluating one’s experience of war. (I’ve spent time with wounded Iraq veterans lately, and for some of them, seeing Iraq relatively more stable provides them with comfort, and helps them put some their demons to rest.)

Or maybe I’m missing something–perhaps in a meaningless fight the most truthful meaning exists within the soldiers themselves, or others(like innocent civilians and the like)who had the war change their lives. (And, like I said, I haven’t finished the book, so maybe these issues get addressed, maybe they don’t.)

Anyway.

Along the same lines, I highly recommend checking out Junger’s review of the new Vietnam novel Matterhorn, while waiting for ‘War’ to hit the bookstores.

Afghanistan: The Birther Who Won't Go To War

I’m usually pretty sympathetic to conscientious  objectors, but this is just obscenely stupid. An Army flight surgeon, Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, won’t deploy to Afghanistan until President Obama proves he’s “a natural born citizen.” From Military.com:

Lakin’s failure to report essentially dares the Army to bring charges against him for being an unauthorized absence…Lakin, who has been the chief of primary care at the Pentagon’s Tricare health clinic, could not be reached this morning at his Maryland home. Margaret Hemenway, a spokeswoman for a group called the Patriotic American Foundation, which is supporting the 18-year officer, said the Army should not expect Lakin to report unless he sees an original birth certificate showing that Obama was born in Hawaii.

Apparently it’s part of some half-assed birther legal strategy to secure the President’s birth certificate in the discovery process during a court-martial. Shockingly, that strategy isn’t likely to work, according to the legal expert quoted in the story.

More shocking: the gentleman isn’t the first patriot to refuse orders on behalf of the birther movement.

Lakin is not the first servicemember to use the so-called “birther” argument to fight deployment orders. Last July, the Army yanked Afghanistan deployment orders for Maj. Stefan Cook when he challenged President Obama’s legitimacy in court. Army Capt. Connie Rhodes, another doctor, went to federal court to stop her Iraq deployment for the same reason. Her case was tossed out in September.

I’ll let the above stand without additional comment.

What do journalists and starving artists have in common?

I’ve picked up on a journalists-as-starving-artist meme lately. (Okay, two columns mention it, both on Truthdig.org.)

As Alan Mutter said of young journalists in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, “The starving-artist lifestyle may be colorful and appealing for a while, but it gets old fast if you are bunking on a friend’s sofa, living under the same roof you did in junior high and lying awake at night wondering how you are going to repay your staggering five-figure student loan.

“If nothing changes, the next generation of journalists will give up and move on to entirely different pursuits. And you can’t blame them.”

And Chris Hedges predicts:

Journalism will again become what it was more than a century ago—a form of art. It will be as concerned with truth and beauty as it is with justice. It will no longer speak in the deformed language of balance and objectivity but instead be a conduit for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. It will, like classical theater, be relegated to the margins of society but will endure for the literate and the moral. It will sustain all who seek to live with a conscience in an unconscious age. Journalism will survive, but it will reach a limited audience, as the sparsely attended productions of Aristophanes or Racine in small New York theaters are all that is left of great classical theater. The larger society will be deluged with propaganda, spectacle and entertainment as news. Those who carry the flame of journalism forward will live lives as difficult, financially precarious and outside the mainstream as most classical actors and musicians.

Sign right up kids! I’ve never written a ‘holy-f**k-my-chosen-industry-is-imploding’ post, so now is a good of time as any to offer up a few personal observations.

1)I started in journalism in 2002. The magazine I worked for at the time had about 25 full time foreign correspondents, maybe 8 domestic bureaus across the country, and a few more around the world. There are now less than 5 full time foreign correspondents, no more foreign bureaus, and a handful domestic bureaus left. This trend, as has been well documented, has been repeated in many other news organizations.

2) In the past two years, half of my friends in journalism have either been laid off or switched careers. (How many friends do I have? Good question!) To put a number on it: I’d say I know sort of well about ten people who’ve left or been pushed out. But it almost feels like the majority of the people I entered the profession with are no longer in it.

3) I really love what I do, and I feel it’s a privilege to be able to do it. So am I going to abandon ship? Well, I’m probably not employable in any other field, so the answer is no. However, it’s bit disconcerting to look at the various options out there…Marginal future, here I come!

4)What’s most worrisome to me, actually, is that we’ve entered into a period of journalism where toeing the line and being a good corporate citizen becomes a tremendous asset. The best journalists, though, are by nature troublemakers and often have difficult personalities. Not in the cunning CEO asshole way, but in the charming, iconoclastic, drunk by noon way. But with such scarce number of cushy gigs still available, newspapers and magazines and the like don’t need to(and are not going to) put up with the troublemaker factor.

5) I used to wake up in the morning and think, ‘wow, at least I’m not a poet.’ What hubris! Anyway, I tell myself that the future might not be as dire as Hedges’ prediction. I’m hoping there will always be narrative non-fiction market(which I love to both read and write) and other forms of “serious” foreign/expense account journalism. At least until I retire or get shot.

6) I wonder if we’re heading towards a future where people have jobs teaching journalism, spinning journalists(public relations, marketing etc.) and commenting on journalism(the media-blog-complex)…But no one is actually a journalist. Indeed.

Totally unrelated: The Hastings Report would like to wish a hearty congratulations to Anthony Shadid for winning his second Pulitzer. The man’s reporting and writing is really in another league–reading his work is ample justification of our entire profession.

Afghanistan: Roadside bombs double in past year

This caught my eye.

The number of crude roadside bombs in Afghanistan has doubled in the past year, prompting U.S. officials to rush billions of dollars of new protective gear to troops and double the number of road-clearing teams.

The campaign against the deadly devices, described Thursday by senior officials, follows Pentagon warnings of an increase in casualties in the months to come. President Barack Obama has ordered the deployment of more than 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, and already, more U.S. deaths have accompanied the rise in forces.

Military officials are preparing for a nasty summer of fighting. Already, as the article notes, twice the number of Americans have been killed in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year.Interestingly enough, it’s still only a third of the number of IED’s that were going off per month at the height of the Iraq War.  The Joint Defeat IED task force is at it again, with 1.6 billion heading their way to figure out how to beat the roadside bombs. Question: how much money do we think the insurgents, in total, has spent on building IED’s over the past 9 years? I have no idea–maybe 50 million, but that’s a total guess, and if anyone does know, please feel free to comment–but it’s safe to say it’s only a fraction of the billions we’ve spent on protecting ourselves from them.

Anyway, not much more to say at the moment. I’ve been swamped these past two weeks a) writing, and b) preparing for a trip to Afghanistan. More to come on that, but there will be a shift in the blog from mostly Iraq related posts to Afghanistan stuff.

Iraq: On the brink of civil war again?

I don’t think so, although the bombings of the German, Eygptian, and Iranian embassies yesterday that killed over 40 people are not good signs. Either was the massacre of 24 Sunnis over the weekend by men in “Iraqi army uniforms” in a town south of Baghdad. So, the question has been raised: will Iraq fall back into a full blown civil war?  From Ned Parker at the L.A. Times:

The bloodshed raises fears that the security situation could unravel before Iraq’s next government is formed, as armed groups and political parties look to exploit the uncertain period after last month’s national elections. The conditions are reminiscent of early 2006 when Al Qaeda in Iraq took advantage of the transition between elected governments to blow up a major Shiite Muslim shrine and ignite a civil war between the country’s Shiite majority and its Sunni minority, which dominated the government of President Saddam Hussein before he was toppled in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

In my view, what we’re seeing is not the beginning of another civil war, but the continutation of a civil war that never really ended–it just become much less intense. In the next few months, the intensity of the conflict is likely to increase again, though I don’t think it will return to 2006-2007 violence. That being said, the violence is very significant. If the bar for violence wasn’t already set so high in Iraq, alarms would be going off in and around the Beltway telling us that the conflict was not even close to being resolved. (And it’s not, but we’re going to ignore the alarms, no matter how loud they get.)

Army says Xbox, PlayStation make recruits 'soft;' overhauls basic training

This is a post that would certainly be bettered handled by T/S colleague Paul Tassi, but I thought it was worth mentioning.From NPR via Military.com:

The Army is making changes to its basic training regimen, partially because new recruits are “soft” from years of playing video games.

NPR quotes Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling as saying that recruits are “advanced in terms of their use of technology, and maybe not as advanced in their physical capabilities or ability to go into a fight.”

New recruits will receive more extensive training in hand-to-hand skills like kicking, punching and holds to prepare recruits for that kind of close combat that Hertling expects our soldiers to “be in for a very long time.”

Not only are the the recruits these days poor grapplers, punchers, and kickers, they aren’t very disciplined, either. Hertling says that the video game generation has a technological edge–he concedes they might be the “smartest” recruits the Army has ever seen–but that means they “ask a lot of questions.” The NPR story continues:

It’s not just a fitness issue, either. “We certainly have a generation that is not as disciplined when they enter the military.”

“Whereas they might have what they believe is a form of courage or discipline, it’s not what we expect of a soldier in very tense and difficult situations,” Hertling says.

Despite the drop in athleticism, I think video games have actually helped the military more than they’ve hurt them. The Army has used video games to help recruit soldiers for years–and clearly, they’re getting recruits that have been playing videogames so often that it has made them poor specimens for hand to hand combat. It also doesn’t hurt that a lot of the games glorify killing bunches of people–on some level, growing up wasting bad guys on a screen prepares the mind for careers in the military where the advanced gee-wiz technology means you occasionally get to waste bad guys on a screen in real life. A number of times during interviews I’ve done with with soldiers and Marines about their combat experience, they’ve compared it to actually being in a video game rather than a movie.