Iraq In Perspective: At Least Several Perspectives

The State of Iraq: An Update

AS 2006 winds down, two developments inside Iraq stand out: the failure of the previous year’s election to produce any sense of progress, and the commencement of Iraq’s civil war, dating back to the Feb. 22 bombing of the hallowed Shiite mosque in Samarra and escalating ever since.

It is still possible to find signs of hope in our running statistics on Iraq — the number of Iraqi security forces who are trained and technically proficient, the gradually improving economic output, the number of children being immunized. But those same children cannot feel safe on the way to school in much of today’s Iraq; economic growth is a top-down phenomenon having little effect on the unemployment rate or well-being of Iraqis in places like Anbar Province and the Sadr City slum in Baghdad; and those increasingly proficient security forces remain politically unreliable in many cases, just as inclined to stoke sectarian strife as to contain it.

Despite some unconvincing comments from President Bush in the prelude to the November midterm elections that “absolutely, we’re winning,” most Americans now agree on the diagnosis of the situation in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group warned of a further “slide toward chaos.” Colin Powell said on Sunday that he thought we are losing, even if all is not yet lost. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted in his confirmation hearings that we aren’t winning, even if he holds out hope that we also aren’t losing. His predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, in a memo leaked several weeks ago, recognized that Iraq is going badly and put out a laundry list of potential options that we may have to consider, including multiparty negotiations modeled on those that ended the war in Bosnia.

Significant changes are clearly needed. At a minimum, we will probably require some combination of the options now being offered the president by the Iraq Study Group, the Pentagon and others — a large program to create jobs, a surge of perhaps 25,000 more American troops to Iraq to improve security in Baghdad, an ultimatum to Iraqi political leaders that if they fail to achieve consensus on key issues like sharing oil, American support for the operation could very soon decline.

If such steps fail, last-ditch options may well be needed within a year, including the sort of “soft partition” of Iraq by religion and ethnicity that Mr. Rumsfeld and Senator Joseph Biden have been discussing, combined with a plan to help people move to where they feel safer within the country. Although it has been said before about previous new years, it seems very likely that 2007 will be make or break time in Iraq.

President Wants to Increase Size of Armed Forces

President Bush said Tuesday that the United States should expand the size of its armed forces, acknowledging that the military had been strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and would need to grow to cope with what he suggested would be a long battle against Islamic extremism.

“I’m inclined to believe it’s important and necessary to do,” Mr. Bush said. He said this was an “accurate reflection that this ideological war we’re in is going to last for a while, and that we’re going to need a military that’s capable of being able to sustain our efforts and help us achieve peace.”

Speaking in an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Bush did not specify how large an increase he was contemplating or put a dollar figure on the cost. He said that he had asked his new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to bring him a proposal, and that the budget he unveils at the beginning of February would seek approval for the plan from Congress, where many members of both parties have been urging an increase in the military’s size.

In interviews on Tuesday, administration officials said the president was speaking generally about the broader campaign against terrorism and was not foreshadowing a decision on whether to send additional troops into Iraq in coming months in an effort to stabilize Baghdad. Any big change in the size of the American military would take years to accomplish.

Mr. Bush told The Post, which excerpted the interview Tuesday on its Web site, that he had not made a decision about sending more troops to Iraq.

Coming the day after Mr. Gates was sworn in as defense secretary, Mr. Bush’s comments indicated that the administration was breaking abruptly with the stance taken by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former Pentagon chief, who championed the view that better intelligence and technological advancements could substitute for a bigger military.

Mr. Bush said his plan would focus on ground forces rather than on the Navy and the Air Force, telling The Post, “I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the Army, the Marines.” There are about 507,000 active-duty Army soldiers and 180,000 active-duty marines.

New Iraq Strategy Emerges: First Security, Then Politics

Those of us with a lick of sense saw this strategy as a no-brainer some time ago.

The debate over whether to increase the American military presence in Baghdad is much more than a dispute over troop levels. It reflects a more fundamental dispute over the American mission.

In proposing to send tens of thousands of additional troops, proponents of reinforcing the American military effort argue that the violence in Iraq is increasing at such an alarming rate that Washington can no longer wait for the newly minted Iraqi security forces to take on the main burden of securing the Iraqi capital.

The United States, they assert, needs to expand its mission by making the protection of the Iraqi population its primary objective.

The calculation is that by sending additional troops and taking up positions in mixed Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods, the American military can finally break the escalating cycle of sectarian killings. Only after restoring some semblance of security, the proponents of a troop increase maintain, can the Bush administration reasonably expect Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to rein in the Shiite militias.

As President Bush mulls his Iraq strategy, the idea of deploying 20,000 additional American troops or more, at least temporarily, has emerged as a leading option. Mr. Bush intends to unveil his plan in early January, and the realization that the White House is approaching a fateful decision on the level of American involvement in Iraq has set off a spirited debate among retired officers, lawmakers and policy experts.

By most accounts, a decision to substantially increase the American military presence in Baghdad would signal an important strategic shift. For years, the generals have argued that their military strategy could not work unless the Iraqis simultaneously made progress toward political reconciliation, a development that American commanders calculated would reduce the support among Sunnis for the insurgency and ease sectarian tensions.

Top Iraqi Shiite Cleric Is Inching Toward a Coalition

Iraq’s most venerated Shiite cleric has tentatively approved an American-backed coalition of Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties that aims to isolate extremists, particularly the powerful Shiite militia leader Moktada al-Sadr, Iraqi and Western officials say.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has been the spiritual custodian of Shiite political dominance in Iraq, corralling the fractious Shiite parties into an alliance to rule the country.

But Ayatollah Sistani has grown increasingly distressed as the Shiite-led government has proved incapable of taming the violence and improving public services, Shiite officials say. He now appears to be backing away from his demand that the Shiite bloc play the dominant political role and that it hold together at all costs, Iraqi and Western officials say.

As the effective arbiter of a Shiite role in the planned coalition, the ayatollah is considered critical to the Iraqi and American effort.

American officials have been told by intermediaries that Ayatollah Sistani “has blessed the idea of forming a moderate front,” according to a senior American official. “We wouldn’t have gotten this far without his support.”

President Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, wrote in a classified memo last month that the Americans should “engage Sistani to reassure and seek his support for a new, nonsectarian political movement.” In recent weeks, President Bush has received Shiite and Sunni politicians at the White House to encourage them to move forward with the coalition, officials said.

Since the American invasion of Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani has refused to meet with anyone from the American government but receives messages through intermediaries.

Only the Jailers Are Safe

Ever since the world learned of the lawless state of American military prisons in Iraq, the administration has hidden behind the claim that only a few bad apples were brutalizing prisoners. President Bush also has dodged the full force of public outrage because the victims were foreigners, mostly Muslims, captured in what he has painted as a war against Islamic terrorists bent on destroying America.

This week, The Times published two articles that reminded us again that the American military prisons are profoundly and systemically broken and that no one is safe from the summary judgment and harsh treatment institutionalized by the White House and the Pentagon after 9/11.

On Monday, Michael Moss wrote about a U.S. contractor who was swept up in a military raid and dumped into a system where everyone is presumed guilty and denied any chance to prove otherwise.

Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago, was a whistle-blower who prompted the raid by tipping off the F.B.I. to suspicious activity at the company where he worked, including possible weapons trafficking. He was arrested and held for 97 days — shackled and blindfolded, prevented from sleeping by blaring music and round-the-clock lights. In other words, he was subjected to the same mistreatment that thousands of non-Americans have been subjected to since the 2003 invasion.

Even after the military learned who Mr. Vance was, they continued to hold him in these abusive conditions for weeks more. He was not allowed to defend himself at the Potemkin hearing held to justify his detention. And that was special treatment. As an American citizen, he was at least allowed to attend his hearing. An Iraqi, or an Afghani, or any other foreigner, would have been barred from the room.

This is not the handiwork of a few out-of-control sadists at Abu Ghraib. This is a system that was created and operated outside American law and American standards of decency. Except for the few low-ranking soldiers periodically punished for abusing prisoners, it is a system without any accountability.