Friday, March 09, 2007

But don't let that stop the killing . . .

New commander says there is no military solution in Iraq

By Patrick Cockburn

The US military commander in Iraq is looking for further reinforcements while admitting that the war cannot be won without reconciliation with militants.

The US administration announced in January that it was going to send an extra 21,500 troops to Baghdad and Anbar province west of the capital. Since then, the Pentagon has said that it will send a further 7,000 support troops of whom 2,200 will be military police, to handle an increased number of Iraqi detainees.

General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, said that some of the reinforcements would go to Diyala province, east of Baghdad, where Sunni insurgents are on the offensive.

But he added that military force alone was "not sufficient" to end violence in Iraq and political talks must include militant groups now fighting the US. "This is critical," said General Petraeus, adding that such negotiations "will determine in the long run the success of this effort".

The US reinforcements, though they have hitherto been slow to arrive in Iraq, would raise the number of US troops there to 160,000 in 2008. The request for more troops by General Petraeus indicates that the "surge" to regain control in Baghdad announced by President Bush, in reality, means prolonging and expanding the US occupation.

However, in a challenge to the President, the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives yesterday proposed legislation that would bring American combat troops out of Iraq by August 2008 at the latest.

It is not clear how far the White House has a single coherent strategy on Iraq and how far this will change week-by-week depending on who has the President's ear. An international conference on Iraq is to meet tomorrow attended by both the US and Iran.

"We are waiting to see if the US turns up visibly holding its nose or really wanting dialogue with Iran," said one Iraqi observer. In the the past couple of weeks, the US had reined back on its confrontational rhetoric towards Tehran.

Iran will want to see if the US stance is really changing. The Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that his country hoped "the conference will bring forward the end of the presence of foreign forces" in Iraq. The US has accused Iran of funding and supplying the Mehdi Army, the main militia of the majority Shia community.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mehdi Army, has told his militiamen not to confront the US troops entering Shia areas such as Sadr City. He may calculate that the inability of the US Army and Iraqi government forces to protect Shia from the bombs of Sunni insurgents - several hundred have died in the past week - will reinforce popular demands for the return of the Shia militia.

General Petraeus admitted yesterday the difficulty in protecting Shia civilians from suicide bomb attacks. This is particularly true at the moment when the roads in Shia districts are crowded with pilgrims walking to Kerbala to mark Arba'in, the 40th day of mourning for Imam Hussein, who was killed in the battle of Kerbala in AD680. "It is an enormous task to protect them all," said General Petraeus. "If someone wants to blow himself up the problem becomes very very difficult indeed." Some 113 pilgrims were killed on Tuesday at a fake aid station in Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, on Tuesday.

The US is also trying to create the basis for a new and "moderate" Iraqi government, though in practice, it would be more dependent on the US than that of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The Shia Fadhila party, which is largely in control of Basra and the Southern Oil Company that exports oil from fields around Basra, says that it is leaving the main Shia bloc. In any new government it would probably demand that one of its members be oil minister, a post it used to hold until a year ago.

Original article posted here.

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