Speaking in Ohio yesterday, the president boasted that “normalcy is returning back to Iraq.” In his speech, Bush used the phrase “security gains” four times, including a reference to the ongoing offensive in Basra: “This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge.”
The president kind of smirked when he said it, leading me to wonder if even he found his own rhetoric hard to believe.
This, for example, is not, or at least shouldn’t be, “normalcy” returning to Iraq.
Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al-Mahdi Army fighters in Basra.
His response, while swift, was not what British and US military trainers who have spent the past five years schooling the Iraqi security forces would have hoped for. He and 15 of his comrades took off their uniforms, kept their government-issued rifles and went over to the other side without a second thought.
For that matter, the NYT reported, “Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities. In Baghdad, where explosions shook the city throughout the day, American officials said 11 rockets struck the Green Zone, killing an unidentified American government worker, the second this week…. The Iraqi government imposed a citywide curfew in Baghdad until Sunday.”
Can’t you just taste the “normalcy” returning to Iraq?
And then, of course, there’s our role in dealing with this crisis — or, at least trying to deal with the crisis — which apparently includes a far larger military role than the administration had let on.
U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.
Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army’s AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.
The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets.
Not that U.S. officials are actually in a position to know what’s going on. The WaPo reported that Maliki “decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies,” and an administration official conceded that “we can’t quite decipher” what is going on. It’s a question, he said, of “who’s got the best conspiracy” theory about why Maliki decided to act now.
How reassuring.
When the offensive began earlier this week, the administration’s talking points emphasized that Maliki was leading a U.S.-trained Iraqi Army, with little help from American troops. It was part of the broader Bush-backed spin — the president’s policy has been so successful, Iraq can now go after the Mahdi militias on its own.
Except the offensive has been a disaster, Iraqi troops are taking off their uniforms to fight the Iraqi Army, U.S. officials have to guess what’s going on, and we have the untenable political task of fighting Shiite militias while carefully not blaming Moqtada al-Sadr’s political movement, for fear of him officially calling for an end to the ceasefire.
Anyone who thought this fiasco couldn’t get worse was mistaken.