Iranian Complicity in the Iraqi Insurgency

The evidence continues to mount that Iran is very involved in fostering the Iraqi insurgency. All sorts of weapons are being recovered by coalition forces that have the signatures of Iran and beyond.

Richard Miniter recently spent several days in Iraq. He traveled to various remote areas of the country and interviewed several Iraqi civilians, Iraqi government leaders, insurgents being detained, and US soldiers. He reported on his stay on The Right Balance with Greg Allen this morning.

The sense that he got, because of visiting with the people and from his own observation was that outside of Baghdad, electricity and running water are in much more plentiful supply than they were during the Saddam era.

His study of terrorism and insurgencies indicates that insurgencies to do not succeed unless they have outside help. Interestingly then, several of the Iraqi people he communicated with are increasingly blaming Iran with fostering the insurgency.

Below is a video segment with a US Army Major who explains what they have been finding with increasing regularly in the Anbar province. Many rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and explosively formed penetrators bear distinct evidence of having been manufactured in Iran. Others of these same and other weapons appear to be Chinese-made, having been repainted and renumbered, likely by Iranians.

Observations About "The Wall" in "Sadr City"

Recently construction on a wall was begun and then quickly halted in the Adhamiyah section of Baghdad. Why? You might be interested to find out.

My first reaction to the cessation of the most recent wall being built in Baghdad was that if President al Maliki asks the Iraqi and US militaries to stop building the wall, then we should stop building it.

But then I found out that other walls have been built in other sections of Baghdad with no similar outcry. In fact, they have been welcomed. These walls are not just solid slabs of concrete, but rather have at regular intervals gates through which access can be granted in a more controlled way. Terrorist acts can thus be severely diminished. The citizens of Amiriyah and Ghazaliyah had no problem with greater safety.

So why did the citizens of Adhamiyah? Well, it's not actually clear that they did. Leaflets passed around the area in the days leading up to the wall construction begin date threatened death to those who cooperate with Americans.

Iraq the Model sheds some interesting light on the issue of "The Wall":

Yesterday leaflets were distributed in the streets of Adhamiya (or Azamiya, English doesn’t have the exact sound anyway). The leaflets — printed and distributed by persons unknown — called on residents to protest the building of the wall. Knowing that the only organized entity capable of such quick response to events in Adhamiya are either the insurgents or al-Qaeda strongly indicates that they were behind the planned protest. More important still is that it indicates they see the wall as a threat to their movement and ability to carry out their actions.

Interestingly as well: Iraq the Model points out that Adhamiyah is not Sadr City, as the media reported...

Serving Iraq on "The Right Balance"

Greg Allen has one of the most thoughtful and provocative radio programs in the United States today. It was my good fortune to be on his show this morning. In the segment (included below), we talked about my service in Iraq and my feelings about how things are going. Greg's show is called The Right Balance. Click the image at right to go to his website.



About 3 or 4 months ago, I began listening to the Accent Radio Network. One of the shows I still listen to in the mornings while getting ready for and driving off to work is The Right Balance with Greg Allen. I was immediately impressed by the show because it was not bombastic and it interviewed a wide variety of well-spoken and very interesting people. Almost every day I hear on The Right Balance of a web site that I want to check out or a book that I want to read.

A few days ago I e-mailed Greg and told him how much I like his show, and told him a little bit about my service in Iraq. An e-mail conversation ensued, followed by a telephone conversation in which he asked if I would like to be on his show. My only radio experience is having called in to two talk shows in my life, but I decided it would be a fun thing to do.

It was. If you'd like to hear the interview, click on the player below. Check out Greg's show as well. I think you'll be impressed. Then drop him a line and tell him you think he has one of the best radio talk programs in the country. Because he does.

The American Hegemon is Here to Help You!

Given any one of a number of duplicitous actions by the United States government over the last few decades, it does not surprise me at all that the Iraqis would have a tendency not to trust the United States. Were our historical actions taken into account by the Bush II Administration when we went into Iraq in 2003? I'm not sure which of "Yes" or "No" is the worse answer.


Disclaimer: In areas with which I am not overly familiar, I am greatly influenced by the perspectives of those whose books I am reading. This post fits that category. I need to do more research, but at this point I am afraid that I will not like what I find in the footnotes of two copiously footnoted books:

• Web of Deceit by Barry M. Lando
• Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky
  

In the guise of spreading liberty across the globe, it appears what the United States has done in the last 50 years is sown discord and hatred while protecting what it terms its international (read elite and corporate) interests. If this is true, America has much to be embarrassed about and much to apologize for. I'm not sure if the juggernaut is too fully formed that a clean electoral sweep of the House, the Congress, and the White House would solve the problem, but that's beginning to look more and more like the only viable solution.

The problems of US duplicity in Iraq pervade every US administration since at least John F. Kennedy, if you believe Barry Lando and Noam Chomsky. Their research is detailed. They draw attention to the schemes of power players in every administration, whether Republican or Democrat. I, therefore, have a tendency to believe that the information they are providing is true.

I recently posted about US involvement in the Middle East (and particularly Iraq) as told by Barry Lando in his recent book "Web of Deceit". I'm nearly half finished with the book, and will have more to say on it here later. For now, I will say I am thoroughly disgusted with my government's attempts to mind the business of nearly every country but its own. Its short-sighted siding with Iraq-then Iran-then Iraq (and sometimes both at the same time) during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's is but one example of how I am embarrassed for my country in that we as a populace cannot see beyond the sound bites to elect leaders who truly care about liberty rather than foisting the worst facets of American capitalism and imperialism on the world.

It is no surprise to me, then, as Noam Chomsky says in his book Hegemony or Survival that most countries see the United States as the most dangerous country in the world. It is not possible to understand this concept until we understand the history of American involvement in the Middle East.

At least one microcosm of today's Iraq is told on page 5 of today's Parade Magazine:

"Before the United States came here, no one cared who was Sunni or Shia," Muhammad [not his real name] says... "Everyone was Iraqi."

"There would be no insurgency if you [the United States] were not here."

Muhammad was in his second year at the Iraqi Military Academy when L. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army. It is suspected that between recently, when Muhammad joined the Iraqi army, and then Muhammad was an insurgent. He might still be.

Like Lando, Noam Chomsky gives some insight into why Iraqis like Muhammad feel like they do, and why they probably do for good reason. The first time I heard of Chomsky, through the filter of the establishment media, my impression was that he was a kook. After having read one of his books, however, I no longer think so.

Chomsky, whose book was written in 2003, has this to say:

..a US attack could "globalize anti-American and anti-Western sentiment...attacking Iraq would intensify Islamic terrorism, not reduce it."

An understanding of their mistrust of America makes that an un-surprising prognostication.

With the Iraqi people at the edge of survival after a decade of destructive sanctions, international aid and medical agencies warned that a war might lead to a serious humanitarian catastrophe. Switzerland hosted a meeting of thirty countries to prepare what might lie ahead. The US alone refused to attend.

Perhaps Chomsky's most interesting observation in this context was not even stated about Iraq:

It has been regularly observed that the extension of formal democracy in Latin America has been accompanied by increasing disillusionment about democracy.

I am sad to say that, considering the ineptitude (purposefulness?) of the Bush Administration, Iraqis have every reason to feel the same way about democracy.

Petraeus 'Gets It'

There is a good chance that things will improve in Iraq, now that General David Petraeus is in charge of the US military. What took us so long to get to this point? Based on Gen Petraeus' previous successes, he should have been the top man at least 3 years ago.

Newsweek speaks of a do-over. And the likelihood that under the new Petraeus plan for Iraq, we're going to be there a long time. It's frustrating to me that we've spun our wheels with crap plans from non-thinking people for about 4 years now. But ineptitudes aside, I consider The Do-Over to be our only option.

Like only a few others, David Petraeus has been successful in combating the insurgency where he has tried it before. Thomas Ricks' stellar overview of our last few years in Iraq, entitled Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, points out that the adventure has had its bright spots. And Petraeus' tactics have been some of the best and most successful.

Gen. Petraeus took seriously the counter-insurgency tactics learned in Vietnam as he served over the 101st Airborne in Mosul in 2003. His maxim: Violence is a last resort.

Counter-insurgency (CI) realizes that the indigenous population is a crucial element to success. CI understands as best it can the culture and seeks to maintain human dignity at all costs. As opposed to anti-insurgency, which breaks in doors, points weapons at innocent people in a show of defiance, and rounds up all men in the area and carts them off to prison, CI understands that if you seek to understand, you will be understood.

CI realizes that constantly bringing the attack to the ever-elusive enemy is an exercise in frustration, which will only marginalize that portion of the populace that is your only hope for success. Anti-insurgency reaps ever smaller intelligence returns on its in-your-face investment. CI works among the people, learns the language, cultures, and frustrations, and seeks to help them overcome the problems that beset them--and inevitably gets far better intelligence information as to who the insurgents are. Where CI has been tried, two things have generally happened: (1) The place has gotten much more peaceful, and (2) the successful US military unit has been replaced by a unit that neither gives nor understands two cents about successful counterinsurgency tactics--and the place gets violent again.

Ricks provides an anecdote that captures the essence of Petraeus' engendering of success. When one of his brigade commanders heard of a rumor that Iraqi men thought American night-vision goggles could be used to see through Iraqi women's clothing, the commander had a town meeting where anyone who wanted to could look through the NVGs to see what they were really for. This generous act led to a a monthly convention of what came to be known as the Tigris River Valley Commission, which accomplished a great deal.

It's about time that they put Petraeus in charge. Imagine where we might be now if someone like him had been in charge from the beginning--someone who shows respect for the Iraqi people.

Things are Going Much Better...Boom!!!

Each time the announcement is made that the coalition is getting the upper hand on the insurgency, another large scale attack occurs. Is it because the insurgency wants to prove the announcement wrong, or is it because the insurgency wants to give everyone a false sense of security and then further demoralize them? I suggest we stop announcing that we have things under control when we really don't.

The Christian Science Monitor reported the following from Nouri al Maliki yesterday regarding the Baghdad security crackdown:

Two days of relative calm in the capital prompted Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to declare a "dazzling success" in the security clampdown, as officials reported an 80 percent drop in violence.

That was before yesterday when sixty people were killed in dual car bomb attacks in a market area. And before a US military installation was attacked and 3 soldiers were killed and several others wounded.

That was before today when when a suicide bomber insinuated himself into a funeral procession and killed at least 18 people.

This seems to be the modus operandi of the insurgency. Periods of relative calm followed by a shattering of that calm. I'm not sure where the correlation lies. Is it because of the deliberate psychological effect of shattering a false sense of security? Is it because they want to prove wrong them (Coalition Provisional Authority, US Military, Nouri al Maliki) who announce that things are going much better? I think it's the latter.

Maybe the trend of violence and death really is down. Maybe it's a good thing to talk in terms of reduced numbers of deaths. But that is a precarious supposition anyway, especially when many insurgents seemed to have left Baghdad until the 'storm' clears. Last February, we were sure we had turned a corner because the number of US deaths was the lowest in several months. And then boom!!! The Samarra Mosque was bombed.

I guess my underlying point is this. From square one, we have underestimated the insurgency. And we continue to underestimate the insurgency. We needed 3 times as many forces in Iraq than we had following the invasion. And we need that many now. Iraqi military forces have made significant improvements, but not to the tune of the 250,000 more US troops we need. Insurgents can still come and go essentially at will.

It would be wonderful if it worked, but I don't imagine that the surge will work. The insurgents will continue to strike with abandon until we have enough forces to ensure that they cannot come back to the strongholds that we flushed them out of. There are places near Baghdad that we have not even patrolled yet. There are "black" areas that we do not even patrol because of their danger.

I'm sure the surge is making things marginally better in Iraq, but it's ironic to say that we're having "dazzling success". It encourages people to put their guard down so that they're ripe for the next knockout.

Until we start doing it right, it's going to be a long and usually discouraging haul, punctuated by periods of apparent gain, which are then followed by large scale attacks to remind us that we're really not doing it right. Until we stop fooling ourselves, we won't take the steps necessary to bring true peace to Iraq.

The Greatest Mistake

When one's options are taken away, there always exists one remaining option--to fight. What might have happened--and where would Iraq be now--if we hadn't made The Greatest Mistake?

Retired Army General Jay Garner was originally assigned to make sense of the aftermath of the United States and coalition forces invasion of Iraq. It appears that he was doing an excellent job, despite an invasion that occurred perhaps prematurely, leaving Garner and his people not quite in place to organize security forces against looting and other destruction.

Garner's plan was to involve as many as 400,000 Iraqi army soldiers in the security and reconstruction of their country, providing them a generous paycheck that would at least offset the lucrativeness of a career in the insurgency.

Suddenly, Garner was replaced. Perhaps the images of day-after-day looting and upheaval weakened the Bush Administration's resolve. Enter Henry Kissinger protege, L. Paul Bremer.

In May, 2003, Bremer issued a decree disbanding the Iraqi army from top to bottom. An unnamed US Official in Baghdad at the time said "There was never a discussion that I was involved in where we would disband the military. It caught me completely by surprise."

During the transition phase, while Garner was still in Iraq, he was handed Bremer's "Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA] Order Number 1--De-Baathification of Iraqi Society", which effectively removed thousands of public school teachers and ministry workers who were members of the Baath party only because they had to sign up if they wanted their job. "We can't do this," Garner said, seeing the havoc it would cause in Iraqi society.

The very next day, Bremer's CPA issued an order disbanding the Iraqi army. The plan to throw hundreds of thousands of potential security and reconstruction workers out on the streets without a job was seen as a disaster by Garner.

A disaster it turned out to be.

In his recent book, State of Denial: Bush at War Part III, Bob Woodward discusses the results of CPA Orders #1 and #2. Electricity failed. Sewer systems backed up. The disorganization grew to beyond anything anyone had imagined. And the first Improvised Explosive Device went off, taking everyone in Bremer's group by surprise.

Beginning in early June, hundreds and then thousands of former Iraqi soldiers gathered outside the Saddam Palace that the CPA had decided to make as its headquarters. Now out of jobs, they threatened Bremer and his people that they would turn into aggressors against the occupation. Bremer did not listen until it was too late.

A recent documentary, produced by PBS Frontline, details the grievances and makeup of the Iraqi insurgency. While it is true that mujahideen have come from many other countries, including the West to fight, the common thread that wound through the Frontline documentary, "The Insurgency" was this--the bulk of the Iraqi insurgency is made up of former Iraqi military members who lost all their other options when the rug was pulled out from under them by L. Paul Bremer.

Where would we be now if the imperial Henry Kissinger acolyte L. Paul Bremer had not surprised a lot of people by disbanding the Iraqi government and military? It's hard to say exactly. But it is easy to say that it would have been much better than it is today.

Evidence of Iranian Support of Iraqi Insurgency

In light of the fact that US Troops seized high-level Iranian military members in a raid on a site suspected of conducting attacks on Iraqi security forces, I thought it appropriate to research the evidence that exists as to Iranian support of the Iraqi insurgency.

Updated December 29, 2006.

It is interesting that, while recently following a lead to apprehend insurgents who had reportedly been planning and conducting attacks against Iraqi security forces, US military personnel were heard to exclaim (and I paraphrase):

Holy crap! There are a couple of Iranian dudes in here!

The New York Times, reporting on the story, makes the bland accusation in its otherwise impeccably non-partisan reportage of the story that:

American and Iraqi officials have long accused Iran of interfering in this country’s internal affairs, but have rarely produced evidence.

December 29 update: Since the initial arrest, US military leaders say that they have uncovered evidence that 2 high-ranking Iranian military leaders were organizing insurgent attacks against civilians, US forces, and Iraqi forces. Initial statements from Iraq president Jalal Talabani that he had invited them are being disputed, and they "did not appear to have formally registered with the government."

While in Iraq, I was part of briefings wherein we learned that clearly identifiably Iranian arms shipments had on more than one occasion been intercepted at various points in Iraq or along its border. Part of the shipments taken over were technologically improved Improvised Explosive Devices.

A lot of the killing in Iraq appears to be a back and forth of Sunni killing Shia and Shia seeking revenge and killing Sunni, and on and on. But I wonder, how much of the killing on either side is being fomented by Iran, who has a BIG dog in this fight (even moreso today as it has been reported that Iranian oil reserves may be dwindling).

On June 23, General George Casey gave a report of the progress:

Army General George Casey told reporters at the Pentagon June 22 that covert Iranian special forces are adding to the complexity of an unstable security situation in Iraq by providing weapons, roadside bomb technology and training to Shi’ite extremist groups.

Casey returned to Washington from Iraq to brief Defense Department officials and others on Iraq’s progress. Appearing with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the general said Iranian assistance to Iraqi insurgents is “decidedly unhelpful.” He said Iran is using surrogate groups to attack Iraqi, U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and that some of the surrogates are being trained in Iran, while others are receiving training in Lebanon.

So in an effort to see what's been going on, let's Google the clock all the way back to...November 30, 2006.

U.S. officials say they have found smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories. According to a senior defense official, coalition forces have recently seized Iranian-made weapons and munitions that bear manufacturing dates in 2006.

In March of 2006, ABC News had a similar story.

U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.

Another article reports that the US Military seized weapons shipments from Iran in the south of Iraq in summer 2006.

On May 15, 2008, Iraq the Model cites an Associate Press story wherein Iran admits that Iranians were augmenting the Iraqi insurgency. (See link inside blog post.)

WorldNetDaily reports that al Zarqawi and other al Qaeda members have received sanctuary in Iran.

In early 2005, Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Al-Shaalan accused Iran of supporting the Iraqi insurgency.

See if you've ever heard this one before: an Iranian agent arrested in Iraq for fomenting and financing attacks--sound familiar? But this one happened in January 2005.

And even today, the Saudis grow more and more grim as they contemplate the growing Iranian threat, including their cavorting with members of the Iraqi insurgency.

Yes, there's a little bit of evidence, I guess.