JOURNAL: A reboot for Iraq's insurgency?

A new campaign of systems disruption has begun in Iraq (with a particular focus on electricity systems). Its goal is to reboot the insurgency. Attacks over the last 24 hours include:

• Sunday: A massive car bomb attack on a power station in Mosul caused widespread power outages.
• Monday: A successful attack on a natural gas line in northern Iraq will cause widespread power outages for at least a week.
• Monday: A huge bomb was found and defused at the entrance of the Electricity ministry in Baghdad.

Without a means to provide Iraq's fragile communities with resilience against attacks on national infrastructure, any and all gains recently made in security will be for naught (remember, the "Anbar Awakening" effort isn't the result of COIN, it is a fragile short cut). See State Failure 101 for more.

Random Link: More GG tech. Here's a report on how amateur/tinkerer submersible technology is being used to smuggle cocaine out of Colombia -- 13 submersibles were captured in 2007 alone.

Comments

[The Buffalo In Da' Midst]

There ARE NO 'security gains', just more blathering from the Pentagon's for-hire talking heads parroted by the MSM.

Case-in-point

"Treasure of Baghdad (an independent Iraqi blogger) watched the video released of Iraqi children being trained as ‘al qaeda’ although some of the training seems to him to be regular military training. He identifies the children and their adult trainers as being Iraqi from the accent. He thinks the trainers are former members of Iraqi’s military which was disbanded in 2003."

Source: Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus
http://ooibc.blogspot.com/2008/02/some-iraqi-bloggers-losing-hope.html

If the Iraqis want to destroy their own country to deprive the US of it's (oil) spoils of war and the security needed to loot it, at least we can be reasonably sure, despite the Pentagon's continuing black propaganda campaign, that al Qaeda isn't responsible, but the children, Iraqi adults of the future, unless we kill them all too, might be.

[Joe the Joe]

Any updates 9 months later?

Still feel like the Awakening is a shortcut?

That progress is an imaginary product of the MSM?

What do you feel about quotes like this one:
“There’s nothing going on. I’m with the 10th Mountain Division, and about half of the guys I’m with haven’t fired their weapons on this tour and they’ve been here eight months. And the place we’re at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there’s nothing going on. I’ve been walking my feet off and haven’t seen anything. I’ve been asking Iraqis, ‘do you think the violence will kick up again,’ but even the Iraqi journalists are sounding optimistic now and they’re usually dour.”

(Source: http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/11/14/the-war-is-over-and-we-won/ )

[johnrobb]

Joe,

I do think it is fragile. I haven't changed my opinion of the strategy since I recommended it (as the least worst of many bad options) in 2005 (in my NYTimes OpEd).

The better question is: should, can, or must we leave?

Joe,

A fair challenge.

Fighting in Iraq is down because the war is won. But not by the US. The US is seeking a face-saving agreement on its troops leaving. The question now is when do the US troops leave (its agreed by 2011 - only 2 years away, but how fast will they go? British forces nominally covering the South will be gone within the next 6 months. We are as they saying goes... "outta here!").

If the US decides to stay then fighting will restart again, but as long as the Americans are going anyway, why should the Iraqis bother? That part of the war is over, they've won; next up is the restarted Iraqi civil war (part x of x).

Since February we've had the Turks invade Northern Iraq, aimed at slaughtering the Kurds, who were once critical US allies, but aren't any more, so the Kurds don't get US help. Fighting continues to this day. Well.. I say fighting... the Turks pick a village, pulverise it, and then pick another village the next day. Its not really fighting, more ethnic cleansing, but that'd be a bad thing for Turkey, a NATO ally to do. On the other hand the Turks can argue with a straight face that they are merely a part of TWAT (The War Against Terror) as they are nominally attacking terrorists (by defining all Kurds as terrorists).

Also in February the UK pulls out of Basra. Almost immediately the Iraqi army goes into Basra, attacking the elected city government, resulting in a hell of mess. During which the Iraqi army collapses (again) in the face of local people with guns. Hundreds of civilians are killed as the Iraqi army and US backers resort to shelling the second largest city in Iraq in order to make it behave.

The upshot is that the Sadrists called a ceasefire, whilst at the same time noting that they can break the August 2007 truce that they have made with the US and Iraqi armies. The US and Iraqi armies sit up at that one and decide not to fight the Sadrists any more. The Sadrists remain on ceasefire to this day.

Also in the time period we're discussing US forces pulled out of Anbar province, leaving it in the hands of militias that had comprehensively outfought the US; about a third of all US dead (some 1300 US soldiers) were in Anbar alone.

That alone explains the lower American death rate, and if we add in the Sadrist ceasefire which will hold as long as the US leaves and that's the reason for the lower violence.

In short the problem with this note is that it was written at a time when the war was effectively over and done, there was no further need for the Iraqi resistance, they had won.

The key thing is that this month Iraq and the US (finally) agreed on a draft security pact to ensure a complete US withdrawal by 2011, this is expected to pass the Iraqi cabinet sometime next week.

Now the security pact is the end of the US war in Iraq, so it bears some watching. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has reportedly said that if he felt the agreement infringed on Iraqi sovereignty, he would "directly intervene." Sistani remains immensely influential so he does have a lot of say in what goes into the final agreement. Sistani certainly rejected the original US draft which made Iraq a colony of the US (that was back in the days when the US wanted to stay in Iraq... now its US policy to leave).

The Iranian backed Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq which had been negative to the earlier version are now on board, so the US has the support of people that matter in Iraq. The Kurds are less so as there is a lot of stuff about Iraqi Central Government which means that the Kurdish autonomous zone can be eliminated, as happened in the 1930s - mind you back in the 1930s there was a combined Iraqi - Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas... and that could never happen again, right? I mean, its not like Turkey is already bombing.... oh hang on...

As for the current US idea that Iraq is peaceful, lets try the last day I have information for, the 12th of November:

In one day - car bombings (multiple, including some with more than one bomb) killed about 20 and wounded a hundred. There was an assassination attempt on a Christian politician in Kirkuk which splatted a few bodyguards and wounded the man himself (plus there were a couple of separate drive by shootings, but the dead weren't important). Mosul featured ethnic cleansing on Christians (its been a theme in Mosul since February, the US blames Al-Qaeda in Iraq). I'm not sure how many dead, but at least 2 women were murdered.

And this, bear in mind, is peace. So yes the US military are using their guns a lot less - after all they are leaving, but there is going to be a period of intense violence afterwards as everyone in Iraq works out who is top dog.

In short its early days yet.