Yesterday I watched The News Hour on PBS. I listened to John Burns reporting from Iraq. In his report Burns said that U.S. troops actually bring a calming effect where they are deployed. If they can calm Baghdad they might have a chance to pacify regions beyond the 30 mile radius of Baghdad.
Burns went on to make the remarkable claim that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki did not want additional U.S. troops sent to Iraq. Why? The unspoken reason is that the Shiites are doing a pretty good job against the Sunnis all my themselves. Shiites militias (mainly Moqtada al Sadr's Mehdi Army) are driving to create a cordon sanitaire arch from Sadr City in east Baghdad across northern Baghdad. This would cut off Sunnis militants in Baghdad from their homelands in northern Iraq.
Yesterday, the Pentagon went to considerable effort to claim that the idea of sending more U.S. troops originated with Nouri al Maliki. Mark Shields said on The News Hour that he would take John Burns account over what Pentagon briefers were pushing.
Here is John Burns' followup story:
Promising Troops Where They Aren’t Really Wanted
quote:
January 11, 2007
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 — As President Bush challenges public opinion at home by committing more American troops, he is confronted by a paradox: an Iraqi government that does not really want them.
The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has not publicly opposed the American troop increase, but aides to Mr. Maliki have been saying for weeks that the government is wary of the proposal. They fear that an increased American troop presence, particularly in Baghdad, will be accompanied by a more assertive American role that will conflict with the Shiite government’s haste to cut back on American authority and run the war the way it wants. American troops, Shiite leaders say, should stay out of Shiite neighborhoods and focus on fighting Sunni insurgents.
“The government believes there is no need for extra troops from the American side,” Haidar al-Abadi, a Parliament member and close associate of Mr. Maliki, said Wednesday. “The existing troops can do the job.”
It is an opinion that is broadly held among a Shiite political elite that is increasingly impatient, after nearly two years heading the government here, to exercise power without the constraining supervision of the United States. As a long-oppressed majority, the Shiites have a deep-seated fear that the power they won at the polls, after centuries of subjugation by the Sunni minority, will be progressively whittled away as the Americans seek deals with the Sunnis that will help bring American troops home.
These misgivings are broadly shared by Shiite leaders in the government, including some whom Mr. Bush has courted recently in a United States effort to form a bloc of politicians from the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that can break Mr. Maliki’s political dependence on the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He leads the Mahdi Army, the most powerful of the Shiite militias that are at the heart of sectarian violence in Iraq.
Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of the security committee in Parliament and a close associate of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim — a prominent Shiite leader who met with Mr. Bush last month in Washington, and who has quietly supported the American push to reshape the political landscape in Baghdad — was unequivocal in his opposition to a troop increase. “I’m against any increase in troops,” he said.
Redha Jawad Tahi, another Shiite member of Parliament from Mr. Hakim’s party, took a similar view. “You can’t solve the problem by adding more troops,” he said. “The security should be in the hands of the Iraqis. The U.S. should be in a supporting role.”
The plan sketched out by Mr. Bush went at least part way to meeting these Shiite concerns by ceding greater operational authority over the war in Baghdad to the government. The plan envisages an Iraqi commander with overall control of the new security crackdown in Baghdad, and Iraqi officers working under him who would be in charge of military operations in nine newly demarcated districts in the capital.
~~~snip~~~
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Faire l'amour, pas la guerre
Make love not war
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