THE MYTH OF "THE SURGE" IN IRAQ

There are two reasons why Americans are being misled by the so-called success of "the surge" in Iraq.

The first one is because the Bush Administration keeps putting out propaganda that "the surge" has been a big success in Baghdad and Falluja.

The second reason is because the mainstream media in the United States has bought into the Bush Administration smokescreen about "the surge" and no longer tells the truth about what is really happening in Baghdad, Falluja and other parts of Iraq.

National opinion polls in the United States reflect how the Bush Administration in concert with the mainstream media in the United States have shoved the Iraq War off the front burner and replaced it with the economy.

However, the success of "the surge" is all a myth and the people who are suffering most from the myth are the Iraqi citizens and 160,000 U.S. military stationed in Iraq who daily witness anything but a successful operation.

Rolling Stone sent a reporter into the heart of Iraq to get a firsthand look at the evolution "the surge."

What Nir Rosen of Rolling Stone reports is a shocking overview of how the U.S. military has been arming Iraqis who were once members of the insurgents fighting and killing U.S. forces.

But there is more. Much more. And it is a read that will leave you wondering what in the world is the Bush Administration and the U.S. military in Iraq thinking.

Commentary by Bill Corcoran, editor of CORKSPHERE, the blog that dares to bring readers the REAL TRUTH about the war in Iraq and not Bush Administration hype pushed on the American public by the likes of FOX NEWS.


The Myth of the Surge

Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq

NIR ROSEN

Posted Mar 06, 2008 8:53 AM

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18722376/the_myth_of_the_surge

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Click here to see more photos taken by Danfung Dennis for this feature

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones.

Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town.

This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs.

The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama's, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

"The Mahdi Army was killing people here," Osama says, pointing to a now-destroyed Shiite mosque that in earlier times had been a cafe and before that an office for Saddam's Baath Party. Later, driving in the nearby district of Baya, Osama shows me a gas station. "They killed my uncle here. He didn't accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him." Under siege by Shiite militias and the U.S. military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance. Others turned to Al Qaeda and other jihadists for protection.

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige.

The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

At least 80,000 men across Iraq are now employed by the Americans as ISVs. Nearly all are Sunnis, with the exception of a few thousand Shiites. Operating as a contractor, Osama runs 300 of these new militiamen, former resistance fighters whom the U.S. now counts as allies because they are cashing our checks.

The Americans pay Osama once a month; he in turn provides his men with uniforms and pays them ten dollars a day to man checkpoints in the Dora district — a paltry sum even by Iraqi standards. A former contractor for KBR, Osama is now running an armed network on behalf of the United States government. "We use our own guns," he tells me, expressing regret that his units have not been able to obtain the heavy-caliber machine guns brandished by other Sunni militias.

Click on link to ROLLING STONE: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18722376/the_myth_of_the_surge
to read the full story.