Eric Umansky

Ah Yes, the Success of Tal Afar

President Bush:

The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year's assault in Fallujah....

Many Iraqi units [in Tal Afar] conducted their own anti-terrorist operations and controlled their own battle space -- hunting for enemy fighters and securing neighborhoods block-by-block. To consolidate their military success, Iraqi units stayed behind to help maintain law and order -- and reconstruction projects have been started to improve infrastructure and create jobs and provide hope.

From a September Washington Post piece, filed from Tal Afar:

As in the past several days, Iraqi soldiers drawn primarily from the Kurdish pesh merga militia led the operation, joined as always by U.S. Special Operations soldiers, distinctive with their unkempt hair and facial stubble.

U.S. commanders have praised the performance of the Kurdish forces during the operation, while privately expressing concern that their tactics sometimes verge on being heavy-handed.

In a briefing the night before the morning operation, Lt. Col. Christopher Hickey, commander of the 3rd ACR's 2nd Squadron, instructed the Special Operations soldiers working with the pesh merga to avoid alienating residents.

"We lose these people if we go in there and tear people's homes apart," Hickey said.

By 8 a.m., nearly 400 people were assembled, squatting or seated in the dirt beside the road. Two of the men had bloodied faces and spots of red soaking through their green dishdashas.

"They tried to grab my father, and I said, 'He is old, you don't need to take him,' " said one of the men, whose upper lip and right ear were swollen and bleeding. "They hit us with their fists and their rifles."

Many of the men's hands were bound so tightly with plastic cuffs that their circulation was cut off, so U.S. soldiers cut the bindings and instead wrapped their hands with thick green tape.

Before boarding trucks and returning to their base, the Kurdish soldiers lined up behind the detainees and posed for digital pictures. They threw packages of food and bottles of water to a large group of children assembled across the road, many of whose fathers had been detained.

Some children picked up the gifts, but several grabbed them and threw them at the departing army vehicles.

Soldiers and some neighborhood children gave the detainees food and water as they waited in the 100-degree heat for trucks to arrive to transport them to Camp Sykes. A woman in a long purple dress and white head scarf shouted at the remaining soldiers in Turkish, and others began to gather behind her.

"I give this 30 minutes before it gets out of hand," said Sgt. 1st Class Herbet Gadsden, surveying the scene. "We have to get these people out of here before their families go nuts."

At noon, two trucks arrived. Soldiers lined up the detainees, photographed each one with a digital camera and loaded them aboard. The crowd of family members faded back into their homes. "Another day of making friends," Hanners said, shaking his head.

Can someone remind me: Which page of the sure-to-win "Victory for Iraq" plan explains how we should rely on thuggish rebadged militia men?

 

P.S. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say that simply training Iraqi troops isn't going to do it.

Lookout for the Lincoln Group

Tip for  reporters, editors, and procrastinating bloggers: Start poking about something called the Lincoln Group.

That's the company the LAT says was hired to secretly place U.S. propaganda in Iraqi papers. They've been doing such a bang-up job of that, LG--formerly known as Iraqex--has also been hired as one of the main contractors for a $300 million Pentagon deal  to, as the Washington Post put it, "inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military."

The only significant digging (read: reporting) I've seen on the Lincoln Group doesn't come from a reporter. It comes from Digby.  Here's how s/he summarized what s/he found:

We have a tiny start-up venture, controlled by persons unknown, that suddenly materializes in late 2003 doing "private equity" deals in the middle of a war zone, and then obtains a huge PR contract from the Pentagon, and then hires a bunch of unemployed GOP campaign operatives to execute that contract, and then is absorbed by a shadowy DC company that specializes in corporate and political detective work and that may have close ties to both the Republican Party and the intelligence community, which then is awarded an even bigger contract to produce even more Pentagon propaganda.

Check out Digby's findings, which he dug up back in June. 

More: If you're bored by the notion of googling a company, might I reccomend entering the search terms "Christian Bailey." He's the fellow in charge of Lincoln  Group, a young GOPer, and not a bad-looking guy (for somebody who looks like a teenager).

The Speech

Lots of build-up and yet precious little new. He did talk about how fabulously Iraqi forces are doing. And he did talk about how as the Iraqi army theoretically improves the U.S. will "increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys."

Here's what I'm curious about: What explains the discrepancy between the expectations for the speech and the speech itself? Was it just a case of media-types and others overreading the tea-leaves? Was it a case of a tone-deaf White House , again, not realizing how stale its rhetoric sounds?  I'm flummoxed.

Spending Millions to Shoot Yourself in the Foot

Priceless:

WASHINGTON — As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group , which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets....

One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first made him suspect that the American military was planting articles.

"Stuff would show up in the Iraqi press, and I would ask, 'Where the hell did that come from?' It was clearly not something that indigenous Iraqi press would have conceived of on their own," the official said.

The Iraqi Death Squads

This is the kind of stuff I was referring to when writing about questions of loyalty and the exaggerated faith in training.

But reports of the "Salvador Options" notwithstanding, I  also suspect that  Pratkike is on to something when he suggests that the U.S. far from condoning any of this, is at least now trying rein it in--without success:

If you read this WaPo summary of an interview with SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, it will be clear to you that the U.S. is actually trying to restrain SCIRI/Badr, who are chafing at the bit to assassinate Sunni Arab leaders who support the insurgency. Note also that U.S. military officials are speaking candidly to the press about the problem. But the matter is probably out of our hands, and, assuming the U.S. is going to drawdown in large numbers over the next year or so, our leverage with the Badr Brigades will decrease accordingly.

I also suspect that some  U.S. officials  long prefered to  turn a blind eye.  If I were reporting from Iraq right now, I'd be busting my butt to profile one James Steele. Just saying...

Into the Wild Blue Election Yonder

From the Wash Post:

The Air Force, under pressure from the Pentagon, committed a "gross error" last year when it rushed to sign a no-bid contract for advisers to help plan and implement Iraq's national elections and draft its constitution, the Government Accountability Office has ruled.

OK, so the Air Force did some quickie contracting (worth about $40 million). But here's what I want to know: WTF was the Air Force doing in charge of hiring advisors for Iraq's elections and constitution? Is there a Top Gun school for constitution drafting I don't know about?


P.S. The Post has some interesting background:

The program, according to the report, grew out of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, which the Pentagon created in 2003 to help the Coalition Provisional Authority establish an Iraqi government. The council contained about 150 Iraqi exiles -- including lawyers, physicians, and others with links to ethnic or tribal groups.

That group dissolved along with the CPA in June 2004. But shortly thereafter, Paul D. Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, "determined that the success of the United States war effort" required experts in "reconstruction and governance," the report said. Wolfowitz sought to enable 50 to 75 council members to operate independently throughout the country, according to the report. The program originally called for "Western oriented individuals of Iraqi background" but was later changed to Iraqis with U.S. citizenship.

 

The Pentagon asked the Air Force to issue the contract. The service initially attempted to use an environmental contracting mechanism to hire the advisers but dropped the plan. An Air Force contracting director determined the failed effort was the result of overzealous personnel, who were "leaning way forward in the saddle" and were "not in the habit of saying no to anyone."

With only a few months remaining before the January 2005 elections and "experiencing what it perceived to be significant pressure" from the Pentagon to deliver the bilingual advisers, the Air Force decided there was no time for a competition.

 

Holla! (Real Estate Edition)

From the WSJ:

Sales of previously occupied homes slowed in October as inventories of unsold properties continued to grow, the National Association of Realtors reported.

The trade group said home sales -- including single-family, townhouses, condominiums and cooperatives -- set a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 7.1 million units last month, down 2.7% from September. Inventories increased 3.5% to 2.9 million homes.

"Housing activity has peaked and is coming down a bit," said David Lereah, the association's chief economist, "and we expect further cooling in the coming months." He predicted that the boom will settle down gently as interest rates continue to climb, raising the cost of buying a home.

Some other housing watchers are more worried about the outlook.

A Clarification on Iraqi Army Training

I think some commentators and linkers misunderstood my (probably poorly expressed) post on training the Iraqi army.

Training the Iraqi army is important and necessary; I just don't think it's sufficient or the Holy Grail that many assume/assert it to be.

You can train Iraqi forces all you want, but what you ultimately need in addition to capability is  will. That is, you need Iraqi troops willing to fight and die for the Iraqi government.  Insurgents are willing to do that for their cause. As have some Shiite militia and Kurdish peshmerga. But how about Iraqi government troops? Who, on balance, are they loyal to?

I don't know the answer. And I suspect nobody here, or in the Green Zone, does either.

UPDATE: I just heard James Fallows, whose article  prompted this thread--asked the loyalty question. His answer: More training; that is, train the forces enough and they will move past their "primitive identifications." (Fallows words; my memory. No transcript yet.) It's that kind of outlook, of training itself as the ultimate and implicit cure-all, that I'm skeptical of.

Contractors Shooting Iraqis

I have no idea what the video making its way around the 'net  reveals, if anything. Who knows whether those were mostly warning shots, whether most of the  cars really represented a threat (as opposed to the "trophy" shootings being suggested).  Clearly there were some shootings recorded--but the video in and of itself should only being the starting point of a conversation.

And that conversation shouldn't be about a few purportedly sadistic contractors getting their jollies by shooting civilians. Maybe that happened and maybe it didn't. The bigger issue is the  lack of accountability for contractors in Iraq.

Contractors exist is a legal grey zone. They have been granted immunity from Iraqi law. Nor are they subject to the Unfirom Code Military Justice. The Justice Department  has the power to prosecute contractors for the U.S. abroad, but it hasn't exactly taken a forward stance with respect to contractors in Iraq (i.e. nobody has been prosecuted). That's not a question of sadism, it's a question policy. And it has real effects:

Capt Adnan Tawfiq of the Iraqi Interior Ministry which deals with compensation issues, has told the Sunday Telegraph that he has received numerous claims from families who allege that their relatives have been shot by private security contractors travelling in road convoys.

He said: "When the security companies kill people they just drive away and nothing is done. Sometimes we ring the companies concerned and they deny everything. The families don't get any money or compensation. I would say we have had about 50-60 incidents of this kind."

(Thanks: Laura)

Let Freedom Reign (Indonesia Edition)

Last Tuesday, the U.S. renewed military ties with Indonesia.

Friday, Indonesia announced that it has expelled Sidney Jones, an American human-rights and counter-terrorism super-expert. 

Saturday, the U.S. embassy "declined to comment."

(HT: Michael Roston.)