Why can’t the US press get Iraq right?

Circumstances in Iraq are insanely complicated, but not generally indecipherable. The major players are known—some well, some not so well—many major occurrences are reported, and a fair number of people who are either in Iraq or know the country well regularly provide commentary and analysis. Yet the US press continue to rely largely on the US government for information—the one source that has proved consistently wrong about what is happening in the country and what those events mean since before the invasion and occupation began.

Not everyone is equally guilty: McClatchy Newspapers, formerly Knight Ridder, has had a sterling team in Iraq since the invasion, and their Washington Bureau correspondents were among the lone skeptical voices reporting on the Bush administration’s sales pitch for the invasion. But editors and reporters at the heavyweight newspapers, the Washington Post and New York Times, despite the credible efforts of a few of their writers, served as little more than government mouthpieces prior to the invasion and continue to get spun by the administration and US military sources in gravity-defying fashion.

On the military and quasi-military front, there are at least six sides in Iraq: the US military; the Medhi Army, a Shiite militia fielded by nationalist, anti-occupation cleric Moqtada al Sadr; the Badr Brigade of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a Shiite militia fielded by the Federalist al Hakim family—they’re the ones who lived in exile in Iran during Saddam’s reign and who were trained and financed by the Iranians, and ISCI is the primary ally of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki’s Da’wa party, which doesn’t have a militia— the Kurdish militia, some of whom have been integrated into the national army and some of whom remain separate, functioning as Iraqi Kurdistan’s national guard; the Sunni/Ba’athist insurgents, an umbrella moniker for several organizations which include former Hussein regime members, Sunni tribes and others disaffected from the government; and the radical religious Sunnis, including the organization known here as Al Qaeda in Iraq, under which most of the non-Iraqi Arab fighters serve.

Add to that mix the so-called Sunni Awakening forces, many of whom were recruited by the US from the ranks of the insurgents, whose primary allegiance is tribal, and who are regarded with deep suspicion by the central government. The Awakening forces total about 70,000 and are armed, trained and financed by the US. Recently they’ve been in the news because the US fell behind on their payroll obligations and a number of the Awakening units either went on strike or declared their intention to do so soon.

Politically, the major groups differ on whether Iraq should function as a unitary state or a federalist one. The Kurds and ISCI favor a federalist system, dividing the country into regions each with considerable internal autonomy. Not coincidentally, most of Iraq’s oil sits in provinces that are within the two groups’ spheres of influence.

The Sadrists and the insurgents favor a unitary state with a strong central government and little regional autonomy, partly for economic reasons (see “oil” above) and partly because they see the federalist scheme as the beginning of the end of Iraq as it has existed for most of the past century. The radical religious Sunnis, by far the smallest of the groups, want a unitary state with a fundamentalist religious government—the Islamic Caliphate that the Bush administration is fond of threatening us with.

So we have two groups, al Sadr’s and the insurgents, that are both vehemently anti-occupation and anti-federalist but have significant enough religious and political differences to make cooperation between them problematic. We have two other groups, the Kurds and ISCI, who favor federalism but have major differences of opinion about which of the northern provinces could legitimately be absorbed into the Kurdish federation.

All of those groups have generally good relations with the Iranian government. Of the majority Shi’ite groups, the ISCI and prime minister al Maliki’s Da’wa party have the strongest ties to the neighboring state. Moqtada al Sadr has a more cautious relationship; unlike the ISCI and Da’wa leaders, he and his family remained in Iraq throughout Saddam’s tenure despite the obvious peril: his father and uncle, both of whom were among the country’s top clerics, were murdered by Saddam. His constituency, drawn in large part from the most economically deprived Shiite enclaves, did much of the fighting and dying in the Iraq-Iran war, which ended less than 20 years ago and signalled the beginning of a decline that accelerated with the sanctions imposed following the first Gulf War, and want into overdrive after the US invasion in 2003.

One reason all this matters is that the US is constantly accusing Iran of arming the forces who are attacking Iraqi soldiers and police and US troops, while painting al Sadr as Iran’s man in Iraq when he enjoys considerably less favor there than many other Iraqi political figures, including one-time Washington fair-haired boy Ahmed Chalabi. Not too long ago, the Iranians help calm the waters in southern Iraq after the central government, perhaps prodded by the ISCI, sent army troops down to Basra and other important southern cities in order to dislodge al Sadr’s militia from its position of strength there in advance of provincial elections later this year. Petitioned by ISCI and Dawa parliamentarians, the head of Iran’s Qod Force—an influential paramilitary wing of the country’s cleric-controlled Revolutionary Guards—brokered a deal which culminated in al Sadr’s declaration of a unilateral cease fire after the initial Iraqi army incursion faltered and cast serious doubt on the continued existence of the central government.

Another reason it matters is that the complexity of the relationships between the various parties, while not indecipherable, nicely highlights the folly of attempting to occupy the country—especially with fewer than half the troops called for by Petraeus and his coauthors of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, which recommends a ratio of 20 trined peacekeeping and counterinsurgency troops for each 1,000 indigenous civilians. With Iraq’s population of 26 million, less however many we’ve killed or chased out of the country, the recommended troop level is 500,000, as opposed to the 130,000-180,000 we’ve had there during the past four years. And very of them are specifically trained as peacekeepers or counterinsurgency forces.

A third reason mastering the details matters is the one that prompted this restrained rant: that the failure to do so allows the administration virtually free reign to lie and distort without challenge, especially with the help of their trained seals among print and broadcast military analysts, a subject BTC News contributor and former White House writer Eric Brewer brought up during his most recent trip to the White House press room for Raw Story (who actually pays him to go, unlike, say, me).

And speaking of money, the editor of this fine publication remains an internally displaced person right here in the US. If you like the site and can afford to help support it, please feel perfectly free to make a contribution via the “Support BTC News” graphic atop the right-hand column.