'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Is this what the current fighting in Basra is about?

Posted by Helena Cobban at March 29, 2008 01:36 PM

When the Brits withdrew from Basra city to Basra airport last year, I was intrigued by the strategic implications of this at a number of levels. Most broadly, it seemed to represent a judgment by the British government and general staff that the "western" coalition of which the UK is a part could not "win" in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Afghanistan was more important. (See Dannatt.)

That was obviously, in itself, bad news for those in the US military still tasked by their political bosses to "win" in Iraq. But even worse news for the US military is that the space the Brits were withdrawing from was (and remains) an absolutely vital node on the supply chain for the whole US military in Iraq.

Ever since July 2005, I have been underlining the importance of Basra to the supply chain of the occupation force.

Now, however, it seems that Petraeus and his Centcom superiors may have finally twigged to the importance of Basra. Peter Oborne of Britain's Daily Mail reports that:

Already at the Basra air base, I can reveal, the British subsidiary of U.S. construction giant KBR is building four huge dining facilities - known to the American army as DFACs. These are capable of feeding 4,000 men and suggest that the U.S. Army is contemplating a massive deployment to southern Iraq - including a major presence inside Basra itself.

(Hat-tip to Cloned Poster for his comment at Pat Lang's blog, for that.)

So that construction has evidently been planned for some time now... But here was a problem for Petraeus and Co in their project to implant a 4,000-person base in Basra: Iraq is allegedly a "sovereign" state. So how to get Nuri al-Maliki's allegedly "sovereign" government to agree to the creation of this new base?

Did they, essentially, snooker Maliki into getting into a firefight with the Sadrists in Basra that he very evidently couldn't win, and that would therefore lead him to call in a robust US (oh, excuse me, "coalition") ground-force presence there?

Badger of Missing Links has been doing a great job of following the still-evolving story of the new escalation between the Maliki-US axis and the Sadrists. In this post yesterday, he highlighted a great report from Lebanon's Al-Akhbar that noted the self-deception Maliki has been engaging in by imagining himself not only a military leader but also one who by traveling to the battlefront in Basra could help to rally his forces. (Several alternative explanations of his strange trip to Basra are also possible.)

It hasn't worked, of course. Indeed, thus far it has been a debacle. Having earlier given a 3-day deadline for the Sadrist/resistance forces in Basra to lay down their weapons, they then extended that to ten days amid reports that it was the government forces that have been majorly laying down their weapons, instead.

Yesterday, the US military sent in its airpower against suspected opposition sites in Basra, and today they did the same again.

The WaPo's Karen DeYoung has some intriguing tidbits, in a report written apparently from Washington DC, about the laments voiced by an (anonymous) "senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence in southern Iraq" to the effect that,

our intelligence in that area is far less than we would like. We don't have any forces there... [W]e are operating with a good dose of opaqueness.

I also want to draw attention to the fine round-up of war-related news from Iraq that WaPo.com's Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday.

That round-up included this:

I called attention yesterday to two Time magazine articles that today seem even more prescient and are worth mentioning again. Charles Crain noted how chief military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner (" Bush's Baghdad Mouthpiece") refused to say "whether the Americans would become involved more directly if the Iraqi government could not complete its Basra operation. 'I would say,' he said, 'that's a very hypothetical question at this time.'" But, Crain wrote: "It is also the question of the hour. If the violence continues to intensify and the Iraqi government cannot finish what it started then the U.S. must choose whether to throw its troops into the fight."

And Darrin Mortenson wrote: "If the U.S. decides to actively go after the Shi'ite forces in the south, it would mean reopening a southern front where American forces once fought some of the Iraq war's fiercest battles against Sadr but now have only a shadow presence. That would involve draining the concentration of surge troops around Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. It might even require more troop extensions or additional deployments to hold ground and maintain modest gains. Moving against the Shi'ite strongholds could then open opportunities for the Sunni fighters of al-Qaeda to strike Iraqi and U.S. targets in the Sunni triangle as the American heat turns south."

Froomkin is also excellent at noting the blithe idiocy of the US commander-in-chief. He provides what seems like an excellent critique of the big, cheerleading speech that Bush made on Iraq, Thursday.

Froomkin wrote:

Mocking his critics, Bush asked yesterday: "If America's strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?"

The obvious answer: Pakistan's rugged tribal area, where bin Laden and the real al-Qaeda are said to be actively re-establishing al-Qaeda training camps.

And Bush, whose prognostication skills have been almost uniformly poor when it comes to Iraq, spoke with great certainty about what would happen if U.S. forces came home:

"The reality is that retreating from Iraq would carry enormous strategic costs for the United States," he said. "It would incite chaos and killing, destroy the political gains the Iraqis have made, and abandon our friends to terrorists and death squads. It would endanger Iraq's oil resources and could serve as a severe disruption to the world's economy. It would increase the likelihood that al Qaeda would gain safe havens that they could use to attack us here at home. It would be a propaganda victory of colossal proportions for the global terrorist movement, which would gain new funds, and find new recruits, and conclude that the way to defeat America is to bleed us into submission. It would signal to Iran that we were not serious about confronting its efforts to impose its will on the region. It would signal to people across the Middle East that the United States cannot be trusted to keep its word. A defeat in Iraq would have consequences far beyond that country -- and they would be felt by Americans here at home."

On each and every count, however, as critics like retired Gen. William Odom have long been arguing, it's quite possible that the exact opposite is true.

Let's assume, though, that military planners a few levels under Bush have a better grasp on reality than him; and also that perhaps they have some plan in mind in having egged Maliki into a confrontation with the Sadrists at this time. If so, a concept that would lead to the reinforcement of the "coalition" positions and ground capabilities in Basra would seem to have considerable rationality.

And that is the case, regardless of what any bigger US military "plan" for Iraq might be. Indeed, reinforcing the US positions in Basra would certainly be a worthy goal to win even if it involves leaving US positions elsewhere in the country much more vulnerable, or even letting huge additional areas of Iraq fall out of their hands.

To recall the importance of Basra and retaining control of military supply lines through Basra, just recall what happened to the British-Indian expeditionary force in Iraq in 1915-16. Was it 23,000 troops that they lost there?