Deep Blade Journal

CBS reports “Dozens Of Sunnis Killed In Iraq Rampage: Shiite Cops And Militants Allegedlly Kill Sunni Civilians As Revenge For Dual Truck Bombings” in a city that CBS reporter Lara Logan helped the administration hold out as “a model for how to fight and win the rest of the war.”

Today both Atrios and the PBS News Hour coupled the news story of a grisly round of bombings and killings in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar with a review of the March 2006 pronouncement by President George W. Bush that this city was “a concrete example of progress in Iraq.”

I thought that the PBS News Hour did a pretty good job with this story. The analyst Ahmed Hashim from the Naval War College basically debunked Lara Logan’s angle on “Tal Afar: Al Qaeda’s Town,” and the US “battle to retake” it:

GWEN IFILL: For more on Tall Afar, we are joined by Ahmed Hashim, who worked in Tall Afar as a political adviser to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in 2005. He’s now an associate professor at the Naval War College, and he lectures at Harvard…. Mr. Hashim, given the latest violence, is it possible to assume at this point that perhaps the optimism that was expressed in 2005 about what was happening there was either overstated or premature?

AHMED HASHIM, Naval War College: I think it was overstated. Tall Afar was never consolidated after the 3rd ACR left.

The situation in the city has more to do with local grievances and identity conflicts between the Sunni Turkmen, and the Shia Turkmen. And it really is not al-Qaida who has infiltrated so much as the fact that what happened in 2003 is the formerly dominant Sunni-Turkmen majority there, that constitute 70 percent of the population, that controlled the police, the municipality, the security services.

They were primarily the teachers, and also there was about 20,000 Turkmen who were veterans of the former Iraqi army. Suddenly, they felt themselves having been thrown out of power.

And this is essentially their revenge on what they see as the empowerment of the Shia minority in the town, which has been helped by central power in Baghdad, which is, of course, now in the hands of the Shia.

This explanation for the violence in Tal Afar is completely missing from the tales told by Ms. Logan last year for the program 60 Minutes under the guidance of one Colonel H.R. McMaster, who according to the CBS story “should know” how “Al Qaeda in Iraq had a very sophisticated strategy for taking over the city” because he “served as one of the military’s top advisers on fighting the Iraqi insurgency.”

Even if there is some truth about the earlier incidents described in the CBS Tal Afar story, given today’s extreme violence it is obvious they had no interest in looking into the dynamics of the place beyond a deeply embedded, White-House-friendly view. “Success” is ethereal and fleeting for the US in Iraq.

President Bush simply never will quit. Last year’s falsely rosy portrait of Tal Afar is followed today by his upbeat remarks before the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association:

the Iraqi people are beginning to say — see positive changes. I want to share with you how two Iraqi bloggers — they have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we’ve got here — (laughter) — “Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed. We hope the governments in Baghdad and America do not lose their resolve.”

I want to read something that Army Sergeant Major Chris Nadeau says — the guy is on his second tour in Iraq. He says, “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m a soldier. The facts are the facts. Things are getting better, we’re picking up momentum.”

These are hopeful signs, and that’s positive.

That’s rich for dear leader to be citing “bloggers,” who just happen to write exactly what the White House likes, described on Olbermann’s show tonight by Rajiv Chandrasekaran as Baghdad dentists and who also were guests in the White House a couple of years ago. How much credibility does Bush have? My answer is none.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 20:41 and is filed under Iraq, commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.