[Marxism] Now in Iraq: Something there is in US policy that dealy loves a wall

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

April 5, 2007 
Wall Street Journal
GREAT DIVIDE
In Iraq, an Officer's Answer To Violence: Build a Wall
Col. Peterson Creates A Gated Community; Body Count Declines
By GREG JAFFE
April 5, 2007; Page A1

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The lower-middle-class neighborhoods that Lt. Col.
Jeff Peterson's troops patrol have been the epicenter of Iraq's civil
war for most of the past year. "Every issue facing Baghdad writ large
is in our area," he says.

In recent weeks, Col. Peterson has tried a controversial approach to
calming his sector. As Sunnis and Shiites have separated into their own
neighborhoods, he has resisted the urge to encourage reconciliation or
even dialogue. Instead, he has erected massive concrete barriers
between the sects.

His vision is for a series of small, homogenous, gated communities,
each consisting of a two-block square. Each would be built around a
market, a mosque and a generator. "The goal is to provide the
neighborhoods with a chance to protect themselves, without having to
rely on coalition forces, the Iraqi government or the militias," he says.

How he got to that point -- after months of bloodshed and failed
experiments -- illustrates a lot about both the possibilities and
limitations of the U.S. vision for Iraq.

Currently, the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq is built around
getting Iraqis to reconcile and support the democratically elected,
Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. It's a classic approach to
fighting an insurgency, in which an outside power works to strengthen a
friendly, albeit weak, government. The hope is that with help, the
government will eventually win the backing of the people by providing
security and meeting essential needs. Once insurgents are cut off from
support among the population, they will be relatively easy to crush.
That's the premise of President Bush's surge strategy, built around
bolstering support for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.

The problem, say some commanders, is that they aren't fighting an
insurgency in Iraq anymore. Today, they are trying to stop a civil war
between feuding Sunnis and Shiites. "At times I have been tempted to
call it a counter-civil war or counter-sectarian fight," Col. Peterson
says.

This isn't just an academic point. In a civil war, building up the
government and its security forces may be counterproductive, serving
only to ratchet up the killing. Defusing a civil war depends on
stopping everyone from fighting.

"If you are given the mission to stop hatred, how do you do that?" asks
Brig. Gen. John Campbell, an assistant commander overseeing all U.S.
forces in Baghdad.

The difficult mission has led military officials to try some unusual
tactics. In an effort to reduce retaliatory attacks on locals, some
U.S. commanders say they will hold off raiding a Sunni insurgent cell
until they have intelligence on a Shiite cell of equal size in an
adjoining neighborhood. U.S. commanders have even coined a new term for
this tactic: "balanced targeting."

Success Story

Senior military officials in Iraq give mid-level commanders, like Col.
Peterson, wide latitude in their sectors. They point to Col. Peterson
as one of their success stories. "Gating off a Sunni neighborhood is
not our idea of a free society," Gen. Campbell says. But in some
neighborhoods it may be the only way to stop the killing, he concedes.

Col. Peterson, the 42-year-old son of an Army chaplain, has a shy,
almost bemused grin, and an informal manner with his troops. He was
working on finishing his doctoral thesis and getting ready to take over
the economics department at West Point when he was chosen to command a
battalion headed to Iraq.

When Col. Peterson's 500-soldier squadron arrived in Iraq last summer,
he was told his top priority was to assist Iraqi troops in restoring order.

His squadron was based in southern Baghdad, where the U.S. military had
little presence. In the weeks before his arrival, a radical Sunni group
known as the Omar Brigade and the Shiite Mahdi militia had begun to
battle for territory, targeting locals. In the typical sectarian
murder, masked assassins would speed into a neighborhood, grab a
resident, shoot him in the head, and then dump the body in a
residential street. "The murders were designed to send a message about
which side was dominating and which side was safe in a particular
area," Col. Peterson says.

Col. Peterson's unit was partnered with an all-Shiite battalion of
about 400 national police commandos. Their area, consisting of about
415,000 residents, is dominated by a large Sunni neighborhood and a
densely packed Shiite enclave called Abu Dasheer.

It quickly became clear, he says, that one of his biggest problems was
his partner, the national police. Sunni residents "feared the national
police," Col. Peterson says. In some cases, he even believed that rogue
police troops were helping the radical Shiite Mahdi militia target his
unit and local Sunnis.

The animosity between Sunnis and Shiites dates to a seventh-century
leadership struggle following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. More
recently, the Sunnis, who are a minority in Iraq, dominated the top
positions in Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship. Today, many Shiites
are determined to exact revenge for decades of Sunni oppression.

In early October, the national police began to get into gun battles at
the local Sunni mosques. They called for help from the U.S. troops, who
initially joined the fight. But the police commanders could never
clearly explain how or why the fights started, says Col. Peterson. "The
battles were always with a Sunni mosque; never a Shiite mosque," he
says. They always began when U.S. forces weren't around.

Drastic Action

"What have I gotten myself into?" he recalls thinking. "I felt as
though I had been co-opted into their sectarian agenda."

After the third such battle, Col. Peterson decided to take drastic action.

On Oct. 8, he used massive concrete barriers to wall off dozens of
streets in the Sunni district, home to about 120,000 people, so there
were only two entrances. Col. Peterson then told the national police
troops -- whom he was supposed to be mentoring -- that they weren't
allowed into the area unless they were accompanied by his soldiers.

"It was a pretty big step backwards in terms of cooperation," he says.

After a few days, violence began to drop. In October, his troops
discovered 54 dead bodies in their sector. In November, the number was
43. Locked out of the big Sunni neighborhood, the national police
concentrated on patrolling the largely Shiite district of Abu Dasheer
-- where they were welcomed by the people as an alternative to the
radical Shiite militias that had been providing security. Col. Peterson
concentrated his forces inside the Sunni isolation zone.

The lesson: "Self segregation might be a necessary interim step to
reducing sectarian killing," he says.

The U.S. strategy for dealing with sectarian tension is focused on
reconciliation and sharing power. Last month, Mr. Maliki, the Iraqi
prime minister, encouraged Sunnis and Shiites who had been driven from
their neighborhoods by sectarian bloodletting to go back to their
homes. He is promising cash payments and support from the largely
Shiite Iraqi army and police forces to speed the resettlement.

Shortly after Mr. Maliki's televised address, Col. Peterson saw how
disruptive such a policy might be in his area. He met with leaders of
the now almost exclusively Shiite district of Abu Dasheer. The area had
once been home to a sizable number of Sunnis, but most have been driven
out by Shiite militias issuing death threats.

At the meeting, Sheikh Sattar, a Shiite leader of the neighborhood
council, insisted that only three Sunni families had been driven from
Abu Dasheer. His voice brimming with anger, he said that the three
families were responsible for the deaths of 400 Shiites, including his
son. The other Sunnis left willingly, selling their homes and stores to
Shiites, he said.

"They all say that no Sunnis left Abu Dasheer" against their will, Col.
Peterson says. "It is a denial of reality. But it is the party line."

After the meeting, Col. Peterson said prospects for any real
reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites were dim because of so much
mistrust and hatred. Overcoming differences is probably a "generational
undertaking," he said.

Little Faith

There is also little faith among the people in the Iraqi government,
which in 2006 spent only $29 billion of its $40 billion annual budget.
Most of that went to salaries instead of services, say senior U.S.
officials. In Col. Peterson's area, various groups -- including
mosques, militias and insurgents -- have rushed to fill the void,
offering security or even food and fuel. These groups don't have to do
much to win support. "They just have to do better than the government.
Anything above zero is a better alternative," Col. Peterson says.

By January, Col. Peterson concluded he couldn't wait for the Iraqi
government to provide basic services. Nor was it realistic to think
local residents would reconcile and share power any time soon. He began
to search for a different approach, relying as much on his education as
an economist as his training as a military commander.

"How do we give people control over their neighborhoods so they take
responsibility for what happens there?" he recalls thinking.

About the same time, some Shiites asked one of his lieutenants if they
could form a neighborhood-watch group to protect themselves. The group
members weren't allowed to carry guns. But they did wear badges and
when they spotted outsiders in their area, they could notify U.S. or
Iraqi forces using cellphones.

At first, the neighborhood watch seemed to work. Then, leadership of
the group was taken over by the radical Shiite Mahdi militia. "If we
were not sitting in the area, there would be gunfire from sunup to
sundown," says Capt. Adam Grim, the company commander in that area. In
February, Col. Peterson detained eight of the watch members and charged
them with participating in the murder and intimidation of Sunnis.

Analyzing the Failure

After the arrest, Col. Peterson analyzed why the watch had failed. He
concluded that the neighborhood they were overseeing was too big. He
hadn't controlled access to the area. Most important, he felt he hadn't
given the neighborhood anything worth defending, such as a better
quality of life.

The failure helped give birth to a new approach. He began to refurbish
a market in the Sunni district he had blocked off. He noticed that as
soon as he installed concrete barriers around the market to prevent car
bombs, people flocked to the once-deserted stores. He then walled off a
two-block-by- two-block-square area of homes around the market so there
was only one way in and out of the neighborhood.

"That seemed to be about the right size that allowed the community to
handle its own security and quickly spot outsiders," he says.

Finally, he bought the market manager a 450-kilowatt generator --
enough to power the 29 stores in the market and about 100 houses.
Today, the Sunni manager, Khalid Ishmael, sells power to the stores and
the houses in the gated community. The Americans help him buy fuel. He
handles the maintenance and sets his own rates -- enough to turn a
small profit. He has nothing but contempt for the Iraqi government and
the national police in the area. "They will kill us without the
American forces to stop them," he says.

Many residents feel the same way. But the area is fairly free of
insurgent and militia groups, according to Col. Peterson and locals. In
contrast to most Iraqi neighborhoods, where trash is piled on median
strips, neighbors in the gated community collect their refuse and burn
it in an abandoned lot. Mr. Ishmael keeps a handwritten log of his
power customers in a small notebook. He and his staff of two take turns
sleeping nights on a filthy cot next to the generator, to protect it
from thieves. The streets and the market bustle with women and children.

"I want to get to the point where people say, 'When are you going to
build one of those gated communities for me?'" says Col. Peterson.
"When we leave here, I'd like to have a string of them."

Although life has improved for many Iraqis in Col. Peterson's sector,
it is far from safe or stable. In February, his unit discovered 25
bodies, down from 39 in January. In many areas, more than half the
houses are abandoned. Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods exchange mortar
and rocket fire on an almost daily basis, often wounding and killing
innocent locals.

On a recent morning, Capt. Douglas Graham, one of Col. Peterson's
company commanders, was heading out on a foot patrol through the gated
community when he heard an explosion of gunfire. A national police unit
was traveling on the nearby main highway when an insurgent sniper
opened fire on them from a neighborhood to the north. The police
stopped traffic in both directions, and, for the next hour, blasted
away at that neighborhood, as well as Col. Peterson's gated community.

Capt. Graham tried to tell the Iraqi troops to cease fire. When that
failed, he had his interpreter call the brigade commander. "Nothing is
going to be solved by taking potshots into the neighborhood," he said.

The next day, Sgt. First Class Roger Hunceker led a patrol of about 20
soldiers through the gated community. They were met by Mr. Ishmael, the
market manager, who said the gunfire had wounded a woman in the leg and
left his home pockmarked with bullet holes. He was convinced the police
were targeting the neighborhood on purpose. "They do not want us to
succeed. Anything positive that happens in the Sunni areas they will
try to destroy it," he said through an interpreter.

Sgt. Hunceker tried to reassure him, telling him that the police who
opened fire were from a different area, and that the national police in
his neighborhood were improving. But locals can't distinguish one
police commando unit from the other. They all wear the same green
camouflage uniforms and for the most part, are all feared by Sunnis.
"We cannot leave our neighborhood. If we try to pass through one of
their checkpoints, they will kill us," Mr. Ishmael said. However, he
says he has no plans to turn to the Omar Brigade, the Sunni-based
militia force that operates in the area. "We have accepted all this
help. The Omar Brigade will kill us for cooperating with the
Americans," he said.

For Col. Peterson, the market manager's remarks were encouraging. The
gated community offers "an alternative to the militia and it's an
alternative he has some control over," he says.

In late March, Col. Peterson's squadron was transferred from southern
Baghdad to the Haifa Street area of the capital, the site of a massive
gun battle between Sunnis and U.S. forces earlier this year. Senior
U.S. officials say they moved the squadron to the area, which has been
a persistent problem for U.S. forces, in the hope it will be able to
replicate some of the success it has had in southern Baghdad. A new
U.S. battalion has been assigned to that area.

"We'll have a fresh start to continue these techniques," Col. Peterson
wrote in an email. "Hopefully it won't take as long to get started this
time."

Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@xxxxxxxx



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