The creation of Hamastan?

In the wake of an all out civil war in the Gaza Strip, Hamas forces have beat the forces of Fatah (at times brutally) and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) out of Gaza. Immediately this was seen as a failure of the Bush administrations vision for the ME and an end to the prospect of peace between Israelis and Palestinians and a Palestinian two-state solution. Well, at least for the time being.

Without skipping a beat, many are now saying that this may isolate Hamas in Gaza and open up an avenue for progress in the West Bank where Fatah is still viable. Israel has requested that the new landscape in Palestine view the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as two separate entities. I’m sure someone has suggested sending aid to the West Bank Palestinians and not those in Gaza. Of course we heard similar claims after Hamas won the Palestinian election. The claim then was that they wouldn’t be able to govern and they would become unpopular and weaken culminating in another round of elections where Fatah would resume control. That never happened and Hamas is not weakened and not out of power (although the government they were part of no longer stands according the Abbas) and they currently have full control of a significant territory.

Iraq “Surge”

The US “surge” into Baghdad and western Iraq is complete, 28,500 additional troops are now in Iraq. An early Pentagon assessment concluded:

Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.
…
Iraq’s government, for its part, has proven “uneven” in delivering on its commitments under the strategy, the report said, stating that public pledges by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have in many cases produced no concrete results.

Iraqi leaders have made “little progress” on the overarching political goals that the stepped-up security operations are intended to help advance, the report said, calling reconciliation between Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni factions “a serious unfulfilled objective.” Indeed, “some analysts see a growing fragmentation of Iraq,” it said, noting that 36 percent of Iraqis believe “the Iraqi people would be better off if the country were divided into three or more separate countries.”

Unfortunately the Bush administration will not be able to claim the the “surge” is still surging and that the full “surge” is not present. That didn’t stop Press Secretary Tony Snow from using this excuse one last time in yesterdays press conference:

So what the President does is he looks at the 90-10, and you look at it in terms of what’s going on not merely throughout the nation, but keep in mind that the Baghdad security plan understands that the first thing you’ve got to do is secure the capital. There have been some encouraging signs, but, again, we will reiterate, the surge is not complete, forces are just now, this next couple of weeks flowing in so that you’ve have the full complement of forces, and it’s going to be another month or two before they’re completely up and running at full speed.

Next, I’m sure will be the line, they just got there and they are just now getting started. I expect this line to last till September. Hopefully Sept. will bring a marked improvement but I’m not optomistic and don’t believe the case will be made that the strategy is effective enough. Now is not the time for baby steps in Iraq. The time for that was in 2003-04.

Menwhile, 4^th generation warfare guru William Lind lambastes the tactics used in this urban guerrilla war as indicative of the failure of US foreign policy (check out a coming post on the Gaza situation for more claims of US FP failure). Particularity the use of US air power on Iraqi ground targets such as a railroad station. Lind writes:

It turns out the bombed railroad station was no fluke. According to other reports, U.S. aircraft have dropped more than 200 bombs or missiles on Iraqi ground targets this year in support of U.S. ground forces at a rate double that of last year.

Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the “surge” is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: It isn’t.

Worse, the growing number of air strikes shows that, despite what the Marines have accomplished in Anbar province and Gen. David Petraeus’s best efforts, our high command remains as incapable as ever of grasping Fourth Generation war.

To put it bluntly, there is no surer or faster way to lose in 4GW than by calling in airstrikes. It is a disaster on every level. Physically, it inevitably kills far more civilians than enemies, enraging the population against us and driving them into the arms of our opponents. Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air. Morally, it turns us into Goliath, a monster every real man has to fight. So negative are the results of air strikes in this kind of war that there is only one possible good number of them: zero, unless we are employing the “Hama model” of seeking total destruction, which we are not.

Lebanon Violence, Pakistan Violence

Four more Lebanese troops were killed in continued violence in Palestinian refugee camps. This is a continuation of a confrontation at the Nahr al-Bared camp and elsewhere earlier this month. This is all happening while the Lebanese consociational government is facing targeted assaniations of anti-Syria member. It is still unknown who is ordering these killings. Is it internal or external? But one can easily opine that “…Lebanon has become a ravaged battlefield where regional and global warriors are facing off in an increasingly brutal contest that shows no signs of abating.”

US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher was given a going away present during a visit to Pakistan in the form of an ambushed military vehicle and around 9 killed, mostly soldiers. This attack came hours after Boucher left the Balochistan region. Motive is still foggy. Was it a local call for autonomy which is typical in this region or a response to the blowing up of the minarets at the al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra, which is being blamed on the US, among others. This blame is sticking. More fiery sermons and protests are to take place in Pakistan and the greater Shi’a ME.

I’m Back

I’m going to gradually get back into this thing. Look for a ‘manifesto’ soon. It will outline the way forward. It is obvious that the initial idea bit off a bit much, therefore I’ll isolate interest areas and change them as the sands shift. This will likely be on the RHS and called ‘focus’ or something like that.

For now just periodic updates on current events, starting today