AT LEAST NINE SOLDIERS DIED today in a car bombing in Diyala province, and the chattering class will soon be weighing in on what this does to the Democrat's or Bush's positions in the fight over funding and withdrawal, as if that's the big story here.
But it's not. Nor is the big story about the senseless death of nine more of the valiant, nor the wisdom of flimsy 'outposts', nor any of the dozens of other prismatic considerations such an event begets.
No, the big story is that having sown the wind, we are reaping the whirlwind, and all that lies ahead is failure.
But before you read on, consider the picture above for a good long minute.
It was taken less than two weeks ago in Diyala.
IT STARTED IN JANUARY, and went little noticed.
On Monday, January 6, the Chicago Tribune reported...
Insurgents elude forces in eastern Iraqi province
FONTIMIYA, IRAQ; U.S. and Iraqi forces trudged through waterlogged fields, crawled down tunnels and went house to house Friday in a painstaking search for Sunni Arab insurgents, combing a remote rural region east of Baghdad that has been a training and logistics base for Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militant groups.
But for the second day of the 1,000-troop operation, in home after home, they found only women, children and men too old to fight.
Time and again, U.S. forces in Iraq have staged major assaults on known insurgent hide-outs only to have key individuals melt away. As with other operations, the military is attempting to dislodge insurgents from their hiding places in Diyala province, then sweep them into known escape routes where they can be intercepted.
This had been the first major new military operation undertaken since the December arrival of the notorious Lt. General Raymond Odierno as commander of day to day operations in Iraq.
And he had a history in Iraq. Especially when it comes to dealing with Sunnis.
The LA Times gave a capsule description of his most notorious history:
Odierno gained a reputation as an aggressive commander while leading the 4th Infantry Division in Sunni Arab-dominated parts of the country in 2003 and '04. Some military analysts have argued that the region's continued unrest can be traced to his heavy-handed methods.
But that doesn't quite capture his time there, which included included widespread indiscriminate 'mass sweeps' of all adult males 16 years or older in Sunni villages, many of whom ended up in Abu Ghraib. From the book, Fiasco:
What wasn't widely understood at the time, or even now outside the military, is that the overcrowding at the prison... resulted directly from tactical decisions... most notably the 4th ID's Gen. Odierno. In the fall of 2003 they were stuffing Abu Ghraib with thousands of detainees, the majority of them bystanders caught up in the sweeps.
When Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq, questioned the 4th ID's indiscriminate approach, she was told by its intelligence officer that Odierno didn't care...
Brig. Gen. Karpinski, the reserve MP officer overseeing detentions across Iraq (said)..."The 82nd's interrogators did it right. They'd interview twenty-five and send three to me. Odierno's guys would grab twenty-five, and send twenty-five, or fifty, by including a bunch from his holding pen..."
And from the Washington Post:
From its first days in Iraq in April 2003, the Army's 4th Infantry Division made an impression on soldiers from other units -- the wrong one.
"We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly," recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. "They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians. . . . What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong..."
The unit, a heavy armored division despite its name, was known for "grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not," according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's detainee operations by the Army inspector general's office. Its indiscriminate detention of Iraqis filled Abu Ghraib prison, swamped the U.S. interrogation system and overwhelmed the U.S. soldiers guarding the prison.
Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division's approach was indiscriminate. "With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: 'Round up all the military-age males, because we don't know who's good or bad.' " Col. Alan King, a civil affairs officer working at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a similar impression of the 4th Infantry's approach. "Every male from 16 to 60" that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."
The unit's tactics were no accident, given its commanding general, according to his critics. "Odierno, he hammered everyone," said Joseph K. Kellogg Jr., a retired Army general who was at Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led occupation agency.
All of which casts a new light on the report above "insurgents elude forces in eastern Iraqi province".
For Odierno is well-known to the Sunnis of Iraq (Diyala, like Anbar where Odierno gained his notoriety, is overwhelmingly Sunni). As is the fact that the Iraqi 'security forces' on the operation were primarily Shi'ite.
And so when the surprise operation started, entire villages emptied themselves of all adult males over the age of 16, and hid in the canals spread throughout the region.
But of course the very act of hiding equalled guilt in the eyes of the new day-to-day commander (Petraeus was not in the picture yet), and so the next day the air strikes began...
HAMOUD, IRAQ : Bombers, fighter jets and attack helicopters unleashed a thundering attack today as U.S. and Iraqi troops closed in on a web of irrigation canals east of Baghdad where they thought Sunni Arab insurgents were massing.
The predawn strikes shook the ground and sent fireballs and thick smoke into the sky.
...and many 'insurgents' were killed.
NOW FLASH FORWARD TO TWO DAYS AGO, and the following report in the Washington Post...
Troops in Diyala Face A Skilled, Flexible Foe
The pale blue light inside the Chinook helicopter cast a faint glow on the young soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, tensed for battle. They crossed themselves and bowed their heads.
The battalion was flying in the middle of the night toward an Iraqi village, one unexplored by American troops and believed to be dominated by Sunni insurgents. The troops had heard the stories -- militant camps hidden in palm groves, underground torture prisons, sniper teams on rooftops -- and were ready for a fight. As a lone soldier had roared on the tarmac amid the thudding rotors: "Battle hard!"
But when the 600 soldiers descended on Buhriz al-Barra with machine guns and night-vision lenses early Monday, they found the village largely devoid of men. Soldiers fanned out from the rocky field where they had landed, combing riverbanks, palm groves and hundreds of concrete and cinder-block homes, only to find many abandoned and others inhabited only by nervous women and children.
"The biggest dry hole ever," said 1st Lt. James Brandon Prisock, 28, a platoon leader on the operation, after several hours in the village. "These guys all took off. They knew we were coming."
And of course, as in January, hiding from night raids that have been robbing villages of adult males for weeks equals guilt in the eyes of the military, and of the Washington Post.
Not villagers cowering in terror as they hide in the crops and canals, but instead a 'skilled, flexible foe'.
NOW GO A LITTLE SOUTH, TO BAGHDAD, and you'll find much the same story, only urbanized. Night after night of raids in the Sunni 'neighborhoods': Dora, Amhadiyah, Ghazaliyah. Raids by U.S. forces accompanied by the notorious Iraqi FPS -- Shi'ite 'security forces' known for their death squad activities. Detention on suspicion, no charges filed, and no need to release ever. And new walls to hem them all in, while they wait to join the 18,000 others now 'detained' by the U.S. -- with the news widely known that the prison camps are expanding and thousands more MPs are being brought in as part of the 'surge'
AND NOW THINK IF YOU ARE SUNNI -- whether a villager in Diyala or a city-dweller in Baghdad, and you see the coming wind, what choice would you make, what choice would you have... other than to be taken by the wind or become part of the whirlwind?
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This diary by Spread the Word: Iraq-Nam, a daily blog on Iraq.