Vol. 71/No. 28      July 23, 2007

Bush also made it clear “Iraq is just a theater” in a multi-front “war on terrorism” that Washington is leading.

The day before Bush’s speech, Frederick Kagan, a military analyst with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, testified on the war in Iraq before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Working with Jack Keane, a retired U.S. Army general, Kagan had authored an AEI study on which Bush’s new plan was largely based.

In his June 27 testimony, Kagan outlined the operational plan of the occupation forces in Iraq. “It is now beyond question that the Bush Administration pursued a flawed approach to the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2007,” he said. That included keeping the number of U.S. troops in Iraq as small as possible, pushing Iraqi government forces into the lead prematurely, and pressing Baghdad to take political steps to stabilize the country before violence could be brought under control, Kagan said.

The “president changed his strategy profoundly in January 2007,” Kagan said. The first phase of the new approach consisted of sending another 30,000 troops to Iraq—the biggest escalation of the war since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion—bringing the total number of U.S. forces in the country to about 155,000. That deployment was completed in early June, Kagan noted.

That was soon after the majority-Democratic Congress approved $100 billion to fund Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Bush signed into law. Since January, no influential voice in the ruling class has presented any serious alternative to the White House plan.

The additional troops were deployed in Baghdad, in the areas around Baghdad, including Baquba in Diyala province, and in Anbar province.

In his speech, Bush said the U.S. military hopes to replicate in and around Baghdad the successes it has had against al-Qaeda forces in Anbar. “A group of tribal sheikhs launched a movement called The Awakening and began cooperating with American and Iraqi forces,” Bush said. That came in response to al-Qaeda killings of Sunnis that it accused of being collaborators and its shakedowns of merchants and other wealthy Sunnis to raise funds.

Such cooperation from Sunni forces against al-Qaeda has begun to “spread from Anbar into Babil, Salah ad-Din, and even Diyala provinces,” Kagan said.

“Now we’ve launched a wider offensive, called Operation Phantom Thunder, which is taking the fight to the enemy in the capital as well as its surrounding regions,” Bush said.

This second phase of the military escalation began June 15, Kagan told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It focused initially on an offensive by 10,000 troops in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, some 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, where al-Qaeda shifted its center of operations after the rout it suffered in Anbar, according to David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq. The purpose of Phantom Thunder, Kagan said, “is to disrupt terrorist and militia networks and bases outside of Baghdad that have been feeding the violence within the city.”

The violence Kagan referred to is fueled to a large degree by wealthy Sunnis and Shiites vying for control of Iraq’s oil and other resources.

“But even this [Phantom Thunder] operation—the largest coordinated combat operation the U.S. has undertaken since the invasion in 2003,” Kagan said, “is not the decisive stage of the current strategy. It is an operation designed to set the preconditions for a successful clear-and-hold operation that will probably begin in late July or early August within Baghdad itself. That is the operation that is designed to bring security to Iraq’s capital in a lasting way.”

In his speech, Bush repeated U.S. threats against Iran and Syria. Tehran “continues to supply deadly IED explosives that are being used against American forces. It’s also providing training in Iran as well as funding and weapons for Iraqi militias,” he said. “Meanwhile, Syria continues to be a transit station for al Qaeda and other foreign fighters on their way to Iraq.”

Making it clear it will take a long time to establish a stable client regime in Baghdad and defeat “terrorists” elsewhere, Bush described current military operations in Iraq and the region as “the beginning stages of this global war.”  
 
 
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