Surg-ing in Iraq

The US has infiltrated Iraqi economic and political “structures” in so many complex ways, yet to be understood by most of us, that it is difficult to evaluate the impact of the US invasion if you’re not paying strict attention.  Fortunately, Tom Englehardt pays attention:

American troop strength in Iraq now stands at about 146,000. That’s perhaps 16,000 more than in January 2007 just before the surge began. It’s also about 16,000 more than in April 2003 when Baghdad was taken. According to Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press, the latest Pentagon plans are to order about 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in 2009, which would keep troop levels at or above that 140,000 mark.

In addition, a vast force of private contractors, armed and unarmed, is in the country. There is no way to know how many of these hired hands and hired guns are actually there, but it’s a reasonable guess that they add up to more — possibly substantially more — than the troops on hand.

Since February 2007 in the U.S., only one “surge” has been discussed, almost nonstop — those 30,000 ground troops the President ordered largely into the Baghdad area. A surprising number of other surges have, however, been underway, even if barely noted in the U.S. These add up to a remarkable Bush administration urge to surge that puts American policy in Iraq in quite a different light.

Among these surges, for instance, has been a political surge of U.S. “advisors” and “mentors” to the Iraqi government, police, and military. In another of his superb reports for the New York Review of Books, “Embedded in Iraq,” Michael Massing says that the main elements of this “little known political surge… were spelled out in a classified ‘Joint Campaign Plan’ completed in May 2007.” It represented, he writes, a “sharp expansion.”

 

“Specialists from Treasury and Justice, Commerce and Agriculture were assigned to government ministries to help draw up budgets and weed out sectarian elements. The Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers set up projects to boost nutrition and reinforce dams. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were stationed in Baghdad and elsewhere to help repair infrastructure, improve water and electrical systems, and stimulate the economy.”

 

We know as well that American advisers are now deeply involved with local government bodies in contested areas; that American advisers, evidently hired from private contractors, are embedded in the key interior, defense, and oil ministries; that advisers, also hired from private contractors, are helping the Iraqi police and that a new multiyear contract with DynCorp International, which already has 700 civilian police advisers in the country, will raise that number above 800. Their mission: “to advise, train and mentor the Iraqi Police Service, Ministry of Interior, and Department of Border Enforcement.”

In this period, even academics have surged into Iraq as the military has embedded anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists from the “Human Terrain System” in military units to advise on local customs and “cultural understanding.” One of them, a political scientist completing her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, was recently killed in a bombing in Sadr City.

We know that more than 20,000 Iraqis are now in two U.S. prisons, Camp Bucca in the south of the country and state-of-the-art Camp Cropper on the outskirts of Baghdad. Both of these have been continually upgraded. In this period, though, it seems that a surge in prison building (and assumedly prisoners) has also been underway. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports that a new “Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center” — i.e. prison — is being built near Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. A “new contract calls for providing food for ‘up to 5,000 detainees’ [there] and will also cover 150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility.” Another “reconciliation center” is to be opened at Ramadi in al-Anbar Province.

There’s much more here.  It will be difficult to dismantle this infrastructure infiltration when and if the US finally decides to pull its military out of Iraq.  That, I would think, is part of the plan to institutionalize US presence in Iraq.