Much Progress Made in Fallujah, Marine Commander Says
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17, 2006 – Two years ago, much of the Iraqi city of Fallujah had suffered severe damage after some of the hardest fighting seen since the country was liberated by U.S. and coalition forces in the spring of 2003.

Today, construction across Fallujah is booming, and the city's 400,000-resident population is growing, Marine Col. Larry D. Nicholson, commander of Regimental Combat Team 5, told Pentagon reporters today from Fallujah during a satellite-televised news conference.

Nicholson has commanded RCT-5's nearly 5,000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors since February. The unit's primary mission, he said, is to train and develop Iraqi soldiers and police within his 1,800-square-mile area of operations in Anbar province.

Yet, security development is just one of RCT-5's many missions, the colonel said, noting his troops also work with local Iraqi officials, tribal sheiks and religious leaders to bolster area governance and economic development.

Fallujah is famous, Nicholson recalled, as being the site of Operation Al-Fajr (the Dawn, in Arabic), also known as Operation Phantom Fury. A joint U.S.-Iraqi military offensive including U.S. Marines and soldiers was launched Nov. 7, 2004, to clear rebel lodgments from the city. The insurgents were defeated, and the operation was concluded Dec. 23.

Prior to the battle, the insurgents had free rein in Fallujah, Nicholson said, noting the hard-fought victory -- often involving house-to-house fighting by U.S. Marines and soldiers -- broke the enemy's control over the city.

In the past two years, U.S. and Iraqi forces "have aggressively worked to make Fallujah a model of progress" and cooperation, Nicholson said. And today, he noted, Fallujah is one of the most forward-looking cities in Iraq.

The Iraqi government has provided $70 million for the rebuilding of Fallujah residences that were damaged or destroyed during the fighting two years ago, Nicholson said. Fallujah has an elected mayor and a functional city council, the colonel noted, that work with U.S. and coalition forces. The city has a police force, he noted, and it also hosts a brigade of Iraqi soldiers.

"Each of these elements of government, police and the Iraqi army work alongside the Marines, sailors and soldiers of RCT-5 every day to solve the city's challenges," Nicholson said.

To illustrate Fallujah's progress, Nicholson pointed to the reduced number of U.S. troops stationed in the city. In March 2005 at the end of his previous duty tour in Iraq, the colonel recalled, about 3,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers were operating in Fallajah. Upon his return to Iraq this February, Nicholson observed, about 300 U.S. troops were operating in Fallujah.

"That is a significant measure of progress under any scale," he pointed out.

Also, Fallujah had no police force in March 2005, Nicholson recalled. Today, he noted, the city boasts more than 700 Iraqi police officers.

Routine teamwork and pragmatism employed by U.S., coalition and Iraqi officials has greatly contributed to the city's success, Nicholson said.

Fallujah's progress has made it a beacon of hope for many beleaguered Sunnis fleeing the violence in Baghdad, Nicholson pointed out.

"While the fleeing of Sunni citizens from Baghdad is in itself a tragedy, the fact that Fallujah has become the overwhelming destination of choice for those seeking refuge and peace is a great testament to the work done here in Fallujah by the coalition forces, the Iraqi forces, and the local government," Nicholson said.

Related Sites:
Multinational Force Iraq
Video of News Conference

November 16, 2006
Fallujah Now a Safe Haven for Sunnis

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:21 p.m. ET

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) -- Some 30 Sunni refugees seeking a safe haven from Baghdad sit under the shade of a camouflage net on the outskirts of Fallujah, waiting at a makeshift U.S. facility for city IDs.

A skinny young man with a red and white scarf wound around his head pulls a reporter aside and lifts his right pant leg, exposing a shin with marks where Shiite militiamen had bored into the bone with an electric drill -- the current tool of choice for Baghdad torture specialists.

Security is tight and snipers abound, but Fallujah -- once an extremely violent Sunni insurgent bastion where the charred bodies of four Blackwater security men were hung on a bridge -- has become a refuge from the death squads and mortar battles in Baghdad. U.S. Marines say about 150 Iraqis flee here each week from the capital, 40 miles to the east.

Unlike Baghdad, which houses large numbers of both Muslim sects, Fallujah's population is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab. As a result, Fallujah has not experienced the raging sectarian warfare that has the capital teetering on the brink of civil war. The migration is part of a larger exodus out of Baghdad, where entire neighborhoods have been uprooted.

Population figures in Iraq are little more than estimates, but Fallujah was said to have about 450,000 residents before U.S. forces stormed the city in November 2004 to drive out the insurgents. As the assault gained force nearly 400,000 of that number had fled, but the Americans say there are about 300,000 living in the city now.

Two years after the U.S. attack on Fallujah, Marine Col. Lawrence Nicholson takes rightful pride in what he and his men have done since taking over.

Nicholson strides the stony ground here in snappy camouflage fatigues, his dog tag secured under the laces of his left boot. He doesn't slip into his flak jacket but instead assaults the bulletproof vest, wrestles it on, then walks off with the slightly bowlegged gait of a man just off a horse.

''This is the club. Welcome to our country club, our gated community,'' the 51-year-old Toronto native said with a grin during a tour of the city Wednesday.

But if Fallujah were a hospital patient, it would still be in intensive care. Two city council members and the council president have been assassinated since February. At least 30 police officers were gunned down this summer. The mayor fled in July.

Reconstruction of the city, ruined in the Marine assault, is in progress but far from complete.

There's no bustle on the main street, and not much to bustle to. Unemployment is well above 50 percent. The cement factories are only now struggling back to life.

A reporter who tried to step outdoors during a city council meeting -- part of the tour -- was grabbed by the arm and pulled back inside by Marines who warned of snipers right in the center of the city.

Nicholson and his 5,000 Marines of Regimental Combat Team 5 have Fallujah sealed -- the incoming roads at least -- with what they call ECPs, or entry control points, manned by Americans, Iraqi army soldiers and Iraqi police. As a result, a long line of cars stretches at Fallujah's eastern reaches. The Americans said they have reduced the wait to drive into the city to about 40 minutes since the ECPs were put in place several months ago. It looked like a much longer wait.

In order to get in, everyone must carry a U.S.-issued ID card proving he or she is a resident and registered to live in the city. Weapons are banned in Fallujah, by law if not in fact.

At one point, Nicholson strode in to begin directing traffic himself, then pulled a local Iraqi policeman -- a Sunni Muslim -- together with an Iraqi soldier -- a Shiite -- and asked them if there were any problems between them. The men, from the rival sects whose religious-based conflict is tearing apart central Iraq, assured the colonel all was well.

Nicholson smiled and shook his head in a ''Didn't I tell you so?'' gesture.

He was seriously wounded the same day he took control of RCT 5 shortly before the Marine assault in November 2004. He missed the Fallujah operation but has returned and surrounded himself with an impressive team of junior officers to whip the place into shape.

His command comes across like a squad of corporate turnaround specialists sent to a troubled regional hub of some Fortune 500 company. They are smart, well-groomed rising stars of the Marine Corps -- specialists in Sunni tribal affairs, linguists, organizational experts.

Nicholson -- wiry and ruddy-faced with the look of a street brawler -- keeps a tight rein on Fallujah and its townspeople. He understands their deep ambivalence about the U.S. forces that keep the peace.

''The average person here would tell us to 'Get the hell out of my city -- but not just yet,' '' the colonel said.

So while he's here, Nicholson is a nonstop dynamo -- here, there, everywhere, or so he would have the Fallujans believe.

His men call him the mayor of the town. The real mayor is Jassim al-Bedawi, who took over from a predecessor who fled to Jordan this summer under threat of death.

Al-Bedawi, a lawyer, looks like a bit like Burt Reynolds in his younger days -- the same white-toothed grin under a he-man mustache. He took Nicholson to task at the latest city council meeting for closing a bridge over the Euphrates River.

They call it the new bridge here. The old bridge, built in 1937, is now called the Blackwater Bridge. It's where insurgents hung the bodies of the four security men who were killed in the city in March 2004.

Al-Bedawi complained that the heavy security and closed new bridge were jamming traffic, blocking deliveries of necessary goods such as canisters of cooking gas.

Nicholson stood as if at attention in front of his chair along the wall of the City Council chamber, listening but shaking his head side to side. He said he would check but countered that there had been too many attacks on the Iraqi army at the new bridge.

He didn't say no, but he didn't offer much hope.

Only 12 of 20 council members showed up this week, obviously not keen to journey through town to a meeting that so closely associates them with the Americans.

The colonel calls the council ''our dysfunctional family, but our family nevertheless.''

''We preach Team Fallujah constantly ... that we're all in this together,'' the 26-year Marine veteran said. ''But in the end we have to tell them it is their choice, what they want it to look like when we're gone.''

Through the daylong tour a reporter observed, Nicholson shook as many Iraqi hands as he could, and introduced his visitors to both town dignitaries and men in the street -- clearly unafraid of what the locals would say about his work.

And in short goodbye remarks, Nicholson smiled and said, ''I hope you got a sense of what the average Omar is thinking.''

Then he spun on his heel and barked out some orders.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

November 16, 2006

Bolstering the SysAdmin from insider the Pentagon
ARTICLE: "DOD, State Dept. Eye Joint 'Hub' For Stability Operations, Irregular War", By Sebastian Sprenger, Inside The Pentagon, November 16, 2006
Some representative excerpts:
Defense and State department officials are seeking funds for a [Center for Complex Operations] charged with synchronizing military and civilian efforts to rebuild troubled states and fight unconventional wars...
The U.S. Agency for International Development also could commit funds for the center...

The new organization would implement the recommendation of two Pentagon policy documents -- Directive 3000 on stability operations and the classified 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review execution roadmap on irregular warfare -- to stand up centers of excellence for these mission areas.

The Center for Complex Operations would be a “hub” for integrating existing training, education, research and lessons-learned efforts throughout a stability operations and irregular warfare “consortium”...

Last November, [Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon] England, who at the time was acting deputy defense secretary, issued Directive 3000, which says stability operations are just as important as traditional combat missions. The guidance document assigned a wide range of responsibilities across DOD to bolster the military’s ability to establish and maintain order in troubled regions and to support other government agencies in rebuilding war-torn countries (ITP, Dec. 8, 2005, p3; Oct. 27, 2005, p3; and July 7, 2005, p1)...

In particular, “severe shortcomings” persist in DOD’s stability operations “capacity” and its planning, information sharing and intelligence capabilities...

Also, civilian agencies have made little progress in bolstering their capabilities to conduct such operations, leaving a “huge gap in essential skills and resources for years, if not decades, to come”

Tom's comments:
Encouraging news. Money is small, but fact that all three D's (defense, diplomacy, development) involved is an indicator of future evolution. Also good is notion that home would be neutral party like USIP. I can see buddy Patrick Cronin being its first director.
All in all, a sign of the SysAdmin's bureaucratic emergence, though I assume "false pregnancies" are inevitable.

Still, do you think this place would be interested in exploring Development-in-a-Box?

Thanks to the USTRANSCOM officer who sent this in.

Posted by Sean Meade at 5:34 PM | Comments (1) | Email this post

November 16, 2006
Iraq Seeks to Arrest Sunni Cleric on Terror Charges

By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Nov. 16 — A warrant was issued late Thursday for the arrest of Sheik Harith al-Dari, one of Iraq’s most prominent Sunni Arab clerics, on charges of inciting terrorism and violence, government officials said.

Mr. Dari, head of the influential Muslim Scholars Association, is an outspoken critic of the foreign military presence in Iraq and of the Shiite-dominated government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The warrant, coming against a man beloved by hard-line and disaffected Sunnis, had the potential to widen the sectarian divide in Iraq and inflame the Sunni Arab-led insurgency.

Jawad al-Bolani, Iraq’s interior minister, announced the warrant on state-run television, and said, “The government’s policy is that anyone who tries to spread division and strife between the Iraqi people will be chased by our security agencies.”

Mr. Dari regularly travels throughout the Middle East and could not be reached for comment on Thursday. Mohammed Bashar al-Faidi, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Association, condemned the warrant on Al Jazeera television, saying, “I don’t know how to describe it but it represents the bankruptcy of the sectarian government following one scandal after the other.”

Rampant sectarian violence, driven by Sunni and Shiite militias, has pushed Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war and confounded American and Iraqi military commanders, who have been unable to reverse the surge.

President Jalal Talabani, worried about the deepening sectarian rifts in Iraq, has called for an emergency meeting of Iraq’s political leaders to prevent the collapse of the government, an official in the presidency said Thursday.

“In a bid to save the political process, he has suggested having a summit of the political parties to try to put an end to the current divisions,” said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter.

Less than a year after Iraqis went to the polls to elect the first full-term Parliament since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s political process, like the rest of Iraqi society, has been fractured by sectarian animosities. As Sunni Arab and Shiite political leaders have moved further apart, and their sectarian rhetoric has become increasingly more bitter, Iraq’s “national unity government” seems to have become one in name only, Western and Iraqi officials say.

On Tuesday, Mr. Talabani floated the idea of an emergency meeting of political leaders during a meeting of a government committee for national security. Tuesday’s meeting had devolved into “a shouting match” between Sunni and Shiite participants, according to an Iraqi official who attended. The president, alarmed by the rancor, announced, “We have to decide if we want a state or not.”

The country’s major blocs and political parties have agreed “in principle” to the emergency meeting and have formed a committee to draft its agenda, the official in the presidency said.

The security challenges facing the government were underscored on Tuesday by the daytime kidnapping of dozens of people from a Ministry of Higher Education building in central Baghdad. Since then, the government’s response to the crisis has been undermined by public disagreements among senior government officials over the fate of the hostages.

The minister of higher education, Abed Thiab al-Ajili, said Thursday that about 70 hostages had been released but that another 70 or so were still missing. Some of the freed victims said they had been beaten and tortured by their captors, and they told ministry officials that others had been killed, Mr. Ajili said, adding that he had not confirmed the reports of killed hostages.

One victim “was almost crying when he described what he was subjected to,” Mr. Ajili said. “It was if they died a hundred times because of the severe torture.”

But Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, the government’s national security adviser, said in an interview on Thursday that all the victims had been freed and no hostages had been killed. “The minister is overreaching,” he said. A statement issued by the office of the government’s spokesman said 50 people had been kidnapped.

Mr. Rubaie said the mass abduction was committed by “rogue elements of a militia.” He refused to identify the group, but other government officials said it appeared to be a component of the Mahdi Army, the militia that follows the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, a mainstay of the ruling Shiite alliance.

American and Sunni Arab officials have been leaning on Mr. Maliki to disband the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias, which are accused of kidnapping and murdering Sunni Arabs with the complicity of government forces. But Mr. Sadr, who in the past year has emerged as one of the single most powerful politicians in Iraq, claims to have lost control of some of his fighters.

Mr. Rubaie said the kidnappers, who were wearing the uniforms of a government police force, appeared to have infiltrated the Interior Ministry, which oversees Iraq’s police forces. The gang may have been working in cooperation with police commanders in the Karada neighborhood, where the ministry building is located, the security adviser said. Several police commanders were arrested on Tuesday and are being investigated for possible involvement in the crime.

The motive for the kidnapping still remained unclear on Thursday. Mr. Rubaie said the kidnappers were trying to embarrass Prime Minister Maliki’s government. For his part, Mr. Maliki has attributed the kidnapping to a rivalry between militias.

In the minds of many Iraqis, the Ministry of Higher Education has long been viewed as a domain of Sunni Arab authority. Some government officials speculated this week that a Shiite militia may have assaulted the ministry as a retributive act of vengeance in response to a Sunni militia attack elsewhere.

No one has been arrested for the kidnappings, according to Mr. Rubaie, though he said that government officials had identified the mastermind of the operation, describing him as a “death squad leader.”

“We know him very well,” he said.

Much of the blame for the government’s disarray, and its inability to curb the raging sectarian violence and to significantly improve public services, has fallen on Mr. Maliki. American officials and some Iraqi leaders say he has failed to move decisively to confront Iraq’s myriad problems, and they now wonder if he has the political muscle — or will — to help pull the government together.

In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Rubaie defended Mr. Maliki, saying the prime minister had “an unfettered commitment” to peace and democracy in Iraq. “We are working very, very hard to reduce the level of violence, especially the sectarian violence,” he said.

He also discounted the notion that a politician other than Mr. Maliki could do a better job of running the country. “I don’t believe we have any other option than Maliki,” Mr. Rubaie said.

In the mixed eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Zayouna, gunmen opened fire in a bakery, killing nine people and wounding two, an Interior Ministry official said. Most bakeries in the city are run by Shiites and have become targets for Sunni Arab death squads. A series of other attacks in Baghdad, including four car bombs, killed at least seven people and wounded at least 17, the ministry official said.

The American military command announced that four American soldiers were killed. One of the soldiers was killed on Tuesday by small arms fire in Baghdad, the military said. The other three were killed on Wednesday in Diyala, two when a bomb exploded near their vehicle and one by small arms fire. At least 44 American soldiers have been killed this month.

Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting

Which Bipartisanship Will Bush Choose?
By: Newt Gingrich 
The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2006 

The election results pose two enormous strategic choices for America. First, the obvious outcome of a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Republican White House is the need for bipartisan cooperation in order to get anything done. The key question is: Which kind of bipartisanship will emerge? Will there be a Ronald Reagan approach to bipartisanship which appeals to the conservative majority of the House? Or will there be an establishment bipartisanship which cuts deals between liberals and the White House? Second: Will the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by Robert Gates lead to a tactical effort to minimize the difficulties of Iraq, or to a fundamental rethinking of the larger threa ts to American safety?
These two choices are strikingly interrelated. An establishment bipartisanship between the White House and liberal congressional leaders will almost certainly make it necessary to focus narrowly on how to minimize difficulties in Iraq and postpone consideration of the larger threats to America for the remainder of this and into the next presidency. By contrast, a conservative bipartisanship that knits together the House Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats into a floor majority, working with a White House that emphasizes popular issues at the grassroots, would make it much easier to focus on the larger threats to American safety. (Such a bipartisanship could stress making the cap gains tax cut permanent; controlling set-asides and discretionary spending; oversight on failing bureaucracies and waste; English as the language of government; and biofuels as part of an energy policy.)
How these bipartisanship choices are made will do a great deal to define our government and politics for the next few years. Each strategy cross-pressures a different part of the House and Senate. Each requires some members to choose between their loyalty to their values and those held by their districts on the one hand and their party leadership on the other.
A liberal establishment strategy will almost certainly split the GOP and lead to a grassroots rebellion against the kind of policies which a Pelosi-Reid alliance would force on the White House. House Republicans would find themselves split again and again as their leadership cooperated with Nancy Pelosi to bring forward liberal legislation. Conservative senators would find themselves blocking and filibustering liberal legislation brought forward by the Senate establishment Republican leadership and Harry Reid. Their supporters at home would be angrily insistent on active opposition to a liberal establishment legislative agenda.
On the other hand, a conservative populist grassroots strategy would almost certainly make daily interactions with liberal leaders more confrontational as they found themselves nominally chairing committees but losing votes on the floor and having their initiatives rejected by a conservative grassroots coalition. With a conservative populist grassroots strategy it is the 44 Blue Dog Democrats who would find themselves cross-pressured. In the House, some 54 Democrats won by claiming they were much more conservative than Nancy Pelosi, and much more conservative than the San Francisco values she represents. Here, they would be forced to choose between their voters back home and the promises made to them during the campaign, and their leadership.
Ironically, the very nature of the Democratic victory makes it possible to re-establish the conservative Democrat and House Republican coalition which made the Reagan legislative victories of 1981-82 possible. Tip O'Neill was the liberal Democratic speaker when Reagan became president, but he did not have a liberal majority in the House. Yet despite a seemingly liberal Democrat lock in a 242-192 majority, they lost control of the floor on the most important bill of Reagan's first term. His tax cuts were initially passed 238-195 with 48 Democrats splitting from the leadership and siding with Reagan and the GOP. The final passage of the conference report passed 282-95, with a 113-vote Democratic majority siding with Reagan and only 95 liberal democrats voting "no."
I was a sophomore during this exciting Reagan first term and I learned from him the art of appealing to the American people to win votes in Washington. When we passed welfare reform in 1996, the Democrats split 98 "yes" and 98 "no." When we passed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Democrats split 153 "yes" and only 52 diehard liberals voted "no."
If President Bush decides to govern as President Reagan did, he will work to unify the Blue Dog Democrats with the Republicans to win a handful of very large victories while accepting a constant barrage of unhappiness from the liberal leadership. That is what conservative bipartisanship is like. If on the other hand, President Bush decides on an establishment strategy of cooperating with the liberal leadership, he will guarantee splitting his own party and will see his legacy drift further and further to the left as the Pelosi-Reid wing of their party demands more and more concessions.
This choice of which strategy to follow domestically has an enormous implication for national security. A liberal coalition will focus narrowly on Iraq and seek to avoid thinking about the scale of threat we face internationally. A conservative bipartisan coalition will look first to the larger threat to American security and will then seek to find solutions in Iraq to strengthen American security. It is hard to see how a liberal coalition will be able to look at the larger threats to our safety, even when the threat, articulated in this warning by Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, is clear: "What we are talking about today is an ideology that thrives on murder, intimidation and fear. It puts innocent people at risk, particularly those in open societies. What we are talking about are people who worship death itself."
Thus the decision about which bipartisanship to pursue with regard to a legislative agenda and the Iraq war becomes for the Bush administration a decision about how safe and how prosperous America will be under divided government.
Mr. Gingrich is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.