July 2, 2007
U.S. Ties Iran to Deadly Iraq Attack

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD, July 2 — Iranian operatives helped plan a January raid in Karbala in which five American soldiers were killed, an American military spokesman in Iraq said today.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman, also said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has used operatives from the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to train and arm Shiite militants in Iraq.

American military officials have long asserted that the Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, has trained and equipped Shiite militants in Iraq. The Americans have also cited extensive intelligence indicating that Iran has supplied Shiite militants with the most lethal type of roadside bomb in Iraq, a bomb called the explosively formed penetrator, which is capable of piercing an armored vehicle.

Previously, Iranian officials have said that the United States is fabricating evidence to back up its accusation that Iran is sending bombs and weapons into Iraq. Some critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about the penetrator bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

In remarks that were reported over the weekend, Iran’s defense minister, Mohammad Najar, denied American claims of Iran’s “military interference” in Iraq. “We have many times announced that we are ready to cooperate with the Iraqi government so to restore security and stability to that country,” Mr. Najar was quoted as saying in a July 1 report by the Iranian student news agency, ISNA. It did not make clear which remarks he was responding to.Today’s assertions by the American military spokesman, which were presented at a news briefing here, marked the first time that the United States has charged that Iranian officials have helped plan operations against American troops in Iraq and have had advance knowledge of specific attacks that have led to the death of American soldiers.

In effect, American officials are charging that Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against American forces for years, though officials today sought to confine their comments to the specific incidents covered in their briefing.

When the Karbala attack was carried out on January 20 this year, American and Iraqi officials said that it appeared to be meticulously planned. The attackers carried forged identity cards and wore American-style uniforms.

One American died at the start of the raid, but the rest of the American soldiers were abducted before they were killed.

Some officials speculated at the time that the aim of the raid might have been to capture a group of American soldiers who could have been exchanged for Iranian officials that American forces detained in Iraq on suspicion of supporting Shiite militants there.

But while Americans officials wondered about an indirect Iranian role in the Karbala raid, until today they stopped short of making a case that the Quds Force may have been directly involved in planning the attack.

General Bergner declined to speculate on the Iranian motivations. But he said that interrogations of Qais Khazali, a Shiite militant who oversaw Iranian-supported cells in Iraq and who was captured several months ago along with another militant, Laith Khazali, his brother, showed that Iran’s Quds force helped plan the operation.

Similar information was obtained following the capture of a senior Hezbollah operative, Ali Musa Daqduq, General Bergner said. The capture of Mr. Daqduq had remained secret until today.

“Both Ali Musa Daqduq and Qais Khazali state that senior leadership within the Quds force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack that killed five coalition soldiers,” General Bergner said.

Documents seized from Qais Khazali, General Bergner said, showed that Iran’s Quds Force provided detailed information on the activities of American soldiers in Karbala, including shift changes and the defenses at the site.

More generally, General Bergner added, Iran’s Quds Force has been using Lebanese Hezbollah as a “proxy” or “surrogate” in training and equipping Shiite militants in Iraq.

The aim of the Quds force was to prepare the militant groups so they would attack American and Iraqi government force while trying to conceal an obvious Iranian role, he said.

There have long been reports that Hezbollah operatives have been working with the Quds Force to train Iraqi operatives in Iran and even Lebanon. But few details had emerged about specific Hezbollah officials.

According to General Bergner, Ali Musa Daqduq joined Hezbollah in 1983, commanded Hezbollah units in Lebanon and was involved in coordinating the protection of the group’s leader, Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has been armed and funded by Iran.

In 2005, the Hezbollah leadership instructed Mr. Daqduq to go to Iran and help the Quds Force train Shiite Iraqi militants, General Bergner said. Mr. Daqduq went to Tehran in 2006 with Yussef Hashim, another Hezbollah operative who serves as the head of the group’s operations in Iraq. They met with the senior Quds force commanders and were directed to go to Iraq and report on efforts to train Shiite militants there, General Bergner said.

Groups of up to 60 Iraqi militants were brought to Iran for military instruction at three camps near Tehran and trained in using road-side bombs, mortars, rockets, kidnapping operations and in how to operate as a sniper. The Quds Force also provided up to $3 million in funding a month to the Iraqi militants, the American general said.

Mr. Daqduq was captured in March in Basra. To avoid giving away his Lebanese accent, he initially pretended that he was a deaf mute, General Bergner said. But he eventually began to speak under interrogation.

In Washington, Bush Administration officials have generally held open the possibility that the Quds Force activities might have been carried out without the knowledge of Iran’s senior leaders.

But military officials say that there is such a long and systematic pattern of Quds Force activity in Iraq, as well as a 2005 confidential American protest to Iranian leaders regarding Iran’s alleged supply of road-side bombs, that senior Iranian leaders must be aware of the Quds Force role in Iraq.

“Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity,” he said. When he was asked if Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be unaware of the activity, General Bergner said “that would be hard to imagine.”

Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York.

May 23: 2954

June 12 3195 11:45 p
June 13 3210 10:30p
June 14 3228 7:30p
June 15 3238
June 16 3249 11:45p
June 18 3274 8 a.m.
June 18 3288 10p.m
June 20 3350 11p.m
June 22 3371 8 a.m.
June 23 3381 10 a.m.
June 24 3408 10 p.m
June 26 3435 8 a,m.

June 27 3455 4p.m.
June 28 3465 9p.m.
June 29 3486 7p.m.
June 30 3501 11p.m.
July 1, 3547 11.p.m.

Failed States, Part 2: How Instability Spreads
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here’s a solid explainer from Foreign Policy on how instability, whether it be violence, drugs, or refugees, can spread from one country to another spreading the chaos. Abridged from the article linked above:

SUDAN
The violence in Darfur has created a ripple effect that is bleeding into Chad and the CAR. The Sudanese government has been accused of backing rebel groups in both countries, which has in turn created hundreds of thousands of additional refugees, and disorganized refugee camps vulnerable to the same types of marauding militias that have terrorized Darfur for the past four years.

SOMALIA
Somalia, hostage to factional fighting between warlords for more than 15 years, recently under the short-lived and allegedly stability Union of Islamic Courts and recently overthrown by the invasion of Ethiopian troops in favor of an interim government. But fighting continues and the region remains as unstable as it has in a decade. And refugees from the fighting have spilled into Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Kenya, destabilizing a large portion of the Horn of Africa. Prospects for the further development of Kenya and Uganda, and the stability of Ethiopia and Eritrea, are in jeopardy as long as Somalia continues to export instability

AFGHANISTAN
Fighting by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and in the lawless Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan has the potential to spread instability across Central Asia. That’s stating the obvious. But what really has neighboring states such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan concerned is that Afghanistan’s record poppy yield and the drug trafficking routes used to export them will cut into the former USSR and bring with it crime, addiction, and HIV/AIDS.

The point of these three examples? Tackling hot spots across the globe isn’t just altruism. It’s common sense. Because places like the Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan will inevitably export their misery to other countries that affects the developed world too.

Check out all of the material for Tom's latest Esquire article,
The Americans Have Landed
including map, photos, and the C-SPAN interview.

June 30, 2007
The Long War naturally generates generational change, speeding it up

ARTICLE: "Critiques of Iraq War Reveal Rifts Among Army Officers: Colonel's Essay Draws Rebuttal From General; Captains Losing Faith," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 29 June 2007, p. A1.
Another great piece from Jaffe, who is by far the best reporter out there on institutional change in response to the Long War.

Yingling's article was unremarkable to me in content. To me, its importance was all timing (my initial posted reaction). Like I wrote up front in BFA, the Iraq War creates an air-versus-ground debate over who's losing and what needs to happen for victory in the future.

This article captures that debate nicely: air wants to stick with precision from above and avoid lotsa boots on the ground in c-insurgencies; ground says the latter are inevitable.

The middle ground from Nagl sounds very SysAdmin: use the new troops promised to create a large (20k) mil advisory corps.

That's middle because Nagl's right in saying our success will come more in training others more than fighting ourselves, and because those forces plus our Leviathan's air power are the best treasure-to-blood ratio we can employ (very Balkans-like).

Nagl's right on training because Petraeus is right on calculating boots required (20-35 troops per local 1k population).

And that's where I come in with my arguments on tapping New Core pillars like India and China for bodies.

The logic is emerging, the answers becoming clearer to more and more younger officers.

I am finally beginning to understand the importance of my books to certain military audiences.

To that end, I speak again at Leavenworth on 9/11. I plan on using Aug to retool the brief some in anticipation.

I address West Point next spring.

July 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Dog Paddling in the Tigris

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
London

It’s too early to pronounce the U.S. military’s surge in Iraq a failure. It’s not too early to say, though, that there’s no sign that it’s succeeding — that it’s making Iraqi politics or security better in any appreciable, self-sustaining way. At best, the surge is keeping Iraq from descending into full-scale civil war. At best we are dog paddling in the Tigris. Which means at least we should start to think about what happens if we have to get out of the water.

We have to start by taking stock — honestly — about where we are. President Bush talks about Iraq as a country where the vast majority of the people are longing to live with each other in peace, harmony and freedom, and where only a tiny minority of terrorists and die-hard Baathists are standing in the way.

I wish. If that were really the case, how could it be that after four years, hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of U.S. troops and thousands of casualties, we and our Iraqi allies have not been able to defeat this tiny minority? It doesn’t add up. No minority could be that powerful.

The truth is we have a majorities problem in Iraq, not just a minority problem. For too many Iraqi leaders and too many of their followers, America’s vision of Iraq — a unified, pluralistic, democratizing, free-market — is actually their second choice, at best.

The first choice for many Shiites is a pro-Iranian, Shiite-dominated religious Iraq, where Sunnis have little say and little power. The first choice for many Sunnis is a return to the good old days of Sunni minority rule over the Shiite majority. The first choice for many Kurds is an independent, democratic Kurdistan. In too many cases, the violence that is bedeviling Iraq today — while carried out by a minority of people — reflects the broad aspirations or fears of the respective majorities.

In short, our first-choice soldiers are dying for Iraqis’ second choice. That is wrong, terribly wrong. It has to stop.

What to do? Most of the options being floated by Democrats and Republicans talk about abandoning the whole idea of trying to implant democracy in Iraq and focusing instead on America’s core “national interests.” Those are described as getting as many of our troops out of Iraq as possible, while preventing the inevitable Iraqi civil war — which would follow any U.S. withdrawal — from spreading around the region. Such proposals are only half right.

Some things are true even if George Bush believes them. And one thing that remains true (maybe the only thing) about Mr. Bush’s strategy toward Iraq is that it is still in our national interest to try to create a model of decent, progressive, pluralistic politics in the heart of the Arab world.

You need to only look at Gaza and Lebanon, not to mention Baghdad, to see how badly this region needs a different model of governance. But I just said earlier that we have a majorities problem in Iraq. So what to do? Build on the minority.

“Go for the Kurdish option,” says Hazem Saghiyeh, the noted columnist for the London Arabic daily Al Hayat. “You can’t build a democratic example in all of Iraq today, but you can build it in Kurdistan. That is where you should go.”

He’s right. If the surge fails to pave the way for a Sunni-Shiite power-sharing agreement in Iraq, then we have to remove our troops from their areas and relocate them to the border to contain their civil war. But we should also talk to the Kurds about setting up a base in Kurdistan and buttressing its development. Kurdistan is not Switzerland (still too much corruption). But it does have the cultural and institutional foundations — including an active Parliament, vibrant newspapers, open universities and free markets — for a decent democratizing example in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Many Iraqis have already fled to Kurdistan to find safety or even vacation in its thriving hotels. A U.S. base in Kurdistan would protect it from invasion by Turkey, and assure Turkey that an autonomous Kurdistan will not be a problem for it.

Nothing could justify the staggering cost of the Iraq war anymore, but if we could get one decent example implanted in the neighborhood, even a small one, at least it wouldn’t be a total loss. The example set by little, progressive, modernizing, globalizing Dubai has had a big impact on other countries in the Gulf. A thriving, progressive Kurdistan could do the same. If such an example doesn’t make Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites come to their senses, it will at least be a mirror that shows them every day how utterly wasteful, senseless and self-destructive their civil war is.