Mid-East Meets Midwest

In his first public statement since the Wednesday’s carnage, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki assured Iraqis that its forces would defeat terrorism despite the year’s deadliest bombings.  His address ignored remarks from a minister that the government had fallen into a false sense of security.

Three Iraqi cattle herders were killed today after wandering into the middle of a U.S.-Iraqi mortar training exercise north of Baghdad.

U.S. troops were conducting a live-fire training exercise with Iraqi forces near Taji, a city about 12 miles north of Baghdad, when the three men walked onto the artillery range, a military spokesman said. An 11-year-old boy was also injured in the incident.  He was evacuated to a U.S. military hospital where he is in stable condition.

The incident comes as the U.S. military shifts its primary role in Iraq from combat to training Iraqi security forces with exercises like these.

The Pentagon said it was “very nervous” about ethnic tensions in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds despite the progress stemming from initial talks between their leaders. A top U.S. commander warned fighting over land and oil could still turn violent.

While the sectarian violence that created massive rifts in Iraq has died down, the battle between northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region and its Arab-led government in Baghdad is being seen as one of the greatest threats to the country’s fragile stability by politicians and military leaders in Washington.

These tensions have not gone unnoticed by al Qaeda insurgents.  According to U.S. defense officials, they have sought to exploit the tensions to retain a strong hold even as their influence wanes in other region’s in Iraq.  These officials point to a string of deadly bombings as evidence that the group was capable of reconstituting its “combat power.”

Reuters reports:

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Washington was “heartened” last week when Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki met the Kurdish region’s president, Masoud Barzani, after more than a year of deadlock.

“But we are very nervous, continue to be, about the overall Arab-Kurd tensions,” Morrell told a news conference.

U.S. troops, preparing to withdraw from Iraq by 2012, have intervened many times to defuse the row, and Washington has pushed for a settlement before its forces go home.

Since the American invasion in Iraq in 2003, Iraqis have enjoyed many of the same freedoms from censorship that Americans have.  Uncensored media from scandalous Egyptian soap operas to romance novels to pornography have been widely available. But now, the Iraqi government is imposing new censorship laws to crack down on this behavior deemed improper by the standards of Islamic law.

The new censorship policy will require Internet cafes to register with the government and publishers to censor content in new books.  The laws are a continuation of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s attempts to censor sexual material coming into the country beginning in May.

Government officials say these uncensored materials are corrupting the minds of young Iraqis and encouraging sectarian violence. Iraq’s cultural minister Mufid Al-Jazairi told the New York Times, “Our constitution respects freedom of thought and freedom of expression, but that should come with respect for society as a whole, and for moral behavior. It is not easy to balance security and democracy. It is like being a tightrope walker.”

A senior military adviser in Iraq, issued an internal memo urging the US to significantly speed up its pullout from Iraq.  In this memo leaked to the New York Times, Col. Timothy Reese pushes for the U.S. to simply “declare victory” and have announce that all troops will be out of the nation by August 2010.

Bluntly, Col. Reese says keeping US troops in Iraq “isn’t yielding benefits commensurate with the effort and is now generating its own opposition.” He asserts that America has overstayed it’s welcome, saying, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Read more…

One month ago today, celebrations filled the streets of Baghdad as Iraqis marked “National Sovereignty Day,” commemorating the official withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities.  But in Kirkuk, just 150 miles north of Baghdad, the cheers and high spirits were replaced with screams and panic when a car bomb exploded in a crowded market, killing at least 34 people.

This incident caused me to take a step back and ask, ‘Is Iraq ready to stand on its own two feet?’

Over the last six years American troops, advisers and diplomats have been working to establish a stable Iraq, combating violence, training Iraqi soldiers and police, and planting the seeds of democracy for the first time in Iraq’s history.  What more can the United States do to help this war torn nation?

Perhaps the answer is to stop helping. Read more…

The American government is now paying for skydiving lessons. And paint ball.

In what could be seen as reverse logic, the U.S. Army is hoping an adrenaline rush will help vets calm down.

With a wave of soldiers returning home from Iraq with mental health disorders and this problem has the military searching for new ways to supplement and redefine its counseling and self-awareness evaluation programs. Beyond your typical therapy, the Army is hoping thrilling terror of war home through safe outlets through a new program called “Warrior Adventure Quest.”

Warrior Adventure Quest sends soldiers just home from war on outings of paintball, mountain biking, scuba diving, sky diving, whitewater rafting, alpine skiing, snowboarding and rock climbing in hopes of overcoming the “Rambo Syndrome”– the emotional need for some of the tension and fear-tinged excitement of combat.

Army officials say they’ve learned that soldiers who are used to life in a war zone suddenly find life at home to be moving at a glacial pace and hope this program will reduce the anxiety of this shift.

Read the AP’s story: Army Using Extreme Sports to Help War Veterans

In the latest saga of a debate that has been raging since Vietnam, the Pentagon will no longer be releasing figures on how many militants have been killed fighting American forces in Afghanistan.

This move reflects a shift in strategy, similar to what we saw in Iraq, where soldiers are now concentrating on protecting the Afghan people rather than finding and wiping out insurgents. Now the military will only release general estimates. “We send the wrong message if all we talk about is the number of insurgents killed. It doesn’t demonstrate anything about whether we have made progress,” Navy Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, who decided on the new policy, told the Los Angeles Times.

Read more…

Iraq is certainly exercising its sovereignty over the last week.

With a new reading for the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement (the same document which set a deadline for the American troop withdrawal from Iraqi cities) the Iraqi government has sharply restricted the movement and activities of American forces. This control has rubbed many U.S. commanders the wrong way, who have become increasingly concerned with the safety of their men and women.

The Washington Post reports:

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 — the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers — Iraq’s top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to “stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to “notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement.”

In an e-mail obtained by the Post, Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote “Maybe something was ‘lost in translation.” He continued, writing, “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.” He indicated that U.S. troops intend to continue to engage in combat operations, even in urban areas, in order to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

“This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe,” he wrote. “We’ll do that, preferably partnered.”

These new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the American and Iraqi governments. Iraqi leaders are using this agreement as an opportunity to show their countrymen that the are in charge and that Iraq’s dependence on the U.S. is decreasing.

Governor Pat Quinn made a surprise visit to Iraq this weekend, visiting Illinoisan troops at bases around the country.

On Sunday, Quinn held a town hall meeting at Tallil Air Base, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, which has a large concentration of members of the Illinois National Guard.

Describing his trip, Quinn said he “received a lot of sympathy” from troops who had followed his rise to governorship after the shambles of former Governor Rod Blagojevich earlier this year. He also indicted that troops were very curious about the educational opportunities for them after they return home.

Compared to his visit in 2004, Quinn said he was impressed with the increased security and stabilization of the country overall. Known for attending the funerals of service members killed in combat, Quinn said the major changes that have taken place in Iraq since his previous visit prove that their lives weren’t given in vain.

“I was in awe, really, of the men and women here,” Quinn told reporters via conference call from Kuwait. “I think it’s important that the governor of the fifth-largest state in the Union personally thank special Illinoisans. They are the best of the best, and I said at every gathering I was at that ‘you are the pride of our nation.’ ”

Quinn was joined by the governors of Missouri, Minnesota, Nevada and Texas.