War in Iraq

President Obama issued a few brief remarks yesterday afternoon, after polls closed in Iraq. Most of it was fairly standard stuff -- glad to see the brave Iraqi people exercising their right to vote, terrorists tried and failed to disrupt the election, etc. -- but he also made a slightly interesting comment about the withdrawal timetable.

Polls closed in Iraq a few minutes ago after 10 hours of voting. The ballot was marred by a few dozen insurgent attacks around the country -- but casualties are remarkably low, and voter turnout (anecdotally at least) seems to be fairly high.

We'll update this thread throughout the day with new developments. Today's news will largely come from non-Iraqi sources: Many Iraqi newspapers suspended publication for the day to allow their staffs time to vote. Here's Al-Rafidayn's statement on the suspension (عربي), for example; As-Sabaah has a banner across its homepage (عربي). So most of today's news comes from Western and pan-Arab news sources.

I forgot to make this point in yesterday's Maliki/SOFA post -- thanks to Joel Wing (in comments) and Michael Hanna (via e-mail) for reminding me.

I do think the Iraqi and American governments will renegotiate the status of forces in a very limited sense, either later this year or next, to provide for a small contingent of U.S. trainers in Iraq. This is standard practice in countries that receive U.S. military aid: If the Pentagon gives high-tech military hardware to another army, someone has to teach that army how to use its new equipment. And Iraq will continue to receive billions in military aid for years to come.

But we're talking about, at most, a few thousand troops -- not the Korea on the Tigris envisioned by Tom Ricks. When I said yesterday that Maliki is unlikely to renegotiate the SOFA, I was referring to that latter scenario.

I nearly fainted earlier today when I glanced up at CNN and saw a reporter doing a live shot from... Iraq! I thought U.S. networks forgot the country existed -- but for a week, at least, it's back on television.

The reporter in question was CNN's Arwa Damon, and she was rolling clips of an interview with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who hinted at asking U.S. troops to stay beyond 2011 -- a decision that would require amending the Status of Forces Agreement.

Nir Rosen reports from Iraq in The National's weekly Review, and it's worth a read, as is most of Rosen's work. In many ways, today's piece is similar to his April 2009 Review piece: Rosen argues that the Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian war is over, because the Iraqi state is too strong.

There are still militias active in Iraq, and the level of deadly violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on Earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign analysts and reporters - that the civil war is merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks, or an unfavourable election result - are overblown.

But you nonetheless see some ominous signs for the future throughout Rosen's piece.

The other big Iraq story this morning, aside from the Moqtada al-Sadr warrant, is a spate of suicide bombings in Diyala province which killed about 30 people.

Two car bombs went off simultaneously this morning, around 9:30 local time, at the provincial government's main building in Baquba (the capital of Diyala) and in a nearby intersection. A third bomber, reportedly wearing a police uniform with the rank of lieutenant, blew himself up at Baquba's main hospital -- as casualties from the first two bombings began arriving for treatment.

I promised to stop writing about calls for delayed withdrawal in Iraq, so I'll keep this short. But Tom Ricks has a new CNAS policy paper repeating his call for a delayed withdrawal. It's basically a longer version of yesterday's op-ed, with a couple of photos and a graph about coalition troop strength (which contributes nothing to the reader's understanding of current events in Iraq).

I've long believed that folks in Washington who want the U.S. to delay its withdrawal from Iraq are really advocating a long-term U.S. military presence in the country. Their basic argument -- Iraq still has problems, so the U.S. can't leave yet -- creates a slippery slope towards lengthy occupation. Tom Ricks is at least honest about this point in his New York Times op-ed today.

The military is drawing up plans to delay the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, according to the Washington Post. I'm staunchly in the "withdraw on time" camp -- but (as I mentioned on Twitter yesterday) I'm honestly not too concerned about these reports. First, the backstory:

But Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday that he had briefed officials in Washington in the past week about possible contingency plans.

Odierno declined to describe the plans in detail and said he was optimistic they would not be necessary. But he said he was prepared to make the changes "if we run into problems" in the coming months.

This is where I always like to point out that the Pentagon has a plan on the books for invading Canada. That's why you have military planners: to prepare for contingencies. And with all the talk in recent months about how the U.S. should delay its withdrawal, I'm not surprised Odierno has a plan for that scenario.

The Washington Post has 600 words of hand-wringing conventional wisdom on its editorial page this morning: Syria is bad, Syria will always be bad, and engagement with Damascus is pointless.

I don't agree with the overall conclusion -- I agree with Andrew Tabler that engagement could bring a meaningful change in U.S.-Syrian relations (though I take issue with many other points in his essay) -- and the editorial also plays loose with the facts. Here's the most egregious example, referring to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

He has promised to check suicide bombers bound for Iraq but has never done so.

I guess Fred Hiatt and the gang over at WaPo don't have access to Lexis-Nexis? Or Google?

A suicide bomber at the provincial government headquarters in Ramadi killed at least 12 people this morning and wounded two dozen more.

The bomber blew himself up at a checkpoint outside the compound; many of the victims were soldiers and police, according to witnesses. A young girl was also among those killed.

"Ahmed Chalabi and Ali Faysal al-Lami... clearly are influenced by Iran," Gen. Ray Odierno said last night. "We have direct intelligence that tells us that."

Surprisingly blunt language from Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who was speaking last night at a forum sponsored by the Institute for the Study of War. Odierno said the U.S. has evidence of several meetings in Tehran between Chalabi, Lami, and Iranian officials, including at least one person on the U.S. terror watch list.

The Sunni Awakening program might be officially over -- the Iraqi government is supposed to fold the Awakening militias into the Iraqi government -- but tribes in Anbar province continue to exact vigilante justice on suspected former members of the insurgency.

Many Iraqis released by U.S. forces after being detained for suspected links to Sunni insurgents have been killed by tribes seeking revenge or are being driven back into the arms of al-Qaeda.

Maj. Gen. Tareq Yusuf, a former police chief in Anbar, told Reuters tribes have killed at least 50 former detainees since 2007. The police largely turn a blind eye to the practice.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq, has threatened more attacks in Iraq in the run-up to parliamentary elections on March 7.

Baghdadi made his threat in a 34-minute audiotape released last night. It's on the forums, which I try to avoid linking to (send me an e-mail if you want a link). The tape is titled "the crime of illegitimate elections in Iraq," and it describes the upcoming election as a Shi'ite plot against the Sunnis.

Max Boot, who is apparently auditioning for a job at the Government Accountability Office, writes that "Iraq has been making some good progress, though considerable challenges remain" -- and therefore Obama needs to delay his timeline for withdrawing.

It's a logically silly argument, because "considerable challenges" will remain in Iraq for decades. If Obama decides to delay withdrawal because things are better-but-still-not-perfect, he's never going to withdraw.

Joshua Foust has a good piece over in The National's weekend review about the folly of relying on tribal militias in Afghanistan. (I haven't touched the subject in nearly two weeks! So I'm long overdue for a post on it.)

One notable mistake: Foust writes, "Unlike the Iraqis in Anbar, however, the Shinwari do not support the central government." But folks in Ramadi aren't too fond of the government in Baghdad, as Spencer Ackerman notes.

There was some good news out of Iraq this morning -- the de-de-Ba'athification decision -- but also a bit of awful news: A suicide bomber killed more than 20 Shi'ite pilgrims in Karbala, and wounded nearly 120 more.

The bomber detonated his bus amidst a crowd of pilgrims traveling on foot from Hilla to Karbala for Friday's Arbaeen holiday. A provincial official said the bombing killed at least several women and children (عربي).

It's the second high-profile attack on Shi'ite pilgrims in three days: A bombing on Monday in Baghdad's Bab al-Sham neighborhood killed 41 people. Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a statement (عربي) blaming that Monday attack on the Ba'ath Party.

When Tony Blair sat down today to take questions from a panel created by the British government to investigate the justifications for and execution of the Iraq War, it was a moment those of us in the United States seem destined never to see: the former leader of the nation, one of the most powerful men in the world when he was in office, subjected to hours of questioning over one of the defining military and foreign policy events of the past two decades and likely decades to come.

Gregg and I consider ourselves political agnostics, and certainly for the purpose of journalism we are behooved not to take partisan positions, but suffice it to say that we believe strongly in the need for rational skepticism and inquiry. We'd love for there to be an Iraq Inquiry in the United States, one that could call George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and others to explain exactly why and how we invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein.

For now, we'll have to live with the testimony of Tony Blair. And that's not half bad; Blair wasn't lampooned by the British press as Bush's "poodle" for no reason. His thinking, I believe, opens a window onto the post-September 11 chain of events in the Western world, one in which the United States played the foremost role.

The Iraqi prime minister is getting hammered from all sides this morning. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister and head of the Iraqiyya coalition, accuses Maliki of staging a coup (عربي) against a "peaceful transfer of power" in Iraq.

"The government has made a decision, in collusion with suspicious forces inside and outside Iraq, to exclude important politicians from participating in the political process. The Iraqi people know this is a conspiracy to ignore the will of voters and to exclude opponents of the parties in power... it is a preemptive coup."

Then we have Motqada al-Sadr, who condemns the Maliki government (عربي) for failing to protect the Iraqi people from ongoing violence. "Shame, all shame" on Maliki, Sadr says, "and the blood of the people is on... this government."

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the forensics department of Iraq's interior ministry, killing at least 18 people and wounding nearly 100.

The bomber blew himself up near a security checkpoint in Tahariyat Square, in Baghdad's central Karrada district. Most of the casualties are police officers (عربي). The forensics department is separate from the main interior ministry building, and its position in a busy square makes it a fairly exposed target.