Reading Juan Cole this AM I came to the his extract from the Reuters news of violence in Iraq and this entry
BAGHDAD - U.S. forces killed one suspected insurgent and arrested four members of an Iranian-backed special groups cell during an operation in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
I assume that the formulation "Iranian-backed special groups cell" came directly from a U.S. military news release and I wondered where this came from. My understanding has been that "eastern Baghdad" aka Sadr City is in general the stronghold of the Mahdi Army and civilian branches of the Sadr movement.
I did a few searches on that language and found that the whole "special groups" was a term that had been injected into the discussion of Shia violence in Iraq last July by Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq, in a news conferenceat the "Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad" in early July.
WASHINGTON (American Forces Press Service, July 3, 2007) - While al Qaeda in Iraq remains the main enemy in the country, coalition and Iraqi forces are increasingly targeting groups whose training, funding and supplies come from Iran, a spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq said yesterday.
In discussing these "groups" General Bergner said that they were linked to Iran's Quds Force which is described as a "special" branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guards he also claimed that "Iran is funding Hezbollah operatives in Iraq"
General Bergner when on to start to use the "special" label as shorthand for any Shia group which can be claimed to have any financial support from Iran.
Brig. Gen. Bergner said these special Iraqi groups have evolved over the past three years into largely rogue elements that use a cellular structure to operate independently.
Since this announcement that the surge forces would be "targeting" these "special cells" that are "funded" by Iran more and more of the announcements of encounters around Baghdad have come to say that the target was some version of the formulation used today in announcing the killing of one and the capture of four in east Baghdad.
It looks to me like the idea is to link every insurgent in Iraq either to Al Qaeda (if they are from Sunni areas) or to Iran (if they are from Shia areas). The idea is to get away from the formulation that we are involved in a civil war.
The problem, however, is that we are using labels that are precisely the same as our used to fuel sectarian violence in Iraq in the first place. Among Sunni, religious or secular, the idea that the Shia (including the government we support) are all a bunch of "Persians" who are not real Iraqis is the standard talking point. And among Shia, both secular and religious, the argument is that the Sunni are a bunch of Salafi militants who believe that all Shia are heretics and the worst sort of infidel, is the standard talking point as to why Shia must remain in control of the country and marginalize the Sunni.
So there we have it: in order to make the war Iraq seem more like a fight against foreign elements in Iraq rather than a civil war the U.S. military (i.e. General Petraeus) has elected to publicly buy into the line that everyone doing any real fighting in Iraq is either an agent of Salafi Islam or of Iran.
The problem I see with this is while it makes sense on some levels, it also would seem to just ad fuel to the fire. It thought that the political goal of U.S. policy in Iraq was use the "surge" to lay the foundation for a political reconciliation between Shia and Sunni that would permit us to leave behind an Iraq not in the grip of a civil war.
By in effect denying that there is a civil war, but rather framing things in terms of infiltration by Salafi militants and Persian infiltrators those in charge of this "surge" are making a political solution less likely rather than more.
This all once again points to the idea that the purpose of the "surge" is to just keep the lid on the pressure cooker until the day that it falls to a Democratic president to find a was to disengage without triggering an explosion.
So, to be politically incorrect about it, it seems that a good case can be made that our current use of our military is being directed in a way that does in fact "betray" the long term interests of United States security in the world and does so for partisan political reasons.