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Shiite Militia Seizes Control of Iraqi City    [

    General Concedes Failure in Baghdad
    By Anna Badkhen
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Friday 20 October 2006

Bush acknowledges comparison to '68 Tet offensive in Vietnam.

    In a confluence of grim official assessments of the war in Iraq, President Bush acknowledged that sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad could be compared to the Viet Cong's 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, and one of the top U.S. generals said the American military's two-month drive to crush the spiraling violence in the Iraqi capital had failed.

    Such downbeat opinions, accompanied by reports of alarmingly high American casualties and unabated violence in Iraq, indicate that U.S. officials at the highest levels are rethinking the progress the United States is making in Iraq, experts said.

    "What this suggests to me is that people in fairly senior levels are getting increasingly worried about what's going on," said Jeffrey White, an expert on military and security affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

    "The increasing pessimism among serious analysts of the conflict is beginning to have an effect," said White, a former government intelligence analyst. "Policy makers are beginning to, if not accept the ultimate conclusions, then at least the main thrust of it: that we're not getting better, that the Iraqi government isn't working, that the Iraqi security forces are not standing up the way we would like them to."

    Bush, who had rejected parallels between the fighting in Iraq and the Vietnam War, reconsidered his stance in an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, saying that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman "could be right" in comparing the violence in Baghdad to the Tet offensive. "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election," Bush said.

    On Jan. 30, 1968, communist North Vietnamese troops chose Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year holiday, to launch coordinated ground attacks against American bases and cities across South Vietnam. Many Vietnam historians call the offensive a turning point for the war in Vietnam as well as a prime reason why President Lyndon Johnson withdrew from his re-election campaign.

     Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said Thursday that "we do not think there has been a flip-over point" in Iraq. "We are going to continue pursuing victory aggressively," he said.

     But on Thursday, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, announced that the American-led crackdown on violence in Baghdad had failed and said U.S. commanders were consulting with the Iraqi government on a new approach.

     "It's clear that the conditions under which we started are probably not the same today, and so it does require some modifications of the plan," Caldwell said.

     "The violence is indeed disheartening," he noted.

     "Gen. Caldwell's admission is yet another indication that the enemy is winning," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a centrist think tank in Arlington, Va. "Commanders in the field are beginning to suggest a lack of success."

     Caldwell's assessment came as the military announced the deaths of three U.S. troops in Iraq, raising the number of American military deaths in October to 74. Car bombs, mortar fire and small-arms fire across Iraq killed at least 66 people -- including the police commander of the volatile Sunni Anbar province, who was shot to death in his own house -- and wounded 175.

     Growing frustration with the continuing drumbeat of bad news from Iraq has driven political debate in the final weeks of the congressional election campaign. As Americans have become increasingly opposed to the war, some of the staunchest Republican supporters of Bush's foreign policy, such as the influential Virginia Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska have joined the Democrats in calling for a new Iraq strategy.

     "This is not about Democrat versus Republican anymore," said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on Iraq and the senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy think tank. "It's serious, senior people across the political spectrum saying this strategy has failed."

     Richard Haass, a former Bush administration foreign policy official, said Thursday that the situation is reaching a "tipping point" both in Iraq and in U.S. politics. "More of essentially the same is going to be a policy that very few people are going to be able to support," said Haass, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that the administration's current Iraq strategy "has virtually no chance of succeeding."

     It is unclear whether this means that Bush -- who so far has steadfastly resolved to "stay the course" in Iraq, is getting ready for a different approach on the conduct of the war.

     "You always have to be skeptical of statements made by politicians on the eve of an election," Thompson warned. "Bush's comments may be purely tactical, and they may not offer any insights into his long-term plans."

     Conservative politicians and analysts say the overall Iraq policy is unlikely to change.

     "President Bush is committed to a strategic end, probably until the end of his administration," said James Phillips, an expert on Iraq at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

     Vice President Dick Cheney, an architect of the administration's Iraq policies, said the United States was "not looking for an exit strategy."

     "We're looking for victory," Cheney said in an interview posted on Time magazine's Web site Thursday.

     But some analysts expect the Iraq policy to take a new direction after the election.

     "The White House is bitterly opposed to acknowledging failure, but it is running out of options, just like the army is," said Thompson. He said it is likely that the Pentagon will "begin reducing its presence in Iraq after the (midterm) election" on Nov. 7.

     Cirincione agreed.

     "There's no doubt in my mind that after the election there will be a fundamental shift in American strategy, almost certainly leading to redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq," he said. "It's very difficult to find any senior figure who supports the president's 'stay the course' strategy."

     Former Secretary of State James Baker, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, a high-powered government advisory body that is developing policy options for Bush, made headlines this month by saying that "stay the course" is no longer a viable strategy and that some kind of change will be required. It is unclear whether Bush will follow the suggestions brought forth in the study group's report, which is due after the November election.

     "It's very hard to tell, because we keep being presented with those 'stay the course' kinds of statements," White said.

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    Chronicle news services contributed to this report. E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.

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    Shiite Militia Seizes Control of Iraqi City
    The Associated Press

    Friday 20 October 2006

    Baghdad, Iraq - The Shiite militia run by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seized total control of the southern Iraqi city of Amarah on Friday in one of the boldest acts of defiance yet by one of the country's powerful, unofficial armies, witnesses and police said.

    Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki dispatched an emergency security delegation that included the Minister of State for Security Affairs and top officials from the Interior and Defense ministries, Yassin Majid, the prime minister's media adviser, told The Associated Press.

    The Mahdi Army fighters stormed three main police stations Friday morning, planting explosives that flattened the buildings, residents said.

    About 800 black-clad militiamen with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were patrolling city streets in commandeered police vehicles, eyewitnesses said. Other fighters had set up roadblocks on routes into the city and sound trucks circulated telling residents to stay indoors.

    Fighting broke out in Amara on Thursday after the head of police intelligence in the surrounding province, a member of the rival Shiite Badr Brigade militia, was killed by a roadside bomb, prompting his family to kidnap the teenage brother of the local head of the a-Madhi Army.

    The Mahdi Army seized several police stations and clamped a curfew on the city in retaliation.

    At least 15 people, including five militiamen, one policeman and two bystanders, have been killed in clashes since Friday, Dr. Zamil Shia, director of Amarah's department of health, said by telephone from Amarah.

    The events in the city highlight the threat of wider violence between rival Shiite factions, who have entrenched themselves among the majority Shiite population and are blamed for killings of rival Sunnis.

    Mahdi Army militiamen have long enjoyed a free rein in Amarah, the provincial capital of the southern province of Maysan. The militiamen often summon local government officials for meetings at their offices, and they roam the city with their weapons, manipulate the local police and set up checkpoints at will.

    Since British troops left Amarah in August, residents say the militia has been involved in a series of killings, including slayings of merchants suspected of selling alcohol and women alleged to have engaged in behavior deemed immoral by militiamen.