Summaries here and here and here and here.

No snippets on this one, rather a strong suggestion to go read the entire article, describing to where the barbed wheel of retribution has turned among segments in Baghdad.

It’s the very nature of the woebegone G. Walker administration.

President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration’s statements about Iraq. Article

If they’re targeted killings, but carried out by ‘our’ side, are they still called death squads?

US military officials say the Bush administration has given them new authority to target leaders of political and religious militias in Iraq who are implicated in sectarian violence, including the powerful Shi’ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Such a showdown, key to Bush’s plan to increase the number of US troops in Baghdad, could spark a deadly confrontation with Shi’ite militias, which enjoy widespread popularity in Shi’ite neighborhoods. It could also erode support for the fragile government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has agreed to the plan.

[snip]

The officials said the new approach will include pinpoint strikes against top leaders in the Mahdi Army as well as other militias from the Shi’ite majority accused of kidnapping and murdering civilians from the Sunni Muslim minority. They said they would focus on methodical man hunts for key leaders, such as the one in June that killed key Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, rather than full-scale battles.

Pursuing the militias carries significant risks, both for Maliki, a far less popular figure than Sadr, and for the United States, which could be drawn deeper into dangerous urban warfare and an increasingly sectarian conflict.

“Even if the Iraqis had the will — and that’s a big question — to do something about sectarian violence, it’s going to be a very bloody business,” said Phebe Marr, a specialist on Iraq’s emerging political parties and author of “The Modern History of Iraq.”

“This could make Sadr even more popular,” Marr said. “He could play this as ‘the imperialist Americans are coming to attack me.’ ” Article

Related:

He has now become part of the White House’s demonology in Iraq. At one time the US believed that Saddam Hussain was responsible for all its problems in Iraq – problems that would be resolved once he was overthrown. Today Sadr, a 32-year-old cleric in his black robe with fierce, staring, dark eyes, is denounced as the fomenter of sectarian warfare.

Many Iraqi leaders never leave the Green Zone. Sadr has never entered it. He has a cult-like following. He controls Sadr City, the ramshackle, sprawling slum in east Baghdad which is home to 2,5mn Shia, important cities such as Kufa and provinces such as Maysan.

He can probably put 100,000 armed militiamen into the field. Much of the Baghdad police force follows him. Army barracks where Shia units are stationed have pictures of him pinned to the walls.

[snip]

An offensive against Sadr’s Mehdi Army will be portrayed as an attempt to eliminate militias. But it is, in reality, an attack on one particular militia, because it is anti-American. Article

So how’s that training (and that manpower) going?

The greatest amount of corruption in the Iraq military and police forces occurs when payrolls are handed out at the unit level. Because the country doesn’t have a functioning banking system that would allow easy money transfers to private accounts, military and security commanders receive large sums of cash every payroll period based on the number and rank of soldiers on their personnel rosters. The endemic problem is that commanders frequently put nonexistent soldiers and security personnel – dubbed “ghosts” by American overseers – on their rosters and pocket their salaries.

It is difficult to overstate how deeply these ghosts hurt the war effort. Most obviously, we have no idea how much of this money is being siphoned off to support tribal and ethnic fighting, and even the insurgency itself.

Also, because hundreds and thousands of ghosts exist at all echelons, many military and police units in the field do not have nearly as many men at arms as they seem to have on paper. Thus the units are often assigned tasks for which they do not have necessary manpower. And when American or other coalition forces are asked to “partner” with Iraqi troops, we have often found that there simply aren’t enough bodies to conduct training and missions.

[snip]

…American advisers assigned to the Fourth Brigade of the Sixth Iraqi Army Division had little luck getting a clear read of the brigade’s strength. Iraqi commanders repeatedly told us that many of their men were “elsewhere, performing security duties for the Ministry of Defense.” The advisers found personnel discrepancies as high as 30 percent in any given unit. Article

Inflating an (and by extension of the woebegone G. Walker administration’s skein of argument, a cunning, skilled and successfully insidious) enemy:

…Many believe that Bush has planned a second - equally high risk - strategy to run in parallel with the surge: to move against growing Iranian influence in Iraq, snubbing the key recommendation of the Iraq Study Group and the will of the British government that it should talk to Tehran, not threaten it.

It is high-risk, because it is in danger of alienating precisely those Shia politicians in the Iraqi government who can help to stabilise Baghdad, many of whom were protected by Iran during Saddam’s reign, and who look to Tehran, not Washington, as their most obvious ally.

That ratcheting up of pressure on Iran is getting more visible by the day even if the new US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, insisted to Congress last week under fierce questioning that US troops would not touch Iranian soil.…

[snip]

While it is true that the sophisticated plugs of machine-pressed steel and copper, that US military intelligence officials believe arrive in Baghdad in kit form for assembly, are being produced in someone’s factory what is not so certain is where it is. Indeed, there is strong evidence that many are produced locally. Questions have also been raised over the widespread claims by senior British and US officers that the devices are being smuggled from Iran. British troops patrolling the border last autumn insisted to several journalists that in months of patrolling they had found no evidence of the devices coming across.

A second long-term accusation by the US is of a more generalised Iranian ‘meddling’ in Iraq, charging that Tehran is providing weapons and training to Shia forces. Again, the evidence is deeply contradictory. British officials have described a far more complex picture of Iran’s attitude towards Iraq, insisting that while Tehran has taken some pleasure in ‘poking’ Washington via Iraq, and is happy that US military might is bogged down there rather than attacking its nuclear and air defence facilities, it has no desire at all to see a ‘failed state’ on its border, or the kind of bloodletting between Shia and Sunni that might draw it into a confrontation with Saudi Arabia.

[snip]

But there is another crucial issue - of perception. For what America sees as ‘evidence’ of Iranian meddling, including the presence of numbers of Iranian officials, in Iraq, is not quite so obvious viewed from the perspective of Iraq’s Shia political parties, many of whose senior figures lived for two decades and more in exile in Iran, and look to its powerful Shia neighbour as both a friend and a religious and political exemplar in the midst of crisis. Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric was born in Iran - although he rejects the role of the clerics in the Iranian state. Many of the returning ‘Iranians’, as Iraqis who stayed under Saddam have dubbed the returning exiles, speak Farsi as comfortably as Arabic and when they want a break from the violence they holiday in villas in Iran. Article

Strictly FYI, the spoiled spoils:

…Saddam has been executed and his holiday home, high in the olive groves above Grasse, near Cannes, stands as a symbol of the fate of his regime. The eight-bedroomed, five-bathroomed home called the Mas de St Croix is deserted, ransacked and ruined.

[snip]

A second villa owned by Saddam’s half brother Barzan al-Tikriti sits on billionaire’s row in Cannes, overlooking the bay. It is also abandoned and looted but - apart from the missing gold bathroom fittings - has escaped the ravages inflicted on the Grasse property. It is now the subject of talks between Baghdad and Paris over the return of assets frozen by UN sanctions in 2003.

[snip]

Saddam’s “mas” was acquired by the Iraqi regime in the 1980s. He had visited Provençe in 1975 as a guest of Jacques Chirac, the then prime minister, who called him “my friend” and showed him round a nuclear power station. Although Saddam never even saw the villa, now potentially worth £3m, an Iraqi official said it was bought as a holiday home for his family. Article