In May of this year, the “national security team” comprised of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Richard B Myers, ordered the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najf, Iraq stormed, occupied and desecrated.

The Iraq War is now managed by a sequel to Nixon’s old “Committee to Re-Elect the President”, only this one is more adventurist than the original. The above-referred-to men are members of this “committee” and as such the Iraq War is now prosecuted not so much with a view to victory over the insurgency but rather as a vehicle to achieve ulterior objectives. Half the current war plan is to keep US casualties to a minimum during the election because the President’s popularity would suffer if the next few months were as bad as April (when 150 American service people were killed and over 800 were seriously wounded). This plan outs itself on the ground with US and UK troops withdrawing to fortified facilities, doing fewer and safer patrols, and eschewing Fallujah-type incursions.

This is not sound counter-insurgency strategy. Pulling back into a shell means allowing several medium sized cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi, Samara, Karbala, Kufa, and Baquba, to slide under the control of heavily armed, locally-sanctioned resistance brigades. Conventional military doctrine argues for a dozen US and UK combat battalions working overtime to stave off exactly this sort of consolidation of insurgent power. However, this conventional pro-active approach would bring significant US casualties, and so the President’s re-election team won’t have it.

The US armed forces can accommodate these new non-marching orders. As they drop back to fortified positions, they can re-arm with an emphasis on armour and they can gather intelligence on insurgent strongholds. Then, after November 4, they can go on a serious offensive. So the re-election team’s short term war plan is doable.

But there is another half to the Iraq War plan—provoking a war with Iran in October. The national security team convinced the President that an “October Surprise”, taking Iran to the brink, should help win the 2004 elections. During such crises there is a popular tendency to rally around the flag and Commander-in-Chief. Thus war with Iran has a gambler’s chance of boosting the President’s popularity. Such a war would also smoke out the Kerryites who will predictably mumble convoluted approvals of the President to the dismay of the powerful US peace movement. War with Iran could “Naderize” Kerry.

More importantly, Rumsfeld and co. want war with Iran even if it hinders the President’s re-election chances. The doctrine of pre-emptively taking down emerging threats only makes sense if the “Axis of Evil” is dispatched in quick succession. To give rapidly arming countries like North Korea, Iran, Syria etc. a five-year reprieve to continue their building-bee, so the argument goes, will make the perceived inevitable clashes between the US and these states apocalyptic. If Kerry wins there is a possibility of no new wars for years. Everyone knows who profits from war and loses from peace and Rumsfeld has surely promised Bush major campaign contributions from the military-industrial complex if a war with Iran goes down.

Any Colonel will tell you, however, that a war with Iran is going to make the Iraq War a whole lot harder.

War with Iran is being provoked on several fronts. Firstly there is the nuclear proliferation issue which will be brought to a head shortly. There is also the deteriorating border security issue bringing US and Iranian army battalions in sight of each other along the 1,480 kilometre Iran-Iraq border. There is also the issue of real or alleged Iranian support for the Iraqi insurgency and for international terrorism in general. Then there is the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

Sending two full combat battalions into Najaf to drive out an entrenched urban militia was a supersize “Fallujah-style” operation. Thus the decision to attack Najaf cuts like a shark’s fin against the current strategy of low-profile, pre-election retrenchment. This operation predictably would, and did, sharply increase US casualties in Najaf and the surrounding areas. But storming the Imam Ali shrine, and the subsequent performance of Christian rights therein, would drive the Shiite theocrats in Tehran crazy, provoking them into intransigence and war. The Najaf siege was a toehold on Tehran and the more the Marines twisted the more the Iranian parliament screamed. Getting a war with Iran started is not dependant on the Najaf operation. The main cause d’ guerre remains Iran’s nuclear program. The Najaf operation played a supporting role.

CentCom didn’t have to attack Najaf. Commander Abizaid had other things to do with a combat brigade. The insurgents in Fallujah, Baghdad’s Sadr City, or Ramadi are each more pressing strategic problems than Najaf’s Mahdi Army. A brigade could have been devoted to combat economic sabotage along the country’s pipelines or to beef up border security. The decision to attack Najaf was based on its potential to inflame Iran and to pre-emptively strike at potential Iraqi Shiite solidarity with Iran.

The decision to attack Najaf was not made at the Colonel level nor was it the response to a skirmish over a police station on August 4 as the media is dutifully alleging. As for the assault on Najaf, somehow being part of a “Shiite uprising”, starting with an attack on a police station, one need only say that Iraqi police stations get attacked on a regular basis but never before have three thousand soldiers been sent in response. This response was 100 times normal. And besides, all three attack forces, the 1 st Marine’s 11 th MEU, the Army’s 1 st Cavalry battalions, and the Iraqi National Guard (ING), were brought to a base outside Najaf long before any attack on a Najaf police station. To the extent there was a Shiite uprising it was a response to the US assault.

Najaf was invaded by a combined force of Marine and Army units with Air Force support. Only Generals are capable of this coordination. A Marine Colonel doesn’t summon an Army battalion across Iraq to help him on a pet project. High level plans involving the cooperation of the military services are intimately followed by the Defence Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff, so both Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and JCS Chair Myers were in on the ground floor, and if they were, so was VP Cheney. It’s worth noting, the main attack force for the Marines, the 11 th MEU, was given a crash course in urban warfare between April 27 and May 1, before being sent to Najaf.

The attack force also had 1,800 ING. Both the CIA and the State Department would be incompetent if they did not know these Guardsmen, whom they helped recruit, pay and manage, had been so deployed. Both Secretary of State Powell and acting CIA Director McLaughlin ought to have known about this attack, and likely did, and the same goes for NSA Condi Rice and President Bush. The profound importance of Najaf, its shrine and graveyard, to the Shiite world was well known the NSC crowd. In short, the full NSC signed-off on the Najaf operation, including the Commander-in-Chief.

The battle itself was joined in the wee hours of Thursday August 4 with a multi-directional attack led by the 11 th MEU. The Marines own the night. The thermal imaging equipment on their aircraft and the night vision equipment on their helmets and telescopic sights are state-of-the-art. The Mahdi Army has little or none of this equipment. The 11 th MEU went in light and fast with little armour and lots of snipers and air support. They claim to have killed over 350 militiamen on the first night, a number pooh-poohed by many in media but not this author. As in the battle for Fallujah in April, the Iraqis seem unable to comprehend that US snipers with their modern scopes and .50 calibre, long-barrel rifles can drop targets a kilometre away without a flash or a pop in the still of the night.

But for all the killing done by the Marine Apache helicopters and sniper teams they did not achieve their goal of sweeping the Shrine and its surrounding Old City before Friday prayers the next day. A jagged front line developed on the outskirts of the Old City which to its north meant a bizarre battle line in the middle of the 15 square kilometre Wadi al-Salam (Valley of Peace) graveyard. The Marines took several dead and a couple dozen seriously wounded in the first day of fighting while the ING took a couple dozen KIAs and hundreds of wounded, and again were wracked with large scale desertion. Marine commanders complained they would receive fire from a building in the Old City, blast the building to a ruin, only to have fire resume from the smouldering rubble. Marine pilots complained they would bomb trench-works in the graveyard only to watch as the militia crawl like ants back into the craters and resume digging. One officer whined there must be a cloning facility in the Shrine because they would knock down one militia man and another would immediately pop up.

There was clearly pressure from the High Command to get the job done before Friday prayers and sermons the next week, but the nature of the terrain brought on near vehicular immobility and the US lacked the willpower and manpower to push through with a major infantry assault. On Friday August 12 thousands of Sadr supporters were mobilized in nearby Kufa and marched unarmed passed a disintegrating American cordon around the Old City and rushed toward the besieged militia carrying money and food. The militia’s ranks depleted by a week of fighting were replenished and then some. This was the low point for the Americans and it was when they began calling for truces and sought a face-saving exit. The bad news for the militia was that the front lines, being several hundred metres apart, made them powerless against the snipers and the 1 st Cavs Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. Hiding in the dark wasn’t going to save them and hiding behind a wall wasn’t going to save them either. It became a turkey shoot. The casualty ratio was over 50 to 1.

The Americans conducted a brilliant psychological operation on the third Friday. At a crucial time, when the mosques in the surrounding cities and towns were full of persons wishing to march on Najaf, the whole world suddenly became convinced that the militia had surrendered en masse. Sadr’s supporters were said to be demoralized and paralyzed for a day. Every news organization bought the story which was an utter lie. All’s fair…

By the fourth Friday the US had moderate Shiite leader al Sistani back in town and he was successfully amassing supporters to peacefully retake the Shrine. It was vital that Sadr supporters from Kufa not crash the party. Sadr’s stronghold in Kufa, a packed mosque, came under accurate mortar fire from unknown persons killing dozens and wounding hundreds. Their subsequent march on Najaf was attacked by unknown snipers inflicting a similar casualty count. It was not until the day before, after three weeks of fighting, when the Americans were capable of pushing through the graveyard and of taking and holding territory within the Old City. When they pushed through the graveyard they lined up a number of Abrams tanks and pumped dozens of tank-shells point blank into the Old City’s outer buildings. The tanks and repeated air-strikes left hardly a habitable building left in the Old City and the Valley of Peace cemetery faired little better.

But in spite all this, the Mehdi did not surrender. They did not give up their guns. Their main leaders remain at large. Thus the Najaf operation is a microcosm of the Iraqi War. The Americans do not have the resources in place to win this war and they are destroying the country. But none of this much bothers Rumsfeld and co. now as they have their cross-hairs on the Persian military industrial complex.

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