8-Day Battle for Najaf: From Attack to Stalemate

By ALEX BERENSON and JOHN F. BURNS

Published: August 18, 2004


AJAF, Iraq, Aug. 16 - Just five days after they arrived here to take over from Army units that had encircled Najaf since an earlier confrontation in the spring, new Marine commanders decided to smash guerrillas loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Acting without the approval of the Pentagon or senior Iraqi officials, the Marine officers said in recent interviews, they turned a firefight with Mr. Sadr's forces on Thursday, Aug. 5, into a eight-day pitched battle, one fought out in deadly skirmishes in an ancient cemetery that brought them within rifle shot of the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine. Eventually, fresh Army units arrived from Baghdad and took over Marine positions near the mosque, but by then the politics of war had taken over and American force had lost the opportunity to storm Mr. Sadr's fighters around the mosque.

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Now, what the Marines had hoped would be a quick, decisive action has bogged down into a stalemate that appears to have strengthened the hand of Mr. Sadr, whose stature rises each time he survives a confrontation with the American military. Just as seriously, it may have weakened the credibility of the interim Iraqi government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, showing him, many Iraqis say, to be alternately rash and indecisive, as well as ultimately beholden to American overrule on crucial military and political matters.

As a reconstruction of the battle in Najaf shows, the sequence of events was strikingly reminiscent of the battle of Falluja in April. In both cases, newly arrived Marine units immediately confronted guerrillas in firefights that quickly escalated. And in both cases, the American military failed to achieve its strategic goals, pulling back after the political costs of the confrontation rose. Falluja is now essentially off-limits to American ground troops and has become a haven for Sunni Muslim insurgents and terrorists menacing Baghdad, American commanders say.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/18/international/middleeast/18najaf.html

On the 2nd page it explains clearly that this is Negroponte's scheming. Negroponte got the ball rolling and the Marines took it and ran with it. That's the real story.. and are any of us really surprised?...

Field officers rarely make decisions that push the envelope established by their orders and the rules of engagement. And when they do, their superiors do not require five days to replace them and bring them under control again. If these are indeed the facts, then the insurgency has succeeded in disrupting the effectiveness of the chain of command, and things are even worse than we feared.

It is much more likely this is an attempt to push the accountability for naked stupidity as far down the chain of command as possible. Trust me, the troops will hear about it ... and this kind of thing becomes a cancer eating away the morale of fighting men. It took 20 years to rebuild our military after Vietnam. Now, we are making all the same dishonest mistakes and undoing the work of a generation of soldiers.

This is what happens when warmongering chicken hawks are allowed to take us to war on false pretenses.

Someone higher up miscalculated, and now the optics are being re-routed to pin it on people lower down.

Remember before all of this new fighting started the US (probably Negropnte's idea!) nabbed a couple of al-Sadr's top advisers. They poked and prodded for this to happen then make it sound like the Mehdi Militia are the aggressors for ameriKan TV audiences.

:thumbsup:

Najaf: US command chain broken

Yesterday evening I started to tease apart some of the political stuff that's been happening in Iraq, over the now-linked issues of Moqtada's stand-off in Najaf and the National Conference going ahead in Baghdad. Overnight, I started wondering about the decisionmaking on the US-forces side.

Who on the US side had made the decision to start and then maintain the confrontation against Moqtada? I wondered. The answers that are now starting to become available make depressing reading, and portray a command system for the US forces in Iraq that looks seriously broken.

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http://justworldnews.org/archives/000845.html

"American intelligence officials monitoring Mr. Sadr said he then summoned reinforcements from around the country, and Ambassador John D. Negroponte, the top American official in Iraq, 'decided to pursue the case,' one official said. The result was a domino effect, with the fighting in Najaf soon replicated in more than half a dozen cities and towns across southern Iraq that are Mahdi Army strongholds, including the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, Diwaniya, Kut, Al Hayy, Nasiriya, Amara and Basra."

The Marines started things off by violating the cease-fire, but it was Negroponte who really escalated the fighting.

Why am I not surprised?

an Internet cafe franchise....

I swear we could have bought Iraq for $1 billion.

The public has got to be wondering who the hell we are fighting now that Saddam has been captured. I don't remember that we went there to depose Sadr.

Guess those fightin' lads aren't being all that they can be.

Very good point.

Yet the cable tv newsreaders curl their lips and put disapproval in their voices whenever they say "Sadr" as if he had always been our country's most diabolical enemy.

Just blowing it out when they get their scripts from the White House, apparently: the American public be damned.

"Radical", "Militant" Shiite cleric al-Sadr for ameriKan viewing audiences...

:puke:

I guess they assume the public can't hold to objects of fear and loathing in mind at the same time.

If it were Smith and Jones they'd begin to get it.

That way, it can be spun off into a TV series as well. Coming this fall, on Fox.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/news/nation/9428946.htm

Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr avoids meeting with the council, though he claims to support their effort to end the fighting in the Shiite holy city.

BY DOGEN HANNAH

Knight Ridder Newspapers


BAGHDAD, Iraq - A national political conference's bid to end the fighting in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf appeared to have failed Tuesday, as a delegation returned to Baghdad early today without having met with rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Aides to al-Sadr blamed his absence on fierce battles that raged between American forces and his Mahdi Army militia near the revered Imam Ali shrine even as the eight-member peace delegation arrived in Najaf aboard two U.S. helicopters. But al-Sadr's aides declined to characterize the mission as a failure.

"This is a good step," said Qais al Khazali, an al-Sadr spokesman. "We gave our agreements in principle, but there are no peaceful negotiations with the continuous fighting."

Heavy fighting continued late into the night after a day that included gunfire, mortar barrages and a U.S. air strike on the huge cemetery adjacent to the shrine. Maj. David Holahan, executive officer of the 1st battalion, 4th Marine regiment, denied that U.S. forces engaged in offensive operations during the peace delegation's visit.

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is winning again. When will we ever learn?

Independent security structure to police itself. Why can't we tap the time and energy of Mahdi fighters to serve as security? We'd need to make sure we wouldn't unleash the religious police.

We're a bunch of murdering, raping, torturing bastards.

We appointed Saddam, then killed a bunch of people getting rid of him, now we appoint a new guy who's just as bad as Saddam was.