BUSH TALL (Afar) TALES: The Pentagon's Potemkin Village

Bush Tall (Afar) Tales:
Iraq's "Potemkin Village"

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By Cheryl Seal

Bush has always depended on the fact that his supporters are just as clueless as he is. Most would be hard-pressed to find Iraq on a map, let alone the location of any particular town. So yesterday (3/20) in Cleveland when he waxed poetical over the triumphs of US occupation, citing the city of Tal Afar , it sounded a whole lot more impressive than in fact it is.

Just taking a look at a demographic map of Iraq and you will wonder why Tall Afar would be used as a "poster town" for US success. The city is located in the far northwestern part of the country, a little over 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, and is relatively isolated. It is near the Turkish border, and in fact before 2003, about 90% of the population were Sunni Turkmen. Although Tall Afar has a population of about 200,000, the average population density of the northwestern section of Iraq overall is low, especially compared to the heavily populated southeastern part of the country. In addition, the region is dominated by Sunnis and Kurds, while in southern Iraq there is a mix of Shias and Sunnis - the two groups now in major conflict.

It should also be pointed out that, unlike Ramadi (for example), Tall afar's infrastructure was not bombed and shelled into rubble. ( Note how Ramadi was not chosen by Bush as the "model city!") Also, Tall afar is conveniently near staging areas for airstrikes. And, while media propaganda always emphasizes that Tall Afar is "near the Syrian border," it almost never mentions that the town is also near the Turkish border - an ally country that is allowing the US to use some of its facilities. One of the major US air staging sites is Incirlik Air Base near Andana, Turkey.

In short, while most of Iraq's population and all of its most severe and widespread problems are now centered in the central and southeastern section of Iraq, Bush is claiming "success" because of one town in northwestern Iraq! It should also be noted that if the US had the same troop strength per 100,000 Iraqis everywhere it was needed, and not just in Tall Afar, then similar success stories might be possible. But that would probably translate into some half million US soldiers, and that ain't gonna happen! In fact, it should be noted that to create the model security of Tall Afar, a substantial number of troops had to be diverted from the chaotic southern sector. The big September 2005 sweep of Tall Afar involved 8,500 US and Iraq soldiers. That's 4,250 soldiers per 100,000 population, or roughly 1 soldier per every 23 Iraqi residents in Tall afar. Translate this to Baghdad, which has a population of nearly 6 million. What would be needed to secure Baghdad with the same success is about 260,000 soldiers! And there are only 132,000 US troops in the entire country.

By last fall, it was clear the Bush propaganda machine had already targeted the town as their "triumph of the US" model. To help pump up the drama, the Pentagon released horrifying stories along the lines of Gulf War I's baby's-torn-from-incubators tales about Tall Afar. One report claimed small children were being used as "human bombs" and killers, while the menacing "film noir" photo of Al Zarqawi was repeatedly paired with Tall Afar. The story was also widely disseminated that Tall Afar was a major "staging ground" for Al Qaeda and foreign insurgents. All as a prelude to Bush's claims of how the US drove the insurgents from a city upon which they'd had a stranglehold.

However, he didn't mention that the chaos that overtook Tall afar for over a year was directly attributable to US mismanagement of an earlier campaign. Yes, indeed, insurgents - most of them local Iraqis - had taken over the city in 2005. But this situation was a direct backlash against the US's heavy handed "counterinsurgency" sweep through the city in 2004.

Here's a report from the Washington Post from last September just before the big countersinsurgency drive
"The [2004] operation basically made people angry, which the insurgents were able to take advantage of," said Maj. Bob Molinari, 35, of Fort Carson, Colo., the planning officer for the 3rd Armored Cavalry, which was shifted from Baghdad in late April as the situation here deteriorated. The offensive "had the opposite effect than was intended. We created a power vacuum and they filled it."

"All but a few dozen local police officers quit, many siding with the insurgents. The city's imams and schoolteachers were replaced with newly arrived adherents of radical Islamic sects, U.S. military commanders and local residents said. After a year of violence, as many as half of Tall Afar's residents have fled to outlying areas, leaving behind a ghost town of shuttered shops and charred hulls of vehicles.

""This place is not a town, it's a cemetery. It is the lowest of the low in Iraq," Najim Abdullah Jabouri, a former general in Saddam Hussein's army, said in an interview the day before the operation began. "It needs to be cleaned out.""

However, as Tall Afar was "cleaned out," it was discovered that most of the insurgents were NOT outsiders. The Washington Post reported in November, 2005, "When the air and ground operation wound down in mid-September, nearly 200 insurgents had been killed and close to 1,000 detained, the military said at the time. But interrogations and other analyses carried out in recent weeks showed that none of those captured was from outside Iraq. "

To bring it home, Bush claiming Tall Afar represents success in Iraq would be like Bush claiming that his Katrina response in Louisiana was a success because he'd managed to get FEMA trailers and Red Cross workers into some town 225 miles northwest of New Orleans a couple of years after the storm hit.

I suspect that Tall Afar was selected as the "Potemkin model village" because it is fairly remote and once secured, was easy to hold with sufficient troops. It also had less severe infrastructure damage compared to other war torn Iraqi towns. So while Tall Afar is secure, has a reasonable level of power and water, and a mayor willing to spew Bush's praises, the other 98% of Iraq continues to spiral downward.