"Four million Iraqis cannot guarantee they're going to have food on their table tomorrow", the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, David Shearer, told Reuters news agency on February 12, adding that "humanitarian needs in Iraq have risen sharply over the last two years".
In a media release, Shearer issued an emergency appeal on behalf of 14 UN agencies and 14 Iraqi NGOs for US$265 million to provide desperately needed food, shelter, safe drinking water and health and education services over the next 12 months to the poorest Iraqis. He noted that only 40% of Iraq's 27 million people had access to safe drinking water.
On January 28, the US House of Representatives defence appropriations subcommittee chairperson John Murtha issued a media statement saying that the panel had calculated that the Pentagon was spending $343 million a day waging war in Iraq.
That same day, the US Congress' special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction reported that Washington had spent $29 billion since its March 2003 invasion on contracts to US corporations to rebuild Iraq's war-damaged infrastructure. In addition, up to June 2004, the US-led occupation authority spent $23 billion of Iraqi oil revenues — sequestered by the UN under the 1990s sanctions regime — on reconstruction contracts, though $8.8 billion of these funds could not be accounted for.
Reuters also reported that the US-installed Iraqi government now has "a national budget of $48 billion, buoyed by oil exports of 1.6 million barrels per day". However, "Underscoring the paradox of an aid appeal in a nation as wealthy as Iraq, the government said it would for the first time give $40 million from its own coffers" to the UN's Iraq aid programs.
Driven from homes
According to figures compiled by Iraq's leading humanitarian organisation, Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS), which has 3200 employees and 10,000 volunteers, the total number of internally displaced Iraqis more than doubled between the start of the US troop "surge" in February last year — which increased troop numbers by 30,000 — and its completion in June — from 499,000, to 1.1 million.
A February 12 Reuters dispatch reported that the UN now estimates there are 2.5 million internally displaced Iraqis. The UN also estimates that since the US-led invasion nearly five years ago up to 2 million Iraqis have taken refuge in neighbouring countries, with 1.4 million in Syria and 750,000 in Jordan.
While US President George Bush claimed in his January 28 State of the Union speech that the US troop surge "has worked", months ago one of its key architects — David Kilcullen — admitted that it hadn't.
A former Australian Army officer, Kilcullen was employed in 2005-06 as the US State Department's "chief strategist" in its office of the coordinator for counterterrorism. During 2007, he served as senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq.
Writing in the August 29 Small Wars Journal, Kilcullen noted that "the pattern we are seeing runs somewhat counter to what we expected in the 'surge' … The original concept was that we (the Coalition and the Iraqi government) would create security, which would in turn create space for a 'grand bargain' at the national level. Instead, we are seeing the exact opposite: a series of local political deals has displaced extremists, resulting in a major improvement in security at the local level."
When Bush announced the troop surge in January 2007 he said its goal was to defeat and disarm Baghdad's neighbourhood-based Sunni and Shiite "sectarian militias" — by which he meant the local supporters of the Sunni-based Iraqi nationalist guerrilla fighters and the Mahdi Army militia of anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr.
Instead, after attempts by US troops to occupy Baghdad's rebel-dominated neighbourhoods led to a surge in US combat deaths — 331 in the second quarter of 2007, the highest number of any three-month period since the beginning of the war — the US military began paying local crime bosses up to $60,000 a month each to recruit local militias to "police" Baghdad's Sunni neighbourhoods, with the US military providing arms.
Writing on February 7 on the Middle East Rountable website, Jonathan Steele, the British Guardian's senior foreign correspondent, observed that the US military "dub the new vigilante and militia groups with the innocent label, Concerned Local Citizens [CLC]. But most are anything but innocent. They are linked to local warlords, gang leaders and criminal groups — the sort of people who always emerge in times of civic breakdown and urban violence. They fight with each other in pursuit of monopoly control over whatever area of the city they feel they have the muscle to exploit."
Resistance
However, it also appears that local leaders of the Iraqi resistance movement have sought to take advantage of the CLC program to strengthen their fighting forces. According to the Pentagon, the CLC militias — which are responsible to local "Awakening Councils", not Washington's puppet Iraqi government — will soon have 100,000 members
In congressional testimony on February 8, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor — who drew up the initial Iraq invasion plan in January 2002 at then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's personal request — warned the CLC program would backfire on the US occupation forces.
Wayne White, former deputy director of the US State Department's Middle East intelligence unit, told the February 10 Philadephia Inquirer: "What we have done, in effect, is we have made a deal with the devil in order to get rid of al Qaeda. We have allowed nearly 100,000 tough Sunni Arab fighters to organise and arm themselves as they never could before when they had to operate underground. We have destroyed a nasty insurgency and replaced it with a more deeply rooted and broad-based potential insurgency."
"There are several hundred thousand Sunni Arabs with military training and probably still young enough to fight", White said. "You could see, in a matter of a couple of months, the 100,000 CLCs turn into a force several times that size, increasingly well-armed and very well-led."