IRAQ. Patrick Cockburn

nationalist parties that make up the government is not keen to share power with anybody. This is scarcely surprising since they triumphantly won the election in 2005.

      There have been some real improvements over the past six months. Sectarian killings in Iraq have declined to 650 in June compared with 2,100 in January. So-called "high-profile" bombings, including suicide bomb attacks on Shia markets, fell to 90 in June compared with 180 in March. But it is doubtful if these are entirely or even mainly due to the US surge. The fall in sectarian killings, mostly of Sunni by Shia, may be largely the result of the Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr being told by their leader to curb their murder campaign. It is also true that last year, after the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, there was a battle for Baghdad which the Shia won and the Sunni lost. Baghdad is more and more Shia-dominated and the Sunni are pinned into the south-west of the city and a few other enclaves. As Sunni and Shia are killed or driven out of mixed areas, there are fewer of them to kill. Some 4.2 million people in Iraq are now refugees, of whom about half have fled the country.

      The real and appalling situation on the ground in Iraq has been all too evident this week. Thirty bodies, the harvest of the death squads, were found in the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday. The figure for Tuesday was 26 and, in addition, 20 rockets and mortar bombs were fired into the Green Zone killing three people. This was significant because they were fired by the Mehdi Army, who had been upset by criticism made of them by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. By way of gentle reproof they shelled his offices in the Green Zone.

      US and British claims of success in Iraq over the past four years have a grim record of being entirely sculpted to political needs at home. British ministers trumpeted the success of Operation Sinbad in Basra last year and early this year, saying it would put the worst of the militia out of business. This year Basra is wholly ruled by these very same militias.

      Overall the "surge" has already failed. It was never necessary to wait for yesterday's report or a further assessment in September. The reason for the failure is the same as that for American failures since 2003. They have very few allies in Iraq outside Kurdistan. The occupation is unpopular and always has been.

      Economic and social conditions are becoming more and more desperate. There is in theory 5.6 hours of electricity in Baghdad every 24 hours but many districts get none at all. It is baking hot in the Mesopotamian plain, where temperatures even at night are above 40C. People used to sleep on the roof but this has become dangerous because of mortar bombardments.

      Oil pipelines are sabotaged by insurgents and punctured by thieves. "In just one stretch of pipeline between Baghdad and Baiji, we found 1,488 holes," the Oil Minister, Hussein Shahristani, told the Iraqi parliament, speaking of an important pipe that brings oil products to the capital from Baiji refinery. He added: "It doesn't function as a pipeline … it's more like a sieve." Gasoline is brought to Baghdad by truck but these are not allowed on bridges because they might be packed with explosives.

      In a further sign of how life is lived in Baghdad, clerics have issued a fatwa against eating river fish - previously a favourite food - because the fish gorge on dead bodies floating in the Tigris. Astonishingly, the report suggests that one of the successes in Iraq has been the spending of $10 billion "for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis".

      The danger of the false optimism in the report is that it prevents other policies being devised. In January, President Bush decided to in effect ignore the most important recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which were to talk to Iran and Syria and to disengage US troops. Instead Mr Bush sent reinforcements to Iraq, denounced Iran and Syria and added to the number of his enemies by threatening to clamp down on the Shia militias.

      But talking to Iran has always been essential to any solution in Iraq.

      "The Iranians can afford to compromise in Iraq but they cannot afford to lose," said one Iraqi observer. The more threatened they feel by the US over nuclear power or the possibility of air attack, the greater incentive they have to ensure that the US does not succeed in gaining control of Iraq. For most of the past four years they have not had to do much because the US has helpfully ensured its own failure by pursuing disastrous policies.

      Paradoxically, Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab states, actually supports the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It is run largely by their Shia co-religionists and political leaders who were supported by Iran for years against Saddam Hussein. The problem here is that Washington has never been willing to accept that the great campaign it launched to overthrow Saddam Hussein has increased Iranian influence and put Shia clergy in black turbans in power in Baghdad as they have long held power in Tehran.

      The "benchmarks" in President Bush's report are trivial and prove nothing. They appear to be an attempt to pretend that the war is still winnable in Iraq up to the presidential election in the US next year.

      These vain hopes of victory rule out compromises that the US still might make and are a pretence which many Americans and Iraqis will die unnecessarily trying to sustain.

      Tuesday, 17 July 2007

DERBY MAN WHO CAME TO IRAQ TO WAGE WAR

      The wars being waged by the US and a mosaic of Iraqi communities in northern Iraq have on the surface little to do with Britain. But Kurdish security men recently killed a man called Mala Isa in a shoot-out in his house in Kirkuk. His brother also died in the gun battle. Mala Isa was a Kurd and also a member of Ansar al Sunna, a particularly dangerous Sunni fundamentalist group. The Kurds say that he was previously a resident of Derby, where he raised money for jihadi causes. They point out that northern Iraq is now filled with people like Mr Isa, who are as willing to blow up Piccadilly as Kirkuk, and know exactly how to do so.

      Iraq has become a breeding ground for numerous groups who know the impact a few well-placed explosives can have. "Every shepherd in this country knows how to make a detonator," said one security specialist here.

      The idea pushed by the White House and Downing Street, that the manufacture of shaped charges to make bombs more effective can be blamed on Iran, was always unrealistic. Iraq is full of military specialists and unemployed engineers. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein claimed to have raised an army of one million men. What is new about the war in Iraq since 2003 is the use of suicide bombers on an industrial scale. This has never happened before. The US and Britain have kept very quiet about the origins of these young men prepared to kill themselves, but 45 per cent are reportedly from Saudi Arabia, 15 per cent from Syria and Lebanon and 10 per cent from north Africa.

      This fits in with the pattern set by 9/11, when 15 out of the 19 men who hijacked the planes and flew them into the twin towers were Saudi. But because the US and Britain are closely allied to the Saudi kingdom they have never seriously tried to staunch the flow of suicide bombers from there. President Bush and Tony Blair reserved all their criticism for Iran, which is not known to have provided a single suicide bomber.

      There is a further reason why the expertise and motivation of suicide bombers is likely to spread further. The war in Iraq has created a diaspora of Iraqis across the world. In Syria and Jordan alone there are 1.8 million refugees. This is the biggest exodus from a single country ever in the Middle East, surpassing even the flight or expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. The world is full of angry Iraqis.

      In Iraq itself, US military offensives to eradicate al-Qa'ida or other fundamentalist groups simply disperse them. This has always been the pattern of guerrilla wars. But al-Qa'ida leaders could not in their most optimistic dreams have expected to have such an ideal base as embattled Iraq.

      Monday, 30 July 2007

HUMAN TIDE SPILLING INTO NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES

      Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

      Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the