Word: baghdads
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...view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written. But it also raises, implicitly, the mystery of our qualified success there. Finkel follows an Army battalion through the 2007 surge, as it attempts to secure a particularly nasty and neglected area of Baghdad. This was the first attempt to implement the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and the troops have their doubts about the new tactics. Major Brent Cummings, the second-in-command, reads the doctrine and is perplexed by sentences like "Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective...
...give them the benefit of the doubt." True enough, but the mystery at the heart of The Good Soldiers remains: By what magic process did Iraq turn around, especially since the counterinsurgency tactics were so unevenly applied? Was it merely the doctrine - or did the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods and the sheer exhaustion after five years of astonishing fraternal brutality have something to do with...
...that it has remained largely stable owes much to the cosmopolitan character of the city's native population, and the city's heroic local police force led by three generals - a Kurd, an Arab and a Turkoman. The relative calm in Kirkuk may also be a vindication of the Baghdad government's foot-dragging over the question of whether to turn Kirkuk over to Kurdish control. (See pictures of Iraq's revival...
...Iraqis settled there by Saddam as part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. After such normalization, according to the constitution, Kirkuk - and other areas with large Kurdish populations in four Iraqi governorates - should then hold a referendum to determine whether they should continue to be administered by Baghdad or be ruled by the Kurdistan Regional Government. It may have been constitutionally mandated, but the idea of forcibly resettling Kirkuk's Arab population was unthinkable while Iraq was in the grip of a Sunni-Arab insurgency and a Shi'ite-Sunni civil war, and that became the excuse...
...postponing the normalization process in Kirkuk envisaged by the constitution, and Kurdish politicians have begun to suspect that al-Maliki intends to use the central government's growing strength to push back against gains won by the Kurds in the aftermath of the invasion, when the government in Baghdad was weak. The central government has already blocked oil pumped under the auspices of the Kurdish regional government from being exported in Iraqi pipelines, even though revenue from the sales would have been shared with the central government...