McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants Say

New Security Plan Baghdad Not Working

KIRK SEMPLE / New York Times 3apr2007

BAGHDAD, April 2 — A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hour-long visit.

“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.”

He added, “This will not change anything.”

At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.

But the market that the congressmen said they saw is fundamentally different from the market Iraqis know.

Merchants and customers say that a campaign by insurgents to attack Baghdad’s markets has put many shop owners out of business and forced radical changes in the way people shop. Shorja, the city’s oldest and largest market, set in a sprawling labyrinth of narrow streets and alleyways, has been bombed at least a half-dozen times since last summer.

At least 61 people were killed and many more wounded in a three-pronged attack there on Feb. 12 involving two vehicle bombs and a roadside bomb.

American and Iraqi security forces have tried to protect Shorja and other markets against car bombs by restricting vehicular traffic in some shopping areas and erecting blast walls around the markets’ perimeters. But those measures, while making the markets safer, have not made them safe.

In the latest large-scale attack on a Baghdad market, at least 60 people, most of them women and children, were killed last Thursday when a man wrapped in an explosives belt walked around such barriers into a crowded street market in the Shaab neighborhood and blew himself up.

In recent weeks, snipers hidden in Shorja’s bazaar have killed several people, merchants and the police say, and gunfights have erupted between militants and the Iraqi security forces in the area.

During their visit on Sunday, the Americans were buttonholed by merchants and customers who wanted to talk about how unsafe they felt and the urgent need for more security in the markets and throughout the city, witnesses said.

“They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad,” said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. “I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel,” he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: “Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed.”

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the drop-off in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

“This area here is very dangerous,” continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. “They cannot secure it.”

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen’s comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. “The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered,” Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

“I just came from one,” he replied sharply. “Things are better and there are encouraging signs.”

He added, “Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today.”

Told about Mr. McCain’s assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: “He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing.”

A Senate spokeswoman for Mr. McCain said he left Iraq on Monday and was unavailable for comment because he was traveling.

Several merchants said Monday that the Americans’ visit might have only made the market a more inviting target for insurgents.

“Every time the government announces anything — that the electricity is good or the water supply is good — the insurgents come to attack it immediately,” said Abu Samer, 49, who would give only his nickname out of concern for his safety.

But even though he was fearful of a revenge attack, he said, he could not afford to stay away from the market. This was his livelihood. “We can never anticipate when they will attack,” he said, his voice heavy with gloomy resignation. “This is not a new worry.”

Ahmad Fadam and Wisam A. Habeeb contributed reporting.

source: 10apr2007

Many Lawmakers Go to Iraq,
but Few Change Their Minds

MICHAEL LUO / New York Times 3apr2007

WASHINGTON, March 30 — Visits to Iraq have become a required part of the political wardrobe for lawmakers hoping to be taken seriously in the debate over the future of the war.

Over the past two months, as lawmakers have debated the supplemental spending bill for the war and the troop buildup, they have brought up their trips again and again, wielding their experiences as rhetorical weapons to bolster their case.

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

“I was there in Iraq,” Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, said several weeks ago while detailing her reasons for opposing Mr. Bush’s plan to send 21,500 additional troops to the region.

Rising in support of the president’s strategy, Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, said he spoke as “one who has been there.” [He made his fifth trip over the weekend].

A recent survey by the Medill News Service found that about two-thirds of House Republicans had been to Iraq, while fewer than half of Democrats had visited. Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who is the ranking member on the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security, has visited 15 times, more than any other member.

Among the presidential contenders, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York made her third visit to Iraq this year. Her chief Democratic competitor, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, visited for the first time last year. [Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is vying for the Republican nomination and has largely linked his political fortunes to the president’s new strategy, made his fifth trip to Iraq on Sunday with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and two Republican congressmen, Rick Renzi of Arizona and Mr. Pence.]

Representative Patrick Murphy, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former Army paratrooper who served a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq and later visited the country as a member of a Congressional delegation, said lawmakers’ trips were invariably “somewhat scripted.” He said, “I demanded that I break bread with guys I served with that would give me the straight story.”

Jack Keane, a retired general and former Army vice chief of staff, said the trips had been “very limited” because of security concerns.

Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Mr. Keane said the new commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, was trying to get Congressional delegations out into the field more.

“He wants them to have primary sources,” he said, “not just secondary sources.”

Even with the extraordinary security precautions, the trips are clearly dangerous. Representatives Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, and Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, were traveling in a minibus when a tanker truck accidentally sideswiped them in 2005, tipping their vehicle over. The two were hospitalized, but not seriously injured.

Many prominent critics of the war have never been to Iraq — fewer than one-third of the 75 members of the House’s Out of Iraq Caucus have visited — and some insist that they are none the worse for it.

“I don’t like to fly,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, a North Carolina Republican who broke with his party last month to oppose President Bush’s troop buildup. “Where you really need to go is go to Walter Reed. See the legs that are gone. See those who are paralyzed and cannot control their bodily functions.”

But Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who made her first visit to the region a few weeks ago with three Senate colleagues — John E. Sununu, Republican of New Hampshire, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota — said she found there was “no substitute for seeing things firsthand.”

Before her visit, she said, she had been skeptical of the president’s new strategy. But she said she came away believing that it had a chance of making a difference. “I’m willing to give Petraeus what he has asked for,” she said. “He said, ‘I will know by midsummer whether or not this surge has worked.’ ”

Mr. Whitehouse, who made his first visit to Iraq this year, admitted that his 36-hour trip had been tantamount to “drilling a tiny, tiny, little core sample out of some vast geologic mass and then drawing conclusions from it.”

Nevertheless, he said, he returned from the trip convinced that repeated Democratic efforts to force an American withdrawal were having a desirable effect. “We are actually arming General Petraeus with arguments to get the Iraqis off their tail ends to do what they need to do,” he said.

But Mr. Sununu said he returned more convinced than ever about the danger of legislation that imposes conditions on war financing.

“The message was very clear,” he said, citing his own conversations with troops. “We need this funding, and we need it immediately.”

The most valuable parts of the trips, however, transcend politics, said Ms. Klobuchar. At the end of their visit, when the senators were waiting to leave, the military transport plane next to theirs was being loaded with six coffins.

While Mr. Sununu and Ms. Murkowski participated in the ceremony honoring the dead service members, a group of National Guardsmen from Minnesota called Ms. Klobuchar to stand with them. They saluted the dead together.

source: 10apr2007