During President George Bush’s State of the Union address on January 28 he hailed the so-called progress in Iraq. “Our objective in the coming year is to sustain and build on the gains we made in 2007, while transitioning to the next phase of our strategy. American troops are shifting from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and, eventually, to a protective overwatch mission,” he said.

Last month Rolling Stone magazine published an article titled “The Myth of the Surge.” Independent journalist Nir Rosen reported that the Bush administration has armed “the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces.” U.S. forces now back Sunni militias, referred to as Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs). About 80,000 Iraqi men serve in ISVs, most of them are Sunnis.

An Army intelligence officer told Rosen, “The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money.”

Chas Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia for President George H.W. Bush, says, “We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority. Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future.”
 
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, published an article last year in The New Yorker magazine about the Bush administration’s strategy to undermine Iran. According to Seymour, “The Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran.” However, the strategy has a “contradictory aspect” because most of the violence directed at the U.S. military “has come from Sunni forces.”
 
Food shortages, internal refugees, and lack of electricity

According to the U.S. State Department’s weekly reports on Iraq for this year, there are food shortages in Iraq, thousands of refugees, and not enough electricity. Oxfam International’s July 2007 report on Iraq stated that sixty percent of Iraqis utilize monthly food rations, a little less than half of the population lives in poverty, and child malnutrition rose nine percent during the last four years.
 
The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization stated in its July 2007 report that the “overall food security situation” in Iraq “continues to be adversely affected by conflict and security problems.” The UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq said last month that four million Iraqis suffer from food shortages, and forty percent do not have safe drinking water.

The news organization Reuters reported in February that Iraq could face wheat shortages in 2008. Data obtained by Reuters shows that only 2.1 million tons of wheat were imported by Iraq in 2007, about a third less than in 2006 or 2005.
 
State Department reports refer to internal refugees in Iraq as internally-displaced persons (IDPs). Although “displacement rates have decreased,” according to the reports, “the humanitarian situation of the IDP population continues to deteriorate.”  Housing for IDPs is the “primary need.” A third of all IDPs that have been assessed said their homes have been occupied by other people.
 
Independent journalist, Dahr Jamail, wrote in December that during the U.S. troops surge “the number of Iraqis displaced from their homes quadrupled, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent (IRC). By the end of 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there are over 2.3 million internally displaced persons within Iraq, and over 2.3 million Iraqis who have fled the country.”
Refugees International, a non-governmental organization, called Iraq’s refugee problem, “the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis.”
 
Between 1.5 million to 2.2 million Iraqis fled to Syria, according to the IRC. A UNHCR report in February stated that refugees coming back to Iraq from Syria slowed, and more Iraqis were leaving than returning. Most Iraqis who returned did so because they could no afford to live in Syria.
 
Electrical blackouts are frequent in Iraq, particularly in Babil Province, according to a January 28 State Department report. The report stated that Babil threatened to cut its power plants off from the national grid “due to frustration over electrical blackouts.” Tahseen Sheikhly, spokesman for the Baghdad security plant, said, ““Sewage, water, and electricity are our three main problems.”
 
In May 2007 Iraqis had an average of ten daily hours of electricity in their homes, according to the Brookings Institution. Baghdad homes only had an average of 5.6 hours. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Baghdad homes had an average of sixteen to twenty-four hours of electricity.