Iraq is the grim, nearly invisible spectre lurking over the U.S. elections, all but forgotten by the recession-struck public as senators Barack Obama and John McCain enter the home stretch of their race for the White House.

Behind this collective amnesia lies “the surge,” the commitment last year of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to the war. Deployed mostly in Baghdad and volatile Anbar Province, they are widely credited with turning the tide in Washington’s favor.

“This strategy has succeeded. We are winning in Iraq,” McCain declared at the second presidential debate on October 7. “We will come home with victory and with honor.”

While insisting that the war itself was a disastrous mistake, Obama concedes that the surge “has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of Americans are now convinced that the U.S. military effort in Iraq is on track. The figure was 30 percent eight months ago.

But there are compelling reasons to fear that the troop increase has won little more than a transitory moment of calm in Iraq – and that an end to the conflict is nowhere on the horizon. Like the real estate and finance bubbles that pushed it off the front pages, the bubble of relief over the surge is an explosion in the making.

A MURDEROUS “PEACE”

Although the dire carnage that marked 2006 appears to have eased, especially over the past six months, Iraq remains very distant from the peaceful revival that surge euphoria implies.

Last Wednesday alone (October 1), 30 civilians died in a series of bombings near Shiite mosques in Baghdad, despite the presence of thousands of U.S. troops there. Since mid-summer, Iraqi government spokesmen have repeatedly warned that deadly inter-communal attacks are once more on the rise.

Four days later in the northern city of Mosul, suicide bombers killed 18 people, half of them women and children. Just 48 hours before the Obama-McCain debate, two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters went down in the Iraqi capital, when one was hit by ground fire and another crashed into it.

Were such events taking place anywhere else in the world, they “would make headlines,” notes Joseph Stieglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and an influential critic of the war. “Only in Iraq have we become so inured to violence that it is a good day if only 25 civilians get killed.”

Expert analyses of the present situation in Iraq, by military and political figures alike, cite a wide array of danger signals. They are anything but reassuring.

Chief among them is the unraveling of the “Sunni Awakening Councils,” groups of former insurgents who have been converted into U.S. allies against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Iraq’s most feared terrorist organization. The conventional wisdom is that the councils marked a clear break with anti-American xenophobia – and also with the corrosive internal divisions that made Iraq a living nightmare in the civil war that erupted after George Bush’s premature “Mission Accomplished” boast in 2003.

IS ANYONE WATCHING?

No one is warier of declaring the surge another mission accomplished than outgoing U.S. commander General David Petraeus, the strategy’s key architect since its implementation and a featured player in McCain’s campaign oratory, mentioned a dozen times in the second debate with Obama.

Unlike McCain, “I don’t use words like victory or defeat,” Petraeus said last month, shortly before he left Iraq for a new posting at the U.S. Central Command in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The surge’s gains, are “not irreversible,” he warned in an interview with the BBC, adding that the United States was still confronted with “many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems.”

One of the most ominous clouds surrounds the Sons of Iraq, the nearly 100,000 Awakening Council fighters who were trained, armed and paid monthly salaries under Petraeus to patrol troubled Iraqi urban districts. There is disturbing evidence that the patrols have gradually reinserted themselves into Iraq’s millennial struggle between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, using their firepower to settle religious scores rather than keep the peace.

“What you have is essentially armed factions, like mini-gangs, that operate in a certain set of checkpoints in certain territories,” Lieutenant Erick Kuylman of the U.S. First Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment., told Erica Goode of the New York Times in late September.

On October 1, just as Petraeus was packing his bags, the central government of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki began disbanding the Sunni patrols, and announced that no more than 20 percent of their men would be integrated into the national Army and police.

The remaining 80 percent, many of whom were ambushing U.S. and Iraqi troops as recently as 2006, might very well switch sides once more. That could provoke an abrupt return to the no-holds-barred civil war responsible for an estimated 96,000 civilian deaths from 2003 to 2007.

Related concerns swirl around the unresolved status of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk. Divided among four deeply hostile communities – including Kurds and Turkmen, as well as Shiite and Sunni Arabs – it is claimed as an “ancestral capital” by all of them. Sporadic reports suggest that Kirkuk is even more dangerous today than it was when I covered it three years ago, describing terrorist attacks that rocked the fragile balance of power at the rate of four or five per day.

There is no dependable way of keeping count in 2008. The war has experienced a spectacular drop in foreign press attention since surge amnesia set in – yet another reason why optimism over its effects is misplaced.

In early 2007, Iraq accounted for 23 percent of air time on American TV networks. By 2008, notes Sherry Ricchiardi of the American Journalism Review, it had plummeted to 3 percent. On cable networks, coverage dropped from 24 percent of the news hole to 1 percent, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

A WIDER CONFLICT

The spectre of Iraq pales before developments in Afghanistan, scene of Washington’s second ongoing war.

From the very beginning, these conflicts have been closely linked, with U.S. troops – and the foreign Islamic fighters who are their most effective enemy – shifting back and forth between the two countries. The decline in recorded violence in Iraq since mid-2007 has been directly proportionate to a sudden escalation in Afghanistan, where the pronouncements of western military officers have grown ever more apocalyptic.

On October 5, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the British Army’s commander in Afghanistan, flatly predicted that the most allied forces can now hope for is a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. “We’re not going to win this war,” he said.

To make matters infinitely worse, sheer chaos has taken hold inside Pakistan’s borders with Afghanistan, as squabbling Pakistani and U.S. forces alternate between directing fire at each other and launching futile joint operations against the Taliban.

Finally, there are Iraq’s immediate neighbors.

As much as anything else, the relative drop in Iraqi bloodletting is due to last year’s decision by Muqtada al Sadr, the bitterly anti-American Shiite cleric,  to withdraw his Madhdi Army from offensive operations. It is inconceivable that this step was taken without consulting Iran, Sadr’s patron and arms-provider. The Shiite leadership in Teheran is convinced it will soon inherit control over the southern third of Iraq, including the Basra oil fields, and is almost certainly marshalling its proxy forces for a decisive thrust as soon as the surge is ended.

That moment is likely to come in the next six months, following negotiations between Baghdad and Washington aimed at a substantial pullout of U.S. troops.

Meanwhile, the long-running war between Turkey and Kurdish separatists based in Iraq shows no sign of abating. As this column is being filed, Turkish jets are bombing a reported 21 targets inside Iraq. The surge has done nothing whatsoever to mitigate these dangerous cross-border tensions.

The sum result is a long-term security picture, in the broader field of military action undertaken by Washington, that is arguably more dismal today than it was when the surge began. It is wishful thinking to conclude that a 21-month increase in U.S. troop strength has turned anything around. The much greater likelihood is that it has been little more than a costly band-aid, applied to gravely festering wounds.

“We’ve spent over $600 billion so far, soon to be $1 trillion. We have lost over 4,000 lives,” Barrack Obama pointed out at the October 7 debate. “We have seen 30,000 wounded, and most importantly, from a strategic national security perspective, al Qaeda is resurgent, stronger now than at any time since 2001.”

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5