Surgeview
Old Baghdad hand Jon Lee Anderson, no fan of America in Iraq, with a relatively clear groundview plus overview of the surge and its prospects, in this New Yorker Letter from Iraq:
Indeed, analysts credit much of the recent drop in Iraqi civilian deaths not to the surge but to Sadr’s decision, in August, to order the Mahdi Army, which is believed to have been responsible for much of the Shiite-on-Sunni sectarian killing in and around Baghdad, to “freeze” its activities for six months. Sadr’s apparent aim was to ward off an escalation of a two-day gun battle between the Mahdi and another Shiite militia, and to reassert his control over his men.
The surge also coincided with the so-called Sunni Awakening, the decision by some Anbar tribesmen to ally themselves with the Americans and to fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—a shift that was not foreseen in Petraeus’s plan. Sunnis in other areas have since joined them, though many have not; Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is still active, and foreign jihadis remain in the country. On September 13th, Abu Risha, the Sunni tribal leader regarded as the catalyst of the alliance, whom President Bush had met in Anbar ten days before, was assassinated. Abu Risha was an influential and charismatic figure, and although his brother stepped in to take his place, most of the Iraqis I spoke to viewed his death as a serious loss and wondered how long his brother would survive. Still, there was hope that Al Qaeda might eventually be neutralized, thus removing at least one vicious aspect of the multifaceted war.
Some combination of the surge, the Sunni Awakening, and Sadr’s freeze has helped to stabilize troubled areas of the capital and Anbar; it is unclear whether the gains can be expanded upon—or even sustained—with fewer troops, but further increases alone will not win the war. And no more troop additions are planned; instead, President Bush has promised to withdraw, by next July, almost as many troops as were brought in for the surge. Iraq’s future, for the moment, is in limbo. The best one can say, perhaps, is that the U.S. has bought or borrowed a little space to work with. But there have been costs, some more obvious than others.
A couple of bickering points. Sadr’s initial standdown directly coinincided with the surge, when he ordered his men not to engage with the surging Americans, that they might live to fight another day. The Sunni Awakening did not happen in a vaccum. The Sunnis would not have allied themselves with the Americans if they did not recognize them as a reliable and worthwhile ally, if only in the relatively short term. The following remarks notwithstanding, the Anbar Awakening followed three years of determined fighting and efforts at inroads by a lot of Americans. The Americans set the terms under which both Sadr has stood down and the Sunnis have awakened to their own interest, and I look forward to the detailed history of those developments.
But here’s a Sunni shiek’s view, which while presented at face value by Anderson, clearly has an element of Sunni tribal braggadocio and propaganda to it. Anderson presents this as one of the seeds of failure and the next conflict … both sides positioning themselves for if/when the Americans withdraw. Both sides would be foolish not to. Welcome to war. That does not make failure and renewed sectarian violence a foregone conclusion, however. Unless we withdraw prematurely.
A few days before General Petraeus testified before Congress, I met with Sheikh Zaidan al-Awad, a prominent Sunni tribal leader from Anbar. The last time I had seen him, in 2004, he was full of hostile bluster about the U.S., and made no secret of his identification with the “resistance,” as he described the hard-line Sunni insurgents. Sheikh Zaidan was a fugitive, suspected by the Americans of being a sponsor of the insurgency, and he was living in voluntary exile in Jordan. But when we spoke this fall, in an apartment in Amman, Zaidan told me that he had recently met for informal talks with American military and intelligence officials, because he approved of what they were now doing—allowing Sunni tribesmen to police themselves.
I asked Zaidan what sort of deal had led to the Sunni Awakening. “It’s not a deal,” he said, bristling. “People have come to realize that our fate is tied to the Americans’, and theirs to ours. If they are successful in Iraq, it will depend on Anbar. We always said this. Time was lost. America was lost, but now it’s woken up; it now holds a thread in its hand. For the first time, they’re doing something right.”
Zaidan said that Anbar’s Sunni tribes no longer had any need to exact blood vengeance on U.S. forces. “We’ve already taken our revenge,” he said. “We’re the ones who’ve made them crawl on their stomachs, and now we’re the ones to pick them up.” He added, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.” There would have to be a lot more fighting before the capital was taken back from the Shiites, he said. “The Anbaris will take charge of the purge. What the whole world failed to do in Anbar, we have done overnight. Baghdad will be a lot easier.”
Many of the players in Iraq seemed, like Zaidan, to be positioning themselves for the next battle.
Anderson vastly oversimplifies the case with his statement “The new strategy, like most of the previous strategies employed in Iraq, had the drawback of having been imposed by the Americans,” which dismisses considerable Iraqi involvement and cooperation, in addition to the abovementioned Iraqi developments. But whatever.
Shiite political parties and militias are so interwoven that a Shiite equivalent of the Sunni Awakening seems unlikely—it would probably require a split within the Shiite community, a civil war within a civil war.
Anderson also apparently has not been clued in on reports that Shiites have, much like the Sunnis, been awakening south of Baghdad and acting against thuggish militias, which may well be a factor in Sadr’s latest standdown.
The piece continues with a lot of on-the-ground anecdotal bitterness, revengelust, difficulty of the task. Anderson chooses to end with remarkably clear, to the point, and all things considered, even optimistic note, with a quote from an American captain based in a now less-trouble Iraqi neighborhood. With luck, this view could resonate in certain quarters:
When I asked how long he thought the U.S. would remain in Iraq, Brooks thought for a while, and said, “I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass, but it really depends on what the U.S. civilian-controlled government decides its goals are and what it tells the military to do.”
Brooks continued, “Things are going well. Just about everything we wanted to achieve on a local level, we’ve achieved. It’s counterinsurgency, it’s different from what one would normally associate with war—i.e., ‘victory is won.’ I feel that winning will be a point you never realize that you’re there—that at some indeterminate point you’ll look back and realize that you’ve won.”
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:47 am on Friday, November 16, 2007
2 Responses to “Surgeview”
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November 16th, 2007 at 11:44 am
It wouldn’t surprise me if we have US troops stationed in Iraq for the next fifty years. Why not? We’ve been in Europe and Asia longer than that.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
“And no more troop additions are planned”
The Iraqi Army is growing by 5K+ a month. Simple plan…flood Iraq with enough troops to minimize the violence…then withdraw foreign troops at a 1 for 2 ratio.
The Iraqi army will grow by 10 brigades in the timeframe that the 5 US brigades are withdrawn.