Page 2 of 3 US military has a lose-lose dilemma in
Iraq By Michael Schwartz
practices. The Mahdis have been able to
generate such patrol "density" only in their
headquarters community, Sadr City - the vast
Shi'ite slum in the eastern part of Baghdad.
There, where the Mahdis have a huge presence,
there were almost no suicide attacks until late
2006 when the US military began sending patrols
into the community aimed at disarming, disrupting
or destroying the Sadrist militia. This forced
them off the streets,
opening the way for suicide
bombers to reach their targets.
If the US
had decided to join forces with the Mahdis,
augmenting their neighborhood patrols with a
strong American presence in public gathering
places, they might indeed have choked off all but
a few of the most determined, resourceful, or
lucky bombers. However, this strategy was not
adopted, at least in part because it would have
strengthened the Mahdis, a group that the US
military and Bush had - until their recent
fixation on al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) - repeatedly
designated as their most dangerous enemy.
Instead, the "surge" has been forced to
focus on the suicide-bomber "supply side".
Lieutenant. General Raymond T Odierno, the
commander of day-to-day US military operations,
told Barnes of the Los Angeles Times that the
anti-bombing strategy was directed toward al-Qaeda
in Iraq because they "are the ones that are
creating the truck bombs and car bombs ... So we
are going after the safe havens that allow them to
build these things without a lot of interference".
According to Barnes, the generals charged
with implementing the plan endorsed the surge into
Sunni neighborhoods because, "for the first time,
they have enough forces to root out al-Qaeda
fighters by entering havens where US forces have
not been for years".
Thus, the American
strategy for preventing suicide bombings in
Shi'ite communities involved flooding Sunni
communities with huge numbers of soldiers.
Invading the hotbeds of the insurgency
Historically, to successfully "root out"
groups like the al-Qaeda fighters requires an
occupying force capable of enlisting the aid of
large numbers of people within a host community.
After all, those planning multiple-fatality
bombings need a level of toleration, if not
outright support or participation, from the
surrounding community. If local residents are
totally alienated from the effort, someone will
either take direct action or contact the occupying
authorities, who can then raid key locations,
capturing or killing the plotters.
An
attack on the "supply side" might therefore have
been a viable option for the Americans, if the
host community was hostile to the jihadis. In
fact, such hostility does exist in many Sunni
communities, including among insurgent groups that
are the backbone of the fight against the American
occupation. This hostility derives partly from a
principled opposition to attacks on Iraqis - most
of the 30 or so key insurgent groups have
explicitly stated that they support armed force
only against the American-led coalition forces,
often exempting even Iraqi police and military
units from attack.
But the hostility also
comes from distaste for the violently enforced
demands of the jihadis that local citizens conform
to their fundamentalist beliefs - including
prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco consumption,
as well as an insistence that men grow full beards
and women wear headscarves.
As a result, a
tactical alliance of convenience between the
occupation and the nationalist Sunni insurgency
against the AQI and other fundamentalist jihadis
has been an option for the US military since as
early as the last months of 2004, when the US
refused an offer by insurgent leaders in Fallujah
to expel the jihadis if the US would refrain from
its pending attack on the city.
The next
year, during a major offensive in Western al-Anbar
province, US military commanders stood idly by -
despite explicit calls for help - while local
insurgents fought fierce battles with jihadis,
telling embedded reporters that they were letting
two equally objectionable enemies weaken each
other. American commanders have repeatedly
enunciated a general principle that they would
never form an alliance with, or give aid to, any
"Sunni group that had attacked Americans".
Starting in early 2007, this principle was
apparently compromised in Anbar province; by July,
under the pressure of the failing "surge", it was
also being eroded in Baghdad. But these alliances
with local militia groups of various sorts involve
their own sets of problems. They only create
further conundrums for US strategists since, of
course, they undermine the larger goals of the
occupation. After all, the anti-al-Qaeda
insurgents - not the jihadi car-bombers - are, by
far, the major force in the insurgency and they
are unremitting enemies of the occupation as well
as of the Shi'ite and Kurdish-dominated central
Iraqi government, which they view as an agent of
either the American occupation or Iranian imperial
designs.
Major General Rick Lynch, who was
involved in negotiations with the Anbar
insurgents, quoted them as saying, "We hate you
because you are occupiers. But we hate al-Qaeda
worse, and we hate the Persians even more." Under
these circumstances, any alliance can almost
certainly only be temporary, strengthening as it
does the chief antagonist to the American
presence. The Independent's Cockburn summarized
the situation this way:
The US is caught in [a] quagmire of
its own making. Such successes as it does have
are usually the result of tenuous alliances with
previously hostile tribes, insurgent groups or
militias. The British experience in Basra was
that these marriages of convenience with local
gangs weakened the central government and
contributed to anarchy in Iraq. They did not
work in the long term.
In Baghdad,
the US chose - at least for the opening months of
the "surge" - to hold the line against such an
alliance with Shi'ite insurgents. Instead, they
used the presence of al-Qaeda militants in Sunni
communities as an invitation to attack the
communities themselves, attempting to "root out"
the insurgents, who have been their chief
adversary all these years, while also capturing or
killing the al-Qaeda activists responsible for the
suicide attacks on Shi'ite neighborhoods.
But this dual strategy has no hope of
capturing the support of local Sunni communities
and, without such support, the US has no choice
but to adopt a grim, if straightforward, strategy
of brute force in neighborhoods where its sources
of information (and so targeting) are, at best,
severely limited. The military has, in fact, taken
such crude - and, in the end, self-defeating -
tactical measures as erecting massive barriers
around target Sunni communities to prevent their
quarry from escaping; manning check-points at all
entrances to capture suspects with weapons and
explosives in their vehicles; and erecting
outposts within these hostile communities to
create a 24-hour quick-response presence. Worse
yet, they have conducted knock-the-door-down,
house-to-house searches looking for suspicious
individuals, weapons or literature - the sort of
approach that, for years, has been known to
thoroughly alienate the inhabitants of such
neighborhoods.
This ensures that the
failure of the "surge" is no passing phenomenon.
It leads, first of all, to the brutal treatment of
local
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
