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2 SPEAKING
FREELY It's a fragile 'quiet' in
Iraq By Brian M Downing
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
In recent months, US
casualties and Iraqi deaths have dropped markedly.
Americans and Iraqis welcome the news but are
perplexed by it as well. This is especially so in
the US Congress, where confusion and indecision
have deepened, and opposition to
the
war is even more tepid and incoherent than a year
ago.
The administration and the military
have cautiously claimed progress; sympathetic
figures in Congress and the media have
incautiously trumpeted it. They advance a readily
understood explanation with an intuitive
plausibility that a war-weary public is willing to
accept. But momentous shifts rarely have simple
causes.
Sunni Arabs The most
common explanation is that the "surge", the US
counterinsurgency program designed and implemented
by General David Petraeus, is working very well.
Based on counterinsurgency doctrines developed
late in the colonial era, the "surge" used US
troops to drive out insurgents from an area and
hold it.
Iraqi troops and officials were
then to win popular support by providing services
and inducements. The process was to be repeated in
contiguous areas, gradually spreading government
control across the country, as an oil spot would
spread across water. Whatever success the "surge"
has thus far enjoyed in Baghdad, it has not spread
out from the capital - largely because of the
ineptitude or insouciance in the Iraqi military
and state, both of which are Shi'ite-dominated and
hostile to Sunnis. Services and inducements are
more often provided by the Americans than by the
national government - hardly in keeping with
counterinsurgency doctrine.
Violence has
declined for several other reasons, many of which
might be reckoned more important than the "surge".
Sunni-Shi'ite violence, which spiraled out of
control following the Samarra mosque bombing in
early 2006, has eased. This has not been due to
any reconciliation between the sects, but rather
because sectarian violence over the past
two-and-a-half years has turned most of Baghdad
and a few other major cities into homogeneous
semi-fortified enclaves. Mixed neighborhoods have
all but disappeared. Furthermore, 2 million or so
Sunnis have fled to foreign countries. With so
much forced dislocation, the opportunity for
sectarian violence is down.
Bruited with
the good news of the "surge" - and mistakenly or
disingenuously lumped together with it - have been
the changes in al-Anbar and Diyali provinces
around Baghdad - once insurgent and al-Qaeda
havens. Over the past year or so, tribes there
have solicited and received US assistance to fight
al-Qaeda, which had incurred the wrath of the
tribes because of its disrespect for local
authorities, customs, and women. Tribal forces and
GIs now work together to finish off al-Qaeda.
Former insurgents even draw pay from
American coffers. And Anbar and Diyali have seen
remarkable declines in US casualties. Proximity to
Baghdad invites inference that this resulted from
the spreading oil spot of the "surge" - an
inference that US officials are unlikely to
discourage. However, the tribal volte-face
preceded the "surge's" operationalization; the
potential for turning the Sunnis was recognized
and exploited by local field commanders (and
foreign powers), not by the "surge's" directors in
the Green Zone; and there has been little if any
follow-up into the areas by the Iraqi state.
Changes in Sunni Arab provinces might be
best considered in two contexts. First, since the
country's inception following World War I, the
Sunni Arabs were a minority of the population, yet
they controlled the state, army and oil revenue.
This suddenly and irreversibly ended when the
US-led coalition ousted Saddam Hussein and
regarded the Shi'ites as natural allies, the
Sunnis as defeated enemies harboring varying
degrees of hostility.
During years of
insurgency and sectarian fighting, Americans
troops and Shi'ite militias, separately and
without coordination, inflicted hundreds of
thousand casualties on the Sunni Arabs and helped
drive many into nearby Sunni countries, reducing
their population from 18% to about 13%.
Without some sort of political change, the
Sunni Arabs faced marginalization, if not
extermination. The Shi'ite-dominated state was
hardly amenable to a deal with their former
oppressors, but by late 2006 the Americans, mired
in a vicious and domestically unsustainable
insurgency, were amenable to a deal. And so US
commanders and tribal councils forged working
arrangements. The Americans got reduced
casualties, the Sunni Arabs a protector.
Historians might well ask someday, who turned
whom?
International dynamics constitute a
second context. Sunni states around Iraq were wary
of ousting Saddam. He had been a useful counter to
the Shi'ite revival begun by revolutionary Iran in
1979, and so they financed his long war with Iran
in the 1980s. Since then, Sunni states have
continued to beware Iran and have looked on
domestic Shi'ites as potential fifth columns.
Following Saddam's ouster, the region
braced as the Shi'ites of Iraq and Iran filled the
vacuum. Sunni states, especially Saudi Arabia,
established or strengthened ties with tribal
leaders in the Sunni regions of Iraq. Their
diplomatic and intelligence services, whose
practical knowledge of tribal politics in and out
of their lands greatly exceeds the ken of American
counterparts, were almost certainly critical in
effecting the volte-face in Anbar, Diyali, and
elsewhere in Iraq. Again, who turned whom?
Shi'ite Arabs and Iran Violence
in Shi'ite areas has been based on militias
fighting US and British forces and on the militias
fighting each other, most notably Muqtada
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's
Badr Brigades. Both forms of violence are down
sharply. Shi'ite efforts to marginalize or drive
out the Sunni Arabs have dwindled as the latter
sidled up to the US. Skirmishes between Shi'ite
militias and US and British troops have also
dwindled.
Until recently, US forces had
been hammering Shi'ite militias in Baghdad,
wreaking havoc on their neighborhoods, suggesting
to many Shi'ites that the US now saw the Sunnis as
natural allies. Shi'ites saw the fearsome specter
of renewed Sunni power in a truncated but
nonetheless dangerous state, backed by the US and
Saudi Arabia, and one day enriched by recent oil
finds in Anbar. Sobered by this, Muqtada and Hakim
recently inked an agreement to end fighting
between their forces, fighting that a few months
ago seemed about to engulf the south as the
British withdrew.
Iranian pressure might
have brought about the agreement. Many of the key
Shi'ite parties and militias were formed under
Iranian tutelage and continue to receive money and
advice from their co-religionists, so Iranian
influence has naturally if covertly shaped recent
events. Iran has been seeking a golden mean in
Iraq: to
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