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Even if "surge" succeeds, Iraq faces volatile future
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
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San Francisco Chronicle - Dec 2, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/02/MNOJTM0R2.DTL
Even if surge succeeds, Iraq faces volatile future
by Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Wa****ngton Bureau
Is the troop surge in Iraq working?
If it is, the battleground at home could ****ft in ways unthinkable just
two months ago: President Bush could be off the ropes and Republicans
back on offense. The Democratic Congress and presidential candidates
could lose their footing on their biggest issue. And U.S. troop
commitments and war funding could be set on a higher, more permanent
trajectory.
Already there seems to be a ****ft in public perception. A Pew poll last
month found that nearly half of the public now believes the U.S.
military effort is going well "for the first time in a long time," up
from a third in June. Still, the 54 percent majority who believe the
troops should come home has not budged.
Leading Iraq experts who have advised government officials are divided
about the consequences of the troop surge. Political reconciliation
among Iraqi factions, always the strategic aim of the decision last
January to increase U.S. combat troops, is not in sight.
Some analysts believe that the United States is merely helping warring
factions arm themselves during a lull in violence that will explode
again once the surge ends as planned by summer - around the time
Democrats and Republicans hold their national party conventions. Others
say Iraq is on the brink of a long-sought cease-fire that will allow
the U.S. military to serve as a classic peacekeeping force stabilizing
Iraq and the region.
There is no question that violence in Iraq has ebbed since the troop
surge announced by Bush in January reached its full capacity in June
with about 162,000 troops. Even Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of
the House subcommittee that controls defense spending, a key ally of
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and a leading Democratic
opponent of the war, recently returned from Iraq saying, "I think the
surge is working."
Violence has receded to the levels of January 2006, before the bombing
of the Golden Mosque in Samarra set off a sectarian civil war between
****ites and Sunni. By many accounts, al Qaeda in Iraq has been
hammered. Sunni tribes, many of them former insurgents, have turned
against al Qaeda in Iraq in what is called the Sunni awakening.
Many former Sunni insurgents in western Iraq, and increasingly ****ite
groups in the south, are allied with American forces in what the
military euphemistically calls groups of "concerned local citizens" to
control their neighborhoods and regions. Radical ****ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr has lain low, avoiding a confrontation with U.S. forces. Syria
is tightening its border to foreign fighters, and Iran has pulled back.
The U.S. military contends that Iraqi security forces are improved and
now control substantial parts of the battlefield.
"The original logic for the surge clearly hasn't worked the way it was
intended or planned," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the
top U.S. commander in Iraq.
Yet even as the Iraqi government has failed to use this "breathing
space" as an op****tunity to reach vital agreements on how to govern the
country, "into our lap, almost completely by accident, fell this
bottom-up process, starting in Anbar (province), that has now spread
through most of the rest of the country," said Biddle, who recently
returned from Iraq. "It wasn't part of the original idea of the surge,
but here it is."
If these trends continue, the United States could be hitting what he
called the long-shot chance of reaching a classic cease-fire, and U.S.
politicians of all stripes will have to resist the strong temptation to
jeopardize this progress by reducing forces too soon and too fast.
"The idea that we could end up with a situation in which we get a
cease-fire, but the locals are all beset with ulterior motives - they're
still armed, they could resume firing, they don't trust each other, they
hate each other, they're revanchist and they want to reopen the fighting
at a better, more op****tune moment later - all these things are
absolutely the case for Iraq," Biddle said. "They're also always the
case whenever a civil war gets terminated through a negotiated
cease-fire."
Any cease-fire would require an outside force to police it, he said.
"And of course we're the only people who have any serious prospect of
playing that role in Iraq. No Banglade****s or Pakistanis or other U.N.
blue helmets are lining up to go get a chance to do duty in Iraq right
now."
Other Iraq analysts see something very different happening.
Vali Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at
Tufts University and leading Middle East expert, contends that Petraeus
has traded the goal of a united Iraq for a tem****ary calm, without
acknowledgement by the administration.
"Gen. Petraeus, despite all his appearances, has completely gone off
script with Wa****ngton," Nasr said. "He is not following a course that
is based on a nonsectarian, united government in Baghdad. He is creating
Sunni militias here, ****a militias there. He's cutting deals locally,
which in the short run may benefit the security issue, but in the long
run is going to, in fact, divide this country much further."
Nasr agreed with Biddle that the lull in the fighting will end if U.S.
forces start to leave, "because Iraq is not a functioning country. Its
fundamental political issues have not been solved. Everybody has guns
and mutually exclusive agendas that still have to be sorted out, and the
minute we get out of the middle, there has to still be a fight for the
future of their country, which will be joined."
U.S. aid to militias it once condemned but now calls "concerned local
citizens," may tamp down violence now but "in the long run will make a
civil war far more vicious and bloody, because they will be much better
armed," Nasr said.
"The first order of business is that Americans have to have an honest
discussion about what are they doing in Iraq politically," Nasr said.
"There's too much obsession in this country with what the U.S. military
is doing and with the number of casualties. That's a very, very narrow
way of looking at Iraq.
"The far more im****tant question is what are we doing there. The
administration had a claim that it was able to create a unified, stable,
democratic, nonsectarian Iraq. Is it still doing that? If it is not,
then what is really our game plan here, other than just finding a way
to reduce numbers?"
Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq Intelligence
team from 2003-05 and an adviser to the Iraq Study Group, said the
United States rebuffed Sunni offers of alliance in the past because
Sunni leaders refused to join the ****ite- and Kurdish-dominated central
government in Baghdad. The administration rejected the deals because it
was trying to create a central government.
That clearly has changed. By some estimates, there are now 60,000 to
70,000 members of such "concerned citizen" groups working with the U.S.
military. Many have been issued uniforms and are paid stipends of about
$300 a month by the U.S. military. The military denies issuing them
arms, though most analysts said there is little need to do that because
they have an ample supply already.
White worries that if no formal political deals are made between the
Baghdad government, the Sunnis and the Kurds by the time the surge ends
next summer, violence will escalate among ****ite militias that have lain
low in Baghdad or fled south, the ****ite- and Kurdish-dominated Iraqi
military, and the freshly armed and organized Sunni groups.
"It is very dangerous to destroy one insurgency, al Qaeda in Iraq, by
allowing another insurgency to arm and organize itself," White said.
The quiet in Baghdad now, he contends, is the result of U.S. forces
sitting on neighborhoods and separating factions. As U.S. forces
withdraw from newly stabilized Sunni areas, it will leave them under
the control of armed Sunni groups. "If these elements come into contact
with the largely ****a and Kurdish Iraqi army, or with ****a militias,
there's going to be bloodshed," White said.
Bruce Reidel, a former Central Intelligence Agency veteran who served in
Bush's National Security Agency, said the United States is "in the
paradoxical situation where we are now arming and funding all of the
major Iraqi warring parties, the Sunnis, the ****as and the Kurds. They
are all happy to take our weapons and our money but they've not
necessarily bought onto the same strategy as we have."
He doesn't rule out Biddle's optimistic scenario. "I just think the odds
are still against us, and in the absence of movement on the political
front it is very worrisome to just be reassured by a reduction in body
counts. The violence can flare up with remarkable speed."
U.S. troop withdrawals will occur. By all accounts, the military cannot
maintain its current level of operations because of the strain it is
putting on the Army. Whether the remaining 130,000 U.S. troops the
administration plans to have in Iraq next summer, at the pre-surge
level, is enough to maintain the calm, and whether political progress
can be made by then, no one can say.
Biddle contends that Sunnis now recognize they lost the struggle for
Baghdad in 2006 and cannot regain control of Iraq. "That played a very
im****tant role in my view in their seeking a new ally," Biddle said.
"They needed to make peace with us while they still could. Not because
they're nice people, not because they're peace-loving, not because they
want to mend fences with people they've hated for a long time, but
because they think they don't have any choice."
The choice, he said, is for U.S. policymakers. "Either stay with the
largest force you can sustain and try to pull a rabbit out of the hat,
or cut your losses altogether and get out to the last soldier. Leave no
one behind. But the Congress doesn't want either of those."
Either is defensible he said. Both are fraught with risk.
"Even if you try to retain a large force in Iraq to pursue a nationwide
cease-fire and then police it if it happens, that's still a risky
undertaking," he said.
Still, he said, "I think the case for the stick-it-out extreme has been
strengthened by the dramatic spread of the bottom-up reconciliation
process."
Despite election-year pressure in both parties to bring troops home fast
and in large numbers, "we create a self-defeating prophecy by removing
the stabilizing force that classically you need to enforce this kind of
uneasy cease-fire. ... Paradoxically, success in bringing the violence
down does not imply an op****tunity to bring the troops home."
(c) The San Francisco Chronicle
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