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"Quiet" on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Due to the "Surge?"
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Counterpunch - Dec 1, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/downing12012007.html
The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front
How Much Credit Goes to the Surge?
By BRIAN M. DOWNING
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 ****fts rarely have simple
causes.
Sunni Arabs
The most common explanation is that the Surge, the US counterinsurgency
program designed and implemented by Gen. 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
sup****t 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 ****'a-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 im****tant than the Surge. Sunni-****'a 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 last 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 op****tunity for
sectarian violence is down.
Bruited along with the good news of the Surge--and mistakenly or
disingenuously lumped together with it--have been the changes in Anbar
and Diyali provinces around Baghdad--once insurgent and al Qaeda
havens. Over the last 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 the First
World War, 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 and regarded
the ****'as as natural allies, the Sunnis as defeated enemies harboring
varying degrees of hostility. During years of insurgency and sectarian
fighting, Americans troops and ****'a 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 ****'a-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
****'a revival begun by revolutionary Iran in 1979, and so they financed
his long war with Iran in the eighties. Since then, Sunni states have
continued to beware Iran and have looked upon domestic ****'as as
potential fifth columns. Following Saddam's ouster, the region braced
as the ****'a 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?
****'a Arabs and Iran
Violence in ****'a areas has been based on militias fighting US and
British forces and on the militias fighting each other, most notably
Sadr's Mahdi Army and Hakim's Badr Brigades. Both forms of violence are
down sharply. ****'a efforts to marginalize or drive out the Sunni Arabs
have dwindled as the latter sidled up to the US. Skirmishes between
****'a militias and US and British troops have also dwindled. Until
recently, US forces had been hammering ****'a militias in Baghdad,
wreaking havoc on their neighborhoods, suggesting to many ****'as that
the US now saw the Sunnis as natural allies. ****'as 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, Sadr 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 ****'a 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 inflict enough casualties on
the US to bring about an eventual pullout, leaving a coherent ****'a
majority there; but to avoid inflicting so many casualties as to bring
on harsh economic sanctions or devastating air strikes. Supplies to
****'a militias over the years have never been very high--Iran wishes to
demonstrate that it has supply lines into Iraq, and it can expand them,
raising US casualties to domestically intolerable levels. In other
words, Iran has considerable control over American casualties.
But Iran's policy is in disarray. Israel's air strike in September 2007
on a possible nuclear facility in Syria weighs heavily on Iran. It
implied Israeli and American willingness to attack Iran, but more
im****tantly it demonstrated their ability to defeat the best
Russian-made air defense systems, upon which Iran has based much of its
national security. In other words, Iran is virtually defenseless.
Heretofore, the US feared the loss of too many aircraft and planned to
strike with only cruise missiles. But its aircraft can almost certainly
penetrate Iranian air defenses, devastate nuclear facilities and
military bases and economic infrastructure, and return to their
carriers and bases with relatively few casualties. Iran could retaliate
in several ways: send its special forces into Iraq to attack American
troops and supply lines from Kuwait; encourage Hizbullah to launch
strikes across the Middle East; and press the ****'a factions in Iraq to
order the US out or at least squeeze supplies. Some analysts suspect
that Iran has Russian-made missiles capable of inflicting grave damage
on American aircraft carriers, two of which patrol just outside Iranian
waters.
Iran has no desire to suffer the devastation the Israeli air force
visited upon Lebanon in 2006, which American airpower can now easily
repeat. It would rally the nation, but the economic damage would be
frightful. And so Iran might have blinked recently. US generals have
re****ted a decline in Iranian arms entering Iraq. Iran realizes that
these supplies, limited though they are, constitute a rationale for the
US to launch protracted air strikes across it--several thousand targets
according to some sources. And although US policy toward Iran is
probably independent of Iran's actions in Iraq, it sees no point in
helping the US contrive a casus belli.
Stability and Instability
The absence of political compromise between the sects is oft-noted,
leading some to conclude that stability in the region is not in the
offing and that recent developments have no lasting meaning. However,
another form of stability is possible, one based on the US abandoning
mediation between Sunni and ****'a in Iraq and aligning with the Sunnis
in and out of Iraq. The region might be headed for a standoff between
the US, Saudi Arabia, and the Sunni Arabs of Iraq opposed to Iran and
the ****'a Arabs of Iraq and elsewhere. A new cold war, with uneasy
frontiers stretching from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south,
might be falling into place. This standoff would necessitate stationing
a considerable ****tion of the US's available combat divisions in the
region for an unfathomable amount of time, possibly making the duration
of its antecedent in Central Europe seem ephemeral.
For better or worse, there might be too many instabilities for this
standoff to come about. One source of instability lies in the make-up
of Iraqi tribes. The tribes of Anbar and Diyali are confederations
comprising numerous tribes, hence they are subject to fissures along
tribal, clan, and personal lines. Tribal leaders cooperating, or to
some collaborating, with Americans and receiving emoluments from them
can worsen these fissures. Related to this, al Qaeda, though ostensibly
on the run in Iraq, has enjoyed considerable success in recent weeks in
assassinating tribal leaders working with the US. Chastened by its
blunders, it might learn to exacerbate fissures and find allies. And
increased use of air strikes to keep American casualties down has
predictably led to many inadvertent deaths of civilians and friendly
forces that could worsen uneasiness regarding cooperation with the US.
The ****'a tribes also have serious fissures. Saddam played one off
against the other and prevented the ****'a majority from coalescing into
a threat to his regime. Presently, ****'a leaders nominally command
militias and even some regular army formations, but they rely on
traditional and charismatic appeals, making mutiny and infighting by
lieutenants disaffected by recent events far more likely than in
militaries based on rational-legal authority. A further source of
instability lies in the recent return of many Sunni Arabs. As
middle-class Sunnis who fled to Syria and Jordan return, they will
politically and financially strengthen the old oppressors of the
****'as. Many ****'as will find this ominous and demand preemptive
action. Most ****'a have never heard of Santayana, but they know his
famous message from long experience.
The showdown over Iran's nuclear program is perhaps the most critical
source of instability. A formidable group within the US government,
centered on the vice president, is pressing for air strikes on Iran,
regardless of its actions in Iraq. There is of course an opposing
group, centered on the secretary of state, stressing negotiations and
international pressures, which has the upper hand for now. But the
correlation of forces within the administration remains opaque to most
observers. Iran's president or the supreme leader, neither of whom
seems well acquainted with the norms of world politics, could take
action that would alter politics in Wa****ngton. However, against
expectation, the supreme leader has recently rebuked the president for
his sharp denunciation of domestic figures who oppose the nation's
nuclear program--perhaps another blink.
The decline in violence in Iraq rests uneasily on several unrelated and
loosely related processes. The Surge is certainly one of them, but it
is not foremost --maybe not even in Baghdad where it began. The number
of these processes and their fragility do not inspire confidence that
the decline in violence can continue, let alone help to promote
desirable political development. Nor are they likely to allow the US to
leave Iraq gracefully in the foreseeable future.
[Brian M. Downing is a veteran of the Vietnam War and author of several
works of political and military history, including "The Military
Revolution and Political Change" and "The Paths of Glory: War and Social
Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam." He can be reached at:
brianmdowning@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
]
(c) Brian M. Downing
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