Number one: the Sahwa (Awakening) Councils often referred to as "Sons of Iraq" by U.S. officials, who enjoy renaming foreign entities and processes to fit their own domestic marketing machines. These are Sunni Arab militias composed primarily of young men who have no love for America but who have also come to revile al-Qaeda and other elements within the insurgency for their use of brutal tactics against civilians. Many of the militiamen are themselves former insurgents, among them considerable numbers of the men thrown to the dogs in 2003 when L. Paul Bremer III, then Washington's viceroy in Bahgdad, disbanded the Iraqi Army. Instead of retaining an institution that provided income and structure to tens of thousands of men with military training, instead of using them to help control the insurgency that was then just getting off the ground, Bremer offered them up - bitter, fearful and jobless - as recruits for his country's most determined enemy.
Now those who have joined the Sahwa Councils have switched sides, but that does not mean they are on America's. On the contrary, they know the Americans are looking for the exit door, so they are looking out for what they perceive to be the interests of their own clans, their own tribes and their own sect - as they must in the gerrymandered Lebanese-style confessional model cooked up under U.S. auspices. One of the few positives in Saddam Hussein's legacy was the illusion, at least, of a unified and secular Iraqi state. Instead of injecting fact into that fallacy, the Americans stood idly by while it was replaced with a system that inevitably breeds ill will and mistrust among different regions, ethnic groups and religious communities.
What the prototypical Sahwa militiaman knew before signing up, therefore, is that while al-Qaeda and other components of the insurgency were more interested in fighting the United States than in defending Iraq, he and his Sunni brethren were in danger of being frozen out of the post-occupation melange. One bloc of Shiites already controlled the cabinet, as well as the new Iraqi military and other elements of the security forces (including both the police and the primary intelligence apparatus) - and another led the country's largest militia, the Mehdi Army. The Kurds, too, were acquiring all sorts of levers: expansion of the de facto autonomy dating back to the aftermath of the 1990-91 war over Kuwait, the elevation of their own Peshmerga militia into an army in all but name, and a presidential veto over all major policy decisions.
Many Sunnis, then, had very good reason to want a vehicle for their own empowerment and/or protection - but also to keep the Americans (but not their guns and money) at arm's length. Hence the appearance of the Sahwa Councils resulted in the removal of tens of thousands of men from the ranks of those engaged daily in attacks on Iraqi and U.S.-led forces.
Number two: The Mehdi Army declared a cease-fire in August 2007 and has largely honored it - even though the Iraqi military has repeatedly sought out confrontations, perhaps because it is heavily influenced (some say infiltrated) by a rival Shiite party with much stronger ties to Iran, the Badr Organization. The Mehdi fighters were a key ingredient in the sectarian bloodshed that followed the devastating 2006 bombing of the Askari Mosque in Samarra. They launched precisely what the Askari attack was designed to provoke, but the extent to which they succeeded must have come as a nasty surprise.
The Mehdi Army's first appearance on Iraq's urban battlefield came after the Sunni-led insurgency had begun to take a serious toll (especially in Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and other cities) but before the new government security forces had been built up. They were formed almost spontaneously as a means of protection, and when the U.S. military sought to preserve its own prerogatives by cracking down on the group, its foolhardy commanders elected to stand their ground. The slaughter of poorly trained militiamen that followed left the impression that the Mehdi Army would not be much of a factor. By the time of the Samarra incident, however, the group had swelled in size to approximately 50,000 men - and it had radically improved their training. The result was a series of offensives, many of them bloody witch-hunts for Sunnis that established the Mehdi Army as the country's most powerful indigenous armed entity; only American support gave the official security forces more authority.
When the cease-fire was declared in August 2007, therefore, another front-line belligerent left the field, further reducing the level of violence - and this at almost exactly the same time as U.S. troop numbers were reaching the levels authorized by the surge.
Number three: At around the same time, the consequences of sectarian fighting had removed one of the factors that made it so intense, namely the physical proximity of Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods and families. Around 5 million and 7 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes since 2003. A little better than 2 million have left the country altogether but most of these remain relatively close by, predominantly in Syria and Jordan. The rest are internally displaced persons who have fled mixed areas for the perceived safety of more homogeneous ones. These mass departures mean that there are fewer Iraqi sharing space with others who want to kill them.
This is good news for the short term, but it is no long-term solution for the country's internal divisions: Separation wrought by ethnic cleansing is hardly a recipe for national stability, especially if the respite affords all sides an opportunity to build up their respective arsenals amid continuing political discord among the parties that represent them.
All of these reasons appear to have escaped the U.S. presidential campaign, and the paucity of intelligent argument is not just a loss for those excited by academic debates about who was right in the past: It is also a missed opportunity to prevent additional hardships in the future because none of these contributing factors is permanent - and a reversal on any one of them could turn the others around as well, sparking a new and perhaps even deadlier war.
*Published in Lebanon's THE DAILY STAR on October 20, 2008. John Smith is a freelance journalist who has covered the Middle East since the late 1990s. |
