More on the Surge and the Political Realities of Iraq

This week has been an unmitigated disaster for McCain in the foreign policy arena, supposedly the source of his greatest advantage. Apart from the Maliki government asserting its opinion that US troops should begin preparations for withdrawal, McCain exhibited quite ably his inability to grasp anything in international relations beyond that of 'gut feeling,' a reality that became more clear each time McCain tried to walk back his previous statements.

After expressing anachronistic support for the efficacy of the Surge, McCain was forced to create a new history, explaining that the Surge was actually just a term employed to describe a general counterinsurgency strategy that began well before anybody thought to mention it. A nice try, but an argument that simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny, like most of McCain's policy statements. The term 'Surge' has been used from the start to describe the increase in US troops beginning in February 2007, to go back and retroactively apply the term to a overarching strategy post mortem flies in the face of 17 months of use.

But even if we allow for a midstream change of definition, McCain's claim that "the Surge has succeeded" doesn't hold up under his own definition of the term.

By controlling the violence, we can pave the way for a political settlement. Once the government wields greater authority, however, Iraqi leaders must take significant steps on their own. These include a commitment to go after the militias, a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, a more equitable distribution of government resources, provincial elections that would bring Sunnis and the government, and a large increase in employment-generating economic projects.

In other words, the true aim of the Surge was exactly what Barack Obama and everyone else has been saying it was, political reconciliation, and on that front the Iraqis have failed miserably. They've pushed back provincial elections into next year, the country is still a broken arrangement of fiefdoms, and there is still no plan for dispersement of oil money to name just a few shortcomings.

The Maliki government has indeed gone after militias, most notably in Basra, but even that operation failed to achieve a pure strategic victory, as the most recent issue of Newsweek examines in a profile of the governor of Basra, Mohammed Waeli. Waeli exemplifies the ambiguities of enemies and allies that both Bush and McCain declare they ignore in favor of a 'gut' approach to foreign policy. On paper, Waeli, as a government official, is a friend of the US and Maliki and a ally in the fight against insurgents and Iran. In reality, he is an opportunist who has made millions off of oil smuggling and overseen the transformation of Basra from relatively liberal (for the Middle East) into a Shiite fundamentalist city indicative of Iranian influence throughout eastern and southern Iraq.

Even as Maliki and the US forces must concern themselves with insurgents from the street, they must also battle officials like Waeli who have carved out a profitable niche and will be reluctant to give it up in favor of political reconciliation. Waeli is an indication of the realities facing the country as a whole, a vast, diverse collection of power centers resistant to becoming part of a united whole. The number of US troops in Iraq has little bearing on solving that core issue.

If the past week has been an illustration of anything, it's that McCain is trying to make up for lost time by showing that he has the ability to grasp the intricacies of real-world conflicts and put away his past reliance on blanket statements and assessments of good versus evil. Unfortunately for him, every time he rolls out a new theory, facts and history shoot it down rather hastily.


Related:

McCain's Foreign Policy Illiteracy, July 22
Iraq Withdrawal: Clutching at Straws, July 22

Sphere: Related Content

Tangible Evidence of McCain's Foreign Policy Illiteracy

Pointing out every gaffe and misstep along the campaign trail doesn't particularly interest me, but as the one contained in John McCain's interview with Katie Couric today speaks volumes about his lack of basic understanding in Iraq I'll break my own (unwritten) rule.

As I've said before, pointing to the "success" of the Surge is a tactic employed purely out of a desire to wipe discussion of the initial decision to invade Iraq from polite discourse, for obvious reasons. As Obama and others, including myself, understand, there were numerous factors to the drop in violence in Iraq, and the drop itself preceded the Surge by several months.

One of these factors was the Sunni Awakening, a resistance to AQI activities in Anbar province aided by both American funds and a legitimate frustration with militant actions. John McCain tried to tie this together today, at long last.

Couric: Senator McCain, Sen. Obama says, while the increased number of U.S. troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?

McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane (phonetic) was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.

McCain apparently thinks the last clause seals all debate, but alas, history is indeed set on the timeline here: The Anbar Awakening was declared in progress in September of 2006, two months before the subject of escalation was even broached and fore before the President's State of the Union in which it was announced. The Sunni Awakening is indeed a matter of history, Mr. McCain, just not your version. As Juan Cole explains, few Surge troops ever made it to Anbar:

The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?"

Before the Surge, the US still had more than 100,000 soldiers (not counting private mercenaries) in Iraq, to say that 30,000 more were solely responsible for pacifying the entire country flies in the face of credulity. It's simply not plausible that other factors -- the Awakening, the Mahdi Army cease fire to name a couple -- did not play a role.

Here again McCain illustrates rather clearly that his reputation regarding foreign policy bears little resemblance to his actual grasp of the subject. Mistaking which country borders which (Iraq-Pakistan) or mentioning the name of a country that no longer exists (Czechoslovakia) are generic missteps that don't add up in the long run. Exhibiting a continual failure to grasp even the most obvious realities and enduring lack of historical literacy, however, paint a much broader picture. Namely, that John McCain's entire foreign policy rests on his ability to talk tough and pray that nobody asks him to explain anything.

Sphere: Related Content

Surge II: Afghanistan

The Surge in Iraq was successful in two respects. First, it did coincide, coincidental or causal I'm not sure, with a drop in violence in Iraq. Second, it injected new life into proponents of the war, who by now have very little to stand on in the way of rational thought. By throwing out the red herring of the Surge, the administration was able to point to its moderate successes as a way of directing attention away from the vast array of failures of its Iraq adventure, failures which persist regardless of the attention paid to them.

Where the Surge failed, however, was in accomplishing its stated goal. The tempering of violence was meant as a vehicle for achieving its true aim, which was stabilization of the government. From the American perspective, this meant allowing Maliki the time to push the undesirable political factions out so that democratic principles could not be applied to them in the upcoming (maybe) provincial elections. While the Surge did witness the return of Sunni politicians to Parliament, Iraq is no closer to ceasing to be a "collection of different fiefdoms controlled by warlords," thus signaling the Surge failed in achieving its central goal.

Luckily for the Bush administration, no one is paying attention to the political front, including the Messiah himself, who this weekend wiped his website clear of criticism of the Surge. Apparently, after 100s of thousands of Iraqis have met their demise, a slower pace over several months and all will be forgiven. Downturn in violence or not, those Iraqis remain deceased and the country's infrastructure remains ashambles, well after the taxpayers granted engineering firms billions to fix it. Pointing to the minor success of the Surge is to disregard all the miserable failures that came before, and to grant the term 'success' to simply a slower pace of devastation seems a misuse of the term.

Both Presidential candidates are so enamored with the blinding PR victory that they're calling for a reprise in Afghanistan, which for anyone paying attention has regressed to the point it was circa October 2001. To Obama's credit, he has continuously pointed to Afghanistan as "the real front in the War on Terror," so his call for 10,000 more troops comes as a natural offshoot of his campaign.

McCain, however, made today his first acceptance of that point, his first attempt to perhaps admit that Iraq never was about terrorism and was always an economic endeavor. This change of direction of course comes only after the administration signaled it was okay by insinuating it may do the same last week.

But spoiling the self-congratulatory party are some pesky facts, differences between the two situations. If the most abject failure of American foreign policy is to apply cookie-cutter policies to the world as if its inhabitants were a homogeneous sample and transposable over any region, both McCain and Obama exhibit similar failures in attempting to apply the same tactics used in Iraq to Afghanistan.

The most glaring difficulty is that the Taliban stronghold they seek to root out is not in Afghanistan, but Pakistan. Thus, regardless of the number of troops stationed in Afghanistan, whether increased by 10 or 50 thousand, the same issue of Pakistani sovereignty exists. The Pakistani government has shown no willingness to allow NATO forces to conduct cross-border raids, so any suggestion that the Surge forces would do so would come as an affront to the wishes of our 'ally.'

Musharraf's hold on power grows weaker by the day, which has led to the Pakistanis remaining lax on raids in the FATA and NWP in order to avoid stoking a fire which might drive him from the seat of government. Allowing NATO to conduct itself in Pakistan with autonomy would surely be unpopular among the populace and put Musharraf in greater peril.

The other wrench thrown into the rhetorical cog is the ISI, Pakistan's Intelligence force. Karzai's government is convinced that the ISI is interfering in his country, and responsible for the attempts on his life as well as several bombings, including the recent bombing of the Indian embassy. In other words, Pakistan is engaging in everything Iran is chastised for in Iraq. These are no small obstacles for McCain or Obama.

Unless the two are willing to address the tangible differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, any suggestions involving a Surge in Afghanistan should be regarded as mere rhetorical flair. Neither has illustrated any effort to address Pakistan's role in the deteriorating situation, and until such time as they do, the Surge is a promise without hope for fulfillment.

Related:

Pakistan Stops Fighting Militants, May 18
Nir Rosen: Iraq a Collection of Fiefdoms, April 5
GAO: US Lacks a Plan in Afghanistan, April 20

Sphere: Related Content

Nir Rosen Goes Off Message

As the President eagerly awaited his mouthpieces' appearance on Capitol Hill next week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on progress in Iraq involving un-embedded individuals, including Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America Foundation. Rosen, unlike the other testifiers in this and next weeks' hearings, has spent the majority of the last five years outside the Green Zone in Iraq and speaks Arabic.

This administration and its supporters in the media continue to portray the conflict in Iraq as a battle between good and evil, light and dark. Nowhere is this more evident than the assessment of the failed military endeavor undertaken by the Maliki government last week. Former Press Secretary Tony Snow exemplifies this fallacy by claiming, "What happened was the bad guys backed down because they were getting crushed! … Moqtada al-Sadr is in hiding in Iran. That’s how tough it is."

Ignore of course that al Sadr has been in Iraq for reasons unrelated to the recent fighting. Or, for that matter, that al Maliki's domicile prior to Saddam's ouster was none other than Iran, but the point here, as I said earlier this week, is that claiming that a government which had the tenets of the cease fire dictated to it, accomplished not a single aim of its operation, and showed itself increasingly reliant on Iran's influence is far from a clear victor.

Juan Cole:

For the Iraqi government to depend on Badr and Peshmerga militias, however, weakens its independence and makes it hostage to allies of Iran (both Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq and a Kurdish leader, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, have close relations with the Iranian ayatollahs.) So not only did Iran gain stature and authority in Iraq by negotiating a (fragile) ceasefire between al-Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr, but al-Maliki has is now more than ever dependent on Iranian clients.

While Snow and his counterparts continue to fantasize about the world as they want to see it, in the schoolyard environment of clear delineations and demarcations of good and evil, the world goes on as it is. Iraq is not a battle between two factions, it is, in the words of Nir Rosen, "a collection of different fiefdoms controlled by warlords."

Rosen speaking to Amy Goodman:

First of all, the Iraqi government doesn’t matter. It has no power. And it doesn’t matter who you put in there. He’s not going to have any power. Baghdad doesn’t really matter, except for Baghdad. Baghdad used to be the most important city in Iraq, and whoever controlled Baghdad controlled Iraq. These days, you have a collection of city states: Mosul, Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Irbil, Sulaymaniyah. Each one is virtually independent, and they have their own warlords and their own militias. And what happens in Baghdad makes no difference.

On Friday, al Maliki again took the stance of the clear victor:

Iraq's prime minister on Friday ordered a nationwide freeze on raids against suspected Shiite militants after the leader of the biggest militia complained that arrests were continuing even after he ordered fighters off the streets.

The announcement was a major shift from comments Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made a day earlier, and came after Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr — whose Mahdi Army militia fought government troops in the southern city of Basra and in Baghdad last week — hinted at retaliation if arrests of his followers did not stop.

A victory so thorough and unambiguous that the leader of the country is still beholden to the will of the defeated.

Last week's debacle for US aims aside, Rosen's testimony slaughters a few more Bush, Petraeus, and Crocker sacred cows.

Regarding the success of the surge:

So one of the main reason less people are being killed is because there are less people to kill. This is a key to understanding the drop in violence. Shiites were cleansed from Sunni areas and Sunnis were cleansed from Shiite areas. Militias consolidated their control over fiefdoms. The violence in Iraq was not senseless, it was meant to displace the enemy’s population. And if war is politics by other means, then the Shiites won, they now control Iraq. Fortunately for the planners of the new strategy, events in the Iraqi civil war were working in their favor. The Sunnis had lost. They realized they could no longer fight the Americans and the Shiites, and many decided to side with the Americans, especially because many Sunnis identified their Shiite enemy with Iran, America’s sworn enemy as well.

Surely he meant that people willing to martyr themselves in the name of a cause saw a couple thousand more troops in and around Baghdad and gave up, right?

The Government of Iraq is dominated by sectarian Shiite Islamist parties. They also dominate the security forces which often targeted Sunni civilians for cleansing. The Government and Security Forces also worry about the empowered Sunni militias who they will one day have to fight again. As we saw last week, rival Shiite militias are also bitter enemies. The clashes throughout Shiite areas of Iraq were not between the Mahdi Army bad guys and the Iraqi government good guys. They were between more nationalist and populist, and popular, Shiite militias who reject the occupation and are opposed to federalism and on the other side the Shiite militias such as Badr who collaborate with the Americans and are competing for power, territory, resources and votes with the Mahdi Army. The Iraqi security forces are divided in their loyalties and hence the Iraqi Army units that fought in the south were recruited from areas where they were more likely to be loyal to the Iraqi Supreme Islamic Council, formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and its Badr militia. (Emphasis mine)

Indeed, as the US presents a case for withdrawal contingent upon a strengthening of the Iraqi security forces, it becomes increasingly clear that these forces are far from a bastion of light in a sea of darkness.

Rosen, on the state of the Iraqi National Police:

I met Iraqi National Police officers who complained to me that all their men were loyal to the Mahdi Army and their commanders were loyal to the Mahdi Army or the Badr militia. If they were suspected of disloyalty to the Shiite militias their own men informed on them and the Mahdi Army threatened them with the knowledge of their superior officers

The New York Times reports that "more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts during the inconclusive assault against Shiite militias in Basra last week," and al Maliki then filled the void with members of the Badr militia. Further evidence to both the influence of Shiite militias in the security and government sectors and the further affront to Sunnis who already view the government as a Shiite-led tool of an "Iranian occupation."

Proponents of the surge will certainly try to convey that a vacation of US troops will create a power vacuum in their upcoming testimony. While a US withdrawal will undoubtedly result in a rise in violence, the implication that there is a tenable point at which such a relationship would not exist is fallacious.

The power vacuum was created long ago, in April 2003. As Rosen insists--and he's been there enough to gauge--Iraq is already bereft of a centralized government. Al Maliki doesn't control the state of affairs any more than al Sadr or al Hakim. The US hitches itself to his coattails out of necessity, as he is representative of its perceived commitment to democracy. But it was the nationalist al Sadr and the Sunni boycott of the elections that led to his rise, and in time it will be al Sadr who stands long after al Maliki has become even more irrelevant.

In the current political arena, to say that al Sadr is stronger than al Maliki will be portrayed as somehow rooting for the wrong side. Rooting interests don't affect reality, though, no matter how hard Bush, Patraeus, or Crocker try. All the cheerleading and grandstanding in the world hasn't propelled al Maliki to competency yet and there's no reason to support a willfully-blind, ridiculously-optimistic assessment of Iraqi affairs that fails to include reality at any point.

If there's one thing to take from the events of the last two weeks, it's that there aren't two sides, and this isn't a choice between good and evil. What began as inter-sect ethnic cleansing has evolved into an intra-sect power grab. The sooner the United States changes the narrative from Hollywood script to murky reality, the sooner we can begin rational discussion which includes the often-blurred lines of real-world affairs.

Sphere: Related Content

If the President Spoke and No One Was There to Hear Him, Would He Still Be Full of Crap?

After months of being assaulted with the insurgent falsehood that "the surge is working" by the President, his administration, and his new BFF, John McCain, it seems that Muqtada al Sadr has thrown a wrench into their new reality. Or so you would think.

To hear Bush tell it, that violence you're hearing about in Basra and the Green Zone, it never happened. And if you don't believe that, well then consider that the renewed attacks are actually a good thing.

Concerning the efficacy of the surge in the first place, the decrease in violence was attributable to many factors, the greatest of which certainly wasn't a couple thousand more troops. The cease-fire called for by al Sadr last August is arguably the most significant factor, taking his formidable Mahdi army (militia) out of the equation. You take the largest Shiite faction and outspoken opponent of the Maliki government off the table and that violence was reduced should come as no surprise.

Additionally, it has been well-publicized that the US government is paying off a large number of Sunni (former) insurgents to not attack us. Of course, they don't call them Temporarily-Bribed Noncombatants, they call them the Concerned Local Citizens.

Another aspect of the drop in violence--one that people seem loathe to address--is the pure logistics of the sectarian violence. Upon the fall of the Hussein regime, sectarian killings were easy due to the mixed neighborhoods which bred close proximity and accessibility. Five years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, sectarian killings have become harder because the population is mostly segregated along Sunni/Shia lines. That is, it's literally harder to find people to kill (that aren't protected by their own kind.)

So, clearly there is a number of ingredients to the mirage of success, but an increase in troops isn't high on the list of most significant. That said, somehow Gen. Petraeus has become an untouchable among the US government and media, and to question the success of the surge pure blasphemy.

Then came the week of March 24:

Is 'success' of US surge about to unravel?

Clashes spread as US, Iraqi forces attack Shiite Militia

From the first link:

A cease-fire critical to the improved security situation in Iraq appeared to unravel Monday when a militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr began shutting down neighborhoods in west Baghdad and issuing demands of the central government.

Simultaneously, in the strategic southern port city of Basra, where Sadr's Mahdi militia is in control, the Iraqi government launched a crackdown in the face of warnings by Sadr's followers that they'll fight government forces if any Sadrists are detained. By 1 a.m. Arab satellite news channels reported clashes between the Mahdi Army and police in Basra.

That this renewed violence by Sadr's loyalists is generally considered as a less-than-full-scale rollback of the cease-fire should scare supporters of the the efficacy of the surge. If this is only a slight upturn, the likelihood of the Iraqi forces pushing back successfully against a full-scale onslaught is extremely low.

Basra is Iraq's only port city and contains 80 percent of the country's oil reserves. Not a small tactical region by any stretch.

But when life hands President Bush lemons:

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will provide more details about the progress of the surge when they testify before Congress early next month. But this much is clear: The surge is doing what it was designed to do. It's helping Iraqis reclaim security and restart political and economic life. It is bringing America closer to a key strategic victory in the war against these extremists and radicals.

On the security side, the surge has brought important gains, which I discussed in detail last week in a speech at the Pentagon. In Baghdad, we've worked with Iraqi security forces to greatly diminish the sectarian violence and civilian deaths. We've broken the grip of al Qaida on the capital. We've weakened the influence of Iranian-backed militias. We've dramatically improved security conditions in many devastated neighborhoods in what some have deemed a "re-liberation."

In Anbar Province -- which 18 months ago was declared "lost" to al Qaeda -- we joined with (read: paid off) the brave local sheiks who launched the first large-scale Arab uprising against al Qaeda.

This speech was given Thursday, as the situation in Iraq deteriorated into chaos. As that Shiite militia that we've rendered impotent interrupted the functions of government and daily life. As significant instability spread to the all-important oil-exporting port town of Basra.

Besides the obvious unwillingness to look at the situation as it is, and not as he wishes, President Bush continues to stress the impact of al Qaeda at every opportunity. This repetition is clearly his effort to continuously conflate al Qaeda and Iraq as retroactive justification for the war, despite ample evidence that no such relationship existed prior to the US occupation.

While spending plenty of time on al Qaeda--not the group responsible for the most recent uprising--in his speech Thursday, Bush mentions al Sadr and his Mahdi militia by name precisely zero times.

That omission is no accident. The actual situation on the ground is of no significance to Bush. All that matters is his continued desire to make this debate about al Qaeda even when the facts belie his case. No one can read a speech that doesn't once name the actual root of the violence, yet centers on a rival group, and suggest that he has any other goal in mind.

The surge isn't working. It never was. Al Sadr was calling the shots from the beginning, and, admit it or not, this administration knows it.

-------------

Update (3/27, 1915):

Glen Greenwald points to this prophetic article from February in the The Guardian predicting the very outbreak of violence that now threatens Basra.

This indicates two distinct options: One, that Dan Smith, a newspaper reporter, has better intelligence and a firmer grasp on the situation than the US government. Or, two, the US government is not being particularly honest about the reality of the situation.

Sphere: Related Content