Seeds of Conflict

Alissa Rubin and Damien Cave of The New York Times take a good hard look at the Sunni "awakening" strategy and how, shockingly enough, a policy of handing out cash, training and guns to whoever's willing to work with us could wind up backfiring:

How, when thousands are joining each month, can spies and extremists be reliably weeded out? How can the men’s loyalty be maintained, given their tribal and sectarian ties, and in many cases their insurgent pasts? And crucially, how can the movement be sustained once the Americans turn over control to a Shiite-dominated government that has been wary, and sometimes hostile, toward the groups?

Despite the successes of the movement, including the members’ ability to provide valuable intelligence and give rebuilding efforts a new chance in war-shattered communities, the American military acknowledges that it is also a high-risk proposition. It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain the seeds of a civil war — in which, if the worst fears come true, the United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives and dollars have been spent.

Yes, right, exactly. In a society full of rival armed factions contending for power, you can't achieve peace by just building opportunistic alliances with a whole bunch of separate factions. If our commanders and troops are nimble enough -- and they very well might be, as they've demonstrated a good deal of nimbleness recently -- they may be able to keep playing this dangerous game and keeping the US deployment viable, but it doesn't really achieve anything. Achieve anything, that is, beyond a welcome reduction in American casualites. But going home would reduce casualties further, faster, and cheaper.

Comments

Politics is not much different from war: in both enterprises, one should never lose sight of the ultimate goals, and should engage in pitched battles only when they are likely to bring one significantly closer to one's strategic aims. Otherwise, it's best to avoid combat. America lacks the political will at this point to decisively pull out of Iraq, and any political struggle to accomplish such a pullout would entail greater costs than it is worth. The best bet is the Clinton/Obama approach: rapid cuts in troops and a de-emphasis of the importance of the mission, accompanied by a lot of blather about a "new paradigm" that "builds on our already proven successes". This should be accompanied by dramatic foreign policy initiatives elsewhere, to shift the media's focus away from any deteriorations in Iraq that may ensue.

The approach should be similar to the way experienced politicians kill programs or departments they don't like. They don't go all out for a bill to abolish the program. They just gradually take away its personnel and its funding, and try to make sure nobody talks about it anymore. And if anybody asks, they say they remain committed to the mission and that nothing could be more important than ensuring its success.

Posted by brooksfoe | December 23, 2007 11:38 AM

It's a good strategy; if I were the King of the US of A I would've been doing exactly the same.

When you have a lawless province in your domain, you want to divide your adversaries and trick them into fighting each other for as long as possible, until they bleed each other out and ask for your patronage. So, you always support the weaker factions against the strongest one. It's very simple, really.

Posted by abb1 | December 23, 2007 12:13 PM

Yeah, I thought "get the natives to fight each other" was Imperialism 101.

Posted by Heathcliff | December 23, 2007 12:37 PM

"How, when thousands are joining each month, can spies and extremists be reliably weeded out?"

This is a challenge that also applies for the Iraqi national army, but no one has argued that Iraq shouldn't have an army.

"The best bet is the Clinton/Obama approach: rapid cuts in troops and a de-emphasis of the importance of the mission, accompanied by a lot of blather about a "new paradigm" that "builds on our already proven successes"."

Rapid cuts in troops would risk reversing recent security gains, and 'blather' about building on proven successes would sound like just that from members of the party that was calling the surge a failure a month after it began. Had Dems taken credit for the surge initially -- and they could have plausibly argued that their political pressure forced Bush to change strategies -- they would be in a position now to take credit for the current progress. Instead, they listed to their base and tried, unsuccessfully, to legislate retreat and defeat. A Dem President's best tack next year would be to continue the successful Bush/Petraeus/Crocker policy and try not to talk about Iraq, to reduce the cognitive dissonance.

Posted by Fred | December 23, 2007 12:38 PM

Ah, conservatives love giving away cash to people for doing nothing.

If we're going to splash the cash, putting a large percentages of the Sunnis on the (U.S.) public dole, perhaps I could get a cool million. I promise never to be a bother again.

They hate us for our freedoms but love us for our duplicity.

Posted by mcd | December 23, 2007 1:08 PM

A Dem President's best tack next year would be to continue the successful Bush/Petraeus/Crocker policy and try not to talk about Iraq, to reduce the cognitive dissonance.

Ah, the ultimate concern trolling moment. This is what Democrats did in 2002 -- not talk about Iraq because they assumed it would be a success for the Bush administration -- and of course it bombed electorally.

It's even more true now; there has been no actual "progress" in Iraq, since "progress" would mean that we can draw down troops and get out. (And of course, since the surge caused Iraq violence to spike through August, the September-December drop in violence has to be balanced with the extra thousands killed by the failure of the surge.)

The Democrats may indeed follow the concern-troll strategy and stop talking about Iraq, but if they do, they'll lose as they always do when they don't talk about Iraq. This is because the only people who consider Iraq a success are people like Fred who want America to be defeated and humiliated by an eternal presence in Iraq; normal people know that unless you want America to withdraw from Iraq, you want failure for America. Democrats lose when they stand for failure, and the only way to avoid failure is to leave Iraq.

Posted by M.A. | December 23, 2007 1:11 PM

Good post by Fred.
The Democrats killed themselves by refusing to acknowledge that the Surge was a bold change in direction, Rumsfeld'd firing - all were victories for them - and instead foolishly listened to their Far Left and declared Democrats wouldn't win until we lost the war, our troops running in retreat under fire. They had victory and turned their back on Bush's commupance by holding out for American defeat and total Bush humiliation as goals.

MY's care and concern about the poor, poor Shiites that might be attacked by the people their death squads targeted is noted. But well-armed, separated neighbors tend to be peaceful neighbors, globally. Certain levels of sectarian fighting and population moves are unavoidable when a pseudo-nation like British India, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Iraq has the independence to sort out preferred areas for people to live. Sometimes you get civil war and partition with violence, sometimes you get peaceful federalism, sometimes you even get peaceful partition like with the Soviet Empire and Czech-Slovakia. But Iraq sorting out its affairs is inevitable and arming populace so they can defend themselves historically shows a reduced death toll over giving a dictator of the majority or minority in a land with ethnic strife the monopoly on the use of deadly force.

Besides helping the Iraqis avoid a more deadly internal war where the dictator has all the guns - allying with the Sunnis has helped OUR American interests.

1. Less US deaths, less civilian deaths we helped cause by keeping the Sunnis out of the legitimate gov't mix.

2. More pressure on Malaki and other Iranian stooges to negotiate sharing of power and oil revenue.

3. The US-Sunni alliance has been absolutely lethal on Al Qaeda. We have destroyed bin Laden's Central Front of Holy War. Without cover and allies, the AQ Jihadis have been fingered, isolated from the population, slaughtered in the thousands by US firepower and we have captured over 2,000.
Besides the battlefield defeat, we found new means of backtracking the Islamoids, and have huge intel on the group now. AQ did not have the great operational security it could manage with a sucker-punch shot like 9/11 that only involved 40 of the Islamoids as actual plot participants. When they desperately cleaned out cells in Europe, N Africa, ME to get fighters into Iraq, they exposed their logistics, finance, recruiting people plus cellmates left behind. We found out what Mosques they organized at and who the recruits tend to be (well-off university students, not poor peasants)
Nothing we have done since 9/11 has hurt AQ as much as Iraq did.
The final blow to the Islamoids is that Iraqi Sunnis are now telling the Muslim world that Al Qaeda is worse than the infidel. Americans are not that bad, the message goes, though they should go ----but AQ is bad. Perhaps as bad as Jews, the Sunni reasoning goes...

4. The success of the Surge has helped force Iran to stop shipping sniper rifles, IEDs, EFPs in to kill Americans on the cheap. The Iranians with knowledge the Leftist American Jews, liberal Democrats were unwilling to fight them, thought Bush was helpless and it was a great opportunity to take pot shots at GIs and kill hundreds of USA guys with impunity. But the Iranians saw that they and their Iraqi stooges could be the next targets of the Surge with the Sunni areas pacified, and they intelligently stopped their covert war to kill Americans when they could.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 23, 2007 1:31 PM

Democrats lose when they stand for failure, and the only way to avoid failure is to leave Iraq.
Posted by M.A.

No, they lose when American voters see Democrats siding with and sympathizing with the "sacred rights" of the enemy and conclude they cannot be trusted with the nation's defense.

It's even more true now; there has been no actual "progress" in Iraq, since "progress" would mean that we can draw down troops and get out. - M.A.

Only Lefties with no military experience measure "progress" by numbers of military resources we have in the combat theater. Typically, forces in war build up on the winning side and attrit on the losing side as a harbinger of coming victory.
And with classic insurgencies, only when insurgencies are under control does meaningful reduction in forces take place - as in the Brit victories and in what military historians now call the brilliant Creighton Abrams-Richard Nixon "Vietnamization" campaign which US Lefties, media then undermined and caused the defeat
of America...

normal people know that unless you want America to withdraw from Iraq, you want failure for America.M.A.

By normal people I assume you just mean ACLU Jews, AQ sympathizers, enemy rights lovers, and craven weak people emotionally overwhelmed by the light American casualties they read about that think with their hearts, not their brains.

(More US military died each year in Jimmy Carter's peacetime Army than in Iraq each year and all to absolutely no Lefty, ACLU Jew blubbering about our poor, dead children in uniform)

Normal people who once supported the Iraq War 70%-to -30% turned against it not because the war was a wholly bad idea, but because the postwar was horribly bungled by Bush, Rumsfeld, Bremer, and the shithead Shiites running a dysfunctional central government.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 23, 2007 1:48 PM

...and how, shockingly enough, a policy of handing out cash, training and guns to whoever's willing to work with us could wind up backfiring

Isn't that how we wound up with al Qaeda in the first place???

Posted by Roddy McCorley | December 23, 2007 2:04 PM

Although we were manipulated by Bush administration neocons into trashing Iraq unnecessarily to benefit Israel, the irony is that we have since morphed into Syria and must now stay in Iraq to prevent all-out civil war bloodbaths. This is identical to the role Syria played in Lebanon at the time of its civil war. Although most Americans now oppose the war and occupation, they don't want a repeat of Vietnam, where we left the place in a bloody mess. Piecing together today's NY Times report and General Petraeus' remarks to Chris Wallace (Fox News Sunday) today, it's clear we'll be in Iraq a very long time. We are arming both sides so they can defend their homes and families, but since neither side trusts the other, it's unlikely that they will unify; thus, we must stay so that they don't fight each other. It's a thankless job. The lesson is: don't let Zionist neocons manipulate us into another war.

Posted by Courtney Squires | December 23, 2007 2:14 PM

Chris, what is 'islamoid'? Is it something like 'kike' and 'nigger'? Could you explain, please.

And while at it, could you give us a similar derogatory term for who you are, so we can use it when addressing you, please.

Thanks.

Posted by abb1 | December 23, 2007 2:22 PM

What I find fascinating is that the Chris Ford crowd has decided that part and parcel of "winning" is "protecting our right and duty to engage in torture."

It's not that opposing torture has become a trope to paint Democrats as weak with, it's become that supporting torture has become a litmus test of "toughness" with the radical Republicans. This indicates to me that they are slowly driving themselves off a cliff... because that sort of political culture can't thrive in a first-world democratic country.

Posted by Tyro | December 23, 2007 2:24 PM

What about the benefit of allowing us to fight "al Qaeda in Iraq?" Unlike the rest of the people in Iraq, whose only beef with us is that they want us to leave, the stated policy of al Qaeda in Iraq is to fight against the United States globally, not just in Iraq.

We intercepted a note indicating that al Qaeda in Iraq is worried about losing members if we leave Iraq. Some (most?) members of al Qaeda in Iraq joined the group in order to defend an Islamic country (Iraq) from a non-Islamic country (the United States). These members would simply go home if we left Iraq.

The view of the leadership is that the United States is engaged in a long term war against Islam, and that to stop fighting just because the United States withdrew from Iraq would be foolishly naive.

The bottom line is that if we now, al Qaeda in Iraq will probably be weakened but will remain a viable organization. Based on that, it seems to me that our current strategy of fighting al Qaeda in Iraq now is at least plausibly our best option.

Granting that Iraq is going to be a mess when we leave, whether we leave now or five years from now, is it never the less in our interest to stay and attempt to defeated al Qaeda in Iraq?

Posted by Kenneth Almquist | December 23, 2007 4:22 PM

Kenneth, the brunt of Al qaeda is and has been in Pakistan since the Bushies looked the other way and let Osama bin Laden and his core group escape. And they've been there now since 2001. And what have they done? They've aided various attacks in Europe and Morocco. That's it. And what have we done? Squat. We have given immense amount of money to a dictator in Pakistan who is supposed to pretend to chase Al Qaeda. And we've watched Al qaeda help rebuild the Taliban.

Now, according to your logic, we are in the wrong country. We should be fighting in Pakistan, no?

But we aren't, for the good reason that our chance to fight Al qaeda on that level flickered out in 2002, due to the idiocy of the Bush White House and their twin policy of using Al Qaeda as a politically charged threat and their idea of invading Iraq, the latter of which had nothing to do with terrorism.

I'm sure that if we decided to invade, say, Yemen, it would give a jumpstart to Al Qaeda in Yemen. And strategy would make the same turn - americans would flight blindly, use a lot of technology, pretend to support some Yemeni proxy, and eventually surrender to a number of tribes in order to really fight Al qaeda. If you want to fight Al Qaeda to the death, we've finished in Iraq - we have the proxies to do it. That those proxies will probably end up fighting the Shi'a dominated government and spill a lot more Iraqi blood -which is up there past 675,000 dead so far - makes it seem like America's strategy was a gross, immoral farce so far, measured by the interests of the country we are occupying.

So if anything, all the recent exhaustion in fighting associated with the surge does not make it look like we should stay in Iraq. It makes getting out now the preferable option. Maybe the next president can actually focus on Afghanistan enough to keep it from falling to the Taliban or becoming the generator of an enlarged Islamicist threat. In the end, the U.S. just might have to negotiate that. Continuing to keep a U.S. force in Iraq is just a waste, either way.

Posted by roger | December 23, 2007 7:14 PM

I agree with Fred and Ken Almquist, and recognize a number of valid points in Chris Ford's and some other posts. A few additional thoughts:

--Any reasonably accurate appreciation of the war in Iraq needs to begin with the fact that it started, with full legal bells and whistles, in 1991. Whatever criticisms the Bush Administration deserves, and they are many, they did not gin this conflict up out of thin air after 9/11, and blinkered partisans who behave as if they did are a distraction from the important considerations.

--Unlike Vietnam, where we had no vital interests beyond those we damaged by losing, Iraq is the keystone state in the region producing most of the oil and most of the terrorists. We simply must succeed there, and it's realistic to think more in terms of South Korea as an analogy if one must analogize. An Iraq in any of several possible configurations that is reasonably stable, reasonably democratic, reasonably pro-Western, at peace with its neighbors, not beavering away on wmd's, and pumping oil, would represent a major victory for the US and the larger civilized world.

--The greatest source of genuine terrorist danger to the US is not Afghanistan or Pakistan, or even Iraq (assuming that we don't give them The Mother of All Propaganda Victories by defeating ourselves and running away), but European cities. We need to be actively engaged with our allies to roll up networks of jihadists there who are well-financed and supported, throughly radicalized, and who in many cases have passports with which they can travel visa-free to the US.

--John McCain is the leading expert on torture among the American leadership, and he should be followed faithfully here. We don't need torture, and in fact need to make it explicitly clear that it is illegal. We can get all the intelligence we need, and of a much higher quality, by the patient and diligent pursuit of legal interrogation techniques.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 24, 2007 4:08 AM

The concerns about the potential problems with sponsoring Sunni militias are massive and well founded. At the same time, even with all those issues, I think it's pretty clear that the current situation is a real improvement over the status quo ante.

I find it slightly encouraging that, in addition to having (finally) adopted a somewhat more sensible approach to the insurgency, at least some of the US military leadership seems to have (finally) acquired a reasonable grasp of the potential pitfalls of their approach, and of the overall situation in Iraq. That's a positive change from the obvious nonsense I'd gotten accustomed to hearing during the first few years; i.e. the moronic idea that taking Fallujah would "break the back of the insurgency," and so forth.

Posted by N | December 24, 2007 8:06 AM

Although, as mentioned by Courtney Squires above, (12/23 2:15 PM) we are now re-playing Syria's previous peacekeeping role in Lebanon, it would be far better to have an international Muslim peace-keeping force, which would not serve as a magnet for anti-American Islamic terrorists. As pointed out in the Iraq Study Group Report, co-operation with neighboring Muslim states depends upon our wider diplomatic initiatives, especially the Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations. Unfortunately, as reported in today's New York Times, Israel both rejects a Hamas peace offer and is also set on settlement expansion, especially in Jerusalem. Indeed, it is our association with Israel's rogue regime, along with our occupation of Muslim countries, which is the cause of anti-American Islamic terrorism.

Posted by J. E. Dundee | December 24, 2007 9:25 AM

@Chris Ford: You do realize that a group of 'Islamoid' militants, armed, and bearing grudges against an occupying force, might not work be in our best interests, right? Are you willfully ignoring the truism that 'while all AQ are terrorists, not all terrorists are AQ,' and that brand names matter little when it comes to national security? Did you ever stop and think that perhaps, after the AQ 'takfiris' have been wiped out, that the greater numbers of militants produced by the current conflict will coalesce into a group with similar motives to that of AQ, focusing their efforts solely on the 'infidels,' and thereby producing a threat that dwarfs that of AQ itself?

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | December 24, 2007 11:03 AM

As any number of people have pointed out in books and elsewhere, there IS NO military option to defeat terrorism.

It cannot be done militarily BY DEFINITION.

The only exceptions are in relatively rare cases where the terrorist group is small, localized and has no support from the indigenous population - which does not apply to Al Qaeda in any quality.

Even in Iraq, where Al Qaeda IS RELATIVELY small, localized and does not have the support of MOST of the population, Al Qaeda was NOT being destroyed by US military action. It was only hampered when the indigenous militias and tribes turned on them for their own political purposes.

Therefore ANY discussion of expending US forces to "defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq" is simply nonsense.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 25, 2007 7:01 AM