Awakening By Talking

Rich Lowry gets frighteningly reality based: "Part of the success of the surge is that we were talking to Sunni tribesmen and former Saddamists who were doing terrible things in Iraq. When conditions were right (they got sick of al Qaeda, the Shia were killing them, we were there in force), we flipped them. Would anyone now have it any other way?"

I'd say this is an underappreciated point in several directions. But the beginning of wisdom here is to recall that the decision to start negotiating with insurgent leaders was not, in fact, "part of" the surge. It began chronologically prior to the surge and is, of course, logically independent of it. This is something that liberals had been recommending for a long time and conservatives, as is there want, tended to reject the idea out of hand as a form of appeasement. The troop surge was a different idea which, it seems to me, mostly served as a hawkish gesture with the right hand to distract attention from the left hand's dovish move to negotiate with foes.

But be that as it may, the point stands. Even if you think that maintaining a large, indefinite American military presence in Iraq ill-serves our strategic interests, I think there's no denying at this point that the tactical shift toward cutting deals with insurgent leaders has paid dividends in terms of making the presence more sustainable and helping to damage AQI. And this is essentially what liberals are saying about Iran -- that the U.S. can often best advance its interests by setting clear priorities and preparing to negotiate (even with "bad guys") about how to advance our priorities in ways that are consistent with the priorities of other actors.

Comments

Indeed, and noting the actual chronology is important because Lowry is trying to suggest that being "there in force" was somehow a crucial step to making these negotiations possible.

Posted by DTM | June 4, 2008 8:59 AM

I think another key point of the chronology to get is that there has never been any point in this occupation at which insurgents or enemies of any sort in Iraq managed to stand up to successful fight toe-to-toe with American forces. They would cause some havoc, coalition forces would rush in, then they would melt away to cause havoc somewhere else.

When Lowry lists the "right conditions", one of those conditions has been true at all points since 2003. We have always been there in force. That's not the relevant change.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 4, 2008 9:15 AM

The troop surge was a different idea which, it seems to me, mostly served as a hawkish gesture with the right hand to distract attention from the left hand's dovish move

Whatever propaganda aspects the "surge" may have had, it appears to have been militarily necessary to in order to execute Petraeus's COIN strategy. There simply weren't enough soldiers to put in all those outposts.

Posted by Creamy Goodness | June 4, 2008 9:15 AM

Flipped them? Seems more like we just pay them not to cause trouble. I guess that's a form of flipping. Does make you wonder what happens when the money stops flowing.

Posted by Helter | June 4, 2008 9:33 AM

Rich Lowry is a pantywaist.

Posted by Nick Varner's wimpy cousin | June 4, 2008 9:40 AM

That we are even having a debate about whether the negotiating with our foes is inherently a form of appeasement is mind boggling, and a sign of how twisted our foriegn policy consensus is.

Of course, a significant percentage of the people making the argument don't really believe it, and are deploying it merely for political reasons. What is rather frightening is that the relatively few people who really believe the argument seem poised to control decision making in a McCain administration should he be elected.

Of course, from a certain cynical perspective, that is all to the good; a McCain administration, despite potentially horrific short and medium term damage to the world, would at least have the massive benefit of accelerating the decline of American power in the world.

Posted by LarryM | June 4, 2008 9:41 AM

That should be "as is their wont", not "want".

Posted by Grammar Police | June 4, 2008 9:48 AM

and is, of course, logically independent of it

Of course not.

Talking to them only worked when we put enough pressure on them to flip. Did Matthew even read Lowry's post? Maybe Matthew missed the part where Lowry explained that it worked because, among other things, "we were there in force".

Let's face it, on the biggest foreign policy question of the last 4 years - the surge - Matthew (and Obama) blew it. They were completely wrong, and Bush (and us Republicans) were completely right.

Posted by Al | June 4, 2008 10:01 AM

I am tired of hearing about the 'success' of the surge. If it weren't for the militias standing down prior to the surge, our troop increase would only serve to surge the number of deaths in Iraq. So long as our troops are on the ground the country is a tinderbox on the cusp of blowing up in our faces.

Posted by Ricky | June 4, 2008 10:04 AM

Ours has been a pretty standard strategy for imperial ventures in disordered countries without strong central governments. Inject yourself into local quarrels and make alliances with some of the parties against the others. Just ask the Romans in Palestine, or the French in Quebec, or the British in India, etc. Obviously this strategy requires a mixture of diplomacy, bribery, threats and force. It's not clear what relevance this strategy would have to our relations with Iran, unless we first turned Iran into a disordered region without a strong central government, which I don't think Yglesias is suggesting.

Posted by y81 | June 4, 2008 10:08 AM

And of course Al shows up to prove that getting the chronology wrong is indeed crucial to the point Lowry was trying to make.

Posted by DTM | June 4, 2008 10:18 AM

I guess there might be some sort of sliding imaginary scale of hawkishness, but hiring local thugs & warlords to do your bidding is not exactly "dovish", otherwise suddenly a lot of Republicans are really going to be disappointed in Saint Ronnie's hiring of the Contras in Nicaragua.

I know Matt's mainly addressing the domestic political use of rhetoric with regard to the fake bullsh*t spewn by right wing talkoids about toughness and "the surge" this and "the surge" that, but it's not exactly an insightful way to talk about what appears to have happened on the ground in Iraq.

Although, yes, it should have been emphasized more publicly that the Republican "you're either with us or agin' us" Surge in Iraq depended heavily upon paying off the guys who had been attacking our troops.

Posted by El Cid | June 4, 2008 10:19 AM

Ah, Al, I'd love to get into why your claims are false, but you'd never respond. Which, I've realized, is why you (and chris ford) qualify as trolls, whereas James Robertson and his ilk do not.

Still a fan, though.

Posted by Will Allen | June 4, 2008 10:21 AM

You can't buy them. You can only rent them.

Posted by Jose Padilla | June 4, 2008 10:38 AM

Bush has a naturally affinity for game theory (it's the only part of his three-debate series with Kerry that he did rather well), so it's weird that he allowed an Iraqi War plan that eschewed it. Their plan was to knock out Saddam, fire EVERYONE, create a 'free market,' and kick back and watch the flowers grow. Fucking weird. Last year or whatever, they're actually, ya' know, trying to play each interest group off each other to arrive at some consensus. Why did they think Iraq wasn't on Earth?

Posted by mike | June 4, 2008 11:46 AM

I am tired of hearing about the 'success' of the surge. If it weren't for the militias standing down prior to the surge, our troop increase would only serve to surge the number of deaths in Iraq. So long as our troops are on the ground the country is a tinderbox on the cusp of blowing up in our faces.

Additionally, the surge is only a success if one casts the entire goal of the US occupation of Iraq in a circular way, i.e., our goal is to reduce the violence that we caused by invading in the first place.

However, the occupation is actually supposed to have real strategic benefits to the US, i.e., that it will lead to a democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors, allied with the US, and able to police itself without US forces, who would remain on the permanent bases we are building.

The surge has not advanced that strategic objective. Iraq is no closer to self-policing and self-governance without US help than it was before. The surge hasn't fixed the problems with US occupation in Iraq or supplied it with a strategic rationale. All it has done is slow the bleeding-- while raising the question of why we are continuing to bleed there in the first place.

In any event, on a baser political level, folks like Al and John McCain can babble between now and November about how the surge is really a success, but the American people don't give a crap because they hate the war and want to get out. The only sort of hawkish strategy which could work for Republicans is the one they refuse to try, because they really do want to be in Iraq for 100 years: a strategy that says we seek some specific short term objective and then declare victory and pull our troops out of there once achieved. The American people could go for that-- they will not go for indefinite occupation in Iraq, and bleating about the surge for the past 6 months hasn't changed that.

Posted by Dilan Esper | June 4, 2008 12:03 PM

Ah, Al, I'd love to get into why your claims are false, but you'd never respond.

Why do you think I'd never respond?

Posted by Al | June 4, 2008 12:08 PM

i'm under the impression that our paying and arming various sunni milita groups is conterproductive to creating a stable government.
i know maliki doesn't like that idea very much.

Posted by dj spellchecka | June 4, 2008 1:56 PM

I suggested the plan well before the "surge." I noted that we were spending something in excess of THREE TIMES THE ENTIRE IRAQ GDP on the war, and said that maybe it would be cheaper to just PAY them not to shoot each other. Maybe the administration saw one of my blog posts.

Posted by dogfacegeorge | June 4, 2008 2:12 PM

Why do you think I'd never respond?

Will had good reason to think that because I and others posted direct answers to your post before you even posted.

We were there in force the whole time--even while violence was getting worse. "There in force" is not the relevant improving condition that allowed violence to fall.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 4, 2008 2:48 PM

It's not clear what relevance this strategy would have to our relations with Iran, unless we first turned Iran into a disordered region without a strong central government, which I don't think Yglesias is suggesting.

You can tell conservatives are on new ground here when they talk about diplomacy. Stuff we've been thinking about for years, they're just thinking about now.

The relevant disordered region is the Middle East. There are a number of governments, all of them struggling with each other, and we can, if we're careful, play one off against another. Iran has regional interests in security, esteem, and economics that don't necessarily conflict with our own. It would be wise to at least attempt a deal here.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 4, 2008 3:02 PM

Consumatopia, first of all, the conventional strategy I describe works better with tribes or other sub-national groups, not with entities as large and ordered as countries.

To the extent that the Mideast is fairly described as "tribes with flags," our strategy in the Mideast IS as you describe, i.e., ally with some tribes against others. But we are allying mostly with the Saudis, who don't get along with the Iranians. To make this sort of imperialism work, you have to have enemies as well as friends, so you can threaten to abandon your friends to their enemies. If we turned the Iranians into a force for peace or something, the other countries wouldn't be scared of them, and they wouldn't need us.

Posted by y81 | June 4, 2008 3:30 PM

Very good point. Please pimp this for all it's worth. If one of the main dem/obama talking points is that the surge owes most of it's limited success to negotiating with THE ENEMY, the fp debate will be fought on very favorable terrain.

I expect at least one comment is free blog post, one tapped column, and one article in the atlantic mag making this point. Suffice it to say that if you can reuse the same cliches over and over again, you should feel free to repeat the same original insights with that much more alacity. At the end of the day, it's what your readers want.

Posted by Client #11 | June 4, 2008 3:48 PM

Consumatopia, first of all, the conventional strategy I describe works better with tribes or other sub-national groups, not with entities as large and ordered as countries.

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you don't care about long-term stability and just want to extract resources, then yes, tribes are better. You can prop up some two-bit autocrat who will be dependent on your power, and you can boss him around.

If you want transparency and order--if you want the inspectable absence of WMDs and terror training camps--states are better.

To make this sort of imperialism work, you have to have enemies as well as friends, so you can threaten to abandon your friends to their enemies.

You could just have rivals. Even if Iran fully opened up their nuke program to inspection and stopped funding Hezbollah and friends, Sunni regimes in the region would still be resentful of them.

But in any case, for domestic reasons Iran is interested in the esteem and economic growth that a formal recognition and an end to sanctions could provide. Not all Iranian aspirations are inconsistent with American goals.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 4, 2008 4:18 PM

We were there in force the whole time

But of course this is just plain false. Our "force" was plainly inadequate until the surge last year, coupled with increased numbers and effectiveness of Iraqi troops (also made possible by the surge).

Posted by Al | June 4, 2008 5:31 PM

Our "force" was plainly inadequate until the surge last year

No, that's plainly silly. Like I said before:

I think another key point of the chronology to get is that there has never been any point in this occupation at which insurgents or enemies of any sort in Iraq managed to stand up to successful fight toe-to-toe with American forces. They would cause some havoc, coalition forces would rush in, then they would melt away to cause havoc somewhere else.

Surge or surge, this was still the case. We had enough force to disperse them, never enough to suppress them. However, once Sunni tribes became irritated with AQI and Shiite death squads, then they were prepared to cooperate with us.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 4, 2008 5:44 PM

Sad how the best situation we can hope for is a strong Sunni army controlling the country... while turning our eyes to various human rights abuses. Wait, wasn't that the situation in 2002? Sigh.

Posted by Yaya | June 5, 2008 2:39 PM