August 3, 2008
FIGHT THE POWER:
The Last Battle (MICHAEL R. GORDON, 8/03/08, NY Times Magazine)
The goals of the surge against Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia were political as well as military. The old strategy assumed that elections and the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis would take the steam out of the insurgency and help the United States to manage with fewer and fewer troops. Iraqi politics, it assumed, would enable the military strategy.Petraeus’s new approach turned that formula on its head. It postulated that a troop increase — and a strategy that put a premium on protecting civilians — would win over hesitant Iraqis, generate intelligence about the insurgents and give Iraqi leaders the confidence to turn away from their militias and private armies and work together. More than half of the American reinforcements were allocated to the regions surrounding Baghdad that Al Qaeda militants used to mount their car-bomb attacks, while the rest were distributed throughout the city. The theory was that once Al Qaeda was weakened, that would eliminate the rationale that Shiite militias like Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq were needed to protect the Shiite population. Breathing space would be created for political reconciliation. Military action would enable Iraqi politics.
To encourage political change, the United States was working from the top down as well as bottom up. Before the surge, the White House had taken the measure of Maliki, a compromise choice among the Supreme Council and the Sadrists who was named prime minister precisely because his Dawa Party had no militia and thin popular support. (Later he broke with the Sadrists, thus becoming much more dependent on the Supreme Council.) Maliki often told American officials that he had a vision of partnership among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national-security adviser, reported in a confidential memo on Nov. 8, 2006, that Maliki was having difficulty figuring out how to be a strong leader and — as a leader of the Dawa Party, which was an underground movement during Saddam’s day — was “naturally inclined to distrust new actors.”
If Maliki broadened his political base, rose above sectarianism and moved against the Shiite militias, Hadley wrote, the United States should do what it could to give the Iraqi prime minister more control over Iraq’s security forces and persuade other politicians to support him, including Sunnis and, notably, the Supreme Council, which had established itself as the most potent party in Maliki’s coalition.
But even as it sought ways to support Maliki, the United States was also hedging its bets by working with tribes in Iraq’s far-flung provinces. Before the surge, the American military had joined forces with Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi (known as Abu Risha) and other Sunni sheiks against Sunni insurgents. The additional American troops during the surge reinforced that effort and encouraged it to spread. The Iraqis called the tribal movement a Sahawa or Awakening. The Americans initially called the tribesmen “concerned local citizens,” but when translated into Arabic that came out something like “worried Iraqis.” So the name was changed to “Sons of Iraq.”
The Americans were working, in Sam Parker’s terms, with both the “powers that be” and the “powers that aren’t.” In theory, the efforts to buttress Maliki and to work with the tribes would eventually merge. Some of the Sons of Iraq would be incorporated into Maliki’s security forces. Others would get jobs building the new Iraq.
The prospect of provincial elections was expected to provide another opportunity for the “powers that aren’t,” including the tribal movement, to work their way in. Many Sunnis were effectively disenfranchised by their decision to boycott previous votes, as were the many Shiites who were influenced by Sadr’s ambivalent pronouncements. Other Iraqis also found themselves politically marginalized by a system that required them to vote for a party, not an individual.
The coming provincial elections are to be far more open and promise to be a significant step forward for democratic inclusion. Sunni tribes in Anbar, for example, see the vote as an opportunity to wrest control from the Iraqi Islamic Party, which currently represents Sunni interests in Baghdad. Sunnis in Nineveh, who make up a plurality of that province’s electorate but chafe under a Kurdish-dominated provincial government, view the elections as an opportunity to redress an imbalance; so do Sunnis in Diyala Province, which has a Shiite governor.
But the provincial elections also represent a democratizing opportunity for many Shiite voters, who do not necessarily want to be represented by the “powers that be.” More than 500 politicians and parties have registered to participate in the provincial elections, including 40 in Basra alone. These represent a potential challenge to the Supreme Council and Dawa parties in Maliki’s coalition, which have the backing of powerful politicians in Baghdad but have done a poor job of delivering services to the Iraqi public, even as the central government’s coffers have filled as a result of high oil prices.
How fair those elections will be is the critical question. “The provincial elections are very important because they have the potential to usher in new leadership that is not drawn from the former exiles,” Joost Hiltermann, an expert on Iraq at the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization, told me. “The Supreme Council and Dawa have not excelled at governance at the local level. If they cannot prevent elections, and it is probably too late for that, they will try to delegitimize the Sadrists and control the process though the domination they have accumulated over the years at the local level. Dawa, for example, has used its control over the Iraqi Red Crescent to appoint local officials to make sure they bring out the vote.”
While we've sided with the wrong folks, we've also created conditions where the Iraqis will sort it themselves after we're gone.
