History Forum / General / British History / July 2008

Some reality concerning the "surge", versus buying off Sunni insurgents.
Anyone maintaining that it was the surge in US troops that was the main
cause of the decline in Iraq violence, as McCain does,  should call their
Congressmen and demand that the US quit paying the former Sunni insurgent
killers ten of millions every month.

Afterall, we have a housing mortgage debacle, facilitated by McCain's former
economic adviser (Phil Gramm),  to pay for...

In my opinion, it's honestly questionable whether McCain really knows what's
going on in Iraq.

from: http://www.juancole.com/
Thursday, July 24, 2008
A Social History of the Surge

I want to weigh in as a social historian of Iraq on the controversy over
whether the "surge" "worked." The NYT notes:

 'Mr. McCain bristled in an interview with the "CBS Evening News" on
Tuesday when asked about Mr. Obama's contention that while the added troops
had helped reduce violence in Iraq, other factors had helped, including the
Sunni Awakening movement, in which thousands of Sunnis were enlisted to
patrol neighborhoods and fight the insurgency, and the Iraqi government's
crackdown on Shiite militias.

 "I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction
of what actually happened," Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the
Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with
Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there.

 "Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and
others," Mr. McCain said. "And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that's
just a matter of history."

 The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the
fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop
escalation strategy, which became known as the surge. (No less an authority
than Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, testified before
Congress this spring that the Awakening "started before the surge, but then
was very much enabled by the surge.")

 And Democrats noted that the sheik who helped form the Awakening, Abdul
Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, was assassinated in September 2007, after the
troop escalation began.

 The National Security Network, a liberal foreign policy group, called Mr.
McCain's explanation of the surge's history "completely wrong."

 But several foreign policy analysts said that if Mr. McCain got the
chronology wrong, his broader point - that the troop escalation was crucial
for the Awakening movement to succeed and spread - was right. "I would say
McCain is three-quarters right in this debate," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. '

The problem with this debate is that it has few Iraqis in it.

It is also open to charges of logical fallacy. The only evidence presented
for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from political
violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs in the second
half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That apocalyptic violence was set
off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February of 2006,
which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war.) What few political
achievements are attributed to the troop escalation are too laughable to
command real respect.

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or
when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in
February, 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former
insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the
"surge" by politicians such as John McCain. But attempts to pay off the
Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a
dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra US troops were
sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will
disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation beginning winter of 2007.
The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued
without a significant troop escalation, and was.

Aside from defining what proponents mean by the "surge," all kinds of things
are claimed for it that are not in evidence. The assertion depends on a
possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after
event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a
false assumption. Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent
earthquake in China was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters.
That is just superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good
illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am referring.

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence
continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing
differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was
such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note
that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had
been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are
highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was
that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad.
Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night
and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed
neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of
2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis
would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of
thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the
way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic
cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed
neighborhoods.

As Think Progress quoted CNN correspondent Michael Ware:

 ' The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has been - albeit tragic - one of the
key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. [.] It's a
very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; segregated into Sunni and
Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. [.] If anyone is
telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in
violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are
lying to you.'

Of course, Gen. Petraeus took courageous and effective steps to try to stop
bombings in markets and so forth. But I am skeptical that most of these
techniques had macro effects. Big population movements because of militia
ethnic cleansing are more likely to account for big changes in social
statistics.

The way in which the escalation troops did help establish Awakening Councils
is that when they got wise to the Shiite ethnic cleansing program, the US
began supporting these Sunni militias, thus forestalling further expulsions.

The Shiitization of Baghdad was thus a significant cause of falling casualty
rates. But it is another war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to
find Shiite militiamen in their living rooms.

In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the
bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils
had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier
than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have
forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers
from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite
allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop
escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop
escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed
to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they
would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement. There were
typically only 10,000 US troops in al-Anbar before 2007 as I recollect (It
has a population of a million and a half or so). If the number of US troops
went up to 14,000, that cannot possibly have made the difference.

The Mahdi Army militia of Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr concluded a cease-fire with
US and Iraqi troops in September of 2007. Since the US had inadvertently
enabled the transformation of Baghdad into a largely Shiite city, a prime
aim of the Mahdi Army, they could afford to stand down. Moreover, they were
being beaten militarily by the Badr Corps militia of the pro-Iranian Islamic
Supreme Council of Iraq and by Iraqi security forces, in Karbala, Diwaniya
and elsewhere. It was prudent for them to stand down. Their doing so much
reduced civilian deaths.

Badr reassertion in Basra was also important, and ultimately received
backing this spring from PM Nuri al-Maliki. There were few coalition troops
in Basra, mainly British, and most were moved out to the airport, so the
troop escalation was obviously irrelevant to improvements in Basra. Now PM
Gordon Brown seems to be signalling that most British troops will come home
in 2009.

The vast increase in Iraqi oil revenues in recent years, and the
cancellation of much foreign debt, has made the central government more
powerful vis-a-vis the society. Al-Maliki can afford to pay, train and equip
many more police and soldiers. An Iraq with an unencumbered $75 billion in
oil income begins to look more like Kuwait, and to be able to afford to buy
off various constituencies. It is a different game than an Iraq with $33 bn.
in revenues, much of it pre-committed to debt servicing.

Senator McCain was wrong to say that US or Iraqi casualty rates were
unprecedentedly low in May.

Most American commentators are so focused on the relative fall in casualties
that they do not stop to consider how high the rates of violence remain.
Kudos to Steve Chapman for telling it like it is.

I'd suggest some comparisons. The Sri Lankan civil war between Sinhalese and
Tamils has killed an average of 233 persons a month since 1983 and is
considered one of the world's major ongoing trouble spots. That is half the
average monthly casualties in Iraq recently. In 2007, the conflict in
Afghanistan killed an average of 550 persons a month. That is about the rate
recently according to official statistics for Iraq. The death rate in
2006-2007 in Somalia was probably about 300 a month, or about half this
year's average monthsly rate in Iraq. Does anybody think Afghanistan or
Somalia is calm? Thirty years of North Ireland troubles left about 3,000
dead, a toll still racked up in Iraq every five months on average.

All the talk of casualty rates, of course, is to some extent beside the
point. The announced purpose of the troop escalation was to create secure
conditions in which political compromises could be achieved.

In spring of 2007, Iraq had a national unity government. Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki's cabinet had members in it from the Shiite Islamic Virtue Party,
the Sadr Movement, the secular Iraqi National list of Iyad Allawi, the Sunni
Iraqi Accord Front, the Kurdistan Alliance, and the two Shiite core
partners, the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party and the Islami Supreme Council
of Iraq.

Al-Maliki lost his national unity government in summer, 2007, just as
casualties began to decline. The Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadrists, and the
Iraqi National List are all still in the opposition. The Islamic Mission
Party of al-Maliki has split, and he appears to remain in control of the
smaller remnant. So although the Sunni IAF has agreed to rejoin the
government, al-Maliki's ability to promote national reconciliation is
actually much reduced now from 14 months ago.

There has been very little reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite. The new
de-Baathification law which ostensibly aimed at improving the condition of
Sunnis who had worked in the former regime was loudly denounced by the very
ex-Baathists who would be affected by it. In any case, the measure has
languished in oblivion and no effort has been made to implement it.
Depending on how it is implemented it could easily lead to large numbers of
Sunnis being fired from government ministries, and so might make things
worse.

An important step was the holding of new provincial elections. Since the
Sunni Arabs boycotted the last ones in Jan., 2005, their provinces have not
had representative governments and in some, Shiite and Kurdish officials
have wielded power over the majority Sunnis Arabs! Attempts to hold the
provincial elections this fall have so far run aground on the shoals of
ethnic conflict. Thus, the Shiite parties wanted to use ayatollahs' pictures
in their campaigns, against the wishes of the other parties. It isn't clear
what parliament will decide about that. More important is the question of
whether provincial elections will be held in the disputed Kirkuk Province,
which the Kurds want to annex. That dispute has caused (Kurdish) President
Jalal Talabani to veto the enabling legislation for the provincial
elections, which may set them back months or indefinitely.

There is also no oil law, essential to allow foreign investment in
developing new fields.

So did the "surge" "work"?

The troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential.
That the troops were used in new ways by Gen. Petraeus was more important.
But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by accidentally
turning it into a Shiite city, as Shiite as Isfahan or Tehran, and thus a
terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement could not hope to fight
effectively.

It is Obama who has the better argument in this debate, not Senator McCain,
who knows almost nothing about Iraq and Iraqis, and overestimates what can
be expected of 30,000 US troops in an enormous, complex country.

But the problem for McCain is that it does not matter very much for policy
who is right in this debate. Security in Iraq is demonstrably improved, for
whatever reason, and the Iraqis want the US out. If things are better, what
is the rationale for keeping US troops in Iraq?
Labels: Iraq

posted by Juan Cole @ 7/24/2008 01:08:00 AM 11 comments |