Archive for the 'Iraq' Category

Courtesy of John Robb’s Global Guerrillas, William Lind tells us why the U.S. forces should not replace a “war with the Iraqi Sunnis with a war against the Shi’ites.”

If we replace a war against Iraqis Sunnis with a war against the Shiites, we will not only have suffered a serious, self-inflicted operational defeat, we will endanger our whole position in Iraq, since our supply lines mostly run through Shiite country.

I say such a defeat would be self-inflicted because Shiite attacks on Americans in Baghdad seem to be responses to American actions. In dealing with the Shiites, we appear to be doing what spurred the growth of the Sunni insurgency, i.e., raids, air strikes and a “kill or capture” policy directed against local Shiite leaders. Not only does this lead to retaliation, it also fractures Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army as he tries to avoid fighting us. Such fracturing works against, not for, the potential re-creation of an Iraqi state.

Notwithstanding whatever contributions William Lind has made to this field of theory, these warnings are not only based on misconception, but they also betray a lack of clear thought on the matters at hand.

As my friend Michael Ledeen is quick to point out (and has so many times to me), air raids and “kill or capture” policy didn’t spur the growth of the insurgency.  Insurgencies are not born, and the Iraqi insurgency didn’t have a birthplace called Fallujah.  They are planned, and the Iraqi insurgency was planned and crafted before the war began in Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran (and possibly Riyadh).

We have covered rules of engagement quite thoroughly at The Captain’s Journal, the most recent of which was an article entitled Calamity in Basra and British Rules of Engagement (which bears re-studying at this point to remind the reader about the situation in Basra after three years of the presence of the British and their ‘soft’ rules of engagement).  For all of those ‘professionals’ who claim that the U.S. ROE have caused halting progress in the pacification of Iraq, it warrants serious, quiet and pensive reflection that Anbar is all but pacified and Basra is currently a calamity, having been utterly lost to the various factions of the Shia militia.

In Rise of the JAM, we covered the the current danger the Jaish al Mahdi pose to the security of Iraq, and cite Omar Fadhil on the danger Moqtada al Sadr poses to the political stability and infrastructure of the country.  This is a clear and present danger, not one that awaits heavy handed U.S. rules of engagement.

Contrary to Lind’s short-sighted and hand-wringing assessment, the U.S. will choose to deal a blow to the JAM and thereby allow reconciliation among the more peaceful of the population, or it will cower to the arrogant, undisciplined teenagers roaming the streets as thugs and criminals, taking and harming whatever and whomever they wish.  The first choice means stability and security for Iraq.  The second means a complete, chaotic disaster.

Courtesy of John Robb’s Global Guerrillas, William Lind tells us why the U.S. forces should not replace a “war with the Iraqi Sunnis with a war against the Shi’ites.”

If we replace a war against Iraqis Sunnis with a war against the Shiites, we will not only have suffered a serious, self-inflicted operational defeat, we will endanger our whole position in Iraq, since our supply lines mostly run through Shiite country.

I say such a defeat would be self-inflicted because Shiite attacks on Americans in Baghdad seem to be responses to American actions. In dealing with the Shiites, we appear to be doing what spurred the growth of the Sunni insurgency, i.e., raids, air strikes and a “kill or capture” policy directed against local Shiite leaders. Not only does this lead to retaliation, it also fractures Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army as he tries to avoid fighting us. Such fracturing works against, not for, the potential re-creation of an Iraqi state.

Notwithstanding whatever contributions William Lind has made to this field of theory, these warnings are not only based on misconception, but they also betray a lack of clear thought on the matters at hand.

As my friend Michael Ledeen is quick to point out (and has so many times to me), air raids and “kill or capture” policy didn’t spur the growth of the insurgency.  Insurgencies are not born, and the Iraqi insurgency didn’t have a birthplace called Fallujah.  They are planned, and the Iraqi insurgency was planned and crafted before the war began in Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran (and possibly Riyadh).

We have covered rules of engagement quite thoroughly at The Captain’s Journal, the most recent of which was an article entitled Calamity in Basra and British Rules of Engagement (which bears re-studying at this point to remind the reader about the situation in Basra after three years of the presence of the British and their ‘soft’ rules of engagement).  For all of those ‘professionals’ who claim that the U.S. ROE have caused halting progress in the pacification of Iraq, it warrants serious, quiet and pensive reflection that Anbar is all but pacified and Basra is currently a calamity, having been utterly lost to the various factions of the Shia militia.

In Rise of the JAM, we covered the the current danger the Jaish al Mahdi pose to the security of Iraq, and cite Omar Fadhil on the danger Moqtada al Sadr poses to the political stability and infrastructure of the country.  This is a clear and present danger, not one that awaits heavy handed U.S. rules of engagement.

Contrary to Lind’s short-sighted and hand-wringing assessment, the U.S. will choose to deal a blow to the JAM and thereby allow reconciliation among the more peaceful of the population, or it will cower to the arrogant, undisciplined teenagers roaming the streets as thugs and criminals, taking and harming whatever and whomever they wish.  The first choice means stability and security for Iraq.  The second means a complete, chaotic disaster.

Jaish al Mahdi (JAM) essentially had its beginnings in June of 2003.  Since then, they have grown, developed and embedded themselves into Iraqi Shi’ite culture more efficiently than the mafiosi, and their thugery, control and violence is rivaled only by their analogue in Lebanon, the Hezbollah.

A Muslim imam dropped his cloak to the sidewalk. It was a signal for the gunmen to move.

They surrounded the top Iraqi security official in a north Baghdad district. Iraqi military vehicles – commandeered by other Shiite militiamen – screeched into a cordon, blocking his exit. A gun was put to his head.

Brig. Gen. Falah Hassan Kanbar, a fellow Shiite, managed to escape when his bodyguards pulled him into a vehicle that sped down an alley.

Details of the Aug. 5 ambush emerged this week in interviews with Kanbar, U.S. military and intelligence officials. It remains unclear whether the thugs sought to kill Kanbar or simply intimidate him, but suspicions over the source of the brazen assault pointed in just one direction: the powerful Shiite armed faction known as the Mahdi Army and its increasingly unpredictable trajectory.

The vast Mahdi network – ranging from hardcore fighting units to community aid groups – is emerging as perhaps the biggest wild card as Iraq’s U.S.-backed government stumbles and the Pentagon struggles to build a credible Iraqi security force to allow an eventual U.S. withdrawal.

Just a few months ago, the Mahdi Army and its leader, firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, were seen as reluctant – but critical – partners with Iraq’s leadership. Al-Sadr agreed to government appeals to lessen his anti-American fervor and not directly challenge the waves of U.S. soldiers trying to regain control of Baghdad and surrounding areas.

But now, the once-cohesive ranks of the Mahdi Army are splintering into rival factions with widely varying priorities.

Some breakaway guerrillas are accused by Washington of strengthening ties with Iranian patrons supplying parts for powerful roadside bombs – which accounted for nearly three-quarters of U.S. military deaths and injuries last month. The devices suggest that Shiite militias could replace Sunni insurgents as the top threat to American troops.

Other Mahdi loyalists are seeking to expand their footholds in the Iraqi military and police, frustrating U.S. attempts to bring more Sunni Muslims into the forces as part of national reconciliation goals.

And in many Shiite strongholds across Iraq, Mahdi crews are trying to shore up their power and influence. The pace has picked up with the sense that the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government could be irrevocably damaged after political mutinies by Sunni and Shiite Cabinet ministers.

The Mahdi Army, meanwhile, appears to be going through its own leadership crisis. Al-Sadr has been unable to rein in the renegade Mahdi factions. On Friday, a U.S. military commander said al-Sadr had returned to Iran, where he spent several months earlier this year. Al-Sadr’s top aides called the claim baseless.

But there is no dispute that Mahdi Army operatives are busy planning for the future.

The militia is working behind-the-scenes to solidify control of rent markets, fuel distribution and other services in Shiite neighborhoods – taking a page from other influential groups across the region, such as Hezbollah, that have mixed militia muscle and social outreach.

The JAM uses force to control the supply of ice in Baghdad, a non-trivial thing at this time of year.

Each day before the midsummer sun rises high enough to bake blood on concrete, Baghdad’s underclass lines up outside Dickensian ice factories.

With electricity reaching most homes for just a couple of hours each day, the poor hand over soiled brown dinars for what has become a symbol of Iraq’s steady descent into a more primitive era and its broken covenant with leaders, domestic and foreign. In a capital that was once the seat of the Islamic Caliphate and a center of Arab worldliness, ice is now a currency of last resort for the poor, subject to sectarian horrors and gangland rules.

In Shiite-majority Topci, icemakers say that Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army militia issued a diktat on the first day of summer ordering vendors to set a price ceiling of 4,000 dinars, or $3, per 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, block of ice – 30 percent less than they charge in areas outside Mahdi army control.

Everyone complied, delivering an instant subsidy to the veiled women and poor laborers who are the radical Shiite cleric’s natural constituency. The same price is enforced in his other power bases, like Sadr City.

We have discussed both the counterinsurgency victory by the Marines in the Anbar province, as well as the expansion of this model into other areas of Iraq (e.g., the Diyala province).  Some senior military officers are advocating the position that the Shi’ite militias have replaced al Qaeda as the most significant threat.  “The longer-term threat to Iraq is potentially the Shiite militias.”  In addition to Sadr’s army, there is another with which to contend, perhaps even more deeply embedded into Iraqi culture and with deeper roots and history.

The two largest militias, Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, are tied to prominent Iraqi families whose rivalries date back generations. Both militias have infiltrated the security forces.

Badr, which has never openly battled American forces, generally gets credit for being the more astute player of the two. “The Badr corps understood the game from the beginning and incorporated itself into the security forces,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said.

A senior U.S. military official described American support for Badr — an Iranian-funded organization that many think still conducts targeted assassinations — as the only option since many of its members have been absorbed into the Iraqi security forces.

“Badr has decided to join the government, and they gave up their weapons and became part of the state,” the senior military official said.

Note the excuses and unwillingness to excise the Badr corp from the ISF.  But these main stream media reports about the JAM splintering, while having a kernel of truth, are probably exaggerated.  Omar Fadhil has noted the power of Moqtada al Sadr.  “While Al-Qaeda poses a serious security challenge in some provinces, Sadr threatens the future of the whole country. He can paralyze or disrupt the proper functioning of whole ministries and provinces.

In Al Qaeda, Indigenous Sunnis and the Insurgency in Iraq, we outlined a schema for the insurgency in the Anbar Province in which, in spite of the use of the term al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) or al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a surrogate for the combination of the insurgency, terrorist elements, foreign fighters and criminals, we showed that the insurgency was primarily indigenous Sunnis.  To be sure, there are these other elements, and their presence has made the counterinsurgency more difficult.

The presence of terrorist elements and global and religiously motivated fighters – who do not wish to provide governance or welfare for the people – has caused the necessity to militarily defeat the terrorists while at the same time defeating the insurgents and providing for the security of the people.  It was ultimately and finally necessary to settle with the insurgency (not the terrorists), and so the twists and turns of this strategy involved hard and lengthy negotiations (over several deployments of Marines) with the insurgency to effect their reintegration into Iraqi culture and society.  This all constituted the greatest counterinsurgency campaign in history.  Surely, it is a victory that was fraught with problems and obstacles never seen before in history.  And while saying that a significant part of the battle was with fighters other than AQI carries heavy political baggage in the U.S., it doesn’t make the assertion false.  In fact, recognition of this fact only serves to fill out the almost incredible picture of the campaign the U.S. Marines have waged in Anbar.

The so-called “Anbar Awakening

“The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle.  For if he does not know where I intend to give battle he must prepare in a great many places.  And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one place will be few,” Sun Tzu, The Art of War, VI.14.

“He who intimidates his neighbors does so by inflicting injury upon them,” Sun Tzu, The Art of War, VIII.14.

At the moment, the enemies of the United States are fighting us within the borders of Iraq.  It is a global war, but it has been confined by U.S. policy strictly to the contiguous Iraqi territory.   It has been noted that although talks occurred between Iran and the U.S. over Iraq and the U.S. position has been made abundantly clear, rather than a reduction in Iranian influence, there has been a marked increase in Iranian influence and activity within Iraq.

[Maj. Gen. Rick] Lynch said he gave the order on Wednesday for the division’s 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade to begin Marne Husky — the latest in a series of offensives in the capital and surrounding areas.

The new operation is aimed at disrupting insurgents who fled a recent crackdown on the rural areas of Arab Jubour and Salman Pak in a predominantly Sunni area south of the capital.

Lynch also noted a “marked and increasing Iranian influence” in weapons and the training of Shiite extremists in restive areas south of Baghdad.

“There’s three pots of bad guys in my battle space. One’s the Sunni extremists, one’s the Shia extremists and the other is marked and increasing Iranian influence,” he said. “They’re all anti-Iraq, they’re all against the government of Iraq, they’re all against the Iraqi people.”

The presence and role of Saudi Arabia in Iraq (while the U.S. has been reluctant to admit it) has also been noted by the administration.

Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.

We have discussed the fact that organizations (not necessarily associated with al Qaeda) in Syria sell suicide bombers and foreign fighters across the Syrian border to the insurgency in Iraq.  These borders serve as a sieve for not just Saudi or Syrian fighters.  On July 31, 2007, sixty six Pakistani nationals were arrested in Karbala using forged visas.  The influx of suicide bombers from countries around the world is well known (Saudi Arabia (53), Iraq (18), Italy (8), Syria (8), Kuwait (7), Jordan (4), Libya (3), Egypt (3), Tunisia (3), Turkey (3), Belgium (2), France (2), Spain (2), Yemen (3), Lebanon (1), Morocco (1), Britain (1), Bengal (1), Sudan (1) and Unknown (18), and this list is likely short on bombers from Morocco).

Iraq has a long border: 1458 km with Iran, 181 km with Jordan, 814 km with Saudi Arabia, 240 km with Kuwait, 605 km with Syria, and 352 km with Turkey (some sources have slightly different values).  Leaking borders has been a problem since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and three years ago Iraq was “calling on” Iran and Syria to help seal the borders.  How does a country with such porous and long borders seal them?  More than a year ago Saudi Arabia invited bids for the construction of a fence along its border with Iraq.  And while this is interesting (and may ultimately succeed to slow the flow of terrorists across the border), it is not the immediate solution needed, while also possibly pointing the way forward.

The solution is not for Iraq to seal the borders.  The solution involves intimidation of Iraq’s neighbors into sealing the borders.  While the U.S. and Iraq are involved in talks with Iran and other neighbors, tried and tested military strategy suggests that bullying is the order of the day.

This bullying and intimidation might take the form of financial pressure (or conversely rewards for good behavior), market sanctions, air assets used against foreign fighters flowing in from across the borders, small incursions across the borders to destroy the sanctuaries of foreign fighters, or even larger air power involvement to destroy those sanctuaries and other supporting infrastructure.

The alternative is leaving these sanctuaries and flow paths in place, with no hope of the Iraqi security forces or U.S. forces being able to stop them (due to force size).  Tested military strategy aims for the right target.  In the case of the borders, the target is the offending country, not the Iraqi border proper.  At the moment, the offending countries know that U.S. forces have restricted the battle space to Iraq proper.  Either this changes — causing confusion and disaggregation among the foreign elements who wish to destabilize Iraq — or the borders will remain porous.

Courtesy of Forward Deployed, we learn that some of the Marines in Anbar might be shedding body armor soon.

COMBAT OUTPOST RAWAH, Iraq — The commander of a U.S. Marine Corps unit in Iraq wants to have his Marines begin patrolling without helmets and with less body armor.But the Marines would have the gear at their local patrol bases and could resume wearing it whenever needed, said Lt. Col. Kelly Alexander, commanding officer of Task Force Highlander, part of Regimental Combat Team-2, which operates in western Anbar province.The proposed changes apply to what is called PPE, or personal protective equipment.Alexander said a change to a “soft posture

Sunnis in Iraq deal not only with the violence perpetrated by Shia death sqauds, but also the day to day living difficulties associated with being in the minority and out of power.  In Baghdad, the search for ice has become a deadly struggle.

Each day before the midsummer sun rises high enough to bake blood on concrete, Baghdad’s underclass lines up outside Dickensian ice factories.

With electricity reaching most homes for just a couple of hours each day, the poor hand over soiled brown dinars for what has become a symbol of Iraq’s steady descent into a more primitive era and its broken covenant with leaders, domestic and foreign. In a capital that was once the seat of the Islamic Caliphate and a center of Arab worldliness, ice is now a currency of last resort for the poor, subject to sectarian horrors and gangland rules.

In Shiite-majority Topci, icemakers say that Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army militia issued a diktat on the first day of summer ordering vendors to set a price ceiling of 4,000 dinars, or $3, per 25-kilogram, or 55-pound, block of ice – 30 percent less than they charge in areas outside Mahdi army control.

Everyone complied, delivering an instant subsidy to the veiled women and poor laborers who are the radical Shiite cleric’s natural constituency. The same price is enforced in his other power bases, like Sadr City.

Some suppliers are horrified.

“They are trying to improve their image, and gain favor,” grumbled one merchant, as a sickle-wielding colleague chopped the hollow crystalline blocks in half for black-robed women to cram into shopping bags. “But it won’t do much good. We all know what the Mahdi army are.”

We have repeatedly called for the disappearance of Moqtada al Sadr from the political and military scene in Iraq, as has Omar Fadhil of Iraq The Model, who observed that “While Al-Qaeda poses a serious security challenge in some provinces, Sadr threatens the future of the whole country. He can paralyze or disrupt the proper functioning of whole ministries and provinces.”  But it appears that Sadr will remain unmolested, and perhaps for good reason (in Maliki’s eyes).  Maliki’s party remains secretive, suspicious, and obsessesed with survival.

As the U.S. military attempts to pacify Iraq so its leaders can pursue political reconciliation, Iraqi and Western observers say Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his inner circle appear increasingly unable to pull the government out of its paralysis.

At times consumed by conspiracy theories, Maliki and his Dawa party elite operate much as they did when they plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein — covertly and concerned more about their community’s survival than with building consensus among Iraq’s warring groups, say Iraqi politicians and analysts and Western diplomats.

In recent weeks, those suspicions have deepened as U.S. military commanders have begun to work with Sunni insurgents, longtime foes of the Shiite-led government, who have agreed to battle the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

“The level of mutual trust is so low that you really have to not just rebuild trust, you have to build trust in the first place, and that is still very much a work in progress right now,” said Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the top U.N. envoy to Iraq.

The prime minister’s close aides counter that Maliki can lead and that party leaders are committed to building a broad-based government.

“The Dawa party has no special request that Maliki must listen to us,” said Hassan Suneid, a Dawa legislator and close adviser to the prime minister. “We do not want to impose a government different than what everybody else wants. Trust me, the Dawa party is the one who pushes Maliki to be open-minded to other voices.”

There are many reasons for Iraq’s political stagnation. In the fifth year of war, Iraq’s politicians remain more loyal to their sect, clan, tribe and region than they are to the nation. A culture of fear, inherited from Hussein’s reign, remains entrenched.

“Some of the coterie of Maliki fear their friends more than they fear their enemies,” said Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite who heads Iraq’s Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification. “You can’t separate people from their backgrounds. Most of them were used to secret-society politics, not open politics.”

A moderately different take on this might be that Maliki and his party distrusts, and because of this doesn’t want a strong central government or institutions to develop.  It is seen as contrary to his own survival.

Not surprisingly, insurgencies have become a topic of considerable interest among military analysts, with experts studying the life cycles of insurgencies around the world. In that work, they’ve found that as an insurgency matures, the motivation of its leaders often changes. Rebels who start out fighting for what they see as a noble cause or to achieve a goal in time come to enjoy the power and money that insurgency brings them. Analysts describe that transition as “grievance to greed.”

In a new paper, Steven Metz, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, makes a point with considerable relevance to Iraq. He argues that government leaders fighting an insurgency undergo that same transformation. They too find the insurgency a convenient way to accumulate power and money, and they don’t really mind if it continues. In their world, the considerable personal risks they would have to take to make peace vastly outweigh the minor risks of letting the insurgency continue.

For example, Metz points out, building an effective military is essential if a government is to defeat an insurgency. Yet government leaders also understand that a powerful military can also become a threat to their own existence. As Metz notes, “more regimes have been overthrown by coups than by insurgencies.” Government leaders are more secure with a weak military and continuing insurgency than with a strong military and no insurgency.

Then there is another view.  The always interesting and compelling Nibras Kazimi calls the Sunni withdrawal from the government a miscalculation, and points to the hardship of learning democratic politics as the root cause of the problems.  After dealing with a significant amount of detail on the personalities and political machinations involved, he concludes:

Maliki may be secure for now in the fact that no one can agree on his replacement in such a confused, yet healthy, atmosphere of political jockeying. The sectarian-based coalitions that emerged from the last elections are breaking down as the threat of sectarian warfare diminishes further and further, and the Sunni insurgency grinds down to an allowable baseline of violence. But Maliki must act quickly and confidently to put his own stamp on a new cabinet of his own choosing, something that many doubt that he has the personal stamina and brain-power to do.

For now, it’s great for me to watch the Islamist parties fumble, with no dominant ‘leader’ emerging. Everyone is being forced to play politics within the rules of the game; no more military coups, no more ‘Great Leaders’. The Sadrists have shown themselves to be as inept and corrupt as all the rest, and the shrill Sunni voices are being supplanted by new political forces that can live with the huge cascade of change begun on April 9, 2003.

But Iraqis are still suffering from the ineptness of their public servants, and new and empowered managerial talent must be harnessed to improve basic services and revive the economy, and it’s immoral to keep Iraqis waiting much longer.

The best case scenario would be early parliamentary elections in six months, with Maliki acting as a care-taker. But all the parties understand that this may greatly diminish their gains and will work to prevent it from happening; the Shiites will probably be unable to depend on a blessing from Grand Ayatollah Sistani this time around given their poor performance in power. An even-better scenario would be to turn parliamentary seats into district representations rather than slate-backed, but again, the current lack-lustre MPs would refuse that.

Congressional critics and the western media may want to play up this political confusion as a sign that Bush is not making progress in Iraq, and they predictably will. But a fairer analysis would conclude that these are all healthy signs of the re-introduction of politics into Iraqi life. It may not even be as pretty as sausage-making, yet it puts to rest the Middle Eastern instinctual impulse for a short-cut to power through violence and tyranny.

These are two radically different views of the events transpiring before our eyes.  From politics to the daily needs of ice to prevent food from spoiling, every element of Iraqi society is in a struggle.  Is this a struggle to prevent a strong central government from developing and keep a party in power, or is this a picture of the reintroduction of politics into a society which hasn’t seen it in decades?  Which view is correct will become apparent in good time.

Michael Totten is in Baghdad, and while his (most recent) entire report is both interesting and highly worth reading, I want to focus in on the following words:

“They have a little bunker up there,

The broad outlines of the long range plan being formalized by senior military leadership was divulged several days ago.  The plan includes an extension of force deployment in Iraq to provide security, along with pressure on the government and various political and religious factions to resolve differences.

Fred Kaplan weighed in on the plan at Slate in an article entitled Interesting But Doomed: Why Petraeus’ Ingtriguing New Iraq Strategy Will Probably Fail.  The plan has numerous critics, but Kaplan’s most recent article warrants close study, including (we think) at the same time both misperception and compelling argument.  In order to mine his complex thoughts on the matter, his article will be cited at length, followed up by commentary and analysis.  Kaplan writes:

If the U.S. military had, say, 100,000 more troops to send and another 10 years to keep them there; if the Iraqi security forces (especially the Iraqi police) were as skilled and, more important, as loyal to the Iraqi nation (as opposed to their ethnic sects) as many had hoped they would be by now; if the Iraqi government were a governing entity, as opposed to a ramshackle assemblage that can barely form a quorum—then maybe, maybe, this plan might have a chance.

But under the circumstances, it seems unlikely. One officer who’s familiar with Iraq planning put it this way to me: “No one who understands the situation is optimistic. I think the division among those who have thought deeply about the situation is mainly between those who are still fighting and trying to influence the outcome and those who have concluded that the principal objective must now become disengagement.”

Kaplan outlines in broad form the known problems with the Iraqi government and culture, and then summarizes his opening remarks by citing bleak insider views about the situation.  Then he gets specific.

First, to define “localized security” as including “Baghdad and other areas” is to finesse the major challenge. Securing Baghdad and securing “other areas” have long been considered two separate goals. The former involves pacifying the capital, to give the national politicians enough “breathing room” to make their deals. The latter involves keeping the rest of the country—or at least the major cities—sufficiently secure that democratic politics can function from the ground up as well as from the top down. Ever since late last year, when President Bush ordered the “surge” and hired Gen. Petraeus to create a counterinsurgency strategy, the plan has involved securing the capital and the provinces simultaneously.

The problem—a familiar one—is that we don’t have enough troops to do this all at once. No one who has seriously analyzed the problem ever believed that a “surge” of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. combat troops would be sufficient. It was assumed from the outset that at least two or three times that many would have to come from the Iraqi army (whose soldiers, furthermore, would have to take the lead in many operations) and the Iraqi police (who would need to maintain order once the troops seized new territory).

Yet Iraqi forces have not materialized in anything like the necessary numbers. Many army units are infiltrated with sectarian militiamen. Many, if not most, police units are thoroughly corrupted.

The second, “intermediate” phase of the plan is more intriguing, but ultimately unpersuasive. For a few months now, U.S. field commanders have formed alliances with Sunni tribesmen, especially in Anbar province, for the common goal of crushing jihadists. The new plan, as the Times puts it, is “to stitch together such local arrangements to establish a broader sense of security on a nationwide basis.”

But in these alliances, we’re dealing with tribesmen who are cooperating with us for a common goal. It is not at all clear on what basis these various local Sunni factions can be stitched together into some seamless security quilt—or why, because they’ve agreed to help us kill jihadists, they might suddenly agree to stop killing Shiites, compromise their larger ambitions, redirect their passions into peaceful politics, and settle into a minority party’s status within a unified government.

Kaplan has within a few words hit on three salient themes: (1) force size, (2) ‘whack-a-mole’ counterinsurgency, and (3) the inability to utilize Iraqi security forces and police to assist in the COIN campaign due to corruption and sectarian divisions.  Kaplan then targets the strategy of alliance with the Anbar tribal leaders and explains why he believes that this ultimately will fail (or at least, most probably will fail).

Alliances of convenience rarely outlive their immediate aims. Josef Stalin formed an alliance with the United States and Britain for the purpose of defeating Nazi Germany. But once the war was over, he had no interest in integrating the Soviet Union into the Western economic system.

The idea of extending the alliances may have come, in part, from Stephen Biddle, a military historian and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who, according to the Times, was a member of the “Joint Strategic Assessment Team” that helped conceive the new U.S. strategy.

In a July 12 interview at the Council, conducted by Bernard Gwertzman, Biddle said that the only way to secure all of Iraq is “to negotiate a series of cease-fire deals with Iraq’s current combatants in which, even though they retain the ability to fight, they decide it’s in their own self-interest to … decline to fight.”

He referred to Anbar as “a model” for this concept, and added, “There are now similar negotiations ongoing in a variety of other places around Iraq.” In Anbar, he said, the alliance “dropped into our lap”; the Sunni sheiks came to us and asked for help. “If it’s going to happen elsewhere, we’re going to have to take a more proactive role. … We have to start using the military not as a device to secure everything uniformly but as a device for creating incentives and disincentives—sticks and carrots—to push along the process of local cease-fires with particular factions.” For instance, he said, we would have to tell each faction: “We will defend you if you cooperate; if you don’t cooperate, we will attack you” …

Some set of “sticks and carrots” could conceivably extend the alliances of convenience into a sustained cease-fire of normal democratic politics. But if so, the deal would have to be hammered out by a recognized government in Baghdad. Neither Gen. Petraeus nor Ambassador Crocker (nor, for that matter, President Bush) has the political authority to make such a deal—much less the military firepower to enforce it.

Analysis &  Commentary

Stephen Biddle notwithstanding, reconciliation with the indigenous insurgency in Anbar has been ongoing for quite a while.  It is absurd to claim that the peace between the Anbar tribes and U.S. forces merely “dropped into our lap.”  As we observed in Al Qaeda, Indigenous Sunnis and the Insurgency in Iraq:

… terrorization of the population (and competing groups) managed to achieve its goal of keeping the population in submission, at least until the Marines prevailed over the course of several years at hunting down and killing many of the rogue elements.  It has been observed that