Following up on the recent McClatchy Article on the Bush distortion of what is really going on in Iraq. One of the problems within Iraq is that broad assertions about the nature of the conflict have been made by the Bush administration that have proven to be false, or have lead to strategic errors.
If we have made strategic errors, we must also accept that we have either had poor intelligence, or our assumptions about the nature of the Iraq conflict have been wrong. I tend to believe that it is our view of Iraq that has been wrong and has caused us so much grief. If we accept we have made a strategic error we must also accept the logical consequence that the error was an integral part of our thinking.
According to the McClatchy article, a pattern of malformed assumptions continues, and it likely follows that further strategic errors will follow those assumptions:
"They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra - in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate," Bush said. "Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today."
That version of events helps to justify Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, in which U.S. forces will largely target Sunni insurgents and leave it to Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite government to - perhaps - disarm its allies in Shiite militias and death squads.
But the president's account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics. It also ignores the role that Iranian-backed Shiite groups had in death squad activities prior to the Samarra bombing.
Blaming the start of sectarian violence in Iraq on the Golden Dome bombing risks policy errors because it underestimates the depth of sectarian hatred in Iraq and overlooks the conflict's root causes. The Bush account also fails to acknowledge that Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite groups stoked the conflict.
This points to a severe problem in the way the Bush administration is explaining the Iraq war. There has been a tendency to dumb down the rhetoric and explanations to the American people. Rather than go into detail on the issues of the war. There is a reflexive need to make these issues fit into a neat, and tidy little box among the Bush people.
The way the Bush administration articulates the Iraq war is along a linear progression, between two poles. This graphic from the New York Times shows this kind of thinking. We are proceeding from order to chaos. The explanation of how we move from order to chaos is explained by a literal understanding of whom is attacking whom. The Sunnis are fighting Shiites, and since this accelerated after the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque, that must be the cause of the violence. It is analyzed as simple cause and effect.
The kind of conflict that Bush is describing looks very linear, something like this. In that kind of conflict it makes sense to surge. You can make the argument that if only we make a strong enough break between the warring factions, we can give them the breathing space they need to make concessions. After all, they don't really want a war do they, they will "step back from the abyss". That kind of thinking assumes that the Shiites and the Sunnis are monolithic in nature, and that they are in fact partners we can negotiate with on a one to one basis via the Iraqi government and that the parties have control of their factions. That kind of thinking assumes that we can build institutions that will act as a mediator between the primary factions and establish some kind of detente or cease fire. This is a vast oversimplification and a dumbing down of the problem.
The McClatchy article points to something very different. Rather than analyzing the outcomes of events, it analyzes the motives of those committing those acts and the various parties and constituencies of this war and what they are fighting for. Based on this kind of analysis, rather than seeing Iraq as a continuum from peace to Chaos, Iraq is seen as an intersection of forces, a multi-polar war. Not only will we not see a traditional victory, the definition of who exactly is the enemy in Iraq is very unclear.
In fact we face, at the very least least, two significantly different problems in Iraq, one of them being anti-American/nationalist/al Queada inspired, and the other being rooted in the 1400 year old conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. To a certain degree these root causes follow the fault lines of the sectarian divides, but they do not match completely. There are tribal factors to take into account, there are geographic factors to consider and regional alliances, such as those between Syria and Iran to factor in. If you take them all together, it might look something like this.
When you look at the problem from this point of view, it opens up questions related to factionalization and fragmentation, both of which seem to be clear and present problems in Iraq. A real world example of this kind of factionalization is in the Iraqi military, its inability to function. If we view this from a multi-polar point of view, we can understand why the soldiers don't fight and why they don't have loyalty to the central government. Some Shiites may see an operation in a Sunni area as positive, but the Sunnis will resist with everything they can throw at them. The Shiite recruits don't want to take that kind of abuse. When they are tasked to go into Shiite areas, they will be loath attack perceived allies or hesitant to make enemies from neutral parties. From this point of view, security must be developed on the local level, not the national level. It is virtually impossible to build a functional military because any mission they may be tasked with will be immediately compromised. And yet, this is exactly the kind of thinking we get from Bush. "When they stand up, we will stand down", stand up to who?
I think this also shows the weakness of the US State Department. The military is not tasked to create a culture that can ask questions such as these, they are typically tasked to bring the hammer down. A strong State Department would have analyzed these issues and brought them to the fore so that the decision maker could render informed decisions. We are making our Iraq policy totally apart from a working understanding of what is going on within the internal mechanics of the country. This administration does not grasp the nature of the problem at a fundamental level. What is even worse, the neocons, who invented the methodology that has brought us this deep into the Iraq morass still run the decision making process and control the mechanics of how knowledge is gathered and distributed. I am starting to believe that this is the reason we are going to have an escalation in the Iraq war, they simply do not understand or are aware of what is going on and believe this will achieve some kind of victory.
There is a simple question we all need to ask ourselves and the answer will save us a lot of grief. Who exactly are our soldiers supposed to shoot first, who is the specific and definable enemy, where does he live, what does his organization look like and how does he operate? Who specifically is the enemy in Iraq? If we cannot answer that question, we need to re-deploy our forces.