Few observers of the war in Iraq have been more insightful than journalist Tom Ricks. In his military and defense reporting for the Washington Post and in his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Ricks showed the incompetence of the American occupation of Iraq, and exposed the idiocy at the core of the program to invade Iraq and try to remake the Middle East. In his recent book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, he tracks the genesis and execution of "the surge." Mainstream reporting and most political dialog about the surge focused on sending more combat troops to Iraq in 2007, but Ricks shows it was also a fundamental shift from a traditional military occupation to a tactically superior engagement of the entire Iraqi population. Petraeus championed the doctrine of counterinsurgency, and it is indeed one of the factors that had helped reduce violence in Iraq, especially in the Baghdad area. But, Ricks writes in The Gamble,
[I]t is unclear in 2009 if [Petraeus] did much more than lengthen the war. In revising the U.S. approach to the Iraq war, Petraeus found tactical success—that is, improved security—but not the clear political breakthrough that would have meant unambiguous strategic success. At the end of the surge, the fundamental political problems facing Iraq were the same ones as when it began…Under Petraeus, the American goal of transforming Iraq had quietly been scaled down. But even his less ambitious target of sustainable security would remain elusive, with no certainty of reaching it any time soon.
It's been only a few years since the illusions of Paul Wolfowitz and the criminally foolish utopians at the American Enterprise Institute were scuttled and replaced by the Robert Gates-led Department of Defense with a more chastened desire for basic stability. The surge was announced shortly after the Democratic victories in the 2006 elections, aided by the extreme violence and chaos in Iraq that had been ramping up for two years. The main criticism of the surge was that it would not address the underlying political problems at the heart of what was by just about any reasonable standard a raging civil war in Iraq. Advocates of the surge, including Petraeus, depicted it as the predicate to political reconciliation; that when the population once again felt safe, the would be an opportunity for political reconciliation.
The surge, as Ricks chronicles in The Gamble, did help contribute to greater security for many Iraqis. Of course numerous other factors also contributed to the decline in violence. For instance, much of the violence in 2005-2006 was sectarian, and related to the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods. The surge began as the ethnic cleansing was just about complete; whereas once there were many multi-ethnic and mixed sectarian neighborhoods in Baghdad, by the end of 2006 there were almost none.
One of the other factors that contributed to the decline in violence contemporaneous with the surge was the Sunni Awakening, the movement of tribal leaders in many Sunni areas to ally with the Americans—and to accept large sums of money to do so—and fight against the extremist elements who represented themselves as Al Qaeda in Iraq or Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The goal with the Sunni Awakening—which eventually led to about 100,000 Sunnis aligned with the US and the Shiite-led Iraqi national government—was to eventually be integrated in to the new post-Baathist power structure. To that end, they were to be given some political power—many of them had boycotted the national elections, so they had no representative power in the national government—and as or more important, plenty of patronage positions; roughly 20,000 of the Awakening fighters were supposed to be integrated in to the army and police forces.
Ricks' hasn't thought that the surge would deal with the long-term political problems caused by the US invasion and occupation, which took an awful but still mostly internally stable situation under Saddam and didn't replace it with anything, leading to a mostly anarchic situation of inter-and-intra-sectarian rivalries with no significant trans-sectarian political party, movement or cohesive coalition. But on his blog this week, Ricks still expressed surprise at how quickly the stability facilitated by the surge appears to be unraveling:
I thought some of the surge-era deals in Iraq would unravel but I didn't think that would begin happening this quickly. It's only March 2009, and already Awakening fighters are fighting U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.
Last weekend the Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki arrested one of the leaders of the Sunni Awakening in the Fadhil neighborhood of Baghdad. The reaction can best be described as a rebellion by the local Sunni population and its armed representatives against the Iraqi government, with the US forces on the side of the government:
In response to the arrest, Awakening fighters took to the streets and rooftops, engaging in fierce gun battles with U.S. and Iraqi troops. At least eight Iraqi soldiers were injured; an additional five were taken hostage but were released Sunday morning, Iraqi security officials said.
By Sunday, Iraqi security forces and American troops had surrounded the neighborhood. Snipers peered from the roofs of buildings as Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters circled in the overcast sky. Some dropped leaflets urging residents to hand over weapons; the handbills also stressed that there was a legal warrant for Mashadani's arrest and that no residents were being targeted.
By mid-week things had settled down. But the conflicts with Sunni Awakening fighters have not. On Thursday US aircraft fired at Sons of Iraq members—as the Awakening fighters are sometimes called—who were allegedly planting a roadside bomb. And government arrests of Awakening figures continued.
There's good reason to think that the Awakening has been severely compromised, with possibly as many as 40% of the members now secretly loyal to jihadi groups. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem, because since the US military foisted payment of the Awakening members on to the Iraqi government, most of the Awakening members have not been paid.
There's also the limitations of the surge. Ricks quotes from an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace:
Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is shifting its focus back to Afghanistan now that the war in Iraq has been won. The suggestion -- which has, by now, been internalized in mainstream discourse -- that the surge of American troops into Baghdad has been a success is dubious on two grounds.
First, there are factual difficulties. A September 2008 report by researchers at UCLA found that "violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning." They concluded, therefore, that "the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved." That is, the surge occurred after the tinderbox that it was intended to eliminate had mostly been defused. Furthermore, according to a recent wire story, the apparent stability in Baghdad results from "fear," which "keeps the peace."
Second, there are moral considerations. Approximately five million Iraqis, or 20% of the Iraqi population, have been displaced from their homes; Human Rights Watch reports that "no structure exists to meet [their] humanitarian needs." According to recent statistics, 88% of Iraqis do not have access to electricity; 70% do not have access to clean water (a new report found that 36% of Baghdad's drinking water is unsafe); and 43% live on less than a dollar a day. One in five Iraqi women suffers physical violence, and one in three Iraqi children is hungry. It strains credulity to suggest that victory has been achieved in Iraq even though the country's social services apparatus is dysfunctional, most Iraqis cannot access basic provisions, and the rule of fear substitutes for the rule of law. Because the surge "is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state," concluded a respected analyst, "the recent short-term gains [in stability] have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq."
Where does all this lead? Ricks' conclusion is that a withdrawal from Iraq on Barack Obama's timeline will lead to a horrific moral, human, political and military disaster, as there's no stability in Iraq. As Ricks was an opponent of the war, this isn't standard right wing talking points. It's a sober assessment by someone well informed with a very critical view of the entire endeavor in Iraq; after all, remember the title of his first book on the subject.
Ricks adds this:
I am reminded of Ambassador Ryan Crocker's worry, expressed in my new book and elsewhere, that the future of Iraq was something like Lebanon. That is, it has a government, but it is shaky, and there is violence in the streets, with some political parties having armed wings that are outside the control of the government.
I expressed the same concern…five and a half years ago.
Barack Obama is faced with a horrifying array of problems. In foreign and military affairs, some have never had easy solutions, and he would have probably faced them even if the previous administration hadn't been an utter disaster; for instance, North Korea would still have been a quandary without any easy solutions.
Other situations, though, could easily have been avoided, but now the damage done is so great that it's difficult to imagine any result that isn't horrible, and at best the outcome of pursuing the least bad of an array of nothing but bad options. The Sunni insurgency, as part of the larger chaos of Iraq, is maybe the most predictable, and possibly the most intractable of the problems facing Barack Obama.