The Consequences of the Surge in Iraq

Not enough attention is being paid to the fact that the so-called "success" of the Surge is going to have consequences that will happen later this year or early next year--at essentially the point where the Bush Administration will be fleeing responsibility and leaving the mess in Iraq to the next President.

The strategy of "surging" troops into Iraq pushes the bubble down the calendar and kicks the can down the road--it has done nothing but ease the political pressure on the Administration until such time as the unsustainable "surge" ends and the resulting vacuum allows...what exactly? What will happen when the reduced troop presence is made apparent to all sides in Iraq? Will the violence return? Let us hope not.

The sincere wish of every reasonable person is that the violence in Iraq will stop. No one prays for it to return, just so we can say "I told you so!"

This article examines the consequences that might lie ahead:

POLITICS-US: On Anniversary, Views of Surge Diverge
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 10 (IPS) - Exactly one year after U.S. President George W. Bush announced that he would significantly increase the number of troops deployed to Iraq, the wisdom of his so-called "surge" strategy remains very much in dispute here.

While even many Democrats, who have sought in vain to reverse the strategy since it was first announced, now concede that it has helped reduce the violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, critics say that its ultimate political objective -- national reconciliation between Iraq's three major ethnic and sectarian groups -- remains as distant as ever.

Some even argue that the surge, which added some 30,000 troops to the 140,000 deployed to Iraq at the time of Bush's announcement, may actually have enhanced prospects for a bloodier civil war by effectively permitting the warring sides -- now more demographically segregated than ever -- to re-group and re-arm in anticipation of a new round of bloodletting as U.S. troops withdraw.

"The thing that worries me most of all is what happens over the next 12 to 24 months in Iraq," ret. Army Gen. Douglas MacGregor, an outspoken critic of U.S. strategy in the Iraq war since the 2003 invasion, told National Public Radio (NPR) earlier this week. "Could we have actually made matters worse in the long term?"

So if you can add, and I know I can, "12 to 24 months" means the NEXT President. And if you're watching the polls, you know it ain't gonna be Fred Thompson.

The surge, which actually got underway in February under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, was designed primarily to increase U.S. troop strength and military operations in a way that would both halt the slide into all-out civil war between the Sunni and Shi'a communities and provide greater security to all sides.

The goal, in Bush's words, was to provide the Shi'a-dominated government with "the breathing space it needs" to "make reconciliation [with the Sunni insurgency] possible".

As laid out by Bush one year ago, that reconciliation would be signaled by the passage by Iraq's National Assembly of key legislative "benchmarks", including a reform of the de-Ba'athification programme; an oil law that would ensure equitable distribution of the revenue gained from Iraq's energy resources; and constitutional reforms that, among other things, would result in provincial elections in 2007.

This Spring, General Petraeus will return to the capitol, and will, no doubt, be considered the Greatest General of All Time by the people who have a vested interest in seeing the can kicked down the road. Is anyone going to bring up the fact that the surge RE-Ba'athified the country and allowed those who were purged to essentially stand up with arms and come back into the process, now readily armed and prepared to fight it out for the soul of the country? Those Sunni generals see the Shia who "replaced" them as what, now? Their countrymen? Or their enemies?

There is little doubt that violence in Iraq, and especially in Baghdad and al Anbar province, has fallen dramatically. According to statistics assembled by Petraeus' command, attacks against both civilians and U.S. and Iraqi forces have fallen by 60 percent since just last summer when the surge reached its full strength, and even compared to the all-time high of December 2006 when more than 1,500 deaths from ethnic or sectarian violence were recorded in Baghdad alone.

At the same time, however, a major debate has broken out over how much that decline was due to the surge itself. While the more aggressive counter-insurgency tactics pursued by Petraeus may have played an important role in the capital, in particular, experts point as well to other factors that were not directly related to the surge itself.

Indeed, by the time the surge got underway, the process of "sectarian cleansing" in formerly mixed Shi'a-Sunni neighbourhoods in and around Baghdad had been mostly completed, thus reducing a major catalyst for sectarian violence.

Many analysts also point to the pre-surge decision by key Sunni tribal groups, initially in al Anbar province, to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq. By deciding that al Qaeda was the dangerous enemy, the so-called "Sunni Awakening" movement, led in many cases by former Ba'athists, became de facto U.S. allies, effectively pacifying the region where U.S. forces had suffered the highest casualty rates in the war.

Similarly, the decision by Shi'a cleric Moqtada al Sadr to order his powerful Mahdi Army to stand down -- largely as a result of the popular backlash caused by its operations in Najaf, according to one Pentagon consultant, ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- has also helped reduce bloodshed.

That's the part that no one talks about--the stand-down of the Mahdi Army and the payoffs to the Sunnis are what caused the violence to ebb. More US troops also helped--but how much? Realistically, what is the impact of adding 30,000 troops to help contain violence in a country with over 24 million people? [The population used to be 26 million--with widespread numbers fleeing the violence, I'm revising that number down. As people return, I'll revise it upwards.]

[snip]

A particular point of contention at this point is the future of the Sunni Awakening, re-named CLCs, more than 80,000 of whom are currently being paid and equipped by the U.S. military. Washington is pushing hard for them to be integrated into the official, Shi'a-dominated Iraqi security forces, but the Maliki government is worried that they will eventually turn their guns against it.

"There has been no strategy for integrating these militias into the Shi'a central government, which now feels threatened by the growing power of the Sunnis," according to a new report by the National Security Network. "In the long run, this approach threatens to further split Iraq and exacerbate sectarian tensions."

"We need to understand that buying off your enemy is a good, short-term solution to gain a respite from violence, but it's not a long-term solution to creating a legitimate political order inside a country that, quite frankly, is recovering from the worst sort of civil war," said MacGregor. "...Are we not actually setting Iraq up for a worse civil war than the one we've already seen?"

So what the "unintended consequence" of all this will turn out to be seems to be this--we took a pause, and allowed both sides to regroup, rearm and reposition themselves. Nice!

So all we did was give the Iraqis a year off from fighting each other. Did our troops get a year off? No. But the Iraqi government has had vacation time, and the combatants have had their time to go off, get married, father children, and clean their newly purchased weapons, weapons bought with your tax dollars.

You can't make this stuff up anymore.