I do not know who does layout work at The New York Times but someone deserves a pat on the back for a nice little juxtaposition on yesterday’s A12. The front page of Tuesday’s Times had a story about our handover of Anbar province to the Iraqi government, “U.S. Hands Off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraq Insurgency“. That story jumped to page A12 where, right beneath it, there was another Iraq story, “U.S. Military Will Transfer Control of Sunni Citizen Patrols to Iraqi Government“.
The first story chronicled a little ceremony held in Ramadi where formal responsibility for Anbar province was turned over to the Iraqi military. As with the much touted transfer of sovereignty in 2004 it has never been entirely clear just what the real implications are for these security handoffs; U.S. military personnel seem to still be involved in combat or patrols after a province has been handed over. While I’m sure there are changes in the military bureaucracy and maybe a lightening of American responsibilities by no stretch of the imagination does it mean that American troops are done getting killed in Anbar.
The second story is far less hopeful and far more concrete. The opening sentence lays it out, “Come Oct. 1, the Iraqi government will take over responsibility for paying and directing the Sunni-dominated citizen patrols known as Awakening Councils that operate in and around Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials said Monday.” They key word there is “paying”.
The Sunni insurgency is basically comprised of those who lost out after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. It’s always tempting to think of dictatorships as oppressing “the people” and being resented. But things are rarely so clear cut and in Iraq the Sunni minority, which traditionally held outsize political power given its relative portion of the total population (even before Hussein), did alright. They didn’t have any political freedom, but materially they were treated comparatively well. Then we showed up and installed a government dominated by Shiites; the Sunnis lost their privileges and got upset, and the country descended into civil war.
Thick skulled war supporters here in America like to tout the success of our troop escalation, which they refer to, with an enviable lack of self awareness, as the “surge”. There is a macho logic to it all: we stopped fucking around and started doing proper counterinsurgency, canned Rumsfeld, sent in more troops, opened up with good old fashioned American firepower, and now Iraq is getting better. It’s a nice story if you’re a war supporter who had been getting despondent (it plays well with those who believe in the myth that we could’ve won in Vietnam if we’d taken the gloves off), unfortunately it doesn’t fit the known facts.
The - ahem - “Anbar Awakening” began with one contact between an Iraqi sheik and an American colonel in September 2006, months before the vapid term “surge” was being kicked around in the press. It has become a program whereby we pay previously hostile Sunni militias, in both cash and arms, not to attack us. Casualties went way down on both sides and at least in the short term it’s win-win; our government can claim progress in Iraq and the Sunnis don’t have to exhaust themselves fighting us when they’d rather be fighting the Shiites. Combine that with the violent, ethnic reorganization of Baghdad (via Prof. Cole) and the rate of death declined considerably, however it has not made Iraq any more politically stable than it was before.
What that second Times story means is that starting October 1st those nice Sunnis, the ones who haven’t been fighting us as long as we’ve been supporting them, will have their paychecks signed by the Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. The story concludes:
Sheik Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, leader of one of the largest tribes in Anbar Province, said the Iraqi government must bring all the Awakening members into its security forces. If it cannot, he said, “then it’s not a real government.”
It’s not a real government, that’s a downright warlike statement coming from a leader of a large (well armed) minority. It becomes even more chilling when we combine it with this passage from yesterday’s article by McClatchy’s Leila Fadel (one of the true gold-standard bylines for Iraq news):
The Iraqi government is eager to take over the Sons of Iraq program, a U.S. initiative that pays mostly Sunni former insurgents to protect their neighborhoods. The Shiite-led government’s aim, however, isn’t to absorb the mostly Sunni groups into the security forces, but to disarm and in some cases detain the men.
That puts things in a very grim light, al-Maliki’s government wants to detain and disarm these men, the men themselves view any attempt to do anything other than incorporate them into the Iraqi military as illegitimate. It’s certainly not a guarantee of civil war, but it doesn’t augur well for peace and reconciliation.
