Analysis of the surge strategy in Iraq
Feb. 10th, 2009 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tagrynvia a WaPo chat session on the topic.
Stephen Biddle: Sorting out the relative importance of the troop increase, the strategy change, and Iraqi events over which we had limited control is a key question for the future. I think the best account from what we know now is that the surge was necessary but insufficient for the violence reduction. Also necessary - but also insufficient - was al Qaeda's brutality toward Sunni co-religionists, and especially, the Sunnis' defeat in 2006's sectarian warfare in Baghdad following the Samarra mosque bombing in 2/06. Before the mosque bombing, Sunnis believed they were the stronger side, and that only American support for a weak Shiite puppet regime stood between them and a return to power. Hence their strategy turned on driving the Americans out through a combination of casualties and general chaos. When al Qaeda in Iraq bombed the Samarra mosque, however, a collection of Shiite militias that had mostly been standing on the sidelines, defending their own population bases - and especially the Mahdi Army - entered the war en masse and on the offensive. The result was a year long sectarian slugfest in the capital in which the Sunnis got a technicolor view of exactly what a true one-on-one battle with the Shiite rivals would look like (we didn't have the troop strength at the time to prevent this battle, so the Sunnis and Shiites got to fight it out with relatively modest interference from US or Iraqi government forces). To their shock, they lost - badly. Sunnis were pushed almost all the way out of the city in spite of their (and AQI's) best efforts to the contrary. As a result, it became clear to them that if the Americans left and they really were pitted against the Shia alone, the result would be defeat and possible mass violence against them, not victory as they had previously assumed. This gave them a powerful incentive to seek a negotiated deal while they still could - and the result was the Sunni Awakening movement and its progeny. But this wasn't enough. Sunnis had tried turning on AQI before, and AQI's signature brutality had always driving them back into the fold via violent counterattack. Enter the surge. What the surge did was to protect Sunnis who wished to realign against AQI to survive the attempt. The surge wasn't big enough to suffocate the insurgency by putting an American on every street corner - there weren't enough Americans. But what it did was to put Americans into a position to team up with realigning Sunnis to combine their knowledge of who and where the AQI cells were with our firepower. That combination rapidly rolled up the AQI infrastructure in western and central Iraq, and in the process resulted in the series of negotiated deals in which the Sunni insurgency stood down. And this in turn changed the Shiite militia's incentives - and especially Sadr's - in ways that drove them, too, into ceasefire. The net result is a situation that would never have happened without the Sunni defeat in Baghdad in 2006 (and their consequent desire to realign) *or* the US surge (without which that realignment would have died aborning). And this has important implications for US policy elsewhere: more troops can be important - even necessary - for success. But they cannot necessarily guarantee it without favorable underlying conditions. The time has to be ripe. It was in Iraq in 2007; it may or may not be elsewhere.
This jives with something I've thought for a while, that the driving factor behind the insurgency was that the Sunnis who had thrived under Saddam, especially the Tikritis of Saddam's tribe, just weren't ready to accept that they had lost the war, and with that their privileged place in Iraqi society, especially to the Shia who they had always dominated. Until they realized that there was the real prospect of mass ethnic cleansing at the hands of Shia looking for payback after what Saddam had put them through, no accommodation was possible.
Stephen Biddle: Sorting out the relative importance of the troop increase, the strategy change, and Iraqi events over which we had limited control is a key question for the future. I think the best account from what we know now is that the surge was necessary but insufficient for the violence reduction. Also necessary - but also insufficient - was al Qaeda's brutality toward Sunni co-religionists, and especially, the Sunnis' defeat in 2006's sectarian warfare in Baghdad following the Samarra mosque bombing in 2/06. Before the mosque bombing, Sunnis believed they were the stronger side, and that only American support for a weak Shiite puppet regime stood between them and a return to power. Hence their strategy turned on driving the Americans out through a combination of casualties and general chaos. When al Qaeda in Iraq bombed the Samarra mosque, however, a collection of Shiite militias that had mostly been standing on the sidelines, defending their own population bases - and especially the Mahdi Army - entered the war en masse and on the offensive. The result was a year long sectarian slugfest in the capital in which the Sunnis got a technicolor view of exactly what a true one-on-one battle with the Shiite rivals would look like (we didn't have the troop strength at the time to prevent this battle, so the Sunnis and Shiites got to fight it out with relatively modest interference from US or Iraqi government forces). To their shock, they lost - badly. Sunnis were pushed almost all the way out of the city in spite of their (and AQI's) best efforts to the contrary. As a result, it became clear to them that if the Americans left and they really were pitted against the Shia alone, the result would be defeat and possible mass violence against them, not victory as they had previously assumed. This gave them a powerful incentive to seek a negotiated deal while they still could - and the result was the Sunni Awakening movement and its progeny. But this wasn't enough. Sunnis had tried turning on AQI before, and AQI's signature brutality had always driving them back into the fold via violent counterattack. Enter the surge. What the surge did was to protect Sunnis who wished to realign against AQI to survive the attempt. The surge wasn't big enough to suffocate the insurgency by putting an American on every street corner - there weren't enough Americans. But what it did was to put Americans into a position to team up with realigning Sunnis to combine their knowledge of who and where the AQI cells were with our firepower. That combination rapidly rolled up the AQI infrastructure in western and central Iraq, and in the process resulted in the series of negotiated deals in which the Sunni insurgency stood down. And this in turn changed the Shiite militia's incentives - and especially Sadr's - in ways that drove them, too, into ceasefire. The net result is a situation that would never have happened without the Sunni defeat in Baghdad in 2006 (and their consequent desire to realign) *or* the US surge (without which that realignment would have died aborning). And this has important implications for US policy elsewhere: more troops can be important - even necessary - for success. But they cannot necessarily guarantee it without favorable underlying conditions. The time has to be ripe. It was in Iraq in 2007; it may or may not be elsewhere.
This jives with something I've thought for a while, that the driving factor behind the insurgency was that the Sunnis who had thrived under Saddam, especially the Tikritis of Saddam's tribe, just weren't ready to accept that they had lost the war, and with that their privileged place in Iraqi society, especially to the Shia who they had always dominated. Until they realized that there was the real prospect of mass ethnic cleansing at the hands of Shia looking for payback after what Saddam had put them through, no accommodation was possible.
