The Sound Of Closing Windows

Posted By Cernig

Over at Vet Voice, Brandon Friedman has a graph:

He writes:

To be certain, people don't plant IEDs randomly.  Planting roadside bombs in the first place is incredibly risky, and insurgents don't take the issue lightly.  Thus, when IEDs and VBIEDs (car bombs) suddenly start going off west of Baghdad again, it's for a reason.

While I do not profess to know exactly what change in the political climate precipitated this specific spike in violence, I do know that General Petraeus was correct when he said that the placidity in Anbar Province was reversible.  What most have failed to realize thus far is that, while al Qaeda is deeply unpopular in Anbar, U.S. forces are equally despised.  So it seems that those who've repeatedly used Anbar's relative peacefulness as a sign of impending U.S. success in Iraq know little about counterinsurgency and less about Iraq.

Success in Iraq is something that will be brought about by Iraqis--not the American military.  As long as we're there, the best we can hope for is extreme violence broken by periodic lulls--such as what we've witnessed in Anbar over the past seven months.  As long we remain in Iraq, the violence will remain cyclical.  It will rise and fall, contingent on the latest deal we've cut with tribal leaders or the latest deal that someone has brokered within the Iraqi government.  But our military will never completely solve this inherently Iraqi problem.  We're watching that unfortunate fact unfold before us in Anbar this month.

The "successes" of the Surge, we've been told, only opened a window for political reconciliation which would rapidly close if the Iraqi central government didn't act. I would suggest that Brandon's graph is of a window that is well-nigh closed.

Recent intra-Shiite faction fighting has only served to slam the Sunni Awakening window closed more quickly.  Matt Duss points to a podcast from New York Times reporters Alissa Rubin and Stephen Farrell:

You have the people who rule the street and the people who run the government. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Iraqis who would wholeheartedly side with the idea that somehow the official democratic clean honest wonderful government is bringing law and order to an undisciplined rabble. I think most people, certainly most Sunnis that you talk to, would see this as a fight between a militia [ISCI/Badr] which happens to have turned itself into the government army and a militia [Sadr’s Mahdi Army] which hasn’t. The insiders and the outsiders.

After the Basra operation, Maliki suddenly found room for 10,000 new Badrist recruits to the security forces - after saying for a long time that there was no room in those forces for more than a fraction of the 90,000 Sunni Awakening members. The rest, they were told, would be turned from warriors in to streetsweepers and garbage collectors. Even then, the central government is balking at taking over paying the Awakening's wages (some $30 million every month) from the U.S. military. Maliki and others from his ruling axis are on record as saying they will not tolerate the lengthy existence of the Awakening as an armed group and thus it is attempting to transition itself to a movement much like Sadr's, where there is a political wing as well as an armed one. But the existing Sunni parties already in power in the Green Zone will massively lose support thereby - and are already, by some accounts, preparing to have the Iraqi Army do to the Awakening what the ISCI had done to the Sadrists.