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The Surge
24.2.2007
By Peter W. Galbraith
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February 24, 2007
On January 10, 2007, President Bush presented his
new Iraq plan in a nationally broadcast address from
the White House library. "The most urgent priority
for success in Iraq," he explained, "is security,
especially in Baghdad." He announced that he was
sending more than 20,000 additional troops to
Baghdad and Anbar Province.
Baghdad would be divided into nine districts and US
forces would be embedded with the Iraqi army and
police in each of those districts. These forces
would monitor the Iraqi units operating in Baghdad,
support them with additional firepower, and provide
training.
By reducing the violence, Bush hopes to open the
door to political reconciliation between Shiites and
Sunnis. |
Former U.S. State Department Official, Peter
Galbraith |
He said he would hold
the Iraqi government to a program of national
reconciliation that included disarming Shiite
militias, a petroleum law guaranteeing the regions
of Iraq a fair share of revenues, and a relaxation
of penalties for service in the Baath Party. But
unlike the Iraq Study Group report, Bush proposed no
penalty if the Iraqi government failed to comply.
Bush aimed his toughest language at Iran and Syria,
charging that they were allowing terrorists to move
in and out of Iraq. The Iranians, he said, were
providing material support for attacks on US troops,
which he vowed to disrupt. To underscore his
determination, he announced the deployment of an
aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, and a few days
after the speech, US special forces staged a raid on
the Iranian liaison office in Erbil and arrested six
Iranian intelligence operatives.
Bush's strategy is the polar opposite of that
proposed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their
Iraq Study Group report. Where they recommended the
withdrawal of combat troops, Bush announced an
escalation. Where they urged a diplomatic opening to
Iran and Syria, Bush issued threats.
Bush's plan is laden with ironies. Four years ago,
military and diplomatic professionals warned that
the US was embarking on a war with insufficient
troops and inadequate planning. President Bush never
listened to this advice, choosing to rely on the
neoconservative appointees who assured him that
victory in Iraq would be easy.
In devising his new strategy, Bush again turned to
the neoconservatives. The so-called surge strategy
is the brainchild of Frederick Kagan, a military
historian at the neoconservative American Enterprise
Institute who has never been to Iraq. And once
again, President Bush dismissed the views of his
military advisers. General George Casey and General
John Abizaid, the commanders in the field, doubted
that additional troops would make any difference in
Iraq. They were replaced by surge advocates,
including Lieutenant General David Petraeus, now the
top commander in Iraq.
Petraeus, on whom so much now rests, served two
previous tours in Iraq. As the American commander in
Mosul in 2003 and 2004, he earned adulatory press
coverage—including a Newsweek cover story captioned
"Can This Man Save Iraq?"—for taming the
Sunni-majority city. Petraeus ignored warnings from
America's Kurdish allies that he was appointing the
wrong people to key positions in Mosul's local
government and police. A few months after he left
the city, the Petraeus-appointed local police
commander defected to the insurgency while the Sunni
Arab police handed their weapons and uniforms over
en masse to the insurgents.[1] Neither this episode
nor the evident failure of the training programs for
the Iraqi army and police which he ran in his next
assignment seemed to have damaged the general's
reputation.
--
In view of the role of neoconservatives in producing
the Iraq fiasco, Bush's continued reliance on them
was, even more than the proverbial second marriage,
the triumph of hope over experience. In so doing,
Bush apparently, and uncharacteristically, swallowed
his pride. In a Vanity Fair article released just
before the mid-term elections, the main
neoconservative proponents of the war, including the
AEI's Richard Perle and David Frum, trashed Bush as
an incompetent. Perle, a noted Washington defense
hawk who was among the most vociferous advocates of
the war, said that in retrospect, the invasion was a
mistake. Frum, who wrote the most famous phrase of
the Bush presidency, "the axis of evil," provided a
comment that
neatly encapsulated the President's governing style
and the neo-conservatives' belief that ideas trump
the practical:
I always believed as a speechwriter that if you
could persuade the president to commit himself to
certain words, he would feel himself committed to
the ideas that underlay those words. And the big
shock to me has been that, although the president
said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas.
And that is the root of, maybe, everything.In his
speech and in interviews that followed, Bush said he
would take responsibility for the mistakes made in
the Iraq war. But when asked if he owed the Iraqi
people an apology for not doing a better job of
providing security after the invasion, he quickly
deflected the responsibility to the Iraqis:
Well I don't, that we didn't do a better job or they
didn't do a better job?... I think I am proud of the
efforts we did. We liberated that country from a
tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American
people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem
here in America. They wonder whether or not there is
a gratitude level that's significant enough in
Iraq.Bush's obliviousness to his own failure
contributed to the overwhelmingly negative public
and congressional reaction to his plan. According to
a Gallup poll taken immediately after the speech, 70
percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling
of the Iraq war and his overall approval ratings
fell to the lowest of his presidency. Aside from
Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, no Democrat
supported the new Bush plan. At the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee the day after the speech,
Republican senators—and in particular those up for
reelection in 2008—were among the fiercest critics
as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to
defend the new strategy.
President Bush's plan has no chance of actually
working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional
troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill
prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure
Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the
city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops
meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish
peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the
Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems
as the Americans, including an inability to
communicate in Arabic.
Bush's strategy assumes that Iraq's Shiite-led
government can become a force for national unity and
that Iraqi security forces can, once trained, be
neutral guarantors of public safety. There is no
convincing basis for either proposition. The Bush
administration's inability to grasp the realities of
Iraq is, in no small measure, owing to its
unwillingness to acknowledge that Iraq is in the
middle of a civil war.
--
As everyone except Bush seems to understand, Iraq's
Shiite-led government has no intention of
transforming itself into an inclusive government of
national unity. The parties that lead Iraq define
themselves—and the state they now control—by their
Shiite identity. For them, Saddam's overthrow and
their electoral victory is a triumph for Islam's
minority sect that has been 1,300 years in the
making and a matter of historic justice. They are
not going to abandon this achievement for the sake
of a particular Iraqi identity urged by an American
president.
Sunni Arabs are implacably opposed to an Iraq ruled
by Shiites who want to define their country by the
religion of the majority. Most see the current Iraqi
government as alien and disloyal to the Iraq the
Sunni Arabs built. (On the gallows, Saddam spoke for
many Sunni Arabs when he warned against the
Americans and "the Persians," by which he clearly
meant Iraq's Shiite rulers.) The Sunni Arabs will
not be reconciled with what they see as small
measures, such as a guaranteed share of petroleum, a
relaxation of de-Baathification laws, or
constitutional amendments. They object to the very
things that are quintessential to the claims of the
Shiites, namely Shiite rule and the Shiite character
of the new Iraq.
Bush's strategy depends on the Iraqi police and army
eventually taking over from US forces. Somehow the
President imagines that Iraq's army and police are
exempt from the country's sectarian and ethnic
divisions. In reality, both the army and police are
as polarized as the country itself. US training will
not make these forces neutral guarantors of public
security but will make them more effective killers
in Iraq's civil war. It is hard to see how this is
in the US interest. The execution of Saddam—in
which, as Iraqi officials subsequently admitted,
members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army
participated— illustrated just how pervasive is the
militia penetration of Iraq's security services.
Since the advocates of the President's surge
strategy have had no idea about how to make Iraq's
police and army committed to an inclusive Iraq, they
simply pretend the problem does not exist.
At best, Bush's new strategy will be a costly
postponement of the day of reckoning with failure.
But it is also a reckless escalation of the military
mission in Iraq that could leave US forces fighting
a powerful new enemy with only marginally more
troops than are now engaged in fighting the Sunni
insurgency. The strategy also risks extending Iraq's
civil war to the hitherto peaceful Kurdish regions,
with no corresponding gain for security in the Arab
parts of the country.
Until now, US forces in Iraq have been fighting,
almost exclusively, the Sunni Arab insurgency.
Bush's new plan calls for the US military to
initiate operations against the Mahdi Army (and
related militias) as well, a measure that could mean
US forces will become embroiled in all-out urban
warfare throughout Baghdad, a city of more than five
million. In addition, the Mahdi Army has members
throughout southern Iraq, in the Diyala Governorate
northeast of Baghdad, and in Kirkuk. While many
Shiites do not support al-Sadr (the Mahdi Army has
had armed clashes with the Badr Organization
belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution, or SCIRI, one of the two main Shiite
parties), the Mahdi Army is a formidable force
comprising as many as 60,000 armed men.[2] With Bush
ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran, the Iranian
government may see a broad-based Shiite uprising
against the coalition as its best insurance against
a US military strike. It has every incentive to
encourage—and assist—the Mahdi Army in organizing
such an uprising. Iran has sufficient influence with
Iraqi Shiite groups—including SCIRI—to ensure at
least their neutrality in a clash with the Mahdi
Army.[3]
At the core of the Iraq fiasco has been Bush's
unwillingness to send forces adequate to accomplish
the mission. Now the President proposes a military
strategy to confront twice as many foes with just 15
percent more troops. The Mahdi Army may choose to
wait out the Americans by taking a low profile for
the duration of the surge. If so, this will be
helpful to US troops, but, of course, it will have
done nothing to break the power of the Shiite
militias. President Bush's public statements
indicate no awareness of the risks of escalating
America's mission in Iraq. Democrats have
concentrated almost exclusively on the escalation in
troop numbers, giving the President a free ride on
the far more dangerous escalation of the mission
itself.
--
So far, the Kurds have largely sat out Iraq's civil
war. Although their constituents want as little
connection with the Iraqi nation as possible, Iraq's
Kurdish president and Kurdish ministers often appear
to be the only senior figures in Baghdad serious
about national unity and national reconciliation.
President Jalal Talabani has worked tirelessly to
reach out to Sunni Arabs, including the insurgents.
Barham Salih, once again Iraq's deputy prime
minister, promoted an Iraq-wide development strategy
and has gotten the Kurdistan government to agree to
share revenues from (but not control of) new oil
fields, even though the constitution assigns such
revenues to the producing region.
Latif Rashid, the Kurd who has been minister of
water resources since his appointment by L. Paul
Bremer in 2003, has put most of his efforts into
restoring the marshes in southern Iraq, in an
attempt to reverse Saddam Hussein's draining of
them, which resulted in an ecological catastrophe.
The rebirth of some marshes is, perhaps, the biggest
achievement of the "new Iraq," but one largely
unnoticed by the press and, oddly, little mentioned
by the Bush administration. Hoshyer Zebari, the Kurd
who has been Iraq's foreign minister since 2003, has
proved a powerful voice for the entire country, both
internationally and at pan-Arab conclaves. The
Kurdish leaders have been able to pursue a national
agenda precisely because their actions do not affect
Kurdistan's separate status.
But Bush's plan could change that. As of this
writing it is not clear how the Kurdish troops will
be used in Baghdad, but any deployment runs a
serious risk of enlarging Iraq's civil war. If the
Kurdish troops are used against Sunni Arabs,
insurgents may respond by escalating attacks on
Kurds living in close proximity to Sunni areas. The
most endangered population consists of the Kurds
living in mostly Kurdish east Mosul. The Kurdish
political parties will respond militarily to an
escalation of the attacks on Mosul's Kurds and this
could transform Mosul from a place of low-level
ethnic conflict to full-scale civil war.
Even more risky, the US military may use Kurdish
troops to fight the Mahdi Army. Iraq's Shiite-led
government obstructed past US moves against the
Mahdi Army and Shiite troops have been mostly
unwilling to fight their coreligionists. This leaves
Kurdish troops as the only indigenous force that the
US could plausibly deploy against the Mahdi Army.
Iraq's government is a partnership between a
coalition of Shiite religious parties and the two
main Kurdish nationalist parties. The Shiite
coalition is itself evenly split between a faction
led by SCIRI and a faction heavily influenced by
supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr. The Kurdish parties
have a close relationship with SCIRI that goes back
decades in the struggle against Saddam and is built
around a shared commitment to a highly decentralized
Iraqi state. By contrast, Moqtada al-Sadr, with his
political support coming heavily from Shiite east
Baghdad, opposes federalism and Kurdish claims to
Kirkuk. Like the Sunni Arabs, he objects to the
constitutional mandate for a referendum to determine
Kirkuk's status and has sent the Mahdi Army there to
fight the peshmerga on behalf of Kirkuk's Shiite
Arabs. (Kirkuk's indigenous Arab population is Sunni
and Kirkuk is adjacent to Iraq's Sunni Arab
govenorates. As part of his plan to make Kirkuk more
Arab and less Kurdish and Turcoman, Saddam settled
Shiites from the south in the homes of Kurds and
Turcomans who were killed or expelled. Many of these
Shiite settlers want to return south but those who
wish to stay are a fertile pool for Mahdi Army
recruits.)
A battle for Baghdad between the Mahdi Army and
Kurdish troops could spill over to Kirkuk. If the
Shiite coalition stays together, it could fracture
the Kurdish–Shiite alliance. Or the Shiite coalition
could itself fracture, making Iraq's civil war a
three-way affair among Sunni Arab insurgents, the
Mahdi Army and its allies, and a SCIRI–Kurdish
alliance. Neither outcome will make resolving Iraq's
problems any simpler. The Kurds, of course, are
aware of the risks. Their decision to send troops at
America's behest reflects their deep commitment to
their American ally in spite of a history that would
suggest they are more likely to be double-crossed
than to have their support reciprocated.
There is near-unanimous opposition in Kurdistan to
sending troops to Baghdad. Although the Kurdish
troops are nominally part of the Iraqi army, Kurdish
leaders understand that Arab Iraqis will see the
Kurdish troops as peshmerga; and, indeed, their
loyalty is to Kurdistan and not Iraq. They only
began moving to Baghdad after getting approval from
the Kurdish political leaders. Even so, many Kurdish
troops deserted rather than go to Baghdad. The
actual number of Kurds deployed is more likely to be
two thousand than the anticipated four thousand.
Kurdish leaders have told their troops to stay out
of Sunni–Shiite sectarian fighting.
--
Scholars who study civil wars observe that they
generally last a long time—a decade is the mean
since 1945—and they end, in 85 percent of the cases,
with one side winning a military victory. If Iraq's
civil war is fought to the end, there can be little
doubt that the Shiites will prevail. They are three
times as numerous as the Sunnis, are in control of
the armed apparatus of the Iraqi state, and have a
powerful ally in neighboring Iran. While Arab
states, including Saudi Arabia, talk about
supporting the Sunni Arabs, those that border Iraq
are relatively small, militarily weak, and separated
from Iraq's population centers by vast tracts of
desert.
The three-state solution I have outlined in my book
would protect the Sunni Arabs from military
annihilation —and its attendant humanitarian
consequences—by giving them their own self-governing
region with defined borders.[4] The alternative to
promoting this kind of power-sharing arrangement is
to let the civil war take its course. In late 2006,
Vice President Cheney floated a trial balloon dubbed
the "80 percent solution." In starkest terms, the 80
percent solution would write off reconciliation with
the Sunni Arabs on the grounds that they are
intractable and focus on supporting the 80 percent
of Iraqis who are Shiite or Kurdish. In essence, the
United States would take the Shiite side in the
Sunni–Shiite civil war.
This is a plausible, if cruel, strategy. But it
would not result in a democratic, unified, or stable
Iraq. The common ground between Shiites and Kurds is
their shared commitment to the par-tition plan
embodied in the Iraqi constitution. An 80 percent
solution is, in effect, a two-state solution with
Kurdistan and a Shiite-dominated Arab Iraq. It
becomes all the more difficult to achieve if Bush
administration efforts to involve the Kurds in the
civil war shatter the Shiite coalition or break up
the Kurdish –Shiite alliance.
George W. Bush has said he will leave the problem of
Iraq to the president elected in 2008. Rather than
acknowledge failure in Iraq—and by extension a
failed presidency—Bush has chosen to postpone the
day of reckoning. It is a decision that will cost
many American and Iraqi lives, will leave the United
States weaker, and will prolong the decline in
American prestige abroad caused by the mismanaged
Iraq war. And it will not change the truth that the
President so desperately wishes to escape: George W.
Bush launched and lost America's Iraq war.
Notes
[1] In a coordinated assault in November 2004, Sunni
insurgents overran all of Mosul's Sunni-led police
stations, while every Kurdish police station
successfully defended itself.
[2] When the Mahdi Army last fought the coalition on
a large scale in April and May 2004, it severely
disrupted US supply lines from Kuwait and took over
several US installations. It is a more potent force
in 2007 than it was then.
[3] In 2004, SCIRI was neutral in the battle between
the coalition and the Mahdi Army, in spite of
attacks by the latter on SCIRI's militiamen.
[4] See "How to Get Out of Iraq," The New York
Review, May 13, 2004, and my book The End of Iraq:
How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
(Simon and Schuster, 2006), to be reissued in June
with an afterword from which this article is drawn.
nybooks com
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