- "I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false
depiction of what actually happened," Mr. McCain told Katie Couric,
noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni
sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army
brigade there.
- "Because of the surge we were able to go out
and protect that sheik and others," Mr. McCain said. "And it began the
Anbar Awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."
- The
Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the
fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the
troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge.
- And
Democrats noted that the sheik who helped form the Awakening, Abdul
Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, was assassinated in September 2007, after
the troop escalation began.
- But several foreign policy
analysts said that if Mr. McCain got the chronology wrong, his broader
point -- that the troop escalation was crucial for the Awakening
movement to succeed and spread -- was right. "I would say McCain is
three-quarters right in this debate," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The problem with this debate is that it has few Iraqis in it.
It
is also open to charges of logical fallacy. The only evidence presented
for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from
political violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs
in the second half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That
apocalyptic violence was set off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine
in Samarra in February 2006, which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil
war.) What few political achievements are attributed to the troop
escalation are too laughable to command real respect.
Proponents
are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when
it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in
February 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former
insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the
"surge" by politicians such as McCain. But attempts to pay off the
Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a
dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra U.S. troops
were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent
there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation that
began in the winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the
cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation,
and was.
Aside from defining what proponents mean by the
"surge," all kinds of things are claimed for it that are not in
evidence. The assertion depends on a possible logical fallacy: post hoc
ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to
suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption.
Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent earthquake in China
was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters. That is just
superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good
illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am
referring.
For the first six months of the troop escalation,
high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What
exactly were U.S. troops doing differently from September than they
were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to
that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only
brought U.S. force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a
country of 27 million, 30,000 extra U.S. troops are highly unlikely to
have had a really major impact, when they had not before.
As
best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was
that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in
Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came
in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya
had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis.
Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65 percent Shiite to at least
75 percent Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the United
States inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of
Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to
Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing
was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.
This MNF graph courtesy of
Think Progress makes the point:
As Think Progress quoted CNN correspondent Michael Ware:
"The
sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has been -- albeit tragic -- one of the
key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. It's a
very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; segregated into Sunni
and Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. If anyone
is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the
fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or
they are lying to you."
Of course, Gen. David Petraeus took
courageous and effective steps to try to stop bombings in markets and
so forth. But I am skeptical that most of these techniques had macro
effects. Big population movements because of militia ethnic cleansing
are more likely to account for big changes in social statistics.
The
way in which the escalation troops did help establish Awakening
Councils is that when they got wise to the Shiite ethnic cleansing
program; the United States began supporting these Sunni militias, thus
forestalling further expulsions.
The Shiitization of Baghdad was
thus a significant cause of falling casualty rates. But it is another
war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to find Shiite
militiamen in their living rooms.
In al-Anbar Province, among
the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni
guerrillas to join U.S.-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming
effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006;
indeed, it could have been deployed from 2003 and might have
forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade U.S. military
officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of
alienating U.S. Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was
independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not
being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of
U.S. soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in
search-and-destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced
the guerrilla movement. There were typically only 10,000 U.S. troops in
al-Anbar before 2007, as I recollect. (It has a population of a million
and a half or so.) If the number of U.S. troops went up to 14,000, that
cannot possibly have made the difference.
The Mahdi Army militia
of Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr concluded a cease-fire with U.S. and Iraqi
troops in September 2007. Since the United States had inadvertently
enabled the transformation of Baghdad into a largely Shiite city, a
prime aim of the Mahdi Army, they could afford to stand down. Moreover,
they were being beaten militarily by the Badr Corps militia of the
pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and by Iraqi security
forces, in Karbala, Diwaniya and elsewhere. It was prudent for them to
stand down. Their doing so much reduced civilian deaths.
Badr
reassertion in Basra was also important, and ultimately received
backing this spring from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. There
were few coalition troops in Basra, mainly British, and most were moved
out to the airport, so the troop escalation was obviously irrelevant to
improvements in Basra. Now British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown seems to
be signaling that most British troops will come home in 2009.
The
vast increase in Iraqi oil revenues in recent years, and the
cancellation of much foreign debt, has made the central government more
powerful vis-a-vis the society. Al-Maliki can afford to pay, train and
equip many more police and soldiers. An Iraq with an unencumbered $75
billion in oil income begins to look more like Kuwait, and to be able
to afford to buy off various constituencies. It is a different game
than an Iraq with $33 billion in revenues, much of it precommitted to
debt servicing.
McCain was wrong to say that U.S. or Iraqi casualty rates were unprecedentedly low in May.
Most
American commentators are so focused on the relative fall in casualties
that they do not stop to consider how high the rates of violence
remain.
Kudos to Steve Chapman for telling it like it is.
I'd
suggest some comparisons. The Sri Lankan civil war between Sinhalese
and Tamils has killed an average of 233 persons a month since 1983 and
is considered one of the world's major ongoing trouble spots. That is
half the average monthly casualties in Iraq recently. In 2007, the
conflict in Afghanistan killed an average of 550 persons a month. That
is about the rate recently, according to official statistics, for Iraq.
The death rate in 2006-2007 in Somalia was probably about 300 a month,
or about half this year's average monthly rate in Iraq. Does anybody
think Afghanistan or Somalia is calm? Thirty years of Northern Ireland
troubles left about 3,000 dead, a toll still racked up in Iraq every
five months on average.
All the talk of casualty rates, of
course, is to some extent beside the point. The announced purpose of
the troop escalation was to create secure conditions in which political
compromises could be achieved.
In spring of 2007, Iraq had a
national unity government. Al-Maliki's cabinet had members in it from
the Shiite Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadr Movement, the secular Iraqi
National list of Iyad Allawi, the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, the
Kurdistan Alliance, and the two Shiite core partners, the Islamic
Mission (Da'wa) Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
Al-Maliki
lost his national unity government in the summer of 2007, just as
casualties began to decline. The Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadrists and
the Iraqi National List are all still in the opposition. The Islamic
Mission Party of al-Maliki has split, and he appears to remain in
control of the smaller remnant. So although the Sunni IAF has agreed to
rejoin the government, al-Maliki's ability to promote national
reconciliation is actually much reduced now from 14 months ago.
There
has been very little reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite. The new
de-Baathification law, which ostensibly was aimed at improving the
condition of Sunnis who had worked in the former regime, was loudly
denounced by the very ex-Baathists who would be affected by it. In any
case, the measure has languished in oblivion and no effort has been
made to implement it. Depending on how it is implemented, it could
easily lead to large numbers of Sunnis being fired from government
ministries and so might make things worse.
An important step was
the holding of new provincial elections. Since the Sunni Arabs
boycotted the last ones in January 2005, their provinces have not had
representative governments; in some, Shiite and Kurdish officials have
wielded power over the majority Sunni Arabs. Attempts to hold the
provincial elections this fall have so far run aground on the shoals of
ethnic conflict. Thus, the Shiite parties wanted to use ayatollahs'
pictures in their campaigns, against the wishes of the other parties.
It isn't clear what parliament will decide about that. More important
is the question of whether provincial elections will be held in the
disputed Kirkuk Province, which the Kurds want to annex. That dispute
has caused (Kurdish)
President Jalal Talabani to veto the enabling
legislation for the provincial elections, which may set them back
months or indefinitely.
There is also no oil law, essential to allow foreign investment in developing new fields.
So did the "surge" "work"?
The
troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential.
That the troops were used in new ways by Petraeus was more important.
But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by
accidentally turning it into a Shiite city, as Shiite as Isfahan or
Tehran, and thus a terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement
could not hope to fight effectively.
It is Obama who has the
better argument in this debate, not McCain, who knows almost nothing
about Iraq and Iraqis and who overestimates what can be expected of
30,000 U.S. troops in an enormous, complex country.
But the
problem for McCain is that it does not matter very much for policy who
is right in this debate. Security in Iraq is demonstrably improved, for
whatever reason, and the Iraqis want the United States out. If things
are better, what is the rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq?
Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the popular blog
Informed Comment.
