It seems like just yesterday - to surge or not to surge?

If you’re thinking it was just yesterday (literally), then you’ve got the wrong major American military deployment.  Not Afghanistan, but Iraq.  What a difference a year makes - at the heart of the presidential campaign debate on national security in 2008, Iraq has all-but-faded from public discussion.

So, to review:  Earlier this month, the Iraqi parliament passed an election law to govern the January 18, 2010 parliamentary vote.  The law theoretically resolved a handful of outstanding yet crucial issues that were needed to facilitate the vote, even though the UN’s man in Baghdad says pulling off the election by January would be a “herculean task“.  However, just today Iraqi President Jalad Talibani again threw the January poll in doubt by insisting, perhaps on behalf of his Sunni veep, that minority and refugee Iraqis needed greater representation in parliament.

The election is the last major hurdle to a US military withdrawal at the end of 2010 (save the 40,000-50,000 American troops hunkered down for training and counter terrorism operations).  Failure to conduct a legitimate election - and more importantly, to have the loser accept the results without resorting to more violence -  would potentially re-escalate sectarian strife as Iraq’s deep political wounds along ethic lines would be ripped open again.

Addressing and resolving the parties’ various complaints about the election law will be a major issue over the next few days.  Watch this space.

If you believe Tom Ricks’ analysis (and in this case, I happen to) there’s a good chance that violence in 2010 - at least against Iraq’s civilian population if not American military forces - will be the highest it has been in several years.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that one-off attacks are on the rise, with the occasional massive bombing like the August attack against the Iraqi Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Finance that killed some 155 people.  Groups proclaiming to be al Qaeda in Iraq - though probably composed of Sadam’s Ba’ath party loyalists - have claimed responsibility in several instances.  The good news?  Even though they carry the “al Qaeda” brand, they’re not intent on or capable of attack the US mainland.  The bad news?  They could be a major destabilizing force in Iraq for years to come, because…

… The US military has pulled back from cities and towns - as stipulated in the Status of Forces Agreement - and is now in a supportive roll to Baghdad’s forces, which seem none-too-hurried to ask for American help.  What’s more, the cash used to flip the Sunni Sons of Iraq to cooperate with Iraqi/American forces has dried up as the task of distributing payment has fallen to the Iraqi government.

Or, to cut all this down to a nice, tidy phrase used by the Special Inspector General For Iraq Reconstruction’s (SIGIR’s) quarterly report from October 2009:

The security picture in Iraq remains mixed.”

As for reconstruction itself, SIGIR points to several positive developments in oil infrastructure development, but nothing will be really resolved until a comprehensive revenue-sharing agreement among the Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds for hydrocarbons is passed.

That’s a ton to chew over.  Here’s what I think all this means: If the election is held come January and the Iraqi security forces are able to at least contain violence, then the US will able to stick to the plan.  American troops will be substantially reduced from 120,000 to 50,000 by the end of 2010.  This is no small feat and there are a few major hurdles before it happens.  However, if it does, allow me to bastardize a Churchillian phrase and say it would represent the beginning of the end.

NYT:

NAWA, Afghanistan — In three combat tours in Anbar Province, Marine Sgt. Jacob Tambunga fought the deadliest insurgents in Iraq.

But he says he never encountered an enemy as tenacious as what he saw immediately after arriving at this outpost in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In his first days here in late June, he fought through three ambushes, each lasting as long as the most sustained fight he saw in Anbar. …

In contrast to Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban do not seem to have access to large artillery shells and other powerful military munitions that Anbar fighters used to kill hundreds of Marines and soldiers. The bombs found so far have been largely homemade with fertilizer, though they have still killed more than 20 British soldiers and United States Marines to the north and south of Nawa.

“If they had better weapons, we’d be in real trouble,” said Lance Cpl. Vazgen Matevosyan.

I ran out of time yesterday to write about this, but please do yourself a favor and read the Washington Post’s recent series of articles on the new security situation in Iraq - with US forces in a clearly subservient role to their Iraqi counterparts and now stationed away from Iraqi cities.

From the first in the series:

The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops. …

The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.

And in the second, the Post shows the new guidelines in an operational context:

A credible informant told U.S. intelligence officials Tuesday morning that several mortars launching from nearby Amiriyah, a quiet neighborhood that had not been a staging ground for rocket or mortar attacks since 2007, would rain down shells on the base that night.

Over the next few days, Capt. Dustin Navarro and his Iraqi army counterpart wrangled over the appropriate response. They met, argued, sparred and compromised. In the end, two things became evident: First, Iraqi and American commanders have markedly different notions of what U.S. troops in Baghdad are entitled to do to protect themselves under a security agreement that went into effect July 1 and that sharply limits U.S. activity in Iraqi cities.

Also clear was that the balance of power, at least in the capital, has tipped … Iraqis are taking the lead. … A month ago, when U.S. troops could operate openly in the city without permission from the Iraqis, Navarro could have sent soldiers on foot to stealthily take up positions in the neighborhood. … Ever since the pullback of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities, the Iraqi government has sharply limited their mobility and operations in urban areas.

Then the article cuts to the heart of the matter:

Success in my mind was preventing the attack and capturing the individuals with admissible evidence,” said Navarro, a cavalry commander from Dallas. “Success in his [Navarro's Iraqi counterpart] mind is that there is no attack and no one gets caught. Any attack or any capture would have been perceived as a failure on his part because it means enemy forces and mortar systems were able to get inside his checkpoints.”

Navarro was overruled.

I don’t think the Gringos counted in the Iraqis sticking to the letter of the law so much.  The prevailing mindset seemed to be “Yeah, sure, the Iraqis will take the ‘lead’, but we know who’s really running the show… wink wink.”

Do all Iraqi units share this mentality?  Is it a “disappointment” for the Americans?  How does it effect morale?  Are our units less safe because of it?  How useful can our forces be?  I don’t really have a good handle on any of the answers.

I channeled my inner Terry McAuliffe yesterday when I dogged on Tom Ricks for being a huge stinking defeatist.  He still might be one, but at least he’s allowed some nuance - nay, optimism - on his site.  Give this full note - from a “smart Marine” (an adjective that most jarheads take pride in rejecting, I’ll have you know) in Fallujah - a spin.  Here’s the bottom line:

Despite recent reporting, the area is stable, while still not completely safe.  The attacks mentioned in the article are not part of a mounting trend, but are normal and to be expected from time to time in this environment.  If we want Iraq to return to normal it will necessarily mean making itself more vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

But we have taken it as far as Americans can.  In my opinion, anything we do now may do more harm than good in delaying the inevitable and reinforcing their, at times, crippling malaise. The only enduring role for Americans is to provide the safety net to prevent complete collapse, chaos, and civil war; three things that I do not believe will happen in any event.”

I agree with the general premise that we’ve done just about everything we can. In a sense, Ricks is very, very correct when he calls the surge a failure - tactically, it did decrease daily violence by several orders of magnitude; strategically, Iraqi politicians did not reconcile, as that decreased violence was designed to facilitate.  American civilian and military forces will continue to have limited capacities to force differing sects to cooperate, never mind reverse decades - if not centuries - of ingrained corruption and cronyism amongst Iraq’s bureaucracies.

However, just because we may have driven this jalopy as far as we can doesn’t mean we’re packing up and going home tomorrow.  There is a chance - and frankly, I’m not sure how great of one - we will backslide into the aforementioned collapse, chaos, and civil war.  Our “safety net” roll, as the author calls it, means that we’ll be there through the end of the SOFA next year.

If this isn’t sitting on a knife’s edge, then I don’t know what is.

Today, the US military says syonara to Iraq’s cities and towns, pulling back to their relatively isolated FOBs (”Forward Operating Bases”), which sit removed from the average Iraqi’s daily life.  Why is this a big deal?  It represents a return to a pre-surge military posture.  “The surge” was many things, but more than a blanket increase in the number of American troops, it was a change in mentality - one that morphed from the US military protecting its own ass to protecting Iraqis’.  Read Tom Ricks “The Gamble” and you’ll see why.  In a nutshell, the military went from hiding far away from Iraq’s cities, villages, and towns, to living - quite literally - among them.  This positioning built confidence with Iraqis, leading them to cooperate with the Americans, viewing them as a mechanism to decreaing violence, not an obstacle.

Today reverses that posture.

Interesting that Tom Ricks is a huge stinking pessimist about our prospects for success:

My worry is that I don’t see the political situation as being much different than it has in the past. Nothing much has changed from the previous rush to failures. As readers of this blog have seen me say before: the surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically. That is, as planned, it created a breathing space in which a political breakthrough might occur. But Iraqi leaders, for whatever reason, didn’t take advantage of that space, and no breakthrough occurred. All the basic issues that faced Iraq before the surge are still hanging out there: How to share oil revenue? What is the power relationship between Shia, Sunni and Kurd? Who holds power inside the Shiite community? What is the role of Iran, the biggest winner in this war so far? And will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what happens when all the refugees outside the country and those displaced inside it, who I think are majority Sunni, try to go back to their old houses, now largely occupied by Shiites and protected by Shiite militias?

A secondary issue is how Iraqi forces will behave once they are operating without American forces watching them. There are a lot of “Little Saddams” in Iraq. That didn’t used to be our problem-but now these guys have been trained, equipped and empowered by us.

I hope I am wrong, and that Iraq really is embarking on a new course this week. But I don’t think so. So I think the real question now is: How fast will the unraveling occur?

Yours truly is more optimistic, but very cautiously so.  I appreciate the lack of political accommodation, and agree that without it, tensions will continue to simmer in throughout the political factions.

But one of the aspects that Ricks fails to account for is how the Iranian election has effected Tehran’s ability to maintain influence on the ground in Iraq.  Is Iran’s attention so focused on internal politics now that the phone line to its Iraq-sponsored militias has been figuratively cut?

The following is a guest-post from Milton Wilkins, an intern at the Center for American Progress.  Milton was my stalwart intern last summer.

The recent bombings in Baghdad and across Iraq are tragic. But while Tom Ricks suggests that the sky is falling, I, for one, am not panicking just yet.

First, the bombings, overwhelmingly targeting Shiite communities, are not a sign that Iraqi Sunnis are returning en masse to insurgency against the government or U.S. forces, in spite of the recent attacks on U.S. troops in Fallujah by (alleged) Sunni nationalists.  Rather, the bombings are the work of Al Qaeda in Iraq (a/k/a Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a/k/a Islamic State of Iraq), a dying foreign jihadi organization whose indigenous support base eroded after the Sunni-Shiite civil war of 2006, which they were instrumental in starting.

Second, while Al Qaeda certainly intended for their new campaign to lead us to postpone our withdrawal from Iraqi cities, overtaxing Iraqis’ patience and provoking a new insurgency against our troops, that plan has obviously failed.  Furthermore, even had it succeeded, Sunni participation in the new insurgency was far from guaranteed – worsening relations between Sunnis and the Shia majority (caused by Al Qaeda’s comeback), could have seen Sunnis invite American military protection, as we saw in 2006.

This leaves us with the possibility that these attacks could provoke another ethnic civil war.  Unfortunately for AQI (AQM/ISI), a strategy like theirs – which is based on provoking a war between Iraqi Sunni and Shiite communities, allowing the jihadists to ascend to political leadership within the Sunni populace – backfires once both communities realize the extent to which they’re being manipulated by an exogenous force.  This “realization” (in an event we now call ‘the Awakening’) saw the Sunnis turn against Al Qaeda in 2006, which in turn convinced the Shiites not to perpetuate the civil war.

Thus, neither group should be duped into playing-into Al Qaeda’s endgame for the second time in three years. The question is whether or not the Shiites can actually be made to believe that the Sunni militias are somehow complicit in this Al Qaeda resurgence.

Unfortunately, nothing is guaranteed.  Events of last week and earlier this year suggest that the Shiites just might bite. The Shiite-dominated government’s round-ups of numerous Sunni Awakening Council leaders in March (on the grounds of their alleged ties to Al Qaeda) heightened tensions on both sides, as has the government’s foot-dragging on paying and rehabilitating the militiamen. Reports that some Sunni leaders have consequently turned to terror to extort from the government are also ominous, as are reported Shiite reactions to the recent bombings.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the recent uptick in violence, however tragic, is not in itself a sign of Iraqi security unraveling. It is only a potential catalyst for such an unraveling sometime in the future, pushing Iraq towards the slippery slope into chaos, but Iraq is not on that slope, at least just yet.

The views expressed here are solely the author’s.

Khalid Shiek Mohammed, 9/11 mastermind and director of al Qaeda’s external operations until early 2003, on torture:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ ”

Mohammed also appeared to say that he had fingered people he did not know as being Al Qaeda members in order to avoid abusive treatment.

I have written extensively that torture obscures the truth, incentivising detainees to speak, and not necessarily tell the truth.  I’m very happy that this evidence is now part of the public debate.