Seven Red

I have hesitated to post on anything related to The War, with the exception of some mild snark aimed David Petraeus’ way, largely because there’s too much know-nothing opinion about Iraq floating around, not too little, so I didn’t really want to add to it. And, indeed, one of the reasons the United States is in the Iraq mess is the utter incapacity among policy-makers to see Iraqis as people, and even smart people. There’s true racist and neo-colonial fuckery at the root of the war – and each “surprise move” by the “wily” Iraqis only confirms it. But I am shocked to see so little attention being paid to, in my view, a major New York Times story about the latest moves and counter-moves, titled Attacks Imperil U.S.-backed Militias in Iraq.

BAGHDAD — American-backed Sunni militias who have fought Sunni extremists to a standstill in some of Iraq’s bloodiest battlegrounds are being hit with a wave of assassinations and bomb attacks, threatening a fragile linchpin of the military’s strategy to pacify the nation.

At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.

Violence is also shaking up the Awakening movement, many of whose members are former insurgents, in its birthplace in the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province. On Sunday, a teenage suicide bomber exploded at a gathering of Awakening leaders, killing Hadi Hussein al-Issawi, a midlevel sheik, and three other tribesmen.

These attacks clearly go to the heart of the counter-insurgency strategy developed by David Petraeus; quelling the Sunni uprising (and concomitant civil war) is not so much about increasing troop strength as it is about providing the disenfranchised Sunnis with a stake in the survival of the Iraqi government. The troop increases were there as stick and boundary, but the plan really operates through the carrot. Since the Shia weren’t going to pay the Sunni off, and since they still appear hostile to full Sunni participation (including revenue sharing), some other compromise had to be made, and that largely happened through payoffs and encouragement of this “Awakening Movement, which is most likely just a palatable “political” front for the payoff regime in any case.

Now, I fully believe that people in Iraq wanted to stop the slaughter that was Summer-Winter 2006, and perhaps a lot of those people even joined this Awakening Movement with that intention, but the cynic in me sees it as largely pretext, an acceptable receptacle for U.S. cash money, where dispersed tribal entities seemed not abstract enough for American negotiators. We learn, furthermore, that the Awakening Movement is largely infiltrated and otherwise populated by the so-called “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” and still-hostile Sunnis, and that most of the members still view the Shiite Iraqi government with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. The only conclusion one can draw is that the payoff regime is a temporary sop, at best, since it seems no closer to addressing the cause of the uprising, but rather seeks to ease the symptoms of Sunni disenfranchisement.

But how temporary? That’s the $64,000 question. Or $1 trillion, as the case may be. The article does not hold out high hopes for the long-term survival of the payoff regime. Once the still-hostile Sunni and “AQM” people saw how the infrastructure worked, they simply turned their attention to destroying it. Will this strategy will work? Can the Awakening constitute a semi-stable entity that tamps down the insurgency for a period sufficient to allow political reconciliation? That’s certainly up in the air at this point. But the underlying structure of the “Surge” does not seem like a solid foundation for long-term stability. Its entire premise is the failure of reconciliation at the level of the State. To the extent that the insurgents recognize this, which they surely do, it seems a very fraught sort of affair indeed.

As I was reading the article, however, I was struck by the detailed reporting on the social structure and relations in various provinces, and this put me in the mind of some of my long-ago Vietnam War research. Knowledgeable readers may recognize the title of this post; it comes from Jeffrey Race’s brilliant War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province. Race works through complex data to present a fairly persuasive case for why, as he puts it, a “revolutionary social movement” took root in Vietnam’s Long An province. It’s a local and detailed study, and I’m not sure we’ve seen similar case studies coming out of Iraq. Yes, I’ve seen even longish journalistic pieces on how the insurgency took root in Anbar (pieces clearly modelled – at least in conception – after War Comes to Long An), but they never provide the real historical depth of Race’s social science masterpiece. So where are the great studies? Where is the War Comes to Long An for Iraq? The Times article points toward a direction such research could take. But we’re still not there yet.

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