Seven Red

Another interesting read on the Awakening Movement in Iraq, this time from legendary war correspondent Chris Hedges. Hedges wrote the must-read book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. I saw him speak a few years back at previous Unnamed Institution, and his description of the exhilarating emptiness of the firefights he experienced in Central America during the wars there sticks with me. Today, like most other commentators who haven’t completely swallowed the Petraeus Magic Pill, he’s focused keenly on the sahwas – the Sunni Awakening Movement that is, as I’ve said here, the fundamental kickback at the heart of the “Surge.” A snippet:

The United States cut a deal with its Sunni Arab enemies. It would pay the former insurgents. It would allow them to arm and form military units and give them control of their ethnic enclaves. The Sunni Arabs, in exchange, would halt attacks on U.S. troops. The Sunni Arabs agreed.

The U.S. is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the monthly salaries of some 600,000 armed fighters in the three rival ethnic camps in Iraq. These fighters—Shiite, Kurd and Sunni Arab—are not only antagonistic but deeply unreliable allies. The Sunni Arab militias have replaced central government officials, including police, and taken over local administration and security in the pockets of Iraq under their control. They have no loyalty outside of their own ethnic community. Once the money runs out, or once they feel strong enough to make a thrust for power, the civil war in Iraq will accelerate with deadly speed. The tactic of money-for-peace failed in Afghanistan. The U.S. doled out funds and weapons to tribal groups in Afghanistan to buy their loyalty, but when the payments and weapons shipments ceased, the tribal groups headed back into the embrace of the Taliban.

The Sunni Arab militias are known by a variety of names: the Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias call themselves “sahwas” (“sahwa” being the Arabic word for awakening). There are now 80,000 militia fighters, nearly all Sunni Arabs, paid by the United States to control their squalid patches of Iraq. They are expected to reach 100,000. The Sunni Arab militias have more fighters under arms than the Shiite Mahdi Army and are about half the size of the feeble Iraqi army. The Sunni Awakening groups, which fly a yellow satin flag, are forming a political party.

Hedges extensive experiences in war zones – especially those constituted by ethnic divisions – makes his prognosis especially jarring. Booga Face’s assessment from the other day seems right on; that the payments come in the form of weapons does not portend good consequences for the people of Iraq. One can readily see how a temporary cease fire to better arm themselves would have benefited the Sunni insurgents of late 2006; that such arms should come from the US military, also busy arming the sahwas’ Shiite and Kurdish foes, only makes the whole clusterfuck that much more unbelievable. Graham Greene couldn’t write up a more catastrophic scenario of fundamental American “innocence.”

One could have expected this outcome with the elevation of David Petraeus to High Muckity-Muck of the Baghdad Garrison. In Thomas Ricks’ excellent Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, we see a contrast emerge between Petraeus’ “counter-insurgency” activities and the heavier-handed traditional military tactics of General Ray Odierno, then in charge of the 4th Infantry Division. Petraeus comes out golden in Ricks’ analysis; where other divisions were tear-assing around Iraq, to quote Captain Willard, beating up on the hajjis, Petraeus was encouraging cooperation through self-rule and other velvet gloved approaches to the local populace, including straight payment for cooperation. Counter-insurgency, see? Mao says that an insurgent moves among the people as a fish in water; if you change the character of the water, you prevent the ecology necessary for fish. There are, of course, a number of ways of making people unavailable to the insurgents; Petraeus chose the lighter way. Odierno, on the other hand, comes off as one of the chief villains of Ricks’ account, though in a subtle way. The 4th Infantry Division is portrayed as virtually out of control; indeed, one can hardly read Ricks without concluding that Odierno and his Division were in large part responsible for the Sunni insurgency itself (together with the dumbfuck ideologues at the CPA). So, in this psychodrama between the fist and the caress, Petraeus gets the nod. What happens to Odierno? Fear not, Howitzer Heads. He’s Petraeus’ second in command to this day. We never really give up on a FIST, it seems.

The emergence of the sahwas also helps explain that other phenomenon we witnessed early last year: the general transformation of “insurgents” into “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This phenomenon has been covered extensively in the press and on the blogs, and even provoked self-reflective commentary by the New York Times. In any case, it was largely considered a rhetorical sleight-of-hand designed for domestic consumption. If all the baddies in Iraq are “Al Qaeda” types, then Iraq is an extension of the War on Terror, etc. I think we all know this story. But the Awakening strategy tells us another story altogether: the construction of “Al Qaeda in Iraq” was actually a condition precedent for the payment regime of the Sahwa Movement. You can’t have “concerned local citizens” (a formulation as laughable and overtly propagandistic as the naming of the “Coalition Provisional Authority”) unless you have something for citizens to be concerned about. Something other than themselves, that is. So what seemed like trite propaganda for clueless American audiences was actually a functional mechanism for the establishment of Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq itself. We can start to see the outlines of why the seemingly credulous American press went along with this comical renaming.

But the larger point here is clear: the complete failure of the aggressive tactics led to the elevation of Petraeus, whose ideas, for all the right wing bluster about stamping out the jihadis through “offensives” were there from the beginning: Pay these people, and they will stop attacking us. That’s the essence of it, even from Petraeus’ early days in the summer of 2003, when a roadside bomb in the dusty streets was still considered a holdover from a previous era, rather than the deadly new reality of our age. The strategy that developed into the Sahwa was already waiting its turn. And now its turn has come. What have we learned?

Contra Ricks, the light-handed approach is seemingly little better than the muscular firepower fetish of our cultural and military Odierno’s. Now we’re not just self-defeating blusterers stomping around a delicate social ecosystem with boots five sizes too big. Now we’re fucking suckers, too. Cash money suckers. Marks. The worst kind. And the sahwas, at least according to Hedges, bide their time. Why disrupt the gun and ammo funnel when the sucker is paying out? And worse, as Hedges has it, Petraeus’ strategy not only institutionalizes the divisions of civil war, but establish US troops as a permanent force for that very reason. Two things must become permanent under the Petraeus regime: payments in cash and weapons for the militias, and US troops to keep them apart. This is a strategy? It’s insanity. Asked for an exit strategy, the administration instead produced a no-exit strategy. But if the heavy fist didn’t work, and the light caress doesn’t work, what then? And what now?

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