Seven Red

Fascinating article in the NY Times today on the increasing desire of the Iraqi Shiite government to eliminate the Awakening leadership. The most interesting quote:

“The state cannot accept the Awakening,” said Sheik Jalaladeen al-Sagheer, a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Their days are numbered.”

I argued earlier that the continued existence of the Awakening Movement depends on two conditions: fundamental failure of reconciliation at the level of the Iraqi State, and the continued presence of US troops. The logic is fairly clear. If there was reconciliation at the level of the State, you wouldn’t need armed quasi-state Sunni groups. If you don’t have reconciliation at the level of the State, you need a combination of payoffs and military force to keep the quasi-state group (that is, the Awakening Movement) from asserting itself as an anti-state force, that is, as insurgents. As a means for reducing the violence in Iraq, US financial support for the Awakening Movement has been a marked success, but the success comes at the cost of institutionalizing the Shiite-Sunni conflict (and, of course, huge buckets of US taxpayer money).

What incentive does the Shiite government have for accepting and extending this arrangement? As long as an equilibrium exists between the groups, the incentive is clear: the arrangement reduces chaos while allowing the government to consolidate power. But that consolidation itself destroys the equilibrium; the more the State consolidates power, the less it needs the Awakening to reduce chaos. That’s what we’re seeing unfold now, I think. The Iraqi state apparatus feels increasing comfort with its ability (through the Iraqi Army) to maintain order itself. So the Awakening Movement becomes not only dispensable, but decidedly undesirable, since it always signalled the weakness of the State in the first place, and really constitutes a shadow governement anyway. An Iraqi general puts it more succinctly, if in the chilling biopolitical tropes that almost always precede rampant “ethnic cleansing:”

“These people are like cancer, and we must remove them,” said Brig. Gen. Nassir al-Hiti, commander of the Iraqi Army’s 5,000-strong Muthanna Brigade, which patrols west of Baghdad, said of the Awakening leaders on his list for arrest.

Since theAwakening also depends on continued US presence, it’s likely that initial moves to eliminate the Awakening Movement are connected to any deal for removing US troops by 2011.  It’s not surprising, of course, that the Sahwa was merely a temporary solution to the violence. It could not, structurally, constitute a permanent solution if the Iraqi State hoped to have any legitimacy, and it certainly had no viability without continued American involvement. But the continued failure of reconciliation makes one wonder what will happen to the 100,000 strong Sahwa armed body, much less to the Sunni population that sees the Sahwa movement as the only real state operating in their areas.

BAGHDAD – Shiite militiamen are everywhere. Police and Iraqi army checkpoints are nowhere in sight. U.S. soldiers are keeping their distance. [...]But a more finely tuned measure of the tensions may be found among the one- and two-story homes and shabby storefronts of Sadr City. As the crisis deepened, The Associated Press toured Sadr City on Wednesday to observe its rapid swing from relative quiet to a return of the Mahdi Army swagger before the U.S. military troop buildup in Baghdad last year.- “Mahdi Militia Makes Sadr City its Stronghold“

You never know what you’re going to get with a Secretary of Defense. The Vietnam generation got a sad statistician; Robert MacNamara could dazzle with his sheer grasp of the numbers – how many sorties, the rice production in tonnage of New Life Hamlets in a particular province, the percentage of remaining petroleum, oil, and lubricant facilities within 45 miles of Haiphong. And so you got those kinds of briefings, but a different kind of war. Maybe the war always goes the opposite way. When your guy at the DoD is a maniacal rationalist, you get a war of concerted irrationality. So what do we get?

Let us now praise Donald Rumsfeld, five years hence. If you wanted an anti-MacNamara, well, you sure got it. Rumsfeld is like an intuitionist, even a Romantic. Whereas MacNamara gave us the POL percentage destroyed, Rumsfeld gave us tales of the glass boxes from his childhood. If you haven’t seen it already, I strongly suggest a reading of the poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld. Journalist Hart Seely took a few of Rumsfeld’s ridiculous press conference proclamations, and just introduced line breaks to make them “look like poetry.” In an Intro to Critical Reading class, I gave the students three “poems” to analyze by close reading. One was e.e. cummings “Plato told,” another was a verbatim transcript of a found grocery list from Grocerylists.org, and the last was one of D.H. Rumsfeld’s poems. Their readings were ingenious, but they felt cheated when I showed them the sources of the poems. Apparently few had read the reading for that day, Stanley Fish’s “How to Know a Poem When You See One,” since that would have given away the game, one would think. Needless to say, one of the all-time greats is Rumsfeld’s meditation on epistemological classifications, called simply “The Unknowns.”

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

The genius of the classification schema – which would pass quite well as some rhetorical declamation exercise – is the lead-in: “As we know…” We know all these things about knowledge: that’s taken as an axiom. Consider then one of the unknown unknowns. It is something that we know we don’t know we don’t know. If MacNamara was on some Cartesian jag, Rumsfeld operated more in the mode of Duns Scotus (which is not surprising, given the medieval character of The War). So what kind of war do we get, if it turns out to be the opposite of such poetry? I remember when The War began, I heard Rumsfeld on the radio doing his usual ask-yourself-a-question-and-answer-it routine. He said “How long will it last? We can’t say. Will it be six weeks? We hope so. Six months? Maybe. Six years? I don’t think so.” I’m a pessimist, but I didn’t think so either. I couldn’t believe it. So here we are now.

Imagine if somebody had said to you in March 2003 that these unknown unknowns will be true in five years time:

• The United States will have 160,000+ troops still in Iraq, with hopeful talk of a draw down to 140,000 vaguely mentioned for summer
• The Iraqi Army will be engaged in fierce street battles with the Jaish al-Mahdi, a Shiite militia nominally led by a guy whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein (he will be known as the “radical cleric” whenever his name is mentioned)
• US jets will be flying close air support to assist the Iraqi army in their militia crackdown; US troops will be running hammer-and-anvil sweeps in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, largely to tamp down the barrage of mortar fire being launched into the city center from that area
• We will be paying off Sunni tribes to fight an entity called “al Qaeda in Iraq;” many of the Sunnis we pay will be former “insurgents” who fought American troops from 2003-2007, when they joined this extortion scheme called the “Awakening” movement
• the Awakening Movement will be fraying, leading to fears that Anbar Province and towns to the north of Baghdad will turn into fierce combat zones once again
• The American military will have lost the equivalent of a complete regiment in Kilo India Alpha, with the equivalent of two reinforced divisions severely wounded
• Numbers on Iraqi civilian deaths would be spotty, but range between many tens of thousands and many hundreds of thousands

I’m a pessimist, but if Rumsfeld had made such proclamations during one of his pre-war poetry jams, I would have thought him an alarmist, and I knew something about Iraq, having been involved in activism against the sanctions regime during the late-1990′s. I wouldn’t believe it, no sir. But there it is. Four thousand, or the ones we didn’t know we didn’t know.

it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

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.

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There’s an amazing article in Rolling Stone, the most detailed account of the Sunni Awakening Movement in Iraq that I’ve seen. Rolling Stone‘s articles lately have really been at the top of the batch for me. Mike Taibbi’s political reporting from the campaign trail is great snark with political smarts. His various fights with conservative dickheads on Real Time are similarly amusing. This Nir Rosen piece on the Awakening Movement, “The Myth of the Surge,” will likely find its place in the required reading historians will use to evaluate the Iraq catastrophe some years hence. Some snippets:

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or “the Awakening.”

[...]

The American forces responsible for overseeing “volunteer” militias like Osama’s have no illusions about their loyalty. “The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama’s territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to “make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight.

This massive buyoff is the “Awakening Movement,” period. Now, I’m not against buying people off to stop with the car bombs and the IEDs and whatnot. I’m the kind of guy who thinks you can solve problems with money (like, say, public education). The rather drastic decline in violence from apocalyptic to merely grossly intolerable levels in Iraq shows that you can. It’s just that money tends to cause new problems, and is not, perhaps, the best way to build relationships of trust. So, if we believe that the “Surge” was directly responsible ofr the decline in violence, we end up with one policy. But that might have nothing to do with what’s actually going on. If we consider the “Awakening Movement” to be some movement constituted by national pride and the desire to end the power struggle, we’re going to end up with a very sorry policy indeed.

There’s enough Sahwa to go around these days.

Money’s another story. So the real question is simple: Will we have a dedicated line in the federal budget paying off – er, funding – the Awakening Movement in perpetuity? Because that seems to be the only way to prevent the Awoken from slipping back into the nightmare.

I was wondering about the sudden appearance all over the US media of the Iraqi flag this week, the totally new Iraqi flag, again. Now, whenever they mention Iraq in the news, you see this new flag as the backdrop or graphic. Its key difference from the old flag is the removal of the three stars, and the Allahu Akbar written (totally weirdly) in Saddam Hussein’s handwriting. Instead, we get virtually the same flag, but with this teched-up-looking Kufic script: Iraq 2.0, get it? Here it is, folks:

Believe it or not, Iraq seems to have been operating all this time with the old Iraqi flag. Two years is a long memory in the Iraq debacle. If you can think back longer than that, you might remember the last attempt to change the Iraqi flag, which happened back in April, 2004 when the geniuses in the Coalition Provisional Authority came up with this doozy (supposedly chosen through a contest), because everybody knows Islamic countries are just dying to get themselves some pale blue and white flaggage…

Needless to say, the fanfare around that flag was as short-lived as its shelf life in Ramadi; it went away quietly, slinking into the closets and storage rooms of conservative think tanks like former CPA uber-liar Dan Senor, hopefully never to be heard of again outside of the beaming and completely painful personal monologues of media moron Campbell Brown. And so the Saddam flag lived on, tagged by the dead dictator, until just this week, when the Iraqi parliament OK’ed this new flag in order to have something to fly at an upcoming summit in the Kurdish region, where Saddam’s handwriting is apparently verboten. Our good friends in the Awakening movement are not so happy:

BAGHDAD — Officials in Iraq’s mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq’s new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.

“The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won’t raise it,” said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, “If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida.”

Yikes. We learn later in the article that none of this really matters, since this flag – which took painful negotiations to pass by a slim vote – is not even permanent and probably won’t end up being the permanent flag, which the parliament has to decide on at some later date. They just needed something to fly at the meeting. But we get the outline of some of the real social conflict that runs through the Awakening movement:

Suleiman of the Anbar Awakening Council, however, said he was angry that the parliament and government toiled away on a new flag rather than dealing with the country’s lack of services.

Which just goes to show that whenever it seems like a frivolous symbolic dispute, it’s really a material question of resources. The threat, however, is interesting. If the Awakening folks are comfortable with outright extortion over an issue like this, one wonders exactly how much the payoff regime is actually paying off, in both senses of the term.

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.