More
Doublespeak
Situation in Iraq
on
the
By Ivan Eland
Some things never change. In a continuation of the Bush
administration’s Orwellian doublespeak on the Iraq War,
President Bush recently gave an upbeat speech in Dayton, Ohio,
extolling the progress in Iraq and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki’s military offensive in the southern oil port of
Basra against "criminal" elements. Strangely, as violence
erupted in many cities across the country in response to
Maliki’s offensive, the president claimed that "normalcy is
returning back to Iraq." Yet the widespread violence belied
the "security gains" of the U.S. troop surge.
Of course, the U.S. troop surge had little to do with the
reduced violence—now seemingly temporary—in Iraq. U.S. forces
were at comparable strength in 2005 to try to quell the
violence during the Iraqi national elections. Instead, the
violence increased during that year. According to William
Polk—a former U.S. State Department official who has studied
many examples of counterinsurgency warfare, some in the
field—for the administration to adequately execute its “clear,
hold, and build” strategy under existing counterinsurgency
doctrine, it would have to increase American forces six-fold.
That is something the already exhausted U.S. military could
not possibly do. In addition, Polk points out that two of the
foremost authorities on guerrilla warfare, China’s Mao Tsetung and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, who defeated
the United States in Vietnam, pointed out that holding an
expanding amount of territory overstretches and weakens
counterinsurgency forces and thus strengthens the insurgents.
So something else besides the surge must have temporarily
lessened the carnage. In all likelihood, the U.S. surge was a
Bush administration-induced muscular mirage designed to mask
the real change in American policy—a Neville Chamberlain-style
appeasement and payoff of U.S. enemies. In fact, the United
States began the rather unmacho arming, training, and paying
of former Sunni insurgents to fight al Qaeda in Iraq. In
addition, in many Shi’i areas, the United States worked
quietly with Moktada al-Sadr’s militias to provide aid and
reconstruction, thereby enabling a nationwide truce with his
Mahdi Army. Although it looks bad, paying off your enemies
instead of fighting them can be a smart strategy, at least in
the short-term.
The problem is that when you stop paying your former enemies,
the “former” label may be quickly rescinded. One of the signs
of progress touted by the president in the Dayton speech was
Iraq’s new law allowing mid-level Sunni Baathists back into
the government and military. Yet many analysts think that this
legislation might have the opposite effect and actually be a
way for the Shi’a to remove Sunnis from those positions. The
Sunnis are impatient with being shut out of the Iraqi
government and may return to the “dark side” if their high
expectations for the new law are not quickly met. With
underlying suspicions between ethno-religious groups in Iraqi
society—the Shi’a who control the Iraqi government are leery
of letting the Sunnis back into positions of some power—those
expectations are unlikely to be met. Thus, new laws on paper
mean nothing if there is an insufficient social consensus to
make them work.
Another problem with paying off U.S. enemies is that in the
long-term, the United States is strengthening all sides for
the almost inevitable full-blown civil wars. A preview of one
of those civil wars was on display during the intra-Shi’i
violence in Basra. Although President Bush, in his speech,
supported Maliki’s offensive in the name of destroying
“terrorists and extremists,” the prime minister’s offensive
was apparently his own idea and not coordinated with American
forces. Although another measure of progress cited by the
president was recent legislation setting a date for Iraqi
provincial elections later this year, Maliki’s offensive
seemed designed to weaken the rival Shi’i Mahdi Army’s strong
position prior to those elections. Many say that the Mahdi
Army could win a majority of the seats. As the United States
learned in 2005, in a fractious nation, elections can often
exacerbate societal cleavages rather than heal them. Thus,
instead of demonstrating progress on national reconciliation,
the law for local elections already may have destabilized the
country further.
In contradiction to its formal nationwide cease-fire, the
Mahdi Army fought back in Basra and throughout Iraq. In Basra,
the Iraqi security forces had trouble subduing Mahdi fighters,
and in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City the security forces were
apparently so poor that the Americans took the lead in
fighting al-Sadr’s militias. In the long-term, Maliki’s illtimed and freelance offensive may have backfired—by
effectively torching the cease-fire with al-Sadr forces
throughout Iraq and showing that the Iraqi government is too
militarily weak to provide security. Some return to
“normalcy.”
-Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at
The Independent Institute.