Reality Used To Be A Friend Of Mine

The McCain camp is trying to defend his laughably bad gaffe about the Sunni Awakening and the surge by saying it doesn't matter, anyway.

Democrats can debate whether the awakening would have survived without the surge ... but that is nothing more than a transparent effort to minimize the role of our commanders and our troops in defeating the enemy, because to credit them would be to disparage the judgment of Barack Obama and praise the leadership of John McCain.

Well, that's completely besides the point. McCain said the surge enabled the sheikhs in Anbar to fight Al Qaeda. And that's just not true. In fact, the sheikh McCain was talking about who was "protected" by surge forces, Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, was actually murdered last year.

They're going ahead with this, though. "Senator McCain is correct,'' said spokesman Tucker Bounds today. Reality is just besides the point.

McCain's team is really flailing about these days.

Anbar Is Not Missouri

When the President poked his head into Anbar Province, he spent an hour with Sattar Abu Risha, a Sunni tribal sheik notorious for highway banditry and petty theft, a con man pretty much any way you look at it. He was also held up as the de facto leader of the Administration's brand-new "bottom-up" security strategy.

Sheikh Sattar, whose tribe is notorious for highway banditry, is also building a personal militia, loyal not to the Iraqi government but only to him. Other tribes — even those who want no truck with terrorists — complain they are being forced to kowtow to him. Those who refuse risk being branded as friends of al-Qaeda and tossed in jail, or worse. In Baghdad, government delight at the Anbar Front's impact on al-Qaeda is tempered by concern that the Marines have unwittingly turned Sheikh Sattar into a warlord who will turn the province into his personal fiefdom.

Risha was murdered today.

The most prominent figure in a U.S.-backed revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida in Iraq was killed Thursday by a bomb planted near his home in Anbar province, 10 days after he met with President George W. Bush, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.

Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha and two of his bodyguards were killed by a roadside bomb planted near the tribal leader's home in Ramadi, Anbar's provincial capital, said Col. Tareq Youssef, supervisor of Anbar police.

Abu Risha was leader of the Anbar Salvation Council, also known as the Anbar Awakening — an alliance of clans backing the Iraqi government and U.S. forces. His death deals a sharp blow to American efforts to recruit tribal leaders to fight terror.

Obviously, al Qaeda will be seen as responsible; in fact, Gen. Petraeus has already said as much. But it appears Risha had a lot of enemies. He was forcing other Sunni tribes into acting under his command, under threat of being branded as al Qaeda. The central government in Baghdad didn't want to see him set up a personal Sunni kingdom out in the desert and resist efforts to unify. Risha granted an interview recently to Al Jazeera which added to those worries.

Enders interviews the famous Sattar Abu Risha in Amman (he claims to be the leader of all Iraq's Sunni tribes, and makes some rather grand promises), and also presents harsh criticism of Abu Risha from his rival Ali Hatem (who denounces Abu Risha as a con man and fraud, as he has repeatedly to various American journalists) [...]

Hatem and the Shia head of Maliki's reconciliation office both warn that the Americans are pouring weapons into the hands of people who will still have those weapons once the immediate AQI problem is gone. Maliki's guy describes it as bringing a "baby crocodile" into the house which will grow into a monster, warning that putting more guns into the hands of "war criminals" responsible for sectarian cleansing guarantees more bloodshed down the road. Hatem warns that once AQI is gone the weapons will be used for intra-tribal fighting. When Abu Risha told Enders (on camera) that "we are on our way to Mosul and Kirkuk, God willing", one wonders whether that should be seen as a promise or a threat (it also lends plausibility to the story making the rounds in the Iraqi press yesterday that during the meeting with Bush Abu Risha offered to extend the services of his tribesmen into the center and south of the country if the US would provide more money and guns.. exactly what many Shia fear).

There is absolutely no reason to automatically state that Risha was a martyr killed by al Qaeda. The Shia and other Sunni tribes in the area feared his taking power and resented his public relations campaign to curry favor with US interests. Add on that he wanted to move into Mosul and Kirkuk, and any interest group in the whole country had a motive.

This demonstrates a few things.

• Anbar Province is still incredibly dangerous, and not the rosy picture we've been given over the last week.

• Competing interests in Iraq will not hold the country together, but drive the country further apart. This isn't a case where you arm both sides and expect a detente to hold; you just ensure more blood.

• Furthermore, dealing with tribal interests leads to tribal warfare, as warlords compete for power. This is completely unsurprising, and why signs point far more to Risha being killed by fellow national insurgent groups and not foreign jihadis.

• General Petraeus made the point, unwittingly, during Congressional hearings that we do not have the power to control events in Iraq. This proves it; the architect of the "Anbar miracle" strategy has now been gotten to a mere few days after meeting with the President of the United States. We are not going to be able to mold the future course of events in Iraq, whether we're in the region with 160,000 troops or 130,000 troops or 50,000 troops or three advisers and a flashlight. The Iraqis will determine the future of Iraq. And we've unleashed a whirlwind that ensures that future will be deadly and tragic.

• If you want to make yourself a marked man in Iraq, take a picture of yourself shaking hands with President Bush and put it in every newspaper in the country.



...wonder if this will get a mention in tonight's speech in between all the happy talk about how Anbar is like Paris in the springtime...

Petraeus Against The World

Beware the opinions of one man lionized for years who now sees his mission as a crusade.

For two hours, President Bush listened to contrasting visions of the U.S. future in Iraq. Gen. David H. Petraeus dominated the conversation by video link from Baghdad, making the case to keep as many troops as long as possible to cement any security progress. Adm. William J. Fallon, his superior, argued instead for accepting more risks in Iraq, officials said, in order to have enough forces available to confront other potential threats in the region.

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops.

One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men.

"Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it."

There has been a sustained PR offensive designed to promote the message that the escalation has been universally good and that this fact is unanimously accepted by the serious people. But that's not the case, as this "bloom-off-the-rose" story proves. I believe Gen. Petraeus thinks he's being sincere but he also has a tremendous ego despite a record of failure (which makes him a perfect Bushie). His first order of business after delivering testimony on Capitol Hill is to give an exclusive interview to Fox News, fercryinoutloud. And he is leading a strategy that his superiors are so desperate to have work that they'll enter into the dumbest alliances imaginable:

Why the sheiks turned remains a point of debate, but it seems clear that the tribes resented al-Qaeda's efforts to ban smoking and marry local women to build ties to the region. "Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done," Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a Petraeus adviser, wrote in an essay.

The sheik who forged the alliance with the Americans, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, traced the decision to fight al-Qaeda to Sept. 14, 2006, long before the new Bush strategy, but the president's plan dispatched another 4,000 U.S. troops to Anbar to exploit the situation. As security improved, the White House eagerly took credit.

The "Anbar Awakening" represented perhaps the most important shift in years, but it generated little debate at the White House. Long before the tribes switched sides, the administration conducted a policy exercise on how to team up with former insurgents. But when such an alliance occurred, it bubbled up from the ground with no Washington involvement. "We're not smart enough to know the course that these matters might take," Rice conceded to an Australian newspaper last week.

We're still not smart enough. Bush is betting on Sattar Abu Risha, a petty thug who is building his own militia loyal only to his tribe. And we're arming it. We're setting things up for an even more raging conflagration in the near future.

It'd be nice to see a real debate at the Petraeus hearing tomorrow and not the clown show I expect.