Hokey Pokey In Iraq

We put some more troops in, we get all the troops out...

Mixed messages from Iraq over the past 24-48 hours. On the one hand, the Prime Minister has agreed to hold a referendum on the American troop presence in Iraq, which would remove the US forces a year earlier than currently scheduled.

If Iraqi lawmakers sign off on Maliki's initiative to hold a referendum in January on the withdrawal timeline, a majority of voters could annul a standing U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, forcing the military to pull out completely by January 2011 under the terms of a previous law.

It is unclear whether parliament, which is in recess until next month, would approve the referendum. Lawmakers have yet to pass a measure laying the basic ground rules for the Jan. 16 national election, their top legislative priority for the remainder of 2009.

At the same time, the US military wants to break one facet of the status of forces agreement by putting troops back into major cities in the north.

In an effort to defuse mounting Arab-Kurdish tensions, the U.S. military is proposing to deploy troops for the first time in a strip of disputed territory in northern Iraq, the top American general in Iraq said Monday.

....Though the plan is still not finalized, Odierno said that he had discussed it recently with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and with Massoud Barzani, the president of the regional government, and that both had been receptive to the idea.

The New York Times calls this a done deal. So on the one hand, Maliki wants US troops in the north so Al Qaeda in Iraq cannot exploit tensions between Arabs and Kurds, but on the other hand, he favors a referendum that could accelerate the full US withdrawal.

Juan Cole has some thoughts about this. But it sounds to me like the classic tension between policy and politics. It's good politically for Maliki to call for an referendum on withdrawal - the US presence is broadly unpopular. Having open warfare break out in the North, however, wouldn't meet Maliki's goals either, so as long as the US military remains, there's a lot to be gained out of placing them there. It may look incongruous on the outside, but Maliki is speaking different language to different groups.

Meanwhile, a major bombing in Baghdad shows that violence is still a fact of life in the war-torn country. I don't believe that the US military can change that reality after six years in country, so if the referendum passed and the troops had to leave by January 2011 instead of December, I would not necessarily be upset.

Dueling Threats

A strange bit of stories coming out of Joe Biden's trip to Iraq yesterday. In the first, the Vice President warned that US troops would bug out if sectarian violence increased.

In meetings with senior Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Biden stressed that the United States would remain engaged in Iraq, even as its military role diminishes in a withdrawal that is expected to dramatically gather pace after parliamentary elections in January.

But a senior administration official briefing journalists said Biden made that support contingent on Iraqi progress in resolving long-standing conflicts, some that bedeviled Iraq even before the United States invaded in March 2003.

If "Iraq were to revert to sectarian violence or engage in ethnic violence, then that's not something that would make it likely that we would remain engaged because, one, the American people would have no interest in doing that, and, as he put it, neither would he nor the president," the official said.

He added that there "wasn't any appetite to put Humpty Dumpty back together again if, by the action of people in Iraq, it fell apart."

I would argue that there's no ability to put Humpty Dumpty back together again is it falls apart. The decisions on sectarian violence and reconciliation will be made by Iraqis. Despite our firepower we have had little ability to control events over there.

At the same time, another report suggests that the US sought a greater diplomatic role in pushing reconciliation, and the Prime Minister rebuffed him:

Biden's meeting with Maliki was a reminder that although the U.S. maintains about 130,000 troops in Iraq, its influence is waning rapidly now that the clock is ticking on the timetable for the departure of all American combat troops next year.

Days earlier, Iraqis had celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. forces from their cities as a "day of national sovereignty." And though Biden's visit was welcomed as evidence that the United States doesn't plan to completely disengage from Iraq, Maliki made it clear that he does not want U.S. officials to be as closely involved in Iraqi politics as they have been.

Maliki told Biden that "the reconciliation issue is a purely Iraqi issue and any non-Iraqi involvement might have a negative effect," said Maliki's spokesman, Ali Dabbagh. "We don't want the Americans to come and get involved."

Biden "received the message well, and he said he is ready to help whenever the Iraqi government asks," Dabbagh said.

I'm trying to piece together the narrative here. It goes something like this:

Biden: We want to help you reconcile.
Maliki: You can't help us reconcile.
Biden: Well, if you don't reconcile, we will leave.
Maliki: We want you to leave.
Biden: Then we're in agreement!

All indications are that Maliki has successfully used the leverage of US military might to crush his internal enemies, and now wants to govern as a potentate without interference from the US. And yet Arab-Kurdish violence does actually threaten to break apart the country, though I wonder if everyone - particularly Biden - would see that as a bad thing.

The Arab-Kurdish divide in Iraq is extremely unfortunate and economically irrational. If Iraq can ever reestablish security and develop the southern oil fields, which are enormous, Kurds will be drawn down south as workers in large numbers, and get spread around the country. The Kirkuk fields are old, water-logged and on the way to being worked out. Iraq's future probably lies elsewhere and therefore probably so does the future of Kurdish citizens of Iraq. Kurds would be wiser to forget about trying to control territory in the 19th century way and surrender to the messiness, ethnic mixing and multiple identities, and uprootedness of postmodern life. And nothing better exemplifies such postmodernism than the polyglot hydrocarbon states of the Gulf. If Kurds aren't careful they'll be stuck landlocked, with small resources, and surrounded by powerful local enemies fearful of their separatism, while Nepalis, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans get rich working in the oil economy of the Arab Shiite south of Iraq.

I think the view of the Administration, at least on Iraq, is that they don't want to get sucked into some other country's internal civil conflict. Maliki obviously believes he can come out on top in such a struggle because he has the numbers behind him. Lots of parts of the world are dangerous, and we don't sit 130,000 American troops in them to babysit. If we cannot affect spasmodic violence - and we can't - we shouldn't sit around waiting.

Out Of Iraq

Iraq has disappeared from the headlines lately, but today, the United States fulfilled its first obligation in the status of forces agreement by pulling its troops out of major cities, and one day ahead of schedule, to boot.

U.S. troops pulled out of Baghdad on Monday, triggering jubilation among Iraqis hopeful that foreign military occupation is ending six years after the invasion to depose Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi soldiers paraded through the streets in their American-made vehicles draped with Iraqi flags and flowers, chanting, dancing and calling the pullout a "victory".

One drove a motorcycle with party streamers on it; another, a Humvee with a garland of plastic roses on the grill [...]

"The American forces' withdrawal is something awaited by every Iraqi: male, female, young and old. I consider June 30 to be like a wedding," said Ahmed Hameed, 38, near an ice cream bar in Baghdad's upmarket Karrada district.

"This is proof Iraqis are capable of controlling security inside Iraq," added the recent returnee from exile in Egypt.

The government has declared June 30 a national holiday, "National Sovereignty Day".

Iraq still faces extreme challenges, exemplified by the spate of bombings and attacks last week leading up to this pullout, which killed at least 200. And the opening of oil fields to international corporations could signal a decline for the Iraqi people and an increase in, basically, kleptocracy. But the presence or absence of US forces means little to these challenges. The Iraqis yearn to return to self-determination, and an American pullback from the military forces the remaining factions to come to a political accommodation. Marc Lynch has a smart take:

It's true that there has been an increase in the number of high-profile, high-casualty attacks over the last few weeks. The thing about spoilers is that they try to spoil. The key questions are whether the attacks trigger sectarian mobilization and security dilemma dynamics, seriously undermine confidence in the state and its ability to provide security, or drive momentum towards wider conflict. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of mounting popular anxiety, but very little evidence of those kinds of conflict dynamics kicking in. For what it's worth, both Iraqi and American officials seem confident -- and remember when the judgment of the commanders on the ground was supposed to be considered sacred writ?

I'm not particularly an optimist on these matters, any more than I was in the past -- but I also see a rapidly declining ability or need for the U.S. to manage these issues. I think that there are still very serious issues surrounding the integration of Sunnis into the emerging Iraqi state and political system -- not just the endlessly dragging integration of the Sons of Iraq into the security forces and civil administration, but the selective targeting of key Awakenings leaders and other ongoing complaints. I also think that some amount of the recent uptick in violence is driven by the disenchantment of some of these Awakenings men, either actively or passively. But it seems clear that Maliki has decided that he can get away with selective repression and co-optation of the various Sunni forces, and will only change his approach if he determines that the price is too high. Maybe he's wrong, maybe he's right -- but that's for Iraqis to determine, not Americans.

Iraqi politics are going to continue to face all kinds of problems, as every analyst under the moon has pointed out. The Arab-Kurd issue, the continuing problems with government capacity, budget problems, and a host of unresolved issues remain. I think that the refugee/IDP issue remains the largest unresolved and virtually untouched issue facing Iraq -- those millions of people uprooted from their homes by force or fear who have few prospects of returning to their original homes, are largely disenfranchised in the emerging Iraqi political system, and who are almost completely unserved by Iraqi state institutions. But slowing down the American drawdown would not materially improve any of these issues. The best thing the U.S. can do is to continue to demonstrate its clear, credible commitment to withdraw on the agreed-upon timeline, and do what it can to help Iraqis adjust to the new realities.

Clearly, just this symbolic gesture of pulling out from the cities has produced near-universal glee among Iraqis, and hopefully that can foster a national sense of identity which can lead to all sides working together on the future of their nation. It would certainly not happen while they remained under the thumb of occupation. Just by adhering to the agreement, Obama and the US military probably garnered some goodwill in the region.

...Clever move by Fourthbranch Cheney, complaining about Obama following through on the pullout of Iraqi cities that was negotiated and signed by Bush-Cheney. This is simple blame-shifting, so Cheney can point his finger at someone else if anything goes wrong. Pathetic.

Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

It's concerning enough that the Pakistani Taliban has responded to the offensive against them in the Swat Valley with bombings in Lahore and Peshawar. Clearly they are embedded enough in local populations to carry out attacks without a base of operations in Swat, even in cities like Peshawar which are not Taliban strongholds. Juan Cole makes the argument that this could all turn public opinion against the Taliban, which is possible.

While is is possible that the public will blame the government for stirring up so much trouble with the Swat campaign, it is also possible that the public will turn decisively on the Taliban. There are precedents for such loss of popularity. After the 1997 attack on innocent tourists in Luxor, Egypt, the Egyptian public turned against the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping (al-Gama'a al-Islamiya), the two small terrorist groups that had committed many acts of violence in the 1970s and 1980s and had assassinated President Anwar el Sadat in 1981. EIJ declined into irrelevance in Egypt, and al-Gama'a al-Islamiya's leadership has renounced violence.

But what REALLY bothers me is the series of attacks over the border, in Iran. A Shiite mosque in Zahedan was struck earlier in the week, and yesterday, gunmen fired on a campaign office for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Preelection tensions rose Friday in Iran's religiously and ethnically mixed southeast after gunmen opened fire on the president's campaign office and a radical group claimed responsibility for the bombing of a mosque the day before that killed up to 23 people and injured scores.

Iranian authorities blamed the United States for the violence in Zahedan, on the border with Pakistan.

"The hands of America and Israel were undoubtedly involved in this incident," prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told supporters in Tehran, referring to Thursday's bombing of a Shiite mosque. "Although Wahhabis and the infidel and evil Salafis were an accomplice to the crime, they were being led from somewhere else."

Wahhabi and Salafi are puritanical schools of Sunni Islam rooted in Saudi Arabia. They have inspired Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network, as well as the Taliban and other groups that denounce Shiite Islam, the majority sect in Iran [...]

Hours earlier, the Sunni militant group Jundallah, which is linked to Al Qaeda and draws support from Iran's ethnic Baluch minority, claimed responsibility for the mosque bombing on a Shiite holiday. It made the claim in a phone call to the United Arab Emirates-based Al Arabiya satellite news channel.

The caller claimed that the victims were hard-line pro-government militiamen discussing the June 12 election.

Now, this province is basically lawless anyway, so I don't want to make too much of it. But I fear that this widens the larger Shiite-Sunni struggle inside Islam, but that hardliner cleric trying to push blame onto the Americans is a ploy to increase tensions and move away from any reconciliation and negotiation. You can clearly see the tensions between Shiite Iran and their Sunni competitors here. You can also see it in Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki throwing up his hands at any further gestures to the Saudis, accusing them of allowing Sunni insurgents to flow through their borders. This is something that many of us worried about at the start of the Iraq conflict, the spread of sectarian violence throughout the region. I really hope this is not the beginning.

No, You Have To Leave Now

The US commanders in Iraq have always wanted to fudge one of the early details of the status of forces agreement. They were comfortable with leaving on schedule and removing combat troops on time, but they sought to keep troops inside major Iraqi cities, a key element of the surge, beyond the June 30 deadline. The Iraqis have other ideas.

Iraq's government Monday ruled out allowing U.S. combat troops to remain in Iraqi cities after the June 30 deadline for their withdrawal, despite concern that Iraqi forces cannot cope with the security challenge following a recent resurgence of bombings.

Asking U.S. forces to stay in the cities, including volatile Mosul in the north, would be embarrassing for Iraq's prime minister, who has staked his political future on claims that the country has turned the corner in the war against Sunni and Shiite extremists.

The departure of heavily armed combat troops from bases inside the cities is important psychologically to many Iraqis, who are eager to regain control of their country after six years of war and U.S. military occupation.

U.S. officials played down the Iraqi decision, with Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman saying it's up to the Iraqi government to request an extension of the U.S. presence in the cities and "we intend to fully abide by" terms of the security agreement.

This actually makes me more assured than ever that Iraq will stand on its own feet in a post-American landscape. The Maliki government wants to remove US forces from the cities, essentially, due to public pressure. That pressure will also force the long-overdue political solutions which still lack between the government and the Sunni Awakening forces. For too long our troops have been the crutch that Maliki falls back on to enforce his increasingly autocratic rule. He probably thinks that his own forces are now sufficient to do the job. But he shows constraints from the public in holding to the deadline to remove Americans from the major cities, which in many ways is the fundamental tenet of democracy. I'm rarely hopeful about Iraq, but this is an exception.

Iraq Violence Is Rising

The President made one mistake last night, when he talked about violence still being below the levels of "a year ago." Actually, with yesterday's attacks killing 47 it has risen to that level.

BAGHDAD — April was the bloodiest month for violence in Baghdad in more than a year, another sign that Iraq's security gains are beginning to reverse.

President Barack Obama acknowledged Wednesday night that violence has risen in recent weeks, but he said the levels of violence were still below last year's.

Calling recent bombings "a legitimate cause for concern," Obama said "civilian deaths . . . remain very low compared to what was going on last year."

But statistics kept by McClatchy show that in Baghdad alone, more than 200 people have been killed in attacks so far this month, compared with 99 last month and 46 in February, according to a McClatchy count.

The last time McClatchy recorded more than 200 civilian deaths in one month in the capital was more than a year ago, in March 2008.

To maintain credibility in foreign policy, Presidents must talk straight with the American people. There's a reason for the rising violence, and that's the failure of the surge to effect a meaningful political reconciliation, which is leading to an increase in sectarian violence. Obama could make that case, and tweak his Iraq plans to increase the diplomatic efforts to force those political solutions. In fact, by dispatching Hillary Clinton to Iraq last week, he's doing that. But he shouldn't minimize the scope of the violence in Iraq right now. That's disingenuous and distorting.

The Exceptions To Leaving Iraq Begin

I'm still trying to get back in the swing, but I am troubled by this story about the US and the Iraqis negotiating exceptions to the June deadline to remove troops from the major cities in Iraq.

The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials. Some parts of Baghdad also will still have combat troops.

Everywhere else, the withdrawal of United States combat troops from all Iraqi cities and towns is on schedule to finish by the June 30 deadline, and in many cases even earlier. But because of the level of insurgent activity in Mosul, United States and Iraqi military officials will meet Monday to decide whether to consider the city an exception to the deadline in the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, between the countries.

“Mosul is the one area where you may see U.S. combat forces operating in the city” after June 30, the United States military’s top spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. David Perkins, said in an interview.

In Baghdad, however, there are no plans to close the Camp Victory base complex, consisting of five bases housing more than 20,000 soldiers, many of them combat troops. Although Victory is only a 15 minute drive from the center of Baghdad and sprawls over both sides of the city’s boundary, Iraqi officials say they have agreed to consider it outside the city.

Mosul remains troubled, and the recent rise in Baghdad may necessitate troops staying through the elections. But this is a slippery slope. This past weekend, I talked with Bill Hedrick, a candidate for Congress in CA-44 who has two sons and two daughters-in-law with a combined 10 tours of duty in Iraq. He told me how concerned he is about the residual forces, about continuing the occupation, and about these efforts at exceptions and delays and moving of the markers. He brought up the examples of Korea and Germany, and our continued presence in those countries, however friendly.

I would imagine this would concern the Iraqis as well. I'm sure many of them think that the US will never leave, and this adds to that frustration. Which can easily turn to violence. I fully understand that the sectarian conflict is rising but we can do little about that from a military perspective. Not to mention that the Prime Minister is thundering against a raid carried out by US forces:

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's prime minister denounced a deadly U.S. raid on Sunday as a "crime" that violated the security pact with Washington and demanded American commanders hand over those responsible to face possible trial in Iraqi courts.

The U.S. military, however, strongly denied that it overstepped its bounds and said it notified Iraqi authorities in advance — in accordance with the rules that took effect this year governing U.S. battlefield conduct.

The pre-dawn raid in the southern Shiite city of Kut ended with at least one woman dead after being caught in gunfire and six suspects arrested for alleged links to Shiite militia factions [...]

A statement from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — in his role as commander general of Iraqi forces — called the raid a "violation of the security pact."

He asked the U.S. military "to release the detainees and hand over those responsible for this crime to the courts," according to an Iraqi security official who read the statement to The Associated Press.

According to the Washington Post Maliki wants the soldiers to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts for violating the security arrangement. Juan Cole explains:

Under the Status of Forces Agreement, the US must notify the Iraqi government before it takes military action.

Al-Maliki is touchy about such an operation in Kut and probably wants personal approval in such matters. Kut is in the Shiite south, where al-Maliki has been attempting to spread the influence of his Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa). It has a significant Sadrist constituency, and al-Maliki is trying to put together coalition provincial governments with the Sadrists. So the US raid made al-Maliki look weak and puppet-like and made him unpopular in a key area where he wants support.

Maliki is not necessarily a good faith actor. He refuses to reconcile with Baathists and Sunnis, and he wants to consolidate power. The information on the raid in Kut never went up the chain of command from local Iraqi officials, but Maliki wouldn't have minded if this had taken place elsewhere. He is out for his own power and not a broader reconciliation among the Iraqis. He is a dangerous partner, and this tantrum further breaches the trust that Iraqis have in the Americans leaving. That could lead to violence very quickly.

Meanwhile, insurgents attacked an important Shiite shrine over the weekend. Very worrying.

Iraq Still A Dangerous Place

Two major bombings in Iraq, among the biggest this year, show that stability in Iraq remains a long way off. The Iraqis reportedly captured Abu Omar al-Baghdadi today, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the important part of that would be that the Iraqis did the capturing. But the bombings today show that leaders can cycle in and out as long as the breadth of the insurgent movement remains. Unfortunately we have not seen the political reconciliation necessary to bring about real and lasting stability.

The selection of a critic of Nouri al-Maliki as the Speaker of Iraq's Parliament could perhaps lead to that reconciliation, as Maliki has little other choice to get his agenda passed. However, the last speaker was something of a critic as well. So the problems still stew. We need to remain on track in Iraq, because our leaving, and maybe only our leaving, will spur the kind of compromises needed to end the chaos once and for all.

Reconciliation Through Withdrawal

Earlier this week Marc Lynch wrote about the rising violence in Iraq and the inability of the Sunni Awakening forces and the Shiite central government to reach a reconciliation. He makes some important points:

Given all that uncertainty, it would be unwise to offer a confident assessment of what's really going on. But the emerging crisis surrounding the Awakenings and the uptick in violence do both seem to be primarily driven by the continuing refusal of Maliki and the Iraqi government to make meaningful political accommodations and their decision to move against at least some of the Awakenings groups at a convenient moment [...]

I'm obviously worried about all of this. I've been warning about the potential for trouble with the Awakenings project for a long time, and it would be easy to say that those predictions are now coming due. But I think it's way too early for that -- there is still time for these troubles to demonstrate the costs of political failure and to become the spur to the needed political action.

That's why it's really important that the United States not now begin to hedge on its commitment to the drawdown of its forces in the face of this uptick in violence. It is in moments like this that the credibility of commitments is made or broken. Thus far, the signals have been very good -- consistent, clear, and tightly linked to continuing pressure on political progress. President Obama reportedly pushed hard on the political accommodation front during his stopover in Baghdad last week, and General Odierno did very well to emphasize on CNN yesterday that the U.S. is firmly committed to removing its troops by the end of 2011. Maliki and everyone need to take deep breath and strike power sharing deals before things go south, and understand that they will pay consequences if they don't.

It's not just the crackdown on the Awakening forces, but the broad trends against human rights and freedom of the press that cause alarm. Maliki has been laying the groundwork for a strongman rule since last year, and it's starting to come to fruition. 25 gay men have been killed over the past two weeks, and newspapers are being harassed by the Iraqi military. This is very troubling all around, but I agree with Lynch that the United States must stay on its glide path to withdrawal, because that's the only way to force reconciliation between the sectarian factions. Ultimately, we can no longer be the backstop for internecine violence, acting as Maliki's proxy militia while he runs roughshod over his competitors. I hope we don't get cold feet on this.

Yes, We're Really Leaving Iraq

The estimable Marc Lynch thinks President Obama is on course in Iraq:

Obama's surprise stop-over in Baghdad, following his impressive performance in Turkey, again hit the right notes. He demonstrated his continuing commitment to the American effort in Iraq, while strongly affirming his intention of carrying out the withdrawal of troops by the end of 2011. He pushed hard on Maliki, by all accounts, to move on reconciliation and to take advantage of the closing window of the American troop presence to secure a workable political accomodation. The message he's sending is the right one: American troops can not be the answer to Iraq's problems, they really are leaving, and it's now up to the Iraqis -- whether things go well or they go badly.

I really wish I would have bet money with the conservative I debated back in October who swore there was no way we'd ever leave Iraq for decades. Not only will we honor the SOFA, it's the right thing to do. I am deeply pessimistic that Iraq will become stable in the near-term - the spate of bombings and jockeying for power among Sunnis and Shiites suggests the opposite - but I do know that the US forces will have very little say over that. Today in Baghdad thousands gathered in the streets to protest the continued US presence. We have 140,000 troops in country now and cannot stop the violence. Internal dynamics have accounted for the ebb and flow of this war. Our presence has not. Lynch continues, taking to task commentators like Tom Ricks who can write entire books about Iraq without the perspective of one Iraqi:

Do I think that the war is over and that Iraq's problems have been solved? No, no, no. For years I've been pointing out the fragility of the political situation, and I've seen little to change my mind [...] But that's not the same thing as saying that America's war in Iraq will continue for a long, long time. I take Obama's commitment to drawing down seriously, and so --- increasingly -- do many Iraqis and those in the region. It isn't that the war is "over"... it's that the American role is fundamentally going to change. As American troops withdraw and Iraqi sovereignty cystallizes, something else I've been arguing for years will become ever more central: a solution which depends on American troops to enforce it is not a solution. Americans, as much as Iraqis, need to adapt to this credible commitment to the drawdown of U.S. troops.

Contrary to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the President has clearly decided that the United States needs to be involved in the solution, in Iraq he has committed to a regional solution that involves the Iraqis instead of our men and women. In THIS - not in the surge - Obama could learn from the experience and apply it to the other Asian land war.

Drawing A Straight Line

The ruling Shiite government gained responsibility for paying the Sunni Awakening forces. They stiffed most of them and even started arresting some of the Sunni leadership. And then...

A series of six car bombs exploded in or near Baghdad on Monday, killing more than 30 people and wounding scores more, according to witnesses and the police.

Three bombs struck markets in predominately Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad, but there did not appear to be any obvious pattern to the attacks. The blasts began shortly after dawn and continued in disparate parts of the city into the afternoon.

Um, I think there IS an obvious pattern to the attacks.

The spike in attacks in Iraq seems to me to be DIRECTLY attributable to the tension between the Shiite ruling government and the Sunni Sons of Iraq. While this guest poster at Informed Comment claims that the disputes in Iraq are about control of resources and power, that seems to me a distinction without a difference. Right now, Maliki and the Shiites are in power, and the Sons of Iraq/Awakening forces are dependent upon them. And they certainly have back channels to what's left of the insurgency, and the increased fighting represents another stage in that power relationship. It does nobody good to turn Iraq into the forgotten war that Afghanistan used to be. The Maliki government needs to be pressured into meeting their responsibilities to keep the country secure and stable, and having a US Ambassador in place would maybe help. So stop grandstanding, Senate GOP. People's lives are at stake.

Send One Back, Take Fifty More

No doubt under duress from the Americans, the Iraqi government abruptly released a Sunni Muslim Awakening Council leader and dropped all charges. Of course, he's just one of the several they've captured.

While freeing Raad Ali, the Shiite-led government continued to hold another Sunni leader, whose arrest Saturday triggered an uprising that left at least 17 people wounded, and it's arrested a number of other Sunni paramilitary leaders and members this week.

The turmoil is fueling fears that rising tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and between Sunni Arabs and Kurds could trigger a new round of violence and even disrupt the Obama administration's plans to draw down American forces in Iraq.

Ali, the head of the Sons of Iraq in the Ghazaliyah neighborhood in northwest Baghdad, returned home to a rain of celebratory shooting by neighbors and supporters. He told McClatchy that he'd been charged with seven crimes, including kidnapping a man who'd already accused someone else of the crime, planting roadside bombs, displacing Shiite families and killing two police officers, one of whom had been his own follower.

He said that all of the charges were bogus. He was treated well while in prison and was able to plead his case before a judge Wednesday, he said.

What's worrying is that the arrests are continuing. Another 50 were arrested yesterday in Ameriyah, a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. Ali was a US ally, but he's but one of what is now ranging into hundreds of detainees. And he is correct that this could spark a new round of violence.

"The Awakening succeeded to make everything good and clean the face of the government," Ali said. "They (the Iraqi government) are crazy, they are foolish, they don't need to target us . . . . we help you and support you why do you want to target us?"

He said he'd told U.S. officials many times that the Iraqi government's apparent plan was to "arrest big leaders," and that this would "destroy" the U.S. project to end the Sunni insurgency. But the American said he was wrong, he said.

I hope somebody at the highest levels of the White House is paying attention to this. It could explode.

...Oh dear. This could get really, really bad.

An American military aircraft opened fire Thursday night on Sons of Iraq members who were allegedly spotted placing a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Friday.

The incident, which killed one suspected member of the paramilitary group and wounded two, is the latest sign of the fraying allegiance between the paramilitary groups and the U.S. military.

Can you say "insurgency resurgence"?

Sectarian Strife In Iraq Does Not Presume A Continued Military Presence

Brian Katulis, one of my favorite foreign policy wonks, has a very good paper spinning off of the incident in Baghdad over the weekend, which signaled a breakdown in relations between the Shiite central government and the Sunni Awakening forces. Katulis argues that this was inevitable:

The standoff between two U.S. “allies” this weekend in the heart of Baghdad is a harbinger of things to come in Iraq. The showdown between Iraq’s central government security forces and members of Sunni militias, known as "Awakenings," had nothing to do with the size of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and almost everything to do with enduring tensions in Iraq—multiple struggles for power between competing Iraqi factions.

What happened this weekend in central Baghdad between Iraqi security forces and members of the Sunni Awakening groups was not unexpected, in large part because many of the tactics used in the 2007 “surge” of U.S. forces built a shaky and unstable foundation. Violence broke out in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Fadhil—just a few miles north of the Green Zone—when Iraqi troops backed by U.S. forces arrested Adil Mashadani, an “Awakening” militia leader on charges of terrorist and sectarian crimes. According to news reports, Mashadani allegedly maintained ties with Al Qaeda forces, helped plan roadside bombing attacks against Iraqi security forces, and ran an extortion racket that squeezed Fadhil residents for tens of thousands of dollars.

Whether these specific charges against Mashadani are true or not, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that someone like Mashadani was on the payroll of the U.S. taxpayers. I argued in a paper on the Awakening groups more than a year ago that the same U.S. tactics that contributed to the so-called “success” of the surge were actually undermining the process of helping Iraq bridge internal divisions. The tactics employed during the surge helped create alternate centers of power in supporting new militias, which built a shaky foundation that led to short-term security gains at the expense of longer-term political stability.

Iraq still exhibits a stark divide between competing sectarian factions, and the surge did nothing to assuage that. Instead we paid off the Awakening forces to provide the illusion of stability without really addressing the root causes that could make such stability lasting. And we allowed delay on the fundamental political solutions that need to be made between Arabs and Kurds in northern Iraq. As Thomas Ricks says, "That is Iraq 2009. Does it sound peaceful to you? Does it seem like the political questions vexing Iraq have been solved?" And he also thinks the Sadrists could take advantage of the chaos.

If the Awakening fighting spreads, I wouldn't be surprised to see Moqtada al-Sadr's Shiite militia re-emerge. I've always thought the Sunni Awakening forced him to go to ground, because he didn't want to be the only guy taking on American forces. But if the Sunnis are on the attack again, it might be game on for him as well. I am reminded of Ambassador Ryan Crocker's worry, expressed in my new book and elsewhere, that the future of Iraq was something like Lebanon. That is, it has a government, but it is shaky, and there is violence in the streets, with some political parties having armed wings that are outside the control of the government.

That's probably accurate, and yet it's important to note that we don't have 140,000 troops in Lebanon right now, and when we tried to put troops there we eventually were forced to leave, and Ronald Reagan made that call and I would argue that it was the right one. Anyone using the continued sectarian strife in Iraq to call for a continued military commitment from the US is not being mindful of other realities. As Katulis notes, the Iraqis set the withdrawal date, not us. We have bigger challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan that push against a giant commitment in Iraq. In addition, our military presence probably inflames this situation. The US should be engaged diplomatically to force a solution between the factions, but our military is essentially being used as a pawn for Nouri al-Maliki as he jockeys for power. Without soveriegnty, and without the US military as a crutch, Iraq will simply never be stable.

Uprising?

I know the Iraq war is over and everything, but this strikes me as a notable development:

Sunni militants staged a violent uprising in central Baghdad Saturday after Iraqi forces detained a leader of the Sons of Iraq, a mostly Sunni paramilitary force that until recently had received salaries from the United States and is now on the Iraqi government payroll.

Sixteen people were injured in the battle in the once volatile Fadhl neighborhood, and five Iraqi soldiers were missing - snatched Saturday night by members of the Sons of Iraq, a security official said.

The arrest of Adel Mashhadani, who leads the force in Fadhl, and his assistant, heightened fears among Sunnis that the Iraqi government plans to divide and disband the movements now that its taken control of all but a few thousand of the 94,000 members across the country.

Earlier in the week we learned that Sunni Awakening forces weren't receiving the jobs promised to them by the central government. Falling oil prices have lessened the funds for the government, and they are having trouble paying existing employees, so payouts and make-work jobs for Sunni militants are unlikely. And this has caused anger and distrust.

The point of the Sunni Awakening was one of reconciliation, to re-integrate former militiamen into Iraqi society. If each of them could be arrested for past criminal actions, is there any way to avoid massive resistance and a resumption of Sunni-Shiite conflict, as well as violence against US forces (which occurred yesterday as well)?

"They sold him," said Khaled Jamal Qaisi, Mashhadani's deputy, referring to the U.S. military.

"The Americans are vile people and they betrayed our trust," Qaisi said. "We are the ones who fought al Qaida. They want things to return as they used to be? If they don't release Adel al Mashhadani today, you will all be prisoners in your homes."

This could be a blip, and Mashhadani could be a legitimate criminal. But when I start to see pitched gun battles in the streets of Baghdad again, I get nervous.

The Return Of Sectarian Violence?

Violence raged in Iraq today, but the country has yet to be fully pacified; hundreds of Iraqis die every month in bombings and other actions. A certain level of violence is expected. What would truly change the dynamic toward an uneasy stability in the country can be found in stories like this:

The American military marked another milestone the other day in the initiative perhaps most responsible for taming the violence in Iraq: All but 10,000 of the 94,000 Sunni militiamen — many of them former insurgents who agreed, for cash, to stop killing American soldiers — had been turned over to the control of the Iraqi military.

Significantly, the militiamen themselves were not celebrating.

The same day, one group of the fighters north of Baghdad announced they were resigning from their Awakening Council, the Iraqi name for what the Americans call the Sons of Iraq. And in the town of Salman Pak, councils in southern Baghdad and its suburbs, an area once called “the ring of death,” met to denounce Iraqi efforts to integrate them.

These are among the signs that the fighters’ patience is fraying badly at a difficult moment. After months of promises, only 5,000 Awakening members — just over 5 percent — have been given permanent jobs in the Iraqi security forces. Those promises were made last year when Iraq was flush with oil money.

Now with Iraq’s budget badly battered by falling oil prices, the government is having trouble paying existing employees, much less bringing in Sunni gunmen already regarded with suspicion by the Shiite-led government.

In interviews with leaders from a dozen local Awakening Councils, nearly all complained that full-time jobs were lacking, that pay was in arrears and that members were being arrested despite promises of amnesty.

Perhaps most ominously, many expressed concern this might drive some followers back to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership, at a time when both Iraqi and American military commanders say that the group seems to be making gains, small but worrisome, around Baghdad.

We've been hearing that the Sunni Awakening forces were unhappy with the ruling government's indifference and even hostility toward them for a while. With a full rift along those lines, the country could easily lapse back into a resumption of the tensions and violence of the civil war period in 2005-2006. Some of this could simply be bargaining positions by the Sunnis, to get the best deal for their men. But commanders should take the threat of a renewed insurgency seriously. It was easier for the Maliki government to make promises about hiring 100,000 Sunnis when oil revenues were high. Since the collapse of the global economy, the government is in a much weaker position, and the Sunnis will surely be the first to get squeezed.

Perhaps the only good news that can come of this would be if everyone stopped their thrall to a "surge strategy" that may well not work and wasn't the exclusive province of the American military, anyway. Nobody "won" in Iraq; instead everyone punched themselves out, and neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed to the extent that something slightly less awful but no less fragile could predominate. Now this Sunni-Shiite rift would turn something slightly less awful into something just as awful, and it frankly doesn't matter a bit whether we have 150,000 troops or 100,000 troops or no troops standing by when the chaos erupts. Perhaps this should NOT be the model for next steps in Afghanistan, after all.

...More hopeful signs exist, as well.

"No Major Violence"

That's how the AP describes Iraq's provincial elections. I mean, sure, they put the entire country under effective martial law for a day and had voters pass through security checkpoints and razor-wire, but there were no major incidents. See, this time, only eight candidates were assassinated prior to the vote.

Progress!

I am actually hopeful that President Obama will live up to the security agreement and withdraw from Iraq, but let's not kid ourselves that the place is like Cape Cod on a windswept morning. It's still a war zone and we still broke it, and we'll need to be engaged diplomatically and financially for a long time.

Cernig has more that is interesting:

But there are still deep-seated problems in Iraq which these provincial election's won't touch, or will actually make worse. The Kurdish North didn't participate and neither did the disputed region of Kirkuk. Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga have already faced off there a few times and most analysts see Kurdish aspirations as the primary future source of violence. Then there's the resurgent Sunni minority, where the old and entirely undemocratic tribal power structure is set to be the election winner. And among Shiites, factional infighting which has fractured Maliki's own coalition heavily, looks to be another potential source of future violence. We may not know the full results for a month or more and there are going to be divisive allegations of intimidation, vote-rigging and double-crossing to navigate.

These elections are a good thing, but they're not a universal panacea. Still, the American Right wants to have its cake and eat it. They want to pretend that provincial elections mean "victory" while getting ready to blame only Obama if Iraqi social fractures ignored by Bush for so long lead to more violence later.

...Sunnis in Baghdad were left off the voter rolls. Iraq IS learning about American-style democracy!

Iraq in 2009

Perhaps the biggest milestone of the new year that will be immediately felt is that the Iraq-US status of forces agreement becomes operative, meaning that Iraq has formal control of the Green Zone in Baghdad, and American troops must petition the Iraqi government before taking action against insurgent activity.

Many of the changes inaugurated on New Year's Day won't bring immediately visible results. The Green Zone, the country's government and military command center, remains ringed by concrete blast walls and off limits to most Iraqis. U.S. troops still man its checkpoints, although now as trainers rather than leaders.

But the Americans have moved out of the Republican Palace, the sprawling former headquarters of Saddam's regime that they took over shortly after the 2003 invasion. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki formerly took control of the building Thursday and exulted over the security pact under which U.S. troops are to leave the country by 2012.

"A year ago, the mere thought of forces withdrawing from Iraq was considered a dream," al-Maliki told reporters afterward. "The dream that no one had the right to think about became true."

He called for making Jan. 1 a national holiday called "Sovereignty Day." Iraq already officially observes New Year's Day as a holiday.

The road to what passes for stability in Iraq is lines with the blood of ethnic cleansing, and when there was nobody left to cleanse violence plummeted. The resultant uneasy peace is fortified by blast walls separating Shiite from Sunni. This is what we're supposed to consider in a celebration of democracy and order.

The geography of Baghdad is walls, built one barrier at a time, along streets and around neighborhoods, through intersections and over bridges. For some, the gray of freshly poured concrete long ago gave way to the city's more dominant ochers. Many are painted. Others are decorated with plastic flowers, gathering dust. A few bear murals.

But they remain walls, dividing a city from itself, in an attempt to stanch violence.

"Welcome to the city of Sadiya," the wall here reads, with no sense of irony.

"The walls are the most hated thing. I swear to God, they're despised," said Hussein Abbas Hassan, plastering posters for a candidate with his two sons, Yasser and Samir. "I wish God would descend from heaven and tear them down."

Juan Cole has his annual top ten myths about Iraq in 2008. Millions of Iraqis have been displaced and very few have come back. Maybe a million are food insecure and 6 million subsist on UN rations. This is on top of the maybe a million dead. We are being forced out of the country by a defiant Iraqi populace who demanded a withdrawal date in the SOFA agreement and did the best job of any entity in bending George Bush to their will. But I don't want to hear anybody talking about victory. Iraq is a garden of nightmares, and that the preliminary stages are coming to an end does not blot those out of the memory.

The Strangling Tourniquet

We're starting to see some consideration put to the planned escalation in Afghanistan, and a lot of people are finally getting around to asking the "why" instead of accepting that Obama will fulfill a campaign promise by sending 20-30,000 more troops into that hostile environment and a rapidly deteriorating occupation. The first person asking why is, interestingly enough, Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

President Hamid Karzai pressed America's top military leader Monday on the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and preparations to pour up to 30,000 more forces into the country, reflecting Karzai's concerns over civilian casualties and operations in villages. Karzai asked Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what kinds of operations the newly deployed troops would carry out and told him that the Afghan government should be consulted about those missions.

The Afghan president, stinging from a series of civilian casualties in U.S. military operations in recent years, said he doubts that sending more American forces into Afghan villages will tamp down the insurgency, and he has questioned a U.S. plan to deploy 3,500 U.S. forces in two provinces on Kabul's doorstep next month.

Karzai told Mullen that U.S. troops must take more care during operations in Afghan villages and stop searching Afghan homes. He asked the chairman to investigate allegations that U.S. forces killed three civilians in a raid last week in Khost province, a reflection of increasing concern about civilian casualties. The U.S. says three militants were killed.

This is the central problem. A larger footprint for occupiers will do nothing for security and is likely to turn the population further against an effort they are after seven years beginning to resent. Karzai acknowledges a possible need for border protection, but troops in major Afghan cities and villages is counterproductive.

Indeed any option in Afghanistan is fraught with pitfalls right now. A surge of troops would have made sense when the population was still behind the effort and the Taliban wasn't reconstituted as an insurgency force. Now the Taliban pretty much controls the countryside and the amount of troops needed to perform a counterinsurgency campaign cannot be brought into the country without much resentment and hatred.

“We may have missed the golden moment there,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who has long advocated an increased U.S. focus on Afghanistan.

The tension between the short-run need for more muscle to thwart the Taliban and the long-term trap of becoming the latest in a long line of foreign intruders bogged down in Afghanistan forms the core of the dilemma confronting Obama.

There are efforts underway to recruit local tribal militias to bolster the paltry amount of native security forces in a kind of "Afghan awakening," but they are likely to have little or no control from the central government, not historically a factor in the country, and more likely to rule over their own areas and increase bloodshed among ethnic rivals.

“There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.

“A civil war will start very soon,” he said.

NATO forces would like to stem the poppy trade that is funding the insurgency and encourage alternative crop development, but many member nations are wary of involving themselves in counter-narcotics actions.

NATO officials in Brussels declined to list the nations that have opposed widening the alliance mandate to include attacks on drug networks, and no nation has volunteered that it has legal objections.

But a number of NATO members have in broad terms described their reluctance publicly, including Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. Their leaders have cited domestic policies that make counternarcotics a law enforcement matter — not a job for their militaries — and expressed concern that domestic lawsuits could be filed if their soldiers carried out attacks to kill noncombatants, even if the victims were involved in the drug industry in Afghanistan.

There are discussions about splitting off Taliban elements and causing a rift in the insurgency through negotiations and entry into the government, but there's absolutely no sign that any Taliban fighter would be amenable to it.

Overall, everyone knows that a major strategic shift is needed, but there's simply no evidence that any of these shifts would produce something resembling success, or any indication that anyone knows what "success" means. In fact, "success" is most likely defined as "an end to total failure."

"Right now there is a sense you need to apply a tourniquet of some kind," said a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing contacts with the transition team. "You need to control bleeding at the site of the wound, you need to stabilize, and you need to see what you need to do next."

After a record number of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan this year, national security officials consider it crucial for the new administration to act soon after taking office. The senior Defense official said Obama would have a limited time period to announce a new strategy for Afghanistan and build up the troop strength.

"Over time, it will be harder to put more stuff in," the official said. "You have a window where you can do dramatic things. But the opportunity to do dramatic things reduces over time."

But what are those "dramatic things" and how will they produce improvements in both American security and the lives of the Afghan people? If the goal is now to tread water and not fail so badly I can't see how staying makes sense. Tourniquets can be refashioned into nooses, after all. The plans for Afghanistan 2.0 are all based on such wishful thinking, and suffused with so many potential drawbacks, that it almost looks like they are designed to do nothing but draw our military further into an intractable conflict. There are regional diplomatic solutions that make sense at providing space for a withdrawal without leaving behind any group that can project power beyond their borders. That does not have to include thousands more troops of dubious effectiveness.

I don't look kindly on suggestions that we "must do something dramatic" in cases like this, on the grounds that something dramatic always and forever works to our benefit. I agree with Spencer Ackerman on this one - we need to at least pretend to think about the interests of the Afghans at some point.

What I did see was an overwhelming desire for security among the population. Lots of people said something to me that boiled down to, “When the Taliban were in power, the roads were safe, food was cheap and gas is cheap. Now the Americans are here and none of that is true.” The major factor that made the tribal revolt in Anbar work was that the population, including the extremists, understood that Al Qaeda offered them a bleaker future than even the occupation. Nothing like that exists in Afghanistan — or, at least, there is an alarming lack of evidence for that crucial proposition.

People need to take a very deep breath. To judge by the available evidence, the Afghan population wants security. It does not want more militias. The Afghan Senate has actually rejected this proposal explicitly. Is there any actual appetite among Afghans for a Sons-of-Afghanistan program? Or is this a case of hubristic Americans coming into Afghanistan and imposing a template from Iraq upon an overwhelmingly different country and overwhelmingly different set of conditions? You can tell what I suspect from the way I framed the question.

My fear is that we aren't looking at the concerns of Afghanistan policy through the lens of "is this policy good or bad" rather than "does this make us look like we are responding to the problem." That way lies disaster.

...Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip...

There were demonstrations in Iraq calling for the release of Muntathar al-Zaidi in Falluja, in the Sunni Triagle, and in the Baghdad Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya. This is not relegated to a concern of Sadrist Shiites. In Falluja, US troops fired warning shots:

University students rallied for Zaidi in Fallujah on Wednesday, drawing the attention of U.S. forces.

Students raised their shoes and threw rocks at American soldiers, who reportedly opened fire above the crowd. Protesters said that indirect fire wounded one student, Zaid Salih. U.S. forces haven't confirmed the account.

"We demonstrated to express our support for Muntathar al Zaidi, but we were surprised with the entrance of the U.S. military," said Ahmed Ismail, one of the protesters. "Unconsciously, we raised our shoes expressing our support for al Zaidi, but they attacked us."

I'm sure that won't escalate.

The mood in Iraq these days is, well let's call it "tense". Yesterday demonstrators blocked the passage out of the Green Zone and ignored warning shots.

Al-Zaidi has formally apologized to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for his conduct and begged for forgiveness (his brother thinks it was coerced). For geostrategic reasons alone, he should be set free.

...This raid of the Interior Ministry is interesting. Maliki is clearly using a paramilitary group that he calls an "elite counterterrorism force" to muscle out all his competition. The idea that this was a foiled coup attempt doesn't make sense at all. He is just consolidating power. But if he fails to understand the danger of the al-Zaidi case and the popular movement that could erupt, it won't matter.

Drip, Drip, Drip

The Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament has resigned over the al-Zaidi arrest.

Iraq's parliament speaker announced his resignation Wednesday after a parliamentary session descended into chaos as lawmakers argued about whether to free a journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush.

The speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, has threatened to resign before and has been suspended for embarrassing the prime minister with erratic behavior.

On Wednesday, after arguments erupted among lawmakers over the fate of the journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the speaker said: "I have no honor leading this parliament and I announce my resignation."

al-Mashhadani is a Salafi elected on the Iraqi Accord Front list, a Sunni-led slate. So much for the idea that only Shiite Sadrists supported al-Zaidi.

Meanwhile, as rallies seeking al-Zaidi's release continue, he received a judge in his jail cell rather than a courtroom today, pleading guilty to the charges.

THE Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at United States President George W. Bush has appeared before a judge in his jail cell because he is too injured to appear in a courtroom, his brother says.

The al-Zaidi family went to Baghdad's Central Criminal Court expecting to attend a hearing, his brother, Dhargham, said.

He said the family was told that the investigative judge went to see al-Zaidi in jail, and to return in eight days, Associated Press has reported.

"That means my brother was severely beaten and they fear that his appearance could trigger anger at the court,'' Dhargham said.

The anger is already being triggered. This is very dangerous.