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US-IRAQ: Surge Exposing Political Tensions
By Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Feb 14 (IPS) - Despite assertions by the George W. Bush Administration that the escalation
strategy in Iraq - known as the "surge" - has been a rousing success, many of
the problems of pre-surge Iraq still exist and, along with new issues, are
exacerbating a tenuous political situation there.
With the five-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion looming, two
Washington think-tanks released reports today on the subject of increasing
multi-lateral sectarian tensions in Iraq.
"The conventional wisdom among most conservatives and Washington policy
elites is that the surge has ‘worked’," starts the Centre for American Progress
report, titled ‘Awakening to the New Danger in Iraq’. "This conventional
wisdom ignores the fact that the fundamental objectives of the surge - to
create a more sustainable security framework for Iraq and advance Iraq’s
political transition - have not been met," according to the report.
The surge period has, in fact, quelled violence across Iraq to some degree,
but critics argue that the drop in violent attacks has less to do with the
increased number of U.S. troops and more to do with the newfound
cooperation of Sunni groups who used to align themselves with the violent
insurgency.
"Rather than facilitating reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis," said Brian
Katulis, lead author of the Centre for American Progress report, "the main
concern we raise in the paper is that these efforts are undermining the
overall effort of getting to a political reconciliation among Iraq's leaders."
"I think that there’s a very real risk that one aspect of the surge -
supporting these Sunni militias - could amount to a U.S. policy of
supporting different sides in an Iraqi civil war," Katulis said.
The so-called ‘Sunni Awakening’ (or Sahwa), saw Sunni militias - both rural
tribal groups and more urban neighbourhood militias - cease their attacks
on Americans and the central Iraqi government in favour of working to
diminish the influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Numbering over 73,000 soldiers, these militias - about ninety percent of
whose ranks are paid 300 dollars a month by U.S. forces - have little central
structure save a loosely federated group of tribes called the Anbar Awakening
in the troubled Iraqi province of the same name.
Having lessened some of the violence, the groups are now clamouring for the
further political involvement that their new U.S. allies promised them. But at
least in Anbar, they expect these political gains to come at the expense of the
Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, which participated in the last round of elections in
2005.
The Awakening groups had expected that provincial elections would be held
in the spring. When the central government announced elections for the fall,
the Anbar Awakening groups angrily said that the current officials had thirty
days to give up their seats or the groups would take up arms against them.
But even with the political empowerment of the Awakening groups, some
critics of the "surge" strategy fear that the tensions being exposed between
the Sunni groups are likely to work against the goal of political reconciliation.
"It’s really a long-shot strategy," said Ilan Goldenberg, policy director of the
National Security Network. "And there’s a real danger associated with it. It’s a
low probability of at least trying to bring some of these guys in. But I think
the much higher probability is that when you introduce a competitive
electoral process into this type of situation, things tend to go worse not
better."
The National Security Network also released a report today - titled ‘Sunni
infighting Threatens Iraqi Stability’ - which criticized the overall "surge"
strategy with regard to the Awakening. The report cites recent violence and
the possibility of further impending turmoil.
"America’s ‘Awakening Strategy’ in Western and Central Iraq," said the
National Security Network report, "rests atop a complex and unresolved set of
conflicts. A policy that focuses on temporarily reducing violence while not
addressing the underlying political crisis is risky and unstable."
One of the goals of political empowerment for the Awakening movement is to
gain control of Iraqi central government resources flowing into various
provinces, in addition to the vast amounts of U.S. material support they are
already receiving.
The groups claim that the Shia-led national government has been too slow
to incorporate the militia members and leadership into Iraqi police jobs -
often blaming Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki by name.
The groups claim that the Shia dominated Iraqi security forces are abusive in
their territories in a way that they are not in rural and urban Shia territories,
and hope to replace them and police their own turf. The power-struggle has
already yielded several minor but deadly spats.
"[The U.S.] efforts in a sense have helped make the process of achieving a
sustainable political agreement among Iraq's political factions much more
difficult by heightening tensions between Iraqi security forces and these
independent militias," said Katulis.
"Sahwa leaders calculate that the prospect of Iraq sliding further into chaos if
they dissolve or turn back to insurgency will force Maliki to accept them,"
said the National Security Network report.
This approach of threatening violence - or at least ceasing to help abate it -
- has done little to endear the Awakening movements to either the Sunni
parties they hope to replace, or Shia parties controlling the government in
Baghdad.
All of this - concluded both reports - continues to show that despite the
Bush Administration’s trumpeting of the successes of the "surge" strategy,
the strategy could actually be causing the very tensions it hopes to subdue to
boil beneath the surface. In a worst-case scenario, these sectarian
differences could explode into a civil war.
(END/2008)
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