Iraq: Six Answers on the War and the State of the Country (Rosen)

Harper's interview with Nir Rosen, one of the most incisive reporters and analysts of Iraq:

1. On the war in Iraq, the wisdom of the Beltway pundits might be summed up this way: Bush’s efforts were floundering, then Petraeus saved the day with his surge, converting an ambiguous situation into an unqualified success. What’s the matter with this analysis?

Success isn’t a relevant concept....

The various events that have come to be called “the surge” actually started well before Petraeus took over the war in Iraq, although he did help support and institutionalize some of the changes. And the civil war and cleansing continued well into the surge. I recently visited many villages in Diyala that were totally destroyed in the civil war in the summer of 2007, six months into the surge. There was a peak of violence and then a relative decline in violence.

This was the product of a slew of developments, starting with the fact that the Shiites won the civil war. The Sunnis, realizing they were losing (a process that began in 2006), shifted their strategy and attempted to reach an accommodation with the Americans. You have to throw in the Mahdi Army ceasefire, the growing anger Iraqis felt at the predations of their own self-defense militias (whether they were Al Qaeda or the Mahdi Army), the expulsion of millions of people from their homes and the creation of pure enclaves, a surge in the Iraqi Security Forces and the removal of many of their worst members, an increase in the number of American troops, the high number of fatalities from air strikes and kill missions (which struck intended targets and innocents alike and brutalized the civilian population), American counterinsurgency tactics such as walling off areas and living in neighborhoods in combat outposts, the decision by Prime Minister Al Maliki to crush Shiite militias.

All of this brings us where we are today–daily bombings and assassinations, poor services, a corrupt, authoritarian regime, torture, misery and fear. But at least it’s better than 2006, right?

2. The New York Times reports that with the failure of efforts to form a government in Baghdad with broad Sunni-Shia support, Sunni leaders who had reconciled themselves to the Americans during the “Anbar Awakening” are now moving once more towards armed opposition. Do you share this analysis? Was it foreseeable? And what does it mean in terms of American claims of success in the Iraq War?

I strongly disagree with this analysis. It’s true that Sunni militiamen who switched sides in the civil war and decided to ally with the Americans now feel betrayed. They were expecting to fight Shiites when the Americans left and overthrow the government, or at least attain positions of power and influence. Instead many have been arrested or killed, others have been fired or given jobs they consider humiliating, such as in sanitation, while others have been incorporated into the security forces. I was critical of the Awakening phenomenon when it began. I thought that creating new militias would be catastrophic.

But the Sunni militiamen miscalculated. They went from being underground guerilla fighters to public figures, their names, addresses, and biometric data known by the Americans and Iraqi Security Forces. They also proved unable to unite. Instead they have been emasculated and have gone from being powerful to being pathetic. They failed to translate the power they once had on the ground into political influence. Instead of contesting the system, they just want a piece of it. But they are powerless to do anything about it. Their leadership was decimated, and they have little support from the local population. Now Al Qaeda is picking them off slowly, slaughtering them or blowing them up here and there.

These days the Awakening leaders I knew are either dead, in exile, or asking me to help them get visas to the United States. Importantly, Sunnis are no longer under threat so there is no grass roots support for the Awakening militias either. There is no security vacuum in Iraq these days. The Iraqi Security Forces are pervasive and no longer perceived as sectarian death squads. So the former Sunni militiamen have been marginalized with little consequence. The occasional suicide bomber or car bomb that Sunni rejectionists can dispatch have no strategic impact on the situation in Iraq.

Read full interview....