Where Do We Go From Here?
Iraq Trip Report
By Linda Robinson
During a three-week trip to Iraq in late August and early September, I found the security situation improved compared to the spring and even more markedly over last year. But it was harder to determine whether there had been any change in the all-important question of Iraqi political will. The views about the Iraqi government‘s true intent among those working most closely with it tend to break down into two groups. Senior U.S. military and civilian officials believe that they can painfully and haltingly nudge the Maliki government forward on reconciliation as its fears of a Sunni return to dominance are allayed. Many of them believe this option is merely the least worst option. Lower-ranking officials are more pessimistic, perhaps because they can afford to be. They tend to believe that the Shia-led government is bent on domination of Sunnis, who are now largely fighting for their survival rather than a return to power.
Behind closed doors, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker and their subordinates are engaged in a full-court press to get more Sunnis into the government and to push Maliki ahead on reconciliation. They have achieved some success on local initiatives, though not on passage of key legislation and not enough to demonstrate unequivocally that the Maliki government has the will or ability to achieve a power-sharing agreement if given more time. Success in Iraq, if it comes, is not going to come in a big bang but rather through a series of piecemeal steps that at a minimum give the Sunni minority the ability to secure and govern the areas they inhabit, with funding from the central government. The vision is federalism, not partition. The U.S. officials hope to allay Shia fears as it becomes clear that these local concessions do not court the return of their oppressors. In the lingo of peacemakers, these are called “confidence-building measures.” It is a grinding, exhausting business, and certainly not one given to headline-making breakthroughs.
The most significant (and underreported) development has been the U.S. recruitment of thousands of Sunnis to serve as U.S.-paid security guards, which the Iraqi army is now permitted to work alongside. This is not just an Anbar phenomenon. In an interview Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the three-star commander of the Multinational Corps, told me that some 15,000 Iraqi volunteers have been contracted by U.S. battalions in greater Baghdad (Ameriya, Ghazaliya, Adhamiya, Taji, Radwaniya, Abu Ghraib, Yusifiyah) and provinces to the north. That is as many as have been recruited in Anbar. The volunteers I talked to in southern and western Baghdad see this as their best chance to secure their neighborhoods and to become part of the Iraqi security forces. They still distrust the Iraqi government, but they now see the U.S. military as their best bulwark against further sectarian attacks. Many of these groups once fought both American and Iraqi forces, but they have responded readily to the chance to the come in from the cold.
I returned to two of the most conflicted neighborhoods in Baghdad, which I had visited in April. The first group of volunteers in Baghdad came forward in the neighborhood of Ameriya on May 31. Violence has dwindled dramatically since then, from 35 bombs in May to two in August. The soldiers there have suffered heavy losses and still patrol in Bradley fighting vehicles outfitted with extra armor. Unfortunately, even that extra protection did not prevent heavy losses: 14 soldiers were killed there in May by massive buried bombs, concocted from hundreds of pounds of homemade explosive.
Since May 31, a group of 227 Sunnis led by a 40-year-old former Iraqi soldier named Abu Abid has helped U.S. forces pick off Al Qaeda targets in the neighborhood and capture those who have killed Americans. Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, the U.S. battalion commander (1-5 Cav) says Abu Abid’s targeting has been much better than anything he has seen in the Iraqi army. I spent a fair amount of time with Abu Abid and his motley group of fighters and concluded that he clearly has the charisma and skill to lead. To ride herd on the band, Kuehl’s soldiers patrol with their new allies and oversee payday and other activities at Abu Abid’s headquarters and the half-dozen outposts the volunteers have set up in Ameriya.
On the east side of Baghdad, Adhamiya is still a bastion of Sunni insurgents, but even there attacks have declined and the number of bodies on the streets has decreased from a weekly average of 10 to 2. A possible turning point was reached last month when a local sheikh stormed the Sunnis’ most important mosque, Abu Hanifa, and uncovered weapons caches. Several hundred volunteers have signed up for U.S. training at Combat Outpost Apache. So far, thirty stand guard at the gas station and thirty are guarding the only hospital in eastern Baghdad where Sunnis can go without fear of abduction.
The only way these Sunni volunteers will contribute to lasting peace is if they are incorporated into the standing security forces of the country. The U.S. has drawn up a plan to institutionalize this wave of Sunni volunteerism through Operation Blue Shield, which aims to incorporate 12,671 of those guards into the Iraqi police force in the next six months. A National Reconciliation Committee made up of three officials close to the prime minister has been formed, and after much prodding, come up with a transparent vetting policy to approve the Sunni candidates.
So far 1,500 volunteers from Abu Ghraib have begun training at the police academy, and 691 more from Mansour have been accepted. Getting the first group admitted to the academy required Petraeus to confront Maliki in one of their more heated exchanges. Abu Abid wants to get his fighters into the regular Iraqi forces, and Lt. Col. Kuehl and his brigade commander, Colonel J.B. Burton, have taken Abu Abid to meet with the National Reconciliation Committee twice in the past month and are continuing to push for their incorporation in the police or army.
The U.S. officers in charge of this initiative doggedly push it along, one decision at a time. The Baghdad division deputy commander for maneuver, Brig. Gen. John Campbell, is the man laboring in the trenches on this initiative. In addition to flying around to see units deployed all over Baghdad, Campbell attends all the Iraqi operational planning meetings for the Baghdad security plan. The Iraqi general in charge of the Baghdad operations, Lt. Gen. Abboud Qanbar, has come to support bringing the volunteers into the standing security forces. He told me that he sees the utility of having Sunnis provide security in Sunni areas and acknowledges that it will fill the under-strength and Shia-dominated police. In most Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad there is no police presence whatsoever, and where they do exist, they huddle inside their blue-and-white police stations instead of patrolling among hostile citizens.
Campbell has brought Abboud around by taking him out three or four times a week to meet the Sunni volunteer militias and see what is happening on the ground. On one trip to meet a wealthy sheik who has recruited 650 volunteers to guard the Radwaniyah area on Baghdad’s southern fringe, Abboud met two volunteers who were colonels in Saddam Hussein’s army until 2003. One came up to kiss him on the cheeks at a sand-bagged checkpoint manned by men in reflective belts. The man remembered Abboud from his days as inspector general of Saddam’s army. The other former colonel sat next to the sheik, taking notes and giving him advice, as they discussed the possible incorporation of the volunteers into the police.
Baghdad is the most difficult and important area for this initiative because it is the center of power and has the most intermixed population. U.S. officials have had more success to date in getting the Iraqi government to support the empowerment of Anbari Sunnis. The Iraqi government may invite Sunni leaders in Anbar and other provinces to fill some of its 17 vacant cabinet seats, although the murder of Sheik Sattar eliminates one key candidate. Sunnis in Anbar have been admitted to the army and police to secure that province, additional resources have been funneled to the provincial government, and more Sunnis have joined Anbar’s provincial council. This is the shape of the emerging national deal: Sunnis control their local security and local government and win an adequate share of resources.
In an interview in his office on August 27 and a subsequent visit to Fallujah on September 1, Petraeus made clear how much stock he places in this bottom-up approach to get there. Anbar is his model for how to link the local volunteer security initiative to national political and economic power-sharing and institutionalization. “You see local progress that produces improvements in local security, and then leads to local leaders wanting to connect to the central government, because all resources here flow from the central government,” he said in his office. That power of the purse, he added, in turn “provides a degree of control that addresses some of the legitimate concerns of the Shia-led central government about hiring in some cases former insurgents and in any case Sunni Arabs.”
Every step toward this incipient deal has come at the insistent prodding of U.S. officials, with the help of a few statesmanlike Iraqi officials such as Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. In the second Anbar reconstruction conference in early September, the Iraqi government did come forward with more economic resources for Anbar, but it balked at increasing the authorized level of Anbar police from 21,000 to 30,000, despite heavy pressure from Petraeus. I sat in a meeting in Fallujah on September 1 when the general reminded a top Interior Ministry official that that bargain had been struck and its formal announcement was being eagerly awaited. But in the end, the government reneged on the bargain; instead, its response was “first fill the 21,000 slots and then we’ll see.”
At the same time it has been reluctant to embrace the wholesale incorporation of Sunnis into the police, however, the Iraqi government has also taken another major, and, oddly enough, unpublicized step to bring former Iraqi officers back into the army. Since the spring Maliki’s government circulated a survey and received 48,600 responses from interested former soldiers. According to U.S. officials, Maliki has decided to reincorporate 5,000 officers, offer civil service jobs to another 7,000, and grant full pensions to the rest. Just as puzzling, Petraeus mentioned this in passing in his testimony, rather than making it a centerpiece. It is nonetheless the most significant step toward reconciliation that the government has yet taken.
Another step dismissed in the U.S. debate as meaningless was the August 26 accord among Maliki, the president and the two vice presidents. It was the product of intensive and torturous negotiations and a new, staff-driven effort to broker substantive deals on the core issues of the conflict. The principals agreed on two pieces of legislation, on de-Baathification and on provincial powers, and a new governing mechanism to replace Maliki’s insular style. Detainee releases were used as the bait to get Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi to sign on. It will be a significant breakthrough if Maliki honors it and if the laws are passed by parliament. Other parts of the agreement, including a commitment to review and due process for all detainees, also constitute a significant olive branch to the Sunnis. Iraqi and U.S. officials are also trying to gain Sunni acceptance of a key point in the stalled oil legislation. The primary sticking point at this stage is Sunni objections to the Kurds’ wish to offer production-sharing agreements to entice foreign oil companies to exploit their more difficult reserves.
Officials also report progress in confronting the most sectarian influences. In contrast to his obstruction last year, Maliki has permitted far more targeting of extremist Shia militia groups than is generally known. Iraqi and U.S. special operations forces conduct almost nightly raids into Sadr City and other Shia extremist strongholds all over southern Iraq. They have captured many of the top leaders, which is probably one reason why Sadr has declared a truce. But in the armed camp that Basra has become, special operations forces require continued cover from British armor to make headway there, U.S. special operations Lt. Col. Sean Swindell told me. In addition to this kinetic action, political efforts have been under way simultaneously for over a year to drive a wedge between Maliki and Sadr extremists and to moderate Sadr’s movement.
Finally, the Petraeus and Crocker teams have pushed relentlessly to get the dysfunctional Iraqi government to spend its money and improve services to the Iraqi people. There is a long way to go still, but the efforts have resulted in twice as much money being sent to the provinces this year as last, and power generation has increased to 5300 megawatts from the 4000 mw level where it had plateaued. Iraqis of all sects express outrage at the continuing dismal level of services, and Sunni neighborhoods in particular are still visibly starved of electricity, water, sewage drainage, trash pickup and food delivery.
In his daily morning briefings, Petraeus has persistently asked his staff to find out why repairs of Tower 57, a key high-voltage power line leading from the south into Baghdad, has not been made. Since letters often have more impact in Iraq’s legalistic culture, he also wrote a letter to Prime Minister Maliki complaining that the ministry of electricity was not repairing the line. That night, the minister of electricity worriedly called Petraeus and assured him that the work would be done.
From the perspective of folks in Iraq working 18-hour days, this is not a negligible list of accomplishments, but it isn’t enough to satisfy a war-weary American public that wants a clear sign that the Iraqi government has the will and capability to move ahead. The September reporting deadline created an expectation that reconciliation and all the key legislation would be completed by then. That was never in the cards.
Against the view of senior officials that this inchworm progress can continue if only we persevere is an alternative view that prevails among mid-level officers who work in the neighborhoods daily with Iraqi security forces. In their view, the Shiite militias and their important allies in the Iraqi government are bent upon total domination and are waging what U.S. Colonel J.B. Burton calls “a campaign of exhaustion by kinetic and nonkinetic means” against the Sunnis. Many officers in different areas told me that the Iraqi army routinely targets only Sunnis, unless their U.S. counterparts insist they do otherwise. In another recent display of sectarian behavior, the Iraqi government has refused to release the final test scores of Sunni students graduating from high school, which will prevent them from attending university.
Such acts convince these officers that the Maliki government is simply playing along, granting some minor concessions in response to the Americans’ pressure, until the United States goes home. These officers are pushing back hard, to get sectarian Iraqis fired and to compel the government to provide services and jobs to Sunnis. But if these efforts fail, then the United States owes visas to those Sunnis who have volunteered for guard duty this summer, in addition to the others who are likely to be targeted by the government in the wake of a U.S. departure. The wife of Abu Abid, the first Sunni militia leader to come forward in Baghdad, already fearing the worst, begged me for help in getting visas for her two young children. Abu Abid’s two brothers were tortured and killed last year during Ramadan by the Jaish al Mahdi Shia militia.
Despite the dispersal of U.S. troops around Baghdad, the decline in violence and the Sunni response to the recruiting initiative, sectarian behavior continues to plague the Shia-dominated military and police. The most acute current problem is in the Saddiya neighborhood of Baghdad’s West Rashid security district. The Shia militia Jaish al-Mahdi is pushing Sunnis out of their homes in a continuing cycle of violence. The National Police unit there is doing nothing to stop it, and in the opinion of at least one officer there are too few U.S. troops in that neighborhood to lay down the security blanket that has proven effective elsewhere in the city. Along Route Jackson, the major thoroughfare bordering the neighborhood, Shia militias continue to pick off U.S. humvees with explosively formed projectiles. They are doing the same on Route Pluto, which borders Sadr City.
When Americans encounter sectarian behavior, the current remedy is for U.S. officers to collect detailed information which is then presented through the chain of command to Iraqi authorities. Many Iraqi units routinely target Sunni insurgents and not Shia militias. Lt. Col. John Reynolds, commander of 1-26 Infantry in eastern Baghdad, believes that the local Iraqi commander he works with may even be implicated in militia attacks on his soldiers. During a recent recruiting drive to hire volunteers in the Sulaikh neighborhood of Baghdad, this commander’s strike platoon arrested one of the volunteers. The Iraqi commander told me that while he agreed with the neighborhood watch policy, “we must vet the recruits, and in any case continue to go after the terrorists.”
Even if this view of the Iraqi government as bent on a winner-take-all outcome is correct, however, the consequences of leaving Iraq to its civil war must still be reckoned with. At a minimum, U.S. regional interests must be looked after and an attempt made to prevent the war from spilling over into neighboring countries. Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a genial Kurd, told me that while he has been preparing for an alternative policy since June, when he visited the White House and proposed that the U.S. and Iraq begin negotiating a long-term security agreement to replace the United Nations resolution authorizing the U.S. military coalition’s presence in Iraq, which expires in December. The White House agreed, and sent National Security Council official Meghan O’Sullivan to Baghdad this summer to begin the negotiations.
Zebari said that the bilateral security agreement will provide the framework for a redefined U.S. presence in Iraq and compared it to those governing U.S. forces stationed in Persian Gulf countries and Europe. “This will impact the level of troops, their mission and role, which will be regulated through the bilateral security agreement,” Zebari told me in an interview on August 29 at his office in Baghdad. The August 26 accord commits the Maliki government to seek a renewal of the U.N. resolution into next year until the new agreement is reached. Zebari signaled, however, that Iraq will seek revisions in the U.N. terms to gain more control over its forces and territory.
In the meantime, Zebari fervently hopes the United States will not up and leave. “We need the Multinational Forces to stay and not withdraw in a premature, abrupt or precipitous way because the consequences would be very dangerous,” he said. “This would be a devastating blow to U.S. interests in Iraq and the region.” The possibilities he enumerated were: a divided Iraq, civil war of unprecedented violence, regional war, and a convenient location for Al Qaeda with plenty of oil revenues to fund its terrorism.
General Petraeus successfully argued within the administration for more time to continue the Sisyphean task of putting Iraq back on its feet and keeping it from splitting apart, but this position pitted him against many senior military officials who believe the stress on the Army and Marines requires a more rapid drawdown sooner. Congress is likely to continue attempts to force a more rapid reduction in the U.S. commitment. Petraeus and his inner circle don’t dispute the fact that the Army and Marines are strained. But one of his advisers, chairman of the social sciences department at West Point Professor Mike Meese, argues that while it will take years to recover from the loss of captains and noncoms worn out by the war, “leaving Iraq in the wrong way so it appears to be a failure will have a decades-long impact.”
The announcement of the drawdown sets in motion a chain reaction that will be difficult to predict. The risk of “rushing to failure” considerable, given that the positive trends are incipient and reversible and the Iraqi government has still not clearly embraced the Sunnis’ wish to come in from the cold. The really thorny question is how fast to draw down the remaining 15 combat brigades. The game plan is one brigade every 45 days, conditions permitting. Lt. Gen. Odierno argues that to draw down more quickly now jeopardizes the chances for consolidating the initial gains won by the surge. “If you tell me today, we are going to go down to ten brigades in six months, I believe that’s a failed failed strategy,” he told me in early September. “We will not accomplish our goals that I see here in Iraq. If you ask me that six months from now, I might give you a different answer.”
The drawdown begins in December, and with it the transition to a support role for U.S. troops. What has not yet been recognized is that U.S. leverage begins to wane at the same time. So the question is how to maximize that leverage while it still exists and to prepare for what will become increasingly a political game. There is no doubt that purging some key sectarian-minded officials and officers from the Iraqi government ranks would help. Also, some senior military officials and Democratic legislators like Senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed believe new deadlines for reporting on the Iraqi government’s progress or lack thereof will help hold their feet to the fire. Bringing new diplomatic partners into the effort to negotiate the elusive accord among the Iraqis will also help share the burden of what it likely to be a protracted peace-making effort. But the United States must remain forcefully engaged, outline a clear political strategy and offer some creative new mechanisms. The Maliki government may or may not survive, but Crocker and others I interviewed believe that many months would be lost, at an absolutely critical time, in the effort to form a new government.
What hope of success is there? The war in Iraq will have an ending, and the United States’ choice is to influence it or not. Despite the intense U.S. partisan politics surrounding the war, the bedrock reality is that Iraq is simply too important to walk away from. The best reason to believe that further progress might be made is the sheer doggedness of Petraeus and Crocker. Petraeus, unlike previous commanders here, does not shy away from locking horns and pounding tables on the political issues. And Crocker is a professional who has finally assembled a team of top-flight talent that has been missing the entire war, for what is really a peace-making venture. The next best reason is a second tier of well-intentioned Iraqi officials such as Barham Salih and Iyad Samarrai, who crafted the August 26 accord with U.S. help. Additional deadlines and markers imposed by Congress could help move this Sisyphean project along. But with or without progress, 2008 will be, finally, a year of transition.
Linda Robinson, a contributing editor for U.S. News, is working on a book about the endgame for Iraq, to be published next year by PublicAffairs Books. She has been covering the war since 2003.
