The House of Cards
When the “surge” was announced, the theory was that more troops would create more security which would lead to political reconciliation. I thought this was backwards — the violence was caused not be “insecurity” but by political conflict and absent reconciliation, more troops would just be more targets. Clearly, things have worked out better than I thought they would. But what the surge’s proponents claimed hasn’t happened either. Instead, the Army has shown itself to be much more capable of producing tactical security gains unrelated to the underlying political situation than I would have guessed. But just as I guessed, this has done nothing to resolve the political conflicts. And it’s still true, analytically, that it’s political conflicts that drive violence rather than insecurity driving political conflict. Thus we’ve created a situation where violence may return along any number of different axes.
Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Peter Juul have an excellent new report that lays out the dimensions of political conflict in Iraq — something that’s much more complicated than the vision of an “enemy” against which we may achieve “victory” in Iraq — and shows the deep underlying instability. The three authors, like me, all believe in a fairly rapid withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, though one should concede that to some extent the analysis cuts in both directions as far as withdrawal goes.
38 Responses to “The House of Cards”
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September 10th, 2008 at 10:46 am
cool report, matt. Great perspectives.
http://culturedecoded.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/issue-mccain-campaign-hurt-by-biden-comment-or-thats-what-they-released-to-the-press/
September 10th, 2008 at 10:56 am
I think the left would be wise to praise the surge for what it’s actually provided: an easier way out of Iraq.
We’ve diminished violence to the point where our troops can now withdraw relatively safely. The political reconciliations aren’t likely to come, but we can play the “let’s hope for the best” or “it’s up to the Iraqis now” line and get the fuck out of dodge.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:58 am
The goal of the surge was to produce an immediate visible improvement and otherwise, regarding the long term issues, kick the can past the November election.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:04 am
The secondary reasons why violence has died down in Iraq are increased military presence on the streets, ethnic cleansing, Awakening councils, and the other stuff people talk about. Why is it that the primary reason – Iranian policy decisions to not confront the US – doesn’t get talked about. In fact, if the military aspect of the surge does have any impact, it was in making it less rational for Iranian allies/clients opposed to the Iraqi government (which is itself infiltrated by Iranian allies and clients) to confront the US militarily.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:08 am
What is interesting about all this is that the only reason we saw an improvement in the security situation is because the administration was doing such a bad job of it to start with. If the surge was such a great policy move, why did it take 3-4 years of occupation before it was implemented? We probably would have had a better shot at political reconciliation at that time as well.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:09 am
When I read these reports, I’m always struck by how narrow our strategic thinking has become. Yes, we now have cover to withdraw troops and we can claim an important military victory against Al Qaeda. But, what happens if we want to place military pressure on Iran or Syria? Do we hope that the pathetic excuse for a governing coalition in Iraq will hold if the Iranians decide to retaliate by stoking violence?
Iraq is a dead-weight on all future U.S. policy initiatives in the region until we decide to cut all our losses and move on. Because, if we’re constantly forced to look over our shoulder to reassure ourselves that Iraq is stable and democratic, there will be a lot of policies made using the rear-view mirror.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:15 am
If your goal is to get out of Iraq so we can spend the money on American firemen and spend the money on bailouts for Lehman brothers (socialism for the rich) then the decrease in violence is a good thing. It provides better conditions for the groups to politically reconcile.
However if your goal is to blame everything on the Republicans and Bush in a partisan way then the surge isn’t necessarily a good thing. I thought it good news that the Muslim president of Turkey (which borders Iraq) recently visited Armenia to watch a soccer match. Groups can reconcile even if it takes a while.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:21 am
The “surge” is an escalation of forces which were deployed to Iraq. However, it says nothing about how those troops are deployed in Iraq. In some areas the “surge” seems to be accompanied by the actual withdrawal of U.S. troops from some hot spots in Iraq and turning the security of those areas over to Iraqi security forces and local militias.
My problem with the “surge” is that it makes it sounds like putting some more soldiers in Iraq was all that needed. It denies any strategic shifts that occurred at the same time, or that merely started showing fruition around the time of the escalation.
“Surge” of course has long been shown to be a misnomer. George Bush has now confirmed that troop levels will be elevated in Iraq, from pre-surge levels, for the duration of his Presidency. Amazingly, this extension of the escalation was presented by many media outlets as a plan to bring the troops home.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:30 am
I think most people would be OK with leaving Iraq and focusing more resources on Afghanistan.
The decrease in violence is a good thing, but if it depends on keeping 130k+ troops in the country, then it’s a bit of a Phyrric victory.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I read the report. It lays out various sources of tension between Iraqi groups. It concludes by saying that these groups have to make arrangements to “share power” for these tensions to be resolved peacefully. That doesn’t follow. They could just as well, and perhaps more plausibly, agree to procedures that determine who gets political power at one time or another. Parties in parliamentary democracy don’t “share power”. One side wins it all for themselves at the ballot box, and there’s another election down the road that decides if they get to keep it, or have to hand it over to the other side. Of course, everyone will only agree to a procedure that will safeguard their basic interests, but that’s different from sharing control over the levers of government.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:40 am
The elephant in the room is northern Iraq.I don’t think the Independence movement there is going away. When the issue will arise is anybody’s guess, but it will.
If it starts before we begin withdrawing, it will be an excuse to stay.
If it starts after we’re gone, it will be the new Viet Nam.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I thought it good news that the Muslim president of Turkey (which borders Iraq) recently visited Armenia to watch a soccer match. Groups can reconcile even if it takes a while.
So, by that standard, we can expect the first steps toward harmony in Iraq to be taken sometime in about 2093?
September 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
AQ is defeated in Iraq. Sadr is marginalized. Inter-ethnic violence is minimal. Most of the country is under full Iraqi control. U.S. deaths are low, lower than Afghanistan, with the majority now coming from non-hostile causes. That’s the good news.
The problem is that Iraq is a corrupt, dysfunctional third world country with three major ethnic groups that distrust each other. If we manage our withdrawal carefully, as the Iraqis resolve their differences and step up, there’s a reasonable chance this can work out. There’s certainly plenty of oil loot to feed all the hungry politicians. But if we pull out heedlessly, there’s a good chance the three groups will fall on each other the way the Bosnians did when Yugoslavia dissolved.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Katulis/Lynch/Juul:
This is exactly right and us “cut and runners” have been saying this for years. Most Iraqi’s and Maliki want us gone. Why aren’t we leaving?
September 10th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Every time I read a text lauding the “surge,” I am reminded of one of the final scenes in the film Charlie Wilson’s War:
September 10th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
“When the ’surge’ was announced, the theory was that
more troops would create more security which would lead to political reconciliationit would buy Bush another couple years worth of confusing Democrats (”the 2006 election was a mandate for *more* troops in Iraq? Um, okay.”), deterring anti-war action in Congress (”gotta support the troops, ya know”), and keeping foreign policy fuck-ups on the front burner, on the theory that Democrats could win a domestic-policy election (see Clinton, Bill, 1992), but that Republicans could win a national-security election (see Bush, George W., 2004), even if it was *Republicans* who’d been responsible for fucking things up.”There, fixed that for you.
(assuming that the “strike” tag is accepted here.)
(”Strike tags. Accepted at most of the finer blogs.”)
September 10th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I don’t understand the surprise here. Put more security on the ground and there’s going to be less mayhem. It’s true about the size of police forces, it’s true about the size of occupation forces.
But the larger point, that the Iraqis themselves have used the relative lack of mayhem (if California, a state the size of Iraq, were undergoing the same level of violence as Iraq we wouldn’t hear Republicans talking about “victory”) to entrench their sectarian political and social culture. De-facto partition doesn’t meet my definition of “reconciliation.”
September 10th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
When one group wants to kill everyone from the other group that lives in their city, and does so, there will be a drop in violence. That’s what happened in Iraq, and it isn’t a good outcome.
September 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
From a political point of view, Democrats really need to stop arguing so much about the damn surge and the last two years, and focus a lot more on the whole war and the last seven years.
To the extent that the election becomes a referendum on the war, the candidates will succeed or fail on the basis of the simplest possible stories they can tell about the war, and on whose story turns out to be more compelling. The two campaigns are battling for victory over the rhetorical high ground and the power to pronounce the historical verdict on the Iraq War.
So far, this is what the broader public probably understands about the contrasting positions:
Republicans: The Iraq War was a good war, and it’s a damn good thing we fought it. It took us a little longer than we hoped to win it, but with the success of surge we have finally won the war. This proves we were right all along!
Democrats: The surge helped make some a bad situation better, but the Iraq War was a bad war and should never have been fought. It was a national disaster, and it’s the Republicans fault.
The problem I see is the the Democrats, possibly to do with deep internal divisions in the party over foreign policy, have failed to articulate a really compelling, simple and easily grasped account of why exactly the war was a bad war. And yet, this should be so damned easy! The public appears to have decided for the time being that the war was a bad mistake. But for some reason the campaign will not rely on the factors that are most compelling to the general public, but has gotten way too subtle. And the public repudiation of the war will not stand if the Republicans are able to continue running their Iraq victory narrative while we hear such confused and inconsistent opposition from Democrats.
The Democratic campaign is now relying heavily on the idea that the war was a mistake because it “distracted” us from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the broader war on terror. But while this account may carry some weight with certain audiences, I’m not sure how much overall traction it gets. It seems hard to make the case to ordinary observers that the Iraq War has seriously damaged the war on terror, given that we haven’t been hit with a terrorist attack in the US since 9/11. Obama needs a short, sweet, forceful and more compelling answer to the question, “Why should we never have fought the Iraq War?”
My sense is that if you ask ordinary Americans who have rejected the war what they think was so bad about it, the answer goes something like this:
1. It cost an absolute fortune and has burdened us with massive debt;
2. It killed and maimed thousands of good American soldiers;
3. Iraq is a shithole country on which we have no business wasting all these lives and treasure unless we have to do it to defend ourselves against dangerous bad guys;
But,
4. There were no WMDs in Iraq, and there was no Al Qaeda connection with Saddam, even though Bush deceived us into thinking the opposite in 2002 and 2003. So we spent in excess of a trillion bucks and killed all of those American boys for no good reason.
Lots of ordinary Americans judge wars by selfish national defense criteria. But elite foreign policy experts often don’t share the values of ordinary Americans. The Obama campaign is being held back by a gang of experts and advisers from the foreign policy establishment who are deeply out of tune with the outlook of ordinary Americans. Most of them have plenty of money, and don’t know anyone who came home in a body bag or without a leg, and they think there are all sorts of very excellent reasons to spend a fortune and kill thousands of our guys, reasons that have nothing to do with defending the United States and its people in any urgent way, but are about various other moral and ideological objectives – like removing one crappy dictator from one crappy foreign country, or enlarging the “liberal world system”, or something of that sort. Since money and lives are no object for these pampered elitist pricks, the latter have to come up with lots of complicated and iffy reasons for opposing an obviously stupid war, Reasons, for example, such as the story that the war was a mere tactical misstep in the “good fight” that we must fight with “all our might”, a blunder in the megalomaniacal world crusade to stamp out non-Americanism wherever it is found, and stuff the liberal democratic world system into every orifice in the global body.
Let’s get back to basics here. The Iraq War was an absurd, unwarranted and criminally wasteful venture. The Bad Iraq War is sitting right there on a tee. It is very frustrating that the campaign refuses to knock it out of the park.
It’s likely that the election will hinge on a simple thumbs up vs. thumbs down debate on the Iraq War. Republicans are going for a big thumbs up. If Democrats fail to go bold with a hearty and forceful thumbs down, and go for a wavering thumb flopping up and down, or pointing every which way, we will lose!
September 10th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I heard two (retired) Generals on NPR yesterday and I thought that they were pretty incoherent. I felt just like I did during the “Mission Accomplished” period. I wanted to ask them a few, simple, questions – have you defeated (killed, captured, destroyed) your opponents ? (No.) At least, have you disarmed your opponents ? (No.) Have you changed the political conditions (the occupation) that caused their opposition ? (No.) Then why in the hell do you think they are no longer your opponents ? Anyone who thinks we are winning in Iraq is crazy.
September 10th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Dan Kervick, why should this election be a referendum on a decision made in 2003 with overwhelming support from both parties? Can’t we all agree that the surge has improved conditions on the ground and has finally given us a chance for an orderly withdrawal that avoids a geopolitical disaster? As Americans, shouldn’t we all want the best possible outcome, regardless of our opinion of the original decision to remove Saddam or of the conduct of the war?
AQ and the Sadr Army are almost defeated. Sectarian violence has almost disappeared. Now let’s transfer responsibility to the Iraqis in the most prudent, sensible way possible, based on conditions, and then help them however we can. We have a moral responsibility as well as a national interest in their success.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
No, we cannot agree that the surge has improved conditions on the ground, because there is literally NO evidence that the surge is responsible for anything that has happened in the last year and a half.
What appears to actually have “improved” conditions (i.e., a reduction in actual deaths per day) is the following:
1) Bribing the Sunni insurgency to stop shooting at US troops – which only worked because they were also fighting the Shia and losing – which is hardly something you can credit the Surge for.
2) al-Sadr stood down his militia (temporarily and so far) in order to modify his methods of operation, stressing his clerical credentials and his political party options instead of direct conflict – again, an independent decision unrelated to the minor increase in US troops.
3) The completion of sectarian cleansing in Baghdad – which not only had nothing to do with the Surge, but was in fact ACCELERATED by the Surge, in that the Sunni neighborhood militias were forced off the street by the enhanced number of US troops and thus were unable to defend their neighborhoods from Shia death squads.
The Sadr militia is no where near being “defeated”. Every article on the topic mentions that they have not been disarmed, and could probably retake many of the neighborhoods in Baghdad and in southern Iraq within hours IF SADR WANTED TO. Sadr continues to have the support of literally millions of poor Shia in Baghdad and southern Iraq.
Neither has sectarian violence “disappeared”. The news lists the following just for yesterday:
And similar deaths continue to occur every single day of the week.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Richard Steven Hack, Iraq has not turned into Switzerland (neither has Chicago), but no one can deny the remarkable progress that has occurred. Go to icasualties.org http://icasualties.org/oif/ and compare this past August with a year ago. We suffered 23 fatalities compared to 84 last August, and only 12 were combat-related. Iraqi security forces and civilians suffered only 311 fatalities compared to 1,674 a year ago. This is close to a “background level” of violence for a Middle East country, according to our military leaders. We’ve turned Anbar over to the Iraqis, and Sadr City has been pacified. Muqtada al-Sadr’s protest demonstrations are drawing a few hundred at best.
THe situation is good, but precarious. We must build on our success, not sabotage it so that we can say we were right and the other side wrong. There’s too much at stake.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Sadr City has not been “pacified”. You need to read up. Sadr has stood down, primarily at Iran’s request but also for his own purposes. But every expert I’ve seen quoted says that he could retake the Shia neighborhood in Baghdad in an hour if he reversed course.
Anbar is irrelevant. We know the Sunni insurgency has turned into a massive 100,000-plus militia. Maliki is scared to death of them and eventually they are going to stop waiting around for the Maliki government to deal fairly with the Sunnis. When the US leaves, the civil war will resume unless Maliki accommodates the Sunnis.
And as others have pointed out, the Kurdish situation is not looking good either.
And nothing the US is doing is going to have any impact on any of that.
Citing the drop in violence is irrelevant because we know what the cause of that was – and how easily it can be ramped up again when those causes change.
It’s not even relevant that McCain or Obama would consider withdrawing at this point. The whole point of the exercise was to grab the oil and establish bases. With Maliki adamant that ALL US forces must be gone from Iraq by 2011, that doesn’t leave the neocons or the oil companies much room to maneuver. So expect more trouble – not less. And when the US tries to remain influential in Iraq, the Iranians can at any time make sure that doesn’t happen simply by reactivating al-Sadr.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Never give up on defeat. Never,never,never!
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