Even if surge succeeds, Iraq faces volatile future

Even if surge succeeds, Iraq faces volatile future

Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle Washington Bureau

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Is the troop surge in Iraq working?

If it is, the battleground at home could shift in ways unthinkable just two months ago: President Bush could be off the ropes and Republicans back on offense. The Democratic Congress and presidential candidates could lose their footing on their biggest issue. And U.S. troop commitments and war funding could be set on a higher, more permanent trajectory.

Already there seems to be a shift in public perception. A Pew poll last month found that nearly half of the public now believes the U.S. military effort is going well "for the first time in a long time," up from a third in June. Still, the 54 percent majority who believe the troops should come home has not budged.

Leading Iraq experts who have advised government officials are divided about the consequences of the troop surge. Political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, always the strategic aim of the decision last January to increase U.S. combat troops, is not in sight.

Some analysts believe that the United States is merely helping warring factions arm themselves during a lull in violence that will explode again once the surge ends as planned by summer - around the time Democrats and Republicans hold their national party conventions. Others say Iraq is on the brink of a long-sought cease-fire that will allow the U.S. military to serve as a classic peacekeeping force stabilizing Iraq and the region.

There is no question that violence in Iraq has ebbed since the troop surge announced by Bush in January reached its full capacity in June with about 162,000 troops. Even Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House subcommittee that controls defense spending, a key ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and a leading Democratic opponent of the war, recently returned from Iraq saying, "I think the surge is working."

Violence has receded to the levels of January 2006, before the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra set off a sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunni. By many accounts, al Qaeda in Iraq has been hammered. Sunni tribes, many of them former insurgents, have turned against al Qaeda in Iraq in what is called the Sunni awakening.

Many former Sunni insurgents in western Iraq, and increasingly Shiite groups in the south, are allied with American forces in what the military euphemistically calls groups of "concerned local citizens" to control their neighborhoods and regions. Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has lain low, avoiding a confrontation with U.S. forces. Syria is tightening its border to foreign fighters, and Iran has pulled back. The U.S. military contends that Iraqi security forces are improved and now control substantial parts of the battlefield.

"The original logic for the surge clearly hasn't worked the way it was intended or planned," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Yet even as the Iraqi government has failed to use this "breathing space" as an opportunity to reach vital agreements on how to govern the country, "into our lap, almost completely by accident, fell this bottom-up process, starting in Anbar (province), that has now spread through most of the rest of the country," said Biddle, who recently returned from Iraq. "It wasn't part of the original idea of the surge, but here it is."

If these trends continue, the United States could be hitting what he called the long-shot chance of reaching a classic cease-fire, and U.S. politicians of all stripes will have to resist the strong temptation to jeopardize this progress by reducing forces too soon and too fast.

"The idea that we could end up with a situation in which we get a cease-fire, but the locals are all beset with ulterior motives - they're still armed, they could resume firing, they don't trust each other, they hate each other, they're revanchist and they want to reopen the fighting at a better, more opportune moment later - all these things are absolutely the case for Iraq," Biddle said. "They're also always the case whenever a civil war gets terminated through a negotiated cease-fire."

Any cease-fire would require an outside force to police it, he said. "And of course we're the only people who have any serious prospect of playing that role in Iraq. No Bangladeshis or Pakistanis or other U.N. blue helmets are lining up to go get a chance to do duty in Iraq right now."

Other Iraq analysts see something very different happening.

Vali Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and leading Middle East expert, contends that Petraeus has traded the goal of a united Iraq for a temporary calm, without acknowledgement by the administration.

"Gen. Petraeus, despite all his appearances, has completely gone off script with Washington," Nasr said. "He is not following a course that is based on a nonsectarian, united government in Baghdad. He is creating Sunni militias here, Shia militias there. He's cutting deals locally, which in the short run may benefit the security issue, but in the long run is going to, in fact, divide this country much further."

Nasr agreed with Biddle that the lull in the fighting will end if U.S. forces start to leave, "because Iraq is not a functioning country. Its fundamental political issues have not been solved. Everybody has guns and mutually exclusive agendas that still have to be sorted out, and the minute we get out of the middle, there has to still be a fight for the future of their country, which will be joined."

U.S. aid to militias it once condemned but now calls "concerned local citizens," may tamp down violence now but "in the long run will make a civil war far more vicious and bloody, because they will be much better armed," Nasr said.

"The first order of business is that Americans have to have an honest discussion about what are they doing in Iraq politically," Nasr said. "There's too much obsession in this country with what the U.S. military is doing and with the number of casualties. That's a very, very narrow way of looking at Iraq.

"The far more important question is what are we doing there. The administration had a claim that it was able to create a unified, stable, democratic, nonsectarian Iraq. Is it still doing that? If it is not, then what is really our game plan here, other than just finding a way to reduce numbers?"

Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq Intelligence team from 2003-05 and an adviser to the Iraq Study Group, said the United States rebuffed Sunni offers of alliance in the past because Sunni leaders refused to join the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated central government in Baghdad. The administration rejected the deals because it was trying to create a central government.

That clearly has changed. By some estimates, there are now 60,000 to 70,000 members of such "concerned citizen" groups working with the U.S. military. Many have been issued uniforms and are paid stipends of about $300 a month by the U.S. military. The military denies issuing them arms, though most analysts said there is little need to do that because they have an ample supply already.

White worries that if no formal political deals are made between the Baghdad government, the Sunnis and the Kurds by the time the surge ends next summer, violence will escalate among Shiite militias that have lain low in Baghdad or fled south, the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated Iraqi military, and the freshly armed and organized Sunni groups.

"It is very dangerous to destroy one insurgency, al Qaeda in Iraq, by allowing another insurgency to arm and organize itself," White said.

The quiet in Baghdad now, he contends, is the result of U.S. forces sitting on neighborhoods and separating factions. As U.S. forces withdraw from newly stabilized Sunni areas, it will leave them under the control of armed Sunni groups. "If these elements come into contact with the largely Shia and Kurdish Iraqi army, or with Shia militias, there's going to be bloodshed," White said.

Bruce Reidel, a former Central Intelligence Agency veteran who served in Bush's National Security Agency, said the United States is "in the paradoxical situation where we are now arming and funding all of the major Iraqi warring parties, the Sunnis, the Shias and the Kurds. They are all happy to take our weapons and our money but they've not necessarily bought onto the same strategy as we have."

He doesn't rule out Biddle's optimistic scenario. "I just think the odds are still against us, and in the absence of movement on the political front it is very worrisome to just be reassured by a reduction in body counts. The violence can flare up with remarkable speed."

U.S. troop withdrawals will occur. By all accounts, the military cannot maintain its current level of operations because of the strain it is putting on the Army. Whether the remaining 130,000 U.S. troops the administration plans to have in Iraq next summer, at the pre-surge level, is enough to maintain the calm, and whether political progress can be made by then, no one can say.

Biddle contends that Sunnis now recognize they lost the struggle for Baghdad in 2006 and cannot regain control of Iraq. "That played a very important role in my view in their seeking a new ally," Biddle said. "They needed to make peace with us while they still could. Not because they're nice people, not because they're peace-loving, not because they want to mend fences with people they've hated for a long time, but because they think they don't have any choice."

The choice, he said, is for U.S. policymakers. "Either stay with the largest force you can sustain and try to pull a rabbit out of the hat, or cut your losses altogether and get out to the last soldier. Leave no one behind. But the Congress doesn't want either of those."

Either is defensible he said. Both are fraught with risk.

"Even if you try to retain a large force in Iraq to pursue a nationwide cease-fire and then police it if it happens, that's still a risky undertaking," he said.

Still, he said, "I think the case for the stick-it-out extreme has been strengthened by the dramatic spread of the bottom-up reconciliation process."

Despite election-year pressure in both parties to bring troops home fast and in large numbers, "we create a self-defeating prophecy by removing the stabilizing force that classically you need to enforce this kind of uneasy cease-fire. ... Paradoxically, success in bringing the violence down does not imply an opportunity to bring the troops home."

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

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