Reconciliation in Iraq Goes Local
By HAMZA HENDAWI
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071017/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_grassroots_diplomacy

The helicopter trip was brief. But the journey also crossed something huge and ugly: Iraq's bloody sectarian divisions.

Aboard the 70-mile flight from Baghdad to Ramadi was a top Pentagon envoy and a leader of Iraq's biggest Shiite political party. They were paying a visit to Sunni sheiks who have joined the U.S. battle against extremists.

The meeting Sunday was part of budding contacts between Iraq's rival Muslim groups that has shown promise where the nation's political leadership has stalled: trying to find common ground among Shiites and Sunnis.

The exchanges — which have bypassed the stumbling government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — are supported by Washington as part its evolving strategies to tap the influence of religious authorities and tribal chiefs.

Although the outreach is in early and cautious stages, it also reinforces questions about al-Maliki's relevance and ability to bridge Iraq's bloody sectarian divisions.

Washington has grown frustrated by al-Maliki's failure to push through "benchmarks" intended to spur reconciliation, including a formula to share Iraq's oil wealth among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. At the same time, Sunnis have widely turned their backs on al-Maliki, accusing his government of keeping the security forces and other key institutions in the hands of the Shiite majority.

Even some of al-Maliki's main allies — including Shiite political bosses — have opened their own channels to Sunnis outside the official frameworks.

The U.S. military acknowledges it is urging the grassroots-style reconciliation — an apparent extension of its successes to recruit local fighters against extremist groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq.

But it also insists that the central government still has a vital role.

"It's all happening simultaneously. You've got to approach this from all sides," said Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

He told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the "bottom-up" contacts would have no chance for momentum "unless the national level was willing to accept it, embrace it and foster it."

One of the most important overtures came Sunday when Ammar al-Hakim — the son and heir apparent of top Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim — paid an unprecedented visit to the mostly Sunni Anbar province for talks with leaders of a U.S.-backed tribal revolt against al-Qaida.

As a sign of Washington's endorsement, Ammar al-Hakim traveled on U.S. military helicopters and a senior U.S. official, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Barbero of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended the meeting.

In what could be another landmark visit, the Anbar leaders have said they wanted to travel to the Shiite holy city of Najaf to meet with Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Last month, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab who is often at odds with al-Maliki, gave the clearest Sunni endorsement of al-Sistani's status as a national leader. Al-Hashemi met the Iranian-born cleric in Najaf to discuss a 25-point blueprint for political reform the vice president announced last month.

Al-Hashemi is an outspoken critic of perceived sectarian bias by the prime minister. He has looked to make his own political bonds.

He's worked on forging closer ties with al-Hakim's Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the two main Kurdish parties. His Iraqi Islamic Party, meanwhile, has been distancing itself from militant Sunni groups.

The shift toward the grassroots diplomacy, some experts believe, was first set in motion earlier this year. Washington ignored al-Maliki's protests and began reaching out to Sunni insurgents and tribal leaders to join the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq.

The change of course also helped ease bitterness among Sunni Arabs, who were favored under Saddam Hussein but lost their privileged perch went he was swept away in 2003.

"The new U.S. policy doesn't view the al-Maliki government as its only partner in Iraq," said Mustapha al-Ani, an expert on Iraqi affairs from the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. "The government is no longer the sponsor of national reconciliation in the eyes of the United States.

Yet al-Maliki is still standing — and even displaying a renewed confidence — because there's no great unifier in the wings who the White House can promote as an alternative.

"Al-Maliki has persuaded the Americans that there is no substitute for him," said senior Shiite lawmaker Reda Jawad Taqi of the Supreme Council.

That means the heat is now off to push the Washington-supported benchmarks and try to spearhead grand schemes for reconciliation.

"The Bush administration is backing away from maximal goals and quietly working toward a workable and doable Iraq," said Vali Nasr, who lectures at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. "Now we have more manageable goals."

Al-Maliki has tried to fend off U.S. pressure and criticism by arguing that the country is not yet ripe for laws seeking to enforce national unity.

His go-slow pleas have met with some support.

"We ask of the Iraqis 'national reconciliation' and bemoan their inability to offer it in ways we can recognize, but a broad, subtle national accord is settling upon the land," Middle East expert Fouad Ajami wrote in a recent article in the weekly U.S. News and World Report.

"This is not a country at peace, and all its furies have not burned out, but a measure of order has begun to stick on the ground," wrote Ajami of Johns Hopkins University.


Vicory Is Within Reach in Iraq
By MICHAEL A. LEDEEN
http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/michaelledeen/2007/10/20/maybe_were_winning_in_iraq.php

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

Almost exactly 13 months ago, the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq wrote that the grim situation in Anbar province would continue to deteriorate unless an additional division was sent in, along with substantial economic aid. Today, Marine leaders are musing openly about clearing out of Anbar, not because it is a lost cause, but because we have defeated al Qaeda there.

In Fallujah, enlisted marines have complained to an officer of my acquaintance: “There’s nobody to shoot here, sir. If it’s just going to be building schools and hospitals, that’s what the Army is for, isn’t it?” Throughout the area, Sunni sheikhs have joined the Marines to drive out al Qaeda, and this template has spread to Diyala Province, and even to many neighborhoods in Baghdad itself, where Shiites are fighting their erstwhile heroes in the Mahdi Army.

British troops are on their way out of Basra, and it was widely expected that Iranian-backed Shiite militias would impose a brutal domination of the city, That hasn’t happened. Lt. Col. Patrick Sanders, stationed near Basra, confirmed that violence in Basra has dropped precipitously in recent weeks. He gives most of the credit to the work of Iraqi soldiers and police.

As evidence of success mounts, skeptics often say that while military operations have gone well, there is still no sign of political movement to bind up the bloody wounds in the Iraqi body politic. Recent events suggest otherwise. Just a few days ago, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of and presumed successor to the country’s most important Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, went to Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, to meet with Sunni sheikhs. The act, and his words, were amazing. “Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen,” he said. “Today, we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis.”

Mr. Hakim’s call for national unity mirrors last month’s pilgrimage to Najaf, the epicenter of Iraqi Shiism, by Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni. There he visited Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite cleric. The visit symbolically endorsed Mr. Sistani’s role as the most authoritative religious figure in Iraq. Mr. Hashemi has also been working closely with Mr. Hakim’s people, as well as with the Kurds. Elsewhere, similar efforts at ecumenical healing proceed rapidly. As Robert McFarlane reported in these pages, Baghdad’s Anglican Canon, Andrew White, has organized meetings of leading Iraqi Christian, Sunni and Shiite clerics, all of whom called for nation-wide reconciliation.

The Iraqi people seem to be turning against the terrorists, even against those who have been in cahoots with the terror masters in Tehran. As Col. Sanders puts it, “while we were down in Basra, an awful lot of the violence against us was enabled, sponsored and equipped by… Iran. [But] what has united a lot of the militias was a sense of Iraqi nationalism, and they resent interference by Iran.”

How is one to explain this turn of events? While our canny military leaders have been careful to give the lion’s share of the credit to terrorist excesses and locals’ courage, the most logical explanation comes from the late David Galula, the French colonel who fought in Algeria and then wrote “Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice” in the 1960s. He argued that insurgencies are revolutionary wars whose outcome is determined by control of, and support from, the population. The best way to think about such wars is to imagine the board game of Go. Each side starts with limited assets, each has the support of a minority of the territory and the population. Each has some assets within the enemy’s sphere of influence. The game ends when one side takes control of the majority of the population, and thus the territory.

Whoever gains popular support wins the war. Galula realized that while revolutionary ideology is central to the creation of an insurgency, it has very little to do with the outcome. That is determined by politics, and, just as in an election, the people choose the winner.

In the early phases of the conflict, the people remain as neutral as they can, simply trying to stay alive. As the war escalates, they are eventually forced to make a choice, to place a bet, and that bet becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The people have the winning piece on the board: intelligence. Once the Iraqis decided that we were going to win, they provided us with information about the terrorists: who they were, where they were, what they were planning, where their weapons were stashed, and so forth.

It’s easy to say, but quite beside the point, that any smart Iraqi would prefer us to the terrorists. We’re short-termers, while the terrorists promise to stay forever and make Iraq part of an oppressive caliphate. We’re going to leave in a few years, and put the country in Iraqi hands, while the terrorists — many of whom are the cat’s-paws of foreign powers — intend to turn the place into an alien domain. We promise freedom, while the jihadis impose clerical fascism and slaughter their fellow Arab Muslims.

But that preference isn’t enough to explain the dramatic turnaround — the nature of the terrorists was luminously clear a year ago, when the battle for Iraq was going badly. As Galula elegantly observed, “which side gives the best protection, which one threatens the most, which one is likely to win, these are the criteria governing the population’s stand. So much the better, of course, if popularity and effectiveness are combined.”

The turnaround took place because we started to defeat the terrorists, at a time that roughly coincides with the surge. There is a tendency to treat the surge as a mere increase in numbers, but its most important component was the change in doctrine. Instead of keeping too many of our soldiers off the battlefield in remote and heavily fortified mega-bases, we put them into the field. Instead of reacting to the terrorists’ initiatives, we went after them. No longer were we going to maintain the polite fiction that we were in Iraq to train the locals so that they could fight the war. Instead, we aggressively engaged our enemies. It was at that point that the Iraqi people placed their decisive bet.

Herschel Smith, of the blog Captain’s Journal, puts it neatly in describing the events in Anbar: “There is no point in fighting forces (U.S. Marines) who will not be beaten and who will not go away.” We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it.

No doubt Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno know all this. It is, after all, their strategy that has produced the good news. Their reluctance to take credit for the defeat of al Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq is due to the uncertain outcome of the big battle now being waged here at home. They, and our soldiers, fear that the political class in Washington may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They know that Iran and Syria still have a free shot at us across long borders, and Gen. Petraeus told Congress last month that it would not be possible to win in Iraq if our mission were restricted to that country.

Not a day goes by without one of our commanders shouting to the four winds that the Iranians are operating all over Iraq, and that virtually all the suicide terrorists are foreigners, sent in from Syria. We have done great damage to their forces on the battlefield, but they can always escalate, and we still have no policy to direct against the terror masters in Damascus and Tehran. That problem is not going to be resolved by sound counterinsurgency strategy alone, no matter how brilliantly executed.

Mr. Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His book, “The Iranian Time Bomb,” was recently published by St. Martin’s Press.