The Anbar Story

Jon Lee Anderson has written a terrific in-depth article in the New Yorker about the American military surge in Iraq. After having spent some time in Anbar, he writes about the complexities of American attempts at providing security while fostering a secular military.

I've floated the idea that the current "calm" in Iraq is merely a pause to reload. Anderson seems to have found the same thing:

I asked Zaidan what sort of deal had led to the Sunni Awakening. “It’s not a deal,” he said, bristling. “People have come to realize that our fate is tied to the Americans’, and theirs to ours. If they are successful in Iraq, it will depend on Anbar. We always said this. Time was lost. America was lost, but now it’s woken up; it now holds a thread in its hand. For the first time, they’re doing something right.”

Zaidan said that Anbar’s Sunni tribes no longer had any need to exact blood vengeance on U.S. forces. “We’ve already taken our revenge,” he said. “We’re the ones who’ve made them crawl on their stomachs, and now we’re the ones to pick them up.” He added, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.” There would have to be a lot more fighting before the capital was taken back from the Shiites, he said. “The Anbaris will take charge of the purge. What the whole world failed to do in Anbar, we have done overnight. Baghdad will be a lot easier.”

Many of the players in Iraq seemed, like Zaidan, to be positioning themselves for the next battle. While the Shiites issued warnings about the Sunnis’ intentions, nearly all the talk among the Americans was of the Mahdi Army and its reputed sponsor, Iran, which Petraeus accused of waging a “proxy war” in Iraq; there were dismissive references to Al Qaeda as a spent force.

The chess match in Iraq continues with Sunni's, now with American help, who are positioning themselves to retake Baghdad and the government. They're planning and fostering a Shitte civil war (a civil war within the civil war) that would allow Sunni's to fill the vacuum and take control. It seems to me that this was the successful strategy used by Saddam to have the minority Sunni's becoming the ruling party of Iraq to begin with.

Interestingly, while Anderson mentions how Iran's affiliations with Shiite groups further complicates things, he makes no mention of Sunni states (Saudi Arabia anyone?) supporting the Sunni's.

The bottom line of Anderson's piece seems to me to be that while a greater American presence may have slowed some of the violence, it's only temporary with the lower levels of attacks more the result of chess moves by Sunni's than any real peace. The Americans continued to be used as pawns in the ongoing battle for power and control in Iraq. The American military is portrayed as doing whatever it takes to calm things including ethnic cleansing, building twenty mile fences between neighborhoods and tacitly sanctioning sectarian murder. Above all, this is clearly a period of positioning and reloading by all sides.