Center for a New American Security

Iraqologist wants to call readers' attention to the excellent new report on Iraqi politics from the Center for American Progress by Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch and Peter Juul, "Iraq's Political Transition after the Surge."* This report gives a very thorough and accurate account of the current political dynamics in Iraq, identifies the critical issues going forward, and will no doubt serve as a helpful primer and reference for policymakers and academics who want to understand what political progress in Iraq would look like.

However, Iraqologist strongly disagrees with one of the paper's primary arguments:

"The reductions in violence in 2007 and 2008 have, in fact, made political accommodation more elusive, contrary to the central theory of the surge."

This argument is wrong because it is ahistorical: it lacks a realistic comparison to the dire pre-surge political reality of 2006. To be sure, as the authors accurately describe, the political gridlock Iraq now faces is daunting. Without accommodation by the PTB on critical issues like provincial elections and Sahwa integration, and without peaceful resolution of Kirkuk and the disputed territories, Iraq will either descend back into chaos or, in the best case, become an authoritarian regime with a narrow social base that will depend on both internal repression and massive external support by the US and/or Iran to stay alive, all the while continuing to be a source of instability in the region. Some degree of one or both outcomes is still quite likely, whether political accommodation occurs or not. But, compared to 2006, the current political challenges are very good problems to have, seen in the context of US interests.

In 2006, chaos reigned in Iraq. The Iraqi government was little more than a set of corrupt factions who could not deliver anything, the constitutional order was broadly perceived by many Iraqis and much of the world as illegitimate and ephemeral, and large swaths of Iraqis were using violence to try to destroy this new order. The maelstrom of violence created centrifugal political forces that made efforts to build the state, particularly the Iraqi security forces, basically impossible. The political process was bankrupt and useless. There was no locus in which political development could occur. Indeed, in this environment, it was very difficult to say what “reconciliation” or “accommodation” would even look like. There was no agreed upon set of issues to be resolved, and no way to have confidence that sufficient numbers of Iraqi parties and the Iraqi people would buy into the political process in the long term, for political development to have any meaning.

Because of the reduction in violence, the Iraqi “center” has begun to emerge: Iraqi officials started going to work, service provision (though still uneven) markedly improved, oil revenues flowed in, and the Iraqi Security Forces got a chance to stand up. The government is coming into being, and it seems more and more likely that it is here to stay. Iraqi political actors increasingly appear to believe that it is only a question of who will control this government and the vast resources at its disposal. The insurgency, both Sunni and Shi'a, has now (at least for the moment) become political: the insurgents and supporters of the insurgency want a seat at the table. To their credit, the authors of the report acknowledge this fact as "a genuinely positive political development." However, it's important to realize the magnitude of this shift in a way the authors don't: If you had told any Iraq analyst in late 2006 that most of the forces currently fighting to bring down Iraq's new political order would, in two years time, want to take part in that very political order, he would have said you were crazy and he would have been right.

The reduction in violence of the past two years has provided what could be described as "breathing space" for the political process, although not in the sense that General Petraeus and the architects of the surge likely meant that phrase. "Breathing space," as it was commonly presented in justifying the surge, meant leaders coming to accommodation and compromise. But the problem with that conception was always that it missed a step. There first had to be a playing field that all or nearly all Iraqi actors agreed to play on. The reduction in violence over the past two years has provided this playing field, and was the essential precursor for the political accommodation that must now occur. It is now possible, in a way that it wasn't in 2006, to identify specific steps toward accommodation that one can reasonably expect will have the effect of reducing violence in the long term, and that will broaden the base of the regime and the portion of Iraqi society that views the political process as legitimate. The centrifugal political forces generated by the violence of 2006 that made political development and state building impossible, have now, because of the reduction in violence, been redirected (at least for the moment) towards the center.

For clarity's sake, we should understand that the surge--meaning the increase in troops and adoption of a viable counterinsurgency strategy--was only one, and perhaps not even the most important, element in the reduction of violence. By late 2006, it had become clear that the US public and US leaders and policy-makers had run out of patience in Iraq. By that point, large-scale withdrawal of US forces from Iraq had become a serious, immediate possibility. It's hard to know for sure how much this development actually played a role in Iraq and the region. Nonetheless, it's quite plausible that the growing impatience in the US, coupled with nightmarish violence across Iraq, led to a change in a number of actors' calculi about the need to damage the US and pursue their own narrow advantages on the one hand, versus the desirability of making pragmatic changes and compromises toward a basically livable, self-sustaining stability on the other.

This broad trend is visible in a number of specific, positive developments. The most obvious is the "Awakening" of broad swaths of Iraq's Sunni community against AQI, the partnership of many of these groups with the US military forces they formerly fought, and an attendant turn towards politics. Iraq's Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, have supported these efforts and have a large stake in making sure the Sunnis that they have backed against AQI do not get left out in the cold. Similarly, Iran, as is evident by its intervention in the fighting of early 2008, appears to have dialed down its support for violence and tilted its support toward the Iraqi government, where it enjoys good relations with nearly all of the PTB. One could also include improved performance by the government and steps toward compromise in parliament, halting and superficial though they may be. Overall, this dynamic ended up being interwoven with the surge, and together they resulted in the dramatic reduction of violence of the past two years and the improvement in the Iraqi political environment.

Again, whether necessary political accommodation will actually happen, as the authors rightly point out, is highly in doubt. Making it happen should be the central, defining political goal around which the US constructs its military strategy in Iraq. Moreover, as these authors advise us, expectations have become so high on all sides that, even if the steps toward political accommodation that they and others have identified do occur, reality will likely fall short. This last point is a critical one that is not made enough.

We should not discount these challenges, and the authors do us all a service in describing how difficult they will be. But the authors' argument that true political accommodation is now less likely than it was before the surge cannot be defended until they explain why it was more likely in the maelstrom of 2006.

Iraqologist will leave it here for now and will address some other important and provocative arguments made in this paper in a subsequent post.

*For full disclosure, the authors kindly gave Iraqologist the opportunity to comment on an earlier draft.