Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS.
I cannot think of another recent piece of journalistic analysis that has had the effect of Nir Rosen's essay a few months back in The National. Nir ended his essay with this provocative conclusion:
The occasional al Qa’eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil. It would be naive to say that Iraq’s future is certain, or even likely, to be a peaceful one, but the war between Sunnis and Shiites is now over.
A high percentage of policy-makers and intelligence analysts I have spoken with agree with Rosen: there is no going back to the dark old days of 2005 because the balance of power in Iraq has decisively shifted. If we have anything to fear, we should instead fear Arab-Kurd tensions rather than Sunni-Shia tensions. That fear of a conflagration between Arabs and Kurds is a fear shared by both senior officials on the ground in Iraq as well as John and Brian in this paper.
But let's take a step back and consider the Rosen thesis, which has gained a lot of attention in part because Nir, until now, has been a reliable pessimist on Iraq. He's no cheer-leader when it comes to U.S. policy. But do we think what he writes is true? Do events like today's market bombing carry no strategic significance?
In my mind, this is the question is Iraq right now. I think Iraq stopped being a counterinsurgency campaign over a year ago, but even when we were fighting an insurgency, a lot of other stuff was going on. A civil war, for example. Do we think Iraq can't go back to that?
If no other point, it serves as a reminder that they (whoever they are) are still around. Wich causes chain-reactions, and divisions, and hinders the political process because of mutual suspicion. It also stokes a psychology of fear and revenge, and so keeps the hatred simmering nicely. So at the very least, it may be seen as prepwork for 2014.
"Have some perspective, gang. And above all, beware those who would now craft a narrative about what did and did not happen in Lebanon that conveniently supports their own ideas about the direction in which U.S. policy should now head"
Change "Lebanon" to "Iraq" and put "in Afghanistan" after "U.S. policy," and I might have a fitting riposte for CNAS discussions about OEF.
From the fossil fuel perspective, the Kurd issues are:
1) The gas supply for the Nabucco pipeline. The U.S. has said that Iran cannot be a supplier, leaving Iraq as suitor #1.
2) Oil exports via Ceyhan, the Turkish oil port that also serves as the termination of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news
This is all part of larger energy-economic conflicts with Russia relating to who will service the European fuel markets:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/8531379
General Ray Odierno pretty much laid out the strategy during the Stephen Colbert haircut interview - we see a "partnership" with a "stabilized Iraq". Now, that doesn't seem so bad - a mutually beneficial relationship...
http://www.allgov.com/ViewNews/Iraqs_Oil__Ready_at_Last_90606
The Iraqi government announced last year that it would award contracts to rehabilitate six major oil fields and two natural gas fields, including the Rumaila oil field, which is estimated to have reserves of 17 billion barrels. The winning contractors are supposed to be announced beginning June 28, but delays are possible. BP is favored to get Rumaila, Royal Dutch Shell the fields of Kirkuk and Missan, while Exxon is going after the Zubair field and Chevron will partner with Total on West Qurna-1.
It's a pretty poor economic strategy, to put all your eggs in the oil export basket - and notice, the oil refineries in Iraq are still decrepit, meaning Iraq has to import refined fuel. Water, sewage, infrastructure are still in pieces - and the whole "Iraqi rebuiding program" was just a huge ripoff by shady engineering firms like Bechtel, Washington Group, Fluor, CH2M Hill, etc. etc. Nevertheless,
The Iraqi government is planning to boost production up to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2010, and to 6 million by 2019. To compare, Saudi Arabia currently produces about 10 million barrels per day.
So, that's the real reason we went into Iraq and neglected the situation in Afghanistan - Iraq is the word's last big cheap oil source. That's also what spawned the insurgency - the theft of Iraqi natural resources and the high-handed imperial regime of Rumsfeld and Bremer. The military PR response has been to blame all the chaos in Iraq on Al Qaeda (go see Body of Lies) and to ignore the oil resource issues that are the insurgency's most potent recruiting weapons.
There is a problem here, isn't there? Let's recall what both FDR and Reagan said was a principle of American foreign policy, that more than justified the efforts to take down the Nazis and the U.S.S.R:
"Nations have the right to self-determination"
That means that they can partner with whoever they want - and they can set whatever limits on foreign investment that they like. That's what "self-determination" means - if China says they'll pay more than Chevron, they should have the right to go with China - but that notion interferes with "American national security interests". Go see Syriana for a nice explanation.
The only solution there is to disconnect the notion of national security from the notion of access to foreign oilfields. That, in a nutshell, is why the military needs to be the leader in developing alternative energy approaches.
Think of it as being similar to Churchill switching the British Navy from coal to oil - there was huge resistance from the British coal barons, but hey - facts are facts:
U.S. Reliance on Oil an 'Urgent Threat'
Retired U.S. generals and admirals say the real cost of fossil fuel, including transport and security, is as much as hundreds of dollars a gallon
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/may2009
From the fossil fuel perspective, the Kurd issues are:
1) The gas supply for the Nabucco pipeline. The U.S. has said that Iran cannot be a supplier, leaving Iraq as suitor #1.
2) Oil exports via Ceyhan, the Turkish oil port that also serves as the termination of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news
This is all part of larger energy-economic conflicts with Russia relating to who will service the European fuel markets:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/8531379
General Ray Odierno pretty much laid out the strategy during the Stephen Colbert haircut interview - we see a "partnership" with a "stabilized Iraq". Now, that doesn't seem so bad - a mutually beneficial relationship...
http://www.allgov.com/ViewNews/Iraqs_Oil__Ready_at_Last_90606
The Iraqi government announced last year that it would award contracts to rehabilitate six major oil fields and two natural gas fields, including the Rumaila oil field, which is estimated to have reserves of 17 billion barrels. The winning contractors are supposed to be announced beginning June 28, but delays are possible. BP is favored to get Rumaila, Royal Dutch Shell the fields of Kirkuk and Missan, while Exxon is going after the Zubair field and Chevron will partner with Total on West Qurna-1.
It's a pretty poor economic strategy, to put all your eggs in the oil export basket - and notice, the oil refineries in Iraq are still decrepit, meaning Iraq has to import refined fuel. Water, sewage, infrastructure are still in pieces - and the whole "Iraqi rebuiding program" was just a huge ripoff by shady engineering firms like Bechtel, Washington Group, Fluor, CH2M Hill, etc. etc. Nevertheless,
The Iraqi government is planning to boost production up to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2010, and to 6 million by 2019. To compare, Saudi Arabia currently produces about 10 million barrels per day.
So, that's the real reason we went into Iraq and neglected the situation in Afghanistan - Iraq is the word's last big cheap oil source. That's also what spawned the insurgency - the theft of Iraqi natural resources and the high-handed imperial regime of Rumsfeld and Bremer. The military PR response has been to blame all the chaos in Iraq on Al Qaeda (go see Body of Lies) and to ignore the oil resource issues that are the insurgency's most potent recruiting weapons.
There is a problem here, isn't there? Let's recall what both FDR and Reagan said was a principle of American foreign policy, that more than justified the efforts to take down the Nazis and the U.S.S.R:
"Nations have the right to self-determination"
That means that they can partner with whoever they want - and they can set whatever limits on foreign investment that they like. That's what "self-determination" means - if China says they'll pay more than Chevron, they should have the right to go with China - but that notion interferes with "American national security interests". Go see Syriana for a nice explanation.
The only solution there is to disconnect the notion of national security from the notion of access to foreign oilfields. That, in a nutshell, is why the military needs to be the leader in developing alternative energy approaches.
Think of it as being similar to Churchill switching the British Navy from coal to oil - there was huge resistance from the British coal barons, but hey - facts are facts:
U.S. Reliance on Oil an 'Urgent Threat'
Retired U.S. generals and admirals say the real cost of fossil fuel, including transport and security, is as much as hundreds of dollars a gallon
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/may2009
Off-topic, but a cool NPR segment on Special Forces trying to win back the population in Azizabad in Herat.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105129772&ft=1&f=10...
Ex:
Excellent question and points.
Agree that Nir Rosen's recent argument on Iraq must be taken seriously because as you point out he has been a skeptic on Iraq, is not a hagiographer and cheerleader on the Surge like so many others have been, and most importantly his on the ground research that probes deep into Iraqi society.
I don’t know. Admittedly my year in 2006 still shapes my thinking on things. I saw so much blood, so much hatred, so much violence, that whenever an attack like today goes off it seems to me that it is a continuation of the civil war that I experienced firsthand. To me the Surge and the following year did not end the war and put the factions on the road to reconciliation but instead helped to freeze them in place, waiting for an uptick in violence to thaw them out. But I may be wrong. These attacks may not be strategically significant as you speculate, and really just the action of a cluster of dead-enders who won’t give up and acknowledge defeat. Rosen's piece supports that view.
I got to know Sunnis very well in Ameriyah. My sense of them at least at the end of 2006 was that they were not even close to accepting the idea of defeat at the hands of the Shia government.
However, the hard hand of war and its violence causes actions and reactions, exponentially. As these attacks continue even if seemingly sporadic on a weekly basis they cause reactions to occur. And it is in this cycle of iterations that the essence of war rests which is why it is hard to know how this will turn out.
gian
Southern Iraq = the new MND-S, an area for the most part (relative to points north) void of U.S. presence until recently.
Is it "strategic" to bomb a few markets in that region for that reason? I'd say yes - but that's not the same as saying that's the reason.
There will be increased reporting from Southern Iraq in American news, too. "Our boys" are there now. That could also be a smaller factor in the strategic calculus.
(Nothing I've said above should be read as dismissal of the event as insignificant.)
Abu et al.
It seems to me that the post-bomb civilian attack on the police, and the bizarre police response have much graver strategic implications than this bombing, or any such bombing. It highlights the failure to develop a meaningful social contract in Iraq: AQI is the clear long term winner.
COL Gentile - your skepticism of long term stability is well founded. I won't say that the attacks are the actions of dead-enders because that statement sounds all too close to "last throes."
I will say that by the time I left just over a year ago, the Iraqis in our OE had just become exhausted with the violence. No one really wanted to kill anyone else anymore. Case in point, is the second Samarra bombing. I guess the key is: are they completely exhausted or taking a breather? That I don't know.
J. Fritz: I would suggest you may be forgetting the generational dynamics. If you look at street-gang demographics, you will see that generational changes come approx every 5 years. In Iraq, a lot of then-12 are now 17-18, and have basically grown up inside war. So the enemy will propably be different, imagine the discussions about young euro muslims being disgruntled x 10. I hope there is some serious planning in State for an exit strategy that leaves behind some sort of cottage industry as an exit strategy for the oppos to use as well, if you see my point? If not, you will have lots of poor sunnis as well as Shi and kurds.
Something I see not discussed a lot in COIN is micro-credit etc.
Greyhawk:
These bombings may also be an adjustment in tactics more than an intentional act of "strategy." That is to say the Sunni attackers may have become frustrated with the changes in Baghdad over the past two years--especially the walling off of markets like these, awareness of local ISF and other security personnel, checkpoints, etc--and picked Nasariyah because it was easier to get a car bomb in place there and psychologically because it shows sunni ability to attack shia in their heartland of the south.
Gian,
Agree with your assessment. Maybe one should try not to look at Iraq wars (or, as I prefer call it: "Wars in Iraq") through American and Western lenses. I've made several points about it on my blog (in French, unfortunately... but I will soon make a presentation in English in the US).
Regarding Nir Rosen's argument, I made the following point last month: there is still a political vacuum and a great political division amongst Sunnis, due to the "ethnicist" policy and strategy of the US military since 2007 (exception: Anbar and Nineveh). Moreover, PM Maliki rely more and more on specific segments of the Sunni population in order to strenghten its grasp on power. On the other hand, one has to consider the possibility of extremists regaining power at the margin of several communities. Indeed, militias have been coopted to distract Sunnis from supporting the more extremist political entrepreneurs that played with real grievances to foster insurgency and rebellion both against Americans and the "Persian" government. One can imagine that, if militias leaders were to be all arrested or neutralized (in mixed areas), AQI and more nationalists elements could induce a reshaping of confessionnal and ethnic identities at their own benefits.
Political and social reshaping in Iraq since 2003 (and, to a certain extent, since the beginning of the nineties) are a very important factor to take into account in order to understand the actual dynamics of violence in Iraq. It seems to me (but I've never been in this country) that Rosen's judgement is too extreme.
Best
Stéphane Taillat
http://coinenirak.wordpress.com
Micro-credit exists (or did through the spring of 2008) and was dispensed usually at the battalion level. Like a lot of such situations, it was a slow transition from grants to credit. There were also many other DDR and vocational programs. Probably not enough, but some - that's a start.
And dammit, COL Gentile. If you keep talking sense like that and force me to agree with you then I'll start losing my street cred as a COINdinista.
Gentile: For all we know, it may be a mercenary hired by one shia family to hit the economic center of another. Do we know it was sunnis doing it?
A follow up to that: To what extent have the recent years kicked Iraq back to pre-colonial times, when Mosul, Baghdad and Basra were the three competing centers in a shifting tie of religion and allegiance?
This tactic isn't unsual. JAM used similar methods, sending bombers from Baghdad to far-flung places (including Tal Afar) to detonate munitions and spark outrage.
Gian is right to point out that insurgents often adapt and choose the target that's easiest to hit (and escape from the area), taking with that gambit what strategic value (propaganda of the deed) the defense gives them.
I should point out that a bombing in Batha, about 40km west of Nasiriyah, while shocking to those who dwell there, is not the same jarring attack as would occur if, say, the Salafi terrorists hit Karbalah.
For those who haven't been to an-Nasiriyah, it's a dust-pocked river town, heavily Shiite, and long the playthings of the Baath secret police. Batha is near, but quite small and equally dusty.
It likely was chosen because it's just off the main route, easy to enter and leave and was bustling with desultory truck traffic and market day pedestrians. Because of tips about an impending attack in the province, security was higher in Nasiriyah, its capital.
That left al Batha as a target of opportunity.
I have a buddy from the MN National Guard who was stationed there during their marathon deployment. I've sent him an email to find out more about al Batha.
I remember about a year ago there was a study done--ableit with dubious methodology--which concluded that some of the reduction in sectarian conflict had something to do with the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods. That is to say, that the Sunni and Shia had kicked the minority groups out of each others' respective neighborhoods. Events like the Samarra bombing last month failed to spur the same reprisals--could it have possibly been because there were fewer minorities in each others' respective neighborhoods (and more American troops standing between them)?
The Kurds and Arabs are still a dangerous mix, particularly in Kirkuk. I can probably forsee Northern Iraq falling into levels of violence, although maybe not as great is we saw in 2006.
"it may be a mercenary hired by one shia family to hit the economic center of another. "
Fnord, when a terrorist engages in widespread bloodletting like an open air bombing, that terrorist makes many enemies through the kinship groups of the casualties.
The organic insurgency very rarely would wage mass casualty attacks that killed indiscriminately in their own backyard, because then they wouldn't only be at war with the US and their "Persian" toadies, but also every under-employed but heavily armed cousin of the victims splattered across the pavement.
An Iraqi Shiite from a prominent commercial family probably wouldn't seek to rub out a rival or destroy his business because there's a great deal of inter-marriage and other social links to preserve a bazaar class social network. But even if he did want to do so, the worst plan he could find would be an indisciminate bombing, for all the aforementioned reasons.
The insurgent who did al Batha attacks did so without caring who died, knowing that they had no connection to him or his family.
"This tactic isn't unsual. JAM used similar methods, sending bombers from Baghdad to far-flung places (including Tal Afar) to detonate munitions and spark outrage"
Blah blah blah. That comment is mine, too. I keep forgetting to put my title in the "Your Name" square.
By the way, Gian, it looks like I'll do the CNAS thing on Friday before heading out to Gettysburg. I'll skip much of the afternoon sessions so that I can get to the battlefield before rush hour.
That might put me into town first. I'll be the one wearing a shirt depicting dogs playing poker, sipping Knob Creek and finishing the final pages of the Sears' study.
This implies, of course, that upon entering the confines of the CNAS conference I won't be mobbed by a gaggle of village COINdinistas bearing torches and pitchforks, claiming that my fiendish monster killed a girl picking flowers.
I'm not much looking forward to lunch at CNAS. I hear that you must eat soup with a knife, which makes for a long, messy and probably expensive meal lacking, in the end, much reason to pursue it.
Now if I could only find some way to use that metaphor...
Snli: Fair enough, it fits MO. But singular MO fitting cases often smell funny if you go into details. I simply dont know enough. My point was to keep a healthy sceptiscism on first conclusions. I think Iraq long term is going to be muy decentralized.
Oh you just go ahead SNLII!! We will be pulling into Gettysburg around 1830 after the drive up from Antietam. Perhaps we can link up for dinner or a beer. You should still have my cell number but I will resend on gmail anyway.
And by the way, we darn sure won't be eating soup with a knife at Gettysburg but instead meat with bare hands to represent the primordial nature of big battles. How about that, Jason, for reestablishing my credentials as a Cointra!!
Stéphane, I'm intrigued by your research into René Girard’s mimetic theories.
Since I'm no way an expert in any way on Girard, are you suggesting that US ethnic ("tribal") policies might have been like fuel for the (unrequited?) mimetic desire? That, perhaps, our policies in Iraq produced the environment for aspirational rivals to contest the spoils of money, power, religion, et al?
Or are you suggesting that the viral nature of this desire amongst many contestants for the spoils created the conditions to which the US had to respond?
I've been wondering, to myself, that perhaps episodic bombings like the latest AQI hit in the south aren't evidence of exchange, or conversation. It's a "gift" of violence, one that is more valuable to both the extremist and the community of victims than it is in terms of casualties, and one that begs to be repaid. The ensuing violence then becomes a grammatical "exchange," a story, a narrative, that takes on a life of its own.
I've been given to understand that the acolytes of Girard engage in these sorts of black notions, but I tend to instead consider Hobbes.
It's important to remember that the Union forces at Gettysburg were counter-insurgents, too.
I don't recall Lincoln advising that they build a defense upon Little Round COP or run joint patrols with the goodly church folk of Gettysburg from Culp's Hill.
But I might be wrong!
"Stéphane, I'm intrigued by your research into René Girard’s mimetic theories."
Grrrrr... Sorry, Stéphane, that was me again. I keep forgetting the "Visitor" thing.
mimetic = memetics?
Because then we are opening an old tech field.
gian p gentile on June 10, 2009 - 12:47pm : " I saw so much blood, so much hatred, so much violence, that whenever an attack like today goes off it seems to me that it is a continuation of the civil war that I experienced firsthand."
There WAS no civil war until the US interjected itself and destabilized a nominally "secular country" (terminology from an early 90s Time-Life mini-encyclopedia) that, until attacked, had never in recent history harmed a single American citizen... and further, Iraq was invaded on the basis on nothing but lies due to an overweening agenda of privatizing Iraq's oil fields (as the maps and nomenclature of Iraq's oil infrastructure Judicial Watch received as an end result of their federal lawsuit against Deadeye Dick Cheney's "Energy Task Force" more than amply illustrates).
Our presence, and the US's half-assed belief that they can bribe (or whatever you want to call it) and cajole the players (with so-called "Awakening Councils" being the most publicly obvious, and the funding of assassinations of opposition candidates and supporters in the rigged "Purple-Thumb Elections" being the least publicized) in the country to OUR own benefit is CAUSING and CONTINUING that 'civil war'
Armed Carpetbaggers with air support... That's what the the Pentagon's tactic in Iraq is, and it's failed dramatically, and fully.
But it's not "civil" war... Our actions have created the sides. Not anything inherent in Iraqi society.
The Shiite/Sunni rift is the longest running Hatfield-McCoy feud on the face of the planet, but they NEVER had the capability for, or perhaps even the interest in, of actually annihilating each other... Until the US came along and stuck it's fat-assed thumb on the scale of Iraqi society and culture.
Here's what one of your brothers-in-arms had to say today about our actions in the region, and it's connection to the economic impoverishment of America's citizens (But not Lockheed, or Loral, or the people who work in the beltway paper mills justifying this travesty.)
Warring out of depression
"The irresistible, if not totally accurate, comparisons of Obama’s administration with that of the lionized FDR ought to include the decisive masterstroke of the cunning patrician Franklin Roosevelt to leave behind the Great Depression once and for all: war.
We always hear about the Works Progress Administration and other quasi-socialist measures taken by Roosevelt’s government, but the real exit strategy from that bout with general deflation was to build the US military-industrial complex, financing it through indebting other war-weakened allies.
Under their own circumstances, the New Dealers had the good fortune to enter the war by phases; first letting others take the brunt of the war — Europe as a battleground, and in particular the USSR, which would surrender around 27 million souls to the charnel house of WWII to debilitate the Wehrmacht — second, becoming the supplier of materiel, thereby indebting the rest of the Allied world while enriching the US prior to actual participation in combat, then finally, entry into the war against a bled-out Germany and Japan to ensure the US would be occupying key terrain in Europe and Asia as a preface to filling the vaccum left in the wake of the imperial collapse of UK and France.
Everybody loves Obama, because he sounds more reassuringly intelligent than George W. Bush even as Obama retains many of the very worst aspects of the Bush regime.
Hey, he is the first Black Prez, he picked Carolina as this year’s basketball champs, and he could charm a badger.
But Obama is planning to use war as his deus ex machina, too.
His war is to be the Pakistan-Afghan-Iran War, with Iraq stuck to his shoe. (He is not “withdrawing” from Iraq; and has stated that he hasn’t the least intention of doing so, unless one considers a force of 30,000 troops to be a non-occupation.)
Roosevelt used Keynesianism at home and war abroad to save capitalism. But Obama is not inheriting Roosevelt’s circumstances; his war will fail, and his “Keynesian” measures remain so contaminated with neoliberalism’s residues that it will leave the US domestic economy in a shambles that his dangerous (potentially nuclear) military adventures will only exacerbate."
In full: http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2009/06/10/warring-out-of-dep...
"There WAS no civil war until the US interjected itself "
You have no idea what you're talking about.
"The Shiite/Sunni rift is the longest running Hatfield-McCoy feud on the face of the planet, but they NEVER had the capability for, or perhaps even the interest in, of actually annihilating each other"
You still have no idea what you're talking about, only now you posit an endemic conflict between two strains of the same confession and suggest that it never was so in the place where they're closest together, Iraq.
Make this stop.
'But it's not "civil" war... Our actions have created the sides. Not anything inherent in Iraqi society.'
Is there anything in this entire, wasted screed that is true or, even, makes sense?
Jason, I hereby withdraw by lukewarm support for a few ideas encrusted in the poo of Buffalo's thoughts.
You may fire at will.
There have been two other very good reports on the Arab-Kurd divide in Iraq recently. I'm at work right now so I can't remember the titles, but will post them when I get home.
The Arab-Kurd divide is definitely much more important than the one between Sunnis-Shiites. The Iraqi security forces and peshmerga have almost come to blows several times since the summer of 2008. During a showdown in Diyala that year one Kurdish led unit of the Iraqi army refused to take orders, and another marched to Kurdistan in protest. Iraqi security forces also got into a shootout with peshmerga then. There have been several other confrontations since then, and the situation in Ninewa is getting worse after the anti-Kurd Al-Hadbaa was elected in the provincial elections. The argument between the two sides also involves the constitution, the oil law, disputed territories, etc. All of those are being held up in parliament because of this divide.
I don't think the Sunnis and Shiites will go back to war. Every time there is a religious pilgrimage by Shiites they get blown up and there's been no response. The Mahdi Army has largely been disbanded and even the Special Groups have done little for several months now. I think the Sunnis largely accept their defeat in the civil war as well, and don't want to go back to fighting. Many Sunnis are also trying to get involved in politics more, and are willing to work with Shiites. Abu Risha's Anbar Awakening party wants to form an alliance with Maliki in the provincial elections for example, and Maliki is looking for other Sunni parties to align himself with.
As for Nir Rosen, a major problem is that in a recent article he was told by insurgents back in 2006 that their fight was over. It only took him three years to write about it!
Buffalo: As a fellow leftie, shut up, you truly do not know what you speak of. Basra ( a shia town) has not been at war w the ME all these years. Shia/Sunni interaction is not a bloodfeud. See Bahrain.
SNLII: "You have no idea what you're talking about."
That's corollary to "you have no idea of the endgame of the Pentagon's warmongering"
Opinions are like assholes.
Why don't you PROVE me wrong... You aren't even stating which part you disagree with.
Those Judicial Watch papers are a fabrications on-par with barrage balloon Hydrogen generators passed of at the UN by Colin Powell as "Bio-Chem labs"?
Is that what you're saying?
Or could it be this?: "...the funding of assassinations of opposition candidates and supporters in the rigged "Purple-Thumb Elections"
Here's some info from THIS YEAR'S elections:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html
Don't make me dig through McClatchy's archives for the CPA run original 'election". The CPA still need to explain how Blackwater ended up shipping all those Glock pistols to Turkey, and how a Russian Mobster, Vicktor Bout "Lost" 250,000 AK47s for them, to which Gen Petraeus replied "bookkeeping error'.
There's other people keeping 'book' too, SNLII... I'm NOT the only one.
...I know as much as you, or more, but my agenda, and my income, is NOT based on promoting worthless wars. You're tainted by what you do for a living, unlike the average 'grunt' who just got fooled... again.
Fnord: "Shia/Sunni interaction is not a bloodfeud."
I know that... and Neturei Karta isn't in a bloodfeud with the prevelant Zionist elements of Judaism either. But our self-interested intervention in Iraqi affairs has essentially created that scenario between the Shia and Sunni.
First of all, the Sunni/Shia rift started with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War. Read some history, you'll see it's true. Exacerbated with US intervention due to lawlessness that allowed Sunni takfiri groups to emerge (AQI)? Sure. Iranian influence in Shia extremist groups to propogate the rift? Yes, out of Iran's own self-interests and to compensate for their getting their asses handed to them by the Sunnis in power in the 1980s. Forget the rest of the invective - not worth the time to respond.
Buffalo, you were doing so well. Very disappointed.
And to COL Gentile. Sir, the cavalryman in me loves the big set-piece battle. Other than the day when people stopped shooting at me, my favorite part of the war was when I had a meeting engagement with a tank battalion from the Humarabi Republican Guard Division. Goddammit, my troopers made me proud that day - they popped all the tops off of those T-72s without a scratch on our men. Now those metrics were measureable. Enjoy your red meat and to hell with the knives. Aieeyah!
"First of all, the Sunni/Shia rift started with Saddam"
Well, a quite different Hussein.
You see, there was this Battle of Karbalah that took place in the Year 61 on Ashura, and it involved this bloke called Hussein ibn Ali and another fellow known around the hood as Omar ibn Sa'ad, who shot the first bolt.
Now, all this is murky, ancient stuff for American commanders in OIF. But if you ever wonder why all the Shiites you meet seem to have names like "Ali," and all the Sunnis you meet seem to have titles such as "Umar," you might understand just how deep the divide runs to this day.
What one might suggest is that the Shiite insurgencies in "Iraq" (the national state actually is quite young in the annals of Shiism) have often followed a messianic, millenarian path, complete with the advent of the Mahdi, and the uprisings tended to erupt against various Sunni Arab, colonial (British or Turk or whatever) or, later, US-backed multinational occupations.
Some scholars would argue that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was, itself, part of this apocalyptic tradition, which is why it ensnared so many Shiite believers in Iraq (against Hussein) and Lebanon along the way.
I bet I forgot to put my name on the comment again.
The previous one on the early revolt was mine.
On another note, I purposely turning my back on this callow remark:
"I think Iraq stopped being a counterinsurgency campaign over a year ago"
I think pixies flew out of the butts of Moqtada al-Sadr and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir and sprinkled peace dust on all the happy people in the Land of the Two Rivers.
But that doesn't mean it's so.
Well Jason, my good cavalryman friend, when have big battles ever really been "set-piece" (implying simplicity instead of complexity) anyway? I bet your brawl with those republican guard dicks was anything but simple, easy, and dare I say the undergraduate level is war. As you and I both know, war--war in any form--is never set-piece; how could it be since if it was it woudn't be way anyway but child's play.
Scouts Out!
Sir, my intention was not to over-simplify the intellectual and tactical challenges of steel-on-steel warfare, or any other conventional engagement. It was, indeed, fairly complex and certainly not undergraduate warfare. I was poking fun at the COINdinista zealots who think so.
As to SNLII and the discussion of Islamic schism, I was talking about recent history which in and of itself was probably beyond the capabilities of our bison friend. Nevermind discussions of martyrs with the name Ali. Good lord, do you want him to strain his grey matter?
Well, if I could bring the thread back to the topic at hand, Gian, this time by focusing on AQI's strategic problem.
Let's say, as Exum frets, that AQI's gambit isn't exactly zero sum. Let's assume that the latest bombing is calculated to devolve Iraq into another sectarian civil war.
The problem remains: AQI does NOT have the ability to defend the population which it putatively serves.
If either Shiite militias or the ISF (now absorbing many of the militiamen) responded against the Sunni Arab people in turn, AQI can't stop them. Therefore, there's absolutely no reason for the population to embrace them. So AQI is back to the beginning of their strategic problem.
If the Shiite militias or the Shiite-dominated government responds with same, a large part of the Sunni Arab population is simply going to blame AQI for restarting the retribution.
AQI can't mitigate its military weakness by lavishing potential followers (or tacit endorsers) with contracts or bribes.
As Fishman would say, AQI has a vision. It knows the endstate it wants to create. The problem remains that the tactics/doctrine -- indiscriminate bombing of open air markets and whatnot -- aren't going to get them there because the insurgents can't protect their own people or keep these people from hating them for causing them pain.
Nor is there any chance for safe harbor in neighboring states, because the near-war AQI also is hated by Jordan and Saudi Arabia because the group is likewise threatening to them.
It's one thing to embark on a Guevarist/Foquismo pursuit of revolution, with the band itself become the cause of the revolt against the government. But AQI can't do that (they're nearly universally hated for the aforementioned reasons).
The reality is that the more AQI bombs, the less popular it becomes in ALL sectors of the Iraqi people. While the near- and far-war strategy appeals to many outside Iraq, part of an IO message that aids fundraising, it really does nothing for the AQI operatives actually working within the state's borders.
The good news is that so long as the vast majority of Sunni Arabs continue to participate in "Awakening" politics or the older confessional parties -- groups that have separated themselves from AQI -- the collective punishment that fell on Sunni Arabs in the hard years from 2004-2007 won't reappear.
What no one is commenting on is why a VBIED and not a SVBIED? AQI is best known for the dramatic, martyr-making SVBIEDs. And yet in this case, the driver calmly drove off. Is AQI having problems attracting nutjob Salafi volunteers? Or have the human smuggling rings dried up?
I haven't gone to the Salafi boards today, but sometimes the comments there will allude to these sorts of details we lack from our vantage points: Is money a problem? Do the Salafi kids read the latest bombings as part of a campaign playing off internal Iraqi politics that gives AQI an "in" that previously wasn't there? Is the campaign a means to denigrate the new class of Sunni Arab politicians by forcing them to come out against the violence?
Or is it a way to prod Shiite militias to deny Sunnis a safe space, carved out by politics, to arbitrate disputes?
I don't know.
I see that bringing the blog onto CNAS ground has done nothing for the buffalo population nor for those who rely upon Hollywood fiction for their political/military education. Kind of like trying to hold a briefing in lobby of an asylum, with the prairie bovine proclaiming the his mother's appraisal of his magic shoes and the movie buff constantly fiddling with the skewed chinstrap on protective headgear and wringing out the drool bib in inappropriate places.
I notice that many will happily point out that insurgencies don't generally die screaming deaths in a massive final expenditure of futile suicidal energy. They eventually lose relevance and adherents, the less than fanatical eventually go home and go to work. There are always die-hards; what makes us think that they will quit attempting to re-stir the passions of 2005? That's their job. It's what they do.
Yet, they lament their own lack of relevance. They have been reduced from a notionally political actor to a criminal element struggling to regain some vestige of their former relevance. They resort to such things as raping women to create a suicidal tendency that they can exploit; the suicide bomber version of pimping out a forlorn runaway. Among others, it's still criminal behavior which is more a law enforcement problem for a recovering nation than an existential political/military threat.
Which is just what you want to do with an insurgency.
It matters not what "narrative" you choose. The proof is in the pudding.
I notice that Grant didn't just establish a Big Box FOB and send out day-trippers to quell the Southern insurgents. Of course, most of the "insurgents" wore uniforms and behaved like a military maneuver force. I wonder if there's a difference between secessionists who seek to break away from a larger entity and insurgents who seek to overthrow a sitting government and replace it with a different government.
I see that bringing the blog onto CNAS ground has done nothing for the buffalo population nor for those who rely upon Hollywood fiction for their political/military education. Kind of like trying to hold a briefing in lobby of an asylum, with the prairie bovine proclaiming the his mother's appraisal of his magic shoes and the movie buff constantly fiddling with the skewed chinstrap on protective headgear and wringing out the drool bib in inappropriate places.
I notice that many will happily point out that insurgencies don't generally die screaming deaths in a massive final expenditure of futile suicidal energy. They eventually lose relevance and adherents, the less than fanatical eventually go home and go to work. There are always die-hards; what makes us think that they will quit attempting to re-stir the passions of 2005? That's their job. It's what they do.
Yet, they lament their own lack of relevance. They have been reduced from a notionally political actor to a criminal element struggling to regain some vestige of their former relevance. They resort to such things as raping women to create a suicidal tendency that they can exploit; the suicide bomber version of pimping out a forlorn runaway. Among others, it's still criminal behavior which is more a law enforcement problem for a recovering nation than an existential political/military threat.
Which is just what you want to do with an insurgency.
It matters not what "narrative" you choose. The proof is in the pudding.
I notice that Grant didn't just establish a Big Box FOB and send out day-trippers to quell the Southern insurgents. Of course, most of the "insurgents" wore uniforms and behaved like a military maneuver force. I wonder if there's a difference between secessionists who seek to break away from a larger entity and insurgents who seek to overthrow a sitting government and replace it with a different government.
Sorry for the double post. The chinstrap on my hockey helmet is too tight, and it keeps making me gray-out when I try to tie my magic shoes. Makes it hard to see that my comment did in fact post.
Perhaps the reason AQ linked networks try to mass murder as many Iraqi civilians as possible is because they don't like Iraqis and want to hurt them for betraying "TRUE" Islam.
Maybe AQ linked networks mass murder Iraqis for the same reason they mass murder Americans, Europeans, Russians and Indonesians. Maybe there isn't any broader strategy, at least in the way strategy is generally understood.
Buffalo, research why Saddam attacked Khomeini in 1980. It was because Khomeini stepped up Iranian assistance to the Iraqi resistance. Saddam felt he couldn't defeat the Iraqi resistance without taking out its Iranian sanctuaries.
A question for you. Do you support violent attacks against the elected Iraqi Government and the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police that are loyal to it?
" I wonder if there's a difference between secessionists who seek to break away from a larger entity and insurgents who seek to overthrow a sitting government and replace it with a different government."
To your beloved Galula, there was but one insurgent, and he believed in a Long March past the FOB.
Contemporaries of Galula (most especially Kitson) had different notions that consider all sorts of ways to respond to many different sorts of actors (or, gangs, if you will) within a complex revolt.
The reason why Dixie's insurgents donned uniforms, drilled in riflery and march and pledged themselves to a remarkably similar government structure was because these methods were part of the culture of the people doing the fighting.
Lincoln, Grant & Co. had a similar culture of warfighting (mostly amateur at first, just like in Dixie), but they tailored the structure, strategy and leadership to win the fight they were in.
Those who were most successful at winning campaigns were also the most likely to be pragmatic, to understand (in the Sun Tzu sense) who they were and the sorts of people they were fighting, and didn't base their tactics on received wisdom pawned from other learned -- but largely unsuccessful -- military savants.
There are different sorts of insurgents, even if many of the COINdinista pundits would have you believe that the flat character in FM 3-24, the Maoist upstart trying to take over a government in sequential stages, is the only one that should concern you.
I bet I forgot to put my name to that post again. Apologies.
You could tell the Sunni-Shiite war was over for about a year. Every time there's a Shite pilgrimage they get bombed, but there are no reprisal attacks. The Mahdi Army has been largely disbanded, and even the Special Groups have done little in recent months. I also think the Sunnis have accepted defeat after the sectarian war and don't want to go back to that. Many Sunnis also participated in the 2009 provincial elections, and some of their parties now want to work with Shiites. Abu Risha's Anbar Awakening party for example wants to run with Maliki in the 2010 parliamentary elections, and Maliki is looking for other Sunni allies as well.
As for Nir Rosen, in a recent article he said that back in 2006 some insurgent leaders told him that their fight was over. It only took him 3 years to write about it!
I would also agree that the Baghdad-Kurdistan dispute is far more pressing than the sectarian Sunni-Shiite one. Beginning in 2008 Maliki began confronting the ruling Kurdish parties. The first time was in the summer of 2008 in Diyala when he sent troops into the Khanaqin district. There was a standoff and a shooting between Iraqi police and peshmerga. One Kurdish led army unit refused to take orders, and another marched to Kurdistan in protest at that time. That was eventually defused, but there have been several other standoffs since then as Maliki is pressing the Kurds across all of the disputed territories which stretch from Diyala to Salahaddin to Tamim and Ninewa. It also involves Kirkuk, the constitution, the oil law, and federalism. It definitely has more potential for violence than the Sunni-Shiite split.
The Brookings Institute also released a paper about it recently "Stability in Iraqi Kurdistan," and the journal Middle East Policy also had a piece on it in the Spring 09 issue "Kurds in Iraq."
Jason:
good copy; I was poking fun at it all too. A sense of humor is always important to maintain.
thanks for your comments.
I hope SNLII is this lively and full of his quips at Gettysburg.
gian
SNLII:
how do we know it is AQI that did this latest bombing, and some of the others recently in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq? A car packed full of 155 rounds in the trunk, modified suspension and all to not look weighted down in the back, has been the hallmark of the non-aqi sunni insurgents. This doesnt mean that aqi couldnt adopt this technique, they could. But there is the strong possibility that this was not aqi but any one of the other sunni insurgent groups, there is even the possibility that on some of these attacks there is collusion between the two. If you think of aqi as on the fringe and no longer supported by the majority of sunnis then your theory holds; but if these attacks are coming from the other sunni insurgent groups then at least within the sunni community they may very well still maintain control over that part of the population. And then if you link the few remaining sunni districts in baghdad and other parts north to the sunni bastion in Anbar there is I think the possibility for the sunnis to rise up and fight if they feel that is thier only option, or if they still believe they can win, or if they believe that fighting back is the only way to get the political concessions that they are looking for. This goes against Nir's argument, but it is in the realm of the possible.
see you on 30 June 1863.
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