Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

The Surge: Illusion and Reality - by Conn Hallinan, AW, December 25, 2007

The narrative in the media these days is the success of the U.S. “surge,” which has poured an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq since early January 2007. In early December, war critic and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) said, “I think the surge is working.”

Polls indicate that concern over the economy has replaced the war as the major issue for voters and that, while a majority of Americans want the troops out, those saying that things are going better jumped from 33 percent to just under 50 percent.

Are they going better? Car bombings, sectarian violence, and attacks on U.S. troops are down, although 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war for the Americans. But does the reduced violence have anything to do with the “surge”?

As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent points out, Americans and the U.S. media tend to “exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there.”

Take the attacks on Americans, which are down. The Sunni-based resistance carried out the majority of those. Sunnis, who constitute 5 million of Iraq’s 27 million people (there are 16 million Shi’ites and five million Kurds), dominated the country under Saddam Hussein.

Initially the Sunnis formed an alliance with al-Qaeda that turned out to be a disaster. Al-Qaeda, an extremist Sunni organization, targeted Shi’ites, whom it considers heretics. The relentless bombings and shootings culminating in the 2006 bombing of the Golden mosque in Samarra, spurred Shi’ite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to counterattack.

The Sunnis suddenly found themselves fighting a two-front war against the Americans and the Shi’ites, a war they cannot win. They soon were driven out of large sections of Baghdad by the Shi’ites while absorbing massive casualties from the U.S. military campaign.

These defeats forced the Sunnis to turn on al-Qaeda and to reach a détente with the U.S. In return, the new Sunni militias – like the Baghdad Brigade, the Knights of Ameriya, and the Guardians of Ghazaliya – were given vehicles, uniforms, flak jackets and $300 a month for each member by the Americans. Starting months before the “surge,” the so-called “Sunni awakening” soon fielded 77,000 militia members, larger than the 60,000-member Mahdi Army and half the size of the Iraqi army.

But according to the Sunday Times, many of these Sunnis were formerly al-Qaeda members, and the current “truce” with the Americans is little more than a tactical maneuver to buy time. “Of course the coming war is with the [Shi’ite] militias,” Baghdad Brigade intelligence officer Abu Omar told the Times. “God willing, we will defeat them and get rid of them just as we did with al-Qaeda.”