We've Seen the Enemy and They Are ... Who, Exactly?
By EDWARD WONG - NYT WEEK IN REVIEW
BAGHDAD — To hear the American commanders in Iraq tell it, William Butler Yeats could well be the poet laureate of Iraq's insurgency. If the guerrillas were to win this war with their suicide car bombs and televised beheadings, what would come next? Nothing, the commanders say, but a widening gyre, and things falling apart, and, finally, mere anarchy being loosed in the cradle of civilization.
"This is a negative insurgency," Brig. Gen. Erwin Lessel, deputy director of operations for the multinational forces, said in an interview inside the fortified American headquarters here, near where two powerful bombs killed five people on Thursday and left the Americans bracing for more mayhem at the start of the holy month of Ramadan. "Unlike a classical insurgency, these groups don't offer anything."
"They've got differing goals, competing ideologies,'' he continued, "and don't offer anything positive for the government."
The general's assertion raised a salient point about the guerrillas, particularly those in Sunni Muslim groups: A year and a half after Baghdad fell, the insurgency has yet to develop a full-fledged political wing, or a coherent political program. Classic insurgencies often have a division of labor between military and political arms, with the latter defining the goals of the struggle and pursuing them through opposition politics. The Vietcong and the Irish Republican Army, for example, had tactical commanders fighting on the battlefield while politicians hammered away at the bargaining table.
But to think that the Sunni resistance's end goal is to spread chaos, or to assume that its lack of any apparent political machinery is a weakness that can be exploited, is to underestimate the fighters, say scholars of insurgencies who have been to Iraq.
Yes, there are dozens of Sunni groups in the war, from Islamist cells of foreign fighters to more secular bands of former Iraqi Army officers, and they have disparate and even competing ideologies, said Bruce D. Hoffman, an insurgency analyst at the RAND Corporation. But, he added, they are united in wanting to drive America out of Iraq, and that is more than enough of a program to galvanize many Sunnis for now.
The universal political rule applies: The simpler the message, the more mass appeal it can gain, as the media-savvy insurgents here no doubt recognize. Presenting more sophisticated political platforms, such as ones that might lay out alternative systems of governance, could drive supporters away or reveal the discord among the groups. Within the insurgency, at least until now, hard-line clerics and secular former Baathists have no doubt maintained their marriage of convenience by focusing on the tactical goal that unites them, rather than on their competing ideologies, even as accused collaborators are threatened or executed.
"You don't really need a comprehensive political program if you have a message that resonates," Mr. Hoffman said. "They're not going to play around with what works."
A senior official in the Muslim Scholars Association, a group of Sunni clerics that has close ties to insurgent leaders, acknowledged that the goals of the cells are "sometimes even antithetical to each other."
"But they all have one goal, and that is to kick the Americans out of Iraq, and I don't think they'll be flexible in this goal," the official, Muhammad Bashar al-Fadhi, said.
The fact that the groups are not operating under a unified leadership with a well-developed political wing can be an advantage. The disparate nature of the insurgency has forced the Americans and the interim Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, to try to pacify the groups one by one, an approach that leaves any deal with one group subject to being undermined by others. This problem cropped up in recent negotiations over the insurgent stronghold of Falluja: peace offers made by Dr. Allawi to the city's tribal sheiks have had no appeal for jihadists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a militant from Jordan whose tactics include taping the beheadings of foreign hostages.
"No one can sort out the exact motivation and ideology, or even how many groups claiming to exist are real," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This makes it extremely difficult to attack the insurgents, except by one group, and center of activity, at a time."
The history of insurgencies shows, of course, that even a disparate rebellion can eventually unify itself and define its goals, although holding the coalition together is another matter entirely. In the recent civil war in the Congo, for example, it took years for the two major rebels groups to form political wings, which then negotiated with the standing government to enter into joint rule. Now, however, power struggles among the various factions are threatening to unravel the partnership once and for all.
In Iraq, Mr. Hoffman says, the current American effort to hold elections in January could put pressure on the Sunni groups to lay out political programs. Now that the Sunni insurgents have struck a populist chord in central Iraq, Mr. Hoffman says, it is likely that "political activities will increase by emerging parties that would likely be insurgent front groups."
"The stakes will be too high for any party to miss out," Mr. Hoffman said, "and political subversion combined with armed action is a perennial dimension of insurgency."
The Americans and the Allawi government say they hope to draw insurgent groups into the political process in order to pacify them. But, as Mr. Hoffman implied, this tactic can have its own dangers. In Algeria in 1991, for example, the fundamentalist rebels of the Islamic Salvation Front were allowed to compete in general elections, and unexpectedly won the first round. The French-backed government's response was to cancel the election results, plunging the country into a new round of civil war.
In the weeks ahead, the Sunni insurgent groups here will no doubt watch closely the careful dance unfolding between the American military and the Allawi government on one side, and the firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr on the other. Mr. Sadr, too, has led an insurgency, but unlike the Sunni guerrillas, he has indicated for months that he wants to take part in mainstream politics. "We have many channels; we have the armed resistance and we have the political channel," Ali Smesim, one of Mr. Sadr's closest aides, boasted in an interview.
That raises some tantalizing, if risky, possibilities for American strategists who seek to replace the violence here with electoral politics. If they bargain with Mr. Sadr, and if the Sunnis see him gaining from it, the Sunni insurgents might be tempted to try to paper over their differences and form their own political front. The young Shiite cleric has already had considerable success: An arrest warrant issued against him is all but forgotten, and Iraqi and American officials have agreed not to prosecute his followers on the condition that he disarm his thousands-strong militia and channel his aggression into mainstream politics. The same officials have their doubts about how seriously he is disarming now, especially given his history of reneging on such promises, but the plan is proceeding anyway.
In other words, just by forcing the authorities to compromise with him, Mr. Sadr has shown that an insurgent with both a private army and a populist political machine can, at this fragile moment, call at least some of the shots. This is likely the message the Sunni guerrillas are taking away right now, though it is probably not quite the lesson the Americans wanted them to learn about what entering politics can bring them.
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