I like this article, thanks for posting. I have just a few comments:
It has spread to Ninewa, Diyala, Babil, Salah-ad-Din, Baghdad and – intriguingly – is filtering into Shi'a communities in the South. The Iraqi government was in on it from the start; our Iraqi intelligence colleagues predicted, well before we realized it, that Anbar was going to "flip", with tribal leaders turning toward the government and away from extremists.
Honestly, Nadine, I thought that this would happen before it actually happened--simply because I never saw Iraq as fertile ground for an Al Qaeda perspective. And I never heard anything that contradicted that view. They have been far more urban than, e.g., Saudi Arabia, and were more diverse than some of the smaller Gulf countries. Not to mention the fact that Sunnis represented a relatively small minority. And Iran would most definitely not look favorably on an Iraq with strong Al Qaeda influences.
slam, of course, is a key identity marker when dealing with non-Muslim outsiders, but when all involved are Muslim, kinship trumps religion. And in fact, most tribal Iraqis I have spoken with consider AQ's brand of "Islam" utterly foreign to their traditional and syncretic version of the faith. One key difference is marriage custom, the tribes only giving their women within the tribe or (on rare occasions to cement a bond or resolve a grievance, as part of a process known as sulha) to other tribes or clans in their confederation (qabila). Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done. AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of "Islam" stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes' view as ignorant, stupid and sinful.
Indeed, this is one of AQ's fatal flaws and why it will never amount to much if the US doesn't give it any ammunition with our own brand of ethno-stupidity (which the Bush admin has been masterfully doing, almost as if they were secret partners with AQ).
This change seems to have passed some observers by, but it is one of the truly significant developments in Iraq this year. For example, a recent Washington Post article begins with a Staff Sergeant who was not expecting combat, "after many uneventful months in Iraq's Anbar province, as he jostled over the rough terrain of brush, fields and irrigation ditches in the lead Humvee of a routine patrol on the night of June 30". Many uneventful months in Anbar? Not expecting combat? A routine patrol – at night? This is not the Anbar we think we know, a media byword for constant pointless violence.
I'm not sure I understand him here--the Post article points out the change in Anbar, so what does he mean that it has "passed some observers by." The dispute isn't about the change, but the cause of the change. I say that when the Iraqis got fed up with AQ or when they saw them as a greater threat than the Americans, they would kick them out. You say, well, they couldn't have done it without American support. Perhaps--but, honestly, I doubt it. Not with a foreign leadership. Even their Iraqi followers--most of them, anyway--would have turned on them or been killed. I don't think the Iraqis are either stupid or children that have to be led around and supported. I definitely don't think that the Surge had anything to do with it. Perhaps some added weapons and some added people fighting on their side made it go faster than it might have otherwise done.
• Developing programs, up front, to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate tribal forces in Iraqi society (a so-called "DDR" plan);
• Ensuring the government does not provide weapons to any group until its loyalty is demonstrated and members have sworn allegiance to the new Iraq;
• Conducting biometric registration of tribal fighters, and registering their weapon serial numbers (to discourage side-switching, detect infiltrators and reassure the Iraqi government of its control);
• Linking tribal loyalty to local governance structures, and then directly to the central government, through traditional tribal control mechanisms such as deera (tribal boundaries; tribal forces could not work outside these without an agreement with the neighboring sheikh) and Sulh (traditional tribal reconciliation processes, leading to compacts within and between communities);
• Vetting and training tribal security forces as a pre-condition for their enrolment into paid, government-sponsored organizations like the Police and Army; and
• Providing advisers, liaison officers and support infrastructure (ideally from the Iraqi government with our help) to prevent human rights abuses and enforce appropriate operational standards.
Well, his list has about as much chance of succeeding as we in the US do of actually implementing gun control, or even registration and identification of guns. Why would anyone think it would succeed in the far more dangerous environment of Iraq?
For one thing, we have spent the last four years carefully building up and supporting an Iraqi political system based on non-tribal institutions. Indeed, the Coalition Provisional Authority deliberately side-lined the tribes in 2003 in order to focus on building a "modern" democratic state in Iraq, which we equated with a non-tribal state. There were good reasons for this at the time, but we are now seeing the most significant political and security progress in years, via a structure outside the one we have been working so hard to create. Does that invalidate the last four years' efforts? Probably not, as long as we recognize that the vision of a Jeffersonian, "modern" (in the Western industrial sense) democracy in Iraq, based around entirely secular non-tribal institutions, was always somewhat unrealistic. In the Iraqi polity, tribes' rights may end up playing a similar role to states' rights in some other democracies. They will remain a competing power center to the religious political parties, and hence will probably never be popular with Baghdad politicians, but if correctly handled they have the potential to actually enhance pluralism in Iraq over the long-term, by restraining the excesses of any central government or sectarian faction.
This is the nub of the matter, and leads to my fundamental disagreement with the author. We keep trying to establish a valid central govt, but that is impossible to do, IMHO. As I've written here and elsewhere before, the only hope that I see for something positive to come of this morass is to recognize that the Sunni tribes will, by and large, never (by "never" I mean at least the next 2 generations) trust the Shia to rule and the Shia will never trust the Sunnis again (both for good reasons), and to try to get them to do that is a fool's errand. We must at some point recognize that reality, and adopt some version of the Biden-Gelb-Galbraith vision of Iraq, allowing each group to have its own sphere of influence with a weak central govt that basically just ensures that at least some oil revenue gets to the Sunnis, that the Shia remaining Sunni territory and the Sunni remaining in Shia territory won't be harmed or discriminated against too badly, and that the religious objects of the other group in each territory are treated with respect.
And that limited objective itself won't be easy. Especially with the Kurds bucking for eventually true independence in the ripeness of time. |
