The Price of the Surge..

This article has an interesting analysis of the effect of the surge that goes counter to the conventional view that the surge is working or at least that it will work in the long run. As recent violence has shown there is still no accomodation among different factions even competing Shiite factions. The U.S. buying off of some Sunni insurgents to fight Al Qaeda was never sanctioned by the Maliki government and the resulting "militia" are not being assimilated into the Iraqi forces.


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The Price of the Surge
How U.S. Strategy Is Hastening Iraq's Demise
Steven Simon
From Foreign Affairs, May / June 2008


STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he
served on the National Security Council in positions including Senior
Director for Transnational Threats.

In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new approach to
the war in Iraq. At the time, sectarian and insurgent violence
appeared to be spiraling out of control, and Democrats in Washington
-- newly in control of both houses of Congress -- were demanding that
the administration start winding down the war. Bush knew he needed to
change course, but he refused to, as he put it, "give up the goal of
winning." So rather than acquiesce to calls for withdrawal, he
decided to ramp up U.S. efforts. With a "surge" in troops, a new
emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, and new commanders overseeing
that strategy, Bush declared, the deteriorating situation could be
turned around. More than a year on, a growing conventional wisdom
holds that the surge has paid off handsomely. U.S. casualties are
down significantly from their peak in mid-2007, the level of violence
in Iraq is lower than at any point since 2005, and Baghdad seems the
safest it has been since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime five
years ago. Some backers of the surge even argue that the Iraqi civil
war is over and that victory on Washington's terms is in sight -- so
long as the United States has the will to see its current efforts
through to their conclusion. Unfortunately, such claims misconstrue
the causes of the recent fall in violence and, more important, ignore
a fatal flaw in the strategy. The surge has changed the situation not
by itself but only in conjunction with several other developments:
the grim successes of ethnic cleansing, the tactical quiescence of
the Shiite militias, and a series of deals between U.S. forces and
Sunni tribes that constitute a new bottom-up approach to pacifying
Iraq. The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not
linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state. If
anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the
revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against
the central government and against one another. In other words, the
recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term
goal of a stable, unitary Iraq. Despite the current lull in violence,
Washington needs to shift from a unilateral bottom-up surge strategy
to a policy that promotes, rather than undermines, Iraq's cohesion.
That means establishing an effective multilateral process to spur top-
down political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions. And
that, in turn, means stating firmly and clearly that most U.S. forces
will be withdrawn from Iraq within two or three years. Otherwise, a
strategy adopted for near-term advantage by a frustrated
administration will only increase the likelihood of long-term debacle.

[...]

Background on Najaf battle

Some early accounts claimed the attack was by Sunni insurgents but by now that seems to have been discounted and this account or something similar seems closer to the truth. It is amazing that so many fighters so well equipped were able to muster. However perhaps the numbers are inflated along with the casualties. Insurgent body counts are always welcome news but whatever the civilian collateral damage there is not even mention of that.


Battle suggests new sectarian divides in Iraq
Sunday's attack on Shiites in Najaf may have been launched by the Shiite 'Army of Heaven' sect.
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
CAIRO - What precisely happened near the Shiite shrine city of Najaf Sunday is still being sorted out, but it seems likely that at its root was an unusual new wrinkle in Iraqi violence: a Shiite plan to attack Shiites.

A battle that lasted for more than 12 hours in the nearby village of Zarqa ended with a US helicopter being shot down and a claim by local authorities that more than 200 militants were slain in the fighting. But who were the militants?

Though the majority Shiite province has a problem with assassinations and gangster-style extortion, Sunni Arab insurgents are rarely active there, and fighting on this scale had not been witnessed in the area for more than a year.

The incident is a reminder of the swirling agendas now at play in Iraq and the turbulent political waters US troops are wading into as more soldiers arrive and President Bush has vowed to stand by Shiite Islamist Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Religious ideologies and classic power plays are now converging in Iraq, leading to what at times seem to be multiple, parallel conflicts: Sunni Arab insurgents who want to establish an Islamic state fight US Marines in Anbar Province; death squads associated with militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stalk the streets of Baghdad, targeting both Sunni and Shiite political rivals; mostly Sunni Arab nationalists with ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath party seek to oust US forces from the country.

Following Sunday's deadly battle, Najaf Governor Asaad Abu Khalil originally implied that the fighters were foreign Arabs of the sort usually associated with Al Qaeda and that their intention was to disrupt the religious festival of Ashura with plans to attack both pilgrims and senior ayatollahs in southern Iraqi city of Najaf, the principal seat of Shiite religious learning in Iraq.

But his office has since backed off from those claims, and it now appears the gunmen – who killed or wounded dozens of Iraqi soldiers in the fighting as well as killing the two pilots of the downed US helicopter – were Shiites motivated by extreme religious ideology.

The central Iraqi government says the fighters are members of a millenarian Shiite group called the Jund al-Sama, or Army of Heaven, and that they were plotting to kill the senior ayatollahs in Najaf, chief among them Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to prepare the way for the Mahdi, a messiah figure for many Shiites.

They believe the Mahdi ascended to heaven in the 9th century and will return to earth to usher in a final confrontation between good and evil that will end with a 1,000-year reign of peace, which will be followed by the end of the world.

According to Iraqi Army Maj. Gen. Othman al-Ghanami, quoted by the Associated Press, the group was heavily armed. He said 500 rifles were confiscated along with mortars, heavy calibre machine guns, and Katyusha rockets. That such a little known group should be so well armed is a sign of the myriad threats to the country's eventual pacification.

Ashura commemorates Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the most revered of Shiite saints, and is the occasion of public flagellation and high emotion.

Local authorities said the gunmen were planning the attack because they believed the Mahdi was due to return Sunday, and were seeking to remove potential rivals.

"In Shiite Islam there is this very strong millenarian trend, similar to Christian movements that think Christ is about to return,'' says Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan. "So just like some millenarian evangelicals think that the pope is the antichrist, they would see the ayatollahs as ... usurpers of his rightful role."

While Professor Cole is skeptical of the view that such millenarian movements are always triggered by social or economic upheaval, he says, "I'm comfortable in saying that in this particular case this movement that's fighting outside of Najaf is certainly enabled by the chaos in Iraq for the past decade and a half."

Such movements have ebbed and flowed throughout Shiite history and Shiite religious politics have been marked by violent power grabs for centuries. Cole points to the Babi Movement in the 1840s and 1850s in Iran and Iraq as a good example. The movement attracted vast numbers of followers, mostly from the urban lower and lower-middle classes, who believed that the Mahdi was about to return and rid them of their unjust rulers. The group's followers targeted the Shiite religious hierarchy of the time, and sought to assassinate the Shah of Iran in 1852.

General Ghanami said the leader of the group was killed in the fighting, and identified him as Abu Qamar al-Yamani. The London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat reported that the Army of Heaven is loyal to Mahmoud al-Hassani al-Sarkhi, a cultish Shiite leader whose followers have clashed with both foreign troops and supporters of mainline Shiite leaders in Iraq numerous times since the US invasion.

His supporters have fought with those of other militant Shiite clerics, most notably those of Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi, whose men dominate the politics of the southern city of Najaf, and also sought to take control of the main shrine in Karbala last summer from supporters of Ayatollah Sistani, the most revered cleric in Iraq.