The history of the Awakening Movement
Posted by Ilan Goldenberg
The Asia Times has an excellent piece chronicling the history of the Anbar Awakening. Apparently, the military had been trying to pursue this strategy of co-opting the insurgency for four years, but every time they made some inroads it got shot down by the White House.
"Don't let the quiet fool you," a senior defense official says. "There's still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the 'surge' has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That's just ludicrous. There's increasing quiet in Iraq, but that's happened because of our shift in strategy - the 'surge' had nothing to do with it."
In part, the roots of the disagreement between the Pentagon and White House over what is really happening in Iraq is historical. Senior military officers contend that the seeming fall-off in in-country violence not only has nothing to do with the increase in US force levels, but that the dampening of the insurgency that took hold last summer could have and would have taken place much earlier, within months of America's April 2003 occupation of Baghdad.
Moreover, these officers contend, the insurgency might not have put down roots in the country after the fall of Baghdad if it had not been for the White House and State Department - which undermined military efforts to strike deals with a number of Iraq's most disaffected tribal leaders. These officers point out that the first contact between high-level Pentagon officials and the nascent insurgency took place in Amman, Jordan, in August of 2003 - but senior Bush administration officials killed the talks.
A second round of meetings, this time with leaders of some of al-Anbar province's tribal chiefs, took place in November of 2004, but again senior administration officials refused to build on the contacts that were made. "We made the right contacts, we said the right things, we listened closely, we put a plan in place that would have saved a lot of time and trouble," a senior Pentagon official says. "And every time we were ready to go forward, the White House said 'no'."
The tragedy here is that four years ago, this strategy might have made a difference. But since then the country has split apart along sectarian lines. You've had massive fits of violence followed by complete political deadlock. Even though we've now managed to temporarily co-opt the elements of the former Sunni insurgency, it's probably too late to try and put humpty dumpty back together again.
I'm pretty skeptical about the first part of this piece. Unless "State Department" is a phrase being used here as a synonym for CPA and Paul Bremer, it seems unlikely that State could have blocked military contacts with Iraqi factions even if it wanted to, unless at least some of the civilians in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and Rumsfeld himself, also disapproved of such contacts. There seems to be a bit of self-excupation going o