SEVERAL ARTICLES IN the news in the past few days have raised questions about the success and even the wisdom of American efforts to turn former insurgents--and Iraq's Sunni Arab population in general--into allies against al Qaeda. Stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times highlighted the risks of this approach, and also made a number of assertions about the supposed "failures" of the Baghdad Security Plan that require a response.
Huh? Failures? Remember, we want to divide our enemies. You know, so we can divide and conquer?
Of course, while this is a complex enemy, if the enemy wasn't splintered, our goal would be to split them apart. So don't go all loopy in panicking over a state that we'd dream of if we fought a monolithic enemy fighting a coordinated campaign against us and the Iraqi government.
Fragmenting our enemies is a good thing:
Over the last two years, I've said that we need to atomize the enemy in Iraq. As long as the enemy can mass in company-sized units, they can overrun police stations. If they can mass in platoon strength, they can wipe out road blocks and patrols.
If Iraqi patrols, road blocks, and police stations can't hold alone, it is more likely that more sophisticated forces with tanks and artillery and air power will be needed to fight the enemy. Right now, that's US forces.
Make it so that the enemy can only gather squads or fire teams, and low tech Iraqi light infantry and police can fight the enemy effectively. Iraqis can provide reaction teams to reinforce threatened Iraqi units.
If the Iraqis can fight effectively, we can pull back sooner into large bases to deter Iranian attack until the Iraqi army defeats the insurgency and then builds up conventional defenses.
And back to the Weekly Standard piece, they note (and ask):
But make no mistake about it: this is a strategy for success, if it works. We get them to start by working with us against a common enemy (can you believe it--AQ is the common enemy between us and the Sunni Arab community?), then we work to gain their trust, then we work to make the current government comfortable dealing with former insurgents (and almost any government would be initially resistant, by the way, to negotiate with former rebels), then we work to transfer the insurgents' trust in us to trust in the government, and work to make that trust reciprocal and permanent. It will take time and good fortune and hard work, and it may fail. In the meantime, violence is way down in Anbar and people who had been our sworn enemies are now swearing to fight al Qaeda both in Anbar and in Baghdad. Any objective observer would see these for the positive signs that they are.
The Baathists screwed up big allying with the Islamists (as I noted in "Center of Gravity" in June 2004). They thought they could use the Islamists to spark a national revolt against American forces but instead the Islamists are giving all Iraqis a foreign enemy to rally against.
I predicted it and saw the trend beginning three years ago when I saw the jihadi-Baathist alliance drive the suspicious Shias to the side of the new Iraqi government. And the effects of the jihad on Iraqi soil is turning the Sunnis against the jihadis.
These things take time. Let's spend the time to win.
UPDATE: Der Spiegel notices the intra-Sunni fighting, too. Although it seems to discount the impact of this trend and strangely relies on a Dubai-based researcher who claims the jihadis are on the verge of victory in Iraq.
