Iraq's Caldron Cools Down

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
September 4, 2008
Pg. 16


Overshadowed by Hurricane Gustav and the Republican convention, a remarkable event took place on Monday. The United States officially handed off control of Iraq's Anbar province to the Iraqi government.
If Anbar province rings ominous bells, it should. Anbar was the deadly heart of the Sunni insurgency, the base from which al-Qaeda in Iraq operated. Four American contractors were ambushed there in 2004; the charred bodies of two of them were strung from a bridge.
That Anbar, which encompasses most of western Iraq, would be sufficiently peaceful to relinquish control this soon was considered wildly optimistic just a year ago. Now, the key question — one that bears strongly on when the U.S. can pull out of Iraq with confidence that it won't disintegrate into sectarian conflict — is whether the Shiite-led government in Baghdad will use the handoff to keep the peace or to settle old scores.
Three factors helped produce the turnaround in Anbar:
*Al-Qaeda in Iraq brutally overplayed its hand, going as far as killing Sunnis who did not follow strict Islamic laws. U.S. leaders in Iraq astutely seized that opportunity, paying Sunni leaders to turn on al-Qaeda, which they did. Al-Qaeda was swiftly defeated.
*The 2007 surge in U.S. troops that President Bush and Sen. John McCain endorsed (and Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden vigorously opposed) quickly improved security.
*The U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, implemented new and better tactics that accelerated training and integrated U.S. and Iraqi troops.
Those gains are still fragile, however.
The Shiite-led Iraqi government is at best unenthusiastic about following through on America's promises that the 100,000 Sunnis now on the U.S. payroll would be melded into Iraqi security forces. Credible reports suggest that the government has even arrested key Sunni leaders, raising fears that it might use its new power in Anbar to exact revenge on Sunnis for the decades under which Sunnis, led by Saddam Hussein, were the privileged elite.
This matters to Americans as much as it does to Iraqis. The goal of the U.S. effort is to leave behind a government in which all the country's warring factions are represented and can resolve their differences peacefully. Obviously, if one faction arrests leaders of the other, that won't happen.
The government also is dragging its feet on scheduling provincial elections. Those would give Sunnis the kind of political power that buys a bigger stake in Iraq's future — unlike now, when so many are shut out and dependent on the U.S. because of earlier election boycotts. But the Iraqi parliament failed to pass an election law before its summer recess. Now back, it needs to make it a priority.
Encouragingly, there is much jockeying among a wide array of factions ahead of both provincial elections and parliamentary elections due next year. Rather than breaking down on pure sectarian lines, different Shiite and Sunni groups are vying among themselves. About 25,000 U.S. forces will remain as backup in Anbar, keeping the pressure on the Iraqi government to keep its promise.
"We would not have even imagined this (Anbar hand-over) in our wildest dreams three or four years ago," said Iraq's national security adviser. True. The issue now is whether the U.S. can successfully press the Iraqis to consolidate those gains before political pressure here and in Iraq forces a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops.
 
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