Experts say the latest surge in Iraq is likely the Bush administration's last throw of the dice, and if Republican unity holds through September, the bond will disintegrate in the spring.
By Dominic Moran in Tel Aviv for ISN Security Watch (29/06/07)
The Bush administration's Iraq policy came under direct attack from two Republican senators this week amid growing anxiety that the current troop surge in Iraq is failing.
All five reinforcement brigades are now on the ground in Iraq, bringing US forces now in the country to 157,000 troops and support personnel.
Around 10,000 US troops are currently engaged in an offensive on Baquba in Diyala province intended to sever alleged militant supply routes and prevent car bombings in Baghdad.
In the capital, the troop build-up initially succeeded in forcing the Shia Mahdi Army off the streets of Sadr City and led to a drop in violence according to statistics. However, a series of massive car bombs and a recent upswing in sectarian death-squad murders indicate that the impact of the deployment may be beginning to wane.
"I was in Baghdad for all of April trying to assess the surge and I think it is certainly the right policy. But I wonder whether there are enough troops on the ground to deliver its military aims," Dr Toby Dodge, senior fellow for the Middle East at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told ISN Security Watch.
Monday's bombing of the al-Mansour hotel in central Baghdad, in which six US-allied sheikhs were killed, was a significant blow to US efforts to draw Sunni tribal groups in restive western al-Anbar province into a direct confrontation with al-Qaida fighters.
Senior fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, Peter Beinart, told ISN Security Watch: "It seems to me that while you could point to some perhaps small improvements, the larger trends in Iraq are negative. The basic level of political insecurity and military conflict is as high as ever."
Unable to stand
A US congressional investigative committee report released on Wednesday found that the surge had not contributed to an overall lessening of violence.
The study established that while Iraqi forces were increasingly involved in combat operations, their progress toward assuming national security responsibility was mixed and likely to take years.
An excerpt from the report leaked by congressional staffers to The Washington Post stated that the Pentagon "cannot report in detail how many of the 346,500 Iraqi military and police personnel that the coalition trained are operational today."
The congressional report found "strong evidence" that some US-trained security personnel were involved in sectarian killings and other illegal activities, while noting the Pentagon's failure to keep track of weapons and equipment provided to Iraqi forces.
After praising UK and US efforts in reconstituting the Iraqi army, Dodge said, "The Iraqi police is dreadful. At all levels it's penetrated by militias, it's highly unreliable and is viewed as such by the Iraqi population and, if anything, is a major player in the civil war and not a break upon it."
To Beinart the issue is not training, "but whether these people are loyal to something called Iraq, or to the government of Iraq. And there is not much evidence of that. […] The basic problem is that you don't have a government that has loyalty across sectarian lines."
Unnamed US commanders in Iraq admitted to the Associated Press this week that Iraqi police and army units had proved incapable of holding gains won by US forces in Baquba and Baghdad, seriously endangering the current US military strategy on which the surge is premised.
Governance chaos
The difficulty in building a coherent Iraqi security force is both a reflection and symptom of ongoing political squabbling within Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's deeply divided coalition government.
The two main Sunni Arab political blocs withdrew their 55 deputies from the 275-seat legislature on Sunday, demanding the reinstatement of controversial speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani.
Al-Maliki, who heads the Shia al-Dawa party, was forced by intense US and British pressure to include al-Mashhadani's political bloc, the 44 MP Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF), in his government. Intended to foster inclusion, the broad coalition has instead brought paralysis.
The prime minister's position had already been undermined by the withdrawal from the legislature of 30 MPs linked to Mahdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr, whose support was crucial to al-Maliki's ascension to the premiership.
Sunni Arab parties have also decried the issuance of an arrest warrant against Culture Minister Asad Kamal al-Hashimi (IAF) who is being sought in connection with his alleged role in the attempted assassination of an independent legislator in 2005. The IAF claimed in a Tuesday statement that the confessions of two gunmen who implicated al-Hashimi were extracted under torture.
Referring to the Sunni Arab boycott, Dodge said, "I think there is a great deal of resentment. They believe the Shia parties in the government have done nothing to stop the partisan delivery of government services and death squad activities. So I think what they are doing is signaling their frustration at the lack of a truly national unity government."
"Many powerful Shias in the political [system] don't want that because for them bringing Sunnis in politically is not as much of a priority as consolidating power and resources for their own," Beinart said.
The US is seeking the passage of a controversial oil bill establishing the sharing of revenues along sectarian and ethnic lines and allowing the privatization of Iraqi oil fields.
"The idea of an oil law that guarantees Sunnis some share of oil wealth is a good idea," Beinart said. "But I think one has to be pessimistic […] that its effects on the ground would be strong enough that it would be able to change public opinion among Sunni Arabs."
"The impact of the oil [law] depends on its final shape," Dodge said. "If the Kurds get everything they want that will exacerbate sectarian tensions. If there's a national oil company with meaningful control over present and future oil reserves that might act as a basis for some form of consensus building."
While achieving the 130 votes necessary for the passage of legislation in the absence of the three political blocs is possible, the non-involvement of the largest Sunni Arab parties will cast a pall over major bills passed in their absence.
"There is too much focus on the passage of largely irrelevant legislation through the parliament when the purging of sectarian actors would be a much better start," said Dodge.
Senate revolt
On Tuesday, US Republican Senator George Voinovich joined the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Richard Lugar, in criticizing Bush administration policy on Iraq.
According to Reuters, Voinovich's office sent a letter to the president "expressing his belief that our nation must begin to develop a comprehensive plan for our gradual military disengagement from Iraq."
Voinovich told reporters that while he did not favor a "precipitous" withdrawal of US troops, redeployments should begin now.
Lugar specifically mentioned the 2008 election in a Monday night address to the Senate in which he called on the Bush administration to draw down troops from Iraq and redeploy within the region before campaigning made securing agreement on partisan initiatives more problematic.
He alleged that current policies were testing the capacities of the US military and had damaged the nation's diplomatic standing.
White House spokesperson Tony Snow rejected the legislators' concerns, asking for more time to allow the surge to take hold.
"If this gathers momentum it could be highly problematic," Dodge said.
"I think the larger and more important dynamic is that the one thing the Senate can do is to block funding. And whenever they have been called to account they haven't. I think, coming into a presidential election year, they will be less willing to do that, not more," he added.
Nevertheless, the Senate revolt is a significant blow to Republican efforts to build a united front on Iraq ahead of the 2008 elections. A further crisis is expected in September when war funding bills and progress reports from Bush and the leader of US-led forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, are expected to reignite debate.
To Beinart, the senators' public disavowal of White House policy "underscores how difficult it is going to be to sustain Republican support in September, and the inability of the Bush administration to move past September and downplay it as a watershed. The best case scenario I think you could imagine for Republicans is that they hold together in September and their unity collapses in March."
Beinart explains that the importance of Lugar's speech lay in the fact that he embodies the conservative center of the GOP: "Lugar is one of those rare members of the Republican party in the Senate who is considered both independent-minded and widely respected but is not considered a liberal or moderate."
Democrats are keen to keep up the pressure on the White House in coming months after succumbing earlier this year to Bush administration pressure to pass war funding measures.
Asked if the surge is a last throw of the dice, Dodge said, "Probably. If they get through September then the surge will run through to February." At that point, if the Iraqi administration was deemed at fault, "then that might mean the removal of the al-Maliki government."
Beinart said "the gradual weight of [US] public opposition to the surge and to America's large presence in Iraq, which is now virtually universal among Democrats and widely held among independents, is now breaking through to the public and, I think, making it virtually impossible to sustain politically the US presence there for much longer."
Dr Dominic Moran is ISN Security Watch's senior correspondent in the Middle East.