Enemies Pretending To Be Friends

This takes you to a report by writer Jon Lee Anderson in the November 19th issue of The New Yorker on the effort to “secure” Ghazaliya, a western Baghdad suburb singled out by Gen. David Petraeus as “an area where the military has made pro- gress” (Anderson’s report also covers Amiriya, another Sunni neighborhood, but it notes that much of the rest of Diyala province remains a collection of “horrific battlegrounds”).

(By the way, I know the New Yorker link is a bit screwed up – I wish they’d fix that.)

One of the most important points of Anderson’s report is that we are basically arming Sunnis who used to fight us and hoping that they now will support us in “the surge” (at least one Shiite official said we were arming them without adequately looking into their backgrounds, though the Shiites are hardly blameless either of course).

As Anderson tells us…

A few days before Gen. Petraeus testified before Congress, I met with Sheikh Zaidan al-Awad, a prominent Sunni tribal leader from Anbar province. The last time I had seen him, in 2004, he was full of hostile bluster about the U.S., and made no secret of his identification with the “resistance,” as he described the hard-line Sunni insurgents. Sheikh Zaidan was a fugitive, suspected by the Americans of being a sponsor of the insurgency, and he was living in voluntary exile in Jordan. But when we spoke last fall, in an apartment in Amman, Zaidan told me that he had recently met for informal talks with American military and intelligence officials, because he approved of what they were now doing – allowing Sunni tribesmen to police themselves.

I asked Zaidan what sort of deal had led to the Sunni Awakening (the decision by some Anbar tribesmen to ally themselves with the Americans and fight al Qaeda in Mesopotamia – a shift unforeseen by Petraeus). “It’s not a deal,” he said, bristling. “People have come to realize that our fate is tied to the Americans, and theirs to ours. If they are successful in Iraq, it will depend on Anbar. We always said this. Time was lost. America was lost, but now it’s woken up; it now holds a thread in its hand. For the first time, they’re doing something right.”

Now before anyone gets an inkling that I’m actually trying to promote “the surge” here (which I will never do), allow me to point this out…

Zaidan said that Anbar’s Sunni tribes no longer had any need to exact blood vengeance on U.S. forces. “We’ve already taken our revenge,” he said. “We’re the ones who made them crawl on their stomachs, and now we’re the ones to pick them up.”

Gosh, isn’t that exactly the sort of talk you want to hear from an “ally”? “Well, we’re pretty much bored with shooting at you and blowing you up, so we’ll decide to help you out because you may actually be of use to us.”

(Zaidan) added, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.” There would have to be a lot more fighting before the capital was taken back from the Shiites, he said. “The Anbaris will take charge of the purge. What the whole world failed to do in Anbar, we have done overnight. Baghdad will be a lot easier.”

…

Sheikh Zaidan offered a vision of how the conflict in Iraq could escalate to the advantage of the Sunnis: “I think America will be able to start a Shia-Shia civil war in the south – with the Arab Shia, the tribes, being supported by the U.S. and the Persian Shiites supported by Iran.” He said that this would be an opportunity for the Americans to “cut off the head of Iran’s government and its militias in Iraq.” The Sunnis could help in the fight, he suggested.

Swell (and believe me, if you read Anderson’s great report, you really get a feel for the intense, murderous hatred between the Shiites and the Sunnis, especially the latter towards the former).

I also learned that, in tribal families, it is often the matriarch that encourages the vendetta, often because when a male victim is targeted, other male relatives are targeted also even though they haven’t committed what is perceived as an offense towards anyone, and subsequently, many more of the males are dead. Such was the case with a woman named Um Jafaar who encouraged one of her sons to seek revenge against those she believed responsible for the killing of one of her other sons.

Anderson’s report also tells us about the Joint Security Stations in Baghdad, 34 in all and 3 in Ghazaliya: J.S.S. Casino, J.S.S. Thrasher (named after a sergeant killed by a sniper), and J.S.S. Maverick. This is important to note for the following excerpt…

On the way back to Maverick, the convoy drove past a group of sullen-looking Iraqi police at a barricade, then pulled up in front of a well-tended middle-class home. A young boy opened the door, smiling when he saw Lieutenant (Matthew) Holtzendorff. We went inside, and were greeted warmly by a man in his thirties whom I will call Sabah, and who worked as a civil engineer inside the Green Zone. A few months earlier, Holtzendorff had saved Sabah from being kidnapped by (an) Iraqi police detachment…they had beaten him badly, and, most likely, had planned to kill him. Holtzendorff made a point of visiting Sabah regularly, to make it clear that he was under American protection.

…

Later, I discussed Sabah’s case with one of the unit’s officers. Developing a nonsectarian national police force is an essential part of the U.S. military’s plan to disengage its own troops, but, as the officer saw it, the police were still part of the problem. “Please don’t print my name, or Petraeus will kill me,” he said. “The national police are supposed to be our salvation; all our hopes are pinned on them!” He added, “Balancing the Shia and the Sunni – the politics of it – that’s the hardest part of my job. ‘Hunt bad guy – kill bad guy’ – OK, that’s what I’m trained to do. But they don’t train you for this.”

I don’t know whether or not it still bears repeating that we remain stuck in an unholy mess with a supposed government in Iraq that apparently has neither the will nor (probably) the desire to get its act together, using the time our military has spent for them in pain and blood, as well as their bodies and (in some cases) their lives to accomplish this task. But Anderson’s report truly tells us that whatever is accomplished in Iraq will not take place on terms we have imagined or may ever likely support.

And as we know, “no one could have foreseen this.”