In December, 2006, President George W. Bush ordered a surge of American troops into Baghdad and its environs in a last hope they could buy time for the Iraqi government to broker an agreement that could then stop the violence.
No deal emerged, but something else happened: the violence itself had become so extreme that the Sunnis themselves had turned on Al Qaeda, and turned to American forces for help.
Life with Al Qaeda was more than the Sunnis had bargained for, with torture and murder as agents of discipline, and the two groups from the beginning had two different aims: Al Qaeda wanted a war to the death that would break up Iraq in the process, while the Sunnis wanted to exercise power in a viable country, and now saw a power-share with the Shiia as not quite the nightmare they thought.
They had tried to rebel, and been killed for their trouble, but this time the surge gave them cover: this was the start of the ‘Anbar Awakening,’ when Sunni tribes joined American forces to end the insurgency, and drive out the jihadist fringe.
From Anbar, the tide flowed to Diyala and Baghdad: As the Sunni threat faded, the Shiia started to turn on their extremist militias and helped coalition forces to bring them to heel. Groups called ‘Concerned Local Citizens’ sprang up throughout the country, and worked with the army, enforcing security.
“Hell is over in Anbar,” Michael Yon would write in September. In December, he added, “In the spring…Ramadi was the most violent place in Iraq. But the insurgency there has been finished…the only shots the Marines have fired have been practice rounds on the range.”
Militarily, the Sunni revolt was a force-multiplier, allowing the Americans and the Iraqi army to accomplish in concert what none could have done on its own. But it did something else that was still more important: The citizens councils assumed a new life as political units, making deals with coalition and government forces in a step in the movement towards national union that eluded the brokers in Baghdad so far.
Sunnis who months earlier were killing Americans were now fighting beside them, clamoring to join the government they had tried to destablize, pledging cooperation in exchange for regional power, and jobs.
At the same time, Shiia and Sunni tribes had been holding meetings, and striking a series of regional deals. “The provincial governments have been working together almost in spite of the national government,” said a Democratic congressman who had gone to Iraq in December.
“American experts…wasted the past few years assuming that change in Iraq would come from the center,” as David Brooks put it. “They are finally acknowledging that the key Iraqi figures are not in the center, but in the provinces and in the tribes.”
Bush hoped, wrote David Kilcullen, for a “grand bargain’ at the national level” that would end the country’s divisions. “Instead, we are seeing the exact opposite: A series of local political deals has displaced extremists, resulting in a major improvement in the security level, and the national government is jumping on board with the program. Instead of the coalition-led top-down reconciliation, this is Iraqi-led, bottom-up, based on civil society rather than national politics. And oddly enough, it seems to be working so far.”
So far, nothing has gone as expected, in the very strange case of Iraq. Al Qaeda and the Shiia allied with Iran wanted to break up the country and drive out the Americans by racheting violence up to inhuman levels, but it was this violence that drove the Sunnis to the Americans, and then to the Shiia, in search of a deal.
Violence drove the Shiia into wanting to take the deal, created the interest in common that seemed to be lacking, and bolstered the need to cohere. Americans tried to build an Iraqi state that sidestepped the local religious and tribal affinities out of a fear that they would be divisive.
This was not effective, and it was the tribes that rose up against their tormentors and moved towards union, in the interests of staying alive. Bush and Iraq had backed by mistake into their solution. Stranger things happen, but not all that often. But this is how history works.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
