More Surge Impressions

The bulk of the escalated troops hasn't arrived in country yet, but the new counterinsurgency plan has been implemented. A pessimistic assessment by the Times:

The much anticipated effort to wrest Baghdad streets from the control of militias and insurgents has been presented in news conferences and public statements as an Iraqi-led operation. Iraqi officials have been out front, announcing arrests, weapons finds and other details, as well as new decrees intended to halt two years of so-called sectarian cleansing. But on the streets, the joint patrols seemed little different from those of the past few years: A handful of Iraqis, acting at the direction of a larger group of Americans, opening drawers and closets and looking behind furniture as they searched for banned weapons or other contraband.

The trouble with this take is twofold: 1) Not even the Kagan-Keane report, much less David Petraeus' field manual, claimed a few weeks is all it would take to see a marked turnaround in besieged city like Baghdad. 2) Sectarian cleansing has been going on for two years, but what about the years before that? Recall that the razing of the Golden Mosque, undertaken with brutal and effective calculation by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was what precipitated the Sunni-on-Shiite violence to the point where "civil war" began appearing in headlines. Before that event, however, a Shiite-controlled military was not spoken of in such dire terms. Why? Because the Shia had the confidence of their numbers, and thus little reason to slaughter their countrymen, who were disaffected and boycotting national elections.

Stopping the vicious cycle where one revenge killing begets another doesn't mean that the devotees of the 12th imam will not continue to "infiltrate" the Iraqi Army — they plainly will in a country where they comprise 60% of the population. But it does mean they'll have good reason to rethink how they express their devotion. The whole point of the surge is to protect Sunnis and mixed-ethnic neighborhoods so that an anxious minority doesn't provoke, by suborning a guerrilla "resistance," a still-insecure majority.

How long will this take? More than a year.

Old Problems Undermine New Security Plan for Baghdad – New York Times

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