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David’s Army: Can former insurgents stabilize Iraq?

FOREIGN POLICY: What did you think of U.S. Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s recent testimony before Congress? Is the so-called surge working?

Toby Dodge: General Petraeus had some undoubted successes to sell. There has been a ferocious debate about the metrics—certainly August is an odd month because of the intensity of the heat, so conflict tends to drop off a bit. However, I think violence has undoubtedly dropped off compared to 2006. Iraq, especially Baghdad, was in the midst of a civil war in 2006. In 2007, the surge has stopped or put a pause on that civil war. In terms of violence, that’s a success story, although the violence in 2007 is also higher than it was in 2004 and 2005.

The problem with Ambassador Crocker is that he didn’t have much to give. Crocker was doing the best he could without having much to work with.

FP: Some Iraq observers argue that the surge is essentially a fortunate coincidence: that it has coincided with a dampening of violence simply because some neighborhoods have been cleared of different sects. Would you dismiss that view?

TD: I wouldn’t dismiss it, but I wouldn’t say it is the major explanation. Up through February when the surge started, there was a very powerful, coordinated attempt to cleanse Baghdad of its Sunnis. As that was happening, government services in the western neighborhoods [of Baghdad] stopped. For example, there is no bank between Yamuk and Fallujah.

What the surge has done is bring down suicide bombings and constrain the effects of the religious cleansing that was driving out the Sunnis. If you drove through western neighborhoods in Baghdad like Mansur at the beginning of the surge, you’d find empty districts. If you move through them today, you find communities that have been rejuvenated. The markets are open, the shops are open, and people are there. The argument is, though, to what extent is that sustainable?

FP: Petraeus argues that keeping these communities apart is going to lead to broader political reconciliation on a national level. But do those ideas connect—separation followed by broader political agreement on an oil law and federalism?

TD: It’s a very fair question. Petraeus has repeatedly said that there is no military solution. But by deploying the American military, he is disincentivizing violence. And to be frank, Moqtada al-Sadr has been offered a choice: Do you use your militia to kill Sunnis, in which case the full force of the American military will be deployed against you, or do you come into the political process on your platform of Iraqi nationalism and play politics?

FP: Unless it can actually get into neighborhoods and provide necessary services, is there a future for the Iraqi government?

TD: I don’t think so. The fundamental cause of all these problems is the collapse of the Iraqi state. I was living in Baghdad in April 2003, and it was amazing to watch the institutions of the state disappear. You would see men running out [of buildings] with computers, then desks and chairs, then the plumbing and electrical wiring out of the walls. The state was dissembled, taken away, and put in people’s houses. And what the looters didn’t do, [Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul] Bremer’s de-Baathification did. It broke the institutional memory of the state.

On that basis, we don’t have a failing state or a collapsed state—we simply don’t have a state. If you stand in the Green Zone and look over the blast walls, the state doesn’t go much beyond that. The Iraqi state’s ability to deliver public goods to the population is crucial for drawing that population back into the state. If you look at the recent BBC/ABC poll, all the indicators—on jobs, water, and electricity—are down from presurge levels. There is a militant pessimism. First and foremost, the state needs to be rebuilt. And that is an international problem and it needs an international solution.

FP: What about Anbar province? Is the strategy of empowering groups like the Anbar Salvation Council working?

TD: The first thing to keep in mind is that the Anbar Awakening was a purely indigenous event that happened before the surge started. A series of Anbaris collectively and diffusely revolted against the heavy hand of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was enforcing a very vicious, austere form of Islamism. And so they kicked back. The American Army, quite rightly, encouraged that, and pushed it forward.

But you run the danger of empowering social forces that could clearly be one-sided in a civil war. You lessen the danger of that by integrating these people into the police force and the Army. There has been an upsurge in applications of Anbaris to go to the police force and the Army. We need to take that manpower and integrate it into state institutions. The great problem there, which needs to be overseen, is whether the government allows these people to join and be paid by the central government.