The Wonk Room

Bush’s Iraq Policy: Cheerleading For Warlordism And Hoping Provincial Elections Will Cure All

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The big story out of Iraq today is Iraqi security forces entering parts of the Sadr City section of Baghdad, in accordance with the terms of the Iranian-facilitated truce between the Iraqi government and representatives of Muqtada al-Sadr. It remains to be seen if the fragile calm will hold, though residents seemed to have welcomed the government presence. But even as Iraqi security forces work to eliminate street thugs and extend government control in this important part of Baghdad, U.S. policy continues to support a separate band of street thugs in the Sons of Iraq effort.

Too many people have disregarded the dangers (pdf) posed by these efforts, as was highlighted earlier this year by Ian Moss and me and also Steven Simon in his recent Foreign Affairs piece. David Ucko, in a recent piece published in World Politics Review, ignores the threats of the new U.S. policy of supporting local warlords and offers a vague non-solution largely based on the continued fetish for elections as the cure-all solution for Iraq’s problems.

The Sons of Iraq effort –- which now involves more than 100,000 Iraqis who are organized in community-based security forces –- first got underway about a year and a half ago. As the central goals of the surge –- to advance Iraq’s national reconciliation and jumpstart Iraq’s political transition –- appeared more elusive, last summer the Bush administration shifted the metrics for success by talking about so-called “bottom up” reconciliation -– a bait and switch that encouraged Iraqi leaders to kick the can down the road on the central questions related to power-sharing in Iraq. In addition, it heightened tensions between Iraqi factions, with the Iraqi central government expressing opposition to these efforts and dragging its heels in integrating these forces into the Iraqi government.

Too many advocates of the Sons of Iraq effort have turned a blind eye to serious abuses by members of these newly empowered militias. Alexandra Zavis of the Los Angeles Times yesterday captured some of the problems in an unfortunately all-too rare piece of journalism from the ground in Iraq that depicts the unvarnished truth about many of these militiamen –- that they act like mafia dons shaking down local businessmen for protection money and avenging old grudges. In a piece for the New Yorker magazine last November, Jon Lee Anderson profiled some of the gangs and murderers that are working with the U.S. military.

What’s the solution to these problems? Ucko takes up the increasingly popular argument -– recycled from 2004 and 2005 –- that provincial and national elections will cure all and will somehow lead to a less fractured and more consolidated national government. Analysts like Michael O’Hanlon have been making a similar argument centered on the importance of elections as a reason for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. This argument should no longer get a free pass. It represents the triumph of hope over the bitter experience of the last five years –- two elections and a constitutional referendum didn’t bring the country together in 2005, and it’s not likely to do so given the continued fractures in Iraqi society. The elections argument also begs the central question of whether the various Iraqi leaders agree on the basics of what Iraq and should be. Given the lack of tangible progress on constitutional amendments that were promised to leading Sunnis to be done in the first four months of the Iraqi parliament –- a promise left unfulfilled two years later –- it is hard to see how another set of elections will magically settle these power-sharing disputes.

The current U.S. policy in Iraq amounts to supporting independent warlords governing a patchwork of fiefdoms around Iraq. We should stop pretending otherwise and look to help Iraqi factions address the core issues that divide them, rather than continue to enable the slow fragmentation of their country.