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To further follow up on Matt's post and Spencer's article, I'd like to bring us back to this post by Marc Lynch:
I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday (among three people who have never discussed the issue before, and from much of a very knowledgeable and experienced audience based on post-session conversations) about where Iraq was heading: towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state. As I've argued repeatedly, this is the most likely effect, intended or otherwise, of the Petraeus-Crocker tactics. The US is empowering local actors at the expense of the national level, while both communities are fragmenting at a remarkable rate. The Sunni side is divided among the various insurgency factions (their efforts at forming a Political Council notwithstanding), the various Awakenings (which are themselves internally divided, bickering over power and personalities), tribes and local leaders looking out for their own, and an al-Qaeda movement which peaked last fall when it launched its abortive and self-defeating bid for hegemony with its ill-fated Islamic State of Iraq project. On the Shia side, the UIA has fragmented, the Mahdi Army has fragmented (though reportedly Sadr has used the ceasefire period to try to sort things out), Badrists and Sadrists are fighting in the streeets, Sistani has lost influence and his aides are being murdered at an alarming rate, and as Jon Alterman has pointed out there are some 144 competing militias in Basra alone. This kind of fragmentation might help the US in its tactical maneuvers at the local level, and buy local stability in the short term. But it is absolute anathema to any kind of national deal.Indeed, which is why I can't even begin to share Spencer's optimism about Iraq's future. Spencer writes that "there's breathing room for negotiations," but I have to wonder who is supposed to be negotiating. The tribal strategy has not created two blocs in Iraq capable of negotiating with one another. Even if Shia rifts have healed (and it's unclear that's actually happened), US efforts have empowered local, not national or even regional, actors in the Sunni regions. This has reduced violence but, as Lynch points out, has also served to push any kind of national reconciliation into the distant future. We're engaged in anti-state building; it's difficult for me to imagine a strategy that could have been better designed to preclude the emergence of a strong central government. Moreover, given that a strong central government is the most likely precondition for an American withdrawal from Iraq, making such an entity impossible is virtually a guarantee that American troops will be in Iraq for the foreseeable future. That only 30-50 US soldiers will die per month rather than 80-100 is small consolation. --Robert Farley
