Iraq, the unraveling (VII): tribes vs. Baghdad

If you haven’t yet reviewed the papers from the Midwest Political Science Conference, here’s a little gem that will tell you more about Iraqi politics than a dozen Pentagon PowerPoints. It goes by the deceptively sleepy title of “Preliminary Results From Voices Of The Mada’in: A Tribal History and Study of One of Baghdad’s Six Rural Districts,” and is by Adam Silverman, who was an advisor to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq last year, but who emphasizes that his views, opinions, and conclusions are his, not the brigade’s, the division’s, the Army’s, the Pentagon’s, Joe Torre’s, or anyone else’s.

His findings:

• Shiite sheikhs, as well as Sunni ones, perceived the central government as a subsidiary of the Iranian government. “Even by Shia, … the members of it are viewed as either Iranian agents or Iranians.”

• The central government isn’t providing services, and so is disconnected from the tribes. “The lack of tethering … of governmental structures to the most powerful socio-cultural dynamic in Iraq, the tribal system, is worrying.” This lack threatens to undo the political gains of the last couple of years. “The concern is that unless the population layer, which is tribally oriented, is fully activated and brought into the mix, the hard work, grounded in the COIN reality of empowering the lowest levels,…will fail.”

• The two groups with “broad based indigenous support in Iraq are the Sawha/SOI who are tribally oriented and the Sadrists.” I am not quite sure what to make of this conclusion, except that certainly isn’t where the U.S. government has placed its bets.

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