Best Defense

Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Iraq: We went wrong after the surge when we let Maliki stonewall us

By Adam Silverman Best Defense guest columnist The comments to the post regarding Sunni fighters returning to the insurgency are thought provoking. I wanted to take a moment and address a couple of items that stood out to me. The first had to do with the contention in the early comments about the surge working tactically ...

The U.S. Army/flickr
The U.S. Army/flickr
The U.S. Army/flickr

By Adam Silverman
Best Defense guest columnist

By Adam Silverman
Best Defense guest columnist

The comments to the post regarding Sunni fighters returning to the insurgency are thought provoking. I wanted to take a moment and address a couple of items that stood out to me. The first had to do with the contention in the early comments about the surge working tactically and failing strategically. As someone who has been watching this from far (here in the U.S.) and near (in Iraq as an advisor to a BCT that backfilled one of the last surge brigades into Iraq and that was outside the city of Baghdad itself), I think that Mr. Ricks has the correct view of this. Three things contributed to tactical and operational successes in Iraq between 2007 and 2009: the Awakening Movements and our ability to capitalize on that opening where we were not allowed to do so in 2004, the ethnic cleansing and reordering of the districts in the city of Baghdad and other places, and the influx of troops and change in approach that were the result of the surge. 

What led to a failure in the strategy and/or policy was that we were unable to capitalize on the opening through working with the Iraqis to achieve socio-political reconciliation. Every time we tried to do so the Iraqis stonewalled us and we let them get away with it. Moreover, as both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testified before Congress (and I’m paraphrasing here): failure to achieve political and social reconciliation closed the opening created by the surge. My understanding is that the previous administration used its leverage to focus on negotiating an unrealistic SOFA agreement and on setting up provincial elections for 2008, thus allowing the Iraqis to run out the clock on our U.N. mandate as an official occupying power. As such, the top down leverage that was needed regarding reconciliation, which was essential to tether with the bottom-up work (where the tactical and operational successes were occurring), failed to happen. And we didn’t even get what we wanted in the negotiations for the SOFA or the provincial elections! So today what we have is an Iraqi government that is hung through parliamentary electoral results, with varying degrees of legitimacy, and no societal element reconciliation — all of which had to happen to achieve the COIN end state.

Adam Silverman is a culture and foreign language advisor at the U.S. Army War College. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College and/or the US Army, or Cliff Lee.

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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