Robin Williams and Robert De Niro in the 1990 film, Awakenings.

In the 1990 film, Awakenings, neurologist Dr. Malcolm Sayer (played by Robin Williams) discovers what at first appears to be a miracle cure in the drug L-DOPA. L-DOPA “awakens” patients of a sleeping sickness rendered comatose for decades. Suddenly, these men and women who were thought to be little more than vegetables were thrust into life once more.

There is a moment, a brief glimpse of hope in this film, as the patients experience life once again. It is as though all is well. The drug works miraculously. And then it starts to slip. Leanord Lowe, played by Robert De Niro, is the focus of the story. He transforms slowly from fully “awakened” into an increasingly disfunctional state. This physical withdrawal is accompanied by a descent into rage, hopelessness, and in the end, resignation. One by one the patients are taken off the drug, and slip once again into a perpetual sleep.

The Awakening Councils

Sheik Abdul al-Rishawi, the founder of the Awakening Councils, was assassinated in September 2007.

In 2005 the sheiks of al Anbar Province in Iraq began what has since been termed the Anbar Awakening. Sheik Abdul al-Rishawi formed the Anbar Awakening Council, the first and most prominent in a series of Sunni tribal coalitions whose aim was to ally themselves to the United States forces in an attempt to kill or force al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq out of that country. This alliance was born from the ashes of both a failed US strategy and the overly aggressive tactics of al Qaeda in Iraq. Essentially, the sheiks had become fed up with their guests, who ended up killing far fewer Americans than Iraqis.

Indeed, Abdul al-Rishawi was assassinated two years later, though his cause and the cause of all the Awakening movements continued beyond his death.

These Awakenings were largely funded by the US Government, and coincided to some extent with three important events in Iraq. The first was the promotion of General David Petraeus to the top job in Iraq, and the Army’s subsequent adoption of a modern counter-insurgency strategy there. The second was the surge in troops authorized by Washington.

The third event is less measurable, and coincided directly with the rise of both Sunni and Shiite militias. What has happened over the past few years has been the voluntary ethnic relocation of Iraqis into their own ethno-religious regions. Sunnis have migrated into Sunni areas, Shiites into their own neighborhoods. Tension remains, but the visceral, daily contact between subgroups has diminished. It is reminiscent of Jerusalem before and after the 1948 war, as Jews and Arabs began to sequester themselves off from one another. Peacefulness ensued, if not peace.

It is likely that the Awakenings along with the continous ethnic relocation during that period warrant greater credit for rising security in Iraq than American efforts such as the Surge, though it could also be argued that they never have worked so well had the US not adopted the Petraeus counter-insurgency approach. Essentially there was a great meeting of minds and will that led to what can now be described as a delicate stability in Iraq, a tenous calm. Indeed, US forces can safely say that they are at least on the road to victory (in some sense) in the country that only a year ago seemed a doomed quagmire, expensive and futile and foolhardy.

Now we have a glimpse of what stability may look like in Iraq. The government there has flexed its muscle at least a little, clamping down on Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army with US assistance, and asserting itself as more than just a US puppet. Iraqi Security forces are better trained and equipped, and more importantly, more confident than at any point during the US occupation.

Perpetual Sleep

They are so confident, in fact, that the predominantly Shiite Iraqi Government has proposed disbanding the Sunni Awakening councils altogether, and though they promise to incorporate up to a quarter of the members into regular Iraqi Security forces, that leaves a potential 75,000 armed, trained militia fighters out of a job. When Dr. Sayer’s patients found themselves suddenly losing their newfound power they experienced hopelessness and rage. If this Awakening should falter, or be actively suppressed, I wonder what sort of rage might be felt on the streets of Baghdad, and through al Anbar and beyond?

Already the Iraqi Government has begun to crack down on the Awakening councils, arresting some members, and attempting to disarm or disenfranchise others. One might see this as a natural progression from militia-rule to centralized Government. Another might see this as sectarian politics, with the Shiite majority doing its best to hold on to as much power as possible.

The US is now planning a drawdown of troops. This is a good thing. While there is no possibility of withdrawing completely from Iraq in the near or even distant future, it has become apparent that the Iraqi Government can do more on its own behalf. Whether the choices it makes will be wise is another question, but it is without a doubt beyond American control. We wisely paid the salaries of thousands of Sunni fighters, and thy drove out al Qaeda. If the Iraqi Government will not do the same, what can the United States do to stop them?

The Surge made the counter-insurgency possible. The vision of General Petraeus coincided perfectly with the brave and sensible actions of the Sunni tribes. Security is possible. We can see it on the horizon, and behind it somewhere well out of sight is that elusive peace we once believed unattainable.

But is it all an illusion? Has this all been little more than the effects of a miracle drug soon to wear off, leaving the country in the same sad state it was in two or three years ago? The threat of civil war still looms like a black cloud above everything, far more visible, more tangible than that will o’ the wisp, peace.

~cross-posted at Newsvine.  Join the Discussion!

Over the past five days we’ve been inundated with all sorts of talking points emanating from the usual suspects in the Democratic Party and the leftwing echochamber of the blogosphere that one, the Iraqis, President Bush, and Gen. Petraeus have mirabile dictu suddenly found the wisdom of the Great Man’s pronouncements on Iraq vis-a-vis the “timetable” for the withdrawal of US forces in Iraq freeing them up for General Obama’s coming campaign to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the “real focus” of the “Global War on Terror”. What utter nonsense.

Leaving aside the utter fatuousness of their claims as regards the complex problems in Afghanistan that I alluded to in my article of Monday 21 July of which a greater troop presence is hardly the solution in and of itself there’s the small problem of the fact that the only thing the improved security situation in Iraq has to do with Obama’s magical sixteen month timeline is one of mere coincidence. Contrary to the received wisdom of the braying jackasses in the press who likened the president’s acceptance of a “time horizon” to some kind of volte face on Iraq the president has always been of the position that our troop levels there will be contingent on both the level of security and the Iraq’s ability to “stand up as we stand down”:

“The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists,” he said. “And that is why we are on the offense. And as we pursue the terrorists, our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

Note that these remarks were delivered exactly three years ago in June. Besides, as we all know from our reading of the malarial swamps that constitute the antiwar blogosphere the president couldn’t possibly be backing a drawdown of forces since it is our aim to have a strong US military garrison in Iraq manning those supposedly permanent bases for decades yet to come. Have the Obamaites, in their adoration, begun drinking White House-spiked Kool Aid?

And now comes the charge of the keyboard kommandos of the Kossack Army alleging that John McCain is “lying” about the surge and the Anbar Awakening or worse yet doesn’t understand it at all. Another half-truth masquerading as the truth. Ilan Goldenberg is not a stupid person but he’s leaving out quite a bit of what actually went down in Anbar in 2006.

For most of the war, the US had been employing pretty heavy-handed tactics which consisted of making smash and grab sweeps from FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) which only repeated many of the mistakes of Vietnam and had little effect upon the enemy in that they were overly concerned with body counts and bringing massive firepower to play to kill a few bad guys and then hightail it back to the FOB leaving the locals to fend for themselves. This proved pretty ineffective in Anbar and it alienated the very people we were trying to win over.

Through most of 2005 and into early 2006, General David Petraeus, mastermind of the “surge”, after having served as division commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the war’s early days in Mosul and enjoying some success there by employing classic counterinsurgent tactics, busied himself at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas with writing the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Manual which hadn’t been updated since Vietnam. It was distributed to the Army beginning in 2006 and surge-like tactics started although the extra troops would only get fully in place in the summer of 2007. And this was begun in Anbar province beginning with Tal Afar as related by Col. H.R. McMaster, one of Petraeus’s key lieutenants, and the commander of a regiment of the 3rd Armored Cav, related to Laura Logan in an interview in ‘06:

But Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes that using numbers to measure victory is a mistake.

“Body counts are completely irrelevant. I mean, what is relevant is, ‘Is the population secure so that political development, economic development can proceed?’” he explains.

So the U.S. military began training a new police force right away, recruiting both Shiites and Sunnis to patrol the streets. Schools and markets were reopened. And Col. McMaster was able to bring together religious leaders who hadn’t spoken for months.

American soldiers like Capt. Jesse Sellars have taken on added responsibilities. On regular patrols through the city, he is part politician and part policeman.”

And in another interview last fall, this one with lefty Laura Rozen of Mother Jones, McMaster talked about the early on shift in tactics in ‘06:

MJ: And you guys have had big success doing that in Anbar? Is that right?

HRM: Yes, it’s a huge success in Al Anbar province and there are also successes that were underreported, or maybe not fully understood, previous to that in Ninewa province, which is where our regiment operated and where the First Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division operated before us in Mosul. They really stopped this cycle of ethnic violence predominantly in Mosul between Kurds and Sunni Arabs and other sub-communities within that city of two-and-a-half million people. The success in Anbar has now spread to Baghdad, Babil, Diyala, and Salah ad Din provinces. Ours and Iraqi forces have been able to break that cycle of sectarian violence and create the conditions for sustainable stability in some of the most critical mixed-sectarian areas. This approach of emphasizing population security, breaking the cycle of sectarian violence, rekindling hope among the population, lifting the pall of fear off the people, and then actively engaging the various communities to bring about political accommodation is working at the local level. What’s key now is to sustain that effort at the local level and try to elevate those successes to the national level. Now, one of the things that is going for the Iraqis, and for us in that connection, is how tired they are of the violence. The number one cross-cutting issue is security. My personal experience in Ninewa province has been that at the most fundamental level people don’t really care if it’s a Shiite, a Sunni, a Kurd, or a Turkoman that’s providing them security, as long as that force treats them with respect.

MJ: Is that really true of the Sunni tribal sheikhs?

HRM: If you have a force that’s professional, that’s well led, that treats people with respect, that’s not advancing a narrow sectarian agenda in a way that’s destabilizing to the situation, people will accept that force after a period of learning about that force and meeting the people. It doesn’t happen easily, and it takes what we call an information campaign, a real effort to reintroduce the Iraqi population to their own security forces. When we first went to Iraq we thought, “Hey, there is a big part of this culture that has to do with mediation and we’re going to have to look for Iraqi mediators to really help us with the population.” What we have found is that we were the principle mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role. Now you don’t want to create dependency. A big part of this problem is not just the capability of Iraqi security forces but their legitimacy. One of the ways to do it is you recruit from the population. What we found is probably the best setup is a combination of indigenous forces, mainly in the police force, but also some outside forces too, that help insulate these security forces from some of the tribal pressures associated with criminality, for example, or a particular tribal agenda. So you don’t want a homogeneous force, but a force that is, at least to some degree, representative of the local population.

What the people yammering on about the Anbar Awakening predating the “surge” don’t seem to fully understand is that the additional combat troops (not a large number given the tooth to tail ratio in many US units) are only one part of the overall strategy. As equally important is the shift in tactics and giving the locals a chance to earn the trust of the occupier and take over the task of their own protection. With it comes vastly better intelligence which in counterinsurgency is half of the battle. For most of the war the US Marine Corps had taken up most of the battle in Anbar province including both of the bloody Battles of Fallujah in 2004. But here too the shift in tactics started to take place in the summer of 2006 as part of the overall “surge” strategy as related by a reporter from Stars and Stripes:

. . .Marine after Marine here says a revival of classic Marine anti-insurgency doctrine is helping them turn the tide from a conventional fight toward a sophisticated anti-insurgency that is cutting into insurgent support.

During the last three months, his Marines have begun using bold counterinsurgency tactics, putting companies on the streets of insurgent strongholds where they fight while finessing locals. Some small teams slip from house to house, paying families to put them up for brief periods.

Squad leaders liken the effort to campaigning for office back home: a street-level, round-the-clock effort to be a positive, responsive presence while going person by person, street by street, settlement by settlement between Ramadi on the west and Fallujah on the east.

The moral of this story is that it’s foolish and inane to try and separate out the additional troop part of the “surge” from the larger mission which involves not only more troops in certain areas but a broad-based shift in strategy and tactics on all fronts.

What has not really changed in this, however, is the fact that Barack Obama’s focus hasn’t been on winning the war in Iraq it’s been on simply leaving it behind by whatever means necessary and that ranges from the kickoff of his campaign sixteen months or so ago when he said he would have all US combat forces out of Iraq by March 2008 to his op-ed in last week’s New York Times when he ended by simply stating — “It’s time to end this war”.