‘We have made a deal with the devil’

June 9, 2007

For a while, part of the administration’s war policy in Iraq was disarming sectarian militias. Now, U.S. forces are trying a different tack — the opposite tack.

The worst month of Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl’s deployment in western Baghdad was finally drawing to a close. The insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq had unleashed bombings that killed 14 of his soldiers in May, a shocking escalation of violence for a battalion that had lost three soldiers in the previous six months while patrolling the Sunni enclave of Amiriyah. On top of that, the 41-year-old battalion commander was doubled up with a stomach flu when, late on May 29, he received a cellphone call that would change everything.

“We’re going after al-Qaeda,” a leading local imam said, Kuehl recalled. “What we want you to do is stay out of the way.”

“Sheik, I can’t do that. I can’t just leave Amiriyah and let you go at it.”

“Well, we’re going to go.”

The week that followed revolutionized Kuehl’s approach to fighting the insurgency and serves as a vivid example of a risky, and expanding, new American strategy of looking beyond the Iraqi police and army for help in controlling violent neighborhoods.

Apparently, U.S. forces have not only aligned themselves with dozens of Sunni militiamen, we’re now cooperating with sectarian militias, working outside the Iraqi security forces, that include insurgents that have attacked Americans in the past. What’s more, we’re allowing them to procure weapons and we’re granting them the power to arrest other Iraqis.

“We have made a deal with the devil,” said an intelligence officer in the battalion.

The dynamic is not without complications.

To the Americans, the fighters on both sides appeared nearly identical. They wore similar sweat suits and carried the same kind of machine guns. “Now we’ve got kind of a mess on our hands,” Salge remembered thinking. “Because we’ve got a lot of armed guys running all over the place, and it’s making it very hard for us to identify which side is which.”

Might these militias turn on the U.S. sometime soon? No one knows.

“Let’s be honest, the enemy now is not the Americans, for the time being,” [Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman, a leader of the Sunni Dulaimi tribe who works in Anbar and Baghdad] said. (emphasis added)

What could possibly go wrong?

“What could possibly go wrong?”

Everything. Especially if the Shias decide to make the Yanks pay as every bullet, bottle of water and MRE goes thru Kuwait and thru southern Iraq.

Taking sides in a civil war is asking to get involved in said Civil war. Leads to a lot of blood. You can ask Athens what the price was for taking sides in the Syracuse revolt was.

  • The problem with a total ignorance of history is the repetition of unnecessary mistakes. It’s hard to tell which is worse – the administration’s inability to imagine more than one outcome of their actions or their woeful ignorance of both the region and the nature of civil wars.

  • There’s no worry about repeating the mistakes of history if you’re continually revising and rewriting it, with the help of a lapdog media.

  • Well… Bush keeps saying that our biggest problem in Iraq is Al Qaeda. Since it’s Sunni militia that’s going after AlQaeda (also Sunni, but, presumably, not local), then our work is done; they’re standing up for themselves. So can we now pack up and leave? Like, yesterday?

  • If another BushCo member or Rethug candidate says “we’re better off without Saddam,” someone may want to press them a bit.

    I personally agree the world is better off without him, but are the R’s so sure they still believe that?

    If I understand this correctly, we supported the nominally-Sunni but basically “in it for himself” warlord-turned-dictator Saddam through the 1980s because he was warring with our “true” enemy, the Shia-led Iran. We armed him, helped fund him, and sent Rumsfeld to shake his hand.

    Then, in 2003, we changed our minds and overthrew Saddam, who was holding the sects under control through sheer force, and women had rights (alas, the same right to be tortured and killed as anyone else, but secular rights nonetheless). One alleged reason was because Saddam was a bad person who used WMDs and mass capture and killings against his own people – i.e. we did it in belated defense of the Shia (who, to further complicate the story, we had encouraged to rise up in 1991 only to then abandon them and allow Saddam to slaughter them). The real reason, of course, was our national machismo needed bloody salve because a bunch of Sunnis committed a heinous act of terrorism on our own soil.

    In 2007, in an apparent fit of post-post-9/11 thinking, we have decided that the Sunnis are more helpful to us on the ground and the Shia are too close with Iran who we once again dislike, and so now we are going to fund, arm and befriend Sunni warlords in the hope that it will help bring order. Will we next send Rummy to shake hands with one of them and acheive stability by letting him become a dictator?

    So we’ve come full circle: we overthrew our old friend Saddam to take part in raising and installing the new version of Saddam, minus secular rights for woman and plus another betrayal of the Iraqi Shia (and did I mention unleashing previously pent-up tensions between Turkey and the Kurds? And destroying all of the country’s infrastructure along the way?)

    What am I missing here? I just don’t understand how the international trust and respect for the US has fallen so far when our actions are so consistent and princpled. . .

  • I dunno- what’s really the problem? That some U.S. soldiers want the militias to look more conventional- wear uniforms?

    This is what the Special Forces does already. This is what the military already did in Afghanistan and what militaries and security agencies and police forces have successfully done the world over for ages, and still successfully do today. Even if you go back to old military history, you have the old Conquistadors and Union army defeating native Americans by hiring native scouts and warriors. And look at the French and Indian wars.

    It’s easy to read too much into that “for the time being” line. I’ll be the first to say that we shouldn’t just brush it off, but– people speak imprecisely all the time. It’s certainly possible, albeit I don’t know how likely, that these people have no idea of turning on American forces in the future at all. It’s just too easy to start taking something like that too seriously too quick, and then you turn it into a self-fulfilling thing. You start probing the people you’re suspicious of, and since you’re so suspicious, they naturally notice it and think, “What’s this guy got going on here?” In a blink of an eye, you’ve turned them into the ones who are worried about you breaking faith, unjustifiably. The best way to keep faith with people is just to show them that it’s worthwhile to work with you and that you’re not going to screw them. If these militias aren’t threatened by us and we even benefit them then they won’t screw us unless they’re stupid.

  • It might be bad, but there’s bad and then there’s worse. These soldiers have to start accepting that we’re not winning over there, we’re not winning by the strategy of propping up Iraq’s military and security forces, and if we’re going to win, it’s going to look something more like this. It’s going to take more time for Iraq to be stable enough for the conventional forces to keep the peace. There are obviously huge problems with relying on the military and police that just haven’t been solved yet. At least if you go to a specific militia, you know more what you’re getting- they know their own guys. It’s not a hodgepodge of people signing up for U.S. military training for unknown and various reasons.

  • If the idea that we could spread democracy to any country as easily as spreading crops- just lay down some seeds and water- sounds cockamamie, that’s because it is cockamamie. Rumsfeld and the rest of them sold us some magic beans.

  • This all comes back to the fact that this nation still can’t clearly express who we are fighting in Iraq and why. I don’t buy the “the enemy of my enemy …” bit anymore. We did that in Afghanistan when the Soviets were the occupiers and those that we thought were our friends caused 9/11.

    We’re fighting enemies of the moment with allies of the moment. That’s the worst situation to be in. The folks we were trying to kill yesterday we are arming today and we may be trying to kill them again tomorrow. Our GIs will be killed because they thought they knew what the program was, but now the rules are becoming too fluid.

    “Let’s be honest, the enemy now is not the Americans, for the time being,” That quote is our canary in the coal mine. It’s time to get out.

  • The enemy of my enemy is my friend …
    unless of course the friend of my enemy is also the friend of my friend …
    then my enemy is also my friend…I think…
    Oh crap,… a civil war with many players makes it all so confusing, especially when they all dress alike and carry the same weapons, and keep quoting the same worn out, dated proverbs.

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