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Analysis: Peace, Without Politics

Council on Foreign Relations

December 3, 2007
Author: Greg Bruno

U.S. fears of a return to violence in Iraq after the September slaying of the Pentagon’s most prominent Sunni Arab ally, Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, have gone unrealized. Weekly attacks (PDF) against coalition forces dropped 55 percent between June and November, military officials say. Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution, calls the decline in violence "really quite stunning” (FT). CFR Senior Fellow Stephen Biddle, who recently returned from Iraq, says local cease-fires and the recruitment of former combatants to serve as de facto peacekeepers has been “extraordinary and...very surprising.”

But security improvements are only part of the story in Iraq. Political gains—another stated aim of President Bush’s “surge” of additional combat troops—are harder to spot. A declaration of principles to map out the U.S. long-term presence in Iraq has drawn fire (BBC) from Iraqi opposition groups. An analysis of the agreement by intelligence consultant Stratfor notes the document “implies that U.S. military bases will be established in Iraq” for years to come. Meanwhile, Shiite legislators have expressed anger over a U.S.-backed bill that would make it easier for former Sunnis loyal to Saddam Hussein to rejoin the political process, one of eighteen “benchmark” issues Washington has pushed. A parliamentary debate (AP) on the bill in Baghdad on November 25 ended when lawmakers loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr began “pounding their fists on their tables in protest.” A second political benchmark, the distribution of oil revenue, has also come under protest, complicated by oil deals signed (Oil and Gas Journal) by the semiautonomous Kurdish Regional Government.

In light of Iraq’s political fits, U.S. observers are piling on the criticism.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.