If what we’re hearing about the the intra-Shiite fighting in Basra is true, it’s an operation that’s been signalled for weeks, which means it’s been planned for longer than that. It’s also pretty obvious, as Phillip Carter observes over at Intel Dump, that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is using the Iraqi security forces to consolidate his hold on power. Which basically means that the factional differences that were supposed to be resolved in the political arena through reconciliation are being settled in the street with mortar and rocket fire, and that this was the plan for quite a while. [...]
Over the course of a well-needed break for the Easter weekend, I actually got around to reading some printed news, which is how I ran across this interview in the Nouvel Observateur with Iraq specialist Pierre-Jean Luizard. In it he expresses some of the broader strategic flaws of the Anbar Awakening which have been ignored due to the tactical success the strategy has had in terms of reducing Sunni violence directed at American forces. Like most criticisms of the Awakening, Luizard’s analysis begins with the vacuum that passes for the Iraqi state. But Luizard suggests that the dynamic has become [...]
I’ve shied away from discussing the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War because most of the analysis I’ve seen didn’t seem to add anything new to our understanding of the situation on the ground or the terms of our domestic debate. The former remains cloudy and depends largely on whether you believe the Surge has been a tactical success or a strategic miscalculation, and as a consequence, the latter seems reduced to the realm of tactics and policy, to the detriment of strategy and history. A satisfying exception is Simon Serfaty’s monograph, A Bad War Gone Worse, from The Washington [...]
