Six Months

I left home three a half months ago; I’ve been in theater two and a half months. With the turn of the New Year, many articles in the press took the time to opine about where the war in Iraq is going. The next six months in Iraq, in particular, got a lot of attention. Columnist Thomas Friedman has been poked fun of for writing way too many times that “the next six months” will determine the future of Iraq. One blogger of note, even coined the term as a “Friedman Unit.”

With the rise of the Sunni “Tribal Awakening” last summer and the formation of Concerned Local Citizens (CLCs) – groups of Sunni Iraqis who rejected the austere Salafist view of Islam imparted by members of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) – the tide of violence swung from away from coalition forces to members of AQI themselves. That is, many Iraqi Sunnis came to recognize AQI as more of a threat than Coalition Forces and began fighting AQI cells, in effect taking cities back from AQI control one neighborhood at a time. As more CLC groups were formed, Coalition Forces initiated a program to sponsor CLCs, paying each CLC member $300 a month. Estimates in the press put current CLC levels between 70,000 to 90,000 members throughout Iraq.

Anbar Province, once notorious as a haven of the Sunni/AQI insurgency, transformed with the rise of CLC groups and the increased number of US troops under the surge. Today, what’s left of AQI has fled north to Ninawa Province, concentrating in the vicinity of Mosul. As many press reports and military spokespersons have noted, AQI is on the run but is not beaten; they still have the ability to stage attacks and are holding on tenaciously. As I write this blog entry, Operation PHANTOM PHOENIX is underway in northern Iraq taking the fight to AQI and hitting them hard.

Sunni CLCs are both a benefit and risk to the fledgling Government of Iraq (GOI), which is comprised mostly of Shi’a. CLCs are a benefit because they directly contribute to security in their own cities, hasten a return to normalcy, and are driving AQI out of populated areas. They are a risk because they are, in effect, a large militia who are being paid, for now, by the CF and eventually will need to be incorporated somehow into Iraqi society, either by integration into the Iraqi Army or job/vocational training. The Shi’a, who for years were marginalized under Saddam’s regime, fear a resurgent Sunni populace, especially a well-armed one.

Meanwhile in Baghdad and the predominantly Shi’a south of Iraq, a six-month peace treaty of sorts was arranged with Muqtada al-Sadr (MAS), a populist Shi’a cleric who nominally controls the Jaish al Mahdi (JAM) or Mahdi Army. JAM has an associated political group, Office of the Martyr Sadr (OMS), named for MAS’s father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, a Shi’a cleric murdered by Saddam’s security forces in 1999. The first six-month freeze expired at the end of December, 2007. There is talk that MAS, who currently is incommunicado pursuing further religious studies, will announce another six month treaty.

These two broad trends – CLCs and the MAS Ceasefire – are big contributing factors to the improving security situation in Iraq. The other major factor was the troop surge announced by President Bush just over a year ago, which brought five extra Army Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) to Iraq bringing the total number of BCTs to twenty. (A successful counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) is dependent on more boots on the ground.) The surge is over now and each of the extra five BCTs will not be replaced when their fifteen month tours end.

There has been much speculation about which of these trends is most responsible for the improved security condition in Iraq. They likely affected each other concurrently in ways that are synergistic. But what happens next?

Which brings us to the next Friedman Unit; by July, there will be fifteen BCTs in Iraq. While there is improved security for now, will it last as more BCTs leave Iraq and are not replaced? The GOI still has a long way to go in establishing itself as a viable government. They will need to deal with the CLCs, pass key legislation, and the fledging new Iraqi Army will have more on its plate dealing with what’s left of AQI all with less US BCTs.

I go home in 1.6 Friedman Units.