Fawaz Gerges blames the Iraqi PM’s divide-and-rule style for the resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq:
Americans learned the hard way that the most effective means of cutting their losses was to co-opt the local population, particularly the tribes, and to turn them against al-Qaida. From 2007 to 2011 it was the so-called Sunni awakening councils or Sons of Iraq – not George W Bush’s “surge” as the received wisdom in the US has it – that made Anbar relatively secure and forced al-Qaida insurgents out of their neighbourhoods. This important lesson has been lost on al-Maliki, whose short-sighted policies have polarised the country further along sectarian, social and ideological lines, creating an opening, a small space, for al-Qaida.
Chotiner gets Exum’s take on the recent events there:
IC: Okay so let me ask you about Iraq specifically. How worried are you about what has gone on there over the last week?
AE: What worries me about Iraq is, if you recall back to the spring and fall of 2004, there was a lot of angst and hand-wringing over how brutal the two US offensives in Fallujah were. The thing that worried me the most was this: if you thought the first battle of Fallujah and the second battle of Fallujah were brutal, the United States Marine Corps, highly trained, did their best to minimize civilian casualties. I worry that the third battle of Fallujah is going to be absolutely brutal. I worry that it’s going to be something that’s much more brutal, much more intense, like Hama in Syria or 1982 or, that’s probably a little unfair, maybe a Grozny-style insurgency, i.e. what Russia did in Chechnya in the mid 1990s. …
IC: The one area in which I feel some optimism is that, I feel like, if the last ten or twelve years have taught us anything, both in Iraq with the Sunnis and in places like the tribal areas of Pakistan, people do not want to live under Al Qaeda rule.
AE: The one thing that I would caution you on is that Al Qaeda has learned. On the one hand, you can’t overcome a crazy ideology, which is always going to alienate people, whether you’re talking about the tribes of western Iraq or the urban middle class of Syria. On the other hand, Hezbollah certainly learned in the 1980s, when they first got to Southern Lebanon. They thought, you know, ban card playing and all sorts of stuff—backgammon—and they learned from their error. I would think that Al Qaeda might have learned from their experiences, too.
Previous Dish on the latest conflict here.
The Dish 