1115.org

In the days of my youth, when I was a spry, svelte Ph.D. student working hard on my dissertation, my dissertation chairman was a Korean gentleman who occasionally produced some truly amazing English. His all-time best performance was the occasion on which, intending to tell me not to shoot from the hip, he said within the hearing of others: “Don’t speak with your bottom.”

What moved me to share this was all the bottom-up talk emanating from the Bush administration over the last week. This full-throated campaign arguing that the bottom-up progress we have seen in Anbar province represents reason for genuine hope that things will still turn out well in Iraq (eventually) is nothing more than the Bush administration speaking with their collective bottom.

It’s a preposterous claim that doesn’t even stand up to the most rudimentary scrutiny.

Most of the criticism of the bottom-up campaign has focused on the fact that what was due in September was an evaluation of Bush’s surge, and “Bush’s ’surge’ is not responsible for progress in Anbar.” True, but that’s not the most important angle. What matters most, ultimately, is whether there’s reason to expect that these bottom-up forces can succeed in bringing about the changes in Iraq that are necessary. If not, then once again they’re just selling a crock of smelly stuff that we should refuse to buy.

First of all, the over-touted Anbar bottom-up phenomenon is about Sunni tribal leaders standing up to al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). It’s about tribal leaders deciding they’ll tackle the AQI problem themselves rather than leaving it to the national government of Nouri al-Maliki.

So it is well to remember that no matter how hard the Bush administration sells AQI as the enemy in Iraq, they are only a very small factor in the ongoing violence. Here’s Andrew Tilghman, who used to be Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes, in the Washington Monthly:

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I’ve heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” according to Nance, “is a microscopic terrorist organization.”

Tilghman documents a pattern whereby the U.S. military in Iraq (for reasons best known to itself) consistently overestimates the role of AQI in Iraqi violence. Major attacks are initially ascribed to AQI. When it turns out later that they had no role in the attack, statistics are not corrected.

But if Tilghman’s word is not good enough for you, then maybe you’ll accept the word of retired Gen. James Jones, who was commissioned by Congress to head an independent commission to evaluate the readiness of Iraq’s army and police to take charge of the country’s security. He agreed in congressional testimony last week that “two percent or fewer of the adversaries that we’re facing in Iraq and that the Iraqis are facing in Iraq are foreign jihadis or AQI affiliates, [and] 98 percent or more are Iraqis fighting amongst Iraqis for the future of Iraq”.

So when Sunni tribal leaders enter into local initiatives to fight AQI, that’s addressing only 2% of the ongoing violence. Hard to see that as a major force for turning things around in Iraq.

More tellingly, the Anbar bottom-up revolution is actually a symptom of the biggest problem facing Iraq, and not a solution to it. That problem, of course, is national reconciliation. And the biggest obstacle to national reconciliation is the deep distrust that Sunnis have of al Maliki’s Shi’ite government. So it’s probably not a helpful sign when Sunni tribal leaders decide they’ll work with the U.S. to tackle the AQI problem themselves rather than trust the national government of Nouri al-Maliki to address the problem, or work with the national government.

You have to be more duplicitous than Tony Snow and Donald Rumsfeld combined to argue that these bottom-up developments in Anbar province offer any real hope for national reconciliation, which still remains the key to meaningful progress in Iraq.

(For the record, yes, I did just say that Gen. Petraeus and President Bush are more duplicitous than Tony Snow and Donald Rumsfeld combined.)

The fact that Sunni tribesmen are fed up of AQI, and are willing to openly oppose this Sunni terrorist group, does nothing to help achieve national reconciliation in Iraq. It’s just the only straw these drowning men could come up with. They simply have nothing else. Which is to say, they have nothing.