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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/05/iraqi-insurgents200905?currentPage=1Heads in the SandThe so-called Sunni Awakening, in which American forces formed tactical alliances with local sheikhs, has been credited with dampening the insurgency in much of Iraq. But new evidence suggests that the Sunnis were offering the same deal as early as 2004—one that was eagerly embraced by commanders on the ground, but rejected out of hand at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
by David Rose WEB EXCLUSIVE May 12, 2009
The history books will record that the so-called Sunni Awakening—when many of Iraq’s Sunni tribes, in return for money and other considerations, began cutting deals with American forces and turned away from their nationalist insurgency—got under way in late 2006. The Sunni tribes, concentrated in Anbar province, had long been the backbone of the insurgency. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs had exercised a domination far out of proportion to their numbers (some 20 percent of the population), and after the American-led invasion, suddenly excluded from power and influence, they exacted a bloody revenge. After the Awakening, the Sunnis helped obliterate al-Qaeda’s networks in most of Sunni Iraq, a development that many believe did more to dampen the violence than the subsequent “surge” in American troop numbers. Having reached a peak in 2006 and early 2007, the casualty rates for combatants and civilians quickly plummeted. ... The Sunni Awakening, when it did finally come, provided welcome relief, says Jerry Jones. But the cost of delay is quantifiable. “From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error, and if we hadn’t been fighting the Sunni, we’d have had a lot more resources for dealing with Shia militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr in places such as Baghdad. It didn’t have to happen. Those lives did not have to be lost.” To put the matter concretely: if the compromises accepted later by the Bush administration had been accepted when a rapprochement was first broached by the Sunnis, in 2004, some 2,000 Americans and thousands more Iraqis might not have died.
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After the invasion, in 2003, the al-Gaaods were convinced that the Americans would have the sense to work with Iraq’s existing elites. “Because we’d been educated in the States, people looked to us for help in dealing with the Americans,” Jalal al-Gaaod recalls. The Americans, however, “didn’t even have translators, and, mostly from ignorance, they were treating the sheikhs with huge disrespect. That’s when things started falling apart, because when someone disrespects the sheikhs, they will fight for their honor.”
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The Americans who attended still speak of what they call the “Amman surprise” with something approaching wonder. Besides Jones and Wischkaemper, the American group included James Clad; Evan Galbraith; one official from the U.S. Embassy in Jordan; and, perhaps most important of all, a clutch of senior American officers serving in Iraq, all from the Marine Corps, including Mike Walker, the civil-affairs chief. Among the 71 Iraqis were sheikhs, businessmen, and academics. There were also several former senior officials in Saddam Hussein’s government and four generals who had served in his military. Most of the Iraqis were Sunni.
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“We could have solved several problems at once,” al-Hamdani told me when I met him last November in Amman. “Many of the security problems America faced would never have existed if they had listened to us in 2004.” Besides fighting al-Qaeda, the force would starve the insurgency of recruits, many of whom had been driven to fight for lack of better options. “The people from the old army were without any job, any control,” al-Hamdani says. “The insurgency was paying them, and there were guns everywhere.”
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Why did these two promising initiatives die in the cradle? In retrospect, the lost opportunity is made at once more haunting and more ironic by the fact that the idea behind the initiatives was once regarded favorably by Donald Rumsfeld himself. The historian Mark Perry has obtained access to internal Pentagon documents that chart the progress of earlier proposals for curbing the insurgency by working with the Sunni tribes. One is a classified memo to Rumsfeld that advocated a policy of rapprochement as early as October 2003. It was written by Major General Ronald L. Burgess, the intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld was reportedly sympathetic to the concept. But according to a Pentagon official who has reviewed the documentary record, the U.S. military and civilian leadership in Baghdad ignored the memo entirely, while a copy sent to Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was returned to Burgess with a handwritten comment: “They are Nazis!” Wolfowitz says today that, while he often did refer to ideological Ba’thists as Nazis, he cannot recall this particular incident.
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