The Petraeus Narrative

I've allowed my comments on the Petraeus Report to slip to the backburner, so let me return to that theme.

Historians all normally tackle a mass of inchoate facts that they must shape into narrative. General Petraeus basically had the same job in writing his report. It was very clear from his testimony to the House committee that he had constructed his narrative and stuck to it like a catechism.

The Petraeus narrative is as follows:

1) After the U.S. invasion, it was imperative to rebuild the Iraqi state.
2) U.S. measures at first went as well as one could legitimately expect, given the many problems. However, the bombing of the mosque at Samarra by al-Qaeda unleashed the pent-up sectarian divisions in Iraq.
3) Sectarian violence then threatened to spin out of control, and coalition forces were unable to protect the civilian population.
4) After the height of the problems in December 2006, American forces and their Iraqi associates slowly began to reassert a measure of authority.
5) A sudden and dramatic transformation occurred during the summer of 2007, and now the success in Anbar province provides a model to apply to the rest of the country.

Neither the House nor the Senate committees sought to challenge this narrative at all. I'm not so sure that was helpful. Where, for example, do we fit in the bombing of the UN headquarters building in the Canal Hotel? Or there is the Imam Ali mosque bombing also in 2003. These events took place in the distant past, relatively speaking. Presumably Petraeus regards the problems they provoked as being under way to solution before the Samarra bombing. Yet American and Iraqi authorities have been eager to find evidence that these were the product of al-Qaeda's strategy of stirring up sectarianism.

I don't know, even this event, when al-Qaeda's Iraqi mastermind formally declared war on Shia Iraq seems to have been swept under the carpet. I'm afraid if I were marking Petraeus's exam paper, I'd give him a C for this narrative. Samarra was just another episode in a long series. If the Shia didn't respond as vigorously, it might be because they lacked the means to do so.

Have We Met the Enemy?

I've been watching the Petraeus Report hearings via C-Span's web site. For some reason it wasn't working on my PC last night, so I couldn't finish the Senate portion, but I have watched all of the Joint House committee hearings. I'll make some comments over the next few days about some of what was said.

I'd like to start with something that bothered me about some of the House members. One or two seemed to have no clear idea about who the enemy was in Iraq. And then, I thought, it's actually not all that clear because even Petraeus himself admitted that the situation had changed during the time American forces have been in the country.

Let's review the players briefly:
(1) American forces attacked Afghanistan, whose government declined to extradite Osama Bin-Laden on American terms. Enemy: Al-Qaeda and Taliban.
(2) Coalition forces attacked Iraq, out of fear that the government possessed weapons of mass destruction and that they might form an alliance with Al-Qaeda. Enemy: Saddam Hussein.
(3) Coalition forces in Iraq become the target of a resistance movement of unreconstructed Ba'athists and al-Qaeda opportunists. Enemy: Ba'ath Party Iraqis and al-Qaeda.
(4) Iraq, under occupation, teeters toward civil war, as Moslem rivals of Sunni and Shia traditions began sparring. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda opportunists continue to attack a large concentration of American forces in Iraq. Enemy: Extremists and al-Qaeda.
(5) Once large-scale terrorism breaks out in Iraq, Sunnis in other Arab countries and Iranian Shias send assistance to their co-religionists in Iraq. America decides Sunni helpers are good and Shia ones are bad. Enemy: Extremists, al-Qaeda, Iranians.

You can see the problem here for a congressperson whose time is taken up with fundraising for the election war chest, getting federal funds for his constituents, and fretting about the young state politician with an eye on going to Washington. They cling to the idea that the enemy in Iraq is al-Qaeda, because that's the only consistent thread, and it plays well with the folks.

However, one cannot go through that list without realizing that the French government was right all along. Overthrowing Saddam without anything coherent to put in his place would only make matters worse, because he was a force for stability in the region, despite all his troublemaking. I'm hard-pressed to come up with a parallel for this from American history, or even the history of other countries.