The Insurgency
From nearly the beginning we have heard that Americans regarding insurgency in Iraq have asked: Who are these guys?
Also from the beginning, the answer has clearly been shifting and complex. To date, (and a very late date it is) I don’t recall seeing any attempt to address the question head on, in a comprehensive fashion. What I have seen is a peripatetic series of snapshots defining what some particular element in the insurgency might be at some given time. While I have neither the sources nor resources to put together what would like to see, I will attempt to sketch things in to the degree that common sense would suggest, and an intent observation of media coverage and much reading would permit. In so doing, I would hope to offer a starting point for consideration of what is clearly a vital question.
‘These guys’ are willing to fight and die. We are talking motivations. I will propose those motivations are many and various, but perhaps the most important point of all is that they act, variously mixed, simultaneously on both individuals and groups. The ‘players’ can be actors in many scenarios at the same time.
It began with something inevitable: Iraqis of whatever stripe were going to be resentful of an alien, i.e. non-Muslim, occupying force. How quickly this would start, how wide and deep it would go, and how steeply it would rise could not be exactly predicted, but it would happen. Likewise all Iraqis would be suspicious of the motives of a nominal international presence overwhelmingly dominated by Americans. Americans, Iraqis knew, were interested in their oil.
As his regime was being driven from power, Saddam and his acolytes engaged the insurgency. I rather doubt, however, this ever had, or would have been likely to garner, any significant support. It was clear most Iraqis, Sunni, Shia and Kurd alike, were quite glad to be rid of Saddam along with his, by then, pervasively thuggish cronies. On the other hand, Sunnis understood that an Iraq run by a majority Shia would not only end traditional Sunni dominance, but would likely open to reprisals against them. They could reap the whirlwind they had so assiduously sowed for so long. For that reason, predominantly Sunni Anbar province – populated with non-Baghdadi, non-cosmopolitan Iraqis - offered fertile ground in which an insurgency might take root and grow. At the very least, Anbar was a place where eyes might be averted, and ‘things’ be allowed to proceed. It was good territory for recruiting resistance to an Iraq which was all too likely to be anti Sunni, and under the influence of a non-Muslim foreign power. Al Qaeda in Iraq – initially a non Osama affiliated entity – would find good pickings in Anbar for its radical agendas.
The initial heart of the insurgency, then, were disaffected Sunnis, protecting traditional Sunni dominance, and, as they saw it, striking against an infidel invader. In this, Al Qaeda in Iraq, with a foreign core of leadership and, in the main, a locally recruited Sunni force, played a relatively small, if virulent, role. (Al Qaeda in Iraq was never assessed at more than10% or so of the total insurgency.) What is certainly true, however, is that a primarily Sunni rising was the only part of what we saw in Iraq that closely fit the profile of a classic insurgency. The Sunnis were insurgent against us and a nascent Iraqi government expected to be hostile to their interests.
The insurgency in majority Shia Iraq played off of a contention for power and influence within the Shia population. As Anthony Shadid lays out in his Night Draws Near, the exultant release from Saddam’s repression initiated something like a Shia religious revival. This exacerbated a struggle for authority within the Shia community that had its roots in the recent past. The clergy in the Shia world is far more influential than is the case in Sunni communities. They exercise political power in addition to spiritual influence and magisterial authority (i.e. the administration of Shiria law). The leadership of the Shia clergy is vested in a community of Ayatollahs - men of unquestioned religious devotion, accomplishment and scholarship. When we invaded, the leader of the Shia religious community was the Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, but there was an incipient rival. A decade before another well regarded Ayatollah, Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, broke with his brethren to begin energetically championing the cause of the urban and rural poor in Shia Iraq. Almost of its nature, the religious aspect of Sadr’s cause gravitated towards hidebound traditionalist Islam. This was a populist movement, however, and its demagogic dimension of did not escape his fellow Ayatollahs - or Saddam Hussein. Saddam had Sadr assassinated in the late 1990s, along with a couple of his sons. The Sadr movement died away, or rather went underground. There remained one son: Muqtada al Sadr. When Saddam was driven from power, and the repression of Shia Iraq lifted, the upsurge of the ‘old’ Sadr movement became a dramatic part of the scene. Muqtada - young, by all accounts feckless, and by no means an Ayatollah - was vested with his father’s mantle and (at least) ostensible control of the movement. The movement quickly fielded its own militia: the Mahdi army. Muqtada’s authority over the movement (or the Mahdi army) is not well comprehended, but he appears to be wielding his influence with an eye to becoming a power.
The relationship of the situation just outlined to the insurgency is complex. For quite a while the Ayatollah al Sistani held to a line that emphasized civil peace (and our interests). The Shia were the dominant polity and the Americans championed democracy. If things worked out, the Shia would wind up dominant and in control of the ‘new Iraq’. Both the Sunnis and their Al Qaeda elements were NOT interested in ‘things working out’ and did not hesitate to employ violence to keep the pot boiling. The first shock came with the attacks on participants in a long banned pilgrimage observation early in 2004. With that, the gauntlet on sectarian conflict went down and has not been taken up since - although Sistani still managed, more or less, to keep the lid on for some time. The Mahdi army, however, was a joker in the pack, and would from time to time take revenge against the Sunni community. As Sunni predations multiplied, the Mahdi army and other Shia elements (e.g. the Badr Corps) would come to play the role of defender of their communities, and then morph into agents of ethnic cleansing. As this evolved, the Sadr forces, the Badr, and other Shia forces became rivals for power and influence. None of this Shia activity, however destabilizing to Iraq as a whole, follows a classic insurgency profile. Only insofar as fundamentalist leanings, especially manifest in the ‘traditional’ Sadr movement, took the form of a boiling anger against the ‘alien’ occupation forces, did these violent disruptions take on aspects of a classic insurgency. This was rather, in General David Petraeus characterization, an ethnocentric struggle for power and resources in an oil rich state: a struggle between Sunni, Kurd and Shia, and between elements in the Shia community.
The tangle only gets worse from there. To this point we have pretty much cited the sorts of motivations conventionally dealt with in thinking about societal contentions. But the chaos of looting at the inception of the American effort in Iraq helped to empower a whole other set of motivations. That lawlessness, all too much in line with the thuggish reality of the departing regime, opened to criminal activities of all sorts and at all levels. There were many reports that at least some of the looting was highly organized and operated on a massive scale. All kinds of associations, from incidental and petty, to organized criminal groups, to familial and tribal interests quickly came to see vast opportunities to enrich themselves from two monumental floods of wealth. First and foremost was Iraq’s own oil riches, but then, in addition, there was clearly going to be an immense flow of American monies pouring down upon Iraq.
Criminal activity and political corruption go hand in hand, and neither has any use for any more stabilization than serves their own narrow interests. The convergence of this with insurgent activity was all too predictable, quickly realized, and remains pervasive right up to the present. It constitutes an immense can of very nasty worms that fits a classic insurgency profile in only one aspect – it is an enemy of all social stability and order. It is a problem at once deadly, pervasive, and elusive, animated by prospects for rewards sometimes easy and sometimes immense.
Finally, some role for Iran in post invasion Iraq was inevitable. How consequential and what directions it might take were going to be a function of how things actually played out. However that may be, there were two likely enduring concerns. First, a ‘failed-state’ Iraq would not be in Iran’s interests; second, a weak Arab state on Iran’s borders was in their interests. In those regards a fine line to walk would exist between supporting destabilizing violence and containing it.
As I have tried to sketch in, the Insurgency is associated with many motivations, sometimes conflicting, and all too often overlapping. The pervasive nature of Muslim resentment of an alien occupying force and a suspicion of its motives underlays everything. The Sunni/Shia problem, and the problem of the Sadr forces versus the more traditional Shia elites (not to mention further divisions within those elites) can only be resolved politically. The ubiquitous criminal problem calls for an effort that American forces might contribute to, but assistance from locals, so critical to success, will always find self-interested treachery in play. Ultimately the criminal problem can only be dealt with after the larger political resolution is achieved. In the end, a classic insurgency strategy, the only truly substantive thing we have done, addresses only a part of the problem. For the rest, we await.
While George fiddles, Iraq burns – and we bleed.
For an update on the political situation see Tom Friedman’s NY Times Op-Ed for Wednesday, October 24, 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24friedman.html?_r=1&;hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
7:10:13 PM 
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