Iraq After An Najaf
By George Friedman
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr have reached an agreement to end the standoff in An Najaf, putting in place a cease-fire, providing for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the city and the Mehdi Army from the Imam Ali shrine. With al-Sadr's forces isolated -- and with no other Shiite forces coming to their rescue, and the Iranians backing away and making it clear they never supported him and never provided him with assistance -- such a deal was almost inevitable.
With the rebellion's collapse, the military phase of the Shiite rectification will be over and the political phase will begin. By Shiite rectification, we mean the period in which the United States redefined its relationships with the Shia in Iraq as well as with Iran. Al-Sadr's rebellion -- which served as a warning to the United States of the consequences of backing off its guarantee of a Shiite-dominated state in Iraq -- failed. It failed in large part because the Shiite leadership was not prepared to venture into military confrontation, preferring political negotiation and accommodation.
On the broadest level then, what is the current situation in Iraq?
The original Baathist resistance has diminished substantially. Much of the Baathist leadership is being absorbed into the Interim Iraqi Government, and support for the guerrillas has declined. That has reduced the number and the effectiveness of the guerrillas. The guerrilla war is far from over, but it has not surged for a while and there are reasons to think it cannot surge.
The jihadists under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have been relatively quiet for the past several months. There have been kidnappings and beheadings, but we have not seen concerted action by the jihadists since the summer began. At that time, al-Zarqawi complained the Sunni public was no longer supporting him materially and that he needed more support from al Qaeda. The public interpretation was that al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda were deeply estranged.
The Shiite community -- assuming the An Najaf affair is closed out effectively -- will be following al-Sistani's lead, which means primarily a political rather than military approach. Al-Sistani's goal is to maximize the political space the Shia have in Iraq. He appears to have accepted, out of necessity, the fact that an essentially Shiite government will not be created in Iraq.
The military situation seems to be slowly containing itself. Put differently, the political process in Iraq has increasingly attracted rather than repelled participants. After the capture of Saddam Hussein, for example, some Sunni leaders -- afraid they would be excluded from the political process and linked to the losing side in a guerrilla war -- cut support for the Baathist guerrillas and entered into the political process. In the same way, Shiite leaders, afraid being linked to al-Sadr would cost them post-conflict political influence, also moved into the political process in Baghdad. Baghdad, coupled with all-important local politics, has become more significant at the moment than the military process -- in spite of the activity in that sphere.
What we are arguing here is: Over the course of the summer, the tempo of military activity limited itself and its strategic significance has declined. In both the Sunni and Shiite communities, the military process has been marginalized and is no longer shaping the political process as it did in fall 2003 or in April, for example. The war is not going away, but it is not as strategically significant as it once was.
There also are international reasons for this. The crisis in Saudi Arabia has led to a shift in Saudi policy. The combination of arrests and amnesties has, for the time being, weakened the radical Islamist movement in the kingdom. That has had two complementary results. First, Saudi jihadists operating in Iraq have been drawn back into Saudi Arabia as that front opened up. Second, the Saudi government, which previously had an interest in minimal conflict with the jihadists and therefore was not actively interdicting their movement northward, now is actively mitigating the flow of personnel. This has substantially weakened the jihadist faction in Saudi Arabia.
Iran also has changed its behavior based on events. Tehran has experienced a massive disappointment. It had expected a highly favorable outcome in Iraq from its point of view. Instead, it is watching Iraq's new government working with leaders of the hated Baath Party and the military. At the same time, it has seen many of its clients in Iraq either move toward the political process or -- in the case of al-Sadr -- toward isolation and defeat. Iran has few options remaining in Iraq. Its primary options are international. Most important, it can reactivate pro-Iranian groups such as Hezbollah and allow them to link with al Qaeda, assuming that al Qaeda has an interest in such a linkage.
In a sense, the United States is back in the position it was in after the capture of Hussein. The guerrilla war appears to be contained, if not over. The political process seems increasingly important and the Iraqis themselves are increasingly in control. Of course, that led to the events of April, which led to the Al Fallujah agreements and ultimately to al-Sadr's rising. There is precedent that points to major counterattacks. But there also is reason to believe that, in this case, increased operations are not nearly as likely as they were last winter.
Consider each of the groups. The Sunnis have increasing political power. Guerrilla wars cannot take place without support -- and support for the guerrillas is in the hands of local leaders. They have little interest at this point in supporting losers. The jihadists are having trouble drawing support inside Iraq, and Saudi Arabia is far more inhospitable than it was. The Shia had their moment to rise up during the past few weeks. They did not do it. Unless there is a dramatic reversal in the next few days, which we think unlikely, rising up after al-Sadr is defeated makes little sense.
The violence will drag on. In all three factions there are diehard elements that are committed to continued resistance. Indeed, as in other countries, it is altogether possible that some level of guerrilla violence will become a permanent feature of the political landscape. Consider the IRA or ETA in Europe, or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines. The wars are not strategic. They do not threaten the regimes or even have much opportunity to hold terrain. They are essentially forces of habit, unable to end, having no real negotiating platform, having no purpose, but continuing. The world is filled with such movements and there is every reason to believe this is happening in Iraq. But there is a vast difference between a purposeful, strategic campaign that threatens the survival of the regime and this sort of war by habit: The former makes history; the latter is history.
Some things follow from this analysis, if it is correct:
The primary mission of the United States -- the destruction of Hussein's regime and the occupation of Iraq with an acceptable, not threatening, level of resistance -- appears to be reachable.
The new Iraqi government will be both functional and limited in effectiveness because of built-in tensions between factions.
The Iraq campaign will, in many ways, be closing and the U.S.-jihadist war will be moving into a new phase.
Last winter, after Hussein's capture and the apparent collapse of the guerrilla movement, a great deal of U.S. strategic thinking shifted toward Pakistan, and there was discussion of a large-scale incursion to capture Osama bin Laden. Indeed, some incursions did take place and the Pakistanis were pressured to operate in the region themselves. Nothing came of it because of insufficient forces and weak intelligence. When the situation in Iraq exploded in April, any expansion of those operations was pushed off to the side. We would expect the Pakistani issue to come to the top politically and militarily. Since these events normally coincide with an Indo-Pakistani crisis, we would not be surprised to see deterioration there.
But the most important issue now is not what the United States plans, but what other forces plan:
Iran is deeply disappointed by events in Iraq to say the least. It has limited counters -- since we do not take an Iranian nuclear attack seriously (Iran would be devastated by the response). But they have something more important than nuclear weapons. They have large Shiite communities throughout the Persian Gulf, many of these at strategic points in terms of the oil trade. It is not clear that Iran can trigger a rising among the Shia -- in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, for example -- but that is something that cannot be dismissed out of hand, and it would pose a massive challenge to the United States.
In Saudi Arabia, the ability of the government to contain the radical Islamist rising appears to be substantial, but it is far from a sure thing. As summer passes and the jihadist failure in Iraq is factored in, the radical Islamists will be under heavy pressure to resume attacks. Any instability in Saudi Arabia will inevitably effect American interests and force some U.S. response.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is by many accounts in his last days. In the past, Egypt has had extremely smooth transitions in leadership. There is no reason to believe the next transition will not be smooth, but there remain strong, if suppressed, Islamist forces in Egypt that might choose that moment for reasserting themselves. Egypt is the center of gravity of the Arab world and the foundation of U.S. policy there. Chaos could not be ignored.
The United States has fewer offensive options than al Qaeda and its sympathizers. While the U.S. position in Iraq improves, the incentive on the militants' part to open new fronts in order to spread U.S. forces even thinner than they already are grows. Put simply, if the United States solves its problems in Iraq, al Qaeda must create new problems elsewhere, and there are opportunities. More important, any move of Iran toward alliance with al Qaeda -- linking al Qaeda operations with Hezbollah's for example -- would be extremely dangerous to the United States.
If the situation stabilizes in Iraq before elections, U.S. President George W. Bush will be more likely to win. However, win or lose, we must remember that on the day after the election, Bush will be president and will never face election again. He might be president for two months or four years, but he will remain president. In either case, he will be more concerned about his place in history and his own sense of what must be done than in political considerations. It follows that he will try to shape the war decisively in either case.
Al Qaeda will be facing, in either case, a world in which it has failed to ignite the Islamic masses and in which the general political tendencies in the Islamic world have not only not fulfilled al Qaeda's hopes, but have moved against them. At some point, they will have to assert themselves somewhere. Al Qaeda has political goals and it must generate some movement toward achieving them.
With those two imperatives in mind, the decline in the importance of the Iraqi theater of operations will generate massive forces pointing to further military confrontations after the elections, quite apart from the threat of terrorist actions.
