The Fleeting Success of the Surge
Humanitarian agencies reckon that there are 750,000 Iraqis in Jordan and 1.5 million in Syria. Fewer than 30,000 have returned, and many of them will simply join the ranks of the 2.4 million who are classified as "internally displaced persons"--living in Iraq but unable to return to their old neighborhoods because they are now run by sectarian militias.
In truth, Baghdad is nothing like normal and still some distance from safe. The number of sectarian killings is down, but few Sunnis dare to venture into Shi'ite neighborhoods, and vice versa. U.S. military commanders, whose efforts have led to the sharp reduction in violence, have been cautioning against reading too much into the statistics.
"Nobody says anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases," General David Petraeus told journalists on Dec. 6. "There's nobody in uniform who is doing victory dances in the end zone."Petraeus' words may have been directed at Washington, where some Administration officials have been crowing about the success of the military surge strategy. Iraqis living in exile don't need to be told it's too soon to celebrate.
Baghdad may be safer than it was, but people like the Awadis worry that the gains of the surge are temporary and predicated on a massive American presence. They point out that Iraq's political leadership has failed to use the relative calm to engineer any real reconciliation between the majority Shi'ites and the Sunnis. While U.S. troops have battled al-Qaeda in Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala, the Iraqi Parliament has made little progress on critical legislation in more than a year. And partly because of massive government corruption, improvements in basic services like electricity, water and fuel have lagged behind security gains. Baghdad gets an average of eight hours of electricity a day, about half the prewar level. So while there's a trickle of refugees going home, many Iraqis continue to leave Baghdad. Here are four reasons families like the Awadis are not yet packing their bags for home.
The Killers Are Still at Large
The U.S. military has recruited thousands of Sunni insurgents to join the fight against jihadist groups like al-Qaeda, but the Shi'ite militias mainly responsible for last year's sectarian carnage remain largely untouched.
The Sunnis Remain Out in the Cold
But many Shi'ite leaders see Sunni groups as a long-term threat--a fifth column within the armed forces. The distrust is so deep that many Sunni fighters injured in battles against al-Qaeda have to be taken to U.S. military hospitals because they would not be safe in the Shi'ite-controlled Iraqi medical system.
Crooked State, Crippled Services
While politicians in the protected bubble of the Green Zone argue in circles, rampant graft has left Iraq devoid of any meaningful governance. Transparency International, which monitors corruption worldwide, recently ranked Iraq as the third most corrupt country in the world, ahead of only Burma and Somalia.
There's No Political Leadership
In a year and a half in office, Al-Maliki has proved incapable of rising above narrow Shi'ite politics. -
TimeYes, the Surge is working; violence
is down. But it's still there, and the reasons it's down may be that we armed (again) one side, and have paved the way for the continuation of the civil war that has been playing out in Iraq since we removed the only restraints on sectarian violence.
Almost 10% of Iraqis now live in neighboring countries. having fled, in many cases, for their lives. Slightly more that that are still living in Iraq, but not in their homes; they've been driven out by the other sect.
Those who see the Surge only as a military action see that the violence has indeed gone down. But they don't see all the reasons why it has, and they fail to remember exactly
why the Surge was implemented.
Those who remember the reasons given for the Surge see that the Iraqi government has done little with what we have given them.
And then there is this: "Baghdad gets an average of eight hours of electricity a day, about half the prewar level."
But the Surge is working, and we all should be dancing in the streets. We'll have to do the dancing, because Iraqis sure aren't.
