Ceasefire Blues

And so, it begins anew. Although the 7-month ceasefire hasn’t come to an official end, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is again picking up their arms, this time to battle American and Iraqi forces in the Shiite-dominated southern port city of Basra. Local members of ISCI (led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim) and Dawa (led by Nuri al-Maliki) have fled the area. The fighting has recently spread to Baghdad, and Sadr City appears to be coming apart at the seams.

The renewed fighting, and the apparent disintegration of Sadr’s ceasefire, could easily bring about the unraveling of the myth surrounding the surge’s success: that the relative calm is likely to endure. By most accounts, the drop in violence experienced during the last few months of heightened troop levels can be attributed to several factors: the buying-off of Sunni militiamen (who now make up the 80,000-strong Awakening Councils), better American counterinsurgency tactics, successful ethnic cleansing, and the self-declared ceasefire of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia. Of all of these factors, the last may well be the most significant.

If you look at the data, one of the most significant drops in violence occurred in August/September of 2007, directly after Sadr ordered his militia to lay low and put down their arms. At the time, the surge had been going on for several months and funding for the Awakening Councils had been ongoing for months longer. As Ilan Goldenberg notes, “the data seems to point to the fact that the Sadr Ceasefire more then anything else is what caused the drop in violence in the early fall.” Indeed, according to The Seattle Times, “U.S. commanders say the cease-fire played a key part in a 60 percent drop in attacks nationwide since the troop buildup ordered last year by President Bush reached its height in June.”

The apparent unraveling of the ceasefire, then, might well lead to a spike in violence, perhaps bringing us back to the high levels of 2006. If this occurs, our surge strategy will likely fall apart as the underlying strategic flaws become increasingly obvious. As a writer for Daily Kos argues, “if the surge had worked, Iraq would not find itself in today’s precarious situation, relying upon a radical cleric’s fragile ceasefire for [relative] stability.”