U.S. Reconciliation Chief Says Sunnis Could Return to Insurgency

The U.S. military official in charge of supporting reconciliation efforts in Iraq says that unless the Shiite-led Iraqi government takes concrete steps to embrace the Sunnis, the new, mostly-Sunni ex-insurgent militias supported by the U.S. could return to insurgency.

Shiite officials are like an “enormous lion very, very afraid of a tiny mouse,” Army Colonel Martin Stanton told a blogger conference call this afternoon. That mouse, however, isn’t so tiny: over the past several months, hundreds if not thousands of irregular groups of (mostly) Sunni militiamen — called “Concerned Local Citizens” by the U.S. military — have been formed with U.S. support. Stanton, like other military officials, estimated their number at 67,000 men under arms, with 39,000 of them operating under “security contracts” with U.S. and allied forces. Ever since the U.S. began cooperating with Sunni tribal figures who agreed to turn against al-Qaeda, the Shiites have feared that U.S.-supported Sunni gunmen represent a threat to their political dominance.

Stanton believes Shiite reluctance to bring the so-called Concerned Local Citizens into the formal security forces and to hold provincial elections — expected to benefit the Sunnis, who boycotted the last round of provincial voting in 2005 — might guarantee precisely the result that the Shiites fear. “How long before all of these people trying to reconcile get discouraged at the continuous rebuff and come up with their own Plan B?” he asked. Plan B, Stanton assessed, might be either formal secession or to “pick up insurgency again.” When I asked what the timetable might be for the Sunni Concerned Local Citizens to go to Plan B, he replied, “God, man, if I knew that, I’d be so much happier with my job than I am right now.”

For months, the Bush administration has suggested that the Sunni split from al-Qaeda in Iraq augurs the end of sectarian warfare. Ambassador Ryan Crocker contended in his September testimony to Congress that the entrance of the Sunnis into anti-al-Qaeda security partnerships with the U.S. amounts to what he calls “bottom-up reconciliation” by creating a way station into a partnership with the Shiite-led central government, who will hire them into the formal security forces and demonstrate “the readiness of the central government to provide resources” to the Sunnis. President Bush has portrayed the process as all but inexorable. “When you have bottom-up reconciliation like you’re seeing here in Anbar, it’ll begin to translate into central government action,” he said in a September trip to an airbase in Anbar Province.

Stanton’s comments place doubt on both elements of the bottom-up-reconciliation approach. First, the Iraqi government isn’t, despite promises, “providing resources” to the Sunnis. “I’d be lying to you if I said, ‘Yup, they’ve got a national-level plan for reconciliation and they’re all working toward it assiduously with big smiles on their faces,” he said. And second, the ex-Sunni insurgents haven’t made “a fundamental break” with armed struggle against the Shiites. While they’re “less likely to go back to insurgency if the government does anything at all to meet them close to halfway,” Stanton said, “nobody here is gonna take any option off the table for themselves.” The Sunnis haven’t “crossed the Rubicon” away from insurgency.

It’s hard to say how fast the clock is ticking. Stanton qualified his statement by saying that the Iraqi government hasn’t fundamentally “rebuffed” the Sunnis. But he’d be “nervous” if the same level of half-hearted outreach continues through the summer. And ultimately, actual reconciliation operates on a much slower timetable than many in the U.S. have patience for.

“In terms of true reconciliation, as in absolute peace and acceptance of everything my enemy has done, that’s a generational thing,” Stanton said. “To get these guys where they instinctively don’t distrust and hate each other is gonna be generational.”