Insurgency
and Counter-Insurgency In Iraq
might be the best introduction to the subject. Ahmed Hashim worked in Iraq two
times in 2003-04 and 2005 advising the U.S. military. He also did extensive
research with dozens of quotes by Iraqis on the resistance to the U.S.
occupation. While he covered the goals, organization, tactics and U.S. response
to the insurgency, he might have done his best work on what caused it focusing
upon Sunni grievances.
Hashim
wrote that Sunnis joined the insurgency for many reasons from nationalism to
honor to revenge to pride to religion, but to him the loss of identity was the
most important. When the British created Iraq in the wake of World War I they
gave power to the Sunni community even though it was a minority. For the
following decades Sunnis came to believe that their interests were the
interests of Iraq. The 2003 invasion destroyed that system and threatened their
world view as well. They lost their status, their privilege, and believed that
the Americans, the Shiites and Kurds were marginalizing them. Decades of
Baathist propaganda and the rise of Salafism in the 1990s also made many Sunnis
look down on Shiites and when they took over the state in 2005 it increased the
identity crisis. Despite all that not all Sunnis immediately opposed the U.S.
occupation. The majority took a wait and see approach. Hashim believed that the
Coalition Provisional Authority could have co-opted the community, but instead
not only ignored it, but instituted policies such as disbanding the military
that made Sunnis feel like victims. The author makes a convincing case that
this list of grievances that started right after the overthrow of Saddam are
the main factors and those can still be found at work to the present day.
There’s
also a section on how U.S. strategy failed, which is still relevant today
because the Iraqi security forces are largely doing the same thing today. The
Americans did things like failing to rebuild Iraq and restore services. It
never dealt with the militias which challenged the state’s authority. It
struggled to create an effective police and army. It carried out mass arrests
which enraged Sunnis and short term security sweeps which allowed the militants
to leave when they started and return when they ended. Many of these are still
apparent in Iraq. Baghdad had no policy for rebuilding war ravaged areas in
2017 and many of those places still have destroyed and damaged housing and poor
services. There are still militias in the form of the Hashd al-Shaabi who have
even more power today than when Hashim wrote his book, and the army and police
still face institutional problems. Finally the authorities still rely upon
large security operations which only secure an area as long as forces are there
and then the insurgents return afterward.
Where the
book goes off track a bit is a chapter on identity politics in post-03 Iraq. It
goes into the split between Sunnis and Shiites, whether the Kurds wanted to be
independent from Iraq or no, etc. Reading the book today that’s really
unnecessary to explain the insurgency, especially because he didn’t relate much
of it to that topic. However, since the book was written in 2005 when many had
little in depth knowledge of Iraq it was probably considered necessary.
If you
want to get a good understanding of the origins of the Iraqi insurgency and why
it still continues to this day there might not be a better source than Insurgency
and Counter-Insurgency In Iraq. The insights into Sunni grievances is the
highlight and the endless quotes by Iraqis support Hashim’s main points. The
fact that it was written in 2005 and still stands up to today shows how spot on
the author’s research and arguments were.
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