Break Point

By George Friedman

A government has been formed in Iraq. It is
a defective government, in the sense that it does not yet have a defense or
interior minister. It is an ineffective government, insofar as the ability
to govern directly is at this point limited institutionally, politically and
functionally. Ultimately, what exists now is less a government than a
political arrangement between major elements of Iraq's three main ethnic
groups. And that is what makes this agreement of potentially decisive
importance: If it holds, it represents the political foundation of a regime.


If it holds.

If it holds, the rest is almost easy. If it
doesn't hold, the rest is impossible. Therefore, the fate of this political
arrangement will define the future of Iraq and, with that, the future of the
region -- and in some ways, the future of the American position in the
region. It is not hyperbole to say that everything depends on this deal.


The deal that has been shaped is about two things: power and money.
First, it addresses the composition of power in Iraq -- defining the Shia as
the dominant group, based on demographics, the Kurds next and the Sunnis as
the smallest group. At the same time, it provides institutional and
political guarantees to the Sunnis that their interests will not simply be
ignored and that they will not be crushed by the Shia and Kurds. In terms of
money, we are talking about oil. Iraq's oil fields are in the south,
unquestionably in Shiite country, and in the north, in the borderland
between Kurd and Sunni territory. One of the points of this arrangement is
to assure that oil revenues will not be controlled on a simply regional
basis, but will be at least partially controlled by the central government.
Therefore, at least some of that money will go to the Sunnis, regardless of
what arrangements are made on the ground with the Kurds.

The Sunnis
got this deal for a simple reason: Their insurgency made them impossible to
ignore. First, the insurgency forced the Americans to recognize that their
initial inclination, de-Baathification, also meant de-Sunnification of Iraq,
and that the price for that would be painful. Second, the insurgency
threatened Iraq with partition and civil war. Any such partition would have
made Iran the dominant power in the region, something that would be
unacceptable to Saudi Arabia and the other governments in the Persian Gulf.
The Saudis were no friends of the Baathists in Iraq, but the thought of
partition -- and of only the United States to provide security against
Iranian influence -- forced them to mobilize Arab support for the Sunnis.
The insurgency was the Sunni leaders' prime bargaining chip, and they played
it well.

Now there is a twofold question that must be faced. First, in
response to the deal that has been made, can the Sunni political leadership
move decisively to end the insurgency, or at least reduce its tempo? And
second, is it willing to do so? The implications are significant: If the
insurgency continues, the entire political agreement will cease to be
meaningful to the Americans, who are sponsoring and, in effect, guaranteeing
the deal. Moreover, if Sunni insurgents continue to target Iraqi Shia, the
quietly vicious counterattacks that the Shia have carried out will surge.
The Sunnis blow things up; the Shia come quietly and kill their enemies. If
the sectarian violence continues, it will mean there is no political
foundation, no government and no change in the situation in Iraq. In that
case, the United States will have to choose between remaining and mitigating
a chaotic situation, or leaving and letting events run their course -- which
also means leaving an open field for Iranian ambitions. From the American
point of view, this agreement has to work. And everything depends on the
Sunnis.

Core Assumptions and Brass Tacks

Insurgencies
don't simply float in the air. It isn't a question of just loading a car
with explosives or setting up an improvised explosive device. Someone has to
obtain, store and distribute explosives. Someone has to train people to build
the device. Someone has to communicate with others without getting caught.
Someone has to recruit new insurgents without being detected, and without
allowing enemy agents to slip in. Someone has to provide security. And all
of this has to happen somewhere, in a geographic space.

That space
has been, for the most part, the villages and urban neighborhoods of the
Sunni Triangle. The insurgency has been rooted there, the insurgents are
known and their presence is protected in those neighborhoods. They are
provided with food and shelter, and the village and neighborhood network
warns them of enemy approaches. Mao Zedong said once that revolutionaries
must be to the people as the tongue is to the teeth: If the support of the
population is withdrawn, the revolution collapses.

At the heart of
this political settlement, then, is the expectation that -- in return for
political and financial concessions -- the Sunni leadership will order the
insurgents they do control to cease attacks, and will order the population
to withdraw support from the insurgents they don't control. In other words,
the Baathist and nationalist insurgents who are linked to the Sunni
leadership would halt operations, while the jihadists led by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi -- who have their own set of needs and goals in the region --
would either halt operations themselves or have the shield of the Sunni
community withdrawn. The insurgency would not just end suddenly, but would
decline fairly rapidly as recalcitrant troops were squeezed out of the Sunni
region.

Given this dynamic, we would expect a surge of violence from
elements who oppose the political agreement in Baghdad and see themselves
being squeezed out. Their hope will be that the violence, particularly
against the Shia, will trigger a Shiite response and cause the settlement to
collapse. But the success or failure of that gamble will hinge on the answer
to the core question: To what extent does the Sunni leadership control the
insurgents? We assume that it is not total control, and we assume that there
are elements among the Sunni leadership who oppose the political deal.


But the central assumption is that the bulk of the leadership has
bought into the deal and, therefore, that the bulk of the insurgents will
follow their lead. There also is an assumption that the bulk of the Sunni
population will follow these leaders and withdraw support for remaining
insurgents. Now, these insurgents could enjoy some lingering support among
the public, and they could coerce others into protecting them. This would
lead to a short but intense struggle within the Sunni community that, given
the correlation of forces, ultimately would result in the defeat of the
diehards. They would hang on -- waging a campaign that would be painful but
not decisive, increasingly marginalized and ineffective.

This is the
likely path, but it assumes two things. The first is that the political wing
that has negotiated this agreement is able to assert control over the bulk of
the Sunni population. In other words, one assumes that the Americans and Shia
have been negotiating with the right people. If not, then the political
settlement will not end the insurgency, and the violence will continue. We
do not see this as the likely problem, however: The leadership ought to be
able to deliver the bulk of the Sunni community and therefore reduce the
fighting, if they want to.

The real question is whether they want to.
As we said before, the insurgency is the only bargaining chip the Sunnis
have. It was because of the insurgency that the Sunnis were not completely
bypassed by the Americans and Shia. If they stand down but retain the
ability to resume their offensive, the political deal can hold. But if, by
standing down, the Sunnis demoralize their forces or permit intelligence on
the location of weapons caches and personnel to diffuse to the Americans or
Shia over time, the Sunnis could find themselves in a position from which
they no longer can enforce the agreement.

So the key calculation for
the Sunnis is this: If they stand down, can they maintain a credible force
that is ready to serve their political purposes?

The demand that
Iraq's various militias disarm has been focused on the Shiite militias. But
at the end of the day, the Shia are the dominant force in the Iraqi
government: If their militias were integrated into the military and security
structures, they still would be available to serve Shiite political purposes.
If, on the other hand, the Sunni militias were disarmed or integrated into
the Iraqi military and security structures, they would lose their force and
their leverage.

Obviously, this is why the defense and interior
ministers have not yet been designated. It is not really about the
individuals to be named, as their power will be circumscribed by the
Cabinet. The issue is not the ministers themselves, but how the ministries
will be run. More accurately, since it is these ministries that will control
Iraq's military and internal security forces, the question that must be
answered is how these forces will be configured. The Shia do not need
guarantees. The Sunnis do. So the architecture of these ministries -- and
the constitution of military and police units -- has everything to do with
Sunni security.

There is a chicken-or-egg problem. The Sunnis do not
want to begin standing down their forces until structural guarantees are in
place. The Shia -- and in this case, the Americans -- are not going to give
those guarantees until they see that the Sunnis can and will control the
insurgents. They will not both confirm the Sunni position in the ministries
and continue to endure the insurgency. They want to see steps toward the
insurgency being controlled. The naming of the ministers is more symbolic
than real, but the ministries themselves are very real. The Sunnis cannot be
both in the army and making policy and still be waging an
insurgency.

Other Considerations

There also is a real
question as to whether the Shia want the agreement to work. Certainly the
Iranians would like another go-around in order to increase not only the
power of the Shia in general, but of those Iraqi Shia who are close to the
Iranians. A civil war would increase Shiite dependence on the Iranians,
since they would need weapons and political support. The Iraqi Shia do not
seem to have much appetite for Iranian ambitions at the moment. They will
dominate the government; they do not need to obliterate the Sunnis at the
cost of a long civil war. They have most of what they want. Still, there are
those in the Shiite community who are ambitious to displace the current power
structure, and who see civil war as the way to achieve this. They are the
ones who will continue with operations against the Sunni community, hoping
to prevent a stand-down by the insurgents. The Shiite leaders, therefore,
have a similar (though smaller) problem to the Sunnis'. They can contain the
more aggressive and ambitious Shia. But Iran's ability to destabilize their
community is the wild card.

This points up another dynamic as well.
The United States and Iran have been engaged in a seemingly incomprehensible
round of meetings, non-meetings, threats, offers of accommodation and so on
over Iraq and nuclear weapons. Each side has made strange noises, given
contemptuous shrugs and pulled fierce faces at the other. One would think
that war was imminent. In fact, the opposite is true: Each is trying to
avoid war by appearing fearsome and slightly nuts. The Americans want to
scare the Iranians away from destabilizing Iraq's Shiite community. The
Iranians want to make one last run at the Americans to maximize the power of
the Shia -- and particularly that of their allies -- in the Iraqi government.


The Americans obviously want a settlement. And the Iraqi Shia want
one. They are less dependent on Tehran than it might appear, and it seems
they are prepared to follow through. The Sunnis, all doubts and worries
aside, have every reason to want a settlement, and it is unlikely that they
will get a better one. Certainly there are Sunnis who don't want a
settlement, but it seems to us that they can be dealt with if the Sunni
leaders want to deal with them. At this point, the only alternative to this
settlement is civil war -- and it is hard to see a major player who benefits
from a civil war, even if plenty of minor ones might.

For the
Americans, the deal at hand is the exit strategy from the war. As violence
declines, the United States can draw down its forces and begin concentrating
on the question of what it plans to do in Afghanistan, the next item on the
agenda. On the other hand, if the agreement in Baghdad blows apart, there is
little point in American forces remaining in Iraq. With 130,000 troops, the
United States could not contain a civil war; the forces could only take
casualties, while achieving nothing. The ideal outcome would be a drawdown
culminating in a residual force of, say, 40,000 troops based outside of
heavily populated regions.

This goal is not unreachable at this
point. It is possible to recoup the poorly played American hand, to some
extent. But the fate of the political deal is not within U.S. control. The
outcome depends, first, on the Sunni leadership and its desire and ability
to suppress the insurgency. It depends, second, on the Iraqi Shiite leaders'
ability to dominate their community and resist destabilization by Iran. And
it depends, finally, on the Iranians accepting the current situation without
surging forces covertly into Iraq.

In other words, the United States
has become, to a great extent, a bystander. Washington can make whatever
guarantees it wants, but the calculus by all sides now is whether they can
secure their interests with their own resources. At this point, the United
States is growing less and less relevant to the outcome in Iraq, though it
remains urgently interested in what that outcome will be.

If we had
to guess, we would say that the political arrangement should work, more or
less. But we don't have to guess. It is now nearly Memorial Day. The
violence in Iraq will surge, but by July 4 there either will be clear signs
that the Sunnis are controlling the insurgency -- or there won't. If they
are controlling the insurgency, the United States will begin withdrawing
troops in earnest. If they are not controlling the insurgency, the United
States will begin withdrawing troops in earnest. Regardless of whether the
deal holds, the U.S. war in Iraq is going to end: U.S. troops either will
not be needed, or will not be useful.

Thus, we are at a break point
-- at least for the Americans.

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