Delanceyplace.com 9/12/08-The Anbar Awakening

In today's excerpt--in Shiite-controlled Iraq, a key has been evolving U.S. relations with Sunnis, who are as yet not integrated into this Shiite control. As part of this, the U.S. has hired almost 100,000 Sunni militiamen, some with a history of killing Americans:

"Unexpectedly, the most important political development in Iraq during the first year of [General David] Petraeus's command--the change of heart by the Sunni tribes--took place in Anbar Province, a large area stretching to the west of Baghdad, which had been the site of some of the war's bloodiest fighting for three years after the invasion.

"In September, 2006, long before the surge had been decided upon, Sunni tribal sheikhs had approached U.S. Marine commanders and offered to switch sides--to align themselves with the United States against Iraq's Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militants. The sheikhs had grown weary of Al Qaeda's brutality, puritanism, and arrogance, and they resented its attempts to take control of tribal smuggling businesses. By the time Petraeus arrived, the Anbar Awakening, as it would become known, had started to spread. Petraeus and his commanders turned it into a national project; they spent millions of dollars of American funds and backed up the Sunni sheikhs with military operations against the tribes' enemies. Ultimately, during 2007 and 2008, the United States Army hired about a hundred thousand militiamen, known as Sons of Iraq, at three hundred dollars per month, to serve as neighborhood guards; the Army eventually expanded the program to include Shia militiamen. Most of these guardsmen were former insurgents, some with a history of killing Americans. To Petraeus and his advisers, however, the project presented a prime example of adaptive learning. 'Anbar, you could just feel it flipping,' Petraeus told me. 'Really, the early spring, the mid-spring of 2007, it just started to speed down the chain.' ...

"I joined Petraeus ... for a day of what Army officers call 'battlefield circulation,' a version of management-by-walking-around. ... Petraeus talked about the sectarian demographics in particular neighborhoods we passed. He pointed out the many concrete barriers, known as T-walls, that his forces had erected to separate Sunni areas from Shia ones, or to protect mixed districts from hostile outsiders. ...

"There remains a list of dangers that could reignite violence or even civil war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of Sunni Sons of Iraq must yet be transformed from militiamen into government servants in a Shia-dominated administration; so far, Maliki's government has been slow to accommodate these Sunni tribesmen. Earlier this year, when I spoke with Senator Joseph Biden about the surge, he emphasized the centrality of this challenge. Progress in Iraq will evaporate 'unless they figure out what to do about eighty thousand people in the Awakening,' he said. 'Guess what? They're awakened. . . . They want a piece of the action, and they're not getting any.' "

Steve Coll, "The General's Dilemma," The New Yorker, September 8, 2008, pp. 43-47.