The United States’ media and the populace always seem averse to asking the questions that are the most important. After 9/11, the question should have been what drove those people to fly those planes into the towers and what is the reason for the hate. Sadly, that question was never asked and when it was the populace drank the kool-aid and accepted the reason given by the politicians – “they hate us because we are free and they hate what we stand for“. A few people that questioned this ridiculous claim were shut out by being labelled sissies, unpatriotic and traitors.

Now after a few disastrous years of occupation we begin to see a semblance of normalcy; only by Iraqi standards, returning. So what caused this? That should be the most important question, shouldn’t it. No one seems to be asking that. Again, we are forced to accept the premise that the so-called “surge” is what caused it and people and the media have accepted it at face value, even with the shameful history of lies and deceit by the Bush administration.

Lets analyse this a bit further. First, the surge was never really a surge. Anyone who has followed the troop numbers and compared that month by month knows that the troop numbers after the surge only matched the numbers in early 2007. I accept though that the violence did go down and quite dramatically. Why it went down though is another question and the answer to that has very little to do with the surge.

When the US went in to Iraq and disbanded the Iraqi army and the Baath party, a lot of people were unemployed with no way to feed their families. The local tribal militias which are a part of middle east in any country also found their influence over defined boundaries being eroded and all power centralised with the US forces. The tribal war-lords, Sunni or Shia weren’t going to take this lying down and they shook hands with Al-Qaeda likes and started targeting the US forces and indeed, even civilians to ensure that the US would eventually turn to them and grant them semi-autonomy over regions they controlled before the invasion. The US flatly refused initially. But as time wore on, the US was forced to accept the reality on the ground and rescinded from its earlier pledge never to negotiate with these warlords. Now the US granted them autonomy and even handed them bourses trying to bring them on their side. And these tribal warlords accepted this offer readily. Their only concern was autonomy and rule over the areas they already controlled before the invasion. After joining forces with the Americans these warlords started targeting the foreign fighters as per the terms of their agreement with the Americans. The violence naturally took a downward turn.

This has gone completely under-reported in the media, which is not surprising in the least bit. The one time I heard a reporter actually talk about this was on CNN with Michael Ware. But Wolf Blitzer immediately cut him off.

Read this report in the Times: Sunni sheiks turn their sights from US forces to Al-Qaeda. From the report:

One of the younger members of Moltz’s A Company acknowledged that he found it hard to grasp such a rapid shifting of alliances. “I’m not sure about this,” he said. “Two months ago, these guys were shooting at us. Now we’re supposed to be friends. It’s kind of hard when you know that guy blew up your buddy.”…[...]

Some critics also worry that the deals with Sunni sheikhs might ultimately turn them into warlords, even if the stated aim is for their private armies to be absorbed into the Iraqi security forces as soon as possible.

The above report was from a while back. Now look at this report that again appeared in the Times, today, which says: American backed killer militias strut across Iraq. From this report:

The US military is delighted with the results achieved by the brigade in Abu Ghraib and by similar groups in other former “hot spots” of sectarian conflict that have seen a sharp decline in violence. For Shi’ites such as Kahiriya Musa, however, a Sunni militia represents another potential source of terror in a country where millions have been traumatised by ethnic cleansing.

Officials in the Shi’ite-led government also fear the burgeoning of fresh forces beyond its control. The question being asked in government circles is: have the Americans achieved a short-term gain in security at a cost of long-term pain that may be inflicted by the Sunni militias, which are already threatening to go to war against their Shi’ite counterparts?

These are the real reasons why the so-called surge has worked. Will it continue to work is what no one can say right now, but if history teaches us anything, I would not say it will. US has again managed to ravage a country and create such divisions that it will be almost impossible for it to return to any sort of normalcy. I guess the Americans never ever learned anything from their experience with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and how they morphed into the dreaded Taliban.

And as has become the norm the US citizenry and the media continue to sleep.