Word: anbar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...limited has progress been on the political front that the prime achievement the Bush Administration has been touting is the alliance the U.S. has struck up with Sunni tribal sheikhs in Anbar province against al-Qaeda. This is certainly an important tactical advance in confronting the jihadists in Iraq - although it's not entirely clear whether the greater shift has come from the sheikhs (long a backbone of both the Saddam regime and then of the insurgency), or from the U.S. in finally recognizing that the Ba'athists were open to cooperation against al-Qaeda. Although the fighters represented...
...groups with which the U.S. is cooperating in Anbar are not only outside of the Iraqi government; they are actively opposed to it, seeing it as a Shi'ite entity beholden to Iran. Such cooperation helps deal with the problem of al-Qaeda in Iraq - a brutal presence, to be sure, but still a minority element in the overall Sunni insurgency - but it doesn't necessarily reinforce national reconciliation...
...Capt. Travis Patriquin, the military's tribal liaison for the area. Patriquin and Sattar had worked closely together late last year, when Sattar first emerged as the leader of a band of tribes around Ramadi coming together to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. Sattar, like other tribal leaders of Anbar Province, had fallen out with al-Qaeda in Iraq after years of complacency and cooperation with insurgents targeting U.S. forces. The longtime pact between tribal leaders and insurgents in Anbar Province had broken down around Ramadi amid squabbling over money, essentially. When insurgents began raiding highways in Sattar's territory...
...were in part the result of luck. Al-Qaeda violently overplayed its hand and started randomly killing Sunnis who refused to ally themselves with the terrorist organization. And in some places, America won the Sunnis over the old-fashioned way: by paying them. The question is how widely the Anbar model can be applied elsewhere. It is easy to forget that Anbar is the one part of Iraq that is largely Sunni and thus doesn't suffer from the same kind of civil strife that upends order in other parts of the country. And if Anbar was truly secure...
...encouraging. Washington has blown hot and cold this summer about the wisdom of sticking with what the Government Accountability Office called the "dysfunctional" al-Maliki's government. The current wind is marginally positive, but it was hard to miss the way Bush summoned the entire Iraqi A-team to Anbar during his surprise visit to press them to move faster. Iraqis tell Time, however, that it doesn't really matter if al-Maliki stays or leaves. As long as the current cast of dubious and discredited characters continues to dominate Iraqi politics, reconciliation is not going to happen. None...