Illusions of Victory

In late 2006 and then 2007 the Sunni Arab tribes in the Anbar province,located in western Iraq, came together with the United States armed forcespositioned in the same province and conducted a grueling fight againstAl-Qaeda in Iraq, also known at the time as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI,as it shall be referred to hereafter). Their victory in this struggle has sincebeen held up as a shining example of counterinsurgency tactics, even if, asauthor Carter Malkasian points out, the specific reasons that the movementsucceeded have been oversimplified and misidentified in accounts renderedsince the Awakening. After the brutal advance of the Islamic State in Iraq afew years ago, however, the image of Anbar as a counterinsurgency examplehas been the target of no small amount of doubt. Malkasian argues thatAnbar should be remembered not as an example of a successful counterinsurgencystrategy but instead as a warning to not engage in military interventionswithout a better understanding of the local dynamics and politicsof a given country or wider region, nor without the willingness to commitone’s forces for a much longer period than the US initially did in Iraq ...