Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq
- Correspondence:Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq
To the Editors (John Hagan, Joshua Kaiser, and Anna Hanson write):
Americans are inclined to remember their nation's wars victoriously. "Let it be remembered," President Barack Obama told the Minneapolis American Legion veterans of the Vietnam War on August 30, 2011, "that you won every major battle of that war."1 He repeated this message on May 28, 2012, during the commemoration ceremony of the fiftieth anniversary of this war at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.2 How soon might we hear talk of winning the major battles in Iraq?
Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro (hereafter Biddle et al.) caution that "[t]he decline of violence in Iraq in 2007 does not mean that the war was necessarily a success."3 Their implication, however, is that the war was not necessarily a failure either. Biddle et al. write that the 2007 drop in violence from 2006 was a "remarkable reversal." They ask, "What caused this turnaround?" (p. 7). Their answer is that the United States devised a strategy that stopped the violence in Iraq with a "synergistic" combination of the U.S. troop surge and the U.S. subsidized Sunni Awakening that "stood up" the Sons of Iraq (SOI). [End Page 173]
We argue first that the Biddle et al. synergy thesis and the evidence the authors present in its support overestimate the SOI role in the reduction of violence. Second, we argue that they underestimate the significance of the decision by Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr to limit the Mahdi Army's criminality by declaring a unilateral cease-fire. Furthermore, al-Sadr's political calculations of the increasing costs of the Mahdi Army's spiraling violence in 2007 to his Sadrist movement may have motivated this unanticipated cease-fire. Thus, our third argument is that the cease-fire played a major role alongside the surge in reducing the violence and increasing al-Sadr's political influence in the governance of Iraq.
Overestimation and Selective Sampling
The data Biddle et al. use for their empirical assessment of the synergy thesis consist of "significant activities" (SIGACTs) recorded by the Multinational Force-Iraq in 38 areas of operations (AOs) from 2004 to 2008. They regard these data as "objective and consistent" measures, although it should be noted that use of the U.S. military's own data to evaluate U.S. military policies is open to question—especially given that these data were collected in a time of intense congressional and journalistic scrutiny. Independent data collection is preferable; the temptation to "define down" targeted activities is well recognized in evaluation research.4
More important, the AOs that Biddle et al. chose for their sample omit areas of Iraq where the SOI did not stand up, leading to a likely overestimation of the SOI policy impact across all of Iraq. The selected AOs also include only one neighborhood (i.e., Rusafa) east of the Tigris River in Baghdad, thus omitting Sadr City and the other areas of Baghdad most extensively controlled by the Shiites and al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. This impoverished community contains about a third of Baghdad's total population. The sample further omitted Adhamiyah, the location of violent sectarian fighting and subsequent efforts during the surge to reduce the mayhem by installing miles of twelve-foot cement wall barriers. Astretch of these barriers completely walled off a Sunni enclave, stabilizing and preserving one of the few surviving Sunni neighborhoods in east Baghdad.
Some accounts of the decline in violence suggest that it was the result of a mass cleansing of Sunni from mixed and predominantly Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad.5 Biddle et al. initially dismiss sectarian cleansing explanations for the decline of violence by focusing on the shift of the Mahdi Army's attacks from targeting mixed Sunni/ Shiite areas to targeting Sunni majority neighborhoods to the west of the Tigris. Their point is that "unmixing" the mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad did not exhaust the violence. Instead, the violent attacks persisted and...
