The campaign of assassinations in Iraq shows that the political parties are not immune from the temptation of violent jockeying. After 2003, political parties and movements have been able to slide around on the fringes of the political spectrum at will, with relatively reputable parties able to reach out to affiliates in the insurgency when they needed to get tough. The intense campaign of assassinations in Baghdad began in 2010 as the selective attacks of insurgent groups such as AQI and JRTN against government officials quickly became a free-for-all that drew negative energy from the stagnation of the government formation process.
As Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki admitted at a press conference last April, Iraq's political parties used the cover of large numbers of unsolved killings to undertake "political assassinations." This, in turn, unleashed a wave of score-settling and intimidation attacks. Shiite political factions, including various splinters of Muqtada al-Sadr's movement, the Badr organization, and Maliki's own Dawa party appear to have fought low-profile skirmishes with one another for dominance of various security agencies, key Iraqi Army formations, and regions throughout the southern provinces.
As part of these struggles, Shia political parties have carried out a wave of Shia-on-Shia assassination attempts against Iraqi Army division commanders, political party bosses, and local representatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. By this June, when the assassinations had reached their height, senior Iraqi politicians and bureaucrats were attending multiple funerals per week. Although the pace of these attacks is now slowing due to government raids against assassination gangs, the spring season of assassinations cast a spotlight on the violence lurking just beneath the surface of Iraqi politics.
As the crackdown on Baghdad assassinations showed, events can only deteriorate so far before the Iraqi government will act. The government has unacceptable "red lines" for general destabilization that are broadly understood by militant groups. For example, in response to closed-door meetings with government representatives, Sadr has stepped back from his threat to mobilize his militia; Sadrists, meanwhile, have scrupulously avoided taking actions that would trigger a government offensive, such as openly carrying weapons at their parades or mounting armed patrols within their strongholds. In places such as Basra, local political pressure and operations by Iraqi security forces have curtailed armed resistance against U.S. targets, such as the heavy rocketing of the U.S. base at the airport.
Likewise, although the violent jockeying within sectarian factions has increased, the government has been sure to take steps to prevent any widespread conflict between sectarian communities in Baghdad and other trouble spots. In other words, there appear to be definite limits to how far security can deteriorate in Iraq. The flip side, however, is that there are probably equally definite limits concerning how much better things can get in the coming years.
For a while, Iraq will be stuck on this plateau: a moderate level of insecurity in which the country suffers somewhere between 300 and 500 insurgent attacks per month, including around two dozen attempted mass-casualty attacks.
A formal extension of the U.S. military presence will not shorten this period of moderate insecurity. Today, most Iraqis do not interact with U.S. forces, and the U.S. military is no longer the glue holding together many ISF divisions and brigades. Indeed, there is little that a formally extended U.S. presence on Iraq's streets could achieve at this point. An extension would also prove contentious: Iraq's highly fragmented parliament and an equally uncertain public may not be ready to debate and approve a formal security agreement that would modify the December 31, 2011 departure date for U.S. military units.
Behind the scenes, the U.S. mission in Iraq can still achieve a great deal. Iraqi politicians seem ready to approve a less formal memorandum between the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense that would allow the United States to rotate additional military training teams through Iraq.
Using such mechanisms, Washington should make sure that the U.S. Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq monitors and shapes Iraqi military efforts to maintain or build support within all-important Sunni Arab communities (for example, to complete the population-focused counterinsurgency campaign begun by the United States). Insurgent groups will be severely challenged by the loss of their arch-nemesis and raison d'etre: the U.S. military. They are already shifting their rhetoric to build up the case for long-term resistance against the Iraqi government, portraying federal military and police units as either Shiite-led pro-Iranian stooges or Kurdish-led proxies intent on dismembering Iraq and evicting Arabs from their homes.
Finally, insurgent movements such as AQI and JRTN (plus Shia equivalents such as Kataib Hezbollah) seek to perpetuate violence by turning militancy into an industry, paying Iraqis to launch attacks long after any ideological motives have disappeared. The sustained presence of U.S. intelligence and special forces targeting the small leadership cadres of these movements will continue to be one of the most prized and effective forms of security cooperation between the two countries, providing one means of keeping violence in Iraq as low as possible in the coming years.
