Iraq: The Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency, and Leaving Iraq.

The 2005 elections in Iraq caused that the traditional group in power, the Sunni, lost the control of the government, leading to an unstable situation that created important insurgences and reinforce of support to Al Qaeda. This situation forces to the Bush Administration to change the approach in Iraq, focusing on a new military strategy called counterinsurgency: instead of destroying the enemy, put troops to help with security and stability, so Iraq could establish a legitimate government who would be able to build partnerships strong enough to «isolate insurgents form their cause and support» (Cohen, 2006, 50). 

Nevertheless, due to the polemics and problems that the Iraq war caused. Both in American and Iraqi’s soil, when Barak Obama was elected as president in the United States after the SOFA determined the US should leave the country, he decided to leave the country and focus his efforts on Afghanistan instead.

That decision created two different narratives, divided by Charlotte F. Blatt between the optimists and the ones who thought the operations had failed.

According to the optimists, like Colonel Conrad Crane, if the United States would have stayed, they could have helped to keep stability and security enough time to give the Sunni and Shia find agreement. But, by abandoning the country, it «resulted in a significant increase in violence and Sunni-Shia’s friction» (Crane, 2015, 138).

According to the critics, the lack of understanding of the deep conflict between the different factions in Iraq (Kurds, Sunni, and Shia), made the problem continue and didn’t solve the deep problems between factions. And one of the main points within the principles of counterinsurgency is the understanding of the environment. And that lack of comprehension it can clearly be seen by the US support to Maliki’s government, who only made the tensions between factions deeper.

Therefore, the counterinsurgency policy was a failure, again, because of not applying properly the principles they were supposed to be applied. And, the failure of this forced the abandonment of the country.