Experts Analyze American Progress with Iraqi Insurgents

GWEN IFILL:

Now a two-part look at efforts to quell the Iraqi insurgency. We begin with a report on U.S. efforts to engage Sunni tribal leaders in the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq. We get that from New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief John burns. I spoke with him earlier this evening.

John, welcome back. So what we understand here is now that the United States forces are trying to work out a plan where they engage or they pay Sunni groups in order to go after al-Qaida. How is that going to work?

JOHN BURNS, Baghdad Bureau Chief, New York Times:

Well, it's an expedient, of course, that has been tried before, in fact, quite frequently before in counterinsurgency wars of this kind. If you can split the insurgency, if you can, if you will, suborn some elements of it by giving them arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and other supplies, obviously you change the balance of the equation.

The problem here in Iraq is that the people that they are trying to recruit, if you will, to the American side of this war — or, if you will, the Iraqi side of this war — are Baathist insurgents who have been fighting the United States forces here now for four years and who have played a considerable role in killing more than 3,500 American troops.

It's an enterprise fraught with risk, obviously, because, how long do these people, in effect, stay bought and stay loyal? The intent is to split the insurgency and have the Baathist insurgents, if you will, go after al-Qaida and to drive al-Qaida from the battlefield. It's a long shot. It's not hard to understand why American generals want to give it a try, but it is certainly fraught with risk.

GWEN IFILL:

What precautions have been put in place, John, so that they know who is friend and who is foe?

JOHN BURNS:

Well, at the front end of this, to answer your question a little obliquely, the problem is that it's very hard to know who you are talking to, who you are negotiating with, to whom you are supplying arms, because there's very little forensic evidence.

There is a supposition, and more than a supposition in some areas, that these people belong to Sunni Baathists or elements of the insurgency that have, in fact, fought and killed Americans. It's altogether likely that, in most cases, that will not be provable and that these — if you will, these deals will go through.

They're going to attempt to, if you will, fix the loyalty of these groups to whom, you know, support is given by various forensic means. They're going to subject all of the members of these groups to biometric tests. That's to say retina scans, fingerprints, and they're going to record the serial numbers of all weapons that are transferred.

The hope is, of course, that, should these groups in effect betray their new American patrons by attacking American troops or attacking, for that matter, Iraqi troops, that it will be possible, ex post facto, to caught onto that fact.

GWEN IFILL:

Internally, is this something that the Shiite-led government, the Army and the Iraqi police, are in league with, or is this something they have some problem with, seeing as how these are their enemies?

JOHN BURNS:

They have a problem with it. This began in al-Anbar province to the west of Baghdad, counting for something like 30 percent of the territory of Iraq, crucially important stretch of territory bordering Jordan to the west, Syria and Saudi Arabia, which, as I think many of your viewers will know, was for a very long time the most dangerous place in Iraq. It's overwhelmingly Sunni.

Now, a deal with tribal sheikhs there who have recruited what in British imperial times would have been called tribal levies, and among them former Baathist insurgents, has worked very well in Anbar. The levels of violence in the last four or five months have really plunged.

Where it involves an overwhelmingly Sunni population, the Shiite-led government in Baghdad doesn't have much of a problem with it. They do have a problem when you try and introduce this in mixed Sunni-Shia areas, and that, unfortunately for the Americans, includes many of the areas they are now attempting to replicate this procedure in, in central and north-central Iraq, which is to say Sunni-dominated areas on the approaches to Baghdad, where there are significant Shiite populations.

And not surprisingly, the Shiite leaders of the present government don't much like it, because they are looking beyond the American troop presence here, a year or more down the road, to the point where I think it's now rather widely assumed here the struggle for power will become, in fact, an all-out civil war between Shiite and Sunni groups. And weapons and ammunition passed now by the Americans to Sunni groups, of course, are going to empower the Sunnis in that, let's hope avoidable, but widely expected, if you will, cataclysm.