Despite assertions by the George W. Bush administration that the escalation strategy in Iraq - known as the ‘surge’ - has been a rousing success, many of the problems of pre-surge Iraq still exist and, along with new issues, are exacerbating a tenuous political situation there.

With the five-year anniversary of the US-led invasion looming, two Washington think-tanks released reports a week ago on the subject of increasing multi-lateral sectarian tensions in Iraq. “The conventional wisdom among most conservatives and Washington policy elites is that the surge has ‘worked’,” states the Centre for American Progress report, titled ‘Awakening to the New Danger in Iraq’. “This conventional wisdom ignores the fact that the fundamental objectives of the surge have not been met,” according to the report.

The surge period has, in fact, quelled violence across Iraq to some degree, but critics argue that the drop in violent attacks has less to do with the increased number of US troops and more to do with the newfound cooperation of Sunni groups who used to align themselves with the violent insurgency.“Rather than facilitating reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis,” said Brian Katulis, lead author of the Centre for American Progress report, “the main concern we raise in the paper is that these efforts are undermining the overall effort of getting to a political reconciliation among Iraq’s leaders.”

“I think that there’s a very real risk that one aspect of the surge - supporting these Sunni militias - could amount to a US policy of supporting different sides in an Iraqi civil war,” Katulis said. The so-called ‘Sunni Awakening’ (or Sahwa), saw Sunni militias - both rural tribal groups and more urban neighbourhood militias - cease their attacks on Americans and the central Iraqi government in favour of working to diminish the influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Numbering over 73,000 soldiers, these militias - about ninety percent of whose ranks are paid 300 dollars a month by US forces - have little central structure save a loosely federated group of tribes called the Anbar Awakening in the troubled Iraqi province of the same name. Having lessened some of the violence, the groups are now clamouring for the further political involvement that their new US allies promised them. But at least in Anbar, they expect these political gains to come at the expense of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, which participated in the last round of elections in 2005.

The Awakening groups had expected that provincial elections would be held in the spring. When the central government announced elections for the fall, the Anbar Awakening groups angrily said that the current officials had thirty days to give up their seats or the groups would take up arms against them. But even with the political empowerment of the Awakening groups, some critics of the ‘surge’ strategy fear that the tensions being exposed between the Sunni groups are likely to work against the goal of political reconciliation. —IPS