Anbar reverts to Iraqi control

The U.S. military this week formally handed over control of Anbar province to the Iraqis, a move U.S. and Iraqi officials touted as a major milestone in the five-and-a-half-year-old war. Anbar was the heartland of the Sunni insurgency and home base of al Qaida in Iraq. More than one-quarter of U.S. combat deaths in the war occurred there. But in the wake of the U.S. troop surge and the Sunni uprising known as the Awakening, the number of insurgent attacks in Anbar has dropped by more than 90 percent. “Anbar is no longer lost to al Qaida,” President Bush said. “It is al Qaida that lost Anbar.”

The U.S. also said that Iraq’s government would soon take command of some 50,000 mainly Sunni Arab fighters, known as the Sons of Iraq, who are allied with U.S. forces. Taken together, the developments represent a major power shift that will test the Shiite-led government’s willingness to give Sunnis a larger role in Iraqi political life and security.

The surge has now been completely vindicated, said Ralph Peters in the New York Post. Two years ago, the chaos in Anbar’s main cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, led “defeatists” to insist that we pull out our troops. But Bush held firm. Now, Anbar offers “a near-perfect example of how flexibility and perseverance in response to the inevitable reversals of war can turn the tide and secure victory.”

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The significance of this turn of events cannot be overstated, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. War critics insisted that Anbar could never be brought into the fold because of deep-seated hatred over the American “occupation.” Instead, we are looking at “the most significant military and ideological defeat for al Qaida since the Taliban was driven from Kabul in 2001.”

Don’t celebrate yet, said Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl in the Los Angeles Times. Any Shiite-Sunni alliance is fragile at best. Indeed, the Iraqi government has launched a campaign “to arrest, drive away, or otherwise intimidate tens of thousands” of Sunni fighters. These fighters could well turn on the government. If that happens, Anbar province—and all of Iraq—could “spiral back into chaos.”