Mix of Trust and Despair Helped Turn Tide in Iraq

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT

The Iraq war archive, taken as a whole with its details of incidents small and large, offers a cautionary postscript for the current military strategy in Afghanistan.

That same strategy, based on an infusion of additional troops, is often credited with rescuing Iraq. The American military applied it and turned around an increasingly hopeless war, according to one narrative. And while it is true that the additional troops offered better security, the reports in the archive suggest that the approach was also successful because many Iraqis were ready for it.

A unique set of conditions had coalesced on the ground. The warring communities were exhausted from the frenzy of killing. Mixed neighborhoods and cities were largely cleansed. The militias, both Sunni and Shiite, long seen as defenders of their communities, had begun to cannibalize them, making local residents newly receptive to American overtures.

The war that emerges from the documents is a rapidly changing set of circumstances with its own logic and arc, whose fluidity was underestimated by the military, the media and Washington policy makers. The troop increase, devised and led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is now the commander in Afghanistan, came around the time that many Iraqis were so fed up with their local militias that they were ready to risk cooperating with the Americans by giving them information. Two years earlier, they were not.

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