[Richard]

Once a Renegade, Counterinsurgency Retiree Represents Iraq Norm
(cont'd)

Having worked for the Bush administration, Ollivant doesn’t dispute that Obama doesn’t share Bush’s “laser-like” focus on Iraq during his administration’s final year in office, a focus that emerged partially out of concern for Bush’s legacy. But Ollivant stresses that the policy options for the United States have narrowed after Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement guaranteeing a date for U.S. withdrawal, something the Iraqis compelled the administration to sign in an unexpected policy reversal. The so-called SOFA “narrowed the political discourse in this country” on Iraq,” Ollivant said. “The Bush administration’s final position ended up close enough to the Obama campaign’s rhetoric that you really have the two sides coming together at a place of common ground.”

Not all observers are as sanguine as Ollivant. “Iraq certainly seems to be an afterthought at the moment,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East expert at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “All of a sudden I find myself writing about the need to think about how we do still retain some levers of influence in the country. This is a transition and it is an awkward period where new sorts of relations are being sorted out, the military interaction receiving the lion’s share of the attention.” Without a sharpening of administration focus, Hanna said he feared that “rest of the [Obama administration's] agenda for the region will never survive if Iraq backslides into broader violence.”

Ollivant drew a distinction between the continued, diminished levels of violence in Iraq and the strategic threat of a renewed sectarian upheaval. “There’s a huge difference between a Sunni leader being assassinated because he’s leading a political movement and is a threat to an established power base or a rival power base or an up-and-coming power base and a Sunni leader being assassinated because he’s a Sunni,” he said. That distinction is what prevented widespread conflagrations when, in the spring, Iraqi security forces in Baghdad arrested several leaders of the mostly-Sunni auxiliary militia known as the Sons of Iraq or the Awakening on various criminal charges. “It’s still an unstable country,” Ollivant said, “but I think we have to distinguish between political violence and sectarian violence.”

He didn’t always know that such a distinction would be meaningful in Iraq. His first Iraq tour, as operations chief for the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, overlapped with much of the first sustained period of crisis during the war — June 2004 to February 2005 — and took him to some of the war’s toughest fighting: the Shiite graveyards of Najaf, the Marine-led invasion of Fallujah and the restive Shiite neighborhood of Khadimiya in Baghdad. Like many officers with Iraq experience during the war’s deteriorating fortunes, Ollivant and “Producing Victory’s” co-author, Lt. Eric Chewning, studied counterinsurgency theory and wrote their paper “almost as catharsis.” In Baghdad during the surge, Ollivant would wake early and work until “11, midnight, 1 a.m.,” swallowing Ambien so his thoughts would let him sleep.

“My confidence in the strategy waxed and waned over time,” he said when asked if he thought the surge would succeed in reducing violence in Iraq.

Asked what his proudest moment of service was, Ollivant equivocated. “I had three very very different experiences in Iraq,” he said. “I’m glad I smelled cordite in Iraq. I’m glad I was at [Multinational Division-Baghdad] when we did the surge and I was part of putting that together. And I was immensely proud and honored to have worked at the White House for two administrations.”

http://washingtonindependent.com/520...ents-iraq-norm