Bush Announces an Iraq Surge of 20,000 Troops, Ethiopia Routs Somalia’s Islamists, Iran Seizes British Naval Personnel and North Korea Agrees to Disarm

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 April 2007 | Reporting Period: 3 January – 2 April 2007

Quarterly Briefing

• President Bush announces a new Iraq strategy on January 10, deploying 20,000 additional troops in a “surge” designed to stabilise Baghdad and enable political reconciliation; the strategy, developed by General David Petraeus who will take command in February, reverses the previous policy of reducing American troop presence; Congress, now controlled by Democrats after the November midterm elections, strongly opposes the escalation.
• Ethiopian forces, which entered Somalia in December at the request of the Transitional Federal Government, rout the Islamic Courts Union and seize Mogadishu in January; the ICU retreats to the south and its fighters disperse; the Transitional Government returns to Mogadishu from Baidoa; but the ICU’s defeat does not end Somalia’s instability, as clan militias and insurgents begin a guerrilla campaign against the Ethiopian presence.
• Iran seizes fifteen British Royal Navy personnel in the Shatt al-Arab waterway on March 23, claiming they had violated Iranian waters; Britain insists they were in Iraqi territorial waters on a routine boarding mission authorised by the UN; the personnel are paraded on Iranian television; after thirteen days of diplomatic crisis, they are released on April 4 — just after our period — as a “gift”.
• The Six-Party Talks produce an initial agreement on February 13 under which North Korea commits to close and seal its Yongbyon nuclear reactor in exchange for energy assistance and diplomatic normalisation; the agreement, brokered in Beijing, is the most significant diplomatic progress on North Korea’s nuclear programme since 2003 and comes despite Pyongyang’s October 2006 nuclear test.
• Iraq’s sectarian violence reaches new heights in the early weeks of the year; the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006 set off the cycle; by January 2007 Baghdad is experiencing hundreds of civilian deaths a month from sectarian killings, car bombs and death squad activity; the surge’s stated primary mission is to reduce this violence to levels that political progress becomes possible.
• Israel and the Palestinian Authority conduct direct talks under US mediation; Palestinian Authority President Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert hold several meetings; the re-emergence of a Hamas-Fatah unity government deal at Mecca in February raises questions about whether Abbas has a mandate to negotiate and whether Israel will engage a government that includes Hamas.

Prologue: Iraq and the Limits of the Possible

The first quarter of 2007 found American foreign policy at its most overstretched. The Iraq War, now in its fourth year, had produced not the democratic model its architects had promised but a sectarian civil conflict whose casualty rates exceeded those of many acknowledged wars. The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group’s December report — with its recommendation of diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria and a gradual drawdown of US forces — had been publicly received by a president who then rejected its prescriptions in favour of escalation. Bush’s surge announced on January 10 was, in effect, a wager that four more years of military strategy had been wrong and that a new approach under a new commander could still achieve the objective. Its reception in a Congress controlled by Democrats elected on a mandate to end the war was hostile; its reception in Baghdad was sceptical. For the Caribbean, America’s continued military entanglement in the Middle East translated directly into a foreign policy machine too consumed by Iraq to engage meaningfully with hemispheric concerns.

Somalia and the Caribbean’s Security Concerns

Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia, invited by the internationally recognised Transitional Federal Government, was a significant regional military operation that displaced the Islamic Courts Union from its control of most of southern Somalia including Mogadishu. The ICU had provided a form of order — courts, traffic rules, markets — that the absent state had not; its defeat by Ethiopian forces was welcomed by some Somalis who resented the ICU’s religious impositions and feared by others who had appreciated its relative stability. The aftermath was, as observers predicted, a return to clan warfare and the beginning of an insurgency against the Ethiopian presence. The broader significance was geopolitical: the United States had quietly supported Ethiopia’s intervention as a counterterrorism operation against ICU figures with al-Qaeda connections. Somalia was becoming the newest theatre in the global war on terror.

For the Caribbean, Somalia’s instability mattered primarily through its effect on the global security environment and on the international community’s bandwidth for engaging with the region’s own governance challenges. The Somali piracy that would later threaten international shipping was not yet the phenomenon it would become; the humanitarian crisis created by the continued conflict — with hundreds of thousands displaced in Mogadishu — was one of several competing for international attention that was primarily focused on Iraq.

North Korea and Non-Proliferation

The February 13 Six-Party Talks agreement was the most tangible diplomatic achievement of the Bush administration’s second term and came just months after North Korea’s first nuclear test. The agreement committed North Korea to shut and seal Yongbyon within sixty days; in return, it would receive 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, with a further 950,000 tonnes to follow on full nuclear disarmament. The negotiation represented a significant shift: the administration had for years refused to offer North Korea anything in exchange for compliance with its treaty obligations; the October 2006 test had demonstrated the costs of that approach. Whether the Yongbyon shutdown would lead to genuine denuclearisation — or whether it would follow the pattern of earlier agreements that collapsed — was a question the coming months would begin to answer.

Looking Ahead

General Petraeus’s surge is only weeks old; its results will not be visible until later in the year; the political debate in Washington will intensify as Democrats attempt to attach withdrawal timelines to supplemental funding legislation. Iran’s release of the British naval personnel removes an immediate crisis but does not resolve the underlying confrontation over its nuclear programme; the UN Security Council’s sanctions regime will need to be tightened if diplomacy is to have any leverage. Somalia’s post-ICU insurgency is gathering momentum; Ethiopia’s continued presence is an occupation that generates resistance rather than stability. And the Caribbean’s energy security — still dependent on Venezuelan Petrocaribe flows at a time of high oil prices — underscores how much the region’s economic stability depends on stable geopolitical relationships in the wider world.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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