by Robin Wright
The leaders, however, seemed to reflect a minority view.
Everywhere I traveled in northern Iraq, the overwhelming majority of students, shop owners, government employees, Peshmerga fighters, and people on the streets expressed a preference, even a yearning, to live in their own Kurdish nation. Many acted as if they already had one. With sixty-five percent of the Kurds under twenty-five, many had no memory of the days under Baghdad’s control. For them, Saddam had ruled far away and long ago—even though he was still in power.
“I only know about him from stories my father tells,” Sawsan Ali, a University of Irbil freshman, told me, virtually dismissing one of the region’s most powerful dictators. “We were just children when he ruled here.”
After Saddam cut off the Kurds in 1991, the Kurdish language made a full comeback in government, schools, and workplaces. The Kurds flew their own flag, a red, green, and white tricolor with a big yellow sun in the middle. School curriculum was “Kurdicized.”
What the Kurds do will determine whether Iraq can move beyond the primordial instincts that have defined the Middle East for millennia and ultimately hold together as a country. Iraq’s fate may ultimately be decided in Kirkuk. A multiethnic city of almost one million people, Kirkuk is claimed with equal vehemence by the Kurds, the Arabs, and minority Turkomans backed by Turkey.
Kirkuk is the Jersualem of Iraq.
The city’s importance was hinted at in the Old Testament. King Nebuchadnezzar cast the Jews of Babylon into a “burning fiery furnace,” a site some Middle East scholars believe was the endless flame from Kirkuk’s natural gas, a clue to oil deposits discovered twenty-five hundred years later that gave modern Iraq its economic and strategic importance.
Kirkuk holds the second largest oil fields in Iraq. The area has produced up to one million barrels a day; it has another ten billion barrels of proven reserves. Oil analysts believe other rich fields have yet to be discovered nearby.
Saddam Hussein went to imaginatively ruthless extremes to secure Kirkuk for the Arabs. His Arabization campaign—many Kurds called it ethnic cleansing—began with mass Kurdish deportation from the city. After the outside world protested, the regime used more subtle tactics: Employers were coerced into firing Kurdish staff. Landlords were squeezed into turning out Kurdish tenants. Kurdish children were detained until parents agreed to leave the city. Kurdish food-ration cards were confiscated to cut off access to UN aid. As Kurds fled, their homes and jobs were filled with Arabs brought up from the south. In a “nationality correction” scheme in the late 1990s, the Baghdad government also forced minorities applying for anything from school enrollment to marriage licenses and car registrations to sign a form changing their national identity to Arab. Newborns were not allowed to be registered with non-Arab names.6
The regime then adopted bizarre tactics to erase the Kurdish presence. To provide a false sense of how long Arabs had been there, tombstones with non-Arab names were rubbed out and Arab names engraved in their place. In 2002, local relief groups told me, the government offered Arab families an extra incentive, including land, if they would dig up the remains of ancestors and rebury them in a Kirkuk graveyard.
More than 120,000 Kurds had been expelled since 1991, UN officials and human rights groups told me. I drove to checkpoints in both the eastern and western Kurdish sectors and saw more families walking across. Many had been dumped at the frontier, with virtually no possessions, clothing, or furniture. The United Nations had set up tent camps with communal water and toilets, but waiting lists were long. Thousands of evicted Kurds ended up homeless. I saw one newly arrived family with six small children scouring the ground for rocks to build a hovel in a mountain clearing where other families were living under roofs of cardboard and plastic sheeting. In Kurdistan, the brutal winters can sink to twenty degrees below zero.
The Kurds were intent on getting Kirkuk back. The process of Arabization, Barzani made a point of telling me, would have to be reversed.
“It doesn’t mean that apart from the Kurds there should be nobody else in Kirkuk. It’s an Iraqi city like Baghdad or Basra. There could be Arabs, Turkomans, and Shiites living there,” Barzani said. “But what we are not ready to compromise on is the city’s identity. Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan.
“For others, Kirkuk’s importance is that it lies on a sea of oil,” Barzani added. “For us, Kirkuk is important because it lies on a sea of our blood.”
Change in today’s Middle East is likely to succeed only when all major players—not just the majority—believe they have a stake in the new order. Rival identities will otherwise derail it. The sense of common nationhood is still too fragile. Suspicions run too deep.
Iraq is a telling, and tragic, precedent.
In September 2003, five months after the fall of Baghdad, I flew back to Iraq with Secretary of State Colin Powell. It was the first visit by an American secretary of state in a half century. There was still freedom of movement in Baghdad back then. The New York Times correspondent and I walked out of the Green Zone, met The Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief, and wandered around the sprawling capital. Powell, too, left the Green Zone for a meeting with Iraqi leaders. We stayed for a couple of nights in the legendary al Rashid Hotel. I visited Iraqis and former exiles who had moved back to the capital. I meandered around the Green Zone oasis of palm-fringed streets and villas. And I stopped by Vendors’ Alley, where dozens of Iraqis flogged memorabilia from Saddam Hussein’s rule. A military medal, hung from grosgrain ribbon in the red, white, and black colors of Iraq’s flag, went for ten bucks.
For the Bush administration, from a great distance, Iraq had seemed a logical candidate for change. Neoconservative theorists called it “Iraqi exceptionalism.”7 Saddam Hussein had been so ruthless at home, they argued, that “liberation” would be welcomed. The Iraqi leader was also vulnerable because he was in violation of more than a dozen United Nations resolutions spanning a dozen years. So, they concluded, Iraq would be an exception to all the dangers of a foreign army overthrowing a Middle East government.
Iraq generally also seemed to have appealing requisites for change.
It had the allure of past greatness. A cradle of early civilization, advanced cultures flourished in ancient Mesopotamia long before the empires of Egypt, Greece, or Rome. They invented writing. They figured out how to tell time. They founded modern mathematics. They were the first people to build cities. For centuries, they wrote some of the greatest poetry, history, and literature in the world.
Abraham, the father of the three great monotheistic religions, came from the Mesopotamian city of Ur. Some four thousand years ago, the Code of Hammurabi introduced the world’s first codified laws. It included trials and witnesses and judges accountable for their decisions; protection for the weak, widows, and orphans; an eye-for-an-eye punishment; and contracts, deeds, and receipts for ownership.
Iraq also had a comparatively literate society. The area along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had long been a center of education. For more than a millennium, Baghdad was considered one of the world’s most civilized cities. It had the first school for astronomers. In the ninth century, its universities imported teachers from throughout the civilized world to teach medicine, mathematics, philosophy, theology, literature, and poetry. Until Saddam drained the country’s coffers, Iraqis had the largest percentage of well-educated people in the Arab world.
Slightly larger than California, modern Iraq also had economic riches. It had the third largest proven oil reserves in the world. It had rich agriculture. And as home to the two holiest sites in Shiite Islam, it also had tourism. Hundreds of thousands of religious tourists poured into Iraq even in the worst of times. Najaf was the burial site of Ali, the first Shiite imam, after whom the sect is named; Karbala was where his son Hussein lost his battle against the Omayyad dynasty. Iraq was flush with wealth when Saddam Hussein seized the presidency in 1979. By Middle East standards, it had well-equipped hospitals and new industries. New apartment blocks and
housing complexes offered modern standards of living. The arts, heavily subsidized with petrodollars, were thriving. The middle class was robust and rapidly growing. Iraq was flooded with luxury goods, from Mercedes-Benz cars to imported Camembert cheese and the latest technology.
“Iraq has the elements of either an amazing success or an outstanding disaster,” Barham Salih told me just weeks before the American invasion. “That’s the irony of Iraq.”
To the outside world, many Iraqis also appeared ready for change.
During his quarter-century rule, Saddam Hussein made more mistakes—at home and in the region—than any other Middle East leader. In 1980, he invaded Iran, a country four times the size of Iraq with almost three times the population. Baghdad boasted that the conflict would be over in weeks because Iran’s revolutionary regime was still fragile and fractured. The war instead dragged on, exhausting Iraq’s wealth and weaponry. Baghdad had to borrow heavily from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and take loans from Moscow to buy Russian arms.
In the mid-1980s, I covered Saddam’s campaign to get Iraqi women to donate their jewelry to pay for the war. Nightly television programs showed women turning in family heirlooms, gold bracelets bestowed at the birth of a child, and even their bridal dowry jewelry.
The war carried political costs too, as Saddam cracked down brutally to keep Kurds in the northern mountains and Shiites in the southern marshes along the Iranian border in check. Opposition outside the country—western-educated exiles in Europe, clerics and refugees in Iran, and Baathist rivals in Syria—gained new momentum.
In 1986, it began to look as if Baghdad could even lose the war as Iranian troops gained ground inside Iraq for the first time. It took Iraq two years—and massive amounts of mustard gas and poisonous nerve agents—to repel them. In a decisive 1988 Iraqi offensive to recapture the strategic Fao Peninsula, thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were killed by chemical weapons, in part because gas masks did not fit snugly enough over their beards. During the two-year interval, Iraq had received an unusual combination of Arab, Soviet, European, and American assistance—funds, arms, training, and intelligence—motivated largely by shared fear of an Iranian victory. Tehran reluctantly agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire four months after the battle at Fao Peninsula.
After eight years of the bloodiest modern Middle East war, however, neither side gained a square inch of territory—at the cost of more than one million casualties. The war had been for naught.
Owing billions, Saddam demanded that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait forgive his debts. He played to historic rivalries, claiming to have fought the Shiite Persian revolutionaries on behalf of all Sunni Arabs. When his neighbors balked, the Iraqi leader first accused Kuwait of stealing oil from wells along their common border. He then revived a long-standing claim to Kuwait as Iraq’s nineteenth province. And finally, in 1990, he invaded the little city-state.
Operation Desert Storm, led by the United States and including troops from three dozen countries, liberated Kuwait in 1991. Afterward, Washington tried to exploit the Iraqi leader’s vulnerability by calling on Shiites and Kurds to rebel against him. They did. But the United States had not required the grounding of Iraq’s air force in the cease-fire. So Saddam dispatched his helicopter gunships to put down the uprisings, bloodily. Thousands died. Hatred deepened.
After two wars, Iraqis and their treasury were spent—only to then face the toughest international economic embargo ever imposed, when Saddam Hussein refused to allow UN inspectors to track down his deadliest weapons programs. Over the next dozen years, Iraqis paid the price as daily life began to break down. By 2002, more than one quarter of the population struggled with poverty or need; per-capita income was estimated at less than one quarter of what it had been in 1980.8 Malnutrition was rampant. Child mortality soared.
In 2002, Saddam Hussein was given one more chance by the United Nations to cooperate. Again, he invoked the rights of sovereignty rather than allow UN inspectors to freely search his realm—even though by then he no longer had active chemical, biological, or nuclear programs. It was an extraordinarily arrogant bluff.
So by 2003, the American advocates of war argued, a confluence of factors made Iraq ripe for new direction. Ousting the regime in Baghdad would also be a catalyst for wider change throughout the Middle East. Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, told The New York Times:
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that Iraq, properly managed…really could turn out to be, I hesitate to say it, the first Arab democracy…I think the more we are committed to influencing the outcome, the more chance there could be that it would be something quite significant for Iraq. And I think if it’s significant for Iraq, it’s going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world.9
Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched on March 20, 2003, was initially easier than anticipated. The Iraqi military used no chemical or biological weapons, as had been widely feared. Resistance from Iraqi troops was limited. Many either disappeared or failed to put up much of a fight.
The U.S. blitz to Baghdad took only three weeks.
On April 9, as U.S. troops poured into the Iraqi capital, Iraqi weightlifting champion Kadhim al Jubouri rallied his neighbors to go to Firdous Square to bring down the statue of Saddam Hussein, a twenty-foot bronze of the Iraqi leader with his arm raised above the city he ruled. Jubouri, who had spent nine years in Saddam’s jails, reflected the initial relief of many Iraqis.
“There were lots of people from my tribe who were also put in prison or hanged,” he told reporters. “It became my dream ever since I saw them building that statue to one day topple it.”10
Over and over and over again, Jubouri slammed a sledgehammer into the massive concrete plinth beneath the statue until his hands bled. An American tank eventually rumbled in to help bring it down. Although Saddam managed to escape Baghdad, the toppling of the huge statue symbolized the end of his rule.
Yet by the time Powell arrived in Baghdad, six months after Saddam’s ouster, Iraq was rapidly unraveling.
Ali Allawi understood why. He saw it happening from the inside.
Allawi was just the kind of Iraqi the United States wanted to lead the new Iraq. He bridged the two worlds. A tall, trim man with salt-and-pepper eyebrows, Allawi is usually attired in well-made suits and looks the businessman he is. Born in Baghdad in 1947 to a wealthy Shiite family, he spent large chunks of time in the West after the monarchy was toppled in 1958. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Business School. He worked at the World Bank, then in finance in London and Kuwait. But he was also a practicing Shiite. His wife Munya wore a head scarf and modest Islamic dress even when she visited the West.
Allawi went back to Baghdad three days before Powell’s visit to take part in rebuilding Iraq. He initially believed in the dream.
“I returned on September 11, 2003. It was the culmination of something I had been working toward for years,” Allawi later recalled, almost wistfully. He agreed to serve under the U.S. occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority. He became the first minister of trade.
“My expectation was that we’d help in stabilizing the country short-term. We’d build a foundation for post-Saddam Iraq, realizing there were shortcomings in the Iraqi state, not just the dictatorship. This would be the first step,” he told me.
Allawi kept a diary of his impressions and Iraq’s prospects. He very soon began chronicling the political shadows accumulating over Iraq.
“Within a month, I was dissuaded, as I saw the incoherence of the American project. By October, the whole thing seemed to be spinning out of control,” he recounted, with polite anger. “I became very dispirited.”
Like many Iraqis, Allawi concluded that the United States made two basic mistakes that doomed any early success—and possibly the long-term mission. The first was miscalculating the dynamics within Iraqi society.
“The Unite
d States embarked on its invasion with very little understanding of the country,” Allawi told me. “The Americans didn’t even grasp that Iraq had been through this before.”
Iraq is a microcosm of many Middle East countries. It was artificially created in 1920 with the decline of the Ottoman empire. Britain won the mandate for Iraq, which was formed by the merger of three Ottoman regions—with disparate populations—centered in Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.
Iraq challenged foreign rule from its earliest days. Both Sunnis and Shiites rebelled against the British in waves of attacks. Iraqi militias, clerics, and politicians all had a piece of the action. In an eerie foreshadowing of the American experience, The London Times editorialized in 1920, “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”
The 1920 revolt took four months to put down. By the time it ended, some 6,000 Iraqis and 500 British troops were dead.11
In 1921, the British installed King Faisal I to govern Iraq. The choice riled Iraqis for many reasons, foremost because Faisal was not Iraqi. Born in what is today western Saudi Arabia, he had been a representative for Jeddah in the Ottoman parliament. During World War I, he worked with the allies—in a role later made famous in the epic film Lawrence of Arabia, in which he was played by Alec Guinness. For a few months in 1920, Faisal was made king of Greater Syria, until France won the mandate for Syria and expelled him. Britain then put Faisal on the throne in Baghdad.
Iraq was still a predominantly tribal society. Tribal sheikhs were unfamiliar with the concept of modern statehood, uncomfortable with recognizing a higher authority, and unwilling to cede control, resources, or revenues with uncertain return—especially to a foreign king. Winning their fealty proved difficult.
