Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

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  Sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni began in August 2003 when al-Qa’ida suicide bombers started targeting Shia civilians. It escalated over the next two years, but it was the bomb the destroyed the Shia shrine at Samarra on 22 February 2006 that unleashed a Shia pogrom in Baghdad in which 1,300 Sunni were killed in days.

  A struggle for the capital was waged between the two sects for the rest of the year, and by January 2007 the Shia had largely won it. My surviving Sunni friends were terrified that the Mehdi Army, often used as a catch-all phrase to describe Shia militiamen of all descriptions, would launch a final “battle of Baghdad” to wipe out the remaining Sunni enclaves.

  A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside Kurdistan, it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and it reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US, which were passed on or sold to insurgents.

  US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda, even as the ground is giving way beneath their feet. In Baquba, a provincial capital north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders praised their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link. Chiding media critics for their pessimism, the generals claimed: “The situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people.” Within hours Sunni insurgents, possibly irked by these self-congratulatory words, stormed Baquba, kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.

  The surge got underway in February, and from the beginning the sceptics seemed to be in the right. Its most positive impact was that Muqtada al-Sadr decided not to risk an all-out military confrontation between his Mehdi Army and the US army. He sent many of his senior lieutenants out of Baghdad, stood down his men and disappeared, either to Iran, as the US claimed, or to the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf, according to his followers.

  The Sunni bore the brunt of the surge in Baghdad. Districts like al-Adhamiyah in east Baghdad were sealed off. But this probably achieved less than was intended, because Adhamiyah is a commercial district in which half of the people who work there live elsewhere. Joint security stations were set up in every neighborhood manned by US and Iraqi forces, but these posts seem ineffectual and tie down troops.

  There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator’s assertions. When Vice President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving waring of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America.

  By the end of May, I found it a little easier to drive through Baghdad, but the danger was still extreme. I sat in the back of the car with my jacket hanging inside the window so it was difficult for other drivers to see me. We were pulled over by an army checkpoint. A soldier leaned in and asked who I was. We were lucky. He looked surprised when I told him I was a foreign journalist, and said softly: “Keep well hidden.”

  Back in my hotel I phoned an Iraqi friend in the Green Zone who was close to the government. “Be very careful,” he warned. “Above all do not trust the army or police.” There was an example of what he meant a few days later when a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying 40 uniformed policemen arrived in the forecourt of the Finance Ministry. They entered the building and calmly abducted five British security men, who have not been seen since. The kidnappers may be linked to a unit of the Mehdi Army.

  The surge has changed very little in Baghdad. It was always a collection of tactics rather than a strategy. All the main players – Sunni insurgents, Shia militiamen, Iraqi government, Kurds, Iran and Syria – are still in the game.

  One real benchmark of progress – or lack of it – is the number of Iraqis who have fled for their lives. This figure is still going up. Over one million Iraqis have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) since the Samarra bombing, according to the Red Crescent. A further 2.2 million people have fled the country. This exodus is bigger than anything ever seen in the Middle East, exceeding in size even the flight or expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. A true sign of progress in Iraq will be when the number of refugees, inside and outside the country, starts to go down.

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  The surge was never going to bring Iraq nearer to peace. It always made sense in terms of American, but not Iraqi, politics. It has become a cliché for US politicians to say that there is a “Washington clock” and a “Baghdad clock”, which do not operate at the same speed. This has the patronizing implication that Iraqis are slothful in moving to fix problems within their country, while Americans are all get-up-and-go. But the reality is that it is not the clocks, but the agendas, that are different. The Americans and the Iraqis want contrary things.

  The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War. It wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him; something the Shia were bound to do in fair elections, because they comprise 60 percent of the population. Worse, the Shia coming to power would have close relations with Iran, America’s arch-enemy in the Middle East.

  This was the main reason the US did not press on to Baghdad after defeating Saddam’s armies in Kuwait in 1991. It then allowed him to savagely to crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces.

  Ever since 2003, the US has wrestled with this same problem. Unwittingly, the most conservative of American administrations had committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the minority Sunni Baathist regime.

  The Bush family has always been close to the Saudi monarchy, but George W Bush dismantled a cornerstone of the Sunni Arab security order. This is why the US and Britain opted for a thoroughgoing occupation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They put off elections for as long as they could. When elections were held in 2005 and voters overwhelmingly chose a Shia-Kurdish government, Washington tried to keep it under tight control.

  “The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by the Baath disappearing, but it is unsuccessful,” says Ahmed Chalabi, out of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq. “Now the Americans and British want to disengage, but if they do so the worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass. Shia control and strong Iranian influence in Iraq.”

  The hidden history of the past four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish to win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other.

  The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget, but by the CIA. Iraq independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realizes. The US is trying to limit the extent of the Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq, Washington is ensuring that the bloodiest of wars goes on, with no end in sight.

  Tuesday, 11 December 2007

  ONLY ONE THING UNITES IRAQ, HATRED OF THE US

  As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting?

  American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They look at Iraq in ove
r-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of events there.

  The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year, though for reasons that have little to do with "the surge" - the 30,000 US troop reinforcements - and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia Muslim communities.

  The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because it tried to monopolise power but primarily because it brought their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against US occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa'ida, which the Sunni were losing, with disastrous results for themselves. "The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars - against the occupation and the government - at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment."

  This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa'ida has lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US military - the State Department has been very much marginalised in decision-making in Baghdad - does not want to emphasise that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll, who are misleadingly called "concerned citizens", until recently belonged to al Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and American soldiers on their hands.

  The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds holding power.

  At first, the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people. The bombers came from al-Qa'ida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very short-sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.

  The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni, which became known in Iraq as "the battle for Baghdad". This struggle was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the capital but, by the end of 2006, they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.

  In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni trying to expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialised.

  It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa'ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up ISI, which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al Qai'da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al Qa'ida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.

  Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

  Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

  The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.

  If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

  American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilising is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.

  Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

  Monday, 17 December 2007

  BRITAIN BOWS OUT OF A WAR IT COULD NEVER HAVE WON

  Britain handed over security in Basra province yesterday, bringing a formal end to its ill-starred attempt over almost five years to control southern Iraq.

  The transfer of power was marked by a parade of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police beside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which runs past Basra. As helicopters roared overhead it was the biggest show of strength by the Iraqi army forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

  The majority of people in Basra were glad to see the British go. "You can see the happiness on the faces of everyone," said Adel Jassam, a teacher. "It feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off our chests."

  The unpopularity of the British presence is underlined by the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the BBC showing that just 2 per cent of people in Basra believed that the British presence had had a positive effect on their province since 2003. Some 86 per cent said they saw British troops as having a negative impact.

  Britain did not suffer a military defeat in southern Iraq, though it lost 134 soldiers and never really established control of the city, the second-largest in Iraq.

  By the time of yesterday's handover ceremony it had 4,500 troops in Iraq, confined to Basra airport, whose numbers will be reduced to 2,500 by mid-2008.

  The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was at the ceremony in Basra, said that Britain was not handing over "a land of milk and honey". This is an understatement, since the Basra that Britain leaves behind will be controlled by semi-criminal Shia militias and political movements.

  "This remains a violent society whose tensions need to be redressed," said Mr Miliband, "but they need to be addressed by Iraqi political leaders, and it is politics that is going to come to the fore in the months and years ahead."

  The British Army some time ago concluded that its patrols simply provided targets for militiamen without doing any good.

  Last night Al Qaeda's second-in-command said the handover showed that insurgents were gaining the upper hand. In a video posted on the internet, Ayman al-Zawahri said: "Reports from Iraq point to the increasing power of the mujahideen and the deteriorating condition of the Americans. And the decisi
on of the British to flee is sufficient [proof of this]."

  Mr Zawahri said that Iraq was still the most important theatre of battle for Islamist militants, and dismissed optimistic US assessments of the situation there.

  The steady retreat of the British has not so far been followed by a battle for Basra between the three main contenders for power. These are the Fadhila movement, which controls much of the government, the Mehdi Army militia, loyal to the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Organisation of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

  These groups control different units of the security forces, as well as valuable economic concessions, such as Basra port. Iran also retains a pervasive influence over the militias.

  Britain is officially handing over control of Basra to government security forces. This has supposedly long been the aim of the US and Britain in southern Iraq, but in practice both countries have favoured only one of the Shia parties, ISCI, as its favoured ally.

  Violence in Basra was never as bad as it was in Baghdad or Mosul, because the city was overwhelmingly Shia. The Sunni and other minority groups have been progressively driven out. The British Army never tried to impose its authority on the four southern provinces of Iraq to the degree that the US forces tried to win control of central Iraq.

  The area where they were meant to be bringing a better life is one of the most devastated in Iraq. Because it was Shia it was never favoured by the overwhelmingly Sunni regime of Saddam.

  The date palms for which southern Iraq was famous were burned or cut down. In the marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, a distinct civilisation had survived for 5,000 years until Saddam drained them so they could no longer provide a sanctuary for his opponents.

  There seems to be no end to the miseries that Basra has suffered since the war with Iran started in 1980. The Iran-Iraq war was followed by the first Gulf War, and this in turn by the great Shia uprising of 1991, which began in a square in Basra when a tank gunner fired a shell into one of the omnipresent pictures of Saddam. In the fighting which followed, thousands of Shia were killed.