Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  But all the news is not bad for al-Qa'ida because tightly run police states have collapsed across the region. There is room for small groups of militants to organise without being under constant pressure of state security forces. Whatever happens in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria over the next year, the states there will be weaker than before. Moreover, the near civil wars in Syria and Yemen are not over. Al-Qa'ida guerrilla fighters seasoned in Iraq are now making their way to Syria - according to the CIA - and have started launching suicide bomb attacks in Damascus and Aleppo.

  There are two other reasons why al-Qa'ida has survived the death of Bin Laden and other leaders over the last year. US security officials speak of it as if it was structured like the Pentagon with ranking officers whose killing by drones or death squads would disrupt the organisation. It was always much more ramshackle than this. Few of the al-Qa'ida militants killed over the last year are irreplaceable, an exception being perhaps Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. An intelligent, eloquent English-speaking fundamentalist, and one of the few effective al-Qa'ida propagandists, he was killed by a US drone on 30 September last year.

  A further reason is that its most powerful elements have always been franchisees not under the control of any core group. This was true of al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which, starting in 2003, became a lethally effective organisation in Iraq until much of the Sunni community turned against it. It still has the capacity to bomb Shia civilians and, though it may be weaker, it is far from being eradicated. But al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia was always distinct from the core group of leaders around Bin Laden. From the beginning it focussed primarily on a sectarian war against the Shia targeting day labourers in the markets, pilgrims and worshippers leaving mosques. For all their ferocity, al-Qa'ida suicide bombers infrequently attacked US troops in the years before the US final withdrawal. Similarly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, where the core of al-Qa'ida is supposedly based, there are plenty of people who have experience in guerrilla warfare. Hatred of foreigners and infidels of all sorts is a Pashtun tradition. A kidnapped British aid worker, Khalil Rasjed Dale, was killed there at the weekend. But the local Pakistani Taliban, periodic allies of al-Qa'ida, are involved in their own struggles and closely monitored by Pakistani and foreign intelligence services.

  As a base, Yemen has the advantage of being a mosaic of different power centres and with a weak central state. President Ali Abdullah Saleh, now removed from power, used to play an elaborate game with the US whereby he would present himself as America's loyal ally against al-Qa'ida, offering even to take responsibility for their drone attacks. But this also gave him an incentive to make sure that AQAP was never destroyed. Unlike Iraq, AQAP has tried to launch attacks on the US, which might just have succeeded. It controls much of Abyan province east of Aden and made a show of strength in the last few days by arranging to release 73 government soldiers it had captured.

  A problem for al-Qa'ida is that being associated with the organisation in any way immediately creates a host of enemies. In 2003-4, when al-Qa'ida grew in strength in Iraq, it brought in money and foreign suicide bombers. Today it brings few resources to embattled groups like al-Shabaab in Somalia. The same is true of al-Qa'ida in the Maghreb (AQIM) which operates in the wastes of the Sahara, kidnapping foreigners but whose motives are largely criminal.

  Weakened though it may be, al-Qa'ida will not fade from the headlines. This is partly because headline writers have got used to its existence as a universal bogeyman. The "war against al-Qa'ida" since 9/11 has also produced self-declared experts, think-tanks, intelligence officers and army generals who all have budgets to defend. They are never likely to declare the al-Qa'ida threat over, while emphasising, as one counter-terrorism expert said, that "we've made progress towards defeating al-Qa'ida the organisation".

  US counter-terrorism and intelligence officers say that al-Qa'ida could never again carry out an onslaught as devastating as 9/11. They may well be right. On the other hand, the very length of time it took for the US to find Bin Laden and his family, though they had been living in the same house for years, may show that their own level of competence, in contrast to their numbers and budgets, has not improved much since the World Trade Centre was destroyed.

  Monday, 3 September 2012

  AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST INFLUENCE IS PAST ITS PEAK

  Are the days of American predominance in the Middle East coming to an end or is US influence simply taking a new shape? How far is Washington, after refusing to try to keep Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt, facing the same situation as the Soviet Union in 1989, when the police states it had sustained in Eastern Europe were allowed to collapse? The US is obviously weaker than it was between 1979, when the then Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David agreement and allied Egypt with the US, and 2004/05, when it became obvious to the outside world that the Iraq war was a disaster for America. At the time, General William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency, the biggest US intelligence agency, rightly called it "the greatest strategic disaster in American history".

  Since then, the verdict of the Iraq war has been confirmed in Afghanistan, where another vastly expensive US expeditionary force has failed to crush an insurgency. In the last few weeks alone, Taliban fighters have succeeded in storming Camp Bastion in Helmand province and destroying $200m worth of aircraft. So many American and allied soldiers have now been shot by Afghan soldiers and police that US advisers are under orders to wear full body armour when having tea with their local allies.

  The Arab Spring uprisings posed a new threat to the US, but also opened up new options. Support for Mubarak was decisively withdrawn at an early stage, to the dismay of Saudi Arabia and Israel. But the Muslim Brotherhood had long been considering how it could reach an accommodation with the US that would safeguard it against military coups, and enable it to chop back the power of the Egyptian security forces. This was very much the successful strategy of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AKP) party, explaining why it was prepared to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003 and why it has become the chief instrument of American policy towards Syria in the past year.

  This alliance with Islamic but democratic and pro-capitalist parties in Egypt and Turkey is obviously in the interests of the US and the Atlantic powers. But their support for democratic change in North Africa and West Asia is determined by self-interest. It does not, for instance, extend to Bahrain where the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy has been busily locking up its Shia opponents and retreating from promises of meaningful reform. But new allies must at some point mean fresh policies. In sharp contrast to the Mubarak regime, a new government in Egypt is unlikely to support covertly Israeli military action such as the bombardment of Lebanon in 2006 and of Gaza in 2008.

  A problem for the White House is that American voters have not taken on board the extent to which US influence has been reduced.

  For all the rhetoric about the Iraq war being a strategic disaster, the American political and military elite has also failed to appreciate the extent and consequences of failure. It is extraordinary to discover, according to recent revelations, that as late as 2010 Vice-President Joe Biden was under the impression that he could blithely decide who would be president of Iraq. Biden's grip on Iraqi geography appears to be as shaky as his understanding of its politics.

  On one occasion in Baghdad, he lauded all the good things the US had done for Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, having apparently mistaken it for Basra in southern Iraq.

  The killing of the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and the burning of the US Consulate in Benghazi could have been a worse political disaster for President Barack Obama than it turned out to be. It highlighted that the rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi were not quite as they had been presented by the US government and media during the war past year. The US State Department appears to have had an unhealthy belief in its own propaganda, not seeing that its consulat
e in Benghazi was in one of the most dangerous places in the world. The assault did not come out of a blue sky. Fighters had shot at the convoy of the British ambassador, Sir Dominic Asquith, in Benghazi a few weeks earlier. In July last year, the rebels' own commander, Abdel Fatah Younis, was abducted and murdered by men nominally under his command in revenge for repressive actions he had carried out before he defected from Gaddafi's forces.

  Diplomats and soldiers are often curiously blind to dangers facing them. It may be that both live in very inward-looking communities and somehow cannot internalise how somebody outside may think and act. I remember in 1983 in Lebanon talking to the highly intelligent US marine commander whose soldiers were based near Beirut airport. In theoretical terms, he could see very clearly that American forces had some very dangerous enemies and were vulnerable to attack, but he unaccountably failed to take effective measures that might have stopped a truck packed with explosives killing 241 marines when their base was destroyed.

  Likewise, the Green Zone in Baghdad from 2003 on had elaborate fortifications, but its outer defences were manned at one moment by former Peruvian policemen from Lima and, at another, by ex-soldiers from Uganda hired on the cheap by a security company.

  A more effective political opponent than Mitt Romney could surely have inflicted damage on Obama over the Benghazi debacle. A measure of Romney's ineptitude is that he failed to do so and, instead of scoring points, he came across as opportunistic and ignorant. After all, Obama has been conducting a policy of retreat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt without quite coming clean about it. Romney's denunciation of Obama for "apologising" for America was shallow demagoguery, though rhetoric on the American right should not be dismissed too casually. George W Bush's supporters used to spout similar nonsense, but only after 9/11 did it become appallingly clear that they believed a lot of what they were saying.

  Supposing Obama is re-elected in November, will the US stance change at all? The endlessly repeated Israeli threats to launch air strikes on Iran have always struck me as being most likely highly successful bluff, since threats alone have served Israeli purposes so well, isolating Iran economically and diverting attention from the Palestinians.

  More immediately, will the US move after the election, possibly acting through Turkey, to take military action to displace Bashar al-Assad in Syria? There is something deceptive about David Cameron implying that Russia and China are responsible for the slaughter of Syrian children.

  A central problem in getting rid of President Assad and the Baathist regime is that the war against him is not just for and against autocracy. If this were the only issue, how come that the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Arabian peninsula are Assad's fiercest enemies? The struggle is also between Shia and Sunni and between Iran and its enemies, guaranteeing that Assad has support in Tehran, Baghdad and Beirut. The quickest way to end the war is to reassure Assad's allies at home and abroad that they are not next in line for elimination.

  A NATION IN CRISIS (2013)

  At the grave of a child, Kirkuk, Iraq

  Monday, 4 March 2013

  DISINTEGRATING AS A COUNTRY

  Iraq is disintegrating as a country under the pressure of a mounting political, social and economic crisis, say Iraqi leaders. They add that 10 years after the US invasion and occupation the conflict between the three main communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurd - is deepening to a point just short of civil war. "There is zero trust between Iraqi leaders," says an Iraqi politician in daily contact with them. But like many of those interviewed by The Independent for this article, he did not want to be identified by name.

  The escalating crisis in Iraq since the end of 2011 has largely been ignored by the rest of the world because international attention has been focused on Syria, the Arab uprisings and domestic economic troubles. The US and the UK have sought to play down overwhelming evidence that their invasion and occupation has produced one of the most dysfunctional and crooked governments in the world. Iraq has been violent and unstable for so long that Iraqis and foreigners alike have become desensitised to omens suggesting that, bad as the situation has been, it may be about to get a great deal worse.

  The record of failure of post-Saddam governments, given the financial resources available, is astounding. One of the reasons many Iraqis welcomed the fall of Saddam in 2003, whatever their feelings about foreign occupation, was that they thought that his successors would restore normal life after years of sanctions and war. To their astonishment and fury this has not happened, though Iraq now enjoys $100 billion (£66 billion) a year in oil revenues. In Baghdad there is scarcely a new civilian building to be seen and most of the new construction is heavily fortified police or military outposts. In Basra, at the heart of the oilfields, there are pools of sewage and heaps of uncollected rubbish in the streets on which herds of goats forage.

  I was in Baghdad at the end of January when there were a couple of days of heavy rain. For years, contractors - Iraqi and foreign - have supposedly been building a new sewage system for the Iraqi capital but none of the water was disappearing down the drains. I drove for miles in east Baghdad through streets flooded with grey, murky water, diluted with sewage. I only turned round in Sadr City, the Shia working-class bastion, when the flood waters became too deep to drive through. Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, explained to me that "since 2003, $7 billion has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren't built or they were built very badly". She said the worst flooding had been where in theory there were new sewage pipes, while those built in the 1980s worked better, concluding that "corruption is the key to all this".

  Theft of public money and incompetence on a gargantuan scale means the government fails to provide adequate electricity, clean water or sanitation. One-third of the labour force is unemployed and, when you include those under-employed, the figure is over half. Even those who do have a job have often obtained it by bribery. "I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria," says one former minister, "but in fact it is far worse." He cited as evidence a $1.3 billion contract for an electricity project signed by a minister with a Canadian company that had only a nominal existence - and a German company that was bankrupt.

  Iraqis looked for improved personal security and the rule of law after Saddam, but again this has not materialised. The violence is much less than during the mass slaughter of 2006 and 2007 when upwards of 3,000 Iraqis were being butchered every month. But Baghdad and central Iraq remains one of the most dangerous places on earth in terms of bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. It is not just political violence that darkens lives, but a breakdown of civil society that leaves people often looking to tribal justice in preference to police or official courts. One woman said that: "If you have a traffic accident, what matters is not whether you were right or wrong but what tribe you belong to."

  The same sense of insecurity in the face of arbitrary government taints political life. If there is not quite the same fear as under Saddam, it often feels as if this is only because the security forces are less efficient, not because they are any less cruel or corrupt. The rule of Nouri al-Maliki, Prime Minister since 2006, has become a near dictatorship with highly developed means of repression, such as secret prisons, and pervasive use of torture. He has sought to monopolise control over the army, intelligence service, government apparatus and budget, making sure that his supporters get the lion's share of jobs and contracts. His State of Law Coalition won only 24 per cent of the votes in the 2010 election - 2.8 million votes out of 19 million registered voters - but he has ruled as if he had received an overwhelming mandate.

  Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Kurdish leader and member of parliament, gives an excoriating analysis of what is wrong with present-day Iraq. "It is a failed state," he says. "The country is run by gangs [within the government] and gangs are more important than law. Maliki rules because he is head of the armed forces. Iraq is run by force, but force do
es not mean that those exercising it are in control."

  Saddam Hussein and the US both found to their cost that Iraq can never be ruled by compulsion alone, something Mr Maliki has been slow to learn. The power of religious and ethnic communities is too great for successful coercion by the state and is underpinned by Iraqis' loyalty to tribes, clans and extended families. When the Americans were leaving Iraq their main concern was that they would leave behind a security vacuum. But this was to mistake the nature of Iraqi politics. "The new [post-Saddam Hussein] Iraq has been built on the consensus of three communities: the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni," says one Iraqi leader, previously optimistic about the future of the country. "This political consensus has fractured." He believes there is still some chance of repairing the damage, but, if this fails, he says "the end of Iraq and the division of the country will be inevitable".

  Iraqis who fought for years against Saddam Hussein, blaming most of Iraq's ills on his regime, today express bitter disillusionment with his successors. Mustafa al-Khadimi, a veteran opponent of Saddam's rule, says "I feel saddened and disappointed. I have given my life to destroying the old system and have seen members of my family and friends killed. Now I watch Iraq treated like a cake to be cut up between our politicians." Others, equally despairing, criticise Mr Maliki for exacerbating and exploiting political divisions to keep power in his hands. As the pre-eminent leader of the Shia, three-fifths of the population, he alarms them by suggesting that their political dominance is under threat from the Sunni, a fifth of Iraqis, once in charge under Saddam but now marginalised. Last year, Mr Maliki sought to unite Sunni and Shia Arabs against the Kurds, another fifth of the population, by massing troops and threatening to invade Kurdish-controlled but disputed areas.