Iraqi and American Fault Lines

by Tom Engelhardt and Dilip Hiro
by Tom Engelhardt and Dilip Hiro

Flattened Iraq

In October 2003, the TV series Frontline did a show from Iraq, "Truth, War, and Consequences," that featured a remarkable scene shot the previous April, not long after American troops arrived in Baghdad. A group of GIs have captured some Iraqis whom they accuse of stealing wood. As an instant punishment in the "Wild West" of that moment, they simply run their tank over the Iraqis' car. First the tank climbs forward over the car's body, then does it again in reverse, two sustained blows that turn the vehicle into something like a metal pancake. (GI: "We try to stop them from looting, and they don't understand, so we take their car and we crush it, the United States Army tankers. That's what you get when you loot.") One of the Iraqis later says to an interviewer simply: "I am a taxi driver. The car was my livelihood."

The scene stuck in my head and, when I was trying to imagine how Iraq might be described today, I thought of that car again – this time in a ditch at the side of an Iraqi highway. An election has, of course, just occurred in Iraq which amounted to two massive presences and a massive absence, accounting for the three major Iraqi communities – Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni. At the same time, much American celebration and self-congratulation (from our media as well as the Bush administration) took place over that success. And the election was indeed a striking statement of some sort.

It was as if representatives of two of those Iraqi communities suddenly appeared at the roadside in a generous mood, banged that crushed car back into some crude shape, lifted it onto the road, and pointed it in the direction they wanted to go. Soon after, a group of squabbling, none-too-savory drivers appear, eager to get into the windowless, still broken vehicle. The only problem is that, barring a miracle, it won't take them anywhere. And even if it did, representatives of the third community, feeling none too generous of spirit, have already set up a series of roadblocks and ambushes, just a few hundred yards down the highway.

Put another way – and we desperately need a little perspective at the moment – here we are just a month short of two years after the Bush administration launched its triumphant invasion against a fifth-rate military with a nonexistent air force and no effective air defenses, in a tattered country already run into the ground by a combination of endless war, a tyrant's whims, and international sanctions. After all this time, the election aside, the actual condition of the country and its people may in most ways have worsened.

Iraq's economy is in ruins and parts of it are still being given away to foreign firms who don't quite know if they want it or not. It's a land without a reliable supply of electricity or, sitting on a sea of fossil fuel, gas for its cars, or kerosene for its stoves and lamps, or jobs for its people, or potable water to drink, or security of almost any sort in significant parts of the country. (A massive crime wave, only faintly linked to the insurgency, continues almost everywhere as far as we can tell.)

With the election, we've just turned another of many announced "corners" in post-invasion Iraq, only to find ourselves once again where Chaos and Mayhem Streets meet. After a post-election day or two in which our media widely broadcast the news that "violence" had precipitously declined, it predictably rose again. In the last week, an Iraqi judge, an Iraqi National Guard general, and two top Iraqi police officials have been assassinated, while 23 American soldiers died in the first half of February as well as uncounted ordinary Iraqis – and that is surely just the tip of the iceberg.

After all, one can wonder how much we really know about the nature of the carnage in Iraq given that the insurgents, according to Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent, now control to one degree or another all the major routes into or out of Baghdad, where most Western reporters are posted; kidnappings are again on the rise; and, as Roger Cohen of the New York Times wrote last Sunday, "Today, no Westerner with any vestige of sanity would contemplate making… trips [by vehicle out of Baghdad], even in the aftermath of an election that was a remarkable success." Rory McCarthy, Baghdad correspondent for the British Guardian, draws the necessary conclusion (no less applicable to our media), "Too often we have sat and listened to officials tell us what is happening in an Iraq that they themselves are barely able to visit."

There have been a number of post-election reports suggesting that more tips about the insurgency have been coming in to the Americans and the Iraqi forces allied with them, but the only thing we really know is that American-controlled detention centers, including the notorious Saddam-Hussein era prison at Abu Ghraib, are once again filling with "insurgents." Many of the more than 8,000 Iraqis now incarcerated are, past experience tells us, simply innocents swept up in crudely organized American raids. We can only guess what's happening to them, but it surely isn't pretty. (Of a 20 year-old physics student, released from American captivity only a month ago, 24 year-old freelance journalist David Enders wrote for Mother Jones online: "He says he was… interrogated and beaten daily. He points to his nose, which he says wasn't crooked before he was arrested. He said the prisoners were shocked repeatedly with tasers, forced to spend 24 hours at a time in cells too low to stand and too narrow sit, forced to sit for two days.")

Right now, as before the election, American forces find themselves on the horns of a dilemma that our top officer corps, post-Vietnam, never thought we would experience again. Our troops are mired in a seemingly endless guerrilla war in which, if you withdraw to your reasonably impregnable bases, you instantly surrender significant swathes of territory to your enemy; while, if you venture out armed and en masse to take the offensive, you not only suffer continual casualties but, operating relatively blindly in a strange land, create by your every act yet more enemies out of ordinary citizens.

Add to this an insurgency which seems to become ever more extreme and whose acts are increasingly directed at other Iraqis, threatening to plunge the country into an internecine bloodbath as well a struggle against a foreign occupier. In this way, the global extremity of the Bush administration has called up to meet it a localized movement (reinforced by international volunteers or jihadis) of extremity and ferocity – and Iraq has been shoved bodily into a grim world of self-fulfilling prophesy, becoming a (if not the) "central theater in the war on terror."

In the meantime, our allies in "the coalition of the willing" are ever so slowly abandoning ship. The sizeable Ukrainian contingent, the modest Dutch force, and the tiny Portuguese one have most recently gone overboard. Poland, recent recipient of a Bush promise of $100 million in aid – military aid, of course, since all international relations for this administration are essentially military ones – may still hang in there along with the Italians. But American and British troops are already stretched to the limit, and even some of them are now, by necessity, cycling out of the country. In fact, as Robert H. Reid of the Associated Press reports, "violence is once again on the rise just as some of the most experienced U.S. military units prepare to leave. Their replacements, some of them part-time soldiers from the National Guard, will need time to learn the situation on the ground." As for those National Guard troops, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, just told the House Armed Services Committee:

In Europe, where Condi Rice has launched her version of a charm offensive, the "old" Europeans are cooing nicely, a comforting hand on the Bush administration's shoulder, and saying all the right things. But their eyes are on that pancaked car, and they are proceeding to do next to nothing when it comes to helping the U.S. program, such as it is, in Iraq.

As for other countries, who even remembers our attempts to bring in Pakistani or Indian or other "native" troops? That's ancient history, unimaginable today. Only one seldom-mentioned "ally" is really sticking with the Bush administration and the Brits to the end – the private security companies that represent the sole booming industry in Iraq. Though when our press counts up "allied" troops there, mercenaries are never added in (or these days much written about), there are thousands and thousands of them in the country. From the first days of the occupation, Brits, Serbs, South Africans, Nepalese Gurkhas, former American Special Forces troops, and other mercenaries poured in to provide "security" for pay.

We know relatively little about this at present, though we do know that Donald Rumsfeld's privatizing Pentagon has been left in the ridiculous position of competing with itself because mercenary money is now so enticing. As Craig Gordon of Newsday reports, "The Pentagon is falling short on efforts to keep elite special forces units at full strength and now is fighting back dollar by dollar, offering up to $150,000 bonuses to commandos to keep high-paying private security firms from cherry-picking the teams… Some military commanders have expressed worries that such high bonuses can distort the nature of the all-volunteer force and lead to a 'mercenary' culture."

So the Iraqi election is over; the votes are in; and our main man in Baghdad, Ayad Allawi (aka "Saddam Lite") suffered a significant battering, as Juan Cole pointed out immediately at his invaluable Informed Comment blog. On the other hand, Shiite votes, projected soon after the election at close to 60%, came in at close to 50% – what one might call a convenient drop, from the American point of view. After all, the election of a heavily Shiite government with possible pro-Iranian sympathies wasn't quite what the neocons had in mind when they launched this little adventure. (Even as is, the Washington Post's Robin Wright points out, "[T]he top two winning parties – which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president – are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.") I haven't heard anyone asking yet, but it's worth wondering what did, in fact, happen in those unexpected extra days of vote-counting that went on behind very closed doors. On this subject, given the American presence in Baghdad where the votes were counted (and our own now tainted electoral process), I would be surprised by nothing.

In any case, soon a new government is to take… well, the normal word here would be "power," but that's not a word to be used idly in this situation. There are at present, as far as can be told, just about none of the normal institutions of civil government left to take over in Baghdad. All Iraqi ministries have American advisers in them. The Iraqi armed forces that the new government might command seem to consist of only about 5,000 functional troops, no heavy arms, and no air force. The strength of the Kurdish vote and the lack of a Sunni one look sure to create a weak coalition of some sort in Baghdad where all the legislators will be targeted by assassins. The Bush administration is deeply embedded in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone where a $1–2 billion new embassy is to be built; its 120,000 or more troops are bunkered into up to 14 massive, "permanent" military bases, also known as "enduring camps"; its CIA contingent is probably the largest in the world; its officials are openly talking about American troops remaining in Iraq at or near present levels at least through 2007; the administration is eager to negotiate a long-term Status of Forces Agreement with the new Iraqi government; and, as Stephen R. Shalom recently discussed at the ZNET website, El-Salvador-style hit squads seem already to be operative.

All in all, the Bush administration holds power of a sort – through a kind of brute force that has yet to bring Iraq to heel – and shows no sign of having the slightest desire to give up on its Iraqi holdings (no matter the inside-the-Beltway mutterings about "withdrawal"). This is the true face of American "democracy" and "freedom" in Iraq; but then again, for the Bush administration, "democracy," now raised to the very heights in its global morality play, has just taken over the role WMD once played, as Paul Wolfowitz so famously put it, as "the one issue that everyone could agree on," every other explanation for invasion, occupation, and insurgency having been swept off the table. (As a translator for journalist Christian Parenti commented: "Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don't know what to do with all this freedom.")

Against this the Sunnis have arms, funds, and determination; the Kurds, a powerful urge for independence; and Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who brought so many Shiites out to the polls, has but a single (though immensely powerful) threat – that, if unsatisfied, he could, in a version of the 1979 Iranian solution, call untold numbers of Shiites into the streets to defy the occupation.

In the meantime, the bargaining for "power" looks somewhat like a rat's nest. There's America's former man in Baghdad, Ayad Allawi, still in the mix; there's our previous man in Baghdad, Ahmed Chalabi (Scheherazade to the pre-invasion neocons and still supported by some of them), a man who has outdone any cat when it comes to lives; there's Adel Abd al-Mahdi, the Interim Government's finance minister and the Bush Administration's supposed "Trojan horse" in the main Shiite coalition – superpowers, remember, don't need to restrict themselves to a single "man" when they can have "men" wherever they want – who was only recently negotiating austerity budgets with the IMF and planning a new oil law "very promising to the American investors," as Naomi Klein reports; then there are the pro-Iranian Kurds and pro-Iranian Shiites; and even a few unnerved Sunnis, and god knows who else.

In reality, Iraq has been flattened by the Bush administration's tank and there's no obvious road to push it onto that's likely to lead anywhere palatable, no matter who may now be in the driver's seat. As Dilip Hiro indicates in an update of his pre-election report on Iraq's electoral cul-de-sac, even the most immediate problems of any new government will be fraught with peril. And whatever happens, for the foreseeable future, Iraq – with its still largely unobtainable sea of oil – will remain an occupied and thoroughly humiliated land. What image should then be chosen for America's Iraq – Ponzi scheme, house of cards, or [fill in the blank] – but not, I think, by any stretch of the imagination, a land of democracy and freedom. ~ Tom

An Election That Sharpened Iraq's Fault Lines
By Dilip Hiro

An apt headline, summarizing the results of the elections to Iraq's 275-representative-strong National Assembly on January 30, would be: "No surprises, no upsets."

Given a large voter turnout in the Shiite majority areas and an even a larger one in the Kurdistan region, it was widely predicted that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated alliances would top the polls. They did. As expected, due to the widespread Sunni boycott of the election, the only Sunni-dominated list that managed to win any seats garnered just five – one-eleventh of the seats that the Sunnis should have won.

Overall, the poll has exposed and sharpened the sectarian and ethnic fault lines in Iraqi society. At the same time, bolstered by a popular mandate, the new government seems set on a collision course with the American occupiers regarding the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.

Each of the three major communities has come to nurture a different scenario for the post-Saddam era. Shorn of their long-held power and yet not reconciled to powerlessness, Sunni leaders are still in disarray, focusing merely on expelling the Americans from their country. For minority Kurds, ethnically and linguistically set apart from Arabs, post-Saddam Iraq holds the promise of a sovereign state of Kurdistan with the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as its capital.

Driven by ethnic nationalism, the Kurds outdid the Shiites in their enthusiasm for balloting. The 90%-plus voter turnout in the three Kurdish-dominated provinces as well as in the ethnically-mixed provinces of Nineveh (capital, Mosul) and Tamim (capital, Kirkuk) has, not surprisingly, strengthened the bargaining power of the Kurdish leaders. Their Kurdistan Alliance gained 25 extra seats at the expense of Sunni Arabs. This has raised tensions between the two communities, especially in Kirkuk and Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city.

For the long-suppressed Shiite majority, the fall of Saddam's regime opened up for the first time the prospect of a popularly-elected, Shiite-led government in Iraq. Little wonder that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani declared that voting was a religious duty for believers. Accepting Sistani's fatwa (religious decree) unquestioningly, Shiite Muslims streamed to the polling centers on January 30. By backing the Sistani-inspired United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), they underscored the UIA's 22-point manifesto, where the demand for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq" is almost at the top.

As it happens, this Shiite demand is also popular among Sunnis, from moderates to insurgents. It is up to the leaders of the better-organized Shiite community to find ways to end the alienation most Sunnis are feeling.

Once the National Assembly has elected a Presidency Council – a President and two deputies – it will elect an executive Prime Minister and a cabinet. A Shiite-majority government is mandated to demand immediate negotiations with the Bush administration on the modalities of the withdrawal of the American and other foreign troops from Iraq.

But it won't get far. "We will not set an artificial time table for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out," said President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech on February 2. "We are in Iraq to achieve a result: a country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself." No prizes for guessing how long it will take to realize this over-ambitious set of Bush objectives.

So there is a strong prospect of a crisis in Baghdad soon after the inauguration of an elected government.

Besides administering Iraq, the new government will supervise the drafting of the permanent constitution by the National Assembly. Those charged with this task will face two major problems: defining the relationship between state and mosque and the degree of autonomy the Kurds are to receive (not to mention the boundaries of the region where it is to be exercised).

The Role of Islam

A year ago, when the interim constitution was being drafted by the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) under the supervision of Paul Bremer, the chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the issue of Islam and the state proved contentious. When IGC President Muhsin Abdul Hamid proposed making the Sharia "the primary basis" of law in the interim constitution, Bremer threatened to veto the document. (The Sharia is a compendium of the Koran and the Hadith, Sayings and Doings of Prophet Muhammad.) In the end, IGC members compromised by describing the Sharia as "a main source" of Iraqi legislation.

Following the recent poll, Shiite religious leaders staked out a demand. On February 6, a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq al Fayad, said, "All of the ulema [clergy] and marja [religious leaders], and the majority of the Iraqi people want the National Assembly to make Islam the [sole] source of legislation in the permanent constitution and to reject any law that is contrary to Islam." Sistani backed the statement. A week later, Hussein Shahristani, a leader of the UIA, the winner of 51% of the National Assembly seats, repeated the demand.

While Shiites overwhelmingly favor specifying the Sharia as the sole source of legislation, the Kurdish leaders are not so keen. And the Americans are decidedly against it. But such a provision in the constitution could be an effective way to conciliate the Sunni militants who want "the flag of Islam to fly in Iraq."

The second intractable problem concerns the Kurdish demand that the present boundaries of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region (KAR) consisting of three provinces – formed during the Baathist rule in 1974 – be expanded to include the oil-rich Tamim province. The fact that the Kurdistan Alliance secured 48% of the vote (due to the poll boycott by most Sunni Arabs and many Sunni Turkmen) in the simultaneously held elections to the region's Provincial Council has emboldened the Kurdish leaders.

Any enlargement of the KAR will be opposed bitterly not only by local Arabs and Turkmen but also by neighboring Turkey. It fears that the oil revenue from Tamim will make the KAR economically vibrant and pave the way for the declaration of an independent Kurdistan. That in turn will inspire Turkish Kurds in southeastern Turkey to revive their armed struggle for independence.

But, intoxicated by their electoral success, Iraqi Kurdish leaders are likely to turn a deaf ear to the concerns of Turkey or the fears of their ethnic Arab and Turkmen neighbors. So there is trouble brewing ahead within Iraq on ethnic lines – Kurds versus Arabs and Turkmen – that threatens to spill over into adjoining Turkey. In other words, Bush's much-trumpeted electoral turning point is likely to bring in its train even more severe problems than existed before.

February 17, 2005

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture. Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After (Nation Books) and The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide (Carrol & Graf).

Copyright © 2005 Dilip Hiro

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