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Is
This a 'Victory'? |
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Source : NY Books - Volume 55, Number 16 ·
October 23, 2008 |
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Is This a 'Victory'?
27.9.2008
By Peter W. Galbraith
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September
27, 2008
1.
We hear again and again from Washington that we have
turned a corner in Iraq and are on the path to
victory. If so, it is a strange victory. Shiite
religious parties that are Iran's closest allies in
the Middle East control Iraq's central government
and the country's oil-rich south. A Sunni militia,
known as the Awakening, dominates Iraq's Sunni
center. It is led by Baathists,www.ekurd.net
the very people we
invaded Iraq in 2003 to remove from power. While the
US sees the Awakening as key to defeating al-Qaeda
in Iraq, Iraq's Shiite government views it as a
mortal enemy and has issued arrest warrants for many
of its members. Meanwhile the Shiite-Kurdish
alliance that brought stability to parts of Iraq is
crumbling. The two sides confronted each other
militarily after the Iraqi army entered the
Kurdish-administered town of Khanaqin in early
September. |
Former U.S. State Department Official, Peter
Galbraith |
John McCain has staked
his presidential candidacy on his early advocacy of
sending more troops to Iraq. He says he is for
victory while Barack Obama is for surrender; and
polls suggest that voters trust McCain more on Iraq
than they do Obama. In 2006, dissatisfaction with
the Iraq war ended Republican control of both the
House of Representatives and the Senate. This year,
in spite of being burdened with the gravest
financial crisis since 1929 and the most unpopular
president since the advent of polling, the
Republican presidential nominee is running a
competitive race.
The US sent more troops into Iraq in 2007 and
violence has declined sharply in Anbar, Baghdad, and
many other parts of the country. Sectarian killings
in Baghdad are a fraction of what they were in 2006,
although that city remains one of the world's most
dangerous places. In recent months, US casualties
have been at their lowest level of the entire war.
While it is debatable how much of this is the result
of the "surge" in US troop strength, as opposed to
other factors, the decline in violence is obviously
a welcome development.
Less violence, however, is not the same thing as
success. The United States did not go to war in Iraq
for the purpose of ending violence between
contending sectarian forces. Success has to be
measured against US objectives. John McCain
proclaims his goal to be victory and says we are now
winning in Iraq (a victory that will,www.ekurd.net
of course, be lost if
his allegedly pro-surrender opponent wins). He
considers victory to be an Iraq that is "a
democratic ally." George W. Bush has defined victory
as a unified, democratic, and stable Iraq. Neither
man has explained how he will transform Iraq's
ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish Iran's
vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and
Sunnis to Iraq's new order. Remarkably, neither the
Democrats nor the press has challenged them to do
so.
2.
In January 2007, President Bush announced that he
was sending 25,000 additional troops to Baghdad and
Anbar province. Under a military strategy devised by
the newly appointed Iraq commander, General David
Petraeus, US troops moved out of their secure bases
and embedded themselves among the population. The
forces of the surge were intended to provide
sufficient protection to the local population so
that they would cooperate with the Iraqi army and
police and US troops fighting insurgents and
subversive Shiite militias. By living with their
Iraqi counterparts, the US troops could provide
training, advice, and confidence, making the Iraqi
forces more capable.
Politically, the surge was intended to provide a
breathing space for Iraq's diverse factions to come
together on a program of national reconciliation.
This was to include revision of a law excluding
Baathists from public service, new provincial
elections so that Sunnis might be fully represented
on the local level, a law for the equitable sharing
of oil revenues, and revisions of the Iraqi
constitution to create a more powerful central
government. Except for a flawed law on de-Baathification,
these goals have not been achieved, although the
parliament recently passed a law to allow elections
in parts of the country. Militarily, however, the
surge worked as General Petraeus intended. In
Baghdad and other places wracked by sectarian
violence, Sunnis and Shiites welcomed the increased
presence of US troops.
The surge, however, has not been the main reason for
the decline in violence. In 2006, Sunni tribal
leaders in Anbar decided that al-Qaeda and
like-minded Islamic fundamentalist fighters were a
greater threat than the Americans. The
fundamentalists were a direct challenge to the local
establishment, assassinating sheikhs and raping
their daughters (sometimes under the pretext of
forced marriage to jihadis). More importantly, the
tribal leaders came to realize that the Americans
would sooner or later want to leave while the
fundamentalists intended to stay and rule. The
tribal leaders obtained American money to create
their own militias and, in a brief period of time,
forced al-Qaeda and its allies out of most of Sunni
Iraq. Denied their base in Sunni areas, the
fundamentalists have been less able to stage the
spectacular attacks on Shiites that helped fuel
Iraq's Sunni–Shiite civil war.
Meanwhile, the radical Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr
responded to the increased US military deployments
by ordering his militia, the Mahdi Army, to stand
down. At the time, this seemed like a sensible
tactical approach. He, too, realized that the US
presence—in particular the surge in troop
numbers—was a temporary phenomenon. By not fighting
the Americans, he could wait out the surge, recall
his troops, and eventually resume battle with the
Sunnis and rival Shiite factions.
Al-Sadr's Shiite rivals, however, outfoxed him. In
2006, the support of al-Sadr's parliamentarians
enabled Nouri al-Maliki to win the nomination of the
Shiite caucus to be prime minister by one vote over
Adel Abdul Mehdi, the candidate of Iraq's largest
Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In 2008, however,
al-Maliki broke his connection to al-Sadr and
aligned himself with SCIRI (since renamed the
Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC). In March,
he used the Iraqi army, a Shiite-dominated
institution built around the SIIC's militia, the
Badr Corps, to oust the Mahdi Army from much of
Basra. Subsequently, the Iraqi army and police have
made inroads against the Madhi Army in its
stronghold in Sadr City, Baghdad's sprawling Shiite
slum.
Al-Maliki launched the Basra operation without first
telling the Americans, and when the Iraqi forces ran
into difficulty, he had to ask for American support.
Once it became clear that the government and the
Americans were bringing substantial resources to
both the Basra and Baghdad campaigns, the Mahdi Army
chose to negotiate a halt in the fighting rather
than engage in full-scale combat.
Thus in 2007 and 2008, both the Sunnis and the
Shiites fought civil wars within their communities.
Among the Sunnis, the Awakening emerged as the
decisive victor over al-Qaeda and the other
fundamentalists. Among the Shiites, the ruling
Shiite political parties have undercut Moqtada al-Sadr
politically and diminished the Mahdi Army
militarily. But al-Sadr has not been defeated and
has significant residual support.
In both the Shiite and Sunni communities, relative
"moderates" have emerged from the intracommunal
fighting. This is one key factor in the reduced
violence. The Sunni Awakening does not use car bombs
against Shiite pilgrims and it has diminished
al-Qaeda's ability to do so. The SCIRI-controlled
Iraqi Interior Ministry had run its own death squads
targeting Sunnis, but they were not as murderous and
cruel as the death squads of al-Sadr. The surge had
little to do with Sunnis turning against al-Qaeda
(although US funds were critical) but it did have a
part in undermining the Mahdi Army.
Although the Bush administration would never say so,
it has in effect adopted the decentralization
strategy long advocated by Senator Joseph Biden and
now also supported by Senator Obama. Biden's plan
would devolve almost all central government
functions—including security—to Sunni or Shiite
regions with powers similar to those now exercised
by Kurdistan. Until late 2006, the Bush
administration tried to defeat al-Qaeda with a
US-backed Shiite- dominated Iraqi army. The approach
failed and the US Marines even concluded that Anbar,
Iraq's largest Sunni province, was lost to al-Qaeda.
While the Sunnis have yet to set up a region (as
allowed by Iraq's constitution), they now have, in
the Awakening, a Sunni-commanded army. And it has
defeated al-Qaeda.
3.
In July, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki interjected
himself into the US presidential campaign, telling
the German magazine Der Spiegel that "US
presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about
sixteen months. That, we think, would be the right
time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of
slight changes." Al-Maliki's endorsement of the main
plank of Obama's Iraq plan undercut both President
Bush and Senator McCain. The US embassy prevailed on
al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, to say that
Der Spiegel had mistranslated his boss. Al-Dabbagh,
however, wouldn't issue the statement himself, so it
was put out by CENTCOM in his name. A few days
later, al-Maliki met the visiting Senator Obama and
again endorsed his deadline. This time al-Dabbagh
explained that al-Maliki meant it.
Some conservative commentators suggested that
al-Maliki had decided Obama was going to win and
wanted to have good relations with the next US
president. Others suggested that al-Maliki was
playing to Iraqi public opinion and didn't mean what
he said. Bush loyalists grumbled that al-Maliki was
an ingrate.
Few grasped the most obvious explanation: Nouri
al-Maliki wants US troops out of Iraq. He leads a
Shiite coalition comprised of religious parties,
including his own Dawa party, which is committed to
making Iraq into a Shiite Islamic state. Like his
coalition partners, al-Maliki views Iraq's Sunnis
with deep—and justifiable—suspicion. For four years
after Saddam's fall, Iraqi Sunnis supported an
insurgency that branded Shiites as apostates
deserving death. Now the Sunnis have thrown their
support behind the Awakening, which is portrayed by
American politicians, including Senator McCain, as a
group of patriotic Iraqis engaged in the fight
against al-Qaeda. Iraq's Shiite leaders see the
Awakening as a Baathist-led organization that
rejects Iraq's new Shiite-led order—an accurate
description.
Until 2007, the Americans fought alongside the
Shiite-led Iraqi army against the Sunni
fundamentalists. The Shiites were more than happy to
have the Americans do much of their fighting for
them. When the US created and began to finance the
Sunni Awakening in 2007, the Shiite perspective on
the American presence shifted. Now the United States
was backing a military force deeply hostile to
Shiite rule. Al-Qaeda could—and did—kill thousands
of Shiites but it was no threat to Shiite rule per
se. It was a shadowy terrorist organization
operating with small cells and unable to mobilize or
concentrate large forces. Further, both the US and
Iran, the two most important external powers in the
Iraqi equation, were certain to support the Shiites
against al-Qaeda.
With some 100,000 men under arms, the Awakening is,
at least potentially, a strong military force in its
own right. Its leaders are not only ideologically
linked to Saddam's anti-Shiite Baath regime, but
many served in Saddam's army. And most importantly
from a Shiite perspective, the Awakening has
powerful outside support—from the United States.
Al-Qaeda could never take over Iraq, but the
Awakening might—or at least so Iraq's Shiite
government fears.
Since the US created the Awakening, its goal has
been to integrate the Sunni militiamen into Iraq's
armed forces. Al-Maliki's government has repeatedly
promised the Bush administration that it would do
so, and then reneged. (Iraqis learned in the early
days of the occupation that President Bush and his
team were readily satisfied with promises,www.ekurd.net
regardless of whether
any actions followed.) At the end of 2007, General
Jim Huggins, who oversaw the Iraqi police in the
Sunni belt south of Baghdad, submitted three
thousand names—most from the Awakening but also
including a few hundred Shiites—to the Iraqi
government for incorporation into the security
forces. Four hundred were accepted. All were
Shiites. As of October 1, the Iraqi government is
supposed to take over responsibility for the 54,000
Awakening militiamen in Baghdad, including paying
their salaries. By all accounts, the militiamen are
deeply skeptical that this will happen, as
apparently are their American sponsors. US
commanders have been reassuring the Awakening that
the US will not abandon them.
As many as one half the members of the Awakening
have been insurgents or insurgent sympathizers.
While the Sunni militiamen can gain tactical
advantage by joining the Iraqi army and police, they
are no less hostile to the Shiite-led Iraqi
government than when they were planting roadside
bombs, ambushing government forces, and executing
kidnapped Iraqi army recruits and police. The
Shiites understand this and so, apparently, do some
of the Americans. As General Huggins told USA Today,
if the Sunnis "aren't pulled into the Iraqi security
forces, then we have to wonder if we're just arming
the next Sunni resistance."
From 2003 until 2007, the Bush administration helped
Iraq's most pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties
take and consolidate power. Naturally, the
Shiites—and their Iranian backers—welcomed the US
involvement, at least temporarily. Now the United
States is putting heavier pressure on al-Maliki to
include the Sunni enemy in Iraq's security forces.
It has created a Sunni army that, as long as the US
remains in Iraq, can only grow in strength.
Al-Maliki and his allies want the US out of Iraq
because the American presence has become dangerous.
Without American troops, the Iraqi army and police
would be able to move against the Awakening. Should
Sunni forces prove too powerful, Iran is always
available to help.
4.
In early September, al-Maliki sent Iraqi troops into
Khanaqin, a dusty Kurdish town on the Iranian border
northeast of Baghdad. While technically not part of
the Kurdistan Region, the Kurdistan Regional
Government has administered Khanaqin since 2003. The
forces of the Kurdish Peshmerga army, who liberated
the town from Saddam that April, have provided
security. It is widely expected that Khanaqin will
formally be incorporated into the Kurdistan Region
as part of the process specified in Article 140 of
Iraq's constitution for determining Kurdistan's
borders. By sending Arab troops to Khanaqin,
al-Maliki deliberately picked a fight with the
Kurds, who have been the Shiites' partner in
governing Iraq since 2003.
Iraq's Kurds have had a very large part in
post-Saddam Iraq. Iraq's president, deputy prime
minister, foreign minister, and army chief are all
Kurds. The Peshmerga fought on the US side in the
2003 war and is the one indigenous Iraqi force that
is reliably pro-American. Iraqi Kurds are secular,
democratic, and pro-Western. Both militarily and
politically, they have supported US policy, even
when they have had reservations about its wisdom.
In recent months, al-Maliki has tried to marginalize
the Kurds. In ordering troops to Khanaqin, he did
not consult Jalal Talabani, Iraq's Kurdish
president, and he did not involve General Babakir
Zebari, the Kurd who supposedly heads Iraq's army.
In order to bypass Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish
foreign minister, al-Maliki has appointed his own
"special envoys."
President Talabani, who was in the US for medical
treatment at the time, helped defuse the Khanaqin
crisis by persuading both the Peshmerga and the
Iraqi army to withdraw. But the incident has been
seen by the Kurds as a danger sign. When Iraq's
defense minister proposed acquiring American F-16s
for the Iraqi air force, Iraq's neighbors—including
Iran and Kuwait—said nothing. But the Kurdish deputy
speaker of the Iraqi parliament strongly protested,
expressing fear that the planes' most likely target
would be Kurdistan. As a condition of the proposed
US–Iraq security agreement, the Kurds want
assurances that the Iraqi army will not be used in
Kurdistan.
5.
The surge was intended to buy time for political
reconciliation. In January, Iraq's parliament
revised the country's de-Baathification law, thus
meeting a long-standing US demand. While the new law
restored the rights of some former Baathists,
however, it imposed an entirely new set of
exclusions on Baathists in so-called sensitive
ministries. Iraq's Sunni parliamentarians mostly
opposed the law, which was supposed to help them.
The Sunnis had demanded early provincial elections
since they had boycotted the previous local
elections in 2005 and were largely unrepresented on
the provincial councils, even in Sunni areas. The
Shiite-dominated parliament inserted a poison pill
into the election law, a provision that would
invalidate the "one man, one vote" principle in the
Kirkuk Governorate—the administrative unit that
includes the major city of Kirkuk on the Kurdistan
border—in favor of a system of equal representation
for each of Kirkuk's three communities: Kurds,
Arabs, and Turkmen. Naturally, the Kurds, who are a
majority both in the Governorate and on the
Governorate Council, opposed a system that would
give their foes two thirds of council seats.
Talabani vetoed the entire bill and as a result the
Kurds were blamed for blocking national elections
that the Shiites and some Sunnis also did not want
to hold. (The SIIC was afraid it might lose some
Governorates it now controls, including Baghdad, to
Moqtada al-Sadr, while some Sunni parliamentarians
feared the Awakening's electoral strength would
underscore the fact that they do not represent the
Sunni community.) Recently, the parliament passed a
law to allow elections in 2009 in Sunni and Shiite
Iraq, but not in Kirkuk or Kurdistan. The
maneuverings left the Kurds politically isolated
while, as a bonus to the Shiite ruling parties,
providing more time for them to deal with al-Sadr.
The Shiites are also pursuing changes in Iraq's
constitution that would strengthen the central
government at the expense of Kurdistan, knowing full
well that these changes will be rejected by the
Kurds.
Al-Maliki's agenda is transparent. The Kurds and
Sunnis are obstacles to the ruling coalition's
ambitions for a Shiite Islamic state. Al-Maliki
wants to eliminate the Sunni militia and contain the
Kurds politically and geographically. America's
interest in defeating al-Qaeda is far less important
to him than the Shiite interest in not having a
powerful Sunni military that could overthrow Iraq's
new Shiite order. The Kurds are too secular, too
Western, and too pro-American for the Shiites to
share power comfortably with them.
This should not be a surprise. Iran, not the US, is
the most important ally of Iraq's ruling Shiite
political parties. The largest party in al-Maliki's
coalition is the SIIC, which was founded by the
Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1982. By all accounts,
Iran wields enormous influence within Iraq's ruling
Shiite coalition and has an effective veto over
Iraqi security policies. In 2005, Iran intervened in
Iraq's constitutional deliberations to undo a
Shiite–Kurdish agreement on Kurdistan's powers, only
to relent after Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani
made clear that there would be no constitution
without the deal; many Iraqis have told me that one
reason that the US and Iraq have been unable to
agree on a new security arrangement is that Iran
opposes anything of the kind.
Nor is al-Maliki a Western-style democrat, in spite
of President Bush's attempts to portray him as just
that. Rather, he is a Shiite militant from the
hard-line Dawa Party. Before returning to Iraq in
2003, he had spent more than twenty years in exile
in Iran and Syria. As late as 2002, State Department
officials sought to exclude Dawa from a US-sponsored
Iraqi opposition conference because of Dawa's
historical links to terrorism, including a 1983
suicide bomb attack on the US embassy in Kuwait.
(There is no basis for linking al-Maliki or other
mainstream Dawa leaders to that attack.)
Al-Maliki is an accidental prime minister, having
secured the job only after internecine Shiite
rivalries (and Kurdish opposition) derailed more
prominent candidates. The Bush administration knew
so little about him that it initially had his first
name wrong. He had never been considered important
enough to meet the many senior US officials
traipsing to Baghdad. But President Bush has
embraced him as the embodiment of American values
and goals in Iraq.
John McCain says that partly because of his
persistent support of the surge, we are now winning
the Iraq war. He defines victory as an Iraq that is
a democratic ally. Yet he advocates continued US
military support to an Iraqi government led by
Shiite religious parties committed to the
establishment of an Islamic republic. He takes a
harder line on Iran than President Bush, but
supports Iraqi factions that are Iran's closest
allies in the Middle East. He praises the Awakening
and but seems not to have realized that the Iraqi
government is intent on crushing it. He has
denounced the Obama-Biden plan for a decentralized
state but has said nothing about how he would
protect Iraq's Kurds, the only committed American
allies in the country.
George W. Bush has put the United States on the side
of undemocratic Iraqis who are Iran's allies. John
McCain would continue the same approach. It is hard
to understand how this can be called a success—or a
path to victory.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, nybooks
com
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