Iraq civil war: Rumors and
reality By Ritt Goldstein
As cracks
appear in the Bush administration's campaign to portray
Iraqi setbacks as the work of foreign terrorists and
al-Qaeda, Iraq's homegrown factional fault lines are
becoming increasingly evident. Repeated calls for
direct elections by Iraq's majority Shi'ites have in
effect pushed a succession of US plans and deadlines
into the
wastebin, with the United Nations
issuing repeated cautions against a descent into civil
war.
Amid the exponentially expanding US
reports of al-Qaeda and foreign-terrorist action in Iraq, the
US-led coalition's failures in addressing domestic Iraqi
pressures in the war's aftermath have made potential
civil war a stark reality. Despite Washington's
spin, domestic Iraqi lines have been drawn both along
factional borders and between those who are Islamic and
secular. The potential for conflict is abundant.
In an interview with this journalist last
October, a then recently retired former senior-level
Pentagon staffer, Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski,
revealed what is now becoming increasingly evident of
postwar planning. Kwiatkowski warned that in the
months immediately preceding the Iraq invasion, the
"focus was entirely on leading us to war, not its
aftermath".
Highlighting what this lack of
foresight has meant, UN envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi
said: "I have appealed to the members of the [Iraqi]
Governing Council and to Iraqis in every part of Iraq to
be conscious that civil wars do not happen because a
person makes a decision, 'Today, I'm going to start a
civil war.'" And in a real sense, if a civil war
does break out, it will be Iraq's second in about 13
years.
After Saddam Hussein's defeat by US-led
forces in the first Gulf War in 1991, Shi'ites and Kurds
rose against Saddam and the Sunni Ba'ath Party's domination. Both
groups were badly defeated when the
United States failed to intervene on their behalf, unresolved
questions of a US betrayal being subsequently raised.
In the wake of the present Iraq war, the Sunnis
- who have dominated Iraqi politics since the Ottoman
Empire despite being numerically smaller than the
Shi'ites - find their status threatened by the
substantive and growing power of both the Kurds and the
Shi'ites. And in the ongoing jockeying for position
and power, both Shi'ites and Sunnis have chafed at
Kurdish demands for oil-rich Kirkuk and effective
autonomy, a Kurdish mini-state of their own (perhaps
even outside a federal Iraq) carved from the country's
north.
As factional assassinations and
bombings punctuate the jagged edges
of Iraq's internal rivalries, the administration of US
President George W Bush has worked to paint these
internal conflicts as externally driven, particularly
seizing on al-Qaeda as its designated whipping
boy. But contradictions abound.
Highlighting this ongoing scenario, the
Associated Press quoted Gareth Stansfield of the United
Kingdom's Exeter University Institute of Arab and
Islamic Studies as observing: "The potential for civil
war is already in place ... it does not need al-Qaeda to
encourage it." Illustrating the all too real
minefield surrounding direct elections and the adamant
Shi'ite (60 percent of Iraqis) calls for them,
Stansfield warned: "It flies in the face of Iraq's
history of the past 80 years to imagine that the Sunnis
will accept Shi'ite domination or allow them to rule."
After the 1991 Gulf War, it emerged that
Saddam was allowed to retain power out of fears that
removing him would plunge Iraq into prolonged civil war
and/or transform the nation into an Iran-like
republic. Notably, the Iraqi Shi'ite leader, Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has stated that he does not
seek Iraq's transformation to an Iranian-type state.
The grand ayatollah's pronouncement came last
month during a meeting convened at his home in Najaf.
Representatives from both the Sunni and Kurdish
communities were in attendance. The gathering was
set off by Sunni and Kurdish concerns over Shi'ite
direct-election demands, and the increasing militancy
within Iraq's three factions being fanned by them.
It is expected that in a direct election the
Shi'ites would gain a controlling majority in Iraq's
legislature. And in the rough game of Iraqi
politics, a Sunni cleric was gunned down this past week
after his influential half-brother cautioned against
quick elections.
Iraq is an artificially
created state, formed by the British from three
Ottoman provinces after World War I. During the long
period when the US supported Saddam, a favored rationale
was that it took such leadership as his to hold the
country together. As with Yugoslavia, now that the
strongman is gone, the potential for civil war has
risen, floating as an abhorrent specter above the
nation's future.
One aspect of the Bush
administration's response has been in essence to deny
the latent factional forces that the war surfaced,
concurrently working to legitimize the war itself via
accusations against non-Iraqi "terror
groups". Another has been simultaneously pursuing
the creation of the necessary Iraqi political and
security apparatus to best ensure the administration's
agenda. But even with the present US-chosen Iraqi
leadership, key features of the US-sponsored November
plan for Iraqi sovereignty have gone awry.
Kurdish autonomy and border
questions have reportedly plagued efforts at drafting
an interim constitution. Of more concern, last
Wednesday, a Kurdish grassroots body, Referendum
Movement, presented US and Iraqi leaders with a 1.7-million-signature
petition for a referendum on transforming the Kurdish
enclave into a completely independent state, outside the
proposed Iraqi federal system.
In the early
hours of Monday morning, Iraqi time, members of the
Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), with the US mediating,
finally agreed on the draft of an interim constitution,
reaching a compromise on the role of Islam and putting
off the details of Kurdish autonomy. The charter is
likely to be signed on Wednesday.
Last
month, Sistani criticized as undemocratic the US plan
for creating an interim government to receive power on
June 30, the date for officially ending the US occupation. He
initiated the calls for direct elections,
in effect killing the caucus system the US
had designed.
The Shi'ites have also
raised concerns that the US is "stalling" their
enfranchisement. The grand ayatollah is reportedly
willing to negotiate elections by the year's end, but
only in exchange for UN guarantees, as well as
limitations on the power of the government existing
prior to then. And with Sunnis alone forming the
vast bulk of Iraqi resistance, the Bush administration
can ill afford a showdown with the Shi'ites, and the
expansion of armed resistance that would mean.
Accentuating just such a possibility,
Sistani has threatened to launch an intifada (uprising)
against the US should Shi'ite wishes be
ignored. Muqtada al-Sadr, said to be Iraq's second-most-influential
Shi'ite leader, also threatened intifada, and expressed
outrage at US efforts to secularize Iraq's proposed
constitution.
The US has threatened to veto
Islamic law as the constitution's basis, responding to a
proposal advanced by Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, a
Sunni. Abdel-Hamid is the current IGC president,
and his proposal met with support from Sistani.
In terms of the interim constitution, Islam
will be recognized as "a major source" of legislation and
any laws that violate the tenets of the Muslim faith will
be banned. US officials and secular-minded members got
their way with the phrase "a source" - out of many
sources - but the ban on laws that violate Islam was
aimed at pleasing conservatives.
Nevertheless, the Islamic-law issue highlights the existing
divide between Islamic and secular forces within the
country, cutting across factional boundaries. And it
presents another brittle fault line that violence has already
cracked, particularly as regards intra-Kurdish strife.
As it weighs its options and seeks a UN formula
that will defuse the political standoffs, the Bush
administration has concentrated on both legitimizing the
war and insulating itself from the potential fallout
should civil war occur. Accusations against
foreign terrorists, al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam and Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi have risen in virtually direct
proportion to US setbacks. Particularly noteworthy
is a letter that surfaced last month that was allegedly
written by Zarqawi, a Jordanian, to al-Qaeda.
According to US sources, Zarqawi allegedly
leads Ansar al-Islam, a group that "clearly is supported to
some degree by al-Qaeda", said US General Richard Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Describing
Zarqawi, the US State Department says he is "a close
associate of Osama bin Laden". But also according
to official US sources, Zarqawi's relationship to bin
Laden is "uncertain", and he instead leads a Jordanian
extremist group, al-Tawhid. And most notably, a
recent report by the intelligence branch of the US
Department of State stressed that al-Qaeda and Ansar
appear quite unrelated and independent of each other,
though last Thursday media reports by US officials have
again claimed the contrary. But while
contradictions abound, the killing has continued, with
speculation existing that the Iraq war's hawks are
manipulating its description for their own purposes,
Zarqawi's alleged letter providing an example.
In the alleged letter to al-Qaeda, Zarqawi
invites the group to Iraq in hopes of initiating a
sequence of attacks which will set off civil war.
However, US officials have long claimed that al-Qaeda is
already in Iraq. This past week, US civil administrator
L Paul Bremer charged that the last several months have
marked an upsurge of Iraqi attacks by "the professional
terrorists of al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam".
Of course, a most curious thing is that if indeed
al-Qaeda is in the country, why did it need to be invited to
Iraq by Zarqawi? And the US military does claim
the alleged letter is authentic. But such
"confusion" has been evident since US Secretary of State
Colin Powell's UN address of a year ago.
At
that time, in an attempt to win UN backing for the
Iraq invasion, Powell told the UN of a "much more
sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist
network ... a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama
bin Laden". Powell also said that Ansar
"offered al-Qaeda safe haven in the region" in 2000.
And Powell also claimed that Iraq had a stockpile
"of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent,
rocket launchers and warheads containing biological
warfare agent, mobile production facilities used to make
biological agents" and that it provided "training in
these weapons to al-Qaeda".
Powell's portrayal
of Zarqawi and Ansar as Iraq's links to al-Qaeda, and
al-Qaeda's links to weapons of mass destruction (WMD),
is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of his effort
to gain UN support. Of particular note, Powell took
pains to emphasize the unquestionable accuracy of his
claims, saying: "My colleagues, every statement I
make today is backed up by sources, solid
sources. These are not assertions."
By contrast, a report last June by the UN's terrorism
committee found no links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and
former Powell aide Greg Thielmann said in October that
"the secretary of state misinformed Americans during his
speech at the UN last winter". Beyond this, little
needs be said regarding Iraq's missing WMD, except that
allegations of al-Qaeda and terrorism distract public
attention from their glaring absence.
According to the Washington-area defense think-tank Global
Security, only 2.8 percent of those arrested in Iraq
have been non-Iraqis. But accusations of foreign
terrorists and links to al-Qaeda do serve to obscure the
domestic factors driving Iraq violence - think Lebanese
civil war - and in the "war on terror" they also serve
to legitimize the war effort. And should civil war
break out, the Bush administration has its alleged
Zarqawi letter showing who's to blame.
Ritt Goldstein is an American
investigative political journalist based in Stockholm.
His work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia's
Sydney Morning Herald, Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's
Politiken, as well as with Inter Press Service (IPS), a
global news agency.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
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Amid the exponentially expanding US
reports of al-Qaeda and foreign-terrorist action in Iraq, the
US-led coalition's failures in addressing domestic Iraqi
pressures in the war's aftermath have made potential
civil war a stark reality. Despite Washington's
spin, domestic Iraqi lines have been drawn both along
factional borders and between those who are Islamic and
secular. The potential for conflict is abundant.
