Dropping the sovereignty baton
By K Gajendra Singh

"It was by force that the sons of Osman seized the sovereignty and Sultanate of the Turkish nation; they have maintained this usurpation for six centuries. Now, the Turkish nation has rebelled and has put a stop to these usurpers and has effectively taken sovereignty and Sultanate in its own hands."

Thus admonished Kemal Ataturk in the Grand National Assembly in Ankara in 1923, when some members, including Islamic clerics and scholars, opposed his proposal to abolish the Sultanate. Many, including some of his comrades, had wanted the Sultanate to continue. A vote by applause after his intervention abolished the six-century-old institution, leaving Ataturk to embark on his program of Westernizing and modernizing the new nation forged out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

The nucleus of those who will take back Iraq's sovereignty by force and with blood has come into being at Fallujah and Najaf. These are the first recognizable but critical developments in the Iraqi resistance for freedom and the war for independence. Fallujah, where 700-1,000 people paid with their lives to establish the first independent space in their country, is now guarded by the very troops of demonized Saddam Hussein. Iraqis prefer them to US soldiers, and the limitations of sheer brutal power were exposed.

At the same time, many Shi'ites in Najaf, Karbala and southern Iraq, led by the rising young firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr, made the point that Iraqi people, whether Sunni or Shi'ite Arabs, were all determined to see US-led forces out of Iraq. Questions remain only about the Kurds in the north, under US and United Kingdom protection since 1991.

Caught in a quagmire of its own making, the administration of US President George W Bush is now looking for ways and means to quit Iraq, and wants someone reliable to whom Iraq's "sovereignty" can be handed on June 30, because polls indicate that 64 percent of Americans believe that Bush has no clear plans for Iraq. The sovereignty timetable remains driven by the US electoral calendar and growing Iraqi impatience with a deeply unpopular occupation. Thus the June 30 date was fixed last November, so that the US electorate could be told that the mission in Iraq - whatever it was - had been accomplished.

A few weeks ago, officials from Bush down said there was only one fate for Muqtada and his Mahdi Army who were occupying Najaf: "Be killed or be captured." But under a deal last week, charges related to the murder of a rival cleric last year were apparently dropped, and in return for withdrawal of his army, the US also withdrew from the city. The White House had also said earlier that the Mahdi Army must be broken up, but it is still intact.

Another deal cut four weeks ago with Sunni rebels in Fallujah in effect turned the city over to former Ba'athist commanders acceptable to the insurgents. Many in Washington complain that US commanders, desperate to avoid clashes heading into the June 30 transfer, have granted concessions to Sunni and Shi'ite insurgents, greatly strengthening the hand of sectarian militias answerable neither to Baghdad nor to Washington.

"What we're trying to do is extricate ourselves from Fallujah," said a senior US official familiar with US strategy who spoke only on condition of anonymity. "There's overwhelming pressure with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the White House to deliver a successful Iraq transition, and Iraq is proving uncooperative."

Even Richard Perle, a powerful adviser to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, described US policy in postwar Iraq as a failure: "I would be the first to acknowledge we allowed the liberation [of Iraq] to subside into an occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a continuing error," said Perle. "We didn't have to find ourselves in the role of occupier. We could have made the transition that is going to be made at the end of June more or less immediately," he told BBC Radio.

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, "The war itself has led to, rightly or wrongly, the feeling among many in the military that they're not receiving competent direction, that it is too ideological, and that a lot of their military efforts have been wasted by what they regard as poor, inept planning for the stability phase."

Meanwhile, the military has been stained by a scandal in which soldiers physically and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners. "It's obvious there has been damage to the US military as an institution because it is over-strained and it is over-deployed. And it is beginning to see its morale erode because it is losing confidence in the direction of the war," Cordesman said.

Military historian Richard Kohn said a natural tension always exists between political appointees to head the Defense Department and professional military officers, but Rumsfeld's relationship with the military brass has been as tense as that of any defense secretary except Robert McNamara, the Vietnam War-era Pentagon chief.

The US-led coalition, now weakening, with Spain and a few others having withdrawn their troops already, invaded Iraq against the will of most of the members of the United Nations, thus fatally undermining whatever credibility the world body had left after its misuse first by big powers and then by the United States since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With its deplorable record of resolutions and poor implementation of the oil-for-food program in Iraq, the UN remains a somewhat irrelevant and partisan entity as far as Iraqis are concerned.

Even some Iraqi diplomats now under training in India, with whom this writer interacted recently, had no good word for the UN, which "takes orders from the US". The attack last August that devastated the UN compound in Baghdad, killing scores of people, did lead to some soul-searching about the neutrality of the world body, its utility and even its relevance. Since then there have been few takers for UN work in Iraq.

Transfer of 'sovereignty'
On the question of the transfer of sovereignty, Bush's ever-faithful ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was out of step when he insisted that after the June 30 handover the Iraqi interim government would have "full sovereignty". He said "yes" when Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy asked whether the Iraqi government would be able to "retain control of both its oil revenues and its prisoners".

At the same time, Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defense secretary, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "June 30 is not a magical date on which the Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA] will suddenly [pass] all of its responsibilities to a new Iraqi government". Wolfowitz added that under the Transitional Administrative Law - the document that lays out broad principles covering the post-June 30 period - CPA orders "shall remain in force until rescinded or amended by legislation duly enacted and having the force of law".

Before Bush expounded his views to Americans on the transfer of power to Iraqis, on May 24 (more such speeches are scheduled up to June 30 to shore up his slipping popularity), the UK media aired the views of British politicians, experts on the Middle East, retired ambassadors and others. While the US will retain authority over Iraq's development fund, established by the UN Security Council and supplied by revenue from the sale of Iraqi oil, other unanswered questions remain about the status of US-led foreign forces in Iraq and their relationship, militarily and legally, with Iraqi security forces.

But what will it take to convince Iraqis that they control their own sovereign state? Views expressed included that new laws should not be vetoed by the US, which should be in the country in a subordinate role. The UN Security Council will have to define the limits of the powers of the new transitional government in its resolution which brings it into being. The German idea of a national security council with representatives from Iraq, the UN and the US/UK to handle security decisions seems well worth developing. The main issue is not to have the Americans solely in charge of anything. And to be sure, that they don't anticipate or succeed in pulling all the strings from behind the scenes via their advisers on the civilian side and military command on the security side.

The agreement last November 15 between the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and the CPA provides for "full sovereignty for Iraq" to be assumed by the end of this month. In international law, "full sovereignty" means the right of the Iraqi Transitional National Assembly (ITNA) to exercise all the functions of a state within the territory of Iraq, over all persons and things, and the right to exercise supreme authority over its citizens at home and abroad. The starting point must be that no limits or exceptions to "full sovereignty" can be presumed, and that any such limits or exceptions have to be agreed by the ITNA. Full sovereignty means control over everything, including budgets, prisons, laws, borders etc, subject to any constraints arising under international law. It includes control over any foreign military personnel, subject to any express agreement or Security Council resolution to the contrary, and the right to decide that foreign forces shall leave the territory of Iraq. It means also that the ITNA is free to enter international agreements with other states, and to become a party to treaties such as the statute of the International Criminal Court.

Absolute sovereignty may be less of a concern for the new government than one might think: the key question is perhaps one of its legitimacy. The outgoing IGC is lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis not simply because it is perceived as being appointed by the US, but also because it has no real power to make decisions. Yet even if the scope of the interim government's sovereignty is curtailed by the US, there are other steps it might take to plug the legitimacy gap. Holding local elections would re-engage the disaffected Iraqi population, and contribute to the development of a "democratic culture" inside the country. Such elections might also result in the emergence of local representatives who might move on to play a role in politics at the national level after the elections next January.

Runaway Pentagon
It is now accepted that strategically the invasion was poorly planned and executed. The former commander of the central command and later special envoy to the Middle East, marine General Anthony Zinni, described in 2002 some plans to invade Iraq hare-brained and likely to end as a "Bay of Goats" disaster, like John Kennedy's 1961 "Bay of Pigs" misadventure in Cuba. Now in his new book Battle Ready he writes that in the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, he saw "at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption".

"I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning. Even before the conflict, not just generals, but others - diplomats, those in the international community that understood the situation, friends of ours in the region - felt strongly we were underestimating the problems and the scope of the problems we would have in there." Recently, both Rumsfeld and his deputy acknowledged that they hadn't anticipated the level of violence that would continue in Iraq a year after the war began.

When Zinni criticized the group of policymakers within the administration known as the neo-conservatives who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize US interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel, he was called anti-Semite. They include Wolfowitz; Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith; former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked US policy in Iraq.

Zinni added that the Pentagon relied on inflated intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and others, whose credibility was in doubt. There was no viable plan or strategy for governing post-Saddam Iraq. "As best as I could see, I saw a pick-up team, very small, insufficient in the Pentagon with no detailed plans that walked on to the battlefield after the major fighting stopped and tried to work it out in the huddle - in effect to create a seat-of-the-pants operation on reconstructing a country." As for US proconsul in Iraq, L Paul Bremer, Zinni said: "He has made mistake after mistake after mistake, like disbanding the army, de-Ba'athifying, even people that were competent and didn't have blood on their hands and were needed in the aftermath of reconstruction - alienating certain elements of that society."

Zinni's plan called for troops numbering about 300,000 (instead of 180,000). Zinni explained: "I think it's critical in the aftermath, if you're going to go to resolve a conflict through the use of force, and then to rebuild the country. The first requirement is to freeze the situation, is to gain control of the security. To patrol the streets. To prevent the looting. To prevent the 'revenge' killings that might occur. To prevent bands or gangs or militias that might not have your best interests at heart from growing or developing," he added.

Zinni believes this was a war the generals didn't want - but it was a war the civilians wanted. Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time - with the wrong strategy. Others who had opposed the war were former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, former central commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander Wesley Clark, and former army chief of staff Eric Shinseki.

"If we are going to 'stay the course', as Bush always insists, the course is headed over the Niagara Falls," warns Zinni in his book.

Sow war and reap terror
Zinni added that Saddam was in effect contained by the no-fly, no-drive zones and the sanctions that were imposed on him after the 1991 Gulf War. "Now, at the same time, we had this war on terrorism. We were fighting al-Qaeda. We were engaged in Afghanistan. We were looking at 'cells' in 60 countries. We were looking at threats that we were receiving information on and intelligence on. And I think most of the generals felt, let's deal with this one at a time. Let's deal with this threat from terrorism, from al-Qaeda." But Bush made the Iraq war the central plank of his so-called "war on terror".

A report from a leading think-tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, suggested last week that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only accelerated recruitment for al-Qaeda. It is estimated that the extremist network now has 18,000 radical militants in its ranks and cells in more than 60 countries. "Al-Qaeda must be expected to keep trying to develop more promising plans for terrorist operations in North America and Europe - potentially involving weapons of mass destruction," institute director John Chipman told a news conference to launch the think-tank's annual survey.

A colonial war
As for the purported reason for invasion, weapons of mass destruction, they were only a pretext, as Wolfowitz admitted soon after the invasion. Saudi Ambassador in London Prince Turki al-Faisal recently said in an interview that the US-led invasion of Iraq was a colonial war. "No matter how exalted the aims of the US in that war, in the final analysis it was a colonial war very similar to the wars conducted by the ex-colonial powers when they went out to conquer the rest of the world ... What we have heard from American sources they were there to remove the weapons of mass destruction which Saddam Hussein was supposed to have acquired.

"What we read and hear from our commentators in America and sometimes congressional sources, if you remember going back a year ago, there was the issue of the oil reserves in Iraq and that in a year or two they would be producing so much oil in Iraq that, as it were, the war would pay for itself - indicated that there were those in America who were thinking in those terms of acquiring the natural resources of Iraq for America," Prince Turki added.

According to year-old United Nations estimates, about 80 percent of all Iraqis lived in poverty. Wars, government mismanagement under Saddam and the consequences of UN sanctions led to the continuous shrinking of the economy, despite huge oil reserves. Gross domestic product (GDP), which was US$3,300 per person in 1980, fell to $1,200 shortly before the Iraq war. This desolate situation has worsened, not improved, since the war. It is suspected that unemployment hovers around 60 percent, if not more. One cause is Bremer's decision to dissolve the Ba'ath Party, the Iraqi army and the national security forces, making about 500,000 soldiers and employees lose their jobs. So GDP, according to estimates of the World Bank, shrank yet again to between $450 and $610 at the end 2003.

As a UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter inspected a facility in June 1996, but found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he did find an organization that specialized in the construction and employment of "improvised explosive devices" - now killing Americans daily in Iraq. So Iraqis were preparing for all contingencies. Of course, they have full details of buildings, roads and other installations. The insurgency is home-grown, he added.

Iraq has been a nation for 80 years, having successfully overcome British colonialism and an imposed Hashemite dynasty. This unity was maintained during the war with Iran in the 1980s after the Khomeini revolution, in spite of a Shi'ite majority in Iraq being suppressed by the Sunni minority.

Iraqis have serious differences among themselves, but when it comes to outsiders they close ranks. Cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites against the invading US-led alliance emerged immediately after the war began. Ahmad Kubeisi, Iraq's most important Sunni scholar, in a post-prayer sermon in April 2003, said Baghdad had been occupied by the Mongols (referring to the sacking of the capital of the Muslim world in 1258 by Hulegu and his hordes).

Now the new Mongols were trying to create divisions between Sunnis and Shi'ites, he said. The Shi'ites and Sunnis were one, however, and they should remain united and reject foreign occupation. As all religious leaders had suffered under Saddam, he added that they had all suffered together earlier. There were no Sunnis or Shi'ites, all Iraqis were Muslims, and they must defend their country together from the new invaders. Throughout Iraq, Sunnis and Shi'ites held joint prayers and their militias supported each other, during the battles of Fallujah, Najaf and Karbala, when radical Sunni, former Ba'athist and hardline Shi'ite militias, collectively known as the muqawama, or resistance, sent medical aid and weapons to one another and even fought together.

Despite Saddam's brutal regime, numerous wars and 13 years of sanctions, the indomitable Iraqi spirit that survived British colonization after World War I refuses to bend. Any student of history of political violence will tell you how against repression, exploitation and denial of freedom, individual and group violence coalesces into insurgency and then into a war for freedom and independence. Something Bush and Blair refused to understand. Instead, they chose to listen to the echo of their own voices bouncing back at them from some of the tame Iraqi opposition groups, nurtured, financed and trained by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Now out goes former Pentagon favorite Chalabi, and in comes Ayad Allawi as the premier-designate from July 1. A Pentagon favorite has been replaced by a State Department favorite.

In the quest for a new president, on Tuesday Iraqis appeared to have gotten their way over US opposition to have tribal chief Ghazi Yawar appointed president after Washington's choice stepped aside in a face-saving arrangement. After two days of arguing over the largely ceremonial post, IGC members said Washington's preferred presidential candidate, elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, had turned down the post minutes after being offered it by the UN in defiance of the IGC. A further test of strength between Washington and the US-appointed IGC lies ahead with the imminent announcement of 26 ministers to serve in an interim cabinet until elections are held in the new year.

And in another development on Tuesday, the IGC was dissolved.   Muwafaq al-Rubaiye, a council member, said that all IGC members agreed to dissolve their body. The council had originally been expected to remain in office until the handover of sovereignty on June 30.

The US authority's attempts to define the so-called "Sunni triangle" and "Shi'ite Baghdad and south" failed to divide the Iraqi people or drive them into internecine conflict. From the very beginning Iraqis wanted US and other troops to leave. The only people who believe that the US will bring democracy to Iraq are the few who have still not fully grasped America's role in Iraq's modern history, the strategic significance of Iraq and US foreign policy in the region. Even the members of the IGC know, some are trying to guard their sectarian interests, others are joining in the looting going on, fully knowing it will not last for ever. Chalabi has collected enough information from the tons of records of the Saddam regime to blackmail rulers of neighboring kingdoms and even those in the West who collaborated with him during the Iraq-Iran War.

The IGC is not so much hated as ridiculed. Support for it is largely confined to some activists of the organizations that belong to it. Indeed, it could be argued that most supporters of the more credible organizations belonging to the council are opposed to membership of the US-appointed body. The leaders of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, for example, are finding it increasingly hard to convince their supporters that cooperation with the invaders is still a possible route to independence and democracy. The same goes for another smaller but equally credible party, the Islamic Dawa, which experienced a split and serious hemorrhaging of membership following its decision to join the IGC. Some council members have been killed; all need as heavy security as the US administrators.

Interim government: Old wine in an old bottle
The IGC has now selected Ayad Allawi as prime minister of the interim Iraqi government, which will hold elections early next year (after the US elections are over). Allawi was not the choice of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy charged to form the transition government and give it a stamp of UN legality and credibility. His choice was technocrat Hussain Shahristani, who was forced to withdraw after opposition by other council members. IGC members "feel they are a kind of club, and Shahristani was an outsider and could not get the support of this club", said an aide to Shahristani. Allawi had lobbied furiously for the job. Brahimi was forced into accepting him under joint pressure from the US and the IGC.

Eighteen out of 25 members of the IGC hold foreign passports. Allawi, a Shi'ite, is a British citizen and until 1975 was a Ba'athist. He now heads the Iraqi National Accord and is a long-term protege of the CIA and MI6, and like most others spent much of his life in exile. To pacify the Kurds, the key portfolios of defense and foreign affairs have been allotted to them (but where Bremer's successor, ambassador John Negroponte, will continue to make all decisions).

Only the role of the Kurds in the north, who have enjoyed US protection since 1991, remains ambiguous. But even they admit that the security situation was better under Saddam. A press release from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of last Thursday said that "the current situation in Iraq and the new-found attitude of the US, UK and UN has led to a serious re-think for the Kurds. The proposed plans do not seem to promise the expected Kurdish role in the future of a new Iraq. The Kurds feel betrayed once again." It added that "if the plight of the Kurds is ignored yet again and we are left with no say in the future of a new Iraq, the will of the Kurdish people will be too great for the Kurdish political parties to ignore, leading to a total withdrawal from any further discussions relating to the formation of any new Iraqi government. This will certainly not serve the unity of Iraq." Underlining that the Kurds have been the only true friends and allies of the coalition, the release concluded that "the Kurds will no longer be second-class citizens in Iraq".

Many analysts write that the post-handover government will be as unknown and unpopular as the current IGC, which is widely seen as a US puppet. "The Iraqi people want to see new faces," said Sadoun al-Dulame, head of the Iraqi Center for Research and Strategic Studies. "They thought the new government would be different. But instead the new government is being nominated by the governing council. What about the United Nations? This is what Iraqis are asking." A late-April opinion poll for the coalition said that Allawi, one of the least popular members of the council, was opposed by 61 percent of the people, while only 22 percent supported him. Others are equally little-known and unpopular.

K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. E-mail Gajendrak@hotmail.com.

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