IRAQ'S
SOVEREIGNTY VACUUM PART 1: A
government with no military, no
territory By Michael Schwartz
US President George W Bush marked the
Iraqi election in December as the beginning of a
new era. A freely selected permanent government
would begin asserting its sovereignty over the
country, building an administrative infrastructure
and rising to the challenge of governing an unruly
and often violent constituency.
Only three
months later, this hopeful vision is in ruins.
Various parliamentary leaders have occupied
themselves with tortuous
negotiations over who will be
the next prime minister, while crises explode
around their Green Zone sanctuary.
Some of
these crises flashed in and out of the headlines,
including a controversy over illegal detention and
torture sites reportedly run by Shi'ite militias
under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior; a
new wave of insurgent attacks in Baghdad; and,
most dramatical, the bombing of the Golden Mosque
in Samarra, triggering retaliatory attacks against
Sunni mosques as well as nationwide demonstrations
calling for the withdrawal of US
forces.
Other crises continue to build
without benefit of the media spotlight: a
multi-ethnic conflict over control of Kirkuk, the
northern oil hub and projected capital of a future
Kurdistan; the steady escalation of guerrilla
attacks on American troops and of US air strikes
against Sunni cities; a further degeneration in
the delivery of electricity, potable water, fuel
and most of the other basics of modern life; a
growing population of homeless refugees; an
ongoing exodus of professionals; and unremitting
unemployment levels, variously estimated at
between 30% and 65% of the workforce.
In
dealing with all these crises, the Iraqi
government was notable mainly for its absence -
neither a party to the controversies, nor a
mediating force in any of them. It volunteered no
leadership and was not invoked by any of the
contesting groups.
This irrelevance is not
temporary. It is the single enduring, probably
irremediable feature of a government that has none
of the resources needed to exercise sovereignty.
As these multi-faceted crises grow, intertwine and
overlap, the capacity for exercising sovereignty -
whether by this government, the occupation forces
or any other entity - will only be further eroded.
US Army, Iraqi soldiers Iraqi
government impotence flows from its lack of access
to any systematic means of coercion. This may seem
a strange assertion, given the increasing
prominence of the Iraqi army in various military
campaigns since late last summer, and the slogan
popularized by Bush since about the same moment,
"As the Iraqi military stands up, we will stand
down."
Nonetheless, even if the Iraqi
army, special forces and local police were to
become the formidable military machine that
American officials envisage, they would not add up
to an effective instrument of Iraqi national
policy, for a simple reason: these units are being
developed as part of the occupation military, not
as a force loyal to or commanded by the elected
government.
It is well known that the
Americans are recruiting and training both the
military and the police in Iraq. What is less well
known is that, once their training is complete,
the Bush administration does not relinquish
control over these forces.
Let's begin
with the Iraqi army. Its troops are directly
integrated into the occupation structure commanded
by the US military. This is not just a matter of
who makes command decisions. The Iraqi military
has no air support, no artillery and almost no
armored vehicles; nor does it have a logistics
capacity that would allow it to resupply its
fighting units. As a result, even if the Iraqi
government could "take command" of its army, it
could not fight battles on its own. This
distinguishes the Iraqi army from virtually every
other military on the planet. None of its units
can go into battle unless they are integrated into
the US military.
In the major campaigns
undertaken in October and November in western
Anbar province, this was quite evident; the Iraqis
were used in "partnership programs", involving
"Iraqi and US military units patrolling and
fighting together". According to
Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Wellman, official
spokesman for the US effort to create an
"effective" Iraqi army, this sort of close
"control and cooperation" is crucial to the
usefulness of Iraqi army units in sweeps through
western Anbar. When an Iraqi unit "is specifically
tasked to operate side by side" with US units, he
assured Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer,
"The unit absolutely just blossoms."
Is it
possible, however, that the Iraqi military might
eventually develop the capacity to command,
support and supply itself? While this could occur,
of course, the Americans have no current plans to
make it happen, and no resources are available to
the Iraqi government to launch such an effort.
Keep in mind, for instance, that all projections
of future US troop reductions explicitly call for
the continued presence of US air power and support
troops in Iraq. As a result, the integration of
Iraqi units into the occupation military will
continue into the foreseeable future, and with it
the incapacity of the Iraqi government to craft
and enforce a military policy independent of the
occupation.
Who controls the
police? Things are somewhat different for
the police and special forces, including SWAT
(special weapons and tactics) squads, secret
police and other units designed to carry on covert
and irregular military operations. Instead of
being subject to American commanding officers,
these forces are advised by counter-insurgency
specialists - either American military officers or
US-employed private security contractors. Such
units act semi-autonomously under the direction of
Iraqi officers appointed by the Ministry of the
Interior.
This looseness of command worked
well as long as there was no policy friction
between American officials and the Iraqi
government. In January 2005, for example, Newsweek
reported that US advisers in the Interior Ministry
were instituting a program of systematic
assassination of leaders and supporters of the
resistance - including prominent Sunni clerics and
political leaders. The program was dubbed the
"Salvador option" because it was modeled after the
right-wing assassination squads that committed
thousands of murders in El Salvador and other
Latin American countries two decades earlier.
There was no opposition to this policy
within the Interior Ministry, since the new units
were to be recruited largely from the Badr
Brigade, the Shi'ite militia associated with the
Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI), the political party already in charge of
the ministry. The recruits were apparently
militant fighters anxious to avenge suicide-car
bombings organized by Sunni jihadists against
Shi'ite civilians. Soon, reports on their
activities became a staple of the news from Iraq,
as dead bodies of Sunnis, often described as
suspected resistance fighters, were found hours or
days after being arrested by "men dressed in Iraq
police uniforms".
Toward the end of 2005,
problems began to develop between the
ministry-controlled police (and special forces)
and their US sponsors. Soon after, American
personnel twice raided detention centers operated
by the Interior Ministry, replete with accusations
of torture and mistreatment of prisoners. These
incidents, and a host of lesser ones, seemed to
suggest a lack of control by the United States
over the police and special forces.
A
senior US military official commented to the
Washington Post that US-sponsored reforms of the
Iraqi police and special forces were "aimed
specifically at former militia forces within the
Interior Ministry, which is dominated by the
current governing Shi'ite religious parties and
those parties' factional fighters". He designated
them as enemies whom the US was committed to
controlling: "We're going to try to wrap ourselves
around them ... By hugging the enemy, wrapping our
arms around them, we hope to control them ... like
we did with the army."
What a closer look
at this controversy reveals, however, is how much
the US already does dominate most such units.
First of all, episodes of friction between
occupation forces and local law enforcement are
the exception rather than the rule. For the most
part, the occupation military continues to
determine much of both the strategy and tactics of
the police and special forces. This was well
demonstrated when SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim
reacted to accusations of brutality in detention.
He insisted to Knickmeyer that even more drastic
measures were needed to defeat the insurgency and
complained bitterly of the restraints imposed by
the occupation: "The ministries of Interior and
Defense want to carry out some operations to clean
out some areas. There were plans that should have
been implemented months ago, but American
officials and forces rejected them."
His
comment makes clear the limited nature of the
autonomy even of the ministry forces. In this
context, programs the Bush administration opposes
will probably remain low visibility and largely
concealed from American advisers stationed with
the units involved.
Second, the dramatic,
almost draconian, responses to some of these
controversies demonstrate the degree of ultimate
control the occupation expects to retain. Take a
spectacular one: in December, a firefight erupted
in the southern city of Basra between the British
army and the police, who had arrested two English
plainclothes operatives. After this confrontation,
the British announced plans to disband the city's
entire 25,000-man police force and "replace it
with a new military-style unit capable of
maintaining law and order". They expected so much
resistance to this measure that "a detailed plan
that could have seen UK forces withdrawn by May"
(this year) was reportedly scrapped. "Instead,"
writes Brian Brady of the Scotsman, "it now seems
certain Prime Minister Tony Blair will have to
keep British troops in the country until 2007 at
the earliest."
The response of the US to
the controversies over the detention centers,
hardly less draconian, was caught in front-page
headlines this way: "GIs to increase supervision
of Iraqi police" (New York Times), "US to restrict
Iraqi police" (Los Angeles Times), and "US troops
to mentor Iraqi police" (Washington Post).
A new US program to bring the Iraqi police
and special forces into line reportedly involved a
control structure "modeled on an existing program
that has Iraqi and US military units patrolling
and fighting together". It was announced in
December that the number of US troops assigned to
Iraqi police and special forces units would
increase by a factor of 10, with as many as 500
Americans working with a special-forces brigade of
about 2,500 Iraqis. The Americans - and by
extension the Iraqis - would, of course, "be under
the command of American officers". With such
controls in place, the Americans hoped to
eradicate future controversies.
In other
words, an already desperately weak Iraqi central
government will have no enforcement apparatus at
its command for its policy decisions, if these
diverge from occupation desires. Strangely,
however, such policies, while denying the power of
sovereignty to Iraqis, have not conferred
sovereignty on the Americans. A necessary
ingredient is lacking: the capacity to administer
at the regional or local level. All over Iraq,
local communities are now governed by
ethno-religious political groupings whose actions
have been, time after time, antithetical to
occupation policy. To understand what might be
called a stalemate of sovereignty lodged at the
very center of Iraqi politics for the past three
years, each region of the country must be
considered separately.
Shi'ite
fundamentalism dominates the south In the
southern cities of Iraq, where the population is
overwhelmingly Shi'ite, the occupation has
generally had a light touch. After the invading
forces disbanded Saddam Hussein's military and
police - and with US and allied militaries
protecting oil facilities and searching for the
remnants of the defeated army - the various
communities in the region were left largely
unpoliced. When a crime wave swept through cities
and towns, citizens began to look to home-grown
forces to re-establish order.
The vacuum
was filled by organizations affiliated with local
mosques, which had always been the center of
Shi'ite civil society. These groups generally
emerged with a minimal array of poorly funded
social services and a far better-developed sharia
(religious) court system that could adjudicate
personal issues. To this traditional mix were
added newly created armed militias in charge of
police functions, guided by religious leaders and
populated mainly by unemployed young men, many of
whom had once been conscripts in Saddam's
Ba'athist army.
These ad hoc local
governments had no resources to address the huge
economic and infrastructural problems facing them.
Only an infusion of oil revenues could have begun
to repair the damage from the Saddam Hussein
years, the decade of brutal sanctions and the
devastation of war and its aftermath. They
nevertheless became de facto governments, and
local elections in January 2005 tended to make
their leadership official. Early that year, Jack
Fairweather and Haider Samad, reporters for
London's Telegraph newspaper, assessed the results
this way: "A silent and largely undocumented
social revolution has transformed the
Shi'ite-dominated south of Iraq into a virtual
Islamic state in the two years since the US Army
invaded."
This process extended to Sadr
City, the vast Shi'ite slum in Baghdad, which
reputedly holds about 10% of the country's
population. It was dominated by the Sadrist
movement led by young "firebrand" cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr, and in effect policed by the movement's
militia, the Mahdi Army.
New York Times
reporter Edward Wong nicely caught the
embeddedness of the Mahdi militiamen in Sadr City
culture (and, by extension, the role of similar
militias throughout the Shi'ite south) in the
following description: "For many poor Shi'ites,
and even some in middle-class enclaves ... the
Mahdi Army is a defender of the faith and a
populist force. Its members have permeated every
aspect of Iraqi life, from the uniformed police
forces to student groups at Baghdad's campuses,
where they enforce strict Islamist codes, like
headscarves for women."
What happened
in Basra? Basra, a cosmopolitan oil hub and
one of the largest cities in Iraq outside the
Baghdad conurbation, provides an example of this
locally based power and what it means. British
troops placed in control of Basra adopted a
laissez-faire approach, remaining in bases outside
the city and leaving local problems to be solved
by local residents. In the absence of any
officially recognized local government, various
Shi'ite factions sought dominance, combining
political organizing (replete with patronage and
social-welfare programs), the imposition of law
and order (at a time when the city was swept by
lawlessness), and the liberal application of
violent repression.
By mid-2004, SCIRI,
the same group that would later control the
Interior Ministry, established an uneasy hegemony
over the city, alternately aided and opposed by
the Fadhila, a local Sadrist group not affiliated
with Sadr. Both groups sent their militia members
into the reconstituted police force, and by autumn
2005, an Iraqi official estimated that 90% of the
force was primarily loyal to one of the two
groups. As a result, neither the national
government nor the occupation had an
administrative or law-enforcement presence in the
city.
Though an absence of resources
prevented any ambitious economic activities, SCIRI
and Fadhila were able to enact a cultural agenda,
applying fundamentalist sharia law to the Basra
community. As the Telegraph reported: "In Basra's
courthouses, sharia law is now routinely used in
place of civil codes. Politicians work with the
tacit approval of the Shi'ite clergy and refer
many important decisions to religious leaders."
What had once been a center of secular and
cosmopolitan Iraqi culture was thus transformed
into a showcase for traditional Shi'ite cultural
values. Alcohol disappeared from stores; women
only appeared in public wearing scarves and with
escorts; and the nightlife of the city
disappeared. A deadly incident in which picnicking
male and female students were attacked by Fadhila
activists gave international publicity to the
transformation.
Ultimately the British
sought to reverse these and other changes by a
series of interventions leading to that
headline-making clash. It, in turn, triggered the
attempted disbanding of Basra's police force, an
action that only set off a further cascading
series of confrontations, including a resolution
by the Basra Provincial Council to stop
cooperating with the British.
In none of
this did the Iraqi government in Baghdad play a
role.
However different in the details,
similar processes have been under way throughout
the Shi'ite cities and towns of the south, with
the same monotonous result from the point of view
of the national government - irrelevance. In
Maysan province, home of the Marsh Arabs, a
25-year-old rebellion led by the Sadrists against
the Hussein regime continued unabated after the
British took over. In this and other situations,
the national government made no attempt to
influence local events or had its meager efforts
forcibly rebuffed. It has no presence in the south
(beyond an occasional politically isolated
governor or police chief). It has no legitimacy.
(People do not even think to protest to the
government when they are aggrieved.) Police and
military forces that should be under its command -
were its sovereignty real - are controlled either
by the Americans or by local factions.
Friction between occupation authorities
and Shi'ite fundamentalists, leading to occasional
violent confrontations, reflects possibly
irreconcilable differences. The most visible, but
likely most tractable, of these has been the
Islamist commitment to sharia law, which flatly
contradicts the occupation's commitment to a
secular state. Only slightly less visible has been
the affinity of the Shi'ite parties for Iran,
expressed in their unwavering desire to establish
political, cultural and economic relations with
their Shi'ite neighbor. This has led to public
disputes between the Shi'ite parties and the US
leadership, which sees Iran as its principal enemy
in the Middle East.
Finally, the
commitment of the Iraqis to state-organized
solutions to economic problems fits poorly with
the neo-liberal stance of the occupation. The
Americans have, for instance, been unwilling to
allocate any reconstruction monies to
impoverished, struggling state-owned enterprises
and have pursued International Monetary Fund
polices to reduce drastically, if not eliminate,
Saddam-era subsidies for food and supplies
(including gasoline), a course that would
instantly generate popular distrust in any Iraqi
governing body.
Not surprisingly, the
occupation authorities have generally been hostile
to these local governments and disturbed that
local policing powers have somehow escaped their
grasp. While it is not clear how the confrontation
between the occupation and forces in the Shi'ite
south will play out, it is clear that the Iraqi
national government will have virtually no impact
on the outcome, whatever it may be.
The
situation in Kurdistan The fall of the
Hussein regime represented for Iraqi Kurds the
culmination of a decades-long drive for regional
autonomy. Since the Kurds were allies of the
Americans even before the invasion, the US
established only a token military presence in
their regions north of Baghdad. Law and order were
maintained by members of the peshmerga, the
militia/army that, over three decades, had fought
for Kurdish independence. While its units were
technically under the command of coalition
military officers and the new Iraqi government,
they were in fact loyal only to the Kurdish
leadership; and they continued to be commanded by
the officers who had led them before the invasion.
As Washington Post reporters Anthony Shadid and
Steve Fainaru put it, these forces are only
"nominally under the authority of the US-backed
Iraqi army".
Kurdish independence (or a
level of autonomy that hardly differs from
independence) has now become a key issue in Iraqi
politics - with the city of Kirkuk at the
epicenter of the controversy. While most Iraqis
accepted the idea that Kurdistan would retain the
autonomy it had achieved under the "no-fly zone"
protection of the US Air Force during Saddam's
last years, there has been considerable
controversy over the Kurdish demand that Kirkuk be
incorporated into (and made the capital of) their
realm. Historically, Kirkuk had been a polyglot
city made up of Turkmens (about 40% of its
population), Kurds ( 30%), Assyrians and
Christians (20%), and a smattering of Sunni and
Shi'ite Arabs. Because of its importance as an oil
hub, Saddam had driven out many Turkmens and
Kurds, sending in colonizing Sunni Arabs to take
their place (and property).
In Kirkuk
after the invasion, the main friction at first was
between Kurds and Arabs. The Kurds sought the
repatriation of all Kurdish exiles and the
expulsion of Arab colonists, even those born in
the city. Turkmens and Assyrians soon allied with
the Arabs, however, because they saw that the
Kurdish efforts might be but the beginning of an
ethnic-cleansing program under which they, too,
would in the end be expelled.
Formally,
the national government in Baghdad adjudicated
this complex situation by scheduling a 2007
election in which the city would choose its own
fate. But subsequent events have revealed the
near-irrelevance of the government's action. The
Kurds made it clear that they would leave little
to chance in such an election and, since early
2005, have exploited their power on the ground to
create a fait accompli within the city. In part,
they did so by consolidating their control over
the local police, a campaign as successful in
Kirkuk as it had been for Shi'ite factions in
southern cities.
Echoing his counterpart
in Basra, General Tuhan Yusuf Abdel-Rahman, the
Baghdad-appointed chief of the Kirkuk police, told
Washington Post reporters Fainaru and Shadid: "The
main problem is that the loyalty of the police is
to the [Kurdish political] parties and not the
police force ...They'll obey the parties' orders
and disobey us."
In the meantime, once
they gained control of the local government, the
Kurds mounted major repatriation efforts, bringing
back exiled Kurds in massive numbers. By late
2004, as many as 100,000 Kurds had already arrived
in a city of 1 million that had no ability to
absorb them. The resulting housing crisis led the
local government to accelerate its campaign to
expel Arabs. Reports of violence leveled against
Arabs mixed with tales of misery among newly
arrived Kurds, relegated to shanty towns "just as
wretched as those they left in the
Kurdish-controlled north."
By the end of
2005. Kirkuk seemed on the verge of a mini-civil
war. Resistance centered in the city's Turkmen
population (without the means to back a
recolonization effort like that of the Kurds).
They found allies among threatened Sunni Arabs who
had numerous contacts with the Sunni resistance in
nearby cities. They also enlisted the support of
the Turkish government, which claimed ethnic
solidarity with Turkmen Iraqis and threatened to
intervene if serious human-rights violations
developed. By mid-2005, this opposition
constituted a serious threat to Kurdish plans and
persistent reports began to emerge that a form of
state terrorism had developed to suppress it.
In June, the Washington Post reported on a
"confidential State Department cable" detailing a
pattern of "extrajudicial detentions ... part of a
'concerted and widespread initiative' by Kurdish
political parties 'to exercise authority in Kirkuk
in an increasingly provocative manner'". According
to the Post, "Police and security units, forces
led by Kurdish political parties ... have abducted
hundreds of minority Arabs and Turkmens in this
intensely volatile city and spirited them to
prisons in Kurdish-held northern Iraq."
The Iraqi government had no resources or
authority with which to stop the Kurdish campaign.
It had no functioning military or police in
Kirkuk. It had no administrative apparatus; the
local government, insofar as it functioned, had
been constructed by the Kurds. And it had no
national institutions that could intervene in any
of the various disputes. The legal structure that
was supposed to adjudicate the claims of Arabs,
Turkmens and Kurds when it came to housing never
functioned; eligibility to vote was to be decided
by local officials (appointed by the Kurds); and
the "extrajudicial detentions" were in Kurdistan,
where the government had no presence.
The
Americans certainly had a greater ability to
intervene in the conflict. After all, the
occupation could always threaten to bring its
overwhelming military strength to bear on the
situation. But in reality its ability to redeploy
already overstretched military forces to Kirkuk is
probably limited. Moreover, military action by the
US in support of the Kurds could further provoke
the Turkish government.
The fate of Kirkuk
will undoubtedly be determined on the ground - and
not by the government in Baghdad. The situation is
fraught with violence between already polarized
partisans. The Kurdish viewpoint was stated
bluntly to Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter by
Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Hamid Afandi:
"Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the
Arabs ... If we can resolve this by talking, fine,
but if not, then we will resolve it by fighting."
Lasseter, one of most informed reporters
in Iraq, summarized the military situation this
way: "Kurdish leaders have inserted more than
10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army
divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork
to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk
and possibly half of Mosul ... and secure the
borders of an independent Kurdistan."
The
perspective of the loosely organized Turkmen/Sunni
resistance was expressed to Post reporters Fainaru
and Shadid by Aissa Ramadan, a Kirkuk Arab whose
87-year-old father had been taken along with his
three brothers and two sons in an "extrajudicial
detention" action.
"If you could see our
house on any day, you'd see that we're having
funerals without the corpses ... Children are
looking for their fathers, wives don't know the
fate of their husbands, and mothers are dying 40
times a day."
Ramadan then uttered a call
to arms: "Tomorrow, I could recruit the entire
tribe ... I could block the street in Kirkuk and
kidnap 40 Kurds. When you lose patience, you can
do anything."
Already the armed struggle
these two men are describing has been joined.
Kirkuk, which had been largely quiet after the
fall of Saddam, has now become an ongoing
battlefront, replete with car bombs, attacks on
police stations, a full complement of roadside
explosives and, in mid-February, the assassination
of the city's Kurdish-appointed police chief.
The battle in Kirkuk will be resolved by
the contending forces within the city. If the US
military chooses to intervene, it will become an
additional vector in an already complex equation.
But the Iraqi government has neither the resources
nor the credibility to play a role in this matter,
which may not only determine the place of
Kurdistan in Iraq but the future of Iraq as a
unitary country.
Who's sovereign in the
north and the south? Outbreaks of violence
in Basra, Kirkuk and other locations are ominous
signs, but still exceptions to the sometimes
brutal but generally peaceful domination of the
Shi'ite south and the Kurdish north by the local
branches of various parties and factions.
Nevertheless, in neither the south nor the north
is sovereignty in sight.
The US-led
occupation, though it controls the military bases
in which its troops are encamped and parts of the
heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, and can
go anywhere via large military operations, can no
longer aspire even to behind-the-scenes
sovereignty. From the beginning of the occupation,
any claims the occupying power had to legitimacy
were sacrificed when most cities were left to
govern themselves. In June 2004, when the Bush
administration officially handed "sovereignty"
(which it already didn't possess) to the Iyad
Allawi government, which it had put in power, it
withdrew any claims it might have had to such
authority; and yet it also failed to deliver any
of the ingredients of sovereignty to its supposed
successor.
Local forces, south and north -
despite their ability to maintain order - cannot
fully consolidate their legitimacy either, even at
the level of individual cities. Aside from the
credibility gap created (even in Kurdish areas) by
the indisputable ability of occupation forces to
disrupt life via military incursions, there is a
striking administrative incapacity that derives
from a basic lack of resources - in the better-off
regions of Kurdistan as well as in the south.
To have access to such resources would
involve controlling parts of the country's oil
industry, which will undoubtedly remain badly
crippled as long as the insurgency in Sunni areas
continues at its current levels. Nor can any local
government begin to implement economic recovery
programs without the partnership (or the
departure) of the Americans, a partnership that -
even in Kurdistan - is held captive to profound
disagreements over policy.
As a result,
what exists is a sovereignty stalemate. The longer
it continues, the more it eats away at the
resources and the legitimacy of the contending
parties. Meanwhile in Baghdad, even after a
government of some sort is finally formed by the
various clashing factions, what exactly will it be
able to do? After all, it possesses far less power
and legitimacy than even local governments, north
or south.
Next: The campaign to
pacify Sunni Iraq
Michael
Schwartz, professor of sociology and faculty
director of the undergraduate college of global
studies at Stony Brook University, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and
on US business and government dynamics. His e-mail
address isMs42@optonline.net.
