IRAQ'S
SOVEREIGNTY VACUUM, Part 2 The
campaign to pacify Sunni
Iraq By Michael Schwartz
The December elections in Iraq did not
initiate a period of state-building, but instead
marked an expanding, many-sided conflict whose
latest major horror was the bombing of the Golden
Mosque in Samarra and the carnage it triggered.
[Editor's note: At least 40 people were killed and
about 140 wounded on Sunday after bombs rocked
crowded markets in Sadr City, a Shi'ite district
of Baghdad and bastion of the powerful Shi'ite
militia. The finger is
pointed, as usual, at Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi's
stated desire is to anihilate the Shi'ites.]
All the conflicts of the present moment
have metastasized and spread from the ill-fated
attempt by American-led forces to pacify Sunni
communities in Baghdad and in four provinces to
the north and west. Today, not only is the country
edging toward an ever-more virulent civil war, but
the Sunni resistance is stronger than ever,
registering about 100 attacks a day in January.
This original war remains the central
front in the ongoing battle for domination in Iraq
and, as the core conflict, it continues to cast
off enough bitterness,
suffering, destruction and rebellion to guarantee
its never-ending spread to new areas and groups.
More than anything else, this low-level
but fierce war is responsible for the constantly
diminishing reservoir of sovereignty in Iraq. If
the Americans sought to establish the legitimacy
of the occupation by crushing early signs of Sunni
resistance, that effort has, in the end, only
helped convince Iraqis of the illegitimacy of the
American presence. For all its failures, however,
the occupation has succeeded in one endeavor. It
has managed to undermine all efforts by other
parties to establish their own legitimacy and
therefore to build a foundation for a new and
sovereign Iraq. If one day Iraq ceases to be,
splitting chaotically into several entities, the
way the occupation destroyed sovereignty (along
with parts of Sunni cities) will certainly come in
for a major share of the blame.
The
Sunni resistance What the world has come to
call the "insurgency" in Iraq is largely located
in Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated cities to the
north and west of the capital. In the Kurdish
north and Shi'ite south, residents have largely
been organized into local quasi-governments that
are frequently at odds with the American
occupation (and therefore with the central
government in the capital); but - despite notable
moments of great violence - none of these
localities has mounted a sustained war against the
American-led presence as the Sunnis have.
While the Sunni insurgency is certainly
the focus of Iraqi news coverage, the actual
nature of the war in Sunni areas goes largely
unreported. Coverage tends to focus on spectacular
moments of violence and destruction, especially
car bombs and other suicide attacks against
civilian targets. Only rarely mentioned are the
multitude of small-scale confrontations between
resistance fighters and patrolling American troops
that account for the majority of violent clashes.
As a result, the methods of the American side -
the use of assault weapons, tanks, artillery and
air power - and so the spreading "collateral"
damage to Iraqi civilians is significantly
underreported.
A recent James Glanz piece
in the New York Times proved an exception to this
pattern. Based on US military statistics, Glanz
offered strong evidence against the administration
portrait of a weakening (or at least stalemated)
resistance movement. Guerrilla attacks had, in
fact, "steadily grown in the nearly three years
since the invasion". Even during a "lull" in
December, the 2,500 violent confrontations - more
than 80 per day - were "almost 250% [higher than]
the number in March 2004", which in turn was twice
the level of August 2003.
The chart that
accompanied the article (originally delivered to
the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee by Joseph A
Christoff of the Government Accountability Office)
contained an even more significant fact, almost
unknown to the American public: despite the
impression we may have from news reports, Iraqi
civilians constitute only a small proportion of
resistance targets each month - never exceeding
20% and typically falling well below 10%. In
December, they accounted for just 8% - about 200 -
of the 2,500 attacks.
The overwhelming
target of such attacks - in a typical month about
80% of them - was the American military and its
coalition allies, mainly the British. In December,
the figure was a little more than 70%; some months
it reaches 90%. The Iraqi armed forces
(integrated, as they are, into the American
command) account for another 5-10% of the targets.
Until now, at least, the war in the Sunni
areas of Iraq has largely been between the
Americans and the guerrillas. The Iraqi government
itself is not a factor in this confrontation, and
consequently is rarely mentioned - even in a pro
forma way - in news accounts of the battles,
negotiations and other elements of the war.
How then, as best we can tell, is the
Sunni resistance organized in the many cities in
the four provinces in central Iraq and Baghdad
where the war is an ongoing part of life?
Though it is divided into two
ideologically contrary groups - the guerrillas who
target the occupation and the jihadists who tend
to seek out civilian targets - and within those
divisions into many smaller groups, the Sunni
resistance is coherent enough to be another
contender for sovereignty, at least in its own
areas. It has tied down and exhausted the US
military, forcing strategic and tactical
alterations in American policy. It continues to
influence both national and local Iraqi politics,
even as its internal contradictions increasingly
set jihadists and guerrillas against each other.
The role played by the Sunni resistance
can best be understood by briefly reviewing the
situation in Falluja before its recapture by
American forces in November 2004. In April of that
year, after an abortive attempt to seize the city,
the US military had withdrawn, leaving it in the
hands of the "Falluja Brigade", made up mainly of
Ba'athist army veterans. They were assigned the
job of pacifying the city. Instead, the brigade
gave its support to a group of local religious
leaders allied with the insurgency that soon
evolved into a local government. Borrowing its
organizational skeleton from the rich community
organizations traditionally connected to Sunni
mosques (including their Sharia courts), it used
the resistance fighters as a police force. Perhaps
not surprisingly, the structure that developed was
similar to those that had already formed in
Shi'ite cities such as Basra.
During the
period from April to November, Falluja had only
the most tenuous ties to the national government
in Baghdad. Nir Rosen, an independent journalist,
produced remarkable descriptions of the city in
this period (for Asia Times Online and the New
Yorker). His pieces give a sense of the developing
tensions between the jihadists, who wanted to
establish Falluja as a safe rear area for their
larger operations, and the local resistance,
determined to keep the Americans out but
uninterested in going on the offensive. The new
government also heightened tensions by enforcing
cultural customs similar to those adopted in
Basra: head scarves for women, facial hair for men
and the abolition of liquor and Western music. In
these months, street crime disappeared, as did
armed confrontations of any sort. They would prove
the most peaceful in Falluja since the fall of
Saddam Hussein's regime.
As this interlude
indicated, in the Sunni areas local clerics
already constituted a proto-government-in-waiting,
quite capable of enforcing "law and order" if not
challenged by the occupation military. The
fighting in Sunni cities comes and goes with the
arrival and departure of the occupation military.
When the occupation forces enter a city (or a
neighborhood in Baghdad), the IEDs (roadside
bombs) begin to explode, snipers fire away and
hit-and-run attacks start up. As soon as they
withdraw to pacify another town, the city in
question, in a more battered state, falls back
into the hands of local clerics and their allies
among the guerrillas.
At no time does the
Iraqi government figure significantly into this
process. Occasionally, it may appoint a governor
or police chief, but these functionaries quickly
discover (like their counterparts in Basra and
Kirkuk) that they have little choice but to work
with the local power structure, resign in protest
over their lack of authority or become
assassination targets.
In a sense, the
difference between Sunni cities - most of which
have been wracked by fighting - and their Shi'ite
or Kurdish counterparts has been the determination
of the American military to pacify them.
The guerrilla war in Baiji The
experience of Baiji illustrates how little
leverage the Iraqi government has over events on
the ground in Sunni Iraq. As the site of the
largest oil refining plant in the country, it is a
more important city than its population of 70,000
might suggest. During the Saddam years, its 98%
Sunni inhabitants were supported by well-paying
jobs in a government-owned industrial district
that grew up around the oil-refining facilities.
After the American-led invasion, however,
Baiji fell on hard times. Thanks to one of the
first executive orders issued by L Paul Bremer,
the Bush-appointed head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority that was then ruling from
Baghdad, all government-owned enterprises, with
the exception of the oil industry itself, were
shut. This was in preparation for a privatization
program considered crucial by American economic
planners. Unemployment swept through Baiji,
generating bitterness, inspiring a variety of
protests and eventually energizing what had until
then been an exceedingly modest resistance to the
US presence.
In late 2003, in response to
this growing discontent, the US initiated what
Washington Post reporter Ann Tyson characterized
as "heavy-handed sweeps through Baiji ... [that]
left many people angry, frightened and
humiliated". She quoted Adil Faez Jeel, the
director of the oil refinery, saying the sweeps
only solidified support for an armed resistance:
"Most of the people fighting the Americans tell me
they do nothing for us but destroy the houses and
capture people ... There are no jobs, no water, no
electricity."
By late 2004, Baiji's
guerrillas were strong enough to take control of
the town in response to the American conquest of
Falluja. In addition to skirmishes with US troops
and Iraqi police, the guerrillas began to sabotage
pipelines around the refinery and to attack oil
trucks. At one point, they launched a mortar
attack against a mixed American and Iraqi National
Guard patrol in the center of town, triggering two
days of running battles. A doctor at the local
hospital told the Agence France Press that at
least 10 civilians were killed and 26 wounded in
the ensuing melee.
For the next year,
Baiji was out of the news, largely because the
American military was busy with massive sweeps in
the west of Anbar province. In late 2005, however,
the Americans returned to Baiji, characterized at
the time by Tyson as "firmly in the grip of
insurgents".
According to US military
sources, this pacification attempt was provoked by
suspicions that guerrillas were using Baiji as a
staging area for attacks in Mosul and Baghdad, and
- more immediately - by evidence that, while
targeting oil pipelines and convoys, they were
also siphoning off a significant proportion of the
refinery's output for sale on the black market to
finance their activities. A resistance supporter
in Baiji told Inter Press Service reporters Brian
Conley and Isam Rashid that that these efforts
were meant to stop what he considered an American
"theft" of Iraqi oil.
The Americans
temporarily closed the refinery and sent in the
101st Airborne Division to retake Baiji. For a
month, virtually no progress was made in pacifying
the city, while American casualties were high. A
quarter of the 34 soldiers in one platoon suffered
casualties of one sort or another. Sergeant 1st
Class Danny Kidd, a veteran of Afghanistan and
Iraq, attributed the hard going to the fact that
Baiji residents supported the guerrilla fighters:
"They have the place locked down. We have almost
no support from the local people. We talk to 1,000
people and one will come forward."
The
degree of this support was illustrated by a
gruesome incident during the early weeks of the
campaign. Captain Matt Bartlett, accompanied by a
convoy of tanks and personnel carriers, sought
information from a tribal chief about a group of
bombmakers suspected of operating in the chief's
domain. The convoy was cordially greeted by the
sheikh's children, who accepted the officers'
gifts and "traded high-fives with them". Bartlett
was told, however, that the sheikh was hosting a
large gathering and could not meet him that day.
Preparing to leave, the Americans found the street
blocked by people and cars, apparently part of the
gathering. They were directed instead down a dirt
route along the Tigris River nicknamed "Smugglers'
Road".
A few hundred yards down the road,
bordered by fields, the convoy was hit by a
massive explosion. Behind the blast, First
Sergeant Robert Goudy jumped out of his Humvee and
ran forward toward the huge cloud of smoke and
debris. As it cleared, he was confused by what he
found.
"I saw this big piece of flesh and
thought it was a goat or cow. I thought, 'Wow,
these guys put an IED in a dead animal'," he
recalled. He went on, hoping to find his men
sitting in the truck. But as he got closer, he
recalled: "I didn't see the truck. I started
seeing limbs and body parts." Goudy tripped over
what was left of one soldier. Then he found the
only survivor of the five soldiers in the Humvee,
blinded and screaming.
"It was horrible,"
Bartlett said. "We had to pick up body parts 200
meters away." The Humvee was "ripped in half and
shredded", he said, by a monster bomb later found
to contain 450 kilograms of explosives and two
antitank mines, with a 155mm artillery round on
top.
Goudy and the other survivors were
"convinced Iraqis living nearby knew about the
bomb but did nothing to warn them". In fact, it
appears that they participated in luring the
convoy into a trap. The soldiers' thoughts
naturally turned to revenge: "I felt so angry and
violated ... We all wanted to go out and tear up
the city, kick down the doors, shoot the
civilians, blow up the mosque."
Subsequent
reports from Baiji contain no accounts of such
acts of revenge, but the incident, and the failure
of other strategies to pacify the city, led to an
official escalation of the American assault.
According to the Army Times, the new strategy was
modeled after "walls built around Falluja and
Samarra in recent months [that] have quelled
restive insurgent cells". An earthen barrier was
constructed around Siniyah, the most rebellious
neighborhood in the city. Checkpoints were set up
to stop "all vehicles leaving or entering ... as
soldiers look for known insurgents, bomb-making
materials and illegal weapons".
These
draconian measures disrupted normal life. Anyone
with business inside or outside the community
could not reliably pass through the checkpoint:
college students interrupted their education;
employees lost their jobs.
Sumiya, a 33
year old Siniyah housewife, who spoke on the phone
to Conley and Rashid, described the situation
inside the community of 3,000: "Siniyah has become
a real battlefield now, and the occupation forces
have destroyed many of our homes ... There is no
security inside Siniyah and it is worse than any
place in Iraq now. The occupation forces and Iraqi
National Guard are raiding Siniyah houses everyday
and arresting many people. There is a curfew from
5pm to 5am; in Baghdad it is only midnight to
5am."
One resident commented to the Inter
Press Service reporters, "We live in a very big
jail for three thousand"; while a local cleric
told the Army Times that Siniyah had become "a
concentration camp".
This situation will
prevail until the American troops move on to
"pacify" another city. At that time, the residents
- further alienated from the occupation - will
attempt to rebuild their lives, though from an
even deeper hole than before. The jerry-rigged
local government left behind will have no
resources with which to address their problems,
and there will be none forthcoming from either the
Americans or, of course, the Iraqi government,
which has none to offer.
As in other Sunni
cities, while the fighting in Baiji has occurred
episodically, the physical, economic and
infrastructural decline of the city has been more
or less continuous. So has the inability of either
the Americans or the resistance to create a stable
government. Each has undermined the credibility of
the other. And the national government has no
presence at all. In such circumstances, any
residual faith residents might have in the idea of
a sovereign state has undoubtedly evaporated as
well.
Sovereignty lost? "Stay
the course," President George W Bush tells us.
"Democracy is being built," he insists. His case
rests on high turnout percentages in the national
elections, which demonstrate, he believes, that
the vast majority of Iraqis want (and support) a
national government. American forces, in his view,
are training the Iraqi military and police to
provide that government with the coercive force it
needs to destroy a small but persistent insurgency
that relies on intimidation and terror to keep the
majority of Iraqis from speaking out and acting as
they might wish. The developing institutions of
civil society will provide, in his opinion, a
non-violent social infrastructure for a successful
central government. But all this naturally takes
time and money, and the American people need to
give his administration the space to apply both
effectively.
The on-the-ground evidence
suggests quite a different reality. Sovereignty is
made up of four ingredients: ultimate control over
the means of coercion; sufficient resources to
deliver government services; an administrative
apparatus capable of carrying out these functions;
and the acquiescence of most people in the
exercise of such power. The government in Baghdad
has none of these, nor will any of them soon be
available to it.
As the war between Sunni
communities and the occupation military continues,
and as it throws off pieces of rebellion that set
off new conflicts, the impotent isolation of the
Iraqi government within its Green Zone sanctuary
becomes more visible to all. In the meantime, the
various contending parties - the occupation, the
Sunni resistance, the Shi'ite fundamentalists and
the Kurdish nationalists - frustrate each other's
designs on power while destroying any group's
ability to establish sovereignty.
One
symptom of the debilitation of Iraq under the
weight of this war has been its ever-declining oil
production which, in January 2006, fell to perhaps
half of the already depressed production levels
during the last embattled years of Saddam.
Oil - that most precious commodity - has
become scarce in oil-rich Iraq. But sovereignty -
an even more precious commodity - is scarcer
still.
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 is
Ms42@optonline.net.
enough bitterness,
suffering, destruction and rebellion to guarantee
its never-ending spread to new areas and groups.
