Lifting seven veils of the Iraqi
illusion By Michael Schwartz
With a tenuous ceasefire between Israel
and Lebanon holding, the ever-hotter war in Iraq
is once again creeping back on to newspaper front
pages and toward the top of the evening news.
Before being fully immersed in daily
reports of bomb blasts, sectarian violence and
casualties, however, it might be worth considering
some of the just-under-the-radar realities of the
situation in that country. Here, then, is a little
guide to
understanding what is likely
to be a flood of new Iraqi developments - a few
enduring, but seldom commented on - patterns
central to the dynamics of the Iraq war, as well
as to the fate of the US occupation and Iraqi
society.
1: The Iraqi government - a
group of 'talking heads' A minimally
viable central government is built on at least
three foundations: the coercive capacity to
maintain order, an administrative apparatus that
can deliver government services and directives to
society, and the resources to manage these
functions.
The Iraqi government has none
of these attributes - and no prospect of
developing them. It has no coercive capacity. The
national army we hear so much about is actually
trained and commanded by the Americans, while the
police forces are largely controlled by local
governments and have few, if any, viable links to
the central government in Baghdad.
Only
the Special Forces, whose death-squad activities
in the capital have lately been in the news, have
any formal relationship with the elected
government; and they have more enduring ties to
the US military that created them and the Shi'ite
militias who staffed them.
Administratively, the Iraqi government has
no existence outside Baghdad's heavily fortified
Green Zone - and little presence within it.
Whatever local apparatus exists elsewhere in the
country is run by local leaders, usually with
little or no loyalty to the central government and
not dependent on it for resources it doesn't, in
any case, possess.
In Baghdad itself, this
is clearly illustrated in the vast Shi'ite slum of
Sadr City, controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi
Army and his elaborate network of political
clerics. (Even US occupation forces enter that
enormous swath of the capital only in large
brigades, braced for significant firefights.)
In the major city of the Shi'ite south,
Basra, local clerics lead a government that
alternately ignores and defies the central
government on all policy issues from oil to
women's rights; in Sunni cities such as Tal Afar
and Ramadi, where major battles with the Americans
alternate with insurgent control, the government
simply has no presence whatsoever. In Kurdistan in
the north, the Kurdish leadership maintains full
control of all local governments.
As for
resources, with 85% of the country's revenues
deriving from oil, all you really need to know is
that oil-rich Iraq is also suffering from an
"acute fuel shortage" (including soaring prices,
all-night lines at fueling stations, and a deal to
get help from neighboring Syria, which itself has
minimal refining capacity). The almost helpless
Iraqi government has had little choice but to
accept the dictates of American advisers and of
the International Monetary Fund about exactly how
and what energy resources will be used. Paying off
Saddam Hussein-era debt, reparations to Kuwait
from the Gulf War of 1990, and the needs of the
US-controlled national army have had first claim.
With what remains, so meager that it
cannot sustain a viable administrative apparatus
in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country,
there is barely enough to spare for the government
leadership to line their own pockets.
2: There is no Iraqi army The
"Iraqi army" is a misnomer. The government's
military consists of Iraqi units integrated into
the US-commanded occupation army. These units rely
on the Americans for intelligence, logistics and -
lacking almost all heavy weaponry themselves -
artillery, tanks and any kind of air power. The
Iraqi "air force" typically consists of fewer then
10 planes with no combat capability. The
government has no real control over either
personnel or strategy.
We can see this
clearly in a recent operation in Sadr City,
conducted (as news reports tell us) by "Iraqi
troops and US advisers" and backed up by US
artillery and air power.
It was one of an
ongoing series of attempts to undermine the
Sadrists and their Mehdi Army, who have governed
the area since the fall of Saddam. The day after
the assault, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
complained about the tactics used, which he
labeled "unjustified", and about the fact that
neither he nor his government had been included in
the decision-making leading up to the assault.
As he put it to Agence France-Presse, "I
reiterate my rejection to [sic] such an operation
and it should not be executed without my consent.
This particular operation did not have my
approval."
This happened because the US
has functionally expanded its own forces in Iraq
by integrating local Iraqi units into its command
structure, while in essence depriving the central
government of any army it could use purely for its
own purposes. Iraqi units have their own officers,
but they always operate with American advisers. As
US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad put it, "We'll
ultimately help them become independent." (Don't
hold your breath.)
3: Misleading
decline in US casualties At the beginning
of August, the press carried reports of a
significant decline in US casualties, punctuated
with announcements from American officials that
the military situation was improving. The figures
(compiled by the Brookings Institution) do show a
decline in US military deaths (76 in April, 69 in
May, 63 in June and then only 48 in July).
But these were offset by dramatic
increases in Iraqi military fatalities, which
almost doubled in July as the US sent larger
numbers of Iraqi units into battle, and as
undermanned US units were redeployed from Anbar
province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency,
to civil-war-torn Baghdad in preparation for a big
push to recapture various out-of-control
neighborhoods in the capital.
More
important, when it comes to long-term US
casualties, the trends are not good. In recent
months, US units had been pulled off the streets
of the capital. But the Iraqi army units that
replaced them proved incapable of controlling
Baghdad in even minimal ways. So in addition to
fighting the Sunni insurgency, American troops are
now back on the streets of Baghdad in the midst of
a swirling civil war, with US casualties likely to
rise.
In recent months, there has also
been an escalation of fighting between US forces
and the insurgency, independent of the sectarian
fighting that now dominates the headlines.
As a consequence, the US has actually
increased its troop levels in Iraq (by delaying
the return of some units, sending others back to
Iraq early, and sending in some troops previously
held in reserve in Kuwait). The number of battles
(large and small) between occupation troops and
the Iraqi resistance has increased from about 70 a
day to about 90 a day; and the number of
resistance fighters estimated by US officials has
held steady at about 20,000. The number of
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) placed - the
principal weapon targeted at occupation troops
(including Iraqi units) - has been rising steadily
since spring.
The effort by Sunni
guerrillas to expel the Americans and their allies
is more widespread and energetic than at any time
since the fall of the Hussein regime.
4: Most Iraqi cities have active local
governments Neither the Iraqi government
nor the US-led occupation has a significant
presence in most parts of Iraq. This is well
publicized in the three Kurdish provinces, which
are ruled by a stable Kurdish government without
any outside presence.
It is less
publicized in Shi'ite urban areas where various
religio-political groups - notably the Sadrists,
the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
Da'wa and Fadhila vie for local control, and then
organize cities and towns around their own
political and religious platforms. While there is
often violent friction among these groups -
particularly when they contest control of an area
that is undecided - most cities and towns are
largely peaceful as local governments and local
populations struggle to provide city services
without a viable national economy.
This
situation also holds true in the Sunni areas,
except when the occupation is actively trying to
pacify them. When there is no fighting, local
governments dominated by the religious and tribal
leaders of the resistance establish the laws and
maintain a kind of order, relying for law
enforcement on guerrilla fighters and militia
members.
All these governments - Kurdish,
Shi'ite and Sunni - have shown themselves capable
of maintaining (often fundamentalist) law and
(often quite harsh) order, with little crime and
little resistance from the local population.
Though often severely limited by the lack of
resources from a paralyzed national economy and a
bankrupt national government, they do collect the
garbage, direct traffic, suppress the local
criminal element and perform many of the other
duties expected of local governments.
5: Violence arrives
with the occupation army The portrait of
chaos across Iraq that US news generally offers is
a genuine half-truth. Certainly, Baghdad has been
plunged into massive and worsening disarray as
both the war against the Americans and the civil
war have come to be concentrated there, and as the
terrifying process of ethnic cleansing has hit
neighborhood after neighborhood, and is now
beginning to seep into the environs of the
capital.
However, outside Baghdad (with
the exception of the northern cities of Kirkuk and
Mosul, where historic friction among Kurds, Sunni
and Turkmens has created a different version of
sectarian violence), Iraqi cities tend to be
reasonably ethnically homogeneous and to have at
least quasi-stable governments. The real violence
often only arrives when the occupation military
makes its periodic sweeps aimed at recapturing
cities where it has lost all authority and even
presence.
This deadly pattern of
escalating violence is regularly triggered by
those dreaded sweeps, involving brutal,
destructive and sometimes lethal home invasions
aimed at capturing or killing suspected insurgents
or their supporters.
The insurgent
response involves the emplacement of ever more
sophisticated roadside IEDs and sniper attacks,
aimed at distracting or hampering the patrols. The
ensuing firefights frequently involve the use of
artillery, tanks and air power in urban areas,
demolishing homes and stores in a neighborhood,
which only adds to the bitter resistance and
increasing the support for the insurgency.
These mini-wars can last between a few
hours and, in Fallujah, Ramadi or other "centers
of resistance", a few weeks. They constitute the
overwhelming preponderance of the fighting in
Iraq. For any city, the results can be widespread
death and devastation from which it can take
months or years to recover. Yet these are still
episodes punctuating a less violent, if
increasingly more rundown, normalcy.
6:
Growing resistance movement in Shi'ite areas Lately, the pattern of violence established in
largely Sunni areas of Iraq has begun to spread to
largely Shi'ite cities, which had previously been
insulated from the periodic devastation of US
pacification attempts. This ended with growing
anxiety in the US administration about economic,
religious and militia connections between local
Shi'ite governments and Iran, and with the growing
power of the anti-American Sadrist movement, which
had already fought two fierce battles with the US
in Najaf in 2004 and a number of times since then
in Sadr City.
Symptomatic of this change
is the increasing violence in Basra, the urban oil
hub at the southern tip of the country, whose
local government has long been dominated by
various fundamentalist Shi'ite political groups
with strong ties to Iran. When the British
military began a campaign to undermine the
fundamentalists' control of the police force
there, two British military operatives were
arrested, triggering a battle between British
soldiers (supported by the Shi'ite leadership of
the Iraqi central government) and the local police
(supported by local Shi'ite leaders). This
confrontation initiated a series of armed
confrontations among the various contenders for
power in Basra.
Similar confrontations
have occurred in other localities, including
Karbala, Najaf, Sadr City and Maysan province. So
far, no general offensive to recapture any of
these areas has been attempted, but Britain has
recently been concentrating its troops outside
Basra.
If the occupation decides to use
military means to bring the Shi'ite cities back
into anything like a US orbit, full-scale battles
may be looming in the near future that could begin
to replicate the fighting in Sunni areas,
including the use of IEDs, so far only
sporadically employed in the south. If you think
US (and British) troops are overextended now,
dealing with internecine warfare and a minority
Sunni insurgency, just imagine what a real Shi'ite
insurgency would mean.
7: Terrorism is
tied to the occupation Terrorism involves
attacking civilians to force them to abandon their
support for your enemy, or to drive them away from
a coveted territory.
The original
terrorists in Iraq were the military and civilian
officials of the US administration of President
George W Bush - starting with their "shock and
awe" bombing campaign that destroyed Iraq's
infrastructure to "undermine civilian morale". The
US form of terrorism continued with the wholesale
destruction of most of Fallujah and parts of other
Sunni cities, designed to pacify the "hotbeds" of
the insurgency, while teaching the residents of
those areas that if they "harbor the insurgents",
they will surely "suffer the consequences".
At the individual level, this program of
terror was continued through the invasions of, and
demolishing of, homes (or, in some cases, parts of
neighborhoods) where insurgents were believed to
be hidden among a larger civilian population, thus
spreading the "lesson" about "harboring
terrorists" to everyone in the Sunni sections of
the country.
Generating a violent-death
rate of at least 18,000 per year, the US drumbeat
of terror has contributed more than its share to
the recently escalating monthly civilian death
toll, which reached a record 3,149 in the official
count during July. It is unfortunately accurate to
characterize the US occupation of Sunni Iraq as a
reign of terror.
Sunni terrorists, such as
those led by slain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have used
suicide car bombs to generate the most widely
publicized violence in Iraq - hundreds of civilian
casualties each month resulting from attacks on
restaurants, markets and mosques where large
number of Shi'ites congregate.
At the
beginning of the US occupation, car bombs were
non-existent; they only became common when a tiny
proportion of the Sunni resistance movement became
convinced that the Shi'ites were the main domestic
support for the US occupation. (As far as we can
tell, the vast majority of those fighting the
Americans oppose such terrorists and have
sometimes fought them.)
As al-Qaeda leader
Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, these attacks were
justified by "the treason of the Shi'ites and
their collusion with the Americans". As if to
prove him correct, the number of such attacks
tripled to current levels of about 70 per month
after the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government
supported the US devastation of Fallujah in
November 2004.
Sunni terrorists work with
the same terrorist logic that the Americans have
applied in Iraq: attacks on civilians are meant to
terrify them into not supporting the enemy. There
is a belief, of course, among the leadership of
the Sunni terrorists that, ultimately, only the
violent suppression or expulsion of the Shi'ites
is acceptable. But as Zawahiri himself stated, the
"majority of Muslims don't comprehend this and
possibly could not even imagine it". So the
practical justification for such terrorism lies in
the more immediate association of the Shi'ites
with the hated occupation.
The final link
in the terrorist chain can also be traced to the
occupation. In January 2005, Newsweek broke the
story that the US was establishing (Shi'ite)
"death squads" within the Iraqi Ministry of
Interior, modeled after the assassination teams
that the Central Intelligence Agency had helped
organize in El Salvador during the 1980s.
These death squads were intended to
assassinate activists and supporters of the Sunni
resistance. Particularly after the bombing of the
Golden Dome, an important Shi'ite shrine in
Samarra, in March, they became a fixture in
Baghdad, where thousands of corpses - virtually
all Sunni men - have been found with signs of
torture, including electric-drill holes, in their
bodies and bullet holes in their heads. Here again
the logic is the same: to use terror to stop the
Sunni community from nurturing and harboring both
terrorist car-bombers and anti-American resistance
fighters.
While there is disagreement
about whether the Americans, the
Shi'ite-controlled Ministry of Defense or the
Shi'ite political parties should shoulder the most
responsibility for setting these death squads on
Baghdad, one conclusion is indisputable: they have
earned their place in the ignominious triumvirate
of Iraqi terrorism.
One might say that the
war has converted one of Bush's biggest lies into
an unimaginably horrible truth: Iraq is now the
epicenter of worldwide terrorism.
Where
the seven facts lead With this terror
triumvirate at the center of Iraqi society, we now
enter the horrible era of ethnic cleansing, the
logical extension of multidimensional terror.
When the US toppled the Hussein regime,
there was little sectarian sentiment outside of
Kurdistan, which had long-standing nationalist
ambitions. Even today, opinion polls show that
more than two-thirds of Sunnis and Shi'ites stand
opposed to the idea of any further weakening of
the central government and are not in favor of
federation, no less dividing Iraq into three
separate nations.
Nevertheless, ethnic
cleansing by both Shi'ite and Sunni has become the
order of the day in many of the neighborhoods of
Baghdad, replete with house burnings, physical
assaults, torture and murder, all directed against
those who resist leaving their homes. These acts
are aimed at creating religiously homogeneous
neighborhoods.
This is a terrifying
development that derives from the rising tide of
terrorism. Sunnis believe that they must expel
their Shi'ite neighbors to stop them from giving
the Shi'ite death squads the names of resistance
fighters and their supporters. Shi'ites believe
that they must expel their Sunni neighbors to stop
them from providing information and cover for
car-bombing attacks. And, as the situation
matures, militants on both sides come to embrace
removal - period.
As these actions
escalate, feeding on each other, more and more
individuals, caught in a vise of fear and bent on
revenge, embrace the infernal logic of terrorism:
that it is acceptable to punish everyone for the
actions of a tiny minority.
There is still
some hope for the Iraqis to recover their
equilibrium. All the centripetal forces in Iraq
derive from the US occupation, and might still be
sufficiently reduced by a US departure followed by
a viable reconstruction program embraced by the
key elements inside of Iraq.
But if the
occupation continues, there will certainly come a
point - perhaps already passed - when the collapse
of government legitimacy, the destruction wrought
by the war and the horror of terrorist violence
become self-sustaining. If that point is reached,
all parties will enter a new territory with
incalculable consequences.
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 books
include Radical Protest and Social Structure
and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail
address isMs42@optonline.net .
