Page 3 of 3 A war guaranteed to damage a
superpower By Patrick Cockburn
the problem is not about a few
infiltrators. "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been
assassinated or targeted for assassination is
giving information or support to the insurgents,"
one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any Iraqi
officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is
already dead."
Some problems facing the US
and Britain in Iraq have not changed since Saddam
invaded Kuwait in 1990. Getting rid of the
Iraqi
leader was far easier than finding a successor
regime that would not be more dangerous to US
interests. It is a dilemma still unresolved more
than four years into the occupation.
A
prime reason the US supported Saddam during his
war with Iran in 1980-88 was that it did not want
a Shi'ite clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to
America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in
Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped
president George H W Bush pushing on to Baghdad
and overthrowing Saddam after defeating the Iraqi
Army in Kuwait in 1991. After 2003, Washington was
in the same quandary: if elections were held, the
Shi'ites, comprising 60% of the population that
had been long excluded from power, were bound to
win.
The nightmare for Washington was to
find that it had conquered Iraq only to install
black-turbaned clerics in power in Baghdad, as
they already were in Tehran. At first, the US
tried to postpone elections, claiming that a
census had to be held. It was only on the
insistence of the Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005,
in which the Shi'ite religious parties triumphed.
Washington has never been comfortable with these
Shi'ite-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they
try to reconcile with the Sunnis - though exactly
how Shi'ite and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do
this, given that the main Sunni demand is a
timetable for a US withdrawal, has never been
clear.
For their part, the Shi'ites have
become increasingly suspicious that the US and
Britain do not intend to relinquish real control
over security to the elected Iraqi government.
There were many examples of this. For instance, in
the Middle East the most important force
underpinning every government is the intelligence
service. In theory, the Iraqi government should
get its information from the Iraqi National
Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established
in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional
Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that
its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance
Ministry but by the CIA.
Over the next
three years, the CIA paid US$3 billion to fund its
activities. During this time it was run by General
Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure
in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam that had
failed disastrously.
For long periods he
was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet
meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was
a member of the country's National Security
Council, complained to me that "we only get
information that the CIA wants us to hear". Iraqis
did not fail to spot the extent to which the power
of their elected government was being trimmed. The
poll cited above showed that by this spring only
34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run
by their own government; 59% believed the US was
in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed
of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
Destabilizing Iraq In the
course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated
into a dozen hostile cities at war with one
another. There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni
and Shi'ite neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the
city like a poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be
frightened of: Sunni insurgent groups; the Shi'ite
militias, the Mehdi Army, and the Badr
Organization; police and police commandos; the
Iraqi Army and the Americans.
One day I
received an e-mail message from an old friend. He
wrote: "Yesterday the cousin of my stepbrother (as
you know, my father married twice) was killed by
Badr troops three days after he was arrested. His
body was found in the trash in al-Shula district.
He was one of three other people who were killed
after heavy torture. They did nothing, but they
are Sunni people among the huge numbers of Shi'ite
people in the General Factory for Cotton in
al-Khadamiyah where they were working. His family
couldn't recognize his face [and only knew it was
him] because of the wart on his arm."
Most
of my Iraqi friends had fled Iraq for Jordan or
Syria or, when they could get a visa, Western
Europe. Soon, I could not enter the coffee shop of
the Four Seasons, the hotel where I usually stayed
in the Jordanian capital Amman, without seeing
several Iraqis I knew sitting at other tables.
These were the better-off. The poor often had to
chose between staying in jobs where they were at
risk, becoming permanently unemployed, or taking
flight.
I was in contact with a Sunni
family named al-Mashadani who lived in the west
Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack
by Shi'ite militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked
as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced
to leave his job when the repair yard was taken
over by Shi'ite militiamen. He stayed away and
asked a Shi'ite fellow worker to pick up his
salary. This worked until the Shi'ite militias
found out what was happening and threatened to
kill any Shi'ite who passed on the salary of a
Sunni.
Khalid was forced to leave for
Syria, where he found work. He left behind his
wife, Nadia, and four children, the eldest of whom
was eight years old. Living with them in the house
was Nadia's sister, Sarah, whose husband had been
an ordinary guard at the Oil Ministry building. He
was killed by the resistance, who considered that
his job made him a collaborator with the
government.
Last December 25, this whole
family group was told by the Shi'ite militia to
get out of their house immediately without taking
any possessions or be killed. They fled into the
night and sat beside the road until a charitable
minibus driver picked them up. Eventually, they
found refuge in a school. Nadia recalled, "We
stayed 29 days in a dark and damp room and we
couldn't go out of it when the students were
studying." Her husband in Syria offered to return,
but she told him to stay because the family could
not afford for him to lose his job.
Nadia
blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war
that had engulfed her family. She said: "We were
living together, Sunni and Shi'ite, and there was
no sign of sectarian differences between us in
Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged
sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists."
Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as
the work of the Americans. This is not entirely
fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper
under Saddam and his predecessors than many Iraqis
now admit. But in one important respect, foreign
occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism.
Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a
Shi'ite but still feel they were both Iraqis.
Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and
Shi'ite defined it differently. But the Sunnis
fought the US occupation, unlike the Shi'ites, who
were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003,
the Sunnis saw any Shi'ite who took a job as a
policeman as not only a member of a different
community, but as a traitor to his country.
Sectarian and national antipathies combined to
produce a lethal brew.
The war in Iraq
that started in 2003 has now lasted longer than
World War I. Militarily, the conflicts could not
be more different. The scale of the fighting in
Iraq is far below anything seen in 1914-18, but
the political significance of the Iraq war has
been enormous. The United States blithely invaded
Iraq to overthrow Saddam to show its great
political and military strength. Instead it
demonstrated its weakness.
The vastly
expensive US war machine failed to defeat a
limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas.
International leaders such as Blair who
confidently allied themselves to Washington at the
start of the war, convinced that they were betting
on a winner, are either discredited or out of
power.
At times, Bush seemed intent on
finding out how much damage could be done to the
US by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing
a high proportion of his own propaganda about the
resistance to the occupation being limited in
scale and inspired from outside the country.
By this year, the Bush administration was
even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian
Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It
was a repeat performance of US assertions four
years earlier that Saddam was backing al-Qaeda. In
this fantasy world, constructed to impress
American voters, in which failures were sold as
successes, it was impossible to devise sensible
policies.
The US occupation has
destabilized Iraq and the Middle East. Stability
will not return until the occupation has ended.
The Iraqi government, penned into the Green Zone,
has become tainted in the eyes of Iraqis by
reliance on a foreign power.
Even when it
tries to be independent, it seldom escapes the
culture of dependency in which its members live.
Much of what has gone wrong has more to do with
the US than Iraq. The weaknesses of its government
and army have been exposed. Iraq has joined the
list of small wars - as France found in Algeria in
the 1950s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in
the 1980s - that inflict extraordinary damage on
their occupiers.
Middle East
correspondent for the British newspaper The
Independent, Patrick Cockburn was awarded
the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting.
His book on his years covering the war in Iraq,
The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
(Verso), was a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. This essay
will be the new introduction to the paperback
edition of that book, due this autumn.
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