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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The way to go in
Iraq By Peter Galbraith
(This essay appears in the August 16,
2007, issue of the New York Review of Books
and is posted here with the kind permission of the
editors of that magazine.)
On May 30, the
coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of
Irbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's
three Kurdish
provinces from the coalition
to the Iraqi government.
General Benjamin
Mixon, the US commander for northern Iraq, praised
the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of
the handover. And he drew attention to the
"benchmark" now achieved: with the handover, he
said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of
Iraq's 18 provinces.
In fact, nothing was
handed over. The only coalition force in Kurdistan
is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that
fought alongside the Americans in the 2003
campaign to oust the late president Saddam Hussein
and is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Irbil.
The peshmerga provided security in the
three Kurdish provinces before the handover and
after. The Iraqi Army has not been on Kurdistan's
territory since 1996 and is in effect prohibited
from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at
the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.
Although the Irbil handover was a sham
that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was
not easily arranged. The administration of US
President George W Bush had wanted the handover to
take place before the US congressional elections
last November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag
flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgement
that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds
were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in
the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be
no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a
compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the
ceremony was followed by a military parade without
a single flag - an event so unusual that one
observer thought it might merit mention in
Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national
security adviser, attended the ceremony alongside
Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechervan Barzani, but
the Iraqi government had no part in supervising
the non-existent handover. While General Mixon, a
highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to
the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks
he did, Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct
nature and the right of the Kurds - about 6
million people, or some 20% of Iraq's population -
to chart their own course.
Last Thursday,
the White House released a congressionally
mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the
sham handover, the report reflected the Bush
administration's desperate search for indicators
of progress since it began its "surge" by sending
five additional combat brigades to the country in
February. In recent months the administration and
its advocates have been promoting the success of
the "surge" in reducing sectarian killing in
Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar
province, where former Sunni insurgents are
signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq
are notoriously hard to come by, it does appear
that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad
has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it
is still at the extremely high levels of last
summer. Moreover, the number of unidentified
bodies - usually the victims of Shi'ite death
squads - has risen in May and June to pre-surge
levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian
deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the "surge"
is not knowable, nor is there any way to know
whether it will last.
The developments in
Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been
attacking US troops in support of the insurgency
are now taking US weapons to fight al-Qaeda and
other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni
fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these
new US-sponsored militias. The Sunni tribes also
regard Iraq's Shi'ite-led government as an enemy,
and the US appears now to be in the business of
arming both the Sunni and Shi'ite factions in what
has long since become a civil war.
Against
the backdrop of modest progress, much has not
changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green
Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar
attacks and is deemed at greater risk of
penetration by suicide bombers. Muqtada al-Sadr,
the radical Shi'ite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a
major target of Bush's "surge" strategy, remains
one of Iraq's most powerful political figures. The
military activity against his forces seems only to
have enhanced his standing with the public.
Even if the "surge" has had some modest
military success, it has failed to accomplish its
political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new
strategy was to increase temporarily the number of
US troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to
provide a breathing space so that Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki's government might enact a program
of national reconciliation that would accommodate
enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents.
Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close
relations with US troops and additional training,
would take over security.
The core of the
national reconciliation program is a series of
legislative and political steps that the
government should take to address the concerns of
Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country
they dominated until 2003. These steps include an
oil-revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the
oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of
revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnis
boycotted the January 2005 provincial and
parliamentary elections, leaving them
underrepresented even in Sunni-majority
provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the
Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising
the ban on public-sector employment of former
Ba'athists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of
the Ba'ath Party and of the Saddam-era public
service); and a fair distribution of
reconstruction funds.
Both the US
administration and Congress have placed great
emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government
to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress
has, by law, linked US strategy on Iraq and
financial support of the Iraqi government to
progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq's government has not met one of the
benchmarks and, with the exception of the
revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen.
But even if they were all enacted, it would not
help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less
governable, while the process of constitutional
revision could break the country apart.
Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to
Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity between
the Iraqi clock and the US clock, suggesting that
Iraqis believe they have more time to reach
agreement than the US political calendar will
tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's
foremost Iraq hand but, more generally, US
impatience often reflects ignorance. For example,
both Congress and the Bush administration have
expressed frustration that the ban on public
service by ex-Ba'athists has not been relaxed,
since this appears to be a straightforward change,
easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq's
leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the
Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously
known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shi'ite
party and a critical component of Prime Minister
Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of
eight brothers. During Saddam's rule, Ba'athists
executed six of them. On August 29, 2003, a
suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Ba'athists,
blew up his last surviving brother, and
predecessor as SCIRI (Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq) leader, at the shrine
of Ali in Najaf.
Muqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's
main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent
Shi'ite religious family. Saddam's Ba'ath regime
murdered his father and two brothers in 1999.
Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested
Muqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's
sister - the grand ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and
Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the
Ba'ath security men raped and killed his sister.
They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before
driving nails into his head.
De-Ba'athification is an intensely
personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful
Shi'ite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of
thousands of their followers who suffered similar
atrocities.
Iraq's Shi'ite leaders are
reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni
areas because they believe, not without reason,
that
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