Iraq Dismantled
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Sometimes, U.S. commanders persuaded themselves (and embedded journalists) that they were making progress. On this occasion, I looked up and read a long, optimistic article about Haifa Street in an American paper, claiming there were signs that "the tide was turning on Iraq's street of fear." It was no longer an arrow pointing at the heart of the Green Zone; rebel leaders had been arrested or killed; large weapons caches had been discovered; insurgent attacks were less intense and less frequent; Iraqi troops were at last being effectively deployed. Having finished reading the piece, I was reflecting on whether or not the U.S. military and its local allies were at last achieving something on Haifa Street when I glanced at the piece and realized, with a groan, that it was dated March 2005, almost two years earlier.
American commanders often genuinely believed that they were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis, including the local police, told me were dominated by Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently claiming that they were winning the fight against the Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in Baquba, the capital of Diyala. It only withdrew after blowing up the building and kidnapping the mayor. The government announced that it was dismissing 1,500 policemen in Diyala because of their repeated failure to resist the insurgents. When I checked with a police commander a few months later he said threw up his hands in disgust and said that not a single policeman had been fired.
The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first, some difference to security in the capital. The number of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and dumped in the street, went down from the horrific levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or of army and police units collaborating with them.
A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent on avoiding direct military confrontation with the U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market places. These did not stop and improved security measures made little difference. On February 3, a truck delivering vegetables blew up in the Shia-Kurdish Sadriya quarter in central Baghdad killing 135 people and wounding 305. Ten weeks later, long after the Security Plan had been launched, another vehicle bomb blew up in the same market, killing 127 people and wounding 148. Not surprisingly, local people jeered and threw stones at American and Iraqi soldiers who turned up after the explosion. The main failing of the security plan for ordinary Iraqis, many of whom had initially welcomed it, was simply that it did not deliver security for them or their families.
Who Rules Iraq?
There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied.
It is this lack of political support that has so far doomed all U.S. political and military actions in Iraq. It makes the country very different from Afghanistan where foreign troops are far more welcome. Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November 2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17% of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was so large as to make it difficult to control and impossible to eliminate them.
Again and again, assassinations and bombs showed that the Iraqi army and police were thoroughly infiltrated by militants from all sides. Nowhere was safe. Some incidents are well known. In April 2007, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the café of the Iraqi parliament in its heavily defended building in the Green Zone. The bomber had somehow circumvented seven or eight layers of security. Earlier, on March 23, the deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, was badly injured by a bomber who got close to him with the connivance of his bodyguards.
There were lesser unknown incidents indicative of the divided loyalties of the security forces. On March 6, militants from the Islamic State of Iraq movement -- of which al Qaida in Iraq is part -- stormed Badoush prison northwest of Mosul. In the biggest jailbreak since 2003, they freed 68 prisoners of whom 57 were foreign. Of the 1,200 guards at the prison, 400-500 were on duty at the time, but did nothing to stop the Islamic militants breaking in or the prisoners breaking out. Some American soldiers see that 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 U.S. and Britain in Iraq have not changed since Saddam Hussein 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 American interests. It is a dilemma still unresolved more than four years into the occupation.
A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq. It was the same motive that stopped President Bush senior 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 Shia, 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 U.S. tried to postpone elections, claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile with the Sunni -- though exactly how Shia and Kurdish leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main Sunni demand is a timetable for an American withdrawal, has never been clear.
For their part, the Shia, have become increasingly suspicious that the U.S. 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.
