22 September 2009
BAGHDAD: An adviser to the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) on Tuesday said that it may reconsider its monetary policy if inflation rates continue to run high.
"The bank will not change its monetary policy at the time being as it attributes high inflation to the unexpected rise in foodstuff prices, which form 70 percent of consumer expenditure," Madhhar Mohammed Saleh told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
The rise in foodstuff prices in August, which hit 10.8 percent, was due to external factors, including desertification and drought, Saleh explained.
"If inflation index remains high, the CBI may change interest rates and exchange rates," he added.
© Aswat Aliraq 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
With U.S. Forces In Iraq Beginning To Leave, Need For Private Guards Grows
September 8, 2009
By Walter Pincus
As the United States withdraws its combat forces from Iraq, the government is hiring more private guards to protect U.S. installations at a cost that could near $1 billion, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
On Sept. 1, the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) awarded contracts expected to be worth $485 million over the next two years to five firms to provide security and patrol services to U.S. bases in Iraq.
Under this contract, the firms will bid against one another for individual orders at specific bases or locations. These "task orders" in the past have ranged from supplying one specialist to providing as many as 1,000 people to handle security for a major base.
Under a similar contract with five security contractors that began in September 2007, the MNF-I spent $253 million through March 2009, with needs growing over that 18-month period. That contract, which was to run three years, had a spending limit of $450 million.
Against that background, the inspector general for reconstruction predicted that costs for private security at U.S. facilities in Iraq "will grow in size to a potential $935 million." The inspector general's report, issued this year, said the MNF-I planned to switch to private guards for Victory Base Camp, one of its largest installations. That facility alone would require "approximately 2,600 security personnel," the report said.
The need for contract guards began growing this year. The Central Command's June quarterly report on contracting showed a 19 percent increase from the three previous months in the number of security guards in Iraq hired by the Defense Department. The Central Command attributed the increase, from 10,743 at the end of March to 13,232 at the end of June, mainly to "an increased need for PSCs [private security companies] to provide security as the military begins to draw down forces."
In its study, the inspector general's office found that at 19 sites where private guards replaced soldiers, many more guards were needed to do the same job. It said the task order for Camp Bucca, primarily a detention facility, called for "417 personnel to free up approximately 350 soldiers for combat operations." At Forward Operating Base Hammer, the task order called for 124 private guards to allow 102 soldiers to take on combat activities.
In some cases, as at Camp Taji, a major supply installation, the report says that more than 900 private personnel replaced 400 soldiers, but that the private guards took on additional tasks "to address deficiencies in existing site security."
The United States also uses contractors when coalition forces withdraw. When Georgian soldiers left unexpectedly last August from a base near the Iranian border where they were providing security, private contractors replaced them.
The Central Command study found that of the armed private security personnel working in June, 623 were Americans, 1,029 were Iraqis and 11,580 were third-country nationals. Most of that group "were from countries such as Uganda and Kenya," according to the inspector general's report.
Under the new MNF-I contract, guards must be at least 21 years old, speak English "at a level necessary to give and receive situational reports," and be an expatriate or an Iraqi, but the latter only when specifically allowed. Those who handle dogs used to inspect vehicles and search out explosives must be at least 25 years old and "must be expatriates." Shift supervisors, who direct guard teams, must also be at least 25 and be fluent in reading and writing English.
The inspector general's report shows that government estimates of the total cost of replacing soldiers with contractors are hidden in public accounting. The report notes that government services provided to the private guard force -- food, housing and other benefits -- are not considered, only payments going directly to the contractors. The report estimated that such services provided to private security personnel in the 12 months ending in March cost "more than $250 million," at a time when listed outlays to the contractor firms in that period totaled $155 million.
In the new contracts, private contractors will continue to be allowed to use government dining facilities, living quarters, barber services, some transportation within Iraq and emergency medical care.
Another new contract, posted Sept. 3 for "Advisor & Atmospherics technical support services," calls for providing information to senior commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq to assist them "in gaining a deeper understanding of the many complex issues across Iraq." The aim is to provide "anecdotal information derived from varied native sources" so that commanders can become aware of "the Iraqi viewpoint of life in Iraq, the government of Iraq, U.S. forces, key events and other perceptions that are relevant to accomplishing the mission in Iraq."
By Walter Pincus
As the United States withdraws its combat forces from Iraq, the government is hiring more private guards to protect U.S. installations at a cost that could near $1 billion, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
On Sept. 1, the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) awarded contracts expected to be worth $485 million over the next two years to five firms to provide security and patrol services to U.S. bases in Iraq.
Under this contract, the firms will bid against one another for individual orders at specific bases or locations. These "task orders" in the past have ranged from supplying one specialist to providing as many as 1,000 people to handle security for a major base.
Under a similar contract with five security contractors that began in September 2007, the MNF-I spent $253 million through March 2009, with needs growing over that 18-month period. That contract, which was to run three years, had a spending limit of $450 million.
Against that background, the inspector general for reconstruction predicted that costs for private security at U.S. facilities in Iraq "will grow in size to a potential $935 million." The inspector general's report, issued this year, said the MNF-I planned to switch to private guards for Victory Base Camp, one of its largest installations. That facility alone would require "approximately 2,600 security personnel," the report said.
The need for contract guards began growing this year. The Central Command's June quarterly report on contracting showed a 19 percent increase from the three previous months in the number of security guards in Iraq hired by the Defense Department. The Central Command attributed the increase, from 10,743 at the end of March to 13,232 at the end of June, mainly to "an increased need for PSCs [private security companies] to provide security as the military begins to draw down forces."
In its study, the inspector general's office found that at 19 sites where private guards replaced soldiers, many more guards were needed to do the same job. It said the task order for Camp Bucca, primarily a detention facility, called for "417 personnel to free up approximately 350 soldiers for combat operations." At Forward Operating Base Hammer, the task order called for 124 private guards to allow 102 soldiers to take on combat activities.
In some cases, as at Camp Taji, a major supply installation, the report says that more than 900 private personnel replaced 400 soldiers, but that the private guards took on additional tasks "to address deficiencies in existing site security."
The United States also uses contractors when coalition forces withdraw. When Georgian soldiers left unexpectedly last August from a base near the Iranian border where they were providing security, private contractors replaced them.
The Central Command study found that of the armed private security personnel working in June, 623 were Americans, 1,029 were Iraqis and 11,580 were third-country nationals. Most of that group "were from countries such as Uganda and Kenya," according to the inspector general's report.
Under the new MNF-I contract, guards must be at least 21 years old, speak English "at a level necessary to give and receive situational reports," and be an expatriate or an Iraqi, but the latter only when specifically allowed. Those who handle dogs used to inspect vehicles and search out explosives must be at least 25 years old and "must be expatriates." Shift supervisors, who direct guard teams, must also be at least 25 and be fluent in reading and writing English.
The inspector general's report shows that government estimates of the total cost of replacing soldiers with contractors are hidden in public accounting. The report notes that government services provided to the private guard force -- food, housing and other benefits -- are not considered, only payments going directly to the contractors. The report estimated that such services provided to private security personnel in the 12 months ending in March cost "more than $250 million," at a time when listed outlays to the contractor firms in that period totaled $155 million.
In the new contracts, private contractors will continue to be allowed to use government dining facilities, living quarters, barber services, some transportation within Iraq and emergency medical care.
Another new contract, posted Sept. 3 for "Advisor & Atmospherics technical support services," calls for providing information to senior commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq to assist them "in gaining a deeper understanding of the many complex issues across Iraq." The aim is to provide "anecdotal information derived from varied native sources" so that commanders can become aware of "the Iraqi viewpoint of life in Iraq, the government of Iraq, U.S. forces, key events and other perceptions that are relevant to accomplishing the mission in Iraq."
Monday, September 7, 2009
China Oil Deal Is New Source Of Strife Among Iraqis
New York Times
September 6, 2009
China Oil Deal Is New Source Of Strife Among Iraqis
By Timothy Williams
WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq — When China’s biggest oil company signed the first post-invasion oil field development contract in Iraq last year, the deal was seen as a test of Iraq’s willingness to open an industry that had previously prohibited foreign investment.
One year later, the China National Petroleum Corporation has struck oil at the Ahdab field in Wasit Province, southeast of Baghdad. And while the relationship between the company and the Iraqi government has gone smoothly, the presence of a foreign company with vast resources drilling for oil in this poor, rural corner of Iraq has awakened a wave of discontent here.
“We get nothing directly from the Chinese company, and we are suffering,” said Mahmoud Abdul Ridha, head of the Wasit provincial council, whose budget has been cut in half by Baghdad in the past year because of lower international oil prices. “There is an unemployment crisis. We need roads, schools, water treatment plants. We need everything.”
The result has been a local-rights movement — extraordinary in a country where political dissent has historically carried the risk of death — that in the past few months has begun demanding that at least $1 of each barrel of oil produced at the Ahdab field be used to improve access to clean water, health services, schools, paved roads and other needs in the province, which is among Iraq’s poorest.
The ripples are traveling far beyond this province, too. Frustrations have spilled over into sabotage and intimidation of Chinese oil workers, turning the Ahdab field into a cautionary tale for international oil companies seeking to join the rush to profit from Iraq’s vast untapped oil reserves.
Because Iraq is so heavily dependent on oil revenue, any international hesitation by oil companies to invest could mean years of continued economic and political instability in the country. All oil revenues go directly to the government in Baghdad and are the foundation of the national budget.
The Iraqi government has so far rejected the locals’ demands, but people here are clearly beginning to feel that something new is possible.
“No one would have dared to ask for such a thing during Saddam’s regime; if he did, he would definitely be executed,” said Ghassan Ali, a 43-year-old farmer who lives near the oil field. “But now we are a democratic country, so we have the right to ask for our rights like any other province in Iraq.”
The basis of the complaints here is that, aside from the hiring of a few hundred residents as laborers and security guards at salaries of less than $600 a month, the Ahdab field — a roughly $3 billion development project — has provided no local benefit.
Some local farmers began reacting by destroying the company’s generators and severing electrical hoses, angry because they believed that their fields were being unfairly handed over to the company. Other residents began expressing outrage that very few jobs were being opened to them.
China National Petroleum says it needs relatively few workers because it is still in the exploration phase of its 23-year project at the Ahdab field. Oil production is not scheduled to begin for two and a half years.
Now, the field’s 100 or so Chinese workers rarely leave their spartan compound for fear of being kidnapped, the company said, even though the Iraqi government recently deployed extra security to the area.
But the Iraqis’ anger has been increasingly channeled into an above-board labor movement, expressing concerns about workers’ rights, local government authority, pollution, transparent hiring practices and public accountability, among other issues.
Ghassan Atiyyah, executive director of the nonprofit Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, said the nascent activism in Wasit Province was part of a broader shift in a society that had until recently been resistant to such demands because of years of dictatorship, economic sanctions, war and a culture that retains a strong tribal influence.
“There is a social transformation going on in Iraq that will take years to sort out,” Mr. Atiyyah said, “but what we are seeing is a new social order emerging as rural people challenge the urban people who have always looked down on them.”
The Iraqi government and the Chinese oil company have played down the tensions in Wasit Province, saying that aside from a few hiccups, things are going according to plan.
Still, the unrest also comes at a critical time for Iraq’s oil industry, which has struggled to reach prewar production levels and is preparing to auction off 10 oil fields to international companies this fall after a first round of bidding for a group of other oil and gas fields this summer led to only one signed contract.
The Ahdab field contains about one billion barrels of oil, modest by Iraq’s standards. In comparison, the Rumaila field in southern Iraq, for which the Chinese company and British Petroleum signed a development deal in June, is Iraq’s largest field with an estimated 17.8 billion barrels.
China National Petroleum said it renegotiated a Saddam Hussein-era contract at Ahdab last August knowing that it would take away profits of barely 1 percent.
“We wanted to get a foot in the door,” said Han Ruimin, vice president of Al Waha Petroleum Company, the name of the joint venture at Ahdab between the Chinese company and ZhenHua Oil, also based in China. “Our strategy worked, because we just got another contract,” he said, referring to the Rumaila field.
The Ahdab field is surrounded by tenant farmers living in cramped, mud houses without electricity or running water. They had hoped the arrival of the oil company would end their poverty.
Instead, China National Petroleum has hired only about 450 workers, many of whom lived outside the province, according to residents and local officials.
“The problem is that people were expecting thousands of jobs right away, and then they realized that the company depended more on machines than on people,” said Ali Hussein, head of the local district council.
Mr. Hussein said the extent of local suffering had emboldened him to begin discussing the situation with the Chinese company in unvarnished language. But troubles have persisted.
Earlier this year, the area’s farmers complained that the oil company’s electrical and seismic equipment — used to help determine where wells should be drilled — was damaging fragile homes and crops.
About the same time, electrical lines, many of which were laid across farmland, were severed or stolen, as were expensive generators and other equipment. This spring, a rocket was fired, though it fell harmlessly. Mr. Han said he believed that it had been aimed at a nearby American military base, though local farmers said they suspected that the Ahdab field was the target.
More trouble could be on the way next spring when 1,000 Chinese workers arrive to build a central processing plant.
Mr. Han said hiring Iraqis to do the job was out of the question. “We don’t have enough time to train local people to do that work,” he said.
In the meantime, the field’s neighbors say they worry that they are about to be swallowed by the pursuit of the oil beneath their crops.
Ghazi Hwaidi, 39, whose wheat field now shares space with towering seismic oil prospecting equipment, said he had sought compensation for his damaged crops — and just in case, had also applied for a job with the oil company. He has not received word about either effort.
“My farm is now more like an oil field,” he said, “and I have gotten nothing for it.”
Reporting was contributed by Abeer Mohammed and Mohammed Hussein from Baghdad, and Riyadh Mohammed and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Wasit Province.
September 6, 2009
China Oil Deal Is New Source Of Strife Among Iraqis
By Timothy Williams
WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq — When China’s biggest oil company signed the first post-invasion oil field development contract in Iraq last year, the deal was seen as a test of Iraq’s willingness to open an industry that had previously prohibited foreign investment.
One year later, the China National Petroleum Corporation has struck oil at the Ahdab field in Wasit Province, southeast of Baghdad. And while the relationship between the company and the Iraqi government has gone smoothly, the presence of a foreign company with vast resources drilling for oil in this poor, rural corner of Iraq has awakened a wave of discontent here.
“We get nothing directly from the Chinese company, and we are suffering,” said Mahmoud Abdul Ridha, head of the Wasit provincial council, whose budget has been cut in half by Baghdad in the past year because of lower international oil prices. “There is an unemployment crisis. We need roads, schools, water treatment plants. We need everything.”
The result has been a local-rights movement — extraordinary in a country where political dissent has historically carried the risk of death — that in the past few months has begun demanding that at least $1 of each barrel of oil produced at the Ahdab field be used to improve access to clean water, health services, schools, paved roads and other needs in the province, which is among Iraq’s poorest.
The ripples are traveling far beyond this province, too. Frustrations have spilled over into sabotage and intimidation of Chinese oil workers, turning the Ahdab field into a cautionary tale for international oil companies seeking to join the rush to profit from Iraq’s vast untapped oil reserves.
Because Iraq is so heavily dependent on oil revenue, any international hesitation by oil companies to invest could mean years of continued economic and political instability in the country. All oil revenues go directly to the government in Baghdad and are the foundation of the national budget.
The Iraqi government has so far rejected the locals’ demands, but people here are clearly beginning to feel that something new is possible.
“No one would have dared to ask for such a thing during Saddam’s regime; if he did, he would definitely be executed,” said Ghassan Ali, a 43-year-old farmer who lives near the oil field. “But now we are a democratic country, so we have the right to ask for our rights like any other province in Iraq.”
The basis of the complaints here is that, aside from the hiring of a few hundred residents as laborers and security guards at salaries of less than $600 a month, the Ahdab field — a roughly $3 billion development project — has provided no local benefit.
Some local farmers began reacting by destroying the company’s generators and severing electrical hoses, angry because they believed that their fields were being unfairly handed over to the company. Other residents began expressing outrage that very few jobs were being opened to them.
China National Petroleum says it needs relatively few workers because it is still in the exploration phase of its 23-year project at the Ahdab field. Oil production is not scheduled to begin for two and a half years.
Now, the field’s 100 or so Chinese workers rarely leave their spartan compound for fear of being kidnapped, the company said, even though the Iraqi government recently deployed extra security to the area.
But the Iraqis’ anger has been increasingly channeled into an above-board labor movement, expressing concerns about workers’ rights, local government authority, pollution, transparent hiring practices and public accountability, among other issues.
Ghassan Atiyyah, executive director of the nonprofit Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, said the nascent activism in Wasit Province was part of a broader shift in a society that had until recently been resistant to such demands because of years of dictatorship, economic sanctions, war and a culture that retains a strong tribal influence.
“There is a social transformation going on in Iraq that will take years to sort out,” Mr. Atiyyah said, “but what we are seeing is a new social order emerging as rural people challenge the urban people who have always looked down on them.”
The Iraqi government and the Chinese oil company have played down the tensions in Wasit Province, saying that aside from a few hiccups, things are going according to plan.
Still, the unrest also comes at a critical time for Iraq’s oil industry, which has struggled to reach prewar production levels and is preparing to auction off 10 oil fields to international companies this fall after a first round of bidding for a group of other oil and gas fields this summer led to only one signed contract.
The Ahdab field contains about one billion barrels of oil, modest by Iraq’s standards. In comparison, the Rumaila field in southern Iraq, for which the Chinese company and British Petroleum signed a development deal in June, is Iraq’s largest field with an estimated 17.8 billion barrels.
China National Petroleum said it renegotiated a Saddam Hussein-era contract at Ahdab last August knowing that it would take away profits of barely 1 percent.
“We wanted to get a foot in the door,” said Han Ruimin, vice president of Al Waha Petroleum Company, the name of the joint venture at Ahdab between the Chinese company and ZhenHua Oil, also based in China. “Our strategy worked, because we just got another contract,” he said, referring to the Rumaila field.
The Ahdab field is surrounded by tenant farmers living in cramped, mud houses without electricity or running water. They had hoped the arrival of the oil company would end their poverty.
Instead, China National Petroleum has hired only about 450 workers, many of whom lived outside the province, according to residents and local officials.
“The problem is that people were expecting thousands of jobs right away, and then they realized that the company depended more on machines than on people,” said Ali Hussein, head of the local district council.
Mr. Hussein said the extent of local suffering had emboldened him to begin discussing the situation with the Chinese company in unvarnished language. But troubles have persisted.
Earlier this year, the area’s farmers complained that the oil company’s electrical and seismic equipment — used to help determine where wells should be drilled — was damaging fragile homes and crops.
About the same time, electrical lines, many of which were laid across farmland, were severed or stolen, as were expensive generators and other equipment. This spring, a rocket was fired, though it fell harmlessly. Mr. Han said he believed that it had been aimed at a nearby American military base, though local farmers said they suspected that the Ahdab field was the target.
More trouble could be on the way next spring when 1,000 Chinese workers arrive to build a central processing plant.
Mr. Han said hiring Iraqis to do the job was out of the question. “We don’t have enough time to train local people to do that work,” he said.
In the meantime, the field’s neighbors say they worry that they are about to be swallowed by the pursuit of the oil beneath their crops.
Ghazi Hwaidi, 39, whose wheat field now shares space with towering seismic oil prospecting equipment, said he had sought compensation for his damaged crops — and just in case, had also applied for a job with the oil company. He has not received word about either effort.
“My farm is now more like an oil field,” he said, “and I have gotten nothing for it.”
Reporting was contributed by Abeer Mohammed and Mohammed Hussein from Baghdad, and Riyadh Mohammed and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Wasit Province.
The unraveling of Iraq, XXII: What he said
Tom Ricks
Foreign Policy
7 Sep 09
David Ignatius, who knows more about intelligence and the Middle East than I ever will, inexplicably chose the dog days of mid-August to run a very good column about the increasing domination of Iraqi intelligence forces by the agents of Tehran. He clearly has had a long talk with an Iraqi intelligence official. My guess, and that is all it is, is that that official with whom Ignatius spoke was none other than Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, who, as Ignatius writes, resigned in August over the issue of Iranian influence:
When pressed about what his country would look like in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: "Iraq will be a colony of Iran."
Meanwhile, here is a headline from Aswat al-Iraq that caught my eye in August, some six years into the war:
Official says only 2 blasts occurred in Baghdad today
It was a famous victory.
********************************************
Behind the Carnage in Baghdad
By David Ignatius
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
As security deteriorates in Baghdad, there's a new cause for worry: The head of the US-trained Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) has quit in a long-running quarrel with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- depriving that country of a key leader in the fight against sectarian terrorism.
Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, the head of Iraqi intelligence since 2004, resigned this month because of what he viewed as Maliki's attempts to undermine his service and allow Iranian spies to operate freely. The CIA, which has worked closely with Shahwani since he went into exile in the 1990s and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars training the INIS, was apparently caught by surprise by his departure.
The chaotic conditions in Iraq that triggered Shahwani's resignation are illustrated by several recent events -- each of which suggests that without the backstop of US support, Iraqi authorities are now desperately vulnerable to pressure, especially from neighboring Iran.
An early warning was the brazen July 28 robbery of the state-run Rafidain Bank in central Baghdad, apparently by members of an Iraqi security force. Gunmen broke into the bank and stole about 5.6 billion Iraqi dinars, or roughly $5 million. After a battle that left eight dead, the robbers fled to a newspaper run by Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the country's vice presidents.
Abdul Mahdi, once an American favorite, has admitted that one of the robbers was a member of his security detail but denied personal involvement, according to Iraqi news reports. Some of the money has been recovered, but the rest is believed to be in Iran, along with some members of the robbery team.
A second concern for Shahwani has been threats against his service's roughly 6,000 members. Maliki's government has issued arrest warrants against 180 Iraqi intelligence officers for alleged crimes that, according to Shahwani's camp, are really political reprisals for doing their jobs. Since the INIS was formally created in 2004, 290 of its officers have been killed, many targeted by Iranian intelligence operatives.
With Shahwani's resignation, the intelligence service is commanded by Gen. Zuheir Fadel, a former pilot in Saddam Hussein's air force. But some of Fadel's key officers are said to be fleeing for safety in Jordan, Egypt and Syria -- fearing that they will be targets of Iranian hit teams if they remain in Iraq.
The breakdown of order in Iraq was most dramatic in the truck bombings on Aug. 19 that targeted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other agencies, and left more than 100 dead and 500 wounded. Here, again, there is evidence that government security forces may have aided the terrorists.
"I don't rule out that there was collaboration by the security forces," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after the bombings. "We have to face the truth. There has been an obvious deterioration in the security situation in the past two months."
Who's to blame for the carnage? In today's Iraq, that's open to sectarian conspiracy theories. Maliki's Shiite-led government last weekend broadcast the alleged confession of a Sunni Baathist named Wisam Ali Khazim Ibrahim, who said the truck-bombing plot had been hatched in Syria and that he had paid security guards $10,000 to pass through checkpoints.
But forensic evidence points to a possible Iranian role, according to an Iraqi intelligence source who is close to Shahwani. He said that signatures of the C-4 explosive residues that have been found at the bomb sites are similar to those of Iranian-made explosives that have been captured in Kut, Nasiriyah, Basra and other Iraqi cities since 2006.
Iran's links with Maliki are so close, said this Iraqi intelligence source, that the prime minister uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel. The Iranians are said to have sent Maliki an offer to help his Dawa Party win at least 49seats in January's parliamentary elections if Maliki will make changes in his government that Iran wants.
As security unravels in Iraq, US forces there are mostly bystanders. Even in the areas where al-Qaeda operatives remain potent, such as Mosul, the Americans have little control. Sunni terrorists who are arrested are quickly released by the Iraqis in exchange for bribes of up to $100,000, according to an Iraqi source.
Should the Americans try to restore order? The top Iraqi intelligence source answered sadly that it was probably wiser to "stay out of it and be safe." When pressed about what his country would look like in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: "Iraq will be a colony of Iran."
Foreign Policy
7 Sep 09
David Ignatius, who knows more about intelligence and the Middle East than I ever will, inexplicably chose the dog days of mid-August to run a very good column about the increasing domination of Iraqi intelligence forces by the agents of Tehran. He clearly has had a long talk with an Iraqi intelligence official. My guess, and that is all it is, is that that official with whom Ignatius spoke was none other than Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, who, as Ignatius writes, resigned in August over the issue of Iranian influence:
When pressed about what his country would look like in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: "Iraq will be a colony of Iran."
Meanwhile, here is a headline from Aswat al-Iraq that caught my eye in August, some six years into the war:
Official says only 2 blasts occurred in Baghdad today
It was a famous victory.
********************************************
Behind the Carnage in Baghdad
By David Ignatius
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
As security deteriorates in Baghdad, there's a new cause for worry: The head of the US-trained Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) has quit in a long-running quarrel with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- depriving that country of a key leader in the fight against sectarian terrorism.
Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, the head of Iraqi intelligence since 2004, resigned this month because of what he viewed as Maliki's attempts to undermine his service and allow Iranian spies to operate freely. The CIA, which has worked closely with Shahwani since he went into exile in the 1990s and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars training the INIS, was apparently caught by surprise by his departure.
The chaotic conditions in Iraq that triggered Shahwani's resignation are illustrated by several recent events -- each of which suggests that without the backstop of US support, Iraqi authorities are now desperately vulnerable to pressure, especially from neighboring Iran.
An early warning was the brazen July 28 robbery of the state-run Rafidain Bank in central Baghdad, apparently by members of an Iraqi security force. Gunmen broke into the bank and stole about 5.6 billion Iraqi dinars, or roughly $5 million. After a battle that left eight dead, the robbers fled to a newspaper run by Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the country's vice presidents.
Abdul Mahdi, once an American favorite, has admitted that one of the robbers was a member of his security detail but denied personal involvement, according to Iraqi news reports. Some of the money has been recovered, but the rest is believed to be in Iran, along with some members of the robbery team.
A second concern for Shahwani has been threats against his service's roughly 6,000 members. Maliki's government has issued arrest warrants against 180 Iraqi intelligence officers for alleged crimes that, according to Shahwani's camp, are really political reprisals for doing their jobs. Since the INIS was formally created in 2004, 290 of its officers have been killed, many targeted by Iranian intelligence operatives.
With Shahwani's resignation, the intelligence service is commanded by Gen. Zuheir Fadel, a former pilot in Saddam Hussein's air force. But some of Fadel's key officers are said to be fleeing for safety in Jordan, Egypt and Syria -- fearing that they will be targets of Iranian hit teams if they remain in Iraq.
The breakdown of order in Iraq was most dramatic in the truck bombings on Aug. 19 that targeted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other agencies, and left more than 100 dead and 500 wounded. Here, again, there is evidence that government security forces may have aided the terrorists.
"I don't rule out that there was collaboration by the security forces," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after the bombings. "We have to face the truth. There has been an obvious deterioration in the security situation in the past two months."
Who's to blame for the carnage? In today's Iraq, that's open to sectarian conspiracy theories. Maliki's Shiite-led government last weekend broadcast the alleged confession of a Sunni Baathist named Wisam Ali Khazim Ibrahim, who said the truck-bombing plot had been hatched in Syria and that he had paid security guards $10,000 to pass through checkpoints.
But forensic evidence points to a possible Iranian role, according to an Iraqi intelligence source who is close to Shahwani. He said that signatures of the C-4 explosive residues that have been found at the bomb sites are similar to those of Iranian-made explosives that have been captured in Kut, Nasiriyah, Basra and other Iraqi cities since 2006.
Iran's links with Maliki are so close, said this Iraqi intelligence source, that the prime minister uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel. The Iranians are said to have sent Maliki an offer to help his Dawa Party win at least 49seats in January's parliamentary elections if Maliki will make changes in his government that Iran wants.
As security unravels in Iraq, US forces there are mostly bystanders. Even in the areas where al-Qaeda operatives remain potent, such as Mosul, the Americans have little control. Sunni terrorists who are arrested are quickly released by the Iraqis in exchange for bribes of up to $100,000, according to an Iraqi source.
Should the Americans try to restore order? The top Iraqi intelligence source answered sadly that it was probably wiser to "stay out of it and be safe." When pressed about what his country would look like in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: "Iraq will be a colony of Iran."
The Battle for Baghdad
The Battle for Baghdad
by Kenneth M. Pollack
From the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest.
THE SCHEMING had gone on for hours. The Iraqis were from a half dozen different political groupings, some sectarian, some secular. It was Baghdad, it was February 2009 and it was less than a month after Iraq's provincial elections. For our hosts, the purpose of the dinner was to assure me and a colleague that their coalition had enough people on its side to oust Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in a vote of no confidence. It was one of many such meals we attended on that trip with Iraqi friends determined to prevent Maliki from spinning his recent electoral victories into absolute power.
That night our hosts were hoping to convince us of the strength of their position, but as the evening dragged on, assurances were forgotten. The scheming turned desperate. A little longer and any remaining vestige of confidence was gone altogether. The Iraqis began to reveal, to each other as much as to us, the problems they faced. This party boss would only join if he were named defense minister, but he brought too few votes to justify it. Another group would only join if still another party were excluded. But they would not give up on their dream of ousting Maliki, and their machinations turned to ways of getting around those obstacles.
Finally, the conversation reached its climax. The Iraqis managed to convince themselves they would have the votes they needed. They had convinced themselves that they had ways-tenuous ways, but ways-to overcome their problems. The somber mood of concern that had hung in the room seemed like it was about to lift. They had successfully built a Rube Goldberg machine that would oust the prime minister. Then, at that moment, one member of the group dispelled the whole fantastic edifice: "But Hakim [leader of the most important Shia party] won't agree to a vote of no confidence," he pointed out glumly. "He says it would look like we were trying to overturn the will of the people. And without ISCI [the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Hakim's party] we don't have the votes."
The dream was over. The desperate confidence evaporated. The circle of conversation splintered as some went to get more coffee or tea or sweets; others simply rose to give physical manifestation to their frustration. They fell to complaining about Sa'id Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's unwillingness to join a vote of no confidence and to warning us that if the United States did not do something about Prime Minister Maliki we would be facing either a new Saddam or a new civil war. And as the evening faded, their warnings wasted away into plaintive questions about the new Obama administration's willingness to oust Maliki since they could not do it themselves.
America is still all that stands between stability and anarchy in Iraq.
A FEW days earlier we had seen the other side of the coin: a lunch with several of the prime minister's most important confidantes. The tone was understandably different. There was great confidence borne of Maliki's Dawa Party victory in the recent provincial elections. They now had control of many of Iraq's most important provinces and, of far greater importance, momentum. Yet, there was also concern. They knew that their position was hardly unassailable, and they knew all about the dinner meetings going on all over Iraq at which other Iraqi leaders schemed to forge coalitions to prevent them from securing an equal or greater victory in Iraq's national elections scheduled for January 2010. They wanted to convince me and my colleagues that Maliki could not only sweep to power in those polls, but would do so in a perfectly legal, democratic fashion. All of our questions about the prime minister's not-quite-constitutionally stipulated moves-his reliance on regional operations centers outside the official Iraqi military chain of command; the slew of procedures, especially in the oil and electricity sectors, that likewise bypass formal lines of authority; the formation of tribal-support councils beyond the established bureaucratic structure that are used to funnel money to willing sheikhs-were all deflected with pitch-perfect talking points and a Cheshire cat grin.
Here as well, we had many friends, and they knew us well enough to know that we took no sides in Iraq's political battles. So as the afternoon wore on we heard more about their electoral strategy. It was simple and powerful. During 2009, the prime minister would throw himself into the task of solving Iraq's last remaining security problems and improving the provision of basic services like electricity, clean water, sanitation and medical care to the Iraqi people. He would demonstrate that he was the only man who could do so. Many of the prime minister's foes may try to block whatever he tries to do on these scores, and this would only play to his advantage. Maliki and his allies would make the election about the provision
of security and basic services, and the only question would be how big their victory would be.
We saw that the strength of this strategy also came from the weaknesses of the parties opposing Maliki, all of which are nearly hopeless when it comes to fashioning their own electoral message let alone successfully redefining the issues on which the election will turn.
But we also knew that Maliki had several more aces up his sleeve that were less savory than those our friends wanted to discuss.
IRAQI NATIONALISM is on the rise. And it is this force that the prime minister hopes to unleash if providing basic services is not enough to secure reelection. As always, nationalism is a double-edged sword. It has started to heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia. And it has been the most important factor in limiting Iranian influence. The more Iraqis feel confident in themselves, the more they push back on the mostly despised Persian interlopers. But the forces of nationalism are also threatening to Iraq's minorities and the cohesion of the state, no more so than when it comes to the Kurdish problem.
Since late 2008, Maliki has been deploying more of Iraq's nascent military power to the north and goading the army into regular provocations with the Kurdish militia-the pesh merga. The prime minister has a legitimate reason: the Iraqi government's security forces have a right and a need to control all of Iraq's territory. But no one with any sense believes that now is the time to resolve this issue, or that marching army battalions into Kurdistan without an agreement with the Kurds is the right way to do it. Predictably, the Kurds have just as regularly risen to the bait. In August 2008, an Iraqi army operation in the ethnically mixed city of Khanaqin in northeast Iraq nearly resulted in a firefight. Only the timely intervention of the American soldiers accompanying the Iraqi units prevented bloodshed. Since then, Iraqi army and pesh merga formations have continued to maneuver against one another constantly, and again it is only the presence of American soldiers that averts violence.
On the streets of most Iraqi cities outside of Iraqi Kurdistan, these near-clashes have cast the Kurds as villains seeking to dismember Iraq, something no Iraqi Arab will countenance. Stoking this rivalry allows Maliki to cast himself as the nationalist champion of a unified Iraq, a very popular position everywhere outside of Kurdistan. It's also not a secondary consideration that the two main Kurdish parties are key allies of the ISCI, Maliki's most dangerous political opponent. Thus, discrediting the Kurds also discredits his Shia political rivals.
Of course, the Kurds aren't blameless. Sometimes in response to Baghdad's moves and sometimes for reasons of their own, they too are taking increasingly provocative actions. The Kurds are threatening to promulgate a constitution for the Kurdish region which diverges from the national constitution on key issues like oil and security, which could trigger nationalist outbursts on both sides. Kurdish elements also continue to stir up trouble in places like Mosul and Diyala, and both sides treat the status of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk like a political football, rather than the kind of powder keg that could bring them all to ruin.
Against this backdrop, the United States is increasingly becoming an impediment for Maliki. American soldiers prevent the clashes he seems to desire between pesh merga and Iraqi forces. This not only complicates his election strategy, but is an affront to his own nationalist desire to see the writ of Iraq's central government run everywhere in the country-including Kurdistan.
FOR THE United States, the reemergence of Iraqi nationalism has created two challenges. It produces new incentives to violence that American forces need to prevent. But it has also led many Iraqi politicians, including the prime minister, to take public positions unsupportive of the American presence, even though most know that America's role as peacekeeper, mediator, adviser and capacity-builder remains critical to Iraq's stability and progress.
In 2008, Maliki attempted to replace virtually every commander above battalion level in the Iraqi army divisions in the northern regions of Iraq, and the United States stepped in to prevent him from doing so. In the spring of that year, Maliki once again defied American military advice and launched his security forces unilaterally against the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq's great southern city of Basra, which they had made their fiefdom. After some initial disasters, the US military came to the rescue, the Iraqis rallied, the people of Basra turned against the Sadrists and JAM was vanquished. Weeks later, a joint American-Iraqi operation cleared the JAM-infested neighborhoods of Sadr City in Baghdad, followed by Iraqi-led operations elsewhere in the south. Although these operations were all heavily supported by the US military, and likely would have failed badly without that support, Prime Minister Maliki seems to have concluded that his security forces are much stronger than either the Americans or his own generals think them to be. He may already believe that by January 2010 they will be ready to handle Iraq's security entirely on their own. But not everyone agrees.
In October 2008, I found myself at yet another tense dinner in Baghdad. It was at the home of one of Iraq's most senior political leaders and when I arrived with several other Americans, a remarkable meeting was still going on nearby. The prime minister had brought the cabinet and other critical leaders together to hear the minister of defense and the minister of the interior brief on the state of the Iraqi security forces. The question before them was whether the government should sign the Security Agreement (SA) then being negotiated with the United States-the agreement that provides for American military forces to remain in Iraq until the end of 2011.
The rumor among many well-informed Iraqis was that the prime minister wanted the two security ministers to report that the army and police were now ready to secure the country without American military assistance, which would allow him to decline the SA and send the Americans home. My host at that dinner and virtually all of the rest of Iraq's political leadership felt this would be a disastrous mistake. My host assumed that those in the meeting would find out that a group of senior Americans from Washington was sitting right next door, and that this might inject some caution into their decision making. And we Americans realized quickly that we were present just next-door to serve as witnesses and reminders to those in the meeting with the prime minister and the security chiefs that Big Brother may not have been watching, but Uncle Sam was.
The defense minister and interior minister both stood their ground in that meeting, arguing that the Iraqi security forces were still at least three years away from being ready to handle their country's safety on their own. By all accounts, Maliki was disappointed. But after extracting a few more concessions from the American negotiators, he signed the SA and tried to make as little of it as possible. Although it is clear that the political war is not yet won by either side, no one is willing to quit the field either.
The prime minister seems to have, at best, mixed emotions regarding the American presence. On the one hand, his popularity is based on the improvement in security across Iraq, which he recognizes was caused in large measure by the change in American military strategy and tactics (coupled temporarily with the increased numbers of American troops) beginning in 2007 under the leadership of Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno. If the American troops leave and the security situation worsens, his reelection prospects will dim accordingly. He recognizes that the average Iraqi wants to see Iraq stand on its own, but also wants to know that the Americans are still there in the background to prevent his country's problems from mushrooming into another civil war.
But the fact remains that the United States remains a powerful force in Iraq and not every action we take redounds to Maliki's personal or political benefit. The American military and political leadership is focused on what is in the long-term best interests of Iraq, not necessarily the immediate fortunes of the prime minister or his party. And this irritating American predilection seems to weigh evermore heavily in his thinking.
MANY IRAQIS (and many Americans) believe Maliki intends to make himself a new dictator. Although none of us can know what lies in his heart, I suspect that this is not his deliberate aim, but may end up being his unintentional goal. Maliki is said to be deeply suspicious by nature-itself not surprising for a longtime member of an underground terrorist movement relentlessly hunted by Saddam's minions. Moreover, he is impetuous and appears to react emotionally when he faces serious resistance. He lashes out at his political rivals and his actions often seem to reflect a frustration and a desire to rid himself of all opposition.
To many Iraqis, his moves look like those of an old-style Iraqi politician scheming to make himself all-powerful by exerting direct control over the levers of power and cutting out potential rivals elsewhere in the Iraqi leadership. But Maliki's supporters counter that the hapless Iraqi bureaucracy is incapable of functioning in a way that could produce the outcomes that the Iraqi people, the Americans, the UN and the rest of the world have repeatedly demanded. Only by circumventing bureaucratic choke points and energizing those responsible for acting can he get the Iraqi system moving. And when it comes to the prime minister's personnel policies, his supporters argue that many in the Iraqi military and bureaucracy serve other masters and so often ignore Maliki's directives, leaving him no choice but to replace them with others willing to follow orders.
Of course, the prime minister is not the only Iraqi politician perched between upholding democracy and subverting it. It was fascinating to hear all those Iraqi politicians back in February conspiring to bring about a vote of no confidence against the prime minister. A few years ago their goal would have been to kill him or simply force him out. It was absolutely stunning to hear them concede that their schemes were fruitless because Hakim, one of the cleverest and most powerful of Iraq's warlords, had refused to participate in a move that could be perceived as subverting the will of the Iraqi people-a conversation that even two years ago would have been unimaginable. But that doesn't mean democracy or even democratization has fully taken hold yet.
AND THEREIN lies the rub. There is still a lot of old-fashioned dirty politics in Iraq-the politics borne of Iraq's descent into civil war that in turn helped accelerate that slide. All of the same parties and all of the same politicians are still there, and they continue to try to maneuver for power any way they can. The ISCI, Dawa, the Sadrists, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi National Accord and a handful of others continue to dominate Iraqi politics today just as they did at the height of the civil war.
But democratization is happening in Iraq, and it is transforming the Iraqi political landscape. It has brought new people and new parties to power, it has redistributed power among the old parties and it is creating new incentive structures everywhere. The January 2009 provincial elections killed off at least one of the old militia parties (Fadhila in southern Iraq) and heralded the emergence of at least one major new party (al-Hadba in northern Iraq). Moreover, Iraqi politicians everywhere are learning-like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim-that prospering in the new Iraq means responding to the will of the Iraqi people.
The old Iraqi politics of corruption and violence constantly risk subverting or co-opting the new politics of democratization. Left to their own devices, Iraq's militia-politicians would doubtless drive the country back to civil war.
The militia parties who ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 are very much alive and well. They remain the major political parties today, albeit mostly without their militias. They too scheme, plot and maneuver constantly. They still bribe and extort. They still assassinate and kidnap. They still steal and vandalize. They can't do it as openly or as much as they once did, and they often have to be much more subtle, but they find ways. Many pine for the "good old days" when their militias ruled the streets, the Iraqi security forces were their Wal-Mart, Iraq's oil fields were their ATMs and the Americans were off on wild-goose chases hunting "terrorists" around the wastelands of Anbar while they held sway over the Iraqi people. And they especially do whatever they can to prevent the emergence of new political parties-parties that are more secular, more democratic, more representative, less corrupt and less violent. If this modus operandi prevails and America is forced out, the glimmers of democracy will fade and Iraq will be lost again.
This is why the role of the United States remains critical. American troops are still needed as peacekeepers to prevent the old militia parties-including those that control the government and its security forces-from employing violence to advance their political agendas. And American diplomats are needed to rein in the forces of nationalism, prevent wrangling among the political bosses from causing the Iraqi political process either to halt or explode, and to keep the forces of corruption from derailing the process of democratization that could transform Iraqi politics altogether if it can survive long enough.
This is the stuff of the backroom deals. This has been the cost of the Iraqi historical legacy, the American blunders and an unsurprisingly difficult transition to democracy. The question now is whether the Iraqis can come out the other side of this process. The January elections will be critical in determining the contours of Iraqi politics for years, even decades, to come. There is a lot riding on this vote.
THERE IS growing evidence that the national elections are being set up to fail the Iraqi people.
The Iraqi government is pushing to hold the elections using "closed" rather than "open" lists. In a closed-list election, individuals vote for a party, and the party determines who will occupy the seats it wins. It is a system that rewards party loyalty and insulates the individual candidate from democratic pressure. In an open-list election, the voters select specific individuals, which makes the members of parliament individually beholden to their constituents.
In 2005, the Iraqi parties were able to convince the United States and the UN to agree to closed-list elections. The result was utterly disastrous elections that helped propel the country into civil war. In January 2009, the United States and UN insisted that Iraq employ open-list voting and this resulted in an extremely positive election that represented a giant step toward greater stability and pluralism.
It is a no-brainer that Iraq should be employing open lists in the January 2010 polls, and yet so far we have not pushed them to do so. All of the Iraqi parties want the closed lists because it will diminish the impact of democratization and allow the old Iraqi politics-and the old Iraqi political parties who benefited from it-to reemerge. For some, it is their last chance to hold on to power because if the Iraqi people get to decide, they will be swept into political oblivion, and so backroom machinations are their only chance. For others, they simply distrust the unpredictability of the democratic process, preferring the greater certainty of deals cut with other parties at the expense of the popular will. Prime Minister Maliki is confident of his own popularity and desirous of the discipline over his own party that closed lists will give him. Thus, all of Iraq's current power brokers win from closed lists. The only ones who lose are the Iraqi people and anyone who cares about the future stability and progress of Iraq.
And if, as seems likely, Dawa and the ISCI agree to reunite as one unified Shia electoral bloc, this will further limit the ability of the Iraqi people to decide who they want to run their country. In the run-up to the 2005 national elections, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani demanded that all of Iraq's Shia political parties agree to run as one grand coalition called the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). Especially with the change in Iraq's fortunes after 2007 and the end of the civil war, the disputes among the various Shia groups tore the UIA apart. However, in the spring, reportedly at Iranian or clerical instigation, they moved to resurrect the UIA.
Since there is little chance that the ISCI and Dawa will truly reconcile, the UIA will be a sham. By running jointly, however, it will mean that the process of sorting out which should be more politically powerful will not be decided openly by the Iraqi people voting for the party they prefer, but in the shadows of postelection maneuvering. That fight is unlikely to be resolved democratically. Moreover, because the stakes will be so high for both (the UIA will likely garner a plurality of votes, possibly even an outright majority), they will have tremendous incentives to fight to win using whatever methods necessary. It is not a course apt to help Iraq move in the direction of greater stability and security, let alone democracy.
In the spring, another well-sourced rumor began to spread in Baghdad, a rumor that the government planned to move the national referendum on the SA to January 2010, the same time as Iraq's national elections. Holding the referendum at the same time as the national election could be the most dangerous step yet. According to the SA, all American troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. But one of the contingencies placed on the finalized pact was a referendum in which the Iraqi people could vote on the terms. If they vote down the agreement, US troops will have to be out of Iraq within a year and American influence in Iraq will evaporate within a day. This vote promises to be a disaster. It will make the election the referendum itself. If Prime Minister Maliki does push to hold the referendum with the election, it can only mean that his intent is to create a situation in which he is bound to remove one of the main obstacles constraining his freedom of action. He almost certainly will not campaign publicly in favor of the SA, as he did not when it was first signed and ratified in 2008.
By holding the referendum and the election at the same time, Maliki would back his political opposition into a corner. The groups opposing Maliki and his Dawa Party ardently believe that the US military presence remains necessary, at least in part to keep the prime minister in check. However, by making the referendum the critical campaign issue, he would force them to publicly reject the SA as well. If they refuse to do so, they would probably be punished at the polls, handing Dawa victory. If they do, the referendum will fail, the SA will be abrogated and American troops will have to leave Iraq a year early. In this scenario, with the Iraqi people and their entire leadership having publicly rejected the American presence, US leverage would be gone before the final vote is tallied.
MY FRIEND Terry Barnich was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in Anbar on May 25, 2009-Memorial Day. For over two years, he had been the senior Coalition adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity and was one of the finest men you could have met. He was also superb at his job, and his Herculean efforts were a major part of getting that moribund ministry moving in the right direction.
One of Terry's greatest frustrations was the resignation of so many American officials to the idea that the signing of the security agreement between the United States and Iraq left America powerless. Terry could quickly list two dozen ways in which the United States remained one of the most influential-if not the most influential-player in Iraq and would likely remain so for years if only we would learn to use that influence correctly.
In part to remember Terry and all that he achieved, but more because it is so important to understand the role that the United States should be playing in Iraq, it is worth considering the many sources of American influence there. We provide training and logistics for Iraqi security forces; we are the honest broker for the Iraqi people; our presence ensures that a policeman coming to knock on their door is not a death squad; we still provide critical economic and political assistance-microloans, military equipment, technical expertise; American provincial reconstruction teams are still demanded by Iraqi governors and mayors; American businessmen are pursued avidly, even amorously. There should be no question that the United States retains great influence in Iraq and will continue to do so for some time to come, as long as the referendum on the security agreement doesn't fail.
To avert disaster come January, now is the time to wield that power.
There is a lot of important work to be done by the United States in Iraq this year, and less time to do it every day. We need to work with the United Nations to establish a new process of negotiations to defuse the standoff over Kirkuk and the wider issues related to Iraqi federalism so dear to the hearts of the Kurds. We need to ensure that Iraqi detainees (the vast majority of whom are Sunni) and the Sunni Sons of Iraq are treated properly by the government. We need to push Baghdad to provide for the safety of Iraq's minorities, particularly Christians, Turkomans and others too small to protect themselves. And we need to convince the government that it must work harder to make its political and bureaucratic processes more effective and not simply figure out how to work around them.
Of greater import, we can't let the old parties hijack the January elections. Jointly with the United Nations (which works well with the United States in Iraq and tends to share its assessments and interests), we need to pressure Iraq's political leadership to adopt open-list voting for the national elections. US aid can no longer be unconditional. Instead, we should dole out assistance only if the Iraqi government moves in the right direction. Open lists are a key part of that. To make good on this threat, the United States will have to think through what forms of aid could be suspended or canceled in the event the Iraqis refused.
The United States would also do well to more actively address the fears created by the prime minister's style of rule. President Obama must press Prime Minister Maliki to establish processes that would reassure other Iraqis about his intentions. This is particularly true in the critical area of security. Iraq currently has four joint-military operations centers-one for Baghdad, one for Basra, one for Nineveh (Mosul) and one for Diyala. And they terrify many Iraqi political elites because they bypass the normal military chain of command. Since there are still combat operations going on in Diyala and Nineveh, and Baghdad remains a work in progress, these centers are all arguably necessary. But Basra is quiet now and there seems unlikely to be a rapid resumption of large-scale violence there. To reassure Iraqis that these joint operations centers were temporary expedients to meet emergency situations (not permanent fixtures), the United States should encourage the prime minister to disestablish the Basra Operations Center. Likewise, the prime minister has established tribal-support councils to enable the central government to quickly provide resources directly to tribal leaders in southern Iraq. Many Iraqis believe that the prime minister uses these councils to provide government money to tribal leaders in return for electoral support. The United States should press Maliki to place the tribal-support councils under the provincial governors (many of whom are now Dawa anyway) as a way of demonstrating his commitment to abide by established, transparent, democratic processes.
But the United States needs to be there in order to make these dreams reality. We need to make clear that holding the referendum at the same time as the national elections will be regarded by the American people as an extremely unfriendly action, unless the prime minister himself actively campaigns in favor of the agreement. The Iraqis need to understand that rejecting the SA after American officials worked so hard to craft an agreement that would meet Iraqi needs would be seen by the American people as a snub, and a great ingratitude. It would also be taken as a sign that Iraqis were uninterested in continuing a relationship with the United States. In those circumstances, Washington would have to reassess its interest in the economic, diplomatic, political and security relationships with Baghdad enshrined in the longer-term Strategic Framework Agreement.
IN MAY 2009 I was back in DC and attended the annual US government conference on Iraq. Perhaps the most powerful panel of the whole two days was the one most of the participants expected the least from. The first panel of the conference consisted of three of the leading academic experts on civil war. These were not specialists on Iraq or even the Middle East, but scholars who had spent decades looking at major internal conflicts-what causes them, what propels them and how they end. Their central message was a chilling one: countries that experience major civil wars like the one Iraq went through in 2004-06 have a terrifyingly high rate of recidivism, and the one factor that provides any hope of preventing such a recurrence is the willingness of an external great power (typically the former colonial power) to make a long-term commitment to serve as a peacekeeper and mediator.
Iraq has made a great deal of progress since 2006 and the evidence indicates it could make a great deal more. But it is not going to make progress if left to its own devices. If the United States walks away from Iraq or if we are evicted too soon, the old patterns of Iraqi politics will subvert the new patterns of democratization and the country could easily become yet another data point on the academic graphs that demonstrate how pitifully few countries can escape the civil-war trap.
In 2002, the United States turned away from Afghanistan prematurely to focus on Iraq. The result was a tragedy for us and for the people of Afghanistan. In 2009, we are courting the risk of turning away from Iraq prematurely to focus back on Afghanistan. Should we do so, the result could be a disaster-for us, for the Iraqis, for the entire Middle East and potentially for the world.
Kenneth M. Pollack, a contributing editor to The National Interest, is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
by Kenneth M. Pollack
From the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest.
THE SCHEMING had gone on for hours. The Iraqis were from a half dozen different political groupings, some sectarian, some secular. It was Baghdad, it was February 2009 and it was less than a month after Iraq's provincial elections. For our hosts, the purpose of the dinner was to assure me and a colleague that their coalition had enough people on its side to oust Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in a vote of no confidence. It was one of many such meals we attended on that trip with Iraqi friends determined to prevent Maliki from spinning his recent electoral victories into absolute power.
That night our hosts were hoping to convince us of the strength of their position, but as the evening dragged on, assurances were forgotten. The scheming turned desperate. A little longer and any remaining vestige of confidence was gone altogether. The Iraqis began to reveal, to each other as much as to us, the problems they faced. This party boss would only join if he were named defense minister, but he brought too few votes to justify it. Another group would only join if still another party were excluded. But they would not give up on their dream of ousting Maliki, and their machinations turned to ways of getting around those obstacles.
Finally, the conversation reached its climax. The Iraqis managed to convince themselves they would have the votes they needed. They had convinced themselves that they had ways-tenuous ways, but ways-to overcome their problems. The somber mood of concern that had hung in the room seemed like it was about to lift. They had successfully built a Rube Goldberg machine that would oust the prime minister. Then, at that moment, one member of the group dispelled the whole fantastic edifice: "But Hakim [leader of the most important Shia party] won't agree to a vote of no confidence," he pointed out glumly. "He says it would look like we were trying to overturn the will of the people. And without ISCI [the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Hakim's party] we don't have the votes."
The dream was over. The desperate confidence evaporated. The circle of conversation splintered as some went to get more coffee or tea or sweets; others simply rose to give physical manifestation to their frustration. They fell to complaining about Sa'id Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's unwillingness to join a vote of no confidence and to warning us that if the United States did not do something about Prime Minister Maliki we would be facing either a new Saddam or a new civil war. And as the evening faded, their warnings wasted away into plaintive questions about the new Obama administration's willingness to oust Maliki since they could not do it themselves.
America is still all that stands between stability and anarchy in Iraq.
A FEW days earlier we had seen the other side of the coin: a lunch with several of the prime minister's most important confidantes. The tone was understandably different. There was great confidence borne of Maliki's Dawa Party victory in the recent provincial elections. They now had control of many of Iraq's most important provinces and, of far greater importance, momentum. Yet, there was also concern. They knew that their position was hardly unassailable, and they knew all about the dinner meetings going on all over Iraq at which other Iraqi leaders schemed to forge coalitions to prevent them from securing an equal or greater victory in Iraq's national elections scheduled for January 2010. They wanted to convince me and my colleagues that Maliki could not only sweep to power in those polls, but would do so in a perfectly legal, democratic fashion. All of our questions about the prime minister's not-quite-constitutionally stipulated moves-his reliance on regional operations centers outside the official Iraqi military chain of command; the slew of procedures, especially in the oil and electricity sectors, that likewise bypass formal lines of authority; the formation of tribal-support councils beyond the established bureaucratic structure that are used to funnel money to willing sheikhs-were all deflected with pitch-perfect talking points and a Cheshire cat grin.
Here as well, we had many friends, and they knew us well enough to know that we took no sides in Iraq's political battles. So as the afternoon wore on we heard more about their electoral strategy. It was simple and powerful. During 2009, the prime minister would throw himself into the task of solving Iraq's last remaining security problems and improving the provision of basic services like electricity, clean water, sanitation and medical care to the Iraqi people. He would demonstrate that he was the only man who could do so. Many of the prime minister's foes may try to block whatever he tries to do on these scores, and this would only play to his advantage. Maliki and his allies would make the election about the provision
of security and basic services, and the only question would be how big their victory would be.
We saw that the strength of this strategy also came from the weaknesses of the parties opposing Maliki, all of which are nearly hopeless when it comes to fashioning their own electoral message let alone successfully redefining the issues on which the election will turn.
But we also knew that Maliki had several more aces up his sleeve that were less savory than those our friends wanted to discuss.
IRAQI NATIONALISM is on the rise. And it is this force that the prime minister hopes to unleash if providing basic services is not enough to secure reelection. As always, nationalism is a double-edged sword. It has started to heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia. And it has been the most important factor in limiting Iranian influence. The more Iraqis feel confident in themselves, the more they push back on the mostly despised Persian interlopers. But the forces of nationalism are also threatening to Iraq's minorities and the cohesion of the state, no more so than when it comes to the Kurdish problem.
Since late 2008, Maliki has been deploying more of Iraq's nascent military power to the north and goading the army into regular provocations with the Kurdish militia-the pesh merga. The prime minister has a legitimate reason: the Iraqi government's security forces have a right and a need to control all of Iraq's territory. But no one with any sense believes that now is the time to resolve this issue, or that marching army battalions into Kurdistan without an agreement with the Kurds is the right way to do it. Predictably, the Kurds have just as regularly risen to the bait. In August 2008, an Iraqi army operation in the ethnically mixed city of Khanaqin in northeast Iraq nearly resulted in a firefight. Only the timely intervention of the American soldiers accompanying the Iraqi units prevented bloodshed. Since then, Iraqi army and pesh merga formations have continued to maneuver against one another constantly, and again it is only the presence of American soldiers that averts violence.
On the streets of most Iraqi cities outside of Iraqi Kurdistan, these near-clashes have cast the Kurds as villains seeking to dismember Iraq, something no Iraqi Arab will countenance. Stoking this rivalry allows Maliki to cast himself as the nationalist champion of a unified Iraq, a very popular position everywhere outside of Kurdistan. It's also not a secondary consideration that the two main Kurdish parties are key allies of the ISCI, Maliki's most dangerous political opponent. Thus, discrediting the Kurds also discredits his Shia political rivals.
Of course, the Kurds aren't blameless. Sometimes in response to Baghdad's moves and sometimes for reasons of their own, they too are taking increasingly provocative actions. The Kurds are threatening to promulgate a constitution for the Kurdish region which diverges from the national constitution on key issues like oil and security, which could trigger nationalist outbursts on both sides. Kurdish elements also continue to stir up trouble in places like Mosul and Diyala, and both sides treat the status of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk like a political football, rather than the kind of powder keg that could bring them all to ruin.
Against this backdrop, the United States is increasingly becoming an impediment for Maliki. American soldiers prevent the clashes he seems to desire between pesh merga and Iraqi forces. This not only complicates his election strategy, but is an affront to his own nationalist desire to see the writ of Iraq's central government run everywhere in the country-including Kurdistan.
FOR THE United States, the reemergence of Iraqi nationalism has created two challenges. It produces new incentives to violence that American forces need to prevent. But it has also led many Iraqi politicians, including the prime minister, to take public positions unsupportive of the American presence, even though most know that America's role as peacekeeper, mediator, adviser and capacity-builder remains critical to Iraq's stability and progress.
In 2008, Maliki attempted to replace virtually every commander above battalion level in the Iraqi army divisions in the northern regions of Iraq, and the United States stepped in to prevent him from doing so. In the spring of that year, Maliki once again defied American military advice and launched his security forces unilaterally against the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq's great southern city of Basra, which they had made their fiefdom. After some initial disasters, the US military came to the rescue, the Iraqis rallied, the people of Basra turned against the Sadrists and JAM was vanquished. Weeks later, a joint American-Iraqi operation cleared the JAM-infested neighborhoods of Sadr City in Baghdad, followed by Iraqi-led operations elsewhere in the south. Although these operations were all heavily supported by the US military, and likely would have failed badly without that support, Prime Minister Maliki seems to have concluded that his security forces are much stronger than either the Americans or his own generals think them to be. He may already believe that by January 2010 they will be ready to handle Iraq's security entirely on their own. But not everyone agrees.
In October 2008, I found myself at yet another tense dinner in Baghdad. It was at the home of one of Iraq's most senior political leaders and when I arrived with several other Americans, a remarkable meeting was still going on nearby. The prime minister had brought the cabinet and other critical leaders together to hear the minister of defense and the minister of the interior brief on the state of the Iraqi security forces. The question before them was whether the government should sign the Security Agreement (SA) then being negotiated with the United States-the agreement that provides for American military forces to remain in Iraq until the end of 2011.
The rumor among many well-informed Iraqis was that the prime minister wanted the two security ministers to report that the army and police were now ready to secure the country without American military assistance, which would allow him to decline the SA and send the Americans home. My host at that dinner and virtually all of the rest of Iraq's political leadership felt this would be a disastrous mistake. My host assumed that those in the meeting would find out that a group of senior Americans from Washington was sitting right next door, and that this might inject some caution into their decision making. And we Americans realized quickly that we were present just next-door to serve as witnesses and reminders to those in the meeting with the prime minister and the security chiefs that Big Brother may not have been watching, but Uncle Sam was.
The defense minister and interior minister both stood their ground in that meeting, arguing that the Iraqi security forces were still at least three years away from being ready to handle their country's safety on their own. By all accounts, Maliki was disappointed. But after extracting a few more concessions from the American negotiators, he signed the SA and tried to make as little of it as possible. Although it is clear that the political war is not yet won by either side, no one is willing to quit the field either.
The prime minister seems to have, at best, mixed emotions regarding the American presence. On the one hand, his popularity is based on the improvement in security across Iraq, which he recognizes was caused in large measure by the change in American military strategy and tactics (coupled temporarily with the increased numbers of American troops) beginning in 2007 under the leadership of Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno. If the American troops leave and the security situation worsens, his reelection prospects will dim accordingly. He recognizes that the average Iraqi wants to see Iraq stand on its own, but also wants to know that the Americans are still there in the background to prevent his country's problems from mushrooming into another civil war.
But the fact remains that the United States remains a powerful force in Iraq and not every action we take redounds to Maliki's personal or political benefit. The American military and political leadership is focused on what is in the long-term best interests of Iraq, not necessarily the immediate fortunes of the prime minister or his party. And this irritating American predilection seems to weigh evermore heavily in his thinking.
MANY IRAQIS (and many Americans) believe Maliki intends to make himself a new dictator. Although none of us can know what lies in his heart, I suspect that this is not his deliberate aim, but may end up being his unintentional goal. Maliki is said to be deeply suspicious by nature-itself not surprising for a longtime member of an underground terrorist movement relentlessly hunted by Saddam's minions. Moreover, he is impetuous and appears to react emotionally when he faces serious resistance. He lashes out at his political rivals and his actions often seem to reflect a frustration and a desire to rid himself of all opposition.
To many Iraqis, his moves look like those of an old-style Iraqi politician scheming to make himself all-powerful by exerting direct control over the levers of power and cutting out potential rivals elsewhere in the Iraqi leadership. But Maliki's supporters counter that the hapless Iraqi bureaucracy is incapable of functioning in a way that could produce the outcomes that the Iraqi people, the Americans, the UN and the rest of the world have repeatedly demanded. Only by circumventing bureaucratic choke points and energizing those responsible for acting can he get the Iraqi system moving. And when it comes to the prime minister's personnel policies, his supporters argue that many in the Iraqi military and bureaucracy serve other masters and so often ignore Maliki's directives, leaving him no choice but to replace them with others willing to follow orders.
Of course, the prime minister is not the only Iraqi politician perched between upholding democracy and subverting it. It was fascinating to hear all those Iraqi politicians back in February conspiring to bring about a vote of no confidence against the prime minister. A few years ago their goal would have been to kill him or simply force him out. It was absolutely stunning to hear them concede that their schemes were fruitless because Hakim, one of the cleverest and most powerful of Iraq's warlords, had refused to participate in a move that could be perceived as subverting the will of the Iraqi people-a conversation that even two years ago would have been unimaginable. But that doesn't mean democracy or even democratization has fully taken hold yet.
AND THEREIN lies the rub. There is still a lot of old-fashioned dirty politics in Iraq-the politics borne of Iraq's descent into civil war that in turn helped accelerate that slide. All of the same parties and all of the same politicians are still there, and they continue to try to maneuver for power any way they can. The ISCI, Dawa, the Sadrists, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi National Accord and a handful of others continue to dominate Iraqi politics today just as they did at the height of the civil war.
But democratization is happening in Iraq, and it is transforming the Iraqi political landscape. It has brought new people and new parties to power, it has redistributed power among the old parties and it is creating new incentive structures everywhere. The January 2009 provincial elections killed off at least one of the old militia parties (Fadhila in southern Iraq) and heralded the emergence of at least one major new party (al-Hadba in northern Iraq). Moreover, Iraqi politicians everywhere are learning-like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim-that prospering in the new Iraq means responding to the will of the Iraqi people.
The old Iraqi politics of corruption and violence constantly risk subverting or co-opting the new politics of democratization. Left to their own devices, Iraq's militia-politicians would doubtless drive the country back to civil war.
The militia parties who ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 are very much alive and well. They remain the major political parties today, albeit mostly without their militias. They too scheme, plot and maneuver constantly. They still bribe and extort. They still assassinate and kidnap. They still steal and vandalize. They can't do it as openly or as much as they once did, and they often have to be much more subtle, but they find ways. Many pine for the "good old days" when their militias ruled the streets, the Iraqi security forces were their Wal-Mart, Iraq's oil fields were their ATMs and the Americans were off on wild-goose chases hunting "terrorists" around the wastelands of Anbar while they held sway over the Iraqi people. And they especially do whatever they can to prevent the emergence of new political parties-parties that are more secular, more democratic, more representative, less corrupt and less violent. If this modus operandi prevails and America is forced out, the glimmers of democracy will fade and Iraq will be lost again.
This is why the role of the United States remains critical. American troops are still needed as peacekeepers to prevent the old militia parties-including those that control the government and its security forces-from employing violence to advance their political agendas. And American diplomats are needed to rein in the forces of nationalism, prevent wrangling among the political bosses from causing the Iraqi political process either to halt or explode, and to keep the forces of corruption from derailing the process of democratization that could transform Iraqi politics altogether if it can survive long enough.
This is the stuff of the backroom deals. This has been the cost of the Iraqi historical legacy, the American blunders and an unsurprisingly difficult transition to democracy. The question now is whether the Iraqis can come out the other side of this process. The January elections will be critical in determining the contours of Iraqi politics for years, even decades, to come. There is a lot riding on this vote.
THERE IS growing evidence that the national elections are being set up to fail the Iraqi people.
The Iraqi government is pushing to hold the elections using "closed" rather than "open" lists. In a closed-list election, individuals vote for a party, and the party determines who will occupy the seats it wins. It is a system that rewards party loyalty and insulates the individual candidate from democratic pressure. In an open-list election, the voters select specific individuals, which makes the members of parliament individually beholden to their constituents.
In 2005, the Iraqi parties were able to convince the United States and the UN to agree to closed-list elections. The result was utterly disastrous elections that helped propel the country into civil war. In January 2009, the United States and UN insisted that Iraq employ open-list voting and this resulted in an extremely positive election that represented a giant step toward greater stability and pluralism.
It is a no-brainer that Iraq should be employing open lists in the January 2010 polls, and yet so far we have not pushed them to do so. All of the Iraqi parties want the closed lists because it will diminish the impact of democratization and allow the old Iraqi politics-and the old Iraqi political parties who benefited from it-to reemerge. For some, it is their last chance to hold on to power because if the Iraqi people get to decide, they will be swept into political oblivion, and so backroom machinations are their only chance. For others, they simply distrust the unpredictability of the democratic process, preferring the greater certainty of deals cut with other parties at the expense of the popular will. Prime Minister Maliki is confident of his own popularity and desirous of the discipline over his own party that closed lists will give him. Thus, all of Iraq's current power brokers win from closed lists. The only ones who lose are the Iraqi people and anyone who cares about the future stability and progress of Iraq.
And if, as seems likely, Dawa and the ISCI agree to reunite as one unified Shia electoral bloc, this will further limit the ability of the Iraqi people to decide who they want to run their country. In the run-up to the 2005 national elections, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani demanded that all of Iraq's Shia political parties agree to run as one grand coalition called the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). Especially with the change in Iraq's fortunes after 2007 and the end of the civil war, the disputes among the various Shia groups tore the UIA apart. However, in the spring, reportedly at Iranian or clerical instigation, they moved to resurrect the UIA.
Since there is little chance that the ISCI and Dawa will truly reconcile, the UIA will be a sham. By running jointly, however, it will mean that the process of sorting out which should be more politically powerful will not be decided openly by the Iraqi people voting for the party they prefer, but in the shadows of postelection maneuvering. That fight is unlikely to be resolved democratically. Moreover, because the stakes will be so high for both (the UIA will likely garner a plurality of votes, possibly even an outright majority), they will have tremendous incentives to fight to win using whatever methods necessary. It is not a course apt to help Iraq move in the direction of greater stability and security, let alone democracy.
In the spring, another well-sourced rumor began to spread in Baghdad, a rumor that the government planned to move the national referendum on the SA to January 2010, the same time as Iraq's national elections. Holding the referendum at the same time as the national election could be the most dangerous step yet. According to the SA, all American troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. But one of the contingencies placed on the finalized pact was a referendum in which the Iraqi people could vote on the terms. If they vote down the agreement, US troops will have to be out of Iraq within a year and American influence in Iraq will evaporate within a day. This vote promises to be a disaster. It will make the election the referendum itself. If Prime Minister Maliki does push to hold the referendum with the election, it can only mean that his intent is to create a situation in which he is bound to remove one of the main obstacles constraining his freedom of action. He almost certainly will not campaign publicly in favor of the SA, as he did not when it was first signed and ratified in 2008.
By holding the referendum and the election at the same time, Maliki would back his political opposition into a corner. The groups opposing Maliki and his Dawa Party ardently believe that the US military presence remains necessary, at least in part to keep the prime minister in check. However, by making the referendum the critical campaign issue, he would force them to publicly reject the SA as well. If they refuse to do so, they would probably be punished at the polls, handing Dawa victory. If they do, the referendum will fail, the SA will be abrogated and American troops will have to leave Iraq a year early. In this scenario, with the Iraqi people and their entire leadership having publicly rejected the American presence, US leverage would be gone before the final vote is tallied.
MY FRIEND Terry Barnich was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in Anbar on May 25, 2009-Memorial Day. For over two years, he had been the senior Coalition adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity and was one of the finest men you could have met. He was also superb at his job, and his Herculean efforts were a major part of getting that moribund ministry moving in the right direction.
One of Terry's greatest frustrations was the resignation of so many American officials to the idea that the signing of the security agreement between the United States and Iraq left America powerless. Terry could quickly list two dozen ways in which the United States remained one of the most influential-if not the most influential-player in Iraq and would likely remain so for years if only we would learn to use that influence correctly.
In part to remember Terry and all that he achieved, but more because it is so important to understand the role that the United States should be playing in Iraq, it is worth considering the many sources of American influence there. We provide training and logistics for Iraqi security forces; we are the honest broker for the Iraqi people; our presence ensures that a policeman coming to knock on their door is not a death squad; we still provide critical economic and political assistance-microloans, military equipment, technical expertise; American provincial reconstruction teams are still demanded by Iraqi governors and mayors; American businessmen are pursued avidly, even amorously. There should be no question that the United States retains great influence in Iraq and will continue to do so for some time to come, as long as the referendum on the security agreement doesn't fail.
To avert disaster come January, now is the time to wield that power.
There is a lot of important work to be done by the United States in Iraq this year, and less time to do it every day. We need to work with the United Nations to establish a new process of negotiations to defuse the standoff over Kirkuk and the wider issues related to Iraqi federalism so dear to the hearts of the Kurds. We need to ensure that Iraqi detainees (the vast majority of whom are Sunni) and the Sunni Sons of Iraq are treated properly by the government. We need to push Baghdad to provide for the safety of Iraq's minorities, particularly Christians, Turkomans and others too small to protect themselves. And we need to convince the government that it must work harder to make its political and bureaucratic processes more effective and not simply figure out how to work around them.
Of greater import, we can't let the old parties hijack the January elections. Jointly with the United Nations (which works well with the United States in Iraq and tends to share its assessments and interests), we need to pressure Iraq's political leadership to adopt open-list voting for the national elections. US aid can no longer be unconditional. Instead, we should dole out assistance only if the Iraqi government moves in the right direction. Open lists are a key part of that. To make good on this threat, the United States will have to think through what forms of aid could be suspended or canceled in the event the Iraqis refused.
The United States would also do well to more actively address the fears created by the prime minister's style of rule. President Obama must press Prime Minister Maliki to establish processes that would reassure other Iraqis about his intentions. This is particularly true in the critical area of security. Iraq currently has four joint-military operations centers-one for Baghdad, one for Basra, one for Nineveh (Mosul) and one for Diyala. And they terrify many Iraqi political elites because they bypass the normal military chain of command. Since there are still combat operations going on in Diyala and Nineveh, and Baghdad remains a work in progress, these centers are all arguably necessary. But Basra is quiet now and there seems unlikely to be a rapid resumption of large-scale violence there. To reassure Iraqis that these joint operations centers were temporary expedients to meet emergency situations (not permanent fixtures), the United States should encourage the prime minister to disestablish the Basra Operations Center. Likewise, the prime minister has established tribal-support councils to enable the central government to quickly provide resources directly to tribal leaders in southern Iraq. Many Iraqis believe that the prime minister uses these councils to provide government money to tribal leaders in return for electoral support. The United States should press Maliki to place the tribal-support councils under the provincial governors (many of whom are now Dawa anyway) as a way of demonstrating his commitment to abide by established, transparent, democratic processes.
But the United States needs to be there in order to make these dreams reality. We need to make clear that holding the referendum at the same time as the national elections will be regarded by the American people as an extremely unfriendly action, unless the prime minister himself actively campaigns in favor of the agreement. The Iraqis need to understand that rejecting the SA after American officials worked so hard to craft an agreement that would meet Iraqi needs would be seen by the American people as a snub, and a great ingratitude. It would also be taken as a sign that Iraqis were uninterested in continuing a relationship with the United States. In those circumstances, Washington would have to reassess its interest in the economic, diplomatic, political and security relationships with Baghdad enshrined in the longer-term Strategic Framework Agreement.
IN MAY 2009 I was back in DC and attended the annual US government conference on Iraq. Perhaps the most powerful panel of the whole two days was the one most of the participants expected the least from. The first panel of the conference consisted of three of the leading academic experts on civil war. These were not specialists on Iraq or even the Middle East, but scholars who had spent decades looking at major internal conflicts-what causes them, what propels them and how they end. Their central message was a chilling one: countries that experience major civil wars like the one Iraq went through in 2004-06 have a terrifyingly high rate of recidivism, and the one factor that provides any hope of preventing such a recurrence is the willingness of an external great power (typically the former colonial power) to make a long-term commitment to serve as a peacekeeper and mediator.
Iraq has made a great deal of progress since 2006 and the evidence indicates it could make a great deal more. But it is not going to make progress if left to its own devices. If the United States walks away from Iraq or if we are evicted too soon, the old patterns of Iraqi politics will subvert the new patterns of democratization and the country could easily become yet another data point on the academic graphs that demonstrate how pitifully few countries can escape the civil-war trap.
In 2002, the United States turned away from Afghanistan prematurely to focus on Iraq. The result was a tragedy for us and for the people of Afghanistan. In 2009, we are courting the risk of turning away from Iraq prematurely to focus back on Afghanistan. Should we do so, the result could be a disaster-for us, for the Iraqis, for the entire Middle East and potentially for the world.
Kenneth M. Pollack, a contributing editor to The National Interest, is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Correcting George Will on Iraq [Frederick W. Kagan]
National Review Online
In his latest column, about Iraq, George Will writes:
"More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of US forces from the cities."
That's an annual death rate, on the Iraqi population of 28 million, of about 15 per 100,000, assuming it's accurate - such figures vary widely and are not generally verifiable. Nevertheless, using Mr. Will's number, we should note that according to the FBI, the US national average for murder and manslaughter in 2007 was 5.6 per 100,000. On the other hand, the Louisiana average for 2007 was 14.2 per 100,000. Steven Lee Myers put the problem in excellent perspective in an August 28 blog post for the New York Times:
August is already the bloodiest month for Iraqis since April 2008 . . . And yet the number of security incidents - defined as all manner of attacks, from sniper fire to roadside bombings - is lower than it has been for much of the year, according to statistics released by the American military this week. . . . One conclusion: fewer attacks are having deadlier results. Does it mean violence is worse or better than before?
The terrorists conducting these attacks are in large part al-Qaeda members attempting to restart the sectarian conflict and prove their continued relevance to the international militant Islamist cause. They have thus far failed to reignite sectarian conflict - we have seen no reprisal attacks against Sunnis by either the Iraqi government, Shi'a militias, or Iraqi citizens. The attacks have focused on the security forces, including the Sunni Sons of Iraq, and have killed both Sunni and Shi'a. The security forces have stood their ground and fought back, including the Sons of Iraq. In other words, Iraq continues to wage a determined struggle against al-Qaeda, spending its own blood to defeat our common enemies. Again we should note that more Iraqi soldiers and police have been killed fighting al-Qaeda than those of any other country in the world, including the US.
Mr. Will continues:
"Already [the US] presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in."
The current situation in Iraq - as I saw as recently as last month (after the transition of security responsibilities in the city) - is not chaos. There are isolated terrorist attacks, but nothing like the violence I saw on my previous trips in April, May, and July of 2007 or even February of 2008. Most remarkable is something Mr. Will entirely ignores - the Shi'a militias have dramatically reduced their violent activities both against US forces and against Iraqi Security Forces and government officials, and their activities remain low. One of the most important remaining Shi'a extremist groups, Asaib Ahl al Haq (a military splinter of the Sadrist Trend organized by Qais Khazali, who remains in US custody - go to the Institute for the Study of War website for details on this organization), is negotiating its reconciliation with the Iraqi government. We'll see if that happens, but it is a remarkable development considering the previous role of that organization in using Iranian aid to kill Americans and Iraqis.
The US presence is far from irrelevant. American combat forces are out of the cities, but they are continuing to operate aggressively in the areas around the cities that have traditionally served as safe havens for insurgents and terrorists, as Gen. Ray Odierno explained in a recent interview. They are playing a critical role in supporting the Iraqi Security Forces in these areas as the Iraqis take responsibility for protecting their own cities. In addition, American forces of all varieties continue to conduct operations against al-Qaeda fighters and remnant Sunni insurgents in ways that the Iraqi Security Forces cannot now replicate. US forces also provide essential logistical support, intelligence support, and control and defense of Iraqi airspace (without which Iraq would be unable to defend its territorial sovereignty) and, of course, continue to train, mentor, and partner with Iraqi Security Forces.
The Iraqi government, contrary to Mr. Will's assertions, has done a good job of containing the violence. It is no accident that violence rose as the US withdrew from cities. The Iraqi Security Forces have to learn how to plan and conduct complex counter-insurgency operations to defend large urban areas on their own - which one would have thought was a good thing. In doing so, they inevitably make mistakes, as they did when the insurgents managed to set off a large bomb near the Foreign Ministry. They are now engaging in a process of trying to learn from that mistake and are rethinking their security posture. The enemy, moreover, knew the precise date of the handover and planned an offensive to test the ISF. That, of course, is one of the reasons why I and many others have always opposed publicly announced timelines. The ISF has done a better job of disrupting and soaking up this offensive than could reasonably have been expected, all the while conducting a relief-in-place of US forces on a massive scale. Yes, Mr. Will, it is still a war, which means that the enemy is still trying to kill people and occasionally succeeding. Both American and Iraqi forces are energetically resisting the enemy's attempts to do so, and they have done pretty well so far.
"Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank . . ."
If Mr. Will peruses American newspapers, he will find more than a few instances of American police and even American military personnel committing crimes in the United States. One sensationalized (and unverified) anecdote does not make an argument.
"Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's links with Iran are so close that he 'uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel.'"
I don't know what kind of plane with what kind of crew Maliki uses. I do know that in March 2008 he launched - on his own initiative - Operation Knights' Charge against the most thoroughly Iranian-backed and -controlled militias in Basra. When Iran's proxies expanded the conflict to Baghdad by rocketing the Green Zone, Maliki committed significant numbers of Iraqi forces alongside American forces to clearing Sadr City - one of the most important bases of Iranian influence in the country. Maliki has consistently supported American operations against Shi'a militias supported by Iran.
US forces still hold a large number of Shi'a militia leaders and terrorists at our detention facilities at Iraq's request, including Qais Khazali and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Ali Mussa Daqduq. Maliki has had the legal right to insist on the release of these detainees-something the Iranians would dearly like - since January 1 and has not done so.
In addition, Iran conducted a massive information operation in 2008 aimed at preventing Iraq from signing the strategic agreement that provides legal sanction for the continued American presence in Iraq after expiration of the UN Security Council resolution. Maliki - and most of the rest of Iraq's Shi'a leaders - resisted that pressure and signed the agreement, to Iran's evident displeasure.
Iranian leaders have also worked tirelessly to ensure the formation of a new Shi'a political coalition including all major parties. They attempted to cajole Maliki into joining it, but he has refused and the coalition was announced without him.
"The militia parties that ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 remain, [Ken] Pollack says, the major political parties, although mostly without militias."
That is precisely the objective of reconciliation, and it is how most insurgencies and civil wars end - organized groups that had been fighting put down their weapons and join the political process. A little more than a year after the hard fighting stopped, significant problems remain in Iraq's political fabric, including the dangers and challenges that Ken Pollack rightly identifies. Mr. Will has here taken a reasoned and thoughtful exposition of problems and dangers ahead as the basis for an argument that nothing has changed, which is absolutely false.
The quotations from Ken Pollack's article are extremely selective, to the point of seriously misrepresenting his assessment and his thesis. Here are some others for context:
As always, nationalism is a double-edged sword. It has started to heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia. And it has been the most important factor in limiting Iranian influence. The more Iraqis feel confident in themselves, the more they push back on the mostly despised Persian interlopers.
Before the sentence Mr. Will cites, Ken Pollack wrote:
But democratization is happening in Iraq, and it is transforming the Iraqi political landscape. It has brought new people and new parties to power, it has redistributed power among the old parties and it is creating new incentive structures everywhere. The January 2009 provincial elections killed off at least one of the old militia parties (Fadhila in southern Iraq) and heralded the emergence of at least one major new party (al-Hadba in northern Iraq). Moreover, Iraqi politicians everywhere are learning - like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim - that prospering in the new Iraq means responding to the will of the Iraqi people.
Pollack later explained (in advance) why Mr. Will's argument is so wrong-headed:
It is worth considering the many sources of American influence there. We provide training and logistics for Iraqi security forces; we are the honest broker for the Iraqi people; our presence ensures that a policeman coming to knock on their door is not a death squad; we still provide critical economic and political assistance - microloans, military equipment, technical expertise; American provincial reconstruction teams are still demanded by Iraqi governors and mayors; American businessmen are pursued avidly, even amorously. There should be no question that the United States retains great influence in Iraq and will continue to do so for some time to come, as long as the referendum on the security agreement doesn't fail.
Pollack's overall assessment:
Iraq has made a great deal of progress since 2006 and the evidence indicates it could make a great deal more. But it is not going to make progress if left to its own devices. If the United States walks away from Iraq or if we are evicted too soon, the old patterns of Iraqi politics will subvert the new patterns of democratization and the country could easily become yet another data point on the academic graphs that demonstrate how pitifully few countries can escape the civil-war trap.
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September 4, 2009
One Way Or Another, Leaving Iraq
By George Will
Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Since US troops withdrew from Iraq's cities, two months have passed, and so has the illusion that Iraq is smoothly transitioning to a normality free of sectarian violence. Recently, Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of US troops there, "blanched" when asked if the war is "functionally over." According to The Washington Post's Greg Jaffe, Odierno said:
"There are still civilians being killed in Iraq. We still have people that are attempting to attack the new Iraqi order and the move towards democracy and a more open economy. So we still have some work to do."
George Will Iraq
No, we don't, even if, as Jaffe reports, the presence of 130,000 US troops "serves as a check on Iraqi military and political leaders' baser and more sectarian instincts." After almost six and a half years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the US military -- overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation -- to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is worse use of the US military than "nation-building," it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples' politicians.
More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of US forces from the cities. All US combat units are to be withdrawn from the country within a year. Up to 50,000 can remain as "advisers" to an Iraqi government that is ostentatious about its belief that the presence of US forces is superfluous and obnoxious.
The advisers are to leave by the end of 2011, by which time the final two years of the US military presence will have achieved ... what? Already that presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in: Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank in central Baghdad.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius correctly argues that "without the backstop of US support," Iraq is "desperately vulnerable" to Iranian pressure. He also reports, however, that an Iraqi intelligence official says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's links with Iran are so close that he "uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel." Whenever US forces leave, Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor.
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, writing in The National Interest, notes that although rising Iraqi nationalism might help "heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia," it also might exacerbate relations with the Kurdish semi-state in northern Iraq, where control of much oil and the city of Kirkuk is being contested.
The militia parties that ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 remain, Pollack says, the major political parties, although mostly without militias. They "still bribe and extort," "assassinate and kidnap," "steal and vandalize" and try to prevent the emergence of new political parties that are "more secular, more democratic, more representative, less corrupt and less violent." If they succeed and "America is forced out," Pollack says, "the glimmers of democracy will fade and Iraq will be lost again." But if democracy is still just a glimmer that will be extinguished by the withdrawal of a protective US presence, its extinction can perhaps be delayed for two more years but cannot be prevented.
The 2008 US-Iraq security agreement must be submitted to a referendum by the Iraqi people. If they reject it, US forces must leave the country in a year. Pollack believes that if Maliki pushes to hold the referendum in January, coinciding with the national elections, the agreement will become the campaign issue and will indicate that Maliki wants US forces removed in order to enlarge his freedom of action. The United States should treat this as a Dirty Harry Moment: Make our day.
Many scholars believe, Pollack says, that nations which suffer civil wars as large as Iraq's was between 2004 and 2006 have "a terrifyingly high rate of recidivism." Two more years of U.S. military presence cannot control whether that is in Iraq's future. Some people believe the war in Iraq was not only "won" but vindicated by the success of the 2007 U.S. troop surge. Yet as Iraqi violence is resurgent, the logic of triumphalism leads here:
If, in spite of contrary evidence, the US surge permanently dampened sectarian violence, all US forces can come home sooner than the end of 2011. If, however, the surge did not so succeed, US forces must come home sooner.
In his latest column, about Iraq, George Will writes:
"More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of US forces from the cities."
That's an annual death rate, on the Iraqi population of 28 million, of about 15 per 100,000, assuming it's accurate - such figures vary widely and are not generally verifiable. Nevertheless, using Mr. Will's number, we should note that according to the FBI, the US national average for murder and manslaughter in 2007 was 5.6 per 100,000. On the other hand, the Louisiana average for 2007 was 14.2 per 100,000. Steven Lee Myers put the problem in excellent perspective in an August 28 blog post for the New York Times:
August is already the bloodiest month for Iraqis since April 2008 . . . And yet the number of security incidents - defined as all manner of attacks, from sniper fire to roadside bombings - is lower than it has been for much of the year, according to statistics released by the American military this week. . . . One conclusion: fewer attacks are having deadlier results. Does it mean violence is worse or better than before?
The terrorists conducting these attacks are in large part al-Qaeda members attempting to restart the sectarian conflict and prove their continued relevance to the international militant Islamist cause. They have thus far failed to reignite sectarian conflict - we have seen no reprisal attacks against Sunnis by either the Iraqi government, Shi'a militias, or Iraqi citizens. The attacks have focused on the security forces, including the Sunni Sons of Iraq, and have killed both Sunni and Shi'a. The security forces have stood their ground and fought back, including the Sons of Iraq. In other words, Iraq continues to wage a determined struggle against al-Qaeda, spending its own blood to defeat our common enemies. Again we should note that more Iraqi soldiers and police have been killed fighting al-Qaeda than those of any other country in the world, including the US.
Mr. Will continues:
"Already [the US] presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in."
The current situation in Iraq - as I saw as recently as last month (after the transition of security responsibilities in the city) - is not chaos. There are isolated terrorist attacks, but nothing like the violence I saw on my previous trips in April, May, and July of 2007 or even February of 2008. Most remarkable is something Mr. Will entirely ignores - the Shi'a militias have dramatically reduced their violent activities both against US forces and against Iraqi Security Forces and government officials, and their activities remain low. One of the most important remaining Shi'a extremist groups, Asaib Ahl al Haq (a military splinter of the Sadrist Trend organized by Qais Khazali, who remains in US custody - go to the Institute for the Study of War website for details on this organization), is negotiating its reconciliation with the Iraqi government. We'll see if that happens, but it is a remarkable development considering the previous role of that organization in using Iranian aid to kill Americans and Iraqis.
The US presence is far from irrelevant. American combat forces are out of the cities, but they are continuing to operate aggressively in the areas around the cities that have traditionally served as safe havens for insurgents and terrorists, as Gen. Ray Odierno explained in a recent interview. They are playing a critical role in supporting the Iraqi Security Forces in these areas as the Iraqis take responsibility for protecting their own cities. In addition, American forces of all varieties continue to conduct operations against al-Qaeda fighters and remnant Sunni insurgents in ways that the Iraqi Security Forces cannot now replicate. US forces also provide essential logistical support, intelligence support, and control and defense of Iraqi airspace (without which Iraq would be unable to defend its territorial sovereignty) and, of course, continue to train, mentor, and partner with Iraqi Security Forces.
The Iraqi government, contrary to Mr. Will's assertions, has done a good job of containing the violence. It is no accident that violence rose as the US withdrew from cities. The Iraqi Security Forces have to learn how to plan and conduct complex counter-insurgency operations to defend large urban areas on their own - which one would have thought was a good thing. In doing so, they inevitably make mistakes, as they did when the insurgents managed to set off a large bomb near the Foreign Ministry. They are now engaging in a process of trying to learn from that mistake and are rethinking their security posture. The enemy, moreover, knew the precise date of the handover and planned an offensive to test the ISF. That, of course, is one of the reasons why I and many others have always opposed publicly announced timelines. The ISF has done a better job of disrupting and soaking up this offensive than could reasonably have been expected, all the while conducting a relief-in-place of US forces on a massive scale. Yes, Mr. Will, it is still a war, which means that the enemy is still trying to kill people and occasionally succeeding. Both American and Iraqi forces are energetically resisting the enemy's attempts to do so, and they have done pretty well so far.
"Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank . . ."
If Mr. Will peruses American newspapers, he will find more than a few instances of American police and even American military personnel committing crimes in the United States. One sensationalized (and unverified) anecdote does not make an argument.
"Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's links with Iran are so close that he 'uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel.'"
I don't know what kind of plane with what kind of crew Maliki uses. I do know that in March 2008 he launched - on his own initiative - Operation Knights' Charge against the most thoroughly Iranian-backed and -controlled militias in Basra. When Iran's proxies expanded the conflict to Baghdad by rocketing the Green Zone, Maliki committed significant numbers of Iraqi forces alongside American forces to clearing Sadr City - one of the most important bases of Iranian influence in the country. Maliki has consistently supported American operations against Shi'a militias supported by Iran.
US forces still hold a large number of Shi'a militia leaders and terrorists at our detention facilities at Iraq's request, including Qais Khazali and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Ali Mussa Daqduq. Maliki has had the legal right to insist on the release of these detainees-something the Iranians would dearly like - since January 1 and has not done so.
In addition, Iran conducted a massive information operation in 2008 aimed at preventing Iraq from signing the strategic agreement that provides legal sanction for the continued American presence in Iraq after expiration of the UN Security Council resolution. Maliki - and most of the rest of Iraq's Shi'a leaders - resisted that pressure and signed the agreement, to Iran's evident displeasure.
Iranian leaders have also worked tirelessly to ensure the formation of a new Shi'a political coalition including all major parties. They attempted to cajole Maliki into joining it, but he has refused and the coalition was announced without him.
"The militia parties that ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 remain, [Ken] Pollack says, the major political parties, although mostly without militias."
That is precisely the objective of reconciliation, and it is how most insurgencies and civil wars end - organized groups that had been fighting put down their weapons and join the political process. A little more than a year after the hard fighting stopped, significant problems remain in Iraq's political fabric, including the dangers and challenges that Ken Pollack rightly identifies. Mr. Will has here taken a reasoned and thoughtful exposition of problems and dangers ahead as the basis for an argument that nothing has changed, which is absolutely false.
The quotations from Ken Pollack's article are extremely selective, to the point of seriously misrepresenting his assessment and his thesis. Here are some others for context:
As always, nationalism is a double-edged sword. It has started to heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia. And it has been the most important factor in limiting Iranian influence. The more Iraqis feel confident in themselves, the more they push back on the mostly despised Persian interlopers.
Before the sentence Mr. Will cites, Ken Pollack wrote:
But democratization is happening in Iraq, and it is transforming the Iraqi political landscape. It has brought new people and new parties to power, it has redistributed power among the old parties and it is creating new incentive structures everywhere. The January 2009 provincial elections killed off at least one of the old militia parties (Fadhila in southern Iraq) and heralded the emergence of at least one major new party (al-Hadba in northern Iraq). Moreover, Iraqi politicians everywhere are learning - like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim - that prospering in the new Iraq means responding to the will of the Iraqi people.
Pollack later explained (in advance) why Mr. Will's argument is so wrong-headed:
It is worth considering the many sources of American influence there. We provide training and logistics for Iraqi security forces; we are the honest broker for the Iraqi people; our presence ensures that a policeman coming to knock on their door is not a death squad; we still provide critical economic and political assistance - microloans, military equipment, technical expertise; American provincial reconstruction teams are still demanded by Iraqi governors and mayors; American businessmen are pursued avidly, even amorously. There should be no question that the United States retains great influence in Iraq and will continue to do so for some time to come, as long as the referendum on the security agreement doesn't fail.
Pollack's overall assessment:
Iraq has made a great deal of progress since 2006 and the evidence indicates it could make a great deal more. But it is not going to make progress if left to its own devices. If the United States walks away from Iraq or if we are evicted too soon, the old patterns of Iraqi politics will subvert the new patterns of democratization and the country could easily become yet another data point on the academic graphs that demonstrate how pitifully few countries can escape the civil-war trap.
**********************************
September 4, 2009
One Way Or Another, Leaving Iraq
By George Will
Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Since US troops withdrew from Iraq's cities, two months have passed, and so has the illusion that Iraq is smoothly transitioning to a normality free of sectarian violence. Recently, Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of US troops there, "blanched" when asked if the war is "functionally over." According to The Washington Post's Greg Jaffe, Odierno said:
"There are still civilians being killed in Iraq. We still have people that are attempting to attack the new Iraqi order and the move towards democracy and a more open economy. So we still have some work to do."
George Will Iraq
No, we don't, even if, as Jaffe reports, the presence of 130,000 US troops "serves as a check on Iraqi military and political leaders' baser and more sectarian instincts." After almost six and a half years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the US military -- overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation -- to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is worse use of the US military than "nation-building," it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples' politicians.
More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of US forces from the cities. All US combat units are to be withdrawn from the country within a year. Up to 50,000 can remain as "advisers" to an Iraqi government that is ostentatious about its belief that the presence of US forces is superfluous and obnoxious.
The advisers are to leave by the end of 2011, by which time the final two years of the US military presence will have achieved ... what? Already that presence is irrelevant to the rising chaos, which the Iraqi government can neither contain nor refrain from participating in: Security forces seem to have been involved in the recent robbery of a state-run bank in central Baghdad.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius correctly argues that "without the backstop of US support," Iraq is "desperately vulnerable" to Iranian pressure. He also reports, however, that an Iraqi intelligence official says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's links with Iran are so close that he "uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel." Whenever US forces leave, Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor.
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, writing in The National Interest, notes that although rising Iraqi nationalism might help "heal the rifts between Sunni and Shia," it also might exacerbate relations with the Kurdish semi-state in northern Iraq, where control of much oil and the city of Kirkuk is being contested.
The militia parties that ruled Iraq from 2003 to 2007 remain, Pollack says, the major political parties, although mostly without militias. They "still bribe and extort," "assassinate and kidnap," "steal and vandalize" and try to prevent the emergence of new political parties that are "more secular, more democratic, more representative, less corrupt and less violent." If they succeed and "America is forced out," Pollack says, "the glimmers of democracy will fade and Iraq will be lost again." But if democracy is still just a glimmer that will be extinguished by the withdrawal of a protective US presence, its extinction can perhaps be delayed for two more years but cannot be prevented.
The 2008 US-Iraq security agreement must be submitted to a referendum by the Iraqi people. If they reject it, US forces must leave the country in a year. Pollack believes that if Maliki pushes to hold the referendum in January, coinciding with the national elections, the agreement will become the campaign issue and will indicate that Maliki wants US forces removed in order to enlarge his freedom of action. The United States should treat this as a Dirty Harry Moment: Make our day.
Many scholars believe, Pollack says, that nations which suffer civil wars as large as Iraq's was between 2004 and 2006 have "a terrifyingly high rate of recidivism." Two more years of U.S. military presence cannot control whether that is in Iraq's future. Some people believe the war in Iraq was not only "won" but vindicated by the success of the 2007 U.S. troop surge. Yet as Iraqi violence is resurgent, the logic of triumphalism leads here:
If, in spite of contrary evidence, the US surge permanently dampened sectarian violence, all US forces can come home sooner than the end of 2011. If, however, the surge did not so succeed, US forces must come home sooner.
Where is the Muslim anger over Darfur?
Are they the 'wrong' kind of Muslims if they self-identify as black
African instead of Arab?
Ed Husain
The Independent (UK)
As war raged in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, people around the world
called for international intervention to stop the shelling of civilians.
In January this year, millions shared similar feelings of horror and
anger witnessing the bloodshed in Gaza. Both events were especially
painful to Muslims watching other defenceless Muslims being killed. But
why have the deaths of vastly more unarmed Muslims in Darfur caused so
little concern among co-religionists?
The Khartoum regime, brought to power in a highly ideological and
fundamentalist Islamist coup 20 years ago, has killed an estimated
400,000 of its fellow Muslim citizens. Yet, there is near silence about
massive human rights abuses in the remote western corner of Sudan. As
Tareq Al-Hamed, editor of the Asharq Alaswat paper, has asked, "Are the
people of Darfur not Muslims as well?"
When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the
Sudanese leader, President Bashir, in March, Muslim politicians from
Senegal to Malaysia rallied behind him. The same people who demand
international justice for war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza abruptly
changed their tune. Instead of denouncing Bashir as the architect of
ethnic cleansing, they congratulated him for defying the "conspiracy" to
undermine Sudan's sovereignty so the West can take its oil. The Iranian
Parliamentary Speaker, Ali Larijani, said the ICC warrant was "an insult
to the Muslim world".
Mercifully, the views expressed by Arab and Muslim leaders are at odds
with their citizens. The Lebanese American pollster James Zogby found 80
per cent of those questioned in four Arab countries were concerned about
Darfur and felt it should have more media attention. However, they were
reluctant to apportion blame, and, not surprisingly, they were hostile
to international intervention. Meanwhile some commentators in
Muslim-majority countries are questioning their leaders' support for
Bashir.
According to The Daily Star of Lebanon, "Bashir has sought to cultivate
an image of himself as an Arab/African hero who is standing up for his
fellow Arabs/Africans by defying the edicts of foreign 'imperial'
powers."
So, are Darfuris the "wrong" kind of Muslims because they self-identify
as black Africans rather than Arabs, despite widespread inter-marriage
in Sudan? The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, cites Arab chauvinism
against Africans. I have lived in Arab countries and seen firsthand the
racism and bigotry that commands the minds of the Arab political class.
The Canadian academic Salim Mansur claims: "Blacks are viewed by Arabs
as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long,
turbulent record."
For the Nobel Prize winning novelist Wole Soyinka, the unwillingness to
confront Arab racism is rooted in the role of Arabs in the slave trade.
"Arabs and Islam are guilty of the cultural and spiritual savaging of
the Continent," he writes.
The Ethiopian academic Mekuria Bulcha estimates that Arab traders sold
17 million Africans to the Middle East and Asia between the sixth and
twentieth centuries. Yet, there is an almost total reluctance on the
part of Arab intellectuals to examine their central role in slavery,
past or present. Any attempt to confront persistent Arab racism is
shouted down by appeals to Arab/African solidarity against the
neo-colonialist West, a sentiment that seldom moves beyond slogans.
Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of the senior council of Wahhabi
clerics responsible for writing Saudi school text books, states:
"Slavery is part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad and jihad will
remain as long as there is Islam. It has not been abolished."
Arab racism is familiar to African guest workers in countries like Libya
and Egypt, enduring routine verbal and physical attack. Sudanese Arabs
suffer from their own racial identity dilemma, viewed as black by their
Egyptian neighbours to the north (Sudan is a corruption of the Egyptian
word for black). I have heard the Arab Sudanese use the word for slave
(abid) to the faces of their fellow citizens who self-identify as
non-Arab. It is also known for Sudanese parents to tease their
darker-skinned children, calling them slaves.
To be charitable, it seems that Muslim and Arab leaders wish Darfur
would simply go away. Hence their enthusiasm for postponing Bashir's
arrest warrant "to allow peace talks to work". Shortly after the ICC
announcement, key members of the Khartoum regime attended an Arab League
summit. They were confident the League would call for the cancellation
of ICC jurisdiction in Darfur, conferred by the United Nations Security
Council in 2005. The meeting failed to agree on anything stronger than
the usual denunciations of Israel and America. Privately, Jordan, Egypt,
and Saudi were urging Sudan to deal with the ICC through legal channels.
The Sudanese also failed to get a solidarity summit in Khartoum.
However, Bashir did enjoy a victory tour of countries where he was
hailed rather than arrested.
Arab and Muslim leaders are by no means unique in failing to back up
their words with action. Both the US and the UK until recently had
leaders who frequently cited their Christian faith, yet did little to
help Christians being persecuted in China, Nigeria, Eritrea, North Korea
or Egypt.
However, "Muslim solidarity" matters for two reasons. The Khartoum
dictatorship is sensitive to the opinion of Muslim and Arab leaders. A
genuine peace deal will be more likely as a consequence of private
pressure from Iran or Egypt rather than Canada or Sweden.
Muslims' amnesia about Darfur is also symptomatic of the malaise
affecting the public face of a faith that lacks the confidence to engage
in constructive debate or renewal. Until Muslims can be self-critical
without being condemned as heretics, there will be atrophy where there
should be vibrancy, and polarisation and extremism where there should be
tolerance and inclusiveness. Darfur's tragedy is fast becoming an
indelible stain on the collective name of Islam and Muslims.
Ed Husain is co-director of the Quilliam Foundation and author of The
Islamist {a terrific book}.
African instead of Arab?
Ed Husain
The Independent (UK)
As war raged in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, people around the world
called for international intervention to stop the shelling of civilians.
In January this year, millions shared similar feelings of horror and
anger witnessing the bloodshed in Gaza. Both events were especially
painful to Muslims watching other defenceless Muslims being killed. But
why have the deaths of vastly more unarmed Muslims in Darfur caused so
little concern among co-religionists?
The Khartoum regime, brought to power in a highly ideological and
fundamentalist Islamist coup 20 years ago, has killed an estimated
400,000 of its fellow Muslim citizens. Yet, there is near silence about
massive human rights abuses in the remote western corner of Sudan. As
Tareq Al-Hamed, editor of the Asharq Alaswat paper, has asked, "Are the
people of Darfur not Muslims as well?"
When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the
Sudanese leader, President Bashir, in March, Muslim politicians from
Senegal to Malaysia rallied behind him. The same people who demand
international justice for war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza abruptly
changed their tune. Instead of denouncing Bashir as the architect of
ethnic cleansing, they congratulated him for defying the "conspiracy" to
undermine Sudan's sovereignty so the West can take its oil. The Iranian
Parliamentary Speaker, Ali Larijani, said the ICC warrant was "an insult
to the Muslim world".
Mercifully, the views expressed by Arab and Muslim leaders are at odds
with their citizens. The Lebanese American pollster James Zogby found 80
per cent of those questioned in four Arab countries were concerned about
Darfur and felt it should have more media attention. However, they were
reluctant to apportion blame, and, not surprisingly, they were hostile
to international intervention. Meanwhile some commentators in
Muslim-majority countries are questioning their leaders' support for
Bashir.
According to The Daily Star of Lebanon, "Bashir has sought to cultivate
an image of himself as an Arab/African hero who is standing up for his
fellow Arabs/Africans by defying the edicts of foreign 'imperial'
powers."
So, are Darfuris the "wrong" kind of Muslims because they self-identify
as black Africans rather than Arabs, despite widespread inter-marriage
in Sudan? The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, cites Arab chauvinism
against Africans. I have lived in Arab countries and seen firsthand the
racism and bigotry that commands the minds of the Arab political class.
The Canadian academic Salim Mansur claims: "Blacks are viewed by Arabs
as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long,
turbulent record."
For the Nobel Prize winning novelist Wole Soyinka, the unwillingness to
confront Arab racism is rooted in the role of Arabs in the slave trade.
"Arabs and Islam are guilty of the cultural and spiritual savaging of
the Continent," he writes.
The Ethiopian academic Mekuria Bulcha estimates that Arab traders sold
17 million Africans to the Middle East and Asia between the sixth and
twentieth centuries. Yet, there is an almost total reluctance on the
part of Arab intellectuals to examine their central role in slavery,
past or present. Any attempt to confront persistent Arab racism is
shouted down by appeals to Arab/African solidarity against the
neo-colonialist West, a sentiment that seldom moves beyond slogans.
Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of the senior council of Wahhabi
clerics responsible for writing Saudi school text books, states:
"Slavery is part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad and jihad will
remain as long as there is Islam. It has not been abolished."
Arab racism is familiar to African guest workers in countries like Libya
and Egypt, enduring routine verbal and physical attack. Sudanese Arabs
suffer from their own racial identity dilemma, viewed as black by their
Egyptian neighbours to the north (Sudan is a corruption of the Egyptian
word for black). I have heard the Arab Sudanese use the word for slave
(abid) to the faces of their fellow citizens who self-identify as
non-Arab. It is also known for Sudanese parents to tease their
darker-skinned children, calling them slaves.
To be charitable, it seems that Muslim and Arab leaders wish Darfur
would simply go away. Hence their enthusiasm for postponing Bashir's
arrest warrant "to allow peace talks to work". Shortly after the ICC
announcement, key members of the Khartoum regime attended an Arab League
summit. They were confident the League would call for the cancellation
of ICC jurisdiction in Darfur, conferred by the United Nations Security
Council in 2005. The meeting failed to agree on anything stronger than
the usual denunciations of Israel and America. Privately, Jordan, Egypt,
and Saudi were urging Sudan to deal with the ICC through legal channels.
The Sudanese also failed to get a solidarity summit in Khartoum.
However, Bashir did enjoy a victory tour of countries where he was
hailed rather than arrested.
Arab and Muslim leaders are by no means unique in failing to back up
their words with action. Both the US and the UK until recently had
leaders who frequently cited their Christian faith, yet did little to
help Christians being persecuted in China, Nigeria, Eritrea, North Korea
or Egypt.
However, "Muslim solidarity" matters for two reasons. The Khartoum
dictatorship is sensitive to the opinion of Muslim and Arab leaders. A
genuine peace deal will be more likely as a consequence of private
pressure from Iran or Egypt rather than Canada or Sweden.
Muslims' amnesia about Darfur is also symptomatic of the malaise
affecting the public face of a faith that lacks the confidence to engage
in constructive debate or renewal. Until Muslims can be self-critical
without being condemned as heretics, there will be atrophy where there
should be vibrancy, and polarisation and extremism where there should be
tolerance and inclusiveness. Darfur's tragedy is fast becoming an
indelible stain on the collective name of Islam and Muslims.
Ed Husain is co-director of the Quilliam Foundation and author of The
Islamist {a terrific book}.
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