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May
8, 2003
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May
10, 2003
The Omens of Occupation
are Not Good
The Iraqi Quagmire
by PATRICK COCKBURN
At a US military checkpoint on the road north
of Kirkuk last week two American soldiers were holding up cardboard
placards on each of which was a message written in Kurdish. One
said 'Drivers must get into one lane' and the other read 'carrying
weapons is forbidden."
The problem was that the soldiers, not
being able to read Kurdish, had mixed up the placards and one
of them was angrily waving the one forbidding weapons in front
of a car which had tried to jump the queue. A hundred yards further
down the road a harassed-looking American officer was asking
drivers in English, which they did not speak, if they were armed
and was receiving benign smiles and thumbs-up signs.
Not that anybody carrying a gun was likely
to be much inconvenienced by this lonely American checkpoint.
Dozens of alternative roads and dirt tracks, all unguarded, lead
to Kirkuk. Iraqis have centuries of experience in evading and
frustrating efforts by governments to tell them what to do.
It is easy enough to mock at the bafflement
of ordinary American soldiers trying to establish their authority
in one of the most complicated societies in the world. But it
is still extraordinary that the US should have spent so many
months planning a military campaign with so little thought about
the likely political consequences inside Iraq.
The mass looting of every Iraqi city
should not have come as a great surprise. It is an old Iraqi
tradition in times of war. In the First World War the British
and Turkish armies, fighting each other in the provinces which
became Iraq, both complained of the speed with which looters
ransacked battlefields, sometimes pausing to slit the throats
of the wounded, long before the shooting had stopped.
During the great Shia and Kurdish uprisings
of 1991 government offices and museums were systematically sacked
as they were in 2003. When one Kurdish party captured the city
of Arbil from another in 1996 looters immediately stole 5,000
cars. Driving around northern Iraq over the last few weeks I
always got very nervous if I could not see any looters in their
battered pick-ups because only something very dangerous could
have deterred them.
The failure to stop the looting has damaged
American prospects for restoring even temporary stability to
Iraq. So too has the slowness in restoring electricity, water
and petrol supplies. Clearly Washington under-estimated the devastating
consequences of the power vacuum which followed the sudden collapse
of Saddam Hussein's regime. The US also seems to have imagined
that the fact that Iraqis were anti-Saddam meant that they would
be pro-US.
Here the US was the victim of some horribly
bad advice from the exiled Iraqi expatriates. According to the
account of Prof Kanaan Makiya, veteran opponent of Saddam Hussein,
describing his meeting with George Bush at the start of the year,
the President asked him: "What reaction do you expect from
the Iraqis to the entry of US forces into their cities?"
To this Prof Makiya replied reassuringly: "The Iraqis will
welcome the US forces with flowers and sweets when they come
in."
But not all the news for the US has been
bad. There has not been a wave of revenge killings of Baath party
members and security men. This could easily have happened given
the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed, tortured
or have simply disappeared over the last thirty five years.
Many of the current problems are temporary.
Electricity and water supplies will ultimately be restored (electricity
is more vital in Iraq than most countries because the flatness
of the Mesopotamian plain means that everything has to be pumped).
Above all an occupation authority needs to pay salaries to government
employees. The state is by far the biggest employer in Iraq and,
exiguous though these salaries are, they are vital for restoring
the economy and the administration.
Food rations under the UN's oil-for-food
programme were distributed in advance by Saddam's government
before the war. But 60 per cent of Iraqis are wholly dependent
for survival on this elaborate and efficient rationing system.
Without it they will starve. The US will face mass riots if,
over the coming months, rations are not supplied.
The long term weaknesses of a US occupation
may not have a lot to do with the looting, spectacular though
it is, or even the current breakdown of the Iraqi administration.
It will stem rather from whether or not Washington is in effect
planning a classic colonial occupation, giving power only to
Iraqis wholly dependent on the US.
The omens here are not very good. Asked
about the visibly growing influence of the Shia clergy a senior
member of the US administration was quoted as saying: "We
don't want to allow Persian fundamentalism to gain any foothold.
We want to find more moderate clerics and move them into positions
of influence."
It is not an effort likely to succeed.
Saddam spent decades unsuccessfully trying to coerce or co-opt
the Shiah clergy through the noose, torture chamber or assassination
squad.
The Anglo-American invasion has destabilised
the relations between the three great communities to which almost
all Iraqis belong. The Kurds have come out winners, second best
allies of the US after the Turkish parliament refused to allow
a US army to use Turkish bases to invade northern Iraq. The Kurds
have taken back the lands in Mosul and Kirkuk provinces from
which they were driven by Saddam. But they cannot hold what they
have gained without US support.
The Sunni Muslims, the traditional rulers
of Iraq for centuries and the backbone of Saddam's regime, are
clear losers. The Shia, some 60 per cent of the Iraqi population,
feel that their day has come, but this deeply religious community
is a very unlikely ally of the US, particularly if Washington
thinks it can now do in Iran what it has just done in Iraq.
For the moment the US can probably control
Iraq by main force, by garrisoning the main towns and getting
the Iraqi administration running again. But in the longer term
it is very vulnerable. With the exception of Kuwait none of Iraq's
neighbours wanted the war or like its outcome. For the moment
they are frightened by the large US land army on their door steps.
But as US forces are reduced and fear dissipates they have every
reason to make sure that the US occupation fails.
If the US is very careful and sensitive
to the needs of Iraqis the occupation might stabilise for a few
years. But with such an ideological and divided administration
in Washington this is about the last thing to expect. Will it,
for instance, be able to keep its hands off Iraqi oil? If there
is one act of Saddam Hussein which remains popular it is his
nationalisation of the oil industry in 1972. Iraqi nationalism
may be an uncertain quantity, but all Iraqis are deeply hostile
to any threat to their control of the oilfields.
In the 1920s Britain solved the problem
of how to rule Iraq by handing power to the Sunni Muslims. The
US might like to do this, but since the Sunni are only 20 per
cent of the population this would inevitably mean a dictatorship.
On the other hand free elections would mean the long-awaited
triumph of the Shiah which the US is so eager to avoid because
it would increase Iranian influence.
In their present triumphant mood there
is no sign that George Bush or Tony Blair appreciate the depth
or extent of the morass which they have now entered. Six months
ago an Iraqi friend told me that he was all in favour of the
US going to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but he added: "My
only fear is that before it starts, the US will realise that
this war is much against its own best interests."
Patrick Cockburn
is co-author with Andrew Cockburn of 'Saddam Hussein: An American
Obsession.'
Yesterday's
Features
Julie
Hilden
When It's a Crime to Visit Your Son
Mickey
Z.
Partisan Protests?
Mark
Zepezauer
Evil is as Evil Does
David Lindorff
The Coming Senior Revolution
Abu
Spinoza
The Detention of Dr. Huda Ammash
Ben
Tripp
The Other "F" Word
Norman
Madarasz
God in the Service of the Security
State: a Dispatch from Brazil
Stew Albert
Pushovers
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/08
Website
of the Day
Department of Sexual Security
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