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Now
Does Anyone in Washington or at Downing
Street Know What's Really Happening in Iraq?
Iraq
Nears the "Saigon Moment"
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs
of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad the police often pick
up over 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government
ministries make war on each other. A new and ominous stage in
the disintegration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month
when police commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry
kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry
in the heart of Baghdad.
Iraq may be getting close to
what Americans call 'the Saigon moment', the time when it becomes
evident to all that the government is expiring. "They say
that the killings and kidnappings are being carried our by men
in police uniforms and with police vehicles," said the Iraqi
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari with a despairing laugh to me
earlier this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that
the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."
It is getting worse. The Iraqi
army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides
to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military
units from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route
between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was stopped at a supposedly
fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border earlier this month
and four American security men and an Austrian taken away.
The US and British position
in Iraq is far more of a house built on sand than is realized
in Washington or London despite the disasters of the last three-and-a-half
years. President Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability
to learn from their mistakes, largely because they do not want
to admit having committed any errors in the first place.
Civil war is raging across
central Iraq, home to a third of the country's 27 million people.
As Shia and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods Iraq is turning
into a country of refugees. The UN High Commission for Refugees
says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country and a
further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad neighbouring
Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each
other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death I phoned
a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought
of the verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken
up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof
of my next door neighbour's house. I am more worried about staying
alive myself than what happens to Saddam."
Iraqi friends used to reassure
me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and
Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now
being compelled to divorce by their families. "I love my
husband, but my family has forced me to divorce him because
we are Shi'ite and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, the mother
of four, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's
family] are insurgents and that living with him is an offence
to God." Members of mixed marriages set up an association
to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but
they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding
members were murdered.
Everything in Iraq is dominated
by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the
last atrocity". All three Iraqi communities--Shia, Sunni
and Kurdish -- see themselves as victims and seldom sympathize
with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its gruesome
discoveries. Earlier this month I visited Mosul, the capital
of northern Iraq that has a population of 1.7 million people
of whom about two thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds.
It not the most dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a place
drenched in violence. A local tribal leader called Sayid Tewfiq
from the nearby city of Tal Afar told me of a man from there
who went to recover the tortured body of his 16-year old son.
The corpse was wired to explosives that blew up killing the
father so their two bodies were buried together.
Khasro Goran, the efficient
and highly effective deputy governor of Mosul, said there was
no civil war yet in Mosul but it could easily happen. He added
that 70,000 Kurds had already fled the city because of assassinations.
It is extraordinary how in Iraq slaughter that would be front
page news any where else in the world soon seems to be part of
normal life. On the day I arrived in Mosul the police had found
11 bodies in the city which would have been on the low side
in Baghdad.
I spoke to the Duraid Mohammed
Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, whose office is decorated with
pictures of smiling fresh faced young men who turned out to
be his son and four nephews, all of them killed by insurgents.
His own house together with his furniture was burned to the
ground two years ago. He added in passing that Mr Goran and
he himself were the prime targets for assassination in Mosul,
a point that was dramatically proved true the day after we spoke
when insurgents exploded a bomb beside beside his convoy--fortunately
he was not in it at the time-- killing one and wounding several
of his bodyguards.
For the moment Mosul is more
strongly-controlled by pro-government forces than most Iraqi
cities. This is because the US has powerful local allies in
the shape of the Kurds.The two army divisions in the province
are primarily Kurdish, but the 17,000 police in Nineveh, the
province of which Mosul is the capiral, are almost entirely
Sunni and their loyalty is dubious. One was dismissed on the
day of Saddam's trial for putting a picture of the former leader
in the window of his car. In November 2004 the entire Mosul
police force abandoned their police stations to the insurgents
who captured $40 million worth of arms.
"The terrorists do not
control a single district in Mosul," is the proud claim
of Major General Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani, the
bullet-headed police chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them
to fight me face to face." But the situation is still very
fragile. We went to see the police operations room where an
officer was bellowing into a microphone: "There is a suicide
bomber in a car in the city. Do not let him get near you or any
of our buildings." There was a reason to be frightened.
On my way into Mosul I had seen the broken concrete walls of
the party headquarters of the Patriotic Unon of Kurdistan, one
of the two big Kurdish political parties. In August two men
in a car packed with explosives had shot their way past the
outer guard post and then blown themselves up killing 17 soldiers.
The balance of forces in Nineveh
between American, Arab, Kurd, Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated
even by Iraqi standards. Power is fragmented. Sayid Tewfiq,
the Shia tribal leader from Tal Afar resplendent in his flowing
robes, admitted: "I would not last 24 hours in Tal Afar
without Coalition [US] support." "That's probably
about right," confirmed Mr Goran, explaining that Sayid
Tewfiq's Shia Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes.
Earlier I had heard him confidently invite all of Nineveh provincial
council to visit him in Tal Afar. Nobody looked enthusiastic
about taking him up on the offer. "He may have 3,000 fighters
from his tribe, but he can't visit most of Tal Afar himself,"
said another member of the council called Mohammed Suleiman
as he declined the invitation. A few hours before somebody
tried to assassinate him Governor Kashmula claimed to me that
"security in Mosul is the best in Iraq outside the Kurdish
provinces." It is a measure of the violence in Iraq that
it is an arguable point. Khasro Goran said that "the situation
is not perfect but it is better than Anbar. Baquba and Diyala."
I could vouch for this. In Iraq however bad things are there
is always somewhere worse.
It is obviously very difficult
for reporters to discover what is happening in Iraq's most violent
provinces without being killed themselves. But at the end of
September I travelled south along the Iraqi side of the border
with Iran sticking to Kurdish villages to try to reach Diyala,
a mixed Sunni-Shia province north-east of Baghdad where there
had been savage fighting. It is a road on which a wrong turning
could be fatal. We drove from Sulaimaniyah through the mountains,
passed through the Derbandikhan tunnel and then took the road
which runs beside the Diyala river, its valley a vivid streak
of lush green in the dun-coloured semi desert. The area is a
smuggler's paradise. At night trucks drive through the desert
without lights, their drivers finding their way with night vision
goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are carrying presumably
weapons or drugs--and nobody has the temerity to ask.
We had been warned that it
was essential to turn left after the tumble- down Kurdish town
of Kalar before reaching the mixed Arab-Kurdish village of Jalula.
We crossed the river by a long and rickety bridge, parts of which
had fallen into the swirling waters below, and soon arrived
in the Kurdish stronghold of Khanaqin in Diyala province. If
I had any thoughts about driving further towards Baghdad they
were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of the yard of
the local police headquarters, of the wreckage of a blue-and-white
police vehicle torn apart by a bomb. "Five policemen were
killed in it when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah
two months ago," a policeman told me. "Only their
commander survived but his legs were amputated."
Officials in Khanaqin had no
doubt about what was happening in their province. Lt Col Ahmed
Nuri Hassan, the exhausted looking commander of the federal
police, said "There is an sectarian civil war here and it
is getting worse every day. The head of the local council estimated
that 100 people were being killed every week. In Baquba, the
provincial capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and Kurds.
The army and police were divided along sectarian lines. The
one Iraqi army division in Diyala was predominantly Shia and
only arrested Sunni. On the day after I left Sunni and Kurdish
police officers fought a gun battle in Jalula, the village I
had been warned not to enter. The fighting started when Kurdish
police refused to accept a new Sunni Arab police chief and his
followers. Here in miniature in Diyala it was possible to see
Iraq breaking up. The province is ruled by its death squads.
The police say at least 9,000 people had been murdered and after
such bloodshed It is difficult to see how Sunni and Shia in
the province can ever live together again.
In much of Iraq we long ago
slipped down the rapids leading from crisis to catastrophe though
it is only in the last six months that these dire facts have
begun to be accepted abroad. For the first three years of the
war Republicans in the US regularly claimed that the liberal
media was ignoring signs of peace and progress in Iraq. Some
right wingers even set up web sites devoted to spreading the
news of American achievements in this ruined land. I remember
a team from a US network news channel staying in my hotel in
Baghdad complaining to me, as they buckled on their body armour
and helmets, that they had been once again told by their bosses
in New York, themselves under pressure from the White House,
to "go and find some good news and report it."
Times have changed in Washington.
The extent of the disaster in Iraq is admitted by almost all
aside from President Bush. Even before the Democrats' victory
in the Congressional elections on 7 November the magazine Vanity
Fair commented acidly that 'the only group in the Bush camp
at this point are the people who wait patiently for news of the
W.M.D. and continue to believe that Saddam and Osama were once
lovers.' Previous supporters of the war are showing embarrassing
haste in recanting past convictions and becoming born again
critics of the White House.
These days it is in Britain
alone, or more specifically in Downing Street, that policies
bloodily discredited in Iraq in the years since the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein still get a hearing. I returned from Mosul
to London earlier this month just in time to hear Tony Blair
speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet. It was a far more extraordinary
performance that his audience appreciated. As the prime minister
spoke with his usual Hugh Grant charm it became clear that he
had learned nothing and forgotten nothing in three- and-a-half
years of war.
Misconception after misconception
poured from his lips. Contrary to views of his own generals
and every opinion poll assessing Iraqi opinion he discounted
the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is fueled by hostility
to foreign occupation. Instead he sees dark forces rising in
the east, dedicated like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings to
principles of pure evil. The enemy, in this case, is "based
on a thoroughly warped misinterpretation of Islam, which is
fanatical and deadly." Even by the standard of Middle
Eastern conspiracy theories it was puerile stuff. Everywhere
Blair saw hidden hands -- "forces outside Iraq that are
trying to create mayhem"--at work. An expert on the politics
of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The most dangerous
error in the Middle East today is to believe that the Shia communities
in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran."
But this is exactly what the
prime minister does believe. The fact that the largest Shia
militia in Iraq--the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al- Sadr--is anti-Iranian
and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored. These misconceptions
are important in terms of practical policy because they give
support to the dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could
only frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then all would
come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon would
inevitably fall into line. In a very British way [and American
too, of course. Editors] opponents of the war in Iraq have focused
not on current events but on the past sins of the government
in getting us into the war. No doubt it was all very wrong for
Downing Street to pretend that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of
Mass Destruction and was a threat to the world when they knew
he was not. But this emphasis on the origins of the war in Iraq
has diverted attention from the fact that, going by official
statements, the British government knows no more about what
was going on in Iraq in 2006 than it did in 2003. The
picture Blair paints of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point.
For instance he says Iraqis 'voted or an explicitly non-sectarian
government,' but every Iraqi knows that the vote in two parliamentary
elections in 2005 went wholly along sectarian and ethnic lines.
The polls were the starting pistol for the start of the civil
war.
Blair steadfastly refuses
to accept the fact that opposition to the American and British
occupation of Iraq has been the main cause of the insurgency.
The commander of the British army General Sir Richard Dannatt
was almost fired for his trouble when he made the obvious point
that "we should get ourselves out some time soon because
our presence exacerbates the security problem." Iraq is
a notoriously complicated country but the swiftest way to grasp
the most important features of its politics is to look at figures
from the latest of a series of opinion polls carried out by
the US-based group WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end of September.
These explain why Dannatt is right and Blair is wrong. The poll
shows that 92 per cent of the Sunni and 62 per cent of the Shia--up
from 41 per cent at the start of the year -- approve of attacks
on US led forces. Only the Kurds support the occupation. Some
78 per cent of all Iraqis think that the US military presence
provokes more conflict than it prevents and 71 per cent want
US-led forces out of Iraq within a year. The biggest and most
menacing change this year is the growing hostility of Iraq's
Shia to the American and British presence.
It used to be said that at
least the foreign occupation prevented a civil war but with
1,000 Iraqis being killed every week, this it is now very clearly
failing to do. On the contrary it was the occupation itself
that helped provoke the present civil war. I do not mean that
anybody conspired in Washington and London to set Iraqis at
each other's throats. It was always true that in post-Saddam
Iraq there was going to be friction-- probably involving violence--between
the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities. But Iraqis were also
forced to decide if they were for or against a foreign invader.
The Sunni community was always going to fight the occupation,
the Kurds to welcome it and the Shia to cooperate with the US
and Britain for just so long as it served their interests. Patriotism
and communal self-interest combined. Before 2003 a Sunni might
see a Shia as the member of a different sect but once the war
had started he started to see him as a traitor to his country.
Of course Bush and Blair argue
that there is no occupation. In June 2004 sovereignty was supposedly
handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom Reign," wrote Mr
Bush on the piece of paper informing him of the carefully choreographed
return of power to an Iraqi government at a ceremony in the
heart of the Green Zone. But the reality of power remained firmly
with the US and Britain. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki
said this month that he could not move a company of soldiers
without seeking permission of the Coalition (the US and Britain).
Officials in Mosul confirmed to me that they could not carry
out a military operation without the agreement of US forces.
There is a hidden history to
the occupation of Iraq which helps explain why it has proved
such a disaster. In 1991 after the first Gulf war a crucial
reason why President George Bush senior did not push on to Baghdad
was that he feared that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would
be followed by elections that would be won in turn by Shia religious
parties sympathetic to Iran. No worse outcome of the war could
be imagined in Washington. After the capture of Baghdad in 2003
the US faced the same dilemma. Many of the contortions of US
policy in Iraq since then have been a covert attempt to avoid
or dilute the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.
For over a year the astute
US envoy in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad tried to conciliate the
Sunni: Bring their politicians into government, modify the federal
constitution and open secret talks with the Sunni armed resistance.
He failed. Attacks on US forces are on the increase. Dead and
wounded US soldiers now total almost 1,000 a month. But the
US is now gearing up for a fight with the Mehdi Army, the largest
Shia militia. An Iraqi government will only have real legitimacy
and freedom to operate when US and British troops have withdrawn.
Washington and London have to accept that if Iraq is to survive
at all it will be as a loose federation run by a Shia-Kurdish
alliance because together they are 80 per cent of the population.
But, thanks to the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair,
the future of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations but on
the battlefield.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of The
Occupation (Verso).
CounterPunch
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