Doomed, or still recoverable?
Dec 4th 2003 | BAGHDAD, NAJAF, SAMARRA AND SAMAWA
From The Economist print edition
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Iraq is on the edge. It is unclear, for America and its Iraqi allies, whether success or failure beckons. But progress towards peace and prosperity is still feasible, just
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IT DEPENDS whom you listen to. One top American soldier says that the battle this week in Samarra, a town of 180,000 at the heart of Iraq's sullen and violent “Sunni Triangle” to the north and west of Baghdad, marks a turning point—on the road towards military success for the ruling American-led coalition. The Americans say that 54 insurgents, some wearing the uniforms of Saddam Hussein's fedayeen militia, were killed after an American convoy was caught in a series of ambushes.
The ferocity with which the Americans returned fire shows, it is said, a new determination to hit back hard, rather than wait tamely while their enemies melt away into the maze-like alleyways of Iraq's small towns. If the success of this American counter-attack is emulated elsewhere, the insurgents would start to lose ground—and more Iraqis might start to co-operate with the coalition forces. As the trend spread, Iraq would gradually be brought to peace. That, at least, is the theory.
But locals offer a different version of what happened in Samarra. The Americans' figure of insurgent casualties, they say, is wildly exaggerated. And they insist that the resentment caused by the attack far outweighs any military gain. From his hospital bed, an 80-year-old sheikh who was caught in the crossfire wobbles his fist in fury. “If there were 1,000 fedayeen before, now there will be 3,500,” he wheezes. Even the town's American-paid police chief says that the Americans “provoked” a popular—and violent—reaction. Black “martyr” flags inscribed with the name of a ten-year-old boy killed in the fighting are pinned to walls across town that are covered with graffiti calling Iraqis to arms.
A pharmacist says that the town's women now stay dressed before going to bed, lest unbelievers on their night raids find them naked. The arrest last month of the wife of one of Saddam Hussein's vice-presidents appears to have enraged locals, who accuse America of adopting the tribal practice of taking relatives hostage. Several Samarrans claim to refuse American salaries. “We would rather chew dirt,” said a teacher. “Saddam Hussein is not orchestrating or financing our resistance,” said a major who lost his job when the Iraqi army was disbanded in May. “But he represents our flag.” In short, if Samarra is any guide, the Americans' latest tactics may well alienate many more Iraqis, especially the already disaffected Sunnis who ran the show under Mr Hussein.
Mother of all months
For the coalition, November was the worst month in terms of casualties—111 dead, including 79 Americans—since Mr Hussein was toppled. That is more than twice the rate in the early summer. It certainly makes the job of the civilians trying to oversee the economic and political rebuilding of Iraq immeasurably harder, if not impossible. Very few of the 1,200-odd people in the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) dare walk around Baghdad, getting to know the people and offering reassurance. Instead, they are cocooned in an array of grandiose buildings behind a massive web of concrete blocks, barricades and barbed wire in a so-called Green Zone which they rarely leave unescorted.
Baghdad itself continues to splutter back to commercial life, though the mayhem of traffic—no one seems to bother, for instance, if roundabouts are negotiated the wrong way round—suggests that barely suppressed lawlessness lies beneath the surface. As soon as darkness falls, few people drive or walk about. The silence of the night is punctuated by random bursts of gunfire. The capital's top three hotels have been hit by rockets or mortars in the past few months. Those who want to see the Americans fail, including, apparently, many in the Arab world beyond Iraq, were much chuffed last month when two separate attacks were launched, one on a hotel, the other on the oil ministry, from rickety donkey carts that had ambled towards the Green Zone—a potent symbol of how the highest-tech power in the world is still vulnerable to the anger of the little man.
The insurgents have made sure that not just Americans are frightened. They have targeted America's allies—Spaniards, Italians, Japanese, South Koreans. Do-gooding organisations, too, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and most notably the United Nations itself, have been victims of murderous bomb attacks. Few charities have dared to stay.
Above all, the insurgents increasingly gun for fellow Iraqis who co-operate with the Americans and their allies. They attack Iraqi police stations. They have assassinated a (female) member of the Governing Council, the top Iraqi body appointed by the Americans, along with the deputy mayor of Baghdad, several judges, a top oil official and several senior policemen. Two top Shia clerics have been murdered; it is unclear by whom, but insurgents have certainly benefited from the resulting tension.
Hoping for chaos
The most likely perpetrators of this violence are former members of Mr Hussein's Baath Party, most but not all of them Sunni Muslims at odds with the emerging new Shia-led order. They aim, quite simply, to make the country ungovernable, so that the Americans will lose their nerve and pull out, leaving Iraq to sink into a welter of anarchy from which remnants of the old regime may re-emerge on top.
General John Abizeid, who oversees the American forces, reckons that the insurgents' hard core is only 5,000 strong, but the number of those willing to help them must be many times higher. Mr Hussein's 400,000-plus army, dissolved by the CPA, provides ample recruiting fodder, as do those senior-to-middling Baathists who were summarily sacked from their jobs or disappeared underground: the number, disputed, ranges from 20,000 to 40,000, out of a party of 2m.
The CPA has yet to discern a clear structure underpinning the insurgency, but it is probably a rough network with roots going far back to the early 1960s, when Mr Hussein and his friends formed an underground movement. Possibly, Mr Hussein himself is its organiser. Before the regime fell in April, says a member of the Governing Council, he arranged for nearly $1 billion in cash to be collected from the Central Bank, presumably to fund a guerrilla war.
The degree to which foreigners have joined the anti-American fray is debated too, but the suicide bombs that killed 22 UN people in August and 19 Italian soldiers last month had all the hallmarks of Muslim fundamentalists from outside, perhaps connected to al-Qaeda. A fair guess is that at least several hundred such zealots have crossed Iraq's utterly porous borders in the past few months, that they are ready to blow up themselves, Americans and their allies, for the cause, and that Mr Hussein's “former regime loyalists” (FRLs, in coalition-speak) have forged a marriage of convenience with them. There have also been reports of growing Islamic fundamentalism in Mosul, in the north, with al-Qaeda sympathisers slipping in from abroad and Wahhabi preachers from the Gulf and Syria stirring things up.
Yet the portrayal of November as the “worst month ever” needs a caveat. The death rate among the allies was certainly the highest since the conventional part of the war ended. But coalition generals say that the rate of attacks by guerrillas since the start, in mid-November, of Operation Iron Hammer and Operation Ivy Cyclone, both of which heralded a more aggressive approach (albeit one that risks more unpopularity), has dropped by nearly half.
What is clearer, in any event, is that the attacks preponderate in the Sunni Triangle between Habbaniya in the west, Baquba to the east of Baghdad and Tikrit in the upper middle, capped by the mixed Sunni Arab and Kurdish city of Mosul in the north. The area immediately to the west and north of Baghdad suffered 35% of all attacks last month (up from 186 recorded incidents in August to 313 in November), while the tally in the capital alone (up from 123 to 216) made up a quarter.
But the area controlled by the Kurds north and east of Mosul and the even bigger chunk of Iraq running from just south of Baghdad to the border with Kuwait are comparatively tranquil. Attacks around Basra and Nasiriya dropped from 27 in August to 14 last month; in the Shias' holy heartland around Najaf, Kerbala and Hilla, the rate steadied from 24 attacks in August to 25 in November. The Kurdish-controlled area and the Shias' in the south and centre, embracing well over half Iraq's population, now witness less than 6% of the violence against the coalition. Indeed, except for the carnage of Italians in Nasariya, not one coalition soldier was killed by insurgents in those two areas last month.
As cash pours in
Moreover, despite the impediments of sabotage and fear and the persistence of massive unemployment, which afflicts at least half the workforce of 7m, the economy is slowly on the mend. So it should be, given the massive amounts of aid—$18.6 billion—that the Americans have promised to dole out, along with pledges of another $14 billion or so from other outside sources. For many Iraqis, living standards have shot up. Labourers get double their pre-war wages, many other public-sector workers between four and ten times more.
Huge amounts of cash are being poured into rebuilding the infrastructure—sewerage, electricity, telecoms, the health service, railways, the port at Umm Qasr, and so on—and are slowly improving it, despite incompetence, cronyism and waste. The electricity supply, though still erratic, is back roughly to its pre-war level, after briefly surpassing it. Most important, oil production is heading for its pre-war level of 2m barrels a day, and is supposed to reach 2.8m b/d in April.
The key to the future, as far as both the economy and security are concerned, is political as much as military. Here too the picture is patchy but, on balance, hopeful. The Kurdish north, where American and British air power has guaranteed autonomy for 12 years, is in good political shape, with its two leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, co-operating with each other—and, just as important, with their Shia compatriots in the centre and south.
Tensions still exist, however, especially in Mosul, where Sunni Arabs are about two-thirds of the population and Kurds a quarter, and in Kirkuk, which Kurds claim for themselves. The degree of federalism, the restitution of land and property sequestered by Mr Hussein's regime, the reversal of his Arabisation policy, and the demarcation of Kurdistan's borders are all delicate issues yet to be resolved. But the weightiest Kurdish leaders apparently accept that Kurds should have an autonomous region within a decentralised, federal Iraq, rather than outright independence, which would break up the country and might reignite a civil war.
The fractious Shias
The Shia south and centre are harder to pin down. Internal Shia politics are complex and riven with rivalries. Moreover, Shias themselves vary widely over how much they want a religiously oriented state. Most of those who live in the holiest city, Najaf, for instance, look to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, better known as SCIRI, led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, or to Ibrahim Jafari's Islamic Dawa Party. Both favour an Islamic state, though not an Iranian-style theocracy, and usually defer to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. A firebrand cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, has a following too. Other, more secular Shias, such as Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's favourite, who leads the Iraqi National Congress, and Iyad Alawi, of the Iraqi National Accord, seek Shia support—especially among the more liberal middle class—by appealing for a more western way.
Shia prayers may be answered
But the main man among Iraq's main religious group, the Shias, who probably embrace around 60% of the country's people, is the shadowy Mr Sistani. Since he rarely talks to outsiders, and has refused to meet the coalition's proconsul, Paul (“Jerry”) Bremer, agreements with him are hard to nail down.
His bottom line, however, is clear. Iraq's long-oppressed Shias must become the greatest power in the land. Iraq may have a pluralistic kind of federal democracy, with all groups, especially Kurds and Sunnis, represented in a broad government. The constitution will probably have to acknowledge that the Iraqi state has some kind of Muslim “character” or “identity”, with recognised rights for non-Muslims as well as non-Shias. But the Shias must have the main say.
Last month Mr Bremer heeded calls by Mr Sistani that the Americans' hitherto ponderous road towards the writing of a new constitution, involving a new census and the eventual holding of elections before untrammelled power is handed over to the Iraqis, should be abandoned in favour of a much faster route towards the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and an end to the formal occupation (see timetable). Mr Bremer, egged on by the British, has since embarked on a much speedier course towards Iraqi-isation in virtually all spheres, including the army and police. The provisional government to take office in July would be chosen by a transitional assembly indirectly elected by “caucuses” in each of Iraq's 18 provinces, which themselves would be overseen by groups of notables, some from local councils, others chosen by the present American-appointed Governing Council.
More recently, however, a new glitch has occurred. Mr Sistani is demanding direct elections even to the transitional assembly. Registration of voters, say his proxies, could be based on the ration-card lists that existed under Mr Hussein. No, say the Americans. A set-piece election would be too vulnerable to disruption by the insurgents; the ration-card system excluded many families punished by the regime; and the Kurds had no such system. Besides, some of the non-Shias in the Governing Council are beginning to resent the veto powers of Mr Sistani, who is not, they note, even a native Iraqi (he speaks with a heavy Persian accent). In the end, a compromise may emerge. But the likelihood is that the politician closest to Mr Sistani—perhaps SCIRI's Mr Hakim—will probably become the country's new leader.
All this assumes that the insurgency is containable, even beatable. At least Mr Bremer's CPA and some of his generals see that politics, as much as military force, is the key. “There is no purely military solution,” says one adviser. “If we lose the Shias' consent, we'll lose the campaign,” says a senior soldier. “But we need the consent of the Sunnis to win the campaign.”
This is the trickiest part of any plan to salvage Iraq. The Sunni Arabs account for only 15-20% of Iraqis, but the new Iraq needs a post-Saddam leader for them. The Governing Council has half a dozen of them, but none with much clout. A further trouble is that, so long as the Sunni-based insurgency can cock a snook at the fragile political authority in Baghdad's fenced-off Green Zone, few Sunnis will have the nerve or the chance to go out among their people to preach conciliation.
A perilous handover
Meanwhile, the Iraqi-isation of security is a high-risk policy that could be knocked askew by infiltration, intimidation and over-hasty training. Indeed, the break-neck handover posited in the latest timetable could, if the insurgents make headway, descend into civil war. Sectarian feelings have been kept in check, thanks largely to the Shia and Kurdish leaders. But they are there, and they could explode.
The next six months are crucial. The violence, more noticeably Iraqi-versus-Iraqi, may well grow. It is vital for the would-be rulers that their American friends, whether as allies or occupiers, show not the slightest sign of wanting to cut and run.
In a gloomy scenario, the anti-American violence, inevitably catching more and more Iraqis in its train, sparks sectarian violence. The Americans give up hope, and beg the United Nations to come in and pick up the bits.
In a happier hypothesis, an emerging Iraqi leadership, with Shias and Kurds finding a tougher anti-Saddamite Sunni leader at their side, gradually faces down the insurgency—and reaps the benefit of American economic largesse and military firepower. It could yet happen. Iraq is still, just, a better-than-evens bet.
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