"Iraq'd" Blog - TNR - Spencer Ackerman
WHAT IS IRAQ'D?: If you're a pro-war liberal, chances are you're probably feeling burned right now. The case for the Iraq war rested on three pillars: The danger of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, with the clock ticking on a nuclear capability; the danger of Saddam Hussein's connections to Al Qaeda; and the human rights imperative of deposing one of the world's most despicable regimes and assisting newly-freed Iraqis in building a democracy. Well, it turns out that Saddam didn't have much in the way of WMD, or even ongoing WMD programs.
And it also appears that his ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous at best. So all that's left for the war rationale is the human-rights-and-democracy argument, which for liberals is intuitively appealing (or should be). But then along comes the Bush administration's November 15 Agreement to relinquish sovereignty by June 30, which tells the Iraqis that, owing to election-year considerations, the United States can't be bothered right now to midwife a democracy. You might say you've been Iraq'd.
And no one is more Iraq'd right now than the Iraqis themselves. It's no accident that, as soon as the Coalition Provisional Authority announced its withdrawal plan, the various Iraqi factions immediately began pressing for their maximal demands: The Kurds want autonomy, an internal militia, and the oil-rich city of Kirkuk; the Shia want direct elections to the body that will assume sovereignty, in order to guard against their disenfranchisement; the Sunnis are resisting elections because they fear disenfranchisement by the numerically-superior Shia; our handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, distrusted by the broader Shia and Sunni populations, is agitating to keep its hold on power. Each faction is fighting hard to impose facts on the ground because it can no longer count on the United States sticking around to ensure that all segments of Iraqi society are represented in a future Iraqi democracy.
One of the premises of Iraq'd is that the U.S. decision to cease nation-building jeopardizes our own national security as well as Iraq's. After all, if we believe that Iraqi democracy would be a model for the region, then the converse is also true: If we leave behind a failing state in Iraq, then we provide Middle Eastern autocrats with a pretext for cracking down on the reformers and liberals in their midst, since they can point to the chaos in Baghdad as the likely fruit of democracy. And since Islamist terrorism feeds in part on Middle Eastern tyranny, then we're in a lot of trouble. Iraq'd will highlight developments in Iraq and the Middle East to call attention to this danger.
A couple of programming notes: This blog is written from Washington. Readers in Iraq are invited to pass along accounts of what's happening on the ground. Readers at home are invited to disagree with any and all of the arguments featured here.
02.02.04
WALK AND PRAISE IMAM ALI AT THE SAME TIME: Two excellent articles--one by David Rieff in The New York Times Magazine and one by Anthony Shadid in The Washington Post--yesterday detail the rise, and chart the ambitions of, Iraq's long-repressed Shia clerics. There are tons of important insights here, such as the singular desire of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani to avoid the 1920 Shia mistake of withdrawing from politics after resisting the British occupation. Another, though, has less to do with the Shia and more to do with us--and our seeming inability to cope with more than one crisis in Iraq at a time, even when the crises are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Rieff recalls something a U.S. official told him just after the fall of Baghdad:
If we alienate the Shiites, we've lost the ballgame. The Kurds owe us, and we're the best deal they'll ever see. We can fight the Sunnis. But we can't fight the Shiites, not if they organize against us. There are too many of them.
Let's hope this guy was either fired or has since reconsidered. Not about alienating the Shia--he's certainly right that we can't afford to do that. He's just dead wrong about the Kurds and the Sunnis.
First, someone forgot to tell the Kurds that they "owe us." In December, U.S. administrator Paul Bremer told the Kurdish parties on the Iraqi Governing Council to back away from their demands for a semi-autonomous, federalist enclave in Iraqi Kurdistan; they promptly told him where to go. In fact, their trump card was that we owe them, since, after all, they prosecuted the war along with us from the north. Bremer, it seems, made a calculation much like Rieff's U.S. official: Since we need to focus on the crisis of the moment, the Shia rejection of the November 15 Agreement, we can afford to give the Kurds what they want, in the interest of keeping the north of the country quiet--since, after all, they won't reject us wholesale.
That's looking more and more like a mistake. This Post story from Friday points out that the word "federalism" might translate in Kurdish as "secession." Here's Jabbar Mohammed, a Kurdish gardener: "I don't know what federalism is. I don't care, as long as it means independence." And since the Kurdish desire for independence is intended as a bulwark against continued repression by Iraqi Arabs, it's worth noting that at least some Kurds view Sistani's call for direct elections as a threat to them. "Rejecting [the November 15 Agreement, as Sistani has] is like rejecting the rule of law," the Post quotes Saad Othman of the Kurdistan Democratic Party as saying. "He wants to impose a kind of religious rule on Iraq. Kurds don't accept that." In other words, acquiescing to Sistani may mean stoking the Kurds' secessionist impulses. How do you expect the rest of Iraq--to say nothing of Turkey or Syria--will react to that?
Then comes the mistake we're making with regard to the Sunnis: believing "we can fight" them. The truth is that we can't. Not without more troops, and probably not without a different mixture of forces. Wrapping whole Sunni cities in concertina wire hasn't prevented January from becoming the second bloodiest month for our soldiers since the fall of Saddam. And, as this New York Times story points out, rather than press the attack, we're planning on reducing our security presence in Baghdad:
One senior military officer said about 8,000 Iraqi police now patrol Baghdad, a city of about 5.5 million, although security analysts say the city needs 19,000. About 1,000 new police officers are being trained each month, the military officer said.
Just like the Kurds, the Sunnis are worried about the U.S. giving Sistani the direct elections he wants. Juan Cole calls attention to the bizarre spectacle of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the local branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, endorsing the November 15 Agreement. Not that members of that group want actual elections: The IIP's Muhsin Abdul Hamid says he has no faith in the U.S. to hold any kind of elections. (And keep in mind that he's on our hand-picked Governing Council.) Rather, he's worried about the Shia majority seizing power. So now imagine how well Abdul Hamid will react to the U.S. making a deal with Sistani--and the subsequent Kurdish demand for more and more autonomy, especially when that includes oil-rich Kirkuk.
The rise of the Shia poses a massive problem for the U.S. transition plan. (Though, as Rieff and Shadid point out, not necessarily for Iraqi democracy: Sistani appears to view democracy as the best means to retain Iraq's Islamic complexion, not a route to launch an Algeria-style manipulation of elections.) In our haste to cut and run, we're looking to the United Nations to give us a way to accommodate the election campaigns of both Sistani and President Bush. But since that opens up additional problems among the rest of the Iraqi population, we'd better hope that nine months of occupation has disabused Rieff's source of the idea that only the Shia matter.
LISTEN TO GALBRAITH: The animals who perpetrated yesterday's suicide bombing in Irbil probably wanted to take advantage of this sectarian dynamic. The Post's account quotes Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. official currently in Iraq, as saying: "It is too early to predict the fallout, but the bombings will strengthen those who want to isolate Kurdistan physically and politically from the rest of Iraq."
Believe this man. As a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1988, Galbraith traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan to meticulously document Saddam's genocide against the Kurds at a time when the Reagan administration was denying it was even happening. The United States would be wise to heed his warnings.
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