Iraq civil war: Rumors and reality
atimes.com
By Ritt Goldstein
As cracks appear in the Bush administration's campaign to portray Iraqi setbacks as the work of foreign terrorists and al-Qaeda, Iraq's homegrown factional fault lines are becoming increasingly evident. Repeated calls for direct elections by Iraq's majority Shi'ites have in effect pushed a succession of US plans and deadlines into the wastebin, with the United Nations issuing repeated cautions against a descent into civil war.
Amid the exponentially expanding US reports of al-Qaeda and foreign-terrorist action in Iraq, the US-led coalition's failures in addressing domestic Iraqi pressures in the war's aftermath have made potential civil war a stark reality. Despite Washington's spin, domestic Iraqi lines have been drawn both along factional borders and between those who are Islamic and secular. The potential for conflict is abundant.
In an interview with this journalist last October, a then recently retired former senior-level Pentagon staffer, Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, revealed what is now becoming increasingly evident of postwar planning. Kwiatkowski warned that in the months immediately preceding the Iraq invasion, the "focus was entirely on leading us to war, not its aftermath".
Highlighting what this lack of foresight has meant, UN envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi said: "I have appealed to the members of the [Iraqi] Governing Council and to Iraqis in every part of Iraq to be conscious that civil wars do not happen because a person makes a decision, 'Today, I'm going to start a civil war.'" And in a real sense, if a civil war does break out, it will be Iraq's second in about 13 years.
After Saddam Hussein's defeat by US-led forces in the first Gulf War in 1991, Shi'ites and Kurds rose against Saddam and the Sunni Ba'ath Party's domination. Both groups were badly defeated when the United States failed to intervene on their behalf, unresolved questions of a US betrayal being subsequently raised.
In the wake of the present Iraq war, the Sunnis - who have dominated Iraqi politics since the Ottoman Empire despite being numerically smaller than the Shi'ites - find their status threatened by the substantive and growing power of both the Kurds and the Shi'ites. And in the ongoing jockeying for position and power, both Shi'ites and Sunnis have chafed at Kurdish demands for oil-rich Kirkuk and effective autonomy, a Kurdish mini-state of their own (perhaps even outside a federal Iraq) carved from the country's north.
As factional assassinations and bombings punctuate the jagged edges of Iraq's internal rivalries, the administration of US President George W Bush has worked to paint these internal conflicts as externally driven, particularly seizing on al-Qaeda as its designated whipping boy. But contradictions abound.
Highlighting this ongoing scenario, the Associated Press quoted Gareth Stansfield of the United Kingdom's Exeter University Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies as observing: "The potential for civil war is already in place ... it does not need al-Qaeda to encourage it." Illustrating the all too real minefield surrounding direct elections and the adamant Shi'ite (60 percent of Iraqis) calls for them, Stansfield warned: "It flies in the face of Iraq's history of the past 80 years to imagine that the Sunnis will accept Shi'ite domination or allow them to rule."
After the 1991 Gulf War, it emerged that Saddam was allowed to retain power out of fears that removing him would plunge Iraq into prolonged civil war and/or transform the nation into an Iran-like republic. Notably, the Iraqi Shi'ite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has stated that he does not seek Iraq's transformation to an Iranian-type state.
The grand ayatollah's pronouncement came last month during a meeting convened at his home in Najaf. Representatives from both the Sunni and Kurdish communities were in attendance. The gathering was set off by Sunni and Kurdish concerns over Shi'ite direct-election demands, and the increasing militancy within Iraq's three factions being fanned by them.
It is expected that in a direct election the Shi'ites would gain a controlling majority in Iraq's legislature. And in the rough game of Iraqi politics, a Sunni cleric was gunned down this past week after his influential half-brother cautioned against quick elections.
Iraq is an artificially created state, formed by the British from three Ottoman provinces after World War I. During the long period when the US supported Saddam, a favored rationale was that it took such leadership as his to hold the country together. As with Yugoslavia, now that the strongman is gone, the potential for civil war has risen, floating as an abhorrent specter above the nation's future.
One aspect of the Bush administration's response has been in essence to deny the latent factional forces that the war surfaced, concurrently working to legitimize the war itself via accusations against non-Iraqi "terror groups". Another has been simultaneously pursuing the creation of the necessary Iraqi political and security apparatus to best ensure the administration's agenda. But even with the present US-chosen Iraqi leadership, key features of the US-sponsored November plan for Iraqi sovereignty have gone awry.
Kurdish autonomy and border questions have reportedly plagued efforts at drafting an interim constitution. Of more concern, last Wednesday, a Kurdish grassroots body, Referendum Movement, presented US and Iraqi leaders with a 1.7-million-signature petition for a referendum on transforming the Kurdish enclave into a completely independent state, outside the proposed Iraqi federal system.
In the early hours of Monday morning, Iraqi time, members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), with the US mediating, finally agreed on the draft of an interim constitution, reaching a compromise on the role of Islam and putting off the details of Kurdish autonomy. The charter is likely to be signed on Wednesday.
Last month, Sistani criticized as undemocratic the US plan for creating an interim government to receive power on June 30, the date for officially ending the US occupation. He initiated the calls for direct elections, in effect killing the caucus system the US had designed.
The Shi'ites have also raised concerns that the US is "stalling" their enfranchisement. The grand ayatollah is reportedly willing to negotiate elections by the year's end, but only in exchange for UN guarantees, as well as limitations on the power of the government existing prior to then. And with Sunnis alone forming the vast bulk of Iraqi resistance, the Bush administration can ill afford a showdown with the Shi'ites, and the expansion of armed resistance that would mean.
Accentuating just such a possibility, Sistani has threatened to launch an intifada (uprising) against the US should Shi'ite wishes be ignored. Muqtada al-Sadr, said to be Iraq's second-most-influential Shi'ite leader, also threatened intifada, and expressed outrage at US efforts to secularize Iraq's proposed constitution.
The US has threatened to veto Islamic law as the constitution's basis, responding to a proposal advanced by Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, a Sunni. Abdel-Hamid is the current IGC president, and his proposal met with support from Sistani.
In terms of the interim constitution, Islam will be recognized as "a major source" of legislation and any laws that violate the tenets of the Muslim faith will be banned. US officials and secular-minded members got their way with the phrase "a source" - out of many sources - but the ban on laws that violate Islam was aimed at pleasing conservatives.
Nevertheless, the Islamic-law issue highlights the existing divide between Islamic and secular forces within the country, cutting across factional boundaries. And it presents another brittle fault line that violence has already cracked, particularly as regards intra-Kurdish strife.
As it weighs its options and seeks a UN formula that will defuse the political standoffs, the Bush administration has concentrated on both legitimizing the war and insulating itself from the potential fallout should civil war occur. Accusations against foreign terrorists, al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have risen in virtually direct proportion to US setbacks. Particularly noteworthy is a letter that surfaced last month that was allegedly written by Zarqawi, a Jordanian, to al-Qaeda.
According to US sources, Zarqawi allegedly leads Ansar al-Islam, a group that "clearly is supported to some degree by al-Qaeda", said US General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Describing Zarqawi, the US State Department says he is "a close associate of Osama bin Laden". But also according to official US sources, Zarqawi's relationship to bin Laden is "uncertain", and he instead leads a Jordanian extremist group, al-Tawhid. And most notably, a recent report by the intelligence branch of the US Department of State stressed that al-Qaeda and Ansar appear quite unrelated and independent of each other, though last Thursday media reports by US officials have again claimed the contrary. But while contradictions abound, the killing has continued, with speculation existing that the Iraq war's hawks are manipulating its description for their own purposes, Zarqawi's alleged letter providing an example.
In the alleged letter to al-Qaeda, Zarqawi invites the group to Iraq in hopes of initiating a sequence of attacks which will set off civil war. However, US officials have long claimed that al-Qaeda is already in Iraq. This past week, US civil administrator L Paul Bremer charged that the last several months have marked an upsurge of Iraqi attacks by "the professional terrorists of al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam".
Of course, a most curious thing is that if indeed al-Qaeda is in the country, why did it need to be invited to Iraq by Zarqawi? And the US military does claim the alleged letter is authentic. But such "confusion" has been evident since US Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN address of a year ago.
At that time, in an attempt to win UN backing for the Iraq invasion, Powell told the UN of a "much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network ... a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden". Powell also said that Ansar "offered al-Qaeda safe haven in the region" in 2000. And Powell also claimed that Iraq had a stockpile "of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent, rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent, mobile production facilities used to make biological agents" and that it provided "training in these weapons to al-Qaeda".
Powell's portrayal of Zarqawi and Ansar as Iraq's links to al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda's links to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of his effort to gain UN support. Of particular note, Powell took pains to emphasize the unquestionable accuracy of his claims, saying: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions."
By contrast, a report last June by the UN's terrorism committee found no links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and former Powell aide Greg Thielmann said in October that "the secretary of state misinformed Americans during his speech at the UN last winter". Beyond this, little needs be said regarding Iraq's missing WMD, except that allegations of al-Qaeda and terrorism distract public attention from their glaring absence.
According to the Washington-area defense think-tank Global Security, only 2.8 percent of those arrested in Iraq have been non-Iraqis. But accusations of foreign terrorists and links to al-Qaeda do serve to obscure the domestic factors driving Iraq violence - think Lebanese civil war - and in the "war on terror" they also serve to legitimize the war effort. And should civil war break out, the Bush administration has its alleged Zarqawi letter showing who's to blame.
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Ritt Goldstein is an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm. His work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's Politiken, as well as with Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.
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