U.S. handing over an unfulfilled Iraq
Occupation falls far short of goals
chicagotribune.com
By Evan Osnos, Alex Rodriguez and Aamer Madhani, Tribune staff reporters
Published June 27, 2004
BAGHDAD -- The Iraq that the United States discovered when it invaded last year was more lawless, dilapidated and hostile than war planners predicted. So is the nation that the U.S. is handing back to Iraqis.
Sovereignty is scheduled to return to Iraqis on Wednesday with few sounds of construction in Baghdad streets and no cranes on the skyline. The national electricity system flickers well short of U.S. goals, forcing meetings to be scheduled in the mornings for fear of afternoon blackouts. Insurgents battle Iraq's ill-equipped security services while assassins stalk fledgling democratic councils.
"It's the Iraqi people who lost," said the Harvard-trained minister of public works, Nasreen Mustapha Berwari, an early proponent of the war who has since survived two assassination attempts.
"We could have saved a lot of lives. We could have generated a lot of support. But it was what we did after [the Saddam Hussein regime fell] that made us lose the public support."
On Wednesday, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority officially dissolves, ending the political occupation and handing power to an interim government. The CPA leaves notable signs of success: Thousands of newly repaired schools are full and functioning, a new currency without Hussein's face is strengthening by the day, and newly acquired cars fill the streets.
But in many other areas, violence, bureaucratic delays and faulty prewar predictions have slowed progress. That mixed record forms the fragile foundation on which the new Iraqi government must seek to soothe an angry populace and avert more bloodshed.
"We palpably failed to achieve the aims of providing for the fairly expeditious reconstruction of the country and for a climate where democracy could emerge," said Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who advised the occupation on building democracy. "There has been a tremendous shortfall in virtually every aspect of physical and economic reconstruction."
Equipment problems
Near the eve of the return of Iraqi sovereignty, the officers of al-Khadra police station have more urgent matters on their minds.
Their 30-year-old Kalashnikov rifles routinely jam. When one officer test-fired a bullet into a coalition-issued bulletproof vest, the bullet went straight through. There are only 10 of those vests for the 130-member unit.
And they have other reasons to worry. Since October, insurgents have launched three major offensives against the station in west central Baghdad.
Behind Iraq's security crisis lies the story of how the U.S.-led coalition found itself scrambling to build a military and police apparatus. It is an essential gap between planning and execution that U.S. commanders believe has permitted the insurgency to persist at the cost of American and Iraqi lives.
"We just haven't been able to move fast enough" to equip them, said Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq.
"Look at how long it was from the time the U.S. Congress authorized and appropriated the supplemental [spending bill] and where we are today--and that's all bureaucratic. It's really frustrating because you know that Iraqi and U.S. and coalition soldiers have been killed because we have a very slow process."
Metz was referring to the spending bill signed by President Bush in November that set aside $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The shortfall's origins lie in what analysts regard as a catastrophic miscalculation by the coalition: the decision to dismantle the Iraqi army after Baghdad's fall. That decision, coupled with the coalition's underestimation of the potential for insurgency, helped set the stage for a security crisis that hampered reconstruction projects and undermined the coalition's credibility with average Iraqis.
Slow to understand
"We spent a year discovering that the insurgency problem was real," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We did not take it seriously. And to not create an Iraqi security force from the start, these were the key problems."
After toppling Hussein, the coalition envisioned an Iraqi army of 30,000 existing soldiers that would help with security while performing road construction and other infrastructure repairs. But barely a month after the fall of Baghdad, coalition administrator Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq and abruptly reversed the plan. He set out to rebuild an Iraqi army from scratch.
Bremer argued that members of Hussein's Baath Party had to be expunged. The decision also reflected reality: Military bases had been ransacked and soldiers had gone home with whatever arms and equipment they could carry.
Instead of seeking to bring back the soldiers, Bremer dissolved the Iraqi armed forces in what became "the most controversial and arguably the most ill-advised CPA decision" of the crucial early weeks, the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research group that focuses on global conflict, wrote last fall.
Since then, the coalition has been trying to train and equip a new Iraqi army and a national guard that it hopes can eventually defend against external and internal threats. As conditions worsened, the coalition also has permitted some former Baathists back into the military to restore expertise and struck a deal that has allowed former Iraqi army generals to take control of Fallujah.
The results are mixed. Iraqi security forces now number 226,000. But the army has only 7,100 members, 80 percent short of the goal of 35,000. That mark won't be reached until early 2005, said Fred Smith, a coalition official who advises the Iraqi Defense Ministry.
Many members of Iraqi security forces have received little or no training, according to figures gathered by Cordesman. Only 255 of Iraq's 20,000 border guards have formally trained. Seven out of 10 Iraqi police have had no training at all.
Desertions have riddled both the army and national guard. In April, when coalition forces called on Iraqi Civil Defense Corps troops to put down an uprising in the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah, half stationed there quit.
"They are still at the start," Cordesman said, "not the finish."
The scale of the challenge facing Iraqi security forces was all too clear last Thursday, when insurgents unleashed coordinated car bombings and attacks in six Iraqi cities that killed 100 people and wounded 320. The attacks appeared to be directed at Iraqi police. Eleven police stations in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqouba, Ramadi and Mahaweel were targeted with everything from small-arms fire to car bombs.
Indeed, for most Iraqi police, fighting crime takes a back seat to staying alive.
At al-Khadra station, the last major attack occurred earlier this month when insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at the station and officers fought back with the only weapons they had--their 30-year-old rifles.
"They tried to get into the police station, but we fought them off," said a police officer who gave only his first name, Abbas.
Many officers believe the $275 a month pay isn't worth the risk and have quit. Al-Khadra police Capt. Ahmed Hamid was deeply affected by the deaths of two close friends who were police officers--both shot by insurgents.
"I'm thinking of quitting," Hamid said. "Not for myself, but for my family."
Iraqi police also lack the basics of evidence-gathering: fingerprinting equipment, cameras and surveillance gear.
The result?
"Our investigation can never be a proper investigation," said Iraqi police Maj. Bassem Mohammed Khaled, "because we don't have this kind of equipment, and we are no longer allowed to beat criminals."
The unmistakable symbols of Iraq's economic woes are four towering smokestacks along the Tigris River, rising out of the hulking al Doura power plant. Not a single curl of smoke has wafted from them in several days.
The plant can produce 680 megawatts of power. It is producing zero.
"Everyone knows there's no smoke coming out of the smokestacks, so everyone knows the condition is not good," said Bashir Khalaf, the plant's director. "People in the streets always ask, `Why is there no smoke?'"
The answer is a tangle of explanations that point to a single conclusion: 13 months after Bremer said electricity would be a barometer of Iraqi progress, the network is hobbled by equipment failures and sabotage. Lack of power remains among the chief complaints about life after Hussein.
In a country where summer temperatures rise to 120 degrees, electricity is more than a luxury. Without air conditioners, a summer day in Baghdad becomes a reminder of what is absent. And without power to rev up Iraq's factories and plants, thousands of jobless people become restless, angry and violent.
Coalition officials set out to repair and rebuild the country's electricity infrastructure and generate 6,000 megawatts by June 1. They have instead averaged about 4,300 megawatts in recent weeks. On Friday, officials said the system had peaked at 4,900 megawatts June 20.
Iraqis deal with blackouts of up to 16 hours a day. According to Defense Department documents obtained by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, seven of Iraq's 18 provinces receive an average of less than eight hours of power daily. Eight provinces, including Baghdad, average 9 to 15 hours of electricity each day.
Violence at root of problem
Like so much in today's Iraq, violence is at the root of the problem. Insurgents have killed engineers, scared off others and regularly sabotaged power lines and towers. Attacks on oil pipelines cut off fuel needed to power electric turbines.
Analysts such as Bathsheba Crocker of the Center for Strategic and International Studies also suggest that war planners underestimated the daunting task of resurrecting Iraq's electrical grid, which Hussein had neglected for decades.
Coalition officials also pin much of the blame on insurgents.
"If the electricity is not running completely, much of it has to do with the infrastructure attacks," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of coalition operations, said recently. "It is an attempt on the part of the terrorists to drive a wedge between the people of Iraq and the coalition, who has spent much of their fortune, much of their treasure, much of their national taxpayers' fortune to try to bring these infrastructure online so that [Iraq] can truly achieve its economic potential."
To discuss the effects on the business community, visit the Iraqi Economy Development Center in Baghdad. There, Director Abdul Hameed al-Hilli suggests coming in the morning, when the lights are on.
"It is just more reliable to do it that way," he said. "It also saves us from embarrassment when we have an important guest."
The violence has slowed progress in recruiting investment and increasing business, Iraqi business leaders and U.S. officials say. Sabotaged pipelines shut down oil exports, which the Pentagon predicted would pay for reconstruction, for five days this month at a cost of hundreds of millions in revenue.
U.S. aid has been slow to arrive. Congress approved $18.4 billion in aid last November for work on 2,300 projects across Iraq. As of May 25, $4 billion had been allotted for specific contracts, but the progress of work remains unclear because many projects have been stalled by security concerns.
Unemployment is estimated at about 28 percent, with an additional 21.6 percent of Iraqis underemployed.
The CPA has delivered $5 million in small-business loans to stimulate growth. Some Iraqi entrepreneurs, however, say violence has stymied their hopes of finding foreign partners.
Industrial developer Zuhair Hamid says he has a plan and funding to build what would be Iraq's first modern chicken feed factory. But Hamid says his project has been held up because the Dutch company that is contracted to build the factory told him it is too dangerous to send foreign workers.
"It was important to me to be among the first back in Iraq and investing," Hamid said. "Until the situation improves, there is little we can do."
Assassinations
In a plain white office with peach trim, Iraqi democracy is sprouting under heavy guard.
As a machine gunner in an armored U.S. Humvee keeps vigil outside, the nine members of Al Wahdah Neighborhood Advisory Council hash out questions of street lighting and curb painting.
On this Thursday night they also have a grave item on the agenda. A little-known association has moved in on the block, calling itself a Free Prisoners' Group. Council Chairman Ismael Khalil Saleh went over to say hello, but one of the new residents lashed out, cursing Saleh and the council.
"He said we are all thieves, and he insulted me," Saleh said.
Officials at all levels have no choice but to take the slight seriously. From local neighborhood councils to the former national Governing Council, every layer of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi leadership has suffered assassinations. There is no definitive death toll, but some Iraqi officials estimate the figure at more than 70 killed.
That physical threat is the fundamental challenge facing the new Iraqi government. But analysts and democratization experts say it is linked to weakness in the political framework: From the outset, Iraqi representatives have served under overt U.S. authority, eroding their credibility in fellow Iraqis' eyes.
A limited number of village-level and regional councils have been elected in Iraq, but most were appointed by U.S. military leaders and later bequeathed to succeeding groups of Iraqis through carefully controlled caucuses. That process has kept many Iraqis suspicious of the new councils.
"People ask if June 30 is too soon" to transfer power amid the security problems, said David Phillips, who was a senior adviser to the U.S. State Department on democracy-building until he resigned last September. "If we had handed it over last June 30 . . . Iraqis would have seen that there was a credible political process under way, their level of resentment wouldn't be so great, and the insurgency may not have found as much support."
U.S. changes course
Iraq's political course has been veering broadly for more than a year, as the coalition has sought to appease competing interests. In the spring of 2003, Bremer pledged to hold elections and draft a permanent constitution before sovereignty was restored. But Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric objected, and in November the U.S. reversed course, calling for a temporary constitution and ultimately an appointed interim government leading up to elections next January.
Now, as Iraq returns to sovereignty, its Kurdish minority is pushing for greater guarantees of its rights and says it is being bullied by the Shiite majority and its senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
In each case, these forces are backed by powerful and well-armed militias that could challenge the interim government and threaten elections. Many Iraqis and analysts worry that ending the occupation with these militias only nominally integrated into Iraqi security forces leaves a dangerous problem unresolved.
Bremer and U.S. military commanders have pledged that armed militias will not be permitted to remain.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi announced that nine of the largest militias had agreed to be integrated into the army, police and national guard. Some militia leaders promptly disputed the extent of the deal.
With that plan in confusion, the Hoover Institution's Diamond argues that the failure to disarm the militias reflects what he considers the occupation authority's reluctance to acknowledge how seriously violence has impeded the building of democracy.
"We didn't have enough helicopters, body armor, armored cars, troops," Diamond said. "We didn't have enough of anything that mattered to do business effectively in the kind of situation that we were in."
Safety first
Iraqi officials and outside analysts are divided on whether some form of elections, however imperfect, might have delivered greater credibility than today's interim government. But all sides agree on one point: The most important ingredient in Iraq's political future is a landscape simply safe enough to hold fair and free elections.
For now, that seems a bit abstract to the Al Wahdah council. They can all recite the story of the chairman of the district council in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold in northern Baghdad, whose body was found tied to a pole with a message hung from his neck warning of such a fate for "American spies."
"Until now, there have been 56 members of these councils who have been murdered in Iraq," said council member Wijdan Michael, citing her own unofficial count. "The most recent was four days ago. The chairman of the Rosafa district and the vice chairman were killed."
Asked whether she would consider running for office in the future, Michael, an engineer and the only woman on the Al Wahdah board, hesitated.
"I don't know," she said. "The councils are a dangerous business." |
