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Last Updated: Oct 7, 2008 - 8:20:22 AM |
If so, it is a strange victory.
Shiite religious parties that are Iran's closest allies in the Middle
East control Iraq's central government and the country's oil-rich
south. A Sunni militia, known as the Awakening, dominates Iraq's Sunni
center. It is led by Baathists, the very people we invaded Iraq in 2003
to remove from power. While the US sees the Awakening as key to
defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq, Iraq's Shiite government views it as a
mortal enemy and has issued arrest warrants for many of its members.
Meanwhile the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that brought stability to parts
of Iraq is crumbling. The two sides confronted each other militarily
after the Iraqi army entered the Kurdish-administered town of Khanaqin
in early September.
John McCain has staked his presidential candidacy on his early advocacy
of sending more troops to Iraq. He says he is for victory while Barack
Obama is for surrender; and polls suggest that voters trust McCain more
on Iraq than they do Obama. In 2006, dissatisfaction with the Iraq war
ended Republican control of both the House of Representatives and the
Senate. This year, in spite of being burdened with the gravest
financial crisis since 1929 and the most unpopular president since the
advent of polling, the Republican presidential nominee is running a
competitive race.
The US sent more troops into Iraq in 2007 and violence has declined
sharply in Anbar, Baghdad, and many other parts of the country.
Sectarian killings in Baghdad are a fraction of what they were in 2006,
although that city remains one of the world's most dangerous places. In
recent months, US casualties have been at their lowest level of the
entire war. While it is debatable how much of this is the result of the
"surge" in US troop strength, as opposed to other factors, the decline
in violence is obviously a welcome development.
Less violence, however, is not the same thing as success. The United
States did not go to war in Iraq for the purpose of ending violence
between contending sectarian forces. Success has to be measured against
US objectives. John McCain proclaims his goal to be victory and says we
are now winning in Iraq (a victory that will, of course, be lost if his
allegedly pro-surrender opponent wins). He considers victory to be an
Iraq that is "a democratic ally." George W. Bush has defined victory as
a unified, democratic, and stable Iraq. Neither man has explained how
he will transform Iraq's ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish
Iran's vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and Sunnis to
Iraq's new order. Remarkably, neither the Democrats nor the press has
challenged them to do so.
In January 2007, President Bush announced that he was sending 25,000
additional troops to Baghdad and Anbar province. Under a military
strategy devised by the newly appointed Iraq commander, General David
Petraeus, US troops moved out of their secure bases and embedded
themselves among the population. The forces of the surge were intended
to provide sufficient protection to the local population so that they
would cooperate with the Iraqi army and police and US troops fighting
insurgents and subversive Shiite militias. By living with their Iraqi
counterparts, the US troops could provide training, advice, and
confidence, making the Iraqi forces more capable.
Politically, the surge was intended to provide a breathing space for
Iraq's diverse factions to come together on a program of national
reconciliation. This was to include revision of a law excluding
Baathists from public service, new provincial elections so that Sunnis
might be fully represented on the local level, a law for the equitable
sharing of oil revenues, and revisions of the Iraqi constitution to
create a more powerful central government. Except for a flawed law on
de-Baathification, these goals have not been achieved, although the
parliament recently passed a law to allow elections in parts of the
country. Militarily, however, the surge worked as General Petraeus
intended. In Baghdad and other places wracked by sectarian violence,
Sunnis and Shiites welcomed the increased presence of US troops.
The surge, however, has not been the main reason for the decline in
violence. In 2006, Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar decided that al-Qaeda
and like-minded Islamic fundamentalist fighters were a greater threat
than the Americans. The fundamentalists were a direct challenge to the
local establishment, assassinating sheikhs and raping their daughters
(sometimes under the pretext of forced marriage to jihadis). More
importantly, the tribal leaders came to realize that the Americans
would sooner or later want to leave while the fundamentalists intended
to stay and rule. The tribal leaders obtained American money to create
their own militias and, in a brief period of time, forced al-Qaeda and
its allies out of most of Sunni Iraq. Denied their base in Sunni areas,
the fundamentalists have been less able to stage the spectacular
attacks on Shiites that helped fuel Iraq's Sunni-Shiite civil war.
Meanwhile, the radical Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr responded to the
increased US military deployments by ordering his militia, the Mahdi
Army, to stand down. At the time, this seemed like a sensible tactical
approach. He, too, realized that the US presence-in particular the
surge in troop numbers-was a temporary phenomenon. By not fighting the
Americans, he could wait out the surge, recall his troops, and
eventually resume battle with the Sunnis and rival Shiite factions.
Al-Sadr's Shiite rivals, however, outfoxed him. In 2006, the support of
al-Sadr's parliamentarians enabled Nouri al-Maliki to win the
nomination of the Shiite caucus to be prime minister by one vote over
Adel Abdul Mehdi, the candidate of Iraq's largest Shiite party, the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In 2008,
however, al-Maliki broke his connection to al-Sadr and aligned himself
with SCIRI (since renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC).
In March, he used the Iraqi army, a Shiite-dominated institution built
around the SIIC's militia, the Badr Corps, to oust the Mahdi Army from
much of Basra. Subsequently, the Iraqi army and police have made
inroads against the Madhi Army in its stronghold in Sadr City,
Baghdad's sprawling Shiite slum.
Al-Maliki launched the Basra operation without first telling the
Americans, and when the Iraqi forces ran into difficulty, he had to ask
for American support. Once it became clear that the government and the
Americans were bringing substantial resources to both the Basra and
Baghdad campaigns, the Mahdi Army chose to negotiate a halt in the
fighting rather than engage in full-scale combat.
Thus in 2007 and 2008, both the Sunnis and the Shiites fought civil
wars within their communities. Among the Sunnis, the Awakening emerged
as the decisive victor over al-Qaeda and the other fundamentalists.
Among the Shiites, the ruling Shiite political parties have undercut
Moqtada al-Sadr politically and diminished the Mahdi Army militarily.
But al-Sadr has not been defeated and has significant residual support.
In both the Shiite and Sunni communities, relative "moderates" have
emerged from the intracommunal fighting. This is one key factor in the
reduced violence. The Sunni Awakening does not use car bombs against
Shiite pilgrims and it has diminished al-Qaeda's ability to do so. The
SCIRI-controlled Iraqi Interior Ministry had run its own death squads
targeting Sunnis, but they were not as murderous and cruel as the death
squads of al-Sadr. The surge had little to do with Sunnis turning
against al-Qaeda (although US funds were critical) but it did have a
part in undermining the Mahdi Army.
Although the Bush administration would never say so, it has in effect
adopted the decentralization strategy long advocated by Senator Joseph
Biden and now also supported by Senator Obama. Biden's plan would
devolve almost all central government functions-including security-to
Sunni or Shiite regions with powers similar to those now exercised by
Kurdistan. Until late
2006, the Bush administration tried to defeat al-Qaeda with a US-backed
Shiite- dominated Iraqi army. The approach failed and the US Marines
even concluded that Anbar, Iraq's largest Sunni province, was lost to
al-Qaeda. While the Sunnis have yet to set up a region (as allowed by
Iraq's constitution), they now have, in the Awakening, a
Sunni-commanded army. And it has defeated al-Qaeda.
In July, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki interjected himself into the US
presidential campaign, telling the German magazine Der Spiegel that "US
presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about sixteen months. That,
we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the
possibility of slight changes." Al-Maliki's endorsement of the main
plank of Obama's Iraq plan undercut both President Bush and Senator
McCain. The US embassy prevailed on al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali
al-Dabbagh, to say that Der Spiegel had mistranslated his boss.
Al-Dabbagh, however, wouldn't issue the statement himself, so it was
put out by CENTCOM in his name. A few days later, al-Maliki met the
visiting Senator Obama and again endorsed his deadline. This time
al-Dabbagh explained that al-Maliki meant it.
Some conservative commentators suggested that al-Maliki had decided
Obama was going to win and wanted to have good relations with the next
US president. Others suggested that al-Maliki was playing to Iraqi
public opinion and didn't mean what he said. Bush loyalists grumbled
that al-Maliki was an ingrate.
Few grasped the most obvious explanation: Nouri al-Maliki wants US
troops out of Iraq. He leads a Shiite coalition comprised of religious
parties, including his own Dawa party, which is committed to making
Iraq into a Shiite Islamic state. Like his coalition partners,
al-Maliki views Iraq's Sunnis with deep-and justifiable-suspicion. For
four years after Saddam's fall, Iraqi Sunnis supported an insurgency
that branded Shiites as apostates deserving death. Now the Sunnis have
thrown their support behind the Awakening, which is portrayed by
American politicians, including Senator McCain, as a group of patriotic
Iraqis engaged in the fight against al-Qaeda. Iraq's Shiite leaders see
the Awakening as a Baathist-led organization that rejects Iraq's new
Shiite-led order-an accurate description.
Until 2007, the Americans fought alongside the Shiite-led Iraqi army
against the Sunni fundamentalists. The Shiites were more than happy to
have the Americans do much of their fighting for them. When the US
created and began to finance the Sunni Awakening in 2007, the Shiite
perspective on the American presence shifted. Now the United States was
backing a military force deeply hostile to Shiite rule. Al-Qaeda
could-and did-kill thousands of Shiites but it was no threat to Shiite
rule per se. It was a shadowy terrorist organization operating with
small cells and unable to mobilize or concentrate large forces.
Further, both the US and Iran, the two most important external powers
in the Iraqi equation, were certain to support the Shiites against
al-Qaeda.
With some 100,000 men under arms, the Awakening is, at least
potentially, a strong military force in its own right. Its leaders are
not only ideologically linked to Saddam's anti-Shiite Baath regime, but
many served in Saddam's army. And most importantly from a Shiite
perspective, the Awakening has powerful outside support-from the United
States. Al-Qaeda could never take over Iraq, but the Awakening might-or
at least so Iraq's Shiite government fears.
Since the US created the Awakening, its goal has been to integrate the
Sunni militiamen into Iraq's armed forces. Al-Maliki's government has
repeatedly promised the Bush administration that it would do so, and
then reneged.
(Iraqis learned in the early days of the occupation that President Bush
and his team were readily satisfied with promises, regardless of
whether any actions followed.) At the end of 2007, General Jim Huggins,
who oversaw the Iraqi police in the Sunni belt south of Baghdad,
submitted three thousand names-most from the Awakening but also
including a few hundred Shiites-to the Iraqi government for
incorporation into the security forces. Four hundred were accepted. All
were Shiites. As of October 1, the Iraqi government is supposed to take
over responsibility for the 54,000 Awakening militiamen in Baghdad,
including paying their salaries. By all accounts, the militiamen are
deeply skeptical that this will happen, as apparently are their
American sponsors. US commanders have been reassuring the Awakening
that the US will not abandon them.
As many as one half the members of the Awakening have been insurgents
or insurgent sympathizers. While the Sunni militiamen can gain tactical
advantage by joining the Iraqi army and police, they are no less
hostile to the Shiite-led Iraqi government than when they were planting
roadside bombs, ambushing government forces, and executing kidnapped
Iraqi army recruits and police. The Shiites understand this and so,
apparently, do some of the Americans. As General Huggins told USA
Today, if the Sunnis "aren't pulled into the Iraqi security forces,
then we have to wonder if we're just arming the next Sunni resistance."
>From 2003 until 2007, the Bush administration helped Iraq's most
pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties take and consolidate power.
Naturally, the Shiites-and their Iranian backers-welcomed the US
involvement, at least temporarily. Now the United States is putting
heavier pressure on al-Maliki to include the Sunni enemy in Iraq's
security forces. It has created a Sunni army that, as long as the US
remains in Iraq, can only grow in strength. Al-Maliki and his allies
want the US out of Iraq because the American presence has become
dangerous.
Without American troops, the Iraqi army and police would be able to
move against the Awakening. Should Sunni forces prove too powerful,
Iran is always available to help.
In early September, al-Maliki sent Iraqi troops into Khanaqin, a dusty
Kurdish town on the Iranian border northeast of Baghdad. While
technically not part of the Kurdistan Region, the Kurdistan Regional
Government has administered Khanaqin since 2003. The forces of the
Kurdish Peshmerga army, who liberated the town from Saddam that April,
have provided security. It is widely expected that Khanaqin will
formally be incorporated into the Kurdistan Region as part of the
process specified in Article 140 of Iraq's constitution for determining
Kurdistan's borders. By sending Arab troops to Khanaqin, al-Maliki
deliberately picked a fight with the Kurds, who have been the Shiites'
partner in governing Iraq since 2003.
Iraq's Kurds have had a very large part in post-Saddam Iraq. Iraq's
president, deputy prime minister, foreign minister, and army chief are
all Kurds. The Peshmerga fought on the US side in the 2003 war and is
the one indigenous Iraqi force that is reliably pro-American. Iraqi
Kurds are secular, democratic, and pro-Western. Both militarily and
politically, they have supported US policy, even when they have had
reservations about its wisdom.
In recent months, al-Maliki has tried to marginalize the Kurds. In
ordering troops to Khanaqin, he did not consult Jalal Talabani, Iraq's
Kurdish president, and he did not involve General Babakir Zebari, the
Kurd who supposedly heads Iraq's army. In order to bypass Hoshyar
Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister, al-Maliki has appointed his
own "special envoys."
President Talabani, who was in the US for medical treatment at the
time, helped defuse the Khanaqin crisis by persuading both the
Peshmerga and the Iraqi army to withdraw. But the incident has been
seen by the Kurds as a danger sign. When Iraq's defense minister
proposed acquiring American F-16s for the Iraqi air force, Iraq's
neighbors-including Iran and Kuwait-said nothing. But the Kurdish
deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament strongly protested, expressing
fear that the planes' most likely target would be Kurdistan. As a
condition of the proposed US-Iraq security agreement, the Kurds want
assurances that the Iraqi army will not be used in Kurdistan.
The surge was intended to buy time for political reconciliation. In
January, Iraq's parliament revised the country's de-Baathification law,
thus meeting a long-standing US demand. While the new law restored the
rights of some former Baathists, however, it imposed an entirely new
set of exclusions on Baathists in so-called sensitive ministries.
Iraq's Sunni parliamentarians mostly opposed the law, which was
supposed to help them. The Sunnis had demanded early provincial
elections since they had boycotted the previous local elections in 2005
and were largely unrepresented on the provincial councils, even in
Sunni areas. The Shiite-dominated parliament inserted a poison pill
into the election law, a provision that would invalidate the "one man,
one vote" principle in the Kirkuk Governorate-the administrative unit
that includes the major city of Kirkuk on the Kurdistan border-in favor
of a system of equal representation for each of Kirkuk's three
communities: Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen. Naturally, the Kurds, who are a
majority both in the Governorate and on the Governorate Council,
opposed a system that would give their foes two thirds of council
seats.
Talabani vetoed the entire bill and as a result the Kurds were blamed
for blocking national elections that the Shiites and some Sunnis also
did not want to hold. (The SIIC was afraid it might lose some
Governorates it now controls, including Baghdad, to Moqtada al-Sadr,
while some Sunni parliamentarians feared the Awakening's electoral
strength would underscore the fact that they do not represent the Sunni
community.) Recently, the parliament passed a law to allow elections in
2009 in Sunni and Shiite Iraq, but not in Kirkuk or Kurdistan. The
maneuverings left the Kurds politically isolated while, as a bonus to
the Shiite ruling parties, providing more time for them to deal with
al-Sadr. The Shiites are also pursuing changes in Iraq's constitution
that would strengthen the central government at the expense of
Kurdistan, knowing full well that these changes will be rejected by the
Kurds.
Al-Maliki's agenda is transparent. The Kurds and Sunnis are obstacles
to the ruling coalition's ambitions for a Shiite Islamic state.
Al-Maliki wants to eliminate the Sunni militia and contain the Kurds
politically and geographically. America's interest in defeating
al-Qaeda is far less important to him than the Shiite interest in not
having a powerful Sunni military that could overthrow Iraq's new Shiite
order. The Kurds are too secular, too Western, and too pro-American for
the Shiites to share power comfortably with them.
This should not be a surprise. Iran, not the US, is the most important
ally of Iraq's ruling Shiite political parties. The largest party in
al-Maliki's coalition is the SIIC, which was founded by the Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran in 1982. By all accounts, Iran wields enormous
influence within Iraq's ruling Shiite coalition and has an effective
veto over Iraqi security policies. In 2005, Iran intervened in Iraq's
constitutional deliberations to undo a Shiite-Kurdish agreement on
Kurdistan's powers, only to relent after Kurdistan President Massoud
Barzani made clear that there would be no constitution without the
deal; many Iraqis have told me that one reason that the US and Iraq
have been unable to agree on a new security arrangement is that Iran
opposes anything of the kind.
Nor is al-Maliki a Western-style democrat, in spite of President Bush's
attempts to portray him as just that. Rather, he is a Shiite militant
from the hard-line Dawa Party. Before returning to Iraq in 2003, he had
spent more than twenty years in exile in Iran and Syria. As late as
2002, State Department officials sought to exclude Dawa from a
US-sponsored Iraqi opposition conference because of Dawa's historical
links to terrorism, including a 1983 suicide bomb attack on the US
embassy in Kuwait. (There is no basis for linking al-Maliki or other
mainstream Dawa leaders to that attack.)
Al-Maliki is an accidental prime minister, having secured the job only
after internecine Shiite rivalries (and Kurdish opposition) derailed
more prominent candidates. The Bush administration knew so little about
him that it initially had his first name wrong. He had never been
considered important enough to meet the many senior US officials
traipsing to Baghdad. But President Bush has embraced him as the
embodiment of American values and goals in Iraq.
John McCain says that partly because of his persistent support of the
surge, we are now winning the Iraq war. He defines victory as an Iraq
that is a democratic ally. Yet he advocates continued US military
support to an Iraqi government led by Shiite religious parties
committed to the establishment of an Islamic republic. He takes a
harder line on Iran than President Bush, but supports Iraqi factions
that are Iran's closest allies in the Middle East. He praises the
Awakening and but seems not to have realized that the Iraqi government
is intent on crushing it. He has denounced the Obama-Biden plan for a
decentralized state but has said nothing about how he would protect
Iraq's Kurds, the only committed American allies in the country.
George W. Bush has put the United States on the side of undemocratic
Iraqis who are Iran's allies. John McCain would continue the same
approach. It is hard to understand how this can be called a success-or
a path to victory.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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