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Leave the field now - the Iraqi endgame is about to
begin
By Simon Jenkins
01/01/06 "The
Times" -- -- The good news is that 2006 will see the
effective end of the western occupation of Iraq. It will end because
everyone will be exhausted: the Americans, the British, the Iraqis
and their neighbours. It will end because all justification for its
continuance will have evaporated.
The election whose result is to be declared this week is good news.
The federal constitution fashioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, the American
ambassador, is good news. The resulting coalition government will be
good news since it will put the strongest group, the cleric-backed
pro-Iranian Sciri, or Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, in effective power.
But all this good news will depend on one thing: the new government
being seen to stand on its own feet. It must have the legitimacy and
authority to forge its own alliances and hack its own deals. As long
as its land is pockmarked with fortresses stuffed with 180,000
foreign troops, such independence will be unreal. Such a government
will continue to be treated as an American puppet.
On December 22 Tony Blair paid his Christmas call on British troops
in Basra to tell them how much things were improving. This time he
said security was “completely changed” from last year. What he meant
was unclear. It was as if Gladstone had visited Gordon during the
siege of Khartoum. Did it not seem strange to Blair that he could
not move outside his walled fortress, could not drive anywhere or
talk to any Iraqis? Did he wonder why British troops have withdrawn
from two anarchic provinces? Was he really told that security is
transformed for the better? If so he is horribly deceived.
Reliable reporting from Iraq is now so dangerous that the level of
insecurity can be gleaned only from circumstantial evidence. Baghdad
outside the American green zone is now all “red zone”, off limits to
any but the most reckless foreigner. The death rate and the number
of explosions are rising. While some rural areas are relatively safe
there is no such thing as national security. Iraq’s borders are
porous. Crime is uncontrolled. The concept of an “occupying power”
is near meaningless.
The Americans cannot even protect the lawyers at Saddam’s trial, two
of whom have been killed. Iraqis are meeting violent death in
greater numbers probably than at any time since the Shi’ite
massacres of 1991. Professionals are being driven into exile,
children are kidnapped, women are forced indoors or shot for being
improperly dressed. Those Britons who preen themselves for “bringing
democracy to Iraq” would not dare visit the place. They have brought
three elections, but elections without security do not equal
democracy.
This is no time to rehearse the self-delusion, vainglory, ineptitude
and cruelty of this venture. The only sensible debate is how to help
Iraq back on its feet after this bungled attempt to “defeat
terrorism” in the region. It will not be easy. It requires the
victorious Shi’ite leaders to respect a devolution of power and
money to the Kurdish and the Sunni minorities, as ordained by the
federal settlement in Khalilzad’s constitution. Local Sunni and
Shi’ite power brokers must fix the boundaries of their domains and
the spoils that go with them. Such deals are crucial to a future
Iraq. The alternatives are tyranny or separatism, probably both.
Such a settlement will have traction only if negotiated notunder
American guns but by plenipotentiary ministers and provincial
chiefs. Already such ministers depend for support and protection not
on a national army or police force but on private militias and
mercenaries. These include those of the interior minister, Bayan
Jabr, allegedly responsible for reviving Saddam’s killing squads and
torture chambers. Governors, mayors and police chiefs depend for
their authority on cutting deals with gangs and militias. This, not
the occupation, is the fact of power in Iraq.
In reality the occupation cut and ran from Iraq in the course of
2004. This was when the Americans and their allies abandoned the
policing of towns and cities and retreated bruised to more than 100
fortified bases. This is not like the Vietnam war, when American
soldiers could move round Saigon at will. The bases are like
crusader castles dotting a hostile Levant. Movement between them
must be by air or heavily armoured convoy. Ferocious
search-and-destroy sallies by the US Marines do not project power,
only death and resentment.
The recent Anbar operation reportedly turned local support for
Al-Qaeda from a trickle to a flood. Money is sprayed at
sub-contractors (much of it stolen), but America exerts no executive
power outside the capital. It imposes no law and order and cannot
even protect infrastructure. This is not an occupation. It is a
military squat.
The question for Tony Blair and George Bush is almost irrelevant to
Iraq. It is how can the squatters leave with enough dignity to pass
muster back home and not seem like weakness abroad? How can it be
staged to fit in with Bush’s mid-term elections and Blair’s legacy
agenda? The policy stance in both Washington and London is of
withdrawal “as soon as the security situation permits”. Hence
presumably Blair’s insistence that security is getting better. Since
it is not getting better he must be saying it as cover for
withdrawal.
The exit strategy at present relies on there being a fixed moment
when the Iraqi army will pass some notional Sandhurst test. It will
be “ready to take on the insurgents” and thus “prevent civil war”.
Such talk has long brought comfort to the armchairs of Pall Mall.
Thus was the Indian army to keep the Empire intact. Thus were Diem’s
soldiers to take on the Vietcong and Moscow’s surrogates to defeat
the Taliban. The concept of locals being “almost ready” to replace
our boys has long appealed to the imperial imagination.
Having recently visited the Iraq army I can attest to the courage of
its officers and the commitment of its instructors. But I was
constantly being taken aside and told that it was inconceivable that
these soldiers would obey an order from a partisan minister in
Baghdad to advance against distant militias except under American
protection. That was even assuming that the constitution allowed
them to do so, which it probably does not. Only the Kurdish
peshmergas would happily fight Sunnis or Shi’ites, and that would
not be a good idea. As for the police, the basis of law and order,
they are a long-lost cause.
Treating the Iraqi army as the cement that will glue together a new
Iraq is unreal. Some Baghdad units might form a new Republican Guard
were a strongman to emerge from the forthcoming coalition haggle.
But if the most devastating American firepower cannot find, let
alone suppress, Al-Qaeda’s Musab al-Zarqawi, what hope is there for
an Iraqi army? Zarqawi will be suppressed if and only if the Sunni
militias take it upon themselves to do so. That must await the end
of the occupation. The same goes for the pro-Iranian hotheads in the
south.
The operative word is await. All Iraq is waiting. Civil strife is
appalling because the militias, gangs and police operate under no
political authority and with an army supposedly being prepared to
fight them. The idea that American or British withdrawal would “lead
to civil war” suggests that Iraq is like Yugoslavia. It is not.
Since the foreign troops spend most of their time in bases they have
no role in policing Iraq’s communal strife. Their departure would
rather end what Iraqis regard as a humiliation and remove a
recruiting sergeant and target for the insurgency.
The next stage in Iraq is no longer within the capacity of America
or Britain to determine. All they can do is postpone it. The country
is about to acquire its third government in as many years. Left to
its own devices this government might just find enough authority to
hold its country together. Imprisoned in its green zone castle as a
puppet of the Pentagon, it will certainly not. That is why
withdrawal needs a date, and an early one.
I was told by a senior security official last month that the Iraq
experience had been so ghastly that at least no British government
would do anything like it “for a very long time indeed”. Funny, I
thought. Why are 4,000 British troops leaving to fight the Taliban
in southern Afghanistan, whence even the Americans have fled? Nobody
can give me an answer.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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