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How George Bush
Became The New Saddam
COVER STORY: Its strategies shattered, a desperate Washington is
reaching out to the late dictator's henchmen.
By Patrick Graham
09/23/07 "Maclean's" -- 09/20/07 -- - It was embarrassing
putting my flak jacket on backwards and sideways, but in the
darkness of the Baghdad airport car park I couldn’t see
anything. “Peterik, put the flak jacket on,” the South African
security contractor was saying politely, impatiently. “You know
the procedure if we are attacked.”
I didn’t. He explained. One of the chase vehicles would pull up
beside us and someone would drag me out of the armoured car,
away from the firing. If both drivers were unconscious—nice
euphemism—he said I should try to run to the nearest army
checkpoint. If the checkpoint was American, things might work
out if they didn’t shoot first. If it was Iraqi . . . he didn’t
elaborate.
Arriving in Baghdad has always been a little weird. Under Saddam
Hussein it was like going into an orderly morgue; when he ran
off after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003 put an end to his
Baathist party regime, the city became a chaotic mess. I lived
in Iraq for almost two years, but after three years away I
wasn’t quite ready for just how deserted and worn down the place
seemed in the early evening. It was as if some kind of mildew
was slowly rotting away at the edges of things, breaking down
the city into urban compost.
Since 2003, more than 3,775 U.S. troops have been killed in
Iraq, while nearly 7,500 Iraqi policemen and soldiers have died.
For Iraq’s civilian population, the carnage has been almost
incalculable. Last year alone, the UN estimated that 34,500
civilians were killed and more than 36,000 wounded; other
estimates are much higher. As the country’s ethnic divisions
widen, especially between Iraq’s Arab Shia and Arab Sunni
Muslims (the Kurds are the third major group), some two million
people have been internally displaced, with another two million
fleeing their homeland altogether. Entering Baghdad I could tell
the Sunni neighbourhoods, ghettos really, by the blasts in the
walls and the emptiness, courtesy of sectarian cleansing by the
majority Shias. The side streets of the Shia districts seemed to
have a little more life to them.
As soon as I arrived, I tried calling old acquaintances. Many of
these were from Falluja and Ramadi, and had once been connected
to the insurgency that had raged across the Sunni Arab province
of Anbar since 2003. In the past few years, though, many in the
insurgency had become disillusioned with the direction of the
anti-occupation fight—and concerned over the future of Arab
Sunnis in Iraq. In Anbar, the terrorist group al-Qaeda in Iraq,
initially a partner in the Sunni insurgency, had alienated many
by trying to overthrow traditional tribal and power structures
to impose an alien interpretation of Islam, a Salafist
fundamentalism that had few adherents before the arrival of the
Americans. In Baghdad, the militias supporting the Shia-dominated
central government—in effect a sectarian regime—were cleansing
Arab Sunni neighbourhoods. Now, Anbari Sunnis view the
government as deeply infiltrated by their traditional enemy,
Shia Iran. So with few allies left in Iraq, they began allying
themselves with their former enemies, the U.S. Army—which also
seems to be running out of friends.
This “Anbar Awakening” has been a slow process, beginning long
before the recent U.S. “surge” that increased the number of
American troops in Iraq by 30,000, to 180,000. But it is still a
shaky union, a desperate marriage of convenience based on shared
enemies: Iran, and the Sunnis’ former-friend-turned-foe
al-Qaeda. Many of America’s new allies are former insurgents and
Saddam Hussein loyalists (Saddam was a Sunni) who only a short
while ago were routinely called terrorists, “anti-Iraqi
fighters,” and “Baathist dead-enders.” They are suspicious of
one another and strongly anti-American, although willing to
work, for the moment, with the U.S. The leader and founder of
the Anbar Awakening Council, Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was
recently killed by a roadside bomb outside his house in Ramadi,
clearly an inside job of some kind for which al-Qaeda claimed
credit. Only 10 days earlier, Abu Risha had met with George W.
Bush during the President’s visit to Iraq, the photo op of
death, apparently.
I kept phoning Iraqis but few answered. When I told a friend in
Baghdad that no one was taking my calls, he suggested that
people didn’t answer unknown numbers because they were afraid of
threats. Apparently, according to Arab custom, if you warn your
victim before an attack, it’s not a crime. Perhaps—but you can
read too much ancient custom into Iraq. My suspicion was that
they were dead. My hope was that they were avoiding embarrassing
calls from girlfriends when they were with their wives. Iraqis’
love lives can be as complicated as their politics.
When I finally got through to one friend, he was in Damascus,
along with several million of his countrymen. “Come to Falluja,”
Ahmed said. “You can kill al-Qaeda with my troop.” It wasn’t
clear how I was supposed to get to Falluja from Baghdad,
although it is only 50 km west of the capital. Ahmed wasn’t sure
it was a good idea to try. Passing through Abu Ghraib, a large
suburban area outside the capital where Saddam and then the
Americans ran a notorious prison, could be a real problem, he
said. There, both insurgents and Shia militias often set up
checkpoints and kidnap travellers. The Americans, mind you, have
a more optimistic view of the Abu Ghraib situation. A few weeks
later, I would watch Ambassador Ryan Crocker tell Congress of a
real milestone in co-operation between former Sunni insurgents
and their enemies in the Shia-dominated administration: over
1,700 Sunni tribesmen in Abu Ghraib were officially hired by the
government as security forces. Ambassador Crocker may have been
accurate—it’s just that the positive steps happening in Iraq
shouldn’t be called milestones. They are more like yard-pebbles.
Or even inch-dust.
“Come to Damascus—we can drive from here and the road is safe,”
Ahmed said. He listed the various tribal militias controlling
the 450-km road through Anbar province from the Syrian border to
Falluja that could protect us. It seemed to be typical of the
recent over-hyped success of the Anbar Awakening that you would
have to fly from Baghdad to Damascus, and then drive six hours
back across the desert, to get only 40 minutes outside Baghdad
in order to see it for yourself (you could go with the U.S. Army
as well, but you learn mostly about Americans if you are with
Americans and end up sounding like a visiting columnist for the
New York Times). Ahmed said that when he and his “troop” (his
quaint word for what sounded death-squadish to me) captured
al-Qaeda fighters around Falluja, they shipped the leaders to
the border for interrogation by Syrian intelligence. So far,
he’d sent 12. You can’t blame him—even the Americans send
suspects to Syria when they want them tortured. Just ask Maher
Arar.
I first met the tribal militias that make up the Anbar Awakening
during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when a family I knew smuggled
me out to a small village between Ramadi and Falluja. Saddam’s
army had virtually disappeared from the countryside, and these
militias, trusted by Saddam’s regime and at the time still loyal
to it, controlled the roads and villages of Anbar just as they
do today. I spent a lot of 2003 and 2004 around Falluja and
Ramadi, getting to know a group of insurgents fighting the U.S.
occupation. I’m fairly certain that if the tribal militias had
been intelligently treated—i.e. paid US$10 each per day the way
they are now—and the U.S. Army hadn’t driven around Ramadi and
Falluja shooting wildly in the spring of 2003, many would have
been American allies from the beginning. Instead, a lot of them
became insurgents, hooked up with their cousins from Saddam’s
former security services, and eventually allied themselves with
the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda. That relationship was symbiotic at
first, but al-Qaeda soon became destructive parasites, jihadi
body snatchers who killed anybody opposed to their control and
strict Islamic codes.
When Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational force
in Iraq, appeared before Congress with Ambassador Crocker to
testify about the results of President Bush’s “surge” strategy,
he talked a lot about these tribal militias and the success of
Anbar. It is the only progress the U.S. has made in Iraq for
years. It’s unclear whether the additional 30,000 troops that
make up the surge have had much effect on the Anbar Awakening.
But watching Gen. Petraeus, I was struck by how familiar his
words sounded. The general talked like every Sunni I’ve ever met
in Iraq—hell, he sounded a bit like Saddam. The old tyrant would
have had one of his characteristic chest-heaving guffaws
watching Petraeus as he intoned the old Baathist mantra about
the dangers to Iraq: Iran, Iran, Iran. Bush took up Gen.
Petraeus’s views a few days later in a nationally televised
speech about Iraq, in which he talked about the threat Tehran
posed. It seems that Petraeus and Bush have come to the same
conclusion as Saddam: the main enemy is Iran, and you can’t
govern Iraq without the Sunni Arab tribes, even as you encourage
anti-Iranian nationalism among the Shia. This is what Saddam did
during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and what Washington is
trying to do now. One of the main problems with this strategy is
that both the Sunni tribes and Shia nationalists are profoundly
anti-American and don’t trust each other—a potential recipe for
further disaster.
Going back to Iraq is like sitting through a depressing
Scheherazade, 10,001 Nights of Horror Stories. Everybody had
them. Do you want to see a picture of someone’s 10-year-old boy,
chopped up in pieces and put in a cooking pot because his
parents couldn’t pay the Shia militia’s ransom? Here, look at
the burns on my body, inflicted by the bodyguards of the Sunni
politician who sold my eight-year-old son and me to al-Qaeda.
Let me tell you about being kidnapped in Falluja by a gang that
pretended to be al-Qaeda—they made me drink urine and had a fake
beheading studio where they set up mock video executions to
scare us into raising ransoms. As a friend of mine kept saying
over and over—“Where do they get these people? What kind of a
person does this? Where do they get them?”
Sadly, these stories are true, while so much that is said about
Iraq is myth and delusion. As the famous American war
correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote about armed conflict, there
is “the real war and the propaganda war.” During the
congressional hearings about the surge, I kept thinking of
Tattoo on Fantasy Island, half expecting Ambassador Crocker to
tug on Gen. Petraeus’s sleeve and say, “Look, boss, da plane.”
Smiles, everyone, smiles! Sometimes I think Iraq doesn’t exist
at all. It’s just a series of preconceptions, a country invented
to keep the West’s intelligentsia busy arguing and
pontificating, fighting over facts about a place that is so
clearly a work of fiction. Frankly, I wish it didn’t exist, at
least for the sake of Iraqis. First Saddam, now this.
Certainly the notion of there being any cohesive central power
in Iraq is a myth. Whatever is running the country, it’s not a
government. Iraq’s body politic has some kind of autoimmune
deficiency syndrome in which the antibodies designed to defend
it have turned on its own organs. It’s a perfect environment for
opportunistic parasites, in this case Iraq’s neighbours. So it
seems almost unfair to criticize Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s
failure to govern, as if somehow he was in charge of anything
that could be called a state.
In many ways, this is Saddam’s fault. Like most tyrants, he
turned the Iraqi government into a series of fiefdoms loyal only
to him. That’s why it was called a regime. But today, it’s
really a set of regimes. Each of the ministries is controlled by
a sectarian or ethnic group and, like Saddam, they hire people
mostly loyal to themselves (although some are fought over by
competing factions). The ministries are important because that’s
where the money is—apart from oil, Iraq has no industries,
unless you consider murder a job, and that is a heavy industry
at the moment. As an Iraqi doctor who left medicine to work for
one of the many foreign companies losing money in Iraq (most of
them are) said to me: “There are only two ways to make money in
Iraq—working for the ministries, or working for the U.S. Army.”
The level of corruption in the ministries is astonishing, but
according to U.S. government reports they are often
“untouchable” because the prime minister’s office protects
allies from investigation. The Ministry of Finance is run by
Bayan Jabr, the former minister of the interior who hired
thousands of Shia militiamen as police and set up death squads
and torture prisons. His successor had to fire 10,000 employees,
and today various factions fight for control of each floor of
the Interior Ministry building.
At least US$10 billion has been embezzled, according to Iraq’s
Commission on Public Integrity, which is itself underfunded (12
of its members have been murdered). After a U.S. report surfaced
detailing how the prime minister blocked the commission’s
investigations of corrupt officials, Maliki accused the head of
the commission of corruption and threatened him with arrest.
Luckily the man was already out of the country. Corruption in
the Oil Ministry—Iraq’s nationalized energy sector is its only
real source of revenue—has resulted in shortages that have only
increased the long lineups for gasoline in a country brimming
with oil. Senior Iraqi army officers complain that when they
organize raids on Shia militias, they are stopped on orders from
the prime minister’s office. Iraq was a disaster under Saddam,
but it has turned into Nigeria.
Maliki has been accused of running an “ethno-sectarian”
government, but accusing him of running a pro-Shia government is
like accusing Bush of running a pro-Republican administration.
Like Karl Rove, who hoped to make the Republican party supreme,
Maliki seems to want to set up Shia-dominated rule that will
control Iraq for generations. And like Rove, he focuses on his
base, with little regard for any other point of view unless the
U.S. pressures him (even then he pouts and makes vague threats
about looking for other allies—by which he obviously means
Iran).
Instead of polls and data mining, the governing Shia parties
have taken control by using militias to “sectarian cleanse”
Baghdad, a retaliation against al-Qaeda’s spectacular car
bombing campaign. By one estimate, Baghdad was once 65 per cent
Sunni; today it is 75 per cent Shia. Deaths from sectarian
killings are reportedly down, in large measure because there are
few mixed neighbourhoods left. Almost the entire Sunni middle
class lives in Jordan or Syria. If you are named Omar, a
traditional Sunni name, chances are you are dead or living
abroad. Under Saddam, no one on the streets of the capital ever
uttered the word mukhabarat, meaning the feared security
police. Today, no one says maktab, meaning “office,” but in fact
referring to radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army’s
bases from which members control neighbourhoods. Their preferred
method of torture is the electric drill.
The great irony of Maliki is that under other circumstances a
government like his—one that is: a) accused by the U.S. of close
relations with an American enemy (Iran); b) running a
strategically important country (like Iraq); c) involved in the
oppression and murder of one of its minorities (the Sunnis),
which is closely linked to an important U.S. ally (the
Saudis)—is an administration that many Americans would want to
eliminate. There is a good chance that if the U.S. Army wasn’t
there already, Washington would have invaded to get rid of
Maliki. But having toppled Saddam, lost thousands of soldiers,
and so far spent some US$500 billion on combat operations alone,
the U.S. is now in too weak of a position to do much.
Maliki, though, might fall of his own accord. In the end, having
alienated Sunnis and secular Iraqis, his unwieldy coalition
government will probably be brought down as a result of the
growing rift between Shia parties that are now fighting for
control of southern Iraq and Baghdad. (On Sept. 15, Muqtada al-Sadr’s
movement withdrew from the ruling coalition because Sadr had
been frozen out of power.)
One of the problems outsiders have in criticizing the present
Iraqi government for its appallingly sectarian policies is that
there is a tendency for people to think: “Well, what do you
want—Saddam?” That’s absurd, of course, like criticizing Russian
President Vladimir Putin and being accused of wanting a return
of the Soviet Union. And the group in Iraq that seems to be most
critical of this government—other than the Sunnis—is the U.S.
Army.
U.S. soldiers have been up to their knees in the blood of Shia
militia killings, as well as insurgent death squads and car
bombs, and have few illusions about this government’s
intentions. You can tell the military’s views not just by its
enthusiasm for its new Sunni tribal allies, but the vehemence
with which American politicians who have come through Iraq on
this summer’s army-organized tours have come out against Maliki.
Senators Carl Levin, a Democrat, and Jack Warner, a Republican,
could barely contain their contempt for Maliki when they left
Iraq in late August. Neither could the refreshingly undiplomatic
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, an outspoken advocate
of human rights who supported the original invasion. It must
drive him mad to see what Maliki is doing now, helping to
destroy Kouchner’s robust, pro-human rights Western foreign
policy model that was supposed to make the world unsafe for
tyrants.
We all understand, in a very basic way, that a settling of
scores by the Shia is impossible to avoid, especially with the
car bombs and insurgent attacks on their neighbourhoods since
2003. But after a few years of patience, the Shia parties have
shown themselves to be particularly motivated by revenge. Take
Bayan Jabr. I met him before the war in Syria, when he was the
representative of the Iranian-based Supreme Islamic Iraqi
Council (now SIIC, formerly SCIRI), and was struck only by his
blandness. When the interview was over, I asked him how many
members of his family had been killed by Saddam. Thirty-two, he
said, shaking my hand. As minister of the interior, Jabr was
responsible for at least as many deaths as the 148 people Saddam
was convicted of killing after an assassination attempt outside
the village of Dujail in 1982, murders for which the dictator
was hanged. That doesn’t mean Jabr is as bad as Saddam, but I
wouldn’t want to be his enemy.
Revenge is deeply woven into the foundations of this war, and
not just on the Iraqi side. I remember looking inside the lead
Humvee coming into downtown Baghdad on the day the Americans
took the city on April 2003. Inside was an “I Love NY” sticker.
How much of the American motivation for the war was payback for
9/11 is a question that can be asked every time Bush is quoted,
as he was recently in Australia, saying “we’re kicking ass.”
Misplaced payback, perhaps, but revenge is rarely rational.
Just as one is accused of being a pro-Saddam, Baathist
sympathizer if you criticize the government in Baghdad, so one
is accused of being a neo-con if you point out how deeply
involved Iran has become in Iraq. The role Iran plays is as
complex and shady as can be expected in a situation that is so
murky on so many different levels, from neighbourhood turf wars
to world oil strategies and a proxy war with America. But the
U.S. government is right to be concerned, although it’s not
clear they can do much except protest, threaten loudly, and
fight a secret, dirty war.
Iraq, Iran’s neighbour to the west, is Tehran’s self-declared
security zone. Iran has already been attacked once from Iraq—by
a then-American ally, Saddam—and won’t let it happen again. Nor
do the Iranians want, as the West does, a secular Iraqi
government that could destabilize their own theocracy. For them,
Iraq is a survival issue. U.S.-led invasions have conquered not
only Iraq but Afghanistan on Iran’s eastern flank. The U.S. Navy
is floating off Iranian shores. Every few weeks, Washington
debates whether to bomb Iran. How could Iran afford not to be
involved in Iraq? Following the American example, the Iranians
have learned that it’s better to fight the U.S. on the
streets of Baghdad than the streets of Tehran.
Continued
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