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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
Part 2 -
Part 1
The real question is, what are
Iran’s objectives in Iraq, and how will Iraqis react? If Iran
wants economic, political and military domination, the problems
are long-term. If Iran is in Iraq to fight a proxy war against
the United States, then presumably it will leave when the U.S.
does. In general, I have found Iraqis to be extremely suspicious
of the Iranian government and its involvement in their
country—not just the Sunnis, but the Shias and Kurds as well.
But then again, even Iranians are suspicious of their own
government.
Iran has a number of interests in Iraq that go beyond security.
The most obvious is religious—Iraq contains some of the holiest
sites of Shia Islam that have been cut off from Iranian pilgrims
for decades. The other is economic. With a population of over 65
million people, Iran views itself as a regional superpower and
expects the financial rewards that come from that position. And
like any other superpower, it creates economic problems for its
neighbours. When I was in Baghdad in August, people complained
that Iraqi farm produce was being driven off of the market by
Iran, which is dumping its fruit and vegetables in Iraq. This is
a disaster for Iraqi agriculture, one of the few areas of
employment in the country.
The actual influence of Iran on the Iraqi government is hard to
gauge. The present administration is made up of mainly Shia
parties, some of which are very nationalistic and anti-Iranian,
like the Fadhila party, while others, like the SIIC, that was
formed as an anti-Saddam party in Iran in 1982, are very close
to Tehran. For the U.S., the most worrying Iranian influence is
the authority that Iranian security services have over militias
like the SIIC’s Badr Organization, which was based in Iran for
20 years until the fall of Saddam. Even Muqtada al-Sadr’s
militia, the Mahdi Army, is thought to have one wing controlled
by Iran.
These days, though, the biggest concern on the highways of
Baghdad is not Sunni insurgent bombs, but the explosively formed
penetrators that fire a molten copper slug through even American
heavy armour. According to U.S. intelligence, they are provided
by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps to Shia militias. Of course,
U.S. intelligence accusations are now as suspect as the Iranian
government denials that they provoke.
America’s other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to
Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss
timepiece—effective, easily reproduced, and disposable. Al-Qaeda
did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, but today it, along
with Iran, are the two strongest arguments the U.S. makes for
“staying the course.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq is essentially a
religious criminal gang that kills anyone who threatens its
power or differs from its Salafist views on establishing a
perverse form of an Islamic state. Its death squads and
enormously destructive truck bombs have killed thousands of
Shias, but Sunnis, too, have suffered al-Qaeda’s violent
nihilism. Car bombs, assassinations and “religious punishments,”
including decapitations and cutting off the fingers of smokers,
have put Sunni Iraq under a Mordor-like shadow of terror and
justified collective punishment from the Shias. In his testimony
to Congress, Gen. Petraeus pointed out the lethal threat of
al-Qaeda. But this should come as no surprise to an American
general—because the U.S. Army helped create al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The American role in the promotion of the terrorist organization
is not some mad conspiracy theory, but a well-documented attempt
by the U.S. government to demonize the insurgency and make it
appear to be the central front in the war on terror. This was as
great a mistake as disbanding the Iraqi army, which the U.S. did
in May 2003, or perhaps even greater, since it led to the
sectarian downward spiral that has destroyed the country.
When the insurgency started in the summer of 2003, it was made
up primarily of the same class of alienated Sunnis who are now
part of the tribal Anbar Awakening. The insurgents I spent time
with in 2003 and 2004 were, in essence, nationalists who didn’t
like the U.S. Army driving around their villages, kicking down
their doors and shooting their cousins at checkpoints. They were
also deeply suspicious of American plans for democracy, because
they feared it would lead to Iran taking over the government.
Some hated Saddam, some liked him, but Saddam wasn’t the issue.
For want of a better term, they are the equivalent of rednecks
who believe in God, their country, and the right to bear arms.
But rather than come up with an intelligent counter-insurgency
policy, reach out to traditional tribal social structures and
try to understand why American soldiers were getting killed,
U.S. military leaders did what Americans have gotten very good
at doing in the last few years. They made up a story, which they
repeated on the news for U.S. domestic consumption—and then
started to believe themselves. In this story, evil foreign
terrorists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a chubby Jordanian
freelance terrorist, were setting upon the popular U.S. Army.
AMZ, as the U.S. Army jauntily called him, existed, but he was a
minor figure unlikely to get much of a following on his own in
Iraq. Jordanians are not greatly respected by Sunni tribal
Iraqis, who tend to view them as the metrosexuals of the Middle
East. I used to watch the nightly news with insurgents—they
called themselves the “resistance”—and they would laugh at what
U.S. spokesmen were saying about the insurgency and Zarqawi’s
prominence. But from the U.S. perspective, “tribal freedom
fighter,” as the former Sunni insurgents are described today,
does not sound as good as “foreign terrorist” or “anti-Iraqi
fighter” when you are trying to demonize people fighting your
occupation.
The ploy backfired. As AMZ (he was killed in June 2006) got more
and more airtime, he gained more and more legitimacy, money and
volunteers. It was as if Japanese whalers were mounting a “Save
The Whales” campaign on television. Thanks to the Americans,
al-Qaeda in Iraq became the Greenpeace of the jihadi world.
AMZ’s foreign fighters were never more than a tiny percentage of
the insurgency, but they got all the credit, especially when
their car bombs began killing civilians. Al-Qaeda in Iraq also
had a tremendous appeal among the Sunni Iraqi underclass, just
as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda appeals to poor, angry Muslims the
world over. Provinces like Anbar are very poor and very
hierarchical, with a large and resentful social stratum at the
bottom. Local Iraqis were drawn to al-Qaeda’s Salafist
fundamentalism because it freed them from the conservative,
tribal oppression that governed their lives. Al-Qaeda was able
to take over some of the insurgency—and still controls chunks of
Iraq—precisely because it was revolutionary, not conservative,
and offered poor people in Anbar a chance to kick some rich
sheik and Baathist ass, as well as kill Americans and Shias. In
part, al-Qaeda was part of a class war fuelled by profound anger
and social resentment.
When my friend Ahmed, the grandson of an important sheik,
invited me to “come kill some al-Qaeda” around Falluja, he
didn’t mean hunt down Saudis who had trained in Afghanistan
under bin Laden. He meant, “Let’s go shoot the uppity trash who
took over my village.” Ahmed comes from an area outside Falluja
where the same people who are now called al-Qaeda briefly
kidnapped me in the spring of 2004. They would have shot my
three Iraqi friends—one of whom was a sheik—and me if the U.S.
Marines hadn’t attacked their checkpoint. After these people
have kidnapped you, you understand where Ahmed is coming from.
The insurgents whom I knew at first tolerated al-Qaeda and its
foreign volunteers, even though Salafism was alien to their
beliefs in local Islamic traditions and their affinity toward
the more mystical branch of Islam, Sufism, both anathema to
Salafists. But al-Qaeda eventually turned against the other
insurgent groups to consolidate its power, demanded their
allegiance, and began killing anyone who opposed it or whom it
thought might be a threat. In doing so, al-Qaeda extremists
became like the Khmer Rouge, murdering any tribal sheik or
former Iraqi military office or educated person not on their
side (al-Qaeda’s attacks on the Sunni elite make many Sunnis
believe that Iran, along with Syria, is funding the
organization).
By 2005, the insurgents and their families, whom I had gotten to
know, were fighting al-Qaeda as well as attacking the Americans.
Today, they are working with the U.S. Army in the various tribal
militias of the Anbar Awakening. But this recent success in Iraq
is really just the proverbial “one step forward” following two
earlier steps backwards. The former insurgents’ loyalty is not
to the U.S. —the same people who make up the tribal militias
probably killed the majority of American soldiers who have died
in Iraq—nor can they tolerate the government in Baghdad. Now
that there are Sunni militias to balance the Shia militias, the
question is whether the Iraqi government will be forced to
reconcile with the Sunnis—or turn up the volume in the civil
war.
One of the worst things to happen to Iraq was the war in Bosnia,
a misleading precedent of civil strife and international
intervention that taught all the wrong lessons. The conflict in
the former Yugoslavia gave the West the false impression that we
could successfully interfere in complex disagreements because we
were on the side of justice and immensely powerful.
We subsequently saw Iraq through a Yugoslav lens, but Iraq is
not Yugoslavia. Instead, it has been balkanized by many of the
journalists, intellectuals and diplomats who cut their teeth
during the “invade and aid” strategies of the 1990s. Western
journalists and intellectuals love a three-way civil war. It is
a deeply satisfying morality play and makes everything
simple—Bad Serbs, Good Bosnians, and Croats allied with the
West. Or in Iraq’s case, Bad Sunnis, Good Shias, Kurdish allies.
The easy trinitarian logic of the Balkans was applied to Iraq,
even before the invasion, by advocates for the war on both the
right and the left of the political spectrum.
But Iraq is not a collection of European nation-states, and
sectarian identity here is far more complex than in the Balkans,
too subtle for foreigners to easily grasp and yet easily
exploited to justify invasions in bumper-sticker phrases
(although Yugoslavs also endured a great deal of moralistic
simplifications themselves). Iraq is like a French cheese that
can’t be pasteurized for the palates of a reading public that
has grown up on Kraft slices of Good Guy/Bad Guy. Of course,
Iraq has good guys and bad guys; they just switch roles a lot
depending on our perspective.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that some of the most
sectarian people in Iraq are the foreign journalists,
intellectuals and diplomats paid to interpret what is happening
in the country. The Kurds were the first to find enthusiastic
backers like Michael Ignatieff, who felt that their suffering
under Saddam justified the invasion. The Shias, too, have their
supporters. For a while after the invasion in 2003 there was a
great deal of sympathy among foreigners in Iraq for their point
of view after the decades they suffered under Saddam. But once
elected, the Shia parties’ policies—militia infiltration of the
security services, death squads, torture prisons, contempt for
secular values and women, embracing Iran—have encouraged
cynicism.
In the past, few outsiders have expressed much sympathy for the
Sunnis, those Saddam-loving authoritarians, but that has
recently begun to change. Now that the White House has
labelled the Anbar sheiks “heroes,” and the Shia government is
described as pro-Iranian and anti-American, we are beginning to
see a sudden outpouring of sympathy for Sunnis in the Western
press. This will probably be short-lived, because the Sunnis
have a talent for making themselves despised. But
intellectuals and journalists are, to an astonishing degree,
sentimental, and fawn over cultures like high school kids with a
new crush. If you protect us and tell us your story, we like you
and are very sympathetic—for a while. If you try to kill us or,
worse, treat us with contempt, we’ll demonize you. The Sunnis
treated Westerners with contempt under Saddam, tried to
kill us during the insurgency, and were vilified. Now they are
weak and friendlier. It is the Shia government that is
contemptuous, and its militias life-threatening, so journalists
aren’t quite so enthusiastic anymore.
An enduring myth about Iraq is that it can be split into
“nation” states based on ethnicity or sectarian differences,
with a Shia south, a Sunni middle and a Kurdish north. But Arab
Iraqis are far more nationalistic than you would guess from all
the discussions of “ethno-sectarian” differences. Indeed, many
Iraqis are astonished by the sudden emergence of Sunni and Shia
divisions. As one Iraqi American said to me: “We never used to
talk about it, but the other day a stripper asked me if I was
Sunni or Shia.” And that was in California.
It’s true that many Kurds are keen on partitioning Iraq, but
they are also keen on taking chunks of Iran, Syria and Turkey to
make a Kurdish homeland. And at least some members of one Shia
party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, promote a very
decentralized federalism. But, for the most part, the vast
majority of Arab Iraqis see Iraq as a strongly unified state.
Shias and Sunnis may be chauvinists, violently so in some cases,
but that doesn’t mean they don’t see Iraq as a nation.
If you look at recent polls, Shia support for partition runs
around two per cent, while the majority, 56 per cent, support a
strong centralized state. Some Shias in the south may want to
create regional blocks, but this is more an expression of
regional culture than sectarianism—they just don’t like Baghdad,
the way western Canadians don’t like Ottawa. The Sunnis, for
their part, want a unified, centrally controlled government
because they view themselves as the country’s natural governing
class. In fact, many Sunnis don’t view themselves as Sunni, just
Iraqi. This is especially true in Baghdad, where every Sunni I
know has a Shia parent or grandparent—until recently class was
the primary division in Baghdad, not sect. The Sunnis think of
themselves as Iraqi in the way that Torontonians think of
themselves as Canadian, not English-Canadian—it’s the other guys
who are hyphenated.
The much-repeated line that Iraq is a phony country made up by
colonial powers is itself a myth. Indeed, I’m always amazed by
the extent of Iraqi nationalism in Arab Iraq, a nationalism that
coexists with sectarian suspicions but which is very real. The
historian Reidar Visser has written extensively about this,
especially the diverse Shia sense of being Iraqi, and the long
history of Iraq as a governed unit. But it is too complex an
argument to be put forward in the media, and blaming previous
colonial governments is easy. As Visser points out, U.S.
Democratic party supporters have found the argument for
partition to be a convenient solution for a problem they have no
clue how to solve, but which makes them sound less clueless and
cruel than saying, “Forget the Iraqis, let’s leave.”
But foreign interference in Iraq has greatly exacerbated the
divisiveness among the various groups, which were already
suffering years of grinding dictatorship under which citizens
and sect were played off against each other. The process that
began during the Saddam era has now turned into civil war—with
outside help. Early on, the American-controlled occupying
government created a “Governing Council” organized on sectarian
lines, with money being funnelled through various groups
according to their “ethno-sectarian” divisions. This only
increased existing divisions, and once an actual Iraqi
government was elected it governed purely along sectarian lines.
Ironically, the recent American support for Sunni militias is
itself a classic Balkan solution to an Iraqi problem. In 1994,
the U.S. quietly helped to build up the Croatian army, allowing
the Croats to sweep through Serb-held Krajina the following
year, viciously cleansing it of the Serbs. The newly pumped-up
Croats then acted as a counterbalance to Serbian power; this, in
turn, brought Slobodan Milosevic to the table and led to the
signing of the Dayton peace accord. Today, the Sunni tribes are
the Croats, backed by the U.S. and presenting an increasing
military threat to the Shia government, which at some point may
have to rely on Iran to defend itself.
To call this “Yugoslav solution” a risky strategy in Iraq is an
understatement. Once the Sunnis are free of their own civil war
with al-Qaeda, and are no longer wasting their strength fighting
U.S. forces, you will see the re-emergence of the same coalition
of Sunnis that supported Saddam, but which is increasily allied
with the U.S. military. And then? My guess is that there will be
a series of well-orchestrated assassinations of Shia government
officials, especially in the Interior Ministry, who are viewed
as responsible for killing Sunnis and the ethnic cleansing of
Baghdad. The U.S. will be unable to stop this, just as in the
aftermath of the invasion it was unable to stop the Shia parties
from hunting down and killing former Baathists. Nor will there
be much incentive for the Americans to step in, since the Sunnis
will also target anyone in the government or
government-sponsored militias who have close ties to Iran. When
Prime Minister Maliki says he’s reluctant to have the tribal
militias gain too much power, he knows that the old Saddam
cadres of Republican Guards and intelligence officers with a
base among the tribal militias in Anbar will be coming into
Baghdad for a little payback. It will be a proxy war against
Iran, masked by warring sectarian militias. And this is just the
kind of problem partitioning the country cannot solve.
A few years ago, I was asked to speak about Iraq at a conference
on insurgencies. At the end of the day, participants were asked
to guess what might happen in five years. I said I thought the
U.S. would be allied with the Sunnis and fighting Iran. In a
limited way, that has turned out to be the case. To some degree,
the military has switched sides in the middle of the fight.
So far, the plan has not been as successful as its proponents
maintain. But it isn’t entirely a failure, either. It is
probably the only major military strategy that has had any real
effect since the original invasion. I’ve now been invited to
“hunt al-Qaeda” in two other areas outside Anbar, which means
there has been a ripple effect in the Sunni areas. But in the
end, it may not matter much. The discussion in Washington and
New York has always drowned out the reality of Iraq. One of the
terrifying aspects of the war is the monumental failure of
analysis and action on the part of America’s political,
military, journalistic and even business elites.
That problem may be systemic—the result of a “fact-based”
America confronting a society it did not understand and simply
making up an alternate reality, guns ablaze. So far, the
Republicans have done an impressive job at failing in Iraq. Soon
it may be the Democrats’ turn to fail, albeit in a different
way. It’s a shame because Iraqi political parties are perfectly
capable of doing that on their own. Indeed, they seem to be
going out of their way to compete with the Americans on that
score.
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