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Does Anyone in Washington or at Downing
Street Know What's Really Happening in Iraq?
29.11.2006
By PATRICK COCKBURN Nov.28 |
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November
29, 2006
Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse
are everywhere. In Baghdad the police often pick up
over 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single
day. Government ministries make war on each other. A
new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the
Iraqi state came earlier this month when police
commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry
kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher
Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.
Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call
'the Saigon moment', the time when it becomes
evident to all that the government is expiring.
"They say that the killings and kidnappings are
being carried our by men in police uniforms and with
police vehicles," said the Iraqi Foreign Minister
Hoshyar Zebari with a despairing laugh to me earlier
this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that
the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."
It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are
not loyal to the state. If the US army decides to
confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia
military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main
American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad.
One convoy was stopped at a supposedly fake police
checkpoint near the Kuwait border earlier this month
and four American security men and an Austrian taken
away.
The US and British position in Iraq is far more of a
house built on sand than is realized in Washington
or London despite the disasters of the last
three-and-a-half years. President Bush and Tony
Blair show a unique inability to learn from their
mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit
having committed any errors in the first place.
Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a
third of the country's 27 million people. As Shia
and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods Iraq is
turning into a country of refugees. The UN High
Commission for Refugees says that 1.6 million are
displaced within the country and a further 1.8
million have fled abroad. In Baghdad neighbouring
Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire
mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was
sentenced to death I phoned a friend in a Sunni area
of the capital to ask what he thought of the
verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken
up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on
the roof of my next door neighbour's house. I am
more worried about staying alive myself than what
happens to Saddam."
Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would
be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were
married to each other. These mixed couples are now
being compelled to divorce by their families. "I
love my husband, but my family has forced me to
divorce him because we are Shi'ite and he is Sunni,"
said Hiba Sami, the mother of four, to a UN
official. "My family say they [the husband's family]
are insurgents and that living with him is an
offence to God." Members of mixed marriages set up
an association to protect each other called the
Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled
to dissolve it when several founding members were
murdered.
Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast
we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity".
All three Iraqi communities--Shia, Sunni and Kurdish
-- see themselves as victims and seldom sympathize
with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its
gruesome discoveries. Earlier this month I visited
Mosul, the capital of northern Iraq that has a
population of 1.7 million people of whom about two
thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds. It not
the most dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a
place drenched in violence. A local tribal leader
called Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal Afar
told me of a man from there who went to recover the
tortured body of his 16-year old son. The corpse was
wired to explosives that blew up killing the father
so their two bodies were buried together.
Khasro Goran, the efficient and highly effective
deputy governor of Mosul, said there was no civil
war yet in Mosul but it could easily happen. He
added that 70,000 Kurds had already fled the city
because of assassinations. It is extraordinary how
in Iraq slaughter that would be front page news any
where else in the world soon seems to be part of
normal life. On the day I arrived in Mosul the
police had found 11 bodies in the city which would
have been on the low side in Baghdad.
I spoke to the Duraid Mohammed Kashmula, the
governor of Mosul, whose office is decorated with
pictures of smiling fresh faced young men who turned
out to be his son and four nephews, all of them
killed by insurgents. His own house together with
his furniture was burned to the ground two years
ago. He added in passing that Mr Goran and he
himself were the prime targets for assassination in
Mosul, a point that was dramatically proved true the
day after we spoke when insurgents exploded a bomb
beside beside his convoy--fortunately he was not in
it at the time-- killing one and wounding several of
his bodyguards.
For the moment Mosul is more strongly-controlled by
pro-government forces than most Iraqi cities. This
is because the US has powerful local allies in the
shape of the Kurds. The two army divisions in the
province are primarily Kurdish, but the 17,000
police in Nineveh, the province of which Mosul is
the capiral, are almost entirely Sunni and their
loyalty is dubious. One was dismissed on the day of
Saddam's trial for putting a picture of the former
leader in the window of his car. In November 2004
the entire Mosul police force abandoned their police
stations to the insurgents who captured $40 million
worth of arms.
"The terrorists do not control a single district in
Mosul," is the proud claim of Major General Wathiq
Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani, the bullet-headed
police chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them to fight
me face to face." But the situation is still very
fragile. We went to see the police operations room
where an officer was bellowing into a microphone:
"There is a suicide bomber in a car in the city. Do
not let him get near you or any of our buildings."
There was a reason to be frightened. On my way into
Mosul I had seen the broken concrete walls of the
party headquarters of the Patriotic Unon of
Kurdistan, one of the two big Kurdish political
parties. In August two men in a car packed with
explosives had shot their way past the outer guard
post and then blown themselves up killing 17
soldiers.
The balance of forces in Nineveh between American,
Arab, Kurd, Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated
even by Iraqi standards. Power is fragmented. Sayid
Tewfiq, the Shia tribal leader from Tal Afar
resplendent in his flowing robes, admitted: "I would
not last 24 hours in Tal Afar without Coalition [US]
support." "That's probably about right," confirmed
Mr Goran, explaining that Sayid Tewfiq's Shia
Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes.
Earlier I had heard him confidently invite all of
Nineveh provincial council to visit him in Tal Afar.
Nobody looked enthusiastic about taking him up on
the offer. "He may have 3,000 fighters from his
tribe, but he can't visit most of Tal Afar himself,"
said another member of the council called Mohammed
Suleiman as he declined the invitation. A few hours
before somebody tried to assassinate him Governor
Kashmula claimed to me that "security in Mosul is
the best in Iraq outside the Kurdish provinces." It
is a measure of the violence in Iraq that it is an
arguable point. Khasro Goran said that "the
situation is not perfect but it is better than Anbar.
Baquba and Diyala." I could vouch for this. In Iraq
however bad things are there is always somewhere
worse.
It is obviously very difficult for reporters to
discover what is happening in Iraq's most violent
provinces without being killed themselves. But at
the end of September I travelled south along the
Iraqi side of the border with Iran sticking to
Kurdish villages to try to reach Diyala, a mixed
Sunni-Shia province north-east of Baghdad where
there had been savage fighting. It is a road on
which a wrong turning could be fatal. We drove from
Sulaimaniyah through the mountains, passed through
the Derbandikhan tunnel and then took the road which
runs beside the Diyala river, its valley a vivid
streak of lush green in the dun-coloured semi
desert. The area is a smuggler's paradise. At night
trucks drive through the desert without lights,
their drivers finding their way with night vision
goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are
carrying presumably weapons or drugs--and nobody
has the temerity to ask.
We had been warned that it was essential to turn
left after the tumble- down Kurdish town of Kalar
before reaching the mixed Arab-Kurdish village of
Jalula. We crossed the river by a long and rickety
bridge, parts of which had fallen into the swirling
waters below, and soon arrived in the Kurdish
stronghold of Khanaqin in Diyala province. If I had
any thoughts about driving further towards Baghdad
they were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of
the yard of the local police headquarters, of the
wreckage of a blue-and-white police vehicle torn
apart by a bomb. "Five policemen were killed in it
when it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah
two months ago," a policeman told me. "Only their
commander survived but his legs were amputated."
Officials in Khanaqin had no doubt about what was
happening in their province. Lt Col Ahmed Nuri
Hassan, the exhausted looking commander of the
federal police, said "There is an sectarian civil
war here and it is getting worse every day. The head
of the local council estimated that 100 people were
being killed every week. In Baquba, the provincial
capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and
Kurds. The army and police were divided along
sectarian lines. The one Iraqi army division in
Diyala was predominantly Shia and only arrested
Sunni. On the day after I left Sunni and Kurdish
police officers fought a gun battle in Jalula, the
village I had been warned not to enter. The fighting
started when Kurdish police refused to accept a new
Sunni Arab police chief and his followers. Here in
miniature in Diyala it was possible to see Iraq
breaking up. The province is ruled by its death
squads. The police say at least 9,000 people had
been murdered and after such bloodshed It is
difficult to see how Sunni and Shia in the province
can ever live together again.
In much of Iraq we long ago slipped down the rapids
leading from crisis to catastrophe though it is only
in the last six months that these dire facts have
begun to be accepted abroad. For the first three
years of the war Republicans in the US regularly
claimed that the liberal media was ignoring signs of
peace and progress in Iraq. Some right wingers even
set up web sites devoted to spreading the news of
American achievements in this ruined land. I
remember a team from a US network news channel
staying in my hotel in Baghdad complaining to me, as
they buckled on their body armour and helmets, that
they had been once again told by their bosses in New
York, themselves under pressure from the White
House, to "go and find some good news and report
it."
Times have changed in Washington. The extent of the
disaster in Iraq is admitted by almost all aside
from President Bush. Even before the Democrats'
victory in the Congressional elections on 7 November
the magazine Vanity Fair commented acidly that 'the
only group in the Bush camp at this point are the
people who wait patiently for news of the W.M.D. and
continue to believe that Saddam and Osama were once
lovers.' Previous supporters of the war are showing
embarrassing haste in recanting past convictions and
becoming born again critics of the White House.
These days it is in Britain alone, or more
specifically in Downing Street, that policies
bloodily discredited in Iraq in the years since the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein still get a hearing. I
returned from Mosul to London earlier this month
just in time to hear Tony Blair speaking at the Lord
Mayor's banquet. It was a far more extraordinary
performance that his audience appreciated. As the
prime minister spoke with his usual Hugh Grant charm
it became clear that he had learned nothing and
forgotten nothing in three- and-a-half years of war.
Misconception after misconception poured from his
lips. Contrary to views of his own generals and
every opinion poll assessing Iraqi opinion he
discounted the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is
fueled by hostility to foreign occupation. Instead
he sees dark forces rising in the east, dedicated
like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings to principles
of pure evil. The enemy, in this case, is "based on
a thoroughly warped misinterpretation of Islam,
which is fanatical and deadly." Even by the standard
of Middle Eastern conspiracy theories it was puerile
stuff. Everywhere Blair saw hidden hands -- "forces
outside Iraq that are trying to create mayhem"--at
work. An expert on the politics of Iraq and Lebanon
recently said to me: "The most dangerous error in
the Middle East today is to believe that the Shia
communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran."
But this is exactly what the prime minister does
believe. The fact that the largest Shia militia in
Iraq--the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al- Sadr--is
anti-Iranian and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently
ignored. These misconceptions are important in terms
of practical policy because they give support to the
dangerous myth that if the US and Britain could only
frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then all
would come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and
Lebanon would inevitably fall into line. In a very
British way [and American too, of course. Editors]
opponents of the war in Iraq have focused not on
current events but on the past sins of the
government in getting us into the war. No doubt it
was all very wrong for Downing Street to pretend
that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction
and was a threat to the world when they knew he was
not. But this emphasis on the origins of the war in
Iraq has diverted attention from the fact that,
going by official statements, the British government
knows no more about what was going on in Iraq in
2006 than it did in 2003. The picture Blair paints
of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point. For
instance he says Iraqis 'voted or an explicitly
non-sectarian government,' but every Iraqi knows
that the vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005
went wholly along sectarian and ethnic lines. The
polls were the starting pistol for the start of the
civil war.
Blair steadfastly refuses to accept the fact that
opposition to the American and British occupation of
Iraq has been the main cause of the insurgency. The
commander of the British army General Sir Richard
Dannatt was almost fired for his trouble when he
made the obvious point that "we should get ourselves
out some time soon because our presence exacerbates
the security problem." Iraq is a notoriously
complicated country but the swiftest way to grasp
the most important features of its politics is to
look at figures from the latest of a series of
opinion polls carried out by the US-based group
WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end of September.
These explain why Dannatt is right and Blair is
wrong. The poll shows that 92 per cent of the Sunni
and 62 per cent of the Shia--up from 41 per cent at
the start of the year -- approve of attacks on US
led forces. Only the Kurds support the occupation.
Some 78 per cent of all Iraqis think that the US
military presence provokes more conflict than it
prevents and 71 per cent want US-led forces out of
Iraq within a year. The biggest and most menacing
change this year is the growing hostility of Iraq's
Shia to the American and British presence.
It used to be said that at least the foreign
occupation prevented a civil war but with 1,000
Iraqis being killed every week, this it is now very
clearly failing to do. On the contrary it was the
occupation itself that helped provoke the present
civil war. I do not mean that anybody conspired in
Washington and London to set Iraqis at each other's
throats. It was always true that in post-Saddam Iraq
there was going to be friction-- probably involving
violence-- between the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish
communities. But Iraqis were also forced to decide
if they were for or against a foreign invader. The
Sunni community was always going to fight the
occupation, the Kurds to welcome it and the Shia to
cooperate with the US and Britain for just so long
as it served their interests. Patriotism and
communal self-interest combined. Before 2003 a Sunni
might see a Shia as the member of a different sect
but once the war had started he started to see him
as a traitor to his country.
Of course Bush and Blair argue that there is no
occupation. In June 2004 sovereignty was supposedly
handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom Reign," wrote Mr
Bush on the piece of paper informing him of the
carefully choreographed return of power to an Iraqi
government at a ceremony in the heart of the Green
Zone. But the reality of power remained firmly with
the US and Britain. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri
al-Maliki said this month that he could not move a
company of soldiers without seeking permission of
the Coalition (the US and Britain). Officials in
Mosul confirmed to me that they could not carry out
a military operation without the agreement of US
forces.
There is a hidden history to the occupation of Iraq
which helps explain why it has proved such a
disaster. In 1991 after the first Gulf war a crucial
reason why President George Bush senior did not push
on to Baghdad was that he feared that the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein would be followed by elections
that would be won in turn by Shia religious parties
sympathetic to Iran. No worse outcome of the war
could be imagined in Washington. After the capture
of Baghdad in 2003 the US faced the same dilemma.
Many of the contortions of US policy in Iraq since
then have been a covert attempt to avoid or dilute
the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.
For over a year the astute US envoy in Baghdad
Zalmay Khalilzad tried to conciliate the Sunni:
Bring their politicians into government, modify the
federal constitution and open secret talks with the
Sunni armed resistance. He failed. Attacks on US
forces are on the increase. Dead and wounded US
soldiers now total almost 1,000 a month. But the US
is now gearing up for a fight with the Mehdi Army,
the largest Shia militia. An Iraqi government will
only have real legitimacy and freedom to operate
when US and British troops have withdrawn.
Washington and London have to accept that if Iraq is
to survive at all it will be as a loose federation
run by a Shia-Kurdish alliance because together they
are 80 per cent of the population. But, thanks to
the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the
future of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations
but on the battlefield.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Occupation
(Verso).
counterpunch org
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