We should not have gone to Iraq because
going to Iraq implied staying and staying implied leaving. Now
begins the leaving, and it will be bloody. All else is an illusion.
This weekend another Iraqi government, the third in three years,
entered office under American guns in Baghdad’s green zone. Ibrahim
al-Jaafari gives way to Nouri al-Maliki, though neither the defence
nor internal security posts are filled. These are posts that matter,
with their murky unofficial links to police, militias and Baghdad
death squads.
The reason they are unfilled is that post-withdrawal Iraq is already
up and running. Power has seeped away from the coalition and its
still puppet ministers. It has moved out onto the streets of Baghdad
and Basra — and into the morgues.
The jungle drums can read the signs. The British are back in helmets
and tanks in the south, the Americans are back bombing and strafing
villages in the west. The coalition has lost any ability to
guarantee security to the Iraqi people, who must look elsewhere. In
Iraq, optimism may always be a virtue but it has become fantasy.
This place is a failed state. There is no rule of law. Murder is
unpunished. No foreigner dares to move except by air. Any Iraqi
risks his life working away from home — and women risk their lives
working at all. Interpreters wear balaclavas. Vendetta killings come
not daily but hourly, measured only by body counts. Professionals
are decamping to Jordan in greater numbers even than under Saddam.
Water, power and petrol supplies are also worse.
At the end of this month Tony Blair flies to Washington to discuss
with George W Bush how to escape. What was to be a neocon beacon of
democratic stability has become a hell-hole of anarchy. Iraq is no
longer just a mistake: it is the outcome of an intellectual and
moral catastrophe from which the image of western democracy will
take a generation to recover.
Bush and Blair have been shielded from this truth by years of
sycophantic briefing, but they cannot be shielded from opinion
polls. The war is overwhelmingly unpopular on both sides of the
Atlantic. Since both leaders are planning their departures, they are
frantic to have the incubus removed from their shoulders. Iraq
policy is a matter of dates.
The best moment to withdraw was when the Pentagon originally
intended, in June 2003, leaving Ahmed Chalabi to fight things out
with the Shi’ite clerics after Saddam’s downfall. But the urge to
“rebuild a nation” got the better of Bush and Blair. Another window
was in December 2003, then June 2004, then December 2005, “drop
dead” dates when control might have been handed over to whichever
majority leader was ascendant. Another date is now, with a new
government in place.
A crucial illusion of American and British policy is that the
occupation is somehow maintaining the integrity of the state and its
government. It is not. It is undermining both. In truth there is no
state and coalition troops are merely squatting in camps dotted
across the landscape, emerging occasionally to kill or get killed.
There are two consequences of each refusal to leave. First, the
troops offer an ever more inviting target for insurgency and a
magnet for anti-western guerrillas from across the region. This in
turn boosts the militias as alternative power networks and
encourages politicians to back them rather than the army. Second,
each postponement of withdrawal undermines the independence and
self-reliance of the current Iraqi leader. The American failure to
entrench Ayad Allawi as a new Baghdad strongman last year and leave
him to fend for himself was not democracy but stupidity.
Miliki’s position even within the Shi’ite majority depends on his
appeasing the Mahdist gangs and the Iran-backed Badr Brigades linked
to Ayatollah al-Sistani. The one certainty is that the presence of
American power at his elbow will weaken, not strengthen, his
credibility as a nationalist leader.
Washington and London still do not hear the message, that their
occupation is hugely unpopular among Iraqis, except for those VIPs
whose lives literally depend on it.
Withdrawal becomes harder with each postponement. Those with a
vested interest in occupation are more entrenched. Bases are
enlarged, contracts let, corruption extended. For the past year
British and American policy has been rooted in the concept of
“orderly transition” to a new Iraqi army, the latest version of
Vietnamisation. Over the course of 2005-06 American and British
troops were to be replaced by new army and police units. Last
October the mooted date for this was May 2006. Such dates are
meaningless when an occupier has lost initiative to anarchy.
The “new Iraqi army” strategy might have been plausible had the old
army been reformed and a new nexus of power and loyalty established
in Baghdad. That option has long gone. Despite quantities of
training and equipment, an Iraqi army deployable nationwide is blind
optimism. (Its officers dare not even drive home in uniform). Local
troops are unreliable outside their home district simply because
they are never going to outgun the militias. Soldiers can be brave
as lions, but why kill fellow Iraqis and provoke revenge when the
occupiers will soon be gone?
Police are more important to local security than soldiers, and they
have everywhere distanced themselves from the occupation. The only
peace in Iraq is where local police are in league with whatever
power structure, clerical or criminal, is locally dominant. Battles
in the south are largely between Mahdist and Badr gangs and their
offshoots. These fights will be resolved only when one or other
emerges as dominant. The coalition has not the remotest leverage
over this.
In much of Iraq everything points to a looming conflict between
Shi’ites and Sunnis. To all who know these people, this is an utter
tragedy, brought on by the coalition’s continued presence and its
failure to establish order. All recent experience of such conflict,
whether in Ulster, Palestine, Sudan or Yugoslavia, sees it resolved
into population movement and ethnic cleansing. This is now
proceeding bloodily in and round Baghdad. It will bring an awful
residue of ghost districts, refugee camps, revenge attacks and safe
havens. In Yugoslavia the solution, abetted by western intervention,
was partition. In Iraq America began the same process by
guaranteeing de facto autonomy to Kurdistan. That logic must now be
followed to its conclusion. Partition was always the most likely
outcome. This view is at last gaining traction in Washington,
advocated by Joe Biden, the Senate foreign relations chairman.
A template is offered by the constitution negotiated a year ago by
Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Baghdad proconsul, and approved by
the voters. Its chapter five allows any of Iraq’s 18 provinces to be
grouped into regions, each with an allotted share of oil revenue and
an option of assuming responsibility for legislation and “organising
internal forces . . . police, security and regional guards”.
This could not be more specific. Provincial governors in Sunni and
Shi’ite regions may vote themselves, individually or collectively, a
similar autonomy to that enjoyed by the Kurds. It is clear that this
will embrace formal and informal military and police units. Dreadful
problems would remain, including the governance of Baghdad and of
the mixed areas bordering Kurdistan. But at least there is a
constitutional framework for decentralisation such that military
responsibility can be handed over to new regional commanders. That
could begin at once if coalition forces can bear to surrender their
bases. The alternative is an eternity of the present stasis.
In southern Iraq the British have already handed three provinces
over to local forces, obeying the old Arabist maxim: find the
nearest strongman and give him guns. What the Americans do in
central Iraq is their decision. American troops are desperate to
leave, though what happens to a dozen gigantic bases is beyond
imagining (perhaps they will become refugee camps).
This is in part Britain’s war and that part should be Britain’s to
end. Iraq is no longer about nation building or democracy spreading
or reputation enhancing. It is about getting out in the best
possible order. The route is mapped in the Khalilzad constitution.
The endgame of yet another western intervention will be yet another
partition. But at least the sooner the better.
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