What is the mission of
the United States military in Iraq now that the
insurgency has escalated into a full-blown civil
war? According to the Bush administration, it is to
support a national unity government that includes
all Iraq’s major communities: the Shiites, Sunni
Arabs and Kurds. O.K., but this raises another
question: What does the Iraqi government govern?
In the southern half of Iraq, Shiite religious
parties and clerics have created theocracies policed
by militias that number well over 100,000 men. In
Basra, three religious parties control — and
sometimes fight over — the thousands of barrels of
oil diverted each day from legal exports into
smuggling. To the extent that the central government
has authority in the south, it is because some of
the same Shiite parties that dominate the government
also control the south.
Kurdistan in the north is effectively independent.
The Iraqi Army is barred from the region, the Iraqi
flag prohibited, and central government ministries
are not present.
The Kurdish people voted nearly unanimously for
independence in an informal referendum in January
2005.
And in the Sunni center of the nation and Baghdad,
the government has virtually no control beyond the
American-protected Green Zone. The Mahdi Army, a
radical Shiite militia, controls the capital’s
Shiite neighborhoods, while Qaeda offshoots and
former Baathists are increasingly taking over the
Sunni districts. |
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While the Bush administration professes a commitment
to Iraq’s unity, it has no intention of undertaking
the major effort required to put the country
together again. During the formal occupation of Iraq
in 2003 and 2004, the American-led coalition allowed
Shiite militias to mushroom and clerics to impose
Islamic rule in the south, in some places with a
severity reminiscent of Afghanistan’s Taliban.
To disarm militias and dismantle undemocratic local
governments now would bring the United States into
direct conflict with Iraq’s Shiites, who are nearly
three times as numerous as the Sunni Arabs and
possess vastly more powerful militias and military
forces.
There are no significant coalition troops in
Kurdistan, which is secure and increasingly
prosperous. Arab Iraqis have largely accepted
Kurdistan’s de facto separation from Iraq, and so
has the Bush administration.
In the Sunni center, our current strategy involves
handing off combat duties to the Iraqi Army. Mostly,
it is Shiite battalions that fight in the Sunni Arab
areas, as the Sunni units are not reliable.
Thus what the Bush administration portrays as
“Iraqi” security forces is seen by the local Sunni
population as a hostile force loyal to a
Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, installed by
the American invaders and closely aligned with the
traditional enemy, Iran. The more we “Iraqize” the
fight in the Sunni heartland, the more we strengthen
the insurgents.
Because it is Iraq’s most mixed city, Baghdad is the
front line of Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite civil war. It is a
tragedy for its people, most of whom do not share
the sectarian hatred behind the killing. Iraqi
forces cannot end the civil war because many of them
are partisans of one side, and none are trusted by
both communities.
For the United States to contain the civil war, we
would have to deploy more troops and accept a
casualty rate many times the current level as our
forces changed their mission from a support role to
intensive police duties.
The American people would not support such an
expanded mission, and the Bush administration has no
desire to undertake it.
The administration, then, must match its goals in
Iraq to the resources it is prepared to deploy.
Since it cannot unify Iraq or stop the civil war, it
should work with the regions that have emerged.
Where no purpose is served by a continuing military
presence — in the Shiite south and in Baghdad —
America and its allies should withdraw.
As an alternative to using Shiite and American
troops to fight the insurgency in Iraq’s Sunni
center, the administration should encourage the
formation of several provinces into a Sunni Arab
region with its own army, as allowed by Iraq’s
Constitution.
Then the Pentagon should pull its troops from this
Sunni territory and allow the new leaders to
establish their authority without being seen as
collaborators.
Seeing as we cannot maintain the peace in Iraq, we
have but one overriding interest there today — to
keep Al Qaeda from creating a base from which it can
plot attacks on the United States. Thus we need to
have troops nearby prepared to re-engage in case the
Sunni Arabs prove unable to provide for their own
security against the foreign jihadists.
This would be best accomplished by placing a small
“over the horizon” force in Kurdistan. Iraqi
Kurdistan is among the most pro-American societies
in the world and its government would welcome our
military presence, not the least because it would
help protect Kurds from Arab Iraqis who resent their
close cooperation with the United States during the
2003 war. American soldiers on the ground might also
ease the escalating tension between the Iraqi Kurds
and Turkey, which is threatening to send its troops
across the border in search of Turkish Kurd
terrorists using Iraq as a haven.
From Kurdistan, the American military could readily
move back into any Sunni Arab area where Al Qaeda or
its allies established a presence.
The Kurdish peshmerga, Iraq’s only reliable
indigenous military force, would gladly assist their
American allies with intelligence and in combat. And
by shifting troops to what is still nominally Iraqi
territory, the Bush administration would be able to
claim it had not “cut and run” and would also avoid
the political complications — in United States and
in Iraq — that would arise if it were to withdraw
totally and then have to send American troops back
into Iraq.
Yes, a United States withdrawal from the Shiite and
Sunni Arab regions of Iraq would leave behind
sectarian conflict and militia rule. But staying
with the current force and mission will produce the
same result. Continuing a military strategy where
the ends far exceed the means is a formula for war
without end.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States
ambassador to Croatia, is the author of “The End of
Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War
Without End.”
Extracted from The End of Iraq by Peter W Galbraith,
published by Simon & Schuster tomorrow at £17.99.
Copies can be ordered for £16.19 including postage
from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585.
Peter Galbraith is a former US ambassador with a
long involvement in policy on Iraq
nytimes com
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