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The Way to Go in Iraq
18.7.2007
By Peter W. Galbraith. This article appears in the
August 16th issue of the New York Review of Books
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The
War Is Lost. By Peter W. Galbraith and Tom
Engelhardt
July
18, 2007
The week in Iraq began with a particularly brutal
triple bombing in the oil-rich, disputed city of
Kirkuk – a truck bomb took out part of the
headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and
subsequent car bombs hit a nearby market and a
police patrol, with over 80 dead and more than 180
wounded. These were reminders, undoubtedly from
Sunni extremists (possibly driven north by President
Bush's surge offensive around Baghdad), that the
only relatively peaceful, economically prospering
region of "Iraq" – Iraqi Kurdistan – may not remain
that way forever. Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmens are
already struggling over who is to inherit the
oil-spoils of Kirkuk, which many Kurds would like to
annex and turn into the capital of what they dream
may someday be an independent country. Kirkuk's fate
is supposedly to be decided by a referendum at
year's end. |
Former U.S. State Department Official, Peter
Galbraith |
In the meantime, on Kurdistan's western border, the
Turkish army continues to mass – with rumors of a
mobilization of up to 200,000 troops as well as
tanks, heavy artillery, and air power. The Turkish
military has been threatening not just "hot pursuit"
of Kurdish rebels into Iraqi Kurdistan, but an
actual invasion in response to terrorist acts
committed by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in
Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish
population. As the Bush administration has been
claiming that Iran is arming Shi'ite (and even
Sunni) insurgents fighting U.S. troops, so the Turks
are now ominously claiming that the PKK is armed, in
part, with American weapons. This represents but
another potentially fatal brew of forces in already
chaotic Iraq. The results of a Turkish invasion are
hard to calculate, but it would surely reverberate
throughout the region – and don't expect those three
"surge" brigades the Kurds sent to Baghdad to remain
there long if Kurdistan explodes.
Former ambassador Peter Galbraith, author of The End
of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War
Without End, has long defended the interests of the
Kurds (a people repeatedly deserted by great and
regional powers) and a possible three-state solution
to the Iraqi catastrophe. I've had my own doubts
about Kurdistan as a fallback position for this
administration. (Imagine, based on the record so far
in the rest of Iraq, the harm they could do.) But in
the following piece, posted at TomDispatch thanks to
the kindness of the editors of the New York Review
of Books, Galbraith vividly lays out the dismal
state of Iraq and the various catastrophes likely to
flow from most of the major "benchmarks" established
by the Bush administration and Congress, if they
were ever to become reality. He also briefly makes
the case for an American responsibility for
"preserving Kurdistan's democracy," one that must be
taken with great seriousness. Tom
The Way to Go in Iraq, By Peter Galbraith
1.
On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the
Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of
security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the
Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin
Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised
the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of
the handover. And he drew attention to the
"benchmark" now achieved: with the handover, he
said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of
Iraq's eighteen provinces.
In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition
force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined
army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003
campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the
Kurdistan government in Erbil The peshmerga provided
security in the three Kurdish provinces before the
handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on
Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively
prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag
fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.
Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince
Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily
arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the
handover to take place before the U.S. congressional
elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi
flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgment
that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds
were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the
ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no
Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise
ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was
followed by a military parade without a single flag
– an event so unusual that one observer thought it
might merit mention in Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security
adviser, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan's
prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi
government had no part in supervising the
nonexistent handover. While General Mixon, a highly
regarded strategist with excellent ties to the
Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did,
Mowaffak al- Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's
distinct nature and the right of the Kurds –
approximately six million people, or some 20% of
Iraq's population – to chart their own course.
On July 12, the White House released a
congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq.
As with the sham handover, the report reflected the
administration's desperate search for indicators of
progress since it began its "surge" by sending five
additional combat brigades to the country in
February 2007. In recent months the Bush
administration and its advocates have been promoting
the success of the surge in reducing sectarian
killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in
Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are
signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq are
notoriously hard to come by it does appear that the
overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined
from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the
extremely high levels of the summer of 2006.
Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies –
usually the victims of Shi'ite death squads – has
risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much
of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad
is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is
there any way to know if it will last.
The developments in Anbar are more significant.
Tribesmen who had been attacking U.S. troops in
support of the insurgency are now taking U.S.
weapons to fight al-Qaeda and other Sunni
extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni fundamentalists
are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored
militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's
Shi'ite -led government as an enemy, and the U.S.
appears now to be in the business of arming both the
Sunni and Shi'ite factions in what has long since
become a civil war.
Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has
not changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green
Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar
attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration
by suicide bombers. Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical
Shi'ite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target
of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most
powerful political figures. The military activity
against his forces seems only to have enhanced his
standing with the public.
Even if the surge has had some modest military
success, it has failed to accomplish its political
objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was
to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in
Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide a
breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's
government might enact a program of national
reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis
to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces,
improved by their close relations with U.S. troops
and additional training, would take over security.
The core of the national reconciliation program is a
series of legislative and political steps that the
government should take to address the concerns of
Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they
dominated until 2003. These steps include an oil
revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor
Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding
provincial elections (the Sunnis boycotted the
January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections
leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority
provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis
want a more centralized state); revising the ban on
public sector employment of former Ba'athists
(Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Ba'ath
Party and of the Saddam-era public service), and a
fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the
administration and Congress have placed great
emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government
to achieve these so- called benchmarks. Congress
has, by law, linked US strategy on Iraq and
financial support of the Iraqi government to
progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks,
and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law,
most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were
all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections
will make Iraq less governable while the process of
constitutional revision could break the country
apart.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes
to talk of the disparity between the Iraqi clock and
the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe they
have more time to reach agreement than the American
political calendar will tolerate. Crocker is the
State Department's foremost Iraq hand but, more
generally, American impatience often reflects
ignorance. For example, both Congress and the
administration have expressed frustration that the
ban on public service by ex-Ba'athists has not been
relaxed, since this appears to be a straightforward
change, easily accomplished and already promised by
Iraq's leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi
Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is
Iraq's leading Shi'ite party and a critical
component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition.
He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During
Saddam's rule Ba'athists executed six of them. On
August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked
to the Ba'athists, blew up his last surviving
brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the
shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al -Sadr, Hakim's
main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent
Shi'ite religious family. Saddam's Ba'ath regime
murdered his father and two brothers in 1999.
Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested
Moqtada's father-in-law and the father -in-law's
sister – the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint
al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Ba'ath
security men raped and killed his sister. They then
set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving
nails into his head. De-Ba'athification is an
intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most
powerful Shi'ite political leaders, as it is to
hundreds of thousands of their followers who
suffered similar atrocities.
Iraq's Shi'ite leaders are reluctant to spend
reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they
believe, not without reason, that such funds support
the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late
June on the Senate floor Indiana Republican Richard
Lugar reported that Iraq's Shi'ite-led government
has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted
for Sunni provinces" and that the "strident
intervention" of the U.S. embassy was required in
order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.
Iraq's mainstream Shi'ite leaders resist holding new
provincial elections because they know what such
elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis
boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not
control the northern governorate, or province, of
Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and
they are not represented in governorates with mixed
populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of
Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give
Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they
live, and the Shi'ites say they do not have a
problem with this, although just how they would
treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is
far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new
elections in the Sunni governorates even though it
means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a
much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial
elections would also require new elections in
southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held,
al-Hakim's Shi'ite party, the SIIC, which now
controls seven of the nine southern governorates,
would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His
main base is in Baghdad and new elections would
almost certainly leave his followers in control of
Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's
population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives
the governorates enormous powers and significant
shares of the national budget, if they choose to
exercise these powers. New local elections are not
required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early
elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to
the U.S. and appears to have close ties to Iran,
serve American interests. But this is precisely what
the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress
seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant
benchmark and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's
constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an
October 2005 referendum, is the product of a
Kurdish-Shi'ite deal: the Kurds supported the
establishment of a Shi'ite-led government in
exchange for Shi'ite support for a confederal
arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions
like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are
virtually independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shi'ites,
Kurds, and Sunnis on any significant constitutional
changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must
come at the expense of the Kurds or Shi'ites. Since
voters in these communities have a veto on any
constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail
in a referendum. A revised constitution has no
chance of being enacted but its failure will
exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has
almost no power, and the Bush administration is
partially to blame for this. When the constitution
was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came
up with a series of proposals that would have made
for more workable sharing of power between regions
and the central government. The U.S. embassy stopped
the UN from presenting these proposals because it
hoped for a final document as centralized as (and
textually close to) the interim constitution written
by the Americans.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present
form, then U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered
a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in
exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there
would be a fast-track process to revise the
constitution in the months following ratification to
meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration,
the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the
U.S. insists that constitutional revision is a moral
obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to
their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they
voted against ratification of the current
constitution.
With input from the United Nations (belatedly
brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi
Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review
Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would
strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its
right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes
applicable in its own territory, and to control its
own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like
Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab
Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures,
constitutional revision may be the final wedge
between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the
CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject
to a vote in the parliament as a single package and
then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters
are certain to reject the proposed package (or any
package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this
could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open
conflict. Kurdish NGOs, who ran a 2005 independence
referendum, are poised to make a "NO" campaign on
constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its
July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded
the CRC's work as "satisfactory," an evaluation that
was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out
of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally
stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible
to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their
constituents don't agree on any common vision for
Iraq. The Shi'ites voted twice in 2005 for parties
that seek to define Iraq as a Shi'ite state. By
their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost
unanimously rejected the Shi'ite vision of Iraq's
future, including the new constitution. The Kurds'
envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the
2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for
Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005
referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the
benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the
civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being run
by Shi'ite religious parties, which they see as
installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and
wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the
Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shi'ites
apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shi'ites
believe that their democratic majority and their
historical suffering under the Ba'athist
dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not
inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as
their long -standing oppressors, especially when
they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to
the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of
ordinary Shi'ites. The differences are fundamental
and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues,
reemploying ex-Ba'athists, or revising the
constitution. The war is not about those things.
2.
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the
President nor the war's intellectual architects are
prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of
defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the
benefits of winning – a stable Iraq, democracy on
the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the
evil Iranian and Syrian regimes – but by the
consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it,
"The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death
and destruction in the Middle East and here in
America."
Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters,
while insisting the surge is working, are moving to
assign blame for defeat. And they have already
picked their target: the American people. In The
Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the
neoconservative American Enterprise Institute,
wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost –
call it the Clinton-Lugar axis – are mounting a
surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes
ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's
anger by noting that the American people had lost
confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated
by the Democratic takeover of both houses of
Congress. (This "blame the American people" approach
has, through repetition, almost become the accepted
explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing
defeat to a loss of public support and not to
fifteen years of military failure.)
Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of
defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaeda would overrun the Green
Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the
rooftop of the still unfinished largest embassy in
the world. President Bush feeds on this imagery. In
his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he
explained:
"If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle
with control of Iraq, they would have control of a
nation with massive oil reserves, which they could
use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread
their influence. The al-Qaeda terrorists who behead
captives or order suicide bombings would not be
satisfied to see America defeated and gone from
Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory,
protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose
their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and
eager to harm Americans."
But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's
Shi'ite-led government is in no danger of losing the
civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni
front. Iraq's Shi'ites are three times as numerous
as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military
and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring
Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis
are small, far away (vast deserts separate the
inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the
main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide
money, something the insurgency has in great amounts
already.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much
like Iraq today – a land divided along ethnic lines
into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being
fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by
America's failure to accomplish its objective of a
self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And
that failure has already taken place, along with the
increase of Iranian power in the region.
Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of
secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S.
withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian
influence. Senator Hillary Clinton, Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, and former
UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the
prominent Democrats who have called for the U.S. to
protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a
withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is
straightforward: it secures the one part of Iraq
that has emerged as stable, democratic, and
pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our
Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention
and a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war;
it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be
used to strike at al-Qaeda in adjacent Sunni
territories; and it limits Iran's gains.
In laying out his dark vision of an American
failure, President Bush never discusses Iran's
domination of Iraq even though this is a far more
likely consequence of American defeat than an
al-Qaeda victory. Bush's reticence is understandable
since it was his miscalculations and incompetent
management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran
its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the
neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its
current powerful influence over Iraq's central
government and southern region, persisting in the
fantasy – notwithstanding all evidence to
the contrary – that Iran is deeply unpopular among
Iraq's Shi'ites and clerics. (At the same time, U.S.
officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shi'ite
militias with particularly lethal roadside bombs.)
3.
On June 25, without giving the press or White House
any advance notice, Richard Lugar, the most
respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in
Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our
Iraq strategy to our vital interests." On the face
of it, the idea is as sensible and conservative as
the senator delivering the speech. He observed that
political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered
by the U.S. military, and growing antiwar sentiment
at home "make it almost impossible for the United
States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian
government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame."
Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi
leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as
Lugar observed, because the leaders do not control
their followers but also because Iraqi leaders have
also discovered that telling the Bush administration
what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable
substitute for action.
Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation
in Iraq:
"Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be
Iraqis.... In this context, the possibility that the
United States can set meaningful benchmarks that
would provide an indication of impending success or
failure is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or
agreements will be initially achieved, but most can
be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the
Iraqi government, a decision by a faction to ignore
agreements, or the next terrorist attack or wave of
sectarian killings. American manpower cannot keep
the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our
training operations could produce an effective Iraqi
army loyal to a cohesive central government is still
just a hopeful plan for the future."
Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we
"refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments
of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of
our vital interests in the Middle East." After four
years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than
strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has
produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from
the administration and overt attack from the
neoconservatives.
Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main
currents of opinion in a nation increasingly
polarized between the growing number who want to
withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a
failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly
does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified
country. In the parts where we can accomplish
nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still
three missions that may be achievable – disrupting
al-Qaeda, preserving Kurdistan's democracy, and
limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all
be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We
need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to
protect American interests. Unfortunately, we
probably won't get it.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to
Croatia, is senior diplomatic fellow at the Center
for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham
Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of
its clients in post-conflict societies, including
Iraq. His The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence
Created a War Without End is now out in paperback
This article appears in the August 16th, 2007 issue
of the
New York Review of Books.
Copyright 2007 Peter Galbraith
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