"When I remember the years since, all I can think about is blood." Dr Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish MP, adds: "Not many people here want the Americans to stay, apart from the Kurds, and Kurdistan was never occupied by US troops."
Ethnic and communal loyalties frequently determine attitudes to the withdrawal. Sunnis in Baghdad, victims of massacre and expulsion, feel one last safeguard against persecution by the Shia-dominated security forces is being removed. "It is not a good time for the Americans to leave," says Zaid Ahmed, 35, a Sunni doctor. "The Iraqis are not prepared to fight al-Qa'ida or Iran."
The Shia majority in the capital is more confident. Adel Hassan, 48, a middle ranking government official, says: "Iraqis will face the same problems whether the Americans stay or go." Asked about the prospects for a civil war, he replies cynically that, if there is one, "it will be no problem for the government because the ministers all have two passports and can leave the country."
Iraqi apprehensiveness is born of fears stemming from past butchery - some 225,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2003 by one estimate - as from any prospect of a return to mass killings. "My best friend just told me she has put off buying a house until she can see what happens after the Americans go," says one woman journalist. "But maybe nothing will happen." She adds that one consequence of the Sunni-Shia battles of 2006-07 means there are now few mixed areas left in Baghdad and therefore less chance of confrontation.
The Americans have in practice played a limited role in Iraqi security since 2009. "In the last two years the Americans have had only a small influence here," says Dr Othman. This is probably an underestimate.
A government minister says "the Americans help keep the leaders of the different communities within some form of consensus which is the most important challenge here".
Iraqis do not spend all their time thinking and talking about politics. For many, the biggest challenge is trying to get through the day. "Everything is always more difficult to do in Iraq than in other countries," complained one professional woman wearily. Improvements are there, but they are infuriatingly slow to come and not everybody benefits. One woman friend told me cheerily that she was getting five to seven hours' electricity, but on the same day a few miles away another friend sitting in his house wrapped in a blanket said to me gloomily that he had received just one hour's power supply.
Getting round Baghdad is easier than last year. There is more traffic and it moves faster because there are fewer checkpoints and many grey concrete blast walls blocking off streets have been removed. There are even traffic lights that operate when electricity is available. The airport road - once the most dangerous stretch of Tarmac in the world - now feels relatively safe. The burnt-out carcasses of cars that once dotted the verge are long gone and the palm trees in the central reservation have been pruned. Shops stay open late and there are no queues at petrol stations.
But, for all the government's claim to have restored peace, it does not take long to be affected by the insecurity in Baghdad. I had just arrived at the al-Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone last week when a bomb exploded, killing two people a couple of hundred yards away in the car park of the parliament building. I saw the burnt-out remains of the chassis of the vehicle and scattered pieces of debris, but I could not find a crater, suggesting that the bomb was not large by Iraqi standards.
Soon afterwards a military spokesman explained that the bombing had been part of a complicated plot to assassinate Mr Maliki and the device had been assembled in the Green Zone. What is significant here is that, for all the tight security protecting the Green Zone, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia - which has little connection with Osama bin Laden's group - and other insurgents still have the personnel, equipment and intelligence to launch an attack inside such a heavily defended area. The failure to eliminate insurgents has little to do with the presence or absence of the US Army. Iraq's own forces number 280,000 soldiers and 645,000 police and frontier guards. "The problem is that we have too many intelligence bodies and some of them are in communication with the terrorists," explained one senior official. The director of one of Iraq's numerous intelligence agencies lamented that "the authorities have no real plan: they react to events day-by-day".
The problem goes deeper than this. It lies essentially in the fact that the divisions and inefficiencies of the Iraqi intelligence apparatus are symptomatic of the failings of Iraq's dysfunctional state. Political leaders advocating the different interests of the Shias, Sunnis and the Kurds have difficulty in reaching an agreement on almost anything. Decision-making is crippled by the way in which senior politicians within a supposedly power-sharing government can veto the action of the others. Mr Maliki's sustained effort to get round this by trying to monopolise power at the centre exacerbates party differences. He takes all security decisions himself and the Shia dominate the upper ranks of the Defence and Interior Ministries.
Not all the news in Iraq is bad. The country is wholly dependent on its oil revenues, but these are expanding rapidly. "I only saw the Iraqi cabinet panic once," said a former minister, "and that was a few years ago when they feared the price of oil would drop below $50 a barrel." These revenues enable the state to pay for an enormous number of employees - the security forces alone total 900,000 men. Teachers, who were scarcely paid during sanctions, get a proper wage.
But physical reconstruction remains painfully slow. There are few cranes on the skyline of Baghdad. Corruption is at the level of Afghanistan or Somalia. Few are punished for the most blatant thefts, though one minister was recently forced to resign after signing a billion-dollar contract with a bankrupt German company and a shell company in Canada that had an address but no assets or operations.
Only in the very autonomous Kurdistan region in the north is there fast development and a government that functions effectively. As the US Army departs this month, non-Kurdish Iraq remains a theoretically wealthy but ruined country whose physical and political wounds will take decades to heal.
‘GREATEST STRATEGIC DISASTER’ (2012)
Sunday, 1 January 2012
IS THIS THE FINAL DISINTEGRATION OF IRAQ?
Compared with many bombs in Iraq, it was not a big one. I had just arrived in the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad on 28 November when there was an explosion a few hundred yards away in front of the parliament building. I thought at first it must be a rocket or a mortar shell fired from outside the Green Zone, but, as night was falling, I drove past the site, which was marked by the burned-out chassis of a car that looked as if a bomb had detonated inside it. I could see no crater, indicating that the explosive must, by Baghdad standards, have been on the small side.
I had no idea at the time that this explosion would mark a significant change of direction in Iraqi politics. It may only have been used as an excuse, but the bomb was the signal for the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to cut adrift the senior Sunni members of his government. He said the bombing was an elaborate attempt to assassinate him and accused the bodyguards of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi of involvement. An arrest warrant was issued for Mr Hashemi, accusing him of running a death squad, with most of the charges relating to 2006-07. Mr Hashemi was forced to flee to Kurdistan; once there, he denounced the Maliki government as a dictatorship.
Is this the final disintegration of Iraq? Is Mr Maliki turning into a Shia version of Saddam Hussein, abandoning compromise, centralising power and relying on force alone? Does he have the means to do so? Even with Iraq's $100 billion-a year oil revenues, a large if chaotic state machine and security forces numbering 900,000 soldiers and policemen, it will not be that easy.
Saddam had far greater means of coercion and still failed to establish his absolute power. He failed because Iraq's three main communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurd - are hard to intimidate permanently. He and previous rulers used massacre and terror against the Kurds for more than 40 years, but were unable to crush them. "The Sunni Arabs are in a better position to destabilise Iraq than the Kurds ever were," says on
e Iraqi observer.
The centralising of power in Iraq faces such great obstacles because all parties have foreign allies and, under pressure, will call on them. The Sunnis in Iraq will look to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the US if they are marginalised and turned into second-class citizens. Though not quite there yet, some Sunni politicians in Baghdad have been leaving with their families, on the grounds that it is too dangerous to stay.
Mr Maliki may appear to have an advantage in physical power, but this is deceptive. His armed forces are numerous, but ramshackle and often ineffective. Al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia is not that big, but it still managed to plant more than a dozen bombs in Baghdad on 22 December.
More important, Mr Maliki's leadership was the result of a compromise when he was first chosen as prime minister in 2006 and again in 2010. He has always had many enemies, but they proved too disunited to choose an alternative candidate acceptable to them all. Kurdish politicians and followers of the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr all denounced Mr Maliki as untrustworthy and dictatorial during his first term in office, but ended up joining his new government. As important is the fact that Mr Maliki is perhaps the only leader acceptable to the US and Iran. Because the Americans and Iranians spend so much time insulting each other over Iraq, too little attention is given to their unspoken accommodations there. In 2006 and 2010, Mr Maliki was the beneficiary of this. When he was selected, an Iraqi official told me with a laugh: "The Great Satan [as the Iranians call the US] and the Axis of Evil [as the US describes Iran and its allies] have come together again and chosen Maliki as their man."
It is a policy that has had its opponents abroad. "I think it was a bad mistake for the US not to say in 2010 that Maliki was unacceptable to them," said a Western diplomat formerly posted to Baghdad. He argued that Mr Maliki should have been rejected because he was a sectarian Shia intent on building an authoritarian state and that this state is corrupt and dysfunctional. Corruption is at a level whereby state funds are simply transferred abroad to shell companies secretly owned by officials at home. Unemployment is between 25 and 40 per cent. Inability to provide an adequate supply of electricity has been a notorious failing of the post-Saddam state, but the electricity ministry still managed to agree to pay $1.3 billion to a bankrupt German company and a non-existent Canadian one. The government's budget is spent mainly on salaries and pensions, with recipients often connected to the ruling parties.
It is easy to be too pious about this. Most oil states in the Middle East and elsewhere use oil revenues to fund vast patronage machines and corruption is rife. But while bribery is pervasive in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to businessmen, roads, airports, bridges, power stations and houses get built there, while in Baghdad they do not. There are few banks and these are openly plundered by state officials. In the long run, continuing mass poverty and deprivation, despite soaring oil revenues, may be as destabilising to Iraq as sectarian differences between Sunni and Shia.
Disaster may come, but perhaps not yet. Iraqi politics can be misleading because, with the country so violent at the best of times, furious political confrontations do not necessarily lead to all-out conflict. Each side has a lot to lose from the final disintegration of the state.
The future of Iraq may well be decided in the capitals of its neighbours over the next year. The US remains important in Baghdad, despite the departure of its troops. The more divided Iraqis are, the more the influence of outside powers increases. Unfortunately, the Arab Spring has destabilised the whole Middle East, with Iran fearing it will lose its most important ally, Syria, while the Sunni-Shia struggle is becoming more intense in countries such as Bahrain.
Occasionally, Mr Maliki sounds like an Iraqi nationalist, but under pressure he plays the sectarian card, usually by frightening the Shias with the phantom of a Baathist and Sunni counter-revolution. But, as the Baathists and the Americans found to their cost, anybody who tries to monopolise power in Iraq, ignoring other power centres, creates the conditions for their own failure.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
IRAN INCREASES HOLD IN IRAQ
An Iranian-backed Shia militia in Iraq, which once killed US soldiers, has agreed to give up its weapons and join the political process. The move is likely to fuel US paranoia about growing Iranian influence.
Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which split from the Mehdi Army militia of the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, carried out some well-organised attacks on US troops at the height of the tit-for-tat covert conflict between Iran and the US in Iraq in 2007. It was also responsible for kidnapping the British IT consultant Peter Moore from the justice ministry in Baghdad. It later killed four of his bodyguards whom it now says tried to escape.
The group says it wishes to run in local and parliamentary elections and is willing to hand over its weapons. "They want to join the political process," said Amer al-Khuzaie, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's adviser for reconciliation. "The government is ready to take them if they want us to." The group carried out lethal attacks on the remaining US bases in Iraq last June. Mr Sadr, who has denounced the sectarian killings by Shia militiamen acting in his name, says that Asaib Ahl al-Haq still has Iraqi blood on its hands.
Mr Maliki may wish to split the Shia militia movement that only grudgingly gave him the support he needed to retain power in 2010.
Pledges to disarm are never worth very much in Iraq since a majority of the male population has weapons. Mr Sadr was heavily supported by Iran when he fought US forces in Najaf twice in 2004 and he later sought refuge there when the US and Mr Maliki were seeking to crush his militia. But his relations with the Iranians have always been equivocal and he has sought to avoid becoming their pawn.
The solidarity of Iraq's Shias, 60 per cent of the population, will increase as al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia continues to launch devastating bomb attacks against Shia targets. At least 78 people were killed on Thursday in such attacks, which create an atmosphere of insecurity though they do not destabilise the government. They do, however, endanger the Sunni community, to which the bombers almost always belong.
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
WHAT NEXT FOR AL-QA’IDA?
A year after Osama bin Laden was killed, how relevant is al-Qa'ida? In the decade since 9/11 Bin Laden was always a symbol rather than an operational commander. His death did not do much to disrupt the group as an organisation. Occasional recordings of his voice that surfaced over the years contained no new ideas and were primarily a way for al-Qa'ida to show that he was still alive. In death such a symbolic but inactive leader can exercise as much influence as when he lived, so his killing by US commandos has not inflicted fatal damage to his organisation.
Yet his death was very important, less because of its impact on al-Qa'ida than because of Bin Laden's unique position in American demonology after 9/11. It is difficult to think of anybody else in US history with the same Satanic status.
President Barack Obama trumpets as one of his main achievements his administration's success in tracking Bin Laden down and eliminating him. With him dead, it became easier for the White House to proceed with the withdrawal from Afghanistan where the presence of a few hundred al-Qa'ida fighters was used to justify the presence of 90,000 US soldiers. The shock to Americans of the 9/11 attacks may be diminishing but it is still there. As a result, any act by al-Qa'ida will go on having an impact out of all proportion to its size or capacity in future just as it had done over the last decade.
No US administration can afford to be seen by American voters as derelict in pursuing al-Qa'ida whenever it shows the slightest signs of life. Few Americans pay attention to the turmoil in Yemen, but any stirring there by al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), head-quartered there, attracts immediate official and media attention. It was from Yemen that two botched plots, the underpants bomber and explosives packed inside ink cartridges, were launched. Both failed but, as an al-Qa'ida statement pointed out, these failures were a success in grabbing the attention of the world.
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Aside from the killing of Bin Laden, have the Arab Spring uprisings and protests over the last year knocked away one of al-Qa'ida's main ideological justifications? This was that dictatorships in the Muslim world could not be peacefully overthrown and the priority was to attack the US as their chief sponsor. In 1998, claiming that the US had declared war on God and his messenger, Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his Egyptian second in command, called for the murder of Americans anywhere in the world as the "individual duty for every Muslim". This made limited impact at the time, but did resonate in the Muslim world after President George W Bush intervened militarily in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
It is a bit glib to imagine al-Qa'ida becoming a back number in the wake of the Arab Spring.
In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Islamic and secular opponents combined their efforts to overthrow police states. But the belief that Islamic fundamentalism is passé may be exaggerated. Firstly, al-Qa'ida was always a small minority and was never planning to run for election. It will not go out of business because there are other effective methods of agitation, though its appeal may be more limited. The Israeli conflict with the Palestinians festers, as the US makes no effective efforts to restrict Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and may soon explode. The political temperature of the whole region is rising and this cannot be to the disadvantage of al-Qa'ida. Islamic militants in eastern Libya, once a recruiting ground for al-Qa'ida suicide bombers going to Iraq, were last year closely cooperating with NATO to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. They included such leaders as Abdelhakim Belhadj, former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was notoriously handed over to Gaddafi's torturers by MI6 and the CIA. Such people are now publicly distancing themselves from al-Qa'ida. Likewise in Egypt the Salafists, hardliners who used to denounce democracy as un-Islamic, run successfully for parliament, are seeking to broaden their appeal, and last weekend surprisingly adopted a liberal former Muslim Brother as their presidential candidate.
Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 21