Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  Sunday, 6 March 2016

  LACK OF OIL REVENUE MAY RUIN IRAQ BEFORE ISIS

  IS prepares its murderous bombings with chilling care and attention to detail. Several months ago, the Iraqi security forces discovered a plan to bomb alKhadamiya, an ancient quarter of Baghdad at the centre of which is one of the holiest Shia shrines. IS operatives first spent a month watching the checkpoints protecting the district, looking for weaknesses. Then they sent a woman through the checkpoint they had chosen as the most vulnerable, to look at it more closely but without carrying explosives. Soon after wards she was sent again, but this time carrying a child's toy under her robes. Nobody stopped or questioned her, so IS had her do the same journey, but this time with a much bulkier toy which the security men at this checkpoint should have noticed but did not.

  The next occasion the would-be suicide bomber entered al-Khadamiya it would have been on a one-way mission to blow herself up and kill as many people as possible in the area of the shrine. Fortunately, it never happened because the Iraqi security forces received some quite separate intelligence about what was intended, and arrested the bombing team. The elaborate nature of the preparations for the attack were typical of the mixture of fanaticism and expertise with which IS carries out its terrorist acts.

  Safa Hussein alSheikh, the Deputy National Security Adviser in Baghdad and one of the most experienced and coolheaded security experts in Iraq, told me the story in an interview in Baghdad, to illustrate the difficulty of stopping IS slaughtering civilians. During the 10 days I had been in Iraq, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a Shia mosque in the Shuala district, killing at least 15 people, and a further 73 people were killed in a market in Sadr City. An IS force fought a pitched battle in Abu Ghraib in west Baghdad, using suicide bombers and fighters in vehicles equipped with heavy machine guns.

  The purpose of these assaults is in keeping with IS strategy of masking failure on the battlefield by targeting soft civilian targets. It sharpens differences between Shia and Sunni with the intention of forcing the Sunni community to look to IS as its defenders. Mr Sheikh says that the military aim of IS in carrying out these atrocities "is to spread out the security forces so IS can get superiority in numbers in one particular sector".

  Mr Sheikh does see IS as getting weaker after losing several cities and much of Salahuddin province, but it is by no means defeated. He says that overall it has between 20,000 and 30,000 core combat fighters, the equivalent of special forces in conventional armies, and they are backed up by a further 40,000 to 50,000 fighters who are less well-trained and ideologically committed. IS has the capacity to replace casualties by recruiting within the self-declared caliphate, but "they cannot recruit foreign fighters who are at the core of their military effectiveness".

  Some 85 per cent of IS troops in Iraq are Iraqi, say other security sources in Iraq, but a limited number of foreign jihadi units have been behind many IS successes in the past. Iraqi security officials I spoke to in Baghdad all downplay the idea of an attempt to recapture Mosul this year, emphasising the political and military problems there. More immediate targets will be Hawijah and alShirqat further south. Mr Sheikh said that "it will be a long road to Mosul". He points out that even during the counteruprising within the Sunni community against al-Qa’ida in Iraq in 2006-07, this never spread to Mosul. In any case, he says that IS can never be decisively defeated "so long as they have strategic depth in Syria".

  The bombings in Shuala and the fear the Mosul dam might break made the mood in Baghdad more edgy, but not for long. People in the capital may not enjoy living in a country which is in a state of permanent crisis, but they have become used to it over the past half-century. IS is not on the verge of defeat, but it is on the retreat and no longer capable of launching an all-out attack on Baghdad as it might have done in the summer of 2014. In fact, Mr Sheikh says that the most dangerous crisis facing Iraqis is not military but economic and political, because the country is running out of money thanks to the low price of oil and the weakness of the government.

  People in Baghdad have been targeted by suicide bombers since 2003, but until recently they always had increasing oil revenues. Even at the height of the sectarian warfare in 2007-08 they were getting their salaries. Seven million Iraqis are on the state payroll at a monthly cost of $4 billion (£2.8 billion), but oil revenues are now less than $2 billion. The difference has to be made up from reserves in the Central Bank; this is now running low.

  The private sector in Iraq is very much parasitic and the state and public investment projects have stopped. I asked a woman in Karbala in charge of the education sector if teachers had been paid for February, and she replied with relief: "I just checked with the bank and the money arrived today." The fact that officials are already checking if salaries are going to get paid shows how nervous they have become.

  There is an air of half-suppressed panic in Baghdad as people look for signs of a higher oil price. Real estate prices stay high but few people are buying or selling houses. The same is true of cars. Aside from crude oil, very little else is produced in Iraq; even the tomatoes on sale in shops in Baghdad are brought from Iran, because they are cheaper than those produced at home. This is the pattern in all the oil producing countries, but nowhere more than Iraq which also has to pay for an enormous, if dysfunctional, war machine and security forces that number almost one million.

  With the frightening prospect of an economic calamity if salaries are not paid, there are growing protests in Baghdad. On Friday the Shia cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr called on 200,000 protesters gathered at the entrance to the Green Zone to bring an end to "the government of corruption" and replace it with one run by technocrats; but even if this happens, it does not resolve the problem that there will still not be enough money.

  Nobody doubts that the Iraqi government is corrupt and ineffective, but it is a bit late to do anything about this. Threats to get those who benefited from the corruption to disgorge their fabulous gains are unrealistic. The whole political class in all parts of Iraq have made money from plundering state revenues since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A large chunk of the population has benefited from a "jobs-for-theboys" patronage system. The economic crisis of 2016 has replaced the military crisis of 2014 and could be equally devastating. One intelligence chief told me: "I can't even pay for food to feed my men."

  Sunday, 20 March 2016

  MEDIA COVERAGE IS MASKING DISASTEROUS POLICIES

  The capture of Salah Abdeslam, thought to be the sole surviving planner of the Paris massacre, means that the media is focusing once again on the threat of terrorist attack by IS. Questions are asked about why the most wanted man in Europe was able to elude the police for so long, even though he was living in his home district of Molenbeek in Brussels. Television and newspapers ask nervously about the chances of IS carrying out another atrocity aimed at dominating the news agenda and showing that it is still in business.

  The reporting of the events in Brussels is in keeping with that after the January (Charlie Hebdo) and November Paris attacks and the Tunisian beach killings by IS last year. For several days there is blanket coverage by the media as it allocates time and space far beyond what is needed to relate developments. But then the focus shifts abruptly elsewhere and IS becomes yesterday's story, treated as if the movement has ceased to exist or at least lost its capacity to affect our lives.

  It is not as if IS has stopped killing people in large numbers since the slaughter in Paris on 13 November; it is, rather, that it is not doing so in Europe. I was in Baghdad on 28 February when two IS suicide bombers on motorcycles blew themselves up in an outdoor mobile phone market in Sadr City, killing 73 people and injuring more than 100. On the same day, dozens of IS fighters riding in pick-ups with heavy machine guns mounted in the back attacked army and police outposts in Abu Ghraib, site of the notorious prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad. There was an initial assault by at least four suicide bombers, one dri
ving a vehicle packed with explosives into a barracks, and fighting went on for hours around a burning grain silo.

  The outside world scarcely noticed these bloody events because they seem to be part of the natural order in Iraq and Syria. But the total number of Iraqis killed by these two attacks - and another double suicide bombing of a Shia mosque in the Shuala district of Baghdad four days earlier - was about the same as the 130 people who died in Paris at the hands of IS last November.

  There has always been a disconnect in the minds of people in Europe between the wars in Iraq and Syria and terrorist attacks against Europeans. This is in part because Baghdad and Damascus are exotic and frightening places, and pictures of the aftermath of bombings have been the norm since the US invasion of 2003. But there is a more insidious reason why Europeans do not sufficiently take on board the connection between the wars in the Middle East and the threat to their own security. Separating the two is much in the interests of Western political leaders, because it means that the public does not see that their disastrous policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and beyond created the conditions for the rise of IS and for terrorist gangs such as that to which Salah Abdeslam belonged.

  The outpouring of official grief that commonly follows atrocities, such as the march of 40 world leaders through the streets of Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings last year, helps neuter any idea that the political failures of these same leaders might be to a degree responsible for the slaughter. After all, such marches are usually held by the powerless to protest and show defiance, but in this case the march simply served as a publicity stunt to divert attention from these leaders' inability to act effectively and stop the wars in the Middle East which they had done much to provoke.

  A strange aspect of these conflicts is that Western leaders have never had to pay any political price for their role in initiating them or pursuing policies that effectively stoke the violence. IS is a growing power in Libya, something that would not have happened had David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy not helped destroy the Libyan state by overthrowing Gaddafi in 2011. Al-Qa’ida is expanding in Yemen, where Western leaders have given a free pass to Saudi Arabia to launch a bombing campaign that has wrecked the country.

  After the Paris massacre last year there was a gush of emotional support for France and little criticism of French policies in Syria and Libya, although they have been to the advantage of IS and other salafi-jihadi movements since 2011.

  It is worth quoting at length Fabrice Balanche, the French cartographer and expert on Syria who now works for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, about these misperceptions in France, although they also apply to other countries. He told Aron Lund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "The media refused to see the Syrian revolt as anything other than the continuation of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, at a time of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring. Journalists didn't understand the sectarian subtleties in Syria, or perhaps they didn't want to understand; I was censored many times.

  "Syrian intellectuals in the opposition, many of whom had been in exile for decades, had a discourse similar to that of the Iraqi opposition during the US invasion of 2003. Some of them honestly confused their own hopes for a non-sectarian society with reality, but others - such as the Muslim Brotherhood - tried to obfuscate reality in order to gain the support of Western countries.

  "In 2011-2012, we suffered a type of intellectual McCarthyism on the Syrian question: if you said that Assad was not about to fall within three months, you would be suspected of being paid by the Syrian regime. And with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs having taken up the cause of the Syrian opposition, it would have been in bad taste to contradict its communiqués."

  By taking up the cause of the Syrian and Libyan opposition and destroying the Syrian and Libyan states, France and Britain opened the door to IS and should share in the blame for the rise of IS and terrorism in Europe. By refusing to admit to or learn from past mistakes, the West Europeans did little to lay the basis for the current, surprisingly successful "cessation of hostilities" in Syria which is almost entirely an US and Russian achievement.

  Britain and France have stuck close to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies in their policies towards Syria. I asked a former negotiator why this was so and he crisply replied: "Money. They wanted Saudi contracts." After the capture of Salah Abdeslam there is talk of security lapses that had allowed him to evade arrest for so long, but this is largely irrelevant as terrorist attacks will go on as long as IS remains a power. Once again, the wall-to-wall media coverage is allowing Western governments to escape responsibility for a far worse security failure, which is their own disastrous policies.

  Saturday, 9 April 2016

  CORRUPTION PAVED THE WAY FOR ISIS

  "Who shall doubt 'the secret hid Under Cheops' pyramid. Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several millions?" The message of Rudyard Kipling's poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption matter, as Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions - and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.

  Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured floodwater combined with raw sewage. Later, I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an adviser to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that "since 2003, $7 billion (£5 billion) has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren't built or they were built very badly". She concluded that "corruption is the key to all this".

  Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7 billion not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting those who profited from this huge theft, but a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.

  There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Isis and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qa’ida and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.

  Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake. From the turn of the century in Syria, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad's first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion. In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of the Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including "one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings".

  The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies such as Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the weal
thy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a licence to steal by anybody with power.

  Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: "Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!" He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The American commanders had insisted on outsourcing food and other supplies to contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers' jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m to purchase the position of a general in charge of a division.

  Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad. For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004-5 when the defence ministry was substantially under US control. It seems implausible that US officers and officials were not complicit in the theft.