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Aftermath

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by Nir Rosen


  Arabs are often criticized for their “conspiracy theories,” and it was common in Iraq to view the Americans as new colonists intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. But the approach implemented by Paul Bremer attempted to do just that. In Bremer’s mind the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities, so he pitted the minority that was not benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and expected them to be grateful to him. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the Shiites by punishing the Sunnis. He was not managing a country, in his view; he was managing a civil war. As a result, he helped to create one.

  The Bush administration believed that Shiites could lead the Arab world to an Islamic reformation that would increase secularism. Bremer claimed that Saddam had “modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler’s,” and he compared the Baath Party with the Nazi Party. This was sheer fabrication: there is no proof or mention of this in any of the copious literature about Iraq. (If anything, Saddam’s inspiration was the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin or Michael Corleone from The Godfather.) The Iraqi Baath Party was established by a Shiite, and the majority of its members were Shiites. So Bremer created this Nazi analogy and imagined himself de-Nazifying Iraq, saving the Shiites from the evil Sunnis. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also often compared Baathists to Nazis.) Indeed, one of the reasons Bremer performed so horribly in Iraq is that he viewed the country through this distorting lens.

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was unwilling to commit resources to the stabilization of Iraq. When Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld’s de facto chief of staff, arrived in Kuwait to serve as the political commissar over ORHA, he met with the humanitarian assistance team led by Chris McMullen. McMullen began the briefing by saying, “What we intend to bring to the Iraqi people,” but he never got to finish his sentence. Di Rita slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “We are bringing freedom to the Iraqi people! We don’t owe them anything more!” Later Di Rita explained that the U.S. military would not be in Iraq for long. Rumsfeld considered Bosnia and Kosovo to be failures, and he considered Afghanistan a potential failure because U.S. troops were still there. The doctrine of the day was “shock and awe” and a hasty U.S. withdrawal.

  President Bush had approved of a plan to take over the Iraqi army, but Bremer and Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Walter Slocombe reversed the decision, casually agreeing to fire more than three hundred thousand armed men without a second thought. ORHA officials had not planned on maintaining the Iraqi army indefinitely. Instead they had hoped to put the army to work until they could get it through a demobilization process. The men of the Iraqi army thought that they would be part of the solution. Iraqi generals did not acknowledge defeat, and the Iraqi army did not feel defeated. The CPA’s refusal to maintain state industries led to the loss of a further 350,000 jobs. In August 2003 the Americans removed agricultural subsidies, forcing many farmers off their land.

  Bremer later claimed that Iraqis hated their army, which was, in fact, the most nationalistic institution in the country and one that predated the Baath Party. In electing not to fight the Americans, the army had expected to be recognized by the occupation; indeed, until Bremer arrived it appeared that many Iraqi soldiers and officers were hoping to cooperate with the Americans. Bremer, however, treated Iraqis as if they harbored ancient grievances, claiming in an article after he retired that “Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers.” This was not true: although Sunnis were overrepresented in the officer corps and Shiites sometimes felt there was a glass ceiling, there were Shiite ministers and generals, and at least one-third of the famous deck of cards of those Iraqis most wanted by the Americans were Shiites. Complex historical factors account for why Sunnis were overrepresented in majority-Shiite areas. Many attribute this to the legacy of the Ottomans and the British colonizers, while others theorize that minorities took power in several postcolonial Arab countries—Alawites in Syria, Maronites in Lebanon, and Sunnis in Iraq. Although there is debate about these matters, nobody has ever argued on behalf of Bremer’s ludicrous view of a Nazi-like regime where Sunnis were the Germans and Shiites were the Jews. There were many Shiite officers in the army. The elite Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard were dominated by Sunni tribes from Anbar and Salahaddin, as were sensitive security services, but there is a false notion that Shiites had no access to power. It implies that there was an open political field for Sunnis from which Shiites were excluded.

  Iraq had a legacy of statism. The state controlled the country’s oil wealth as well as production in industries such as agriculture. The government also employed the majority of the Iraqi workforce. Strict regulation governed the economy, controlling the movement of capital. The American occupiers found an Iraq where the state had played a tremendous role in the lives of citizens, and they assumed this was a timeless character of the culture that they would have to repair, but in fact it dated to the sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003. The sanctions led to a huge increase in the role of the Iraqi government in the daily lives of the population.

  Denis Halliday, the UN assistant secretary general and the humanitarian coordinator of the oil-for-food program in Iraq, resigned in 1998 in protest at the economic sanctions on Iraq. The oil-for-food program was meant to alleviate the impact of the sanctions, but Iraq could not pump enough oil to get enough money to cover its food and medicine needs, and the drop in oil prices at the time made it even worse. Halliday admitted that Iraqi children were dying directly because of the sanctions. The UN itself estimated that about half a million children under five died because of the sanctions.

  Iraqis had few political or civil rights under Saddam, but they had economic rights and a decent standard of living. The sanctions took even those. Halliday’s successor resigned in 2000 protesting the “tightening of the rope around the neck of the average Iraqi citizen. . . . I felt that I was being misused for a United Nations policy that was punitive, that tried to punish a people for not having gotten rid of their leader.”

  To prevent the Iraqi people from starving, the Public Distribution System was established to deliver rations to the population via more than fifty thousand local agents. Rations included soap and basic food needs. For the first time, the people now depended on the government to eat, giving Saddam more control over them than ever before, and making dissent more difficult and dangerous than ever. The middle class, which might have formed the base of that dissent, was wiped out as savings were made worthless. Many Iraqis were driven from towns back to a rural and agricultural life, and the power of feudal landlords increased.

  A stated goal of the American occupation was to transform Iraq into a free-market economy. One of the first measures taken by the American occupation was to impose laws that liberalized capital accounts, currency trading, and investment regulations, and lifted price regulations and most state subsidies. An important principle guiding the occupation was not to invest in any state institution that could be privatized in the future, in anticipation of the liquidation of state assets.

  Extreme measures such as these radically changed the lives of Iraqis as they struggled with higher inflation and reduced state subsidies while imported consumption goods flooded the market at lower prices. Consumer spending increased drastically. This was coupled with the growth of new private institutions that sought to replace the role formerly played by the state. National industry and the export sector were severely undermined. The entire structure of the Iraqi state has been shattered and the central state in Iraq has been vitiated, as shown by the clauses in the Constitution that address control over oil. Although similar attempts at “shock therapy” techniques applied to countries in the 1980s and ’90s showed poor results, often only damaging countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, these same techniques were imposed on Iraq in extreme form. The measures taken in Iraq were neither democratic nor successful, but their ramifications will be felt for years
.

  America’s relationship with Iraq did not begin in 2003. The U.S. encouraged and helped Iraq go to war against Iran in 1980. It was a war that devastated both countries. The U.S. and its Gulf allies also helped support Iraq’s massive army, which encouraged the adventure in Kuwait and which later, after the Americans disbanded this vast army, led to such a large group of unemployed armed young men in 2003. The American project in Iraq resembled and was sometimes even consciously modeled after other colonial endeavors in the region. The act of occupying a country, dismantling and rebuilding its institutions, economic structures, and even its political identity, is not a new feature in the modern history of the Middle East. But occupied Iraq has rarely been studied as a colonial case. There has been a clear effort to avoid labeling the American project a colonial one. This has led to analysis of Iraq through an ahistorical framework.

  Outside observers, including American politicians, have a tendency to assume that the current political divisions, violence, and prejudices in Iraq have “always been there,” and the new conflict between Sunnis and Shiites has been conceptualized as “timeless.” But Iraqis were merely adapting to the American view of Iraq as a collection of sects and trying to fit into the political system the Americans were building around that idea. These observers disregard the fact that the American presence actively created many of these problems and “read history backward” in an attempt to minimize the American role in Iraq. But Iraq is not Rwanda, where Americans could watch Tutsis and Hutus slaughter each other and claim it was not their problem. The civil war in Iraq began with the American occupation.

  The occupation was based on a vision that saw Iraqis as a collection of atomic sects. Even before the invasion, theorizers of the “new Iraq” such as Kanan Makiya sought to de-Arabize the country. They blamed Arabism for the ills of totalitarian Iraq and proposed ideas such as “regional autonomies” and federalism as alternatives to a centralized, top-down, state-sponsored identity. Prescient critics such as Azmi Bishara warned that if Iraqis ceased to be “Arab,” then they would simply adopt more primordial forms of identity that would not necessarily be less violent or damaging.

  After the war Iraq was treated as a tabula rasa experiment, and the political institutions built by the occupation reflected these views. They were devised to undermine the idea of Iraqi nationalism that Saddam had tried to promote, and to correspond to the vision of Iraq as a trinational state. This further politicized sectarian forms of identity, making them the only avenue of political action in Iraq. Several incompatible views of Iraqi identity were promoted by the occupation and postwar Iraqi politicians: Iraq as a tribal society; Iraq as a liberal, multicultural polity, where a concept of Iraqi citizenship trumps other loyalties (promoted by Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, Mithal al-Alousi, and other “liberal” politicians); Iraq as a collection of nations or sects. The last definition was the most potent. Electoral laws and sectarian violence played the largest role in cementing this vision. In addition, the Americans divided Iraq into winners and losers, and they soon made it clear to the Sunnis where they fell into that divide.

  In late 2003 an American NGO arranged a meeting in the Green Zone between several representatives of Falluja’s major tribes (such as the Albu Eisa, Jumaila, Albu Alwan, and others) and representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority. “We had a lot of hopes of big and meaningful projects that could show a more attractive future for the people,” said one of the organizers. “We were talking with the sheikhs about good projects for the city, and they were really interested in the business centers and the links with the foreign companies. They told us the ‘troubled kids’ were few and they could arrange with the bigger tribal leaders to control the situation as long as they can have something to show their people. Their other concern was about the Shiite domination. They said they would really appreciate it if the Americans promised to protect the city from the Badr Brigade [the huge Iranian-trained Shiite militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI]. They were really concerned about this point. The CPA attended the meeting, but they seemed so uninterested. I can say that their general feeling was, ‘You lost, and we don’t care about you.’ To everyone’s disappointment, the main representative of the CPA left fifteen minutes into the meeting. The sheikhs left to Falluja knowing they would have nothing to offer there. One of them was kidnapped and killed a couple of months after the meeting, and the other was attacked and his son was killed. One of them got connected to the armed groups and went on his own.”

  In the spring and summer of 2004, I met many fighters and leaders of the resistance in Falluja. They believed they were defending their city, the country, and their religion. They clashed frequently with their rivals, the Al Qaeda-inspired jihadists and foreign fighters who had based themselves in the Anbar province and threatened to undermine the power of the more conservative Fallujan leadership. Many Sunnis had no alternatives even as the Al Qaeda men undermined the Anbar establishment and imposed a reign of terror, which not only bloodied communities but destroyed infrastructure, institutions, and businesses there. Their traditional leadership was more pragmatic and wasn’t ideologically opposed to an accommodation with the Americans at that time, though they had yet to be chastened by Shiite militias into reducing their expectations.

  A FOREIGN MILITARY OCCUPATION is a systematic imposition of violence on an entire population. Of the many crimes committed against the Iraqi people, most have occurred unnoticed by the American people or the media. Americans, led to believe their soldiers and marines would be welcomed as liberators, still have little idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it feels like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success as a journalist in Iraq is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father’s Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja’s worst neighborhoods, sit in taxis and restaurants, and look like every other Iraqi. My ability to blend in also allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were another “hajji,” the “gook” of the war in Iraq.

  I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this hajji (me) had done to get arrested. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, “That’s the biggest fuckin’ Iraqi [pronounced “eye-raki”] I ever saw.” Another soldier, who was by the gun, replied, “I don’t care how big he is, if he doesn’t stop movin’ I’m gonna shoot him.”

  I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting, “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” It was my first encounter with hostile checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless other Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak English or carry an American passport, and entire families were killed in their cars when they approached checkpoints. In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September of that year, one hundred thousand Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation; most of them had died violently, largely from American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisan backers of the war, it seemed perfectly plausible to me based on what I had seen during the postwar period in Iraq. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the “good news” and to go along with the official story. I never understood why more journalists did not write about the daily Abu Ghraibs that were so essential to the occupation.

  The occupation pitted Iraqis against one another as old scores were settled and battles for resources and Iraq’s identity raged. Sectarian differences that had previous
ly been suppressed are now exaggerated. This book, which begins by looking at the events and trends that led to the outbreak of civil war in Iraq, tells the story of what happened to Iraq as it descended into the nightmare of sectarianism and militia fighting between Sunnis and Shiites in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. And it tells the story of what happened after “the Events,” or “the Sectarianism,” as Iraqis called their civil war, much as the conflict in Northern Ireland is called “the Troubles.” It is a story of Iraq after dark, so to speak, away from the glare of the Western media and far from U.S. patrols and, most important, away from the elite politics of the Green Zone. I focus on the Iraqi “street,” because after the overthrow of Saddam, power was distributed there.

  I first came to Iraq when I was twenty-five years old, a former nightclub bouncer with a skill in languages who hoped to remake himself as a journalist. I have been traveling and living in Iraq ever since, and the longer I have stayed the more interested I have become in what Martha Gellhorn described as the “view from the ground,” a narrative of Iraq that transcends the clichés of much journalism about the region. As a new Iraq emerges, I hope this book will serve as a reminder of the terrible suffering millions of civilians have endured. This book also attempts to understand how the civil war in Iraq ended and what role Americans played in that. More specifically, it is an attempt to understand the role of the “surge,” the term for the increase in American troops that has become a blanket term for a change in the American strategy and military operations in Iraq (and later in Afghanistan). That the Americans began to have more influence on the Iraqi street during the “surge” is reflected in the chapters that cover this period, where they play a larger role in my narrative, and I show that the power dynamic between the Americans and the street was never as simple as one between an occupier and a puppet. For the surge also marked the period coinciding with the cease-fire of the main Shiite militia and the simultaneous cease-fire of most Sunni militias, who changed sides and allied themselves with the Americans. I was a surge skeptic, expecting the worst. I feared that the civil war in Iraq might become a regional war, and I did not immediately see the importance of the new American approach or foresee the role the serendipitous change in Iraqi dynamics would play. The civil war burned itself out faster than I expected, and the Americans went from being an oppressive occupying force, to a neglectful occupier allowing Iraqis to slaughter one another, to a power broker and quasi peacekeeper, and finally, perhaps, to an uneasy strategic ally and partner.

 

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