by Nir Rosen
On my last day in Basra, a British armored vehicle was stoned by a group of local men. One brave man climbed on top of it and was persuaded to go down only when a British soldier emerged and pointed his weapon at him. There was little sign after more than five years of occupation in Basra that the British had built or improved anything in the vast slums where most of the population lived. And when the British tried to encourage the local government to increase services in Hayaniya and similar areas, the local officials said that these poor Shiites didn’t belong in Basra anyway, since they were from Amara, from the marshes. British officers told me the provincial council had a condescending attitude toward the residents of Hayaniya and its neighboring areas, and that they were desperately trying to get services to these areas. Little had been learned after five years. The poor Shiite majority was still neglected, just as it was under Saddam. Only Muqtada carried their voice.
In late December 2008 I visited an Iraqi Christian family in East Beirut that had fled Baghdad only two weeks earlier. A small Christmas tree was in the corner of the room. “My husband couldn’t go to his shop, the children were without school because of the bad situation,” the mother explained. There were less kidnappings in Baghdad now, she admitted, but there were still explosions. “It’s difficult to be away from my country,” she said, switching back and forth between the Lebanese and Iraqi dialect. I told her about the book I was working on, a project about Bush’s legacy in the Middle East. Bush had only brought them war, not freedom, she said bitterly. “Why should I thank Bush?” she asked. “For the war we experienced in Iraq? For our displacement from our homes? For the year we couldn’t send our children to school and the year my husband couldn’t go to his shop to work? Why will I thank him? We just now left Iraq. Where is the democracy? Where is the security?”
When the family moved into their small apartment in Beirut, they found a pencil drawing of Saddam Hussein on their wall, beneath which was written “the brave martyr.” The mother said she kissed it when she saw it. “I love him,” she said. “In Saddam’s time Iraq was safe. We could go to school and work safely—there was no displacement. We were Christians living with Sunnis and Shiites, one next to the other. Since Bush came, the Sunnis left their homes. We have not seen any changes in Iraq. We don’t expect change because of Obama. He’s American.”
I asked Saramand, another Iraqi Christian, the same questions. He had arrived in Beirut six months earlier and now worked in a local church whose congregation was made up entirely of Christian refugees. Two weeks earlier forty families had arrived, he told me. “Before, if there were five or six people in a house and one worked, they could live,” he said. “Here they all work just to survive. Work is not allowed, but people work.” He too blamed Bush for his plight: “What do you expect to happen in an occupation? The democracy that Bush sent us is killing, theft, settling of scores. Where is the democracy? Where is the freedom? Where are the promises he made? Garbage has reached up to our heads in Iraq. Children are dying every day in Iraq—for what? If there was no Bush, I would not be here. If you see a refugee laughing, it’s a lie. Inside, he is full of memories.”
IN MARCH 2007 the surge was still nascent, but the legal basis for the American occupation was expiring. United Nations resolutions effectively let American troops do whatever they wanted, but the Iraqis wanted that to end. The Americans needed a bilateral agreement to anchor their presence in Iraq. Bush wanted a policy to hand to his successor, knowing he would be under a lot of pressure to leave. In the spring of 2007 the Americans began to discuss their options. The U.S. military said it needed a Status of Forces Agreement, but civilians in the government were skeptical that a typical SOFA could be passed.
In the Middle East, most American SOFAs are secret, their terms hidden from the population, because the governments the Americans deal with are dictatorships. If citizens from these countries knew what was in a typical agreement, they would be outraged. But Iraq was sort of a democracy, and the SOFA would have to go through Parliament and be made public. The 1948 Treaty of Portsmouth, between Iraq and Britain, was on the minds of many Iraqi politicians. When the terms of Portsmouth became known in Baghdad, there were massive protests led by a movement known as Al Wathba (The Leap). The treaty was abandoned. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 treaty with the Shah of Iran was also on Iraqis’ minds, since Iranian anger at the treaty helped lead to the rise of Khomeini. Most SOFAs grant immunity to American military personnel. But the Iraqis were afraid that immunity could fuel the Mahdi Army and the resistance. It would look like the politicians were giving Iraq away.
The fall 2007 declaration of principles signed between Maliki and Bush set the atmosphere. It described cultural, economic, and diplomatic ties and laid out the terms of the partnership and security relationship. “It was very hard,” an American official told me. “Maliki didn’t want to sign. He was timid politically, and the other parties would stab him for it even if they agreed with it. Bush wanted him to sign it in the U.S., but he balked, so they signed it via video conference.” In February 2008 the State Department hired Ambassador Robert Loftis, a senior basing negotiator and an expert on drafting SOFAs, but who had no Iraq experience. His draft gave the Americans full authority and control. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and NSA’s Brett McGurk said it wouldn’t work, it was an impossible dream. The terms leaked, the Sadrists protested, and Maliki opposed it. This was not what he got on board for.
The Americans fired the entire SOFA team. McGurk arrived in Iraq in mid-May and worked directly with Maliki, meeting him twice a week and also working with Maliki’s close advisers. It was a small American team: McGurk, Crocker, and David Satterfield. They had a direct line to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and President Bush. The timelines set by the SOFA were very controversial within the U.S. military. It set a June 2009 withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities and a full American withdrawal by 2011.
The Iraqis were making maximalist demands, but the Americans assumed Maliki was just posturing because of domestic politics. The Iraqis rebranded it the Withdrawal Agreement because the original draft had so poisoned the atmosphere. Immunity for troops was the hardest issue, but eventually the two sides came up with a hypothetical situation that was impossible to imagine. Perhaps if an American soldier went to a bar and raped an Iraqi woman or committed some other unlikely but egregious act, then he would be prosecuted under Iraqi law. Otherwise the Americans would try him. “During the SOFA they played us like fiddles,” an American official told me. “The prime minister’s office got exactly what they wanted, a presence in the country that protects them and which they have oversight over and which they can use as a stick against opponents.”
Maliki’s Law and Order campaign against militias resonated with the middle class. His confrontation with Kurds galvanized Iraqi nationalist support, and the SOFA poured water on the Sadrist flames. There was now a timetable for withdrawal; it looked like the occupation would end. But a different iconic moment will be forever associated with the trip Bush took to Baghdad to sign the SOFA.
THE YEAR 2008 ended with Muntadhar al-Zeidi reminding President Bush and the world for only a moment about the Iraqi victims. During a press conference on Bush’s last visit to the country, Zeidi spoke for the masses in the Arab world and beyond when he shouted, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” as he threw his first shoe at the American president. Zeidi was a secular, left-leaning Shiite from Sadr City whose work as a reporter for Baghdadiya television had won him local acclaim because of his focus on the suffering of innocent Iraqis. He had been arrested twice by the American army and kidnapped once by a militia.
He remembered, as did all Iraqis, that the American occupation had not begun with the surge. The story of the American occupation was not one of smart officers contributing to the reduction of violence and increase in stability. That was only one chapter in a longer story of painful, humiliating, sanctions, wars, and b
loody occupation. Those with short memories, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, might remember the American occupation as “a million acts of kindness.” But to Iraqis and anyone else sensitive enough to view them as humans, the occupation was one million acts of violence and humiliation or one million explosives. There was nothing for Bush to be triumphal about during his farewell press conference. Even the surge had exacted a costly toll on Iraqis. Thousands more had been killed, arrested, thrown into overcrowded prisons, and rarely put on trial, their families deprived of them. The surge was not about a victory. With a cost so high, there could be no victory. COIN is still violence, and the occupation persisted, imposing violence on an entire country. As Zeidi threw his second shoe in a last desperate act of defiance, he remembered these victims and shouted, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!”
Part Four
AFTERMATH
CHAPTER TEN
Lebanon: Toward Zero Hour
ONE EVENING IN THE SPRING OF 2008, I WAS SITTING ON A STOOP ON a dark street and speaking to several Sunni “concerned local citizens,” the new euphemism for American-backed militias in the Middle East. The young men were speaking of the danger coming from Shiites when I interrupted one of them, who was wearing a white sleeveless shirt, and said, “Don’t take this personally, but would you let your sister marry a Shiite?” In an instant he flattened his hand and moved his arm like a blade, slicing into the air the way he would slice her throat. I was not in Baghdad, where this might have been commonplace—I was in Beirut, where, as in pre-occupation Iraq, once it would not have been out of the ordinary for a Sunni and a Shiite to marry. In the early years of the American occupation of Iraq there were concerns about the Lebanonization of Iraq; but now it seemed Iraq was coming to Lebanon.
Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut felt insecure. Thuggish Shiite Amal supporters regularly zipped through on their scooters to shoot in the air and taunt them. Leaders from the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition were being blown up occasionally, and it was clear the security forces could not protect them. The Future Movement’s leaders felt pressure to protect themselves and their anxious constituency, so they created a private security company to protect Future leaders and local militias in various Sunni neighborhoods throughout the country, established under the leadership of Salim Diab, former general coordinator of the Future Current.
Lebanon had no history of strife between Sunnis and Shiites. There had been class conflicts in the past—Sunnis were condescending to Shiites the way urban people often are to rural people, and Sunnis reviled Shiite religious traditions, which Shiites resented—but the divide had not been violent. Lebanese Sunni racism against Shiites was an artificial sectarianism, seeming to come out of nowhere. Lebanese Sunnis had never seen themselves exclusively as Sunnis. Even former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri was not seen as a Sunni leader before his death. Until then he had not even had the support of most Sunnis, and Sunni leadership was not centralized. His death was exploited for political and sectarian reasons.
The first Sunni show of force was the Future Movement-backed demonstrations in February 2006 against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which turned into a riot targeting Christians. Hariri’s son Saad was very embarrassed by this. Sunni power often seemed to be devoid of specific goals except keeping Shiites out of power. Historically Shiites were called the epithet “mutwali.” But following Hizballah’s victory in the 2006 war, some urban Shiites reclaimed their victimization as a source of pride and made “mutwali” cool, in a way that resembled the African American reappropriation of the word “nigga.” Hizballah has never exploited sectarianism and has always gone out of its way to ease tensions. Hassan Nasrallah warned that the Americans were trying to drive a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis. But Hizballah could not escape the fact that it was a Shiite party.
From May to September 2007, the army had to contend with the crisis at the Nahr al-Barid Palestinian refugee camp, which left some 420 people killed, 168 of them soldiers. On September 4 of that year, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr announced the cessation of 106 days of fighting against Islamic militants in the camp. It was the second war Lebanon had seen in two summers (see Chapter Six). The Lebanese army, which had stood by impotently in the summer of 2006 as the Israeli military destroyed much of the country in the name of fighting Hizballah, this time destroyed a refugee camp housing forty thousand people in the name of the war on terror. The three months of fighting with the jihadists from Fatah al-Islam, the worst the country had seen since its fifteen-year civil war ended in 1990, had been a distraction from growing internal divisions in Lebanon. These divisions had brought the country dangerously close to civil war once again in January 2007, when Sunnis and Shiites clashed on the streets.
There was a sense of foreboding that summer, a feeling that something worse was about to happen. The July war with Israel was still on everyone’s mind, and with it the fear that neither Israel nor Hizballah viewed the previous summer’s denouement as conclusive. Another war was ongoing in the north, with the interregnum punctuated by the occasional car bomb or assassination. And a third war, “the next civil war,” seemed to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, according to Lebanese political scientist Amer Mohsen, Lebanese politicians seemed like Shakespearean actors on a stage, “tragic characters who follow a path that was already charted for them—i.e., they have no agency in what is happening.” These politicians, Mohsen explained, “are clearly aware that, no matter what they do, events that control their country and destiny are decided by parties that are far larger than them.”
In November 2006, six Hizballah and Amal ministers resigned from the government coalition to protest violations of the agreed-upon rules by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his March 14 allies. They called for the government to uphold the tradition of cabinet consensus, which dated to the end of the civil war. The opposition began planning for street demonstrations, which were called off after a Christian politician was assassinated. That month a young Syrian man detonated his suicide vest on the Syrian border with Lebanon after he was denied permission to cross because his papers were discovered to be fake. He was said to belong to the Al Qaeda-linked Tawhid and Jihad organization. On December 1, 2006, the opposition condemned the government as illegitimate and staged a “sit-in” in downtown Beirut, establishing a huge tent city in Martyrs’ Square, the same place where anti-Syrian demonstrators had launched their March 14 “intifada.” Key roads were blocked, and traffic became unbearable. Numerous shops and boutiques in the downtown area went out of business. Some Sunnis began to view the sit-in as a Shiite occupation. Three days later, a Shiite supporter of Amal was shot dead. The Lebanese army was deployed on the city’s streets. On January 24, 2007, three young men were killed following a strike called by Hizballah, as opposition supporters blocked roads and burned tires. The next day four Lebanese were killed and more than 150 were injured in clashes at the Arab University of Beirut, near the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood. It was left to Iran and Saudi Arabia to get involved and postpone further conflict. This was the nature of Lebanon’s sectarian system: it could never be stable; it was impossible to achieve ideal harmony. Lebanon was not a viable state.
Hizballah was the biggest party in the March 8 coalition, and its patron was Iran. Future, the Hariri family’s movement, was the biggest party in the March 14 movement, and its patron was Saudi Arabia. In a November 29, 2006, op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Stepping Into Iraq; Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis If the U.S. Leaves,” Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi foreign policy adviser to Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, warned that the Saudis would have to defend Iraq’s Sunnis from the Shiites of Iraq and Iran if the Americans did not. The Saudis were worried that the Americans were allowing the Iranians to win in Iraq and Lebanon. Along with the Jordanians, they would provide Iraq’s Sunnis with weapons and financial support. The Saudis had already commenced construction of a multibillion-dollar barrier between them and Iraq to isolate them fro
m the violence they had helped foment. The Saudis also assumed the role of defenders of Lebanon’s Sunnis. Two years later I met Prince Turki—who had been the ambassador to Washington, intelligence chief, and liason to Osama bin Laden—and asked him if he really feared Iran. “Iran wants Mecca and Medina,” he said. “They want their ideology to control it.” Hizballah in Lebanon was completely an Iranian tool, he said. “The Saudi interest is for Iraq to maintain its Arab identity and not fall under Persian influence. Iran views Saudi Arabia as the little Satan, not Israel—read Khomeini’s work.” But he added that Iran’s vulnerability was its ethnic minorities: the Kurds, Baluch, and Azeris.
The Saudis were getting nervous, watching their proxies throughout the region weaken. In the 1960s Egypt’s pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser was the main competition with Saudi influence in the region. The Saudis and Americans both tried to undermine Arab nationalist and leftist movements. The result was an increase in the power of fundamentalists and the weakening of Arab progressives. The Saudis now had no Arab rivals for their influence with the less powerful exceptions of Qatar and Syria. But Hizballah (and Hamas in Palestine) represented resistance to the Saudi, Israeli, and American project in the region, and the Saudis would not tolerate it.
ON AUGUST 10, 2007, four days before Hizballah was to commemorate the “divine victory” over Israel (as they called it), I visited the Salam Mosque in Tripoli, a northern coastal city—Lebanon’s second-largest—and its Sunni bastion. Hundreds of men filled the mosque and overflowed onto straw mats outside. They sat in the heat listening to a fiery sermon with apparent indifference. Sheikh Bilal Barudi, a Sunni cleric close to the March 14 coalition and also part of the Independent Islamic Gathering of Sunni clerics, gave the sermon. Arabs were once again in conflict with the Persians, he said, a conflict he saw as age-old and also between Sunnis and Shiites. “We ask the Iranians and Americans to withdraw from Iraq,” he said. “Iran is our historic enemy. Throughout history Iran always had an ambition of controlling Arab countries around them.” He spoke of the Shiites of Lebanon occupying Beirut, mocking Hizballah’s “divine victory” and calling its members enemies of Islam. The war had started after Hizballah captured two Israeli soldiers, hoping to exchange them for four leftist Lebanese resistance fighters held by the Israelis. Barudi condemned Hizballah for destroying Lebanon to rescue leftists whom he called “infidels.” This was a refrain I would hear repeatedly over the next year.