The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  In May, in an astonishing decision that still has not been adequately explained, American administrator L. Paul Bremer vastly increased the number of willing Iraqi foot soldiers by abruptly dissolving the regular Iraqi army, which had been established by King Faisal I in 1921, and thereby sent out into bitter shame and unemployment 350,000 of those young Iraqis who were well trained, well armed, and deeply angry at the Americans. Add to these a million or so tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, including rockets and missiles, readily available in more than a hundred mostly unguarded arms depots around the country, as well as vast amounts of money stockpiled during thirty-five years in power (notably on March 18, when Saddam sent three tractor trailers to the Central Bank and relieved it of more than a billion dollars in cash), and you have the makings of a well-manned, well-funded insurgency.

  During the months since the fall of Baghdad in April, that insurgency has grown and evolved. Its methods have moved from assassinations of isolated US soldiers, to attacks on convoys with small arms, to increasingly sophisticated and frequent ambushes of convoys with remote-controlled explosives and attacks on helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades and missiles. While there seems to be some regional coordination among groups, it is clear that the opposition is made up of many different organizations, some regionally based, some local; some are explicitly Saddamist, some more broadly Baathist, some Islamist, and some frankly anti-Saddam and nationalist. “I don’t see a vision by these disparate groups of insurgents or partisans,” said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who has closely studied the opposition. “But at this stage they do not need one. They are making our stay uncomfortable, they have affected our calculus and are driving a wedge between us. What I know is the coalition is losing ground among Iraqis.” Within and among these groupings a competitive politics now exists, an armed politics that will evolve and develop, depending on how successful they are in attacking the Americans and forcing them to adjust their policies and, eventually, to leave the country.

  By now much evidence exists, including documents apparently prepared by Iraqi intelligence services, to suggest that this insurgency, at least in its broad outlines, was planned before the war and that the plan included looting, sabotage, and assassination of clerics.5 Particularly damaging was the looting, in which government ministries and other public buildings, including museums, libraries, and universities, were thoroughly ransacked, down to the copper pipes and electrical wiring in the walls, and then burned, and the capital was given over to weeks of utter lawlessness while American soldiers stood by and watched. This was an enormously important political blow against the occupation, undermining any trust or faith Iraqis might have had in their new rulers and destroying any chance the occupiers had to establish their authority. Most of all, the looting created an overwhelming sense of insecurity and trepidation, a sense that the insurgents, with their bombings and attacks, have built on to convince many Iraqis that the Americans have not achieved full control and may well not stay long enough to attain it.

  All of this is another way of saying that if security is the fault line running beneath political development in Iraq, then politics is the fault line running beneath security. By now the failures in planning and execution that have dogged the occupation—the lack of military police, the refusal to provide security in the capital, the dissolution of the Iraqi army—are well known.6 All have originated in Washington, many born of struggles between the leading departments of government, principally the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, which the White House has never managed to resolve. (The most obvious product of these struggles was the President’s decision, barely two months before the invasion, to discard the year of occupation planning by the State Department and shift control to the Pentagon, which proved itself wholly unprepared to take on the task.)

  In Iraq, after the Big Bang of the American invasion, a new political universe is slowly being born. Part of this Iraqi political universe is called the Governing Council, and it does its work behind the concrete barriers of the Green Zone. Another part works at the level of nascent local government throughout the country. Still another works in the mosques of the south and among the Shiite religious establishment known as the Hawza. And yet another part—now a rather large and powerful part—is armed and clandestine and is making increasingly sophisticated and effective use of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, hoping to force the Americans from the country and claim its share of power. The Americans seek to define the armed claimants as illegitimate—essentially, as not part of the recognized universe at all. But in order to enforce that definition—to confine the game to the actors they regard as legitimate—the Americans must prove themselves able to make use of their power, both military and political, more effectively.

  As I write, on November 19, US military forces in Iraq are conducting Operation Iron Hammer, striking with warplanes and artillery bases thought to be occupied by Iraqi insurgents. American television broadcasts are filled with dramatic footage of huge explosions illuminating the night sky. In Tikrit, Saddam’s political base and a stronghold of the opposition, the Americans staged a military show of force, sending tanks and other armored vehicles rumbling through the main street. “They need to understand,” Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell told ABC News, “it’s more than just Humvees we’ll be using in these attacks.”

  The armed opposition in Iraq seems unlikely to be impressed. However many insurgents the Americans manage to kill in bombing runs and artillery barrages, the toll on civilians, in death and disruption, is also likely to be high, as will damage to the fragile sense of normalcy that Americans are struggling to achieve and the opposition forces are determined to destroy. Large-scale armored warfare looks and sounds impressive, inspiring overwhelming fear; but it is not discriminate, which makes it a blunt and ultimately self-defeating instrument to deploy against determined guerrillas. In general, the American military, the finest and most powerful in the world, is not organized and equipped to fight this war, and the part of it that is—the Special Forces—are almost entirely occupied in what seems a never-ending hunt for Saddam. For American leaders, and particularly President Bush, this has become the quest for the Holy Grail: finding Saddam will be an enormous political boon. For the American military, this quest has the feel of a traditional kind of war not wholly suited to what they find in Iraq. “We are a hierarchy and we like to fight hierarchies,” says military strategist John Arquilla. “We think if we cut off the head we can end this.”

  Whatever the political rewards of finding Saddam, they will not likely include putting a definitive end to the insurgency in Iraq.7 “The Americans need to get out of their tanks, get out from behind their sunglasses,” a British military officer, a veteran of Northern Ireland told me. “They need to get on the ground where they can get to know people and encourage them to tell them where the bad guys are.” As I write, operations on the ground seem to be moving in the opposite direction. In any event it is difficult to impress an opponent with a military advance plainly meant to cover a political retreat.

  President Bush’s audacious project in Iraq was always going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, but without political steadfastness and resilience, it had no chance to succeed. This autumn in Baghdad, a ruthless insurgency, growing but still in its infancy, has managed to make the President retreat from his project, and has worked, with growing success, to divide Iraqis from the Americans who claim to govern them. These insurgents cannot win, but by seizing on Washington’s mistakes and working relentlessly to widen the fault lines in occupied Iraq, they threaten to prevent what President Bush sent the US military to achieve: a stable, democratic, and peaceful Iraq, at the heart of a stable and democratic Middle East.

  —December 18, 2003

  1. For the Saudi claim, see Mohammad Bazzi, “Saudis Suspected in 2 Iraq Attacks,” Newsday, November 11, 2003.

  2. See Susan Sachs, “US Is Set to Return Power to Iraqis as Early as June,” The
New York Times, November 15, 2003.

  3. See Jonathan S. Landay, “CIA Has a Bleak Analysis of Iraq,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 12, 2003.

  4. Christopher Hitchens made the comment, in a debate with me at the University of California at Berkeley on November 4. See “Has Bush Made Us Safer? Iraq, Terror and American Power,” at webcast.berkeley.edu/events/archive.html.

  5. See Michael Hirsh, Rod Nordland, and Mark Hosenball, “About-Face in Iraq,” Newsweek, November 24, 2003; and Douglas Jehl, “Plan for Guerrilla Action May Have Predated War,” The New York Times, November 15, 2003.

  6. See Mark Fineman, Robin Wright, and Doyle McManus, “Preparing for War, Stumbling to Peace,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2003; and David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess,” The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003.

  7. See Ahmed S. Hashim, “The Sunni Insurgency in Iraq,” Middle East Institute Policy Brief, August 15, 2003, who notes that the “elimination of Saddam and his dynasty may demoralize pro-regime insurgents but may actually embolden anti-regime and anti-US insurgents who may have held back in the past … because of the barely submerged fears that the regime could come back.”

  23

  Left Out in Turkey

  Christopher de Bellaigue

  The first decade of the twenty-first century was the time when ghosts of the old Ottoman Empire began to stir once more. The empire was not exactly reconstituted; Cairo and Damascus are not ruled from Istanbul. But there is much leftover business, some of it historical: the Armenian genocide; and some very current: the Kurdish question.

  The ghosts were stirring just as, the secularist state, established in the 1920s by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was beginning to be challenged by a new wave of religious populism led by Prime Minister Erdogan. Ethnic and religious differences could no longer be ignored or suppressed. It was no longer possible to silence the unhealed grievances of history. Atatürk and his successors had frozen their vision of Turkey, secular, monoethnic, into place. Now the ice is beginning to melt.

  —I.B.

  1.

  “IN TURKEY WE have no minorities,” the leading official in a poor district in one of the poorest provinces of eastern Turkey told me in April. The official was in his late twenties; he had studied public administration at a Turkish university, then received training in Ankara and spent a few months at a language institute in England’s West Country. He enthusiastically practiced his English on me. There was not much use for it in his district, where most people speak one of two Kurdish tongues, Kirmanji or Zaza, and many of the old people do not know Turkish.

  The Kirmanji speakers in the district are Sunni Kurds, of which there are at least 10 million in Turkey. The Zaza speakers are members of Turkey’s roughly 12-million-strong Alevi community, heterodox Shiites of Turkmen and Kurdish lineage. Neither of these groups, the official went on, should be called a minority; that would imply that there is discrimination against them, which is not the case. He told me this with the assurance of someone who knows that he, and his view of the world, enjoy the sanction of a large and powerful state. You can find young men like him throughout Turkey sitting in government offices, where a cast of the death mask of Kemal Atatürk, the republic’s founder, is hanging on the wall behind them.

  The Turkish Republic’s attitude toward minorities only makes sense if you have an idea of the contribution that the nationalism of those minorities made to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Starting in the eighteenth century, Europe’s Christian powers assumed the role of protectors of their coreligionists in the empire. By the nineteenth century, they were promoting nationalist movements among them and protecting the newly independent states that had been created from former Ottoman territories, such as Greece, Serbia, and Romania. The process of making new nations was lethal for the empire and very often for those Muslims who were caught up in it; millions of Muslims were forced out of those newly independent states (besides the new autonomous territory of Bulgaria) and fled to Anatolia, the empire’s heartland. By the eve of World War I, Anatolia had become a refuge for dispossessed Muslims from the Balkans and from the Caucasian territories that Russia had won during the Russian–Ottoman War of 1877–1878.

  But Anatolia also had large non-Muslim minorities, including the Orthodox Greeks and mostly Gregorian Christian Armenians. These minorities looked to outside Christian powers for protection, especially to Greece (in the case of the Greek Orthodox) and Russia (in the case of the Armenians). Many of them were uneasy about the Ottoman decision during World War I to side with Germany against their own protectors, while the Ottomans viewed them as potential fifth columnists.

  In 1915, following severe military defeat at the hands of the Russians and an Armenian uprising in the eastern city of Van, the Ottomans ordered the deportation of Armenians from Anatolia. Well over one million are thought to have died in what many historians consider to have been a premeditated act of genocide. In the Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed in 1923, Turkey pledged to protect its non-Muslim minorities, but the Turkish delegates at Lausanne succeeded in preventing Muslim minorities such as the Kurds and Alevis from being mentioned; and they emerged from Lausanne protected only by general commitments to linguistic and religious freedom, commitments that, in many cases, the Turks went on to disregard. In 1925, around one million Anatolian Greeks were sent to Greece under a population exchange that was managed relatively humanely and cleansed Anatolia further of non-Turkish minorities.

  Atatürk presented his new state as an increasingly monolithic entity. Regardless of their ethnic identity, Muslim citizens of the republic were henceforth to be considered Turks. The glorious national history taught in schools was supposedly pure in its Turkishness—it starts with an epic migration from the Central Asian steppe, follows the Turks as they assume leadership of the Islamic community, and ends as they triumphantly embrace modern European civilization. “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk” became Atatürk’s most famous saying, and everyone was encouraged to agree.

  It is well known that millions of Kurds, whose ancestors inhabited parts of Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia well before the Turks turned up, resented being designated as Turks, and that on several occasions they took up arms to demand autonomy or independence. (The most recent separatist rebellion, by the Kurdish Workers Party, whose Kurdish acronym is PKK, lasted from 1984 to 1999 and cost at least 30,000 lives.) But the most striking thing about the Turkish identity promoted by Atatürk is just how many citizens of the new state enthusiastically accepted it. Few of today’s Turks are descended from the original Central Asian migrants. Atatürk himself was not the “Father of the Turk” that his self-conferred surname suggests, but was probably descended from Slavic converts to Islam. Many of the people I spoke to in Turkey this spring told me that their ancestors had fled from the Balkans, the Caucasus, or Ottoman Mesopotamia during the empire’s collapse. I met others who were assimilated Kurds; they had, they said, no sympathy for Kurdish nationalism.

  What has induced these people to embrace Atatürk’s national identity? As Muslims under the Ottoman Empire traumatized by the loss of their former lands whether in the Balkans or elsewhere, their forebears found refuge in Anatolia. In the face of new threats to their security, not least Allied attempts at the end of World War I to carve up Anatolia and create new Armenian and Kurdish countries, the only thing for them to do was to assimilate. Most forgot their Balkan or Caucasian languages and traditions; their children became model Turkish citizens, diligently learning at school about allegedly Turkish skull types and memorizing the poems of Ziya Gokalp, an exponent of Turkish nationalism who wrote much of his poetry in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. And so modern Turkishness, while theoretically springing from a common racial heritage, actually means something more and less than that. It was born in response to irredentist Balkan nationalisms of the nineteenth century and it became a means of uniting people against hostile states trying to divide up Anatolia at the end of World War I.

&nbs
p; Atatürk chose Turkishness, and not Islam, to bind the citizens together because he had decided that Turkey should be a secular state, and hoped that Islam, which he felt retarded modern development, would lose its influence over people’s daily lives. In the words of the Turkish historian Taner Akcam, who has written extensively about Turkey’s self-image, particularly in connection with the atrocities committed against the Armenians, the national identity “developed together with the fear of extermination, of extinction” by predatory enemies.1 For the Armenians, of course, the fear of extermination turned out to be real; but many modern Turks concur with the words of Talat Pasha, the chief vizier who ordered the deportations: “If I had not done it to them, they would have done it to us.” Any attempt to dismantle Turkishness, even now, is bound to revive old fears.

  2.

  In April, I visited the eastern city of Erzurum, 150 miles from the Turkish border with Georgia and a thousand miles to the east of Ankara. Commanding both the headwaters of the Euphrates and a vital corridor for a foreign army seeking to invade Anatolia from the northeast, Erzurum has a tumultuous history of acquisition and loss, of resistance and vulnerability. You feel the weight of this history when you visit the city’s medieval mosques, which more closely resemble fortresses than places of worship. From the hills overlooking the city, you can see the plains from which the Russians approached when they conquered Erzerum three times in less than a century. And you learn quickly about ethnic conflict. When H.F.B. Lynch, a British writer and statesman, visited Erzurum in the final years of the nineteenth century, the city’s Turkish and Armenian inhabitants were complaining of attacks by Kurdish militias that the Ottoman government had unwisely armed—militias that embarrassed local officials described as “brigands, disguised as soldiers.”