The
testimony of Dr Toby Dodge1
Committee on Foreign
Relations
April 20,
2004
Society?”
Room
SH 216, Hart Senate Office Building.
Introduction
The current wave of
violence that has swept Iraq, killing over 80 US soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis
this month, is not merely a one off ‘spike’ in attacks on the coalition’s
forces. It is also not the main cause of the coalition’s problems in the
country. It is instead a symptom of three longer-term dynamics that have dogged
the occupation since the liberation of Baghdad on April 9 2003. The first of
these problems, the legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule, could have been
anticipated but could not have been avoided. The other two problems; the
nature of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s interaction with Iraqi
society and the character of the violence faced by coalition forces are partly
the result of decisions taken since the liberation of Baghdad. A different
long-term strategy and short-term tactics could have avoided these
problems. Overall these three problems, the legacy of Saddam Hussein, the
basis of the CPA’s interaction with Iraqi society and the violence coalition
forces are facing means that the occupation, either on a de facto or
de jure basis, will have to last a great deal longer than June 30.
The continued presence of large numbers of foreign troops is essential to the
successful creation of order. International oversight is also key to the
stability of Iraq; its role would be to manage the Iraqi polity while the Iraqi
population negotiates the terms of a national pact. Both these are crucial if
the medium-term stability of the country is to be secured.
With this in mind, given the scale of the
problems faced, the rising resentment directed at US forces and the US domestic
electoral cycle, a rapid internationalization of the occupation is called
for. This would involve a transfer of both political and military
oversight to a multilateral body, preferably the United Nations. This would
allow for a rapid increase in the numbers of troops the occupation could deploy
while also reducing the visibility of American forces. It would have the
advantage of giving the occupation access to a much larger pool of technical
expertise in state building. Finally it would go a long way to reducing the
alienation and mistrust felt by growing sections of the Iraqi population towards
US forces and the Coalition Provisional Authority. It is only by taking this
radical step that successful regime change, that is the building of a stable,
democratic and sustainable state in Iraq, could be
achieved.
The scale of the problems
faced: the legacy of Saddam Hussein
No civil
society
Any attempt to understand
the problems faced by the Coalition Provisional Authority today and any future
government of Iraq has to understand the legacy of Saddam Hussein that
they are striving to overcome. The country that the coalition is struggling to
pacify and reform is in many ways politically distinct, even amongst the states
of the Middle East. Before the liberation of Baghdad last year it was impossible
to talk about civil society in Iraq. The regime had reshaped or broken all
intermediate institutions between the population and the
state.
Iraqi regimes, because of their perceived vulnerability, domestically, regionally and internationally, have sought to maximize their autonomy from society, with varying degrees of success. This autonomy was first supplied in the 1920s and 1930s by British government aid and since 1958 by increasing oil revenue. This means that Iraqi regimes have never had to raise large amounts of tax from or become beholden to domestic interest groups. This in turn has given the government increasing autonomy to control and reshape society.
The Baathist regime built
under Hasan al Bakr and then consolidated by Saddam Hussein represented the apex
of this process. It set about using oil revenues to build a set of powerful
state institutions through the 1970s and 1980s. These managed to reshape
society, breaking resistance and atomizing the population. Since seizing power
in 1968 the Baath regime efficiently used extreme levels of violence and the
powers of patronage to co-opt or break any independent vestiges of civil
society. Autonomous collective societal structures beyond the control of the
Baathist state did not survive. In their place society came to be dominated
by aspects of the ‘shadow state’2, flexible networks of
patronage and violence that were used to reshape Iraqi society in the image of
Saddam Hussein and his regime.
The atomization of society
and the dependence of individuals upon the state increased dramatically after
the 1990-91. It was the government rationing system that provided food for the
majority of the population in the south and center of the country. Under United
Nations resolution 986, agreed to by Iraq in May 1996, Iraq was allowed to
import and distribute humanitarian aid under UN supervision. The food was
distributed through 53,000 neighborhood grocery stores and regulated through a
government controlled ration card.3 Applications to receive a
ration card gave the government crucial information about every household under
its control. The restrictions placed on ration cards meant individuals could
not travel between different areas of the country and had to pick up their food
in the same region each month. The rationing system became an additional way in
which the regime secured loyalty from and domination over the population. 60 per
cent of the populations depended on these handouts for their day-to-day
survival.4
However, the nature of the
state’s domination of society was transformed under the thirteen years of
sanctions that Iraq faced in the aftermath of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The
visible institutions of the state were greatly weakened and ultimately
transformed. The rapid ending of imports and exports after Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait drove annual inflation to levels as high as 500%. The middle class was
devastated to the extent that it became hard to detect as a category. A UN
survey for example, estimated that 63% of professionals were, in the late
1990s, engaged in menial labor. In the early 1990s import levels fell to
well below countries such as Zaire and Sudan.5
For at least the first
seven years of their imposition the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq proved to
be extremely efficient in that it denied the government in Baghdad access to
large or regular amounts of money. From 1990 government economic policy was
largely reactive, dominated by the short-term goal of staying in power. With the
economy placed under a comprehensive and debilitating siege, the government
sector was largely reduced to a welfare system distributing limited rations to
the population. The rapid decline in government income not only forced the
drastic reduction of state welfare provision, it also marginalized its role in
the economy.
The result was that under
the pressure of sanctions, the official institutions of the state, with the
exception of the rationing system, retreated from society during the 1990s,
especially in the areas of welfare and education. As part of the regime’s
strategy for survival resources were drained from government ministries. Civil
servants, teachers and medical staff had to manage as best they could;
extracting resources from the impoverished population that depended on their
services. Over the 1990s many professionals left public service either to take
their chances in the private sector or flee into
exile.
The legacy of Saddam
Hussein’s rule has made the task of the CPA that much harder. The
institutions of the Iraqi state that the US had hoped to inherit in April 2003
were by that time on the verge of collapse. During March they were
targeted by the third war in twenty years. This, in addition to
thirteen years of sanctions specifically designed to weaken them and
three weeks of looting in the aftermath of liberation, resulted in their
disintegration. What had been planned as regime change and then
the speedy reform of state institutions was now going to be something
much more costly and long-term. The legacy of Baathist rule, thirteen years
of sanctions and twenty years of war means that today the CPA is engaged in an
unforeseen process of building a new Iraqi state from the ground up. By its very
nature, this will take much more time, effort and expertise than was
anticipated in the run up to invasion.
However, the negative
legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule on the Iraqi population, is if anything, even
more troublesome. For the Iraqi population, politics only began on April 9
last year. The Iraqi political organizations that the CPA are trying to
liaise with have either been in existence for little over a year or have been
imported into the country in the aftermath of regime change. This means that
they have had a very short period of time to gain the attention of the
population and more importantly win their trust or allegiance. With no
indigenous civil society organizations surviving Saddam’s rule, Iraqi
politics are today extremely fluid. The population was largely atomized
by thirty-five years of Baathist rule. Liberation has certainly led to
political mobilization but at the present juncture this process is tentative,
unstable and highly fractured. No one individual or party has managed to
rally any significant amount of support from the population. This was starkly
born out by the largest opinion poll ever conducted in Iraq. In February 2004
Oxford Research International interviewed 2737 people across Iraq. Although some
of the results were broadly positive for the CPA, others highlighted distinct
problems for the medium-term political stability of the country. When asked
which organization they would vote for in a national election, the Shia
party, Al-Dawa, received the highest polling figure. But the support Al Dawa
registered was extremely low at only 10% of those questioned. Other parties that
also claim a national base registered even lower polling figures. The largest
percentage of those polled, 39.2%, answered that they did not know whom they
would vote for. This was closely followed 34.5% who refused to answer the
question. A similar very low response resulted from the question: ‘Which
national leader in Iraq, if any, do you trust the most?’ Again Al Dawa’s leader
Ibrahim Jaaferi got the highest rating but that was only 7.7% of those
questioned. The more indicative results were 21.1% of those questioned who
answered ‘none’ and the 36.7% of those who did not answer or were not
sure.
In Iraq today the CPA
faces a highly mobilized but largely atomized society that is unrestrained by
effective state institutions or by political parties. Nationwide democratic
elections, both at a local, regional and national level could result in the
structured political mobilization of the population. This would channel the
hopes and aspirations but also the alienation and anger of the Iraqi people into
the political process. It would tie the population in a transparent and
consensual way to political parties who would be forced to develop a national
network but also a national platform. Political parties, in order to prosper,
would be forced to both be responsive to Iraqi public opinion but would also, to
some extent, be responsible for shaping it. This process would also link the
population, through the parties, to state institutions. Without such a
process, discussions about handing sovereignty back to the Iraqi people are
extremely problematic. As the Oxford Research International opinion poll
indicated, ‘the Iraqi people’ have not yet given their allegiance to any
individual or party. They feel unrepresented at a national level. They
have little or no affinity with the parties who claim to speak for Iraq. With
this in mind handing sovereignty back to Iraqis would be dangerous and could, if
anything, further increase the alienation of the Iraqi population from the CPA
and the governing structures it is trying to build.
The
problems
Against a background of
increased violence and insecurity plans for rebuilding the political and
administrative structures in Iraq appear to have become largely reactive. As
policy has moved to meet a series of challenges it appears that little
attention has been paid to the long-term consequences of each new initiative.
The key problem damaging the occupation and hindering state building is the
difficulty in communication between the American civil servants stationed in the
green zone in downtown Baghdad and the mass majority of the Iraqi
population. It is this inability to have meaningful interaction with Iraqi
society that is the core problem facing the US. The CPA’s relations with
Iraqi society have been undermined by three factors. Firstly from April
2003 onwards the CPA has not had enough Arabic speakers on its
staff. The occupation for many Baghdadis is now painfully personified by the
daily scenes at the green zone’s main gate in the center of Baghdad. Here
hundreds of Iraqis queue up to petition Ambassador Bremer whose office actually
lies three miles beyond the initial security cordon. Rolls of barbed wire
manned by worried American soldiers confront those who come to seek
information from the CPA or try to explain their grievances. With no Arabic and
understandably fearful for their own safety, these young men invariably
control the Iraqis at the gate by shouting at them in English, cursing and
threatening to use force. The result is frequent and bitter clashes
between a population and their liberators, with both sides failing to
communicate the reasons
for their anger and
alienation.
The second problem hampering the
occupation is the CPA’s continuing lack of expert knowledge about the country
they are trying to control. Within the CPA’s headquarters there are very
few experts on Iraqi society, politics or economy. Those experts who have
been posted to Baghdad have tended to be a small number of British civil
servants, usually on six-month postings. Even this small handful of specialists
has had difficulty influencing the making and implementation of policy. With
this limited expertise on Iraq the coalition became worryingly dependent upon
the small group of Iraqi exiles it brought back to Baghdad in the aftermath of
liberation. They were meant to provide several functions. First, they would
become the main channel of communication between the wider Iraqi population and
US forces. They would also, in spite of being absent from the country for many
years, become the chief source of information and guidance for the American
administrators struggling to understand and rebuild the country. Finally,
and most importantly, they were set to become the basis of the new political
elite. It was the exiles that were to form the core of Iraq’s new governing
classes. However, this reliance has brought with it distinct problems. The
formerly exiled political parities, dominated by the Iraqi National Congress,
have brought with them a very distinctive view of Iraqi society. This describes
Iraq as irrevocably divided between sectarian and religious groupings mobilized
by deep communal hatreds. This ‘primordialization’ of Iraq bares little
resemblance to Iraqi society in 2004, but appears to be very influential in the
political planning that has gone on since April 9 2003.6
The heavy reliance on
organizations like the Iraqi National Accord (INA) and the Iraqi National
Congress (INC) has further exacerbated the divide between Iraqi society and
US forces. Despite setting up numerous offices around Baghdad, publishing
party newspapers and spending large sums of money, the two main exile groups,
the INC and INA have so far failed to put substantial roots into society. In
a series of interviews with a cross section of Iraqis in Baghdad in May 2003,
rich and poor, religious or secular, I found at best indifference and more
usually anger towards the returned exiles, especially the avowedly secular
INC and INA.7 This included one Baghdadi who under
Saddam’s rule had worked secretly for one of the exile groups. He was arrested
and sentenced to death, a fate he only avoided, after nine months on death row
in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, because the regime collapsed. When I asked
about the party he nearly lost his life for he replied: “I would have done
anything to see the back of Saddam. But since the exiles have returned I have
been disappointed, I do not trust them”. Off the record many of the
more candid formerly exiled politicians will admit that they themselves have
been surprised by the difficulties they have faced since returning. Instead
of being welcomed they have found a sullen and suspicious population who have
largely refused to offer political loyalty to the newly returned
parties.
The inability of the
exiled parties to develop significant constituencies within Iraq has not stopped
the CPA from using them as the cornerstone of the new governing structures. This
policy appears to have gone through four distinct phases. Firstly, once Baghdad
had been taken, the ex-general Jay Garner expressed a desire to move quickly to
an interim government run by the formerly exiled politicians who came back to
the capital with the US military. However the movement towards creating a
representative body was hasty and rather ramshackle in nature. The first two
meetings, at Ur near Nassariyah, on March 15 and then in Baghdad, on April 28
2003, were designed to draw together Iraqis in some form of assembly. The
meeting at Ur was notable for those who chose not to attend and the large
demonstration against the meeting outside. This highlighted the small number
of delegates (80) and the veracity of their claims to be representative of
little more than themselves. Although the turnout in Baghdad was larger at 300,
it did not reach the 2000-3000 predicted in advance. The organizers refused
to indicate how many had been invited but did concede that the meeting was “not
sufficiently representative to establish an interim
authority”.8
The second phase of US
approaches to rebuilding Iraq was marked by one of Ambassador Paul Bremer’s
first decisions upon arriving in Baghdad. He decided to put Jay Garner’s plans
on hold and delay delegating power to a leadership council mainly composed of
the formerly exiled parties. Given the fluidity of the situation and the
difficulties of engaging the Iraqi population in a political process in the
aftermath of conflict, this appeared to have been a very astute decision.
However, this cautious and incremental approach was set aside with the advent of
the third plan for building governmental structures. This was heralded by
the CPA, in conjunction with the United Nations, setting up the Iraqi Governing
Council (IGC) in July 2003. This body, picked by Paul Bremer after extended
negotiations between the CPA, the UN and seven dominant parties, was trumpeted
by the CPA as “the most representative body in Iraq’s history”. The
representative nature of the IGC does not come from the method of its formation
but instead from the supposedly ‘balanced’ nature of its membership. The
politicians were chosen to approximate the ethnic make up of Iraq, with 13
members being technically Shia, five Sunnis, with a Turkoman and a Christian
thrown in for good measure. The nature of this arrangement becomes apparent when
it is realized that Hamid Majid Mousa, the Iraqi Communist Party’s
representative and indeed the avowedly secular Ahmed Chalabi himself are
included within the ‘Shia block’ of thirteen. Is the Marxist Mr. Mousa meant to
represent that section of the Shia community with leftist or secular leanings or
is the CPA’s designation of him as a Shia more indicative of the rather strange
nature of the ethnic mathematics used to form the IGC? This sectarian
mathematics was also why the number of cabinet portfolios was increased to 25,
so that the spoils of office could be divided up in a similar
fashion.
The confessional basis to
choosing the IGC caused much heated debate in Iraqi political circles and across
the newly liberated press in Baghdad. Arguments focused on the
way members were chosen, for their sectarian affiliation not their technical
skills, and the dangers of introducing divisive confessional dynamics into the
highest level of Iraqi politics. To quote Rend Rahim Francke, the Iraqi
Ambassador-in-waiting to Washington DC:
“… a quota system based on
sect and ethnicity undermines the hope of
forging a common Iraqi
citizenship by stressing communitarian identity and
allegiance at the expense
of Iraqi identity … anyone who wishes to be
involved in the political
process must first advertise an ethnic, sectarian or
at least tribal identity,
and play the ethnic and sectarian card. Proclaiming
one's ‘Iraqiness’ is no
longer sufficient: one has to ‘declare’ for a
communal identity. This
puts Iraq well on the road to Lebanonization …”9
By mid-November 2003
the shortcomings of the IGC had become apparent to decision makers in
both London and Washington. A fourth change in policy was trailed by a series of
well sourced leaks in the media originating from both Baghdad and Washington
highlighting the inefficiencies of the IGC. The fact that on average 17 of
its 25 members had been out of Iraq since its formation was used to paint the
governing council as ineffective. This press campaign reached its peak with
the recall of Ambassador Bremer for consultations in Washington. This resulted
in a new plan, a new timetable and the proposal for a new institution through
which Iraqis were to govern themselves.
Pressured by the oncoming electoral cycle
in America and increasing casualties in Iraq, the US government has sought to
radically reduce the length and nature of its political commitment to
Iraq. The
new plan endorsed by the IGC on November 15 2003 called for the drafting of a
‘fundamental law’ to be followed by the creation of a transitional assembly of
anything between 200 to 500 delegates. It is this assembly that was to select a
cabinet and leader for Iraq and guide the country to democratic elections.
Problematically, although the proposed transitional assembly was to play such a
pivotal role in Iraq’s future it was not to be directly elected. Instead a
system of indirect elections and caucuses were to be held, with town and city
leaders ‘electing’ delegates to the assembly in a series
of
countrywide town hall
meetings.
This rather rough and
ready approach to representation was not been greeted with universal approval in
Iraq.
Most importantly, the senior Shia cleric Marja Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani publicly
set himself against the ‘caucusing’ approach, re-stating his long held and very
public position that a constitutional assembly must be elected by universal
suffrage. The Ayatollah’s position had been clearly articulated weeks before
Paul Bremer’s departure for Washington in November. The fact that his opposition
and its ramifications were underestimated, points to the continuing difficulties
that the CPA is having in comprehending the dynamics of Iraqi
politics.
The lack of communication
between the American civil servants and military personnel, their handpicked
allies on IGC and the wider population of Iraq is one of the key problems that
has undermined the occupation and the CPA’s attempts at state
building.
From this inability to interact with Iraqi society springs the core problems
facing the US and those who will inherit Iraq after June 30. Intelligence
gathering is proving to be difficult because many Iraqis feel alienated from the
CPA. The small number of Arabic speakers on its staff has undermined the
CPA’s interaction with Iraqi society. This has contributed to the CPA’s lack
of knowledge about the country they are trying to control. With almost no
experts on Iraq on its staff the coalition became worryingly dependent upon the
small group of Iraqi exiles it brought back to Baghdad with them. It is from
amongst this group that the majority of the 25 members IGC were selected.
However, this reliance has brought with it distinct problems. Firstly the
formerly exiled politicians have proved to be unpopular. This means that the
ICG, the most likely core of a new government, post June 30, is detached from
the very people it is meant to represent. This gap between the political
structures left by the departing CPA and the population does not bode well
either for the growth of democracy or for the vanquishing of the
insurgency.
The whole process of
building institutional and governmental links between the CPA and Iraqi
society has been plagued by the fact that many Iraqis, aware of the
increasing unpopularity of the US presence in their country, and believing it to
be temporary, are still sitting on their hands, eschewing involvement in
government institutions, political and administrative, until the situation
becomes clearer and the risks of political involvement fewer. Overcoming
this problem is the chief concern of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Iraq, who
began his new mission on April 5. Early indications suggest that Brahimi may
well be trying to reproduce an Afghan model. This would involve a caretaker
government made up of a prime minister, president and two vice presidents.
Before elections, scheduled for late 2004 or early 2005, this ruling triumvirate
would gain legitimacy from a national conference, to be convened a short time
after June 30.
It is unclear how this
plan would overcome the problems that have undermined the various approaches of
the CPA.
Firstly where is Mr. Brahimi going to pick the president and prime minister? It
seems very likely that he will be forced to choose from the core of the ICG,
that has to date formed the revolving presidency of the council. If he does
succumb to this temptation then all the problems that dogged the IGC, its lack
of legitimacy, its inability to forge meaningful links with the population and
criticisms of it being appointed and not elected will
resurface.
Secondly because Mr.
Brahimi, like his predecessor, Sergio Viera de Mello, is working under the
auspices of the CPA he runs the distinct danger of being perceived of as
merely an appendage to the occupation. With the current poor security
situation the proposed national conference may find it very difficult attracting
a large and representative sample of the Iraqi population. If this were the case
it would be very difficult for it to fulfill its dual roles as a forum for
national consultation and a source of legitimacy for the new caretaker
government. The failure of a national conference to gather momentum and bring
together a broad cross section of the population would leave the caretaker
government
proposed by Mr. Brahimi dangerously exposed and open to similar criticisms and suspicions as those which have been leveled at the ICG since its formation.
The only way to avoid such pitfalls would
be to internationalize the creation of governing institutions and democratic
structures. This would not mean a
partial or token role for the United Nations, organizing national conferences or
overseeing election. Instead it would involve bringing the whole occupation and
state building under United Nations management. This would reduce the
suspicion felt towards the CPA by sections of the Iraqi population. The
organization overseeing the move towards the creation of a new state would then
not be the United States but the international community. Accusations of double
standards or nefarious intent would be much harder to sustain. Arguments about
the occupier’s willingness to relinquish power would also be negated. It would
be the Security Council in New York not the US government in Washington that
would have ultimate responsibility for Iraq’s transition. This would result in
many more Iraqis viewing the whole exercise with a great deal more legitimacy.
The UN could then utilize expertise and troops from across the international
community. Those involved in reconstruction, both Iraqis and international civil
servants, would then not run the danger of being labeled
collaborators.
Order and
violence
The rising unpopularity of
a sustained US presence in Iraq is closely linked to the nature of the order
they have been able to impose on the country since the taking of
Baghdad.
For military occupation to be successful the population has to be overawed by
both the scale but also the commitment of the occupiers. The speed with which
US forces removed Saddam Hussein’s regime certainly impressed the Iraqi
population. In the immediate aftermath of April 9 there was little doubt that US
military superiority appeared absolute. But the inability
of American forces to control the looting that swept Baghdad and the continued
lawlessness that haunts the lives of ordinary Iraqis has done a great deal to
undermine that initial impression of American omnipotence.
Troop numbers and tactics
have hampered the nature and quality of the law and order that American troops
have been able to enforce in the aftermath of the ceasefire. In the run up to
war Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki in a Senate hearing called for ‘hundreds
of thousands’ of troops to guarantee order. Michael O’Hanlon, of the Brookings
Institute, based on his experience in the Balkans, took the figure of 150,000 as
a minimum with at least 100,000 staying in the country for several
years.10 At the moment there are
only 137,000 US troops attempting to impose order on the country, this is
clearly not enough to achieve the type of sustainable order state building
requires.
The understandable tactics
adopted by US troops, a combination of heavily armed motorized patrols and large
fortified bases, means that the military presence became detached and largely
remote from the Iraqi population. As the daily toll of US casualties’ mounts
American forces are increasingly perceived of as weak and their presence in
and commitment to the country as temporary. This general impression helps
to explain why Baath loyalists began to reorganize in the spring of 2003 and why
the remnants of Saddam's security services, sensing an opportunity to take
advantage of US force vulnerability, began launching hit and run attacks with
increasing frequency and skill.
Understanding the
insurgency
A homogeneity of viewpoint
in explaining the causes of both the insurgency and the large-scale terrorist
attacks in Iraq appears to have developed amongst senior staffers in the US
administration. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has been keen to stress that resistance is neither monolithic nor
nationwide. He argues that 90 percent of the incidents are in the so-called
‘Sunni triangle’ of northwest Iraq, running from Baghdad north to Mosul and west
to the Jordanian border.11 Washington has been keen
to portray the violence as the work of regime ‘hold-outs’, die-hard Saddam
loyalists who may have formed utilitarian alliances with radical Islamists from
across the Middle East.12 The logic of this argument
is that the violence is highly unrepresentative of Iraqi popular opinion,
geographically located in a comparatively small area of the country and
politically limited to those fanatical enough or unintelligent enough not to
realize that the old regime is dead and buried and that opposition to the new,
US sponsored, world is futile.
However, the violence dogging the
occupation springs from three separate sources with a host of causes beyond
the ‘fanatical hold-outs’ of the old regime. The first group undermining law
and order are ‘industrial scale’ criminal gangs operating in the urban
centers of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. It is organized crime that makes the
everyday lives of Iraqi city dwellers so precarious. These groups, born in
the mid-1990s when Saddam’s grip on society was at its weakest, have been
revitalized by the lawlessness of present day Iraq. Capitalizing on
readily available weapons, the weaknesses of a new and hastily trained police
force and the CPA’s shortage of intelligence about Iraqi society, they pray on
middle class Iraqis, car jacking, housebreaking, murdering and kidnapping. It is
groups like these that make the roads surrounding Baghdad so dangerous,
regularly attacking foreign workers.
The second group involved
in violence is, as the CPA argues, the remnants of the Baath regime’s
security services. Sensing the vulnerability of occupation forces they began
launching hit and run attacks on US troops in May and have increased the
frequency, skill and geographic scope with which they are carried out. Two
things must be understood about the genesis of the insurgency. First, the
likelihood of a ‘hidden hand’ coordinating and funding it from its outset is
very doubtful. Research I carried out in Iraq at the outset of the insurgency
paints a much more fractured if not organic picture of the forces arrayed
against the US. The networks and personnel now pursuing the insurgency appear
to have been reconstituted through personal, family and geographic ties in the
months after April 9 not in response to a master plan developed in the run up to
the invasion. Paul Bremer’s decision, upon his arrival in Baghdad, to dissolve
the army on May 23 and embark on root and branch de-Baathification on May 16
2003, contributed to the personal organization of the insurgency. Baathists
in late May felt under attack and vulnerable. The CPA edicts in conjunction with
a spate of assassinations by radical Shia groups gave them the motivation to
re-organize. It was only by the spring of 2004 that evidence began to emerge
that a national organization was beginning to coordinate the actions of the
disparate groups involved in the insurgency.
The second factor
supporting the insurgency is the coherence of the security networks that
guaranteed Saddam’s survival in power for so long. The ‘Sunni triangle’ is
often talked about as a homogenous block of insurgency supporters, offering
material and ideological comfort to the fighters. What is not understood is
that the ‘shadow state’, the flexible networks of patronage and violence that
were used to reshape Iraqi society in the image of Saddam Hussein and his
regime, is still functioning coherently in the north west of
Iraq.13 The same individuals who
intimidated and demobilized Iraqi society in the north west under the Baath
regime are still there today and can be expected to be carrying out their
allotted function.
The result of these two
factors is the insurgency today. The weaknesses of intelligence on the US side
means American forces have a partial understanding of who is killing them, who
is organizing the insurgency and what its relations with the wider community
are. The repeated large-scale swoops through north west Iraq by US troops,
Operation Peninsula Strike, Operation Sidewinder and Operation Soda Mountain,
may have resulted in the capture of large amounts of munitions, but they have
also been accompanied by the deployment of large numbers of troops, mass arrests
and widespread house searches. This has done little to stem the tide of
violence. Without accurate, time sensitive intelligence and local knowledge
such raids do, slowly, locate the remaining key players of Saddam’s ruling elite. But in the
process they also alienate large sections of the population in the targeted
areas. Large numbers of arrests and detentions are bound to fuel resentment and
swell the ranks of the violently disaffected.
The final source of
violence is certainly the most worrying for the CPA and the hardest to deal
with. This can be usefully characterized as Iraqi Islamism, with both Sunni
and Shia variations. Fuelled by both nationalism and religion it is certainly
not going to go away and provides an insight into the mobilizing dynamics of
future Iraqi politics. An early indication of the cause and effect of this
phenomenon can be seen in the town of Falluja, thirty-five miles west of
Baghdad. In spite of assertions to the contrary, Iraqis did not regard
Falluja, prior to the war, as a ‘hotbed of Baathist
activity’.14 On the contrary, Falluja
had a reputation in Iraq as a deeply conservative town, famed for the number of
its mosques and its adherence to Sunni Islam.15 In the immediate aftermath
of regime change Iraqi troops and Baath Party leaders left the town. Imams
from the local mosques stepped into the socio-political vacuum, bringing an end
to the looting, even managing to return some of the stolen
property.16
The fact that this
town became a center of violent opposition to US occupation so soon after
liberation is explained by Iraqis I interviewed as a result of heavy-handed
searches carried out by US troops in the hunt for leading members of the old
regime. Resentment escalated when two local Imam’s were arrested.17 Events reached a climax when US
troops broke up a demonstration with gunfire resulting in reports of seventeen
Iraq fatalities and seventy wounded.
The
repeated violation of the private sphere of Iraqi domestic life by US troops
searching for weapons and fugitives has caused recurring resentment across Iraq,
especially when combined with the seizure of weapons and money. It has to be
remembered that as brutal as Saddam’s regime was, it never sought to disarm the
Iraqi population. The deaths of six British soldiers in June 2003 in the
southern town of Majar al Kabir, although almost certainly carried out by
Shias, can also be explained in a similar fashion. It was preceded by a
British army operation designed to recover weapons by searching houses. The
resentment this caused erupted when a heavy deployment of British troops was
replaced by a small number of lightly armed military police.
The insurgency changes
tactics
The explosions in Baghdad
and Karbala that greeted the signing of Transitional Administrative law in the
first week of March 2004 marked a new phase in the insurgency. This was a
response to the CPA’s plans to hand over the provision of security to the
nascent Iraqi army and police force. This new and destabilizing phase of
violence is designed to make Iraq ungovernable either by the US or a new Iraqi
government. Terrorism is now being deployed with the twin aims of exacerbating
sectarian tensions whilst at the same time seeking to stop the growth in
indigenous governing structures designed to replace the
occupation.
As US troops took a less public role and
began to be redeployed to more secure bases, the insurgents have sought out more
accessible target. The embryonic institutions and personnel of the new Iraqi
state provided these. This change in tactics
was heralded by the attack on three police stations in Baghdad on the same
day in October last year. Since then this method has been extended in its
geographical scope and ferocity, using car bombs to target police stations in
Khalidyah in western Iraq, Mosul in the north and Iskandariya and Hillah south
of Baghdad. These attacks, along with a devastating car bomb assault on an
army recruiting center in Baghdad that killed 53 people in February, are
designed not only to discourage Iraqis from working for the new state but also
to stop the growth of its institutions. They undermine attempts to deliver to
the Iraqi population what they have been demanding since the fall of the Baath
regime: law and order.
However the second
tactic adopted by insurgents has the potential to be even more damaging to
Iraq’s long-term stability. By targeting the large crowds that gathered to
commemorate the Shia festival of Ashura in Baghdad and Karbala, the perpetrators
of the attacks on March 2 were attempting to trigger a civil war between Iraq’s
different communities. This approach first became apparent on August 29,
2003 with the car bomb at the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. In February 2004 this
tactic was extended to the Kurdish areas of Iraq when two suicide bombers killed
101 people in Irbil at the offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan.
Prominent Iraqi
politicians were keen to blame the rise in car bombing, civilian casualties and
the resulting sectarian tension on outside forces. But there is a danger that
they have tended to overstate their case. The efficiency of
these attacks, their regularity and the speed with which they were organized in
the aftermath of Saddam’s fall all point to a large amount of Iraqi
involvement. The shadowy organization behind these sectarian attacks is much
more likely to be a hybrid, with elements of the old regime acting in alliance
with indigenous Islamic radicals and a small number of foreign fighters. This
potent mix has allowed mid-ranking members of the old regime to deploy their
training and weapons stockpiles. They have sought to ally themselves with a new
brand of Islamic nationalism, seeking to mobilize Sunni fears of Shia and
Kurdish domination and a growing resentment at foreign occupation. Although
the use of indiscriminate violence has alienated the vast majority of Iraqi
public opinion across all sections of society the carnage it has produced has
been a major set back for state building and
stability.
The inability of the CPA
to impose law and order on Iraq has created a security vacuum across the
whole of the country. This has given rise to another destabilizing and very
worrying dynamic that may come to dominate post occupation Iraqi politics.
Militias have stepped into the security vacuum further adding to instability and
insecurity. In a country where automatic weapons are widely available and
most men have had military training and many have seen active service, the
organization of militias is comparatively straight forward. The months since
liberation has seen a plethora of armed groups taking to the streets,
increasingly organized along sectarian lines. The inconsistent application of
CPA disarmament edicts, allowing Kurdish militias to retain their arms while
demanding that certain Shia ones cannot, has led to the militias filling the
social space formally occupied by central government. Although these militias
enjoy little popular support their very existence is testament to the inability
of the CPA to guarantee the personal safety of the Iraqi population. Clearly
the establishment of countrywide order is essential for the successful creation
of a stable state. It is also evident that more troops and policemen are
needed for this to happen. What the events of the last two weeks have
highlighted is that the nascent forces of the newly formed Iraqi army and
police force are unable or unwilling to impose order. With the speed with
which these forces were created is was perhaps overly optimistic to put such a
large burden upon them with such haste. However, it is clear that US forces
have also become a target of resentment and nationalist mobilization. More
troops are needed but of a different type. If the occupation were
internationalized, a UN force, would not be such a potent target of anger and
suspicion. They could provide the numbers of troops on the ground needed for the
provision of order.
It is hard to
over-estimate what is at stake in Iraq today. The removal of Saddam Hussein
has proved to be the beginning not the culmination of a long and very uncertain
process of occupation and state building. The lawlessness and looting that
greeted the liberation of Baghdad on April 9 2003 has evolved into a self
sustaining dynamic that combines violence, instability and profound uncertainty.
US troops now face an insurgency that has managed to extend its geographic
impact, while increasing the level of violence and the capacity for destruction
and instability.
Against this background the failure of
American attempts to replace Saddam Hussein’s regime with a stable, sustainable
and hopefully liberal government would have major consequences far beyond Iraq,
the region or indeed the United States itself. The failure of regime
consolidation in Iraq for the Middle East would be very problematic. The
importance of Iraq to the geo-political stability of the Gulf and the wider
Middle East area can hardly be overestimated. Geographically it sits on the
eastern flank of the Arab Middle East with Turkey and Iran as neighbors.
Although its population is considerably smaller than both of its non-Arab
neighbors, it is larger than any of the bordering Arab states. With oil reserves
second only to Saudi Arabia its economic importance is clearly global. If the
present domestic situation does not stabilize then violence and political unrest
would be expected to spread across Iraq’s long and porous borders. A
violently unstable Iraq, bridging the mashreq and the Gulf would further
weaken the already fragile domestic and regional stability of the surrounding
states and the wider region beyond. Iraq’s role as a magnet for radical
Islamists from across the Muslim world, eager to fight US troops on Middle
Eastern soil, would increase. In addition there is a distinct danger that
neighboring states would be sucked into the country, competing for influence,
using Iraqi proxies to violently further their own regime’s interests.
With this in mind and
given the social and political legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule it is unfair but
also unrealistic to ask one country to bear the major burden of rebuilding the
state. No one country, even the world’s sole remaining super power, has the
resources and expertise to finish the job at hand alone. The rebuilding of Iraq
is an international problem and should be given to the international community
to handle.
1 Dr Toby Dodge is Consulting Senior Fellow for the
Middle East at the International
Institute for Strategic Studies, London. He is also
Senior Research Fellow, at the ESRC
Center for the Study of Globalization and
Rationalization, University of Warwick, UK. He
has recently published Inventing Iraq: the failure
of nation building and a history denied,
(New York and London: Columbia University Press,
2003), Iraq at the Crossroads: State
and Society in the Shadow of Regime
Change, (edited with Steven Simon)
(London and
Oxford: IISS and Oxford University Press, 2003),
Globalization and the Middle East, Islam,
Economics, Culture and Politics, (edited
with Richard Higgott) (London and Washington:
Royal Institute of International Affairs and the
Brookings Institution, 2002), and ‘US
intervention and possible Iraqi futures’,
Survival, Vol. 45, No. 3, August 2003.
2 See Charles Tripp, ‘After Saddam’, Survival,
Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 2002-2003, p. 26.
3 Amatzia Baram, Building Towards Crisis: Saddam
Husayn's Strategy for Survival,
Policy Paper No. 47, (Washington: The Washington
Institute for Near East policy, 1998),
p. 73.
4 Frederick D. Barton and Bathsheba Croker, ‘Winning the
Peace in Iraq, The Washington
Quarterly,
Spring 2003, Vol. 26, No. 2, p. 10.
5 See Peter Boone, Haris Gazdar and Athar Hussain,
‘Sanctions against Iraq: Costs of
Failure’, a paper given at ‘Frustrated Development:
the Iraqi Economy in War and in
Peace,’ conference, University of Exeter, Center for
Gulf Studies in collaboration with
the Iraqi Economic Forum, July 1997, p.
10.{PRIVATE }
6 See Isam al Khafaji, ‘A Few Days After: State and
Society in a Post-Saddam Iraq’, in
Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the
Shadow of Regime Change, (edited
by
Toby Dodge and Steven Simon) (London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies and
Oxford University Press, 2003).
7 This finding is supported by the opinion poll
conducted during February 2004 by
Oxford Research International. Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad
Alawi both respectively
registered 0.2% of those questioned when asked ‘Which
national leader in Iraq, if any, do
you trust the most?’ Another opinion poll carried out
on June 2003 by the Iraq Center for
Research and Strategic Studies found “that only 15.1%
of Iraqis polled in Baghdad said
that the political parties in Iraq represented their
interests. Approximately 63% of those
surveyed preferred a technocratic government, rather
than one based upon political
parties.” See Puneet Talwar and Andrew Parasiliti,
108th
Congress, 1st Session,
Committee print, ‘Iraq: meeting the challenge, sharing
the burden, staying the course, A
trip report to members of the Committee on Foreign
Relations, United States Senate’, p.
9.
8 Jonathan Steele, ‘Delegates agree new talks on
government’, The Guardian, April 29,
2003.
9 Rend Rahim Francke, ‘Iraq Democracy Watch: on the
Situation in Iraq’, September
2003 .
(http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/isept/26_democracy_watch.html).
10 See the unedited transcript, ‘The day after: planning
for a post-Saddam Iraq’, The
American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC, October
3, 2002.
11 See transcription of Fox News, July 6,
2003,
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,91170,00.html.
12 George W. Bush, ‘President Addresses the Nation’,
Address of the President to the
Nation, The Cabinet Room, September 7, 2003, and
Testimony as Delivered by Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Director,
Office of Management and Budget,
Joshua Bolten, and Acting Chief of Staff, U.S. Army,
General John Keane, Tuesday, July
29, 2003.
13 For more information on this see Toby Dodge, ‘US
intervention and possible Iraqi
futures’, Survival, Vol. 45, No. 3, August
2003.
14 See Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense,
General Peter Pace, USMC, Vice
Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, Alan Larson, Assistant
Secretary of State for Economics,
Business and Agricultural Affairs, testimony before
the Senate Foreign Committee, 2:35,
pm, Thursday May 22, 2003.
15 This is based on interviews carried out by the author
in Baghdad in late May last year.
16 See Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, May 6,
2003
17 See Jonathan Steele reporting from Falluja, The
Guardian, April 30, 2003.