[Texgreen] What's Really Happening in Iraq

[Roger Baker]

<http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick11282006.html>

Does Anyone in Washington or at Downing Street Know What's Really  
Happening in Iraq?

Iraq Nears the "Saigon Moment"

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere.  
In Baghdad the police often pick up over 100 tortured and mutilated  
bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.  
A new and ominous stage in the disintegration of the Iraqi state came  
earlier this month when police commandos from the Shia-controlled  
Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher  
Education Ministry in the heart of Baghdad.

Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call 'the Saigon moment',  
the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is  
expiring. "They say that the killings and kidnappings are being  
carried our by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles," said  
the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari with a despairing laugh to  
me earlier this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that the  
killers and kidnappers are real policemen."

It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the  
state. If the US army decides to confront the Shia militias it could  
well find Shia military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main  
American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was  
stopped at a supposedly fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border  
earlier this month and four American security men and an Austrian  
taken away.

The US and British position in Iraq is far more of a house built on  
sand than is realized in Washington or London despite the disasters  
of the last three-and-a-half years. President Bush and Tony Blair  
show a unique inability to learn from their mistakes, largely because  
they do not want to admit having committed any errors in the first  
place.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the  
country's 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other's  
neighbourhoods Iraq is turning into a country of refugees. The UN  
High Commission for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced  
within the country and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In  
Baghdad neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire  
mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to  
death I phoned a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he  
thought of the verdict. He answered impatiently that "I was woken up  
this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next  
door neighbour's house. I am more worried about staying alive myself  
than what happens to Saddam."

Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war  
because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These  
mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families.  
"I love my husband, but my family has forced me to divorce him  
because we are Shi'ite and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, the mother  
of four, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's family]  
are insurgents and that living with him is an offence to God."  
Members of mixed marriages set up an association to protect each  
other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled  
to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call  
"the politics of the last atrocity". All three Iraqi communities-- 
Shia, Sunni and Kurdish -- see themselves as victims and seldom  
sympathize with the tragedies of others. Every day brings its  
gruesome discoveries. Earlier this month I visited Mosul, the capital  
of northern Iraq that has a population of 1.7 million people of whom  
about two thirds are Sunni Arabs and one third Kurds. It not the most  
dangerous city in Iraq but it is still a place drenched in violence.  
A local tribal leader called Sayid Tewfiq from the nearby city of Tal  
Afar told me of a man from there who went to recover the tortured  
body of his 16-year old son. The corpse was wired to explosives that  
blew up killing the father so their two bodies were buried together.

Khasro Goran, the efficient and highly effective deputy governor of  
Mosul, said there was no civil war yet in Mosul but it could easily  
happen. He added that 70,000 Kurds had already fled the city because  
of assassinations. It is extraordinary how in Iraq slaughter that  
would be front page news any where else in the world soon seems to be  
part of normal life. On the day I arrived in Mosul the police had  
found 11 bodies in the city which would have been on the low side in  
Baghdad.

I spoke to the Duraid Mohammed Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, whose  
office is decorated with pictures of smiling fresh faced young men  
who turned out to be his son and four nephews, all of them killed by  
insurgents. His own house together with his furniture was burned to  
the ground two years ago. He added in passing that Mr Goran and he  
himself were the prime targets for assassination in Mosul, a point  
that was dramatically proved true the day after we spoke when  
insurgents exploded a bomb beside beside his convoy--fortunately he  
was not in it at the time-- killing one and wounding several of his  
bodyguards.

For the moment Mosul is more strongly-controlled by pro-government  
forces than most Iraqi cities. This is because the US has powerful  
local allies in the shape of the Kurds.The two army divisions in the  
province are primarily Kurdish, but the 17,000 police in Nineveh, the  
province of which Mosul is the capiral, are almost entirely Sunni and  
their loyalty is dubious. One was dismissed on the day of Saddam's  
trial for putting a picture of the former leader in the window of his  
car. In November 2004 the entire Mosul police force abandoned their  
police stations to the insurgents who captured $40 million worth of  
arms.

"The terrorists do not control a single district in Mosul," is the  
proud claim of Major General Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Qadir al-Hamdani,  
the bullet-headed police chief of Nineveh. "I challenge them to fight  
me face to face." But the situation is still very fragile. We went to  
see the police operations room where an officer was bellowing into a  
microphone: "There is a suicide bomber in a car in the city. Do not  
let him get near you or any of our buildings." There was a reason to  
be frightened. On my way into Mosul I had seen the broken concrete  
walls of the party headquarters of the Patriotic Unon of Kurdistan,  
one of the two big Kurdish political parties. In August two men in a  
car packed with explosives had shot their way past the outer guard  
post and then blown themselves up killing 17 soldiers.

The balance of forces in Nineveh between American, Arab, Kurd,  
Turkoman, Sunni and Shia is complicated even by Iraqi standards.  
Power is fragmented. Sayid Tewfiq, the Shia tribal leader from Tal  
Afar resplendent in his flowing robes, admitted: "I would not last 24  
hours in Tal Afar without Coalition [US] support." "That's probably  
about right," confirmed Mr Goran, explaining that Sayid Tewfiq's Shia  
Turkoman tribe was surrounded by Sunni tribes. Earlier I had heard  
him confidently invite all of Nineveh provincial council to visit him  
in Tal Afar. Nobody looked enthusiastic about taking him up on the  
offer. "He may have 3,000 fighters from his tribe, but he can't visit  
most of Tal Afar himself," said another member of the council called  
Mohammed Suleiman as he declined the invitation. A few hours before  
somebody tried to assassinate him Governor Kashmula claimed to me  
that "security in Mosul is the best in Iraq outside the Kurdish  
provinces." It is a measure of the violence in Iraq that it is an  
arguable point. Khasro Goran said that "the situation is not perfect  
but it is better than Anbar. Baquba and Diyala." I could vouch for  
this. In Iraq however bad things are there is always somewhere worse.

It is obviously very difficult for reporters to discover what is  
happening in Iraq's most violent provinces without being killed  
themselves. But at the end of September I travelled south along the  
Iraqi side of the border with Iran sticking to Kurdish villages to  
try to reach Diyala, a mixed Sunni-Shia province north-east of  
Baghdad where there had been savage fighting. It is a road on which a  
wrong turning could be fatal. We drove from

Sulaimaniyah through the mountains, passed through the Derbandikhan  
tunnel and then took the road which runs beside the Diyala river, its  
valley a vivid streak of lush green in the dun-coloured semi desert.  
The area is a smuggler's paradise. At night trucks drive through the  
desert without lights, their drivers finding their way with night  
vision goggles. It is not clear what cargoes they are carrying  
presumably weapons or drugs--and nobody has the temerity to ask.

We had been warned that it was essential to turn left after the  
tumble- down Kurdish town of Kalar before reaching the mixed Arab- 
Kurdish village of Jalula. We crossed the river by a long and rickety  
bridge, parts of which had fallen into the swirling waters below, and  
soon arrived in the Kurdish stronghold of Khanaqin in Diyala  
province. If I had any thoughts about driving further towards Baghdad  
they were put to rest by the sight, in one corner of the yard of the  
local police headquarters, of the wreckage of a blue-and-white police  
vehicle torn apart by a bomb. "Five policemen were killed in it when  
it was blown up at an intersection in As-Sadiyah two months ago," a  
policeman told me. "Only their commander survived but his legs were  
amputated."

Officials in Khanaqin had no doubt about what was happening in their  
province. Lt Col Ahmed Nuri Hassan, the exhausted looking commander  
of the federal police, said "There is an sectarian civil war here and  
it is getting worse every day. The head of the local council  
estimated that 100 people were being killed every week. In Baquba,  
the provincial capital, Sunni Arabs were driving out Shia and Kurds.  
The army and police were divided along sectarian lines. The one Iraqi  
army division in Diyala was predominantly Shia and only arrested  
Sunni. On the day after I left Sunni and Kurdish police officers  
fought a gun battle in Jalula, the village I had been warned not to  
enter. The fighting started when Kurdish police refused to accept a  
new Sunni Arab police chief and his followers. Here in miniature in  
Diyala it was possible to see Iraq breaking up. The province is ruled  
by its death squads. The police say at least 9,000 people had been  
murdered and after such bloodshed It is difficult to see how Sunni  
and Shia in the province can ever live together again.

In much of Iraq we long ago slipped down the rapids leading from  
crisis to catastrophe though it is only in the last six months that  
these dire facts have begun to be accepted abroad. For the first  
three years of the war Republicans in the US regularly claimed that  
the liberal media was ignoring signs of peace and progress in Iraq.  
Some right wingers even set up web sites devoted to spreading the  
news of American achievements in this ruined land. I remember a team  
from a US network news channel staying in my hotel in Baghdad  
complaining to me, as they buckled on their body armour and helmets,  
that they had been once again told by their bosses in New York,  
themselves under pressure from the White House, to "go and find some  
good news and report it."

Times have changed in Washington. The extent of the disaster in Iraq  
is admitted by almost all aside from President Bush. Even before the  
Democrats' victory in the Congressional elections on 7 November the  
magazine Vanity Fair commented acidly that 'the only group in the  
Bush camp at this point are the people who wait patiently for news of  
the W.M.D. and continue to believe that Saddam and Osama were once  
lovers.' Previous supporters of the war are showing embarrassing  
haste in recanting past convictions and becoming born again critics  
of the White House.

These days it is in Britain alone, or more specifically in Downing  
Street, that policies bloodily discredited in Iraq in the years since  
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein still get a hearing. I returned from  
Mosul to London earlier this month just in time to hear Tony Blair  
speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet. It was a far more extraordinary  
performance that his audience appreciated. As the prime minister  
spoke with his usual Hugh Grant charm it became clear that he had  
learned nothing and forgotten nothing in three- and-a-half years of war.

Misconception after misconception poured from his lips. Contrary to  
views of his own generals and every opinion poll assessing Iraqi  
opinion he discounted the idea that armed resistance in Iraq is  
fueled by hostility to foreign occupation. Instead he sees dark  
forces rising in the east, dedicated like Sauron in the Lord of the  
Rings to principles of pure evil. The enemy, in this case, is "based  
on a thoroughly warped misinterpretation of Islam, which is fanatical  
and deadly." Even by the standard of Middle Eastern conspiracy  
theories it was puerile stuff. Everywhere Blair saw hidden hands --  
"forces outside Iraq that are trying to create mayhem"--at work. An  
expert on the politics of Iraq and Lebanon recently said to me: "The  
most dangerous error in the Middle East today is to believe that the  
Shia communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran."

But this is exactly what the prime minister does believe. The fact  
that the largest Shia militia in Iraq--the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-  
Sadr--is anti-Iranian and Iraqi nationalist is conveniently ignored.  
These misconceptions are important in terms of practical policy  
because they give support to the dangerous myth that if the US and  
Britain could only frighten or square the Iranians and Syrians then  
all would come right as their Shia cats-paws in Iraq and Lebanon  
would inevitably fall into line. In a very British way [and American  
too, of course. Editors] opponents of the war in Iraq have focused  
not on current events but on the past sins of the government in  
getting us into the war. No doubt it was all very wrong for Downing  
Street to pretend that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction  
and was a threat to the world when they knew he was not. But this  
emphasis on the origins of the war in Iraq has diverted attention  
from the fact that, going by official statements, the British  
government knows no more about what was going on in Iraq in 2006 than  
it did in 2003. The picture Blair paints of Iraq seldom touches  
reality at any point. For instance he says Iraqis 'voted or an  
explicitly non-sectarian government,' but every Iraqi knows that the  
vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005 went wholly along  
sectarian and ethnic lines. The polls were the starting pistol for  
the start of the civil war.

Blair steadfastly refuses to accept the fact that opposition to the  
American and British occupation of Iraq has been the main cause of  
the insurgency. The commander of the British army General Sir Richard  
Dannatt was almost fired for his trouble when he made the obvious  
point that "we should get ourselves out some time soon because our  
presence exacerbates the security problem." Iraq is a notoriously  
complicated country but the swiftest way to grasp the most important  
features of its politics is to look at figures from the latest of a  
series of opinion polls carried out by the US-based group  
WorldPublicOpinion.org at the end of September. These explain why  
Dannatt is right and Blair is wrong. The poll shows that 92 per cent  
of the Sunni and 62 per cent of the Shia--up from 41 per cent at the  
start of the year -- approve of attacks on US led forces. Only the  
Kurds support the occupation. Some 78 per cent of all Iraqis think  
that the US military presence provokes more conflict than it prevents  
and 71 per cent want US-led forces out of Iraq within a year. The  
biggest and most menacing change this year is the growing hostility  
of Iraq's Shia to the American and British presence.

It used to be said that at least the foreign occupation prevented a  
civil war but with 1,000 Iraqis being killed every week, this it is  
now very clearly failing to do. On the contrary it was the occupation  
itself that helped provoke the present civil war. I do not mean that  
anybody conspired in Washington and London to set Iraqis at each  
other's throats. It was always true that in post-Saddam Iraq there  
was going to be friction-- probably involving violence--between the  
Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities. But Iraqis were also forced to  
decide if they were for or against a foreign invader. The Sunni  
community was always going to fight the occupation, the Kurds to  
welcome it and the Shia to cooperate with the US and Britain for just  
so long as it served their interests. Patriotism and communal self- 
interest combined. Before 2003 a Sunni might see a Shia as the member  
of a different sect but once the war had started he started to see  
him as a traitor to his country.

Of course Bush and Blair argue that there is no occupation. In June  
2004 sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq. "Let Freedom  
Reign," wrote Mr Bush on the piece of paper informing him of the  
carefully choreographed return of power to an Iraqi government at a  
ceremony in the heart of the Green Zone. But the reality of power  
remained firmly with the US and Britain. The Iraqi prime minister  
Nouri al-Maliki said this month that he could not move a company of  
soldiers without seeking permission of the Coalition (the US and  
Britain). Officials in Mosul confirmed to me that they could not  
carry out a military operation without the agreement of US forces.

There is a hidden history to the occupation of Iraq which helps  
explain why it has proved such a disaster. In 1991 after the first  
Gulf war a crucial reason why President George Bush senior did not  
push on to Baghdad was that he feared that the overthrow of Saddam  
Hussein would be followed by elections that would be won in turn by  
Shia religious parties sympathetic to Iran. No worse outcome of the  
war could be imagined in Washington. After the capture of Baghdad in  
2003 the US faced the same dilemma. Many of the contortions of US  
policy in Iraq since then have been a covert attempt to avoid or  
dilute the domination of Iraq's Shia majority.

For over a year the astute US envoy in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad tried  
to conciliate the Sunni: Bring their politicians into government,  
modify the federal constitution and open secret talks with the Sunni  
armed resistance. He failed. Attacks on US forces are on the  
increase. Dead and wounded US soldiers now total almost 1,000 a  
month. But the US is now gearing up for a fight with the Mehdi Army,  
the largest Shia militia. An Iraqi government will only have real  
legitimacy and freedom to operate when US and British troops have  
withdrawn. Washington and London have to accept that if Iraq is to  
survive at all it will be as a loose federation run by a Shia-Kurdish  
alliance because together they are 80 per cent of the population.  
But, thanks to the miscalculations of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the  
future of Iraq will be settled not by negotiations but on the  
battlefield.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Occupation (Verso).