19 October 2008
The Iraqi Deal
By Gwynne Dyer
It has been a short hundred years. That’s how long Republican presidential candidate John McCain said that American troops might have to stay in Iraq at the beginning of his campaign, but the deal that Washington concluded with the Iraqi government last week said that they must all be gone by 2011. And they must be off the streets of Iraqi cities by the middle of next year.
That’s not enough for a lot of Iraqis. Fifty thousand supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader who embodies the resentment of the poor against the Shia establishment, came out onto the streets of Baghdad on Saturday to protest against the deal signed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They want the Americans to leave now, which is also Sadr’s position, and it may win him a commanding position in parliament when Iraq votes again next year.
We should pause to note the remarkable fact that Iraqi politicians now have to seek popular support for their policies. Even Sadr has stood down the bulk of his Mahdi Army militia, keeping only a core group of experienced fighters to protect him from the Americans and his Iraqi enemies and converting the rest into local political workers. Iraq really does have a kind of democracy now, even if the price was very high.
But it is a democracy built on shaky foundations, and one of the shakiest bits is the relationship with the United States. Iraqis deeply distrust American intentions, and the Bush administration’s initial negotiating position, which sought to prolong the American occupation indefinitely, just fed that suspicion. Although Maliki was effectively chosen by the White House after it removed his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, he could not sign that kind of deal.
Maliki stood up for Iraqi sovereignty partly because he would pay for it in next year’s election if he did not, but he was never just an American puppet. He opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he also opposed the decision of his own party, al-Dawa, to join the first Iraqi “governing council” set up by occupation pro-consul Paul Bremer six months later.
So the negotiations for a “status of forces agreement” to provide legal cover for the US military presence in Iraq after the United Nations mandate expires in December were not just window-dressing. The Bush administration had to abandon its quest for permanent military bases in Iraq, although there is a clause in the deal that allows for a change of mind in Baghdad.
As Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh put it, “in 2011 the government at that time will determine whether it needs a new pact or not, and what type of pact will depend on the challenges it faces.” But the shoe is definitely on the other foot now, with the American right to keep troops in Iraq lapsing automatically at the end of 2011 unless the Iraqi government wishes otherwise.
Iraq was less successful in trying to make American troops responsible to Iraqi courts for their actions. The deal contains a clause says that Iraqi law will apply “if they commit a serious and deliberate felony outside their bases and when off duty,” but in practice no American soldiers leave their bases when off duty, and while on duty they can still kill any Iraqi who seems threatening with no questions asked. However, foreign civilian contractors will be subject to Iraqi law in future.
It’s not all that bad a deal, given the extent to which Maliki’s government depends on American troops for survival. But even within the alliance of Shia parties that dominates the government it faces severe criticism, and may not get through parliament. Outside, in the real world, it still feels like a fantasy.
It is now an undisputed factoid in the American political debate that Iraq has been stabilised by last year’s “surge” of US troops, but the reality on the ground is rather different. There is less sectarian killing, but that is mainly because the ethnic cleansing of mixed neighbourhoods where Sunni and Shia Arabs used to live side by side is almost complete. Other major outbreaks of violence remain possible.
The “Awakening” movement, in which tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs who had been fighting the American occupation went on the US government payroll in order to fight the take-over of their community by al-Qaeda extremists, is at a crossroads. Starting this month, the “Awakening” fighters are being paid by the Iraqi government, not by the Americans, and it has announced that only 20 percent of them will be absorbed into the Iraqi army.
The other 60-odd thousand fighters of the “Awakening” will only be paid until they find civilian jobs — but there are almost no well-paying jobs available in Iraq apart from government work, which usually requires a recommendation from one of the big Shia parties. So what do the rest of the Sunni fighters do? Go back to fighting the Americans? It’s not unimaginable.
And the possibility of war between Arab Iraq and Kurdish Iraq over the border between the two regions is ever present: the promised referendum on the future of the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding oilfields is the sword of Damocles hanging over the whole of Iraqi politics. The relative calm that Iraq is experiencing at the moment may just be the eye of the hurricane.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3 and 4. (“We should…deal”)
8 June 2008
US-Iraq: The Treaty That Isn’t
By Gwynne Dyer
In the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” the world’s most famous private detective refers to “the curious incident of the dog in the night.” “But the dog did nothing in the night,” replies his interlocutor. “That was the curious incident,” says Holmes. The dogs aren’t barking over the US-Iraq treaty, either, and that is equally curious.
To begin with, the Iraqi dogs aren’t barking. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki clearly doesn’t like the deal that the Bush administration is forcing on him, but will accept it because his government wouldn’t survive a week without US military support. The Shia religious authorities will not issue a fatwa against it, because their first priority is to preserve the Shias’ newfound domination of Iraq. But in fact most Iraqis who know about it, hate it.
That includes most of the Iraqi parliament’s 270 members, who sent a letter to the US Congress last week asking it to reject any US-Iraq security agreement unless the White House agrees to a specific timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. But Congress will not get to vote on the deal, because the White House has defined it not as a treaty (which has to be ratified by the Senate), but as an alliance (which doesn’t).
Equally curious is the lack of outcry in the US media. Last week the Middle Eastern correspondent of “The Independent,” Patrick Cockburn, published two leaked reports about the terms of the “alliance” and the tactics that the Bush administration is using to get the Iraqi government’s approval by the end of July. Nobody denied them, but hardly any mainstream outlet in the US media reported them as a major story, either.
It’s not necessarily a conspiracy. The exhausting Democratic primary campaign finally came to an end last week, and it’s very hard for the media to focus on two stories at once. Besides, the market leaders who define what is “news” know that the US public is sick of hearing about Iraq, and they are sick of it themselves. But it’s still remarkable that the details of the deal by which the US gets permanent bases in Iraq, and the threats that are being made to extort Iraqi agreement, are getting so little coverage.
Cockburn revealed that the United States will retain more than fifty military bases in Iraq as part of the “strategic alliance” it is pressuring Baghdad to sign. They will not be defined as US bases, however, since US negotiators insist that a perimeter fence with a few Iraqi soldiers on it is a sufficient fig-leaf to make it an “Iraqi base.”
However, those American soldiers on “Iraqi bases” will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens without prior consultation with the Iraqi authorities, if US negotiators get their way. US soldiers, and American civilian contractors as well, will enjoy full legal immunity for their actions. So it will remain the case, as it has been since the invasion, that any American employed by the US government in Iraq can kill any Iraqi without having to explain and justify his or her actions TO IRAQIS.
Indeed, the Unites States will be entitled to conduct entire military campaigns on Iraqi soil without consulting the Iraqi government. The US government is not even willing to tell the Iraqi government what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq under the terms of the “alliance,” apparently because it fears that the government would inform the Iranians.
Terms of this sort are familiar from the era of the European empires, when similar treaties were signed between, for example, the British government and its Iraqi colony in the Middle East. Ali Allawi, minister of finance in the Iraqi transitional government 2005-06, warns that this is “a reprise of that treaty,” and predicts that it will lead to the same “riots, civil disturbances, uprisings and coup” that filled the quarter-century between the British-Iraqi treaty in 1930 and the Iraqi revolt that finally overthrew the local puppet regime in 1958.
Some sort of treaty is needed to provide a legal basis for a continuing US military presence in Iraq, since the existing UN mandate lapses at the end of 2008. The particular treaty that the White House is forcing on Baghdad is designed to justify a permanent military occupation of Iraq, and as far as possible to tie the next administration’s hands when it comes to pulling US troops out of the country.
The Iraqi government will probably accept the US demands after some protests, because its survival depends on American troops. Washington is also threatening to allow $20 billion of outstanding US court judgements against Saddam Hussein’s regime to be executed, wiping out 40 percent of Iraq’s foreign exchange reserves, if the government in Baghdad does not cooperate on the treaty.
The trickier question is what happens if President Bush’s successor is not the like-minded John McCain. To the extent that they can successfully pretend that the US has won the war in Iraq, they can attach a very high political cost to Barack Obama’s pledge to pull US troops out of the country, and this treaty also serves as part of that charade. But it does not oblige US troops to stay in Iraq forever. It just says they can if they want to.
This game is not over, and neither is the war.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 9. (“It’s not…coverage”; and “Terms…1958″)
1 April 2008
Maliki Blinked First, If Anybody Cares
By Gwynne Dyer
Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose that the former United States had splintered into half a dozen fragments after the South won the Civil War 145 years ago. Suppose all the Arabs lived in a single, powerful state, but had no oil. Suppose an Arab military force was currently bringing peace and freedom to the oil-rich, violence-torn country of Texas. What would they be reading in the Arab newspapers five years after the occupation of Texas?
They’d be learning about the minute doctrinal differences and the irreconcilable rivalries between Catholic Hispanics and Protestant anglos, and even between Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists. They’d all know about Texas’s long love affair with guns, as if that explained why Texans were killing Arab soldiers.
They’d constantly be reminded that the dominant minority in east Texas is African-American, while in west Texas it is Hispanic, as if that explained anything. Leader writers in Arab newspapers would be speculating about which of the many Texan militias could be persuaded to side with the Arab troops in the task of pacification.
Everybody in the Arab world would know far more about Texas than any sane non-Texan should ever want to know — without understanding anything at all. And then the Arab troops would go home sooner or later, and everybody in the Arab world would forget all those intricate details about Texas again.
Well, the shoe is not on the other foot. It’s American troops in Iraq, not Arab troops in Texas, so it’s the Western media that are filled with minutiae about the rivalries among Iraqi sects, parties and militias. We’ve just had a fairly intense week of it, with the Baghdad government that is dominated by two Shia parties, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, using the national army to attack the militia of a third Shia faction, that led by Moqtada al-Sadr.
There are also the Kurds (aligned with the United States but divided among themselves) and the Sunni Arabs (who were fighting the Americans last year but are mostly allied with them at the moment, though that alliance may now be fraying). But the main event last week was between the Shias.
For the record, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attempt to shut down Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army, has failed. Maliki’s offensive against the Mahdi army in Basra stalled after four days, with three-quarters of the city still in the hands of the militia. Meanwhile heavy fighting spread to four other cities in the south and to Baghdad itself, and US ground troops were drawn into the fighting to cover the Iraqi army’s failures.
Maliki, who had been full of bluster at the start, declared himself surprised by the strength of the resistance (although nobody else was). He stopped the offensive and extended his deadline for disarming the militias by ten days. Then, after frantic scurrying around behind the scenes, a deal emerged in which Moqtada al-Sadr gently let him off the hook.
Sadr declared on Sunday that he was ordering the Mahdi army to stop fighting and get off the streets. But he coupled that with a demand that the government stop “illegal and random raids” (that target his followers)and release all detainees (including hundreds of Mahdi army members) who have been arrested without formal charges. And Sadr’s spokesman made it very clear that no weapons would be handed in.
Maliki did not argue. The offensive has been called off, and the Mahdi army is still intact. As Maliki’s spokesman put it, “the government will…implement the law against those who do not obey the instructions of the government and of Sadr.” The latter comes out of this confrontation stronger than ever, having faced down Maliki (with the full weight of the United States behind him), and then winning extra points for being the peace-maker
But the saga of the past week is just more minutiae, of no great relevance to the future of Iraq, let alone of the United States. No matter who ends up running Iraq, all the American troops will go home in the end. And whatever happens in Iraq after that, although of great importance to Iraqis, will be of little interest to Americans.
This does presume, of course, that post-occupation Iraq will not be run by bloodthirsty and intolerant fanatics whose only goal in life is to attack the United States. But that was never remotely likely at any stage of the game. The notion that this is anybody’s primary motive in the Arab world, even that of the bloodthirsty and intolerant fanatics who run “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” is just a self-centred American fantasy.
Ten years from now, all that painfully acquired knowledge about the details of Iraq’s internal rivalries will be long gone from American minds. Even in Iraq, few people will remember what happened last week in Iraq or give a damn about it. And the main conclusion of the American public about the Iraq adventure, as it has long been about Vietnam, will be (as Talleyrand said about one of Napoleon’s stupider decisions) that “it was worse than a Crime; it was a Mistake.”
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 12. (“There are…Shias”; and “This does…fantasy”)
10 September 2007
Marking Time
By Gwynne Dyer
The thing to remember about General David Petraeus’s report to Congress on the progress made by the US military “surge” in Iraq is that he is basically reporting on his own performance. Nothing in his past career suggests that he is prone to downplay his own achievements, and since he took command of US forces in Iraq in February his briefings have invariably been upbeat. The probability that he was going to say that it is now time to give up and go home from Iraq was always zero.
At Petraeus’s level of responsibility there is no such thing as a non-political general. He was chosen by and reports to a White House whose occupant has vowed that there will be no withdrawal from Iraq while he is in office. The two American generals who shared the command responsibility in Iraq when President George W. Bush first proposed the “surge” strategy late last year were fired when they did not back it. Of course Petraeus supports it.
So why are his opinions being treated with such reverence in political Washington, as if he were an independent auditor called in to assess the situation? Because the deeper truth is that none of the major players is really willing to pull the plug on the Iraq fiasco until after next year’s election. Meanwhile, everybody is just marking time and Petraeus is their excuse for continuing to do so.
Republicans are lumbered with a president and vice-president who will not be running in the next election and who are determined to prove they were right to invade Iraq no matter what the political cost to their own party. The party elders believe that popular anger at the war will lose them the White House in November 2008, but they do not believe that an open rebellion against Bush’s Iraq policy would achieve anything except to split the party.
The Democrats scent victory in 2008, but are hyper-sensitive about accusations that they are betraying the troops, so they will not try to use their Congressional majorities to cut off funding for the war. They also calculate, quite rightly, that it is the quagmire in Iraq that makes their victory in 2008 so likely so why deprive themselves of the best stick to beat the Republicans with by shutting the war down prematurely?
This explains the relatively easy ride that General Petraeus and his civilian counterpart, US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker, have had in Washington. All Petraeus had to do was promise that the number of American troops in Iraq would be back down to last November’s level by November of 2008, which was hardly a significant concession since the US army could not sustain the “surge” past next summer anyway.
In effect, President Bush’s “surge” strategy has bought him two whole years with the US troop level in Iraq at or above 130,000, but has it actually achieved anything else? Despite Petraeus’s obligatory optimism, the answer is probably no. There is no sign that the weak and divided Iraqi government will become cohesive and effective, or that the Iraqi army will become capable of independent operations and grow into a truly national force.
True, the number of bodies being found in Baghdad every morning is down quite a bit, but that is mostly because the ethnic cleansing is largely complete. The Shias who used to live in Sunni-majority areas of the capital and the Sunnis who lived in Shia-majority areas have almost all fled or been killed, together with the Christians and other minorities, so there are fewer easy targets available.
The much-touted pacification of Anbar province, once the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, is due to a de facto alliance between the American army and traditional tribal leaders whose authority was being usurped by the “al-Qaeda in Mesopotania” fanatics. But that doesn’t mean that the sheikhs are reconciled to the rule of a Shia-majority government ion Baghdad, let alone to the long-term presence of American troops in their province. They are just dealing with the most urgent enemy first.
The British are leaving southern Iraq to the rule of the militias. Open confrontation between the Kurds and the government in Baghdad over the territory around Kirkuk and Mosul grows ever harder to avoid, but that confrontation would break the one alliance that provides a modicum of political stability at the centre. The parliament’s only achievement has been to resist the US-backed oil bill that would open two-thirds of the nation’s oil reserves to exploitation by foreign oil companies: well done, but hardly enough.
One Iraqi in seven has been forced out of his or her home and become a refugee (2 million refugees abroad, and two million displaced people within Iraq). US military dead will reach the 4,000 mark by December, and probably 5,000 by next year’s election. Iraq is not fixed. It is not even on the mend.
The current American troop level, and maybe even the pre-surge level, can freeze the situation for a time, though at a significant cost in lives for both Iraqis and Americans, but it creates only a very temporary stability. Everybody is just waiting for Bush to leave office and the real American withdrawal to begin.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8 and 9. (“True…first”)