The Way To Go In Iraq

[This essay appears in the August 16th, 2007 issue of theNew York Review of Books and is posted here with the kind permission ofthe editors of that magazine, courtesy, Tomdispatch.com]

1.

On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in theKurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdishprovinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin Mixon,the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government foroverseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the"benchmark" now achieved: with the handover, he said, Iraqis nowcontrolled security in seven of Iraq's eighteen provinces.

In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan isthe peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans inthe 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the Kurdistangovernment in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdishprovinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been onKurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there.Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.

Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might haveadmired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted thehandover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. Butit also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgement thatIraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include areference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqiflags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all.Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag -- anevent so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in Ripley'sBelieve it or Not.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, attended theceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqigovernment had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While GeneralMixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had nochoice but to make the remarks he did, Mowaffak al-Rubaie acknowledgedKurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds -- approximately sixmillion people, or some 20% of Iraq's population -- to chart their own course.

On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report onprogress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected theadministration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its"surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country inFebruary 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates havebeen promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdadand achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents aresigning up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.

Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by itdoes appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined fromits pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of thesummer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies -- usually thevictims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels.How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable tothe surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last.

The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had beenattacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S. weaponsto fight al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunnifundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored militias. TheSunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an enemy, and the U.S.appears now to be in the business of arming both the Sunni and Shiite factionsin what has long since become a civil war.

Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gottenworse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar attacksand is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers. Moqtada al-Sadr,the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target of Bush's surgestrategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful political figures. The militaryactivity against his forces seems only to have enhanced his standing with thepublic.

Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed toaccomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was toincrease temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim wasto provide a breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's governmentmight enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enoughSunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by theirclose relations with U.S. troops and additional training, would take oversecurity.

The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislativeand political steps that the government should take to address the concerns ofIraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until 2003. Thesesteps include an oil revenue–sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor Sunniregions get their share of revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnisboycotted the January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections leaving themunderrepresented even in Sunni-majority provinces); revising Iraq's constitution(the Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising the ban on public sectoremployment of former Baathists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the BaathParty and of the Saddam-era public service), and a fair distribution ofreconstruction funds. Both the administration and Congress have placed greatemphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government to achieve these so-calledbenchmarks. Congress has, by law, linked US strategy on Iraq and financialsupport of the Iraqi government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.

Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exceptionof the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they wereall enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq lessgovernable while the process of constitutional revision could break the countryapart.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparitybetween the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe theyhave more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar willtolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but, moregenerally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example, bothCongress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban onpublic service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears to be astraightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq'sleaders.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previouslyknown as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical componentof Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eightbrothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of them. On August 29,2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his lastsurviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali inNajaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominentShiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and twobrothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Moqtada'sfather-in-law and the father-in-law's sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadrand Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped andkilled his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before drivingnails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq'stwo most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands oftheir followers who suffered similar atrocities.

Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunniareas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support theSunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floorIndiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government hasgone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces"and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. embassy was requiredin order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.

Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial electionsbecause they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnisboycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northerngovernorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, andthey are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyalaprovince, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis agreater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do nothave a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunniswho would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept newelections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose controlof Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.

The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require newelections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiiteparty, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates,would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad andnew elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of BaghdadGovernorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralizedconstitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares ofthe national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers. New localelections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early electionsstrengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the U.S. and appears to have close tiesto Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bushadministration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.

Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark and it could breakIraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October 2005referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: the Kurds supported theestablishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for aconfederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIChopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.

Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis on anysignificant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes mustcome at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communitieshave a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in areferendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted but itsfailure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.

Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the Bushadministration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was beingdrafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals thatwould have made for more workable sharing of power between regions and thecentral government. The U.S. embassy stopped the UN from presenting theseproposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textuallyclose to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.

When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then U.S.Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby,in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-trackprocess to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meetSunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralizedstate. While the U.S. insists that constitutional revision is a moralobligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain.Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.

With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the processlast year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC)is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers,including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in itsown territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would alsolike Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racistand exclusionary.

Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may bethe final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, theconstitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the parliament as asingle package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters arecertain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan'spowers), and this could push tense Sunni–Kurdish relations into open conflict.Kurdish NGOs, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a"NO" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq"vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's workas "satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest,or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.

For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn oruncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarksbecause their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. TheShiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiitestate. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimouslyrejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. TheKurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentaryelections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.

But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn'tend the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being runby Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyalto Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunnifundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. TheShiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical sufferingunder the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined tocompromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their longstanding oppressors,especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicidebombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences arefundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists,or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.

2.

The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the Presidentnor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless,the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- astable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evilIranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As PresidentBush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death anddestruction in the Middle East and here in America."

Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge isworking, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already pickedtheir target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly,a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote,"Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the Clinton-Lugaraxis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes groundlost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that the Americanpeople had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated by theDemocratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This "blame the Americanpeople" approach has, through repetition, almost become the acceptedexplanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of publicsupport and not to fifteen years of military failure.)

Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaedawould overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from therooftop of the still unfinished largest embassy in the world. President Bushfeeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, heexplained:

If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.

But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government isin no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunnifront. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; theydominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboringIran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vastdeserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the mainIraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgencyhas in great amounts already.

Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a landdivided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war beingfought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure toaccomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq.