Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Read online

  I had met Mr Chalabi in the early 1990s and had always been impressed by his skill as an operator and his ability to bounce back from defeat. He also had an ability to irritate his friends and attract the loathing of his enemies to a degree which seemed beyond reason. A few days before I met him in al-Mansur, an official in the Green Zone had told me with feeling that he considered Mr Chalabi to be "evil".

  Yet much of what he had done during the 1990s was what all exiled oppositions do when trying to overthrow an authoritarian regime. They try to foment unrest, coups or mutinies inside their country and look for the backing of neighbouring states and the great powers. Mr Chalabi did what others in the Iraqi opposition did but with greater success. The US had failed to go on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991. The opposition always wanted to lure it to try again. Attempted coups and mutinies had all failed by 1996. This was probably inevitable. Mr Chalabi once said to me that people "outside Iraq did not realise how difficult it was to try to overthrow a government with a violent and pro-active security service".

  Did he invent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or prompt witnesses to do so? In fact all the opposition, particularly the Kurdish security services, were doing this. But it was absurd for the CIA and assorted American services and newspapers along with MI6 to claim later that they were misled. They knew what President George Bush and Tony Blair wanted and gave it to them.

  Mr Chalabi's own justification for encouraging the US to invade is simple. He says he favoured the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US but not the subsequent occupation of Iraq to which he attributes all the disasters that followed. It is not an argument that goes down well in Washington or London. In April 2004 a meeting in the White House discussed a memo drawn up by the National Security Council entitled "Marginalising Chalabi".

  Action swiftly followed. Mr Chalabi was accused of being too close to the Iranians and of telling their intelligence station chief in Baghdad that the US had broken Iranian codes. The FBI was told to investigate. A few days later, on 20 May, US-led forces raided his headquarters in Baghdad. His fortunes waned. After the parliamentary elections in December 2005 he was part of the Shia alliance that triumphed. He became deputy prime minister. At the election at the end of the year he stood outside the Shia alliance and did not win a single seat.

  Sitting in his garden, Mr Chalabi is sceptical about the success of the security plan for Baghdad. He says that "there are less sectarian killings and places that were expected to be difficult like Sadr City [the Shia slum that houses two million people] were not". But he says the latter success was only possible because of successful negotiations that led to the Mehdi Army, the main Shia militia body, being stood down, through the influence of its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iranians and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He does not think that US-Iraqi army plan to seal off areas, the so-called gated communities, is going to work. He points out that in a Sunni commercial area such as al-Adhamiyah, most people who work there live outside the enclave. "In any case it is consecrating division in the city. There is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution."

  At the same time he says firmly that "the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. They were encouraged to go on the offensive by Arab states that did nothing for them." He identifies one factor in the weakness of the Sunni, as confirmed by election results. They are far less numerous in Baghdad than they had supposed. Some had spoken of Baghdad being equally divided but Mr Chalabi thinks that the proportions in the capital are 80 per cent Shia and 20 per cent Sunni.

  He sees the most immediate problem in Baghdad as being the return of people driven from their homes and detainees. "Efforts must be made to bring them back otherwise security is reversible. The displaced people are very angry and want to go home." Through popular committees he is trying to get mosques returned to their original community.

  His judgement is different from that of many Iraqi and American officials in the Green Zone. He does not think that the Sadrists, the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, are disintegrating: "A lot of it is wishful thinking. Their local leaders will all comply with what Muqtada al-Sadr says." A key element in ending the war is bringing in the Iranians: "An understanding through the Iraqi government between the US and Iran."

  He does not think that Washington's famous "benchmarks" are more than slogans in Iraq. Giving Saddam Hussein's security services back their old jobs is just not acceptable. He does not add that the Shia and Kurds will veto such an idea but they certainly will. On US threats to withdraw he says "many Iraqis are asking if this is a promise or a threat" but he wants an agreement on the limits of the authority of the multinational forces, essentially the Americans and the British.

  At this stage Mr Chalabi sees a US withdrawal as something that will be a function of US politics and not what is happening in Iraq. Essentially he sees the US and Britain as having unwittingly committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. "The US found that it had dismantled the cornerstone of the Arab security order."

  The US and Britain have been trying ever since to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the Baath party. They wanted "to prevent Shia control and limit Iranian influence in Iraq and in this they have not succeeded." And that is why they will leave.

  Tuesday, 3 July 2007

  IRAQ INVASION STRENGTHENED THE MILITANTS

  Car bombs have almost as long a history as the car. What has changed since the invasion of Iraq is that bombers targeting civilian targets in the West now have a popular base and access to expertise in the Sunni community of Iraq.

  The invasion was seen as an attack on Muslims as a whole by at least some Muslims in every country, who are willing and able to construct and deliver bombs. From the moment foreign armies were ordered into Iraq, al-Qa'ida was bound to be the winner. US spokesmen have long blamed al-Qa'ida for every attack in Iraq but in fact the Salafi, proponents of a puritanical and bigoted variant of Sunni Islam, and the Jihadi, willing to wage holy war, belong to many groups.

  The al-Qa'ida of Osama bin Laden was a surprisingly weak organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan before 2001. To make the blood curdling videos of militants training that are frequently shown in documentaries, al-Qa'ida had to hire local tribesmen.

  It is in Iraq that al-Qa'ida has come into its own. The US proclamation of the group as its most dangerous enemy served only as effective advertising among young Sunni men. Such denunciations also made it much easier for al-Qa'ida to raise money in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

  The three car bombs used in Glasgow and London are far inferior to anything used in Iraq. This is an ominous pointer for the future because Iraq is now full of people who know exactly how to make a highly-effective bomb - and the means to detonate it. It is only a matter of time before this knowledge spreads.

  The expertise of the Iraqi bombers attained a high level almost as soon as the first explosions occurred in Baghdad in August 2003. The Jordanian embassy was attacked and then the UN headquarters. Assassination by suicide bomber began with the killing of Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the largest Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, along with 85 of his followers in Najaf. By November, Jihadists were able to attack half a dozen targets at the same time.

  There also appeared to be an endless supply of suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and almost every state in the Arab world. The one Muslim country that suicide bombers did not come from was Iran, though the Iranians have been far more vigorously denounced than the Sunni states that produce the bombers.

  In the immediate aftermath of the latest bombings in the UK, there were immediate suspicions that Iraqi methods had spread. The opposite is true. It is surprising, given that one of the alleged bombers comes from Jordan, home to one million Iraqi refugees, that they did not know more about making a bomb. It is the political not the technical influence of the Iraq war that we are now seeing.

  Car bombs have almost as
long a history as the car. What has changed since the invasion of Iraq is that bombers targeting civilian targets in the West now have a popular base and access to expertise in the Sunni community of Iraq.

  The invasion was seen as an attack on Muslims as a whole by at least some Muslims in every country, who are willing and able to construct and deliver bombs. From the moment foreign armies were ordered into Iraq, al-Qa'ida was bound to be the winner. US spokesmen have long blamed al-Qa'ida for every attack in Iraq but in fact the Salafi, proponents of a puritanical and bigoted variant of Sunni Islam, and the Jihadi, willing to wage holy war, belong to many groups.

  The al-Qa'ida of Osama bin Laden was a surprisingly weak organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan before 2001. To make the blood curdling videos of militants training that are frequently shown in documentaries, al-Qa'ida had to hire local tribesmen.

  It is in Iraq that al-Qa'ida has come into its own. The US proclamation of the group as its most dangerous enemy served only as effective advertising among young Sunni men. Such denunciations also made it much easier for al-Qa'ida to raise money in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

  The three car bombs used in Glasgow and London are far inferior to anything used in Iraq. This is an ominous pointer for the future because Iraq is now full of people who know exactly how to make a highly-effective bomb - and the means to detonate it. It is only a matter of time before this knowledge spreads.

  The expertise of the Iraqi bombers attained a high level almost as soon as the first explosions occurred in Baghdad in August 2003. The Jordanian embassy was attacked and then the UN headquarters. Assassination by suicide bomber began with the killing of Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the largest Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, along with 85 of his followers in Najaf. By November, Jihadists were able to attack half a dozen targets at the same time.

  There also appeared to be an endless supply of suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and almost every state in the Arab world. The one Muslim country that suicide bombers did not come from was Iran, though the Iranians have been far more vigorously denounced than the Sunni states that produce the bombers.

  In the immediate aftermath of the latest bombings in the UK, there were immediate suspicions that Iraqi methods had spread. The opposite is true. It is surprising, given that one of the alleged bombers comes from Jordan, home to one million Iraqi refugees, that they did not know more about making a bomb. It is the political not the technical influence of the Iraq war that we are now seeing.

  Friday, 13 July 2007

  BUSH’S OPTIMISM IMPOSSIBLE TO SQUARE WITH IRAQ SITUATION

  Scrambling to shore up crumbling support for the Iraq war, President George Bush released a report yesterday claiming sufficient political and military progress to justify the presence of 170,000 US troops in the country.

  Mr Bush said he still believed victory in Iraq was possible. "Those who believe that the battle in Iraq is lost will likely point to the unsatisfactory performance on some of the political benchmarks," he said.

  "Those who believe the battle in Iraq can and must be won see the satisfactory performance on several of the security benchmarks as a cause of optimism." He added it was too early to say if his new strategy in Iraq was working.

  But in Iraq as in the US there is a sense Washington is playing its last cards. "I assume the US is going to start pulling out because 70 per cent of Americans and Congress want the troops to come home," Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, said. "The Americans are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."

  And to underline Mr Othman's comments, last night the House of Representatives approved legislation, by a vote of 223-201, to bring combat troops out of Iraq by 1 April 2008, despite a White House veto threat.

  The report itself admits to a sense in Iraq that the US, one way or another, is on the way out more than four years after its invasion in 2003. It says that political reconciliation in Iraq is being hampered by "increasing concern among Iraqi political leaders that the United States may not have a long-term commitment to Iraq".

  The White House yesterday sought to suggest possible change for the better in Iraq by saying that there had been satisfactory progress on eight of the 18 goals set by Congress. Unsatisfactory progress is reported on six, unsatisfactory but with some progress on two and "too early to assess" on a further two.

  The picture it hopes to give - and this has been un-critically reported by the US media - is of a mixture of progress and frustration in Iraq.

  The wholly misleading suggestion is that the war could go either way. In reality the six failures are on issues critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on largely trivial matters. Thus unsatisfactory progress is reported on "the Iraqi security forces evenhandedly enforcing the law" and on the number of Iraqi units willing to fight independently of the Americans. This means that there is no Iraqi national army but one consisting of Kurds, Shia and Sunni who will never act against their own communities. Despite three years of training, the Iraqi security forces cannot defend the government.

  Set against these vitally important failures are almost ludicrously trivial or meaningless successes. For instance, "the rights of minority political parties are being defended" but these groups have no political influence. The alliance of Shia religious and Kurdish nationalist parties that make up the government is not keen to share power with anybody. This is scarcely surprising since they triumphantly won the election in 2005.

  There have been some real improvements over the past six months. Sectarian killings in Iraq have declined to 650 in June compared with 2,100 in January. So-called "high-profile" bombings, including suicide bomb attacks on Shia markets, fell to 90 in June compared with 180 in March. But it is doubtful if these are entirely or even mainly due to the US surge. The fall in sectarian killings, mostly of Sunni by Shia, may be largely the result of the Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr being told by their leader to curb their murder campaign. It is also true that last year, after the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, there was a battle for Baghdad which the Shia won and the Sunni lost. Baghdad is more and more Shia-dominated and the Sunni are pinned into the south-west of the city and a few other enclaves. As Sunni and Shia are killed or driven out of mixed areas, there are fewer of them to kill. Some 4.2 million people in Iraq are now refugees, of whom about half have fled the country.

  The real and appalling situation on the ground in Iraq has been all too evident this week. Thirty bodies, the harvest of the death squads, were found in the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday. The figure for Tuesday was 26 and, in addition, 20 rockets and mortar bombs were fired into the Green Zone killing three people. This was significant because they were fired by the Mehdi Army, who had been upset by criticism made of them by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. By way of gentle reproof they shelled his offices in the Green Zone.

  US and British claims of success in Iraq over the past four years have a grim record of being entirely sculpted to political needs at home. British ministers trumpeted the success of Operation Sinbad in Basra last year and early this year, saying it would put the worst of the militia out of business. This year Basra is wholly ruled by these very same militias.

  Overall the "surge" has already failed. It was never necessary to wait for yesterday's report or a further assessment in September. The reason for the failure is the same as that for American failures since 2003. They have very few allies in Iraq outside Kurdistan. The occupation is unpopular and always has been.

  Economic and social conditions are becoming more and more desperate. There is in theory 5.6 hours of electricity in Baghdad every 24 hours but many districts get none at all. It is baking hot in the Mesopotamian plain, where temperatures even at night are above 40C. People used to sleep on the roof but this has become dangerous because of mortar bombardments.

  Oil pipelines are sabotaged by insurgents and punctured by th
ieves. "In just one stretch of pipeline between Baghdad and Baiji, we found 1,488 holes," the Oil Minister, Hussein Shahristani, told the Iraqi parliament, speaking of an important pipe that brings oil products to the capital from Baiji refinery. He added: "It doesn't function as a pipeline … it's more like a sieve." Gasoline is brought to Baghdad by truck but these are not allowed on bridges because they might be packed with explosives.

  In a further sign of how life is lived in Baghdad, clerics have issued a fatwa against eating river fish - previously a favourite food - because the fish gorge on dead bodies floating in the Tigris. Astonishingly, the report suggests that one of the successes in Iraq has been the spending of $10 billion "for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis".

  The danger of the false optimism in the report is that it prevents other policies being devised. In January, President Bush decided to in effect ignore the most important recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which were to talk to Iran and Syria and to disengage US troops. Instead Mr Bush sent reinforcements to Iraq, denounced Iran and Syria and added to the number of his enemies by threatening to clamp down on the Shia militias.

  But talking to Iran has always been essential to any solution in Iraq.

  "The Iranians can afford to compromise in Iraq but they cannot afford to lose," said one Iraqi observer. The more threatened they feel by the US over nuclear power or the possibility of air attack, the greater incentive they have to ensure that the US does not succeed in gaining control of Iraq. For most of the past four years they have not had to do much because the US has helpfully ensured its own failure by pursuing disastrous policies.