P***@ctpnch.pl
2008-12-15 21:34:33 UTC
It's Official: Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch. Posted December 15, 2008.
Iraq's parliament came to a major agreement recently: all 150,000
troops are to withdraw from cities by June.
On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor
of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American
troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June
30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi
government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone
in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time.
Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military
operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with
Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the
last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned
in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of
rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's
bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish
quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the
invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national
referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be
implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even
Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA
saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now
says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after
the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival
in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US
occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours
such as Iran.
Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little
surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally
passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly
focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months
polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi
war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many
spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over
the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally
sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit
understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to
publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the
Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so
much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming
Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings
of the expiring Bush administration.
The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms
agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni
Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister
Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure,
wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many
last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of
the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted
them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces.
They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily
at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out
against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent
Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has
been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia
parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal.
If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the
upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the
parliamentary elections later in the year.
The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US
started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links
to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it.
The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation
without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of
the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was
growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the
occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada's
powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq's
second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia
militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident,
realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the
Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has
always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein
because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds.
The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population,
might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never
intended to share power with the US in the long term.
The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers
and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different
Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength
of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could
survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US
proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could
also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so
different from his own, was going to be the next American president.
Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can
present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the
prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his
head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has
strengthened him politically.
It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has
an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone
there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of
Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity
a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the
sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the
improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped
from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security
personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate
the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one
of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I
started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and
wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are
cynical about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are
used to the government always saying that things have become good and
the security situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a
primary school teacher in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little
better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do
not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their
armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards
[revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are
still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni."
Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere
but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less
suicide bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed
underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they
get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in
Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone,
where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic
before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures
taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even
when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a
few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has
got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the
shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial
sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is
supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since
it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than
useless as a security aid.
Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless
claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing
this should mean not just improving security but providing more
electricity, clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still
very bad," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment
affects everybody and you can't get a job unless you pay a bribe.
There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people
have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes
out of the tap for washing." Not everybody has the same grim vision
but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for
how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of the 4.7 million
refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now
living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had
returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back
to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back
from Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In
Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It
is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."
The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much
on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the
government, which community they belong to, their social class and the
area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are
with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The
private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there
are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia
and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to
get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending
him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater
among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a
Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area
of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I am
glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not
finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe
for my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need
badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his
wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives
from coming to Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She
teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year
ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now
the Sunni students are coming back," she says, "though they are still
afraid."
They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni
enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single
entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was
but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim
their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case
in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks
ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to
their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric
sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A
Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the
husband's head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and
daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back."
But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be
divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh
and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.
Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently
denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government
administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent
member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs
is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they
had spent only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the
government's fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have
been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries
have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there
was the eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the
disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the
five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago
UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering
power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no
longer made for them.
Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The
few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign
contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the
streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera
which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad.
Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean
drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of
date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials.
Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where
people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .
The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It
will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of
the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the
price of oil, the state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a
barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries,
such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this,
something the government may now regret. Communal differences are
still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though
it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and
Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many
Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority
Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in
Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there
are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in
Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined
country behind them.On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a
large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under
which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities,
towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December
31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility
for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in
a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal
immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be
carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases
left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the
US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on
other countries from Iraq.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of
rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's
bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish
quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the
invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national
referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be
implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even
Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA
saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now
says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after
the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival
in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US
occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours
such as Iran.
Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little
surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally
passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly
focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months
polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi
war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many
spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over
the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally
sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit
understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to
publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the
Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so
much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming
Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings
of the expiring Bush administration.
The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms
agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni
Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister
Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure,
wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many
last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of
the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted
them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces.
They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily
at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out
against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent
Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has
been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia
parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal.
If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the
upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the
parliamentary elections later in the year.
The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US
started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links
to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it.
The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation
without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of
the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was
growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the
occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada's
powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq's
second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia
militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident,
realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the
Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has
always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein
because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds.
The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population,
might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never
intended to share power with the US in the long term.
The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers
and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different
Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength
of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could
survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US
proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could
also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so
different from his own, was going to be the next American president.
Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can
present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the
prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his
head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has
strengthened him politically.
It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has
an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone
there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of
Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity
a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the
sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the
improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped
from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security
personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate
the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one
of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I
started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and
wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are
cynical about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are
used to the government always saying that things have become good and
the security situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a
primary school teacher in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little
better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do
not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their
armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards
[revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are
still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni."
Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere
but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less
suicide bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed
underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they
get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in
Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone,
where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic
before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures
taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even
when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a
few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has
got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the
shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial
sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is
supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since
it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than
useless as a security aid.
Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless
claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing
this should mean not just improving security but providing more
electricity, clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still
very bad," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment
affects everybody and you can't get a job unless you pay a bribe.
There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people
have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes
out of the tap for washing." Not everybody has the same grim vision
but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for
how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of the 4.7 million
refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now
living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had
returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back
to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back
from Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In
Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It
is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."
The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much
on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the
government, which community they belong to, their social class and the
area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are
with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The
private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there
are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia
and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to
get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending
him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater
among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a
Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area
of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I am
glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not
finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe
for my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need
badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his
wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives
from coming to Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She
teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year
ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now
the Sunni students are coming back," she says, "though they are still
afraid."
They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni
enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single
entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was
but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim
their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case
in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks
ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to
their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric
sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A
Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the
husband's head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and
daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back."
But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be
divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh
and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.
Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently
denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government
administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent
member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs
is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they
had spent only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the
government's fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have
been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries
have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there
was the eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the
disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the
five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago
UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering
power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no
longer made for them.
Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The
few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign
contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the
streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera
which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad.
Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean
drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of
date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials.
Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where
people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .
The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It
will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of
the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the
price of oil, the state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a
barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries,
such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this,
something the government may now regret. Communal differences are
still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though
it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and
Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many
Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority
Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in
Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there
are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in
Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined
country behind them.
By Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch. Posted December 15, 2008.
Iraq's parliament came to a major agreement recently: all 150,000
troops are to withdraw from cities by June.
On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor
of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American
troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June
30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi
government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone
in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time.
Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military
operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with
Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the
last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned
in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of
rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's
bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish
quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the
invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national
referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be
implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even
Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA
saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now
says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after
the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival
in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US
occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours
such as Iran.
Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little
surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally
passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly
focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months
polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi
war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many
spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over
the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally
sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit
understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to
publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the
Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so
much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming
Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings
of the expiring Bush administration.
The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms
agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni
Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister
Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure,
wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many
last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of
the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted
them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces.
They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily
at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out
against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent
Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has
been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia
parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal.
If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the
upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the
parliamentary elections later in the year.
The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US
started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links
to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it.
The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation
without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of
the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was
growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the
occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada's
powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq's
second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia
militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident,
realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the
Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has
always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein
because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds.
The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population,
might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never
intended to share power with the US in the long term.
The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers
and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different
Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength
of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could
survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US
proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could
also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so
different from his own, was going to be the next American president.
Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can
present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the
prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his
head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has
strengthened him politically.
It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has
an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone
there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of
Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity
a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the
sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the
improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped
from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security
personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate
the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one
of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I
started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and
wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are
cynical about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are
used to the government always saying that things have become good and
the security situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a
primary school teacher in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little
better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do
not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their
armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards
[revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are
still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni."
Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere
but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less
suicide bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed
underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they
get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in
Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone,
where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic
before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures
taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even
when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a
few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has
got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the
shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial
sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is
supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since
it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than
useless as a security aid.
Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless
claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing
this should mean not just improving security but providing more
electricity, clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still
very bad," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment
affects everybody and you can't get a job unless you pay a bribe.
There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people
have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes
out of the tap for washing." Not everybody has the same grim vision
but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for
how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of the 4.7 million
refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now
living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had
returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back
to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back
from Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In
Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It
is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."
The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much
on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the
government, which community they belong to, their social class and the
area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are
with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The
private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there
are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia
and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to
get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending
him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater
among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a
Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area
of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I am
glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not
finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe
for my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need
badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his
wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives
from coming to Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She
teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year
ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now
the Sunni students are coming back," she says, "though they are still
afraid."
They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni
enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single
entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was
but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim
their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case
in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks
ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to
their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric
sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A
Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the
husband's head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and
daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back."
But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be
divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh
and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.
Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently
denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government
administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent
member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs
is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they
had spent only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the
government's fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have
been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries
have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there
was the eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the
disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the
five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago
UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering
power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no
longer made for them.
Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The
few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign
contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the
streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera
which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad.
Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean
drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of
date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials.
Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where
people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .
The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It
will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of
the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the
price of oil, the state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a
barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries,
such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this,
something the government may now regret. Communal differences are
still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though
it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and
Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many
Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority
Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in
Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there
are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in
Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined
country behind them.On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a
large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under
which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities,
towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December
31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility
for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in
a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal
immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be
carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases
left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the
US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on
other countries from Iraq.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of
rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's
bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish
quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the
invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national
referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be
implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even
Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA
saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now
says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after
the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival
in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US
occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours
such as Iran.
Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little
surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally
passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly
focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months
polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi
war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many
spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over
the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally
sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit
understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to
publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the
Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so
much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming
Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings
of the expiring Bush administration.
The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms
agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni
Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister
Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure,
wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many
last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of
the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted
them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces.
They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily
at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out
against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent
Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has
been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia
parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal.
If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the
upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the
parliamentary elections later in the year.
The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US
started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links
to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it.
The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation
without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of
the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was
growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the
occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada's
powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq's
second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia
militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident,
realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the
Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has
always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein
because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds.
The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population,
might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never
intended to share power with the US in the long term.
The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers
and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different
Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength
of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could
survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US
proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could
also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so
different from his own, was going to be the next American president.
Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can
present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the
prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his
head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has
strengthened him politically.
It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has
an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone
there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of
Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity
a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the
sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the
improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped
from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security
personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate
the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one
of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I
started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and
wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are
cynical about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are
used to the government always saying that things have become good and
the security situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a
primary school teacher in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little
better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do
not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their
armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards
[revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are
still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni."
Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere
but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less
suicide bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed
underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they
get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in
Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone,
where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic
before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures
taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even
when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a
few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has
got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the
shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial
sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is
supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since
it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than
useless as a security aid.
Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless
claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing
this should mean not just improving security but providing more
electricity, clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still
very bad," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment
affects everybody and you can't get a job unless you pay a bribe.
There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people
have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes
out of the tap for washing." Not everybody has the same grim vision
but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for
how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of the 4.7 million
refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now
living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had
returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back
to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back
from Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In
Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It
is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."
The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much
on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the
government, which community they belong to, their social class and the
area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are
with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The
private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there
are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia
and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to
get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending
him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater
among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a
Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area
of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I am
glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not
finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe
for my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need
badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his
wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives
from coming to Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She
teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year
ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now
the Sunni students are coming back," she says, "though they are still
afraid."
They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni
enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single
entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was
but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim
their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case
in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks
ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to
their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric
sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A
Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the
husband's head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and
daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back."
But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be
divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh
and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.
Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently
denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government
administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent
member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs
is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they
had spent only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the
government's fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have
been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries
have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there
was the eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the
disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the
five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago
UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering
power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no
longer made for them.
Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The
few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign
contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the
streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera
which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad.
Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean
drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of
date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials.
Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where
people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .
The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It
will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of
the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the
price of oil, the state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a
barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries,
such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this,
something the government may now regret. Communal differences are
still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though
it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and
Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many
Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority
Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in
Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there
are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in
Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined
country behind them.