The end of the campaign to defeat Saddam’s forces in April 2003 was succeeded, as described in Chapter 9, by a period of lawlessness and looting. The lawless elements came from the city poor and the former inmates of Saddam’s prisons, unwisely released by the coalition forces in the moment of victory. By August, however, disorder was becoming purposeful and was designed to contest control of Iraq’s cities in the central region with the American occupiers and to destabilise the postwar governmental Iraqi régime. There were attacks on the Jordanian embassy and on United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, on a Shi’a religious site in Najaf and on a leading member of the Iraqi Governing Council, all with fatal consequences.
Such attacks persisted during the winter of 2003–04 and by March 2004 had swelled into a full-scale insurgency. While the Kurdish north settled into peace and a form of self-government, and the Shi’a south, centred on Basra, also accepted the régime sponsored by the British occupiers, Baghdad and the ‘Sunni triangle’ to its west, north and south of Fallujah, relapsed into disorder. There were daily attacks on American forces, on supply columns along the main roads, on the new American-sponsored security forces, army and police, and on Iraqis who co-operated with the American occupiers.
Outline arrangements for the future government of Iraq had been signed between the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), in effect the American military government, and the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), an appointed interim administration, on 15 November 2003. Negotiations between the IGC, the Americans and leaders of the Shi’a community, the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf foremost, resulted in the promulgation on 8 March 2004 of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which laid down that governmental power in Iraq would be transferred to an Iraqi Interim Government (IIG), by 30 June 2004. The IIG was entrusted with the functions of government until the holding of elections to establish a Transitional National Assembly of Iraq (TNA) not later than 31 January 2005. The TNA is intended to select an Iraqi Transitional Government, which will in turn draw up a constitution, to be ratified by referendum in October 2005, under which a definitive national government will be elected by democratic procedure in December 2005.
These constitutional procedures threaten the interests of many groups in Iraq and of their supporters in neighbouring countries. The new constitution will be accepted by the Kurds of the north as long as it recognises the rights they have acquired, perhaps to be institutionalised by the establishment of a federal structure, since Saddam’s fall. The two leading Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), are prepared to co-operate if the eventual constitutional government concedes Kurdish semi-independence. Among the rights they seek are those of control over the rich oilfields around Kirkuk. The constitutional government will, however, also have to accommodate the aspirations of the sizeable Turkmen community, ethnically Turkish, which is supported by Turkey. Turkey’s interest is complicated by its opposition to any enlargement of Kurdish power, given the sizeable overlap of Iraq’s Kurdish population into Turkey proper. Semi-independence for Iraq’s Kurdish population, inside a federal structure, would palliate Kurdish nationalist aspirations. Turkey fears that it might strengthen Kurdish pressure to create an autonomous Kurdish state, embracing the Kurds of Iran and Syria as well.
The Shi’a of Iraq, like Iraq’s Kurds, have also greatly benefited from Saddam’s downfall. Though governing as an Iraqi nationalist, he was a figurehead of Sunni hegemony within Iraq and so a representative of the minority community’s traditional dominance over other Arab Muslims. The Sunni, a minority in Iraq proper but a majority in the Baghdad region, have long been the better educated of Iraq’s Arab communities, richer and better adapted to sharing in and exercising governmental power. Saddam repressed the Shi’a, even though Iraq is the homeland of their sect’s holiest sites, at Najaf particularly. He refused them the right to celebrate their rituals and he excluded them from government. The fall of Saddam and the dissolution of the Ba’ath party in Iraq (it remains the ruling party in Syria) has revived Shi’a political aspirations. They have been allotted a proportion of places in the Interim Government and, with the holding of elections and the referendum in 2005, can expect to be fairly represented in a future sovereign administration. Their claims have been skilfully negotiated by their spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani belongs to the moderate, quietest wing of Shi’a religiosity, which deprecates involvement in day-to-day politics. Unfortunately his leadership is encroached upon, if not directly challenged by, that of Moqtada al-Sadr of Najaf, a young cleric with a fervent following among the poor and powerless. Sadr has links with fundamentalists; he also belongs to a political tradition with a troubled and troublesome history. His ancestors fought the British in the nineteen-twenties; his father, Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr, was killed on Saddam’s orders in 1999. Since 2003 he has made Najaf, where he controls the mosque associated by pious Shi’a with the deaths of their holy men, Ali and Hussein, into a stronghold of resistance to the American occupiers. During 2004 Najaf has been the scene of constant fighting between Sadr’s followers and American forces; a showdown has been postponed, largely because of American reluctance to conduct military operations in the vicinity of the Shi’a holy places, but it may be expected that, unless Sadr moderates his intransigence, there will be a definitive offensive against him before the elections of 2005.
Meanwhile the Sunni, who have enjoyed dominance within Iraq ever since the days of Ottoman rule, are coming to terms with the demise of their privileged position. Their main props as a minority; the Sunni-controlled Ba’ath Party, the army and the police, were dissolved immediately after Saddam’s fall. Some Sunni leaders have attempted to secure their community’s future position by co-operating with and taking places within the Interim Government; others have not. The troubles within the ‘Sunni triangle’, around Fallujah and Ramadi west of Baghdad, have been mounted and directed by Sunni extremists, discontented by their loss of power but also motivated by their connections with al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist bodies. The most important of these Sunni movements is al-Jam’iya al-Salifya al-Mujahida. As its title implies, it adheres to the Islamic belief that religion demands a return to the values and system of the first Muslim centuries (Salafism) and that it regards attack on non-Muslim forces as a religious duty. It has been responsible for many of the attacks on American troops, roadside bombings, ambushes, shootings and kidnappings, though some kidnappings have been carried out directly by al-Qaeda cells present in Iraq, notably those led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi, a fugitive from justice, has specialised in beheading his kidnapped victims, the murders recorded on video and broadcast by unofficial Arab television services. Other Islamist groups, such as Kataeb al-Faruk and the al-Dawa party, a military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, underpin Sunni nationalism but do not espouse violence.
Indigenous violence has been reinforced by the incursion of aggressive Islamist groups from neighbouring countries, particularly Syria. Generally allied to al-Qaeda, and often experienced in fighting in Afghanistan, the foreign insurgents, of whom Zarqawi is representative, are not seeking to establish political positions for the future but to undermine the American occupation and to kill Americans and those Iraqis who co-operate with them. Their interest is in an unstable, not a stable Iraq, since instability in Iraq may also heighten instability in neighbouring Muslim countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, in which the leaders of al-Qaeda originate, and Jordan, whose monarchist regime fundamentalists particularly dislike. Al-Qaeda refuses to recognise the permanence of existing frontiers and seeks the overthrow of all moderate Muslim governments, which it wishes to replace with a Salafist regime as a preliminary to the restoration of the universal Caliphate.
The insurgency has resulted in a steep rise in deaths among the coalition forces; by the end of September 2004 they totalled 1,008 American and 60 British. The focus of the fighting has been in the ‘Sunni triangle’ and at Najaf, where Sadr’s Mahdi army operates. Most Western soldiers have been killed by terrorist methods such as drive-by shootings, roadside booby-traps and suicide bombings. As the insurgency developed, however, between March and June, the American forces did suffer conventional casualties when they mounted operations to overcome the opposition in Najaf, Karbala and neighbouring areas. Their poorly-equipped opponents suffered far worse and also lost ground; they retained, nevertheless their centres of resistance because of American reluctance to press attacks to a conclusion during the sensitive period before the presidential elections at home. The Americans were also deterred from exerting maximum force by the revelation of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib Prison. Small though the number of American soldiers accused of misbehaviour was, the news story compromised the claims of the American forces to have come as liberators and undermined the resolution of American commanders to exert their authority in regions of disorder. The final pacification of central Iraq has had to await the re-election of President George W. Bush and the election of an Iraqi Transitional National Assembly (TNA).
The creation of the TNA will, it may be hoped, be assisted by the development of the new Iraqi national police force and national army. In retrospect it will probably be seen that the gravest mistake made by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was to dissolve the existing army and police force in the aftermath of the coalition’s victory. The decision to do so, though explicable in terms of America’s anti-imperialist past, might not have been taken by a European power, such as Britain, with a less idealistic approach to pacification problems. Britain, during its conquest of India in the nineteenth century, in military circumstances not dissimilar from those facing the Americans in Iraq, suspended moral judgement and expended considerable care and effort to keep in being but win over the forces of its defeated enemies, as during the conquest of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab in the eighteen-forties. The Sikhs, like Iraq’s Sunni, were a dominant regional minority. Having beaten them in battle, the British incorporated their regiments into their governing system, with great success. The Sikh regiments became a mainstay of Britain’s Indian Army and in 1947 transferred their loyalty to the new Republic of India.
A similar incorporation would have been possible in April 2003; instead several hundred thousand policeman and soldiers found their employment and their pay stopped, and were turned loose onto the employment market. Finding no work, they were readily recruited into resistance and wrongdoing. Many of them seek re-employment in their former occupations. Those who report to recruiting stations have been the victims of terror attacks by supporters of the old regime and Islamist fundamentalists. Such attacks, however, do not appear to be a deterrent. The recruitment, training and organisation of the successor security forces continues, at a rate which promises that the Iraqi Transitional Government will command sufficient force to ensure law and order, the condition of life which is at the forefront of Iraq’s hopes for the future. Until the new army and police force have reached effective size and capability, nevertheless, western troops will have to remain.
The presence of a large American army in Iraq, together with the threats levelled by its internal instability, makes the future of the country a matter of keen concern to its neighbours, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Israel.
Iran, as the largest Shi’a country in the Muslim world, is a traditional protector of Shi’a minorities elsewhere and has a particular interest in Iraq because of the presence there of the Shi’as’ holiest places. The religious powerholders in Tehran have undoubtedly sponsored the infiltration of Shi’a militants into Iraq during the disorders of 2004. On the other hand, Tehran’s principal national interest at present is the development of its military nuclear capability, which is being closely watched by the International Atomic Energy Authority. The United States makes it clear that it disapproves strongly of Iran’s nuclear programme, to which Israel is even more sensitive. The United States has recently begun to supply Israel with ‘bunker-busting’ missiles, which might be used in extremis to repeat the pre-emptive attack mounted against Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. Were Iran to proceed to producing weapon-grade nuclear material, which it has the capability to do, or is close to acquiring, the United States might well feel impelled to use its Iraqi-based army to take pre-emptive action, possibly even by ground invasion. Militarily the ayatollahs’ Iran is no more of a match for US power than was Saddam’s Iraq. The likelihood is, therefore, that Iran will desist from exacerbating the troubles in Iraq, since its leaders are aware that after the Republican victory in the 2004 presidential elections there will be strong pressure from the Washington neo-Conservatives to take pre-emptive action against them, both to punish them for meddling in Iraq and to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential.
Iran has an additional interest in the outcome of Iraq’s postwar settlement, which is the future of its oil production. Iraqi territory contains the second largest oil reserves in the world, whose output has been limited since 1991 by international sanctions against sales. Limitation of Iraqi oil supply to the world market benefits Iran, itself a major oil producer, and so gives it an interest in fostering the disorder that inhibits a return to full production. Iran cannot, however, risk being identified as a sponsor of disorder for its own sake and will probably, as a result, desist from malevolence.
The interest of Saudi Arabia in Iraq’s future takes a different form. The country is the heartland of Islam; its ruler, indeed, now prefers to identify himself as ‘the Guardian of the Two Holy Places’ (Mecca and Medina) rather than as King. Its status as an oil producer is not threatened by Iraq’s return to the international oil markets, since its reserves exceed in volume those of any other country. Its internal stability is, however, closely linked to that of Iraq, because the population of its Eastern Province, where most of its oil is located, is Shi’a. The Saudi royal family, which rules as an autocracy, is therefore threatened by the rise of Shi’a power in Iraq. It is also threatened, paradoxically, from the opposite direction by the infiltration into the Kingdom of Iraq of al-Qaeda operatives whose principal ambition is to bring down Saudi royal power. The leaders of al-Qaeda are Saudi nationals. Although they are almost indistinguishable in belief from the Wahabi sect which has been dominant in Arabia since the eighteenth century, they seek its overthrow, and that of the royal family, so that the oil power of the kingdom can be harnessed to the re-establishment of the universal caliphate. The Saudi royal family therefore finds itself in a difficult position. It is linked, currently inextricably, by its alliance to Washington. Washington values the connection, as long as the Saudi government will alter oil output to regulate market prices in favour of Western consumers. The Americans, however, have come to regard Saudi Arabia as a suspect quantity in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), because the leaders and many of the operatives of al-Qaeda are Saudi nationals. The American neo-conservatives have convinced themselves that a principal means towards the defeat of al-Qaeda is the reform of the Saudi political system, favouring the development of representative institutions and the exclusion of Wahabi clerics from access to power. The Saudi royal family thus finds itself in a quandary. Theologically and therefore socially, since religion informs Saudi society at every level, it has no means of detaching itself from the Wahabi clerisy. Politically, practically and commercially, it is tied to an American government which has no truck with theology and wants the world’s largest oil producer to become a modern state. That outcome the Saudis are bound to resist, for reasons that penetrate the heart of their society, but which will be increasingly difficult to sustain against the emergence of a truly modern society in an American-sponsored Iraqi democracy. While the postwar situation in Iraq develops, the Saudi Arabian government will be forced to persist with its policy of domestic repression of Islamic terrorism which, in 2003–04, claimed the lives of 85 victims, most of them Westerners. Terrorism is a threat to the authority of the Saudi royal government which cannot be ignored, since the emigration of Western experts to a revived Iraqi oil industry would be a serious blow to Saudi prosperity.
Saudi Arabia is in an unenviable position. Though a rich country, with the ability to increase its income at will by amplifying oil production, its young population is discontented. Saudi youth know that a vast proportion of oil wealth goes to support the extravagant lives of the bloated royal family (7,000 strong) while their own prospects of gainful employment are limited. Although the government finances free education up to university level, too many Saudi students choose courses in Muslim theology, and so find employment elusive. Per capita income is actually falling. The royal government, at a realistic level, would wish to see the country’s youth trained in modern science and technology, so that its principal assets could be managed by the native-born. Ideologically, however, it prefers an educational system of which the clergy approves, since that defers trouble. In the long run, however, trouble between the royal house and its subjects is inevitable; it is, indeed, already breaking out. At present, many of the troublemakers slip into Iraq to wage jihad against the western troops. Some are, moreover, already choosing the westerners working in Saudi Arabia as their targets. If a successful home-based terror organization can be established in Saudi Arabia proper, it will probably be too late for the royal government to institute reforms that would secure its position.
Jordan, another monarchical state, is also threatened by disorder in Iraq. Early in in Saddam’s regime, the then king, Hussein, made the mistake of supporting the annexation of Kuwait. It was a serious foreign policy error, subsequently retrieved by ostentatious obeisance to the United States. Obeisance continues, under a new king. Meanwhile Jordan exerts careful control over its border, so that, unlike Syria, its territory is not useful to terrorists seeking to infiltrate Iraq from the north. Its main connection with post-Saddam Iraq is as an entrepôt, from which supply convoys deliver essential goods to the Iraqi economy. Attacks on the supply convoys, which kill or injure many nationalities working as transport drivers but a consistent number of Jordanians also, do not endear the dissidents to Jordanian opinion. The Jordanian government will support any strong, non-Islamist administration that emerges in Baghdad. It is an embarrassment to the Jordanian government that the most ferocious of the Islamist fighters operating in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is a Jordanian national.
At the outset of the 2003 war, Jordan’s mistake of 1991 was repeated by Syria. Not expecting the American intervention, or its power, the Damascus government was foolish enough to express publicly its desire that the Western invasion would be defeated. Washington, which has long regarded the Syrian Ba’athist regime with hostility, responded, in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, by accusing Damascus of permitting Islamic fighters to cross into Iraq from Syrian territory, and of hiding numbers of the Saddam régime and even Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Alarmed at the strength of the American reaction, Syria attempted to re-ingratiate itself with Washington, to little effect. In November 2003 the US Congress passed a law (the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act) that imposed a régime of severe sanctions against Syria. During the Iraqi internal disorders of 2003–04 Syria has been lying low, attempting to distance itself from the troublemakers, but failing to restore good relations with the United States. The restoration of law and order in Iraq and the creation of a democratic government will, as Damascus realizes, serve further to isolate it in an Arab world remade in the image the United States seeks to foster. If a tier of pro-American Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and a Lebanon detached from Syrian control is brought into existence, Syria will find itself isolated, particularly because its closest relations are with non-Arab Iran, which stands high on America’s blacklist. The neo-conservative lobby in Washington will pursue ‘régime change’ in Syria if it sees the opportunity to achieve it.
Turkey’s main anxiety vis-à-vis Iraq arises from the nature of the eventual settlement of the country’s Kurdish north. Turkey has its own Kurdish problem, as the homeland of the largest of the Kurdish minorities. It fears the emergence of a sovereign Kurdish state, particularly if such a state, as is highly probable, would seek to incorporate irredentist Kurdish territories elsewhere. Turkey got off to a bad start with the United States at the outset of the Western effort to replace the Saddam régime, by refusing to allow the US 4th Infantry Division to operate against the Iraqi army from its territory. Since Saddam’s fall, Turkey has repaired relations and certainly gives no help to the Iraqi dissidents. The Ankara government welcomes the creation of a democratic régime in Baghdad and will support it.
The last Middle Eastern state on which Iraq has impinged historically is Israel. Under Saddam’s predecessors, Iraq participated actively in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, while Saddam himself had directly attacked Israel with Scud missiles during the Gulf War of 1991. Saddam, however, was among the least threatening of Israel’s Arab neighbours during the periods 1980–90 and 1991–2003, because his military operations against Iran (1980–88) and then with the Western powers (1990 and years following) left him little energy to engage in operations against Israel or even to support other Arab states, such as Syria, which did sustain hostilities. Saddam was not therefore high on Israel’s list of enemies once it had destroyed the Osirak nuclear plant in 1981 during his years in power. Nevertheless the Israeli government is glad at his downfall and will seek to establish mutually tolerant relations with the new Baghdad government, which the United States, as Israel’s protector, will certainly seek to foster.
The nature of future Iraqi-Israeli relations, supposing that democracy in Iraq takes root, will nevertheless be dominated, as other Israeli-Arab relationships are also, by the Palestinian question. Israel’s best hope is that a future Iraqi government will adopt an Egyptian attitude, sympathetic theoretically to Palestinian nationalism but committed pragmatically to co-operation with Tel Aviv. Iraq’s democrats cannot favour the militants of the intifada, since such fanatics resemble all too closely the Iraqi terrorists who are seeking to prevent the emergence of representative government in their homeland.
Beyond Iraq, in the autumn of 2004, the repercussions of the Western military operations to liberate the country from Saddam’s dictatorship and the Ba’ath Party’s institutional tyranny persist. The Iraq war dominated the American presidential election campaign, with the Democratic Party candidate, Senator John Kerry, promising to extricate American troops from Iraq as quickly as possible if he were elected, and President George W. Bush insisting that he would keep them there until the job – manning the establishment of a pro-Western, democratically-oriented regime – were achieved.
In America the debate over Iraq, though intense and at times passionate, remains essentially bipartisan. It is a debate over detail, not principle. In Britain, which in October 2004 still deployed nearly 10,000 troops in the country, there was, by contrast, widespread and organized protest against involvement in the war itself. Although the anti-war movement, which was led by such familiar left-wing bodies as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was unable to achieve such turn-outs as marched in the months before the beginning of the war in March 2003, it succeeded in assembling a crowd of 15,000 to demonstrate in Central London in October 2004. More worrying for the Prime Minister were the positions taken by the Liberal-Democrat Party, which continued to insist that the war was illegal and to demand the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, and by groups of his own backbenchers who expressed similar views. The Prime Minister had been obliged, by media but also by parliamentary pressure, to appoint the Hutton Committee of inquiry into the intelligence reports underpinning resort to war in 2003. In 2004, in order to quell persisting dissatisfaction over legal justification for the war, he appointed a second committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Butler, Master of University College, Oxford, a former Cabinet Secretary, to re-examine the matter. Butler, though less emollient than Hutton, concluded by endorsing the government’s decisions also. Nevertheless discontent persisted, threatening to undermine the Prime Minister’s appeal to the country in the forthcoming general election of 2005.
Meanwhile, within Iraq, disorder persisted. Though American operations around Najaf had, by October, largely quelled the insurrection of the Mullah Sadr’s Mahdi Army, a Shi’ite organisation, resistance by Sunni forces at Fallujah persisted. In mid-October the American high command in Iraq was preparing an offensive against the city, designed to destroy resistance and, with the cooperation of the new Iraqi national army, to impose law and order within the ‘Sunni triangle’. Operations against and within Fallujah by the US 1st Marine Division, in which British troops, notably the Black Watch, played a supporting role, were mounted throughout September, October and November 2004. Heavy casualties were inflicted but, even by mid November, no definitive result had been achieved.