Patrick Cockburn: Only one thing unites Iraq: hatred of the US
The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in
Basra,
that they have few permanent allies
As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of
country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in
Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising
after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a tem****ary pause
in the fighting?
American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have
made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago.
They
look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the
US
is making the political weather and is in control of events there.
The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means the only
one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year, though
for
reasons that have little to do with "the surge" the 30,000 US troop
reinforcements and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the
Sunni and ****a Muslim communities.
The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because it tried
to
monopolise power but primarily because it brought their community close to
catastrophe. The Sunni war against US occupation had gone surprisingly
well
for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the
****a majority led by al-Qa'ida, which the Sunni were losing, with
disastrous
results for themselves. "The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two
wars against the occupation and the government at the same time," a Sunni
friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and accept
the occupation for the moment."
This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has effectively
changed sides. An im****tant reason why al-Qa'ida has lost ground so
swiftly
is a split within its own ranks. The US military the State Department has
been very much marginalised in decision-making in Baghdad does not want to
emphasise that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll, who are
misleadingly called "concerned citizens", until recently belonged to al
Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and American
soldiers on their hands.
The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and
the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were the core of the
resistance
to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to
prevent the 16 million ****a and the five million Kurds holding power.
At first, the ****a were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles,
packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly
detonated in the middle of crowded ****a market places or religious
processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people. The bombers came from
al-Qa'ida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni
political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very
short-sighted since the Iraqi ****a outnumber the Sunni three to one.
Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered ****a
al-Askari
shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.
The bombing led to a savage ****a onslaught on the Sunni, which became
known
in Iraq as "the battle for Baghdad". This struggle was won by the ****a.
They
were always the majority in the capital but, by the end of 2006, they
controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back
into
a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.
In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni
trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being
evicted
by the ****a from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also
miscalculated that an assault on their community by the ****a would provoke
Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more
sup****t
but this never materialised.
It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of ****a civilians, whom it sees as heretics
worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa'ida
also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up the
Islamic State of Iraq, which tried to fasten its control on other
insurgent
groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were
killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in
Baghdad
were ordered to send one of their members to join al Qai'da. Bizarrely,
even
Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al Qa'ida in Iraq, was
reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.
Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the
impulse
for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni militia, often
under tribal leader****p, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the
creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an
end
to the conflict.
Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and
****a
face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni
fighters
say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a preliminary to
an attack on the ****a militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr,
which triumphed last year.
The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the
Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection
is
less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.
If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was
the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the ****a nationalist cleric. This
has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not
control, and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals
within
the ****a community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army
would certainly fight if the ****a community came under attack or the
Americans pressured it too hard.
American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that
Iraqis
cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilising
is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what
role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among
themselves, a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of
the
US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the
fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News,
BBC
and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that
attacks on US forces are acceptable.
Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans
will
discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have
few
permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which
fragile
ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.
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