Born under an ill star. Let us look at some of the many problems bequeathed to the new Iraqi Government just prior to its parturition by the departing CPA and briefly measure their impact on its development and ability to govern.
1. The Selection Process. Conceived in dubious circumstances, the “sovereign” Iraqi government is the ungainly bastard of the CPA and its estranged mistress, the Iraqi Governing Council. For months the Occupation clung to the transfer date without revealing the process by which they hoped to bestow legitimacy to a new government, one quite different from their sullied IGC. Convinced that the IGC lacked legitimacy in the perceptions of too many of the Iraqi people, the Bush administration brought in the UN envoy and savvy Arab fixer, Lahkdar Brahimi, whose stated aims were to bypass the unpopular IGC and discover an apolitical, indigenous “technocracy” from the many parties, religious groups and tribes that he met with. Within days after President Bush lauded Brahimi as the man and method to choose a new Iraqi government, he was shoved aside for . . . one chosen by the IGC (with much input from the CPA as to the new PM, the CIA approved Iyad Allawi). The new government must transcend its origins to win legitimacy from the Iraqi people it claims to represent.
2. The dizzying mélange of insurgents and militia either outside or arrayed against the embryonic state. Doghead has yet to discover a website that gives a decent overview of all the players and the terrain and names seem to be pretty mutagenic (if you know of such a site please send an email). Here’s just a few worthy of note: The Thulfiqar Army, which according to the San Jose Mercury News, is a Shiite countermilitia to Sadr’s Mahdi Army; the pro-Saddam sleeper cell of saboteurs know as M-14; the Badr brigades that answer to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Want to know their agenda? Just look at the name); pro-Sunni militants who sounds like vengeful yet disillusioned member of Saddam’s Fedayeen now fighting under the name the Army of Mohammed (Iraq not Pakistan); and of course Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda affiliated terror group, perhaps operating out of Falluja. Barely a synoptic list but indicative of a lot of trouble.
3. Falluja. No state can allow an armed autonomous zone within its borders. The nascent government will either have to allow the US military to retake the city and withstand the heat for being American quislings or order its own national army, with its very poor track record, to engage in what’s bound to be very nasty urban warfare. Ugly choices.
4. Electricity and oil. Not only have saboteurs crippled an oil depot in the last few days but, the CPA has failed in its stated goals: “Capacity has been stuck in a range around 4,000 megawatts for months. Not only is that less than during the Saddam Hussein era, but it is also far below the American promise of 6,000 megawatts.”
5. Saddam and the establishment of authority. One of Doghead’s many nightmare scenarios has Saddam turned over the Iraqi government only to have the bastard freed in a Falluja like jailbreak. Evidently, the Bushies share this concern and are trying to finesse it through distinctions of legal versus physical custody of the tyrant, which shows a remarkable lack of faith in the new government’s security capabilities. How well can Allawi’s council of thirty odd ministers establish lines of authority? Will the national ministries already plagued by corruption and ineptness answer to a government with so little capacity, legitimacy and authority? What of the regional councils set up in various cities? Underpinning all of these bureaucratic concerns is basic security and already the un-baptized state may be losing control. “Yet even as the violence is peaking in Iraq, American forces are deferring, more and more each day, to Iraqi security services. Much of the political handover has already happened, and American officials say it is now important to allow Iraqi security services to play a bigger role. As a result, a power vacuum seems to be forming.” Let’s hope that vacuum is rapidly filled by the only actors we seem able to deal with . . . the one’s we’ve appointed.

- posted by Editor @ 4:14 PM

 
Doghead Security Briefing: The demobilization and disbanding of the various militia in Iraq are long overdue and these latest efforts already appear imperiled and shallow. Crushing large scale insurgencies and reigning in non-state forces by the American Occupation is a tragic imperative that needs to be completed prior to the June 30th transition. If not, then the weak, nascent state, struggling for legitimacy and hesitant to unleash force on its own will have to contest armed autonomous zones with an unreliable national army.
Throughout the 1990’s Algeria and Egypt fought back bloody Islamic movements that shook their countries to the core. These countries possessed, in contrast to Iraq, legitimate, nation-wide state structures with established lines of succeeding administrations (much more so in Egypt). Gilles Keppel in his Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, emphasizes that in all the countries were Islamist movements brutally agitated for state control in the eighties and nineties, the role of the devout middle class in ultimately rejecting those movements was pivotal to their failure. Can the same societal bulwark be built in Iraq? Al-Sadr’s Mahdi army as Juan Cole has noted, is largely composed of a radicalized urban proletariat, similar in its base to that of the rural and lumpen elements behind the Gamma Islamiya in Egypt and the jobless hittiste thugs of the Algerian GIA. Is there enough of an Iraqi middle class that can be dissuaded from signing on to Sadr’s Khomeneist agenda? George Packer is not terribly optimistic in his analysis of the “Middle Iraqi Mind”. The class, en toto, suffered terribly under the final decade of Saddam and its remnants are still violently besieged, perhaps by vengeful retro-Baathists, right under the noses of the American Occupation. The Iraqi forensic doctor at the center of Packer’s article well represents the sort of professional caste that should be working with the US, though he evinces a reactionary piety and despair that scarily segues with Sadr’s fiery rhetoric and actions. Middle class, in this grim instance, is not some universally recognizable category so much as a testament to multiple modernities, many quite alien to the American example.
In the cases of Egypt and Algiers, Kepel argues that though many elements of the devout middle class were initially willing to back Islamist revolutionaries, but the resulting chaos, economic instability and open fratricide soon turned them back into the arms of the state. Sadr, in seizing his chance after his April uprising, was unable to deliver on security and governance. His militia did not develop, perhaps didn’t have time to establish, the kind of broad social services that Hamas in Palestine is famous for and despite a sizable army, even security was undermined in cities under his control, both by the American response and in the ominous rise of the Thulfiqar Army, a shadowy death squad (Sunni? Baathist?) that struck down his seven of his men in Najaf. Of all the bad options given the US command in rolling up Sadr, it is possible that they hit on the right formula at the correct speed. By allowing popular dissatisfaction to fester within cities under his control, encouraging more moderate Shiite clerics to engage in diplomatic maneuvers and then decisively pushing back his militia at a high cost to him, Sadr has been contained and rolled back. He is still a threat, but given the quickly extinguished ignition of his Islamic Republic last Fall and this latest defeat, Iraqi moderates may demand a more thorough airing of his revolutionary agenda before subscribing. (Juan Cole has given strong counter-arguments that even in defeat Sadr has emerged a moral victor, but Doghead wonders if his latest face-saving meeting with Sistani has weakened his moral claim.)
The US military has not capitalized well on Sadr’s withdrawal. The power vacuum in the cities he abandoned must be filled and our recent history of supporting Iraqi policemen deployed to Najaf has been abysmal. (To be fair, it is uncertain as to whether the US Army or the still ineffective Iraqi Interior Ministry dropped the ball here: “The U.S. adviser to the police told CNN that the officers who went to Najaf felt they had received "second class" treatment after being given no personal gear or changes of clothes and military food rations that contained pork.
"They didn't even have a mattress to sleep on," the adviser said. "The U.S. Army really dropped the ball here."
Which brings us back to the efforts to disband the militias and incorporate their members into the national army. The first question is whether it is indeed universal demobilization or if, in fact, some parties have been cutting special deals: “Adel Murad, the P.U.K. leader, said his group had been assured earlier this year by American and Iraqi leaders that no efforts would be made to disband its militia forces. . . "The pesh merga are not included in this agreement," Mr. Murad said. "That is for the other militias. No change. Nothing. We are like any army in the area."
Even hints of such secret promises could be corrosive for militias already deeply suspicious of the Occupation and the transitional government of Prime Minister Allawi. A second concern lies in infiltration. In previous battles, local police forces have often shown themselves to be compromised, and the incorporation of militia units with prior loyalties into the national army doesn’t instill much faith. (In particular those units of the Badr brigade loyal to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq might be suspect). But then, that’s why we’re cynics. Disarmament and dissolution of militias should have been a primary step of the American Occupation, and doing it now, though still necessary, seems a little late in the game. Let’s hope these efforts prove more effective than they currently seem.

- posted by Editor @ 6:20 PM