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Iraq's
new interim government has no time to lose. Though it was welcome news
when the new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, announced that the militias
of nine major political parties would disband and join the government’s
security forces by January 2005, this is only one of the monumental tasks
and formidable obstacles that the new government faces. As I discovered
in a recent visit to Baghdad, Iraq is in dire need of reconstruction --
not only from the miseries of Saddam Hussein’s long dictatorship, but
also from the failed policies of the one-year occupation by America’s
Coalition administration, which has left demoralization, humiliation,
and a weak security and economic infrastructure in its wake.
The
Iraqi hatred of US occupation has reached a seething point. This was illustrated
by the curious response to the recent Abu Ghraib prison pictures. I was
in Baghdad in May shortly after the news broke, and although I saw the
pictures recycled endlessly on al Jazeera television I was puzzled to
find that the images did not surprise most Iraqis Although they were disgusted
at what was portrayed, rumors of these prison atrocities have been circulating
around Baghdad for months, and most Iraqis with whom I spoke expected
such behavior of what many of them regarded as a brutal occupying force.
This
absence of surprise spoke volumes about the way Iraqis have come to look
at the US military -- a year ago liberators, and now occupiers. Some Iraqis
described the US as a continuation of the kind of oppression they had
experienced under Saddam. A few thought it was even worse.
“Saddam
tortured and punished us physically,” one middle class Iraqi said in quite
articulate English. “But he did not try to humiliate us.”
A
member of the Council of Sunni Clergy that has been formed since the uprising
in Fallouja in April put it more forcefully: “America has become the terrorists,”
he told me. We spoke to him and three other clergy in Saddam’s Mother
of All Battles Mosque, which was recently the site of anti-US occupation
demonstration attended by two hundred thousand Iraqis.
Why
is the US occupation so despised by Iraqis? The disdain is almost universal.
Far
from being limited to a few disgruntled Ba’ath party members, I heard
this seething anti-American hostility expressed by Sunni clergy, Shi’ite
politicians, and middle-class educated secular city folk. It was a hatred
of American occupation that seemed deeply personal. Within a year of the
fall of Saddam, the Iraqi’s hatred towards the former dictator seems to
be redirected towards the US. The reason for this is, I think, partly
due to three disastrous sets of policy mistakes during this past year.
Security
Mistakes
The
US occupation has failed to provide security with an Iraqi face. Baghdad
looks like an armed camp -- an American armed camp. As soon as one arrives
at the airport one is confronted with the sight of the ubiquitous tanks
and humvees that have come to symbolize the US military presence. It is
a feature of modern Iraqi life that increases the closer one comes to
the epicenter of American power in Baghdad: the “green zone.” Our group
was staying in a small hotel outside the heavily-fortified zone where
most American and other Coalition officials live and work, but on one
occasion we had arranged to meet with officials related to the Coalition
Provisional Authority and the Governing Council and had reason to work
our way inside
Americans
and other foreigners who work in the green zone seldom venture outside,
and when we tried to enter we had to pass through several gauntlets of
military checkpoints. All were manned by US troops. On our way to the
zone we were stopped in the street by convoys of US soldiers looking for
insurgents who were said to have been driving a car that look much like
one of ours, and more American soldiers were standing at the entrance
to the green zone to check our passports and gear. As the young soldiers
checked our cameras and had us delete pictures from our digital cameras
that showed scenes of the checkpoint itself, we talked about what conditions
were like for them.
The
soldiers -- from Seattle and Riverside, California -- were due to return
home the month before we talked with them but their term was suddenly
extended, a fact they bitterly resented. Moreover they were aware that
they were vulnerable targets, standing at the outskirts of the green zone
at checkpoints that are frequently targeted by both mortar fire and car
bombs. Only the day before there had been a huge explosion at a gate adjacent
to the green zone, a suicide car bomb attack that killed six Iraqis including
the driver. On this occasion, however, no American soldiers perished.
But the soldiers knew how vulnerable they were. They said they could “feel
the hate” from the eyes of Iraqis who looked at their convoys as the soldiers
drove their humvees down the center of Baghdad’s streets, their fingers
on the triggers of machine guns. They felt as if they had bull’s-eyes
painted on their backs.
The
reason why young American soldiers are patrolling the streets is that
there are no authorized Iraqi forces to do it. One of the first mistakes
was the US policy of dissolving the former Iraq army and refusing to utilize
it in the new security forces that were being created to replace it. Although
low-level soldiers in non-elite forces were allowed to re-apply for the
new army and civil defense forces only a fraction of Saddam’s 400,000
troops have been re-integrated into them and even these soldiers are required
to be retrained. Needless to say, it takes a long time to find capable
applicants and to hire and train a new army and civil defense corps, and
after a year the task has only begun. We talked with the Minister of Defense,
who claimed that perhaps 20-30,000 soldiers in a new civil defense corps
would be trained by the end of the year, but even that optimistic assessment
seemed insufficient. And it did not deal with the problem of private militias.
This
anti-Iraq army policy has had two dire consequences: the ubiquitous presence
of US military on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, and the
emergence of private security forces -- often manned by the unemployed
former Iraqi army personnel. Some of them have joined the independent
militia retained by political parties, businesses, and private citizens.
Saddam’s old army was not only well trained but remarkably diverse --
it integrated various Sunni, Shi’i and Kurdish groups. But these troops
were passed over in the attempt to create new armed forces from scratch,
and in the meantime the Coalition authority has had to rely on American
troops to maintain the country’s security.
Administrative
Mistakes
Another
set of mistakes fostered by Coalition policies in Iraq was similar to
the security ones, in that the US took over the role of government administration
as well as military defense. These policies had the effect of undercutting
the status of many members of the middle class and excluding them from
a role in the reconstruction of Iraq. The most problematic of these policies
was the decision soon after Paul Bremer’s assignment as chief administrator
in Iraq not to employ any members of Saddam’s old Ba’ath Party -- even
lower echelon functionaries -- in the new government offices. A related
and equally problematic policy has been the heavy reliance on outside
contractors to train Iraqis and mold a new governmental structure consistent
with an American concept of governmental organization.
In
the Green Zone we met with several Americans, a man and a woman who had
been in the military and were now working as contractors with Military
Professional Resources International. They were busily training newly-recruited
administrators to work in the Ministry of Defense, which was being rebuilt
from the ground up. Their classroom was a bright, well-lit temporary building
with gleaming tile floors, white walls, and metal tables arranged in a
U-shape facing a wall of white magic-marker boards and flip charts. It
also included a screen for the computer-projected images of the power
point displays they used in the instruction seminars.
Sue
and Ron felt confident that they had a surefire product in these training
sessions since they had given it in many countries before -- including
Bosnia, Columbia, Romania, Angola, and Afghanistan. We described the courses
as “Ministry of Defense in a box.” Sue and Ron accepted the term in good
humor, admitting that their training course was somewhat like a kit, but
one that they thought was universally applicable. There was no need, they
said, to adapt it to difference circumstances. That could be done later
by the trainees themselves. At a couple of points in the conversation
Sue inadvertently referred to Iraq as “Iran,” and she seemed to have difficulty
in identifying the neighboring countries.
Though
we appreciated the enthusiasm with which Sue and Ron approached their
task, we regarded their training sessions as symptomatic of what was wrong
with the US led Coalition’s efforts to rebuild Iraq’s administrative infrastructure.
In deliberately avoiding what was there before, the Coalition administrators
saddled themselves with the task of maintaining the system during the
transition period. They also missed the opportunities of retaining valuable
aspects of the previous organization, and most important the management
abilities of thousands of administrative workers who after the fall of
Saddam were suddenly deprived of their jobs and their careers. In many
cases these were middle-management workers who might have been affiliated
with the Ba’ath party but had no use for Saddam. They were prevented,
however, from being part of the new Iraq. These were the very people who
should have been the allies of the new government, but who were humiliated
and excluded from it.
Moreover,
there was a problem with the American model that many Iraqis felt was
being forced on them. Though it might be true that there are some universal
truths to all administrative organizations, the way that these truths
have been presented seem to imply that America’s way of doing things is
best. Iraqis understandably felt that they had something to contribute
conceptually to the rebuilding of their institutions. A modern, well dressed
professor at Baghdad University put it this way, in eloquent English:
the US led Coalition policies were “forcing American values on Iraqis”
that did not allow them to “treasure and enjoy” their own values.
Economic
Mistakes
Superficially,
the economy of the country appears to be booming. Shops are open, and
with the ending of the embargo, consumer goods abound in the stores. The
streets are crowded with automobiles, many of them fairly recent models.
Air conditioners were a big ticket item. It seemed as if stores could
not keep them on their shelves. US Agency of International Development
officials with whom our group spoke were concerned about the energy consequences
of so many new air conditioners being turned on during peak energy periods
in the hot summer months. “They just assume that when they flick the switch
the machines will work,” one of them said, shaking his head in wonder
as to whether this would actually be the case.
At
the same time there are signs of stagnation on the large-scale reconstruction
efforts. Everywhere in Baghdad are the bombed-out shells and burned and
looted remains of former government buildings. Iraqis are bitter that
the broken infrastructure has not been repaired. They blame the US occupation,
since it is often American companies that have received the huge contracts
to repair the bombed and looted infrastructure. The situation is complicated
by security concerns -- the cost of private security for the American
experts brought in to work on the Iraq reconstruction projects can amount
to a third of the cost of the project itself.
Stories
abound in Baghdad about the inefficiency of many of these American contract
companies. According to one account that we heard, an US company received
a fifteen million dollar contract to rebuild a hospital looted after the
fall of the regime. The company was unable to follow through on the project,
however, due to security concerns. An Iraqi company was then granted the
reconstruction project which they were able to do in a few months at a
cost of only eighty thousand dollars. But in general very little
reconstruction has been completed, and the insult of having to lived in
a war-ravaged country is compounded with the injury of not being allowed
to fully participate in its reconstruction.
On
the other hand, daily life in Baghdad can be quite comfortable for those
Iraqis who are in league with the US contractors, and for those Iraqi
political and religious leaders who publicly support the occupation. We
were invited to the home of Sheik Ayad Jamaluddin, an expatriate Shi’i
religious leader who had been living in Dubai since 1979 who was flown
back to Baghdad after the war. He is outspokenly pro-American and a great
fan of the neo-conservative political ideology of Paul Wolfowitz and Donald
Rumsfeld. Although he does not seem to have much of a following in Iraq
society, he has been allowed to take up residence in one of the former
palaces of Saddam’s Vice President, an opulent mansion on the banks of
the Tigris River where the Sheik amused himself by dynamiting the river
to kill fish.
It
is said that Saddam ruled through a combination of fear and patronage.
The constant roadblocks, bombings, and security patrols extend the climate
of fear from the old regime. In the case of Sheik Jamaluddin, as in many
other cases that are widely reported around the country, we saw the reemergence
of the pattern of privilege granted to the sycophants of those in power.
Sadly, under US-led coalition occupation, Saddam’s pattern of fear and
patronage persists.
What
Lies Ahead
The
defusion of the April crisis in Fallouja is a model for what might be
done in the country as a whole. The redeployment of old military commanders
and local leaders could reduce the need for an intrusive US military presence.
The leaders of the interim government, Iyad Allawi and Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar,
both have given vocal support for these kinds of developments. The recently-announced
integration of political parties’ militia into the national security forces
is a good step forward.
I
found a great deal of healthy nationalism and optimism about the upcoming
elections. Leaders of political parties -- including the Shi’a Da’awa
Party and the Sunni Iraq Islamic Party -- indicated that Iraqi loyalties
were as great or greater than specific religious and ethnic political
affiliations. They expressed a willingness to work across the alleged
Shi’a-Sunni divide. They decried the “myth” of the Shi’a-Sunni-Kurd differences
and alleged that there were many examples of inter-religious and inter-ethnic
cooperation in Iraq society, including inter-religious marriages, the
integration of troops in the old Iraq army, the inclusion of some fifteen
percent Sunni supporters in the Shi’i Da’awa Party, and the existence
of a plethora of political parties and civil associations that had no
specific religious or ethnic identity. The tribe of the designated president
of Iraq’s interim government, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, is both Sunni and
Shi’a.
One
of the Sunni intellectuals with whom we spoke said that Saddam was a great
equalizer of the Iraqi people in that “under him all groups suffered equally.”
The intellectual pointed out that the American occupation of Iraq had
the same unintentional result. Whether or not that was the case, it was
clear that the spirit of Iraqi nationalism is today alive and well, and
continues to be a powerful antidote to particular religious, ethnic, and
tribal allegiances and affiliations.
So
there is some light at the end of Iraq’s currently chaotic tunnel.
There
is, unfortunately, another possible scenario for Iraq’s immediate political
future, a more dismal one. This is the specter of Fallouja in April. It
is the prospect that the center will not hold, and that the country will
unravel. A variety of things could precipitate this downward spiral --
a political assassination, allegations of rigged elections, a military
incursion, or a power play by one faction or another. Or it could simply
be a sad degeneration of public authority and civic identity, a morose
shifting from public demoralization to widespread personal despair. The
result might be a Somalia-like contestation of warlords in a battlefield
of civic anarchy.
The
role of the US-led coalition forces can affect these possibilities. The
issue is whether US leaders can abandon the fantasy of creating an Iraq
in America’s image. “Baghdad is not New York,” a well-dressed Iraqi professor
told me. Her appearance and articulate English, however, would appear
to make her quite at home in any American city. In a peculiar way, US
policies in Iraq have been resented most by those who might otherwise
have been sympathetic to a Western point of view.
What
is happening in Iraq is a litmus test for the new foreign policy trajectory
of the Bush administration. The “war on terror” approach to global conflict
and the “preemptive strike” policy of military engagement both signal
a kind of imperial vision of what America’s role should be in the post-Cold
War globalized world. Iraq is a test of the flexibility of that vision.
Iraq
may indeed emerge, awkwardly and tentatively, as a proudly independent
democratic society. But it will not necessarily be pro-American. The legacies
of disastrous US security, administrative, and economic policies during
the first year of the US-led Coalition occupation will continue to be
obstacles to the effectiveness of any new Iraqi government for some time
to come. Moreover, the disdain engendered by Iraqis against America by
the attitudes conveyed through that occupation will also persist, at least
for a time. When global war is one’s way of thinking, this template has
the ability to make enemies out of a whole society, at least some of whom
should have been one’s friends.
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OTR Politics - August, 2004