The passing of the United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq on 8 June 2004 has fuelled optimism that the transition to an Iraqi government on 30 June 2004 may herald the beginning of the end of the problems facing the United States and its coalition partners in the country.
This optimism is grounded on three beliefs: that the incoming government will not be seen as a client regime; that it will be able to take over many internal security functions; and, most important of all, that it will have a honeymoon period of support from much of the Iraqi population.
The latter may well be true, at least in the short term. Informed observers of Iraqi realities speak of a palpable sense of weariness in the face of the long-running violence and insecurity. There is probably more anti-Americanism than a year ago, much of it exacerbated by events in Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004. The continuing high level of civilian casualties is another factor; at least 120 people were killed in May alone.
Over the past year, the number of Iraqis positively supporting the United States has fallen. It is probable that a majority of people in the country are prepared to give the new, post-30 June government a chance, but that any support they offer it may be tenuous and conditional at best. It follows that the next three months, from June to September 2004, will be crucial in determining the longer-term future of United States involvement in the country.
Also in openDemocracy, six Iraqis debate the future of their country; see Iraq in the balance (June 2004)
In the past two weeks, three trends have become apparent that together permit a preliminary assessment of the likely course of events over this coming period: the intensity of attacks by insurgents, the nature of the US response to such attacks, and the rapidly developing problem of economic targeting.
The first trend, the insurgent attacks, has followed a pattern of assassination of Iraqi officials and attacks on police units coupled with repeated attempts to hit coalition targets, especially convoys. On 12 June, a deputy foreign minister and highly experienced civil servant, Bassam Kubba, was murdered in Baghdad; the following day a senior education ministry official, Kamal al-Jarrah was killed outside his home.
There have been repeated attacks on police stations in recent days; assaults on Iraqi, coalition and US military targets are currently running at thirty-five to forty a day, probably the most intense phase of the insurgency since the termination of the Saddam regime. On 13 June, for example, two car bombs killed a US soldier and two Iraqis, and three rockets were fired into a US security compound in Baghdad. On 14 June, five expatriates and eight Iraqis were killed in another convoy bombing; a further attack on 15 June near Baghdad airport killed several more expatriates. These attacks are accompanied by operations taking a regular toll of Iraqis prepared to work with the new police and military authorities; the most devastating of these was the bombing of an army recruiting office on 17 June, which killed at least thirty-three people and injured many more .
The second trend is one of the less reported aspects of recent major incidents, namely the marked tendency of American soldiers to defer to Iraqi security forces in responding to them. This decreases the risk of US military casualties and serves an important domestic political function, but it also carries the danger of creating a power vacuum insofar as Iraqi forces are either unable or unwilling to embrace this role.
An illustration of this problem is the aftermath of the 14 June convoy attack, when:
a crowd of young men flooded into the streets and rushed towards the wreckage. As more than 50 Iraqi policemen stood by, the mob stomped on the hoods of the crushed vehicles, doused them with kerosene and set them alight, creating a huge fireball in the middle of a crowded neighbourhood What are we to do? asked an Iraqi police lieutenant, Wisam Deab. If we try to stop them, they will think we are helping the Americans. Then they will turn on us. (International Herald Tribune, 15 June 2004)
The test of economic warfare
The combination of increasing operations against Iraqi officials and police, and a US military apparently anxious to lower its profile, is serious enough. Yet even these two trends may be of less long-term significance than the third, the developing pattern of economic targeting through systematic attacks on infrastructure.
As discussed in an earlier column in this series (see An Iraqi intifada, 29 April 2004), current analysis suggests that insurgents have been holding the full potential of their fire before engaging in large-scale attacks on the Iraqi economy, while waiting for a combination of the hot summer weather and the establishment of the new government.
Such attacks began to develop in the first week of June (see Baghdad and Kabul: politics versus war, 10 June 2004) and are now escalating rapidly. There are two main targets: electricity supplies and oil facilities.
In the case of electricity supplies, sabotage has added to existing problems of the harassing and murder of engineers, withdrawal of foreign contractors and the absence of spare pieces of equipment in an industry whose infrastructure became increasingly decrepit during the sanctions era of the 1990s (see Dark Iraq: the other struggle for power, International Herald Tribune, 15 June 2004). Even before recent attacks on power lines, total generating capacity was only 4,000 megawatts compared with the US aim of having 6,000 megawatts available by the onset of the hot weather.
In the case of the oil industry, there have been further major attacks in the past week. On 14-15 June, the bombing of pipelines in southern Iraq closed the export terminal for up to ten days. This incident alone is likely to deprive the country of $600 million in oil revenues. It was followed by the bombing of a pipeline in northern Iraq, on the evening of 15 June, and the assassination of the security chief for the oil industry in northern Iraq, Ghazi al-Talabani.
A regular, sustainable flow of oil is essential for the new Iraqi government. At its peak in the late 1970s, Iraq produced around 3.5 million barrels of oil per day (mbd). This fell markedly after the 1991 war and the onset of sanctions as the industry became more and more decrepit.
Iraqs huge oil reserves - more than four times those of the entire United States, including Alaska, and second only to Saudi Arabia in global terms - give it quite extraordinary potential as an oil state. A key aim of the US occupation has been to redevelop the oil industry to provide a basis for financing reconstruction. A large share of the contracts so far has gone to American companies Kellogg, Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton) and the Parsons Iraq Joint Venture. Another US company, Erinys, has established a force of 14,000 pipeline and installation guards, most of them locally recruited; but even a contingent of this size faces the huge task of securing against determined insurgents a massive industrial system spanning the breadth of Iraq.
Until the last two weeks, attempts to resuscitate the industry had met with some success; exports were close to 1.5 mbd, and the target of producing 2 mbd for export was set for late 2004, in addition to 0.8 mbd for Iraqs domestic needs.
The current assaults, revealing the insurgents sophisticated organisation and sharp strategic sense of the vulnerabilities of the incoming government, call these objectives into question. It may yet be that their efforts to damage the economy by targeting oil supplies and electricity generation will be brought under control, but the events of the past two weeks suggest otherwise.
At present, many media planners expect to be able to focus their attention over the next month on the incoming Iraqi government and the fate of Saddam Hussein. In reality, it looks more likely that they will be obliged to focus on a new phase of the fifteen-month Iraqi insurgency.
