The decision by the United States-led coalition to transfer formal authority to a new client regime in Baghdad on 28 June two days ahead of the pre-announced schedule and in conditions of some secrecy seems guided by two motives: the desire to pre-empt any major insurgency actions to coincide with the planned date of 30 June, and the need for a good news story at the Nato summit in Istanbul.
Dont miss Paul Rogerss exclusive insight into al-Qaidas thinking, The SWISH Report (July 2004)
For around a week after the installation of Iyad Allawis government, the intensity of the insurgency indeed abated, with fewer deaths among United States troops and no major bomb attacks on Iraqi security and political organisations. The Bush administration registered some satisfaction that the Allawi regime had been established without major incident.
The relative smoothness of the handover reinforced Washingtons view of Allawi as its potential Iraqi strongman who was likely to work closely with its new ambassador, John Negroponte a career diplomat with extensive experience of working with autocratic regimes in Latin America. The process was not entirely without problems, foremost among them the Allawi regimes alacrity in introducing a range of emergency security measures, including curfews and martial law; there was even a hint that elections for a legitimate government, planned by the end of January 2005, might need to be delayed.
Such decisions hinted at the re-emergence of an authoritarian, even neo-Ba'athist, tendency in the designated Iraqi leadership. This sense was confirmed by persistent if unconfirmed reports of Allawis severity over prisoners, extending even to summary executions.
The emerging overall pattern in the weeks after 28 June was of a client regime adopting some responsibility for security in the context of heavy support by US forces, which included persistent air attacks on presumed insurgent safe houses in Fallujah and other cities.
These indications of a relatively peaceful transition, and the absence of any sharp increase in violence after 28 June, came as a relief for the Bush administration. The Senate intelligence security committee report on the activities of the CIA, and the national commission on terrorist attacks (reporting on 22 July) present problems of political management, but events in Iraq itself offered a margin of optimism just in time for the run-up to the November 2004 election.
Three and a half weeks after the Allawi regime was inaugurated, the situation in Iraq looks rather bleaker for the United States. This deterioration can be expressed in three ways: casualty, budgetary, and recruitment. There have also been sustained attacks on Iraqi government officials, further economic targeting and perhaps most significant of all the consolidation of several areas of Iraq outside of the control of both the Allawi regime and the United States.
A project under strain
At its peak, the military coalition which overthrew the Saddam regime in March-April 2003 and then took charge of Iraq comprised thirty-two countries. Many contributed only very small numbers of troops, and the numbers are diminishing further.
Spain, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Honduras have already withdrawn their forces. The Philippines, after a hostage crisis involving one of its citizens, is withdrawing its small force ahead of schedule. Thailand does not intend not to replace its 450 troops when they complete their deployment in September; the same month, New Zealand is withdrawing its sixty military engineers. In the least publicised move of all, Norway is extracting all but fifteen of its 170 troops, and those remaining will be involved in training Iraqi security forces as part of a Nato commitment the only significant initiative from Nato towards Iraq, whatever the spin of the Istanbul summit.
It is true that some countries, including Albania and Ukraine, are increasing their troop numbers in Iraq, but the overall extent of international support (inside and outside Nato) is clearly in decline.
Meanwhile, US military casualties in Iraq continue to rise, as its forces have decreased their patrolling activity in some areas. The casualties stem mostly from roadside bombs but there has been a notable pattern of substantial mortar and rocket attacks on US bases. This week, US military deaths in Iraq since the start of the war exceeded 900. The number of combat injuries to US troops is now thought to be well over 4,000 (with many thousands more accidental injuries); most of the troops involved are being evacuated to Germany and then the United States.
These problems come at a time when the Pentagon is struggling to meet the costs of the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the additional $65 billion approved by Congress for the fiscal year ending in September 2004 has already been spent, and an estimated $12.3 billion is having to be found from within existing defence budgets.
The biggest problem lies with the army, which has overspent by $10.2 billion, mainly because of the very high costs of operations and maintenance, especially in Iraq. For the services as a whole, current cost-cutting includes deferring equipment repair, grounding some air force and navy pilots and limiting training.
At the same time, there has been a decrease in voluntary army recruits, with the pool of future recruits those who have enlisted but have not yet joined training camps, declining by 23% in the past year. The army expects to be able to meet its enlarged recruitment target for the year, but the inner concern is that recruiting is weak precisely at a time when the US armed forces as a whole are getting daily publicity across the country. The concern, in essence, is that the military involvement in Iraq is becoming unpopular, even among those sectors of society from which recruits would normally come.
This problem, moreover, arrives at a time when estimates of overall Iraqi support for the insurgency are being revised upwards. US officials have commonly talked about a core of 5,000 insurgents spread across the Sunni regions of Iraq, and of Shi'a militias in the south (such as Muqtada al-Sadrs Mahdi army) offering intermittent resistance. Officials now concede that insurgent forces are closer to 20,000 in number, and are able to call on wide community support in considerable parts of central Iraq.
A spreading insurgency
The casualty, budgetary and recruitment concerns are a serious matter for the US military. For Iraqis themselves, recently increased violence presents equally severe problems. On 14 July, the governor of the northern province of Nineveh, Osama Kashmoula, was assassinated; the same day, ten people died and forty were injured in a Baghdad car bomb near the fortified green zone. The next day, ten people were killed in the bombing of a police station in Haditha. On 17 July, a failed assassination attempt against the justice minister took the lives of four of his guards.
Paul Rogerss new book, a collection of his openDemocracy weekly columns, is A war on terror: Afghanistan and after (Pluto Press); his monthly briefings for the Oxford Research Group (May 2003April 2004) are collected in the organisations international security report for 2004, Iraq and the War on Terror
On 18 July, a senior defence ministry official, Essam al-Dijaili, was murdered in Baghdad. The following days have seen repeated attacks, involving the deaths of four government officials in Baquba and the assassination of a governing council member, Hazim Tawfeek Al-Ainichi, in Basra. This last operation was a further indication of the insurgents sophistication: according to local sources, insurgents seized a checkpoint near his home during a shift change, dressed in police uniforms, shot their victim, and escaped.
Such assassinations are part of a wider process six more councillors in Baghdad have been killed in the past few days, bringing the total number of councillors murdered in recent months to over sixty from a total constituency of councillors in Baghdad of little more than 700.
As the assassinations and car bombs continue, so has economic targeting. In the past two weeks there have been two further pipeline attacks. In northern Iraq, a gas pipeline feeding power stations and a factory producing gas canisters were closed; this was followed by the destruction of another gas pipeline feeding the Baiji power plant.
The persistence of the attacks on gas and oil pipelines is having two immediate effects limiting oil export revenues, so damaging the Allawi administrations revenue base, and further hindering the restoration of power supplies across much of the country.
Beyond even the problems imposed by the American and Iraqi casualties and the economic sabotage, the most significant recent development is the consolidation of Fallujah, a city of 500,000 people, and its surrounding district in the hands of insurgents. Other Sunni towns like Samarra are also effectively no-go areas for US and Allawi forces; much of the Sadr city area of Baghdad, heavily populated by Shia, is under the effective control of militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, working by agreement with local police units.
Fallujah, in particular, has taken on the status of a liberated city, but it is also a city in which insurgent forces can plan, train and develop the equipment and tactics for export to other parts of Sunni central Iraq. In this light, the persistent US air raids appear almost entirely counterproductive in that they do not seem to be limiting the insurgency, but rather further antagonising the Iraqi population as a whole.
The future in the past
In relation to the repeatedly expressed optimism of the past fifteen months, this entire combination of developments suggests an odd sense of history repeating itself.
In the immediate aftermath of the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, the insurgents were described as mere remnants of the old regime that presented little in the way of a long-term problem. Then, in July, the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein was expected greatly to diminish the insurgency. In the autumn, there were reports that the violence was confined to a handful of extended families that had been identified, were under surveillance, and would be brought under control. In December, the detention of Saddam Hussein himself was greeted with confidence that the resistance to the United States would be fatally damaged. Most recently, the transfer of sovereignty to the Allawi regime was heralded as the prelude to a peaceful conversion from militancy to politics.
It is all, in short, eerily reminiscent of the early years of the Vietnam war. Analysts have been reluctant to draw comparisons between those early Vietnam years and Iraq, not least because of fundamental political differences in the two conflicts. In two respects, though continuing false optimism and the potential length of the conflict the similarities are becoming steadily more apparent.
