Losing Iraq

These are decisive days for the coalition and their local allies in Iraq. United States and even the occasional British commander talk about the “tipping-point”, the latest military cliché nicked from Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller about the little things that turn tides of history.

The commanders would do better by sticking to the more precise terminology of their own military science and training. They mean that the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq is reaching a “decision-point” and the “culminating-point” of the whole coalition effort is only months away at most.

In plain English, these are decisive days for the US-British alliance in Iraq. The success or failure of their entire enterprise there will soon be decided. And this will have global consequences, for this war against Saddam has turned Iraq into vital strategic ground.

Who are the insurgents?

The biggest threat to the coalition now is the unpredictable insurgency by the former members of the Ba’ath party and the Iraqi armed forces - police, militia, army and Republican Guards. They are fighting with new improved and unpredictable tactics and using old weapons with a new sophistication. Roadside bombs are triggered with deadly precision by wire-guided systems fired from carefully-prepared observation points. Ambushes are now being laid after careful reconnaissance – it was a roadside ambush on a patrol of soft-skinned Land Rovers which claimed the lives of two British soldiers on 28 September - the 67th and 68th to die in combat in Iraq since the start of conflict on 19 March 2003.

British and American commanders in Baghdad say they do not know who is directing the rebellion by the former loyalists of the regime – or even if they are being led in any formal sense at all. “They appear to be a loose collection of units with plenty of arms,” Lieutenant-General John McColl explained during a recent visit by General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British army.

Earlier this year it had been thought that the campaign was being masterminded by General Izzat Ibrahim ad-Duri, Saddam’s commander in northern Iraq, the most senior non-Tikriti in his gang and the hammer of the Kurds with chemical weaponry.

But ad-Duri, a bizarre mole-like figure with unlikely tufts of red hair in his picture in the Americans’ pack of “wanted - dead or alive” playing-cards, is known to be extremely sick from kidney failure. Usually reliable Arab journalists in the region say he is now probably dying in Syria.

Tony Blair has depicted the insurgency as Iraq’s second war. However he describes it, he must have known that a sustained guerrilla campaign was likely even before British and American forces went into action eighteen months ago. The Israelis had warned that elements of the military were, three months earlier in January 2003, preparing arms caches and burying huge amounts of ammunition in the desert.

During the advance on Baghdad by the US marines and 3rd infantry division, surveillance satellites were recording Iraqi forces burying artillery pieces, tanks and fighter aircraft in containers deep in the desert. Furthermore, British and American military knew that the ground war was not going according to script within thirty-six hours of crossing into Iraq. “I realised that the enemy was not fleeing in front of us”, a trooper from the Royal Tank Regiment remarked, “they were attacking us from behind as well.”

The al-Zarqawi factor

Intelligence on the identity and numbers of the insurgents is thin. Both the Americans and British say they still have few reliable Arabic speakers and there appears to have been almost no infiltration of the cells and commandos of the Ba’ath party and militias or the jihadi fighters following the banner of Ali Musab al-Zarqawi and affiliates of al-Qaida. Of four political advisers I met recently in different British commands in Baghdad and southern Iraq, not one was an Arabic speaker.

The partnership between what the coalition calls “former regime elements” (FREs) is as unlikely as it is deadly. The Ba’athists want “to return to the familiar regime of greed as before”, says a British commander. The followers of al-Zarqawi preach the bloody preparation for a new era of rule according to Islamic law and custom, their version of jihad. For Tony Blair this makes Iraq today the new “crucible of terrorism” and the key front in his and George Bush’s “war on terror”.

Each week on openDemocracy, Paul Rogers tracks the latest developments in the “war on terror” – from Iraq and Afghanistan to Washington itself

Close examination of the phenomenon of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his claims, deeds and aspirations, underline how particular and local is the conflict in Iraq. Certainly there are foreign fighters in Iraq – al-Zarqawi himself is Jordanian after all. The Dutch police and special forces have arrested commandos of al-Qaida sympathisers crossing from Saudi Arabia. A new jihadi cell has been identified operating out of Fallujah under the command of a Saudi militant operating under the name Abu Usamah; and the borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran are to put it mildly, porous.

However, the jihadis who recruit and direct the suicide-bombers depend on the former regime rebels for most of their firepower and ordnance. The majority of the recent suicide car-bombs consist of standard Iraqi army artillery shells and mortars lashed together and triggered by a fuse attached to a small charge of conventional military explosive. The former regime diehards may be directing the tactics of the bombers, too. In four days in mid-September no fewer than ten suicide-bombs were detonated in and around Baghdad. In one case, a first bomb exploded in Haifa street and a second was triggered minutes later to hit the American and Iraqi police rescue-party.

American patrol commanders like Lieutenant Dave Robison whom I met at Checkpoint 12 at the entrance to the protected international “green zone” at the heart of Baghdad are told how to spot the suicide-bomber. “They are single males, shaven and wearing a white robe to show they have undergone the religious ceremony to prepare to die.” However, one of the recent suicide-bombers blew himself up in a car in which he was carrying his wife and young children as passengers, judging by the human remains found at the scene in the immediate aftermath.

The figure of al-Zarqawi himself is a puzzle. He is described as a supporter of al-Qaida, and in the Bush-Blair pantheon of villains the next worst figure after Osama bin Laden himself. However, even the most cursory look at his two so-called manifestos this year show how locally connected he is to the conflict in Iraq and how much this diverges from the more universal messages of jihad and Islamic rule of bin Laden and his chief thinker Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Al-Zarqawi’s latest bayan (statement), published on 12 September 2004, repeats earlier denunciations of the “heretical alliance” of the Americans, the coalition forces, the Kurds, and the Iraqi Shi’a. Far from being a supporter of bin Laden’s aim of a new era of Islamic rule, al-Zarqawi seems determined to foment civil war in Iraq involving Kurds and Shi’a. In one perspective he is Iraq’s very own mutant neo-conservative.

Yet several educated, secular Iraqis and Arabs I know think al-Zarqawi’s profile – as advertised in the western media - is largely a figment of American and CIA propaganda. However outlandish, this widespread view has a genuine political currency that illustrates the yawning gap between the perceptions of the American-led west and the Arab street.

The Allawi factor

A similar misapprehension may underlie the American coalition policy towards its two favourite Shi’a in Iraq, Iyad Allawi and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Neither can deliver the solution the Bush team desires. For Allawi to deliver two sets of elections over the next year, he has to roll several double-sixes. He will have to manage credible elections for a constituent assembly in January 2005. If he delays, he is sunk. But the state of lawlessness in parts of Baghdad, Fallujah, possibly Najaf and Samarra, means that at least 20% of the electorate will not be able to vote. According to the latest straw polls, about half the remaining electorate in central Iraq will be too terrified to go out on the streets on polling day.

Allawi’s swashbuckling style, more inclined to fire than hire, alarms many middle-class Iraqis – some see in him a Saddam-like tendency to autocracy. But he is cunning and tough, and an attested survivor. Certainly he will outlast Saddam Hussein, his one-time ally, oppressor and sponsor of his attempted murder during his exile in London in 1974. Saddam will be tried soon, and if the Iraqi court has its way is likely to face the death penalty – however incalculable the political consequences.

Allawi’s future now depends on the simple calculation of whether he can generate sufficiently credible and effective security forces of his own, principally in Iraq’s new national guard and police service, to get him through to the end of 2005 and the second set of elections, the general election for the new government and assembly. It is a difficult call, but he will know if he can succeed or not by March-April 2005.

The lessons of Najaf

So far, the reviews of the new Iraqi forces are mixed. Major-General David Petraeus, now in charge of coalition operations in Baghdad, believes that three out of four of the National Guard units did well in fighting the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf in August, but the police have been found wanting on several occasions. When al-Sadr’s men started fighting in the centre of Basra in early August, one police unit joined forces with them. The latest revelation that a general in charge of the national guard in the Diyala region was arrested on 23 September for contacting the Ba’athist insurgents is hardly reassuring to Allawi and his supporters.

The coalition aims to have 250,000 national guard and police fully trained by the summer. Apart from the difficulty of training, the shortage of adequate equipment – radios, vehicles, body-armour - is giving a lot of the British and American trainers serious jitters, particularly since the insurgents themselves have ready access to lethal equipment. “We keep turning up caches of arms all over the place”, a British officer told me, “and there is an armoured division’s worth of weapons and ammunition completely unaccounted for.”

The Americans and British are now betting heavily that the senior Shi’a cleric Ali Sistani can use his influence to get the majority of the Shi’a community to support elections, the interim Iraqi government security forces, and a new government – and in the process keep the firebrand cleric al-Sadr quiet. After all, it was Sistani who, via his envoys, persuaded al-Sadr’s forces to stop fighting in Najaf and Basra when he returned from heart surgery in London in late August. If the venerable cleric could do it then, runs the coalition logic, he can do it again and get the Shi’a community as a whole to back the Allawi programme for a constituent assembly and the general election based on the new constitution.

The problem with this simple piece of reasoning is that the Shia community in Iraq rarely if ever does anything as a whole, and to expect Sistani to now become the great constitutional deliverer is fundamentally to misconstrue his role. One of the four grand ayatollahs of the Iraqi Shi’a, Sistani is a spiritual figure who believes that as such he and his like should stay out of politics.

In this sense he is doctrinally at the opposite end of the spectrum from the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, architect of the Islamic Republic of Iran. On the question of spiritual and secular rule (wilayat alfaqih) Sistani believes that the authority of clerics and scholars is spiritual, whereas Khomeini believed it was his moral and spiritual duty to guide and ensure Islamic governance and law. Sistani will resist attempts to drag him into contested elections, for fear of undermining his spiritual authority.

Until Ali Sistani persuaded the Mahdi militia to stop fighting, British forces had been enduring a hectic month in both Basra and Amara. In August alone they fired nearly 100,000 rounds of small arms ammunition and 1,218 mortar rounds. In the fighting three British soldiers were killed and some forty injured; most of the latter were able to return to duty. “We did manage to get a governor elected and take over in Basra, and three local elections, and get the schools open for the autumn”, says Major General Bill Rollo, in charge of the coalition forces in south-eastern Iraq. Turnout at the elections in az-Zubayr was 10-15%.

Coalition commanders in the south, as in north and central Iraq, are worried that the general level of criminality, plus the lack of jobs and the moribund economy, can provide a limitless supply of young recruits for the radicals. In the south there is the additional dimension of “the Iranian influence”. To decry Iranian funding and influence on southern Iraqi Shi’a political parties and communities is rather like criticising the weather. Whatever the influence in manpower, funding and propaganda, very little is centrally directed from Tehran or Qom.

The road to civil war?

A young colonel on the British staff in Basra made one of the shrewdest observations about the current predicament of Iraq. “The disbanding of the Iraqi army and the purging of all Ba’athists has been a huge mistake, from which it is going to be hard to recover.” In this, Iyad Allawi and his staff would wholeheartedly concur – one of whom is reported as saying that in their way “(Paul) Bremer and (Ricardo) Sanchez did as much damage to Iraq as Saddam in the last twelve years.” But the young British colonel said he thought the error had been compounded by the abuses and torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib; “it is hard to recover moral ground after that.”

The coalition and Allawi will know if the point has tipped in their favour within a few months. The omens are not good as the rebel factions of the old army and the Ba’ath party militias grow stronger. For Allawi the only chance for survival may be to turn back to his roots – despite his falling out with Saddam he still sees himself as an old-fashioned Ba’athist, an Arab nationalist and a socialist in the Nasser mould. He will probably have to strike a deal with the last-ditch rebels by pledging that if elected he will demand that the coalition forces withdraw and leave the Iraqis to find their own messy Iraqi solution.

This is not idle speculation – several senior British commanders are expecting this is the most likely outcome, which will see UK forces withdrawing from Iraq in 2005. The outlook is hardly rosy – because a deal with the Ba’ath rebels is likely to be a trigger for a three-way civil war. However Allawi tries to make the deal, it is unlikely that the Kurds in the north and the pro-Iranian Shi’a parties will allow dictatorship by a Sunni-dominated military oligarchy in Baghdad again.

In short, the coming months will be decisive for the future of Iraq, and perhaps a time also for adventures in Iran – that remains an issue of choice. As for the increasingly precarious position in Afghanistan, the British may be obliged to become more involved there in 2005. Indeed, in the conflicts of our times the lands of the Hindu Kush seem destined to be crucial strategic ground for many years to come – perhaps far longer than Iraq despite that country’s present trauma.