Written evidence submitted by Dr Toby
Dodge
"IRAQ: THE
ORIGINS OF
THE PRESENT
CRISIS"
Dr Toby Dodge is a Consulting Senior Fellow
at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study
of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick. From
September he will be a lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary, University
of London.
He has recently published Inventing Iraq: the
failure of nation building and a history denied, (New York and
London: Columbia University Press and Hurst & Co, 2003), Iraq
at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change,
(edited with Steven Simon) (London and Oxford: International Institute
for Strategic Studies and Oxford University Press, 2003) and Globalisation
and the Middle East, Islam, Economics, Culture and Politics, (edited
with Richard Higgott) (London and Washington: Royal Institute
of International Affairs and the Brookings Institution, 2002).
Iraq transformed, violence, poverty and war, will be published
early next year by Blackwells.
Before joining Warwick University he worked
with the Middle East Programme at the Royal Institute of International
Affairs, Chatham House, London. His research there focused on
the uses of coercive diplomacy in the post-Cold War world and
the transformation of Iraq under economic embargo and war.
Before working at RIIA he completed a PhD on
Iraqi politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, where he also taught international relations
and Middle Eastern politics for four years.
Toby has carried out research in Iraq both before
and after regime change. He was last there in May 2003.
INTRODUCTION
The only positive thing to have emerged from
the wave of violence that has swept Iraq during April is that
it has put an end to the breezy confidence and up beat briefings
about the country that have personified government attitudes on
both sides of the Atlantic. Instead of arguments about whether
the Iraqi glass is half empty or half full, serious discussions
about reconstruction can now focus on what has gone wrong and
what is needed to increase the likelihood of successful state-building
in Iraq.
With this in mind it is crucial to realize that
the on going violence in Iraq is not the main cause of the coalition's
problems. It is instead a symptom of three longer-term dynamics
that have dogged the occupation since the liberation of Baghdad
on 9 April 2003. The first of these problems, the legacy of Saddam
Hussein's rule, could have been anticipated but could not have
been avoided. The other two problems; the nature of the Coalition
Provisional Authority's interaction with Iraqi society and the
character of the violence faced by coalition forces is the result
of decisions taken since the liberation of Baghdad. A different
long-term strategy and short-term tactics could have avoided these
problems. Overall these three problems, the legacy of Saddam Hussein,
the basis of the CPA's interaction with Iraqi society and the
violence coalition forces are facing means that the occupation,
either on a de facto or de jure basis, will have
to last a great deal longer than 30 June. The continued presence
of large numbers of foreign troops is essential to the successful
creation of order. International oversight is also key to the
stability of Iraq; its role would be to manage the Iraqi polity
while the Iraqi population negotiates the terms of a national
pact. Both these are crucial if the medium-term stability of the
country is to be secured.
The way a modern state attempts to impose order
on a country reshapes both the society it seeks to control but
also the nature of the government itself. For the creation of
a stable, sustainable and hopefully democratic state in Iraq two
things need to be achieved, one short-term, the other long-term.
Firstly and most importantly order has to be imposed on the country.
To date this has simply not happened. Coalition troops have not
been deployed in large enough numbers for this to happen. Instead
a security vacuum has arisen. The chronic lack of law and order
has allowed militias to step into the void. Coalition forces aware
of their comparative vulnerability have either ignored these groups,
sporadically attempted to disarm them or have struck a series
of unstable and short-term compromises with them. The results
of this inconsistency is the violence that occupation forces face
today.
The second much longer-term task for the CPA
is to build legal-rational and transparent links between the nascent
state and Iraqi society. This is going to be an immensely difficult,
time consuming and costly business. It will have to be carried
out against a background of increasing violence and resentment
directed at US and UK forces from within Iraqi society. However
if these two long-term and short-term problems are not solved
then the promises of freedom, stability, and prosperity made to
the Iraqi people by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on
the eve of invasion are set to be broken.
With this in mind, given the scale of the problems
faced, the rising resentment directed at US forces and the US
domestic electoral cycle, a rapid internationalization of the
occupation is called for. This would involve a transfer of both
political and military oversight to a multilateral body, preferably
the United Nations. This would allow for a rapid increase in the
numbers of troops the occupation could deploy while also reducing
the visibility of American forces. It would have the advantage
of giving the occupation access to a much larger pool of technical
expertise in state building. Finally it would go a long way to
reducing the alienation and mistrust felt by growing sections
of the Iraqi population towards US forces and the Coalition Provisional
Authority. It is only by taking this radical step that successful
regime change, that is the building of a stable, democratic and
sustainable state in Iraq, could be achieved.
THE SCALE
OF THE
PROBLEMS FACED:
THE LEGACY
OF SADDAM
HUSSEIN
No civil society
Any attempt to understand the problems faced
by the Coalition Provisional Authority today and any future government
of Iraq has to understand the legacy of Saddam Hussein that they
are striving to overcome. The country that the coalition is struggling
to pacify and reform is in many ways politically distinct, even
amongst the states of the Middle East. Before the liberation of
Baghdad last year it was impossible to talk about civil society
in Iraq. The regime had reshaped or broken all intermediate institutions
between the population and the state.
Iraqi regimes, because of their perceived vulnerability,
domestically, regionally and internationally, have sought to maximize
their autonomy from society, with varying degrees of success.
This autonomy was first supplied in the 1920s and 1930s by British
government aid and since 1958 by increasing oil revenue. This
means that Iraqi regimes have never had to raise large amounts
of tax from or become beholden to domestic interest groups. This
in turn has given the government increasing autonomy to control
and reshape society.
The Baathist regime built under Hasan al Bakr
and then consolidated by Saddam Hussein represented the apex of
this process. It set about using oil revenues to build a set of
powerful state institutions through the 1970s and 1980s. These
managed to reshape society, breaking resistance and atomizing
the population. Since seizing power in 1968 the Baath regime efficiently
used extreme levels of violence and the powers of patronage to
co-opt or break any independent vestiges of civil society. Autonomous
collective societal structures beyond the control of the Baathist
state did not survive. In their place society came to be dominated
by aspects of the "shadow state"1, flexible
networks of patronage and violence that were used to reshape Iraqi
society in the image of Saddam Hussein and his regime.
The atomisation of society and the dependence
of individuals upon the state increased dramatically after 1990-91.
It was the government rationing system that provided food for
the majority of the population in the south and centre of the
country. Under United Nations resolution 986, agreed to by Iraq
in May 1996, Iraq was allowed to import and distribute humanitarian
aid under UN supervision. The food was distributed through 53,000
neighbourhood grocery stores and regulated through a government
controlled ration card.2 Applications to receive a
ration card gave the government crucial information about every
household under its control. The restrictions placed on ration
cards meant individuals could not travel between different areas
of the country and had to pick up their food in the same region
each month. The rationing system became an additional way in which
the regime secured loyalty from and domination over the population.
60% of the populations depended on these handouts for their day-to-day
survival.3
The weakening of state institutions after 1990
However, the nature of the state's domination
of society was transformed under the 13 years of sanctions that
Iraq faced in the aftermath of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The
visible institutions of the state were greatly weakened and ultimately
transformed. The rapid ending of imports and exports after Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait drove annual inflation to levels as high as
500%. The middle class was devastated to the extent that it became
hard to detect as a category. A UN survey for example, estimated
that 63% of professionals were, in the late 1990s, engaged in
menial labour. In the early 1990s import levels fell to well below
countries such as Zaire and Sudan.4
For at least the first seven years of their
imposition the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq proved to be extremely
efficient in that it denied the government in Baghdad access to
large or regular amounts of money. From 1990 government economic
policy was largely reactive, dominated by the short-term goal
of staying in power. With the economy placed under a comprehensive
and debilitating siege, the government sector was largely reduced
to a welfare system distributing limited rations to the population.
The rapid decline in government income not only forced the drastic
reduction of state welfare provision, it also marginalized its
role in the economy.
The result was that under the pressure of sanctions,
the official institutions of the state, with the exception of
the rationing system, retreated from society during the 1990s,
especially in the areas of welfare and education. As part of the
regime's strategy for survival resources were drained from government
ministries. Civil servants, teachers and medical staff had to
manage as best they could; extracting resources from the impoverished
population that depended on their services. Over the 1990s many
professionals left public service either to take their chances
in the private sector or flee into exile.
The legacy faced by the CPA
The legacy of Saddam Hussein's rule has made
the task of the CPA that much harder. The institutions of the
Iraqi state that the US had hoped to inherit in April 2003 were
by that time on the verge of collapse. During March they were
targeted by the third war in 20 years. This, in addition to 13
years of sanctions specifically designed to weaken them and three
weeks of looting in the aftermath of liberation, resulted in their
disintegration. What had been planned as regime change and then
the speedy reform of state institutions was now going to be something
much more costly and long-term. The legacy of Baathist rule, 13
years of sanctions and 20 years of war means that today the CPA
is engaged in an unforeseen process of building a new Iraqi state
from the ground up. By its very nature, this will take much more
time, effort and expertise than was anticipated in the run up
to invasion.
However, the negative legacy of Saddam Hussein's
rule on the Iraqi population, is if anything, even more troublesome.
For the Iraqi population, politics only began on 9 April last
year. The Iraqi political organisations that the CPA are trying
to liaise with have either been in existence for little over a
year or have been imported into the country in the aftermath of
regime change. This means that they have had a very short period
of time to gain the attention of the population and more importantly
win their trust or allegiance. With no indigenous civil society
organizations surviving Saddam's rule, Iraqi politics are today
extremely fluid. The population was largely atomized by 35 years
of Baathist rule. Liberation has certainly led to political mobilization
but at the present juncture this process is tentative, unstable
and highly fractured. No one individual or party has managed to
rally any significant amount of support from the population. This
was starkly borne out by the largest opinion poll ever conducted
in Iraq. In February 2004 Oxford Research International interviewed
2,737 people across Iraq. Although some of the results were broadly
positive for the CPA, others highlighted distinct problems for
the medium-term political stability of the country. When asked
which organisation they would vote for in a national election,
the Shia party, Al-Dawa, received the highest polling figure.
But the support Al Dawa registered was extremely low at only 10%
of those questioned. Other parties that also claim a national
base registered even lower polling figures. The largest percentage
of those polled, 39.2%, answered that they did not know whom they
would vote for. This was closely followed by 34.5% who refused
to answer the question. A similar very low response resulted from
the question: "Which national leader in Iraq, if any, do
you trust the most?" Again Al Dawa's leader Ibrahim Jaaferi
got the highest rating but that was only 7.7% of those questioned.
The more indicative results were 21.1% of those questioned who
answered "none" and the 36.7% of those who did not answer
or were not sure.
In Iraq today the CPA faces a highly mobilised
but largely atomized society that is unrestrained by effective
state institutions or by political parties. Nationwide democratic
elections, both at a local, regional and national level could
result in the structured political mobilization of the population.
This would channel the hopes and aspirations but also the alienation
and anger of the Iraqi people into the political process. It would
tie the population in a transparent and consensual way to political
parties who would be forced to develop a national network but
also a national platform. Political parties, in order to prosper,
would be forced to both be responsive to Iraqi public opinion
but would also, to some extent, be responsible for shaping it.
This process would also link the population, through the parties,
to state institutions. Without such a process, discussions about
handing sovereignty back to the Iraqi people are extremely problematic.
As the Oxford Research International opinion poll indicated, "the
Iraqi people" have not yet given their allegiance to any
individual or party. They feel unrepresented at a national level.
They have little or no affinity with the parties who claim to
speak for Iraq. With this in mind handing sovereignty back to
Iraqis would be dangerous and could, if anything, further increase
the alienation of the Iraqi population from the CPA and the governing
structures it is trying to build.
THE COALITION
PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY'S
INTERACTION WITH
THE IRAQI
PEOPLE
The problems
Against a background of increased violence and
insecurity plans for rebuilding the political and administrative
structures in Iraq appear to have become largely reactive. As
policy has moved to meet a series of challenges it appears that
little attention has been paid to the long-term consequences of
each new initiative. The key problem damaging the occupation and
hindering state building is the difficulty in communication between
the American civil servants stationed in the green zone in downtown
Baghdad and the mass majority of the Iraqi population. It is this
inability to have meaningful interaction with Iraqi society that
is the core problem facing the US. The CPA's relations with Iraqi
society have been undermined by three factors. Firstly from April
2003 onwards the CPA has not had enough Arabic speakers on its
staff. The occupation for many Baghdadis is now painfully personified
by the daily scenes at the green zone's main gate in the centre
of Baghdad. Here hundreds of Iraqis queue up to petition Ambassador
Bremer whose office actually lies three miles beyond the initial
security cordon. Rolls of barbed wire manned by worried American
soldiers confront those who come to seek information from the
CPA or try to explain their grievances. With no Arabic and understandably
fearful for their own safety, these young men invariably control
the Iraqis at the gate by shouting at them in English, cursing
and threatening to use force. The result is frequent and bitter
clashes between a population and their liberators, with both sides
failing to communicate the reasons for their anger and alienation.
The second problem hampering the occupation
is the CPA's continuing lack of expert knowledge about the country
they are trying to control. Within the CPA's headquarters there
are very few experts on Iraqi society, politics or economy. Those
experts who have been posted to Baghdad have tended to be a small
number of British civil servants, usually on six-month postings.
Even this small handful of specialists has had difficulty influencing
the making and implementation of policy.
With this limited expertise on Iraq the coalition
became worryingly dependent upon the small group of Iraqi exiles
it brought back to Baghdad in the aftermath of liberation. They
were meant to provide several functions. First, they would become
the main channel of communication between the wider Iraqi population
and US forces. They would also, in spite of being absent from
the country for many years, become the chief source of information
and guidance for the American administrators struggling to understand
and rebuild the country. Finally, and most importantly, they were
set to become the basis of the new political elite. It was the
exiles that were to form the core of Iraq's new governing classes.
However, this reliance has brought with it distinct problems.
The formerly exiled political parities, dominated by the Iraqi
National Congress, have brought with them a very distinctive view
of Iraqi society. This describes Iraq as irrevocably divided between
sectarian and religious groupings mobilised by deep communal hatreds.
This "primordialization" of Iraq bares little resemblance
to Iraqi society in 2004, but appears to be very influential in
the political planning that has gone on since 9 April 2003.5
The heavy reliance on organisations like the
Iraqi National Accord (INA) and the Iraqi National Congress (INC)
has further exacerbated the divide between Iraqi society and US
forces. Despite setting up numerous offices around Baghdad, publishing
party newspapers and spending large sums of money, the two main
exile groups, the INC and INA have so far failed to put substantial
roots into society. In a series of interviews with a cross section
of Iraqis in Baghdad in May 2003, rich and poor, religious or
secular, I found at best indifference and more usually anger towards
the returned exiles, especially the avowedly secular INC and INA.6
This included one Baghdadi who under Saddam's rule had worked
secretly for one of the exile groups. He was arrested and sentenced
to death, a fate he only avoided, after nine months on death row
in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, because the regime collapsed.
When I asked about the party he nearly lost his life for he replied:
"I would have done anything to see the back of Saddam. But
since the exiles have returned I have been disappointed, I do
not trust them". Off the record many of the more candid formerly
exiled politicians will admit that they themselves have been surprised
by the difficulties they have faced since returning. Instead of
being welcomed they have found a sullen and suspicious population
who have largely refused to offer political loyalty to the newly
returned parties.
The results
The inability of the exiled parties to develop
significant constituencies within Iraq has not stopped the CPA
from using them as the cornerstone of the new governing structures.
This policy appears to have gone through four distinct phases.
Firstly, once Baghdad had been taken, the ex-general Jay Garner
expressed a desire to move quickly to an interim government run
by the formerly exiled politicians who came back to the capital
with the US military. However the movement towards creating a
representative body was hasty and rather ramshackle in nature.
The first two meetings, at Ur near Nassariyah, on 15 March and
then in Baghdad, on 28 April 2003, were designed to draw together
Iraqis in some form of assembly. The meeting at Ur was notable
for those who chose not to attend and the large demonstration
against the meeting outside. This highlighted the small number
of delegates (80) and the veracity of their claims to be representative
of little more than themselves. Although the turnout in Baghdad
was larger at 300, it did not reach the 2,000-3,000 predicted
in advance. The organisers refused to indicate how many had been
invited but did concede that the meeting was "not sufficiently
representative to establish an interim authority".7
The second phase of US approaches to rebuilding
Iraq was marked by one of Ambassador Paul Bremer's first decisions
upon arriving in Baghdad. He decided to put Jay Garner's plans
on hold and delay delegating power to a leadership council mainly
composed of the formerly exiled parties. Given the fluidity of
the situation and the difficulties of engaging the Iraqi population
in a political process in the aftermath of conflict, this appeared
to have been a very astute decision. However, this cautious and
incremental approach was set aside with the advent of the third
plan for building governmental structures. This was heralded by
the CPA, in conjunction with the United Nations, setting up the
Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) in July 2003. This body, picked
by Paul Bremer after extended negotiations between the CPA, the
UN and seven dominant parties, was trumpeted by the CPA as "the
most representative body in Iraq's history". The representative
nature of the IGC does not come from the method of its formation
but instead from the supposedly "balanced" nature of
its membership. The politicians were chosen to approximate the
ethnic make up of Iraq, with 13 members being technically Shia,
five Sunnis, with a Turkoman and a Christian thrown in for good
measure. The nature of this arrangement becomes apparent when
it is realised that Hamid Majid Mousa, the Iraqi Communist Party's
representative and indeed the avowedly secular Ahmed Chalabi himself
are included within the "Shia block" of 13. Is the Marxist
Mr Mousa meant to represent that section of the Shia community
with leftist or secular leanings or is the CPA's designation of
him as a Shia more indicative of the rather strange nature of
the ethnic mathematics used to form the IGC? This sectarian mathematics
was also why the number of cabinet portfolios was increased to
25, so that the spoils of office could be divided up in a similar
fashion.
The confessional basis to choosing the IGC caused
much heated debate in Iraqi political circles and across the newly
liberated press in Baghdad. Arguments focused on the way members
were chosen, for their sectarian affiliation not their technical
skills, and the dangers of introducing divisive confessional dynamics
into the highest level of Iraqi politics. To quote Rend Rahim
Francke, the Iraqi Ambassador-in-waiting to Washington DC:
". . . a quota system based on sect and
ethnicity undermines the hope of forging a common Iraqi citizenship
by stressing communitarian identity and allegiance at the expense
of Iraqi identity . . . anyone who wishes to be involved in the
political process must first advertise an ethnic, sectarian or
at least tribal identity, and play the ethnic and sectarian card.
Proclaiming one's `Iraqiness' is no longer sufficient: one has
to `declare' for a communal identity. This puts Iraq well on the
road to Lebanonization . . ."8
By mid-November 2003 the shortcomings of the
IGC had become apparent to decision makers in both London and
Washington. A fourth change in policy was trailed by a series
of well sourced leaks in the media originating from both Baghdad
and Washington highlighting the inefficiencies of the IGC. The
fact that on average 17 of its 25 members had been out of Iraq
since its formation was used to paint the governing council as
ineffective. This press campaign reached its peak with the recall
of Ambassador Bremer for consultations in Washington. This resulted
in a new plan, a new timetable and the proposal for a new institution
through which Iraqis were to govern themselves.
Pressured by the oncoming electoral cycle in
America and increasing casualties in Iraq, the US government has
sought to radically reduce the length and nature of its political
commitment to Iraq. The new plan endorsed by the IGC on 15 November
2003 called for the drafting of a "fundamental law"
to be followed by the creation of a transitional assembly of anything
between 200 to 500 delegates. It is this assembly that was to
select a cabinet and leader for Iraq and guide the country to
democratic elections. Problematically, although the proposed transitional
assembly was to play such a pivotal role in Iraq's future it was
not to be directly elected. Instead a system of indirect elections
and caucuses were to be held, with town and city leaders "electing"
delegates to the assembly in a series of countrywide town hall
meetings.
This rather rough and ready approach to representation
has not been greeted with universal approval in Iraq. Most importantly,
the senior Shia cleric Marja Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani publically
set himself against the "caucusing" approach, re-stating
his long held and very public position that a constitutional assembly
must be elected by universal suffrage. The Ayatollah's position
had been clearly articulated weeks before Paul Bremer's departure
for Washington in November. The fact that his opposition and its
ramifications were underestimated, points to the continuing difficulties
that the CPA is having in comprehending the dynamics of Iraqi
politics.
The lack of communication between the American
civil servants and military personnel, their handpicked allies
on IGC and the wider population of Iraq is one of the key problems
that has undermined the occupation and the CPA's attempts at state
building. From this inability to interact with Iraqi society springs
the core problems facing the US and those who will inherit Iraq
after 30 June. Intelligence gathering is proving to be difficult
because many Iraqis feel alienated from the CPA. The small number
of Arabic speakers on its staff has undermined the CPA's interaction
with Iraqi society. This has contributed to the CPA's lack of
knowledge about the country they are trying to control. With almost
no experts on Iraq on its staff the coalition became worryingly
dependent upon the small group of Iraqi exiles it brought back
to Baghdad with them. It is from amongst this group that the majority
of the 25 members IGC were selected. However, this reliance has
brought with it distinct problems. Firstly the formerly exiled
politicians have proved to be unpopular. This means that the ICG,
the most likely core of a new government, post 30 June, is detached
from the very people it is meant to represent. This gap between
the political structures left by the departing CPA and the population
does not bode well either for the growth of democracy or for the
vanquishing of the insurgency.
Possible solutions
The whole process of building institutional
and governmental links between the CPA and Iraqi society has been
plagued by the fact that many Iraqis, aware of the increasing
unpopularity of the US presence in their country, and believing
it to be temporary, are still sitting on their hands, eschewing
involvement in government institutions, political and administrative,
until the situation becomes clearer and the risks of political
involvement fewer. Overcoming this problem is the chief concern
of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Iraq, who began his new mission
on 5 April. Early indications suggest that Brahimi may well be
trying to reproduce an Afghan model. This would involve a caretaker
government made up of a prime minister, president and two vice
presidents. Before elections, scheduled for late 2004 or early
2005, this ruling triumvirate would gain legitimacy from a national
conference, to be convened a short time after 30 June.
It is unclear how this plan would overcome the
problems that have undermined the various approaches of the CPA.
Firstly where is Mr Brahimi going to pick the president and prime
minister? It seems very likely that he will be forced to choose
from the core of the ICG, that has to date formed the revolving
presidency of the council. If he does succumb to this temptation
then all the problems that dogged the IGC, its lack of legitimacy,
its inability to forge meaningful links with the population and
criticisms of it being appointed and not elected will resurface.
Secondly because Mr Brahimi, like his predecessor,
Sergio Viera de Mello, is working under the auspices of the CPA
he runs the distinct danger of being perceived of as merely an
appendage to the occupation. With the current poor security situation
the proposed national conference may find it very difficult attracting
a large and representative sample of the Iraqi population. If
this were the case it would be very difficult for it to fulfil
its dual roles as a forum for national consultation and a source
of legitimacy for the new caretaker government. The failure of
a national conference to gather momentum and bring together a
broad cross section of the population would leave the caretaker
government proposed by Mr Brahimi dangerously exposed and open
to similar criticisms and suspicions as those which have been
levelled at the ICG since its formation.
The only way to avoid such pitfalls would be
to internationalise the creation of governing institutions and
democratic structures. This would not mean a partial or token
role for the United Nations, organising national conferences or
overseeing election. Instead it would involve bringing the whole
occupation and state building under United Nations management.
This would reduce the suspicion felt towards the CPA by sections
of the Iraqi population. The organisation overseeing the move
towards the creation of a new state would then not be the United
States but the international community. Accusations of double
standards or nefarious intent would be much harder to sustain.
Arguments about the occupier's willingness to relinquish power
would also be negated. It would be the Security Council in New
York not the US government in Washington that would have ultimate
responsibility for Iraq's transition. This would result in many
more Iraqis viewing the whole exercise with a great deal more
legitimacy. The UN could then utilise expertise and troops from
across the international community. Those involved in reconstruction,
both Iraqis and international civil servants, would then not run
the danger of being labelled collaborators.
Order and violence
The rising unpopularity of a sustained US presence
in Iraq is closely linked to the nature of the order they have
been able to impose on the country since the taking of Baghdad.
For military occupation to be successful the population has to
be overawed by both the scale but also the commitment of the occupiers.
The speed with which US forces removed Saddam Hussein's regime
certainly impressed the Iraqi population. In the immediate aftermath
of 9 April there was little doubt that US military superiority
appeared absolute. But the inability of American forces to control
the looting that swept Baghdad and the continued lawlessness that
haunts the lives of ordinary Iraqis has done a great deal to undermine
that initial impression of American omnipotence.
Troop numbers and tactics have hampered the
nature and quality of the law and order that American troops have
been able to enforce in the aftermath of the cease-fire. In the
run up to war Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki in a Senate hearing
called for "hundreds of thousands" of troops to guarantee
order. The RAND corporation, in a widely cited study on state
building, published in the run up to the invasion, compared US
interventions in Germany, Japan, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
It concluded that occupying forces would need between 400,000
and 500,000 to impose order on Iraq.9 At the moment
there are only 137,000 US troops attempting to impose order on
the country, this is clearly not enough to achieve the type of
sustainable order state building requires.
The understandable tactics adopted by US troops,
a combination of heavily armed motorised patrols and large fortified
bases, means that the military presence became detached and largely
remote from the Iraqi population. As the daily toll of US casualties
mounts American forces are increasingly perceived of as weak and
their presence in and commitment to the country as temporary.
This general impression helps to explain why Baath loyalists began
to reorganise in the spring of 2003 and why the remnants of Saddam's
security services, sensing an opportunity to take advantage of
US force vulnerability, began launching hit and run attacks with
increasing frequency and skill.
Understanding the insurgency
A homogeneity of viewpoint in explaining the
causes of both the insurgency and the large-scale terrorist attacks
in Iraq appears to have developed amongst senior staffers in the
US administration. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been keen to stress that resistance
is neither monolithic nor nationwide. He argues that 90% of the
incidents are in the so-called "Sunni triangle" of northwest
Iraq, running from Baghdad north to Mosul and west to the Jordanian
border.10 Washington has been keen to portray the violence
as the work of regime "hold-outs", die-hard Saddam loyalists
who may have formed utilitarian alliances with radical Islamists
from across the Middle East.11 The logic of this argument
is that the violence is highly unrepresentative of Iraqi popular
opinion, geographically located in a comparatively small area
of the country and politically limited to those fanatical enough
or unintelligent enough not to realise that the old regime is
dead and buried and that opposition to the new, US sponsored,
world is futile.
However, the violence dogging the occupation
springs from three separate sources with a host of causes beyond
the "fanatical hold-outs" of the old regime. The first
group undermining law and order are "industrial scale"
criminal gangs operating in the urban centres of Basra, Baghdad
and Mosul. It is organised crime that makes the everyday lives
of Iraqi city dwellers so precarious. These groups, born in the
mid-1990s when Saddam's grip on society was at its weakest, have
been revitalised by the lawlessness of present day Iraq. Capitalising
on readily available weapons, the weaknesses of a new and hastily
trained police force and the CPA's shortage of intelligence about
Iraqi society, they prey on middle class Iraqis, car jacking,
housebreaking, murdering and kidnapping. It is groups like these
that make the roads surrounding Baghdad so dangerous, regularly
attacking foreign workers.
The second group involved in violence is, as
the CPA argues, the remnants of the Baath regime's security services.
Sensing the vulnerability of occupation forces they began launching
hit and run attacks on US troops in May and have increased the
frequency, skill and geographic scope with which they are carried
out. Two things must be understood about the genesis of the insurgency.
First, the likelihood of a "hidden hand" co-ordinating
and funding it from its outset is very doubtful. Research I carried
out in Iraq at the outset of the insurgency paints a much more
fractured if not organic picture of the forces arrayed against
the US. The networks and personnel now pursuing the insurgency
appear to have been reconstituted through personal, family and
geographic ties in the months after 9 April not in response to
a master plan developed in the run up to the invasion. Paul Bremer's
decision, upon his arrival in Baghdad, to dissolve the army on
23 May and embark on root and branch de-Baathification on 16 May
2003, contributed to the personal organisation of the insurgency.
Baathists in late May felt under attack and vulnerable. The CPA
edicts in conjunction with a spate of assassinations by radical
Shia groups gave them the motivation to reorganise. It was only
by the spring of 2004 that evidence began to emerge that a national
organisation was beginning to co-ordinate the actions of the disparate
groups involved in the insurgency.
The second factor supporting the insurgency
is the coherence of the security networks that guaranteed Saddam's
survival in power for so long. The "Sunni triangle"
is often talked about as an homogenous block of insurgency supporters,
offering material and ideological comfort to the fighters. What
is not understood is that the "shadow state", the flexible
networks of patronage and violence that were used to reshape Iraqi
society in the image of Saddam Hussein and his regime, is still
functioning coherently in the north west of Iraq.12
The same individuals who intimidated and demobilised Iraqi society
in the north west under the Baath regime are still there today
and can be expected to be carrying out their allotted function.
The result of these two factors is the insurgency
today. The weaknesses of intelligence on the US side means American
forces have a partial understanding of who is killing them, who
is organising the insurgency and what its relations with the wider
community are. The repeated large-scale swoops through north west
Iraq by US troops, Operation Peninsula Strike, Operation Sidewinder
and Operation Soda Mountain, may have resulted in the capture
of large amounts of munitions, but they have also been accompanied
by the deployment of large numbers of troops, mass arrests and
widespread house searches. This has done little to stem the tide
of violence. Without accurate, time sensitive intelligence and
local knowledge such raids do, slowly, locate the remaining key
players of Saddam's ruling elite. But in the process they also
alienate large sections of the population in the targeted areas.
Large numbers of arrests and detentions are bound to fuel resentment
and swell the ranks of the violently disaffected.
The final source of violence is certainly the
most worrying for the CPA and the hardest to deal with. This can
be usefully characterised as Iraqi Islamism, with both Sunni and
Shia variations. Fuelled by both nationalism and religion it is
certainly not going to go away and provides an insight into the
mobilising dynamics of future Iraqi politics. An early indication
of the cause and effect of this phenomenon can be seen in the
town of Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad. In spite of assertions
to the contrary, Iraqis did not regard Falluja, prior to the war,
as a "hotbed of Baathist activity".13 On
the contrary, Falluja had a reputation in Iraq as a deeply conservative
town, famed for the number of its mosques and its adherence to
Sunni Islam.14 In the immediate aftermath of regime
change Iraqi troops and Baath Party leaders left the town. Imams
from the local mosques stepped into the socio-political vacuum,
bringing an end to the looting, even managing to return some of
the stolen property.15
The fact that this town became a centre of violent
opposition to US occupation so soon after liberation is explained
by Iraqis I interviewed as a result of heavy-handed searches carried
out by US troops in the hunt for leading members of the old regime.
Resentment escalated when two local Imam's were arrested.16
Events reached a climax when US troops broke up a demonstration
with gunfire resulting in reports of seventeen Iraq fatalities
and 70 wounded.
The repeated violation of the private sphere
of Iraqi domestic life by US troops searching for weapons and
fugitives has caused recurring resentment across Iraq, especially
when combined with the seizure of weapons and money. It has to
be remembered that as brutal as Saddam's regime was, it never
sought to disarm the Iraqi population. The deaths of six British
soldiers in June 2003 in the southern town of Majar al Kabir,
although almost certainly carried out by Shias, can also be explained
in a similar fashion. It was preceded by a British army operation
designed to recover weapons by searching houses. The resentment
this caused erupted when a heavy deployment of British troops
was replaced by a small number of lightly armed military police.
The insurgency changes tactics
The explosions in Baghdad and Karbala that greeted
the signing of Transitional Administrative law in the first week
of March 2004 marked a new phase in the insurgency. This was a
response to the CPA's plans to hand over the provision of security
to the nascent Iraqi army and police force. This new and destabilising
phase of violence is designed to make Iraq ungovernable either
by the US or a new Iraqi government. Terrorism is now being deployed
with the twin aims of exacerbating sectarian tensions whilst at
the same time seeking to stop the growth in indigenous governing
structures designed to replace the occupation.
As US troops took a less public role and began
to be redeployed to more secure bases, the insurgents have sought
out more accessible target. The embryonic institutions and personnel
of the new Iraqi state provided these. This change in tactics
was heralded by the attack on three police stations in Baghdad
on the same day in October last year. Since then this method has
been extended in its geographical scope and ferocity, using car
bombs to target police stations in Khalidyah in western Iraq,
Mosul in the north and Iskandariya and Hillah south of Baghdad.
These attacks, along with a devastating car bomb assault on an
army-recruiting centre in Baghdad that killed 53 people in February,
are designed not only to discourage Iraqis from working for the
new state but also to stop the growth of its institutions. They
undermine attempts to deliver to the Iraqi population what they
have been demanding since the fall of the Baath regime: law and
order.
However the second tactic adopted by insurgents
has the potential to be even more damaging to Iraq's long-term
stability. By targeting the large crowds that gathered to commemorate
the Shia festival of Ashura in Baghdad and Karbala, the perpetrators
of the attacks on 2 March were attempting to trigger a civil war
between Iraq's different communities. This approach first became
apparent on 29 August 2003 with the car bomb at the Imam Ali mosque
in Najaf. In February 2004 this tactic was extended to the Kurdish
areas of Iraq when two suicide bombers killed 101 people in Irbil
at the offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan.
Prominent Iraqi politicians were keen to blame
the rise in car bombing, civilian casualties and the resulting
sectarian tension on outside forces. But there is a danger that
they have tended to overstate their case. The efficiency of these
attacks, their regularity and the speed with which they were organised
in the aftermath of Saddam's fall all point to a large amount
of Iraqi involvement. The shadowy organisation behind these sectarian
attacks is much more likely to be a hybrid, with elements of the
old regime acting in alliance with indigenous Islamic radicals
and a small number of foreign fighters. This potent mix has allowed
mid-ranking members of the old regime to deploy their training
and weapons stockpiles. They have sought to ally themselves with
a new brand of Islamic nationalism, seeking to mobilise Sunni
fears of Shia and Kurdish domination and a growing resentment
at foreign occupation. Although the use of indiscriminate violence
has alienated the vast majority of Iraqi public opinion across
all sections of society the carnage it has produced has been a
major set back for state building and stability.
The results of insecurity
The inability of the CPA to impose law and order
on Iraq has created a security vacuum across the whole of the
country. This has given rise to another destabilising and very
worrying dynamic that may come to dominate post-occupation Iraqi
politics. Militias have stepped into the security vacuum further
adding to instability and insecurity. In a country where automatic
weapons are widely available and most men have had military training
and many have seen active service, the organisation of militias
is comparatively straight forward. The months since liberation
has seen a plethora of armed groups taking to the streets, increasingly
organised along sectarian lines. The inconsistent application
of CPA disarmament edicts, allowing Kurdish militias to retain
their arms while demanding that certain Shia ones cannot, has
led to the militias filling the social space formally occupied
by central government. Although these militias enjoy little popular
support their very existence is testament to the inability of
the CPA to guarantee the personal safety of the Iraqi population.
Clearly the establishment of countrywide order
is essential for the successful creation of a stable state. It
is also evident that more troops and policemen are needed for
this to happen. What the events of the last two weeks have highlighted
is that the nascent forces of the newly formed Iraqi army and
police force are unable or unwilling to impose order. With the
speed with which these forces were created is was perhaps overly
optimistic to put such a large burden upon them with such haste.
However, it is clear that US forces have also become a target
of resentment and nationalist mobilisation. More troops are needed
but of a different type. If the occupation were internationalised,
a UN force, would not be such a potent target of anger and suspicion.
They could provide the numbers of troops on the ground needed
for the provision of order.
Conclusions
It is hard to over-estimate what is at stake
in Iraq today. The removal of Saddam Hussein has proved to be
the beginning not the culmination of a long and very uncertain
process of occupation and state building. The lawlessness and
looting that greeted the liberation of Baghdad on 9 April 2003
has evolved into a self-sustaining dynamic that combines violence,
instability and profound uncertainty. US troops now face an insurgency
that has managed to extend its geographic impact, while increasing
the level of violence and the capacity for destruction and instability.
Against this background the failure of American
attempts to replace Saddam Hussein's regime with a stable, sustainable
and hopefully liberal government would have major consequences
far beyond Iraq, the region or indeed the United States itself.
The failure of regime consolidation in Iraq for the Middle East
would be very problematic. The importance of Iraq to the geo-political
stability of the Gulf and the wider Middle East area can hardly
be overestimated. Geographically it sits on the eastern flank
of the Arab Middle East with Turkey and Iran as neighbours. Although
its population is considerably smaller than both of its non-Arab
neighbours, it is larger than any of the bordering Arab states.
With oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia its economic importance
is clearly global. If the present domestic situation does not
stabilise then violence and political unrest would be expected
to spread across Iraq's long and porous borders. A violently unstable
Iraq, bridging the mashreq and the Gulf would further weaken the
already fragile domestic and regional stability of the surrounding
states and the wider region beyond. Iraq's role as a magnet for
radial Islamists from across the Muslim world, eager to fight
US troops on Middle Eastern soil, would increase. In addition
there is a distinct danger that neighbouring states would be sucked
into the country, competing for influence, using Iraqi proxies
to violently further their own regime's interests.
With this in mind and given the social and political
legacy of Saddam Hussein's rule it is unfair but also unrealistic
to ask one country to bear the major burden of rebuilding the
state. No one country, even the world's sole remaining super power,
has the resources and expertise to finish the job at hand alone.
The rebuilding of Iraq is an international problem and should
be given to the international community to handle.
Dr Toby Dodge
| 1 | See Charles Tripp, "After Saddam", Survival, Vol 44, No 4, Winter 2002-03, p 26.
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| 2 | Amatzia Baram, Building Towards Crisis: Saddam Husayn's Strategy for Survival, Policy Paper No 47, (Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East policy, 1998), p 73.
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| 3 | Frederick D. Barton and Bathsheba Croker, "Winning the Peace in Iraq", The Washington Quarterly, Spring 2003, Vol 26, No 2, p 10.
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| 4 | See Peter Boone, Haris Gazdar and Athar Hussain, "Sanctions against Iraq: Costs of Failure", a paper given at "Frustrated Development: the Iraqi Economy in War and in Peace," conference, University of Exeter, Centre for Gulf Studies in collaboration with the Iraqi Economic Forum, July 1997, p 10.
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| 5 | See Isam al Khafaji, "A Few Days After: State and Society in a Post-Saddam Iraq", in Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change, (edited by Toby Dodge and Steven Simon) (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies and Oxford University Press, 2003).
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| 6 | This finding is supported by the opinion poll conducted during February 2004 by Oxford Research International. Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad Alawi both respectively registered 0.2% of those questioned when asked "Which national leader in Iraq, if any, do you trust the most?" Another opinion poll carried out on June 2003 by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies found "that only 15.1% of Iraqis polled in Baghdad said that the political parties in Iraq represented their interests. Approximately 63% of those surveyed preferred a technocratic government, rather than one based upon political parties." See Puneet Talwar and Andrew Parasiliti, 108th Congress, 1st Session, Committee print, "Iraq: meeting the challenge, sharing the burden, staying the course, A trip report to members of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate", p 9.
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| 7 | Jonathan Steele, "Delegates agree new talks on government", The Guardian, 29 April 2003.
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| 8 | Rend Rahim Francke, "Iraq Democracy Watch: on the Situation in Iraq", September 2003. (http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/isept/26—democracy—watch.html).
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| 9 | See James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel Swanger and Anga Timilsina, America's role in nation-building: from Germany to Iraq, RAND, http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1753/MR1753.pref.pdf.
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| 10 | transcription of Fox News, 6 July 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,91170,00.html.
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| 11 | George W Bush, "President Addresses the Nation", Address of the President to the Nation, The Cabinet Room, 7 September 2003, and Testimony as Delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Director, Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten, and Acting Chief of Staff, US Army, General John Keane, Tuesday, 29 July 2003.
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| 12 | For more information on this see Toby Dodge, "US intervention and possible Iraqi futures", Survival, Vol 45, No 3, August 2003.
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| 13 | See Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defence, General Peter Pace, USMC, Vice Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, Alan Larson, Assistant Secretary of State for Economics, Business and Agricultural Affairs, testimony before the Senate Foreign Committee, 2:35, pm, Thursday 22 May 2003.
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| 14 | This is based on interviews carried out by the author in Baghdad in late May last year.
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| 15 | See Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, 6 May 2003.
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| 16 | See Jonathan Steele reporting from Falluja, The Guardian, 30 April 2003.
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