Nir Rosen - Aftermath

In July 2009 an internal memorandum written by Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, was leaked. Reese urged the Americans to declare victory and go home: “Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission.” Since the Status of Forces Agreement was signed with the Iraqis, and the June 30 handover of security to the Iraqis took effect, it was clear to Reese that the Americans were no longer wanted. “Prime Minister (PM) Maliki hailed June 30th as a ‘great victory,’ implying the victory was over the U.S.,” Reese wrote. He worried that the longer the Americans remained, the more likely violence would break out between them and the Iraqi government that could “rupture the current partnership.” Reese then detailed the “general lack of progress in essential services and good governance,” including widespread corruption and the refusal to follow commitments to integrate Sunnis into the system.

“The GOI and the ISF will not be toppled by the violence as they might have been between 2006 and 2008,” Reese wrote. Shiite violence could be controlled and Al Qaeda’s influence was insignificant except “when they get lucky with a mass casualty attack.” The Americans were now being targeted in order to send messages to Maliki. Violence was part of a political competition, but “there is no longer any coherent insurgency or serious threat to the stability of the GOI posed by violent groups.” Reese called for an early withdrawal of all American troops by August 2010.

The memo was a strange epitaph for a failed occupation. The Americans were able to defeat Saddam’s army in 2003, but they could not establish control. Militias took over instead. As the country descended into civil war, the Americans devolved power to Iraqi security forces little better than death squads. It was only in 2007 that they finally conquered Iraq, with the help of stronger Iraqi Security Forces, but chiefly thanks to the Shiite defeat of the Sunnis in the civil war. The American surge of troops came at just the right time, and they proved flexible enough to take advantage of events on the ground. The subsequent relative decline in violence was meant to lead to political reconciliation, but it never happened. Instead, the Shiite-dominated government merely asserted its control and marginalized or co-opted its opponents. Iraq would hold, even if it remained corrupt and authoritarian. The puppets installed by the occupier were increasingly recalcitrant, and American officials complained about losing their “leverage” or being treated with hostility by the Iraqi government and its security forces. Just as they weren’t welcomed with flowers and candies, as the advocates of the war predicted, so too will their departure be ignominious.

One day in late February 2010, a few weeks before the March 7 elections in Iraq, I drove south from Baghdad to Iskandariya to see my friend Hazim, a jovial NGO worker, whom I had met on a trip to the town a year earlier. Iskandariya, a majority-Shiite town straddling the key road leading south to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, had been hammered especially hard by the violence of Iraq’s civil war: pilgrims headed to Karbala were often ambushed on the road through town, and the area had seen fierce battles between Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army.

Hazim recalled the worst phases of the civil war: “People couldn’t go out of their houses. When Al Qaeda was strong, Shiites couldn’t go out on the street. Then the Shiites got strong, and Sunnis couldn’t go out on the street.” But all that was now in the past. Iraqi and American forces had arrested members of armed groups in the town during Operation Fard al-Qanun (Rule of Law), the Iraqi name for what Americans called the surge. “The state is strong here now,” Hazim told me. “The government is strong. You can’t even fire a shot in the air now; the police will come in two minutes.”

A year earlier Ali Zahawi, Iskandariya’s chief of police, made an interesting observation to me. “Iskandariya is a small Iraq,” he said. “It connects south to north. It went through very hard times: Al Qaeda was the first phase; then militias who did the same thing as Al Qaeda, killing and displacement; and the third stage was operation Imposing Law [The Surge].” Now he warned of a fourth stage in the battle. Al Qaeda and Mahdi Army men, he said, were falsely implicating their enemies to the courts and getting them arrested.

There were still active militias in Iraq, and the level of violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign analysts and reporters—that the civil war was merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks or an unfavorable election result—were overblown. The threat of civil war no longer seemed to loom; the country was decidedly not “unraveling,” as many continued to suggest. Armed militias had not been eliminated, but they had been emasculated: they carried out assassinations with silenced pistols and magnetic car bombs, but they were no match for the Iraqi Security Forces, which had shed their reputation as sectarian death squads and appeared to have earned the support of much of the public. Apart from the occasional suicide bombing, Iraqi civilians were no longer targeted at random—and even the more spectacular attacks had little to no strategic impact.

As worldwide attention returned to Iraq in the run-up to the March 7 elections, a new chorus of concerns emerged. Many worried that the corrupt maneuvering of some Shiite parties—which banned prominent nationalist and secularist candidates under the thin pretense of de-Baathification—would lead to a Sunni boycott and then renewed sectarian violence and war. But just as the dismantling of the Sunni Awakening groups in 2009 failed to produce the disaster many analysts predicted, the results of the elections seemed unlikely to stoke the embers of a new insurgency.

The continued sectarian exhortations of Iraqi politicians were met with cynicism by the public, whose support for religious parties had diminished considerably. Iraqis were still “sectarian” to a degree: most Shiites preferred the company of Shiites and Sunnis the company of Sunnis. The vitriol and hatred of the war had faded, but a legacy of bitterness and suspicion remained. Gone was the fear of the other—and it was this fear that led to the rise of the militias and sectarian religious parties.

A year later, during my travels in Iraq that February—in the capital and, more important, in the surrounding provinces of Diyala, Babil, and Salahuddin—I found Sunnis and Shiites alike talking of the civil war as if it were a painful memory from the distant past. Just as the residents of Northern Ireland refer obliquely to “the Troubles,” Iraqis spoke of “the Events” or “the Sectarianism”—as in, “My brother was killed in the Sectarianism.” Uneducated Iraqis might even say, “When the Sunni and Shiite happened.”

The looming election—signposted in the foreign media as a critical “turning point” liable to wreck the fragile gains of the previous two years—seemed to be of little interest to most Iraqis, who were disenchanted with the pitiful performance of their political leaders and the tired rhetoric of sectarian religious parties.

In Shuwafa, a Shiite village alongside a canal west of Iskandariya, I met a schoolteacher named Akil, who had led a Shiite Awakening group that battled Al Qaeda after the ethnic cleansing of the village in 2006. He and his men had laid down their weapons the year before—after a portion of their salaries had been siphoned off by official corruption—but he said the security situation had improved dramatically. “The Awakening is over,” he told me. “The Iraqi army is here, with two Hummers, so we feel safe. And nearby there is an army base.” Akil had returned to teaching biology to children.