Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Since the beginning of the Iraq War, American planners and observers had been preoccupied with the consequences of decisive singular events—from the arrest of Saddam Hussein to the battle for Falluja and the previous rounds of national and provincial elections. At each easily identifiable juncture, exaggerated claims were advanced by those in search of a turning point, whether for the better or for the worse.

The elections of March 7 were the first to be held in a formally sovereign Iraq, and they did represent a milestone in the country’s political evolution. Maliki remained a popular candidate, supported by Iraqis for having crushed both Sunni and Shiite armed groups, but his list came a close second to Allawi’s Iraqiya list, which was a surprise after his dismal performance in 2005. Even though Allawi is a Shiite, he was a secular candidate par excellence, capturing the Sunni vote and a sizable Shiite vote, signaling that many Iraqi voters were craving the secular nationalism of old. But it also signaled that the Saudi-Iranian competition in the region dominated Iraqi politics just as it did in Lebanon and even Palestine. Allawi could not have achieved his victory without the tremendous backing of Saudis, financially and in the media.

But regardless of the outcome—Maliki contested but could not overturn the vote count—the elections would not precipitate a return to the civil war. The state was too strong, and there was no longer a security vacuum. The security forces took their work seriously—perhaps too seriously. The sectarian militias had been beaten and marginalized, and the Sunnis had accepted their loss in the civil war. But in the United States, there was considerable trepidation about the election result, and suspicions of Iranian influence still clung to Maliki—an echo of the tendentious Sunni notion that an Arab cannot have a strong Shiite identity without being pro-Iranian. In the elections Maliki was the most popular individual candidate, with Allawi a distant second. Maliki wanted a coup but it would not succeed. Most Shiite parties and candidates did not want Maliki to be prime minister. The debate in Baghdad political circles is how to get rid of Maliki. But Allawi could not form a coalition. Regardless of who became prime minister, Iraq would become increasingly authoritarian. Oil revenues will not kick in for several years so there will not be an immediate improvement in services. Even when revenues reach Iraqi coffers, they will have to initially go to cover the infrastructure costs. The fact that the government cannot provide better services means it will have to become more authoritarian. It will use democratic methods and a façade to seem less authoritarian.

Maliki and his allies, after all, like many other Iraqis, were extremely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They believed Iraq was the only democracy in the region, better than its neighbors, and they zealously wanted to secure their control over a sovereign and increasingly powerful nation. Those who warned of Iranian interference in Iraq ignored Saudi, American, and other foreign involvement. And they too often assumed that Iran was a negative actor in the region that had to be countered, and that only Sunni dictatorships could do that. Indeed, having overcome its fear of Iraqi Shiites, Egypt signed a strategic agreement with Iraq. Egypt could see the shifting alliances in the region and was hedging its bets, an American intelligence official told me: “Iraq is a major opportunity. Iraq will be the number-one or -two oil producer in the world.”

Some pundits, including several leading neoconservatives, had begun to argue that the United States should keep a larger number of troops in Iraq than was previously agreed—but this risked undermining America’s partnership with the Iraqi government. “You want Iraq to be pro-Western and to invite you in,” an American intelligence official told me. “So you build that relationship by strictly adhering to the agreement you signed.”

By 2011 the Americans are expected to reduce their provincial presence to Basra, Erbil, Mosul, Diyala, and Kirkuk, with an eye on the restive fault line between Arabs and Kurds that runs from Iran to Syria. Were it not for the American presence along the so-called disputed territories between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, it is possible that war would have broken out already. Kirkuk has long been described as a powder keg, but of late, Nineveh province has become equally dangerous. Its governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, campaigned in the 2009 election on a rabidly anti-Kurdish platform. Whenever he traveled into areas that the Kurds claimed were theirs, even if they were outside the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government, Kurdish security forces harassed him, even drawing their guns. As a result he traveled with a U.S. Army escort, since he was the governor and had the right to go wherever he wanted in the province, even if he was merely being provocative. In February 2010 Kurdish security forces drew guns on him and the Americans, even firing at their convoy. With American backing, the Iraqi Security Forces arrested three Kurdish men; the next day the Kurds arrested five ISF members.

The Kurds were getting jittery, realizing the Americans really were leaving. But even if the Kurdish star was fading, the Kurds were more than likely to play the kingmaker in the long process of assembling a government after the elections, and anyone forming a government would have to make concessions to them if they wanted to avoid dependence on Shiite rivals. The lack of a unified sectarian bloc in Iraq was a positive development, militating against future conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. “U.S. strategic interests are best served when Shiites of Iraq are divided,” an experienced American intelligence officer explained to me.

FROM THE BEGINNING of the occupation, the U.S. government and media focused too much on elite-level politics and on events in the Green Zone, neglecting the Iraqi people, the atmosphere of the “street,” neighborhoods, villages, mosques. They were too slow to recognize the growing resistance to the occupation, too slow to recognize that there was a civil war—and now, perhaps for the same reason, many were worried that there was a “new” sectarianism or a new threat of civil war. But the U.S. military was no longer on the streets and could not accurately perceive Iraq, and journalists were busy covering the elections and the de-Baathification controversy but not reporting enough from outside or even inside Baghdad. Just as they didn’t understand the power of militias in the past, now they did not understand the power of the Iraqi Security Forces. Iraqis were no longer so scared of rival militias or being exterminated, and they no longer supported the religious parties so vehemently. Another thing people would have noticed, had they cared to look, was that the militias were weaker than ever. The Awakening groups were finished, so violence was very limited in scope and impact. Politicians might have been talking the sectarian talk, but Iraqis had grown very cynical.

But even though Iraq’s elections may have been transparent, Iraq remained colonized by tens of thousands of American soldiers. The Status of Forces Agreement deprived Iraq of its full sovereignty. Part of it was “legally” confiscated by the continuing UN mandate, and the rest was denied by the United States. Throughout the occupation major decisions concerning the shape of Iraq had been made by the occupiers with no input or say by the Iraqis: the economic system, the political regime, the army and its loyalties, all the way to the control over airspace and the formation of all kinds of militias and tribal military groups. The effects of all this will likely linger for decades. While the Americans have mostly, if not totally, withdrawn from the population centers, no occupying army ever wants to be present in the daily lives of citizens if it can have local clients do the job. In the early twentieth century, the British had no presence in the daily lives of Iraqis until Iraqis misbehaved and had to face the wrath of the Royal Air Force. Britain colonized Iraq with fewer than four brigades, most of which were based behind the walls of Habbaniya. But in 1941 they defeated the Iraqi army and occupied the whole country with two brigades.