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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: Only hatred of U.S. unites Iraq Only hatred of U.S. unites Iraq PATRICK COCKBURN As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilizing after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting? U.S. commentators generally are making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there. The U.S. is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year, though for reasons that have little to do with "the surge" in the 30,000 U.S. troop reinforcements -- and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al-Qaida partly because it tried to monopolize power but primarily because it brought their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against U.S. occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shiite majority led by al-Qaida, which the Sunni were losing, with disastrous results for themselves. "The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars -- against the occupation and the government -- at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. "We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment." This is why much of the non-al-Qaida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qaida has lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The U.S. military -- the State Department has been very much marginalized in decision-making in Baghdad -- does not want to emphasize that many of the Sunni fighters now on the U.S. payroll, who are misleadingly called "concerned citizens," until recently belonged to al-Qaida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers on their hands. The Sunni Arabs, 5 million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were the core of the resistance to the U.S. occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shiite and the 5 million Kurds holding power. At first, the Shiite were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shiite market places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people. The bombers came from al-Qaida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very shortsighted since the Iraqi Shiite outnumber the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shiite al-Askari shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, 2006. The bombing led to a savage Shiite onslaught on the Sunni, which became known in Iraq as "the battle for Baghdad." This struggle was won by the Shiite. They were always the majority in the capital but, by the end of 2006, they controlled 75 percent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad. In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shiite from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shiite would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support; this never materialized. It was al-Qaida's slaughter of Shiite civilians, whom it sees as heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qaida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq, which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al-Qaida. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al-Qaida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism. Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al-Qaida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qaida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the U.S. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict. Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shiite face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al-Qaida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shiite militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year. The creation of a U.S.-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened insofar as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control the new force. If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shiite community if they are backed by the U.S. army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shiite community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard. U.S. politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilizing is the presence of a large U.S. Army in Iraq and the uncertainty about what role the U.S. will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the U.S.-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 percent of Iraqis believe that attacks on U.S. forces are acceptable. Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile cease-fires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow. Patrick Cockburn is a columnist for The Independent in Britain. Soundoff (1 comment) Tell us what's on your mind.
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#3. To: tom007 (#0)
Perhaps it would have been wiser to bribe them before we had lost 3K American soldiers and 600K Iraqis. If we had crossed the Iraqi border on 19 march 2003 with suitcases full of money, how much less money would we have spent on this war, overall? A $1K bribe for every Iraqi would have cost only $25B.
We had the opportunity to avoid the war altogether, for quite a reasonable sum. Saddam told us he was willing to leave the country in return for a payoff to him and his family that would have been chickenfeed compared to the costs we have had to pay for the war.
Great. I must not have been paying attention, then, and my browser seems to be useless. Do you have a source?
Ping to myself to remind myself to hunt for a source later.
There are no replies to Comment # 8. End Trace Mode for Comment # 8.
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