Political Views

Michael Schwartz on Disintegrating Iraqi Sovereignty
By Tom Engelhardt

You know things are going badly indeed in Iraq when U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad chooses to use an image -- Pandora's box -- previously wielded only by that critic of the Iraq War, French President Jacques Chirac. Back in September 2004, Chirac compared American actions in Iraq to the famed box of myth, at a moment when Arab League head Amr Mussa was warning that the "gates of Hell" had been opened in that country (a comment assumed at the time to be but another example of overemotional Arab rhetoric). It took a year and a half, the blowing up the Golden Mosque in Samarra, and a near civil war, but now Khalilzad is ready to agree. In a Los Angeles Times interview, according to reporter Borzou Daragahi, he offered, "a far gloomier picture than assessments made in recent days by U.S. military spokesmen." In fact, he suggested the obvious -- if, that is, he weren't representing a government whose Vice President is still claiming that "progress in Iraq has not come easily, but it has been steady." He admitted that the "potential is there" for Iraq to fall into full-blown civil war and then he brought Chirac's image to bear. "We have opened," he said, "the Pandora's box and the question is, what is the way forward?"

You also know things aren't going well when the Pentagon issues an "Iraq Progress Report" (a "security and stability" assessment it is required to send to Congress every four months) indicating that "insurgent attacks in Iraq reached a postwar high in the four months preceding Jan. 20." You know things are not going well when, as that report notes, 88% of Iraqis in the Sunni areas of Tikrit and Bakuba, asked to describe "individuals attacking coalition forces," called them either "freedom fighters" or "patriots." (Don't even ask how that poll was taken.) Or when, surveying the ripples of chaos that George Bush's war has brought to the world, Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the Pentagon's deputy director for the war on terrorism, points to the plethora of terrorist groups popping into existence worldwide and states definitively, "We are not killing them faster than they are being created."

Meanwhile, the top Iraqi general in charge of security in Baghdad, such as it is, was killed in ambush this week; mosques continue to be attacked; Amnesty International announced that the U.S. still holds at least 14,000 (undoubtedly angry) Iraqis in its prisons; Iraqi oil production continues its steady decline to, at present, about 1.5 million barrels a day (almost a million barrels below where it was just before the American invasion began in March 2003); up to 50 employees of a Sunni-owned Iraqi security firm in Baghdad are kidnapped by unknown gunmen in police paramilitary uniforms in broad daylight; and Baghdad's morgue director flees the country in fear of assassination after revealing that "more than 7,000 people have been killed by death squads in recent months." Referring to these staggering figures, John Pace, the outgoing head of the UN human rights office in Iraq, who has clearly put in time at "the gates of Hell," commented, "The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution -- many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills."

In one of the understatements of our moment, Khalilzad offered the following summary of the situation in Iraq, "Right now there's a vacuum of authority, and there's a lot of distrust." He should know. He's the one in Baghdad's Green Zone scuttling between near-warring parties in the vague hope that "once a national unity government is formed, the effort to provoke a civil war will face a huge obstacle."

Michael Schwartz, a Tomdispatch regular, takes up the very issue of that "vacuum of authority" in Iraq in a major two-part piece for this site. He focuses on the strange, powerless state in which Iraq exists, in which Khalilzad's "national unity government" -- if it is ever formed -- will continue to exist. When you are used to living in a sovereign nation, it's easy to forget what a fragile thing sovereignty can be -- and, once destroyed, how hard it can be for anyone to reconstitute it. Tom

A Government with No Military and No Territory

Iraq's Sovereignty Vacuum (Part 1)
By Michael Schwartz

President Bush marked the Iraqi election of December 2005 as the beginning of a new era. A freely selected permanent government would begin asserting its sovereignty over the country, building an administrative infrastructure, and rising to the challenge of governing an unruly and often violent constituency.

Only three months later, this hopeful vision is in ruins. Various parliamentary leaders have occupied themselves with tortuous negotiations over who will be the next prime minister, while crises explode around their Green Zone sanctuary. Some of these crises flashed in and out of the headlines, including a controversy over illegal detention and torture sites reportedly run by Shia militias under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior; a new wave of insurgent attacks in Baghdad; and, most dramatically, the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, triggering retaliatory attacks against Sunni mosques as well as nationwide demonstrations calling for the withdrawal of American forces. Other crises continue to build without benefit of the media spotlight: a multi-ethnic conflict over control of Kirkuk, the northern oil hub and projected capital of a future Kurdistan; the steady escalation of guerrilla attacks on American troops and of American air strikes against Sunni cities; a further degeneration in the delivery of electricity, potable water, fuel, and most of the other basics of modern life; a growing population of homeless refugees; an ongoing exodus of professionals; and unremitting unemployment levels, variously estimated at between 30% and 65% of the workforce.

In dealing with all these crises, the government was notable mainly for its absence -- neither a party to the controversies, nor a mediating force in any of them. It volunteered no leadership and was not invoked by any of the contesting groups.

This irrelevance is not temporary. It is the single enduring, probably irremediable feature of a government that has none of the resources needed to exercise sovereignty. As these multifaceted crises grow, intertwine, and overlap, the capacity for exercising sovereignty -- whether by this government, the occupation forces, or any other entity -- will only be further eroded.

American Army, Iraqi Soldiers

Iraqi government impotence flows from its lack of access to any systematic means of coercion. This may seem a strange assertion, given the increasing prominence of the Iraqi Army in various military campaigns since late last summer, and the slogan popularized by President Bush since about the same moment: "As the Iraqi military stands up, we will stand down."

Nonetheless, even if the Iraqi army, Special Forces, and local police were to become the formidable military machine that American officials envision, they would not add up to an effective instrument of Iraqi national policy for a simple reason: These units are being developed as part of the occupation military, not as a force loyal to or commanded by the elected government.

It is well known that the Americans are recruiting and training both the military and the police in Iraq. What is less well known is that, once their training is complete, the Bush administration does not relinquish control over these forces.

Let's begin with the Iraqi army. Its troops are directly integrated into the occupation structure commanded by the American military. This is not just a matter of who makes command decisions. The Iraqi military has no air support, no artillery, and almost no armored vehicles; nor does it have a logistics capacity that would allow it to resupply its fighting units. As a result, even if the Iraqi government could "take command" of its army, it could not fight battles on its own. This distinguishes the Iraqi Army from virtually every other military on the planet. None of its units can go into battle unless they are integrated into the American military.

In the major campaigns undertaken in October and November in western Anbar province, this was quite evident; the Iraqis were used in "partnership programs," involving "Iraqi and U.S. military units patrolling and fighting together." According to Lt. Col. Frederick Wellman, official spokesman for the U.S. effort to create an "effective" Iraqi army, this sort of close "control and cooperation" is crucial to the usefulness of Iraqi Army units in sweeps through western Anbar. When an Iraqi unit "is specifically tasked to operate side by side" with American units, he assured Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer, "The unit absolutely just blossoms."

Is it possible, however, that the Iraqi military might eventually develop the capacity to command, support, and supply itself? While this could occur, of course, the Americans have no current plans to make it happen, and no resources are available to the Iraqi government to launch such an effort. Keep in mind, for instance, that all projections of future U.S. troop reductions explicitly call for the continued presence of American air power and support troops in Iraq. As a result, the integration of Iraqi units into the occupation military will continue into the foreseeable future, and -- with it -- the incapacity of the Iraqi government to craft and enforce a military policy independent of the occupation.

Who Controls the Police?

Things are somewhat different for the police and Special Forces, including SWAT squads, secret police, and other units designed to carry on covert and irregular military operations. Instead of being subject to American commanding officers, these forces are advised by counterinsurgency specialists -- either American military officers or American-employed private security contractors. Such units act semi-autonomously under the direction of Iraqi officers appointed by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.

This looseness of command worked well as long as there was no policy friction between American officials and the Iraqi government. In January 2005, for example, Newsweek reported that U.S. advisers in the Interior Ministry were instituting a program of systematic assassination of leaders and supporters of the resistance -- including prominent Sunni clerics and political leaders. The program was dubbed the "Salvador option" because it was modeled after the right-wing assassination squads that committed thousands of murders in El Salvador and other Latin American countries two decades earlier.

There was no opposition to this policy within the Interior Ministry, since the new units were to be recruited largely from the Badr Brigade, the Shia militia associated with the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the political party already in charge of the Ministry. The recruits were apparently militant fighters anxious to avenge suicide-car bombings organized by Sunni jihadists against Shia civilians. Soon, reports on their activities became a staple of the news from Iraq, as dead bodies of Sunnis, often described as suspected resistance fighters, were found hours or days after being arrested by "men dressed in Iraq police uniforms."

Toward the end of 2005, problems began to develop between the Ministry-controlled police (and Special Forces) and their American sponsors. Soon after, American personnel twice raided detention centers operated by the Interior Ministry, replete with accusations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners. These incidents, and a host of lesser ones, seemed to suggest a lack of control by the United States over the police and Special Forces.

A senior U.S. military official commented to the Washington Post that U.S.-sponsored reforms of the police and Special Forces were "aimed specifically at former militia forces within the Interior Ministry, which is dominated by the current governing Shiite religious parties and those parties' factional fighters." He designated them as enemies whom the U.S. was committed to controlling: "We're going to try to wrap ourselves around them… By hugging the enemy, wrapping our arms around them, we hope to control them… like we did with the army."

What a closer look at this controversy reveals, however, is how much the U.S. already does dominate most such units. First of all, episodes of friction between occupation forces and local law enforcement are the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the occupation military continues to determine much of both the strategy and tactics of the police and Special Forces. This was well demonstrated when SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim reacted to accusations of brutality in detention. He insisted to Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer that even more drastic measures were needed to defeat the insurgency and complained bitterly of the restraints imposed by the occupation: "The ministries of Interior and Defense want to carry out some operations to clean out some areas. There were plans that should have been implemented months ago, but American officials and forces rejected them."

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