For the next year, Baiji was out of the news, largely because the American military was busy with massive sweeps in the west of Anbar province. In late 2005, however, the Americans returned to Baiji, characterized at the time by Tyson as "firmly in the grip of insurgents."

According to U.S. military sources, this pacification attempt was provoked by suspicions that guerrillas were using Baiji as a staging area for attacks in Mosul and Baghdad, and -- more immediately -- by evidence that, while targeting oil pipelines and convoys, they were also siphoning off a significant proportion of the refinery's output for sale on the black market to finance their activities. A resistance supporter in Baiji told Inter Press Service reporters Brian Conley and Isam Rashid that that these efforts were meant to stop what he considered an American "theft" of Iraqi oil.

The Americans temporarily closed the refinery and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to retake Baiji. For a month, virtually no progress was made in pacifying the city, while American casualties were high. A quarter of the 34 soldiers in one platoon suffered casualties of one sort or another. Sgt. 1st Class Danny Kidd, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, attributed the hard going to the fact that Baiji residents supported the guerrilla fighters: "They have the place locked down. We have almost no support from the local people. We talk to 1,000 people and one will come forward."

The degree of this support was illustrated by a gruesome incident during the early weeks of the campaign. Capt. Matt Bartlett, accompanied by a convoy of tanks and personnel carriers, sought information from a tribal chief about a group of bomb-makers suspected of operating in the chief's domain. The convoy was cordially greeted by the sheik's children, who accepted the officers' gifts and "traded high-fives with them." Capt. Bartlett was told, however, that the sheik was hosting a large gathering and could not meet him that day. Preparing to leave, the Americans found the street blocked by people and cars, apparently part of the gathering. They were directed instead down a dirt route along the Tigris River nicknamed "Smugglers' Road."

"A few hundred yards down the road, bordered by fields, the convoy was hit by a massive explosion. Behind the blast, [First Sgt. Robert] Goudy jumped out of his Humvee and ran forward toward the huge cloud of smoke and debris. As it cleared, he was confused by what he found.

"'I saw this big piece of flesh and thought it was a goat or cow. I thought, ‘Wow, these guys put an IED in a dead animal,' he recalled. He went on, hoping to find his men sitting in the truck. But as he got closer, he recalled, ‘I didn't see the truck. I started seeing limbs and body parts.' Goudy tripped over what was left of one soldier. Then he found the only survivor of the five soldiers in the Humvee, blinded and screaming.

"‘It was horrible,' Bartlett said. ‘We had to pick up body parts 200 meters away.' The Humvee was ‘ripped in half and shredded,' he said, by a monster bomb later found to contain 1,000 pounds of explosives and two antitank mines, with a 155mm artillery round on top."

Sgt Goudy and the other survivors were "convinced Iraqis living nearby knew about the bomb but did nothing to warn them." In fact, it appears that they participated in luring the convoy into a trap. The soldiers' thoughts naturally turned to revenge: "I felt so angry and violated…. We all wanted to go out and tear up the city, kick down the doors, shoot the civilians, blow up the mosque."

Subsequent reports from Baiji contain no accounts of such acts of revenge, but the incident, and the failure of other strategies to pacify the city, led to an official escalation of the American assault. According to the Army Times, the new strategy was modeled after "walls built around Falluja and Samarra in recent months [that] have quelled restive insurgent cells." An earthen barrier was constructed around Siniyah, the most rebellious neighborhood in the city. Checkpoints were set up to stop "all vehicles leaving or entering… as soldiers look for known insurgents, bomb-making materials and illegal weapons."

These draconian measures disrupted normal life. Anyone with business inside or outside the community could not reliably pass through the checkpoint: College students interrupted their educations; employees lost their jobs. Sumiya, a 33 year old Siniyah housewife, who spoke on the phone to Conley and Rashid, described the situation inside the community of 3,000:

"Siniyah has become a real battlefield now, and the occupation forces have destroyed many of our homes…. There is no security inside Siniyah and it is worse than any place in Iraq now. The occupation forces and Iraqi National Guard are raiding Siniyah houses everyday and arresting many people. There is a curfew from 5 pm. to 5 am; in Baghdad it is only midnight to 5 AM."

One resident commented to the Inter Press reporters, "We live in a very big jail for three thousand"; while a local cleric told the Army Times that Siniyah had become "a concentration camp."

This situation will prevail until the American troops move on to "pacify" another city. At that time, the residents -- further alienated from the occupation -- will attempt to rebuild their lives, though from an even deeper hole than before. The jerry-rigged local government left behind will have no resources with which to address their problems, and there will be none forthcoming from either the Americans or, of course, the Iraqi government which has none to offer.

As in other Sunni cities, while the fighting in Baiji has occurred episodically, the physical, economic, and infrastructural decline of the city has been more or less continuous. So has the inability of either the Americans or the resistance to create a stable government. Each has undermined the credibility of the other. And the national government has no presence at all. In such circumstances, any residual faith residents might have in the idea of a sovereign state has undoubtedly evaporated as well.

Sovereignty Lost?

"Stay the course," President Bush tells us. "Democracy is being built," he insists. His case rests on high turnout percentages in the national elections, which demonstrate, he believes, that the vast majority of Iraqis want (and support) a national government. American forces, in his view, are training the Iraqi military and police to provide that government with the coercive force it needs to destroy a small but persistent insurgency that relies on intimidation and terror to keep the majority of Iraqis from speaking out and acting as they might wish. The developing institutions of civil society will provide, in his opinion, a nonviolent social infrastructure for a successful central government. But all this naturally takes time and money, and the American people need to give his administration the space to apply both effectively.

The on-the-ground evidence suggests quite a different reality. Sovereignty is made up of four ingredients: ultimate control over the means of coercion; sufficient resources to deliver government services; an administrative apparatus capable of carrying out these functions; and the acquiescence of most people in the exercise of such power. The government in Baghdad has none of these, nor will any of them soon be available to it.

As the war between Sunni communities and the occupation military continues, and as it throws off pieces of rebellion that set off new conflicts, the impotent isolation of the Iraqi government within its Green Zone sanctuary becomes more visible to all. In the meantime, the various contending parties -- the occupation, the Sunni resistance, the Shia fundamentalists, and the Kurdish nationalists -- frustrate each other's designs on power while destroying any group's ability to establish sovereignty.

One symptom of the debilitation of Iraq under the weight of this war has been its ever-declining oil production which, in January 2006, fell to perhaps half of the already depressed production levels during the last embattled years of Saddam Hussein.

Oil -- that most precious commodity -- has become scarce in oil-rich Iraq. But sovereignty -- an even more precious commodity -- is scarcer still.

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared at numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net

Recommend this article...

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto:

Be first to comment this article

Write Comment

Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article. Personal verbal attacks will be deleted. Please don't use comments to plug your web site. Such material will be removed. Just ensure to *Refresh* your browser for a new security code to be displayed prior to clicking on the 'Send' button. Keep in mind that the above process only applies if you simply entered the wrong security code.
Name:
E-mail
Homepage
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:
Code:*
	I wish to be contacted by email regarding additional comments

Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4