Is There An Iraq?

Iraq’s Biggest Failing: There Is No Iraq

By ROGER COHEN
Published: December 10, 2006

WAR spews words. They make up its fog. Washington was awash in them last week as the damage control exercise called the Iraq Study Group culminated with a proposal to extract all American combat brigades by early 2008, leaving a few tens of thousands of troops to train the Iraqi Army or protect the trainers. As befits a bipartisan report on what looks like a lose-lose situation, it was a fudge.

But beyond the words — from President Bush’s chagrin at “the pace of success” to the report’s “grave and deteriorating” situation — lie people, the millions of Iraqis who have to get their kids up in the morning, those dimly discernible objects of the myriad political contortions. One of them, a 32-year-old Iraqi engineer encountered earlier this year in Baghdad, had this to say in a desperate e-mail message:

“I am facing the most difficult times of my life here in Baghdad. Since I am a Sunni, I became a target to be killed. You know that our army and police are Shia, so every checkpoint represents a serious threat to Sunnis. During the last three weeks, two of my friends were killed at check points belonging to the police. They first asked to show IDs and when they saw the Sunni family name, they killed them.”

There, in plain enough English, you have it. The Iraqi Army and police whose proposed reinforcement lies at the center of the Iraq Study Group’s plan for American extraction are often less neutral institutions supporting the nation than a flimsy camouflage for Shia to settle accounts with Sunnis, while the Kurds bide their time and hope the child of chaos will be an independent Kurdistan.

The Iraqi Army and police are indeed overwhelmingly — but not exclusively — Shia. Most recruitment took place at a time when Sunnis had opted out of the new Iraq. Much has been made of the American error in disbanding Saddam Hussein’s army. More might have been made of the errors committed in creating the new force.

Contacted in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who commands American forces in Iraq, described the Iraqi Army as “fragile.” He said Sunni officers and soldiers “have to believe the government is using force in a fair and evenhanded manner.” As for the police, he said, “it is clear there are some sectarian elements,” but “forceful action” by the Interior Ministry was now addressing the problem.

Are these the bulwarks of an Iraq that can “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself” within 15 months, letting the bulk of American troops go home? Perhaps, the report seems to say, as it urges Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to get with the program — through rapid provincial elections, fairer distribution of oil revenue, the reintegration of Baathists and constitutional reform.

But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the report treats Iraq as an existing country needing a quick fix in the name of resurgent American realism, rather than a still-to-be-born country that needs to be ushered into being in the name of American idealism.

Iraq, in short, needs Iraqis — citizens of a nation rather than of a tribe — and that, after decades of disorienting dictatorship, is a generational undertaking scarcely amenable to American electoral timetables.

Right now, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds see “freedom” more as the opportunity to be free of one another than to forge a liberal democracy. That’s how subjugated peoples, from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia, tend to react to the lifting of tyranny. Iraqi behavior is not especially strange.

But it has been hugely destructive — an estimated 3,000 Iraqi civilians are dying every month — and it presents President Bush with a choice between the stick-with-it idealism that has been the mainstay of his narrative of Iraqi freedom catalyzing a Middle Eastern transformation, and the ease-out realism thrust in his face by his father’s secretary of state, James A. Baker III.

“The report is a devastating critique and an official certification of a failed policy, but its recommendations are a weak compromise,” said Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations. “So the question remains: what will the president do? Most people want an exit timetable, a few want a troop increase and Bush appears unready for either. He seems likely to pass this mess on to his successor.”

Certainly Mr. Bush’s instincts, and his post-report language, suggest he will not embrace a 15-month timetable for large-scale withdrawal, even as a figure weakened by his party’s midterm electoral defeat. The realists, and the angry left, would then be further incensed. There’s no doubt that the administration’s ideology and scant planning, sold as idealism, have done great damage in Iraq. But realism too has its limits.

It was realism, Mr. Baker would say, that made him urge Yugoslavia to stick together days before its disintegration, and realism that later led him to wave away the Balkans with the lapidary phrase: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” That was before the avenging dog of Bosnian mass killing finally outraged American moral principles and drew the country in.

The fact is Iraq was unmade while Mr. Baker was back in Texas, unmade in pursuit of a new Middle Eastern beginning. A state that had known only despotic rule, inhabited by disoriented victims of terror, was asked to govern itself through some form of democracy.


Remaking the unmade, in this case the fragmenting state of Iraq, is time-consuming, and, as Miroslav Hroch, the Czech political theorist, has observed, ethnic or religious nationalism easily becomes the “substitute for factors of integration in a disintegrating society.”

Adel is the name of the young engineer who has been writing to me; to give his full name would put his life and that of his family at risk. He knows all about the death of the old Iraq and the agony of the new.

In 2004 he got a job with Washington Group International, a building contractor.

“Now,” he writes, “I am working at a WGI site and live there because it is safe inside but when I go to my home the danger surrounds me. The police sometimes search the houses, and now the Shia militia force the Sunnis to leave their houses. The majority of the area is Shia. They want it to be completely Shia.”

He concedes that the same abuses “took place in the Sunni areas too.” But, he says, “the Sunnis are 20 percent only while the Shia are 70 percent and the police and army are Shia, so they are able to carry weapons officially.”

The study group lists all sorts of things the Iraqi Army lacks — leadership, equipment, personnel, logistical support. But it does not identify the most fundamental: absence of sufficient belief in the nation.

It seems highly improbable that this can be forged in 15 months. An American officer, Col. Mark Meadows, told me earlier this year in Baghdad that the Iraqi brigade he was training was overwhelmingly Shia, which was a problem.

“They’re where we were in early World War II,” Colonel Meadows said. “We went from the black-only units of that time to Truman’s integrated Army of the 1950s. The Army led the way in the breakthrough from a divided society. That has to happen here, too.”

But, the colonel added, “If we try to go too fast, if we take a short-sighted view, if we expect instant gratification, it won’t work.”

As for the police, it is, in the view of General Chiarelli, in far worse shape than the army. “The year of the police,” as 2006 was billed, has turned into the year of police abuse. The report suggests transferring a large part of the police from the Interior Ministry control to the Defense Ministry to improve discipline.

Quite what that would achieve is unclear. Both ministries have been infested with sectarianism and corruption. The Interior Ministry is now led by a Shiite, Defense by a Sunni, but both forces, police and military are still overwhelmingly Shiite, which is where the fundamental difficulty lies.

Adel, as a Sunni, has suffered directly from that. Now, even as he seeks ways to leave, he believes “that we are not completely lost.”

“If the invasion was the only solution to make Saddam quit,” he writes, “so it was the right choice.”

The problem, he adds, is “not with the invasion itself” but with “how to select the suitable men to take the responsibility of ruling Iraq, because most of those we have now are not devoted to this country.”

Iraq has to survive, not because it’s lovely, or within sight of peace, but because it’s the least bad solution. Its breakup would entail unfathomable horror: one quarter of the population is in mixed Baghdad, and Sunni Anbar province is an oil-free desert suitable only for Al Qaeda central. To have a future, Iraq almost certainly needs a broad federalism of a kind not endorsed in the report, and it needs the likes of Adel.

He’s scared, but not without a frail hope: the hope that Iraq can inspire love of itself in its citizens, beyond religious and ethnic lines. To that lingering aspiration, after the loss of almost 3,000 American lives and the spending of $400 billion in treasure, the United States appears to have an enduring responsibility.

New York Times