Testimony before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 20,
2004
This brief addresses three areas. First,
what mistakes have been made in the Coalition administration of
Iraq, and why? Second, what is the current situation? Third, what
steps can be taken to ensure the emergence of a stable and
democratic Iraq?
Mistakes
The biggest US failure in Iraq to date
lay in American inability to understand the workings of Iraqi
society. Many US administrators and military commanders appeared to
believe that once the Baathist state of Saddam Hussein was
overthrown, they would be dealing with an Iraqi society that was
docile, grateful and virtually a blank slate on which US goals could
be imprinted.
In fact, Baathist Iraq was a pressure-cooker, consisting of a
highly mobilized, urban and relatively literate population that had
organized clandestinely to oppose the weak and ramshackle Baath
state. Although the clan-based political parties and militias of the
Kurds in the north were well known because they had emerged as
autonomous under the US no-fly zone, similar phenomena in the Sunni
Arab center and the Shiite south were obscured by the information
black-out of Baath party censorship. In al-Anbar Province, lying on
the road between Amman and Baghdad, local populations came under the
influence of Salafi or Sunni fundamentalist movements and ideas that
were also growing popular in Jordan. In the late Saddam period, the
secular Baathist state allowed more manifestations of Sunni
religiosity than it had earlier, allowing these groups to establish
beachheads in Fallujah, Ramadi and elsewhere.
Many books and articles were published in Arabic in the 1990s,
that should have made clear that the Shiite south in particular was
a lively arena of contention between the Baath military and the
religious parties and their militias, some with bases in Iran to
which they could withdraw. Shiite guerrillas in the south, springing
from the clandestine al-Da‘wa Party, Iraqi Hizbullah, Sadrists, or
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, conducted bombings,
raids, assassinations and other acts of defiance against the Baath,
often sheltering in the swamps of the south or retreating, if
pursued, to Iranian territory. The followers of Muhammad Sadiq
al-Sadr (d. 1999) in particular were militantly anti-Baath,
anti-American and anti-Israel, and aspired to an Islamic state in
Iraq on the Iranian model. Given the US role in calling for, and
then allowing the crushing of, the Shiite uprising of spring, 1991,
after the Gulf War, the idea that Shiite Iraqis would be "grateful"
to the United States and now willing to forgive altogether that
earlier betrayal, was fanciful. Moreover, US officials appeared to
be ignorant of the important role of Iran in Iraqi Shiite politics,
a role that goes back to 1501, and kept talking about the need of
Iran to avoid "interfering" in Iraq (which is rather like telling
the Vatican to stop interfering in Ireland). In addition to
dissident groups, figures existed within Iraqi society like Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who have enormous moral authority, about
which American administrators were ignorant or skeptical into
winter, 2004, to their peril.
These covert political parties and clandestine guerrilla groups
were curbed by the Baath secret police and by the Fidayee Saddam.
What the Americans did in March and April of 2003 was to remove that
apparatus of repression, and allow the religious parties and
militias freely to organize, canvass for new members, and spread
their ideas and structures freely throughout the country. The Salafi
Sunnis and the various Shiite religious parties had a vision of
post-Baath Iraq, for which they had been planning for over a decade,
that differed starkly from United States goals in Iraq. But because
the US was unable to assemble in post-war Iraq anything like the
500,000 troops it had had in the first Gulf War, it and its
Coalition allies often were forced actively to depend on the good
will and even the security-providing abilities of the religious
militias in the post-war period.
Although the US did wisely choose to attempt to incorporate some
grass-roots Iraqi political organizations into the Interim
Provisional Government, it excluded others. Thus, the London branch
of the Shiite al-Dawa Party was given a seat, but the Tehran branch
was not (both groups had come back to Iraq after the fall of Saddam,
linking back up with local party members who had remained and
organized covertly). The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, which had a Badr Corps militia of perhaps 15,000 trained men,
was given a seat, but the Sadrist organization was not. The Islamic
Party of Iraq, a Muslim Brotherhood-derived party from Mosul, was
given a seat, but the Salafis of al-Anbar Province were excluded. Of
course, some of the excluded groups were hostile to the US
occupation, and might have refused to serve, but it is likely that
some representative of those tendencies could have been found who
would serve. Worse, the US gave special perquisites and extra power
to a handful of expatriate politicians with whom it had cut backroom
deals. These expatriate politicians had often been involved in
scandals, had no grassroots inside the country, and were widely
disliked. Many Iraqis feared that the US would shoehorn these
expatriates into power as a sort of new soft dictatorship, and that
they would betray Iraqi national interests in preference to personal
and American ones for years to come.
On strategy that might have forestalled a lot of opposition would
have been to hold early municipal elections. Such free and fair
elections were actually scheduled in cities like Najaf by local US
military authorities in spring of 2003, but Paul Bremer stepped in
to cancel them. A raft of newly elected mayors who subsequently
gained experience in domestic politics might have thrown up new
leaders in Iraq who could then move to the national stage. This
development appears to have been deliberately forestalled by Mr.
Bremer, in favor of a kind of cronyism that aimed at putting a
preselected group of politicians in power. In Najaf, the US
appointed a Sunni Baathist officer as mayor over this devotedly
Shiite city. He had turned on Saddam only at the last moment. Since
Sunni Baathists had massacred the people of Najaf, he was extremely
unpopular. He took the children of Najaf notables hostage for ransom
and engaged in other corrupt practices. Eventually even the US
authorities had to remove him from power and try him. But the first
impression the US made on the holy city of Najaf, and therefore on
the high Shiite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was
very bad.
The United States made a key strategic error in declining to post
enough US troops to Iraq in the post-war period to establish good
security. A country the size of Iraq probably required 400,000 to
500,000 troops to keep it orderly in the wake of the collapse of the
state. The US compounded that error by dissolving the Iraqi army
altogether, which deprived the US of informed potential allies in
restoring security, created enormous discontent among the 400,000
men fired, and provided a recruitment pool to religious militias
seeking to expand. The US also failed to send in enough experienced,
Arabic-speaking civil administrators at the Coalition Provisional
Authority. The CPA, with only a thousand employees for much of the
post-war period, most of whom could not speak the local language and
did not understand local customs, much reduced its own effectiveness
by remaining relatively insular and cut off from Iraqi society. The
lack of security ensuing from the thinness of the military force on
the ground increased the danger to CPA employees and reinforced this
insularity. There has been no transparency in US decision-making in
Iraq, so that we do not, and the Iraqi people do not know why these
steps, so injurious to the common good, were taken.
The security situation in post-Baath Iraq has not been good in
much of the country, though the Shiite south was for a long time
somewhat quieter than the centernorth.
The problem area encompassed Baghdad, Samarra, Baqubah (and
Diyalah province more generally), Mosul, Kirkuk, and al-Anbar
Province (Fallujah, Ramadi, Habbaniyah). Nevertheless, guerrillas
did mount significant attacks occasionally in the south, as with the
huge August 29 truck bombing at Najaf, and in the far north, as with
the bombing at Irbil in January. These bombings targeted highly
charged political and religious symbols and greatly undermined Iraqi
confidence in the ability of the US to provide security. Coalition
troops routinely came under fire in the South, though not nearly
with as much frequency as in the center-north. The US official and
press tendency to speak of the problems as having concerned a
relatively small portion of the country, mistakenly termed the
"Sunni triangle," obscured the scope and seriousness of a security
collapse that encompassed perhaps half of the geographical area of
Iraq and affected a good third of its population on an ongoing basis
and at least half at some point.
Even in the quieter areas, they were quiet for all the wrong
reasons. In the north, the Kurdish peshmerga or paramilitary
fighters provided much of what urban security there was, and they
had come to dominate the police in multi-ethnic, oil-rich Kirkuk.
These paramilitary fighters constituted a law unto themselves and
Kurdish leaders vowed that Federal Iraqi troops would never again
set foot on Kurdish soil. In the Shiite south, Coalition forces were
spread exceedingly thin and were staffed by inexperienced troops
from countries like Bulgaria and the Ukraine, who had no local
knowledge and who had apparently been assured that they would not be
involved in warfare but rather in peacekeeping. Local townspeople
tended to turn to Shiite militiamen to police neighborhoods,
according to press reports, in places like Samawah, and even in
large urban neighborhoods in East Baghdad and Basra.
Although hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on
reconstruction, and there have been some genuine successes, as with
the restoration of electricity, the poor security situation has
detracted from those successes in the minds of most Iraqis.
Moreover, the successes have been partial and often unsatisfactory.
Hospitals are open, but often strapped for cash and lacking in
equipment, medicine and personnel. Electricity provision before the
war was highly inadequate, so returning to pre-war levels does not
solve the problem. The preference for American and British
contractors has often cut Iraqi businesses out of the lucrative
contracts, except at lower bid levels, which in turn has prevented
the US from making a big dent in massive unemployment rates. The
massive unemployment in turn has contributed to poor security, in a
vicious circle.
The Current Problems
The US administration of Iraq has
suffered from lack of consistency, from infighting among major
bureaucratic organizations such as the Department of Defense and the
State Department, and from an apparent desire strongly to shape
Iraqi society in certain directions, which has the effect of
contravening international law on military occupations, specifically
the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
One example is the determination to impose on the Iraqi economy the
kind of shock therapy or very rapid liberalization tried in Russia,
with disastrous results. It is one thing for a sovereign Iraqi
government to ask for help in liberalizing the economy, it is
another for an American civil administrator to take such a decision
by fiat. American announcements on economic policy have often been
opposed by local Iraqi merchants and entrepreneurs, by the
Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce, and even by the
American-appointed Interim Governing Council itself.
The US has gone through four major plans for Iraqi governance and
it is unclear as of this writing to whom sovereignty will be handed
on June 30. Jay Garner, the first civil administrator, planned to
hold a national congress in July, 2003, and then to hand over Iraq
to the resulting government by October of that year. He was replaced
by Paul Bremer, who initially planned to run Iraq himself by fiat
for two or three years. He was unable to do so, and then appointed
an Interim Governing Council which, however, suffered problems of
legitimacy insofar as it was a committee of a foreign occupying
power. On November 15 Mr. Bremer made a 180 degree turn and
announced councilbased elections for spring of 2004 and a turn-over
of sovereignty to the resulting government. Those elections were
deemed undemocratic by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and were not
held, leaving Bremer with a turn-over date but not a government to
turn over to. Most Iraqis, who have yet to experience anything like
democracy in the post-Baath period, are confused and suspicious at
these high-handed and frankly somewhat dictatorial proceedings.
The US has faced serious opposition from Iraqi paramilitaries in
al-Anbar province and elsewhere, and has sometimes even clashed with
the Kurdish Peshmerga. In late March and early April, it came into
severe conflict with Sunni tribesmen in Fallujah and with the Army
of the Mahdi, a Shiite militia in East Baghdad and the southern
Shiite cities, led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Both conflicts were initially
mishandled. The US military responded to the killing of four
American civilian security guards, and the desecration of their
bodies, by surrounding, besieging, and bombarding the entire town of
Fallujah. While it was a hotbed of guerrilla activity, the entire
town was not implicated in that activity. Many observers, including
the former president of the Interim Governing Council Adnan
Pachachi, and United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, have
accused the US military of engaging in collective punishment of
Fallujans and of failing to take due account of the need to avoid
civilian casualties.
While Fallujah was poorly handled from a political point of view,
the crisis grew out of an attack on US citizens. In contrast, the
decision to go after Muqtada al-Sadr was wholly elective. His
movement had been militant since the days of Saddam, and it is true
that he was organizing a militia. But he had repeatedly instructed
his people to avoid clashing with US troops, and seems mainly to
have been organizing for the future. Measures could have been taken
to forbid his militiamen from training or appearing in uniform in
public. But by attempting to arrest his key aides, the Coalition
Provisional Authority telegraphed to him its determination to arrest
and imprison him. Muqtada had seen his father killed after similar
warnings from Saddam, and reacted by launching an insurgency
throughout the south, making the point that he would not go quietly.
The CPA grossly underestimated the organizational capacity of his
movement. It was able to expel Iraqi police from their stations in
many places in the south, and in some instances Iraqi police and
military either declined to fight the Army of the Mahdi or even
switched sides and joined it. The US military gave up on trying to
maintain a presence in East Baghdad. Ukrainian troops were chased
off their base at Kut, and Nasiriyah fell to the Sadrists, as did
Kufa, Najaf, and parts of Karbala. While the US and its allies were
able to contain and then roll back this insurrection, it
demonstrated that the Coalition did not really control Iraq, and was
only there on the sufferance of powerful social forces that could
effectively challenge it when they so chose.
What Needs to Be Done
In order to defuse the violence, the
US military needs to adopt a much more narrow and targeted approach
to dealing with guerrillas, and stop "using a sledgehammer to crack
a walnut" (in the words of a British officer in Basra). US troops
have repeatedly used disproportionate force to reply to guerrilla
attacks, and in the process have created new guerrillas by harming
innocent civilians. The tactics used at Fallujah have been seen by
most Iraqis, and indeed, by many Coalition partners and Interim
Governing Council members, as an outrage and a direct flaunting of
the Geneva Conventions governing military occupations. Even the
ordinary search and find missions conducted in al-Anbar province and
elsewhere have often involved male troops invading the private homes
of Iraqis, going into the womens’ quarters, and visiting humiliation
on tribesmen for whom protecting their women is the basis of their
honor. Unless these operations are yielding consistently excellent
intelligence and results, they should be curtailed. The Coalition
Provisional Authority must cease attempting to "take out" dissident
leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr before the hand-over of sovereignty. It
was precisely the attempt to cut Muhammad Aidid out of the political
process in Somalia that caused the Mogadishu disaster. The US will
simply have to accept that there are political forces on the ground
in Iraq that it views as undesirable. It cannot dictate Iraqi
politics to Iraqis without becoming a frankly colonial power. If it
does become a mere colonist in Iraq, it will be mired in the country
for decades and be forced to spend hundreds of billions of dollars
and thousands of servicemen’s lives on the endeavor. Rather, it must
draw those less savory political forces in Iraq into parliamentary
politics so that they can learn to rework their goals and conflicts
in the terms of democratic procedure. Groups like the Sadrists
cannot hope to dominate parliament, and so must learn to trade
horses to get part of what they want.
The main problem for the United States in Iraq is a lack of
popular legitimacy. Neither the Coalition Provisional Authority nor
the Interim Governing Council has much popular support, with a few
exceptions. Neither grew out of any Iraqi democratic process, and
neither was formed with significant involvement of the United
Nations Security Council, which even Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has
said he respects. In a recent poll, about half of Iraqis felt that
the US invasion had been a humiliation, and the other half felt it
had been a liberation. Even those who felt liberated, however, are
impatient for a government they can call their own.
The US must now move with all due deliberation to holding free
and fair, oneperson, one-vote elections in Iraq. Only such a process
holds any hope of deflecting faction-fighting into more a more
peaceful reworking of political conflict into parliamentary
processes. The elections should be held even if the security
situation remains poor. Indian and other elections in the global
south are often attended by public disturbances and even loss of
life, but they nevertheless produce legitimate governments. The
recently-released Brahimi plan should be adopted, as President Bush
has indicated. It calls for the dissolution of the Interim Governing
Council on June 30, for the temporary appointment, under United
Nations and Coalition auspices, of a handful of high government
officials (a president, two vice presidents and a prime minister)
who would form a limited, caretaker government to oversee the
transition to elections this winter. It also provides from the
election of a broad advisory council that would represent a broader
range of Iraqi actors than did the old Interim Governing Council.
For the legitimacy of the new government, it is absolutely essential
that the United Nations Security Council be deeply involved in its
formation and in authorizing it. Indeed, the very presence of US
troops and other Coalition troops in Iraq beyond June 30 must be
authorized by a new United Nations Security Council resolution if
their mission is to remain legal in the bounds of international
law.
In the interim, militias should be curbed at the local level and
where possible integrated into the Iraqi military. Emphasis should
not be placed on attacking the top leaders of the militias, but on
dealing with the phenomenon. The pace of the formation of the new
military, and the amount of money spent on it, must increase
rapidly. This approach would reduce unemployment, reduce the
recruitment pool for militias, and provide forces that could help
with at least local security.
The giving of reconstruction bids has been structured so that all
small bids of $50,000 or less automatically go to Iraqi firms. This
ceiling should be raised, to ensure that more Iraqis are involved in
reconstruction and more local jobs created. Shipping the money back
to the US by employing mainly American firms will not greatly
benefit Iraq or address the deep unemployment problems there.
As it is phased out, the Coalition Provisional Authority must
reach out to all sections of the Iraqi public to reassure them that
they will not be crushed by a new tyranny of the majority, or looted
by a handful of cronies of America. The Sadrists in East Baghdad,
Kufa and elsewhere must be convinced that they can best exercise
their influence by becoming ward bosses and electing their delegates
to parliament. Attempting to exclude the Sadrists will only ensure
that they remain violent. They should be encouraged to do what the
Shiite Amal Party did in Lebanon, trading in its militias for a
prominent role in the Lebanese parliament. The Sunni Arabs of Anbar
province must likewise be convinced that they can form alliances in
parliament that protect them and achieve their goals.
It was a mistake to configure the new Iraqi parliament so that it
had only one chamber. In Shiite-majority Iraq, this way of
proceeding ensures that Shiites will dominate the legislature. A way
should be found to create an upper house, and to so gerrymander the
provinces that it over-represents the Sunni minority. This two-house
parliament could then serve as a check on any tyranny of the Shiite
majority. Such a check is preferable to giving the Kurds a veto over
the new constitution to be written in 2005, since giving a minority
a veto seems unfair, whereas insisting that the constitution pass
the upper house of parliament with a two-thirds majority is
unexceptionable.
