Iraq is disintegrating faster than ever. The Turkish Army invaded the north of
the country last week and is still there. Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming like Gaza
where Israel can send in its tanks and helicopters at will.
The US, so sensitive to any threat to Iraqi sovereignty from Iran or Syria, has
blandly consented to the Turkish attack on the one part of Iraq which was at
peace. The Turkish government piously claims that its army is in pursuit of PKK
Turkish Kurd guerrillas, but it is unlikely to inflict serious damage on them as
they hide in long-prepared bunkers and deep ravines of the Kurdish mountains.
What the Turkish incursion is doing is weakening the Kurdistan Regional
Government, the autonomous Kurdish zone, the creation of which is one of the few
concrete achievements of the US and British invasion of Iraq five years ago.
One of the most extraordinary developments in the Iraqi war has been the success
with which the White House has been able to persuade so much of the political
and media establishment in the US that, by means of “the surge”, an extra 30,000
US troops, it is on the verge of political and military success in Iraq. All
that is needed now, argue US generals, is political reconciliation between the
Iraqi communities.
Few demands could be more hypocritical. American success in reducing the level
of violence over the last year has happened precisely because Iraqis are so
divided. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq were the heart of the rebellion against the
American occupation. In fighting the US forces, they were highly successful. But
in 2006, after the bombing of the Shiite shrine at Samarra, Baghdad and central
Iraq was wracked by a savage civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. In some
months the bodies of 3,000 civilians were found, and many others lie buried in
the desert or disappeared into the river. I do not know an Iraqi family that did
not lose a relative, and usually more than one.
The Shiites won this civil war. By the end of 2006 they held threequarters of
Baghdad. The Sunni rebels, fighting the Mehdi Army Shiite militia and the
Shiites, dominated the Iraqi Army and police, and also under pressure from
Al-Qaeda, decided to end their war with US forces. They formed Al-Sahwa, the
Awakening movement, which is now allied to and paid for by the US.
In effect Iraq now has an 80,000 strong Sunni militia which does not hide its
contempt for the Iraqi government, which it claims is dominated by
Iranian-controlled militias. The former anti-American guerrillas have largely
joined Al-Sahwa. The Shiite majority, for its part, is determined not to let the
Sunnis win back their control of the Iraqi state. Power is more fragmented than
ever.
This all may sound like good news for America. For the moment its casualties are
down. Fewer Iraqi civilians are being slaughtered. But the Sunnis have not
fallen in love with the occupation. The fundamental weakness of the US position
in Iraq remains its lack of reliable allies outside Kurdistan. At one moment,
British officers used to lecture their American counterparts, much to their
irritation, about the British Army’s rich experience of successful
counterinsurgency warfare in Malaya and Northern Ireland. “That showed a
fundamental misunderstanding of Iraq on our part,” a former British officer in
Basra told me in exasperation. “In Malaya the guerrillas all came from the
minority Chinese community and in Northern Ireland from the minority Roman
Catholics. Basra was exactly the opposite. The majority supported our enemies.
We had no friends there.” This lack of allies may not be so immediately obvious
in Baghdad and central Iraq because both Shiites and Sunnis are willing and at
times eager to make tactical alliances with US forces. But in the long-term
neither Sunnis nor Shiite Arabs want the Americans to stay in Iraq. Hitherto the
only reliable American allies have been the Kurds, who are now discovering that
Washington is not going to protect them against Turkey.
Very little is holding Iraq together. The government is marooned in the Green
Zone.
Having declared the surge a great success, the US military commanders need just
as many troops to maintain a semblance of control now as they did before the
surge. The mainly Shiite police force regards Al-Sahwa as anti-government
guerrillas wearing new uniforms.
The Turkish invasion should have given the government in Baghdad a chance to
defend Iraq’s territorial integrity and burnish its patriotic credentials.
Instead Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has chosen this moment to have his
regular medical check up in London, a visit which his colleagues say is simply
an excuse to escape Baghdad. Behind him he has left a country which is visibly
falling apart.
