A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower

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A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower
By Patrick Cockburn
(long article)

At 3 am on January 11, 2007 a fleet of American
helicopters made a sudden swoop on the
long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of
Arbil in northern Iraq. Their mission was to capture
two senior Iranian security officials, Mohammed
Jafari, the deputy head of the Iranian National
Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the
head of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards. What made the American raid so extraordinary
is that both men were in Iraq at the official
invitation of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who
held talks with them at his lakeside headquarters at
Dokan in eastern Kurdistan. The Iranians had then
asked to see Massoud Barzani, the president of the
Kurdistan Regional Government, in the Kurdish capital
Arbil. There was nothing covert about the meeting,
which was featured on Kurdish television.

In any event the U.S. attack failed. It was only able
to net five junior Iranian officials at the liaison
office that had existed in Arbil for years, issuing
travel documents, and which was being upgraded to a
consular office by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in
Baghdad. The Kurdish leaders were understandably
furious asking why, without a word to them, their
close allies, the Americans, had tried to abduct two
important foreign officials who were in Iraq at the
request of the Iraqi president. Kurdish troops had
almost opened fire on the American troops. At the very
least, the raid showed a contempt for Iraqi
sovereignty which the U.S. was supposedly defending.
It was three months before officials in Washington
admitted that they had tried and failed to capture
Jafari and General Frouzanda. The U.S. State
Department and Iraqi government argued for the release
of the five officials as relative minnows, but
Vice-President Cheney's office insisted fiercely that
they should be held.

If Iran had undertaken a similar venture by, for
example, trying to kidnap the deputy head of the CIA
when he was on an official visit to Pakistan or
Afghanistan, then Washington might have considered the
attempt a reason for going to war. In the event, the
US assault on Arbil attracted bemused attention inside
and outside Iraq for only a few days before it was
buried by news of the torrent of violence in the rest
of Iraq. The U.S. understandably did not reveal the
seniority of its real targets—or that they had
escaped.

The Arbil raid is significant because it was the first visible sign of a string of highly significant American policy decisions announced by President George Bush in an address to the nation broadcast in the U.S. a few hours earlier on January 10.

There have been so many spurious turning points in the
war—such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003,
the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government in
2004, or the elections of 2005—that truly critical
moments are obscured or underrated.

The NY Times, which had once uncritically repeated White House claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, now ran articles on its front page saying that Iran was exporting sophisticated roadside bombs
to Iraq that were killing American soldiers. There was no reference to the embarrassing discoveries of workshops making just such bombs in Baghdad and Basra.

Above all, the Bush administration was determined to put off the day—at least until after the Presidential election in 2008—when it had to admit that the U.S. had failed in Iraq.

I was in Baghdad soon after Bush had spoken. I had
never known it to be so bad. My driver had to take a
serpentine route from the airport, driving along the
main highway, then suddenly doing a U-turn to dart
down an alleyway. He was trying to avoid checkpoints
that might be manned by Police Commandos in their
mottled uniforms who often acted as Shia death squads.
The journey to the al-Hamra Hotel in Jadriyah, a
district built in a loop of the Tigris river, took
three times as long as normal. In the following days,
I could see Mehdi Army checkpoints, civilians with
guns and a car slewed across the road, operating
almost within sight of the heavily guarded July 14
Bridge that leads to the Green Zone.

The extent of the military failure over the previous
three-and-a-half years was extraordinary. The foreign
media never quite made clear how little territory the
U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled—even in the
heart of Baghdad. It was astonishing, in early 2007,
to look out from the north-facing windows in the Hamra
and see columns of black smoke billowing up from Haifa
Street on the other side of the Tigris river. This is
a two mile long militant Sunni corridor less than a
mile from the northern end of the Green Zone. Since
the early days of the fighting, the U.S. Army,
supported by Iraqi army troops, had been
unsuccessfully trying to drive out the insurgents who
ruled it.

Sometimes, U.S. commanders persuaded themselves (and
embedded journalists) that they were making progress.
On this occasion, I looked up and read a long,
optimistic article about Haifa Street in an American
paper, claiming there were signs that "the tide was
turning on Iraq's street of fear." It was no longer an
arrow pointing at the heart of the Green Zone; rebel
leaders had been arrested or killed; large weapons
caches had been discovered; insurgent attacks were
less intense and less frequent; Iraqi troops were at
last being effectively deployed. Having finished
reading the piece, I was reflecting on whether or not
the U.S. military and its local allies were at last
achieving something on Haifa Street when I glanced at
the piece and realized, with a groan, that it was
dated March 2005, almost two years earlier.

American commanders often genuinely believed that they
were in command of towns and cities which Iraqis,
including the local police, told me were dominated by
Sunni insurgents or Shia militia. On one occasion in
early 2007, senior U.S. and Iraqi officers were giving
a video press conference from Diyala, a much fought
over province northeast of Baghdad, confidently
claiming that they were winning the fight against the
Sunni rebels. Even as they were speaking an insurgent
squad attacked and captured the mayor's office in
Baquba, the capital of Diyala. It only withdrew after
blowing up the building and kidnapping the mayor. The
government announced that it was dismissing 1,500
policemen in Diyala because of their repeated failure
to resist the insurgents. When I checked with a police
commander a few months later he threw up his hands in
disgust and said that not a single policeman had been
fired.

The addition, promised by Bush, of five extra brigades
to the U.S. forces in Baghdad made, at least at first,
some difference to security in the capital. The number
of bodies of people tortured, shot in the head, and
dumped in the street, went down from the horrific
levels of late 2006. These death-squad killings were
mostly of Sunni and were the work of the Mehdi Army or
of army and police units collaborating with them.

A few days before the security plan began, Muqtada
al-Sadr stood down his militiamen, telling them to
dump their arms and move out of Baghdad. He was intent
on avoiding direct military confrontation with the
U.S. reinforcements. But while the Shia were killing
fewer Sunni, the Sunni insurgents were still
slaughtering Shia civilians with massive suicide
bombs, often vehicle-borne, targeting crowded market
places. These did not stop and improved security
measures made little difference. On February 3, a
truck delivering vegetables blew up in the
Shia-Kurdish Sadriya quarter in central Baghdad
killing 135 people and wounding 305. Ten weeks later,
long after the Security Plan had been launched,
another vehicle bomb blew up in the same market,
killing 127 people and wounding 148. Not surprisingly,
local people jeered and threw stones at American and
Iraqi soldiers who turned up after the explosion. The
main failing of the security plan for ordinary Iraqis,
many of whom had initially welcomed it, was simply
that it did not deliver security for them or their
families.

There was a central lesson of four years of war which
Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board,
though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the
occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the
day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always
had enough water to swim in. The only community in
Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the
Kurds—and Kurdistan was not occupied.

It is this lack of political support that has so far
doomed all U.S. political and military actions in
Iraq. Opinion polls consistently show this trend. A
comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted by ABC
News, USAToday, the BBC, and ARD annually over the
last three years. Its findings illuminate the most
important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by
March 2007, no less than 78% of Iraqis opposed the
presence of U.S. forces, compared to 65% in November
2005 and 51% in February 2004. In the latter year,
only 17% of the population thought that violence
against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the
figure had risen to 51%. This pool of people
sympathetic to Sunni insurgents and Shia militias was
so large as to make it difficult to control and
impossible to eliminate them.

Again and again, assassinations and bombs showed that
the Iraqi army and police were thoroughly infiltrated
by militants from all sides. Nowhere was safe. Some
incidents are well known. In April 2007, a suicide
bomber blew himself up in the café of the Iraqi
parliament in its heavily defended building in the
Green Zone. The bomber had somehow circumvented seven
or eight layers of security. Earlier, on March 23, the
deputy prime minister, Salam al-Zubaie, was badly
injured by a bomber who got close to him with the
connivance of his bodyguards.

There were lesser unknown incidents indicative of the
divided loyalties of the security forces. On March 6,
militants from the Islamic State of Iraq movement—of
which al Qaida in Iraq is part—stormed Badoush prison
northwest of Mosul. In the biggest jailbreak since
2003, they freed 68 prisoners, of whom 57 were
foreign. Of the 1,200 guards at the prison, 400-500
were on duty at the time, but did nothing to stop the
Islamic militants breaking in or the prisoners
breaking out. Some American soldiers see that the
problem is not about a few infiltrators. "Any Iraqi
officer who hasn't been assassinated or targeted for
assassination is giving information or support to the
insurgents," one US marine was quoted as saying. "Any
Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is
already dead."

Some problems facing the U.S. and Britain in Iraq have
not changed since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in
1990. Getting rid of the Iraqi leader was far easier
than finding a successor regime that would not be more
dangerous to American interests. It is a dilemma still
unresolved more than four years into the occupation.

A prime reason why the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein
during his war with Iran in 1980-88 is that it did not
want a Shia clerical regime, possibly sympathetic to
America's enemies in Tehran, to come to power in Iraq.
It was the same motive that stopped President Bush
senior pushing on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam
after defeating the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991.
After 2003, Washington was in the same quandary: If
elections were held, the Shia, comprising 60% of the
population that had been long excluded from power,
were bound to win.

The nightmare for Washington was to find that it had
conquered Iraq only to install black-turbaned clerics
in power in Baghdad, as they already were in Tehran.
At first, the U.S. tried to postpone elections,
claiming that a census had to be held. It was only on
the insistence of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani that two elections were held in 2005, in
which the Shia religious parties triumphed. Washington
has never been comfortable with these Shia-Kurdish
governments. It demanded that they try to reconcile
with the Sunni—though exactly how Shia and Kurdish
leaders are supposed to do this, given that the main
Sunni demand is a timetable for an American
withdrawal, has never been clear.

Iraqis do not fail to spot the extent to which the
power of their elected government is being trimmed.
The poll cited above showed that by Spring 2007 only
34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by
their own government; 59% believed the U.S. was in
control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of
legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.

In the course of 2006 and 2007, Baghdad disintegrated
into a dozen hostile cities at war with each other.
There were fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia
neighborhoods. Terror engulfed the city like a
poisonous cloud. There was a lot to be frightened of:
Sunni insurgent groups; the Shia militias, Mehdi Army,
and the Badr Organization; police and police
commandos; the Iraqi army and the Americans. One day I
received an e-mail message from an old friend. He
wrote: "Yesterday the cousin of my stepbrother (as you
know, my father married twice) was killed by Badr
troops three days after he was arrested. His body was
found in the trash in al-Shula district. He was one of
three other people who were killed after heavy
torture. They did nothing, but they are Sunni people
among the huge numbers of Shia people in the General
Factory for Cotton in al-Khadamiyah where they were
working. His family couldn't recognize his face [and
only knew it was him] because of the wart on his arm."

Most of my Iraqi friends had fled Iraq for Jordan or
Syria or, when they could get a visa, Western Europe.
Soon, I could not enter the coffee shop of The Four
Seasons, the hotel where I usually stayed in the
Jordanian capital of Amman, without seeing several
Iraqis I knew sitting at other tables. These were the
better-off. The poor often had to chose between
staying in jobs where they were at risk, becoming
permanently unemployed, or taking flight.

Many Iraqis see sectarianism as the work of the
Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian
differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein
and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But
in one important respect, foreign occupation did
encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni
might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they
were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though
Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis
fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were
prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni
saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only
a member of a different community, but as a traitor to
his country. Sectarian and national antipathies
combined to produce a lethal brew.

The war in Iraq that started in 2003 has now lasted
longer than the First World War. Militarily, the
conflicts could not be more different. The scale of
the fighting in Iraq is far below anything seen in
1914-18, but the political significance of the Iraq
war has been enormous. America blithely invaded Iraq
to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great
political and military strength. Instead it
demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S.
war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni
Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington
at the start of the war, convinced that they were
betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of
power.

At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out
how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the
conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high
proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance
to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired
from outside the country. By 2007, the administration
was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian
Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a
repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years
earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In
this fantasy world, constructed to impress American
voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it
was impossible to devise sensible policies.

The U.S. occupation has destabilized Iraq and the
Middle East. Stability will not return until the
occupation has ended. The Iraqi government, penned
into the Green Zone, has become tainted in the eyes of
Iraqis by reliance on a foreign power. Even when it
tries to be independent, it seldom escapes the culture
of dependency in which its members live. Much of what
has gone wrong has more to do with the U.S. than Iraq.
The weaknesses of its government and army have been
exposed. Iraq has joined the list of small wars—as
France found in Algeria in the 1950s and the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s—that inflict
extraordinary damage on their occupiers.

Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper
The Independent, Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005
Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book on
his years covering the war in Iraq, The Occupation:
War and Resistance in Iraq(Verso) was a finalist for
the National Book Critics Circle Award for
non-fiction. This essay will be the new introduction
to the paperback edition of that book, due this fall.