Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq - It's All Spelled Out in Unpublicized Agreement
Johnny Asia
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq
By PATRICK COCKBURN
December 11, 2008 "Counterpunch" -- - On November 27 the Iraqi parliament
voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US
under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities,
towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31,
2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the
Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks
time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US
military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with
Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last
US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the
interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of
rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's bid to
act as the world's only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control
of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in
failure. There will be a national referendum on the new agreement next July,
but the accord is to be implemented immediately so the poll will be largely
irrelevant. Even Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of
the SOFA saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq,
now says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after
the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival in
the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US
occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such
as Iran.
Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little
surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally
passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly focused
on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months polls in the US
showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi war as the main
issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many spurious milestones in
Iraq have been declared by President Bush over the years that when a real
turning point occurs people are naturally sceptical about its significance.
The White House was so keen to limit understanding of what it had agreed in
Iraq that it did not even to publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some
senior officials in the Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush
for conceding so much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on
the incoming Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the
doings of the expiring Bush administration.
The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms
agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni Arab
minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister Nouri
al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure, wanted to
barter their support for the accord in return for as many last minute
concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of the 17,000
prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted them released or
at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces. They asked for an
end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily at the Sunni community.
Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out against the accord to the
end, declaring it a betrayal of independent Iraq. The ultra-patriotic
opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has been important because it has
made it difficult for the other Shia parties to agree to anything less than
a complete American withdrawal. If they did so they risked being portrayed
as US puppets in the upcoming provincial elections at the end of January
2009 or the parliamentary elections later in the year.
The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US started
to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links to the Shia
parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it. The first US draft
was largely an attempt to continue the occupation without much change from
the UN mandate which expired at the end of the year. Washington overplayed
its hand. The Iraqi government was growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended
their uprising against the occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the
Mehdi Army, Muqtada's powerful militia, so the government regained control
of Basra, Iraq's second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad,
from the Shia militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more
confident, realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case,
the Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has always
been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein because it
has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds. The leaders of
the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population, might ally themselves
to Washington to gain power, but they never intended to share power with
the US in the long term.
The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers and
some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different Iraqi
communities regard each other into underestimating the strength of Iraqi
nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could survive without US
military support then he was able to spurn US proposals until an
unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could also see that Barack Obama,
whose withdrawal timetable was not so different from his own, was going to
be the next American president. Come the provincial and parliamentary
elections of 2009, Maliki can present himself as the man who ended the
occupation. Critics of the prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that
success has gone to his head, but there is no doubt that the new security
agreement has strengthened him politically.
It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has an
exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone there is
access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of Baghdad people
have been getting only three or four hours electricity a day. Security in
Iraq is certainly better than it was during the sectarian civil war between
Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the improvement is wholly comparative. The
monthly death toll has dropped from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi
civilians and security personnel killed this November, though these figures
may understate the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is
still one of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the
day I started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and
wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are cynical
about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are used to the
government always saying that things have become good and the security
situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a primary school teacher
in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little better but the government
leaders live behind concrete barriers and do not know what is happening on
the ground. They only go out in their armoured convoys. We no longer have
sectarian killings by ID cards [revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by
their name] but Sunni are still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to
Sunni."
Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere but
sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less suicide
bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed underneath
vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they get into it. I
try to keep away from notorious choke points in Baghdad, such as Tahrir
Square or the entrances to the Green Zone, where a bomber for can wait for
a target to get stuck in traffic before making an attack. The checkpoints
and the walls, the measures taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad
close to paralysis even when there are no bombs. It can take two or three
hours to travel a few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked
and this has got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy
in the shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short
aerial sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is
supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since it
also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than useless as
a security aid.
Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless
claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing this
should mean not just improving security but providing more electricity,
clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still very bad," says
Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment affects everybody and you
can't get a job unless you pay a bribe. There is no electricity and
nowadays we have cholera again so people have to buy expensive bottled
water and only use the water that comes out of the tap for washing." Not
everybody has the same grim vision but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily
hard. The best barometer for how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of
the 4.7 million refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and
are now living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000
had returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back
to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back from
Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In Syria I
can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It is safe. Here
I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."
The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much on
whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the government,
which community they belong to, their social class and the area they live
in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are with the state that
reputedly employs some two million people. The private sector is very
feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there are almost no cranes visible
on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia and Kurds control of the government,
it is difficult for a Sunni to get a job and probably impossible unless he
has a letter recommending him from a political party in the government.
Optimism is greater among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says
Jafar Sadiq, a Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated
Iskan area of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I
am glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not
finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe for
my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need badly are
electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his wife Jana
admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives from coming to
Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She teaches at
Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year ago was controlled
by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now the Sunni students are
coming back," she says, "though they are still afraid."
They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni enclaves
defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single entrance and
exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was but it is still
dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim their old house in an
area in which they are a minority. In one case in a Sunni district in west
Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks ago, a Shia husband and wife with
their two daughters went back to their house to find it gutted, with
furniture gone and electric sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided
to sleep on the roof. A Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring
building, cut off the husband's head and threw it into the street. They
said to his wife and daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who
comes back." But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still
be divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh
and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.
Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently
denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government
administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent
member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs is
meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they had spent
only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the government's
fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have been shattered by 28
years of war and sanctions. Few other countries have been put under such
intense and prolonged pressure. First there was the eight year Iran- Iraq
war starting in 1980, then the disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years
of sanctions and then the five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US
invasion. Ten years ago UN officials were already saying they could not
repair the faltering power stations because they were so old that spare
parts were no longer made for them.
Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The few
planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign contractors and
Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the streets in Baghdad in
October many of them brought up fear of cholera which had just started to
spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad. Forty per cent of people in
the capital do not have access to clean drinking water. The origin of the
epidemic was the purchase of out of date chemicals for water purification
from Iran by corrupt officials. Everybody talked about the cholera except in
the Green Zone where people had scarcely heard of the epidemic..
The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It will
also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of the Iraqi
state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the price of oil, the
state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a barrel when the budget
assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries, such as those of teachers,
were doubled on the strength of this, something the government may now
regret. Communal differences are still largely unresolved. Friction between
Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less than two years ago, though
hostility between Arabs and Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US
military frightens many Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy
of the majority Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main
communities in Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be
when there are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its
moment in Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined
country behind them.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily
life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for
best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book 'Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the
Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by Scribner.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21444.htm
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