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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The Bush administration invaded Iraq a year ago expecting a shower of rose petals. Today, the country is on the verge of chaos, and there may be no way to stop it.
Mar 19, 2004 | The Bush administration's hope for a clean, quick transition to a sovereign Iraqi government on June 30 has been dealt a series of blows by local Iraqi political forces, of which the bombing campaign by insurgents is only one. Only a year before, the Americans who planned the invasion were largely ignorant of these groups and their leaders. In their haste to hand over Iraq to someone, the Americans have ceased even trying to find solutions to the most divisive issues, creating a series of political time bombs for the future.
Last summer, the U.S. civil administrator, Paul Bremer, said: "We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." But by early November, it had become absolutely clear that the U.S. could not hope to rule Iraq by fiat for a matter of years, as the Bush administration had earlier envisioned. The ongoing Sunni Arab insurgency and widespread lack of security had already made the center-north of the country ungovernable. It even made the capital unsafe, as the recent horrific bombings at Kazimiyah and at the Mount Lebanon Hotel have demonstrated.
The Kurds had blocked an American attempt to bring in 12,000 Turkish troops to fight the insurgents in the Sunni Arab areas, ensuring that U.S. soldiers remained on the front line in Fallujah and Ramadi. The U.S. was weak in the north and relied heavily on the Kurdish militias, or peshmergas. Were the majority Shiites to grow weary of Coalition Provisional Authority rule and begin an uprising of their own, the Americans in Baghdad came to recognize, the entire country could fall into chaos.
By Nov. 15, Bremer had hammered out an agreement with Iraqis on the appointed Interim Governing Council that would allow a transition to a sovereign and more legitimate Iraqi government by June 30. But then everything fell apart, as Bremer's plan smashed into one brick wall after another.
Today, a year after the invasion, the dream of a democratic Iraq sits on a foundation that is fractured by rivalries, conflicts and schisms. Will Iraq be a secular state or governed by Islamic law? Will it have a strong central government or a loose federalism? Will women retain their legal rights or face fundamentalist patriarchy? Will the ethnic Kurds become semi-autonomous and gain a consolidated Kurdish super-province?
Any one of those questions, by itself, could be enough to tear the country apart. The hopes of some in Washington that Paul Bremer would be a second Gen. MacArthur, crafting a permanent Iraqi constitution and imposing a new government, were brought down by the unexpected guerrilla resistance. And the administration of President Bush, for all of its early optimism, has found that it has at best limited leverage over the underlying conflicts.
Imposing solutions by force of will has proven impossible. Bremer struck temporary compromises with the Shiites, who make up a majority of Iraq's population, and with the Kurds, who have been longtime allies, but all the difficult decisions have been put off because of weakness or fear. And now, as the administration looks for a way to resolve the quagmire before it turns into an election-year debacle, it must seem to Bremer that even with superlative diplomacy, the U.S. risks extraordinary turmoil no matter whether it pulls out or stays.
The Bush administration plan for democratizing Iraq implied from the very beginning that the country would be dominated by Shiites, who comprise 65 percent of the population. Not only would that be unacceptable to the Sunni Muslim minority who make up the nation's elite, but a Shiite-led Baghdad is highly likely to enjoy warm relations with Shiite Iran, as well as with the Arab Shiites of southern Lebanon (think Hezbollah). The administration of the first President Bush in the early 1990s declined to overthrow the Baath regime or to help the Shiite uprising in the spring of 1991 precisely because it feared this outcome.
Most of the obstacles to the Nov. 15 plan were rooted in ethnic politics. Bremer had wanted the new government to be elected by provincial councils. He recognized that for elections to be held, an interim constitution would have to be hammered out. In turn, the negotiations would have to settle a number of outstanding conflicts. Would the Kurds be allowed to create a semi-autonomous ethnic enclave? Would the religious parties accept a separation of religion and state? Would the long-dominant Sunni Arabs (about 15 percent of the population) acquiesce in their demotion to a small minority in a democratic system?
Only days after the announcement of the Nov. 15 accord, Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani came out against it, on two main grounds. First, there had been no mention of the place of Islam in the initial plan, nor any guarantee that the new government would avoid passing laws that contradicted Islam. Second, the plan called for elections by provincial and municipal councils rather than by the electorate at large.
Those provincial and municipal councils had in some instances been appointed by the Coalition or by military officers, or had been chosen by a handpicked group of local notables gathered for that purpose by the Coalition or its subcontractors. In short, they were not democratic.
