“So What? (Iraq Istructions for Use)”
from Limes special issue March 2003
By Lucio Caracciolo
The Americans have ended up in Iraq for three principal reasons. In order of importance: because they intended to make it the mainstay of their influence in the Gulf and in the Greater Middle East, Saudi Arabia having become too unreliable; because they wanted to export a communicable model of democracy and development for the whole region; and to guarantee for themselves future control of the enormous Iraqi oil reserves, as yet largely untapped. Geostrategy, ideology, economics. To these was added the official, or rather bureaucratic (Wolfowitz) justification: weapons of mass destruction—a powerful threat for mobilizing US public opinion at the time; a boomerang today.
A year after the self-proclaimed “victory”, the three objectives appear somewhat remote. Painting the war as a “civilizing mission” proves particularly arduous now that the media is circulating the details of the torture practiced on the occupants of the Iraqi prisons—revelations destined to stain the image of the US throughout the world for years. And they cast a sinister light on the overall meaning of the war. “If we combat terrorism with terrorists methods, it is over”, observed our Defense Minister Antonio Martino, hardly one suspected for anti-American prejudice.
Among the different minds of the Bush administration there seems to be a settling of accounts. The neoconservative ideologues are licking their wounds. The hard lessons of history seem to have clouded their prestige. Some shows signs of self-criticism, others return painting scenes of permanent world revolution, and still others accuse the White House of weakness. One of their most honest analysts privately explained to Limes, on the eve of the attack on Saddam, that which the neocons intended by the operation: “No political leader, no strategic planner will ever declare its true objectives in war. I would refer to the old Chinese proverb: you kill the chicken to frighten the monkey. Liberate Iraq from Saddam and hope that Kim Jong-Il and Iran get the message. Work on Iraq democracy as a mode for the rest of the Middle East.
Work through diplomatic channels for ways to favor economic development in the Arab world. Bring down the Iranian regime from the inside. Hope and pray that it all works.
The chicken is dead (or better, incarcerated). But the monkey-rogue states, after an initial reflex of panic don’t seem frightened, neither in the Middle East nor elsewhere. And in Iraq the anti-American guerilla warfare has consummated a marriage of convenience with jihadists, wreaking havoc on the most powerful military in the world.
It is too early to determine what the geopolitical outcome of post-war Mesopotamia will be.
As of today, however, we can estimate a shocking decline in American credibility.
If this tendency intensifies, the Mesopotamian campaign could inaugurate a season of further global destabilization.
Left to overturn the Middle Eastern status quo to its own advantage, the US appears today like the sorcerer’s apprentice. They have changed the rules of the game and the maps of the region. But they have not collected the fruits of the shaken tree.
On the Iraqi ground, few still believe in the goodness of American intentions. If, in the first week after the liberation from Saddam’s regime, many, including those in the Sunni Triangle, seemed disposed to view US intentions well, the Arab Iraqis are by now inclined to wariness when not to pure hate. Seen from the view of the locals, the American’s objective is to put their hands on oil and all other available business products. The rest is rhetoric. A few are absolutely convinced that US troops are fomenting chaos themselves in order to justify the occupation. Machiavelli, detested in America, is in fashion in the Middle East.
How have the Americans managed to lose the propaganda war? First and foremost, by not committing themselves to providing the population with minimal essential services—water, electricity and basic infrastructure. Then, by dismantling what little remained of the residual welfare guaranteed by the “oil for food” program and its connections to dirty traffic to which the UN had closed their eyes. The demobilization of the army, the police and the Baath party has removed the Iraqi base of support. Hundreds of thousands of families were left without wages.
Even the Kurds, historical allies of the Americans, have suffered from the incapacity of the liberators/occupiers to manage post-Saddam Iraq. Above all, they suddenly lost the quota of trade income from the exportation of crude oil and from the contraband of oil products—a very grave blow for a dependent economic, which sustains itself with energy royalties and on the black market.
Under the Bremer administration’s umbrella, on the other hand, jobs have flourished, with the contracts and subcontracts managed directly by the Americans to favor their own companies, from Bechtel to Halliburton (in the first trimester of 2004, vice-President Cheney’s former corporation has received 2.1 billion dollars from its Iraqi activities, out of a total of 5.5 billion). The Coalition Provisional Authority was the main instrument of this game. The contracts have almost all ended up in American hands. A marginal quota has gone to the British, leaving crumbs for the others. Worse: the necessity of protecting them has drawn thousands of private military contractors to the territory. The corporate warriors of the firms involved in Iraqi business are perceived as protectors of foreign interests, not of the country.
The void in political power has multiplied the effects of post-war anomie: besides the guerillas, bands of criminals lay down the law while the structure of archaic power reemerges in the form of religious leaders and tribal heads. The people lack security—that primary good, without which the planned reconstruction makes no sense. According to the Iraqis, the principal responsibility for the chaos rests with the occupying troops, beginning with the Americans.
As far as oil is concerned, even the Iraqis better disposed to believe Bush are now convinced that it was the true reason for the war. Yet, only a half truth, if it is true what we have hinted about US intentions. To imagine that the leaders of the only superpower have unleashed hell for two or three million extra barrels a day, already available on the market, seems implausible.
The fact is, however, that the daily behavior of the Americans in Iraq has been so greedy as to legitimize the worse suspicions. While they refused to finance a minimal reconstruction of the country, while bartering with the head sheiks appointed to indirect control of the territory and the pipelines, until holding the reward for Saddam, the Americans have entrusted to their own businesses—brooking no competition—the major contracts tied to the rebuilding of the infrastructure and the services of the southern oil system.
Bremer is not interested in restoring the flow of oil from Kirkuk but has replaced the network centered on the Basra area: rehabilitation of the wells, pipelines, pump stations, and loading terminals, sufficient to export two million barrels a day (in the short term, perhaps three), all directed towards the United States. And yet the availability of this oil does not sate the American giant, still occupied today with enriching its strategic supplies. The paradox of the war in Iraq is that intending to guarantee the flow of abundant, cheap oil, the Americans have contributed to the breaking of the international mechanism of supply and demand, already overheated from the growing energy needs of China. The price of gas in America has risen sky-high. The global economy suffers as a result.
On the political level, Bremer has tried up until the end to keep a fantasy government standing. In spite of the facts disproving the optimism of the “utility Iraqis”, like Ahmed Chalabi, the Americans believed that they could baptize a local regime without a significant contingent of Sunnis. Only in April, Bush’s provisional viceroy discovered, on the solicitation of the UN messenger, Lakhdar Brahimi, that it was unimaginable to reconstruct an embryonic state excluding the Sunni bureaucracy, a few exponents of the Ba’ath, the army and the security forces—many by now joined with the guerrillas. But the uncertain opening to the Sunnis has resulted in reintroducing their Islamic party, integrated into the Iraqi Governing Council as a mere pretense.
More troubling still is the conviction among many Iraqis that the American occupation is the brainchild of an Israeli project. From Sharon’s point of view, the US intervention has not only liquidated the arch nemesis Saddam, but has installed the friendly superpower in the heart of the Gulf, between Israel and Iran. According to this extremely popular interpretation among the Arabs and Muslims, the war must have served the Israeli interests by destabilizing the Saudi regime and threatening Syria, in order to liquidate the menace of Hizbullah. These hypotheses have been reinforced by Sharon’s recent decisions, that he would like to untie the Palestinian knot without foreign interference, counting on the fact that on the eve of the presidential elections Bush can not allow himself to block Israel.
The Israeli influence would be demonstrated also by the umpteenth gaffe by the Iraqi Governing Council, in which members were chosen by Bremer among the presumed friends of America on the basis of criteria of ethnic proportionality. They commissioned a new national flag to an Iraqi artist residing in London, Rifat Chadirgi, brother of the president of the committee charged by the CPA with choosing the post-Saddam Iraqi flag. Presently, the flag manufactured by Chadirgi recalls the Israeli one.It is white with two parallel blue stripes that represent the Tigris and the Euphrates; in the middle, a yellow band, symbol of the Kurds—the great allies of the US before, during and after the war; above the Islamic crescent, changed from green to blue. Result: the old Iraqi flag was displayed in the Sunni area as a symbol of resistance to foreign occupation. The new standard, moreover provisional, is considered by the Arabs as a collaborationist mark. The adjustment served nothing in extremis—in comparison with the inflamed reaction of the Iraqi Arabs—and was recreated with darker (less “Israeli”) blue bands.
Today in Iraq a war is fought between American-led forces of occupation and armed groups of Arab Iraqis, apart from the thousands of jihadists infiltrated from neighboring countries and from the rest of the Islamic world, beginning with Lebanese Hizbullah.
The objectives of the guerillas and Islamic terrorists are diverse. The aim of the nationalists, as much Sunni as Shiite, is to liberate the country from foreign occupation. The first desire to recover political legitimacy, the second to affirm themselves as future leaders.
Both send a subtle message to the Kurds: don’t think to profit from your privileged relationship with the US in order to rule the new Iraqi order. The Kurds in fact give little thought to their Arab “compatriots”. They are aiming to enlarge there sphere of control, centered on Kirkuk (oil), at the expense of Sunni Arabs and Turks. Besides, they operate on a pan-Kurdish scale, to support their brothers in Syria, Iran and Turkey.
It is not yet a full-scale civil war. It could become one if the Westerners left and the local ethnic-religious components decided to directly settle their accounts. At that point, the principal internal fault line would emerge: not the religious one between Sunnis and Shiites, but the ethnic one between Kurds and Arabs.
As for Hizbullah, they are connected by a thousand strings to the Shiite Iraqis, planning to export their fundamentalist model (political-religious and welfare) to central Mesopotamia, from Baghdad to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. The Lebanese guerillas are among other things a vector of agreement between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, above all through their Sunni Syrian links.
The jihadists want to tie the Americans down in Iraq for as long as possible, so Bush will not have sufficient ground troops to let loose a grand counteroffensive in the Afghan theatre, where Karzai is unable to expand his own control and even the Taliban is rising again. The ideal for Osama bin Laden’s emulators is that Iraq would become a replay of Somalia, multiplied by a thousand. But Iraq is not Somalia. The Iraqis, once recovered some form of sovereignty, would be unlikely to fall victim to the fundamentalists who crave the return of “pure” Islam.
Why are we Italians in Iraq? Now, we remember that we landed there as a favor to the Americans, while hoping to be repaid politically (our image and weight in the coalition) and economically (a slice of the business in the reconstruction). From Bush’s point of view, the Italians and the other partners serve on the other hand to give an international front to the American mission and to contribute to the control of the territory. Berlusconi, with the backing of parliament, presented the operation as purely “humanitarian”. Our three thousand men were installed in an apparently tranquil zone and two steps from the oilfields which interested the ENI. After the strike on Nasiriya (12 November 2003) and the “battle of the three bridges” (6 April 2004), today we are barricaded in our posts, alone and menaced. We cannot even develop the “humanitarian” mission. Among other things, we have never invested sufficient money for this undertaking.
What to do? Allowing that the United States and the United Nations find an agreement on the composition of the provisional government to install after the 30th of June, it is still possible to imagine a credible scenario that conforms to our national interests, not to mention a last chance to avoid total disaster—for America, but by association also for Italy and all the other countries engaged in Iraq.
We will try therefore to sketch out the contours of a hypothetical plan of gradual but active disengagement, designed to surmount the present strategic impasse. The objective at bottom is a unified Iraq, pacified and not excessively exposed to the ambiguous influence of its neighbors. This new Iraq should guarantee to all its ethnic, tribal and religious components an equal partition of resources, beginning with oil. And thus stabilizing itself, favor the emergence of a Middle Eastern geopolitical context able to calm the fears of Israeli security.
Here are the conditions:
A) A truly Iraqi government—not composed only of friends of the Americans, but by credible leaders interested in national unity—and a technical executive able to confront the most urgent problems without the immediate and suffocating control of American (de facto ministers), as under the Bremer administration. Among the priorities would be a national census and the consent to holding elections by 2005.
B) The UN mission in Iraq will first of all have to support the work of the provisional government, therefore contributing to guaranteeing the representation of local powers that will assume responsibility of their respective territories and correctly administer their allocated resources. Altogether, these groups will participate in managing security in accord with the new Iraqi police. To this end, a central role is granted by the UN to continents of international military police (UMP), modeled after our carabinieri, tested with efficacy in Bosnia and Kosovo.
A new ad hoc international conference will gather assistance and credit for the Iraqis, in stages and for particular circumstances. If, up to a prefixed period, UN monitoring determined that such conditions were not met, all non-strictly humanitarianinternational involvement would cease, leaving Iraq to its fate. Besides, the oil embargo would be imposed on unreliable Iraqis.
C) A multinational force centered on Nato and comprising contingents of other countries, beginning with those from the Arab League, would have to operate in Iraq on UN mandate.
It would not be advisable to send troops from Pakistan: the ties are too strong between the Pakistani military and security establishment and the jihadists.
The first function of the UN/Nato/Arab League force is to render visible the de-Americanization of the occupation. Secondly, to form some detachments on a regional basis (Kurdistan, the Center, the holy Shiite cities, the South), to protect the UN mission and the Iraqi authorities and to discretely support local security forces. In particular, they must block the foolish expansionist ambitions of the Kurds towards Mosul and Kirkuk, at the expense of Arabs and Turks—already being carried out to acquire all the northern energy resources.
Another, highly demanding task is the problem of border control. Today no government in Baghdad could dream of doing it. The international contingents will have to patrol the tracts of the riskiest borders in order to make life more difficult for the jihadists that infiltrate Iraqi territory; an advantage for the neighboring countries as well, above all for Syria: the UN/Nato/Arab League deployment could protect it from eventual American reprisals.
Of course, not all borders are equal. The Saudi one, endless and desolate, is almost impossible to guard. The deployment here will be little more than symbolic, because the border with Iraq also serves Riyadh as a security valve. Thousands of Saudi jihadists who would otherwise strike the House of Saud are coming to settle in Iraq. Meanwhile, Nato patrolling of Iraqi and Kuwaiti waters is essential. We could then test the Iranian intentions, extending international control to the Satt al-Arab. On the other hand, imagining any stabilization of Iraq and the surrounding region without or against Tehran—as Bush would like—is senseless. If anything, it is the fastest way to hand over the keys to the Gulf to the Persians.
The UN mission will intend for the US troops to make themselves seen as little as possible in the territory and commit themselves above all to the control of a few borders: the Gulf, Jordan, Kuwait and the Kurdish side of the border with Turkey. In monitoring, the Americans will give to the Nato contingents the support of their exclusive capacity to observe satellite photos of the shifting border-crossers. On the ground, US troops would be in the majority. But the American deputation will be notably reduced in time, moreover with serious delay on Rumsfeld’s initial plans.
Certainly, it will be very difficult to find a balance in the management of the international force. Americans don’t accept on principle the premise of foreign command of their own troops. Besides, they want to conserve at all costs the major bases in Iraq. Washington cannot tout court clear out of Iraq after having evacuated Saudi Arabia and remain without strategic position in the Gulf. After the presidential vote in November, Bush or Kerry will revise the approach to the Middle East, finally free from immediate electoral conditions.
For Italy, this scenario is the extrema ratio for justifying our presence on the ground.
Being ready in fact to expand our commitment in military and financial terms is to claim for a change a voice in the decision making of the UN mission. But if at the end of June the Palazzo di Vetro has not produced a similar agreement, Italy should retire. It would be well advised to advertise our intentions right away—both to pressure the Americans from a position of relative strength (soldiers on the ground), and to lower the risk of reprisals.
For the success of this project it is necessary to remove the general suspicion among Arabs that the West’s interest in Iraq is for oil. Period. These suspicions are only helped by the ambiguous American management of the flow of money into the fund for Iraqi development because of the sale of Iraqi oil.
In this area, the primary task of the provisional Iraqi Government will be to create a plan of territorially balanced development for national energy resources submitted to the United Nations in order to obtain the necessary credit. It should guarantee that the energy proceeds serve above all the needs of the local communities. That which is used is for the royalties in transit, for the quotas on exportation and for the commercialization of the internal market. In this way, moreover, they can stimulate the occupation of areas of interest for the energy plan.
In a few cases, the priorities will be more geopolitical than economic, for reasons of security. For example, the oilfields north of Mosul and the gas reserves of eastern Kurdistan must be revived in order to loosen the Kurdish pressure on Kirkuk; likewise for the oilfields of the Sunni-Arab and Turkish areas of the Central-North, to sustain the stifled tribal economy. Baghdad’s development will favor it as part of the Sunni Triangle rather than the Shiite quarters of the capital. In the South, the utilization of the oil resources will work to the advantage not only of the Shiite majority but also of the Sunni tribes of the western desert.
It is essential that the schemes for local development be interconnected in a national project—the very opposite of what the Americans have done until now. A transparent administration for the oil investments and revenues from part of the provisional government and the UN will have to prevent oil-for-food style fraud. The Minister for Oil will thus have a key role in restoring the trust of the Iraqis; it is not enough that he be a good technocrat. It is necessary that is was not involved in the Bremer management and that he has a collaborative rapport with the region’s Opec countries.
The success of the UN/Nato operation will depend also on the internationalization of the Israel-Palestine question. It is the only way to escape from this blind alley. The logic of Sharon’s plan, now damaged by his party’s opposing vote, will be overturned, beginning with its premise: to definitively resolve the conflict with the Palestinians on a unilateral basis. Collaborating with oneself doesn’t make for a peace.Neither, in the long run, can it be simply imposed. If Israel wants to emancipate itself from the menace of terrorism, it needs an enemy with which to negotiate. Not the discredited and corrupt Arafat, but a leader young and popular enough in the territories, like Marwan Barghouti, still detained in an Israeli state prison.
The Israeli premier is betting, however, on the accomplished facts. He wants to abandon the untenable, venomous Gaza, by transforming it into a prison in the open air, perennially guarded.
He intends to annex the principal West Bank settlements. The rest of the Territories, crossed by the “protective fence” (read: “wall of annexation”), would be reduced to an economically and politically unmanageable patchwork; not an effective security cage against Palestinian terrorism—if anything it will multiply—nor does it amount to a project for peace.
Rather, it is a guarantee of permanent instability.
An alternate approach is necessary, even if it will be impossible to solidify one before the US elections.We could, however, prepare one, making a stimulus out of the UN plan for Iraq as was first hinted. It would mobilize together the Western and Middle Eastern actors. These we could involve in a multilateral plan of interposition between the Israelis and the Palestinians, while accepting Sharon’s arguments on the necessity of protecting the fixed Israeli settlements in the West Bank but refusing the annexation of a vast protective strip around the colonies in question in order to connect them to Israel, thus absorbing more than a third of the occupied Territories. Similarly, the permanent occupation of the border strip along Jordan and the Dead Sea would not be allowed.
Instead, Nato and other international troops under UN mandate could effectively guarantee the security of the Jewish settlements and the corridors joining them with Israel. This approach should extend to the zone of the Syrian-Jordanian-Israeli border, that area of support for Palestinian terrorist acts within the Jewish state. It is not a definitive solution, but an attempt to overturn the tendency of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to seem irreversible, today similar to a sort of asymmetrical suicide. This would be the introduction to commencing, after the American presidential elections, the negotiations that will stabilize the borders between Israel, Palestine and Syria.
When before the Iraqi campaign someone dared to raise doubts over its wisdom, the inevitable neoconservative reply was: “So what?”, coupled with a condescending smile or an annoyed wince. This became the natural reflex for those who truly believed in the political theories of the “unipolar moment”, as if after the surrender and expunging of the Soviet empire, the globe was a clay model for the United States.
Among the American elites that occupy themselves with foreign policy, the neoconservatives remain probably the most transparent—much to the contrary of the legend, with its subtly anti-Semitic overtones, that paints Wolfowitz and his associates as an esoteric sect that maneuvers behind the scenes of the Bush marionette. The neocon language is clear, often brutal—hence open to refutation—and has its official organ available online, in the Weekly Standard.
Today the “so what?” is gone as even various neoconservatives reply: it was not the war but the illusion of winning it conservatively, with little money and fewer soldiers that was mistaken. Maybe. It would be useful for the more devout supporters of the war for Middle East revolution to reread the prophetic words of an eminent veteran conservative, Henry Kissinger. Ten years ago, the sage of United States geopolitics admonished his compatriots: “The end of the Cold War has created what some observers have called a “unipolar” or “one-superpower” world. But the United States is actually in no better position to dictate the global agenda unilaterally than it was at the beginning of the Cold War. America is more preponderant than it was ten years ago, yet, ironically, power has also become more diffuse. Thus, America’s ability to employ it to shape the rest of the world has actually decreased.”
So what? Perhaps without being totally aware of it, in the war against terrorism and above all in the Iraqi campaign, the United States have put in question their standing, their global influence, imagining themselves to be much more authoritative and dominant than they actually were. Now they begin to pay the price. Bush’s embarrassed excuses for torture in Iraq are only the beginning.
However it ends, the relationship between American and the rest of the world will change profoundly. We Europeans, anesthetized from the memories of too much war, find it difficult to perceive this. It will come to be said that, once again, Europe will prove itself the imaginary knight of international politics.In this case, the price we will pay will be proportional to our impotence. Much higher, therefore, than that of the Americans.