Dream of a moderate Iraqi gov’t far off
KIRKUK, Iraq — The American commentariat and political class are obsessed with blaming either former U.S. President George W. Bush or President Barack Obama for having lost Baghdad, and are devising potential road maps for restoring U.S. leadership in the Middle East and the world.
But stripped to its basics, the question is whether it will ever be possible to bridge Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite divide.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), comprising Sunni ultra-fundamentalists, seized about one-third of the country in a lightning advance that began on June 10. The only known U.S. military action since then has been to send navy warplanes over the battlefield to take pictures of potential targets.
However, having previously declared that U.S. combat forces would not return to Iraq on his watch, Obama stuck a toe in the Iraqi sand again Thursday. After meeting with his national security team, the president announced he was dispatching 300 military advisers to Iraq to help its forces “take the fight” to the Sunni extremists.
I have spent a lot of time with U.S. forces in just about every corner of Iraq over the past few decades. About all I can say to Obama’s military advisers is “good luck.”
I was embedded with a U.S. Marine Corps reconnaissance battalion when it swept into Baghdad in March 2003. Completely forgotten now is that for two or three weeks after Saddam Hussein and his statue were toppled in Baghdad, U.S. troops had been greeted as liberators by most Iraqis. Crowds thronged the sides of roads on the approach to the capital, greeting the leathernecks as heroes before expressing their contempt for Saddam by plundering every government building and military base that they could get into, which wasn’t hard to do because they had all been abandoned.
The initial Iraqi reception to the U.S. triumph was different in only one place. That was outside the gates of Saddam’s gaudy castle overlooking a leafy bend in the Tigris River next to his hometown of Tikrit.
Standing not 20 metres away from scores of dismounted marines bristling with heavy weapons as rocket- and cannon-firing Cobra attack helicopters zoomed low overhead, a group of wizened elders told me the U.S. victory was ephemeral. Having long ago figured out that the invasion would strip the Sunni minority of power and hand it to Iraq’s Shiite majority, these Sunnis vowed revenge against the Americans but directed most of their venom toward the Shiites, who had been their enemy for more than 1,000 years.
At the end of the first Gulf War, 12 years earlier, I saw the flip side of the Iraqi coin. Reaching the city of Nasiriyah, nearly halfway up Highway 1 from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad, I sat for hours with the ground element of a U.S. army air cavalry brigade watching with morbid fascination as Saddam’s Soviet-built helicopters blasted away at a hospital flying a Shiite flag.
As that brutal, one-sided assault continued, the U.S. commander repeatedly asked Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf by radio for permission to turn his much superior Apache helicopters loose on Saddam’s forces. It took about 20 minutes for each request from Schwarzkopf to ricochet up the chain of command to George H.W. Bush in the White House and come back down again.
Bush had just declared that the war to liberate Kuwait was over. And that was that. Hold your fire.
All the bewildered young U.S. troops could do that day was patch up the wounded Shiite women and children who ran the gauntlet from the hospital to the U.S. position about two kilometres away. A few of those Shiite survivors told me they would never forgive the U.S. for letting so many of them die. But the hatred they had for those treating their wounds was a fraction of what it was for the Sunnis using gunships to hunt them down.
All this is to say that no matter what the U.S. eventually does or does not do in Iraq, either the Shiites or the Sunnis will gain an advantage from this which, with history as a guide, we know the winners will use to grossly abuse the losers.
The case for trying to halt or limit attacks by those fighting for an Islamic caliphate or religious state ruled by Sunnis is stark and persuasive. ISIL has become the wealthiest and perhaps the most virulent terrorist group in the world. Whether it tries to take Baghdad or not, it already controls enough land in rump-Syria and rump-Iraq to create a state. Most ominous of all, it has no need for foreign patrons because it sits astride about one-tenth of the planet’s oil and gas reserves.
But there are perils in siding with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government too. Arab Sunnis and Kurds I’ve spoken with since returning to Iraq one week ago have talked of their profound contempt for al-Maliki and his close ties to Shiite Iran.
There is much talk today in the Iraqi media and among pundits and politicos about the U.S. dumping al-Maliki to create a more representative administration.
A moderate Iraqi government that is mindful of every community’s needs is the obvious solution. But that has never been this country’s experience since the Ottoman Empire, which gave way to Britain’s futile attempt to bend Mesopotamia to its will after the First World War. With Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite sects at war once again, there is no evidence that Iraq will ever be blessed with such a government.