Iraq War: Make it impossible to inflict such barbarism again

The US and Britain not only bathed Iraq in blood, they promoted a sectarian war that now threatens the region

If anyone doubted what kind of Iraq has been bequeathed by a decade of US-sponsored occupation and war, this Tuesday's deadly sectarian bomb attacks around Baghdad against bus queues and markets should have set them straight. Ten years after American and British troops launched an unprovoked attack on a false pretext - and more than a year since the last combat troops were withdrawn - the conflict they unleashed shows no sign of winding down.

Civilians are still being killed at a rate of at least 4,000 a year, and police at about 1,000. As in the days when US and British forces directly ran the country, torture is rampant, thousands are imprisoned without trial, and disappearances and state killings are routine.

Meanwhile power and sewage systems barely function, more than a third of adults are unemployed, state corruption has become an institutionalised kleptocracy and trade unionists are tried for calling strikes and demonstrations (the oil workers' leader is in court in Basra on that charge tomorrow). In recent months, mass protests in Sunni areas have threatened to tip over into violence, or even renewed civil war.

The dwindling band of Iraq war enthusiasts are trying to put their best face on a gruesome record. Some have drifted off into la-la land: Labour MP Tom Harris claims Iraq is now a "relatively stable and relatively inclusive democracy", which is more or less the direct opposite of reality.

Tony Blair - treated with media reverence but regarded by between 22% and 37% of Britons as a war criminal - accepts the cost of invasion was "very high". But the former prime minister claims justification in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, while insisting that a popular uprising against his regime would have triggered a worse death toll than in Syria. That avoids the fact that the US and Britain controlled Iraq's airspace from 1991 and could have prevented aerial attacks on rebels. It also blithely ignores the scale of the bloodbath for which George Bush and he are directly responsible.

Whether either is ever held to account for it, global opinion against the Iraq war is long settled - including in Britain, the US and Iraq. The invasion was a flagrant act of aggression against a brokenbacked state, regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion.

The onslaught triggered a death toll which certainly runs into hundreds, rather than tens, of thousands: estimates range from the Iraq Body Count's minimum of 173,271 up to 2012 (acknowledged to be an underestimate) through the Iraqi government and World Health Organisation's 223,000 and Lancet survey's 654,965 "excess deaths" in the first three years, to the ORB polling organisation's estimate of more than a million.

The occupation was a catastrophe for Iraqis. It destroyed the country's infrastructure, created 4 million refugees, reduced cities like Fallujah to ruins - littered with depleted uranium and white phos- phorus as cancer rates and birth defects multiplied - and brought alQaida and its sectarian terror into the country.

That wasn't the result of mistakes and lack of planning, as the US and British elites like to tell themselves. But as with the armed resistance that mushroomed in the aftermath of the invasion, they were foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of what by any sober reckoning has been a reckless crime.

Saddam Hussein "created enormous carnage", Blair said on Tuesday - which was certainly true in the years when his regime was backed by Britain and the US. But that is exactly what Bush and he did in their war to overthrow him. The biggest improvement in Iraqis' lives thereafter came as a result of the lifting of US and British-enforced sanctions, estimated by Unicef to have killed half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s.

Ten years on, the US still has a powerful presence in Iraq - now starting to resemble a sort of American-Iranian condominium - with thousands of military contractors, security and intelligence leverage and long-term oil contracts. But it's a long way from the archipelago of bases and control its leaders had in mind.

Iraqi success in preventing a permanent occupation is down to resistance, armed and civil, Sunni and Shia. But that achievement was undermined by the eruption of sectarianism in the aftermath of the invasion, fostered by the occupying forces in the classic imperial divideand-rule mould.

The evidence is now indisputable that this went far beyond the promotion of a sectarian political carveup. As the Guardian reported this month, US forces led by General Petraeus himself were directly involved not only in overseeing torture centres, but also in sponsoring an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads (known as "police commando units") to undermine the resistance.

One outcome is the authoritarian Shia elite-dominated state run by Nouri al-Maliki today. His Sunni vice-president until last year, Tariq al-Hashimi - forced to leave the country and sentenced to death in absentia for allegedly ordering killings - was one of those who in his own words "collaborated" with the occupation, encouraging former resistance leaders to join Petraeus's "awakening councils", and now bitterly regrets it. "If I knew the result would be like this, I would never have done it," he told me at the week- end. "I made a grave mistake."

The sectarian virus incubated in the occupation has now spread beyond Iraq's borders and threatens the future of states across the eastern Arab world. But the war hasn't only been a disaster for Iraq and the region. By demonstrating the limits of US power and its inability to impose its will on peoples prepared to fight back, Iraq proved a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies. For the British state, the retreat of its armed forces from Basra under cover of darkness, with their own record of torture and killings, was a humiliation.

There's little prospect, given the balance of power, of those most responsible for torture and atrocities in Iraq - let alone ordering the original aggression - of facing justice, or of the reparations Iraqis deserve. But there should be a greater chance of preventing more western military intervention in the Middle East, as Blair and his friends are now pressing for in Syria and Iran.

"Damn us for what we did," a British Iraq veteran wrote. Far better would be to make it impossible for the politicians who sent them there to unleash such barbarism again.

Courtesy the Guardian, UK

LONDON - Twenty- five years ago, on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein's troops spread poison gas through the Kurdish town of Halabja. The attack, which killed an estimated 5,000 people and injured up to 10,000 more, remains the largest chemical- weapons attack ever to target a civilian population.

In the light of the Halabja atrocity, and the regime's broader genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and massive repression throughout the country, the question "Is Iraq better off now than it was under Saddam Hussein?" requires no great deliberation. Iraqis are rid of a dictator responsible for the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, a man who plunged the country into three wars in 24 years, and whose policies ( with the international community's complicity) kept ordinary Iraqis under the strictest sanctions ever imposed by the United Nations. Yes, Iraq is better off without this absolute despot.

But, for those of us who participated in the effort to reconstruct Iraq starting in 2003, this answer is far too glib. We set the bar far higher. The success of the war must surely be measured by whether its goals - particularly the establishment of a constitutional democracy and the country's economic reconstruction - have been achieved. By this standard, the war in Iraq was a monumental failure.

The United States- led Coalition Provisional Authority empowered a new group of political elites who fundamentally distrusted one another and, more important, failed to coalesce around a shared vision for governing the country. Rather than giving these new politicians time to broker compromises, the Americans imposed a divisive constitutional process that exacerbated existing fissures, leading to the civil war of 2006-2007.

The Kurdish and Arab Shia religious parties sought a very weak central government in Baghdad, the latter because they feared a return to Sunni minority rule. The Sunni Arab parties initially rejected any notion of a confederated state, but in time they came to believe that the Shia parties would never share power voluntarily. The ongoing cycle of violence is a legacy of this struggle for control.

Today, many Sunni Iraqis aspire to the same autonomy from Baghdad that the Kurds enjoy in the north of the country. The Shia parties, having tasted real power in Iraq for the first time, are now attempting to create a much more centralised state than either the Kurds or Sunni Iraqis - or the constitution, for that matter - will tolerate.

Indeed, Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki has largely succeeded in concentrating power in his own hands. He has created a network of military and security forces that report directly to him, often outside the legal command structure. He has intimidated the judiciary into ignoring institutional checks on his power, so that constitutionally independent agencies, such as the electoral commission and the central bank, are now under his direct control.

Moreover, Maliki has used the criminal courts to silence his political opponents. Iraq's Sunni vice president is a fugitive in Turkey, with multiple death sentences rendered against him for alleged terrorist activities, though the judgments were based on the confessions of bodyguards who had been tortured ( one died during the " investigation"). An arrest warrant has now been issued against the former finance minister, also a Sunni, on similar charges.

As for the economy, no one expected a replication of Germany's post- 1945 Wirtschaftswunder. Still, Iraq has vast oil and natural-

Indeed, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has largely succeeded in concentrating power in his own hands. He has created a network of military and security forces that report directly to him, often outside the legal command structure. He has intimidated the judiciary into ignoring institutional checks on his power, so that constitutionally independent agencies, such as the electoral commission and the central bank, are now under his direct control.

gas reserves, to which all of the major oil companies wanted access. Everyone stood to benefit: the companies would profit handsomely, while Iraq would gain new technology and vast sums to rebuild the country's devastated infrastructure.

The reality has been far different. After ten years, Iraq's oil production has finally recovered to its pre-war level. But Iraq's government has not completed a single infrastructure project: no new hospitals, schools, roads, or housing whatsoever.

Basic services such as electricity and waste collection have yet to be restored even in major urban centers like Baghdad. (By contrast, reconstruction in Iraqi Kurdistan is occurring at breakneck speed.) Iraqis are about to enter their 11th summer, when temperatures routinely exceed 50° C, with no more than sporadic power and running water.

This lack of progress is truly remarkable, given that Iraq's annual budgets for the last five years have totaled nearly $ 500 billion. Incompetence and corruption are rampant: Iraq routinely scores among the bottom ten countries in Transparency International's list of the most corrupt countries in the world.

Likewise, Iraq's unemployment and underemployment levels remain among the highest in the Middle East. And, as Iraq observer Joel Wing has pointed out, publicsector employment doubled from 2005 to 2010, and now accounts for roughly 60% of the full- time labor force. The brain drain among Iraq's educated youth has accelerated in the last ten years, because many of them simply see no future in the country.

Amnesty International recently issued a report detailing the continued systematic abuse of fundamental human rights in Iraq. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. True, Maliki's nascent dictatorship is lighter than that of Saddam at his worst, and perhaps that is some progress. But what has been gained may be far outweighed by what has been lost: the hope that if Saddam and his tyranny could just be removed, decency, stability, and normalcy could be restored. That, finally, is the true tragedy of Iraq in 2013.

Feisal Amin Rasoul alIstrabadi was Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations from 2004- 2007, and was the principal drafter of Iraq's interim constitution. He is the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is University Scholar in International Law and Diplomacy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013. Exclusive to the Sunday Times www.projectsyndicate.org