The massacre of more than 200 persons in Baghdad on the American Thanksgiving Day holiday highlighted anew the violence that is now tearing Iraq apart. During the 2006 U.S. political campaign, progress in Iraq was overstated and setbacks were discounted at times. Behind the scenes, the situation in Iraq was growing steadily worse. At present, the real situation in Iraq is grim.
Semantics and political posturing aside, Iraq is embroiled in a civil war. Various sectarian groups are fighting one another over power and authority. "The fight to define post-Saddam Iraq has been primarily an intra-Arab struggle to determine how power and authority will be distributed... The conflict...is increasingly a sectarian struggle for power and the right to define Iraq's future identity," Lieutenant General Michael Maples, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate Armed Services Committee on November 15, 2006. In speaking before a business forum in the United Arab Emirates, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he would describe the current situation in Iraq as a civil war. "I have been using it [the term "civil war"] because I like to face the reality," Powell explained.
For historic perspective, both recent wars in the Balkans, which were sparked by secession efforts rather than a quest for control over the fragmenting Yugoslavia, were termed civil wars. Iraq certainly fits that definition. Moreover, just as "set piece" ground battles no longer fully define conventional warfare among states, tactics and technologies have also evolved in civil wars. Across Africa and parts of Asia, guerrilla tactics have taken precedence over large-scale ground battles in civil wars.
However, in Iraq, the situation is even more complex. The Shia are seeking domination. Some Sunnis are seeking a restoration of Sunni power. Other Shia and Sunni groups are seeking to break away from Iraq. Al Qaeda is seeking to re-establish a base from which it can export its jihad. One senior member of Iraq's government described the violence as "worse than a civil war." He explained, "In a civil war, you at least know which factions are fighting each other. We don't even know that anymore. It's so bloody confused."
Brutality, ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate attacks, and the targeting of religious institutions characterize the furious storm of violence now raging in Iraq. "What is happening round the clock, in detail, is kidnapping of all that is living in a nation that washes in its blood and counts its days and nights with the number of those missing, killed and tortured from among its sons," Khayri Mansur, an Iraqi commentator wrote Al-Bayan, a Baghdad daily newspaper. In Al-Zaman, the Baghdad edition of a London-based newspaper, columnist Fatih Abd al-Salam observed that police patrols "which are supposed to exude a sense of security, cannot move safely in many Iraqi towns and cities." He also explained in an earlier column, "The failure to stop sectarian displacement in Baghdad is a clear indication that that situation is out of control and that the centers of political power are isolated; except for ambiguous and general statements that make no difference."
In the ongoing maelstrom of violence, Iraqis have increasingly lost confidence in the ability of the United States to stabilize the situation. Columnist Khamis al-Rubay'i, writing in Baghdad's Al-Dustur daily newspaper stated that U.S. troops have proved to be "incapable of establishing security and curbing terror." In Sotaliraq, an electronic newspaper published in Baghdad, Muhammad Abd al-Jabbar al-Shabbout, declared, "The U.S. is no longer capable of solving the Iraqi problem on its own." Alwan Hilayil, another columnist for the same publication, asserted, "America's gift to the people of Iraq has boiled down to this huge parade of turbaned, bearded clerics with silver rings on their fingers, who have done irreparable damage to the essentially tolerant doctrine of Islam and stooped to the basest depths of corruption to hoard enough money to last their next kin for generations to come."
Some U.S. commanders also believe the situation threatens to become unmanageable. A classified Marine Corps intelligence report written by Col. Peter Devlin warned that unless an additional 15,000 to 20,000 troops and billions of dollars in assistance were added to the ongoing efforts in the Anbar Province, "there is nothing" that the U.S. "can do to influence" the insurgency in that region. ABC News reported on November 28 that the Pentagon is now considering a plan to pull U.S. forces out of the Anbar Province. "If we are not going to do a better job doing what we are doing..., what's the point of having them out there?" one senior military official asked. With Al Qaeda forming an "integral part of the social fabric" in that part of Iraq according to Devlin's assessment, such a decision would have the potential to concede territory to Al Qaeda on which it could establish the base it had lost when the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan.
Violence along the lines of ethnic cleansing is also manifesting itself. "The intimidation and killing of ethnic and religious minorities is of particular concern," the United Nations observed in June 2006. According to that UN report, 2,400 Christian families fled Mosul to areas in which there is a Christian majority. That development is occurring on a much larger scale. Increasingly, Iraqis are moving to areas dominated by their own ethnic group or fleeing the country outright. Iraq's Immigration Minister, Abdul-Samad Sultan observed that approximately 890,000 Iraqis have moved to Jordan, Iran, and Syria since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Another 300,000 have fled to other areas within Iraq, largely to areas in which their ethnic group predominates.
The situation has grown so bad that some Iraqis are even yearning for the "old days" under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. "There is no question that democracy is important, but more important still is to pluck Iraq out of this runaway chaos, which is the direct result of unrestrained democracy," Dr. Abd al-Khaliq Husayn explained in Sotaliraq. "What is more, I do believe that security with tyranny is better than insecurity with unlimited democracy. The unspeakable suffering of Iraqis as a result of continuous deterioration in security and public services has grown so acute that they have come to regard any talk of democracy as absolutely otiose, many of them even wishing for a return to Saddam's dictatorial reign."
Neither Iraq's government nor its security forces are currently capable of meeting the challenges presented by the ongoing civil war. Presently, two Shia militias comprise a significant share of seats with Iraq's Shia-dominated government. The Mahdi Army and Badr Militia, both of which have been active in the sectarian violence, currently hold more than 20% of the seats in Iraq's parliament.
Aside from the Sunnis who are politically-disenfranchised in such an arrangement, Iraqis now have little confidence in the Iraqi government. In a November 14 op-ed piece in Al-Sabah al-Jadid, a Baghdad political daily newspaper, columnist Hasaballah Yahya complained, "Even as death carries on with its relentless daily harvest of Iraqi lives, our elected legislators, who represent none but themselves, continue to wallow in peace and wealth, totally unconcerned that their nation is drifting fast into the realm of the unknown or that their motherland is being burnt to cinders." Hasan Hatim al-Madhkur, a columnist for Sotaliraq described the present government as "promoting their own 'divide-and-rule'" agenda at the expense of Iraq's welfare and charged that its leaders are "engaged in a feverish race to stoke up sectarian tension."
Iraq's security forces remain largely impotent and heavily tainted by militia elements. Lieutenant General Maples told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "The Ministry of Interior and the police are heavily infiltrated by members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraaq or SCIRI's Badr Corps and Moqtada al-Sadr's Jayish al-Mahdi. The Jaysh al-Mahdi often operates under the protection or approval of Iraqi police to detain, torture, and kill suspected Sunni insurgents and innocent Sunni civilians." Of Iraq's current 134,000-man army, just 10 battalions or fewer than 10,000 men are deemed effective. In contrast, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army now has 40,000 to 60,000 fighters. Worse, if provincial elections were held, a U.S. intelligence officer predicted that Sadr's group would win most of the seats from southern Iraq and in Baghdad.
All said, the current on-the-ground situation in Iraq has grown very bad. The violence has advanced to the extent that one commentator, Mahdi Qassim proclaimed in Sotaliraq that "Saddam managed to ruin half of Iraq in thirty years" but the present arrangement has "succeeded in ruining the other half in just three."
If a better outcome is still to be realized in Iraq, the United States, its allies, and moderate Arab states will need to proceed from the vantage point of the harsh reality that currently defines Iraq. The task ahead will be difficult. It will entail developing a legitimate Iraqi government, drafting a constitution that safeguards the rights of all Iraqis, establishing security, disarming the militias, developing political and legal institutions, allowing Iraqis to share ownership of the nation's oil wealth, and reconstructing Iraq's economic infrastructure. Otherwise, Sunni disenfranchisement will only grow, Al Qaeda could attain a new base, the ongoing civil war could intensify, and Iraq could ultimately fragment, with mixed-ethnicity areas becoming horrific killing zones as the country breaks up.
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