Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
History may well judge that the tipping point for the U.S. intervention in Iraq was on February 22. It happened at the Shrine of the Two Imams in Samarra, a city along the Tigris River some sixty miles north of Baghdad. The shrine, famed for its bulbous gold dome and pastel blue tiles, was the burial site in the ninth century for the tenth and eleventh Shiite imams, both direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.
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A million Shiites annually made pilgrimages to the Samarra’s golden-domed shrine.
During the night of February 22, a handful of men dressed in military uniforms sneaked into the mosque, tied up the caretaker in a side room, and carefully planted explosives to have maximum impact on the golden dome. Then they fled. At 6:55
A.M.
, the bombs went off. The dome collapsed; the shrine was destroyed.
“For Iraqis, it was like 9/11 was for the United States,” Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, later told me.
Even the White House recognized the potential impact. “Violence will only contribute to what the terrorists sought to achieve by this act,” President Bush said in a written statement. “I ask all Iraqis to exercise restraint in the wake of this tragedy.”
Ironically, no one died in the attack, which was tied to al Qaeda. But it provoked a massive slaughter, as Shiite men poured onto the streets to seek vengeance. More than twenty Sunni mosques were attacked across Iraq. Several Sunni clerics were dragged onto streets and beaten or murdered. More than 1,000 Iraqis—about one third the number who died on 9/11—died in retribution killings.
After Samarra, sectarian passions accounted for the bulk of killings. Many died after grotesque torture, body parts mauled, axed, or power-drilled. On any given day, dozens of bodies were found dumped on roadsides or in remote fields. A man traumatized by the sight of hundreds of gruesome bodies in the hunt for his missing uncle decided to have his name, address, and telephone number tattooed on his thigh, the one place still likely to be distinguishable after torture.
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It started a widespread trend.
By the end of 2006, more than two dozen militias ruled the streets, intimidated society, dictated to businesses, and defied the government.
The new constitution did not prohibit alcohol or impose Islamic dress. But even in cosmopolitan Baghdad, shops selling alcohol were bombed or attacked. Music shops received warnings from gunmen; many closed down. Leaflets threatened women who did not wear
hejab,
while barbers were murdered for shaving men. The constitution stipulated freedom of speech and the press. But dozens of Iraqi reporters, photographers, and cameramen were killed. Many journalists became afraid of telling the truth; fear led to self-censorship.
In politics, sect became a more important criterion for filling a job than training or experience. Shiite parties purged Sunnis in government ministries under their control and fired Sunni generals in the army. Sunnis were denied treatment at hospitals. As the war entered its fifth year, the Organization for the Care of the Displaced estimated more than 40,000 Sunni families had fled Baghdad to other parts of the country.
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Many Sunnis who stayed sought false papers, expunging telltale Sunni names, such as Omar.
The tensions and dangers alienated even some Shiites. In June 2006, Allawi once again left Iraq.
“When I left, I knew a new chapter was beginning in Iraqi politics. At that point I didn’t want to belong,” he told me. “It was clear that Iraq was moving into an era where the Shiite dominance of the state was being cemented through the help of the United States. It was good in some ways in reversing discrimination, but not good for crafting a common identity for Iraq.”
In 2007, the Bush administration deployed 28,000 additional troops in Iraq to try to restore order to Baghdad and quell the sectarian strife. The reinforcements were still arriving as the Iraq war entered its fifth year, surpassing America’s engagement in World War II.
For Allawi, however, the dream had already died. Drawing on his diaries of the transition in Iraq, he marked the anniversary by publishing his own assessment.
“America’s ‘civilizing’ mission in Iraq stumbled, and then quickly vanished, leaving a trail of slogans and an incomplete reconstruction plan,” he wrote in
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
in 2007.
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The billions that American had spent went unrecognized, and therefore not appreciated. Iraqis heard about the billions, like some memorable banquet to which only a few are invited. But what they experienced was the daily chaos, confusion, shortages and the stark terrors of life. Death squads now compounded vicious attacks by terrorists. Opinions and divisions were hardening. No-go areas, ethnic cleansing, emigration, internal displacements were now happening under the watch of 150,000 MNF troops.
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Allawi was just as critical of his own people.
The new Iraqi political establishment was notably silent about how to extricate the country from its current predicament…. The Iraqi political class that inherited the mantle of the state from the Baathist regime was manifestly culpable in presiding over the deterioration of the conditions of the country…. There was no national vision for anything, just a series of deals to push forward a political process, the end state of which was indeterminate. There was no governing plan. The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order.
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As he toured the United States to promote his book, I asked Allawi to look down the road to what Iraq might look like in a decade.
The best-case scenario, he said, would be an electoral democracy dominated by Shiite Islamist parties, with an angry but accepting Sunni minority that worked along with government even as it tried to undermine it, and Kurds on their merry way but not as an independent state.
But the bottom line, he said, was that “Iraq cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as a model for anything worth emulating.”
Allawi’s bleak assessment was not unusual. As the war entered its fifth year, the national weightlifting champion who had wept with joy as he brought down Saddam Hussein’s statue angrily told reporters that the U.S. invasion had all been a horrible mistake.
“I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship,” Kadhim al Jubouri reflected. “Every day is worse than the previous day.”
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Change is always better homegrown. Whatever its shortcomings, it is more legitimate, more familiar, more adaptable, and more accountable. It will also be far less suspect.
The American experiment in Iraq was the ultimate proof.
In October 2006, I made my fourth postwar trip to Iraq with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The visit was so secret that the dozen journalists accompanying her had only a few hours notice; we weren’t allowed to tell anyone, including editors and family. We flew first to a military base in western Turkey and switched to a lumbering military cargo plane equipped with antimissile technology for the ninety-minute flight to Iraq. Over Baghdad, we circled for almost an hour because mortars had struck near the airport. When we finally landed, we donned heavy flak jackets and helmets for the short hop to the Green Zone in Black Hawk helicopter gunships armed with three machine-guns poking out of windows. The road was too unsafe to drive.
With each trip, dangers increased, freedoms shrank. This time, I couldn’t wander
inside
the fortified Green Zone, much less outside it. A trip beyond the blast-proof concrete walls and razor-wire perimeter, even if for only a few hours, cost 25,000 dollars a day for security, an American official told me. The Green Zone was no longer safe either; rocket and mortar attacks were increasing. The al Rashid Hotel had been hit during the visit of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; we stayed instead in trailers on the palace grounds. The alley bazaar had closed, the victim of one of two almost simultaneous suicide bombings inside the Green Zone that killed ten, including four Americans. New armed checkpoints had been set up every few yards throughout the Green Zone.
A “Welcome to Iraq!” packet included instructions to “seek cover in the nearest bunker or hardened shelter” or hide “under a desk or bed, away from any window” to avoid being hit during an attack inside the Green Zone. The threat, the handout warned, “is very real and ever present.”
Saddam Hussein’s sprawling Republican Palace compound, which was the temporary United States Embassy, had been thoroughly militarized. Staff took weapons or security guards everywhere. Saddam’s old pool, where American staff occasionally went to work out or relax, boasted a large and somewhat bizarre sign advising,
NO DRINKING WHILE ARMED.
I was assigned an escort, who was armed, to walk across the hall from the palace media center to the ladies’ bathroom.
“Enjoy your stay in Iraq!” the welcome packet added, noting that the palace dining facility now carried Baskin-Robbins ice cream.
By 2006, the catastrophic turning point, the United States was spending roughly one hundred billion dollars a year—almost two billion dollars a week—on Iraq. But the war only escalated. The kind of grisly terrorism spectaculars that first shook Beirut twenty years earlier—three over an eighteen-month period—had become everyday events in Baghdad. Rice’s entourage was even more barricaded inside the Republican Palace than Saddam Hussein had been in his last days before his ouster.
The most ambitious and costly U.S. foreign intervention since the end of World War II felt like it was in free fall.
The Iraqi press openly mocked the American vision. A Baghdad newspaper ran an editorial cartoon of a mother with a baby, symbolizing democracy, in a doctor’s office. “Doctor, it is three years old,” the mother complains, “but it’s not growing. It’s getting smaller. Is there a cure?”
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Iraq’s democratically elected government was deeply flawed. The 2007 State Department Human Rights Report conceded that its allies in Baghdad were guilty of some of the same “serious” human-rights violations committed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, including torture, electrocution, and sexual assault of detainees. Corruption was also rampant. Billions of dollars had simply gone missing. Among those indicted was an early defense minister. In 2006, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index put Iraq at the very bottom of 163 countries. On a ten-point scale, it rated 1.9. Only Haiti and Myanmar ranked lower.
Rather than create a new democracy and a strategic partner in the Middle East, the American intervention ignited a deep fury in Iraq. As the war entered its fifth year, more than eighty percent of Iraqis polled said they had little or no confidence that the United States or its troops could fix their country. More than half of those surveyed in a nationwide poll in 2007 said it was “acceptable” to attack American troops, triple the number in 2004.
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The vital tools to build a democratic future were caught in the crossfire of political tensions and horrific violence. American plans to build a civil society struggled to get off the ground because Iraqis were too scared to leave their homes, meet in public places that might be targeted by suicide bombers, or be associated with Americans.
The United States spent 100 million dollars to rehabilitate 3,000 schools and educate a new democratic generation. But education was disrupted by fighting on or near school grounds, student abductions, and murders of staff. In one gruesome episode, five Baghdad schoolteachers were executed in 2005 by gunmen dressed as police officers who burst into their school and shot them in an empty classroom. By the war’s fourth anniversary in 2007, almost 200 university professors had been murdered in sectarian warfare, suicide bombings, or assassinations. Hundreds of schools either opted or were forced to close down for weeks at a time; thousands of families began keeping children at home.
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The middle class—an essential component in a healthy democracy—was fleeing. Iraq’s chaos produced more refugees than were unleashed in 1948 when Palestinians fled the new state of Israel during the region’s first modern war. By 2007, almost four million people—out of twenty-six million—had either fled Iraq or fled their homes to other parts of the country, according to the United Nations. Up to 50,000 were fleeing each month. Syria had taken in one million Iraqis, adding five percent to its population. Jordan took some 700,000, swelling its population by twelve percent. The United States had taken in less than 500 Iraqis.
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The danger was not only the numbers. Most were the best educated, the most skilled, and the people most needed to convert Iraq from dictatorship to democracy. One third of the country’s 40,000 doctors had fled by 2007. The hemorrhaging was so serious that the government stopped issuing graduation certificates to new doctors to prevent them from leaving the country—a tactic used during Saddam Hussein’s rule.
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Their main freedom, Iraqis complained, was the freedom to suffer. Daily life was an increasing struggle.
The early U.S. decision to abruptly dismantle Iraq’s state-run enterprises and open up the marketplace had backfired. Violence discouraged investment by either Iraqis or foreign corporations—leaving no alternative when state industries were shut down. The economic miscalculation contributed significantly to thirty-percent unemployment in safe areas, up to sixty percent in danger zones.
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Oil could not compensate. Production was falling short by one million barrels per day.
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And by the war’s fourth anniversary, up to thirty percent of it was being smuggled either out of the country or into Iraq’s own black market.
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