The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (25 page)

Giving American soldiers immunity from local prosecution was not popular either. Many Iraqis thought that U.S. troops, and the private security forces that locals associated with the U.S. presence, had perpetrated violence on the population with impunity, and they wanted no more of that. In addition, giving American troops immunity ran counter to Iraqi nationalist sensibilities; it was an infringement on sovereignty. The powerful Iranian-aligned politicians, too, were opposed to the American troop presence in Iraq—Tehran had objected to the original 2008 SOFA and did not want to see it renewed.

The political cost of giving Washington what it wanted was too high for Maliki and his allies, and they were already content with the United States leaving. Thus the low number of troops that the administration promised was the perfect cover: negotiations broke down in October 2011, and the administration declared that all U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by the end of the year. In effect, Washington confirmed what Iraqis suspected: America was not serious about Iraq, it was not committed to its security, and privately it was happy not to have to leave behind even the 10,000 troops that it had offered.

The administration responded to the collapse of its halfhearted negotiations by declaring victory. It had extricated the United States from Iraq, fulfilling President Obama’s campaign pledge and freeing resources to attend to Afghanistan. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, a testament to American fickleness—a break-it-and-bolt legacy that will be tough to shake. The region got the message loud and clear that America was out of the game. The claim of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that America had been defeated in Iraq gained traction on the
Arab street, and not just in anti-American corners of Damascus or South Beirut. After we packed up and left, our influence would wane, and we would not even care.
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The surge had hardly made Iraq whole, and our speedy departure threatened to break it apart again. Far from Biden’s “great achievement,” Iraq could prove to be one of the Obama administration’s greater mistakes.

American troops had barely left when Iraqi politics imploded. Two days after the last U.S. convoy crossed into Kuwait, the four key Sunni provinces of Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Salahuddin—the Sunni heartland and a bastion of Iraqi nationalism—asked for federalism and regional autonomy.
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This was followed by the major crisis that had been baked in the cake when Maliki left Washington thinking that he had gotten Obama’s go-ahead to hound Iraqiyya on terrorism charges. Iraqiyya threatened to leave the government and then appealed to Kurdish leaders for support to counter Maliki’s growing “dictatorship.”
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Relations between Maliki and the Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani were already tense. Baghdad had put its foot down—unsuccessfully—by declaring that the Kurdish region could not conclude its own oil deals with foreign firms. Kurds had bought into the concept of a united Iraq, provided it would be democratic. But with America leaving and Maliki turning his back on democracy, the Kurds felt vulnerable—it would be only a matter of time before Maliki would try to impose tight control over them. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the fleeing vice president Hashemi found the red carpet rolled out for him in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, or that the Kurds came to his aid by launching sympathetic remonstrations against Baghdad’s increasingly dictatorial ways. Barzani has since hosted Maliki’s Shia critics as well, and raised the possibility of holding a referendum in which the voters of the Kurdish region would be asked if they want to separate from Iraq—unofficial referendums on the same question have yielded 90 percent support for separation.

As a rift opened between the Sunnis and Kurds, on the one hand, and the Shia government in Baghdad on the other, Turkey entered the fray. Since 2006, Turkey had built strong ties with the Kurdish region. Moreover, and more importantly, Turkey felt compelled by its ambitions regarding regional leadership to take up the Sunni cause. It was
the logical step for a majority-Sunni power eager to take the Arab world under its wing. An angry Prime Minister Erdogan summoned Maliki’s national security adviser to Ankara and dressed him down for his treatment of Iraqi Sunnis. The Turkish premier then brushed aside the Interpol warrant for Hashemi’s arrest and gave him shelter in Istanbul under the full protection of the Turkish police. In Turkey, Sunnis and Kurds had found a patron in their quest to move away from Baghdad’s control.

The fight against Maliki strengthens Iran’s hand—Maliki will seek Tehran’s support, and so will his Shia rival Sadr. Sadr has also been talking to Barzani and Iraqiyya’s leaders, lending impetus to their resistance to Maliki. America, meanwhile, is in no mood to be dragged into Iraq’s political drama. It is willing to go along with a Barzani-Sadr plan to unseat Maliki so long as it does not create a mess—which means implicitly endorsing a greater role for Iran in Iraq.

With Turkish influence growing in the Kurdish north and Iranian influence in the Shia south, Iraqi unity is fading fast. Normal politics is over for now. Coalition building between various parties intent on shoring up the center is giving way to a kind of political “warlordism.” Political bosses will divide the spoils to serve their constituencies. They have no vested interest in the state, other than to carve up its resources; they will forge tactical alliances and go to battle with competitors to maximize their share. Iraq’s political warlords will bring down the state to get rid of Maliki, but some will also sell out to Maliki if he meets their price. But even if all the stars align for Maliki to fall, it will not be a restoration of democracy or normal politics, only the gradual demise of the state—the coming apart of Iraq.

America’s quick exit now looks to have doomed Iraq’s experiment with democracy, and in an ironic twist it is America’s man in Iraq who is the aspiring dictator.

All this is happening at a dangerous time, coinciding with the destabilizing force of the Arab Spring. Iraq was meant to send a signal that democratic government was possible in a part of the world that had never seen one up close. Instead it is signaling that sectarianism is ascendant.

When Tunisians and Egyptians revolted against corruption and misrule, many expected that Iraqis, too, irrespective of sect or ethnicity, would take to the streets to demand accountability and good government. After all, they suffer more than any other Arab people from corruption and misrule. A few demonstrations similar to those in Tunis and Cairo raised hope for a proper reckoning, but in Iraq the Arab Spring did not have any wind in its sails.
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Here things were not straightforward.

Iraqis too want dignity, good government, jobs, and an end to corruption, but their politics does not yet turn on these issues. The Bush administration had assumed that once it got rid of Saddam, Iraqis would focus on bread-and-butter issues and building a democracy. But Saddam’s dictatorship had also kept in place minority rule, giving Sunni Arabs a disproportionate share of power and resources, brutally suppressing Kurds and Shias in the process. The U.S. invasion ended that imbalance. Kurds and especially Shias gained as their numbers decided distribution of power and resources. When a dictatorship that keeps in place an inequitable distribution of power among sects and ethnic groups bites the dust, the first upshot is a torturous—and in Iraq’s case, violent—rebalancing act. In Iraq, Sunni resistance to the writ of the Americans who had shattered the Sunni-run state plunged the country into a bloody sectarian war. The Sunni insurgency fought both the U.S. occupation and the Shia ascendancy it facilitated. The insurgency wanted America gone so it could restore Sunni dominance over Iraq.

When the guns fell silent in Iraq in 2008, the assumption was that the Sunnis had finally given up. The American troop surge had convinced them that Baghdad was beyond their reach and Shia control of Iraq was a done deal. America hoped that some combination of Shia magnanimity and Sunni acquiescence would guarantee peace and stability for Iraq—and give U.S. troops a ticket out of the war. But sectarian truce did not mean sectarian peace or a final consensus on the fate of Iraq. The country moved on from the Saddam years but not too far, and the sectarian violence that followed the invasion inflicted fresh wounds and set off fresh cycles of revenge. Shias still fear Sunni rule, and Sunnis rue their loss of power and dream of climbing back to the top. Each has a different vision of the past and a different dream for the future. There are still scores to settle, decades of them.

Sectarianism is an old wound in the Middle East.
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But the recent popular urge for democracy, national unity, and dignity has opened it up and made it sting afresh.
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This is because many of the Arab governments that now face the wrath of protesters are guilty of both suppressing individual rights and concentrating power in the hands of minorities.

The problem goes back to the colonial period, when European administrators created state institutions designed to manipulate religious and ethnic diversity to their advantage. They handed minorities greater representation in colonial security forces and governments in order to give these minorities an intense stake in the colonial regime and, in effect, make them its gendarmes. This is what the French did with the despised (by the Sunnis) Alawite minority in Syria; what the British did with the Hashemites, Bedouins, and Circassians in Jordan; and what the Ottomans and later the British did with the Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

The Arab states that emerged from colonialism after the First World War and the end of the League of Nations mandates promised unity under the banner of Arab nationalism. But as they turned into cynical dictatorships, failing at war, economic development, and governance, they, too, entrenched sectarian biases. They were still the same states Europeans had built. This scarred Arab society so deeply that the impulse for unity was often no match for the deep divisions of tribe, sect, and ethnicity. Some also argue that the infatuation with Arab unity prevented Arab states from developing proper national institutions, which also made them vulnerable to the surge of tribal loyalties and identity politics.

These sectarian states survived for a long time, seeking to hide their deep divisions via tricks such as taking census surveys as seldom as possible. Their authoritarian governments resorted to force when they had to, but more often persuaded restless majorities and minorities to accept things as they were by relying on what the scholar of ethnic conflict David Laitin calls a “hegemonic common sense.”
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Arab nationalism served as that common sensibility. The promises of fulfilling a historic destiny and standing up to America and Israel were potent enough to push sectarian worries to the side.
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But over time the pan-Arabist ideology lost its allure, and as its promise increasingly rang hollow, states built to keep in place minority overlordship grew vulnerable.

Iraq is a preview of what the Arab Spring may bring across the
region. The loosening of the grip of stolid and brutal states over society brings to the surface competitions for power and resources centered on long-suppressed ethnic and sectarian divisions.
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At its worst, conflict could turn into full-scale civil wars culminating in the redrawing of maps. (Already the example of South Sudan, born after decades of conflict over irreconcilable differences, is looming large in the region’s imagination—just ask the Kurds.) The specter also looms of broader regional conflagrations as developments in various countries—often involving the same issues, sects, tribes, and ethnic groups in ways that cross borders—become linked together in a chain of conflict. We thought of the fall of dictatorships in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America as a democracy wave; in the Middle East it will be a wave of tribal and sectarian conflict. It is only now, after the American invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring, that the Middle East is finally throwing off the yoke of colonialism and—via the terrible means of fratricidal bloodletting—getting past its legacy.

So it is that with Gaddafi’s brutal regime gone, Libya is gradually coming apart along tribal and regional lines. Likewise, Yemen is inching closer to civil war and a north-south division, and Syria is descending into a sectarian war between the Sunni majority and the minority Alawites and their allies.
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But the struggle that matters most is the one between Sunnis and Shias. The war in Iraq first unleashed the destructive potential of their competition for power, but the issue was not settled there. The Arab Spring has allowed it to resurface. Today, Shias clamor for greater rights in Lebanon, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, while Sunnis are restless in Iraq and Syria.

In a certain sense, the Middle East is starting to look like South Asia. Politics in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka can be messy. They are more open and democratic than Middle Eastern politics, but South Asian societies feature communal and ethnic divisions that can sometimes erupt into violence. Sri Lanka is the most violent example, and India arguably has done the best job of holding its many separatist groups together. The Arab world, with the exception of Lebanon, was the “anti”–South Asia: authoritarian but stable and united culturally (everyone claims to be Arab first, then something else) and politically (anti-Americanism and opposition to Israel encounter no dissent). But that is no longer
true. We are seeing personal and civic ties that bind sects and ethnicities together coming apart,
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and political incentives putting a wedge between erstwhile friends and neighbors—and sometimes right through families.
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Weak states do less to protect minorities and lack capacity to prevent outbreaks of violence.
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When the state’s ability to contain communal violence collapses, yesterday’s unity can quickly give way to today’s hatred and disorder. Regions find peace when states and nations there mirror one another.
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In the Middle East, states do not mirror their nations, and until they do the region will be racked by conflict.