The New Middle East (50 page)

We all like the place to look nice when we have guests over. Few of us go to the trouble of painting the trees and grass green. But Iraq had not had much to show off in recent years, so as I stepped off the plane in March 2012 it was easy to forgive their enthusiasm as my boots began to shluck their way up through the still-sticky coat of creamy white paint that had been used to coat the gangway walls, the ceiling and the floor. The last time I had seen Baghdad look this relaxed was before the 2003 invasion. Such notions are relative, of course. There were armed soldiers and armoured personnel carriers on many corners, checkpoints snarled up the roads. Things weren’t normal. But it was a measure of improvement, an Iraqi colleague told me, that now even though children were still being kidnapped it was ‘only for money’. So if you paid up you got your kid back. Alive. In the old days if you paid up you often got only a body, and as Souad found with her son, sometimes not even that. And you suspected it might have been your next-door neighbour.

Iraq was putting on a show that was costing it hundreds of millions of dollars because it was about to be welcomed back into the Arab fold. It was the first time the Arab League would hold a summit in Iraq since Saddam invaded Kuwait, and the first big event the Iraqi government would run on its own since it was invaded by the American-led coalition. The centre of Baghdad was shut down. Cars were forbidden to drive. Roadblocks stopped people moving across the city. Mobile phone networks seemed to be switched off. Along with the endless power cuts almost everything that could be done to make the experience thoroughly miserable for those not invited seemed to have been thought of. And then the menu for the delegates was published and it was revealed they would be eating gold-plated dates.

The meeting, like most Arab League summits, achieved very little, but as I sat in a grand room of one of the old dictator’s palaces listening to the final communiqué it was clear that the triumph for Iraq was that it took place at all. Only nine of twenty heads of state turned up, and among those only one was from the Gulf. But he was the Kuwaiti leader, which was symbolically important, because of the two nations’ histories. It was a measure of what Iraq had been through that during the lunch, held in the open air in the grounds outside for the local bureaucrats and journalists, the sound of mortars landing nearby provoked no reaction whatsoever.

The summit though was proof that Iraq, while leaning towards the leadership in Iran, was also seeking to tread its own path. It wanted to recreate the leadership role it once had in the Arab world. Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad used to be the three most important Arab capitals. Iraq would like to be back up in the top tier again. It needs to be part of the Arab fold to ensure its future security. At the back of its mind is what might happen after the Syrian civil war ends. Iraq is sandwiched between two totally different positions on the Syrian crisis adopted by Iran and Turkey. The US says Iraq has been allowing Iran to use its air space to deliver arms to Syria, prompting what Secretary of State John Kerry called ‘a very spirited discussion’ between himself and al-Maliki.
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If a new Sunni-led government is formed in Syria, what line will that government take towards Iraq? Will it send back and support the Sunni extremists who helped overthrow Assad to cause more trouble in Iraq? Al-Maliki thinks so: ‘If the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan and a sectarian war in Iraq.’
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Concerns about fall-out from Syria are likely to add to al-Maliki’s paranoia and increase, not weaken, his attempt to centralise power around him. To mitigate the impact of the civil war in Syria he needs friends in the Arab world. He still doesn’t have many.

In the meantime, as Syria plays out, Iraq faces the enormous task of rebuilding its infrastructure and re-establishing functioning and transparent institutions. That requires stabilising the political and security situation. To encourage foreign investment and diversification it has to deal with the rampant corruption, which was fuelled by the US occupation.

In March 2013, exactly ten years after the war began, the US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen, issued his final report before closing the body down. Of the nine-year US$60 billion rebuilding programme, he said: ‘Ultimately, we estimate that the Iraq program wasted at least $8 billion [due] to fraud, waste, and abuse.’

The Americans seem to have been conned at every level. His report contains a litany of mistakes, whether it was paying a subcontractor $900 for control switches valued at $7.05, or paying $40 million to half-build a prison that nobody wanted and was never used. The report said: ‘in 2003 and 2004, more than $10 billion in cash was flown to Baghdad on U.S. military aircraft in the form of massive shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills stored on large pallets. This money was not managed particularly well.’
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A few weeks before the war began, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked Jay Garner how much he thought it would cost to rebuild Iraq. ‘I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,’ Garner said.

‘My friend,’ Rumsfeld replied, ‘if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.’ Within five years they had spent US$50 billion trying to put Iraq back together.
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Iraq does though have the potential to be a hugely wealthy and powerful player in the region. The country has a population of just over 31 million people.
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It is estimated to have the world’s second-largest oil reserves.
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The oil industry dominates the economy, producing 98 per cent of the government’s foreign exchange earnings, though it provides only 1 per cent of the country’s jobs, so unemployment is a big issue.
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If it can get its oil industry back together it could be pumping out seven to eight million barrels a day. That would put it in a similar league to Saudi Arabia, but with a large standing army. According to Professor Haykel: ‘The Americans have to come to the realisation that they are going to have to contain and sandwich Maliki and the central Iraqi government by maintaining troops and firepower and influence in the south, in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and in the north with the Kurds.’ Which brings American policy almost full circle, to the point just before Saddam switched from being an American ally to chief foe, when he threatened and then invaded Kuwait in 1990.

But others argue that in fact al-Maliki only looks dangerous because you just have to look dangerous to survive in Iraqi politics. ‘I don’t think Maliki is another Saddam, he’s more like Gordon Brown. He’s paranoid and thinks everybody is out to get him,’ explained a Western diplomat to me in 2012 who had dealt with both men.

He wants to keep as much control as he can. He’s manoeuvring and engineering things to try to hold on to that power and actually being pretty ruthless when dealing with political enemies, but that’s just being a politician, though it’s nastier in Iraq. But he’s not a dictator. I think the ‘Oh this is a terrible dictatorship. Maliki is all-powerful’ is overplayed. It’s partly because the Sunnis and the Kurds are more Western-facing and articulate and are travelling off to the UK and the States, whereas the Shia don’t spend as much time in the West, don’t speak as good English and actually don’t give a damn, they are not interested about criticism in the
New York Times
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Al-Maliki wants central government control because he fears the abundance of oil in the areas dominated by the Kurds might allow them to one day seek an independent self-sustaining state. There are regular rows between al-Maliki’s central government and the Kurdish regional government (which already has many of the institutions of state, like a parliament and a president) over the distribution of the oil wealth. The Kurds also have a militia force, the Peshmerga, of around 75,000 men. To be assured he can assert control, al-Maliki wants to run the central security forces. He has tried to keep a grip on key posts in the Defence, Interior and National Security ministries. He already has, through his Office of the Commander-in-Chief, control of the National Counterterrorism Unit and the Baghdad Brigade that runs the capital’s security apparatus. And in August 2012 he created the ‘Tigris Operations Command’, which the Kurds considered a power play for contested areas between Kurds and Arabs.
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The Iraqi Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, have a long relationship with the US which grew out of the safe haven set up for them in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War to stop Saddam’s attacks. From that period they have been largely autonomous and they have very little interest in being part of the new Iraq, though neither do they seek military confrontation with it. In Dr Zogby’s survey 60 per cent thought they were better off after the invasion. Only 4 per cent said they definitely were not. The management of the central government’s relationship with the Kurds is a key test of the viability of the Iraqi state. It will be challenged further if the Kurds in Syria manage, in the post-Assad era, to form their own permanent breakaway region. Attempts by Turkey to build up energy deals directly with the Kurdish government have also soured relationships for both with Baghdad.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has continued its bombing of government and Shia targets. These are often big and bloody attacks, but the fact that they tend to occur at the rate of around one or two a month suggests that Al-Qaeda in Iraq has nowhere near the capacity it used to have. Some of its fighters have also now moved to Syria to attack the regime there.

A Western ambassador in a Middle Eastern capital told me as Syria slid into civil war that policymaking for the post-Assad era was being driven by ‘memories of Iraq’ more than by anything emerging from the Arab Spring uprisings:

We learned our lessons from Iraq. We will not have a back to year zero approach in Syria. There has to be some sort of continuation. The [Paul] Bremer approach backfired and was an absolute disaster. There will be no ‘deba’athification’. We’ve all internalised the lessons from ‘the day after’ [the statue fell]. Everyone has a stabilisation team to manage this now.

The West learned from Iraq that it needed a post-war policy for Syria. What the West continued to lack though was a policy for before and during the civil war in Syria.
One of the key reasons that the Assad regime proved so resilient was because the Syrian people had watched the sectarian violence orchestrated by Shia and Sunni groups in Iraq. Caught in the middle of this were minorities like the Christians, who were particularly persecuted by groups associated with al-Qaeda. It is estimated that perhaps two-thirds of up to 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq when the US troops took over have now left. The minorities in Syria looked across the border at the treatment their brethren got in Iraq and had no faith they would not meet the same fate. Christians felt safer under Saddam than they did after he fell.
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Many minorities fear the same outcome after Syria loses its dictator, so they have not actively supported his overthrow.

The next Iraqi parliamentary elections are due in 2014. There have been attempts to pass a law prohibiting anyone from serving more than two terms as prime minister. This is aimed directly at al-Maliki. The proposal was drawn up with the support of Kurds, members of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya coalition, which includes former prime minister Iyad Allawi, and some Shia politicians once allied with al-Maliki. At the same time Muqtada al-Sadr seems to have been trying to reinvent himself as a more moderate figure, though to what end has not yet become clear.
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‘If things had worked out the way [Bush] and Rumsfeld had imagined then Iraq would have been the beginning of a transformation in the Middle East,’ says the University of Virginia’s Professor William Quandt. ‘It would have been Iraq and then who knows what next, maybe Syria, Iran, and so forth, and this was supposed to be a whole series of dominos which would fall in the direction of more pro-Western democratic regimes coming to power, and it failed.’

Now that he was
President
Barack Obama, as he announced the pulling out of the US troops in that February 2009 speech at a Marine base in North Carolina he could not afford to dwell on the fallacy of the war: the wounds from the conflict were too raw. He optimistically echoed the hopeful words and deeds of his many predecessors who found themselves embroiled in the trials of the Middle East by offering: ‘We can serve as an honest broker in pursuit of fair and durable agreements on issues that have divided Iraq’s leaders.’ But when the last troops did leave, nobody in Iraq wanted to be even seen talking with the US any more. America left no friends behind in Iraq.

‘If you look at the country today we have relatively little influence over the Iraq we created,’ said Professor Quandt. ‘It is just stunning how we spent all this money and lives and treasure and everything else to try to make a new Iraq, and we are hardly on speaking terms with them. We can’t get them to do most of the things we ask of them.’