[NYTr] Only one thing unites Iraq: hatred of the US

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Independent - Dec 11, 2007
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article3241904.ece

Only one thing unites Iraq: hatred of the US

The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in 
Basra, that they have few permanent allies

by Patrick Cockburn

As British forces come to the end of their role in Iraq, what sort of 
country do they leave behind? Has the United States turned the tide in 
Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilising 
after more than four years of war? Or are we seeing only a temporary 
pause in the fighting?

American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they 
have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years 
ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent
to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of
events there.

The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but by no means the 
only one. The shape of Iraqi politics has changed over the past year, 
though for reasons that have little to do with "the surge"  the 30,000 
US troop reinforcements  and much to do with the battle for supremacy 
between the Sunni and Shia Muslim communities.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa'ida partly because it
tried to monopolise power but primarily because it brought their
community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against US occupation had
gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second
war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa'ida, which the
Sunni were losing, with disastrous results for themselves. "The Sunni
people now think they cannot fight two wars  against the occupation and
the government  at the same time," a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me
last week. "We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the
moment."

This is why much of the non-al-Qa'ida Sunni insurgency has effectively 
changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa'ida has lost ground so 
swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US military  the State 
Department has been very much marginalised in decision-making in
Baghdad does not want to emphasise that many of the Sunni fighters now
on the US payroll, who are misleadingly called "concerned citizens",
until recently belonged to al Qa'ida and have the blood of a great many
Iraqi civilians and American soldiers on their hands.

The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million 
and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein's government, were the core of the 
resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a 
sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds 
holding power.

At first, the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities. 
Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were 
regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market places or 
religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people. The 
bombers came from al-Qa'ida but the attacks were never wholeheartedly 
condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The 
bombings were also very short-sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber
the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb
destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February,
2006.

The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni, which became 
known in Iraq as "the battle for Baghdad". This struggle was won by the 
Shia. They were always the majority in the capital but, by the end of 
2006, they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were 
pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.

In the wake of this defeat, there was less and less point in the Sunni 
trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being 
evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders 
had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia 
would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving 
them more support but this never materialised.

It was al-Qa'ida's slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as
heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni
community. Al-Qa'ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of
last year by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq, which tried to
fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as
a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for
the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one
of their members to join al Qai'da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden,
who never had much influence over al Qa'ida in Iraq, was reduced to
advising his acolytes against extremism.

Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa'ida gave the 
impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti-al-Qa'ida Sunni 
militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by 
the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in
Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and 
Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni 
fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai'ida as a 
preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army
of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens 
the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni 
insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control 
this new force.

If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other 
was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist
cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of
elements he does not control, and wishes to avoid a military
confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are
backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the
Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that 
Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally 
destabilising is the presence of a large US army in Iraq and the 
uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much 
Iraqis may fight among themselves, a central political fact in Iraq 
remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. 
This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A
detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in
August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US
forces are acceptable.

Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans 
will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they 
have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in 
which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally 
collapse tomorrow.