Robert Dreyfuss is author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, a contributing editor at The Nation, and a writer for Mother Jones, The American Prospect, and Rolling Stone.

 

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March 7, 2007

Nearly four years into the Iraq War, the Bush administration is once again scrambling to put together an Iraqi government that works. For four years, the White House has been picking and choosing among a relatively fixed cast of characters in Iraqi politics, mostly exiles who spent the years before 2003 in London, Washington, Tehran, and the American-protected Kurdish enclave in Iraq’s northeast. For four years, they have failed, and—despite the administration’s warmed-over stay-the-course strategy for 2007—they are certain to fail again.

Despite the surge, despite a huge pile of cash, despite renewed vows that the United States will not accept defeat in Iraq, there is no combination of political players in Iraq who can establish a stable, American-backed regime in Baghdad.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Iraq is so chaotic that the idea of a government that can provide basic services and security seems fanciful, at best. Deep into civil war, beset by a persistent insurgency that continues to kill American troops at a steady pace, and plagued by dozens of private paramilitary armies, Iraq has become a Mad Max nation. There is no central government at all. The army is not an army but a collection of mercenaries and militiamen loyal to partisan warlords. The police not a police force but a sectarian, Shiite killing squad armed and trained by the United States. Neighborhoods are protected by local militia, who barricade themselves in—except for those mixed neighborhoods in which bloody ethnic cleansing is the norm and death squads run amuck. Unemployment is at 30 to 60 percent, and unemployed men readily sign up for the Sunni-led resistance or for one of the Shiite-led militias and death squads.

But another part of the problem is that any Iraqi leader who chooses to ally himself with the United States, who supports the U.S. occupation of Iraq, instantly looses credibility with the vast majority of Iraqis. Polls done in Iraq, though unreliable given the levels of social chaos, consistently show that 70 to 80 percent of Iraqis oppose the occupation of Iraq by the United States and that 60 percent of Iraqis actually support the killing of U.S. troops. With public sentiment running so strongly against the American role in Iraq, for an Iraqi politician to cooperate with the United States is a political death sentence.

Therefore, the catch-22 of politics in Iraq, at least from the standpoint of the United States, is that any leader that Washington decides to support becomes—precisely because of that support—a leader that few, if any, Iraqis respect.

Since last fall, President Bush has been seeking to create a political coalition in Iraq that can isolate both the Sunni-led resistance and the radical-nationalist Shiite forces led by the Mahdi Army of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. According to the latest iteration, the sought-after coalition in Baghdad would include two Shiite parties (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI], led by Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, and the Islamic Dawa Party, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki), two Kurdish warlord parties (the Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP] and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK], the latter including President Jalal Talabani), and a Sunni religious bloc led by the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is currently led by Tariq al-Hashemi.

Both Hakim, a turban-wearing Shiite cleric, and Hashemi, a suave Sunni Islamic scholar, separately visited the White House late in 2006, as President Bush tried to cobble together what he hopes will be a “moderate,” pro-American Iraqi government.

But because of the catch-22, it is an effort doomed to fail. In fact, by so publicly visiting the White House, both Hakim and Hashemi lost credibility in the eyes of many Iraqis.

For the White House, the paradox of Iraq is that the United States is trying to isolate and marginalize the only two forces in Arab Iraq—namely, the Sunni resistance and the Shiite Mahdi Army—that have credibility among their constituencies. Both the resistance and the Mahdi Army strongly oppose the U.S. occupation. The resistance, of course, is waging a deadly war against it, and in December U.S. casualties were at an all-time high for 2006. The Mahdi Army, which fought battles with U.S. forces in 2004, is explicitly opposed to the United States presence in Iraq, and in November Muqtada al-Sadr pulled his parliamentary deputies and government ministers out of the ruling coalition. Before they will return, he said, the Iraqi government must agree to demand an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq, including those of the United States and Great Britain.

Sadr’s defiance of the Iraqi government came as Prime Minister Maliki traveled to Amman, Jordan, in November for a powwow with President Bush. After freezing his participation in the government, Sadr opened talks with political leaders from the Sunni side, including several who have close ties to the resistance. Among those who talked to Sadr’s party were people representing Saleh al-Mutlaq, a former Baath party official who leads a Sunni bloc in parliament, and clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars, led by Harith al-Dari, which is reportedly very close to the nationalist Sunni resistance. “We are the political arm of the resistance fighting to evict American forces from Iraq,” says Dari’s son.

The talks between Sadr and the Sunnis raised the specter of an Iraqi government that would no longer be beholden to the U.S. forces that invaded Iraq in 2003. Such a coalition, across the Sunni-Shiite divide, is difficult to imagine, given the sectarian passions that are tearing Iraq apart. But it is not unthinkable. In fact, during the 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, a stronghold of the Sunni resistance, Sadr openly backed the resistance and offered aid to Fallujah fighters. Sadr has also reached out to clergymen from the Association of Muslim Scholars, and he has gotten a positive response from AMS representatives in Basra, Nasariyah, Baghdad, and other Iraqi cities. What would hold such a coalition together, at least at the beginning, is its opposition to the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq, a position that would give it a strong base among ordinary Iraqis.

The opposite possibility—namely, a Shiite-Sunni coalition of moderate pro-occupation parties forged with U.S. support—has a far less chance of stabilizing Iraq.

Many, perhaps most, of the so-called moderates in Iraq, the ones supported by the White House, are former exiles who have spent two or three decades or more living outside the country. Many of the Shiites lived in Iran. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, for instance, was created in Iran in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq war, when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini built SCIRI out of the Iraqi prisoners of war. Its leaders, like those of Dawa (another Iranian-backed party of exiles), rode to Baghdad on American tanks in 2003, along with other leaders of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Few, if any, of these exiles have any credibility among Iraqis, and most of them depend for their very lives on the protection of U.S. forces. As Zbigniew Brzezinksi, President Carter’s national security adviser, said to me, “Those Iraqis who want us to stay in Iraq are the ones who would have to leave when we leave.”

So, almost by definition, the only Iraqi government that would have the political support needed to rally Iraqis is one made up of forces—including the resistance and the Mahdi Army—who oppose the occupation. That is why President Bush’s latest “Strategy for Victory” in Iraq is destined to fail. The question is: How long are Americans prepared to support a war whose only purpose is to try to prop up a corrupt, unpopular government in Iraq made up of puppets, charlatans, and quislings? The United States tried that in Saigon in the 1960s and 1970s, when Washington supported the notoriously corrupt regime in South Vietnam, with disastrous results. That war left more than 55,000 Americans—and perhaps 2 million Vietnamese—dead, for nothing. So far, three thousand Americans—and perhaps 600,000 Iraqis—are dead.

Quin Hillyer responds to Robert Dreyfuss.