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IRAQ: How Blair is Losing his War on Terror [Why Iraq is perilously close to a civil war]

Scotsman.com

Sun 14 Aug 2005

How Blair is losing his War on Terror

IRAQ

IAN MATHER, FRASER NELSON AND ALEX MASSIE
IN WASHINGTON


IT ALL sounded so simple. Winding up his pre-summer holiday press conference 10 days ago, Tony Blair dealt with Iraq in a single sentence. The international forces would "help the country get democracy," he declared, "and then leave as soon as the security forces in Iraq are in the position... to look after their own security".

Tomorrow, another step will be taken on the road to Iraq 'getting' democracy when its new constitution is unveiled. With January's elections having been completed, Iraq will move along the path to peace and prosperity. It will not be long before British and American troops can leave; surely not too long either until the wisdom of Blair and George Bush's enlightened intervention is finally borne out.


Except that today the reality is very different. What should have been a historic week for Iraq dawns today with pessimism gripping Washington, London and the Middle Eastern nation itself. It is summed up in the words of Saleh al-Mutlak, a member of Iraq's constitutional committee and a spokesman for the influential Sunni group, the Iraqi Committee for National Dialogue. Looking ahead towards the creation of the constitution tomorrow, he says: "We hoped this day would never come."

The chaos in Iraq was highlighted last month by the horrific murder of American journalist Steven Vincent. What shocked many was the location and the reason behind Vincent's death. It took place in the southern city of Basra, scene of dozens of reassuring images over the last two years of British troops chatting amiably to local people. The pictures have served to make Iraq's second city a byword for tolerance amid the growing nightmare. Vincent was killed, it is understood, by Islamic extremists for the crime of working with an unmarried female interpreter. The woman, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded.

Vincent's murder has focused the world's attention on the fact that even in quiescent southern Iraq the fundamentalists have taken over. If even Basra has fallen then where else in Iraq is there now any hope of a peaceful transition to democracy?

The murder of Vincent is just one of a growing number of gruesome episodes in a wider power struggle as Iraq approaches a pivotal moment in its transition to democracy. It is a struggle which many fear will end up with Iraq's Shia majority - who were held back under the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein - breaking up the country and forming a new hardline theocracy. All the while, British and American diplomats are forced to simply shrug their shoulders and accept it - after all, this is what their nations fought for.

Another incident summing up the tensions last week saw the Sunni mayor of Baghdad, Alaa Tamimi, in hiding after being evicted from his office by dozens of gunmen.

They later transpired to be bodyguards for the Baghdad governor, Hussein Tahhan, a rival for the mayor's job, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shi'ite political party relishing its first taste of power after decades of suppression under Saddam.

"What happened to me was unbelievable. It was horrifying and very dangerous to be treated in such a manner," Alaa Tamimi said from his hideout. "The municipality was invaded by armed forces. This is terror. It's a lot worse than in Saddam's time."

Nakedly aggressive assaults like this are now pushing Iraq perilously close to all-out civil war. And it is becoming increasingly bloody.

July was a record month at Baghdad's main mortuary, where bodies are piling up so quickly that they often have to be buried before they can be identified.

A total of 1,100 corpses were received in July, a sharp increase over June, and more than 60% were victims of shootings, clear proof that the violence in Baghdad is getting worse.

The figures exclude casualties from bombings. Those bodies are not taken for autopsy because the cause of death is already known.

Two attempts to quantify the violence, by the UN Development Programme and by Iraq Body Count, a web site, have each come up with about 24,000 violent deaths in the two years since the invasion, or an average of 1,000 a month. "In the days of Saddam, we had maybe 16 shootings a month," said mortuary director Faed Bakr. "Now we have more than that every day."

Against this backdrop of anarchy and violence, politicians attempting to frame Iraq's new democracy are floundering. The negotiators have agreed that the country be called the Iraqi Federal Republic and that Islam be the religion of the state - but they are still deadlocked on Islamic law and autonomy for Kurds.

The failure to find agreement bodes ill. At root cause is the intransigence of the Shi'ite politicians who, following January's elections, are now in a position of strength.

The elections resulted in the Shi'ites taking a grip on the country. Two leading parties, the United Iraqi Alliance and the Iraqi List, together won 62% of the vote and 180 of 275 seats in the interim National Assembly. These parties have chosen the top leaders of the interim government, and will dominate any future government.

As "C-Day", as the Americans are calling tomorrow, approaches the Shi'ites have become bolder in their demands. Last week they demanded the creation of a "Shiastan" in southern Iraq, raising the prospect of an oil-rich fiefdom dominated by conservative Muslim clerics.

To the dismay of the Iraqi Sunnis, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), one of the main ruling parties, called for the creation of a federal southern state in the new constitution. "Regarding federalism, we think that it is necessary to form one entire region in the south," he told tens of thousands of chanting supporters.

If this nightmare scenario were to come about, the new "Shiastan" would encompass the Gulf oil fields and almost half of Iraq's 26 million population. Since Sciri's cleric leaders have strong ties to Iran, Iran's theocracy could end up dominating the oil-rich region.

Already Shi'ite conservatives, who have emerged after decades of repression under Saddam's rule, are seeking to impose Islamic rule in the Shi'ite heartland of the south, closing alcohol shops, curtailing music and encouraging women to wear head scarves.

Vincent's murder has been linked to this new fundamentalism.

The Shi'ites can argue that all they are doing is following the example of the Kurds, who are demanding federalism to maintain control over the three northern provinces. The Kurds also want to expand their self-ruled region to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, from which thousands of Kurds were expelled by Saddam. This prospect of a Kurdish north, a Shia south, and a Sunni interior is frightening, say experts - as it would deprive Sunnis of almost all of Iraq's oil reserves, situated in the south and north.

Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says: "If Kurds continue to try to push Sunni Arabs off this land and claim the oil below it for themselves, they risk creating a precedent that could lead to a Sunni Arab ghetto within Iraq, deprived of oil or much fertile farmland. It would be a long-term source of instability. Whoever gets the land, the oil revenue should be shared."

The prospect of regional autonomy dismays the Sunnis, who fear being marginalised in the centre of Iraq. The consequences of that marginalisation are already being borne out. While they make up just 20% of the population they provide 90% of the insurgency's active fighters and most of its new recruits.

The fear is that if the Sunnis are further oppressed, their strongholds will become what Afghanistan was in the 1990s - a safe haven for jihadists, who will intensify their attacks on the Shi'ite-dominated security forces and mobilise against Kirkuk or other oil-rich sectors of the country.

Meanwhile, fears of a Shia 'theocracy' are also being expressed by women's rights campaigners. Women's groups had been invited to take part in drafting the constitution to try to stop religious Shi'ites proposing laws to extend the power of clerics over matters of family law.

"We're against federalism because we are against sharia. That is our fear," said Ghareba Ghareb of the Iraqi Women's Association.

They also want women to run at least 10 of Iraq's 30-odd government ministries, and the number of places reserved for women on party lists raised to 40% in future elections. Most of all, they want a promise of respect for women's rights.

But the Shi'ite leadership is relying on women to carry much of the fight over the role of Islam. The conservative cause is being led by women, who are members of the dominant Shi'ite alliance under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, who see the new constitution as an opportunity to bring Iraq's laws into harmony with Islam's version of divine law.

A compromise is now being drawn out. The negotiators agreed that Islam "would be a source of legislation" in the new nation, but that laws derived from other religions - as well as secular legislation - would carry weight, too.

But the deal could also have serious repercussions for Iraqi women. Among aspects of Islamic law that could be incorporated are provisions that would allow men as many as four wives and reduce the amount of money allotted to women in inheritances.

Even ardent supporters of the war in Britain and the US now concede that this prospect of a faction-ridden, semi-theocracy was not what hundreds of coalition troops died to create. And the strain in the US is now beginning to tell.

As Bush drove away from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Friday afternoon, he passed a protest of grieving, angry mothers who are demanding that the President meet them to explain his Iraq policies. The women are fast becoming the focal point of a nation's concerns and fears over a war that has dragged on longer, and cost more lives, than most Americans ever imagined would be possible.

In Washington, the question of whether the battle for Iraq has been lost is no longer confined to irredentist anti-war Democrats. According to Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official now working at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute: "The insurgency has gained momentum as a result of failed US policy and well-meaning but wrong-headed assumptions."

Rubin, who has spent more time outside Baghdad's "Green Zone" than the majority of US officials, worries that American policy in Iraq is "fatally flawed" and that the coalition's continuing presence, both military and civilian, may at best be a one step forwards, one step backwards problem, condemning Iraq to boundless insecurity. The disturbing question is, to which no one has a good answer, is the American presence in Iraq helping or hurting? Rubin says: "The progress evident in Baghdad - new stores, private banks, Internet cafes - is largely despite us rather than because of us."

Just 38% of the American public believes the President is doing a good job in Iraq and a new poll this week found that 56% of the electorate wanted some or all US troops to be brought home now. Support for the war is slipping away at home as the insurgency continues to rage, claiming more American lives, and US commanders appear unable to counter it effectively.

In Britain, the Foreign Office is resigned to the tightening grip of religious parties over Iraq's new civic apparatus - and the acceptance that ideas about equality and women's rights may be sacrificed in the bid for stability. William Patey, the UK's ambassador to Iraq, admits the world may well have to accept a theocratic state. "Having a democratic election in which you have theocracy is okay, as long as that can be changed and is not a once-and-for-all election," he said.

The war to topple Saddam was won long ago. But the dread question being asked across London and Washington now is: will what replaces him be any better?



This article:

http://www.scotsman.com/?id=1777462005

Tony Blair's leadership:

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=926

posted by Annamarie at 5:35 PM