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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Rebellion and Pacification in Iraq

In the first of a two-part dispatch, A Government with No Military and No Territory, Michael Schwartz explored Iraq's missing "sovereignty." Most of us take sovereignty for granted but under the pressure of invasion, occupation, destruction, and arrogance as well as increasing ethnic/religious strife and rippling chaos, it has proved ever harder to bring to bear in Iraq. Schwartz explored an unstable, extremely volatile "stalemate" of sovereignty that has developed there in which a central government without the means of coercion or of administration -- or significant economic resources -- cowers in Baghdad's Green Zone; the Americans occupy their bases and any place they care to put their troops (but no place else); while, in southern Iraq, Shia religious parties, and in the north, Kurdish parties, each with their own militias, established local governments at odds with the central government and the Americans, but have proved capable of wielding only limited and partial power themselves. He now turns to the rebellious Sunni provinces of Iraq and considers the nature of the Iraqi "power vacuum" there. Tom


The Campaign to Pacify Sunni Iraq
Iraq's Sovereignty Vacuum (Part 2)
By Michael Schwartz

The December elections in Iraq did not initiate a period of state building, but instead marked an expanding, many-sided conflict whose latest major horror was the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra and the carnage it triggered. All the conflicts of the present moment have metastasized and spread from the ill-fated attempt by American-led forces to pacify Sunni communities in Baghdad and in four provinces to the north and west. Today, not only is the country edging toward an ever-more virulent civil war, but the Sunni resistance is stronger than ever, registering about 100 attacks a day in January.

This original war remains the central front in the ongoing battle for domination in Iraq and, as the core conflict, it continues to cast off enough bitterness, suffering, destruction, and rebellion to guarantee its never-ending spread to new areas and groups.

More than anything else, this low-level but fierce war is responsible for the constantly diminishing reservoir of sovereignty in Iraq. If the Americans sought to establish the legitimacy of the occupation by crushing early signs of Sunni resistance, that effort has, in the end, only helped convince Iraqis of the illegitimacy of the American presence. For all its failures, however, the occupation has succeeded in one endeavor. It has managed to undermine all efforts by other parties to establish their own legitimacy and therefore to build a foundation for a new and sovereign Iraq. If one day Iraq ceases to be, splitting chaotically into several entities, the way the occupation destroyed sovereignty (along with parts of Sunni cities) will certainly come in for a major share of the blame.

The Sunni Resistance

What the world has come to call the "insurgency "in Iraq is largely located in Baghdad and the Sunni-dominated cities to the north and west of the capital. In the Kurdish north and Shia south, residents have largely been organized into local quasi-governments that are frequently at odds with the American occupation (and therefore with the central government in the capital); but -- despite notable moments of great violence -- none of these localities has mounted a sustained war against the American-led presence as the Sunnis have.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 11:30 PM