Israel and the Clash of Civilisations

Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East

Pluto Press

Contents

REGIME OVERTHROW IN IRAQ

The official justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had been the need to disarm Iraq's unstable dictator, Saddam Hussein. It was assumed that for more than two decades he had been amassing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), developing an advanced biological and chemical weapons programme and making repeated attempts at acquiring nuclear warheads. When the West began a campaign to disarm him from 1991, enforced through United Nations inspections, many reasons were cited for why he might try to evade the inspectors and hold on to his WMD. One was his undoubted need to use coercion to hold together a state that embraced three large, rival communities – an Islamic Shia majority of about 60 per cent, alongside two minorities of roughly equal size, the Islamic Sunnis and the ethnic Kurds. A Sunni leader, Saddam needed to instil fear among the Shia and Kurdish populations to prevent them from rising up against him, and had proved in the past his readiness to do so, most notoriously in 1988 when he used poison gas against the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing 5,000 inhabitants. In addition, Saddam feared the power of the neighbouring state of Iran, ruled since 1979 by Shia clerics who he worried might make an alliance with his own Shia population to overthrow his regime. Iraq fought a bloody eight-year war through the 1980s in which Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers, possibly believing that this contributed to the defeat of his neighbour's larger forces. He was also believed to harbour an ambition to become the unquestioned leader of the wider Arab world, and may have believed that nuclear weapons, in particular, were the key. Then there was his bitter experience of dealing with the West, which had nurtured him as a brutal dictator – including helping to arm him with the chemical weapons used against the Kurds – only to attack him militarily a few years later when he invaded the small oil-rich Gulf state of Kuwait, which was safely within the Western sphere of control. And finally, there was the widespread assumption that Saddam, who was vociferous in espousing the cause of the Palestinians, wanted to use his weapons to destroy Israel. 'With nuclear weapons he would feel able to confront Israel in a spectacular way', argued William Shawcross, a board member of an independent and highly respected organisation dealing with conflict resolution, the International Crisis Group, a month before the invasion.

As became apparent soon after the US attack, however, Saddam had been effectively disarmed following the Gulf War of 1991 by a savage sanctions regime justified in the West by the need to force Iraq to submit to the UN inspections. The Iraqi leader, it seemed, had secretly disposed of his WMD and then played a game of cat and mouse with the inspectors to conceal from his own public and from Iran both his humiliation at the hands of the West and his new state of defencelessness. Saddam was aware that his continuing rule of Iraq was dependent on his appearing invincible. Nonetheless, there was much evidence available to the Bush Administration that he had been effectively disarmed since the early 1990s, though US officials worked strenuously to ensure that the information was either suppressed or contradicted. A series of UN reports into Iraq's suspected nuclear programme showed that the threat had been 'neutralized' and that 'there were no unresolved disarmament issues'. UN inspectors hunting for biological and chemical weapons issued more circumspect reports but still found no evidence of such WMD, and argued for more time to complete their searches. Also, the highest-profile defector from Saddam's regime, his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had run the WMD programme through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, had told the Central Intelligence Agency back in 1995 that 'Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them'. The story, which was leaked to Newsweek eight years later, made no impression on the public debate as it was published only days before the invasion of Iraq. Similarly, some of those involved in the inspection process, including Scott Ritter, who had headed the UN inspectors in Iraq for a time, concluded before the invasion that Saddam was as good as disarmed, though they made almost no impression on the public debate. In 2002 Ritter wrote: 'While we [the UN inspectors] were never able to provide 100 per cent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90–95 per cent level of verified disarmament.' Ritter was proved right in the aftermath of the invasion, in 2004, when a US survey team concluded: 'Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991.' The report added that the team could find 'no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production'.

Given both the lack of plausible evidence that Iraq possessed WMD, or that it intended to use them against the West, few experts believed a 'pre-emptive' attack on Iraq could be justified in international law. But even before the official reason for the invasion had been discredited, the White House offered a secondary justification for its military occupation. US forces, claimed President George W. Bush, were there to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam's rule, which was believed to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis over more than two decades – though Bush and others avoided mentioning that many of those deaths were caused by the West's strict sanctions regime. In Saddam's place, the US army would create an environment in which democracy could flourish. In February 2003, shortly before the invasion, President Bush predicted: 'A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.' Soon the attack on Iraq was being portrayed as the main thrust of a wider US plan to spread democracy through the Middle East. Iraq's invasion, noted one commentator in the Washington Post, 'may be the most idealistic war fought in modern times – a war whose only coherent rationale, for all the misleading hype about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda terrorists, is that it toppled a tyrant and created the possibility of a democratic future'.

But in the wake of the invasion, the White House's moral justifications for overthrowing the Iraqi dictator raised two obvious questions: was freedom really flourishing under the occupation and were Iraqis now better off than under Saddam? A simple measure by which the strength of the White House's claims could be judged was whether the suffering of Iraqis was being brought to an end by the occupation. Although the US media had largely abided by the wishes of the White House in shielding American audiences from the sight of bodybags returning from the Middle East, the numbers of US dead were at least known. By summer 2007, more than four years after the invasion, the death toll among American soldiers had passed the 3,500 mark, and more than seven times that number were officially injured. The month of May had seen 127 American deaths, making it one of the deadliest faced by the US army since the invasion, with more than four soldiers being killed on average each day. Some 150 British soldiers had died over the four years of occupation, as had a further 900 contractors, out of a total of some 180,000 working for the US government, more than a quarter of them believed to be mercenaries.

THE BODY COUNT KEEPS GROWING

Assessing the casualties among Iraqis, however, was far harder. In December 2005, President Bush admitted that several tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians might have paid with their lives: 'How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.' He appeared to be basing his estimate on the work of a British group of academics calling themselves the Iraq Body Count who regularly updated the total number of Iraqi deaths reported by 'reliable' sources, mainly the Western media. By summer 2007, the Iraq Body Count's figure had reached about 70,000 Iraqi dead. However, there were strong reasons for believing that these statistics were in fact a gross under-estimation. With most foreign correspondents consigned to a sealed-off area of Baghdad known as the Green Zone – under heavy protection from US troops – there was little coverage of Iraqi deaths apart from those killed in newsworthy events such as suicide bombings, often reported by Iraqi stringers working on behalf of the foreign media. Drive-by shootings, atrocities happening in remoter parts of Iraq, and the deaths that resulted from the rapid deterioration in sanitation, access to water and electricity, and the closure of hospitals, were not normally reported by the Western media. Even in the case of large-scale bombings, there were grounds for suspecting that the reported casualty figures under-estimated the fatalities. As one internet pundit pointed out:

In the news today, [it was reported that] a car bomb in Baghdad killed 23 people and injured 68 others, while later, a second killed 17 people and wounded 55 others. Will you ever hear what happened to those 123 injured people (or the others who were injured in incidents where the numbers of dead didn't reach double-digits, and weren't even 'newsworthy' by the standards of American reporting on Iraq)? Not a chance. Will some, maybe even the majority, die later today in the hospital, or tomorrow, or next week? Quite likely. But according to the Western press (and those such as Iraq Body Count), 40 people died in those two incidents, a number which will never change.

A more plausible, though less quoted, figure had been produced by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and published in the eminent British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006. Using the standard methodology for estimating deaths in conflict zones, its survey of Iraqi households showed that the most likely number of extra deaths among Iraqi civilians as a result of the US occupation stood at 655,000. This figure was widely rubbished by British and US government officials, though it later emerged that the British Defence Ministry's chief scientific adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, had privately supported the methods used by the survey and the reliability of the findings. If the Lancet figures were right, nearly 200,000 Iraqis had been killed each year since the US invasion. In addition, other sources reported that some two million Iraqis out of a population of some 27 million had fled Iraq and a similar number had been displaced to other parts of the country in what was becoming a slow process of ethnic cleansing. A report compiled by 80 aid agencies in summer 2007 showed that eight million Iraqis – or nearly a third of the population – were in need of emergency aid, 70 per cent had inadequate access to water, 80 per cent were without effective sanitation, more than 800,000 children had dropped out of school and there was rampant malnutrition among the young. In every sense, the White House's decision to topple the Iraqi dictator had created a humanitarian catastrophe for the country's people, producing suffering on a greater scale than had been experienced even under Saddam himself.

The dramatic increase in the deaths of ordinary Iraqis could be easily explained. They found themselves caught in the crossfire of a vicious insurgency to oust the US occupying forces and a relentless campaign of violence unleashed by American soldiers (and a large force of unaccountable mercenaries) to subdue all resistance. US troops and Iraqis who collaborated with them, particularly those joining the new security forces, were the main targets of the insurgency. One of its leaders told a British newspaper: 'Our position is that there are two kinds of people in Iraq: not Sunni and Shia, Kurdish and Arab, Muslim and Christian, but those who are with the occupation and those who are against it.' In an attempt to crush the resistance and reduce the number of US casualties, the army admitted that it was resorting to hi-tech firepower, particularly airpower, that was taking a large toll on the civilian population. Eldon Bargewell, a general who investigated a massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians committed by US soldiers at Haditha, assessed the army's philosophy in Iraq in the following terms: 'Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as US lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, ... the Marines need to get "the job done" no matter what it takes.'

In addition, a growing sectarian war between the country's two main rival Islamic constituencies, the majority Shia population and the former ruling Sunni community, was claiming an ever larger number of civilian lives. The civil war was filling the power vacuum left by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. One independent analyst observed in his testimony to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq in early 2007:

The origins of the civil war lie in the complete collapse of administrative and coercive capacity of the state. The Iraqi state, its ministries, civil servants, police force and army, ceased to exist in any meaningful way in the aftermath of regime change. It is the inability of the US to reconstruct them that lies at heart of the problem.

The White House tried to deflect attention from both its failure to restore order in Iraq and its refusal to end the country's occupation by claiming that the insurgency was not locally organised but being engineered by infiltrators bent on undermining American attempts to bring democracy to Iraq. Both militant Islamic fundamentalists (jihadis) associated with al-Qaeda and the neighbouring Shia-dominated state of Iran were put in the frame. However, neither seemed to be the chief culprit. According to a report by the Iraq Study Group, a cross-party Congressional group led by James Baker, a former Secretary of State in the Administration of George Bush's father:

Most attacks on Americans still come from the Sunni Arab insurgency. The insurgency comprises former elements of the Saddam Hussein regime, disaffected Sunni Arab Iraqis, and common criminals. It has significant support within the Sunni Arab community ... Al Qaeda is responsible for a small portion of the violence in Iraq, but that includes some of the more spectacular acts: suicide attacks, large truck bombs, and attacks on significant religious or political targets.

A respected Middle East analyst, Hussein Agha, suggested instead that Iraq's own paramilitary groups had much to gain from the Americans staying, at least for the time being. As long as the US troops were there to impose a loose order, the groups could arm, build their forces and reinforce wider regional alliances for the moment when American troops were forced to leave.

Inside Iraq, this is a period of consolidation for most political groups. They are building up their political and military capabilities, cultivating and forging alliances, clarifying political objectives and preparing for impending challenges. It is not the moment for all-out confrontation. No group has the confidence or capacity decisively to confront rivals within its own community or across communal lines. Equally, no party is genuinely interested in a serious process of national reconciliation when they feel they can improve their position later on.

A Palestinian academic, Karma Nabulsi, pointed out the similarities in the futures being created for both Iraqis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the latter under a much longer Israeli occupation that seemed to be the template for the new US one in Iraq. Under occupation, the two peoples were living in 'a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists'.

While Bush described the continuing US occupation in terms of bringing democracy to Iraq, he seemed unconcerned by the express wishes of the local population. In poll after poll, it was clear that Iraqis wanted liberation from US forces and profoundly mistrusted the motives behind the invasion. A survey conducted in summer 2006 by the US State Department showed 65 per cent of those living in Baghdad favoured an immediate withdrawal of US forces, while a poll by the University of Maryland found that 71 per cent of Iraqis wanted foreign soldiers to depart within a year. Nonetheless, 77 per cent of Iraqis also believed that the US intended to stay permanently. They were clear about the reasons why. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 43 per cent of Iraqis believed US and British forces had invaded mainly 'to rob Iraq's oil'; only 5 per cent believed the invasion was designed 'to assist the Iraqi people' and 1 per cent believed it was to establish democracy. A later survey, in early 2006, discovered that 80 per cent of Iraqis believed that the US government planned to station permanent military bases in Iraq. Possibly as a consequence, another poll found that 61 per cent of Iraqis approved of 'attacks on US-led forces', including 92 per cent of Sunnis and 62 per cent of Shia (the overall figure was reduced by the opposition of the third main group in Iraq, the Kurds, who backed the US occupation, hoping it would lead to partition of the country and eventual statehood for them).