Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2008, pages 7-9

Special Report

Will Iraqis Vote the U.S. Out of Iraq?

By Rachelle Marshall

An Iraqi woman crawls through a gap in a concrete wall erected by the U.S. Army splitting in two Baghdad’s eastern Sadr City neighborhood, May 19, 2008 (AFP Photo/J. Wissam al-Okaili).

OF COURSE I want the Americans to leave. I want them to go to hell.—May Adnan Yunis, whose sister and two other bank employees were shot to death by U.S. soldiers while on their way to work on June 25. New York Times, July 17, 2008.

Whether Iraq becomes once more a sovereign state or reverts to its postWorld War I status as an oil-rich Western colony depends on the outcomes of two elections scheduled for this fall. In November’s presidential election, Americans will choose between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, whose views on Iraq differ sharply. McCain foresees keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until at least 2013 and fully supported George Bush’s proposal to keep nearly 60 permanent bases there. Obama has promised that his first mission on taking office would be to end the war. He says he would keep only enough troops in Iraq to train Iraqi forces and would not seek permanent U.S. bases.

The differences over Iraq policy between the two American presidential candidates are  significant, but Iraq’s provincial elections scheduled for later this year could be even more crucial to the country’s future. The turnout and the final results will indicate whether the Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave or stay, and Washington’s response will determine whether Iraq is a nation free to make its own decisions. It is certain that more and more Iraqis have become angered at the number of civilian deaths caused by U.S. military operations and are demanding that the U.S. leave.

On June 25 American soldiers in Baghdad shot to death three bank employees, including the bank director, when their car came too close to a convoy. On the same day, an airstrike near Tikrit killed a farmer, his wife, and their three children under 10. In the first case the military claimed the victims were “three criminals.” In the second, the military said the farmer was “an al-Qaeda terrorist.” On July 20, U.S. Special Operations forces broke into a house at 3 a.m. and shot to death the 17-year-old son and 23-year-old nephew of the provincial governor of Salahuddin Province. The Provincial Council issued a statement saying the killings were an indication of “how the American forces disregard the souls of Iraqi citizens.”

The vote count will not reflect Iraqi public opinion unless the elections are fair and free of U.S. influence. The outlook is not reassuring. One problem is that Iraq is now a deeply divided country. Under a system imposed by the American occupation authorities, voters must choose between parties, not individual candidates. As a result, most Iraqis now give their allegiance to sectarian factions rather than to the nation as a whole.

Because of factional disputes within parliament, the elections originally scheduled for October have twice been postponed, and as of late July there was still no election law. Legislation has been held up by Kurdish insistence that the multiethnic oil-rich city of Kirkuk become part of a semi-independent Kurdistan, a demand that Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and some Shi’i reject. 

The troop escalation, or “surge,” that American commanders credit with reducing violence in Iraq only intensified the divisions, by partitioning Iraqi cities into sectarian enclaves cut off from one another by 20-foot-high walls and checkpoints. In Baghdad, according to an AP report, “Walls are everywhere. They have turned a riverside capital of leafy neighborhoods and palm-lined boulevards into a city of shadows that separate Sunnis from Shi’i. The walls block access to schools, mosques, churches, homes, markets, and entire neighborhoods.”

The voting will take place while Iraqis are still far from secure. Four million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes. The American and Iraqi armies continue to launch large-scale air and ground attacks on suspected militants, and soldiers continue to conduct nighttime raids, blowing up homes and making mass arrests. Much of the ongoing military action has a direct bearing on the October elections.

The joint U.S.-Iraqi offensives in Basra and Sadr City, and the Iraqi army’s seizure of Amara in late June, were widely seen as an effort to weaken the political power of Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiercely nationalist cleric who opposes the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and has organized mass rallies calling for their withdrawal. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refers to al-Sadr’s militia as “criminals” and threatens to bar his political bloc from participating in the elections.

Al-Sadr himself has been careful to avoid confrontation. His militia in Amara put up no resistance to the invading Iraqi troops, and he announced that the Sadrists would not compete as a party but that instead he will endorse individual candidates. The endorsements would not be for his followers alone, al-Sadr said, but for “individuals, chieftains, people with popularity and talents to serve and offer public services to the people.”

By the time the elections are held, however, most of his top associates may be in jail. The Iraqi troops who invaded Amara arrested 18 city officials associated with al-Sadr, including the mayor of Amara and deputy governor of Maysan province, the chairman of the provincial council and two council members. On July 11 pro-government forces in the province of Diwaniya burst into a mosque attended by al-Sadr’s followers and arrested the imam, Sheikh Hussein Haddam al-Karbalai, along with several worshippers. “They were arrested because they insulted the local officials in the governorate and verbally abused them,” the commander of the raid said.

Al-Maliki and his ministers have a vested interest in remaining in office. In a recent article for the San Francisco Chronicle, Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, cited Transparency International’s latest index as ranking Iraq third most corrupt of 180 countries, preceded only by Somalia and Burma. According to Brinkley, “American officials say Iraqi government officers from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on down have embezzled not only uncounted millions of dollars from their own treasury, but also $18 billion in American aid.” An internal U.S. Embassy report issued last summer that detailed widescale plundering by Iraqi officials was retroactively classified when Congress requested a copy.

Sovereignty or “Surrender”?

The election of Iraqis who call for the immediate withdrawal of American forces would be even more unwelcome to the Bush administration, which has insisted this would mean “surrender.” Nevertheless, popular pressure has prompted Iraqi politicians across the board to insist on a timetable for withdrawal. The government rejected a status of forces agreement that would have allowed U.S. forces to remain indefinitely in Iraq along with permanent bases, and agreed instead only to an arrangement lasting through 2009.

On July 8 al-Maliki’s national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie declared, “We would not accept any memorandum of understanding with the U.S. side that has no obvious and specific dates for the foreign troops’ withdrawal from Iraq.” Ali al-Adeeb, another member of al-Maliki’s party, said the government considered the determination of a specific date for the withdrawal of foreign forces as the “core issue.”

Such statements put the Bush administration in a bind. Bush has repeatedly claimed the U.S. occupation was about conferring popular sovereignty on a nation that had long been deprived of it. Now that the Iraqis are demanding that the U.S. set a date for leaving, his solution is to stick to his position but fudge the wording. “Now is not the time to give up,” he said in early July. “That’s why I’ve strongly rejected an artificial timetable of withdrawal.” Bush finally agreed to “a general time horizon” for U.S. withdrawal, but as Steve Henry Herman pointed out in The New York Times, horizons almost always recede as you approach them.

There was a brief flurry in late July, when al-Maliki said in an interview with Der Spiegel that he approved Obama’s proposal to withdraw U.S. combat forces in 16 months. After an urgent call from the White House, al-Maliki said his words had been “mistranslated,” but a direct translation from the Arabic by The New York Times showed the report to be accurate. On July 21, during a visit to Iraq by Obama, al-Maliki’s spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said, “The Iraqi government believes the end of 2010 is the appropriate time for the withdrawal.”

Despite the government’s assertion of sovereignty, Iraq could still end up a Western colony, nominally self-governing but with most of its oil profits going to U.S. oil giants. Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Total were recently awarded no-bid development contracts by the Iraqi Oil Ministry with the help of the State Department and U.S. advisers to the ministry. Naomi Klein reported in the July 21/28 issue of the Nation that Iraq will soon open six of its operating oil fields to foreign investors, with the foreign firms keeping 75 percent of future profits and 25 percent remaining in Iraq.

Saddam Hussain threw out the oil companies when he nationalized Iraq’s oil, but Iraqi officials say allowing them back in will provide funds that will be used for reconstruction. The government already has received some $200 million in oil revenue, however, and spent little if any of it on reconstruction. “The Iraqi public is overwhelmingly opposed to this privatization,” according to James Paul, director of the Global Policy Forum. Nevertheless, Iraq’s oil fields will someday yield huge profits, and the Bush administration is determined to see that U.S. companies get the giant share.

A Looming Threat

Looming over the elections in both Iraq and the U.S. is the possibility of a U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Israeli military exercises in the Mediterranean last spring were described by U.S. intelligence officials as rehearsal for a possible strike on Iran. Naval maneuvers in the Persian Gulf by British and American warships in mid-July appeared to have the same purpose.

The Bush administration’s willingness in late July to send Undersecretary of State William J. Burns to join international talks with the Iranians in Geneva helped reduce tensions in the short run, but unless Iran gives up its right under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium, neither Israel nor the U.S. will be satisfied. Two days after the Geneva meeting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice criticized Iran’s response to Western demands as “small talk,” and warned that harsher sanctions were forthcoming. By sending Burns to Geneva Bush may have hoped to demonstrate that diplomacy failed to work and therefore military action was the only recourse.

With Saddam Hussain gone, the Israelis regard Iran as the remaining threat to Israel’s dominance over the region, as evidenced by pressure on Washington from pro-Israel lobbyists to confront Iran at every opportunity. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz has declared, “If Iran continues its nuclear program we will attack.” In mid-July, Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Israel “has proved in the past it is not afraid to take action when its vital security is at stake.”

Israeli historian Benny Morris predicted in a July 18 New York Times op-ed column that “Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months” unless Iran backs down. According to Morris, “From Nov. 5 to Jan. 19 seems the best bet as it gives the West half a year to try the diplomatic route but ensures that Israel will have support from a lame-duck White House.”

Adding to the possibility of precipitate action by Israel is the volatility of Israel’s political situation. An Israeli attack on Iran would distract attention from the mounting charges of corruption against Olmert, and appease his critics on the right. Olmert was forced to agree to an election this September for leadership of the governing Kadima party, and whoever replaces him will face a powerful challenge in the next general election from Likud Binyamin Netanyahu, an extreme hawk who has long favored action against Iran.

Continuing Provocations

Meanwhile tensions between Israel and the Palestinians remain high. On July 24 Israel’s Defense Committee approved construction of a new Jewish settlement in the Jordan Valley, a plan that violates Bush’s 2003 peace plan and further undermines the possibility of a two-state solution. The June 17 truce brought a reduction in rocketing by Palestinian militants but little if any in Israeli violence against Palestinians.

The U.N. reported on June 26 that in the first week there were seven truce violations by Israel and one by the Palestinians. Israeli troops seriously wounded two farmers, one 70 years old and the other 82, as they attempted to reach their land near the border, and in another incident killed an unarmed 18-year-old who came too close to the border. The Israelis continued to fire on Gaza fishermen to force them to stay within three miles of the shore, and wounded at least one fisherman shortly after the truce began.

Israel also continued to hunt down Hamas members and intensified its crackdown on Hamas social service agencies and businesses in the West Bank, including an entire shopping mall in Nablus that Israel claimed was linked to Hamas. After a July 25 bombing attack attributed to Fatah killed five Hamas members in Gaza, Hamas security forces detained a number of Fatah members. The Palestinian Authority in turn arrested more than 50 Hamas members, including several academics and the acting mayor of Nablus. The mayor, like almost all other Hamas members elected to public office in the West Bank, is already in an Israeli prison.

In retaliation for the murder of one of its members, Islamic Jihad fired several rockets into Israel, but Hamas leaders said they remained committed to the cease-fire. Israel nevertheless stopped all deliveries into Gaza, including food trucks, for four days in July. When deliveries resumed only limited supplies were allowed in. Jewish Peace News reported in mid-July that at least 208 seriously ill people have died while waiting in vain for an Israeli exit permit.

Such accounts made all the more poignant the news that Congress in mid-June slipped into the Supplemental Appropriation Act an additional $170 million in military funding for Israel. The U.S. has already promised Israel $30 billion in U.S. aid over the next 10 years, with $2.55 allocated for next year. This means Americans will continue to finance an Israeli occupation that not only is illegal in terms of international law, but condemned around the world for its criminal brutality. So far there is no evidence—only hope—that the U.S. elections in November will end a relationship that has proved damaging to America and an obstacle to Middle East peace.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

SIDEBAR

U.S. War in Afghanistan Creates More Enemies

Many Americans, including presidential candidate Barak Obama, opposed the invasion of Iraq but regard the war in Afghanistan as the center of the war on terror—forgetting that it was not the Taliban that killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 but a band of rootless fanatics based in the mountains of Afghanistan. Today, six years after the U.S. ousted the Taliban, they are back and gaining in strength. More U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan this spring than in Iraq. A Pentagon report in late June said the Taliban “have coalesced into a resilient insurgency.”

What has gone wrong? The Pentagon cites Afghanistan’s “vast problems,” such as corruption, the poppy trade, human rights abuses, and slow progress in reconstruction. But it is clear that the Taliban is growing because more and more Afghans support its efforts to get U.S. and NATO troops out of their country. After a July 14 Taliban assault on an outpost near the Pakistani border killed nine Americans, the provincial police chief, Gen. Mohammed Jangelbagh, said local tribesmen had aided in the attack. Cooperation between the Taliban and various tribal factions is growing, the police chief said, because they all want Western military forces out of Afghanistan.

One of the reasons many Afghans favor a U.S. troop withdrawal is that, like the Iraqis, they experience at first hand the danger these troops pose to ordinary civilians. Afghan officials including President Hamid Karzai have repeatedly complained of U.S. air strikes and other actions that kill civilians. During the Winter Soldier hearings in Washington last March a Marine gunner told how while in Afghanistan he had placed a compass too close to a machine-gun barrel, causing it to give the intended target a false position. The result is that fire was mistakenly directed at an Afghan village and a large number of the inhabitants were killed.

Other soldiers who fought in Afghanistan told of breaking down doors and terrorizing families, of firing into mosques and into cars filled with civilians, out of anger when their buddies were killed. The soldiers who testified said a thousand others could have told similar stories.

On July 11 a U.S. air strike in Nuristan province killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were accompanying a bride to her wedding. On July 17 U.S. Special Forces and Afghan commandos in western Afghanistan killed two tribal leaders and a number of civilians, even though members of the tribe said their leaders had no dealings with the Taliban. On July 20, nine Afghan policemen were killed when a U.S. convoy assumed they were militants and called in air strikes. On the same day NATO mortar fire went astray and killed at least four villagers.

It is apparent that there is no military solution to the situation in Afghanistan. The war has doomed Afghanistan to an upward spiral of violence as U.S. and NATO attacks that harm civilians add new recruits to the Taliban and their allies, whose actions in turn provoke more air strikes. The possibility of unilateral U.S. attacks on militant sanctuaries in Pakistan recently prompted Pakistani officials to warn that such attacks would drive more people into the militants’ ranks and fatally undermine the government.

The situation is approaching what Harvard historian Stanley Hoffmann predicted in October 2001 would be “a quagmire of disastrous proportions.” Hoffmann and others who in 2001 urged measures other than war to subdue al-Qaeda recognized that for more than a thousand years Afghans have been ousting foreign invaders from their land, including Persians, Mongols, Hindu kings, Central Asians, Russians, British, and the Soviet Union. As the war grinds on and more Americans die, the question is not whether our troops will be forced to leave, but when. —R.M.

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