Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 17:06:36 +0200
Iraq dismembered
The fall of the Sunni triangle to rebels in Iraq has raised fears of the
remapping of the country
Salah Nasrawi
Thursday 19, Jun 2014
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"This is a regional problem, and it is going to be a long-term problem,"
said US President Barack Obama in his concluding remarks to a policy
statement made last week on the crisis in Iraq. He vowed that the United
States would not be "dragged back" into military action in Iraq.
While much has been reported about the sudden collapse of the Iraqi forces
and the stunning fall of key cities and communities across Iraq to Sunni
rebels, fewer headlines have been written to put the dynamics of the
geopolitical earthquake unleashed by the new developments in the perspective
of Iraq's overall catastrophe and its larger implications for the Middle
East and the Arab Gulf region.
Iraq is being torn apart, and by calling it a "regional problem" Obama is
trying to distance himself, his administration and the United States from
the ravages of the civil war that is underway and the tragic partitioning of
Iraq, which is fast becoming a reality.
To understand how all this came about, it is necessary to go back to the
US-led invasion of the country in 2003 and the toppling of the
Sunni-dominated regime of former President Saddam Hussein.
Obama and his predecessor, George W Bush, bear special responsibility for
the disaster befalling Iraq by invading the country, destroying the state
apparatus and social fabric, and exiting it nine years later without
securing it or leaving an effective and credible government in place.
The list of the US mistakes in Iraq during the occupation is long and
shameful, the most despicable of which was giving free reign to sectarianism
by effectively creating a governing system based on confessional politics
that did not help Iraq to hold together as a unitary state.
When Obama decided to pull out US troops from Iraq, he left security in the
hands of an incompetent Iraqi military that was unprepared to deal with
domestic and foreign threats.
The blame for this fiasco also lies with Iraqi leaders who are lacking a
collective vision to unite the Iraqi people. They are ineffective,
power-greedy and driven by sectarian politics. The new political class
installed by the Americans has resorted to violence to either maximise their
gains or to stop the other side from doing so.
Shia Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, in particular, takes special blame for
behaving like a dictator, excluding other groups from power, and using the
army, police forces and militias to terrorise his political rivals. His
insistence on having a third term in office despite strong opposition by his
opponents, including Shias, has further polarised Iraq's already fragile
political system.
The humiliating collapse of Iraq's security forces and the fall of a string
of cities into the hands of Sunni radicals spearheaded by fighters of the
terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has marked a
stark failure for Al-Maliki's government forces, largely due to his
leadership style based on sectarianism, nepotism and corruption.
Nearly 100,000 government soldiers in four army divisions could not
withstand a few hundred badly trained and ill-equipped rebels. Other units
lost control of vast territories, including the oil-rich province of Kirkuk
to Kurdish forces, who annexed them to the now de facto Kurdistan state in
northern Iraq.
One reason for the humiliating defeat is the army itself. Despite spending
billions of dollars on Iraq's security apparatus, the army and the security
forces have displayed weakness and incompetence. The army's rank and file is
inefficient and badly trained. Soldiers lack morale, equipment, weapons and
intelligence. Their commanders, mostly political appointees or people who
have bought their posts sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars, are
corrupt and fraudulent.
Another major factor behind the crisis that has climaxed in the new round of
the civil war has been the high expectations of Iraq's three major
communities, Shia, Sunnis and Kurds, who have failed to take the right path
and make the necessary compromises to resolve post-invasion problems and
challenges.
The conflict has revealed what many Iraqis have been hiding for years behind
the empty slogan of "a democratic and federal Iraq," while maintaining a
maximalist, uncompromising and secessionist agenda.
Shia leaders have failed to reach out to Sunnis or to integrate them into a
new decentralised political system that would create a true participatory
democracy. This has eventually led to the alienation of the Sunni community
and its loss to radicals.
The list of Shia mistakes paints a bleak picture of how they have failed to
build a functioning state, making Iraq into an even more miserable place.
Many Sunni leaders have been wrong too, especially for boycotting or not
participating fully in the post-Saddam political process and resorting to
attempts to overthrow the new Shia-led regime.
The Sunni areas' submission to radicals and alliance with ISIL, which is
hell-bent on killing Shias and aims to create an Islamic state, has fanned
communal discord. The seizure of major cities, triggering a fully-fledged
civil war, may turn to be their biggest strategic blunder.
Gruesome pictures of bloodthirsty ISIL terrorists butchering hundreds of
Shia soldiers during the current stand-off will do more harm to the Sunnis
than standing up against Al-Maliki's policies of exclusion and
discrimination.
As recent events began to unfold, the Kurds showed political opportunism and
exploited the tumult to seize control of vast areas of Iraq, including the
strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk and other towns, some of them only 100
kilometres away from Baghdad.
Agencies have reported how Kurdish forces, known as Peshmerga, have deceived
Iraqi army troops in these areas, claiming to offer help only to overrun
their camps and expel them to Baghdad.
They later plundered their bases and made off with everything from weapons
to air-conditioning units, armoured vehicles and mattresses, in scenes
reminiscent of Peshmerga forces and Kurdish parties pillaging Iraqi army
camps and other government installations following the fall of Saddam
Hussein in 2003.
With Kurdish oil already being sold independently from Baghdad, the seizure
of Kirkuk and other parts of Iraq by Kurdish leaders may be part of a
calculation that Kurdish independence will come out of the collapse of Iraq.
But as a result of their strategic weakness, being landlocked and squeezed
between two giant neighbours of Iran and Turkey, the Iraqi Kurds may end up
paying a higher price for their secessionist adventure.
This writer has warned for years that Iraq has been moving steadily towards
disintegration. The way the United States ran the invasion and occupation
was indicative of its intention to drive Iraqis into a corner where
partition was their only option. That hour has now come, and the long-feared
nightmare of the dismemberment of Iraq has now materialised.
Meanwhile, as the Iraqis are now plunged into a bloody and probably
prolonged civil war, their country is falling apart and new national borders
are being drawn in the Middle East.
Videos posted on the Internet this week showed ISIL fighters removing
frontier posts with neighbouring Syria and tearing up passports after their
invasion of Mosul. The new Middle East border lines are being redrawn by
terrorist groups, which are bent on carving out an Islamic caliphate or
state across the region and maybe beyond.
Worse still, as the new Sunni uprising in Iraq has shown, there is an
alliance being carved out between Sunni radicals and Baathist pan-Arabists,
which if it stands the test of time will serve as a force of example for the
rest of the Arab countries and put into action the merging of Arab
nationalism with religious extremism.
This is how the break-up of Iraq will wake the genie from the bottle and
unleash a geostrategic volcano that will remap the region and redefine its
nation states.
It is for this reason that Obama was wrong when he characterised the Iraq
crisis as merely a "regional problem," because what will rise from the ashes
of the volcano will erupt across the whole Middle East and probably beyond.
The writer is an Iraqi writer living in Egypt
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