By Rami G. Khouri
BEIRUT: The anti-American, anti-Iraqi-government insurgency in Iraq comprises over 70 different groups that are based on family, personal or local ties for the most part, and neither military force nor political negotiations are likely to put down their challenge in the near future, according to a leading London-based expert on Iraq who has done research in the country for many years. Dr. Toby Dodge, lecturer in politics at Queen Mary College of the University of London, and a consulting senior fellow for the Middle East at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Daily Star in an interview earlier this week during a conference in Gstaad, Switzerland that Iraq must go through a slow process of rebuilding a credible state structure that can deliver services and provide security, before the insurgency loses its popular support base. He sees an extreme form of local government and identity taking root, which may be hard to reverse in the future. Below is the full text of the interview.
Q: How would you describe the "insurgency" in Iraq?
A: Certainly, it's very fractured and that's a legacy from Saddam Hussein's time when he used a great deal of money and violence to comb through Iraqi society and wipe out any organized national opposition capacity. When you look at the way the regime itself fell after three wars and years of sanctions, what you had left were small groups scattered throughout the country, organized on the basis of family, friendship, kinship, and geography, with only the loosest coordination between them.
Q: How do you come up with the estimate of 74 different groups in the insurgency?
A: The figure of 74 is an amalgamation of discussions I've had with different governments and their best estimates. It's a rough figure. The importance is it indicates you have a series of small, independent fighting forces ranging from 10 or 15 people up to 200 or 300 people, spread across the entire country. Militarily it's almost impossible for the American Army to beat this. You can't roll up one group after another, because as you do other groups will spring up, as we've seen happen. More worrying politically, it's difficult to negotiate with them, because there's not a single figure or group that leads them. Their common denominator position is for the Americans to go home. There's no way to get a set of nuanced negotiations going against that fractured background of the insurgents.
Q: Why do Americans tend to single out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
A: To be frank, if you speak to the senior American military off the record it's clear that Zarqawi is an irritant, but a minor player. They'd say that less than 10 percent of the insurgency is foreign; I would say it's probably closer to 4 or 5 percent. It's a small element. If we put the fighting forces of the insurgency between 20,000 and 30,000, this means you have a few thousand foreign fighters at most.
If we were to map out the insurgency you'd start out with the forces of the old regime, which have reconfigured a new politburo and political and military wings inside and outside the country, but their ability to control the fighters is pretty loose and diffuse. These Baathists are responsible for perhaps 60 percent of the fighting.
The other 40 percent is an indigenous hybrid of Iraqi nationalism and radical Islamism. The fastest growing groups include ones like the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, formed around Abu Ghraib being the suburban hinterland of Iraq. Their ideology is militantly nationalist but also Islamist radical. My sources whom I've interviewed close to the insurgency say this is the fastest growing, fastest recruiting type of group. Beyond this element you get to the other radical fringe, the jihadist, transnational Islamic radicals, almost like jihadist tourists visiting the country, exemplified by Zarqawi.
His forces are fairly small, around 1,000, and his networks delivering in fighting forces are still fairly diffuse, not in any way organized on a large scale. So we don't have an Afghan-like comparison; what we have is an ad hoc, flexible, organic network delivering relatively small numbers of Saudis, Yemenis, Syrians and others into Iraq.
Press coverage focuses on the suicide bombings that terrorize and hurt the population, but they are a small percentage of the fighting that goes on every day. The majority of the violence going on is ambushing, mortars, and improvised explosive devices deployed against American troops and the Iraqi Army in conventional but asymmetrical warfare. You've also got porous borders and there is evidence that the insurgents are bringing in very sophisticated missiles that they are buying abroad and smuggling into the country.
Q: Criminal violence is much more widespread than purely political fighting?
A: Yes. Kidnapping, housebreaking and general violence would be the vast majority now, around 80 percent of violence according to the Americans. However, the 20 percent left is political and it's driven by operatives with a strong ideological commitment to what they are doing. It would be glib and wrong simply to write them off as criminals. There's also a hybrid kind of kidnapping now, with commercial criminal gangs kidnapping people and selling the captives to those people who want to use them for political purposes.
Q: What do the insurgents want beyond getting the Americans out?
A: Beyond getting Americans out the insurgents don't have much of a platform. They see it as a typical national liberation struggle, basically asking the Americans to get out of their country and they'd worry about the rest after that. Again we have a hybrid range of groups from those who are basically Baathists seeking to rebuild a Baathist state through to radical Islamists looking for a caliphate.
Q: What are the implications of all this for political or military progress? It seems gloomy.
A: It's extremely gloomy. If you look at classical counterinsurgency strategy you'd look to a political process that would draw the political support base of the population from the insurgents. That would be about setting up a government of national unity that offered a genuine basis on which to draw in all Iraqis, especially the Sunnis, that would chose Cabinet ministers on the basis of their capacity to represent different aspects of the whole Iraqi community and not on their close ties to the United States.
Q: Is it reasonable in your view to rebuild Iraq on formal sectarian and religious lines?
A: That is an incredibly dangerous dynamic. Until relatively recently if you asked ordinary Iraqis "what are you?" they'd only think of saying they were Iraqis, but that has started to change as they assert other identities. We can understand that, because when the state collapses and you're looking to protect and take care of your family on a day-to-day basis, you'd look for stability and predictability anywhere you can. In Iraq today they're going to be local and based on the local street, neighborhood and town where you live. They're going to use local ideologies to legitimize themselves and in Iraq those are going to be religious, and to a certain extent increasingly sectarian. That's perhaps very depressing. If you look at opinion polls coming out of Iraq those who describe themselves in tribal terms are always very small, so tribal identity is not the main focus for people in terms of how they identify themselves. The main focus is religion and nationalism together.
We have a strong ideological commitment among the population to both Islam and to Iraq, but the realities on a day-to-day basis are that people are finding the security and stability they need on a much more local level; it's much easier to legitimize and understand that on a sectarian level than on the level of Iraqi nationalism.
Q: How does the country move beyond the current insecurity and rebuild the state?
A: If you were to take a technical view of state-building, the first thing to do is to get the government and state in a position where it could control society by having a monopoly on the use of violence and arms. It hasn't got that, and is no way close to that. After that happens, the government would build institutions that deliver daily needed services to the citizens, and if those institutions and their services become necessary to the population they would also become legitimate. That's a slow, generation-long process. We don't have a state today and the government doesn't have the capacity to deliver services to the whole country, so for the moment things are getting worse, not better.
There is also the problem of endemic political corruption among ministers whose power is being used to build a support network of family, friends and faction followers. How do you legitimize that? You clear staff out of the ministry to bring your friends in, and you call that de-Baathification. As you appoint people to represent your community, this gives you an increasing sectarian tinge of communalism in Iraqi politics, which is incredibly negative. Once that ball starts rolling, it will be very difficult to stop it.
Q: Will a rebuilt Iraq possibly be configured on a more decentralized, confederal basis?
A: We have two processes going on. One is a formal political process creating a constitution that sees federalism as the best way to run Iraq. The question is whether it would be geographic or ethnic federalism, based on self-managed governorates or on distinct population groups that are represented in the central state. However, the more real, everyday issue is that the Iraqi state has collapsed and the Americans and their allies have been very bad at rebuilding the state. What you have as a consequence is extreme localism, with the best example perhaps being Basra in the south. Leading politicians in Basra have become extremely alienated and cynical about politics in Baghdad and have started to call for radical decentralization. Politically they're saying they want something similar to what the Kurds have in the north, almost total autonomy. They've started by setting up a local government that has almost no contact with Baghdad at all. So you have a formal political process but also a more powerful every day reality that if you have any vestige of political and security authority where you live in Iraq it's highly likely to be done on a town or neighborhood level.
Q: What are the implications of the Iraq situation today for wider American policies in the rest of the Middle East?
A: The invasion of Iraq was the key moment in the entire Bush doctrine. The point was to take down Saddam Hussein, the most radical oppositional government in the region, and to show the rest of the Middle East that your sovereignty is radically reduced. The United States will tolerate your government only if you play by the rules - no terrorism, shrinking state power, increasing liberalism, no weapons of mass destruction - that American lays down. That's failed, no doubt, and that raises profound questions about America's ability to project power in other parts of the Middle East and beyond the region. American policymakers clearly realize that and are worried about that, which is why they stay in Iraq, because they know the consequences of a defeat in Iraq for American power would be global and devastating, you'd have a kind of post-Vietnam syndrome when American credibility and power would be radically reduced and foreign policy may have to be re-thought.
In the region itself, Iraq gives the U.S. much less influence in neighboring states for now. Bush's team has moved heaven and earth to deny American dependence on neighboring states. Whether they like it or not, Iran and Syria have a vast amount of influence in Iraq, especially Iran. Iran has its hands firmly under the entire south of Iraq, and when the conflict between Iran and the U.S. comes over the uranium enrichment issue, Iran is going to squeeze. The Americans must realize that, but they're trying to deny it, because the consequences are that in Iraq America is much more vulnerable to Iran than Iran is to America. That's a very difficult situation for the world's sole superpower to be in.
