January 25th - - US Senate Foreign Relations Committee - Toby Dodge testimony

 

 

HEARING
before the

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION

25 January 2007: US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

 

 

The publication of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report[2] in early December 2006 and President George W. Bush’s major policy speech[3] on Iraq in January 2007, marked a decisive change in attitudes in Washington.  The acceptance in policy circles of a clear-eyed, realistic and necessarily pessimistic assessment of Iraq, is clearly to be welcomed.  However, acknowledgement that the situation is dire and getting worse, may conceal both disagreement and confusion about the underlying causes of the violent civil war that now dominates the country.

 

To explain the evolution of violent instability in the wake of regime change, the collapse of the state is of much greater significance than the supposedly trans-historical existence of communal antipathies or indeed the ineptitude of Iraq’s new ruling elite.  The entrance of US troops into Baghdad in the first weeks of April 2003, resulted in the death of the Iraqi state.  Faced with the widespread lawlessness that is common after violent regime change, the US did not have the numbers of troops needed to control the situation.  After three weeks of violence and looting the state’s administrative capacity was destroyed.  Seventeen of Baghdad’s twenty-three ministry buildings were completely gutted.[4]  Looters first took portable items of value such as computers, then furniture and fittings.  By the time I reached Baghdad, a month after US forces, they were systematically stripping the electric wiring from the walls of former government buildings, to sell for scrap.  Following the destruction of government infrastructure across the country, de-Ba’athification purged the civil service of its top layer of management, making between 20,000 and 120,000 people unemployed.[5] The administrational capacity of the state was shattered by over a decade of sanctions, three wars in twenty years and then three weeks of uncontrolled looting.  Finally de-Ba’athification removed what was left: its institutional memory and a large section of its skilled personnel. 

 

Iraq today finds itself in a situation of state failure.  Against this background instability is driven by two interlinked problems, which have caused the profound insecurity and violence that now dominates the country.  The complete collapse of state capacity and the US disbanding of the Iraqi army resulted in an acute security vacuum.[6]  This was seized upon by a myriad of groups deploying violence for their own gain.  Organised crime became a dominant source of insecurity for ordinary Iraqis.  For coalition and Iraqi security forces, it is the diffuse groups fighting the insurgency in the name of Iraqi nationalism, increasingly fused with a militant Islamism, that have caused the highest loss of life.  But in early 2006, a new crisis arose with even greater potential for destabilisation: civil war.  The explosion that destroyed the al Askariyya Mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra, on February 22 2006, marked a watershed, exacerbating already mounting sectarian violence and the resultant population transfers. 

 

The second problem that has dominated the politics of the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is the question who should rule?  How to find Iraqis who after thirty-five years of dictatorship have both the technical capacity and national legitimacy to rule over a country of 26 million people?  2005 was dominated by the struggle to build a representative government that could act as a rallying point for the country; allowing the population to invest hope and legitimacy in a new ruling elite that could stabilise the nation and move towards rebuilding the state.  For Iraq to stabilise and regime change to be a success, sustained progress will have to be made in two areas, the building of countrywide state capacity and the growth of a legitimate and competent governing elite.

 

State collapse leads to civil war.

 

The collapse of the state and the resultant security vacuum that has driven Iraq into civil war has created, or at least empowered, three distinct sets of groups deploying violence for their own ends. The first are the ‘industrial strength’ criminal gangs who terrorize what is left of Iraq’s middle class.  Although there is a clear overlap between simple criminality and politically motivated violence, especially where kidnapping is concerned, the continuing crime wave is a glaring example of state incapacity. The persistent reports that crime is as big a problem for the citizens of Basra as Baghdad, indicates that the state’s inability to impose and guarantee order, is a general problem across large swathes of southern and central Iraq. The high levels of criminal activity indicates that violence is driven primarily by opportunity, springing from state weakness, not the antipathy of competing groups within Iraqi society. Crime is obviously instrumentally driven, primarily non-communal and a key factor de-legitimizing the new Iraqi ruling elite. Exceeding the government’s inability to increase electrical output or stimulate the job market, the continued ability of criminal gangs to operate is indicative of a failed state.

 

The second type of organisation capitalising on the collapse of the state are the myriad of groups that make up the Iraqi insurgency.  In the aftermath of regime change, the insurgency was born in a reactive and highly localised fashion, as the US military’s inability to control Iraq became apparent.[7]  This process saw the creation of a number of small fighting groups built around personal ties of trust, cemented by family, locality or many years of friendship. Disparate groups, formed to rid the country of US forces are estimated to consist of between 50 and 74 separate autonomous units, with between 20,000 to 50,000 fighters in their ranks.[8]  Over the past three years they have been innovative in the technology they deploy and the tactics they use. Since 2005 however, the insurgency, has to some degree, consolidated around four or five main groups.  These organisations include the Islamic Army in Iraq, the Partisans of the Sunna Army, the Mujahidin’s Army, Muhammad’s Army and Islamic Resistance Movement in Iraq.[9] As their names suggest, political violence has been increasingly justified in religious terms.  Over the last year these main insurgent groups have found ideological coherence by fusing a powerful appeal to Iraqi nationalism with an austere and extreme Sunni Salafism.  The attraction of the Salalfist doctrine for the insurgents is that it allows a distinction to be drawn between those involved in the jihad or struggle, (the true believers) and those who are not.  Under Salafism those not backing the struggle can be branded non-believers and as such be killed.  This Salafist approach has also lent itself to the increased use of sectarian violence.  Shias can be murdered both because they do not follow the ‘true path of Islam’ and because they form the majority of those staffing the security forces against whom the violence is directed.[10] 

 

The numbers and role played by Arabs from neighbouring countries and beyond them the organising capacity of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, is estimated by the US military to be between five and ten percent of the total.[11] These foreign fighters have played a disproportionately large role in the insurgency’s ideological coherence.   It is al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia that has driven the rising influence of Salafist doctrine and has claimed responsibility or been blamed for the majority of the violence that has increased sectarian tensions in the country. This dynamic reached it peak with the destruction of the al Askariyya Mosque.  Although the city of Samarra has long been dominated by the insurgency, the destruction of the mosque, one of Shia Islam’s most important shrines, was an act calculated to outrage Shia opinion. 

 

The violence that erupted following the Samarra bombing saw criminals and insurgents combine with a third group who have capitalised on the failure of occupation forces and the Iraqi government to impose order.  The plethora of independent militias is estimated to hold between 60,000 to 102,000 fighters in their ranks.[12]  The militias have overtly organised and legitimised themselves by reference to sectarian ideology.  Their existence is testament to the inability of the Iraqi government to guarantee the personal safety of Iraqis on the basis of equal citizenship, not sectarian identity.

 

The militias themselves can be divided into three broad groups, depending on their organisational coherence and relationship to national politics. The first and most disciplined group consists of the two Kurdish militias of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The second set are those that were created in exile and brought back to Iraq in the wake of Saddam’s fall. The most powerful of these is the Badr Brigade, the military arm of Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCRIR), estimated to have 15,000 fighters in its ranks. The Badr Brigade along with SCIRI itself, was set up as a foreign policy vehicle for the Iranian government. Indeed the Badr Brigade was trained and officered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, at least until their return to Iraq.  It remains comparatively disciplined and responsive to its senior commanders.[13]  However it is the Badr Brigade’s colonisation of large swathes of the security forces, notably the police and paramilitary units associated with the Ministry of Interior, which has done so much to de-legitimise the already limited power of the state controlled forces of law and order.  Badr’s dominance of the Ministry of Interior reached its peak when one of its former commanders, Bayan Jabr, served as a minister under the Jaafari government. The Ministry’s Wolf Brigade commandos were repeatedly accused of acting as a death squad, frequently resorting to extra-judicial execution and torture.[14]  Complaints reached their peak in November 2005, when US forces raided a Ministry of Interior detention facility and found 170 detainees “who had been held in appalling conditions.”[15]  However SCIRI’s dominance of government was such that Jabr was not removed until the end of May 2006.  His replacement, Jawad al Bolani a non-aligned politician, has struggled to reform the ministry.  He has reportedly sacked more than 3,000 employees, but the ministry is still dogged by repeated allegations that its forces and prisons are still using murder and torture with impunity.[16]

 

The third group of militias that dominate society in the absence of a state are those that have been created in Iraq since regime change. They vary in size, organisation and discipline, from a few thugs with guns controlling a street or a neighbourhood to militias capable of running whole towns.  The largest and most coherent is the 50,000 strong Jaish al Mahdi, set up by Muqtada al Sadr.  The core of the Mahdi militia is organised around the offices of Sadr’s religious charity, the Martyr al-Sadr.  Each office is run by a cleric appointed by Sadr’s headquarters in Najaf, with full-time fighters paid as much as $300 a week.[17]  However, the speed with which the militia was built after regime change and the two prolonged conflicts with the US military have taken a toll on its organisational coherence.  Mahdi militia commanders have become more financially independent of Najaf through hostage taking, ransom, and the smuggling of antiquities and petroleum.  Sadr has repeatedly tried to instil discipline but, as one of his own commanders admitted, “Even when Sadr fires the brigade commanders, their soldiers follow them and not Sadr. Now Sadr fires commanders every month, so their fighters will not become too loyal to them.”[18]  In spite of Sadr’s repeated calls for calm, it was the Mahdi Army that was blamed for the majority of violence in and around Baghdad following the destruction of the Al Askariyya shrine in February. 

 

The Badr Brigade and Mahdi army both claim to represent the same constituency, urban Iraqi Shias.  They have both tried to legitimise their coercive role in terms of defending this section of the population against violence and instability.   However the instrumental basis to their actions, capitalising on the absence of the state, as opposed to their alleged position as protectors of the Shia population, has been highlighted by the low level civil war they have been fighting against each other.  This struggle erupted in Basra in April and May 2006 and then again in Amarah in October.  Basra has a very small Sunni population, the fighting in April that was responsible for the deaths of 174 Iraqis was not caused by religious or even ideological differences, but money.[19] Basra is the centre of Iraq’s oil exports and the conflict was primarily concerned with the division of the spoils.[20]  The fighting in Amarah in October was again about the dominance of the town once British forces had left.[21]  In each case, none of the groups involved were strong enough to win outright and so the conflict simmers on, erupting periodically, triggered by rival machinations and Iranian interference.

 

Once a state has failed, once its coercive and administrative capacity is removed from society, the population has to seek new local ways to survive, to gain some degree of day-to-day predictability.  This is the quest that has haunted the majority of Iraq’s population since regime change.  The result has been the rise of the militias.  The quality of an individual Iraqi’s life depends on the discipline, organisational coherence and central control of the militias that dominate their streets, neighbourhoods and towns.  In the areas of northern Iraq, the Kurdish militias of the KDP and PUK, since fighting a civil war against each other in the mid-1990s,[22] have centralised and largely institutionalised their military forces.  Elsewhere in Iraq, the militias who came into existence after regime change are far more unstable, prone to criminality and divided loyalties.  Although the militias were formed as an instrumental response to the security vacuum, they have attempted to legitimise themselves by the deployment of hybrid ideologies; sectarian, religious and nationalist.  This has caused the ethnic and religious cleansing across the country from Kirkuk in the north, to Basra in the south, but most powerfully in Baghdad.  This was not an inevitable result of regime change but a direct response to the collapse of the state.  If Iraq is to be stabilised, a central government with a monopoly on coercion must be rebuilt with administrative capacity to give it legitimacy.  Sadly there is no shortcut to this end state, if it is possible, it could take many years and a great deal of resources to achieve.

 

 

Ever since 2003, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, signed the ‘November 15 agreement’, the US government has subcontracted the complex job of rebuilding the state to a small group of inexperienced, formally exiled Iraqis who were long absent from the country.[23]  Their task was to erect a sustainable and legitimate post-regime change political order.  This has been hampered by the two dominant facts of Iraqi politics today.  The major political problem they face is the legacy left by thirty-five years of Ba’athist rule.  Before the imposition of sanctions in 1990, Saddam Hussein used oil wealth and hitherto unheard of levels of state violence, to break any organising capacity within Iraqi society.  Those who were active in anti-regime politics were murdered, imprisoned, tortured or driven into exile.  Those who stayed in the country increasingly realised that survival and economic well-being were directly linked to complete political passivity.  Consequently indigenous political organisation beyond the Ba’ath did not exist in any measurable form.  There was no civil society in Iraq before the US military reached Baghdad.  Iraqi politics began from scratch in April 2003. 

 

The Iraqi politicians sub-contracted by the Americans to rebuild the state have been active in indigenous politics for less than four years.  The majority were also long absent from the country.[24]  Hence they have had to battle against indigenous hostility and suspicion since their return.[25]  The intense political process that stretched across 2005 was meant to overcome these two hurdles; anointing Iraq’s new political elite with the legitimacy of two electoral mandates and a constitution approved by popular referendum.  However the nature of the electoral system chosen, the way the parties decided to fight the elections and the constitutional position of the prime minister in the aftermath, all combined to break the political coherence and administrational efficiency of the government created by this process.

 

Iraq’s new electoral system, based on large multi-party coalitions, is one of the major problems dominating the politics of government.  Whilst the president fulfils a mainly ceremonial role, the office of prime minister has become the main vehicle for delivering governmental coherence.  However the prime minister is in a weak position both constitutionally and electorally.  Real political power is vested in the parties who fight the elections.  For them electoral success within larger coalitions is rewarded by dividing up the spoils of government, cabinet portfolios and the jobs and resources they bring. The prime minister does not dominate the cabinet as first among equals.  Instead Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki has to act as a broker, facilitating negotiations within his own coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance and between it, the American ambassador and the other coalitions.  The prime minister’s decisions are based on the comparative power of the parties and coalitions he is negotiating with, not his own political vision or agenda for rebuilding the Iraqi state. 

 

In the aftermath of the December 2005 elections Prime Minister al Maliki’s task was to build a government of national unity. This involved rewarding the main coalitions while also seeking to balance electoral achievement with the identity politics that the main parties claim to personify.  In addition, al Maliki had to move ministers who under his predecessor, Ibrahim al Jaafari, were too inefficient, scandal ridden or controversial to continue in office. The cabinet that was created sacrificed the needs of a population traumatised by the invasion, occupation, collapse of the state, a crime wave and the growing civil war, at the altar of party politics and electoral outcomes. An unintended consequence of this system was to prevent the prime minister sacking incompetent or corrupt ministers without the agreement of their party bosses.  Even when this was possible, party, coalition and sectarian mathematics meant that other senior party figures replaced them. 

 

The limitations placed upon the prime minister’s powers of appointment were personified by his relations with Bayan Jabr.  Jabr is a key member of SCIRI and a former commander in its militia the Badr Brigade.  As Minister of Interior in the Jaafari government, he was the focus of sustained criticism for politicising the Ministry of Interior, sacking long-standing members of staff, only to replace them with loyal lieutenants from his own militia and party.  Maliki eventually succeeded in moving Jabr from the Interior Ministry, replacing him with the non-aligned Jawad al Bolani.  However the weakness of the prime minister’s position meant that Jabr could not simply be sacked from the cabinet, but was instead moved sideways, to become Minister of Finance.  In his new job Jabr has been accused of obstructing reconstruction initiatives, designed to rebuild support for the government in the Sunni neighbourhoods of Baghdad following the counter-insurgency operation Together Forward II, in the summer and autumn of 2006.

 

During 2005 Iraq did indeed hold two comparatively successful elections and a referendum for the new constitution.  However the government and cabinet that this electoral process delivered are unfit for their purpose: rebuilding the Iraqi state.  The weakness of a prime minister in a system dominated by parties has directly undermined the coherence of the government.  The cabinet, instead of acting as a vehicle for national unity and state building has become a mechanism for dividing up the spoils of electoral success.  If the ministers that al Maliki appointed are answerable to anyone it is to their party bosses, not the prime minister or the electorate.  The ministries these politicians now run have become personal and party fiefdoms. At best scarce government resources are diverted to build party constituencies, with each minister clearing out the payrolls of their ministries to appoint friends, followers and faction members.  At worst, with little or no cabinet responsibility or administrational oversight, this system encourages both personal and political corruption to flourish.

 

Under the transition from regime change, 2005 was meant to give Iraq’s new ruling elite the legitimacy to rule the country.  However the way that electoral mandate was delivered, through large multi-party coalitions, has directly hindered the government’s main and crucial task: the rebuilding of the Iraqi state.  Instead the cabinet has become highly fractured. Ministries have been turned into party fiefdoms directly breaking governmental coherence.  In the aftermath of each election, politicians were locked away within the fortified Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad.  They became quickly removed from the everyday concerns of a population struggling to survive in the midst of an increasingly bloody civil war.  The new government has followed the path of its two predecessors; it has become mired in the incestuous politics of zero sum party competition.  The state, both coercively and administrationally, is still largely irrelevant to the Iraqi population’s lives.  As such it is hastening Iraq’s further descent into inter-communal strife and collapse.

 

Proposed solutions.

 

Against a background of state collapse and the resultant civil war both the Iraq Study Group and President Bush argue, “Only Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people.”[26] However once state capacity has collapsed, civil society’s ability to positively influence events quickly disappears.[27]  The Iraq Study Group’s main suggestion is a dramatic empowerment of Iraq’s current governing elite. They would be forced to take on the role of state builders by the application of both carrots and sticks; greater and speedier devolution of power, increased funding but also the threat of reduced aid or complete US withdrawal.  Under these policy proposals the US would exercise influence over the Iraqi government in two ways.  Firstly, it would make Iraq’s rulers understand that America’s commitment to the country was not open ended.[28]  US troops would be reduced and eventually withdrawn from Iraq, irrespective of the progress made on the ground.  The minds of those in the Iraqi government would be focused by a clear and unambiguous time limit placed upon US support for the country. They would have no American safety net.  If the current ruling elite failed it would be their own lives that would be put at risk. More immediately the Iraq Study Group suggested the imposition of strict conditionality on further US aid.  If specific milestones were not reached by the Iraqi government over the next two years, then US troops and money would be reduced incrementally, until Iraqi government policy was changed for the better.

 

Given that the Iraqi governing elite play such a central role in the ISG’s recommendations, their response is instructive.  The Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, gave the government’s most sustained and detailed reaction stating, “as a whole I reject this report”.  Talabani rejected the report’s suggestion of embedding up to 17,000 US advisers across the Iraqi army and police force.  This he claimed, “is not respecting the desire of the Iraqi people to control its army and to be able to rearm and train Iraqi forces under the leadership of the Iraqi government”.  Talabani also minimised the potential for aid conditionality to influence the government.  Overall Iraq’s president saw the ISG’s recommendations as a negation of Iraq’s hard won sovereignty and thus unacceptable to his government.[29]

 

Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister, and Mowaffak al Rubaie, the National Security Adviser, developed a much more cautious critique of the report.  Speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, al Rubaie broadly agreed with the change in the US military mission suggested by the ISG.  The government, he argued, has been asking for the accelerated training and equipping of Iraqi security forces.  Zebari claimed that on the military front the ISG recommendations were in line with the agreement recently reached between President Bush and Prime Minister al Maliki at their meeting in Amman.  This was to accelerate the transfer of security responsibilities to Iraqi troops in command and control, training, arming, and equipment.

 

However, the final response to the report was not at all positive.  If the ISG’s recommendations on national reconciliation were meant to be perceived as an olive branch to the insurgency then the reaction of the Ba’ath Party cannot have given its author’s much room for optimism.  The Ba’ath Party, in its official response, saw the ISG report as confirmation of America’s dire position in Iraq, commenting that the US had been defeated and “the Iraqi national resistance has achieved a practical victory.  This much was clear from the Baker report.  Now Bush has also admitted that America had failed.”[30]

 

The ISG’s report selected the ruling elite of Iraq as the best tool available to the US, to shape events on the ground.  However the logic of two nationwide elections and a constitutional referendum since the invasion works against this strategy. It means that Iraqi politicians like Talabani feel they have developed a large degree of autonomy from the US government who originally put them in power.  This explains why the ISG’s call for conditionality was rejected in the name of Iraqi sovereignty and the government’s electoral mandate.  Amongst both American diplomats and Iraqi politicians working in the Green Zone, there is a recognition that the negative consequences of a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq would be as great for the US government as it would be for the Iraqi ruling elite, many of whom are very lightly attached to their country.[31]  This gives Iraqi politicians a good deal of leverage over their American colleagues.   Their response to the ISG report has been to call America’s bluff, not taking seriously either its demands for conditionality or threats of withdrawal.  This means Iraqi politicians will continue to squabble amongst themselves directly undermining the coherence of the government and the rebuilding of the state.

 

President Bush, on the other hand, favours a dramatic increase in US troops to impose some order on Baghdad and the north west of Iraq, adding a further 21,500 troops to the current 132,000 troops in the country.[32]  His desire for greater numbers of US troops in Iraq has been shaped by the military and political difficulties faced by the most recent attempt to control Baghdad, operation Together Forward II.  This operation began in August 2006, with plans to deploy 7,000 extra US troops in combination with a similar number of Iraqis.  However the Iraqi government found itself unable to deliver the troops or reconstruction assistance it had promised.  Several battalions refused orders to deploy to Baghdad.[33]  In addition, US commanders had to counter sustained political interference in their operations from the highest levels of the Iraqi government.[34]

 

President Bush’s new proposals for a surge in troops may also suffer from logistical and strategic shortcomings.  Even a new total of 153,500 US troops would be far short of the numbers needed to impose order on the country. A technocratic study on state building published just after the invasion concluded that occupying forces would need 20 security personnel, (both police and troops), per thousand people.[35] It estimated that coalition forces should have had between 400,000 and 500,000 soldiers to impose order on Iraq.  Even this figure compares unfavourably to the estimated 43 per 1,000 that sustained Saddam in power.[36] President Bush’s new approach would see a new total of 32,500 US troops in Baghdad, a city of 6 million people.[37]  This gives commanders 1 American solider for every 184 Baghdadis.  This new enlarged number of US troops is still well below even the 50 per 1,000 that the new Army and Marines field manual on counter-insurgency recommends.[38]

 

In addition, simply flooding one area of Iraq, in this case parts of Baghdad with troops, neglects the subtler aspects of counter-insurgency doctrine.  A surge in troops to Baghdad may be understood as the beginning of an ‘oil spot’ strategy.[39] But to be sustainable this has to be married with the second stage of the process.  After areas have been cleared of insurgents the government needs to reconstitute sustainable security (particularly police forces), build up its administrative capacity, establish the rule of law and transform its despotic capacity for violence into an infrastructural power for governance.[40]  The Iraqi government is neither willing nor able to follow up the clear phase of counter-insurgency with the infrastructural build stage.  Firstly, in the aftermath of a successful US counter-insurgency operation to gain control of the northern city of Tel Afar, the Iraqi government proved remarkably reluctant to secure this victory by deploying enhanced government resources.[41]  After the clear phase US forces found themselves overtly cajoling the Iraqi government, in an effort to get funds released for the area, while trying to stop covert attempts at undermining the whole operation. Secondly in a country dominated by a collapsed state, the ability of the government to build up its capacity across a sustained geographical area is very limited.

 

Conclusions.

 

There is a distinct danger that neither President Bush nor the Iraqi Study Group’s proposals for extracting the United States from the debacle that Iraq has become have recognized the root causes of the violence and instability that has plagued the country since April 2003. The origins of the Iraqi civil war lie in the complete collapse of both the administrative and coercive capacity of the state.  The Iraqi state, its ministries, civil servants, police force and army ceased to exist in a meaningful way in the aftermath of regime change. It is the United States’ inability to reconstruct them that lies at the heart of the Iraq problem.  If and until the state’s capacity is substantially rebuilt, then Iraq will continue to be a wellspring of violent instability, with the population dominated by the Hobbsian nightmare that their lives will be nasty, brutish and short.

Notes and references.