Brookings: Topics - Iraq

National Reconciliation in the Arab Spring Countries: Lessons from Bulgaria, Iraq, Morocco, and South Africa

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

June 19, 2013
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM AST

Brookings Doha Center, Doha, Qatar

This policy discussion focused on past experiences of national reconciliation in Bulgaria, Iraq, Morocco, and South Africa, offering best practices, success stories, and lessons learned for the Arab Spring countries. Can these countries tell the Arab world what – and what not – to do when pursuing national reconciliation? How relevant is their experience to the context of the Arab Spring revolutions? Across the Arab world, we see countries that have toppled their former regimes struggle to rebuild a domestic order. Serious challenges have emerged, for example on the question of how to deal with their past and with former ruling parties. How should new governments address the demands of those who suffered past violations, fulfilling their rights to redress and compensation? How can new governments engage in deep institutional reform to prevent a recurrence of these abuses in the future? This event explored the lessons and principles that should inform policymakers and civil society in countries like Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen as they work to forge a new social contract.

Follow the event on Twitter using the hashtag: #NtlReconciliation »

Participants

Moderator

Ibrahim Sharqieh

Deputy Director, Brookings Doha Center

Panelists

Why the Current Syria Policy Doesn't Make Sense

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama's decision to arm Syrian rebels -- after resisting such a course for nearly two years -- has come under some withering criticism. Marc Lynch, who has long opposed military intervention in Syria, calls it "probably his worst foreign policy decision since taking office," while Daniel Larison casts it as "certainly one of the two or three worst [decisions]." Despite being on the opposite side of the debate -- I began writing in favor of military intervention nearly a year and a half ago -- it is hard to disagree with their assessment that providing "small arms" to the rebels is unlikely to make much difference.

What makes Obama's decision so unsatisfying -- and even infuriating -- to both sides is that even he seems to acknowledge this. As the New York Times reports, "Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement."

To some extent like the 2010 Afghanistan "surge," this is a tactical move that seems almost entirely detached from any clear, long-term strategy. A source of constant and sometimes Kafkaesque debate among interpreters of Obama's Syria policy is figuring out what exactly the policy is in the first place. Secretary of State John Kerry has been promoting the Geneva II peace conference, but his explanations of U.S. goals have tended to confuse. For example, there is this: "The goal of Geneva II is to implement Geneva I." But no one is quite sure what the goals of Geneva I were, except perhaps to "lay the groundwork" for Geneva II.

If the goal is to help rebels regain the military advantage and, second, to diminish the regime's ability to kill, then the proposed means fall well short (for a detailed discussion of why small arms are likely to be ineffective, see C.J. Chivers' explanation here). The fact that nearly everyone seems to agree on the ineffectiveness of such a course -- including even Obama himself -- suggests the president did this because he needed to "do something." It was, after all, getting embarrassing, with open mockery of Obama's fecklessness, in general, and a rather squiggly "red line" that insisted on shifting in odd directions, in particular. But that Obama has done something he clearly didn't want to do for precisely the wrong reasons does not inspire confidence. Rarely has a major policy change been announced so circumspectly with so little conviction.

The fact of the matter, and one the administration seems intent on eliding, is that the only way to help the rebels regain the advantage and force the Assad regime to make real concessions is with a credible threat of military intervention through airstrikes against regime assets and the establishment of no-fly and no-drive zones. This will mean taking additional steps and slowly deepening our involvement, a result which some now fear is inevitable. Of course, the other argument -- eloquently advanced by Larison over the past year -- is that no vital interests are at stake and that the United States would be better staying out altogether. This latter argument, despite defining U.S. "interests" in extremely narrow terms, at least has the virtue of some internal consistency.

For those who supported the NATO operation in Libya -- perhaps the epitome of a non-interests-based intervention -- and past interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, the continued reluctance to entertain direct military action is more difficult to explain, although it no doubt has to do with the legacy of Iraq. Iraq is often mentioned by the administration as offering lessons for the present, although why Syria should be so analogous to Iraq, rather than say Libya or Bosnia, is rarely specified in any detail (Syria shares some of Iraq's sectarian features, but, to my knowledge, this was not the reason that so many felt the war was illegal, unnecessary, and based on false pretenses). Misplaced support for the Iraq war has led to an overcorrection in the opposite direction.

"To my mind," Andrew Sullivan writes for instance, "the key components of a successful Obama presidency -- an actual change we can believe in -- is the ability to resist war in Syria or with Iran under almost any circumstance." Why intervene again in a messy, uncertain region when previous interventions have turned out so bad? Sullivan's position has little to do with understanding Syria and how the situation on the ground has changed, but is based, rather, on an ideological aversion to intervention under, as he puts it, "almost any circumstance." The problem with the Iraq war wasn't that it was an intervention, but that it was a bad intervention. It was the result of conscious policy decisions -- guided by a neo-conservative worldview - just as non-intervention in Syria has been a very conscious and deliberate choice on the part of an Obama administration guided by a philosophical and even ideological aversion to intervention or even pro-active involvement in the Middle East.

The question for Syria anti-interventionists builds on Sullivan's perhaps inadvertent admission: under what circumstances, if any, do they believe military intervention would be warranted, a question which has broad relevance for the future of the "Responsibility to Protect"? In Syria, at least 93,000 have been killed, one of the highest totals of any recent world conflict. Beyond unspeakable mass slaughter, rape, and torture, two other key conditions have been met. First, there have been consistent requests from the Syrian political and military opposition, as well as the broader protest movement, for foreign direct intervention, particularly the imposition of a no-fly zone. Second, there is broad regional and international legitimacy, with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and France backing various degrees of military action.

In an ideal world, these considerations would have been enough to intervene long ago -- the point of the Responsibility to Protect, after all, is to intervene on behalf of the living, rather than the dead -- but that is not the world we live in. I have always hesitated to emphasize the strategic rationale for military action, due to my concern that what should be about protecting the Syrian people and supporting their struggle against a brutal regime becomes much more a matter of setting scores with Iran, Hezbollah, or other unsavory actors. That caveat aside, the strategic arguments are compelling in a way they never were in Libya (or for that matter Kosovo). Unlike most Arab autocratic regimes, Syria has long been an enemy of the United States. The Syrian regime is such a vital lifeline and point of entry for Iran and Hezbollah that both parties are doing everything in their power to keep Assad in power. And so on. It is difficult to think of a comparable case where the moral and strategic rationales for military intervention were this strong.

If, despite all of these reasons, liberal internationalists are still loathe to consider intervention, then this calls into question the broader applicability and relevance of the very concept of "humanitarian intervention" and the Responsibility to Protect. If the exceptionally dire circumstances of Syria -- of mass slaughter and the resulting destabilization of an entire region (including Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) -- are not enough to trigger intervention, then what would?

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The Atlantic

Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters

Sectarianism and the Politics of the New Middle East

F. Gregory Gause, III — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:43:00 -0400

With fighting raging in Syria, spill-over effects becoming more apparent in Lebanon, violence increasing in Iraq, tensions simmering in Bahrain and clerical politicians like Hassan Nasrallah and Yusif al-Qaradawi launching calls for war, it is no surprise that sectarianism is the lens through which most outsiders are viewing events in the Middle East. Even the New York Times thinks so, so it must be true.

There is no denying that sectarianism is a real factor in the politics of all these places, and more places, in the region. But it is important to recognize the political context in which sectarianism becomes prominent in a country’s politics and to realize that neither sectarian conflict nor sectarian political alliances are immutable. While religious identities are extremely important and powerful elements of how people define themselves politically, they are neither always dominant nor do they always mean the same thing. The contemporary political context is more important for understanding how sectarianism plays into modern conflicts than is the history of the first Islamic century.

In the experience of the contemporary Arab world, the salience of sectarianism (and other sub-national identities, like tribalism and regionalism) rises as the power of the state declines. When the state is unable to provide basic security and services for its citizens, they have to look to those communities that will protect them and in which they feel safe. Thus, in Arab states like Lebanon and Yemen, where the state has always been weak, sectarian and tribal identities have played an outsized role in politics.

Syria and Iraq are a different kind of case. In each, the Ba’th Party established a dictatorial regime in the 1960’s that set about building a strong, overweening state. The core of the governing elite in each country was overwhelmingly from a sectarian minority – Sunnis in Iraq and Alawis in Syria. Over time, that core elite came to be identified more and more with a particular family from that sectarian minority. But the state did not govern as a sectarian state at the outset in either. Arab nationalism was the official ideology of the state, the focus of the state educational system and the approved discourse of the state media.

However, as the rulers’ control came to be challenged, they relied more and more on fellow sectarians for support, and their opposition came to be identified more and more by its own sectarian (and ethnic, in Kurdish areas) characteristics. By the time that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, sectarian and ethnic identities dominated Iraqi politics as the power of Saddam Hussein’s brutal state contracted under the pressures of economic sanctions and political pressures. The American destruction of what was left of the Iraqi state apparatus exacerbated this trend. Likewise in Syria, what began as a popular, national protest against the Assad dictatorship devolved into a sectarian fight as the reach of the Syrian state contracted. The regime quickly identified its fight for survival as a sectarian struggle, and the opposition reacted in kind.

Even though Lebanon, Syria and Iraq started in different places, they have ended up as a crescent of state weakness in the Arab East, where sub-national sectarian and ethnic identities now dominate politics and drive conflict. But this was not an inevitable path. Had Saddam Hussein not entered into two disastrous wars in 1980 and 1990, perhaps Iraqi state-building, even with him at the helm, might have developed in a more salutary and less sectarian way. Had Bashar al-Assad actually followed through with his early promises of political reform, Syria might have avoided the protests of 2011 and the collapse of state authority it is now experiencing. The severe sectarianization of their politics was not the only result that could have occurred.

Nor is the sectarian line-up of political conflict in these countries necessarily going to dominate their politics in the future. Lebanon is an instructive comparison here. The weakness of the Lebanese state, a characteristic of the elite bargain that created the Lebanese political system decades ago, became even more pronounced with the civil war of the 1970’s and 1980’s. So it is not surprising that sectarianism remains the driver of its politics. But the axes of conflict and alliance have changed over time. At the height of the civil war, it was a Christian v. Muslim dynamic. Now, Sunnis and Shia square off, with Christians divided between support for the March 14 and March 8 coalitions. It is still sectarian politics, but the scorecard is very different. This is a useful reminder that politics and political choices are not completed controlled by a logic of sectarianism.

Syria, Iraq and even Lebanon are not condemned in the long term to the deep sectarian conflicts that now drive their politics. But to escape the destructive path they are all on, their political elites are going to have to find a way to agree on a way to reconstruct their states on a basis of inclusive citizenship rather than sub-national sectarian and ethnic identities. That is a hard, but not an impossible, task and one that I look forward to being addressed at the forthcoming U.S. Islamic World Forum in Doha this weekend.

Authors

F. Gregory Gause, III

Image Source: Â© Osman Orsal / Reuters

China-Middle East Energy Relations

Erica S. Downs — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Erica Downs discusses China’s energy trade with and investment in the Middle East, and the implications of the resurgence of oil and natural gas production in the United States for China’s role in the Middle East.

View a webcast of the hearing on the USCC website »

I would like to thank the members of the Commission for the opportunity to testify. It is an honor to participate in this hearing.

My remarks today will focus on China’s energy relations with the Middle East. I will discuss China’s energy trade with and investment in the region and the implications of the resurgence of oil and natural gas production in the United States for China’s role in the Middle East.

China’s oil trade with the Middle East

China imports more oil from the Middle East than any other region of the world. In 2011, China imported 2.9 million barrels per day (b/d) of Middle Eastern oil, which accounted for 60 percent of China’s oil imports. For comparison, the United States imported 2.5 million barrels per day of oil from the Middle East in 2011, accounting for 26 percent of US oil imports.[1]

China’s largest crude oil supplier is Saudi Arabia, which provided China with one-fifth of its crude oil imports -- almost 1.1 million b/d – last year.[2] Saudi Arabia has been China’s top crude oil supplier for the past decade. The Kingdom has established itself as a very reliable supplier in both word and deed. Saudi officials have repeatedly reassured the Chinese that they can count on Saudi Arabia to provide China with the oil it needs for continued economic growth.[3] Saudi Aramco has backed up this commitment with its participation in a joint venture refinery in China’s Fujian Province, which processes Saudi crude.

China’s oil imports from Iran-- its fourth largest supplier in 2012 and third largest supplier for most of the previous decade-- have recently declined, probably as a result of US sanctions aimed at reducing Iran’s revenue from crude oil exports. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 prescribes penalties for foreign financial institutions which do business with the Central Bank of Iran, the main clearinghouse for oil payments, but also grants 180-day exemptions to countries that “significantly reduce” oil imports from Iran. China’s imports of Iranian crude have fallen from 555,000 b/d in 2011 to 439,000 b/d in 2012 to 402,000 b/d during the period January-April 2013. These reductions earned China exemptions in June and December 2012 and June 2013.[4]

China’s oil investments in the Middle East

The Chinese national oil companies’ largest upstream projects in the Middle East are in Iraq and Iran. The firms have signed service contracts to develop several large oil fields in both countries. (These include al-Ahdab, Halfaya and Rumaila in Iraq and Azadegan and Yadavaran in Iran.) The projects in Iraq have progressed much more quickly than the projects in Iran.

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which moved quickly to develop a foothold in the postwar Iraqi oil industry, is one of the largest foreign companies, in terms of production, operating in Iraq. One of the crown jewels of CNPC’s international upstream portfolio is Iraq’s Rumaila oil field, which CNPC is developing in partnership with BP. Last year, Rumaila accounted for more than one third of Iraq’s oil output. It was also CNPC’s top-producing overseas project, accounting for almost half of CNPC’s net overseas oil and natural gas production.[5]

In contrast, the upstream activities of CNPC and its domestic peers in Iran have slowed in recent years. The Iranians suspended the contract of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) for the development of the North Pars natural gas field in 2011 for lack of progress, and CNPC withdrew from developing phase 11 of South Pars, the world’s largest natural gas field in 2012 (after the Iranians threatened to void CNPC’s contract for lack of progress).[6] CNPC is behind schedule in developing the Azadegan oil field, and Sinopec ‘s work on the Yadavaran oil field reportedly has suffered delays. [7] The reasons for the shrinking presence of China’s oil companies in Iran include sanctions that have made it difficult for China’s oil companies to secure equipment and technologies needed to operate in Iran, unhappiness with contract terms, uncertainty about whether Iran’s nuclear program will spark a military conflict, and reported guidance from China’s leadership to move slowly in Iran.[8]

In sum, the Chinese oil companies’ strategy for securing upstream projects in Iran has been one of “talk now and spend later.” In the 2000s, the companies were happy to negotiate contracts for projects that would almost certainly have been awarded to major international oil companies in the absence of sanctions. However, they have not been in any rush to actually pump large sums of money into Iran.

The Implications of greater American energy self-sufficiency for China’s role in the Middle East

I would also like to say a few words about how the resurgence of oil and natural gas production in the United States may reshape the roles of the United States and China in the Middle East. The International Energy Agency projects that the United States’ oil imports from the Middle East will fall from 1.9 million b/d in 2011 to just 100,000 b/d --3 percent of total oil imports-- in 2035 as a result of increasing domestic oil production and decreasing demand. In contrast, China’s oil imports from the Middle East are projected to grow from 2.9 million b/d in 2011 to 6.7 million b/d -- 54 percent of total oil imports-- in 2035.[9]

These trends have prompted speculation about future US military posture in the Persian Gulf and, in turn, what it might mean for the security of regional oil flows to China. It is highly unlikely that the United States would completely disengage from the Middle East; Washington will almost certainly retain a variety of interests in the region, including the free flow of oil, counterterrorism and nuclear nonproliferation, even if the United States is importing little or no oil from the Middle East. However, if a diminishing appetite for Middle Eastern crudes and budgetary constraints were to prompt Washington to substantially reduce its military presence in the region, oil security concerns might compel Beijing to play a larger role in defusing the primary threat to the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf – the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. At a minimum, this might entail Beijing communicating to Tehran that it would regard the disruption of oil exports bound for China as a threat to one of China’s vital interests, similar to the public warning then-Premier Wen Jiabao issued in Qatar in January 2012.[10] A less likely but more active Chinese effort might involve reinforcing verbal admonitions with the stationing of a ship in the Persian Gulf, perhaps from one the multinational regional antipiracy patrols in which the Chinese navy participates.[11]

Finally, it is worth noting that the boom in oil and natural gas production in North America may provide Washington with more leverage over the activities of China’s national oil companies in Iran. North America is now the epicenter of global mergers and acquisitions in oil and natural gas exploration and production. In 2011, for example, 60% of all upstream mergers and acquisitions worldwide were in North America.[12] China’s national oil companies are part of this story. Since 2009, almost half of the capital Chinese oil companies have spent on overseas mergers and acquisitions has been used to purchase assets in North America. In the United States alone, Chinese oil companies have invested more than $8 billion since 2010. Chinese oil executives have indicated continued interest in acquiring additional assets in North America.[13]

The more Chinese oil companies are invested in the United States, the more likely they are to think twice about doing business in Iran. This is because involvement in the Iranian oil industry may undermine the efforts of Chinese oil companies to expand their presence in the United States in two ways. First, any proposed acquisition that would result in foreign control of an American business -- such as CNOOC’s recent acquisition of Nexen – should be reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) for national security risks, and it is likely that CFIUS would inquire about the nature of the acquirer’s activities in Iran. Second, Chinese oil companies are acutely aware of how public opinion can scuttle a deal thanks to CNOOC’s unsuccessful bid for Unocal in 2005. Strong opposition to a Chinese oil company’s business in Iran might prevent that company from acquiring an asset in the United States by making the transaction costs unacceptably high. In sum, opportunities to invest in the United States might diminish the appetite of China’s national oil companies for undertaking projects in Iran.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

[1] International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2012 (Paris: OECD/IEA, 2012), pp. 85, 107; and data provided by the International Energy Agency by email on May 29, 2013.

[2] “Table of China December Data on Oil, Oil Product and LNG Imports,” Dow Jones Global Equities News, January 21, 2013.

[3] See, for example, Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi, Speech at the Conferment Ceremony of Honorary Doctorate, Peking University, Beijing, China, November 13, 2009, http://www.kaust.edu.sa/about/bot/speeches/PekingUniversitySpeech.html.

[4] Nidhi Verma and Meeyoung Cho, “India leads Asian cuts in Iran oil imports ahead of waiver review,” Reuters, May 21, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/22/iran-sanctions-waiver-idUSL3N0E30D720130522; “Market Eye: China Demand Growth Sputters to Seven-month Low,” International Oil Daily, April 23, 2013; Judy Hua and Chen Aizhu, “Update 2 – China’s Feb crude imports from Iran up 81 pct on yr,” Reuters, March 21, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/21/china-oil-iran-idUSL3N0CC0CS20130321; “Table of China December Data on Oil, Oil Product and LNG Imports,” Dow Jones Global Equities News, January 21, 2013; and “Oil Data: Table of China December Oil, Oil Pdt, LNG Imports,” Dow Jones International News, January 20, 2012.

[5] He Qing “Zai mou zhaobiao: Zhongshiyou de Yilake jingji zhang” (“Planning another bid: CNPC’s Iraqi balance sheet”), 21^st shjiji jingji daobao (21^st Century Business Herald), April 20, 2013, http://finance.qq.com/a/20130420/000560.htm; “Unrest Hits CNPC’s 2012 Output,” International Oil Daily, January 18, 2013; and Aref Mohammed and Ahmed Rasheed, “Update 2 – BP proposed cuts to Iraq’s Rumaila target,” Reuters, December 13, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/13/energy-iraq-rumaila-idUSL5E8ND7YS20121213.

[6] “Iran Set to Replace CNPC with Local Firms at South Pars 11,” International Oil Daily, April 23, 2013; and “CNPC to Withdraw from Iran’s South Pars Project,” International Oil Daily, September 28, 2012; “CNOOC Iran Gas Project Suspended,” SinoCast, October 14, 2011; and “Iran suspends $16 billion Chinese gas deal,” Platts Oilgram News, October 12, 2011.

[7] “CNPC, NIOC Eye Early Production at South Azadegan,” International Oil Daily, April 1, 2013; “Sanctions Show Importance of China for Iran’s Economy,” June 24, 2012; and “Output of Iran’s Yadavaran field reaches 16,000 b/d,” Platts Oilgram News, May 2, 2012.

[8] For more on the government’s guidance, see Chen Aizhu, “Exclusive: China slows Iran oil work as U.S. energy ties warm,” Reuters, October 28, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/28/us-china-iran-oil-idUSTRE69R1L120101028.

[9] International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2012 (Paris: OECD/IEA, 2012), pp. 78-80; and data provided by the International Energy Agency by email on May 29, 2013.

[10] “Records of Premier Wen Jiabao’s Press Conference at Doha Just Before the End of His Official Visits to the Three Gulf States,” January 18, 2012, http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cebel/eng/zxxx/t898607.htm.

[11] This paragraph is based in part on an email exchange between the author and Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, US Navy (ret.) on May 28-30, 2013.

[12] “2011 Bumper Year for European Upstream M&A,” EI Finance, January 25, 2012.

[13] Rakteem Katakey, Aibing Guo and Sarah Chen, “China Joining US Shale Renaissance With $40 billion,” Bloomberg News, March 6, 2013, http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-05/china-joining-u-s-shale-renaissance-with-40-billion.html; and Judy Hua and Fayen Wong, “China’s Sinopec says still seeking assets in N. America,” Reuters, March 4, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/china-npc-sinopec-idUSB9E8LA02G20130305.

Authors

Erica S. Downs

Publication: U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission

Image Source: © Atef Hassan / Reuters

Tehran and Washington: Unlikely Allies In An Unstable Iraq

Kenneth M. Pollack — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:04:00 -0400

It isn’t terribly remarkable that Iraq appears to be sliding back toward civil war. Between its own unresolved internal problems and spillover from the Syrian civil war, it was almost inevitable that Iraq would see a recurrence of violence. What is most intriguing is that given the power of the forces propelling Iraq back toward civil war, the situation there hasn’t gotten much worse much faster.

What needs explaining are the forces that are slowing the resumption of violence in Iraq. From my conversations with various Iraqis, I see three key factors that have put the brakes on Iraq’s plunge back into civil war:

The residual fear of many Iraqi leaders of a new civil war based on the uncertain outcome of the last civil war. Sunni tribal leaders are well aware that they were losing the civil war in late 2006 and had the United States not stepped in with the Surge to protect them from the Shi’a militias, they likely would have suffered horrific ethnic cleansing. Today, many Sunni tribal leaders see the mobilization of the Sunni world against the Shi’a threat as being a critical change since 2006, one that could bring them victory this time around. However, others are more wary of risking another war that they might lose.
Unexpected Kurdish restraint. In recent months, Kurdish President Mas’ud Barzani had resumed his belligerent stance toward Maliki, which was an important element in convincing the Sunnis to fight back against Baghdad. However, after the clashes last month, the Kurds unexpectedly decided to play peacemaker. Barzani’s reasons are complex and relate to a variety of factors including his need to get the withdrawal of the PKK from Turkey right and the problems of Kurdish internal politics.
Iranian pressure. According to a variety of Iraqi sources, Iran has been urging Maliki and other Shi’a leaders not to overreact to Sunni and Kurdish moves.

That last piece is an interesting and important one, and gets to the complex nature of Iran’s involvement in Iraq, which has often been misrepresented and exaggerated.

Iran’s Influence in Iraq

As always with Iran, we need to be careful about what we actually know. For obvious reasons, the Iranians don’t talk publicly about what they are up to in Iraq. The Iraqis do— endlessly— but every Iraqi politician has an agenda and those agendas often obscure the truth. All that said, it is clear that Iran has the ability to wield considerable influence in Iraq today. From their critical trade ties, to Iran’s ability to employ violence in Iraq, to its support for various Iraqi groups, the Iranians have a number of levers they can pull.

That said, it is important to understand that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki himself is no Iranian stooge, as is sometimes wrongly asserted. Although Maliki is a Shi’a chauvinist, he also sees himself as an Arab and an Iraqi nationalist. His proudest moment seems to have been Operation Charge of the Knights in 2008, when he ordered an Iraqi-American offensive that smashed Jaysh al-Mahdi— then Iran’s most important proxy in Iraq— and ousted it from the country. Especially because he is a Shi’a Islamist, the act of driving Iran and its allies from Iraq made him enormously popular among his countrymen.

Although Maliki dislikes the Iranians and would prefer to minimize their influence in Iraq, he has become uncomfortably dependent on them. On several critical occasions, the Iranians have saved Maliki’s political life. In 2010, it was Iran who ultimately brokered Maliki’s return to power as prime minister by strong-arming the Sadrists to back him. Once Maliki had Sadrist support, it was clear he would be the Shi’a candidate and the Kurds reluctantly fell in line, believing that only a Shi’a could be prime minister. Then, in the summer of 2012, the Sunnis, the Kurds and the Sadrists tried to bring down Maliki in a vote of no-confidence. Once again, it was the Iranians who reportedly saved his bacon by leaning on Iraqi President and PUK leader Jalal Talabani to refuse to call for the vote. Talabani grudgingly complied (reportedly in return for Iranian support for his succession plans for the PUK) and Maliki survived. Thus, Maliki hates the Iranians, but he also needs them and that adds to Tehran’s influence in Baghdad.

Iranian Goals in Iraq Today

Although most Americans tend to assume that the U.S. and Iran will be on opposite sides on every issue across the Middle East, in Iraq, that has often been untrue. In the early years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran was actually very helpful to the United States: Iran did not support the militias and insurgents, and instead it encouraged its Iraqi allies to go along with the American project of building a democracy there, probably because Tehran feared an open confrontation with the U.S., feared Iraq descending into chaos and civil war, and recognized that any Iraqi democracy would inevitably be dominated by the Shi’a, who would probably be on reasonable terms with Iran. Of course, once Iraq slid into civil war, Iran changed gears and backed both all manner of Iraqi militias and supported attacks on Americans to try to get the U.S. troops out of the way. But that change really did not occur until late 2005 or even early 2006, and before then Iran seems to have seen its interests as effectively aligned with our own.

The same seems to be true today. According to various Iraqi sources, Iran believes that it has its hands full with Syria and does not want to open up another front in the region-wide Sunni-Shi’a civil war that many Sunni extremists are now preaching. The Iranians apparently recognize that they are not benefitting from fears of a wider Sunni-Shi’a war and are trying to prevent one from emerging— which is precisely what would happen if civil war resumed in Iraq. Moreover, Tehran no doubt recognizes that a civil war on its doorstep would be particularly dangerous because the spillover could easily affect Iran’s own fractious minorities and fragile internal politics.

Other Iraqis report that Tehran sees a new civil war in Iraq as being potentially deleterious to its currently enviable position within Iraq. Unless the Shi’a could win a quick, overwhelming victory in a new civil war, the status quo is preferable to any other outcome for them. In any other scenario, Iraq would be torn by fighting and the Shi’a dominated government would likely lose control of parts of Iraq. Much better, from Tehran’s perspective, to have the Shi’a in nominal control over the entire country— in part to enable Iran to move supplies across it to their allies in Syria.

Thus, once again, Iraqis are baffled by the apparent collusion of Iran and the United States when it comes to Iraq. Although both Washington and Tehran claim to oppose the other, what Iraqis have seen— at least since 2010, but arguably longer— has been the Americans and the Iranians pushing in the same directions: in favor of Maliki against any and all opposition, and against renewed violence. It’s no wonder that many Iraqis believe that either the U.S. does not understand its own interests, or else we are selling them out to the Iranians in return for something that they cannot fathom.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack

Image Source: © Thaier Al-Sudani / Reuters

Lessons from America’s First War with Iran

Bruce Riedel — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:35:00 -0400

President Barack Obama has committed the United States to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran seems determined to acquire them. As the United States and Iran approach confrontation and possible war to halt Tehran’s nuclear program, it is useful to remember that America has already fought one war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the late 1980s, President Ronald Reagan intervened in the Iran- Iraq War in support of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein, ultimately leading to an Iraqi victory. The United States engaged in an undeclared yet bloody naval and air war, while Iraq fought a brutal land war against Iran. The lessons of the first war with Iran should be carefully considered before the United States embarks hastily on a second.

In hindsight, the central lesson of the war in the 1980s is that it is easy to start a conflict with Iran and very difficult to end it. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not easy to intimidate and is likely to retaliate asymmetrically. Another key lesson is to beware the advice of your allies, both Arabs and Israelis, who are prone to give irresponsible recommendations on how to deal with Tehran.

The Toll of the Iran-Iraq War

The Iran-Iraq War was devastating. It was one of the largest and longest conventional interstate wars since the Korean War ended in 1953. A half million lives were lost, and perhaps another million were injured. The economic cost of the war exceeded one trillion dollars.1 Yet, the battle lines at the end of the war were almost exactly where they had been at the beginning of hostilities. It was also the only war in modern times in which chemical weapons were used on a massive scale.

Although the war ended in 1988, it led to numerous aftershocks that rippled throughout the region including the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the liberation of Kuwait a year later, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The bloody U.S. war that President Obama recently ended in Iraq was the finale in this march of folly. The seeds of multigenerational tragedy were planted in the Iran-Iraq War. The world will live with its consequences for decades, if not longer.

There were no “good guys” in the Iran-Iraq War, only two brutal dictatorships. Saddam Hussein was a megalomaniac who built enormous, ugly monuments to his ambitions and dreamed of becoming the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, controlling the world’s oil supplies, and destroying Israel. At the end of the first Gulf War in 1988, Hussein waged genocide against his own Kurdish population. Ayatollah Khomeini created a theocracy in Iran which imprisoned and executed thousands of its own citizens, forced tens of thousands into exile, and even took American diplomats hostage.

U.S. Policy During the War

America had no natural partners in the Iran-Iraq War, but its interests dictated that the United States allow neither Saddam nor Khomeini to dominate the region and the world’s energy supply. For most of the war, it was Iran that appeared on the verge of victory, so Washington had little choice but to support Iraq.

For those who aspire to a national security policy built on the principles of the United Nations Charter or a moral high ground, Iran-Iraq was an immoral swamp. For American policymakers in the 1980s, there was a simple difference. When the war began, Iran held dozens of American diplomats hostage and even tortured some. Only after 444 days in captivity did Iran let the American hostages go. In contrast to Khomeini, many Americans hoped that the Iraqi leader was somehow redeemable and could be worked with as a difficult but manageable partner. We realize now that this was a mirage, but in the 1980s it was still a hope. Thus, America tilted toward Iraq, hoping it would hold back the “medieval fanatics” to the east from gaining control of the world’s oil reserves.

But “our side” kept breaking the rules. First, Iraq was the aggressor in September 1980. Certainly Iraq had been provoked by Iranian actions along the border, but the main act of aggression was carried out by the Iraqi army in the form of a massive attack. As long as Iraq held Iranian territory, Washington did not call for the restoration of the status quo ante as would be the norm for most international conflicts; only when the tables turned did the United States call for respect for the international border. Then Iraq began using chemical weapons—first, in a piecemeal and largely ineffectual fashion, but by the war’s end, on an industrial scale and with decisive effect. The threat of Iraqi chemical warheads on long range missiles cleared Tehran of many of its inhabitants in 1988, and Saddam began using chemical warheads to systematically kill his own people. Rather than fall silent, the guns of war merely changed theaters with the 1988 cease-fire, as the Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds began, an act of pure genocide by the government that the United States had supported during the war.

The conflict was not President Ronald Reagan’s finest hour. At first he tilted toward Iraq, sending the CIA to Baghdad with critical intelligence in 1982 to thwart Iran’s war plans. It worked. Then Reagan tilted toward Iran, sending sophisticated arms to Tehran in an effort to get American hostages in Lebanon freed. It didn’t work. A few hostages were released but more hostages were taken. Then Reagan tilted back toward Iraq and Washington’s undeclared war followed in 1987 and 1988. The principal architect of the policy was Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Casey, who died before the Iran scandal forced his resignation and possible indictment.

Lessons for Today

So what are the lessons of this war for America today? The first lesson is that we should expect to be blamed for all that goes wrong. Both Iraqis and Iranians came to believe the United States was manipulating each of them during the war. Ironically, and perhaps naively, the United States tried to reach out to both belligerents through the course of the war— in great secrecy both times—to try to build a strategic partnership. The disastrous arms-for-hostages policy, which came to be known as the Iran- Contra affair, convinced Iraqis rightly that the United States was trying to play both sides of the conflict. The result was that when the war ended, the Iraqi regime and most Iraqis regarded the United States as a threat, despite Washington’s support during the war. That support had taken the form of critical intelligence assistance to Baghdad, considerable diplomatic cover, and largesse from our Arab allies who loaned tens of billions of dollars to Baghdad to sustain Iraq’s war effort.

Iranians call the war the “Imposed War” because they believe the United States subjected them to the conflict and orchestrated the global “tilt” toward Iraq. They note that the United Nations did not condemn Iraq for starting the war. In fact, the UN did not even discuss the war for weeks after it started, and it ultimately considered Iraq to be the aggressor only years later, as part of a deal orchestrated by President George H.W. Bush to free the remaining U.S. hostages held by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon.

Although the war had tragic consequences for Iran, by portraying the conflict as a “David and Goliath” struggle imposed by the United States and its allies, Iranian leaders managed to consolidate the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Revolution was fairly short in duration and its cost was miniscule in comparison to the Iran-Iraq War. For the generation of Iranians who are now leading their country, including men like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the war was the defining event of their lives and a major force in shaping their worldview. Their anti-Americanism and deep suspicion of the West can be traced directly to their understanding of the Iran-Iraq War. We should thus expect the next war to make Iran more extreme and more determined to get the bomb.

Another lesson of the first war is that Iran will not be easily intimidated by the United States. By 1987, Iran was devastated by the war, many of its cities had been destroyed, its oil exports were minimal. and its economy was shattered. But it did not hesitate to fight the U.S. Navy in the Gulf and to use asymmetric means to retaliate in Lebanon and elsewhere. Even with most of its navy sunk by U.S. Naval forces, Iran kept fighting and the Iranian people continued rallying behind Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran fought a smart war, avoiding too rapid and too dangerous an escalation. As General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has noted, Iranian behavior is rational, not suicidal.2 Iran will not take steps that endanger the revolution’s survival; the country will look to exploit America’s vulnerabilities in Afghanistan and Bahrain, as well as Israel’s in Lebanon and the Saudis’ in Yemen. In the 1980s, Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon to attack American, French, and Israeli targets as punishment for American support of Iraq. Hezbollah then tried to assassinate the emir of Kuwait to punish that country for being Iraq’s outlet to the Persian Gulf. In essence, Iran expanded the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq War to other countries where it could exploit security vulnerabilities. We should expect the same in a future war, one for which Iran and Hezbollah have had decades to prepare. Indeed, Iran and Hezbollah are already waging a low intensity terror campaign against Israel from Bulgaria to India, and they have reportedly used cyber warfare against Saudi and Qatari oil companies.3

Another lesson is that ending a future war will be a challenge. In 1988, Iran sued for a cease-fire only after suffering catastrophic defeat on the ground against Iraqi forces and after Saddam Hussein threatened to fire Scud missiles armed with chemical warheads into Iranian cities.4 Iranians feared they would face a second “Hiroshima” if they did not accept a truce; indeed many evacuated Tehran in fear of an Iraqi chemical attack. For Khomeini, accepting the truce was like “drinking poison.”5 No two wars are identical, but history suggests that Iran will not back down easily.

The final lesson is to always scrutinize the advice of allies. Ironically, in the 1980s the closest U.S. partner in the region, Israel, pressed Washington hard and repeatedly to essentially switch sides and offer assistance to Iran. Israeli leaders, generals, and spies were obsessed by the Iraqi threat in the 1980s just as they are preoccupied by the Iranian threat today, and they longed to restore the cozy relationship they had with the Shah in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the Iraq-Iran War, Israel was the only consistent source of spare parts for the Iranian air force’s U.S.-made jets.6 Israeli leaders, notably Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, brought considerable pressure to bear on Washington for an American engagement with Tehran, and Iran-Contra was in many ways their idea. American diplomats and spies deployed abroad were told to turn a blind eye to Israeli arms deals with Tehran, even when it was official U.S. policy (in the Washington euphemism of the day) to “staunch” all avenues by which the Iranians might obtain weapons or other material needed for their war effort.7

America’s Arab allies provided equally bad advice. Egypt’s President Mubarak, Jordan’s King Hussein, and Saudi King Fahd all urged support for Saddam and Iraq, while turning a blind eye to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. Egypt sent arms, Jordan sent volunteers, and the Saudis bankrolled Saddam’s war, while telling America that he was a born-again moderate who could be worked with and trusted. It was not to be.

Looking back a quarter century after the war in 1988 is revealing and sobering. America accomplished its immediate goals in the first war: it halted Iran’s advance into Iraq, defended the tankers in the Gulf, and contained the war from spreading into the Arabian Peninsula. Khomeini did not conquer Basra and Baghdad and march on Jerusalem as he dreamed he would. But today, Iran is the dominant foreign power in Baghdad, thanks in large part to another war America fought in the Gulf. President George W. Bush toppled Saddam and ended his brutal dictatorship, but in doing so, Bush opened the door to a Shia majority government which is much friendlier to Tehran than to Riyadh or Amman, or Washington. These are sobering reminders of the unintended consequences of wars.

The first American war with Iran helped make Iran a more radical and extreme country. A second war may well do the same. Thus another war with Iran to stop its nuclear program may ultimately prove to be the catalyst that pushes Iran to acquire a dangerous nuclear weapons arsenal. Rather than stopping proliferation, it could incite it further.

History of course does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Lessons of old wars should be carefully considered before entering new ones. Many Americans have forgotten the lessons of our undeclared war in the 1980s. We have fought so many other wars since: in Iraq (twice), in Afghanistan, and in Libya. While it may be easy for Washington to forget, no Iranian has.

This article was originally published by The Fletcher Forum.

Endnotes
1 Janet Lang et al, Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979-1988 (Plymouth, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), ix.
2 Fareed Zakaria, “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: We are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a ‘rational actor,’” CNN Pressroom, February 21, 2012.
3 Nicole Perlroth, “In Cyberattack on Saudi firm, U.S. sees Iran firing back,” New York Times, October 23, 2012.
4 Lang, 169.
5 Lang, 196.
6 Lang, 89.
7 Lang, 90.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: The Fletcher Forum

Image Source: © Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters

Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan's U.S. Agenda

Kemal Kirişci — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:46:00 -0400

Editor's note: On May 17, 2013 Brookings hosted Prime Minister Erdogan for an event on U.S.-Turkish relations.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is visiting Washington this week and will meet with President Obama today. This is his first visit to the United States since December 2009. But the world and the Middle East have changed dramatically since then. Thus, the agenda for Erdogan’s talks with Obama will be a very crowded one. Four topics in particular are likely to stand out.

1. The Situation in Syria

Erdogan arrives in Washington at a time when there is growing pressure on the Obama administration to change its course on Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry has already taken some steps to increase nonlethal support for the opposition in Syria while putting growing pressure on the moderate opposition to tighten their ranks and distance themselves from radical Islamist groups. These measures are unlikely to satisfy Erdogan. He has long been a vocal critic of the international community, the United Nations Security Council and the United States for idly “watching the tragedy” unfolding in Syria.

He is likely to remind Obama quite loudly that the butchery of civilians by the Assad regime has reached levels that makes it unethical not to respond to and that, as the car bombs that exploded in Turkish border town of Reyhanli last weekend demonstrate, Turkish national security is being directly affected. He will also offer facts and figures to show how the humanitarian situation is fast deteriorating and becoming untenable with an ever expanding flow of refugees and displaced people. He will not miss the opportunity to share with Obama the evidence collected from refugees arriving in Turkish hospitals that the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons. Erdogan may go as far as to push Obama to support the idea of creating a no-fly zone along the Turkish border.

Read the full article »

Authors

Kemal Kirişci

Publication: The National Interest

Image Source: © Larry Downing / Reuters

Al Qaeda Comeback

Bruce Riedel — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

After months of silence, al Qaeda’s Amir Ayman Zawahiri reappeared this week with a long diatribe on the state of the global jihad with special emphasis on Syria, Iraq, and Mali. His commentary underscores his central role in the Qaeda movement once again and in providing leadership to the group and its franchises across the Islamic world.

Zawahiri’s latest audio message, his first since last November, runs over a hundred minutes long and was distributed by al Qaeda’s media arm, As Sahab (“In the Clouds”) from his hide-out in Pakistan. It is vintage Zawahiri. He bemoans the fall of the Ottoman caliphate at the end of the First World War and breakup of the Islamic world into 50 or so small states ruled by “traitor rulers” playing the “satanic American program” to benefit the “biggest criminals in Washington, Moscow, and Tel Aviv.” Zawahiri says some of these countries are so small they can only be seen with a microscope on the map and “barely fit the foreign military bases that occupy them,” a likely reference to the American naval base in Bahrain.

Much of his commentary is devoted to attacking France for intervening in Mali this year. Al Qaeda’s North African franchise, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had taken control of the northern half of Mali last year and threatened the capital, Bamako, this winter before Paris sent in elite troops and air power to reverse the situation. Al Qaeda has been driven out of the cities like Timbuktu and into the desert, many of its foot soldiers have been killed and some of its top leaders as well. For Zawahiri it is a bitter setback. The stronghold in Mali was to be the centerpiece of a larger Qaeda emirate across the Sahel from Mauretania to Nigeria. He warns the French to expect a quagmire in Mali like “what America was met with in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Zawahiri lauds the success of al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq in contrast. In Syria, al Qaeda’s franchise, Jabhat al Nusra, has become the fastest-growing Qaeda movement in the world after Zawahiri called upon jihadists from across Islam to go and fight in Syria a year ago. Since then the Qaeda core headquarters in Pakistan has been in close communication with the Nusra front in Syria. Zawahiri also praises the Qaeda organization in Iraq for outlasting the American occupation and for its constant attacks on the Shia government in Baghdad.

In both Syria and Iraq, Zawahiri blames Iran and its ally Hezbollah for supporting the Assad and Maliki governments. He accuses Tehran of secretly colluding with Washington in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Zawahiri says the “true faces of Iran and Hezbollah have been unmasked” by their opposition to al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.

Zawahiri pays tribute to the Qaeda franchise in Iraq, the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq, for helping the al Nusra front in Syria get organized. Shortly after Zawahiri’s statement the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, publicly claimed credit for helping set up the Qaeda franchise in Syria and announced the two groups had merged into an Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria. Al Baghdadi’s statement confirmed what the United States had been saying for months: the al Nusra front is an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Next the leader of al Nusra, who calls himself Abu Muhammad al Golani, walked it back a bit. He said he had not been “consulted” on any merger with the Iraqi group, although he was careful not to criticize al Baghdadi and stressed his loyalty to Zawahiri and al Qaeda. The exchange has brought al Nusra out of the closet; it is clearly now part of the Qaeda global jihadist campaign. Al Golani admitted that he had earlier been a fighter in Iraq and was a supporter of the Iraqi franchise but he went out of his way to declare al Nusra’s loyalty is to Zawahiri and the Qaeda core group.

The tempest over al Baghdadi’s comments is likely to pass, and the two Qaeda groups will continue to collaborate closely. Both in Syria and Iraq al Qaeda is growing in numbers and power at a dangerous pace. And with Zawahiri’s encouragement, al Qaeda’s support base across the Islamic world is funneling sympathizers to go to Syria and Iraq to join the fight. In his statement Zawahiri makes clear the end state is creation of a new caliphate across Islam that can lead the struggle to recover Jerusalem for Islam and destroy Israel.

Despite his rambling, Zawahiri’s new statement also underscores his continued centrality to the Qaeda movement as a whole. Often underestimated, the Egyptian leader of al Qaeda provides a strategic leadership role that would probably vanish if he was killed or captured. He smoothly and quickly replaced his predecessor, Osama bin Laden, when the SEALS killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. No one challenged him then or challenges him now for leadership of al Qaeda. There is no comparable figure in al Qaeda today serving as Zawahiri’s deputy and heir apparent. Zawahiri has made no effort to groom a successor to lead the global jihad. The lack of a clearly identified number two is a potential vulnerability but only if Ayman’s hideout in Pakistan can be found.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: The Daily Beast

The Arab Awakening and the New Sectarian Divide

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

April 10, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

With the rise of violence between ‘Alawis and Sunnis in Syria, and the ongoing Shi’a-Sunni strife in Iraq, the danger of sectarianism is growing. Will a deepening and potentially violent sectarian divide between Sunni and Shi’a be a lasting legacy of the Arab awakening? How will important smaller countries like Bahrain and Lebanon be affected? Will Iran exploit this trend? How should the United States adjust its foreign policy to reflect the dangers of sectarianism?

On April 10, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted Brookings Nonresident Fellow Geneive Abdo, to discuss her forthcoming Saban Center analysis paper, “The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide.” Abdo was joined by Kristine Smith Diwan, assistant professor of Middle East Politics at American University. Senior Fellow Daniel L. Byman, director of research for the Saban Center, moderated the discussion.

The Human Cost of the Iraq War Outweighs All Others

Bessma Momani — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:51:00 -0400

In the 10 years that have passed since the invasion of Iraq, an endless number of lessons have been drawn by military strategists, diplomats, politicians, and public relations analysts from what was, at almost every stage, a complete and utter fiasco. The continuing debates over what Iraq has taught us — is intervention ever the right policy? Can the perils of "nation-building" ever be overcome? What does an effective counter-insurgency strategy involve? — are important, but their value is diminished when they forget what drives them: the human cost of the war.

The Iraq War left behind five-million Iraqi orphans, took more than 100,000 Iraqi lives, forced four- to five-million Iraqis to flee their homes and communities, displaced ancient Iraqi minority groups, and devastated much of Iraq's infrastructure and economy.

These are the human and material costs of an unwarranted war. And they are not one-time losses. These costs will continue to accrue year after year, generation after generation. For what will be the life story of an Iraqi orphan who lost everything in the war? How will the traumas of her childhood impact her future relationships — to her spouse, her children, and her community? What will the refugee children who cannot remember a childhood in Iraq and have only the memories of extended family or strangers to use in building their own narrative, rely upon for a sense of identity and history? What will all the Iraqi Christians, Yazidis, and Mandaean parents tell their children when they ask about their homeland, knowing they will likely never return? These are not the costs and lessons of war that military strategists and political analysts emphasize, but they are painfully real to many Iraqis today.

There can be no question that the tragedy of Iraq did not end with the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Iraq is still plagued by political and social chaos. The country has been torn apart by inter-sectarian and inter-ethnic conflicts that erupted into the space created by flawed U.S. policies. The destruction of the central Iraqi government's authority made one sectarian group the boogeyman for all of Hussein's past atrocities, and the writing of ethnic and religious cleavages into the foreign-guided constitution entrenched political bargaining based on the lowest common denominator of Iraqi identity.

For those who may not remember, or have never known, this is not the Iraq that so many of its people knew before the war. As has been the case in so many other conflicts, 'pure' ethnic or religious identities were imposed on Iraqis to fit various political agendas. Many Iraqis were of mixed background before the war; having a Sunni mother, a Shiite father, and a Christian aunt by marriage was never 'out of the ordinary' before 2003, particularly in soon-to-become violence-ridden Baghdad. That this diversity has now been almost entirely obscured is a testament to the extent to which Iraq identity has been distorted by the war. Still, while many Iraqis lament the end of the intra-communal harmony that existed under dictatorship, they would not wish to return to the draconian ways of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Some apologists for the invasion of Iraq say that 2003 was an early chapter of the Arab Spring -- that the American-led regime change in Iraq encouraged many others in the region toward democratic revolutions. But this is a false comparison. Iraq was not like the other countries of the Arab Spring where the people rose up against dictatorship. Iraq did not experience a genuine uprising authored by the Iraqi people but a top-down, externally-driven political exercise. Now, imagine that the social and political revolution that swept the Arab countries in 2013 had transformed Iraq, instead of the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. How many lives could have been saved and changed for the better?

This anniversary will be taken by many as an opportunity to reflect on questions of "legitimate intervention." Comparisons will inevitably be made to the situation in Syria today, comparisons which make it all the more important to remember the real lessons of the 2003 war in Iraq: The costs of war are immense, and never just material, and only the people of a country have the right and power to initiate a legitimate revolution.

Authors

Bessma Momani

Publication: OpenCanada.org

Image Source: © Carlos Barria / Reuters

Remembering Iraq's Displaced

Elizabeth Ferris — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Looking at the past 10 years of Iraq's history through the lens of displacement reveals a complex -- and sobering -- reality. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, humanitarian agencies prepared for a massive outpouring of Iraqi refugees. But this didn't happen. Instead a much more dynamic and complex form of displacement occurred. First, some 500,000 Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had been displaced by the Saddam Hussein regime returned to their places of origin. Then, in the 2003 to 2006 period, more than a million Iraqis were displaced as sectarian militias battled for control of specific neighborhoods. In February 2006, the bombing of the Al-Askaria Mosque and its violent aftermath ratcheted the numbers of IDPs up to a staggering 2.7 million. In a period of about a year, five percent of Iraq's total population fled their homes and settled elsewhere in Iraq while an additional 2 million or so fled the country entirely. It is important to underscore that this displacement was not just a by-product of the conflict, but rather the result of deliberate policies of sectarian cleansing by armed militias.

The internally displaced were the most vulnerable -- and perhaps the clearest sign of the success of sectarian cleansing as entire neighborhoods were transformed. Sunnis and Shiites alike moved from mixed communities to ones where their sect was the majority. And while the displacement of Sunnis and Shiites was massive, proportionately the displacement of religious minorities was even more sweeping in effect.

Those who couldn't find shelter with families or friends, or without the resources to rent lodging, occupied public buildings and built informal settlements (slums) on the outskirts of Baghdad and throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi IDPs lived -- and continue to live -- in these informal settlements where living conditions are harsh and the threat of eviction is constant. This large-scale internal displacement also increased the pressure on the Iraqi government to provide basic services such as health, education, sanitation, electricity, food, and shelter.

As of September 2012, Iraq's Ministry of Displacement and Migration (MoDM) reported that there were still over 1.3 million IDPs. (However, if the earlier figures of 2.7 million were correct, one wonders what has happened to the other 1.4 million. Have they all truly integrated into their new communities or moved elsewhere in the country, or simply slipped further under the radar screen?) One of the few international agencies still monitoring displacement in Iraq, the International Organization for Migration, reports that few of today's IDPs expect to ever return to their homes. In fact, the percentage of those expressing a wish to return to their homes has dropped from 45 percent in 2006 to six percent in 2012, mostly because of the lack of security. And the sectarian dimension remains alive and well. Provincial political leaders view potential returns of IDPs through a sectarian lens, seeing returns of particular groups in terms of their impact on the communitarian makeup of their province and the balance of power between different communities.

For those who do want to return to their homes, the complex and extremely bureaucratic question of getting their property back is complicated and will, in the best of cases, take years. The Iraqi MoDM wants to "close the displacement file" by finding solutions for those displaced and has offered cash enticements to encourage people to return to their communities. But finding durable solutions for IDPs isn't so easy in Iraq, particularly given the difficult economic conditions. As the former Representative of the Secretary-General on the Human Rights of IDPs, Walter Kaelin, said two years ago, resolving displacement in Iraq is a political imperative, a development challenge, and a vital issue for reconciliation and peacebuilding.

While IDPs face difficult and uncertain living conditions inside Iraq, Iraqi refugees seeking safety in neighboring countries have faced their own vulnerabilities. With the exception of Palestinian Iraqis, the Iraqis who fled to neighboring countries have not lived in camps, but are dispersed within communities. This has made it difficult to accurately estimate their numbers, assess their needs, and deliver assistance. The Syrian government estimated that a million Iraqis had crossed into its territory and Jordan reported that it was hosting half a million Iraqis. However, the number registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and receiving assistance was far lower. Host governments have been generous in allowing the Iraqis to enter their countries but those policies have been ambiguous and the Iraqis have never had formal refugee status. (None of the governments hosting large numbers of Iraqis is a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees.) Some of the Iraqis are legal residents. In some countries, they are registered but not allowed to work. Many Iraqis have gone back and forth to Iraq in circular migration patterns -- for example, to check on property or collect pensions.

The latest figures, based on government estimates, are that there are 1,428,308 refugees of Iraqi origin in Jordan and Syria of whom only 135,000 receive assistance from the UNHCR. Since the numbers peaked in 2009, some Iraqis have returned to Iraq. According to the UNHCR, an estimated 550,000 Iraqis returned to the country between 2008 and 2011, but most weren't able to return to their homes and instead joined the rank of IDPs. And some Iraqis have been resettled outside the region: more than 85,000 Iraqi refugees over the past decade -- 72 percent of whom have gone to the United States. Surprisingly, more than 3,000 Iraqis were resettled out of Syria last year -- a testament to the courageous UNHCR staff in Damascus and to the desperation of Iraqis wanting to escape the conflict in Syria. Refugee resettlement has worked, but it has been a lengthy and bureaucratic process; in some cases the enhanced security procedures have led to delays stretching for years.

Today Iraqi refugees throughout the region face dwindling donor support, particularly as the needs of Syrian refugees increase. For the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who remain in Syria, the situation is particularly dire. Some have been displaced within Syria. Some Iraqis have moved to other countries in the region (though they have faced an uncertain welcome by governments facing new inflows of Syrians.) Many -- perhaps 100,000 -- Iraqis have chosen to return to Iraq in the past year (though given the violence in Syria, it is hard to see this as a voluntary decision). Those that have returned to Iraq have either congregated in a hastily-constructed camp along the Iraq-Syrian border (which has often been closed) or have simply become IDPs.

Most of those who fled from their homes in Iraq -- whether because of the atrocities of the Hussein regime or the violence of sectarian conflict -- left their homes quickly. The journeys to other Iraqi towns or across borders to neighboring countries took hours or days, or in some cases, a few weeks. Many expected that the displacement was temporary and when things settled down, they would return. It's now been 10 years -- six years since the mass displacement triggered by the February 2006 bombing -- and solutions, safe and lasting solutions, appear as distant as ever. And there is little international pressure or attention on the Iraqi refugees and IDPs anymore. Perhaps 3 million people -- 10 percent of Iraq's population -- remain displaced. And forgotten.

Authors

Elizabeth Ferris

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: © Thaier Al-Sudani / Reuters

Still Peddling Iraq War Myths, Ten Years Later

Paul R. Pillar — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

Documentaries, commentaries and forums marking the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War have been so numerous that they already have become tiresome, even though the actual anniversary of the invasion is not until next Tuesday. The repetition would nonetheless be worthwhile if it helped to inculcate and to reinforce lessons that might reduce the chance that a debacle comparable to the Iraq War will itself be repeated. Maybe some such positive reinforcement will occur, but a problem is that the anniversary retrospectives also give renewed exposure to those who promoted the war and have a large stake in still promoting the idea that they were not responsible for foisting on the nation an expedition that was so hugely damaging to American interests.

I participated in one anniversary event earlier this week: a loosely structured on-the-record discussion, organized by the Rand Corporation and the publishers of Foreign Policy, involving about twenty people who had something to do with the Iraq War, whether it was starting it, fighting it, or writing about it. The session had the admirable stated purpose of extracting lessons for the future rather than merely repeating old debates from the past. But a clear pattern throughout the event was that ten years have not diluted the house line of those most directly involved in promoting the war, including among others then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Douglas Feith, who as an undersecretary of defense was one of the most rabid of the war promoters. Not only did they give no hint of acknowledgment that this war of choice (and Hadley refused to accept even that characterization) was one of the worst and most inexcusable blunders in the history of U.S. foreign policy. They also stuck to the line that if there was any mistake in the origin of the war it was solely a matter of “bad intelligence” and that the only “lessons” to be learned were to distrust intelligence more or ask tougher questions about it.

Intelligence did not drive or guide the decision to invade Iraq—not by a long shot, despite the aggressive use by the Bush administration of cherry-picked fragments of intelligence reporting in its public sales campaign for the war. Multiple realities confirm this observation. I have addressed them in detail elsewhere, but it would be useful to mention briefly the main ones.

The neoconservative champions of the war were publicly pushing for the use of military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein even in the 1990s, when they were out of power. One they were in power in the Bush administration, the intelligence community was not saying to them anything about Iraqi weapons programs that was remotely close to an expression of alarm about such programs, much less a reason to go to war. In its public assessments and (as investigative journalists such as Bob Woodward have reported) in closed ones as well, George Tenet and the community barely even mentioned the subject as being worthy of the policy-makers' attention. Consistent with such assessments, Secretary of State Colin Powell was saying publicly in the first year of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was well contained and that whatever he might be trying to do with unconventional weapons, he wasn't having much success. It was only after the 9/11 terrorist attack drastically changed the mood of the American public and thereby created for the first time the domestic political base for the neocons to realize their regime-changing dream that the administration turned Iraqi weapons programs into a war-justifying rationale.

In rare unguarded comments, some promoters of the war let slip that this is how they were using the issue. Feith and Paul Wolfowitz each later admitted that the weapons of mass destruction issue was a convenient public selling point, not the reason the war was being launched in the first place.

Policy-makers in the administration showed no interest at all in the intelligence community's judgments about Iraq, regarding weapons programs or anything else, despite the assiduousness with which they exploited the fragments of reporting that could be woven into their public sales campaign. The administration did not ask for the infamously flawed intelligence estimate about Iraqi unconventional weapons programs—Democrats in Congress did.

Even that estimate did not support the war-making case. Among other things it contained the judgment that if Saddam did have any of those feared weapons of mass destruction he was unlikely to use them against U.S. interests or to give them to terrorists—except in the extreme case in which his country was invaded and his regime about to be overthrown. If this judgment had a policy implication it was not to launch the war. The judgment directly contradicted—but did nothing to slow down—the administration's steady stream of scary rhetoric about how in the absence of a war Saddam could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

Even if everything in the intelligence assessments about Iraqi weapons were true, this would not have constituted a case for launching an offensive war any more than it would have with China, North Korea, Pakistan, the Soviet Union or any other country which has developed nuclear weapons. This is indicated by the fact that even many people, both in the United States and abroad, who accepted the belief about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction nonetheless opposed the war.

Intelligence assessments on other aspects of Iraq constituted even less of a case for the war. In fact, some of the most important intelligence judgments were so contrary to the administration's pro-war case that the war promoters, far from being guided by those judgments, put considerable effort into trying to discredit them. (That's what the effort in the vice president's office that led to the criminal case against Lewis Libby was all about.) This was especially true of the intelligence community's judgments about terrorist connections, which contradicted the administration's phantasmagorical assertions about an “alliance” between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda. It was also true of the community's judgments—which turned out to be much more relevant to the painful experience that the Iraq War became than were any judgments about weapons of mass destruction—about the political, security and economic mess in Iraq that was likely to follow overthrow of the regime.

The story of the United States getting into the Iraq War was, of course, not just one of what led the war's promoters to seek a war but also of how they were able to get enough other Americans to go along for the ride. But despite how much many of those other Americans, including ones in Congress who voted in favor of the war, said they hinged their position on judgments about Iraqi weapons, intelligence did not drive or guide that part of the process either. Only a very few members of Congress bothered even to look at the infamous intelligence estimate on the subject. One of the few who did—Bob Graham, then chairman of the Senate intelligence committee—later said his reading showed to him that the intelligence judgments were not at all the same as what the administration was saying in its sales campaign. That inconsistency was one of the reasons he voted against the war resolution.

One can also do a thought experiment by imagining how events might or might not have been different if the intelligence work on this subject had been absolutely perfect. (That is well beyond the reach of even the most magnificent intelligence service, but it can serve as an imaginary reference point.) “Perfect” in this case could be equated with what was in the exhaustive post-invasion report later compiled based on exploiting all the on-the-ground evidence that had been unavailable to analysts before the war. That product, known as the Duelfer report after the officer who was in charge of most of its preparation, concluded that Saddam intended to reactivate his nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs once he got out from under the already-weakening international sanctions. If prewar intelligence assessments had said the same things as the Duelfer report, the administration would have had to change a few lines in its rhetoric and maybe would have lost a few member's votes in Congress, but otherwise the sales campaign—which was much more about Saddam's intentions and what he “could” do than about extant weapons systems—would have been unchanged. The administration still would have gotten its war. Even Dick Cheney later cited the actual Duelfer report as support for the administration's pro-war case.

And yet, despite the voluminous record that bad intelligence was not why the United States went to war in Iraq, the myth that it was persists partly because the war promoters also keep promoting the myth. The event in which I participated this week demonstrates this hazard of the ten-year anniversary happenings. An early write-up of the event correctly notes that there were “sharp exchanges” on this and other questions, but on this question only quotes the side of the exchange that came from Hadley and Feith.

If one wants to learn valid lessons from what happened ten years ago, the process back then was so pathological that many specific lessons about what to avoid in the future could be extracted. Many of those lessons could be subsumed into one observation: extraordinary as it may seem, there was no policy process at all—no options paper, no meeting in the White House situation room or anything else—that addressed whether going to war against Iraq was a good idea. So it was not only the intelligence community but also other sources of information and insight, inside and outside government, that were shut out from having any impact on the decision to launch the war.

Hadley denied this observation, too, muttering something about needing to keep things close-hold so as not to jeopardize the “diplomatic process.” That just raises another myth—that the administration was trying to solve a problem through diplomacy before resorting to force—that also is belied by a substantial record, leading up to the final days in which the United States kicked international arms inspectors out of Iraq and in effect said “never mind that we didn't get another UN resolution, we're going to war anyway.” What pretended to be interest in diplomacy was a charade intended mainly to placate Powell and the British.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

Syria Is Not Iraq

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

More than a year ago, a real debate began over whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Here in The Atlantic, Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations was one of the first to propose taking military action - or at least thinking seriously about it. When Cook wrote his article (which, in its prescience, is well worth re-reading today), around 5,000 Syrians had been killed. Today, the number is more than 10 times that, and is now over 60,000 according to some estimates. I remember, early on, wondering whether 15,000 would be a "trigger."

But, apparently, there is no "trigger." Military intervention in Syria cannot not happen without American support and there is nothing to suggest the United States has any interest in intervening, no matter the number of dead. The Obama administration has cited the use of chemical weapons as a "red line," but even that red line has managed to shift back and forth several times.

Opponents of intervention have, understandably, tended to focus on the risky - and potentially prohibitively difficult - nature of military action. Yet, the very fact that some "red lines" do exist suggests that the U.S. would be willing to intervene at some point, in spite of those difficulties. The question, then, isn't so much the difficulty of the operation as much as what is an appropriate red line.

If Bashar al-Assad proceeded to destroy an entire city, killing 100,000 people in the matter of weeks, presumably many of those opposing intervention would decide to support it. But why then and not now? Why exactly is 60,000 people not enough? Sure, the use of chemical weapons should be a red line for national security reasons, but why should strictly national security considerations be a red line, when the killing of tens of thousands isn't? It is this latter point which sends precisely the wrong message to Arab audiences and the broader international community. Nothing fundamental has changed in U.S. policy since the Arab Spring, even though many of us said, and hoped, that new realities required a new way of doing business. As I wrote nearly a year ago,

What made Libya a "pure" intervention was that we acted not because our vital interests were threatened but in spite of the fact that they were not. For me, this was yet one more reason to laud it.

The memory of the Iraq War obviously looms large. The war, itself, was one of the greatest strategic blunders in the recent history of American foreign policy. But its legacy is proving just as damaging, leading to a series of mistakes that we are likely to regret in due time. There would have been much more willingness to intervene in Syria if we hadn't intervened in Iraq. But the Bush Administraton's misguided adventurism abroad has made open displays of ideology, or even simple morality, in foreign policy seem suspect. Today, it is fashionable to play technocrat and ask "what works?" Asking this question, as opposed to others, is a marker of pragmatism and prudence. As difficult as it may be, the thinking goes, we must do away with moral sentiments and attachments, which tend to distort more than clarify.

As Cook pointed out in another piece, fundamental questions of morality and philosophy are what, in part, separate proponents and opponents of intervention. "Is it a morally superior position," Cook asks, "to sit by as people are being killed rather than take action that will kill people, but nevertheless may end up saving lives as well?" The question here, then, isn't whether it will work, but will it be worth it?

Such questions are worth considering, and thinking seriously about, but they're unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. In returning to narrower questions of what, if anything, can stop the killing, a few considerations are in order. First, Bashar al-Assad might have a particularly high tolerance for brutality, but there is little to suggest he has ceased being a rational actor. And the unfortunate reality is that he has no real incentive stop the slaughter of Syrians unless there is a credible threat of military action. It is clear that this is a relevant calculation for Assad and the people around him. The regime has spent the last year testing its limits, seeing how far it can go. Accordingly, the rate of killing has never dramatically shot up. Rather, it has increased slowly and gradually, as Assad gauges the international community reactions and its willingness to intervene more aggressively. He apparently has gotten his answer.

Even if the Obama administration has little interest in intervening, it seems odd, even remarkable, that it would choose to telegraph that lack of interest to the Syrian regime in such a flagrant manner. It would have made much more sense for the Obama administration and leading European powers, along with NATO, to publicly discuss military options and make a good-faith effort to consider them.

So much of the aversion to intervention, as mentioned earlier, has been predicated on Syria's supposed similarity to Iraq and the fear of entering into another quagmire. But no one, to my knowledge, was proposing a full-on ground invasion of Iraq. Instead, what was being suggested was an escalatory ladder of varying military options. An escalation would be contingent on how the Syrian regime (and the rebels) responded. Mission creep is always a risk, but if there was ever an administration resistant to mission creep, it is the Obama administration, as became evident during the Libya operation, when the U.S. went out of its way to limit its involvement, even at the cost of prolonging it.

Another unfortunate feature of the ongoing debate was the tendency to treat the military option and the diplomatic "alternative," as mutually exclusive. They never were. On the contrary, they could have been pursued in parallel. In Bosnia, NATO power forced the Serbs to the negotiating table, leading to the Dayton Accords and the introduction of multinational peacekeeping forces. In Libya, the Qaddafi regime showed more interest in negotiating with the opposition after military intervention, rather than before (Within a few weeks of the NATO operation, Qaddafi envoys were engaging in ceasefire talks).

Lastly, it is worth thinking about what this means for future instances of mass slaughter. With the Libya intervention, there was hope that a post-Arab Spring precedent would be set - that whenever pro-democracy protesters were threatened with massacre, the U.S. and its allies would take the "responsibility to protect" seriously and consider intervention as a legitimate option. But, nearly two years later, what we didn't do in Syria is more relevant than what we did do in Libya.

If I sound defeatist, then it is likely because I am. It is worth speaking frankly, and, unfortunately, this probably requires speaking in the past tense. For Syria, it is likely too late. Notwithstanding something sudden and entirely unexpected, the international community will not intervene. That does not mean that the Syrian people are doomed. They will likely "win" in the end, but their victory, if we can even call it that, will have come at a much greater cost - in the sheer number killed - than was likely necessary. It will have come at the cost of a country destroyed, of sects polarized beyond any hope of reconciliation, of Salafis and Jihadists ascendant, of a state too torn and divided for real governance. As has been reported elsewhere, the Syrian opposition feels that it has been not just forgotten, but, worse, betrayed. They are unlikely to forget this anytime soon. Anti-Americanism, a given among regime supporters, has slowly taken root among the opposition as well. The Syrian protest movement's Friday theme for October 19, 2012 was "America, has your spite not been sated by our blood?" In due time, the Obama administration's inability or unwillingness to act may be remembered as one of the great strategic and moral blunders of recent decades. Hoping to atone for our sins in Iraq, we have overlearned the lessons of the last war. I only wish it wasn't too late.

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The Atlantic

Establishing Good Governance in Fragile States Through Reconstruction Projects: Lessons from Iraq

Seiki Tanaka and Masanori Yoshikawa — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:49:00 -0500

Countries in transition often go through periods of upheaval and weak governance and Iraq is a prime example. Usually donor agencies hesitate to increase their support as they face two key problems in post-conflict or post-revolution situations: (1) high security risk for transparent implementation; and (2) poor government effectiveness, marred by corruption, ethnic tensions and economic stagnation. But this is precisely the time when donor engagement is needed most. By using the experience of JICA projects in Iraq, we argue that donors should not withdraw their support in difficult post-conflict situations. The paper proposes three mechanisms – information; social recognition; and mediation mechanisms – to solve such difficulties in a post-conflict society. The empirical analysis shows that more intensive communication between donor and government officials especially leads to a positive impact even in war-torn Iraq.

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Authors

Seiki Tanaka
Masanori Yoshikawa

The Evolution of Joint Special Operations Command and the Pursuit of al Qaeda in Iraq: A Conversation with General Stanley A. McChrystal

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Event Information

January 28, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

Osama bin Laden may have been the most notorious face of al-Qaeda before his death, but a terrorist by the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arguably had far more blood on his hands—and for years was enemy number one for the United States government. Running the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq, Zarqawi and his followers usurped the Sunni insurgency and through vicious attacks on Iraqi civilians stoked a civil war pitting Sunnis and Shiites against each other. His damage was so great that even after American special operators, intelligence experts and Air Force pilots successfully tracked down and killed Zarqawi in June 2006, General Stanley McChrystal wrote in his newly published memoir My Share of the Task (Penguin Group USA, 2013) that it was “too late. He bequeathed Iraq a sectarian paranoia and an incipient civil war.” Nevertheless, the special operations machine built to defeat Zarqawi’s network continued to run full tilt, eventually having a strategic impact when married to the full-spectrum counterinsurgency and diplomatic pressures of "the surge."

On January 28, the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings hosted a discussion featuring a keynote address by General Stanley A. McChrystal (ret.) that will, for the first time, focus on this crucial part of his career and the careers of so many who worked with him. The story of how Joint Special Operations Command, working with many other agencies and nations, built itself into a powerful network capable of studying, tracking, hunting, and finally killing Zarqawi is at the heart General Stanley McChrystal’s memoir.

Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks. Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, interviewed General McChrystal, before moderating a discussion with the audience.

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Killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and His Legacy: A Discussion with General Stanley A. McChrystal

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Big Bets and Black Swans: Foreign Policy Challenges for President Obama’s Second Term

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

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Can the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Resolve Conflicts?

Ibrahim Sharqieh — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Ibrahim Sharqieh’s article examines the potential of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to contribute to mediation of conflicts in the Muslim world. Based on interviews with OIC senior officials and government officials from Iraq and the Philippines, as well as research involving other primary and secondary sources, the author analyzes four cases in which the OIC participated in mediation efforts: the Philippines, Thailand, Iraq, and Somalia. The article concludes with an assessment of the advantages and challenges of including the OIC in such mediation efforts, as well as recommendations related to capacity-building and inter-organizational partnerships that might enhance the potential for the OIC to play a constructive role in conflicts involving the Muslim community.

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Read the entire Fall 2012 Issue (Volume 19, Number 2) Of Peace and Conflict Studies »

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Authors

Ibrahim Sharqieh

Publication: Peace and Conflict Studies

Reading Machiavelli in Iraq

Kenneth M. Pollack — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Most Americans know Niccolò Machiavelli only from The Prince, a sixteenth-century “audition tape” he dashed off in lieu of a résumé to try to land a job. It’s a shame. Not only was Machiavelli the leading advocate of democracy of his day, but his ideas also had a profound influence on the framers of our own Constitution.

It’s even more of a shame because the corpus of Machiavelli’s remarkable work on democracy, politics and international relations is easily the best guide to understanding the dynamics at play in contemporary Iraq and its situation within the wider Middle East.

Iraq today is a place that Machiavelli would have understood well. It is a weak state, riven by factions, with an embryonic democratic system increasingly undermined from within and without. It is encircled by a combination of equally weak and fragmented Arab states as well as powerful non-Arab neighbors seeking to dominate or even subjugate it. Iraq’s democratic form persists, but its weakness, combined with internal and external threats, seems more likely to drive it toward either renewed autocracy or renewed chaos. It cries out for a leader of great ability and great virtue to vanquish all of these monsters and restore it to the democratic path it had started down in 2008–2009.

That course seems less and less likely with each passing month, and it may take a true Machiavellian prince—one strong and cunning enough to secure the power of the state but foresighted enough to foster a democracy as the only recipe for true stability—to achieve it. Unfortunately, in all of human history, such figures have been rare. It is unclear whether Iraq possesses such a leader, but the reemergence of its old political culture as America’s role ebbs makes it ever less likely that such a remarkable figure could emerge to save Iraq from itself.

Read the full article at nationalinterest.org »

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack

Publication: The National Interest

Arab Politics Is Not All About Us

F. Gregory Gause, III — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

When a presidential campaign is in full swing, we probably should not be surprised that the challenger's team throws everything and the kitchen sink at the incumbent. Still, it seems strange that Republicans want to remind voters that President Barack Obama extricated the United States from a difficult and unpopular war in Iraq. But that is just what Peter Feaver did in the Foreign Policy blog Shadow Government on October 12. He said that the president had opened up a "civil-military problem" for himself, because "significant portions of the military believe the administration abandoned them on Iraq." He went on to accuse the administration, and Vice President Joe Biden specifically, of blowing the chance to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq, either through incompetence or a lack of serious commitment, that would have permitted the United States to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq. Those are some pretty stiff charges. (Full disclosure: Feaver and I went to graduate school together. He is a great guy, but just plain wrong here.)

We can set aside, for this discussion, the big question about whether keeping that many U.S. troops in Iraq would have been a good thing. It is pretty clear what the American people think the answer is. The interesting thing about Feaver's thumbnail account of the supposed failure of the administration on this issue is the utter absence of Iraqis from the story. When the United States fails to achieve a goal, it must be either because we really were not committed to it, or we messed up. The other guys just are not that important. It really is all about us.

A brief review of Iraqi politics indicates precisely the opposite. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki very much wanted to be the Iraqi politician who negotiated the end of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. He pushed the Bush administration to conclude the original timetable for U.S. withdrawal in 2008. President George W. Bush agreed in September 2008 to set a hard deadline of the end of 2011 for complete U.S. withdrawal (undercutting his party's presidential candidate, John McCain, who strongly advocated a continued presence in Iraq, in the process). Maliki would not accept any wiggle room in the deadline or the completeness of the withdrawal. He knew how unpopular the U.S. military presence had become among his constituents, particularly Shiite Arab Iraqis. Kurds and some Sunni Arabs might have felt differently, but Maliki knew his voters. He held up the agreement as one of the signal achievements of his rule when he ran to retain the prime ministry in the Iraqi elections of 2010.

It was the results of that election that sealed the fate of any U.S. effort to re-open the case for a continued U.S. military presence. Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition won two seats more than Maliki's State of Law group in the election, but neither achieved a majority. Had they been able to set their personal differences aside (their platforms were not that far apart), and had Maliki been willing to take the junior role in a partnership (as required of the smaller party), they might have been able to form a strong majority government. But that was not to be. Allawi flubbed his chance to put a parliamentary majority together without Maliki. Maliki stubbornly held on to his office. In the end, Maliki accepted a political deal brokered in Tehran that returned him to the prime ministry with the support of Shiite political groups closely aligned with Iran, like Muqtada al-Sadr's followers and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Once that coalition was formed, no U.S. diplomatic effort, no matter how skillful and concerted, was going to convince Maliki to alter the original withdrawal agreement and allow a substantial U.S. force to stay. Maliki was not so inclined anyway, but with the backing of Iran so central to his return to power, there was no conceivable set of inducements Washington could offer Maliki to move him off his position. Doing so would have jeopardized his hold on the prime ministry. One might criticize the Obama administration for not being more active in trying to broker an Allawi and Maliki coalition in the first place. But once Maliki's ruling bargain was set in Tehran, the game was up. The United States gave Iraq the democracy it has. Now it has to live with it.

Feaver ignores the realities of Iraqi politics in his criticism of the Obama administration's Iraq policies. If this were simply a lacuna in one academic's analysis, it would not be of much interest. He and I could argue this in the pages of musty academic journals. But this analytical flaw, making everything just about us, has become characteristic of Republican criticism of the Obama administration's Middle East policy more generally.

During the October 16 presidential debate, Governor Mitt Romney criticized President Obama's reaction to the Benghazi attack and his Middle East policy more generally, saying: "The president's policies throughout the Middle East began with an apology tour and pursue a strategy of leading from behind, and this strategy is unraveling before our very eyes." (He posted a clearer statement of his belief about the reason for the problems in the Middle East on his website on October 1: "President Obama has allowed our leadership to atrophy.") Earlier on debate day, on National Public Radio (NPR), Romney Middle East advisor Dan Senor said that the attack in Libya is "not an isolated incident." He linked it to the Iranian nuclear program, the fighting in Syria, and other protests against the United States across the Middle East. For Senor, all of these things (specifically Iran, by inference the others) have a single cause: "We have lost credibility." For both the governor and his advisor, events in the Middle East are all about us, not about trends and dynamics within the region itself.

This is a particularly shallow and superficial view of the challenges facing the United States, not only in the Middle East, but around the world. If we were to accept the logic that threats to the United States come primarily from a lack of American credibility and firmness, we would also have to believe the following:

The attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 were because Ronald Reagan was weak and lacked credibility.
Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in 1990 because George H. W. Bush was weak and lacked credibility.
Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 because Bill Clinton was weak and lacked credibility.
Al Qaeda attacked the homeland on September 11, 2001 because George W. Bush was weak and lacked credibility.

These conclusions are patently ridiculous. All of these events stemmed from both deep regional causes and immediate tactical decisions by local players. They had very little, if anything, to do with whether the U.S. president in office was "strong" and "credible," whatever those adjectives might mean in this context. Likewise, the attack in Benghazi is all about the deep currents in the region that produced the Salafi jihadist movement, of which al Qaeda is the most notorious example, and the difficult transition in revolutionary Libya, where the state was never strong and militias dominate the security picture. It would have happened no matter who was in the White House, even Mitt Romney. It was directed at us, but it is not all about us.

One can understand why Dan Senor takes the position he does. He is a spinmeister, and his job is to spin for his boss in an election campaign. He really does not know much about the Arab world, so he could not be expected to understand its complexities. His only substantial experience with it was as the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He sat in the Green Zone and told reporters how well everything was going while the country descended into hell. Even then, for him it was all about us, and not about the Iraqis. That kind of analysis might be expedient in an election campaign, but to actually base U.S. policy in the Middle East on it is a path to disaster, as the Bush administration's Iraq policy demonstrated. If we are going to support our friends, confront our enemies, and deal prudently with that vast group of people in between in the region, we better pay attention to what is actually driving their politics. And it isn't American "credibility."

Read the article on foreignpolicy.com »

Authors

F. Gregory Gause, III

Publication: Foreign Policy