This is the latest in a series of periodic diaries from Iraq. I haven’t written one for a few months, but this last week has been unusually depressing and frightening and the week’s events deserve comment. As the week started, I was in Amman, Jordan for a conference on civil society in Iraq. Civil society in Iraq sounds like an oxymoron, but an extraordinary variety of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operate in the country, working on everything from women’s rights, to local governance, to anticorruption efforts. In the center and south, many of these local NGOs are the last organized venue for an endangered point of view – a willingness to talk across political and ethnic divides and the desire for rule of law. More Iraqis than you might think oppose both the militias and the insurgents, and many of them take considerable risks for their beliefs. This diary is about the worsening political situation, but it is also about some Iraqis who have been "standing up" as the Americans stand down, to use that silly phrase politicians seem to like so much.
The U.S. and European donors who support the civil society sector tend to spend money sponsoring community meetings on democratization, electoral education or reconciliation. These efforts are of questionable long-term benefit. The Iraqis dutifully hold the meetings, but they inflate their budgets so they can use the extra money to do the real work that the US, the UN and the Europeans fail to adequately support - legal representation for women, investigative reporting, pressuring local councils on corruption, and on and on. Although I'm not religious, I am vaguely aware of the controversy about whether faith alone is enough for salvation, or whether works are needed too. Let’s just say that the donors’ insistence on sponsoring democracy training and community reconciliation meetings has a whole lot to do with faith, and when Iraqi organizations siphon off democracy development money to operate a women’s shelter, that has more to do with works. Both contribute something to this dream of a decent Iraq, and a country this troubled sure needs both.
The conference brought together many Iraqi NGOs with donors, UN officials, and international NGOs. It astounds me how Americans and Iraqis can talk past each other. The conference was sponsored by USAID and opened with some conference organizer from Virginia testing the microphones and making a lame attempt at a Verison Wireless joke. She picked up the wireless microphone and said “Can you hear me now?” and then moved over a few meters and said in a more seductive tone “can you hear me now?” It wasn’t funny, but as an American, at least I got the reference. The Iraqis just stared blankly. Then a top USAID official got up and started talking about the successes of privatization, which was not only a lie – privatization has not been a success – but also had nothing to do with the purpose of the conference. Moreover, the whole idea is stunningly irrelevant to Iraq. Now is hardly the time to talk about limited government as civil war spreads and the government seeks to hold on to whatever networks of patronage and support it can. The Iraqis had heard this speech before, so they answered their cell phones or simply ignored him. After the USAID guy was done, the woman from Virginia lectured everyone on cell phone etiquette. Then the Iraqi State Minister for Civil Society gave an address. The interpreter mistranslated his title as the “Civil Minister for Society”, which was oddly appropriate, as he is a polite and courtly little man with thick magnifying lenses for glasses and a quiet, slow manner. He unfolded his prepared statement and spent the next fifteen minutes praising God and the followers of Ali. The Americans started looking at their watches. Then he launched into a rambling twenty-minute critique of the previous regime’s philosophy toward civil society, which was pretty much “kill anyone who attempts it”. He ended with a formal statement on the importance of free dialog between Iraqis. The woman from Virginia wanted to stick to the schedule, so she cut him off and moved on.
A few days before in Baghdad, militia fighters from the Mehdi Army blocked off the roads leading to the Ministry of Higher Education, burst into the buildings, and kidnapped dozens of people responsible for Iraq’s university system. The victims were both Shia’ and Sunni. They pushed them into Nissan Pathfinders and hauled them off to the grim concrete block warrens of Section 70 of Sadr City where Abu Dira’, one of Muqtada al-Sadr’s commanders, maintains a series of ghost houses interspersed with civilian residences. Even if reports say that the perpetrators of a horrible act are unknown, people usually have a pretty good idea who did it. For the militias and insurgent groups, public knowledge of authorship serves the purpose of intimidation, while deniability allows the leader to continue to participate in negotiations as if nothing ever happened. That’s the case here. A human rights monitor from UNAMI, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq, interviewed some of those who were released. It’s quite clear that the Mehdi Army conducted the raid not as some rogue action, but was a carefully planned effort to slaughter Sunnis and force them out of the government. However, this act was also part of the Sadr movement's shadow war to take over control of government ministries from rival Shia’ parties and to intimidate those moderate Shia’ who wish to remain unaligned. In a departure from usual procedures, even the Shia’ professors and administrators were severely tortured. Some of the survivors may be sent to Kurdistan for physical evaluation and documentation of their injuries, in the event that someday there can be prosecutions. They are terrified and it is uncertain whether they will consent to come. If they do, we’ll be glad to host them.
The conference continued, with most of the real work taking place during the coffee and cigarette breaks, when organizations that normally cannot meet or even acknowledge each others’ existence were able to coordinate their work. Organizations in Iraq work very quietly. Our offices are unmarked, our program agreements secret, our staff anonymous. Other local and international organizations operate in the same way, so the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Amman provides a wonderful chance to find out what others are doing. There is an Arabic expression “beina hajirain tahin” which means “between two millstones comes flour”, or hardship sometimes produces something of value. Despite the difficult situation in Iraq, thousands of Iraqis act with remarkable courage and skill for the good of their communities. For every Parsons or Halliburton subsidiary ripping off the US taxpayer, there is a non-governmental organization or individual doing exceptional work with almost no resources. Billions have gone into Iraq – just as billions were misspent on Katrina relief. The Bush Administration screwed both up, but are we that surprised? Doing good work in Iraq is no more impossible than doing good work in New Orleans, and a whole lot is being done – quietly - by the NGOs, the UN and many donors. The problem is that coordination is so difficult, and funding priorities are so misplaced. The US allocated more than $140 million for a hospital in Basra that has never been completed, and in a ridiculous attempt to finish a vanity project, cut off all other funding for basics such as primary health care, child nutritional monitoring, diarrheal disease control, etc.
The next day, word spread at the conference that the Iraqi Ministry of Justice indicted Harith al-Dhari, a prominent Sunni cleric and head of the Association of Islamic Scholars, in absentia for his ties to the insurgency. Al-Dhari is certainly connected to the insurgency, but indicting one of the leading Sunni politicians right now is not going to ease Sunni-Shia’ sectarian tensions. The back story is that the Maliki government has been reaching out to Sunni tribal leaders who don’t care for the Islamists, and when al-Dhari left the country on a trip they moved quickly to make sure he could not return. As usual, the US had no idea what was happening until the damage was done. US protests were ineffective. The Kurds were likewise caught by surprise. Although the Kurds despise al-Dhari, President Talabani is a pragmatist and would probably have preferred to avoid a provocation. That evening, a grim al-Dhari appeared on al-Jazirah and threatened violence.
I’d had enough of the news, and went out for dinner with our program officer Shwan Rashid. Shwan seems to know people everywhere. Soon enough he came across an Arab friend of his from Kirkuk who fled to Jordan and got a job with American Friends Service Committee. A million Iraqis have fled to Jordan, and the AFSC employee was one of the lucky ones. Half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin, and I don’t think any country on earth has such a high percentage of refugees. It’s worth reflecting on the Jordanians’ decency and generosity at a time when American restrictionists are obsessed with building fences and jailing asylum seekers. It was such a pleasure to walk in a city bright with electricity, and soon we came across a small shop with a tandoor oven and tiled pool in the center, containing dozens of big carp. This is a masghouf shop, and as refugee patrons pointed to this or that fish, an Iraqi with a big net caught the carp, split it in two, dusted it with spices, and put it into the wood-fired oven. All the masghouf shops along Abu Nawas street in Baghdad have closed, but at least one of them apparently re-opened in Amman. Carp tastes bad to me no matter how it’s prepared, so I drank some tea while Shwan and his friend ate and talked.
Two days later, as we got into a taxi to go to the airport, the Jordanian taxi driver greeted us in Kurdish. The fact that a taxi driver in Amman would bother to learn a Kurdish greeting is a truly remarkable reversal of fortune for the Middle East’s most repressed and marginalized ethnic group. Until recently, few people knew that the most famous Kurd of all time – Salahaddin, hero of the Crusades – was Kurdish. Fifteen years ago, you could get two years in jail in Turkey for using the same greeting the taxi driver tried on us. Now there are regularly scheduled commercial flights from Iraqi Kurdistan to Amman, Beirut, Istanbul, Dubai, even Frankfurt. I don’t know what all this means for the future, only that it will be difficult to force the Kurds back into the bottle again. We settled into our seats and tried to ignore the corrosion and leaking hydraulic fluid on the wing of the Iraqi Airlines jet. Soon enough we landed back in Suleymaniya.
That afternoon, the other shoe dropped. Sunni insurgents detonated a series of car bombs in Sadr City, at least one of them exploding in the same neighborhood where the Ministry of Education workers had been tortured and killed. The bombs killed more than 200 people. Simultaneously, insurgents attacked the Ministry of Health, which is controlled by the Sadr movement. The Minister is a hard-line Sadr supporter, and MOH ambulances have in the past been used to transport Mehdi Army fighters and weapons past US checkpoints. The car bombs appear to have been placed by Iraqis, not foreign fighters, and the timing suggests that Harith al-Dhari may well have had a hand in ordering them. The cycle goes on, and as evening fell, al-Sharqiya television showed crowds wailing for revenge and Shia’ and Sunni neighborhoods were exchanging mortar fire. US Blackhawk helicopters were shooting at Mehdi Army safe houses in Sadr City. The airport in Baghdad was closed and the city placed under indefinite curfew.
Just that morning, our staff member Dr. Salah returned to his city in the south in a shared taxi before I arrived at the office and could prevent him. We’ve started flying staff rather than asking them to take taxis across the war zone, but my perception of danger and that of our Iraqi employees and partners differ, and they object to using resources frivolously. The Ba’ath party hanged Dr. Salah’s father when he was in medical school, and he left the country as soon as he graduated. He spent six years as a doctor in remote mountains in Yemen, before returning after the 2003 invasion. The loss of his father is still an open wound. We went on a picnic in the mountains during the summer, and the sight of a sheep backbone in an irrigation ditch was enough to immediately spark memories of his father. He talked about how the government, in an act of bureaucratic cruelty, sent a social worker to his mother the day after his father was executed to assess her ability to retain custody of the minor children. Now Dr Salah supports his mother and sisters, and runs several projects in the rural south, in areas where his good sense and diplomatic experience with tribes – acquired in Yemen - facilitates his work. Dr. Salah barely made it home alive that night, driving through raging crowds and getting past the checkpoints just before the city was locked down. The danger keeps increasing and it’s clear that we can no longer permit staff to transit through Baghdad. Several other staff members are stuck here in Kurdistan, perhaps for days, until air travel resumes or we can arrange transit through Iran. Perhaps due to religious faith, or perhaps due to culture or gradual acclimatization to the violence, Iraqis take unimaginable risks. They routinely take six-hour taxi rides, repeatedly crossing the invisible sectarian boundaries that define Iraq’s civil war.
The events of the last few days may well turn out to be as critical in the progress of the war as the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, which for many Iraqis marks the transition between mere terrorism and civil war. While Muqtada al-Sadr calls for calm, his commanders organize for war. Two slow civil wars are taking place simultaneously. The Sadr movement is directly involved in each, and both became much worse this week. The conflict between Shia’ political parties is Iraq’s hidden civil war, in contrast with the obvious civil war pitting Sunni insurgents against the government and Shia’ militias. Sadr commander Abu Dira’s outrageous raid on the Ministry of Higher Education made this hidden conflict worse. The raid sparked a US response, which Sadr then used as a pretext to threaten to leave the government if Maliki meets with Bush. Bush, idiot that he is, continues to meet publicly with Maliki – which only weakens him further. Now Sadr has calculated that he can throw down the gauntlet and make Maliki irrelevant – first by brazenly kidnapping an entire ministry’s leadership, and second by dictating Maliki’s travel plans to him. While Sadr pretends to work with the government through his block in Parliament and his control over several ministries, he is busy ordering hits on his coalition partners. Our local NGO partners from Basra tell us first hand about the rise in assassinations as the Sadr movement murders members of Fadilah and the Badr organization, as his thugs increasingly intimidate the Shia’ community. Through intimidation, assassination and clandestine funding, Sadr is gradually extending his control over the Shia’ regions of Iraq.
Even in Kurdistan, the mood is grim. If Sadr comes to power, which seems more and more likely, the Kurds will have no future in Iraq. Despite all the rhetoric and the silly controversy about the flag, the Kurds have actually exercised great restraint. They have not occupied Kirkuk. They have participated in the government in good faith, and the best units in the national army are composed of Kurdish peshmergha. But now they fear that should Sadr prevail in the current power struggle, the US will cut its losses, and Bush and Cheney - and Baker too - will betray them once again. The Baker plan seems to be to hold Iraq together at all costs, and at the end of the day, the probable result will be another dictatorship with the Kurds once again reduced to poverty and irrelevance, with Kurdish aspirations festering like the Palestinian issue and a new armed revolt recurring every decade. In the eyes of the Iraqis, Bush is viewed as humiliated and weakened by the election, as clueless and adrift as ever, but even more powerless than before. That, frankly, is dangerous – he no longer even has the “wasta” or connections to negotiate effectively. Cheney is visiting King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia – perhaps the only place on the planet where he still has any credibility. Perhaps I’ve been around too many Iraqis for too long and have become as paranoid as they, but I wonder if Cheney sees conflict with Iran as inevitable. Is he in Saudi Arabia because he wants to fight his next war with Iraqi proxies – and thus multiply the misery of Iraq’s Shia’ community? Is the US desperately negotiating for some end state that gets Iraqi off the TV news while Iraq cannibalizes itself? Is the US deciding to give the neighboring countries like Turkey whatever they want if they just establish order? Does that mean that the experiment in self-rule in Kurdistan is a quaint little topic for a National Geographic special, but not something for serious policymakers to concern themselves about? Somehow, I feel that the coming order will have little regard for the bright hopes of those civil society organizations who met in Jordan and still dream of a decent Iraq.
I have always been skeptical of the view that the various sides in the civil war will negotiate once the US military leaves, or that if we threaten the Iraqis with even more chaos they will suddenly shape up and stop fighting. This last week makes me even more pessimistic. I just wish we were not in this alone. Wars take on their own unpredictable courses and their own logic, and the week’s horrors presage a much higher level of violence in the near future. The violence seems destructive and counterproductive from our point of view, but for men like Sadr and al-Dhari, these outrageous acts create opportunity.
Tomorrow is the first day of the Iraqi work week. While Sadr’s commanders plan their next mass abduction and al-Dhari’s bomb makers fit more vehicles with explosives, Dr. Salah will make his rounds in the countryside. A lawyer in Basra will cajole the jailers until his client is released, and a social worker in the women’s shelter in Kifri will prevent another honor killing. Thousands of other Iraqis will continue to do the right thing in the face of cruelty and evil. But will the international community? Is Bush even remotely capable of negotiating a multi-national peace enforcement force for Iraq? If Iraq stays together is anyone focusing on how to minimize the loss of life? If Iraq splits, is anyone focusing on how to keep Turkey from abusing the Kurds, or how to keep Saudi Arabia and Iran from fighting each other using Iraqi proxies? And what of us, the Democrats? I am too close to this war, physically and emotionally. No doubt at all about that. All the talk about "the war is lost, leave the Iraqis to it" is a lot easier to indulge in from a distance. For the Iraqis here, the war may be far from over but it is also far from lost. People do not want to give up on a civil society, and Iraqis don't want one brutal militia leader or another to rise to the top and oppress them again. This is not a win/lose, either/or proposition, and real US diplomacy - combined with UN and European efforts to broker an acceptable regional solution - is a process that should be ongoing. It is time to pull out of al-Anbar and reduce our presence in the rest of the country, time to stop playing "whack a mole" at every provocation. But I remain convinced that the US needs to be prepared to intervene to stop massive ethnic cleansing. Too bad we've lost our allies. Too bad we've got Bush instead of Clark. Too bad we've got Condi Rice instead of Richard Holbrooke. I don't have a solution except to say that total disengagement will be a disaster. When I read comments on DailyKos from good people, from my own side, that we should just move on and let the Iraqis kill each other... well, I feel a sense of desolation.