The 9/11 Wars (50 page)

By the end of 2007, however, it was clear that some vague – and very relative – stability had thus been – at least temporarily – achieved in Iraq.
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It might have been fragile, as General Petraeus continued to insist, but it was undeniable. Through winter, the Surge was rolled out through the belt around Baghdad and even finally into restive and violent Diyala province to the north-east of the capital, where al-Zarqawi had once sought refuge and where now hundreds of local Sunnis joined the militias paid for by the Americans or the police. Support for the insurgents bled away rapidly. ‘There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the tribes changed course … Many of our fighters quit and some of them joined the deserters … As a result of that the number of fighters dropped down to twenty or less,’ one leader of a largely Iraqi hardline ‘al-Qaeda-ist’ group near Balad, north of Baghdad, complained in late 2007.
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In Baghdad and elsewhere several thousand Shia too had signed up to Awakening-type militia by the end of 2007, partly for the cash, partly to fight the al-Mahdi Army.

The gravest problem, of course, remained central government, which was as corrupt, dysfunctional and deeply partisan as it had ever been. The whole aim of the Surge had been to buy time for the Iraqi security forces to develop – which was slowly happening – and also for Iraqi politicians to take steps towards a national reconciliation of sorts – of which there appeared to be little prospect. The political situation had benefited from the replacement as ambassador of the flamboyant Zalmay Khalilzad, an American-Afghan of Sunni ancestry of whom Iraqi Shia leaders were suspicious, by veteran diplomat Ryan Croker, who was able to build a stronger relationship with key political players and worked better with the US military than his predecessor. But Nouri al-Maliki, the fifty-seven-year-old senior figure in the Shia Islamist Dawa organization, who had become prime minister in May 2006, and the other Shia leaders who dominated the government seemed little inclined to make any concessions to the defeated Sunni minority. It was with only great difficulty that they could be persuaded to agree to 35,000 of those on the American payroll in the Sunni militias joining the new Iraqi security forces. Allying with the Kurds, they could also block any moves towards a genuinely equitable distribution of national resources, particularly the vast cash flows that oil production, which began rising again towards the end of 2007, was generating.

In the end no one seemed inclined to push the issue of reconciliation too far. The days of grand ideological projects in Iraq seemed well over, and few regretted their passing. It had tacitly been recognized at the highest levels in Washington that the lofty goals of 2003 were not just impossible to achieve but that continuing to strive towards them would be profoundly counterproductive. If the new counter-insurgency field manual referred repeatedly to the importance of respecting cultural difference at a tactical level, there needed clearly to be a parallel doctrine at a strategic level too. In January 2008, the de-Ba’athification laws passed nearly five years previously over the fateful summer of 2003 were reversed. When Petraeus returned before Congress in April 2008 to brief America’s political representatives once again on the situation in Iraq, he was questioned on the long-term aims of the US project in Iraq by a forty-seven-year-old Democrat Senator representing Illinois. ‘If the definition of success is … no traces of al-Qaeda, no possibility of reconstitution [of al-Qaeda], a highly effective Iraqi government, a democratic multiethnic, multi-sectarian, functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not the kind that we don’t like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for twenty or thirty years,’ Barack Obama said. If, on the contrary, the aim was a ‘messy, sloppy status quo but there’s not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there’s still corruption, but the country’s struggling along, but it’s not a threat to its neighbours and it’s not an al-Qaeda base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable time frame’.
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Such aims had broad bipartisan support, despite being considerably more modest than those announced with such bombast in 2003 and repeatedly reaffirmed since. That they could still be considered relatively ambitious was an indication of how badly wrong Operation Iraqi Freedom had gone.

THE SURGE AND THE 9/11 WARS

What had the Surge shown in the context of the 9/11 Wars?

The year 2007 in Iraq had shown the supremacy of local specificity. First it had been the global ideology proposed by the Americans and their allies that had been rejected. Not in its entirety, certainly, but in sufficient degree for it to become necessary for the original package of liberal democracy and free-market economics to have to be significantly altered for it to overcome the fundamental stain of being ‘foreign’ and get any purchase whatsoever. ‘The Americans failed in Iraq because they did not understand how to treat Iraqis, and Iraqis became their enemies,’ was the simple explanation of Thuryia Ismael, a sixty-year-old housewife in Baghdad’s Amariya neighbourhood. ‘The political process in Iraq was built on wrong policies, and that effected everything: economy, health, education and security.’
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Happily, the globalized ideology of al-Qaeda, as stripped of local context as anything Washington had ever tried to impose, had also been rejected. The fact that the aims, values and methods of al-Zarqawi and his like were ostensibly based on a version or reading of ‘Islam’ was not enough to compensate for the multitude of ways in which they failed to represent the aims, cultures, needs, aspirations, self-image and desires of the communities whose support – or at least fearful acquiescence – they wanted. The international militants or internationally affiliated networks in Iraq had made massive efforts to resolve the strategic problem their international dimension gave them. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been dissolved and its various networks incorporated into the broader and more neutrally named Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen Consultative Council) in the aftermath of the hotel bombings in Jordan. In October 2006, the formation of ‘the Islamic State of Iraq’ (ISI) was announced. Communiqués from its leadership stressed that the organization ‘contained only 200 foreign fighters’. A cabinet was constituted with ministers for education and agriculture and statements disseminated on the internet called for volunteers to fight the ‘Persians’, i.e. Iranians and their Iraqi Shia proxies. But it was all to no avail. By the summer of 2007, the gap between even the ‘al-Qaeda-ist’ militants and the Sunni tribes was greater than ever and the divisions between the various elements of the insurgency – the ISI, the Islamic Army of Iraq, Hamas-Iraq, the 1920 Brigades, the Mujahideen Reform Front – were deeper than they had ever been.
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Successive communities in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 had made their choices. Sunnis in Haditha or al-Doura, Shias in Nasariyah or Amarah had all turned away from global ideologies, whether they arrived on the back of an American tank, were spouted by a neighbourhood preacher or were imported by a foreign petty criminal turned militant leader like al-Zarqawi.

A second lesson, reinforcing that of earlier episodes in the 9/11 Wars, was thus that, in addition to being largely local, identities are dynamic. How Sunni populations in Anbar saw themselves and their duties as men, Iraqis, al-Dulaimi or Zobai, Arabs or Muslims differed between 2003 and 2007. It changed even over the year of the Surge. What had been acceptable to local populations once was no longer acceptable a short time later. One key question posed by the events of 2007 in Iraq was what would fill the gap left by the rejection by millions of people of both the Western universalizing package of liberal democracy and market capitalism and, at least in the short term, radical Islamic ideologies? What system would appear to be sufficiently authentic to local communities to bring a measure of stability? What set of ideas, norms and worldviews, in short what ‘culture’, would they generate themselves? The answers would undoubtedly have a major influence on the coming years of the conflict.

If anything was clear from the events of 2007 it was that any solution to Iraq’s problems – and to those posed by the 9/11 Wars more generally – was going to evolve at a grass-roots level and work its way up rather than being imposed from above. Developments over the period in Iraq had reinforced again the degree to which events in the conflict were driven by what was happening on the ground. The thinking that led to the Surge had its origins with colonels out in Iraq’s Anbar or Nimrud or Salahuddin provinces and had flowed back up the chain of command. The Surge had succeeded because of what had been going on in Sadr City and Ramadi well before even the decision to send extra troops had been taken in Washington. By the end of 2007, bin Laden and other members of the al-Qaeda senior leadership appeared as limited in their ability to project authority and power in Iraq as any Western general or political leader. Bin Laden had been sufficiently concerned by the situation there to dispatch a key aide, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the associate who had steered the young Briton Omar Khyam and thus the other Crevice plotters towards targets in the UK, to try and bring some semblance of order. But al-Iraqi was arrested crossing from Iran into the north of Iraq not far from his native city of Mosul and disappeared into the CIA’s prison system.
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His capture underlined the obstacles bin Laden and the al-Qaeda hardcore were now facing. One consequence of al-Iraqi’s detention was that, instead of a local man taking over the al-Qaeda operation in ‘the land of the two rivers’, the leader of those nominally affiliated with bin Laden’s organization remained a foreigner of unclear origin, Abu Hamza al-Mohajir. Grotesque attacks by the militants continued but dropped from 300 bombings and more than 1,500 deaths in 2007 to 28 incidents and 125 civilian deaths reported in the first six months of 2008.
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The flow of recruits on their way to Iraq began to slow considerably too, dropping, according to American officials, from around 120 to between 40 and 50 each month.
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The days when Amman, Damascus or Kuwaiti border villages were full of foreign volunteers seeking jihad were long gone.
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THE OTHER SURGE

In the summer of 2007 Saudi authorities had opened a new facility just outside the small village of al-Thamama, a half-hour drive down an immaculate asphalt road across scrubby sand and rock desert outside Riyadh. Few of the locals knew what went on behind the iron gates of the small and heavily guarded complex of low modern buildings, but around the world there were many who were closely observing developments there.

For al-Thamama was a pioneering centre for deradicalization. Staffed by psychologists, sociologists and clerics who referred to their charges as ‘students’, its primary aim was to avoid problems of recidivism when Saudi veterans of the fighting in Iraq left prison. In his sumptuous marbled office, which two senior American security officials had just left, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the deputy interior minister responsible for counter-terrorism, explained that the problems of social reinsertion of returning militants from Afghanistan in 2002 had been one of primary reasons for recruitment to extremist organizations responsible for the blasts and killings across Saudi Arabia between 2003 and 2005. The fear was that the thousands of young Saudis who had either fought in Iraq or tried to reach Iraq before being detained would follow a similar course, he said.
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The details of how the ‘deradicalization’ would be carried out had been finalized by a team of highly qualified Ministry of the Interior social scientists. They relied on weeks of religious instruction and group discussions to convince the ‘students’ that the religious reasoning which had justified their decision to travel to Iraq had been erroneous. Any ‘personal issues’ which might also have been responsible were tackled with psychological counselling, team sport and even art therapy. Otayan al-Turki, a Swansea-educated psychologist working at the centre, was struck by how many of the prisoners had very poor reasoning capacity and poor communication skills. ‘Most are young, many come from large families,’ he said. ‘Many come from a non-Islamic background. Some have led sinful lives and were looking for a shortcut to paradise.’ The art therapy was aimed at stopping the young men ‘reacting in such an immediate way to images they see on the television or internet by giving them different visual languages’, he said.
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To ensure that all those released remained ‘well integrated into the mainstream’ the government provided jobs, money, cars, even wives on occasion. ‘To deradicalize them we need to gain their trust and we need to help them restart their lives,’ said Dr Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, a Ministry of the Interior criminologist working on the programme. ‘This is not a reward. It is a necessary policy of containment.’ The programme had so far proved to be extremely successful, he claimed, pointing out that the centre was yet to see one of their former charges relapse into violence or militant activism.
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Among the young men in the centre in the spring of 2008 was Hizam al-Ghatani, the thin, bespectacled former shopkeeper who had fought alongside the insurgents around Falluja in late 2004. Though motivated to keep fighting by scenes of carnage he had witnessed, al-Ghatani, who had originally only wanted to be a medic not a fighter, had been deeply disappointed by the growing internecine violence among the tribes and militants of Anbar and had returned to his home in Saudi Arabia in the spring of 2005, naively imagining that he would be received as a hero. Arrested immediately, al-Ghatani had been in prison since. Now on the brink of completing his time in detention, the former shopkeeper insisted he had been reformed. ‘I am a very emotional man and I did not have a good understanding of Islam,’ he said. ‘Now I realize the wrong I did to my country and my family.’
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Mohammed al-Fawzan, another volunteer who had tried to reach Iraq through Syria but had eventually been arrested, had recently returned to his family home in the middle-class al-Shifa neighbourhood in west Riyadh after serving his prison sentence. He was now back in his old job in the Ministry of Transport. He had also been given a car and had been found a wife – with the dowry paid by the government. ‘I know now that I did not understand Islam and jihad,’ he told the author. ‘Now I still care about what happens in the world, but I understand that political things are the responsibility of the government, and I should not get involved. I am a soldier of the government. I should obey their orders and those of their representatives, even the traffic police.’
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