The New Middle East (49 page)

Iraq, or at least the non-Kurdish areas, was dragged into civil war in 2006 after al-Qaeda bombed the golden-domed Shia al-Askari mosque in Samarra in February. This was despite a claim the previous summer by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he said of Iraq: ‘I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.’
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The blast itself at the Shia shrine did not kill anyone, but the wave of revenge attacks it incited did, and spurred still faster the ethnic cleansing that had been taking place in urban neighbourhoods.

Al-Zarqawi was killed by a US airstrike in June 2006, but by then the sectarian violence had a life of its own. That year also saw the death of Saddam Hussein, after a protracted trial that led to the inevitable death sentence. He was hanged on 30 December 2006. As he went to the gallows he was taunted by his executioners. ‘I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans,’ he said. ‘God damn you.’
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By now George W. Bush had been re-elected president. To change course in Iraq he had to get rid of the man seen as the greatest impediment in his administration to that change, Donald Rumsfeld. Even had the war not been a debacle, something else had happened that did enormous damage to America’s reputation throughout the Arab world and beyond. It provided the enduring and perhaps most iconic images of a military campaign gone totally wrong.

Abu Ghraib prison was a place that scared the hell out of Iraqis under Saddam. It would do the same to the inmates under the authority of the new US guards. The man who investigated the abuse at Abu Ghraib, Major General Antonio Taguba, found: ‘That between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility . . . numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.’
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The report detailed among other appalling abuse ‘credible’ evidence of ‘Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom’ and ‘Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair’.
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But it was the images that leaked out to the media that were the most damaging, because they showed American soldiers treating Iraqis as if they were less than human.

The most haunting image, which for many people summed up the entire scandal, showed a man standing on a box with his arms outstretched, a black sandbag over his head and his body draped in a loose black cloth. Attached to his fingers, toes and penis were wires that the inmate believed were about to electrocute him. The prisoners were regularly forced into these outstretched positions, and the iconography they resembled was not lost on the woman who took many of the pictures of the abuse, the US army’s Specialist Sabrina Harman. She wrote home: ‘At first it was funny . . . but it went too far even I can’t handle what’s going on . . . I can’t get it out of my head. I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with an asp [baton] to find “the taxicab driver” handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ.’
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But for the rest of the world, and particularly in the West, it was the picture of the hooded prisoner that most evoked the image of Christ on the crucifix to the millions of people who saw it. The photo was used on the front page of the
Economist
magazine under the headline ‘Resign, Rumsfeld’.

Almost as elaborate as the cruel and inhuman treatment meted out to the inmates by the American guards were the legal arguments marshalled by the Bush administration in its efforts not to describe as torture what happened in Abu Ghraib and more generally in the treatment of detainees during the ‘War on Terror’. A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee after President Bush had left office said the administration’s support for what the CIA called ‘aggressive interrogation techniques’ ‘conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in US military custody’.
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The US government was immune from lawsuits but the defence contractors working with it were not. Lawyers acting on behalf of inmates began to sue them over claims they were involved in the torture of their clients. Details of the first successful case were reported in January 2013 with an out-of-court settlement of five million dollars to seventy-one former inmates.
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The American military’s great success of the war was the surge of US forces that was announced by George Bush in January 2007. It made a hero of its architect, David Petraeus, who led the troops in Iraq through the build-up that began to curb the violence. The surge added another 30,000 troops. By the autumn almost 170,000 US troops were serving in Iraq, and all had had their tours of duty extended.

As important as the surge, or maybe more so, was a growing fury among the Sunni community with the extremists who claimed to be fighting in their name but who were butchering them too if they didn’t carry out their orders. Petraeus was a firm believer in a more sophisticated approach to counter-insurgency that meant being seen to protect and work with the local communities rather than stopping by only to kick down their doors in a night-time raid. This philosophy and the fatigue with the violence led to the ‘Sons of Iraq’. It began in Anbar province but soon spread across the Sunni areas. It was these men, numbering around one hundred thousand, who by policing their own communities turned the tide. Many were themselves former insurgents. David Matsuda recalled:

One of the things we learned over time was that there were two al-Qaedas. There were al-Qaeda who became part of the [Sons of Iraq] and there were the flying jihadis. I remember talking to Iraqis, and you would get folks saying: ‘The reason I turned against them was because if they wanted my car and I didn’t want to give it to them I’d be shot. If they wanted my daughter and I didn’t want to give her to them I’d be shot,’ all the way to something as simple as: ‘The last straw for me was when they said I couldn’t smoke and that’s when I pointed my guns the other way.’

The Iraqi insurgents turned because while it was clear that the Americans wanted to get out, the foreign Sunni extremists wanted to stay and do just what the label said, create an ‘Islamic State of Iraq’. The ‘Sons of Iraq’ tactics against the jihadists were as brutal as the ones previously inflicted on them. ‘They hunted al-Qaeda down with a vengeance. They dragged al-Qaeda guys through streets behind cars . . . they had videos of feet on the altars in mosques . . . It was pretty much just a ruthless slaughter,’ Doctor Matsuda told an army colleague at the time.
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What happened to the Global Jihadists in Iraq sheds light because it carries lessons for the sectarian conflict in Syria. Just as in Iraq, these men have been welcomed into the fight by the locals in Syria too. Just as in Iraq, the jihadists get their funding and arms from the Gulf. Many of these same men are now in Syria fighting another sectarian war against what they see as Shia proxies for Iran. But in Iraq, when the local fighters grew sick of the violence perpetrated by the foreign extremists they could draw on support from the Americans to force them out. If the foreign fighters start to grow too powerful and savage in Syria, the local fighters will be striving to push them out on their own.

The Sons of Iraq also began taking part in the political process, and many got elected in the first provincial elections in 2009. Some of them probably had a sizeable campaign chest. The US spent $370 million between 2007 and 2009 on the Sons of Iraq. Great wads of dollars were just handed over to its leaders with no receipts required, and no idea how the money was being spent or who received it. No specific goals or benchmarks of success were set either. The financial controls were so weak that in December 2009 a US army captain pleaded guilty to tucking $690,000 of the money into his own back pocket.
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When the Iraqi government took over the programme in October 2008 it was much less willing to hand over the cash. There were constant complaints of late payments and, as the US troops began to wind down, some of the Sunni fighters complained they were being sidelined by the Shia-led government, harassed by the security forces and left at the mercy of revenge attacks by extremists on both sides. But six months after US troops had pulled out, the US ambassador-nominee to Iraq, Brett McGurk, claimed that 70,000 of them were now part of the Iraqi army and had government jobs. Another 30,000 were being paid $300 a month by the state to run checkpoints in Sunni areas.
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The surge was a success for the Americans because it created the environment that enabled them to leave. But it didn’t solve any of the underlying problems in Iraq. There’s no question that the fact that the Americans could and did leave was a good thing. Most people I talked to afterwards were pleased they were gone, because nobody saw them as anything like a solution for the problems that still remained. And those problems are huge.

When those combat troops finally left almost nine years later, the American forces were feared and hated by many ordinary Iraqis. The torture and humiliation of their men at the Abu Ghraib prison had destroyed all trust. US soldiers had been dishonourably discharged for appalling offences and the war campaign had been longer and harder than the American people could have ever imagined.

In his book
The Audacity of Hope
Barack Obama describes a thirty-six-hour trip to Iraq, which included a brief trip to the Marine base in Fallujah in the deadly Anbar province. While he waited for his outgoing helicopter one of his foreign policy advisers struck up a conversation with one of the unit’s senior officers. ‘I asked him what he thought we needed to do to best deal with the situation,’ the staffer tells Obama. ‘What did he say?’ ‘Leave.’ It was advice that Obama intended to take.
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He outlined how to do it in February 2009 in a speech entitled ‘Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq’:

What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals . . . The long-term success of the Iraqi nation will depend upon decisions made by Iraq’s leaders and the fortitude of the Iraqi people. Every nation and every group must know – whether you wish America good or ill – that the end of the war in Iraq will enable a new era of American leadership and engagement in the Middle East. And that era has just begun.
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In September 2011, as the US forces were winding up their operation and the region was reeling from the Arab Spring revolts, Dr James Zogby, from the Washington-based Arab American Institute, was overseeing a major survey across Iraq, the wider Middle East and America about attitudes towards the impact of the war. The Iraqis were ambivalent. They wanted the Americans out yet they were scared about what might come next. But what both Sunni and Shia agreed on was an overwhelming sense that the invasion did not leave them better off.

I asked Dr Zogby whether he thought the US under President Obama did manage to responsibly end the war in Iraq. ‘No, but I don’t fault the administration, because this table was set long before they got involved. We got in badly and we ended up getting out with an unfinished mess that will haunt us and haunt in particular the Iraqi people for a long time to come.’ It was, said Dr Zogby, a war that failed on every level:

America’s leverage is much less than it was ten years ago. Our behaviour during this war was so abominable that it sullied our reputation not just in the Middle East but worldwide. The president said what he said for political reasons, because if you are Commander-in-Chief you don’t put your head between your legs and say: ‘My God we lost, what a disaster, this was an horrific mistake.’ But the reality is that it was.

Iraq was a problem Obama couldn’t wait to be rid of. Two of his team had supported the war though, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, so he handed it over to one of them. Obama had not been in the US Senate when their votes were cast, but if he had been it’s clear that he would have voted against. By the late summer of 2009 he told his vice-president: ‘You take care of it.’ For the rest of the year the two men thought it was going so well that they barely discussed the political transition in Iraq, even over lunch.
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The March 2010 parliamentary elections in Iraq were considered the fairest and most representative in the nation’s history. They may stay that way too. The polls also reached another landmark. Iraq broke the then world record for the longest period between parliamentary elections and the forming of a government. It took eight months for the government to be formed because sectarian divisions once again dragged the process into stalemate. But as I stood in line with hundreds of policemen who were waiting to cast their vote in central Baghdad, it was hard not to be impressed by their willingness to participate in a process that could quite easily have cost them their lives. Long lines of policemen are a magnet for al-Qaeda suicide bombers, so the security at the polling station in Baghdad was very tight. But the policemen lined up patiently, smiling and enjoying the day, waving their newly inked fingers to prove they had taken part. It was a scene I would witness in many other Arab states in the years that followed the 2011 uprisings, but no one suffered more than the Iraqis for their right to vote. What was questionable was whether the vote meant they had a democracy.