Another Gloomy Iraq Post

by hilzoy

The BBC has a story I hope is wrong, but fear is true:

“Iraq’s new police force is facing mounting allegations of systematic abuse and torture of people in detention, as well as allegations of extra-judicial killings. The minority Sunni community in particular claims it is being targeted by the Shia-dominated police force.”

According to the BBC, Human Rights Watch has collected a number of similar stories, including a novel use for power tools that I hope I manage to repress as soon as possible:

“The camera focuses on marks all over his body including what appear to be drill holes. According to Salman al-Faraji, a human rights activist and lawyer, the use of drills is common. “Most cases are quite similar, the same methods are used,” he said. “They torture them, breaking hands and legs. They use electric drills to pierce their bodies and then the killing is carried out at close range.””

One of several nightmare outcomes for Iraq has always been the emergence of a police state like Saddam Hussein’s, but with different allegiances. It is, I think, marginally better than civil war, but that’s sort of like saying that being tortured with an electric drill is marginally better than being tortured with a belt sander. And of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

In the latest New York Review of Books, Peter Galbraith has an article about Iraq that is disturbing, though not surprising. I’ve posted a longish excerpt below the fold, but it’s worth reading the whole article, since Galbraith is, in my opinion, one of the sharpest observers of Iraq around.

“Real power in Shiite Iraq rests, however, with two religious parties: Abdel Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa (“Call,” in English) of Iraq’s Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Of the two, SCIRI is the more pro-Iranian. Both parties have military wings, and SCIRI’s Badr Corps has grown significantly from the five thousand fighters that harassed Saddam’s regime from Iran in the decades before the war; it now works closely with Iraq’s Shiite interior minister, until recently the corps’ commander, to provide security and fight Sunni Arab insurgents.

SCIRI and Dawa want Iraq to be an Islamic state. They propose to make Islam the principal source of law, which most immediately would affect the status of women. For Muslim women, religious law—rather than Iraq’s relatively progressive civil code—would govern personal status, including matters relating to marriage, divorce, property, and child custody. A Dawa draft for the Iraqi constitution would limit religious freedom for non-Muslims, and apparently deny such freedom altogether to peoples not “of the book,” such as the Yezidis (a significant minority in Kurdistan), Zoroastrians, and Bahais.

This program is not just theoretical. Since Saddam’s fall, Shiite religious parties have had de facto control over Iraq’s southern cities. There Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern—and legislate—without authority from Baghdad, and certainly without any reference to the freedoms incorporated in Iraq’s American-written interim constitution—the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL).

Dawa and SCIRI are not just promoting an Iranian-style political system — they are also directly promoting Iranian interests. Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader, has advocated paying Iran billions in reparations for damage done in the Iran–Iraq war, even as the Bush administration has been working to win forgiveness for Iraq’s Saddam-era debt. Iraq’s Shiite oil minister is promoting construction of an export pipeline for petroleum from Basra to the Iranian port city of Abadan, creating an economic and strategic link between the two historic adversaries that would have been unthinkable until now. Iraq’s Shiite government has acknowledged Iraq’s responsibility for starting the Iran–Iraq war, and apologized. It is an acknowledgment probably justified by the historical record, but one that has infuriated Iraq’s Sunni Arabs.

Through its spies, infiltrators, and sympathizers, Iran has a presence in Iraq’s security forces and military. It is virtually certain that Iran has access to any intelligence that the Iraqis have. Not only does Iran have an opportunity to insert its people into the Iraqi apparatus, it also has many Iraqi allies willing to do its bidding When I asked an Iraqi with major intelligence responsibilities about foreign infiltration into Iraq, he dismissed the influx from Syria (the focus of the Bush administration’s attention) and said the real problem was from Iran. When I asked how the infiltration took place, he said simply, “But Iran is already in Baghdad.

On July 7, the Iranian and Iraqi defense ministers signed an agreement on military cooperation that would have Iranians train the Iraqi military. The Iraqi defense minister made a point of saying American views would not count: “Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries.” However, even if the training is deferred or derailed, it is only the visible—and very much smaller—component of a stealth Iranian encroachment into Iraq’s national institutions and security services.

So far, the Bush administration seems surprisingly untroubled by the influence in Baghdad of a country to which it has shown unrelenting hostility. But should the President want to understand why the Shiites have shown so little receptivity to his version of democracy, he need only go back to his father’s presidency. On February 15, 1991, the first President Bush called on the Iraqi people and military to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Shiites made the mistake of believing he meant it. Three days after the first Gulf War ended, on March 2, 1991, a Shiite rebellion began in Basra and quickly spread to the southern reaches of Baghdad. Then Saddam counterattacked with great ferocity. Three hundred thousand Shiites ultimately died. Not only did the elder President Bush not help, his administration refused even to hear the pleas of the more and more desperate Shiites. While the elder Bush’s behavior may have many explanations, no Shiite I know of sees it as anything other than a calculated plan to have them slaughtered. By contrast, Iran, which backed SCIRI and Dawa and equipped the Badr Brigade, has long been seen as a reliable friend.”

Commenting on Iran’s recent agreement to train Iraqi troops, Al Kamen of the Washington Post wrote that “Iran appears to have agreed to become the first member of the Axis of Evil to join the ever-dwindling Coalition of the Willing.” Iran certainly seems to me to be one of the clearest winners of our war in Iraq. It’s ironic: back in the 1980s, the reason we supported Saddam was precisely to prevent Iran from winning its war against him, and thereby becoming the predominant power in the Gulf. That’s why, in that famous photo, Donald Rumsfeld is smiling at Saddam and shaking his hand; and, more to the point, why we gave Saddam weapons and satellite intelligence. Now Saddam has been toppled, parties sympathetic to Iran are in power, and Iran will be helping to train the Iraqi military; and, oddly enough, we are the ones who made it all possible. To quote Galbraith again:

” It may be the ultimate irony that the United States, which, among other reasons, invaded Iraq to help bring liberal democracy to the Middle East, will play a decisive role in establishing its second Shiite Islamic state.”

And what are we doing about this? According to Seymour Hersh, we tried to rig the Iraqi elections against the pro-Iranian Shi’ite parties. More recently, however, we seem to be talking instead about withdrawing substantial numbers of troops and leaving the Iraqis to their fate. I am well and truly torn about this, but I think that, on balance, I’m for it. But that’s not because I don’t think we have a serious moral obligation to stick around and make things right in Iraq, or because I think we will have done that by this spring. It’s because I have lost all hope that this administration will manage to do more good than harm if we remain.

Back in 2003, Dennis Kucinich (I think) used to ask: if it was wrong to go to war in Iraq in the first place, how can it be right to stay? Easily, I thought. We changed everything by invading Iraq, and now we have to stay and make things right. Suppose, I thought to myself, that I kidnapped someone, drugged him, and started to remove his kidney for sale on the black market. If, halfway through the operation, I suddenly realized that what I was doing was wrong, should I say to myself: if it was wrong to start this operation, how can it be right to finish it? and leave my patient to bleed to death on the operating table? Obviously not. And I thought leaving Iraq would be just like that.

I still think so. And I don’t think we’re anywhere near finishing the operation. The patient is still bleeding, and we have a lot to do. The only reason I am prepared to contemplate leaving is because my view of the surgeon has changed. (Note: I didn’t think we’d do a good job before the invasion, but I didn’t think we’d be as staggeringly incompetent as we have been. It never would have occurred to me, for instance, that we would go in without a plan for the occupation.) I now think: suppose that, as before, I kidnap someone, cut him open, hack out his kidney, and then realize that what I’m doing is wrong. I recognize that I still have an obligation to finish the job. But now suppose that, as it happens, I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no surgical training: I located the kidney using a picture of Our Amazing Bodies! from the web, and then I cut it out, but I have no idea what to do next: which blood vessels to tie off, how to close up, and so forth. And imagine further that I’m blind drunk, so that even if I did know what to do, I’d probably botch it.

Under those circumstances, maybe I shouldn’t continue to operate. Maybe, now that the patient is coming round, I should let him deal with it, since he probably won’t do a worse job than I would. Maybe I should let him stagger off for help to his ever-so-obliging neighbor to the east. Maybe I should stick around and do my drunk and ignorant best. The right answer to this question isn’t clear. But what is clear is that even if I make the right call at this point, the whole episode is nothing for me to be proud of.