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Why
the US May Have to Quit Iraq Sooner Than Planned
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Iraq is full of sad memorials to Britain's
disastrous invasion of the country in the First World War. In
military cemeteries along the Tigris and Euphrates are buried
some 31,000 British and Indian soldiers who died in battle or
of disease in four years fighting. I used to visit one cemetery
in Kut where a Brtitish army of 9,000 surrendered to the Turks
in 1916. The swamp water had submerged the graves leaving only
the tops of tombstones protruding out of the green slime.
The second and equally ill-judged
British intervention in Iraq, this time as an ally of the US,
which started in 2003, looks as if it is going to be slightly
shorter than the first. By the end of 2006 the new Iraqi prime
minister Nouri al-Maliki says that US and British troops will
have handed over security to Iraqi forces in 16 out of 18 provinces.
In fact 8,000 British troops
could be withdrawn even earlier since there is no reason for
them to stay in Basra which they do not control and where they
are likely to take casualties. Inside the city the militia are
already predominant. The motive for British soldiers staying
is presumably so the US can have at least one ally with troops
on the ground.
Why was Mr Maliki more assertive
about the time table for withdrawal than his predecessors? Certainly
he needs to offer something concrete on a US withdrawal to Sunni
members of his government. Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni Arab vice
president, said "there have been real signs by the US and
British government that a decision was taken to withdraw foreign
forces." He said this was enough for the armed resistance
to talk to the US about the withdrawal and the role to be played
by the insurgents after it is complete.
A word of warning here: one
of the many problems of bringing peace to Iraq is that the Sunni
community, though it launched a ferocious guerrilla war against
the occupation which killed or wounded 20,000 US soldiers, does
not have a coherent leadership unlike the Shia and the Kurds.
There is little sign that elected political leaders like Mr Hashimi
can do more than plead with the insurgents. But his overall point
is important. Opinion polls have consistently shown that an overwhelming
majority of Iraq's five million Sunni Arabs support armed attacks
on US forces. This figure may wobble a bit as some Sunni look
for American protection against Shia death squads but overall
the Sunni remain against the occupation.
There are now signs that the
Shia, totalling 60 per cent of Iraqis, also want to see the occupation
ended sooner than seemed likely six months ago. The US has become
a major obstacle to them using their election victories last
year to get a permanent grip on power in Baghdad. The US sided
with the Kurds and the Sunni in forcing out the former prime
minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari though it was not able to divide
the Shia coalition permanently.
The US and British armies in
Iraq have both failed--though they could argue that the root
of the failure is political rather than military. Three years
after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein they control extraordinarily
little territory in the country. Watching American forces in
Baghdad since 2003 it always seemed to me that they floated above
the Iraqi population like a film of oil on water.
Shia animosity towards the
Americans and British forces is now beginning to look like that
of the Sunni at the beginning of the guerrilla war. In Basra
crowds spontaneously dance and cheer when a British helicopter
is shot down just as the Sunni used to celebrate the destruction
of every US Humvee in Baghdad (even then Tony Blair and George
Bush claimed that the insurgents were just a small group of foreign
fighters and Saddam Hussein loyalists).
The problem about the withdrawal
is that it may be coming too late. The White House and Downing
Street never took on board the sheer unpopularity of the occupation
and the extent to which it tainted the Iraqi government, soldiers
and police in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. The Iraqi army and
police are 230,000 strong and this figure is due to rise to 320,000
men by the end of next year. But in reality the allegiance of
these forces is to the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish communities and
not to the central government. The problem has always been loyalty
rather than training.
The US and British armies in
Iraq are becoming less and less relevant to political developments
good or ill. Their presence is not acceptable to most Iraqi Arabs.
They clearly cannot stop a civil war that has already started
in the centre of the country. The main reason for keeping them
there is to avoid a scuttle which would look like America's last
days in Vietnam.
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By Michael Neumann
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