IRAQ: The West Shakes Up The Middle East by Patrick Cockburn

Author:Patrick Cockburn [Cockburn, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2016-09-13T05:00:00+00:00

Saturday, 28 August 2010

GRIM STABILITY IS THE US LEGACY

A few days after the US announced that it had withdrawn its last combat brigade from Iraq, the local branch of al-Qa'ida staged a show of strength, killing or wounding 300 people in attacks across the country. Its suicide bombers drove vehicles packed with explosives into police stations or military convoys from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.

The continuing ferocious violence in Iraq, where most days more people die by bomb and bullet than in Afghanistan, is leading to questions about its stability once US forces finally withdraw by the end of next year.

American politicians, soldiers and think tankers blithely recommend American troops staying longer, though at their most numerous US troops signally failed to stop the bombers.

The unfortunate truth may be that Iraq has already achieved a grisly form of stability, though it comes with a persistently high level of violence and a semi-dysfunctional state. Bad though the present situation is in the country, there may not be sufficient reasons for it to change.

Politically, Iraq may look increasingly like Lebanon with each ethnic or sectarian community vying for a share of power and resources. But if Iraq is becoming like Lebanon, it is a Lebanon with money. Dysfunctional the state machine may be, but it still has $60 billion in annual oil revenues to spend, mostly on the salaries of the security forces and the civilian bureaucracy. One former Iraqi minister says that the one time he had seen the new Iraqi political elite "in a state of real panic was when the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel a couple of years ago".

It is oil revenues which prevent Iraq from flying apart and make it such a different country from Afghanistan where the government is dependent on foreign handouts. Shia, Sunni and Kurds may not like each other, but they cannot do without a share of the oil money or the jobs it finances. A third of the 27 million Iraqi population depends on rations provided by the state to prevent malnutrition. Even the highly autonomous Kurds depend on $4-5 billion from Baghdad to fund their government. Aside from oil, and the state machine it pays for, there is not much holding Iraq together. The political landscape is defined by sectarian and ethnic divisions. Communal loyalty almost entirely determined the outcome of the parliamentary election on 7 March this year as it had done in the previous poll in 2005. There is little sign of this changing.

This should not be too surprising. Kurds, Shia and Sunni all nurse memories of being massacred.

Some 180,000 Kurds were slaughtered during Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign in the late 1980s; tens of thousands of Shia were killed when their uprising was crushed by the Iraqi army in 1991; the Sunni were the main victims of the sectarian civil war of 2006-7 when, at its worst, 3,000 bodies were being found every month in Baghdad.

The legacy of these massacres is that each of the three main Iraqi communities behaves as if it were a separate country.

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