Tag: Iraq

From today's Indie:

We are about to find out if the invasion of Iraq really was a war for oil. The country is on the verge of passing a petroleum law, which will set down rules for investing in its oil industry. That will set off a race among the foreign oil giants, scrambling for their slice of Iraq's vast oil riches. Britain's two world-leading oil companies, BP and Shell, both say they want to enter Iraq. Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Total, Russia's Lukoil and the Chinese will also form part of the rush.

Even while the security situation in Iraq remains dire, it seems the prize will be just too great for the oil majors to resist. The country has proven reserves of 115 billion barrels of oil, around the same as Iran, but it is thought that its actual reserves could be anywhere up to 300 billion barrels - which would make it bigger than Saudi Arabia. Much of the west of Iraq remains unexplored.

John Teeling, chairman of Petrel Resources, the explorer listed on London's AIM market which has had interests in Iraq since 1997, says: "Iraq has 70 discovered, undeveloped fields. You'd die for any one of them. Even the small ones have a billion barrels. If this isn't the holy grail, it's right next door to it."

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the opportunity in Iraq, especially given the fact that foreign companies are, essentially, shut out of the rest of the Middle East and Russia is increasingly hostile to international players.

"It costs $1 a barrel to get oil out in Iraq. If you're getting $60 for it, that's good economics. You don't have to go to Harvard to figure that out," Mr Teeling says.

War-torn Iraq is currently producing less than 2 million barrels a day, well down on the 2.8 million barrels before the 2003 invasion by the US and Britain.

The biggest story of this week, month and year in Britain so far. The government will announce that the numbers of troops in Iraq will be halved by the end of the year:

Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to announce a timetable for the withdrawal of UK troops from Iraq.

Mr Blair is set to make a statement to MPs in the House of Commons about the 7,200 British troops serving in Iraq.

It is thought he will say 1,500 troops are expected to return home in months, with 3,000 withdrawn by Christmas.

Downing Street has not confirmed the reports but Whitehall sources have told the BBC the process could be slowed down if the situation in Iraq worsens.

The plan is for the British troops remaining in Iraq to be based outside Basra for a period of time so they can provide support if needed and help monitor the border with Iran.

The Times has more:

The Times has learnt that Mr Blair will emphasise that his hopes of withdrawal will be conditional on signs that the Iraqi forces are able to fulfil their mission. The next rotation of troops in Basra — with 1 Mechanised Brigade taking over from 19 Light Brigade in the early summer — had been due to go ahead without any reduction in numbers.

There has been a growing view that the continued presence of British troops may have contributed to the violence in the city. Soldiers in Basra have predicted that the attacks will fall off when the British leave.

One factor in the move has been the assessment that the international force in Iraq will not recreate a perfect Western-style democracy. General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the General Staff, said in October that the Government should lower its expectations in Iraq.

Sir Richard, who took over from General Sir Mike Jackson in August, said that the continuing presence in Iraq of British troops was “exacerbating the security problems” and that they should come home soon.

This contrasted with Mr Blair, who told the Labour Party conference that it was important for troops to remain in Iraq to secure the peace. He said: “If we retreat now, we won’t be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.”

I suspect this will hand ammunition to those in the US who also argue for a withdrawal sooner rather than later.

The Independent's Patrick Cockburn looks at Muqtada al-Sadr's rise to prominence. A choice excerpt:

The rise of Muqtada has been one of the surprises of the four years since the US invaded. Saddam Hussein must have been astonished as he went to his execution to hear the name: "Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqatada!" shouted by jeering onlookers. Had Saddam realised the potential of this strange, enigmatic young man before the invasion then he would doubtless have killed him, as he did Muqtada's father and two of his brothers eight years ago.

It is difficult to avoid Muqtada's presence in Baghdad. Dressed in his dark clerical robes, he peers menacingly from posters on thousands of walls. His Mehdi Army militiamen control not only Sadr City but much of the capital and southern Iraq. He is an essential prop to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in which six ministers belong to his movement.

Yet the source of his power has remained a mystery to the US and many Iraqi politicians. Few men have been so consistently underestimated. He is not a great orator, nor does he have huge charisma. His movement has limited resources. Until recently, his militiamen were unpaid and provided their own weapons. He does not have a powerful foreign backer. In spite of US efforts to link him to Iran and claim that he has fled there, he and his movement have traditionally been suspicious of the Iranians, and they of him.

The real source of his vast influence among the Shia of Iraq - the Sunni see him as orchestrating the death squads that have killed so many of them - is that he promulgates a blend of religion and nationalism that they find deeply attractive. He comes from the deeply revered Sadr clerical family that provided so many martyrs under Saddam Hussein. Some American commanders may wonder if it is wise for the US to pick a fight with a religious leader regarded with cult-like devotion by millions of Shias. They may also reflect that he is not just popular with the poor masses of Shia Iraq - his picture also hangs on the wall in many Iraqi police stations and army barracks. Some of these will be the very people on whom US and Iraqi commanders will rely in order to regain control of Baghdad.

Which is, I suppose, intended to make you think I'm all the wiser, and should make you embarrassingly eager to read this post. In the Washington Post, Shadid writes that while the Middle East is roiled by sectarian tensions, these tensions have specifically political origins (in other words, this isn't happening because "time stopped" in the Middle East around 680 and suddenly "resumed"):

Over centuries, differences in ritual, jurisprudence and theology evolved, some of them slight. But the Shiite community -- as a majority in Iraq and Bahrain and a sizable minority in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- is shaped far more today by the underprivileged status it has often endured in an Arab world that is predominantly Sunni. For decades, the Saudi government banned Shiite rituals; a Sunni minority rules a restive Shiite majority in Bahrain; Lebanese Shiites, long poor and disenfranchised, often faced chauvinism that still lingers.

One of the key problems here is, I think, the legacy of "Arab nationalism," a concoction that has been little short of a disaster for the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world. Because it attempted to create consensus, connections and commonalities, oftentimes political in nature, where historically few meaningful economic and political connections existed, it divided and suffocated the Arab world precisely when it most needed to develop. Hence Turkey and Iran, with "contained nationalisms", were able to develop far more swiftly and effectively, leaving the Arab world in the dust. Desert. You get my drift.  

This idea that there is an Arab world has long been a popular one, but a strikingly ineffective one, perhaps encouraging us to see the Arab world as instead several distinct regions, each of them with strong Arabic-language influences. What was the Middle East was generally divided between wealthy, broadly Islamic, ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse governments -- even Safavid Iran, which lays the most claim to a proto-nationalist identity, is the result of Turkic dynasties from Azerbaijan establishing their rule in the Persian plateaus.

Historically, Turkey has looked to the Balkans and Anatolia as its power base; wealthy Egypt was important to the Ottomans, but it had no meaningful connections to the Persian Gulf (at least, not compared to its connections to Greece and the Balkans). Iran's sphere of influence was the Mesopotamian plains, the Persian Gulf and southern Transoxiana and Khurasan. Why lump Egypt in with Dubai? Dubai with Jordan? Because they speak the same language? 

The solution is not going to be found in Sunni v. Shi'i "dialoguing" alone -- Sunni and Shi'i have different readings of Islamic history, and it is terribly unlikely we will forego our differences and blend into one Islamic mass. But this does not mean Sunni and Shi'i are doomed to slaughter one another, just because they read history and texts differently: The solution is in effective security for Iraq, with the partnership of neighboring countries, who are far more concerned with their stability than with presumed theological correctness. (Since when has Saudi Arabia, staunch ally of the West, been concerned with upholding pan-Sunni Islamism?).

The solution is democratization, the only process that can handle tensions in the region that are not sectarian, but the product of political strategies of oppression, marginalization and fear. And in that process of democratization, leadership has to bend to the realities of the region: Just as there was never a real Turkey, and hence the problems with the Kurds, there were never small "Arab" states, with an exclusively "Arab orientation," such that would encourage and promote homogenization, dictatorship and demagoguery.

Kamal Nazer Yasin, a journalist at EurasiaNet, provides a factually helpful if theoretically simplistic summary of the current tensions in the Middle East between Sunni and Shi'i factions, governments and potential alliances.

Yasin points out how dominantly Shi'i Iran is alarmed by sectarian tensions, highlighting efforts to soften the divide. This point-of-view is quite helpful in that we often hear of Sunni fears of a "Shi'a crescent", but we rarely read about Iran's government's opinions:

To reduce the chances of a broad anti-Iranian coalition ... Tehran has made a variety of goodwill gestures aimed at improving Iran’s image among Sunnis. Iranian leaders have allocated funds for the construction of Sunni mosques and curtailed anti-Sunni propaganda.

On January 14, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei threw his support behind the new course. Ostensibly responding to the Bush administration’s toughened stance toward Iran, he characterized those urging Shi’a-Sunni strife as "neither Shi’a nor Sunni." He further said there was a need for greater unity in the Islamic world to discourage some Muslim countries from embracing the United States and Britain.

Within days of Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments, the Iranian press and Friday Prayer leaders picked up on the theme of Shi’a-Sunni unity in radically new fashion. For example, Baztab, an influential conservative-dominated website, published an unprecedented article January 25, cataloguing the wrongs that Sunnis have suffered in Iraq.

Later, Iran’s Press Oversight Committee announced that the hardliner-dominated paper Siasat-e Rooz, published by former commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, had been closed indefinitely for publishing an article that mocked Islam’s second caliph, Omar ibn Khattab, who has been traditionally reviled by Shi’as.

(I wonder, where does President Ahmedinejad stand in all of this?) Mr Yasin also points out Sunni concerns about Iran as counterpoint, though I find this portion of his article to be somewhat an after-thought, without a clear discussion of political implications and revelations:

Some believe that anti-Iranian sentiment among many segments of the Sunni community is so deeply entrenched that opening a dialogue would seem impossible at this time. They point out that Iran’s conciliatory rhetoric is contradicted by an aggressive Iranian-backed campaign to win Sunni converts to Shi’sm in Muslim nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria.

Officially, the Islamic Republic has always discouraged anti-Sunni rhetoric and has endorsed the concept of Shi’a-Sunni unity. Nevertheless, anxiety and wariness towards everything Sunni has continued to pervade Iran’s religious and political life at all levels. Evidence of prejudice is found in the fact that, over 27 years after the Islamic revolution in Iran, there are no Sunni mosques allowed to operate in Tehran. Likewise, no Iranian of Sunni persuasion has ever risen to a high official position in the Islamic Republic, even though Sunnis constitute roughly 9 percent of the population.

I can't speak to the charge of "seeking converts" in Middle Eastern countries, though I know it's something King Abdullah (the Saudi variety) picked up on recently, insisting that the majority of Sunnis would not leave the "fold." 

More immediately, the other Sunni grievances don't seem like "real" factors in the current tensions. I continue to believe that the tensions are political and economic in nature, albeit they are increasingly given a sectarian mask in order for both sides to gain leverage or for outside forces, aiming to create regional instability, to accomplish their objectives.

Why, after all, are Sunni governments so concerned Iran doesn't give equal rights to Sunni Islam? It's not like we're talking about democratic states; Saudi Arabia and Iran are already facing-off across an ideological divide created to represent a struggle for control of the Muslim world and the (Persian) (Arabian) Gulf. Saudi Arabia was most threatened by Iran in the early 1980's, as Saudi Arabia saw in radical Khomeinism a great threat to a certain dominance that had in fact only gone unquestioned for 10 years, or so. I'm talking about Nasser, of course, and the Egypt v. Saudi divide that became a Modernizing, Republican v. Traditional, Monarchical divide. If we pay closer attention, we'd see...

Shadi Hamid wrote a diary recently about the liberal obligation to assure that a genocide in Iraq does not take place. He says:

The question, of course, is whether there would in fact be massive ethnic cleansing (on a scale demonstrably worse than what is currently occuring) if America fully withdraws. If the answer is yes (and I'm not so sure that it is), then I don't know how we can advocate immediate/full withdrawal in good conscience. We simply cannot.

So, a couple of things:

First, I myself used to hold this position -- the humanitarian impulse -- for keeping American troops in Iraq. But I gave up on holding those beliefs.

My reason for switching was simple: our continued presence provides an externality that both the Shi'a and Sunni militants can blame when they commit heinous acts. If we remove ourselves, accountability falls upon them directly for any genocide or attempted genocide.

Second, I do not believe there would be massive ethnic cleansing on a demonstrably worse scale. This is largely because there is a power parity between the Shi'a and the Sunni and the Kurds. Actual genocide only occurs in situations where one side is demonstrably stronger than the others. That is not the case in Iraq.

Now, what may occur is a potential escalation in violence (again, potentially). However, it goes back to American troop presence. Our presence serves to color the Iraqi National Guardsmen as illegitimate. Perhaps if we left they could actually make the argument that they represent Iraq, and a true Iraqi is one who joins the police, not the insurgency. However, until our troops are in Iraq, the Iraqi Police wil be seen as our b*tches, and it will be easy for any warlord to rile people up against them.

Third, Aziz in the comments, and Shadi implicitly believe, that troop withdrawal means that the alternative is "isolationism." I used to set up that strawmas as well. However, the fact is, that just because we do not have troops present, does not mean that our diplomatic, and economic influence has to recede. Nor, in fact, do we really have to pull all of our ships out of the Persian Gulf. Nor does our media leave. Nor does our Congress cease to discuss how to engage Iraq. Nor does our President cease to find ways to assist in the reconstruction of Iraq. Nor do American people cease to stop aiding Iraqis. 

So, my message to Shadi, Aziz, and the Andrew Sullivan commentator is pretty simple. The alternative to "sticking around to prevent genocide" isn't isolationism, nor is the likelihood of genocide imminent. 

Promoted to the frontpage 

A Daily Dish reader asks an excellent question, one that I suspect puts liberals in an awkward position:

One of the main arguments against an American pullback or pullout is the likelihood of a genocidal and brutal civil war that would "force" the U.S. to come in to stop the slaughter. I think it is appropriate to assume that there would be massive killing. I've heard arguments to the contrary and I've heard arguments that Syria/Iran, etc. would not permit it, but assuming that it would not take place is as foolish as assuming that everything will be just fine. So we should assume that there will be incredible slaughter, religious dislocation and depravity - at least in the non-Kurdish areas - if we get out.

Query: Do we have the discipline to stay out and to be presented night after night with scenes of uniminaginable slaughter that we will be accused of being "responsible for"?

What's the "progressive" response to this? If we have strong reason to believe that there will be genocidal slaughter if/after American forces withdraw, then it seems to me that simply leaving Iraq - and leaving it at that - is a morally untenable position to take. Perhaps realists can stomach the slaughter of non-Americans (as is their wont), but those of us who claim to be liberals should aspire for a higher standard of conduct. The question, of course, is whether there would in fact be massive ethnic cleansing (on a scale demonstrably worse than what is currently occuring) if America fully withdraws. If the answer is yes (and I'm not so sure that it is), then I don't know how we can advocate immediate/full withdrawal in good conscience. We simply cannot. This is something liberals must grapple with. Andrew Sullivan's response troubles me:

The great drawback of my own position is that it requires the United States to stand back as genocide takes place. The great drawback of the president's position is that we are already policing and enabling a genocide at a slower pace but comparable scale. History suggests that Americans can leave a place to hell. America was tough enough to watch the Vietnamese boat people. But of course it makes me pause. It should. The choices before us are all dreadful. But sometimes the best decision is the least palatable in the short term.

There are, however, other options besides "leaving" and "staying." Which is why I think Fareed Zakaria's partial drawdown/rapid-reaction force proposal is a third way out that puts the needed pressure on the Maliki government (by reducing troop levels), while reserving the American right to intervene in the case of genocidal slaughter.

It tires me to hear, over and over, that Iraq's civil war is somehow about a Sunni v. Shi’i conflict, and that the root of the rage is hundreds of years old, and is now, finally, spilling over into a sectarian catharsis that either Saddam put a lid on or the Iranian Revolution released.

For the American media, this is a common trope in place of and motivated by fear of deep analysis, which is something our media has – over modern-day equivalents of centuries – failed consistently at providing. For the American government, it is a comforting illusion to mask the fact that we lost, the worst four-letter word in the triumphal American narrative. For the wider Arab and Muslim world, it is an easy way out; rather than focus on the dynamics that Iraq and their own societies have in common, one can ward off democracy by way of pointing to Iraq’s troubles. “That’s what’ll happen if Sunni and Shi’i aren’t together kept down by oppressive government,” the Arab elite want us to hear.

But fundamentally it doesn’t matter that Iraq is majority Shi’i and minority Sunni, mostly Arab but also significantly Kurd. What matters are the dynamics inherent in these populations: Majority and minority. What matters in Iraq is that the country was, for a very long time, ruled by an elite in Baghdad that had few ties to Kurdish populations in the north or growing Shi’i populations in the south. (Add oil, draw bad borders, wait for explosion.) This dynamic culminated in the appearance of a terrible dictator, whose dictatorship oppressed all, though because the dictator was an Arab Sunni and like any politician needed a power base, he was especially keen to oppress threatening (that is, numerically significant) populations that were not-Sunni and not-Arab.

We see the same dynamic at work in Iraq's northern neighbor, Turkey. Largely Hanafi Sunni, Turkish Turkey has few problems with largely Hanafi Sunni Pakistan, but largely Sunni Turkey has enormous problems with largely Sunni Kurdish populations, because there is a numerically significant Kurdish Sunni population in Turkey’s borders that does not buy into Ataturk’s vision of an ethnically Turkish state. (Nor should it.) The dynamic here is one of a political elite that has pursued an ideology, developed a base of power, and consistently excluded minorities from sharing in or problematizing that elite, no matter how often that dynamic is proven to be terribly dangerous and destabilizing. We are faced not with a 1,400 year-old religio-cultural failure, but a post-19th century inability to develop institutions that respect changing social realities, imposed borders, not to mention the problem of regularly disastrous foreign interference.