Once more unto the breech...

The situation in Iraq is grim, and the British public knows it; Saturday’s CommunicateResearch poll for The Independent showed 72% of voters believing the that coalition cannot win, and 62% favouring troop withdrawal regardless of the situation on the ground. 72% see Iraq descending into civil war once British and American troops leave, but the public seems to have concluded that this is inevitable, and that maintaining the occupation in the medium term can perhaps postpone but not prevent a cataclysmic sectarian conflict.

I beg to differ; while the coalition holds the ring in Iraq, and withdrawal can only escalate the violence, we owe it to the Iraqi people to give stability another chance. But it is obvious why many in Britain have given up on the citizens of Basra and Baghdad: daily death tolls are not the stuff to stiffen resolve. Tony Blair announced last week a drawing down of British forces in Iraq, and his successor as Prime Minister will face ever mounting pressure to finally withdraw the 5500 troops that will still remain. If the British do ‘cut and run’, American President George Bush will find himself isolated both domestically and internationally, and under unendurable pressure to capitulate too. Mesopotamian carnage will be the result.

If the public is ever again to rally in the cause of Iraq, a new, optimistic narrative is needed, one that focuses attention on the real, positive impact the British army can still have. I’m no monarchist, but the monarchy resonates with the British (and indeed American) people like no other institution, and the deployment of the regiment of Prince Harry, again announced last week, could be just the narrative a sustained - and still potentially successful - occupation needs. Tales of royal derring-do could stem and mitigate the torrent of bad news bombarding the public imagination.

But, then again, the war for British hearts and minds may already be lost, and, if those hearts and minds are to be believed, a new war in Iraq will inevitably follow. By deciding that all is lost, the British public is indulging a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The US and the executions

Another short piece for TCS, answering the question as one of a group of panelists, "Should the US have done anything to stop the execution of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants?":

Capital punishment is wrong in principle. The sordid hanging of Saddam Hussein after a partial trial was not just wrong but abhorrent. But the US was nevertheless right to leave to Iraqi’s the business of punishing their former dictator and his co-defendants.

By executing leaders of the former Baathist regime, the Iraqi administration missed a rare opportunity to take the moral high ground, and sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia have probably widened as a result. But Saddam and his associates were undoubtedly guilty of crimes against humanity and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Shia and Kurds. Many victims and their relatives would have seen a reprieve for Saddam as irresponsibly unjust, and the government calculated that the good will of the previously persecuted was worth the further alienation of the Sunni community. Whether or not we in the West agree with this assessment, it was one for the Iraqi government to make; if Iraq is ever to develop as a functioning state it must be given room for independent policy, and arguably-hypocritical US intervention to stop the executions would have served only to erode the Iraqi government’s fragile legitimacy. Coalition governments ripped Iraq apart by demolishing Saddam’s regime and imposing a new one. Imposing our values as well would have only deepened the chaos.

The 'surge' emerged

United States President George Bush has finally announced a long anticipated 'surge' in American service personnel in Iraq during a televised ‘address to the nation’ last night. The announcement was met with predicable condemnation from the Democratic Party, dismayed at having so little influence over Iraq policy despite fighting and winning Congressional elections on the issue, yet commentators who support the continued presence of coalition forces in Iraq should also have misgivings that the 21,500 extra troops which Bush is sending number considerably fewer than the leading figures behind the new plan, former general Jack Keane and conservative scholar Frederick Kagan, had hoped for and proposed. As a military advisor to the Iraq Study Group, James Carafano, notes, Bush’s policy is essentially a gamble that the tens of thousands of Iraqi troops with which Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki proposes to secure Baghdad will do more than simply make up the numbers.

At stake is not just the future of Iraq, but the future electoral prospects of the Republican Party. As GOP support for the President begins to fissure, many in the leadership are stressing the transitory nature of the boost, yet the strategy set out by Kagan and Keane commits troops to Baghdad for 18 months and then to the province at the heart of the Sunni insurgency, Anbar, for the rest of 2008. Even success in Anbar risks looking like bloody chaos in a year when Bush’s successor on the Republican presidential ticket will have to face an already sceptical electorate. Bush’s policy may yet secure stability in Iraq at the price of Republican victory in America.

Maliki should 'stay the course' too

Following a leaked American administration memo casting doubt on his competence late last year, Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki has given a personal account of his premiership to the American media, telling the Wall Street Journal of his loathing for the top job and his wish to 'be done with it' before the end of his mandate. Criticised for failing to contain factional strife across the country and even within his own government, he has presided over the bloodiest eight months of Iraq's abominably violent recent history. It is probable that his comments embody nothing more than an attempt to secure an increase in the American military presence which, pace the Iraq Study Group, seems certain to be announced. Should, however, Maliki's language signal an intent to quit in the short term, or if his comments are thus interpreted in Iraq, the Shia-dominated government risks squandering an unrivalled opportunity to pull the country back from the brink of civil war. In the coming months it will be in a unique situation, possessing both bankable political capital within the wider Shia community following the execution of Saddam Hussein and the unprecedented ability to enforce its will through that extra American firepower. It is just conceivable that in 2007 an Iraqi statesman will mollify moderate Sunni opinion and put Iraq back on the path to stability by making vital concessions on the constitution - guaranteeing an equitable allocation of oil revenue and ruling out a Shia ‘super-region’ - and reining in the Shia militia. Such a rosy scenario is most likely if the figure attempting to be that statesman is Nuri al-Maliki.

If he were to quit now, Maliki would risk paralysing the highest levels of Iraqi government just as they needed to be at their most dynamic. It took the UIA five months from the December 2005 elections to anoint a leader acceptable to the requisite two thirds of the Iraqi National Assembly. Moreover, a likely outcome of a repeat of such protracted wrangling would be the messy collapse of the UIA itself and the emergence of a new coalition, lead by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the assembly’s largest party, and excluding the supporters of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The SCIRI’s leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose family has an historical animosity to that of Sadr, was reported by Associated Press as attempting to form such a government in December after meeting US President George Bush. But even if an alternative government was swiftly cobbled together, the expulsion of the Sadrists from the government would be worrying. The two largest Shia militia are the SCIRI’s Badr Organisation and Sadr’s Mahdi Army, whose forces have frequently skirmished in the Shia heartlands. A political coup against Sadr risks the implosion of the Shia community, while ultimately disarming these groups depends on the government retaining some influence over them, and they in turn retaining a stake in government. Maliki was elected as a compromise candidate, and he represents the best hope of keeping both the SCIRI and the Sadrists on board. As a relatively neutral figure, he is also a man with whom dissident Sunnis would be more comfortable in dealing with than a figure from the SCIRI, which is seen as a Trojan Horse for Iranian influence. Maliki has come in for much criticism over recent months, but his departure would create more problems than it solves. Like the foreign troops which prop up his government, Maliki should, at least for now, ‘stay the course’.

Saddam

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was hanged at dawn. The former Iraqi dictator had seemed destined for such a fate ever since his capture in December 2003, but his execution, mandated early last month by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the killing of 148 people in the town of Dujail in 1982, is nonetheless deplorable. As many commentators have been keen to argue, keeping him alive would perhaps have allowed Iraq the cathartic process of bringing him to judicial account for the innumerable other crimes of which he is accused, while killing him carries the very real risk of exacerbating further the sectarian horrors which ravage Iraq. Yet such claims are far from certain. It would be optimistic to credit the trials as they stood, widely perceived as a sham in the Sunni community, as reconciling Iraqis with a communal heritage. The American and Iraqi governments are not wholly naive in hoping that the passing of the old dictator may do a little to actually contain factional violence by quashing the hopes, and indeed fears, of those for whom a return to the old order was still conceivable. A neutral position on the relationship between Saddam's death and Iraq's stability is also possible. As Adnan Pachachi, a former President of the post-invasion Iraqi Governing Council, argues, "I don't think it will make much difference, frankly". The ultimate effects of Saddam's death are simply too ambiguous a foundation on which to condemn it.

Yet the execution of Saddam Hussein is nonetheless a deplorable act - not because of any mooted impact on contemporary Iraq, but because it is simply never justified for the state to claim the right to take another's life. Amnesty International counted 2,148 executions and 5,186 sentences of death in 2005. When the figures for 2006 are released, Saddam will simply be one among many. Each deserves censure. But Iraq is and was, as Saddam's foreshortened trials showed, a land cursed with abominable acts. To abhor the hanging of a human being, even one guilty of crimes against humanity, may be an appropriate response, but it should pale beside the revulsion we feel for the sectarian atrocities which are occurring on a daily basis. External pundits and politicians have briefly concerned themselves with the fate of Saddam, but the real debate remains how best to contain and curtail this violence. Coalition troops, who captured Saddam just over three years ago, remain the only bulwark against full-blown civil war. Whatever the impact of the former dictator's execution, no-one should be simply giving up on Iraq. The case that withdrawal is the least-worst option - abandoning Iraqis to a slaughter with the potential to far surpass those of Saddam - is one which is yet to be convincingly made.

Iraqi frying pans and internecine fires

The Iraq Study Group report, due to be published on Wednesday, looks set to recommend talks with Iran and Syria aimed at fostering stability in their troubled neighbour, alongside a drawing down of American combat troops to be fully sidelined to a supporting role by the Iraqi army by early 2008. The aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq has proved disastrous, for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (and the thousands of Iraqi and coalition troops) who have perished, for wider regional stability, and for the image of the West in the world. But that is no reason to withdraw now. If the current situation is a disaster, it is only the continued presence of coalition troops which stand between disaster and catastrophe.

Bar the violence which flared in August 2005 during sensitive discussions over the future constitution, the last five months have been the bloodiest since April 2003, but it was nevertheless misleading for Kofi Annan to describe the situation as 'worse that civil war' earlier this month. A full withdrawal of coalition troops would give free reign to the low level ethnic cleansing already in operation and draw in the major powers from across the region. Recent Iranian and Syrian interest in Iraqi talks, on which parts of the ISG report seem to be predicated, is if anything an indication that such countries are fully aware of the destabilising potential of Iraqi chaos for their own populations. Turn the clock back 30 years and regional powers armed militias and bloodily intervened in Lebanon to fuel a civil war which still fizzes today. Transpose such a situation to Iraq, and we face the prospect of a nuclear Iran invading in support of the Shia-dominated government, a Jordanian, Saudi or Syrian response in support of the Sunni insurgents, and violent Turkish efforts to stamp out an efflorescence of Kurdish separatism. The situation in Iraq might be beyond repair, but until that is certain, the coalition should not seriously be countenancing a phased withdrawal. The elected Iraqi government should be given yet more rather than less time and material support to impose its authority over its territories and peoples. The American government bears the brunt of responsibility for the chaos in Iraq, but George Bush would bring yet more misery to region if he goes against his word and decided to 'cut and run'.

Iraqi freedom

Iraqi leaders are exploiting a new found freedom of manoeuvre to take the diplomatic initiative towards stability in their country: Iraq and Syria have restored diplomatic relations for the first time since 1982, and Iraq and Iran's Presidents Jalal Talabani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are to meet in Tehran for security talks. With British Prime Minister Tony Blair and American President George Bush's credibility weakened over recent months through Leadership strife within Labour and Republican defeats in the Mid-term elections, Baghdad has been able to operate with a much freer hand regarding its neighbours. These Iraqi moves have been aided by shift in emphasis in London and Washington towards increased regional co-operation, but it seems to be Iraq which is now setting the pace of diplomatic manoeuvring, beyond - and at a faster pace - than what the western powers expected. This is surely a positive development. American and British views and priorities in Iraq are inevitably distorted by distance and domestic concerns. Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems will not only have the benefit of the clarity of proximity, but will reinforce the status of the Iraqi government as more than a front for the occupying powers. If some sort of stability is found for Iraq, it will primarily be the achievement of Iraqis, not their western allies.