America’s catastrophic involvement with Iraq is drawing to a close. It has been a fiasco on a colossal scale -- devastating for Iraq, immensely costly for the United States and destabilizing for the entire region.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says US combat troops will leave Iraq by 30 June 2009 and all other US troops by 31 December 2011. That, at least, is the substance of the draft security pact he will present to his government and to the Iraqi parliament for ratification. Its implementation will inevitably need US approval as well.
It may not, however, be too early to draw up a provisional balance-sheet of the Iraq war.
• Iraq has been shattered. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and some 4.5 million driven into exile, or been internally displaced by the Sunni-Shia civil war, triggered by the US invasion. Material destruction has been incalculable.
• The Shia (60 per cent of the population) have replaced the Sunni (20 per cent) as the dominant community in government and in the army and security services. But sectarian passions have by no means cooled and Iraq’s future as a united country remains in doubt.
• The Kurds have achieved virtual autonomy but dare not move towards full independence for fear of a Turkish invasion. Their hopes of including in their domain the oil-rich region of Kirkuk are unlikely to be realized.
• The destruction of Iraq has upset the regional power balance to the great benefit of Iran, which has emerged as the leading power in the Gulf region, able to extend its influence into Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
• The US armed services have suffered the loss of 4,300 men killed and another 40,000 wounded. The financial cost of the war has been put at trillions of dollars. The damage to America’s reputation and to its moral and political authority has been severe.
• The US ambition to turn Iraq into a regional ally -- allowing it to project power far and wide from permanent bases in Iraq -- seems doomed. The vast US embassy under construction in Baghdad -- the largest in the world, the size of Vatican City -- is likely to remain a white elephant.
• Israel and its friends pressed hard for the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to remove any Arab threat to Israel from the east. This ambition was realized, and the Arab world has been correspondingly weakened. Apparently unforeseen, however, was that the rise of Iran would create an enemy of the Jewish state more formidable than Iraq ever was. Israeli efforts to get the United States to attack Iran have so far been unsuccessful.
In the meantime, Iraqi nationalism seems to be making a timid resurgence, encouraged by swelling oil income and the increased confidence of the Iraqi armed services. Iraq is shortly to take control of Al-Anbar province from American troops, a highly symbolic transfer of power since this vast but sparsely populated province, largely inhabited by Sunni tribes, has been the fief of Al-Qaeda.
Another sign of Iraqi resurgence is the recent oil agreement with the China National Petroleum Company said to be worth $3billion -- the first such agreement with a foreign oil company since the 2003 invasion.
Many problems remain, however, including the vexed question of the tense relations between Maliki’s essentially Shia government and the Sunni tribal al-Sahwa (‘Awakening’) movement, organized, financed and armed by the United States to fight al-Qaeda.
This network of local militias -- each man receiving $300 a month from the United States -- now boasts some 100,000 members. It is beginning to be seen as a dangerous rival to the government’s forces, which have recently moved against Al-Sahwa, arresting hundreds of its most prominent members. A government’s pledge to incorporate into the national army 20 per cent of these “Sons of Iraq” -- as they like to call themselves -- seems unlikely to be realized.
The United States will undoubtedly be leaving Iraq but -- such is the continuing instability -- it is by no means certain that the withdrawal will be orderly. One way or another, Iraq will remain at or close to the top of the next US President’s headaches.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale -- distributed by Agence Global
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