When American forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, the White House, backed by an echo chamber of neocons (remember them?), assured everyone that the end result of the invasion would be the emergence of that ancient land between the Tigris and the Euphrates as a “beacon of democracy” for the entire Middle East. When American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011, the lack of progress in achieving that goal had engendered a bout of modesty by the new administration in Washington, which now assured Americans, who had lost 4,500 troops during the eight-year war, that Iraq was on track to becoming, well, merely a “stable democracy”.
The fact of the matter is that Iraq today is neither a beacon of democracy nor a stable expression of it. It is rather a country experiencing death by a thousand cuts, caused by sectarian, ethnic, tribal and secessionist strife. To compound the problem, Las Vegas rules do not apply to Iraq — namely, what happens there stays there. Sykes-Picot notwithstanding, we all live there in the region as subsystems of the same system, interactively related to each other, with each subsystem affecting and being affected by the other. In that regard, consider as a case in point how Al Qaida in Iraq, which last April announced it was joining forces with Jabhat Al Nusra to form the Islamic State in Iraq and Al Sham (ISIS), has found a home — not a welcome home, but home nevertheless — for 6,000 of its fighters in Syria, where they have already built a reputation for kidnappings, beheadings, intimidation of ordinary citizens and a penchant for warring against indigenous Syrian rebels who disagree with their extremist views.
Now we learn that in the western province of Anbar, where Sunnis have been in open revolt against the increasingly sectarian, Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad, militants affiliated with ISIS have occupied and raised their flag over Fallujah. Washington’s knee-jerk, but predictable, reaction to all this was to send more weapons to Nouri Al Maliki’s regime, including Apache helicopters, Hellfire missiles and SeaEagle drones, to help fight the insurgents there. This is the wrong way to go about it, a move sure to exacerbate rather than solve the problem, for it will lead Al Maliki, with his one-track mind, to believe that social strife in Iraq is responsive to a military solution, when in fact it is rooted in state-sanctioned sectarianism. You don’t resolve a political problem via rule of the gun.
The Sunni revolt against the central government in Baghdad, not unlike its counterpart in Syria, began peacefully a year ago in a protest camp in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, where Sunni folks had gathered to voice their discontent at being discriminated against and marginalised, and at the regime’s campaign of arbitrary arrests and persecution directed at them. But then, last week, violence erupted when Al Maliki dispatched troops to break up the sit-in — which in turn led to ISIS and Fallujah. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, the ghoulish violence in the country claimed the lives of well over 7,000 civilians and 950 security forces in 2013 — hardly a country one would identify as well on track to becoming a “stable democracy”.
Yet Iraq faces, additionally, another threat to its integrity as a state, this one territorial, presented, albeit quietly and subtly, by Iraqi Kurds’ ambitions for secession, as evidenced by how leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq have cut deals, separate from the central government, to sell oil and natural gas to Turkey and other countries, raising the spectre of oil independence in the semi-autonomous region, which in turn could lead to a declaration of national independence. Lest we forget, KRG-controlled parts of the country contain the sixth largest oil reserves in the world. And that could constitute, as the New York Times opined in a report recently, “the greatest potential risk to Iraq’s cohesion”.
All of which brings us back to Fallujah and its occupation by ISIS.
For Americans, Fallujah is fraught with powerful symbolism. It was there that their troops, in April 2004, fought insurgents, house by house, alley by alley, losing 92 men. The battle was so fierce that of the city’s roughly 50,000 homes, 36,000 were laid to waste. But again, for Americans, the battle in Fallujah, initially triggered by the much publicised killing and mutilation of four US contractors, had to be fought and the insurgents had to be defeated — at whatever cost. Last week, insurgents retook the city. It was as if the US was being told, to its face, by the bedraggled rebels — from ISIS, no less — that its military enterprise in Iraq, so costly in blood and treasure, had been a sham.
In popular culture, the battle of Fallujah was evocative of the battle of Hue City in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in January 1968, when 212 American troops died there fighting to retake the city from Viet Cong guerrillas and several battalions of the Army of the Republic of North Vietnam. Both battles became encoded in popular culture and the collective imagination, particularly after Stanley Kubrik directed the iconic, Oscar-winning film, Heavy Metal Jacket (1987) about Hue and dozens of documentaries and books, even songs, were released about the six-day war in the ancient city of Fallujah.
Today American leaders, who know that dispatching soldiers back to Iraq to shock and awe ISIS insurgents into defeat is out of the question (“This fight is not ours”, said Secretary of State John Kerry) are helplessly watching the goings on in Iraq and wondering whether the 4,500 American troops who had died there in the war had lost their lives for naught.
Now look closer, and the picture gets worse for Arabs as they battle the legacy of Sykes-Picot, the demon of sectarianism and the prospect of territorial dismemberment in, well, Iraq and the Levant.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
