National Security in the US and Iraq (18 March 2006)

A gulf separates Bush’s new doctrine and a real solution to Iraq’s national security problems, argues Glen Rangwala.

Published in Labour Left Briefing (April 2006)

On 16th March, President Bush laid out the new foreign policy doctrine for his current term of office, the National Security Strategy. Like its immediate predecessor from 2002, this fifty page document contained a mix of the banal with the blood-curdling. This is evident from the first goal of the 2006 doctrine, to “champion aspirations for human dignity”, to the first objective for Iraqi security, to “clear areas of enemy control by remaining on the offensive, killing and capturing enemy fighters” lest America appear “a waning power and an unreliable friend”. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate reliability as a friend would be to stop supplying government ministries that have been operating death squads. Alternatively, he could prosecute senior US personnel who gave the green light to the use of torture against Iraqi prisoners or refund to Iraq its money that was squandered by US corporations.  

None of these problems, however, were even alluded to in the doctrine. Instead, US policy remains wedded to an idea of “aggressively prosecuting the war against the terrorists in Iraq”. True to its word, the US military launched a large-scale attack on the villages around Samarra, north of Baghdad, on the same day as the release of the doctrine. Samarra’s al-Askari shrine, one of the most revered pilgrimage sites for Shi‘a worshippers, had been destroyed in a bombing a month earlier, instigating reprisals and counter-reprisals across the country, with new talk of civil war between the country’s Sunni Arab and Shia populations. 

The US response was to put on a show of force – “the largest air assault operation” since 2003, US military officials proudly proclaimed – that demonstrated their continued hold on the country. However, all was not as it first seemed. There were no reported deaths or injuries, either of US soldiers or of insurgents, and no proclamations of how leaders of the insurgency had been captured. A military operation originally billed as lasting a number of days was quietly scaled down within 24 hours. This then was more show than force, an attempt to demonstrate the relevance of the US military to the politics of a country over which they have only a tenuous grasp.

The only way the US maintains its significance to Iraq’s Shias is by showing that its forces are the ones who can lead the attack on groups supposedly involved in the bombing of al-Askari shrine, affirming that they (and not the Iranians or anyone else) are the agents of Shia communal protection. This may be a façade, but for Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, the actions of the US military represent the alignment of Shia sectarian leaders with the forces of occupation and destruction. For the vast majority of them, the problem is not with Iraq’s Shia community, even though British and US officials try to explain it away in terms of historical tensions between the sects - it is with the US occupation and therefore also with the Iraqis who have supported it.

The escalating violence in Iraq does not have civil strife as its origins. It began instead as a conflict over the US occupation, between those whose positions have been guaranteed by it and those who reject it. Through US actions – those of intimidating the Sunni Arabs in order to show their power to the Shias – the violence takes on a strongly sectarian dimension. By framing it in terms of the potential for civil war, US leaders mask their own responsibility for polarising the communities, and can remain at arm’s length from the ensuing violence. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate committee on 9th March that “the plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the ... Iraqi security forces deal with it”. Put in plainer terms, that means the troops recruited to the Iraqi army will be put on the front line to fight for the US occupation to continue. Bush’s doctrine claims that “Iraqi soldiers are sacrificing to defeat al-Qaida in their own country”. Aside from the spurious reference to al-Qaida, “sacrificed” would be more appropriate than “sacrificing”.

The problem for the US is that, three months after the December elections, they have been unable to stitch together an Iraqi government. This is itself partly a consequence of their past tactics of divide and rule, but means that there is no single power in Iraq that can bring all the different Shia militias under an umbrella aligned with US forces. Instead it is open for Iraq’s more experienced and canny eastern neighbour – Iran - to prise the militias off one by one into their camp, and eventually force the US, defeated, out of Iraq with all guns turned against its troops.

Iraq, three years on from the invasion, is more violent and chaotic than ever. At the end of February, according to the US State Department, Baghdad was receiving only six hours of electricity per day. Iraqi paramilitary forces established by the US continue to engage in widespread abuses of human rights. The response of the US to the odious and widely-discredited Wolf Brigade, which publicised its role in torturing Iraqi detainees as a way to intimidate its opponents, was not to disband or reform it, but to rename it. It is now called the “Freedom Brigade”. This gives new meaning to the National Security Strategy’s platitudes on championing freedom. But it is clear that Iraqis’ strategy for their own national security would have nothing to do with it.