Cracks Show as U.S. Leaves Iraq Cities

The withdrawal of US troops from Iraq's urban areas is a critical test of the institutions set up in the past six years

"Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems" and "an end to occupation" -- well-worn phrases favored by all sides. Stakeholders in Iraq will be suddenly tested by the withdrawal of US troops from urban areas. The date is a huge occasion for the nascent Iraqi state: it will test the durability of the institutions that have emerged from the embers of the almost total state collapse of 2003-04.

Both Iraqi and US officials warned of increasing rates of violence as the deadline for withdrawal approached and they were not wrong: a series of bombings around the country has killed hundreds. Sixty-seven per cent of the Iraqi population lives in urban areas and much of the conflict of the past six years has been focused within cities, in contrast to the rural outfighting in Afghanistan.

Yet the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has ignored calls to delay the withdrawal in certain parts of the country. He has a huge amount of political capital to gain from being the Iraqi leader who ended the occupation of Iraq -- indeed, Maliki stoked US anger by telling Le Monde that Iraq was about to successfully "repulse" the invaders.

However, questions remain as to Maliki's nationalist credentials. Last week Col Burt Thompson, who oversees Diyala province, told USA Today that Maliki was transferring senior Sunni officers and not paying thousands of members of the Awakening movement:

Prime Minister al-Maliki wants to stay in power... Diyala was [Shia]. It went Sunni. Do you think they're going to let it stay that way? I don't think so.

While the "surge" created great improvements, the political space that a drop in violence was supposed to have created has not been exploited by a largely impotent Iraqi parliament -- the poor incorporation of the Sunni militias is just one example among many. These political issues remain unaddressed and with the U.S. military out of the cities, concerns are that a facade of national unity may disintegrate into a complex ethno-sectarian conflict.

Mosul remains a city divided and the potential epicentre of future conflict. The Times correspondent Anthony Loyd spoke recently to US troops who warned that the Iraqi military were likely to be brutal in any clampdown. Meanwhile the LA Times reported that the Kurds were refusing to accept the authority of the region's new Arab governor, Atheel Najafi, unless they gain positions in Mosul's city council, which is currently controlled by Najafi's Hadba coalition. Najafi was warned away by the Kurdish peshmerga from visiting areas under their control, evidence of the levels of internal demarcation present in the new Iraq.

Kurdish-Arab tensions have grown steadily worse as Baghdad has become more assertive within a federal process in which exact sovereignties and territorial demarcations remain disputed. The failure to settle the issue of Kirkuk, in particular, will test the Iraqi body politic to its limits. The question is likely to be a major issue in the run-up to the Kurdish presidential and parliamentary elections on July 25.

On top of this ethno-sectarian conflict is the wildcard presence of al-Qaida-affiliated groups linked to several attacks on Shia marketplaces in Baghdad. Despite the US military telling their Iraqi counterparts that their force numbers would remain steady until the autumn and that they were only a "phone call" away, it would take a significant uptick in violence for Maliki to countenance the loss of face that would come from asking for high-profile US support.

Important tactical questions also remain as to the exact role of US special forces within this new security environment, in addition to the capacity and exact force posture of the Iraqi military and police, who have been criticized in the past for a checkpoint-centric approach not based around the "active patrolling" and population-focused surge strategy the US pursued.

As ever in Iraq, uncertainty is the only certainty. Maliki is right to treat the US withdrawal as a celebration, and the poignancy of it happening on the anniversary of the British withdrawal in 1920 is not lost. Tensions will be high as the institutions of the Iraqi state take the next step towards an elusive sovereignty.

Follow James Denselow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JamesDenselow

Comments

[mergina]

Those cracks are always going to be there. It is the very nature of the region and its people. Get our troops the hell out of there.

[avonrosenbach]

Indeed, incorporating the former memebers of the Awakening Councils (or Sons of Iraq) will prove integral to security in Iraq. WIll these militamen be given the jobs the were promised? Can employment be sustained? There are question that the Iraqi government - despite a number of challenges - must answer with a definitive 'YES' - to fail in this respect invites the resugence of sectarian violence.

More at www.on-message.net

[hark]

I seriously doubt that we're going to entrust all that oil we invaded the country to steal to the Iraqi security force. And what happens when they wake up and find out ExxonMobil is making all the dough on their oil? We need to be there to prevent an uprising, to stop them from stealing our oil after we sacrificed so much to obtain it.

[viper234]

"Our oil?" Surely you jest. The Iraq War was a war of aggression based on false intelligence that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with over a million more dying as a result of exposure to depleted uranium. The US invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and was no threat to the US. "Our oil?" The US installed a puppet government to get its hands on Iraq's oil because Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq's oil which meant no access to US big oil companies. Based on the kind of destruction the US leveled on Iraq, Exxon Mobil should be thrown out of the country, our troops should finally be sent home instead of redeployed to Afghanistan to put their lives in danger for the natural gas industry, and that monster embassy in Iraq should be handed over to the Iraqi people to do with it whatever they please.

[polaris12]

Of course there are cracks - and there always will be. With our invasion, Humpty-Dumpty fell off the wall and all the US troops in the world can't put it back together again without the cracks showing. We can stay there John McCain's 100 years and it won't be any different. The Iraqis have to sort it out themselves even if it means renewed civil war. Sometime civil war, like divorce, is the only answer when you have irreconcilable differences. But on the other side, if we finally leave them alone, they might surprise us.

[ProfessorDuh]

Whatever happens is on our heads. Americans spend more on war-making than all the rest of the world COMBINED, and the rest of the world knows what Americans are -- bellicose, trigger-happy, erratic, immature, hypocritical and easily gulled

[progpro1]

Lets stop calling this a "withdrawal" of troops - that implies that they have left the so-called "sovereign" nation of Iraq. Most combat units have pulled back to their bases, but the Occupation of Iraq continues. There are over a hundred thousand military "contractors" still in Iraq, many of those are armed and dangerous and they don' have a "base" to pull back to. The real question is - will our puppet government survive this face-lift? Or will the Iraqi people rebel once and for all and rid themselves of our puppet AND the US Occupation forces?

[sonoffestus]

Your thoughts on the military "contractors" brings up very good point that no one is talking about.
Who is going to rein in these mercenaries . Contractors, you have to love it. I grew up in the trades, the contractors I knew did electrical, plumbing , masonary , and roofing. To me mercenaries were paid soldiers who's allegiance was to their employer, kind of like today's "contracto­rs".......­......I guess? So we will now have gangs of mercenaries throw into this cauldron. What trouble will they wrought? Will US troops be summoned to "rescue" mercenaries in distress? I sure hope not.

[Benton]

This sounds like more neo-con nonsense.

[eciaccio]

"Tensions will be high as the institutions of the Iraqi state take the next step towards an elusive sovereignt­y." Elusive sovereignty? More like non-existent.

As long as ANY U.S. troops, mercenaries, bases, our fortress/embassy and greedy foreign oil companies are operating in Iraq, sovereignty is a fiction.

An illegal war of aggression based on intentional lies, followed by an unending occupation, all causing more than one million Iraqi deaths, uncounted millions of severe injuries, four million displaced people, and re-ignition of sectarian and regional conflict cannot be so easily smoothed over by what we here choose to delude ourselves into believing is Iraqi "sovereignty".

Like every other country with a significant U.S. military presence, and we presently have more than 800 military bases in over 130 countries, Iraq will never be sovereign as long as foreign troops are stationed there.

When most Americans realize the fact that we are an empire and that our relatively luxurious way of life, declining as it now is, is very much due to our exploitation of people and resources in many other countries, mostly enforced by our military bases and unfair, anti-labor and anti-environmental trade agreements, such as NAFTA, perhaps we will move back from an empire to a democracy. But, as history has taught, a true democracy is not possible with an empire.

THAT is why the U.S. is rightly hated and distrusted in so much of the world.