A Year Later, More Turmoil Ahead For Iraq

by Peyman Pejman

(IPS) DUBAI -- One year after President George W. Bush ordered the start of a three-week ground-and-air assault that toppled three decades of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime, Iraq is still in turmoil.

While the superior military machinery led by more than 100,000 U.S. troops saw little tangible resistance from Saddam's forces, the same force, one year after the March 20 invasion, is bogged down and unable to crush a stubborn force of faceless men trying to thwart the will of the United States and its allies in Iraq.

And although the U.S.-led invasion force has selected two dozen men and women and called them the governing council, even members of the council admit that they have earned little respect from most of their 25 million people.

"This council does not have much credibility with most people because it was not elected and because it has not achieved a whole lot in the past few months," says Mahmoud Osman, a Kurdish member of the council.

Challenges facing the occupying forces are numerous. Challenges facing any future Iraqi administration are even more daunting.

As civilian and military U.S. officials in Baghdad, and their bosses in Washington, have acknowledged, security remains the biggest challenge. But what makes the task even more difficult is that U.S. officials in Baghdad cannot agree on where the source of the problem is. That makes finding a solution more difficult.

Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, and Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command which oversees the Iraq operation, have blamed the terror network al-Qaeda for many of the bombings that have killed hundreds of innocent civilians and UN and Red Cross workers, not to mention more than 500 troops.

The two men, and many of their colleagues in the Pentagon, point as evidence to a letter intercepted from a courier in Iraq earlier this year. The 17-page letter was allegedly written by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-Palestinian whom U.S. officials say is the al-Qaeda ringleader in Iraq.

In that letter, Zarqawi allegedly writes that attacks on the occupying forces and their Iraqi partners must increase before June 30, the day the United States says it will hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi body.

But the involvement of al-Qaeda, or any organized international terrorist force for that matter, in recent Iraq bombings is disputed by some senior U.S. commanders on the ground.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Brigade responsible for security in Baghdad, earlier in March told reporters that the link between al-Qaeda and bombings in Baghdad and Karbala that killed about 200 people and injured another 550 "is just a theory," adding that there is no proof of the link.

He and others have also said they doubt there has been "massive infusion of foreign terrorists" into Iraq, meaning that opposition to the occupying forces is homegrown and carried out by supporters of the former regime.

"There are several schools of doubt on replenishment of foreign fighters and where they come from. I am not sure if I believe that (they are coming from overseas). Certainly in the Baghdad area, I have not seen any infusion of foreign fighters," he said. "It is far less than an empirical evidence" to say al-Qaeda was behind the Baghdad and Karbala bombings, he said.

Adding to the security concern is the worry that attacks on Iraqi targets will continue long after the U.S. government has handed over political power in June.

U.S. officials have repeatedly said their soldiers are likely to stay in Iraq for the next three to five years, a fact that the militants will likely capitalise on to make a point that Iraq remains under foreign occupation and that therefore, armed resistance to their presence is a legitimate national duty.

Political uncertainty is another problem that U.S. officials will likely leave behind long after they are gone.

U.S. officials and the 25 members of the governing council are currently negotiating over who will be in charge after June 30 and how to hold national, even if limited, elections to choose members of Iraq's first post-Saddam administration.

The most likely scenario is to enlarge the current governing council, perhaps to include 100 members, to hold the fort until nationwide elections can be held by the end of the year or early next year.

But even that is not likely to settle the differences among multiple ethnic and religious groups in a country that has not had much recent experience with democratic debate.

The wildcard in whether the situation will deteriorate before it gets better is Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the eminent Shiite religious leader of the Shiite-majority country. From the start of the invasion, the ayatollah has played a cat-and-mouse game with the U.S.-led occupying forces.

Although put under house arrest for decades by Saddam's regime, Ayatollah Sistani has stopped short of blessing the presence of foreign forces. He also has not agreed to meet directly with any U.S. official.

He has not hesitated to put pressure on them, and the Iraqi officials they have appointed, to ensure that the Shiites, who constitute the majority of the Iraqis, get the best political deal possible. His sheer power in the country makes it next to impossible for Shiite members of the governing council to oppose him, even when they do not agree with him.

"The Shiite leaders and particularly Ayatollah Sistani are a reflection of people's opinion and it is extremely important for us to explain our actions and opinions to them and receive their approval," says Mowaffaq al-Rabiee, a Shiite member of governing council.

Early March, after all members had agreed after months of heated debate on an interim constitution that would be the law of the land until a permanent constitution is voted on, the ayatollah opposed it.

That threw off a much-advertised signing ceremony and even the Shiite members of the council who had signed off on it had to rush to Najaf, the ayatollah's headquarters, to convince him to drop his objection. They did so and the signing ceremony was held. How much of a problem the ayatollah will cause for the occupying forces and their Iraqi partners in the months ahead is unknown, but no one is betting that he will completely keep quiet.

Money for running the U.S. occupation remains another problem, although the occupying forces do not talk much about it.

Before the invasion, Pentagon and White House officials said the operation in Iraq will cost U.S. and international taxpayers little money because Iraq's oil revenue would soon start paying for the cost of the country's reconstruction.

"Iraq has massive potential to export oil and we believe it can start paying for its own reconstruction very soon," U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress before the start of the war.

That has not happened, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Militants opposed to the presence of U.S.-led forces continue to attack the pipelines, stopping the exports for days and weeks at a time. The facilities themselves are old and lacked investments during Saddam's time, keeping the export capacity below potential.

Although Iraq is now exporting as much oil as it did before the war, it only earned six billion dollars last year, far less than four billion dollars a month it takes to keep the occupying forces in that country.

It is also much less than what Iraqi officials say they need for what they call "vital reconstruction" projects in the short term.

At a donors' conference in February, Iraqi Planning Minister Mehdi Hafez said his country needs four billion dollars by the end of the year. Donors, weary of giving money to an occupying force and a potentially unstable Iraq after that, only committed to one-fourth of that amount.

All of these issues are badly entangled and each needs some degree of resolution to the affect the others, making it that much harder for the occupying forces to hand over political sovereignty in June and be able to claim a great degree of success.