"Set a thief to catch a thief" has been one of the guiding principles of American and British efforts to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. Far from being pariahs in the new democratic Iraq, ex-Ba'athists constitute the backbone of the reformed Iraqi intelligence service's efforts to face down "FREs"—"Former Regime Elements," to use US military jargon. Some 9,000 servants of the ancien régime have been recalled to the various intelligence branches since the US pro-consul, Paul Bremer, reversed course last April 2004 and announced that the policy of "de-Ba'athification" had been "poorly implemented." In other words, the good FREs were supposed to carry the fight to the bad ones.
After Bremer's volte face, insurgent attacks shot up. It was perhaps coincidental—or perhaps not. But since the election, there has been a sharp fall in bombings and murders: the latest figures indicate that attacks on US forces have dropped from 140 to 30 a day. There are a number of reasons for this, including improved coalition tactics on the ground and the demoralising effects on the rebels of a successful poll.
But even if these successes are maintained, the political orientation and nature of the new Iraq will be profoundly affected by the composition of its security services. Already, many Iraqi democrats fear that there will be a reprise of the state of affairs under the monarchy: over-representation of Sunnis in the upper reaches of the armed services, which made that polity desperately vulnerable to coups.
In fact the role of ex-Ba'athists in the security forces has become one of the most controversial issues in the new democratic Iraq—and triggered bitter exchanges in the new parliament in Baghdad in early April. Shia legislators alleged that the outgoing prime minister, Iyad Allawi (himself an ex-Ba'athist) had accelerated "re-Ba'athification" during his last days in office.
Even staunch anti-Ba'athists are sceptical of some of these claims, but the attacks were sufficiently stinging to prompt the interim defence minister, Hazem Shaalan, to return to the chamber and rebut the charges. Shaalan denied that he had recruited any Ba'athists and sought instead to place the blame for any hirings at the door of the Americans and the British.
It is hard to verify the accuracy of Shaalan's assertion. What can be said, though, is that the organising principles of the Iraqi intelligence services are opaque—which explains much of the anger of the newly elected Iraqi legislators. The intelligence services submitted no budgets to the old unelected assembly. And under an emergency decree passed by Allawi in 2004, they now have the authority to conduct their own prosecutions and arrests, as well as run prisons and interrogation centres.
Few think that the incoming government, headed by the Shia Islamist Ibrahim Jaafari, will tolerate this state of affairs for long. One of the critical issues in Iraqi politics is to what extent the coalition will permit the Iraqis to effect tat-heer, or "cleansing," of the intelligence services. In other words, a classic "who rules?" struggle.
The story of re-Ba'athification is peculiar indeed. With the insurgency gaining momentum in late 2003 and early 2004, American and British forces desperately needed whatever trained personnel came to hand. As casualties grew, the need for "Iraqisation" or the handing over of responsibility to local security forces grew ever more urgent, especially in a US presidential election year. After the alleged disaster of the disbandment of the Iraqi army in May 2003, which was said to have put thousands of discontented officers on to the streets with nothing to do but join the insurgency, de-Ba'athification itself became seen as a liability. Who knew better how to handle the terrorists than their former comrades-in-arms—subject, of course, to the appropriate vetting? It also became imperative to ensure that the disempowered Sunnis were not allowed to coalesce into a single united bloc. What better token of their stake in the new Iraq than reintegration into the key organs of state?
The roots of the re-Ba'athification policy go back much further than that, though. Much of the debate in Washington has been fought out between neoconservative proponents of democracy, concentrated at the Pentagon and the office of the vice-president and "realists" at the state department and the CIA. The latter group feared a Shia-dominated democracy getting too close to Iran and destabilising their Sunni Arab clients in neighbouring states. To realists, the problem with Iraq was not the Ba'ath party but Saddam and his henchmen. They wanted a far more limited "de-Saddamisation." Throughout much of the 1990s, the "realists" did not seek a popular uprising to overthrow Saddam. Instead, they craved a coup from within the Ba'athist hierarchy.
It was the realist faction, with British assistance, which prevailed in Washington over the neocons and which helped place Allawi in the prime minister's office. He was a key figure in one of multiple failed coup attempts sponsored by the CIA out of Jordan in the mid-1990s. One of his main lieutenants was Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani. Like so many of these officers, Shahwani left the country more because he had fallen out of favour rather than out of a wish to construct a democratic Iraq. Today, he is head of the new Iraqi intelligence service, commanding a 1500-strong paramilitary force known locally as the Shahwanis..
The new intelligence service seems to be thoroughly unrepresentative of the society which it seeks to defend— both in political and sectarian terms. In a country that is 60 per cent Shia, best estimates suggest that a mere 12 per cent of the intelligence services now come from the majority community. Some reports indicate that Shahwani personally vets every Shia candidate. Sectarian affiliation alone does not, of course, connote suitability or unsuitabiliy for appointment; about 40 per cent of Saddam's foreign intelligence service was composed of Shias.
Yet even if not a single member of this new service is conspiring with his old Ba'athist chums in the insurgency, the imbalance creates at minimum a big perception problem. If you were a Shia or an anti-Saddam Sunni who had just come through 35 years of hell, would you assist the new Iraqi security forces or the coalition when they are bulging full of your former tormentors? This is a society of mistrust—especially after the failure of the 1991 uprising—and the coalition has done little to alleviate such sentiments. Many democrats also fear that the recent fatwa issued by a prominent group of Sunni clerics called the Muslim Scholars Association—calling for Sunnis to join the security forces but to abstain from assisting the occupiers—presages a further programme of infiltrating the organs of state.
One of the key issues here is quis custodet? The CIA's Iraqi station is now said to be the largest in the world, amounting to around 500 personnel, many of whom are based in the same buildings as their Arab counterparts. But few observers reckon that the agency has the linguistic or cultural abilities, let alone the manpower, to maintain full control of thousands of ex-Ba'athist protégés. After all, the latter enjoy the priceless advantage of operating on their own terrain.
The most effective way of monitoring the ex-Ba'athists' activities is by changing the intelligence service's recruitment policy—to achieve a better balance between the old and the new Iraq. Certainly, many putative applicants from the ranks of the Shia Islamists either lack the skills or else are loyal to Tehran, but it would be wrong to infer from this that clandestine skills are the preserve of the representatives of the ancien régime. Both the Iraqi National Congress and the Kurdish PUK ran counter-intelligence programmes against Saddam's regime.
One lesson which could be learned from the Ba'athist insurgents is their cohesiveness, even as they speak in an increasingly Islamist voice. Ideological commitment is a great asset. The best guarantee of a reliable intelligence service is one that is staffed by people loyal to the vision of a democratic Iraq. For as fans of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief know, it can be hard to distinguish between the reformed diamond thieves and those who are still wedded to the bad old ways.
