US troops leaving Iraq, December 2011: western military activity has unwittingly altered the balance of power throughout the region
On New Year’s Day Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, addressed the nation on television. In a reflective mood, he said: “Any successful person has his enemies; the righteous have their opponents…and every Hussein has his Yazid.” He was entirely confident that his allusion to seventh century history would be understood, and rightly so. The death of Hussein ibn Ali, the Shia martyr and grandson of the prophet Muhammad, at the hands of Yazid, the founder of the Sunni Umayad dynasty, marks the seminal division of Islam into its separate confessional forms, and the start of an enduring tension between Shia and Sunni which has consequences today. It is difficult to imagine Angela Merkel dropping the protagonists of the Thirty Years War into a speech, or David Cameron citing the dissolution of the monasteries to illustrate a point of policy, but neither faces religious schism as a current and insistent political reality.
And Maliki needs all the help he can get. With oil revenues at around $70 billion, Iraq may not be broke but public services remain lamentable, unemployment among young men is stuck at around 30 per cent and politics is conducted against the drumbeat of increasing violence. The uneasy truce between Maliki and his main rival did not survive the departure of a formal American military presence on 18th December, nor did the tense balance between Iraq’s Sunni (the governing class under Saddam Hussein but only a fifth of the population), the Shia (making up 60 per cent and now dominant) and the Kurds in the north (another fifth). The Kurds, interested in keeping Baghdad weak, had negotiated a deal between all parties of such fragility that it collapsed under the weight of its improbable compromises. The day after the last American soldier left, Maliki, a Shia, suddenly called for the arrest of vice president Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, on charges of running death squads. In doing so, he abandoned any pretence of seeking reconciliation of the groups, in what looks like the start of another round of sectarian confrontation.
How did it come to this? How did an intervention intended to showcase the manifest virtues of democracy to an entire region end in the likely failure of democracy in just one country, Iraq? More important still, how did an intervention made at the apogee of American power end up illustrating the limitations of that power? The western action in Iraq has given impetus to a new era of Shia power, transforming the political geography of the region to the advantage of Iran, America’s prospective enemy.
***
The answer to the first question lies in the US military action in Afghanistan in 2001. American operations at the start comprised huge volumes of indirect fire delivered by invulnerable platforms in the air or at sea; CIA agents playing a 21st century version of the Great Game and dispensing wads of cash to anyone claiming the ability to fight the Taliban; a ready-made infantry in the shape of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s old rivals; and an urbane and, at least then, compliant political leader-in-waiting in the shape of Hamid Karzai.
This approach represented an apparent vindication of the view of Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence, that successful operations could be carried out by an “economy of force” (and a rejection of the view of his predecessor Colin Powell that the US should use overwhelming force in order to be sure of achieving its goal). The victory of the Rumsfeld doctrine within the Washington Beltway was more complete than that in the field, but a light operational touch became the new conventional wisdom. As a result, in planning the Iraq invasion, General Tommy Franks commanded a manoeuvre force sufficient only for the first phase of the war—the taking of Baghdad. The Kurds and Shia were assigned the role of auxiliaries and Ahmed Chalabi, darling of the Washington neo-conservative circuit, provided the requisite political urbanity and apparent compliance. That Afghanistan, with its strong society but weak state, was never going to be a model for Iraq, with its highly centralised tradition of governance, only became apparent later.
Iraq’s descent into chaos is well documented, and it led to the crisis of the campaign in the summer of 2006. By this stage it was clear that three things had to happen if the western intervention was to have any historic claim to success: al Qaeda in Iraq (made up of Sunni extremists) had to be destroyed; the Sunni had to be reconciled to Shia leadership of the country; and the Shia had to be contained from abusing their new power at the expense of minorities. Each outcome set the pre-conditions for the next and the whole was dependent on the sequenced effect of its parts.
The destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq was brought about primarily by American and British special forces, operating from bases across the country but directed from Balad, north of Baghdad. Although journalistic accounts of the period are available, the relentless, almost industrial, application of highly targeted force has yet to be recognised for its extraordinary efficiency. When the power of al Qaeda to coerce support from local Sunni residents had been broken, even the most recalcitrant former members of the Ba’ath party recognised there was no alternative but to accept the new Shia pre-eminence. In seeking accommodation with the Maliki government, they gave it a pluralist legitimacy; in turn, this allowed Maliki to take on the radicals within his own Shia constituency in what looked like a one-nation process. By 2007, sufficient progress had been made to enable President George W Bush, contrary to much of the conventional military advice he was receiving at the time, to order the “surge” of American forces—his “Lincoln moment,” echoing the decision of President Abraham Lincoln in June 1863, when he threw his forces into the battle of Gettysburg. The 2007 surge of US forces, re-trained and equipped for a counterinsurgency campaign they did not originally intend to fight, set the cap on US military involvement and created a semblance of strategic success.
However, beneath the grand sweep of the campaign narrative, the intricate relationships between parties, factions and sectarian groups were always fragile and susceptible to the most nuanced changes in political atmosphere—which promptly arrived. In many ways, Iraq got its Arab Spring early, in the destruction of the apparently implacably powerful Saddam regime, and the emancipation of the Shia majority. How much that spectacle encouraged the Arab Spring eight years later is a matter of conjecture, although it is reasonable to think that the sudden downfall of an autocrat was an inspiration. What is clear, though, is that the Arab Spring is now inflaming Iraq’s sectarian tensions even further. Syria under President Bashar al-Assad is an inverted image of Iraq under Saddam; a Shia minority (of the Alawite sect) runs the government and security forces, and tries to keep the lid on a Sunni majority. The term Arab Spring is perhaps inappropriate given the deep roots of the conflict in the millennial-old Shia-Sunni civil war. In any case, the Sunni success in challenging the Assad regime in Syria is now encouraging a new Sunni revival in Iraq, as shown by attacks from Sunni extremists on Shia pilgrims to holy sites, which may jeopardise the accommodation with central government. Meanwhile, the conservative Wahhabi wing of Saudi politics is heckling from the sidelines, supporting Iraq’s Sunni and condemning its Shia as little more than Arabic-speaking apostates under the sway of Persian Iran.
In this toxic sectarian mix what are the prospects for democracy in Iraq? In the American sense of the relationship between the individual and a system of governance, not great. In the Arab sense of the balance of power between communities and the apparatus of the state, rather better. But this is hardly the cause for which America spent its power.
Meanwhile, beyond Iraq, the American intervention has reshaped the region’s political geography, strengthening Iran, and consolidating a new era of Shia influence, the second in the religion’s history. It is worth returning briefly to 680 CE to understand the roots of this new Shia power, as well as the upheaval it represents. The death of Hussein and the triumph of Yazid laid the foundations of the Shia vocation of martyrdom, endurance and redemption through suffering, both as a personal code for the individual and as a state doctrine. Anyone who has witnessed the culminating tenth day of the festival of Ashura, in which believers lash themselves with flails and knives, will need no instruction in those capacities. This sense of marginality may have spiritual benefits but it has also prepared the Shia for a history which has been characterised by a subordinate position to the Sunni for most of the intervening 1300 years, with two exceptional periods during the Safavid dynasty, 1501-1722, and, arguably, the period between 1979 and the present day.
The Safavid Empire, at its greatest, covered modern Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, most of Iraq, Georgia, Afghanistan and the Caucasus, as well as parts of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Turkey, rubbing up against the Ottoman and Mughal empires. Many of these areas retain large residual Shia populations today; some, notably Pakistan and Afghanistan, have seen significant Sunni-Shia violence in recent years as sectarian tensions have increased.
One Safavid legacy which is central to the character of contemporary Iran is to set out clearly the political role of religious leaders in the state. The Safavids established the primacy of the “Twelver” strand of Shia Islam, which holds that the line of Muhammad through Ali became extinct in 873 CE, when the twelfth imam disappeared within days of inheriting the title at the age of four. Believers hold that he will return, but until he does, spiritual power passes to elected imams, as God’s representatives, and capable of holding both spiritual and temporal office. This conjunction of religion and state permits Shia jurists to straddle both disciplines. Indeed, some have argued that one of Iran’s strengths since the 1979 Islamic revolution is in permitting a degree of democracy and in formalising the co-existence of religion and politics, although the regime is run ultimately by the supreme leader, an ayatollah.
The second period of Shia prominence dates from that revolution, which in many ways prefigured the Arab Spring; Iran under the Shah was a tired autocracy supported by the west on the “better the devil you know” principle. The revolution released popular energies that found religious expression, and, because of the Shia dispensation for religious leaders to exercise political powers, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became part of the iconography of the late 20th century.
This militant reassertion of Shia identity was followed by the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and shaped the modern Iranian sense of nationhood. But it was western action in Afghanistan and Iraq which dramatically strengthened Iran’s position in the region, by neatly removing its two nearest enemies. Before then, Iran was encircled by Sunni regimes, with Iraq and Saudi Arabia to the west and Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to the east. At a stroke, the 2003 invasion of Iraq broke down the western part of the Sunni wall and replaced it with a Shia-led government susceptible to Tehran’s influence. Iran then had the luxury of strategic depth between itself and its main enemies. At the same time, Iran re-established its traditional influence in the west of Afghanistan. The contiguous area in which Tehran pulled the strings bore a passing resemblance to the Safavid heartland.
No matter how serendipitous the cause, the Iranian regime has not been slow to consolidate its influence over the 140 million Shia living between Lebanon and Afghanistan (in what King Abdullah of Jordan has demonised as the “Shia Crescent”). Through proxies it has indulged in light adventurism in Shia-majority Bahrain and the eastern Saudi provinces, which have large Shia populations, at the same time engaging Israel through the surrogate of Hezbollah.
Western motives may have been virtuous but the legacy of the intervention has been to transform Iran’s position by neutralising its immediate enemies and extending its influence, enabling it to claim regional leadership from Mesopotamia to southern Afghanistan. This has only encouraged the ambitions of a country which since antiquity has laid claim to being a great power, and is unlikely to stop now.
The key question is what form those ambitions will now take. Iran’s leaders know that its present territorial sway does not guarantee security given, say, the range, accuracy and effect of Israel’s arms. They may reckon that they need to counter this with the deterrence that only the possession of a weaponised nuclear device would give; that might incite other regimes to acquire nuclear weapons too. This gloomy prognosis has been widely rehearsed and needs no elaboration. But it sharpens the question of whether regional intervention by the west, particularly in Iraq, represents a strategic own goal.
It would be wrong to claim a direct link with rocketing oil prices, Iran’s threat to freedom of navigation, unrest in Bahrain and regional nuclear proliferation. But it is fair to say that in choosing to take action, we released energies across the region that we neither fully understood nor could control. We may well have good cause for regret.
On New Year’s Day Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, addressed the nation on television. In a reflective mood, he said: “Any successful person has his enemies; the righteous have their opponents…and every Hussein has his Yazid.” He was entirely confident that his allusion to seventh century history would be understood, and rightly so. The death of Hussein ibn Ali, the Shia martyr and grandson of the prophet Muhammad, at the hands of Yazid, the founder of the Sunni Umayad dynasty, marks the seminal division of Islam into its separate confessional forms, and the start of an enduring tension between Shia and Sunni which has consequences today. It is difficult to imagine Angela Merkel dropping the protagonists of the Thirty Years War into a speech, or David Cameron citing the dissolution of the monasteries to illustrate a point of policy, but neither faces religious schism as a current and insistent political reality.
And Maliki needs all the help he can get. With oil revenues at around $70 billion, Iraq may not be broke but public services remain lamentable, unemployment among young men is stuck at around 30 per cent and politics is conducted against the drumbeat of increasing violence. The uneasy truce between Maliki and his main rival did not survive the departure of a formal American military presence on 18th December, nor did the tense balance between Iraq’s Sunni (the governing class under Saddam Hussein but only a fifth of the population), the Shia (making up 60 per cent and now dominant) and the Kurds in the north (another fifth). The Kurds, interested in keeping Baghdad weak, had negotiated a deal between all parties of such fragility that it collapsed under the weight of its improbable compromises. The day after the last American soldier left, Maliki, a Shia, suddenly called for the arrest of vice president Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, on charges of running death squads. In doing so, he abandoned any pretence of seeking reconciliation of the groups, in what looks like the start of another round of sectarian confrontation.
How did it come to this? How did an intervention intended to showcase the manifest virtues of democracy to an entire region end in the likely failure of democracy in just one country, Iraq? More important still, how did an intervention made at the apogee of American power end up illustrating the limitations of that power? The western action in Iraq has given impetus to a new era of Shia power, transforming the political geography of the region to the advantage of Iran, America’s prospective enemy.
***
The answer to the first question lies in the US military action in Afghanistan in 2001. American operations at the start comprised huge volumes of indirect fire delivered by invulnerable platforms in the air or at sea; CIA agents playing a 21st century version of the Great Game and dispensing wads of cash to anyone claiming the ability to fight the Taliban; a ready-made infantry in the shape of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s old rivals; and an urbane and, at least then, compliant political leader-in-waiting in the shape of Hamid Karzai.
This approach represented an apparent vindication of the view of Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence, that successful operations could be carried out by an “economy of force” (and a rejection of the view of his predecessor Colin Powell that the US should use overwhelming force in order to be sure of achieving its goal). The victory of the Rumsfeld doctrine within the Washington Beltway was more complete than that in the field, but a light operational touch became the new conventional wisdom. As a result, in planning the Iraq invasion, General Tommy Franks commanded a manoeuvre force sufficient only for the first phase of the war—the taking of Baghdad. The Kurds and Shia were assigned the role of auxiliaries and Ahmed Chalabi, darling of the Washington neo-conservative circuit, provided the requisite political urbanity and apparent compliance. That Afghanistan, with its strong society but weak state, was never going to be a model for Iraq, with its highly centralised tradition of governance, only became apparent later.
Iraq’s descent into chaos is well documented, and it led to the crisis of the campaign in the summer of 2006. By this stage it was clear that three things had to happen if the western intervention was to have any historic claim to success: al Qaeda in Iraq (made up of Sunni extremists) had to be destroyed; the Sunni had to be reconciled to Shia leadership of the country; and the Shia had to be contained from abusing their new power at the expense of minorities. Each outcome set the pre-conditions for the next and the whole was dependent on the sequenced effect of its parts.
The destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq was brought about primarily by American and British special forces, operating from bases across the country but directed from Balad, north of Baghdad. Although journalistic accounts of the period are available, the relentless, almost industrial, application of highly targeted force has yet to be recognised for its extraordinary efficiency. When the power of al Qaeda to coerce support from local Sunni residents had been broken, even the most recalcitrant former members of the Ba’ath party recognised there was no alternative but to accept the new Shia pre-eminence. In seeking accommodation with the Maliki government, they gave it a pluralist legitimacy; in turn, this allowed Maliki to take on the radicals within his own Shia constituency in what looked like a one-nation process. By 2007, sufficient progress had been made to enable President George W Bush, contrary to much of the conventional military advice he was receiving at the time, to order the “surge” of American forces—his “Lincoln moment,” echoing the decision of President Abraham Lincoln in June 1863, when he threw his forces into the battle of Gettysburg. The 2007 surge of US forces, re-trained and equipped for a counterinsurgency campaign they did not originally intend to fight, set the cap on US military involvement and created a semblance of strategic success.
However, beneath the grand sweep of the campaign narrative, the intricate relationships between parties, factions and sectarian groups were always fragile and susceptible to the most nuanced changes in political atmosphere—which promptly arrived. In many ways, Iraq got its Arab Spring early, in the destruction of the apparently implacably powerful Saddam regime, and the emancipation of the Shia majority. How much that spectacle encouraged the Arab Spring eight years later is a matter of conjecture, although it is reasonable to think that the sudden downfall of an autocrat was an inspiration. What is clear, though, is that the Arab Spring is now inflaming Iraq’s sectarian tensions even further. Syria under President Bashar al-Assad is an inverted image of Iraq under Saddam; a Shia minority (of the Alawite sect) runs the government and security forces, and tries to keep the lid on a Sunni majority. The term Arab Spring is perhaps inappropriate given the deep roots of the conflict in the millennial-old Shia-Sunni civil war. In any case, the Sunni success in challenging the Assad regime in Syria is now encouraging a new Sunni revival in Iraq, as shown by attacks from Sunni extremists on Shia pilgrims to holy sites, which may jeopardise the accommodation with central government. Meanwhile, the conservative Wahhabi wing of Saudi politics is heckling from the sidelines, supporting Iraq’s Sunni and condemning its Shia as little more than Arabic-speaking apostates under the sway of Persian Iran.
In this toxic sectarian mix what are the prospects for democracy in Iraq? In the American sense of the relationship between the individual and a system of governance, not great. In the Arab sense of the balance of power between communities and the apparatus of the state, rather better. But this is hardly the cause for which America spent its power.
Meanwhile, beyond Iraq, the American intervention has reshaped the region’s political geography, strengthening Iran, and consolidating a new era of Shia influence, the second in the religion’s history. It is worth returning briefly to 680 CE to understand the roots of this new Shia power, as well as the upheaval it represents. The death of Hussein and the triumph of Yazid laid the foundations of the Shia vocation of martyrdom, endurance and redemption through suffering, both as a personal code for the individual and as a state doctrine. Anyone who has witnessed the culminating tenth day of the festival of Ashura, in which believers lash themselves with flails and knives, will need no instruction in those capacities. This sense of marginality may have spiritual benefits but it has also prepared the Shia for a history which has been characterised by a subordinate position to the Sunni for most of the intervening 1300 years, with two exceptional periods during the Safavid dynasty, 1501-1722, and, arguably, the period between 1979 and the present day.
The Safavid Empire, at its greatest, covered modern Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, most of Iraq, Georgia, Afghanistan and the Caucasus, as well as parts of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Turkey, rubbing up against the Ottoman and Mughal empires. Many of these areas retain large residual Shia populations today; some, notably Pakistan and Afghanistan, have seen significant Sunni-Shia violence in recent years as sectarian tensions have increased.
One Safavid legacy which is central to the character of contemporary Iran is to set out clearly the political role of religious leaders in the state. The Safavids established the primacy of the “Twelver” strand of Shia Islam, which holds that the line of Muhammad through Ali became extinct in 873 CE, when the twelfth imam disappeared within days of inheriting the title at the age of four. Believers hold that he will return, but until he does, spiritual power passes to elected imams, as God’s representatives, and capable of holding both spiritual and temporal office. This conjunction of religion and state permits Shia jurists to straddle both disciplines. Indeed, some have argued that one of Iran’s strengths since the 1979 Islamic revolution is in permitting a degree of democracy and in formalising the co-existence of religion and politics, although the regime is run ultimately by the supreme leader, an ayatollah.
The second period of Shia prominence dates from that revolution, which in many ways prefigured the Arab Spring; Iran under the Shah was a tired autocracy supported by the west on the “better the devil you know” principle. The revolution released popular energies that found religious expression, and, because of the Shia dispensation for religious leaders to exercise political powers, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became part of the iconography of the late 20th century.
This militant reassertion of Shia identity was followed by the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and shaped the modern Iranian sense of nationhood. But it was western action in Afghanistan and Iraq which dramatically strengthened Iran’s position in the region, by neatly removing its two nearest enemies. Before then, Iran was encircled by Sunni regimes, with Iraq and Saudi Arabia to the west and Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to the east. At a stroke, the 2003 invasion of Iraq broke down the western part of the Sunni wall and replaced it with a Shia-led government susceptible to Tehran’s influence. Iran then had the luxury of strategic depth between itself and its main enemies. At the same time, Iran re-established its traditional influence in the west of Afghanistan. The contiguous area in which Tehran pulled the strings bore a passing resemblance to the Safavid heartland.
No matter how serendipitous the cause, the Iranian regime has not been slow to consolidate its influence over the 140 million Shia living between Lebanon and Afghanistan (in what King Abdullah of Jordan has demonised as the “Shia Crescent”). Through proxies it has indulged in light adventurism in Shia-majority Bahrain and the eastern Saudi provinces, which have large Shia populations, at the same time engaging Israel through the surrogate of Hezbollah.
Western motives may have been virtuous but the legacy of the intervention has been to transform Iran’s position by neutralising its immediate enemies and extending its influence, enabling it to claim regional leadership from Mesopotamia to southern Afghanistan. This has only encouraged the ambitions of a country which since antiquity has laid claim to being a great power, and is unlikely to stop now.
The key question is what form those ambitions will now take. Iran’s leaders know that its present territorial sway does not guarantee security given, say, the range, accuracy and effect of Israel’s arms. They may reckon that they need to counter this with the deterrence that only the possession of a weaponised nuclear device would give; that might incite other regimes to acquire nuclear weapons too. This gloomy prognosis has been widely rehearsed and needs no elaboration. But it sharpens the question of whether regional intervention by the west, particularly in Iraq, represents a strategic own goal.
It would be wrong to claim a direct link with rocketing oil prices, Iran’s threat to freedom of navigation, unrest in Bahrain and regional nuclear proliferation. But it is fair to say that in choosing to take action, we released energies across the region that we neither fully understood nor could control. We may well have good cause for regret.
