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What Must Be Done Now

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By Sir Jeremy Greenstock*

Economist
May 6, 2004

The violence in Iraq may be endemic. But by understanding it and by clarifying priorities, says Sir Jeremy Greenstock, proper democracy is still possible


If Iraq could somehow be freed from violence, the programme of political, social and economic development set up by the coalition during the occupation would represent real progress. Most Iraqis clearly want it. It marks a transformation from the Saddam era; it delivers the prospect of an important Middle Eastern country moving into the 21st century with a chance of emulating more dynamic regions; and it represents a valuable result for the effort expended and the controversy generated.

For the time being, however, the violence is all too present and is immensely damaging. It cannot be wished away and may be an endemic feature of a state with a tortured recent history. Its nature, and the motives behind it, need to be examined carefully to understand what has been taken on in Iraq. The context needs to be set out with clarity. And the prognosis for the next year has to take account of what the Iraqis themselves wish to and can achieve.

Many of us in the international community had doubts about the invasion of March 2003: about its timing, its effect on the region, and its apparent expression of superpower unilateralism and self-righteousness. As Britain's representative at the United Nations, I was nonetheless clear in my own mind that Iraq had offended so grossly against the requirements of the UN and international law, and had told so many lies about weapons of mass destruction, that it had laid itself open to the use of force to ensure compliance with UN resolutions. The British government had decided to help remove Saddam for those reasons, and it was my job to make sure it was successful. There were compelling reasons for staying with the United States in this complex operation, not only because Britain had something valuable to offer (a passport to other support, military incisiveness, historical perspective and experience), but also because the damage to world diplomacy if America went solo was too awful to contemplate.

In the event, the conflict itself was short and efficiently run. The relief about that was, however, all too soon replaced by uneasiness over the post-conflict handling of events. There were too many signs of mistaken assumptions, analysis and remedies; and too much equivocation about the establishment of effective control. Because I was retiring from the diplomatic service in July 2003 it did not occur to me to volunteer to play a part in the theatre of operations, but when it became clear that trouble was brewing and I was asked to help, I felt that I should not duck. I went to Baghdad, as Britain's special representative, on September 11th 2003, for a clearly defined period of six months and with a remit both to help the Americans through the rough weather and to offer independent advice if it was needed. It was.

My primary aim, agreed with my bosses in London, was to help the Americans develop a political process which would end the occupation as soon as sensibly possible and leave Iraq stable enough to sustain its own experiment of government with the consent of the people. What this meant was reasonably clear: the return of power into Iraqi hands as soon as made sense; no Saddam or Saddam clones in government; no irresolvable inter-communal tensions; established individual and minority rights; minimum corruption and incompetence; and restored services. It was a tall order to try to re-establish Iraqi sovereignty before March 2004, my personal end-point; but I did not dismiss the prospect out of hand. The country had enough educated and talented citizens to break the regional mould in many important respects.

The principles on which Paul Bremer worked, as chief administrator in Iraq, were entirely compatible with the outline I have described. We had clear ideas on the next stages. They had to be adjusted as snags arose, but this was skilfully done; and they were underpinned with a whole range of practical improvements to the Iraqi infrastructure. After a shaky start and some semi-admitted mistakes, we felt we were going somewhere.

It is crucial that the process now laid down for the next stages in Iraq should be widely understood, because it sets the context for the violence and not the other way round. The adoption of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL)—in reality, an interim constitution—on March 8th laid out the steps towards the establishment of a democratic foundation for the new Iraq. Its compromises—including a hard-won deal with the Kurdish leaders on regional autonomy, accepted by the Arab politicians on Iraq's Governing Council (GC)—open up the prospect of inter-communal cohesion, if Iraqis agree to what it offers.

The pivotal event in the calendar for 2004 and 2005 set by the TAL is the holding of elections for a new national assembly before January 31st 2005. The transfer of executive authority to an Iraqi government by June 30th 2004 is less important than the end-year elections in the building of the new state. The interim government will be fully sovereign, in the sense that every arrangement made by America and the international community will need to be agreed with the Iraqis as equal partners. Iraqis will run the budget; Iraqi judges will try Saddam; and Iraqis will determine the future of the oil industry. But, under the TAL, it will be in power for seven months only, from July to January 2005, and will be constrained from activities other than properly administering the country and the elections. The new assembly voted in at the start of 2005 will take on a full and independent responsibility, will organise and approve a new government, will act as the orthodox legislator for the state, and will carry the responsibility for the writing and popular approval of a new permanent constitution by October 2005.

Chickens and Eggs

By the end of 2005 there will be fresh elections for a government in accordance with that new constitution. By then all the elements of legitimacy, national and international, will have been covered and the Iraqi people should feel that there has truly been a change from international oversight to independence and sustainable stability. But can the whole thing hold together for that period? Why all these stages? Why not a straight march to early national elections and leave it at that? Why two elections in 2005 straddling the production of a new permanent constitution?

The answer is that a classic chicken-and-egg problem arose in the second half of 2003. Mr Bremer quite rightly wanted national elections to be held only after the principles of the new state had been prescribed in a new constitution. The political tussle would otherwise have become a crude battle between political operators and their militias for power inadequately defined, and with individuals and minorities inadequately protected. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, however—whose voice was filling the vacuum of independent political expression despite his refusal to hold a political post—declared it unacceptable to have a constitution prepared by unelected actors. The chronological order turned into a stalemate. Mr Bremer's Seven Steps, the political outline designed in the summer of 2003, fell apart.

He and I insisted nevertheless that national elections could not be held at the snap of a finger, and that time was needed to allow new political parties and other democratic practices to develop. We and our capitals, through the autumn of 2003, increasingly came to see the advantage of releasing Iraq and the coalition from the status of "occupation" with all that word's unfortunate connotations. We wished to see Iraqi elections held not only with proper preparation but also under a fully authoritative Iraqi administration, in order to avoid the charge that the elections were a coalition fix.

The agreement of November 15th between the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the GC set out the main features of the new programme up to the end of 2005. The interim government, however, was set to run from mid-2004 to the end of 2005 and was to be chosen by local and national caucuses in spring/summer 2004 which, from the start, looked complicated. The GC politicians close to Mr Sistani reported that he could support the plan. That proved misleading. He soon expressed a powerful objection to any delay in organising national elections and to the caucus process. The CPA and the senior independent voice in Iraq seemed again to be on a collision course. It took the re-entry of the UN into the process, with some sensitive diplomacy by the secretary-general's envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to dissolve the blockage. Mr Sistani accepted in the end that the elections should be held after a reasonable period of preparation, but insisted that the unelected government which preceded it should not have sovereign freedom to affect the future of the Iraqi state.

This somewhat tortuous procedure had various effects. The CPA, and Mr Bremer himself, learned a great deal about the interplay between emerging political forces in the new Iraq. Their handling of the GC developed subtlety and sophistication. The capacity of the GC to etch out political compromises among themselves, including with Mr Sistani, gradually improved. But the public arguments underlined the complexity of the whole operation and sapped credibility from the CPA and the GC. And the wider Iraqi population remained confused about what was happening to them, trusting neither the CPA nor the religious authorities to put the interests of the people first.

The Evolution of Violence

Alongside this swirling evolution of political developments, not so unnatural in itself, came changes in the security situation. Over the winter, as the coalition developed better intelligence and more precise methods of dealing with the people and cells revealed by each anti-coalition operation, the effectiveness of loyalists to the former regime began to decline. (Perhaps we need to learn this lesson about operating in a new theatre, but it takes time to find good ways of dealing with people with a local advantage.) The loyalists were being picked up in increasing numbers, were finding it hard to communicate and co-ordinate with each other, and were coming up against harder protective casing on the coalition side.

Their own methods, nevertheless, evolved in response; and they began to look for ways of operating with the other main threat to the coalition, the non-Iraqi terrorist groups that had infiltrated into Iraq as soon as the conflict ended. These groups, whom many regard as the al-Qaeda franchise, have a rather different political and ideological motivation. But they agree with the indigenous Iraqi insurgents in wanting to turn Iraq into a country ungovernable by the United States or anyone else. For both, violence and anarchy are to be achieved by indiscriminate killing and disruption.

As the coalition itself grew harder to attack, these groups began to turn to softer targets: smaller coalition partners, donors, contractors and the new Iraqi structures themselves. Increasingly, the Iraqi population was taking casualties rather than foreigners on Iraqi soil. This tended to intensify the disgust of ordinary Iraqis at the activities of the loyalists and particularly of the non-Iraqi terrorists. But it also reduced their tolerance of the occupying powers, whose overall responsibility for the security situation was clear in international law and valid as a human judgment.

As the political process went through its various stages, and as the arguments developed between the coalition and the religious and political voices outside the administration, the willingness of the population as a whole to put up with the costs began to decline. This in turn increased the motivation of the committed insurgents to step up their attacks, and it improved their capacity to persuade members of the Iraqi population to try their hand at supporting violence.

This is a crucial area to analyse and comprehend. The Saddam loyalists and the terrorists have no prospect on their own of defeating the coalition militarily. They either have to destroy its political will or attract a much larger opposition to it within the wider Iraqi population. The prospect of Iraqi sovereignty reviving from the beginning of July has narrowed their chances of capitalising on the unpopularity of the occupation. And their methods are heartily loathed by ordinary Iraqis, whose dislike of the Baathists is so intense that they have choked even on the marginal (and sensible) dilution of deBaathification that Mr Bremer has recently proposed. But they know that resentment and frustration within parts of the population, particularly in the Sunni heartland and in certain poorer Shia areas, present an opening for stirring up widespread trouble.

For their part, the great majority of Iraqis have, from the beginning of the occupation, shown that they have their eyes fixed on the opportunity offered by the removal of Saddam Hussein. They were humiliated by his treatment of them and felt that they had been abandoned by the world outside. They were ready to accept a difficult transition and were inured to a certain level of violence. Their tolerance of outside involvement has, under these extraordinary circumstances, proved remarkably resilient, as opinion polls taken in March clearly showed.

But there are limits. The majority must remain confident that life is getting better and that the whole purpose of the invasion, the creation of an Iraq ruled with the consent of its people, will be realised. The new authority has to be credible and acceptable, something of which the UN's Mr Brahimi, now engaged in the selection of an interim government, is very aware. Democracy as such can take its time to materialise, in the view of many Iraqis, so long as the foundations of a normal life begin to reappear. The notice at the front of Mr Bremer's desk is noble enough: "Success has a thousand fathers". I would nevertheless replace it with a sharper message: "Security and jobs, stupid".

If the balance between improvement and cost turns negative for more than a short period, Iraqi resilience will be affected. The measure of this at any one time is the number of people prepared to join the hard-core violence, even temporarily. This is why the events of April, with the dangerous coincidence of trouble in both the Sunni and Shia communities (Fallujah and Najaf respectively), have raised such anxiety. Are these exceptional, or are they evidence of an irrevocable trend towards deterioration?

We need to be very careful in making this judgment. The saga of Iraq encompasses much more than the future of a single people or the success of a particularly risky superpower initiative. We are still trying to restore the mechanics of the geopolitical system to smooth operation in the most difficult conditions. Terrorism is a global threat, and its manifestation in Iraq is a symptom, not a cause, of a wider malaise. Dealing with it in Iraq is essential for its general containment. The usefulness of the UN is connected not just to the principles under which its collective business is done but also to the effectiveness of its performance in the most awkward theatres. The power of nations has to take account of the power of natural chaos; and the right instruments have to be developed—and accepted—by nations to produce the right collective result. We all have a stake in the final outcome of a better state for the Iraqi people than when this started.

Yet the real arbiters of this tense and critical challenge are the Iraqis themselves. They need to know that a new Iraq can genuinely be achieved and that the ousting of Saddam was worth it. Only they can judge whether the cost can be borne. In Fallujah and a few other places where Sunni extremists have local support, they seem to have decided that it cannot. Perhaps the same calculation has been made by the relatively small clique of Shia militants behind the renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Experienced Middle East observers would have been astounded if some Iraqis somewhere had not demonstrated how brutal they can be.

But elsewhere it is by no means clear that tolerance is fading. Moderate Iraqis have moved quite quickly to limit the damage done by the extremists. Iraqi women, over 55% of the population, are overwhelmingly glad that the old regime has gone. Soundings taken in recent weeks show most Iraqis still determined to create a new Iraq. The underlying judgment is that there is no alternative.

This is why the decision to bring government back into Iraqi hands is crucial. Nationalist sentiment will otherwise balloon out of control. And the responsibility of governing has to replace the freedom to complain. The criteria for action have to become predominantly Iraqi; and that, as we have all too clearly witnessed, does not happen with outside powers in the driving seat. If terrorism and indiscriminate violence are to be eliminated from Iraqi society, then Iraqis will have to show their determination to remove it by supporting their security forces, rejecting the presence among them of the enemies of a free Iraq and developing the ideology of a unified rather than a communally divided country. The responsibility for making hard choices has to stimulate a new leadership and inspire a collective spirit beyond the experience of any living Iraqi. And the awareness of international support for this process has to be a comforting one, without the suspicion of outside manipulation or the primacy of other interests.

The Outsiders' Role

This makes it all the more essential to attract the active support of a wider range of international actors, once the more reluctant of them see that the transfer of responsibility is really occurring and once they have overcome their distaste for the origins of the present state of affairs. The foundation of this international effort is the determination of the present coalition leaders to stay the course. Iraqis know that they cannot yet manage their own security and, within a certain level of tolerance, they do not want foreign forces to leave until they can.

That is why American and British troops need to be prepared to stay at least into 2006, and why the talk of finding an earlier exit strategy is misjudged. The numbers can decline as the Iraqis prove a new competence, but not until the borders are secure, the militias are disarmed and terrorist incidents are the exception. Whether or not the UN gears itself up to play a full role in the politics and social reconstruction of Iraq—and Kofi Annan must make a huge decision here about the UN's capacity to take on the hardest tasks—the iron framework for Iraq's future has to be wrought by the powers who volunteered for this job.

It is uncomfortable to recognise that so many important issues in our wider set of interests are caught up in Iraq, and that success there depends so much on the perceptions and strength of character of a people who are being tested in entirely new circumstances. But if we are clear on these points, then the choice itself becomes simpler: we have to stick with Iraq until the job is done.

About the Author: Sir Jeremy Greenstock was a British diplomat from 1969-2004, serving in Washington, Paris, Dubai and Saudi Arabia. He was Britain's permanent representative at the UN from 1998-2003, and its special representative for Iraq from 2003-04


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