Iraq's Third War: The Struggle Against National Dismemberment

By Laura Drake

According to the UN observers who were dispatched to Iraq just after the conclusion of the Gulf war, President Bush and his coalition forces had bombed Iraq back to the preindustrial age, creating problems of "near apocalyptic" proportions. The electric power grid had been completely destroyed. Even now, with limited power restored, everything, even petrol, is in short supply as a result of continued UN sanctions. Medical care is inadequate and medicines still unavailable. And Iraqis are routinely drawing water from rivers and canals, even with the knowledge that it is polluted, because they have no other sources. This situation, unbearable even in February or March, could become cataclysmic in July and August, when daytime temperatures in Baghdad routinely exceed 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Disease threatens to rise to epidemic proportions.

Bush obviously hoped that "the Iraqi people" (read: the Ba'ath and the military) would hold their president responsible for this calamity, as well as for the miserable condition in which the army now finds itself, and overthrow him in fairly short order. The US president did not anticipate that his call would instead be heeded by unintended audiences, namely Iraq's separatist and Islamist elements. The would-be military coup plotters whom Mr. Bush was trying to recruit over the air waves rallied around their leader as the only person in Iraq who had the ability to prevent the mother of all catastrophes—the permanent Lebanon-style fragmentation of the country into its religious and ethnic components.

This nightmarish outcome was one which Bush desperately wanted to avoid. He feared that a dismembered Iraq would become a target for political scavengers coming from Iran, Turkey and Syria. It would also remove the principal regional barrier to a resurgent Iranian threat in the Gulf region, placing Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries at the mercy of a powerful and aggressive non-Arab country. These scenarios explained the president's reluctance to rush to the aid of the Iraqi rebels, despite the drumbeat of congressional and media exhortation.

While many of those calls for US support of Iraqi rebels originated in what conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan has called " the Israeli Defense Ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States, " many other Americans were honestly perplexed at the obvious Bush administration distaste for the first rebels to appear.

The most widely held erroneous view is that these Iraqis rebelled against their leader for the same reasons that President Bush fought a war against him. Bush's war was intentionally portrayed as an American fight against an individual who, in his view, personified all that is evil, inhuman and sinister—another Hitler. Many Americans believed that the Iraqis would focus their hatred on Saddam for these same reasons, and, in addition, that the Iraqi establishment would hold him, rather than Bush, responsible for the destruction of their country.

It generally leads to misunderstandings, however, when Americans seek to project their own motives or viewpoints onto another people. The Shi'i in the south did not rebel against the Iraqi president because they thought he was a dictator or a butcher. They did not even revolt against him as an individual. They rose up against the entire Iraqi establishment because of its secular outlook, which they considered un-Islamic, atheistic, and amoral in a religious sense. In addition, some of the Iraqi Shi'i never forgot that the Ba'athist Iraqi government had fought an eight-year war against the Islamic Republic of Iran and their own hero, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Saddam Hussain was the target of their fury precisely because he heads this establishment which they have always intensely detested. Nor did the Shi'i rebels take to the streets because Saddam allowed the US to destroy their country's infrastructure. They did so because the destruction of Iraq left them a power vacuum—an opportunity in which to stage an insurrection.

The stated goal of the fundamentalist Shi'I opposition has long been the complete over throw of " Saddam and his party," and its replacement with an Islamic theocracy headed by their leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Al-Hakim. The Washington Post quoted one Sri Lankan national, who fled Basra during the Shi'i uprising, as saying: "The revolution has started in Basra. They are saying that their country must be Islamic and that Saddam is not a Muslim .... They want to be like Iran." Accordingly, the rebels focused many of their attacks on Ba'ath party officials, headquarters, ideology, and, of course, the portraits of the Iraqi president. The Shi'i, waving pictures of the late Ayatollah Khomeini and filling the streets with chaos, were proclaiming jihad against Saddam the Ba'athist and Saddam the atheist, not against Bush's version of Saddam the dictator.

Although he denies any involvement, it is clear that Ayatollah Hakim was the chief spokesman and agitator of the Shi'i insurgents. Based in Tehran, he heads an Iraqi Shi'i umbrella organization called the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The SAIRI includes most of the Iranian-inspired groups in Iraq, especially the Islamic Da'wa party, Iraq's oldest fundamentalist dissident organization. Also participating in the southern revolts were the Islamic Action Organization, several hundred agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who infiltrated across the border to organize riots, and even a sprinkling of Hezbollah activists, brought in via Iran all the way from Lebanon.

These rebels, who would certainly have established their Islamic Republic had they been able to, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called democrats. The very presence of an Arabic-speaking Iran—right next to Persian-speaking Iran—would have cast a cloud of apprehension over the heads of Arabs all the way from Jordan and Egypt to Algeria, not to mention the rest of the Iraqi people.

Even if the rebels could not reach Baghdad, the danger remained that southern Iraq could become an Iranian sphere of influence and a constant source of unrest affecting other parts of the country, such as had already occurred in the majority Shi'i, ultraconservative Thawra district of Baghdad. By the end of March, however, this rebellion had been completely eliminated, leaving the Iraqi Republican Guard free to move north and take on the Kurds.

The Non-Arab Kurds

The problem of the Iraqi Kurds is quite different because, unlike the Iraqi Shi'il they are not Arabs. At the height of their rebellion, the Kurds were talking openly about marching on Baghdad, in cooperation with whatever "democratic" Arab opposition forces they could find who shared their goal of seeing the Ba'ath overthrown.

The Kurdish guerrillas already had hereditary clan and tribal leaders and were well organized into armed fighting units, in sharp contrast to their fellow Iraqi dissidents in the south. Politically, the various Kurdish factions are united under the seven-party Iraqi Kurdistan Front. The largest and most important constituent group is the Kurdistan Democratic Party, whose guerrillas are concentrated in their mountain strongholds along the Turkish border.

Masoud Barzani, son of the legendary Kurdish guerrilla leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani, succeeded his father as the head of the KDP and as the overall leader of the Kurdish rebel forces. Jalal Talabani, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the second largest Kurdish guerrilla force, also serves as the chief political officer for the Iraqi Kurdistan Front at its headquarters in Damascus.

A Conference of Dissidents

In mid-March, at the height of the rebellions, a major conference for all Iraqi dissidents was convened at Beirut's Bristol Hotel under heavy guard by Syrian troops. The meeting was attended by more than 325 opposition leaders representing 23 groups and almost every conceivable shade of ideology.

The only thing uniting them was their desire to oust the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. They included, among others: Islamic fundamentalists, Kurds, Communists, liberals, Iraqi members of the Syrian Ba'ath, dissident Iraqi members of the Iraqi Ba'ath, dissident Iraqi military officers, and various Saudi-sponsored Iraqi exiles, many of whom have lived outside Iraq for more than a decade.

The stated aim of the delegates was the overthrow of the Baghdad government, following which this unwieldy opposition coalition would enter into negotiations for the formation of a new Iraqi government and constitution. All agreed that the end result should be a multiparty democracy in a unified Iraq, free of religious or national discrimination, complete with autonomy for the Kurds. These goals, however, stand in stark contradiction to the ideologies, world views and stated aims of most of the individual groups that participated in the meeting.

The stated aim of the delegates was the overthrow of the Baghdad government.

The Beirut conference, therefore, was unsuccessful because of the intense distrust that prevailed amongst so many of the participants. The Kurds feared that the Islamists would try to realize their dream of an Islamic Republic. The Shi'i feared that the Kurds would try to secede from the republic at their first opportunity. The liberals, dissident Ba'athists and Communists feared both. As a result, the delegates emerged from three days of talks without an overall leader, without a clear political program, and without a unified plan of action.

The Saudis had their own ideas about how to effect the removal of Saddam Hussain's government. One group which held meetings in Riyadh under Saudi auspices was the Free Iraq Council, founded in February of this year by a group of 70 individuals, including Sa'ad Jaber, a longtime Iraqi exile. The FIC was criticized early on by a spokesman of the Joint Action of the Iraqi Opposition, a London-based umbrella for opposition groups, who called it a Saudi creation unrepresentative of the Iraqi people.

Another dissident Iraqi hopeful who arrived at Saudi Arabia's doorstep was Gen. Hasan Naqib, a former Ba'athist and Iraqi deputy army chief of staff who broke with the leadership in 1978. After leading a failed uprising three years later, he went into exile.

Gen. Naqib asked Saudi Arabia for help in launching an attack on the Iraqi government from the outside, by making use of Iraqi prisoners of war who had deserted or surrendered during the Gulf war. These defectors, whom the Saudis had already separated from the other prisoners of war, could be retrained, re-indoctrinated, and organized into a substantial insurgent fighting force to spearhead an attack against the Iraqi leadership, Gen. Naqib reasoned. The Saudis made it clear that they viewed those proposals with favor and were giving serious consideration to the means for their implementation.

Many congressional and media critics of administration policy advance arguments that would, if acted upon, lead to the partition of the Republic of Iraq along religious and ethnic lines into three separate pieces. Some Iraqi opposition leaders, however, are more cautious than their US advocates.

Jalal Talabani went to Baghdad at the request of Saddam Hussain. They agreed in principle to revive the Kurdish autonomy plan negotiated between the Kurds and the Ba'ath in 1970, before Saddam became president. Talabani said that he would urge his followers to come down from the mountains, adding that he wanted to see all foreign forces leave Iraqi territory as soon as possible. Saddam, for his part, declared a general amnesty for the Kurds and promised political reforms for the entire country.

Other opposition leaders, however, believe that Talabani is naive, and that the Iraqi government made its declarations for the single purpose of demonstrating that the presence of the US forces currently occupying a small portion of northern Iraq is not necessary in order for the Kurds to be safe. For his part, Ahmed Chalabi, spokesman for the Joint Action of the Iraqi Opposition, made a statement on ABC's " Nightline" in which he more or less accused the Kurds of selling out the rest of the opposition movement.

One Player Among Many, and Fair Game For All

Nevertheless, when Kurds feel secure enough to return to their homes, US forces will no longer have a reason to remain on Iraqi soil. If they remain, they could find themselves in a long-term quagmire in which they would be just one player among many, and fair game for all.

If Iraq's territorial integrity is to be preserved, however, it is essential that Bush allow its people to reach a lasting and comprehensive agreement on their own, without further US involvement. Then, perhaps, international conditions will allow for the UN sanctions finally to be brought to an end, so that this shattered country can begin the long process of making itself whole again.

Laura Drake holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and first visited Iraq in 1988. She currently lives in Arlington, VA.