VOL. XLVI
No 35
The Political Scene (1 September 2003)
US ambassador Paul Bremer has acknowledged that Iraq has become “one of the fields of battle” in the war against terrorism as the US administration has for the first time raised the possibility that the UN may have a role to play. Despite his “irrelevance,” Palestinian leader Yasir 'Arafat has been indulging in what looks very much like a dialogue at one remove with the Americans.
Iraq A Battlefield
In the week following the 21 August suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad there has been no let-up in the violence in Iraq. Indeed, the death of four British soldiers in Basra (three on 23 August and another on 27 August) suggests that the range of whoever is behind the attacks on coalition forces now extends outside the Sunni triangle around Baghdad (where two US soldiers were killed and 9 wounded on 27 August). Moreover the attempted assassination of Shi'a leader Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Sa'id al-Hakim in Najaf on 24 August – presumably by supporters of the fallen regime of Saddam Husain – did little to make the Americans’ task of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again politically any easier.
To explain the steady flow of casualties, US officials have been forced to acknowledge that they are facing not only recalcitrant Iraqi Ba'thists but volunteers from elsewhere in the region as well. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said on 22 August that “the borders are quite porous…and the fact that we’ve captured a certain number of foreign fighters in Baghdad and around Iraq indicates that the ways that these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia.” US administrator Paul Bremer came perilously close to admitting that, far from diminishing the threat of terrorism, the occupation of Iraq was in fact exposing the US to further attacks, when he said on 23 August that “it is now unfortunately the case that Iraq has become one of the fields of battle in this global war” on terror, adding that members of the former regime were responsible for the UN attack as well as “foreign terrorists, of which there are several varieties around” and there may be “some sort of cooperation between the two.” The next day he warned that “we are now seeing a large number of international terrorists coming into Iraq…We do have a problem now with more terrorists here. And I agree with General Abizaid, it emerges now as an important threat to us.” And on 26 August Mr Bremer told the Washington Post of “the growing terrorist threat,” saying that “we have seen it in the last six or eight weeks, essentially two elements of the terrorist threat. One, of the arrival of what you would call foreign terrorists, foreign fighters, who carry documentation from places like Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and who may be linked in some ways to elements of Ba'thist types. It’s not very clear. And then of course we have the arrival in the country of scores of Ansar al-Islam terrorists who are associated with al-Qa'ida.” Even President George Bush described the situation in Iraq on 26 August as “a point of testing in the war on terror. Remnants of Saddam’s regime are still dangerous, and terrorists are gathering in Iraq to undermine the advance of freedom.”
Mr Bush’s response, characteristically, was bravado, saying that “retreat in the face of terror would only invite further and bolder attacks. There will be no retreat” and that “our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or Saint Louis or Los Angeles.” But however satisfying it may be to categorize Washington’s adversaries in Iraq as terrorists, there is clearly a growing danger that US troops in Iraq will provide a target for anyone with a grievance against the US, which, thanks to the Americans’ unqualified support for Israel, is pretty much everyone in the Arab world (not to mention al-Qa'ida). In Lebanon, some twenty odd years ago, the Americans simply withdrew when it became clear that all they were doing was providing target practice for the Syrians and their surrogates. But that is not an option in Iraq, where the Americans must fill the vacuum they have created by deconstructing the Iraqi state before they can go. There is therefore a real possibility that the Americans are facing a prolonged period of low-intensity and asymmetrical conflict in Iraq. And in the meantime, nobody on either side seems to have given much thought to how the unfortunate Iraqis might feel about becoming a battleground for Arab radicals and the US.
US Mulls UN Role
It is still far from clear what – if anything – the Americans originally planned to do with Iraq once they had conquered it, beyond some vague notions of effortlessly creating a democratic market economy that would serve as a model for other countries in the region (and sign a peace treaty with Israel along the way). If that was plan A, it has now given way to a more realistic plan B, in which, as Mr Bush acknowledged on 26 August, “building a free and peaceful Iraq will require a substantial commitment of time and resources.” Just how substantial was made clear by Mr Bremer when he told the Washington Post that – over and above the $4bn a month the occupation is costing the US in military expenditures – “the UN estimates that to get a more or less satisfactory potable water system in the country will cost $16bn over four years. The 2,000 megawatts we need to add just to meet current demand will cost $2bn and the engineers tell me we probably should spend about $13bn over the next five years to get the power system.” Given the parlous state of American finances (and Iraqi oil infrastructure) at the moment, the economic challenges facing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) look almost as daunting as the military ones.
One way out of the military and economic predicament in which the Americans have landed themselves would clearly be to hand responsibility for Iraqi reconstruction and/or security over to the UN, an idea previously unthinkable to the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington but now apparently becoming a good deal more thinkable as the true scale of the task becomes apparent. This shift in the administration’s position was signaled by Mr Armitage when he told reporters on 26 August that a “multinational force under UN leadership, but the American would be the UN commander” is “one idea that’s being explored,” while giving the UN complete control over civilian reconstruction with the US retaining command of military operations is “one of the interesting ideas that has come out of the discussions we’ve had.” Mr Armitage stressed that “we’ve made no final decision” and that “we’ve got a ways to go,” and it remains to be seen whether the administration is ready – yet – to cede enough authority to the UN to meet the objections of, inter alia, the French, Germans and Russians, who feel, not unreasonably, that if they are to contribute troops and money they should have some say as to what is done with them. The position of what might be described as the opposition in the UN was summed up by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on 28 August when he said that “a real change of approach is needed. We must end the ambiguity, transfer responsibilities and allow the Iraqis to play the role they deserve as soon as possible. The eventual arrangements cannot just be an enlargement or adjustment of the current occupation forces. We have to install a real international force under a mandate of the UN Security Council.”
'Arafat Still In The Game
For someone declared irrelevant by the Israelis months ago, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasir 'Arafat has been looming inordinately large in the Americans’ mind as the “road map” goes up in flames in the wake of the cancellation of the cease-fire declared by Palestinian radicals and the 19 August suicide attack in Jerusalem. The Americans believe, probably correctly, that Mr 'Arafat retains a significant degree of control over the Palestinian security apparatus, and since they no longer feel they can talk to the PA president directly, they have been reduced to asking other Arabs to persuade him to cede this control to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud 'Abbas and his security chief Muhammad Dahlan. (These Arabs, unsurprisingly, feel that the Americans would be better off dealing with Mr 'Arafat directly.) According to Mr Armitage on 22 August, “we’ve discussed with our Arab friends the need to prevail upon Mr 'Arafat to allow all the security forces to be put at the disposal of Mr Dahlan and of course Prime Minister Abu Mazen…The fact that up to now all of the security forces haven’t been made available to Prime Minister Abu Mazen seems to indicate that Mr 'Arafat has some mixed views on the situation.” Mr 'Arafat was presumably expressing these mixed views when he appointed former West Bank preventive security chief Jibril Rajub as his national security adviser on 25 August in a move widely seen as asserting his control over the security services. That brought a rebuke from White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, who said on 26 August that “by blocking the consolidation of the Palestinian security services under Prime Minister 'Abbas, Yasir 'Arafat undercuts the fight against terrorism and further undermines the hopes of the Palestinian people for peace and for a Palestinian state.” Mr 'Arafat countered by accusing the Americans of interfering in the Palestinians’ internal affairs and issuing a statement on 27 August calling upon “all Palestinian factions to reiterate their commitment to the truce to give a chance to international peace efforts to implement the road map.” That was not good enough for Ms Buchan, who declared that “actions to dismantle terrorist organizations and to dismantle terrorist networks are what is needed and what’s most important. 'Arafat has once again showed himself to be part of the problem. He is not part of the solution, and the security forces need to be consolidated under Prime Minister 'Abbas.” From the American (and Israeli) point of view, Mr 'Arafat may well be part of the problem and therefore irrelevant to the solution. But to someone unaware of his irrelevance, he might appear to be doing a fairly shrewd job of dealing himself back in to the game.
Charles Snow