Pentagon
Report On Iraq Reveals
A Deepening Catastrophe
By James Cogan
08 September 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
Pentagon report to the US Congress on August 29 provided a frank assessment
of the sectarian and communal divisions that have been fomented since
the 2003 US invasion. The report stated that the fratricidal conflict
between rival Sunni and Shiite Muslim movements for control over regions
of the country had created “the conditions that could lead to
civil war”. At the same time, it acknowledged that the anti-occupation
insurgency in majority Sunni areas will “likely continue to attack
coalition forces while they remain in Iraq”.
Previous US claims that the
formation of a cabinet by the new prime minister, Shiite leader Nouri
al-Maliki, would stabilise Iraq, proved to be unfounded. Since May 20,
the report declared, there had been “an increasing number of execution-style
killings, kidnappings and attacks on civilians, and increasing numbers
of internally displaced persons”.
The Pentagon’s statistics
are horrifying. At least 2,000 Iraqis are being slaughtered each month
in what the US military classifies as “sectarian incidents”.
In Baghdad, 90 percent of the more than 1,800 corpses processed by the
coroner’s office in July had been executed. The report cited UN
estimates that 137,000 people had fled their homes due to the sectarian
violence. The bulk of the displacement was taking place “on the
boundaries of the mixed and ethnically dominated areas of Baghdad and
in southwestern Diyala province”. Violence was also growing, however,
in the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk where Kurdish claims over territory
and resources had heightened communal tensions.
The number of known attacks
on US and foreign troops, the Iraqi security forces, civilians or infrastructure
increased by 15 percent over the past three months to close to 800 per
week. Over 60 percent were directed against US and ISF targets. Civilians
were the targets of just 15 percent of attacks, but constituted the
majority of the victims of the violence. Close to 120 Iraqis were killed
or wounded every day, as well as nearly 20 US and other foreign personnel.
Amid this carnage, the social
conditions facing Iraqis are disastrous. Unemployment is estimated by
one agency at 18 percent, and underemployment at another 34 percent.
At least 15.4 percent of the population “lacks adequate food”,
according to the UN World Food Program. As many as 25.9 percent of children
are afflicted with severe or moderate stunting in their physical growth.
Inflation over the year from June 2005 to June 2006 was 52.5 percent.
Residents of Baghdad still only receive an average of eight hours of
electricity per day.
Polling data from Iraq cited
by the Pentagon indicates that “public perceptions are generally
more pessimistic than they were a year ago”. A majority of people
fear that a full-scale civil war is likely to break out.
The report noted that communities
are increasingly looking to ethno-sectarian militias for protection.
In Shiite areas of Baghdad and southern Iraq, the report noted that
the Mahdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr “is well known and popularly
supported”. The growing backing for Sadr stems in large part from
the total failure of the US occupation forces to prevent the constant
attacks on Shiite civilians, as well as the preparedness of factions
within the Mahdi Army to carry out revenge attacks against Sunni extremists
and the efforts of the Sadrist movement to provide social services and
welfare to the urban poor and victims of violence.
In the Kurdish northern provinces,
the Kurdish regional government and the nationalist peshmerga militia
are regarded as the main guarantor of security—not the Iraqi government
or military.
In largely Sunni areas of
western and central Iraq, there is overwhelming hostility toward the
Maliki government and distrust of the Iraqi security forces. Sunni communities
have come to regard the Iraqi police forces as little more than potential
Shiite death squads. The Pentagon referred at various points to the
influence within the Ministry of the Interior police and the regular
Iraqi police of the Mahdi Army and the Badr Organisation militia of
the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
The report repeatedly blamed “rogue elements” of the Mahdi
Army for a large proportion of the sectarian killings.
The report also noted that
the new Iraqi military is permeated with communal divisions. The majority
of commanders of the 114 battalions in the US-recruited Iraqi Army “command
only soldiers of their own sectarian or regional background”.
The majority of the government troops are Shiite and Kurdish, many of
whom are former members of sectarian militias and have little loyalty
to the Baghdad government.
Summing up the “security
environment” in Iraq, the Pentagon report concluded: “Rising
sectarian strife defines the emerging nature of violence in mid-2006...
the core conflict in Iraq changed into a struggle between Sunni and
Shia extremists seeking to control key areas in Baghdad, create or protect
sectarian enclaves, divert economic resources, and impose their own
respective political and religious agendas.” Sustained ethno-sectarian
violence, the report declared, “is the greatest threat to security
and stability in Iraq”.
New repression prepared
US imperialism, however,
has no solution to the communal catastrophe it has created. Instead,
the Bush administration and American media are using the Pentagon report
to justify preparations for stepped-up operations by the US military
and the Iraqi government forces against the Sadrist movement and its
Mahdi Army militia.
The Sadrists are viewed as
a threat in Washington not because of any particular role they have
in sectarian attacks, but because their supporters among the Shiite
working class and urban poor in areas like Sadr City in Baghdad are
hostile to both the occupation of Iraq and the broader US aggression
in the Middle East. In July, tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites demonstrated
in the Iraqi capital against the Israeli assault on Lebanon. Sadrist
leaders have also declared that the Mahdi Army will fight in defence
of Iran if it is the target of US attack.
Within days of the Pentagon
report being released, Iraqi government troops, backed by US aircraft,
were ordered to attack an alleged “rogue” cell of the Mahdi
Army in the city of Diwaniyah, to the south of Baghdad. Dozens of troops
and militiamen were killed in what was widely regarded as a dress rehearsal
for an assault on Sadr City. The New York Times editorialised on September
1 that “Mr Maliki’s refusal to go after the main stronghold—Sadr
City—helps explain Baghdad’s continued high level of violence”.
Preparations are now underway for a major US-government operation into
the district, ostensibly to crack down on Shiite death squads.
No section of the US ruling
elite dwells on how or why sectarianism has come to define life in Iraq—for
obvious reasons. The fundamental causes are the policies and methods
of the US occupation. The invasion in 2003 was consciously aimed at
destroying the existing state and shattering national institutions such
as the army and public service that provided the base of support for
the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. The US-backed governments that
have been formed since have rested on Kurdish and Shiite parties who
have collaborated with the US invasion primarily from the standpoint
of wresting economic and political power from the traditional Sunni
ruling elite.
The new constitution imposed
on the country by the US occupation last year set the stage for civil
war. It established the mechanisms for the partition of Iraq into ethno-sectarian
regions. In the north of the country, the Kurdish nationalist parties
are pushing forward with plans to expand their “regional”
government to include ethnically mixed cities such as Kirkuk and Iraq’s
largest northern oilfields. Over the next several months, provincial
elections will be held in which sections of the Shiite elite in the
south will call for the formation of a Shiite “region” that
would take control over the even larger southern oilfields.
Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish
organisations are waging brutal campaigns to secure control over as
much territory as they can. The operations of the death squads and militias
in Baghdad—a mixed city of close to six million—are to some
extent aimed at dividing the city into homogenous Sunni and Shiite areas.
Associated Press commented on September 3: “A new but not better
city is emerging. Many Iraqis fear that the result will be a Sunni west
and a Shiite east, with the broad Tigris River snaking through the middle
as the sectarian boundary.” Similar ethnic cleansing is occurring
in mixed Kurdish and Arab cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul.
The US occupation forces
are, in the main, simply standing by as this process takes place. Partition
of the country, in fact, continues to be called for by leading American
analysts as a means of securing US interests. Last month, Michael O’Hanlon,
one of the leading foreign policy commentators for the Brookings Institution,
advocated that the US occupation openly adopt a policy of “actively
facilitating voluntary ethnic segregation” in Iraq. “If
we can encourage future ethnic relocation to occur voluntarily and peacefully”,
Hanlon wrote, “rather than through murder, rape and intimidation,
we can still salvage an imperfect but real success that ultimately leaves
most Iraqis better off than they were under Hussein”.
Such proposals serve only
to underscore the basic truth of the US invasion. The primary objective
was long-term dominance over Iraq’s oil resources and territory
and the subjugation of its population. If achieving that aim meant hundreds
of thousands of people being killed or forced from their homes as the
country divided into three or more mini-states, US imperialism would
have no hesitation in implementing such a plan.