security forces in Basra had been closed to Sunnis, there were currently about four hundred Sunnis in the local police and army. “Now the Sunni sect doesn’t have problems in Basra,” he said.
In stark contrast to downtown Basra were the slums of Hayaniya. They were far removed from the heart of the city, as if the population was segregated, and surrounded by sewage and garbage dumps. Streets were unpaved, and many houses were made of mud. An Iraqi army brigade surrounded them and had bases inside. The brigade, a mixed unit of Sunnis and Shiites that was headquartered in Ramadi and trained by the Americans, had arrived in Basra on April 13. I visited a school they were occupying in Hayaniya and met with two officers: one was a Sunni from Falluja, and the other was a Shiite from Baghdad’s Shaab district. They sat on beds in a room with no door. Their men played volleyball in the yard. “The enemy was anybody illegal,” they told me, “anybody carrying weapons.” They had clashed mostly with the Mahdi Army and Thar Allah, but now the city was quiet, they said, adding that “we don’t need help from the British.” Hayaniya had the most problems, they explained—it was like Sadr City. The officer from Falluja joked that in the upcoming elections, the Saddamists in his city would win because the Awakening groups backed them. Both officers praised the Awakening’s Abu Risha. “Petraeus is wrong,” the Sunni officer told me. “The Americans caused the problems. The army and the people and the Awakening brought peace.” His Shiite friend agreed. “We are the highest authority,” he said. Many locals complained that the Iraqi army’s occupation of schools and heavy presence in their neighborhood was oppressive and made them feel occupied.
One evening I met with four Mahdi Army men in the Gzeiza slum, adjacent to Hayaniya. One commanded one hundred fighters, one commanded forty fighters, and the other two were mere fighters. Their more senior commanders had fled to Iran. They had all taken part in the 1991 uprising against Saddam and a smaller one in 1999. They insisted that both uprisings had been influenced by the Sadrists. There were about 1,500 houses in Gzeiza, they told me. The Iraqi army occupied four schools, they said, complaining that soldiers mistreated children, wore shorts, and were inappropriately dressed in front of women. The army also stole from homes and harassed people, they said. They still supported Maliki despite his crackdown, but they insisted that Muqtada was popular throughout Basra. The Sadrist Current was under extreme pressure from the British forces, the Iraqi government, and the ISF, they said, but added that the Sadrists had no problem with the people or the government. They didn’t think that the Americans would leave Iraq. “The Mahdi Army is not weak,” one of them told me. “We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says we do, and he said, ‘Don’t fight the government.’ We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity. Before Charge of the Knights the Mahdi Army controlled Basra. We can be more than the army. We can get rid of them in two days. There is pressure from the government now. There are provocations, but we were ordered not to have arms on the street.”
The men conceded that killings were down, but they still complained about crime. “We are sitting on oil, and we don’t have electricity,” one of them said. “In the summer for an hour or two. Now it’s three hours on, three off.” The Mahdi Army was loyal only to Iraq, they told me, which was the same thing the two Iraqi army officers had said. The street in Iraq was Sadrist, they said, and the Mahdi Army was the
On my last day in Basra, a British armored vehicle was stoned by a group of local men. One brave man climbed on top of it and was persuaded to go down only when a British soldier emerged and pointed his weapon at him. There was little sign after more than five years of occupation in Basra that the British had built or improved anything in the vast slums where most of the population lived. And when the British tried to encourage the local government to increase services in Hayaniya and similar areas, the local officials said that these poor Shiites didn’t belong in Basra anyway, since they were from Amara, from the marshes. British officers told me the provincial council had a condescending attitude toward the residents of Hayaniya and its neighboring areas, and that they were desperately trying to get services to these areas. Little had been learned after five years. The poor Shiite majority was still neglected, just as it was under Saddam. Only Muqtada carried their voice.
In late December 2008 I visited an Iraqi Christian family in East Beirut that had fled Baghdad only two weeks earlier. A small Christmas tree was in the corner of the room. “My husband couldn’t go to his shop, the children were without school because of the bad situation,” the mother explained. There were less kidnappings in Baghdad now, she admitted, but there were still explosions. “It’s difficult to be away from my country,” she said, switching back and forth between the Lebanese and Iraqi dialect. I told her about the book I was working on, a project about Bush’s legacy in the Middle East. Bush had only brought them war, not freedom, she said bitterly. “Why should I thank Bush?” she asked. “For the war we experienced in Iraq? For our displacement from our homes? For the year we couldn’t send our children to school and the year my husband couldn’t go to his shop to work? Why will I thank him? We just now left Iraq. Where is the democracy? Where is the security?”
When the family moved into their small apartment in Beirut, they found a pencil drawing of Saddam Hussein on their wall, beneath which was written “the brave martyr.” The mother said she kissed it when she saw it. “I love him,” she said. “In Saddam’s time Iraq was safe. We could go to school and work safely—there was no displacement. We were Christians living with Sunnis and Shiites, one next to the other. Since Bush came, the Sunnis left their homes. We have not seen any changes in Iraq. We don’t expect change because of Obama. He’s American.”
I asked Saramand, another Iraqi Christian, the same questions. He had arrived in Beirut six months earlier and now worked in a local church whose congregation was made up entirely of Christian refugees. Two weeks earlier forty families had arrived, he told me. “Before, if there were five or six people in a house and one worked, they could live,” he said. “Here they all work just to survive. Work is not allowed, but people work.” He too blamed Bush for his plight: “What do you expect to happen in an occupation? The democracy that Bush sent us is killing, theft, settling of scores. Where is the democracy? Where is the freedom? Where are the promises he made? Garbage has reached up to our heads in Iraq. Children are dying every day in Iraq—for what? If there was no Bush, I would not be here. If you see a refugee laughing, it’s a lie. Inside, he is full of memories.”
IN MARCH 2007 the surge was still nascent, but the legal basis for the American occupation was expiring. United Nations resolutions effectively let American troops do whatever they wanted, but the Iraqis wanted that to end. The Americans needed a bilateral agreement to anchor their presence in Iraq. Bush wanted a policy to hand to his successor, knowing he would be under a lot of pressure to leave. In the spring of 2007 the Americans began to discuss their options. The U.S. military said it needed a Status of Forces Agreement, but civilians in the government were skeptical that a typical SOFA could be passed.
In the Middle East, most American SOFAs are secret, their terms hidden from the population, because the governments the Americans deal with are dictatorships. If citizens from these countries knew what was in a typical agreement, they would be outraged. But Iraq was sort of a democracy, and the SOFA would have to go through Parliament and be made public. The 1948 Treaty of Portsmouth, between Iraq and Britain, was on the minds of many Iraqi politicians. When the terms of Portsmouth became known in Baghdad, there were massive protests led by a movement known as Al Wathba (The Leap). The treaty was abandoned. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 treaty with the Shah of Iran was also on Iraqis’ minds, since Iranian anger at the treaty helped lead to the rise of Khomeini. Most SOFAs grant immunity to American military personnel. But the Iraqis were afraid that immunity could fuel the Mahdi Army and the resistance. It would look like the politicians were giving Iraq away.
The fall 2007 declaration of principles signed between Maliki and Bush set the atmosphere. It described cultural, economic, and diplomatic ties and laid out the terms of the partnership and security relationship. “It was very hard,” an American official told me. “Maliki didn’t want to sign. He was timid politically, and the other parties would stab him for it even if they agreed with it. Bush wanted him to sign it in the U.S., but he balked, so they signed it via video conference.” In February 2008 the State Department hired Ambassador Robert Loftis, a senior basing negotiator and an expert on drafting SOFAs, but who had no Iraq experience. His draft gave the Americans full authority and control. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and NSA’s Brett McGurk said it wouldn’t work, it was an impossible dream. The terms leaked, the Sadrists protested, and Maliki opposed it. This was not what he got on board for.
The Americans fired the entire SOFA team. McGurk arrived in Iraq in mid-May and worked directly with
