Aftermath

Maliki, meeting him twice a week and also working with Maliki’s close advisers. It was a small American team: McGurk, Crocker, and David Satterfield. They had a direct line to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and President Bush. The timelines set by the SOFA were very controversial within the U.S. military. It set a June 2009 withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities and a full American withdrawal by 2011.

The Iraqis were making maximalist demands, but the Americans assumed Maliki was just posturing because of domestic politics. The Iraqis rebranded it the Withdrawal Agreement because the original draft had so poisoned the atmosphere. Immunity for troops was the hardest issue, but eventually the two sides came up with a hypothetical situation that was impossible to imagine. Perhaps if an American soldier went to a bar and raped an Iraqi woman or committed some other unlikely but egregious act, then he would be prosecuted under Iraqi law. Otherwise the Americans would try him. “During the SOFA they played us like fiddles,” an American official told me. “The prime minister’s office got exactly what they wanted, a presence in the country that protects them and which they have oversight over and which they can use as a stick against opponents.”

Maliki’s Law and Order campaign against militias resonated with the middle class. His confrontation with Kurds galvanized Iraqi nationalist support, and the SOFA poured water on the Sadrist flames. There was now a timetable for withdrawal; it looked like the occupation would end. But a different iconic moment will be forever associated with the trip Bush took to Baghdad to sign the SOFA.

THE YEAR 2008 ended with Muntadhar al-Zeidi reminding President Bush and the world for only a moment about the Iraqi victims. During a press conference on Bush’s last visit to the country, Zeidi spoke for the masses in the Arab world and beyond when he shouted, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” as he threw his first shoe at the American president. Zeidi was a secular, left-leaning Shiite from Sadr City whose work as a reporter for Baghdadiya television had won him local acclaim because of his focus on the suffering of innocent Iraqis. He had been arrested twice by the American army and kidnapped once by a militia.

He remembered, as did all Iraqis, that the American occupation had not begun with the surge. The story of the American occupation was not one of smart officers contributing to the reduction of violence and increase in stability. That was only one chapter in a longer story of painful, humiliating, sanctions, wars, and bloody occupation. Those with short memories, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, might remember the American occupation as “a million acts of kindness.” But to Iraqis and anyone else sensitive enough to view them as humans, the occupation was one million acts of violence and humiliation or one million explosives. There was nothing for Bush to be triumphal about during his farewell press conference. Even the surge had exacted a costly toll on Iraqis. Thousands more had been killed, arrested, thrown into overcrowded prisons, and rarely put on trial, their families deprived of them. The surge was not about a victory. With a cost so high, there could be no victory. COIN is still violence, and the occupation persisted, imposing violence on an entire country. As Zeidi threw his second shoe in a last desperate act of defiance, he remembered these victims and shouted, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!”

Part Four AFTERMATH

CHAPTER TEN Lebanon: Toward Zero Hour

ONE EVENING IN THE SPRING OF 2008, I WAS SITTING ON A STOOP ON a dark street and speaking to several Sunni “concerned local citizens,” the new euphemism for American-backed militias in the Middle East. The young men were speaking of the danger coming from Shiites when I interrupted one of them, who was wearing a white sleeveless shirt, and said, “Don’t take this personally, but would you let your sister marry a Shiite?” In an instant he flattened his hand and moved his arm like a blade, slicing into the air the way he would slice her throat. I was not in Baghdad, where this might have been commonplace—I was in Beirut, where, as in pre-occupation Iraq, once it would not have been out of the ordinary for a Sunni and a Shiite to marry. In the early years of the American occupation of Iraq there were concerns about the Lebanonization of Iraq; but now it seemed Iraq was coming to Lebanon.

Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut felt insecure. Thuggish Shiite Amal supporters regularly zipped through on their scooters to shoot in the air and taunt them. Leaders from the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition were being blown up occasionally, and it was clear the security forces could not protect them. The Future Movement’s leaders felt pressure to protect themselves and their anxious constituency, so they created a private security company to protect Future leaders and local militias in various Sunni neighborhoods throughout the country, established under the leadership of Salim Diab, former general coordinator of the Future Current.

Lebanon had no history of strife between Sunnis and Shiites. There had been class conflicts in the past— Sunnis were condescending to Shiites the way urban people often are to rural people, and Sunnis reviled Shiite religious traditions, which Shiites resented—but the divide had not been violent. Lebanese Sunni racism against Shiites was an artificial sectarianism, seeming to come out of nowhere. Lebanese Sunnis had never seen themselves exclusively as Sunnis. Even former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri was not seen as a Sunni leader before his death. Until then he had not even had the support of most Sunnis, and Sunni leadership was not centralized. His death was exploited for political and sectarian reasons.

The first Sunni show of force was the Future Movement-backed demonstrations in February 2006 against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which turned into a riot targeting Christians. Hariri’s son Saad was very embarrassed by this. Sunni power often seemed to be devoid of specific goals except keeping Shiites out of power. Historically Shiites were called the epithet “mutwali.” But following Hizballah’s victory in the 2006 war, some urban Shiites reclaimed their victimization as a source of pride and made “mutwali” cool, in a way that resembled the African American reappropriation of the word “nigga.” Hizballah has never exploited sectarianism and has always gone out of its way to ease tensions. Hassan Nasrallah warned that the Americans were trying to drive a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis. But Hizballah could not escape the fact that it was a Shiite party.

From May to September 2007, the army had to contend with the crisis at the Nahr al-Barid Palestinian refugee camp, which left some 420 people killed, 168 of them soldiers. On September 4 of that year, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr announced the cessation of 106 days of fighting against Islamic militants in the camp. It was the second war Lebanon had seen in two summers (see Chapter Six). The Lebanese army, which had stood by impotently in the summer of 2006 as the Israeli military destroyed much of the country in the name of fighting Hizballah, this time destroyed a refugee camp housing forty thousand people in the name of the war on terror. The three months of fighting with the jihadists from Fatah al-Islam, the worst the country had seen since its fifteen-year civil war ended in 1990, had been a distraction from growing internal divisions in Lebanon. These divisions had brought the country dangerously close to civil war once again in January 2007, when Sunnis and Shiites clashed on the streets.

There was a sense of foreboding that summer, a feeling that something worse was about to happen. The July war with Israel was still on everyone’s mind, and with it the fear that neither Israel nor Hizballah viewed the previous summer’s denouement as conclusive. Another war was ongoing in the north, with the interregnum punctuated by the occasional car bomb or assassination. And a third war, “the next civil war,” seemed to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, according to Lebanese political scientist Amer Mohsen, Lebanese politicians seemed like Shakespearean actors on a stage, “tragic characters who follow a path that was already charted for them—i.e., they have no agency in what is happening.” These politicians, Mohsen explained, “are clearly aware that, no matter what they do, events that control their country and destiny are decided by parties that are far larger than