marginalized, and the Sunnis had accepted their loss in the civil war. But in the United States, there was considerable trepidation about the election result, and suspicions of Iranian influence still clung to Maliki—an echo of the tendentious Sunni notion that an Arab cannot have a strong Shiite identity without being pro-Iranian. In the elections Maliki was the most popular individual candidate, with Allawi a distant second. Maliki wanted a coup but it would not succeed. Most Shiite parties and candidates did not want Maliki to be prime minister. The debate in Baghdad political circles is how to get rid of Maliki. But Allawi could not form a coalition. Regardless of who became prime minister, Iraq would become increasingly authoritarian. Oil revenues will not kick in for several years so there will not be an immediate improvement in services. Even when revenues reach Iraqi coffers, they will have to initially go to cover the infrastructure costs. The fact that the government cannot provide better services means it will have to become more authoritarian. It will use democratic methods and a facade to seem less authoritarian.
Maliki and his allies, after all, like many other Iraqis, were extremely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They believed Iraq was the only democracy in the region, better than its neighbors, and they zealously wanted to secure their control over a sovereign and increasingly powerful nation. Those who warned of Iranian interference in Iraq ignored Saudi, American, and other foreign involvement. And they too often assumed that Iran was a negative actor in the region that had to be countered, and that only Sunni dictatorships could do that. Indeed, having overcome its fear of Iraqi Shiites, Egypt signed a strategic agreement with Iraq. Egypt could see the shifting alliances in the region and was hedging its bets, an American intelligence official told me: “Iraq is a major opportunity. Iraq will be the number-one or -two oil producer in the world.”
Some pundits, including several leading neoconservatives, had begun to argue that the United States should keep a larger number of troops in Iraq than was previously agreed—but this risked undermining America’s partnership with the Iraqi government. “You want Iraq to be pro-Western and to invite you in,” an American intelligence official told me. “So you build that relationship by strictly adhering to the agreement you signed.”
By 2011 the Americans are expected to reduce their provincial presence to Basra, Erbil, Mosul, Diyala, and Kirkuk, with an eye on the restive fault line between Arabs and Kurds that runs from Iran to Syria. Were it not for the American presence along the so-called disputed territories between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, it is possible that war would have broken out already. Kirkuk has long been described as a powder keg, but of late, Nineveh province has become equally dangerous. Its governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, campaigned in the 2009 election on a rabidly anti-Kurdish platform. Whenever he traveled into areas that the Kurds claimed were theirs, even if they were outside the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government, Kurdish security forces harassed him, even drawing their guns. As a result he traveled with a U.S. Army escort, since he was the governor and had the right to go wherever he wanted in the province, even if he was merely being provocative. In February 2010 Kurdish security forces drew guns on him and the Americans, even firing at their convoy. With American backing, the Iraqi Security Forces arrested three Kurdish men; the next day the Kurds arrested five ISF members.
The Kurds were getting jittery, realizing the Americans really were leaving. But even if the Kurdish star was fading, the Kurds were more than likely to play the kingmaker in the long process of assembling a government after the elections, and anyone forming a government would have to make concessions to them if they wanted to avoid dependence on Shiite rivals. The lack of a unified sectarian bloc in Iraq was a positive development, militating against future conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. “U.S. strategic interests are best served when Shiites of Iraq are divided,” an experienced American intelligence officer explained to me.
FROM THE BEGINNING of the occupation, the U.S. government and media focused too much on elite-level politics and on events in the Green Zone, neglecting the Iraqi people, the atmosphere of the “street,” neighborhoods, villages, mosques. They were too slow to recognize the growing resistance to the occupation, too slow to recognize that there was a civil war—and now, perhaps for the same reason, many were worried that there was a “new” sectarianism or a new threat of civil war. But the U.S. military was no longer on the streets and could not accurately perceive Iraq, and journalists were busy covering the elections and the de-Baathification controversy but not reporting enough from outside or even inside Baghdad. Just as they didn’t understand the power of militias in the past, now they did not understand the power of the Iraqi Security Forces. Iraqis were no longer so scared of rival militias or being exterminated, and they no longer supported the religious parties so vehemently. Another thing people would have noticed, had they cared to look, was that the militias were weaker than ever. The Awakening groups were finished, so violence was very limited in scope and impact. Politicians might have been talking the sectarian talk, but Iraqis had grown very cynical.
But even though Iraq’s elections may have been transparent, Iraq remained colonized by tens of thousands of American soldiers. The Status of Forces Agreement deprived Iraq of its full sovereignty. Part of it was “legally” confiscated by the continuing UN mandate, and the rest was denied by the United States. Throughout the occupation major decisions concerning the shape of Iraq had been made by the occupiers with no input or say by the Iraqis: the economic system, the political regime, the army and its loyalties, all the way to the control over airspace and the formation of all kinds of militias and tribal military groups. The effects of all this will likely linger for decades. While the Americans have mostly, if not totally, withdrawn from the population centers, no occupying army ever wants to be present in the daily lives of citizens if it can have local clients do the job. In the early twentieth century, the British had no presence in the daily lives of Iraqis until Iraqis misbehaved and had to face the wrath of the Royal Air Force. Britain colonized Iraq with fewer than four brigades, most of which were based behind the walls of Habbaniya. But in 1941 they defeated the Iraqi army and occupied the whole country with two brigades.
The presence of the U.S. Army forecloses many options for Iraqis, drawing the parameters within which they can act. There are varieties of colonialism and occupation, and they depend more on the financial interests and strategic aims of the colonizers than their wish to grant independence to their vassals. The continued American military presence in Iraq was still a constant implied threat. The Americans could stay on their bases if the Iraqis behaved, or they could emerge and kill whomever they wanted, as they once had. Moreover, Iraq was still burdened by several UN sanctions dating back to the Saddam era. It was forced to pay 5 percent of its oil revenues in reparations, mostly to the Kuwaitis. The Chapter VII resolutions denied Iraq full sovereignty and isolated it from the international financial community. In addition, with Saudi and Iranian interference and money in post-Saddam Iraq, as in Lebanon, it is impossible to have true democracy or sovereignty.
The Bush administration had tried to implement an “80 percent solution,” based on the notion that if Kurds and Shiites could reach agreement, then Sunnis could be ignored. But Sunni frustration can still lead to destabilization. Sunnis might not be able to overthrow the new Shiite sectarian order, but they can still mount a limited challenge to it. According to Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Atiyyah, the Kurds, with only the mountains as their friends (to paraphrase a Kurdish proverb), were able to destabilize Iraq for eighty years. Sunni Arabs are present in much more of the country and have allies throughout the Arab world who can supply them well enough to destabilize Iraq more than the Kurds ever could. It is not only Baathists and Al Qaeda supporters who oppose the new order. There are Sunnis who see themselves as Iraqi nationalists and worry that Iraq is falling under Iranian control. They see signs of this when much of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite leadership goes to Iran to negotiate political deals and work out the postelection order. But Shiites and Kurds cannot reach agreement without the Sunnis. It is Sunnis who dominate the border area between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. And as long as the Iraqi state insists on its Shiite identity, there will be Sunnis willing to undermine it.
While violence was down even in Baghdad’s worst-hit neighborhoods, and many Sunnis and Shiites strived to rebuild old friendships, Iraqi social relations were deeply wounded. I visited my friend Maher in Dora once again. He took me to the home of his old schoolmate Ra’fat Abid Alwan, a young Shiite man. Ra’fat had once owned a successful local curtain shop. In 2005 his family received a threatening letter. Then his brother was shot in the head and killed in the Dora market. Another brother was kidnapped later that year by an Interior Ministry vehicle. He was released three weeks later for a ransom of eighty thousand dollars, and the family fled to Syria. But they didn’t like Syria. They’d had a nice life in Iraq and didn’t want to end up working as bakers in Syria. So in August 2006 they returned to Baghdad’s I’ilam neighborhood, buying a new shop for curtains. They lived in I’ilam for a year. “Sectarianism started,” Ra’fat told me. “We saw bodies on the street,” so they returned to Syria again. In their absence Dr. Nabil, the local Al Qaeda boss, had taken over their home and given it to a Sunni family. The Americans discovered IEDs in the house and took it over, and then handed it over to the Iraqi army. While they were away four Shiite neighbors in Dora were beheaded. Ra’fat paid twenty-three thousand dollars to be smuggled from Syria to Turkey to Greece to Sweden in late 2007. After a year the Swedes told him Iraq was safe again and sent him home. His family returned to Iraq from Syria, and he joined them in December 2008.
