A bloody shambles

As Iraq descends into fear, disunity and appalling brutality, there is a sense of helplessness pervading the allies who toppled the regime of Saddam Hussain. This is not how the script was supposed to play out. The appeal by President Nuri alMaliki for America to conduct air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which is currently carving up the Iraqi Army has fallen on deaf ears. US President Barack Obama made this clear when he held a lengthy press conference on June 19 in which he laid out American options. The most the Iraqis are going to get is 300 ‘advisers’ to help with the training of Iraqi forces (having already spent billions of dollars doing just that only to have the ‘highly trained’ Iraqi Army fold up like a paper bag) — and maybe, but only maybe, some tightly targeted air strikes based on real-time intelligence. The message that went out to President alMaliki is that the solution to his problems was not military, it was political, and that he was, in very large part, the architect of his own considerable misfortunes.

President alMaliki has for the duration of his presidency marginalised the Sunnis, who had ruled the Shia majority for decades. The Americans added to their largest foreign policy blunder since the end of the Second World War by disbanding the Iraqi Army rather than assimilating it into new structures and the scenario unfolding today is no surprise to the canny Arabists who have been watching — unconsulted for the most part — from the sidelines. The ISIS are far from being the ragtag force that the media is presenting them as. They are masters of the social media in a variety of languages, are well funded — by whom being a question on the lips of many — and have attracted disaffected Sunnis from the world over keen to support jihad and a New Caliphate. There are unconfirmed reports that Pakistani construction workers are among a group of 60 abducted by ISIS near Kirkuk; Iran and Saudi Arabia watch closely and the Kurdish Peshmerga are closely engaged with ISIS. The future of the entire region is truly in the balance.

What is being played out in Iraq is the comprehensive deconstruction of a colonial grand plan that has its origins in the machinations of the likes of Gertrude Bell, who was the creator in many ways of modern Arab geography, and the multinational oil companies that sought to extend and protect their assets and future interests at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The borders that were drawn at the end of the First World War served the interests of the victors and the colonial powers. The colonial powers disappeared in a puff of nationalism in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the shakeout now in process was inevitable. The convulsions in the Levant and the Maghrib in the last four years are set to continue and the major players — Iran and Saudi Arabia being the most powerful militarily in the region — are, in effect, fighting a proxy war in Iraq that is in part sectarian but in as large a part about who controls the oil and the routes of its extraction.

America has been badly burned by its excursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, having comprehensively failed in the task of nation-building in both countries, and in the process, opened the floodgates for the long-suppressed conflicts and rivalries that typified the region before the colonialists imposed a kind of order. Take away the colonial constraints and battle commences.

As with the Syrian conflict (and Syria was a part of the grand plan also), the Western powers are hamstrung. The Americans would be foolish in the extreme to provide what would be quickly seen as a ‘Shia air force’ by Sunni states, and the fight now in process with modern weapons is an extension of that previously fought with swords. Expect no early resolution.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 22^nd, 2014.

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