Photo: The Obama administration has serious misgivings about the Maliki government. (Jim Young : Reuters)
After all the human and material costs, Amin Saikal says the time has come for those Western leaders responsible for the invasion to acknowledge their role in the mess that is Iraq today.
Iraq has fallen apart. Bearing responsibility for this is not just the incompetent Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The former US president George W. Bush, who ordered the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the British and Australian leaders who supported the invasion, for which there was no specific UN authorisation, must also share the responsibility for the dire predicament in which Iraq finds itself today.
The invading powers were repeatedly warned by many world leaders and specialists at the time that whilst the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship might have been highly desirable, it was not foreseeable that such an act would result in the creation of a new stable, secure and democratic Iraq. However, the warnings were dismissed in pursuit of a wider goal: a democratic transformation of Iraq as a beacon for stabilising and democratising the entire Muslim Middle East.
More than a decade later, Iraq has become a nightmare for the Iraqi people and for the US and its allies.
For all practical purposes, Iraq is now divided into three political and territorial entities. Whilst the country's two substantial minorities, the Kurds and Sunnis, have gone their own ways, its majority Shiite population, with control over the capital Baghdad and another major and oil-rich city, Basra, has been struggling to keep the country together. The Kurds have established virtually an independent state in the north and have lately gained control of the Kirkuk oil fields, which provides them with much needed revenue. Disillusioned with the Shiite-dominated Maliki's exclusionary government, many Sunnis have made cause with a militant Islamic group - the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL). ISIL has declared a caliphate or Islamic state in the areas that it has lately conquered in western and north-western Iraq, as well as north-eastern Syria.
These developments have pitched Iraqis against Iraqis, sinking them deeper into bloody ethnic and sectarian conflicts, and have alarmed Iraq's neighbours and the West, particularly the United States, which withdrew its forces from Iraq at the end of 2011 without achieving any of its original goals. Neither the Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis nor the country's neighbours, namely Iran, Turkey and the conflict-ridden Syria, want to see an independent Kurdistan, which could embolden their own sizable Kurdish populations. At the same time they are all, minus many Iraqi Sunnis, opposed to ISIL's creation of a caliphate - a position which is shared by the United States and its Western allies.
Backed by some of its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia has not stood above the fray either. Whilst not openly lending support to ISIL, which has been shunned by other states in the region and beyond as a 'terrorist' cluster, it has nonetheless stood for the cause of the Iraqi Sunnis. It has done so mainly as part of its sectarian and geopolitical rivalries with the Shiite-dominated Iran, which has bonded closely with the Iraqi Shiites and the Shiite-linked Alawite-dominated government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The whole situation has confronted Washington with serious quandaries. The Obama administration wants to see the elimination of the ISIL's caliphate and is ready to reengage Iraq militarily to achieve this objective. Meanwhile, it has serious misgivings about the Maliki leadership, and does not want its long-standing adversary, Iran, to gain wider regional influence either. Nor does it wish to do anything that could offend its traditional oil-rich Arab ally, Saudi Arabia. It has conditioned its assistance to Baghdad on the Iraqi parliament electing a new prime minister, who would pursue inclusive politics. It is of the view that any military assistance would not be successful, unless it is accompanied by a political solution.
The Iraqi parliament has failed twice in as many weeks to have a quorum to elect a new prime minister. However, in its last meeting on July 15, it elected a consensus Sunni politician, Salim al-Jabour, as its new speaker as a prelude to possibly replacing Maliki, who has stubbornly refused to step down. Tehran has indicated that it might back away from Maliki, provided that its Shiite allies retain their dominance in the Iraqi government.
Strangely enough, Washington's interest and that of Tehran have come to coincide in a common opposition to ISIL. But both sides have so far declined to cooperate in Iraq. President Obama is restrained by the fact that the current negotiation over Iran's controversial nuclear program has not resulted in a comprehensive agreement yet, and that Israel and its supporters in the US Congress keep branding Iran as an existentialist threat.
Similarly, the moderate Islamist president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, is under pressure from his hard-line factional opponents not to allow the US to become once again militarily involved in Iraq, whilst the US and its Western allies are maintaining their crippling sanctions on Iran. Rouhani has said that Iran will provide the Baghdad government with only non-combat military support. There is a view in Tehran that ISIL may possibly be a ploy orchestrated by the Saudis and Americans to suck Iran into another war - similar to the one that Saddam Hussein initiated with regional Arab and US support against Iran in 1980, resulting in a very devastating conflict for eight years.
What ultimately may transpire in Iraq is hard to predict at this point. But it is clear that Iraq is now a broken state. Irrespective of whether or not the Kurds achieve full independence and ISIL's caliphate, which faces opposition from within the jihadist movement as well as from regional and international actors, it will be very difficult to put Iraq back together.
After all the human and material costs on the part of the Iraqi people and the invading forces, the time has come for those Western leaders responsible for the invasion to acknowledge their role in the mess that is Iraq today.
Amin Saikal is Professor of Political Science, Public Policy Fellow, and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia), and the author of Zone of Crisis: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, London: I.B. Taauris, 2014. View his full profile here.
Iraq: a broken state - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
