War-Making and State-Making in Iraq, 1920-2010 Ariel I. Ahram School of International & Area Studies University of Oklahoma arielahram@ou.

edu

9,000 Words

February 10, 2012

Abstract:

This paper examines the role of coercion in the history of Iraqi state formation. It contends that the twin processes of war-making, competition in a highly militarized regional system, and statemaking, suppression of significant internal challengers, fundamentally shaped the way the Iraqi state dealt with society and led to a state that was constantly seeking to gain a monopoly over the use of violence and to eliminate armed non-state actors. Though common in the Middle East, this trajectory is rare in much of the developing world, where many states have accommodated or even encouraged armed non-state actors to provide local security. Unique aspects of Iraqs colonial legacy, the interaction between perennially insecure regimes, powerful societal actors, and the imperialist interventions spurred Iraqs leaders to augment and centralize their coercive power. The added element of regional and international rivalries meant that the Iraqi state could not permit non-state actors to have access to the means of violence; when they did, the results were disastrous. This process culminated in the emergence of the hyper-militarized Bath society, where nearly one in twenty Iraqis were associated with the state security forces. At the same time, since the fall of the Bath in 2003, the Iraqi state has struggled to regain its coercive power and its control over society, in many ways reverting to an older form of bargaining between state and society.

Paper presented UC Irvine, May 2012

NOT FOR CITATION

War-Making and State-Making in Iraq, 1920-2010 Mutual aggression of people in towns and cities is averted by the authorities and the governments, which hold back the masses under their control from attacks and aggression upon each other. They are thus prevented by the influence of force and government authority from mutual injustice, save such injustice as comes from the ruler. Ibn Khaldun, Prolegomena, Chapter 2, Section 7

INTRODUCTION Violence has always been intrinsic to state formation, especially where state structures are transplanted and imposed by colonial and imperial power. 1 Yet even by these standards, violence has been particularly prominent in Iraq. Indeed, the history of Iraq from its establishment under British mandatory rule in 1921 until at least the late 1980s has been an immensely aggressive effort to centralize coercive control and eliminate domestic competitors. Kanan Makiya goes so far as to aver that in the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam Husayns Bath Party transformed Iraq into a totalitarian regime whose very ideological premise was the domination of society by force.2 From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s an astonishing one million Iraqis, nearly five percent of the entire population, were enrolled in some branch of the state security services. This represented a vast maturation from Iraqs feeble birth, when Britains High Commissioner supposedly said of Iraq that there is nothing to defend it and nothing to be defended.3 Equally remarkable has been the profound degradation in Iraqs coercive power in the last two decades. The data presented in Table 1 below show the dramatic reversal in states coercive power, beginning with the 1991 Gulf War and accelerating after the 2003 American occupation. The beleaguered Iraqi state now resorts to co-opting tribal and sectarian militias, some barely distinguishable from criminal gangs, in an attempt to devolve violence to non-state agents and has had to rely heavily on American military support.

Max Weber famously provided the touchstone definition of the state as the entity that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.4 Michael Mann notes, however, that most historic states have not possessed a monopoly of organized military force and many have not even claimed it.5 Many developing states have survived and indeed prospered while relying on such armed non-state actors as proxy warriors. Bellicist theories have long argued that threat of war and predation compelled European states to assert greater control over sundry feudal barons and other more or less autonomous bearers of arms. Those European states that failed to centralize power in this manner fell victim to their more powerful neighbors.6 By the same logic, the exact opposite mode seems to prevail in the developing world. As Miguel Centeno puts it, limited war led to limited states.7 Protected by superpower patrons and international norms of inviolable sovereignty, developing states face little risk from their neighbors and thus have no need to centralize.8 Applied specifically to Iraq and the Middle East, Charles Tilly, Ian Lustick, Keith Krause, and Thierry Gongora each point to factors such as superpower intervention, reliance on oil rents, and domestic instability, to explain the divergence from the European pattern of state formation.9 This paper contends, though, that the drivers of Iraqi state formation more closely resembles those of Europe than is commonly assumed. Dissenting from much of the received wisdom, Fred Lawson describes the Middle East as having evolved into an anarchic statessystem characterized by the norms of Westphalian sovereignty. Rivalry and antagonism toward their neighbors was intrinsic to this regional sub-system.10 When compared to other developing regions, the Middle East is differentiated by the significance interstate war and the emergence of stronger, larger, and more centralized armies.11 Like its neighbors, the Iraqi state doggedly pursued the monopoly over the use of force in response to what Charles Tilly calls the twin demands of war-making, competition in a highly militarized regional system, and state-making, suppression of significant internal challengers. This trajectory of military centralization was launched due to unique aspects of the regions colonial legacies and became locked-in or path dependent due to the constellation of regional threat each state confronted.12 When individual leaders tried to veer from the course of centralization they suffered profound repercussions. In this sense, Saddam Husayn and the Bath regime was the culmination of a decades-long process of Iraq state-building. Understanding the continuing impact of these internal and external factors 4

can help explain not only the emergence of the coercive behemoth that was Iraq under Saddam but also the current efforts to reassert central authority after the breakdown of the state in 2003.

Table 1: Changes in the Size of the Iraqi Military13

Size of State Security Forces 1932 1936 1941 1943 1949 1963 1967 1972 1977 1980 1982 1984 1990 1994 2004 2006 2008 12,000 20,000 46,000 30,000 45,000 50,000 82,000 102,000 188,000 242,000 342,000 607,000 1,000,000 382,500 125,000 232,100 425,345 Security Forces as Percentage of Population 0.36 0.56 1.12 0.68 0.82 0.88 0.92 1.02 1.57 1.83 2.44 4.16 5.56 1.91 0.43 0.80 1.47

EARLY IRAQI STATE-MAKING, 1920-1958 Iraqs history of violence is often attributed to the artificial conditions of its creation. The amalgamation of the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra under a single British mandatory territory created a country beset from its inception by internal fissures. Britain carried on the Ottoman legacy of entrusting the reigns of power to Sunni Arabs, effectively blocking the demands for political voice by the countrys Shii Arab majority in the center and south and the sizable Kurdish population of the north. To use Nazih Ayoubis apt phrase, the Iraqi state was quintessentially weak, resting on a precarious and largely artificial foundation that 6

few of its population saw as legitimate, but also fierce, willing to use force to gain popular acquiescence.14 It was not, however, simply a response to fissiparous primordial identities that contributed to this violence, but the concatenation of imperial rule and inherited imperial military institutions, the thwarted goals of a nascent state elite, and the enduring power of embedded societal leadership in the form of tribal sheikhs and religious heads. In a confidential memorandum of March 1933, less than a year after the mandates expiration and Iraqs joining the League of Nations, King Faisal observed that there is still and I say this with a heart full of sorrowno Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic idea. He went to lament (somewhat hyperbolically) that the Iraqi state was still far and away weaker than the people [the people had] more than 100,000 rifles whereas the government possesses only 15,000.15 Faisal was no warmonger. The scion of the Hashemite clan of the Hejaz, 0068e had come to the country only twelve years earlier at the British behest. Politically astute, he tended to be deferential toward Iraqs tribal leaders as well as religious dignitaries from all sects. Local leaders could be bought off, granted large land holdings and positions in the national parliament. Yet this instinct for cooptation was often paired with the resort to suppression, particularly through the novel technology of aerial bombardment. The RAF was first deployed extensively to suppress the 1920 uprising in Iraq. Concerned with minimizing the cost of its military occupation and drawing down its ground forces, airpower was soon recognized as a force multiplier of untold effect. A single airplane could mete out collective punishment against unruly raiders, destroying their villages, livestock, and crops. Merely the sound of an approaching bomber could terrify a rebellious band into submission.16 At the same time sheikhs receives subsidies of various forms from the government and were exempted from the civil code. In 1920 enough tribal leaders and urban notables were lured away from the cause of revolt that the uprising eventually crumbled in on itself. As the last holdouts, the southern Shii tribes suffered the brunt of British pacification efforts.17 The British were nominally tasked with readying Iraq for full sovereignty and handing over power to Faisal. They reported steady improvements in the Iraqi military capability to the League of Nations, but confidential assessments were more candid. Without a British commander and an infusion of British officers in its units, the Secretary of State for Air wrote in 1925, there is not in my view, the least chance of the [Iraqi] Arab Army becoming efficient 7

or of the Imperial forces ever being able safely and honorably to evacuate the country.18 Instead of training the Iraqi infantry or deploying their own troops to Iraq, the British focused on setting up a separate corps of Levies, drawing heavily from the Assyrian Christian population. Between 1921 and 1932, the RAF and the Levies were called upon 130 times to assist Iraqi forces in putting down disturbances in the Kurdish north as well as in the south.19 The Iraqis, in turn, accused the British of perfidy and complained that they deliberately slowed the pace of military growth in order to foster Iraqs dependence. Conscription was a critical point of contention between the leaders of the nascent Iraqi state, Iraqis embedded social elite, and the British imperial overlord. Faisal and his entourage of former Ottoman officers saw conscription both as a means to build Iraqs military strength and to imbue a sense of national identity. The Shii leadership, though, not to mention the Kurds, saw conscription as a ruse for reinforcing the dominance of the largely Sunni officer corps. They warned that they would not serve a government that did not offer them greater political representation.20 For their part the British threatened to withhold military assistance should the Iraqi government provoke an uprising by insisting on conscription.21 With formal independence gained in 1932, though, the Iraqi leadership found latent potential within the military institutions they had inherited from the British and used them in a manner unanticipated by their designers. In August 1933, Iraqi forces under the command of Bakr Sidqi launched a combined air and ground assault on the Assyrians, who had refused to submit to the newly-sovereign Iraqi authority. Hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed.22 The British deplored what they saw as an unconscionable attack on their former protgs, heedless of their own role in arming and training the Iraqi forces that carried out the attack. Faisal was by that point on his sickbed and would die one month later, depriving Iraq of possibly the last bulwark against the outpouring of militarism. The Assyrian campaign was greeted in most of Iraq as a vital step toward national independence. By avenging itself on a community that represented the physical insinuation of British domination, the long-stigmatized Iraqi army proved it could operate independently. Tribal sheikhs who had just a few years earlier blocked any move for mass conscription began volunteering for service. Nationalist factions within the parliament capitalized on the triumph over the Assyrians by pushing forward new laws that expanded the army and air force, largely through conscriptions.

The Shiis and their representatives in parliament continued their traditional objection. Shii tribes in the south launched an all out revolt, harassing tax-collectors, conscription officers, and police stations, and tearing up railways and telegraph lines. Grand Ayatollah Kashif al-Ghita demanded a complete change in Iraqs political balance, including equal Shii representation in the parliament, cabinet, and civil service, greater funding for Shii religious institutions, the cancellation of land rents, and government investment in irrigation, health, and education. British advisors echoed Ghita, recommending the government take steps to address rampant rural poverty. But the balance of coercive power had already tipped away from the tribes. Imposing martial law on the tribal lands, Bakr Sidqi launched a ruthless campaign of aerial bombardment and ground pacification, including the execution of numerous rebel leaders.23 notes, [t]he ease and grim rapidity with which Bakr Sidqis soldiers and airplanes suppressed the tribal outbreaks of 1935 and 1936 presaged the end of the shaikhs era. Prior to this, Iraqs history was to a large extent the history of its shaikhs and their tribes. Its problems, its convulsions, its politics were essentially tribal. After the thirties, the towns came conclusively into their own. The history of Iraq became henceforth largely the history of Baghdad.24 The mid-1930s did not end challenges to the states authority and cohesion, but it marked a turning point in which violence, rather than co-optation, become the modal response to these threats. Given the mounting strength of the Iraqi army, there was no need to compromise with recalcitrant religious or tribal leaders. Of course, the increasing reliance on coercion in Iraq politics also contributed to the increasing prominence of coercers. Bakr Sidqi carried out Iraqs first military coup in 1936. In 1958 a pair of colonels marched on the palace, murdered the royal family, and declared Iraq a republic. By that time, the Iraqi security services had grown fourfold, an institution poised for ferocity. MAKING AND BREAKING THE BATH MILITARY BEHEMOTH, 1968-2003 When Saddam Husayn and the Bath party seized power in 1968 they were cognizant both of the dangers and the necessity of having a strong security force. Having been outmaneuvered and ousted by their former military co-conspirator after February 1963, the Bath were profoundly wary of men in mufti. At the same time, though, Iraqs security position 9 As Hanna Batatu

remained precarious through the turbulent period of praetorian rule. Kurdistan was perennially restive. Even more troubling, Iran (in alliance with Israel and the U.S.) used their support of the Kurds as leverage to force Iraqi concessions on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, Iraqs vital outlet to the Persian Gulf. As early as the 1920s, Iraqs leaders were keenly aware of their weakness and vulnerability relative to Turkey and Iran. The Arab-Israeli conflict helped launch the entire region into an escalating arms race, as shown in Table 2. Table 2: Growth in Military Size of Selected Middle Eastern Countries25 Country Syria Iran Egypt Jordan Israel 25,000+ 6,000 50,000 80,000 23,000 54,000 1946/48 5,000-12,000 1954/55 25,000 1960 45,000 210,000 100,000 36,500 65,000 1970 75,000 181,000 255,000 70,000 105,000 1980 250,000 195,000 447,000 65,000 196,000 1990 408,000 528,000 434,000 100,000 190,000

Iraq became an eager weapons importer, first from Britain and later from France, United States, and the Soviet Union. Those Middle Eastern countries that failed to match their neighbors military prowess fell victim to foreign meddling (e.g., Yemen, 1962-1970; Oman, 1962-1976; Jordan, 1970; Lebanon, 1975-1990) or outright destruction (e.g., the Palestinians in 1948).26 The Bath responded to these dangers by funneling ever larger portions of oil revenue into force modernization and expansion, especially after calamitously intervening in the ArabIsrael war of 1973. Conscription was enforced with greater alacrity. Iraq became one of the worlds leading arms importers, acquiring sixteen hundred Soviet tanks (including advanced T72s), Brazilian armored troop carriers, French Mirage fighters, Italian frigates, anti-aircraft missiles and batteries, and a host of other advanced weaponry.27 Iraq jumpstarted its nuclear weapons program with the purchase of a French-made nuclear reactor and expanded its chemical weapons capability with the help of West German firms.28 At the same time, Saddam Husayn, then vice president and head of the partys internal security, took pains to inoculate political activity within the ranks by installing political commissars to monitor military units and creating a series of overlapping and mutually suspicious intelligence agencies to monitor the activities of the civilians and the military alike.29 10

Careful recruitment ensured that only those from favored and politically reliable clans, notably those close to Saddams, gained admission to the military academies or senior commands. All non-Bathi political activity was banned within the ranks.30 One of the most important facets of this effort to neutralize the army was the establishment of the Popular Army (al-Jaysh ashShabi). The PA was essentially a militia controlled as an organ of the Bath party.31 The PA was deliberately kept outside the armys purview but trained with light weapons and heavy doses of party propaganda. Militiamen kept their weapons at home to be ready for emergency, providing a counterweight to the armed forces.32 As joining the party became requisite for social advancement, PAs ranked swelled, reaching 250,000 men by 1980, with Saddam himself named PA field marshal.33 Consistent with the pattern of belligerent regional relationships described above, the revolution in Iran in 1979 proved a window of opportunity to Iraq. Saddam hoped to take advantage of Irans revolutionary disorder to deal a swift blow that would force Iran to relinquish its claims to the Shatt al-Arab and cease inciting Iraqs Shii population to rebellion. Yet Iraqs limited offensive into Iranian Khuzestan in September 1980 quickly bogged down and the conflict soon expanded in size and scope. The following eight years of war marked the perverse pinnacle of Bathist rule, a crescendo in its militarization and penetration of society. Ideologically, the war became interwoven with Saddams emergent cult of personality and was dubbed Saddams Qadisiya in Bathi parlance, a reference to the Muslim Arabs seventh century victory over the Persians. The fighting itself bore many comparisons to World War I. To man the interminable rows of trenches and fixed positions that characterized most of the war, both Iraq and Iran had to engage in massive mobilization campaigns, bringing millions of people under arms and spending billions of dollars in armaments. Iraqs resort to chemical weapons to stem the Iranian advances and the escalation of missile attacks on Iranian cities bespoke the desperation of the campaign. Conservative estimates hold that Iraq suffered 200,000 dead and 400,000 wounded in battle, not to mention the tens thousands of Iraqis killed by their own government on suspicion of disloyalty.34 In this context, entrusting violence to the party rather than military hands proved to have disastrous consequences. PA units were simply not trained, equipped, or organized for this kind of battle. As Ken Pollack describes, while Iraqi army forces were reasonably competent, 11

especially in defense, the PA units were incapable of standing up to the Iranians and were the favorite target of Iranian assaults. As a result, the Iranians usually were able to push through the gaps or around the flanks of Iraqi defensive lines.35 The army high command regarded the PA as unfit amateurs.36 When Iraq undertook its strategic withdrawal in 1982, regular army units were able to coordinate aircraft and artillery fire to cover its retreat, but the PA crumbled, with thousands of militiamen simply surrendering. Even Saddam conceded that the PA had become a burden to the regular army.37 In the course of the war the PA had to be effectively been reequipped, reorganized, and subordinated within Iraq military command hierarchy, a hollow shell of its original incarnation as the Bath partys alternative to the army.38 Ultimately, the challenges of maintaining control over the army while maintaining military efficacy was solved not by entrusting coercion to civilians, but by building up a fully armed parallel army. In 1979, the Republican Guard was little but the rump of the 20th Brigade, placed under the command of trusted officers from Tikrit. By 1980, however, it was expanded and dispatched to the brutal urban warfare in Khoramshahr. The Guard grew to five full brigades. Tikritis comprised the upper level officers but the lower ranks were generally filled by the most competent fighters from all ethno-sectarian backgrounds. As a result, the Republican Guard was transformed from praetorians garrisoning Baghdad into the spearhead of Iraqs efforts at the front, beating back Irans advances in the south and forcing Iran to accept a ceasefire in 1988.39 If the Iran-Iraq War was the anni mirabilis of the Baths efforts to transform society, Gulf War I (1990-1991) and its aftermath were the anni horribilis. Again, the war began with gross miscalculation by Saddam, this time not so much about the meager strength of the Kuwaiti military, but of the U.S. capacity and willingness to protect its ally. Following defeat at American hands in the winter of 1991 and the March uprisings in Kurdistan and Shii south, most of the Baths ideological pretenses were abandoned in favor of the simpler calculations of regime survival. As such, Saddam began to tap explicitly into the latent power of tribal identity, an element of Iraqi society that the Bathalong with every other Iraqi ruler dating back to the 1930shad tried to suppress. Of course, the nucleus of the Bath since the mid-1960s had always been patrimonial, but this remained sub rosa in the early decades of Bath rule. The first Bath communiqu of 1968 equated tribalism with feudalism. In 1976 tribal surnames were banned. During the more desperate periods of the Iran-Iraq war, when Iranian forces threatened 12

Basra, the regime had tried to invoke Iraqs Arab tribal heritage as a way to mobilize the population of the south.40 Since many Iraqi tribes included both Sunni and Shii branches but were firmly Arab in identity, tribalism was seen as countering Iranian appeals to their Shii coreligionists. After the military defeat, the uprising, and the crippling sanctions regime, Iraq in the 1990s degenerated from a totalitarian to a patrimonial, sultanistic regime which privileging of primordial networks over bureaucratic forms of allegiance and control outright. Neo-tribalism was articulated overtly as delegations of tribal sheikhs were honored at the presidential palace and once disparaged tribal rituals gained prominence in the official media. Saddam granted pliant sheikhs land, extra rations, and even diplomatic passports. They were encouraged to provide adjudication under tribal law (including the reinstatement of honor killing), levy taxes, and ensure security in their territory. Where police protection had broken down along with other public services in the 1990s, everyday Iraqi citizens turned to tribal heads for protection.41 Tribal fealty became the primary basis for recruitment into Republican Guard and intelligence branches. It also provided the backbone for the newly-established Fedayee Saddam (Militants of Saddam, FS), a militia force of fifteen to twenty thousand men under the command of Saddams son, Uday. FS functioned as a kind of government-sponsored assassination squad. Indicatively, Iraqs top generals were opposed to the creation of FS and the group was notorious for corruption.42 Tribes received rifles, grenade launchers, mortars, and even howitzers from the state. When a second insurrection seemed imminent in August 1992, sheikhs cabled Saddam declaring that they would remain his men in times and crisis their guns were at the ready.43 After American air strikes on southern Iraq in December 1998, armed tribesmen in civilian clothing were seen patrolling key installations around the capital.44 This violence devolution undermined whatever bureaucratic structures and power remained in Iraq. Police, judges, and other civil servants were subject to intimidation or threats as tribes attempted to expand their authority. Two hundred sixty-six people were killed in a tribal land dispute in fall 1991, prompting an official Bath newspaper to complain that tribes were given weapons to fight the United States not to fight among themselves. In western Iraq, tribes astride the Amman-Baghdad highway took to hijacking and smuggling.45 In effort to curb the independent use of force, in 1997 Bath Regional Command Council forbade the application of tribal legal principles against government officials. 13

Neo-tribalism was singularly deleterious to the Iraqi army, which saw rampant shortages in both men and material. Even Republican Guard units were forced to accept older equipment to replace what had been destroyed in 1991. As tensions with the U.S. escalated after 2001, Saddams hopes hinged on stymieing the American advance through asymmetric warfare. He secreted thousands of arms caches around the country in the belief that the Iraqi masses would rise up to defend him. In fact, only the Republican Guard, special Republican Guard, and a few thousand dedicated FS eventually took up arms.46 Though useful in defending the regime from coups, conspiracies, and popular uprisings, neo-tribalism ultimately added to Iraqs vulnerability by siphoning power from the centralized, formal institutions of coercion. Of course, the U.S. held such dominance in men and material that chances of Iraqs victory in either 1991 or 2003 were slim. But the Iraqi military performed even worse than anticipated due the impact of neotribalism, leaving Iraq even more vulnerable.

OCCUPATION AND STATE FAILURE, 2003-2010 Even before American troops reached Baghdad in April 2003, Iraq was an enfeebled state. Gangs loyal to the young Shii firebrand cleric Muqtada as-Sadr seized police stations and weapons, redubbing Saddam City, the predominantly Shii slum of eastern Baghdad, as Sadr City. Abu Hatims Iraqi Hizbollah militia moved from their hideouts in the southern marshes to gained virtual control Amara.47 Most of the major exile parties that returned with U.S. forces, including the Kurdish Democratic Party, the Popular Union of Kurdistan, the Dawa Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress, and the Iraqi National Accord, brought their own party militia forces, totaling between 60,000 and 100,000 men. The insufficient size of the American invasion force and the decision to disband the Iraqi army left the Iraqi state with only a tiny fraction of its previous coercive potential. Local elites and their non-state forces moved to fill the gaps. In July 2003, Sadr announced the formation of the Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi, JAM), an organization that combined elements of Iraqi nationalism, Shii millenarialism, and a protection racket in which militias taxed local neighborhoods in return for providing a modicum of protection. Though still in his twenties, Sadr came from an illustrious clerical family and sought to challenge the authority of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whom he deemed a usurper. On August 10 Sadrs forces surrounded 14

Sistanis Najaf offices, demanding the elderly cleric cede his authority or quit the country. Like many senior clerics, though, Sistani maintained his own cortege and responded by calling in fifteen hundred armed tribesmen from the rural hinterlands, restoring order, if not law, to the shrine city.48 In the Sunni heartland west and north of Baghdad, a similar combination of political and religious grievances and economic opportunism spurred the emergence of another insurgent front. Armed groups functioned as dacoits and gangs, extorting money, seizing property, and attacking rivals. With the aid of foreign al-Qaeda infiltrators, militants launched a string of devastating suicide attacks against Kurdish and Shii leaders associated with the American coalition, as well as against American troops themselves.49 At the same time, though, as early as 2003 Sunni tribal leaders approached the occupation authority, offering to turn their forces against the Islamists in return for guarantees of autonomy and immunity from what was perceived as a hostile Shii-dominated central government. American military commanders favored such an arrangement, but civilian officials saw allowing non-state actors to function outside the civil law as a dangerous splintering of state authority and vetoed the proposal.50 In April 2004, the coincidental uprisings of Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and JAM forces in the south posed the greatest challenge to the success of the occupation. Though not initially coordinated, once these insurrections began, a truly cross-sectarian resistance movement seemed to be emerging.51 Much like the British in 1920, the U.S. defused the crisis by isolating each component, confronting them independently with heavy weaponry, particularly airpower. In Fallujah, the U.S. military struck a deal with insurgents on May 1 to place the city under the control of a newly constituted brigade commanded by a former Republic Guard commander. Both the CPA and the Iraqi Minister of Defense denounced the creation of this so-called Fallujah Brigade as inimical to Iraqi sovereignty. After a few weeks, most elements of the brigade dissolved or defected, returning Fallujah to insurgent control and necessitating a second assault on the city in November. But this temporary cease-fire allowed the U.S. to concentrate on suppressing JAM in the south. Sadr held out in Najaf for two month until Sistani brokered a truce that brought Sadr into the political fold.52 The U.S. began intensive efforts to demobilize militias in 2004, decreeing that all armed groups would have to submit to reorganization under the new Iraqi army. Only minimal funding was allocated to help pension-off and demobilize the militiamen, however. Iraqs interim 15

defense minister refused to induct Shii and Kurdish militiamen who had fought for Iran in the 1980s. The newly empowered exile parties, for their part, had little interest in surrendering their respective military forces.53 The formal resumption of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004 and installation of a Shii-led government in 2005 saw a continuing decline in the power of the state. Attacks on government officials seemed designed to provoke reprisal and led to the proliferation of self-defense forces while state forces were powerless to help. In response, ordinary citizens sought out the protection of militias or organized their own armed retinues. While the Iraqi army and defense ministry remained redoubts of Sunni control and under close U.S. supervision, the newly appointed Minister of Interior, Bayan Jabr of SCIRI, quickly began to integrate his partys militia into the national police.54 Iraqs security forces began more and more to resemble what Ahmed Hashim called official ethno-sectarian militias in uniform, cooperating with paramilitary forces in the abduction, torture, and extra-judicial killings of hundreds of Sunnis.55 Once Sadr joined the ruling coalition in December 2005, his independent JAM forces were essentially deputized by the state to become the primary security providers in Sadr City and other areas. By 2006, Baghdads ethnically mixed neighborhoods had become battlegrounds in a Sunni-Shii civil war. U.S. officials deplored the proliferation of government-backed militias and vigilantes and actively tried to block Iraqi police from entering Sunni neighborhoods, but it seemed they could do little to stem the trend toward violence devolution.56 In contrast, in western Iraq the U.S. was actually encouraging the proliferation of armed non-state actors in the form of the Sunni tribal Awakening (Sahwa) Movement. In response to the degradation of public security, many Sunni communities had established informal tribal and neighborhood guards, ostensibly for purposes of self-defense but often times working in collaboration with insurgents. American field commanders realized that it was often cheaper and more effective to buy the loyalty of these tribes than to fight them, especially considering the still dysfunctional state of the Iraqi police and army. Minister of Defense Saadon ad-Dulaymi, himself a leader in of one of Iraqs largest tribes, funneled weapons and money to set up tribal paramilitaries.57 Among the first tribal leaders to seek out an alliance with the U.S. was Abd as-Sattam arRishawi (Abu Risha), of the Dulaymi tribe from Ramadi. He had helped al-Qaeda in the first years of the occupation, but grew weary of the movements puritanical ideology and attempts to 16

displace tribal leadership. In return for a sheikhs willingness to suppress insurgent activities, the U.S. offered not only increased reconstruction aid but also permitted the re-assertion of tribal law and dominion, transforming the tribal leadership into mediators between the state and the people. Both American and Iraqi officials saw the arming of Sunni groups as providing a counterbalance to Shii-dominated police force and its allied militias.58 The decision to introduce a surge of 40,000 American troops in 2007 coupled with the expansion of the Awakening movement to the Babil, Nineveh, Salah ad-Din, Tammim, Diyala, and Baghdad provinces brought dramatic improvements in stability to regions of Iraq that had been virtually lawless in 2005 and 2006. U.S. forces began to insist on vetting and collecting biometric measures of all militiaman and set up a payment system of $300 per month, turning over control of numerous neighborhoods and towns to the tribal forces. By the end of 2007, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 men, largely Sunnis, had joined the militias.59 Still, the gains in security and stability came, as Adeed Dawisha notes, not because of the state, but in spite of it.60 Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki was wary, if not hostile, to the possibility that the U.S. would have bilateral relationships with armed Sunni factions. As an advisor to the prime minister presciently complained, we have enough militias in Iraq that we are struggling to solve the problem. Why are we creating new ones?61 In Baghdad alone there were seventeen separate militia councils. In western Iraq, tribal authority splintered after Rishawis assassination in September 2007, leading to renewed inter-tribal conflict among the militias. In Babil, many militia fighters are believed to be former members of al-Qaeda in Iraq, leading to suspicions that they have been infiltrated by insurgents. In Diyala, Sunni militias seemed to merge with local crime syndicates.62 Many Awakening-associated militiamen demand to be incorporated into the interior or defense ministries. Yet the SCIRI-dominated national police continued to arrest various militia-leaders, increasing the distrust between Sunni fighters and the government.63 It was not just Sunni militias that resisted Baghdad. In the north, Kurdish peshmerga steadily encroached on the so-called blue line in effort to gain control over the oil-rich province of Tamim and its capital, Kirkuk.64 In the south, various elements of JAM rejected Sadrs truce with the central government and continued their periodic bouts with American and Iraqi security forces.65 Despite considerable training at the hands of the U.S., Iraqi forces crumbled in April 2008 in the fight against JAM splinter groups in Basra and had to be rescued by U.S. 17

reinforcements and air support. Since then the U.S. has reported only slow progress in building up the Iraqi armed forces, with less than a quarter of Iraqs 225,000-man state security forces deemed capable of planning, executing, and sustaining operations without U.S. support. Iraqis, again echoing the 1920s and 1930s, accuse the U.S. of blocking access to advanced aircraft and other weaponry in order to sabotage the reestablishment of a formidable Iraqi army and ensure Iraq as a long-term dependency.66 Warned one senior officer, Iraqs army was just a glorified gendarmerie, a lame horse in the competition with neighboring states.67 Indeed, Iraqs sense of regional insecurity remained unabated, underscoring the need for a larger and more heavily armed force than the U.S. was prepared to grant. Turkey routinely launched incursions into northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish separatists lending support for Iraqs Turkomen minority. Only U.S. intervention prevented escalation and a potential Turkish invasion of northern Iraq in early 2008.68 Maliki built close ties with Iran, which has long historical links to many of Iraqs Shii political factions, but even here the relationship was brittle, as evident from Irans seizure of the Fakka oil fields in December 2009.69 While the incident was resolved peacefully, it demonstrated that international borders remain contentious and that coercion is still an integral element to inter-state relations. Moreover, rapprochement with Iran is seen by many Iraqis, especially Sunnis, as an affront to Iraqi nationalism and further alienating Iraq from its Sunni Arab neighbors. Maliki was widely seen as championing political centralization, as opposed to the federalism, but his was a consolidation of personal power, not of state institutions. On one hand, Maliki drew on the resources of the state to intimidate opponents. Special commandos associated with the ministries of defense and interior, but often times indistinguishable from Shii militias, continued their practices of torture, secret detention facilities, and extra-judicial killings, largely against alleged Sunni terrorists and Bathists.70 The trend continued after the hotly contested 2010 election, when Maliki assumed not only the post of prime minister but also the portfolios for interior, defense, and national security affairs. With the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq, Maliki seized the opportunity to purge or arrest Sunnis, culminating in the indictment of Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi on terrorism charges. Sunnis predictably decried these moves and sought protection through Iraqi federalist systems.71 On the other hand, Maliki carried on many of the tropes and techniques of neo-tribalism that undermined state power in the 1990s. During the JAM uprising of April 2008, tribal 18

militias apparently mobilized as government auxiliaries and Maliki later thanked the tribesmen for helping to combat criminal gangs. In the summer and fall of that year he announced the creation of new tribal councils, particularly in the southern provinces of Basra, Dhi Qar, Wassit, Maysan, and Muthana. Maliki repeatedly declared his respect for tribal autonomy and governance and thanked the tribes for aiding the state in the fights against terrorists and criminals.72 At least some of these tribal councils appear to have been absorbed from the Sunni militias of the Awakening movement. The councils provided crucial backing to Malikis slate of candidates during the December 2008 provincial elections. In meetings with tribal leaders all over the south, Maliki openly talked about using tribal institutions and a national tribal council to bypass what he described as the entrenched sectarian element in Iraqs consociational power-sharing arrangement.73 Ironically, appealing to the tribes alarmed some of Malikis erstwhile parliamentary allies, who feared that such militias would provide the prime minister a counterweight to their own armed wings.74 What security improvements Iraq enjoyed since 2006 came in large part a testament to Malikis skill in playing out what Joel Migdal calls the politics of survival. Maliki deftly used state resources to build a patronage web that co-opted potential rivals. At the same time, when faced with more concerted challengers, he has turned to arrests, intimidation, and even killing (by legal and extra-legal means) to ensure his hold on power. By these means Maliki positioned himself as the exclusive broker between various armed groups, both those legally sanctioned by the state and armed non-state actors. Still, as Migdal points out, these maneuvers systematically hollow state institutions and undermine the rule of law. 75 Iraq today remains trapped in the same predicaments that propelled its drive toward military centralization beginning in the 1920s and 1930s.

Conclusion The dangers of Iraqs internal disintegration remain, but they have diminished considerably since the civil war of 2005 and 2006, much less 1933. Contemporary Iraq is not the artifice that it was when the British created it. As Sami Zubaida reminds us, in Iraq (as in many other countries) it is the state that made the nation. Economic and fiscal administration, education, employment, military conscription, the media and social and cultural organizationall make the nation 19

a fact or facticity compelling on the cognition and imagination of its members76 Though oppressive, these institutions have bound Iraqs polity together by collective interest if not by collective identity. The bid to carve out a separate Shia-stan in southern Iraq has proven moribund. While the Kurds seek extensive autonomy, the potentially independent state of Kurdistan would be economically and strategically unviable. Political competition revolves around control over the state, not its negation.77 Iraq today has in many ways reverted to its original condition of state-building, struggling to construct a military force capable of domestic suppression. The presence of U.S. forces temporarily suspended the need for a military to defend Iraqs border. Still, the Middle East remains a region of fierce competition, where the militarily strong dominate the militarily weak and states exploit the distress of their neighbors. If Iraq does not regain its military stature, it may well endure a fate similar to Lebanon, where a precarious inter-communal peace is enforced by a foreign hegemon. In this scenario, the Iraqi state will have finally succumbed, its sovereignty diminished or even negated. Alternatively, Iraq might resume its course of military development, attempting to reconstruct the immensely powerful coercive apparatus that held domestic opposition in check and foreign enemies at bay. Such a process will probably entail yet more flagrant violence of the type that typified Iraqs earlier history. As Isam al-Khafaji notes, the application of violence domestically augmented Iraqs projection of force internationally.78 Iraqi state formation and military development was defined by the interaction between aspirant post-colonial state-makers, embedded societal elites, the British imperial legacies, and enduring regional threat. Norms of military elitism and the necessities of external defense locked-in a highly-centralized, bureaucratic, and technology-intensive military model even after the Iraqi state had wrested power from the colonial overlords and the tribal and religious leadership. Attempts to devolve violence to armed non-state actors, be they a party militias or tribal auxiliaries, have had disastrous consequences. These factors continue to constrain efforts to reshape Iraq in the twenty-first century. While remarkable for the scale of violence, the trajectory of Iraqs state formation is in fact typical of many states in the Middle East. In part, this stems from the legacy of imperial and colonial control region-wide. Across the region states inherited armies trained, organized, and equipped by the departing European powers. The newly ascendant national leaders immediately 20

put these armies to use both to suppress domestic challengers to the state and to compete with regional rival states. These twin efforts at war-making and state-making necessitated constantly increasing the size, sophistication, and centralization of coercive force and militated against reliance on militias, paramilitaries and other forms of civilian armies. In some places, the decision to centralize force came early and decisively, such as when the newly formed Israel Defense Forces destroyed a shipment of arms bound for Irgun, the armed wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement, in June 1948. In many others countries, the lesson took longer to sink in and experiments at violence devolution were tried and failed repeatedly.79 Beside these internal changes, war and the threat of war also shaped the external contours of the Middle Eastern states-system. The Middle East came to resemble Europe precisely because of the salience of violent inter-state rivalry in which strong states subjugated or even destroyed weak ones. It is useful in this sense to reflect retrospectively on the litany of aspirant regional states that have so-far failed to materialize. Every effort to try to assert a sovereign claim over territory has been buttressed by what Yazid Sayigh calls army-building (tajayash).80 The quintessential case is the Palestinians, who lost the war of 1948 and saw their proto-states territory taken over by conquering Israel, Egyptian, and Jordanian armies. Consequently, Palestinian state-making has been amounted to a continual effort to amass the military force necessary to regain some measure of territory. The Kurds exhibit a similar history in their search for a state. Less well-known, the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen crumbled militarily and was absorbed by its northern sister. The perception of Iranian and Saudi threat spurred the Trucial emirates to surrender sovereignty and merge into one political unity. Still, the reach of even the most successful Middle Eastern states has always exceeded their grasp. Despite hewing closely to the European path of state formation, the Middle East still lacks the unified, coherent, and stable states that were the endpoint of the Europes bellicose experience. As Lustick correctly argues, the failed bids by Saddam Husayn (or Gemal abd alNasser and Mehmet Ali before him) to transform their countries into great powers by means of war are illustrative of the determining impact of different norms in the international system and the hierarchical configuration of the international system.81 While great powers helped launch the region on its bellicose path in the 1930s and 1940s, subsequent superpower interventions, both directly and indirectly, blocked any aspirant Middle Eastern Bismarck or Henry VIII from pressing the predatory logic too far. The provision of enormous quantities of military aide 21

bolstered Middle Eastern states, but also deepened their dependence and ultimate inferiority to outside powers. The partial suspension of Iraqi sovereignty after the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 with the implementation of the no-fly zones and the emergence of the de facto Kurdish autonomous zone in the north was followed by a complete suspension in 2003 with the U.S. invasion and occupation. State formation in the Middle East is a race that has been launched but can never be won, at least not under the current rules. Until and unless these rules change, the configuration of global power shifts or new norms of statehood emerge, Middle Eastern states are likely to remain reliably fierce but perennially weak.

22

NOTES
1

Youssef Cohen, Brian R. Brown, and A.F.K. Organski, The Paradoxical Nature of State

Making: The Violent Creation of Order, American Political Science Review, 75 (1981).
2

Kanan Makiya [Samir al-Khalil], Republic of Fear (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1998 [1989]). There remains considerable debate was to whether Iraq ever crossed the threshold from authoritarian to totalitarian, but there is consensus about the importance of violence in general. See Faleh A. Jabar, Sheikhs and Ideologues: Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Tribes under Patrimonial Totalitarianism in Iraq, 1968-1998, in Tribes and Power, ed. Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawud, (London: Saqi Books, 2002); Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Husseins Bath Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 5.
3

Aqil al-Nasri, Al-Jaysh wa al-Sultah fil-Iraq al-Maliki, 1921-1958 (Beirut: Dar al-Hisad lil

Nasr wa al-Tawziya wa al-Tibaah, 2000), 52.

4

Max Weber, Politics as Vocation in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth

and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78 (italics in original).
5

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the

Beginning to A.D. 1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11.
6

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).

Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of Global Powers (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Otto Hintze, The Historical Essay of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
7

Miguel Centeno, Limited War and Limited States, in Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role

in Politics and State Formation, ed. Diane Davis and Anthony Pereira (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

23

Brian D. Taylor and Roxana Botea, Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the

Contemporary Third World International Studies Review 10/1 (2008); George Sorensen, War and State-Making: Why Doesnt It Work in the Third World? Security Dialogue 32/2 (2001)
9

Charles Tilly, War and State Power, Middle East Report, 171 (1991); Ian S. Lustick, The

Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political Backwardness in Historical Perspective, International Organization, 51:4 (1997); Thierry Gongora, War Making and State Power in the Contemporary Middle East, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29:3 (1997); Keith Krause, State-Making and Region-Building: The Interplay of Domestic and Regional Security in the Middle East, Journal of Strategic Studies, 26:3 (2006);
10

Fred Lawson, Constructing International Relations in the Arab World (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2006), 141.

11

Etel Solingen, Pax Asiatica versus Bella Levantina: The Foundation of War and Peace in East

Asia and the Middle East, American Political Science Review, 101/4 (2007); Ariel Ahram, The Origins and Persistence of State-Sponsored Militias: Path Dependent Processes in Third World Military Development, Journal of Strategic Studies, 34:4 (2011).
12

Jack Goldstone, Initial Conditions, General Laws, and Path Dependence in Historical

Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, 104 (1998).

13

Data for years 1933 to 1994 are based on Nasri, Al-Jaysh wa al-Sultah. Data for subsequent

years come from the Brookings Institution Saban Center Iraq Index, each year measuring the month of February. http://www.brookings.edu/saban/~/media/Files/Centers/Saban/Iraq%20Index/index20080131.pdf (Accessed December 1, 2009).

24

14

Nazih Ayoubi, Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (New York:

I.B. Tauris, 1996).

15

Cited in Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements in Iraq

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 25-6.

16

On the RAF in Iraq, see Dodge, Chapter 7; David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control:

The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939 (New York: St. Martins, 1990); Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britains Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
17

Amal Vinogradov, The 1920 Revolution in Iraq Reconsidered: The Role of the Tribes in

National Politics, International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 (1973), 132-3; Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 169-73; Stephen Longrigg, Iraq, 1900 to 1950: A Political, Economic, and Social History (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 106-7.
18

Secretary of State for Air, Defence of Iraq, January 14, 1925 [CO 537/816], in Records of

Iraq, Vol. 4; See also, Air Staff Note, Military Aspects of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty [FO 371/14205] in Records of Iraq, Vol. 5.
19

Ibrahim al-Marashi and Sammy Salama, Iraqs Armed Forces: An Analytical History (New

York: Routledge, 2008), 35.

20

Nakash, Shiis of Iraq, 115-121; Tripp, 61-3. High Commissioner Henry Dobbs to the Colonial Secretary, October 20, 1928, [FO

21

371/13035] in ] in Alan de L. Rush, ed., Records of Iraq, 1914-1966, Vol. 2 (London: Archives Edition, 2001), 373-8.

25

22

See J.S. Stafford, The Tragedy of the Assyrian Minority in Iraq (New York: Kegan Paul, 2004

[1933]); Khaldun S. Husry, The Assyrian Affair of 1933 (I), International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5:1 (1974) and The Assyrian Affair of 1933 (II), International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5:2 (1974); Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder: Westview, 1985), 57-8.
23

For a larger account of the uprisings and military response, see Marr, 62-7 and Tripp 84-7; On

the upgrading of the Iraqi army, see Raja Husayn Husni Khattab, Tasis al-jaysh al-Iraqi watatawwur dawrihi al-siyasi min 1921-1941 (College of Arts, University of Baghdad, 1979), 63-9; Marashi and Salama 34; Nasri, 76; On the Shia response and the role of Ghita and the tribes, see Yitzhak Nakash, The Shiis of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), The Shiis of Iraq, 120-5.
24

Batatu 118-9. Data on Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are from Keith Krause, Insecurity and State

25

Formation in the Global Military Order, European Journal of International Relations, 2/3 (1996). Data on Iran from International Institute for Strategic Studies Military Balance, various years.
26

Nadav Safran, From War to War: The Arab-Israeli Confrontation, 1948-1967 (New York:

Pegasus, 1969). On the downfall of the Palestinians, see Avi Shlaim, The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza, Journal of Palestine Studies 20/1 (1990).
27

John S. Wagner, Iraq: A Combat Assessment in Fighting Armies: Antagonists in the Middle

East, ed. Richard Gabriel (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 68; Faleh A. Jabar, The Iraqi Army and Anti-Army: Some Reflections on the Role of the Military in Iraq at the Crossroads:

26

State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change, eds. Toby Dodge and Steven Simon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 116-8; Marashi and Salama 122-3.
28

Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26; Anthony Cordesman, Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East (Washington DC: Brasseys, 1991), 60; Shai Feldman, Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 135.
29

Sassoon, 95-128. Khalil 25-32; Sluglett and Sluglett, 113-8; Jabar, The Iraqi Army and Anti-Army, 81 There had been earlier attempts to create militias answerable directly to the leader or party in

30

31

the Iraq, most notably the Popular Resistance (al-Muqawama ash-Shabiyya) under the Abd alKarim Qasem regime (1958-1963) and the National Guard (al-Hars al-Qawmi) under the first Bath regime (1963), but these were much smaller in size and shorter in duration than the PA.
32

Taha Yasin Ramadan, Al-Jaysh ash-Shabi wa at-Tajriba an-Namuthaj, (Baghdad: Popular

Army General Command, 1987), 121-6.

33

Batatu 1094-5; Sluglett & Sluglett 184-5, 206-7; Khalil 31 Rob Johnson, The Iran-Iraq War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 193 Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991 (Lincoln, Nebraska:

34

35

University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 201.

36

Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (London: Grafton Books, 1989),

89.
37

Cited in Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (London: I.B. Tauris,

1989), 58.

27

38

Ofra Bengio, Iraq in Middle East Contemporary Survey, 1988, eds. Ami Ayalon and Haim

Shaked (Boulder: Westview, 1990), 516.

39

Marashi and Salama, 155-6; Pollack, 219; Bengio, Iraq, in Middle East Contemporary

Survey, 1984-85, 463.

40

Isam al-Khafaji, War as a Vehicle for the Rise and Demise of a State-Controlled Society: The

Case of Bathist Iraq, in War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 272-81.
41

Jabar, The Iraqi Army and Anti-Army, 92-101; Amatzia Baram, Neo-tribalism in Iraq:

Saddam Husseins Tribal Policies, 1991-1996, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29 (1997), 1-3, 10-2, 16-18; Adeed Dawisha, Identity and Political Survival in Saddams Iraq, Middle East Journal, 53 (1999).
42

Sassoon, 149-50. Dawisha, Identity and Political Survival, 62. Jabar, The Iraqi Army and Anti-Army, 96. Cited in Baram, Neo-Tribalism, 17-18. Anthony Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (Westport, CT:

43

44

45

46

Praeger, 2003), 17, 96; Marashi and Salama, 195-6; Amatzia Baram, Building Toward Crisis: Saddam Husayns Strategy for Survival (Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy Policy Paper No. 47, 1998), 48-9.
47

Juan Cole, The United States and Shiite Religious Factions in Post-Bathist Iraq, Middle

East Journal, 57:4 (2003): 548, 554.

48

Nir Rosen, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of Martyrs in Iraq (New York: Free

Press, 2006), 17-19, 33. 28

49

Amatzia Baram, Who Are the Insurgents: Sunni Arab Rebels in Iraq, U.S. Institute of Peace

Special Report No. 134, Washington DC, April 2005, available at http://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr134.pdf (Accessed December 3, 2009).
50

Bing West, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (Random House,

2008), 24; Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala, Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 88-91, 112.
51

George Packer, The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,

2005), 323-5; Dan Murphy, Shiites Taxing Thin U.S. Forces, Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 2004.
52

Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2007), 276-9; Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 243-5.
53

David Ucko, Militias, Tribes, and Insurgents: The Challenge of Political Reintegration in

Iraq, Conflict, Security, and Development, 8:3 (2008): 343-8; Cordesman, Iraqs Insurgency and the Road to Civil Conflict (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 58-9; 82; Allawi, 316-20.
54

Ken Silverstein, The Minister of Civil War, Harpers (August 2006); Kimberly Kagan, The

Surge: A Military History (New York: Encounter Books, 2009), 7.

55

Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq (Ithaca: Cornell Univesity Press,

2006), 303, 306.

56

Kagan, 11, 40-1; Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the

Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005), 218-228; Cordesman, Iraqs Insurgency and the Road to Civil Conflict (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 297; Allawi, 447-50. 29

57

Cordesman, Iraqs Insurgency, 284-5, 514-6. David Killcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

58

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Michael R. Gordon, The Former-Insurgent Counterinsurgency, New York Times, September 2, 2007; William S. McCallister, Sons of Iraq: A Study in Irregular Warfare, Small Wars Journal, September 8, 2008.
59

Alisa Rubin and Stephen Farrell, Awakening Councils by Region, New York Times,

December 22, 2007; See also, Kagan, in passim.

60

Adeed Dawisha, Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2009), 272.

61

Cordesman, Iraqs Insurgency, 519. Ned Parker, Machiavelli in Mesopotamia: Nouri al-Maliki Builds the Body Politic, World

62

Policy Journal (Spring 2009), 18-22; Anthony J. Schwarz, Iraqs Militias: The True Threat to Coalition Success in Iraq, Parameters (Spring 2007); Kagan, 70-7, 139.
63

Jawad Kathim, Baghdad tuakid at-tizameha difa murtabat as-sahwa, (Baghdad Confirms its

Commitment the Sahwa Platform), Al-Hayat, April 15, 2009; Hadi Jasim, Baghdad: Ansar Sahwa al-fadhil yubashiroon amalahum ma al-jaysh, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, April 1, 2009.
64

Maliki Yutalib Kurdistan bihtiram al-hitt al-azraq (Maliki asks Kurdistan to Respect the

Blue Line Al-Hayat (Internet Edition), November 31, 2008, in Arabic; Steven Lee Myers, Rivalries in Iraq Keep G.I.s in the Field, New York Times, January 26, 2010.
65

Kagan, 40-1, 54-5; Cordesman, Iraqs Insurgency, 594-601. Sharon Behn and Sara A. Carter, Iraqi militias feeling pushback, Washington Times, April

66

12, 2008; Stephen Farrell and James Glanz, More than 1,000 in Iraqs Force Quit Basra Fight, New York Times, April 4, 2008; Solomon Moore, Secret Iraqi Dealings Show Problems in Arms 30

Order, New York Times, April 12, 2008; Kenneth Katzman, Iraq: Politics, Elections, and Benchmarks, Congressional Research Service Report to Congress, August 21, 2009.
67

Iraqi Officer: The Current Iraqi Army is Closer to a Gendarmerie Than a Regular Army,

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat (London), May 17, 2007, in Arabic; Abdel-Wahhab al-Qassab, Rebuilding the Iraqi Army (A Preliminary View), in Khair el-Din Haseeb ed., Planning Iraqs Future: A Detailed Project to Rebuild Post-Liberation Iraq (Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies, 2006), 197-8.
68

Turkey Says 41 Rebels Killed in Iraq Offensive, AFP, February 25, 2008; Baghdad

Yahither min saddamat bayn al-jaysh al-turki wa peshmerga (Baghdad Wary of Confrontation Between Turkish Army and Peshmerga) Ash-Sharq al-Awsat (London), February 26, 2008, in Arabic.
69

Timothy Williams and Saad Al-Izzi, Iran Claims an Oil Field it Seized from Iraqis, New

York Times, December 20, 2009.

70

See U.S. Department of State Human Rights Report: Iraq, 2010,

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/160462.pdf (accessed December 22, 2011); Amnesty International Annual Report, Iraq, 2011, http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/iraq/report2011#section-65-4 (accessed December 22, 2011).
71

Ramzy Mardini, Maliki Arrests Potential Opposition, Institute for the Study of War

Backgrounder, December 12, 2011.

72

On the origins and growth of the tribal councils, see Yassin Muhammed Sadiqi 25 Elf min

Rijal-ha Yandhmoon Ila Quwat al-Amn (25 Thousand Join Security Forces), Al-Hayat, August 6, 2008 (Internet Edition) in Arabic; Scott Weiner, Maliki Makes a Play for the Southern Tribes, Institute for the Study of War Backgrounder No. 37, November 6, 2008 31

73

Iraqi PM addresses tribes conference, urges national unity, text of report by Iraqi

government-controlled Iraqiyah TV, April 19, 2009, BBC Worldwide Monitoring; Speech by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Malikia delivereted at the gathering of tribal chiefs and dignitaries in the Maysan governorate, Iraqiya TV, January 10, 2010, BBC Worldwide Monitoring; Iraqi Premier Urges Formation of National Supreme Tribal Council, Al-Iraqiya Tevelevision evening broadcast, October 16, 2011, BBC Worldwide Monitoring;
74

Alissa J. Rubin, Clash in Iraq Over a Plan for Councils Intensifies, New York Times,

December 4, 2008.
75

Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and Capabilities in the

Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 214-22; See also, Sharon Kettering, The Historical Development of Political Clientelism, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18:3 (1988): 425-6.
76

Sami Zubaida, The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq, International Journal

of Middle East Studies, 34:2 (2002): 214.

77

For a discussion of the centripetal forces keeping Iraq together, see Reider Visser and Gareth

Stransfield, eds., An Iraqi of its Regions: Cornerstone of a Federal Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
78

Isam al-Khafaji, War as a Vehicle for the Rise and Demise of a State-Controlled Society: The

Case of Bathist Iraq, in War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 259.
79

Mehran Kamrava, Military Professionalization and Civil-Military Relations in the Middle

East, Political Science Quarterly, 115:1 (2000); Ahram, 537.

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80

Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement,

1949-1993 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997).

81

Lustick, 671-675.

33