The Iraq Theatre and WOT

Dr Sadia Sulaiman
 Drivers of Conflict in Iraq
• Post-2003 scenario
• US Intentions and reason for attack
• Situation in Iraq
• Aftermath of Afghan war success
• But persistent instability
• Need to identify the reasons
 Socio-Cultural Factors
• The Ba’athist dictatorship that ran the country
for 35 years deployed high levels of state-
sanctioned violence while seeking to realise its
totalitarian aspirations
• However, it also worked hard from 1968
onwards to ensure that the Iraqi state had a
secure grip on the collective deployment of
violence within society, and severely punished
those who used violence without its permission.
 Cont’d
• The regime also used interstate warfare, first
invading Iran and then Kuwait, as a tool for
controlling its own society
• By the mid-1990s, under the pressure of UN
sanctions, the Iraqi state began to lose control
of its monopoly on violence. This allowed
criminality to flourish and privatised coercion
to serve the pursuit of personal interest as well
as state-driven repression.
 Cont’d
• There is a direct link between the suffering imposed
on the Iraqi people under the sanctions regime and
the explosion of violence after 2003.
• War and sanctions left Iraq a highly militarised
society that had been involved in three conflicts in
20 years
• At the peak of its militarisation in 1989, Iraq had a
standing army of one million men, with a weapons
stockpile estimated to contain 4.2m firearms
 Cont’d
• This militarisation led to high civilian gun
ownership, with 3.2m firearms in the hands of
ordinary Iraqis.
• The combination of a large standing army,
conscription and government-formed militias
gave rise to a steady proliferation of small
arms across society
 Cont’d
• By 2003, this proliferation had turned into a flood.
• The rapid collapse of the Iraqi armed forces in the face of
the US invasion led to the looting of its weapons stockpile.
• The 4.2m guns once controlled by the Iraqi security
services spread across the whole of Iraqi society.
• Thus, societal trauma, extreme violence as a common
currency in both politics and crime, and high levels of
private gun ownership (both legal and illicit), combined to
make the rise of collective violence in Iraq after 2003
comparatively easy to organise.
 Cont’d
• Another aspect is the ethnic and sectarian divide
within Iraqi society
• Three states of ethnic and religious identity:
aggressive, passive and banal
• In times of profound insecurity, competition for
scarce resources and the aggressive assertion of
competing identity claims are likely to move a
group’s collective sense of itself from banal or
passive to the violently assertive, as the group
struggles for survival.
 Cont’d
• In pre-2003 Iraq, the state promoted an Iraqi
nationalism that at first glance appeared to be
without religious bias.
• However, on closer inspection, the ruling ideology,
based as it was on Arab nationalism, relied on a
passive but nonetheless important affinity with Sunni
Islam.
• In addition, it was Sunni Islam that was taught in
state schools, and various aspects of Shia religious
practice were banned under the Ba’athist regime.
 Cont’d
• Once Saddam one, Shia majority found the opportunity to
practice freely
• In a country with little government and no order, the Shia
religious hierarchy, the hawza, became the focus of loyalty and
hope
• Once governing
• institutions were tentatively set up, their senior ranks quickly
filled with formerly exiled politicians and parties that actively
asserted the centrality of their Shia religious beliefs to the
country’s new politics, and the desire to remould Iraqi
nationalism, placing Shi’ism at its heart - resulting in backlash
across Sunni sections
 Cont’d
• An increasingly militant assertion of a rival
Sunni Islamism was forged that was both
radicalised and, at its fringes, increasingly
violent
 Weak Iraqi State
• It is a fact that “financially, organizationally and
politically weak central governments render
insurgency more feasible and attractive due to
weak local policing or inept and corrupt
counterinsurgency practices.”
• The initial causes of the security vacuum in
Iraq lies in the lack of troops the invading
forces brought with them, then the disbanding
of the Iraqi army.
 Cont’d
• Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi Army in May
2003 forced 400,000 armed, trained and alienated ex-
soldiers out onto the streets, facing unemployment.
• Of even greater significance, Bremer’s decision meant
that the Iraqi armed forces had to be rebuilt from
scratch, a process that by its very nature was bound to
take several years.
• Thus, the violence that shook Iraq after 2003 was a
direct result of the security vacuum created by the
lack of troops to impose order.
 Cont’d
• The civilian institutional capacity of the state in 2003
was in
• a similarly perilous condition.
• Iraq had staggered through two wars from 1980 to
1990 and was then subjected to the harshest and
longest-running international sanctions ever imposed.
• The sanctions regime was specifically designed to
break the government’s ability to deliver services and,
with the notable exception of the rationing system, it
was effective
 Cont’d
• The civilian capacity of the state was
dismantled by the looting that spread across
Baghdad after the fall of the Ba’athist regime
in April 2003.
• Overall, the looting is estimated to have cost
as much as US$12bn, equal to one-third of
Iraq’s annual GDP.
 Cont’d
• The de-Ba’athification pursued by the US occupation
purged the civil service of its top layer of management,
making between 20,000 and 120,000 people unemployed
and removing what was left of the state and its
institutional memory.
• The state lost its administrative and coercive capacity, the
country’s borders become increasingly meaningless.
• Decisionmaking power leaks out across the boundaries of
the country to neighbouring capitals – in Iraq’s case,
Amman, Damascus and Tehran (as well as distant
Washington).
 Elite Bargain
• The political system put in place after regime change
was built around what can best be described as an
exclusive elite bargain.
• Elite bargains are often placed at the centre of
negotiations to move a country from dictatorship to
democracy, or from civil war to a peace settlement.
• Such bargains are ‘often unarticulated, understandings
between elites that bring about the conditions to end
conflict, but which also in most states prevent violent
conflict from occurring’.
 Cont’d
• Inclusive settlements integrate a broad section
of the existing national elites into a ruling
coalition. This gives the organisations they
represent access to the state’s institutions, jobs
and largesse.
• The politicians can then use state resources,
rents and employment opportunities as
patronage to sustain a strong base of support
within society.
 Cont’d
• Exclusive bargains, on the other hand, involve a
much narrower set of elites. They exclude a
number of key politicians and their followers,
fostering ‘antagonism and violent conflict’.
• In Iraq, the political settlement created by the
United States after the invasion, institutionalised
by the new constitution and legitimatised by
two national elections in 2005, was undoubtedly
an elite bargain of the exclusive variety.
 Cont’d
• The settlement was designed to exclude key
indigenous political elites from any role in
government.
• It played a major role in triggering the
insurgency and driving the country into civil war.
• Iraqi Governing Council the IGC became the
domain of a small number of formerly exiled
political parties, which used it as a platform to
solidify their grip on the Iraqi state.
 Cont’d
• The democratic process was inaugurated by the election
of 30 January 2005, which selected an interim
government to rule for a year.
• The vote itself was held within one nationwide electoral
constituency due to security and logistical concerns.
• This removed local issues and personalities from the
campaign and marshalled the politicians and parties that
controlled the IGC into large coalitions, most of which
played to the lowest common denominator, deploying
ethnic and sectarian rhetoric to maximise their vote.
 Cont’d
• From July 2003 onwards, the Iraqi political parties that
had gained prominence during their long exile
successfully leveraged their alliance with the United
States to control government.
• This, in combination with the radical de-Ba’athification
pursued by both the United States and the new Iraqi
government, created an exclusive elite bargain that
consciously excluded, and indeed demonised, not only
the old ruling elite, but also the whole Sunni section of
Iraqi society from which that elite had largely come.
 Discussion
• Which factor you think was mostly responsible
for the Iraqi state plunging into violence?
 Rise of ISIS
• Post-2003 situation has direct consequences in the form of
rise of ISIS
• In 2014, the Islamic State advanced into Iraq from Syria
and took over parts of Anbar province, eventually
expanding control in the northern part of the country and
capturing Mosul in June 2014.
• Former President Barack Obama authorized targeted air
strikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, and
the United States formed an international coalition that
now includes nearly eighty countries to counter the
Islamic State.
 Cont’d
• Regional forces—including as many as thirty
thousand Iranian troops—joined the Iraqi army,
local tribes, and the Kurdish Peshmerga in
operations to begin retaking territory from the
group, eventually recapturing Tikrit in April
2015, Ramadi in December 2015, Fallujah in
June 2016, and Mosul in July 2017. 
• The Iraqi government declared victory over the
Islamic State in December 2017.
 Cont’d
• The fight to dislodge the Islamic State was exacerbated
by underlying sectarian tensions in Iraq among Sunni and
Shiite groups, as well as tensions between Kurdish
groups in the north and the government in Baghdad.
• By December 2017, the ISIS caliphate had lost 95 percent
of its territory, including its two biggest properties,
Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and the northern Syrian
city of Raqqa, its nominal capital.
• The Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi declared victory
over the Islamic State in Iraq on December 9, 2017.
Cont’d