History > 2011 > USA > War > Iraq (II)

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December 25, 2011

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Weapons Sales to Iraq

Move Ahead Despite U.S. Worries

December 28, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD — The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.

The military aid, including advanced fighter jets and battle tanks, is meant to help the Iraqi government protect its borders and rebuild a military that before the 1991 Persian Gulf war was one of the largest in the world; it was disbanded in 2003 after the United States invasion.

But the sales of the weapons — some of which have already been delivered — are moving ahead even though Mr. Maliki has failed to carry out an agreement that would have limited his ability to marginalize the Sunnis and turn the military into a sectarian force. While the United States is eager to beef up Iraq’s military, at least in part as a hedge against Iranian influence, there are also fears that the move could backfire if the Baghdad government ultimately aligns more closely with the Shiite theocracy in Tehran than with Washington.

United States diplomats, including Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, have expressed concern about the military relationship with Iraq. Some have even said it could have political ramifications for the Obama administration if not properly managed. There is also growing concern that Mr. Maliki’s apparent efforts to marginalize the country’s Sunni minority could set off a civil war.

“The optics of this are terrible,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on national security issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a critic of the administration’s Iraq policy.

The program to arm the military is being led by the United States Embassy here, which through its Office of Security Cooperation serves as a broker between the Iraqi government and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Among the big-ticket items being sold to Iraq are F-16 fighter jets, M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, cannons and armored personnel carriers. The Iraqis have also received body armor, helmets, ammunition trailers and sport utility vehicles, which critics say can be used by domestic security services to help Mr. Maliki consolidate power.

“The purpose of these arrangements is to assist the Iraqis’ ability to defend their sovereignty against foreign security threats,” said Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington.

But Iraqi politicians and analysts, while acknowledging that the American military withdrawal had left Iraq’s borders, and airspace, vulnerable, said there were many reasons for concern.

Despite pronouncements from American and Iraqi officials that the Iraqi military is a nonsectarian force, they said, it had evolved into a hodgepodge of Shiite militias more interested in marginalizing the Sunnis than in protecting the country’s sovereignty. Across the country, they said, Shiite flags — not Iraq’s national flag — fluttered from tanks and military vehicles, evidence, many said, of the troops’ sectarian allegiances.

“It is very risky to arm a sectarian army,” said Rafe al-Essawi, the country’s finance minister and a leading Sunni politician. “It is very risky with all the sacrifices we’ve made, with all the budget to be spent, with all the support of America — at the end of the day, the result will be a formal militia army.”

Mr. Essawi said that he was concerned about how the weapons would be used if political tension led to a renewed tide of sectarian violence. Some Iraqis and analysts said they believed that the weapons could give Mr. Maliki a significant advantage in preventing several Sunni provinces from declaring autonomy from the central government.

“Washington took the decision to build up Iraq as a counterweight to Iran through close military cooperation and the sale of major weapon systems,” said Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East. “Maliki has shown a troubling inclination toward enhancing his control over the country’s institutions without accepting any significant checks and balances.”

Uncertainty over Mr. Maliki’s intentions, and with that the wisdom of the weapons sale, began to emerge even before the last American combat forces withdrew 11 days ago. Mr. Maliki moved against his Sunni rivals, arresting hundreds of former Baath Party members on charges that they were involved in a coup plot. Then security forces under Mr. Maliki’s control sought to arrest the country’s Sunni vice president, who fled to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north. In addition, Mr. Maliki threatened to release damning information on other politicians.

With these actions plunging the country into a political crisis, a few days later, Mr. Maliki said the country would be turned into “rivers of blood” if the predominantly Sunni provinces sought more autonomy.

This was not a completely unforeseen turn of events. Over the summer, the Americans told high-ranking Iraqi officials that the United States did not want an ongoing military relationship with a country that marginalized its minorities and ruled by force.

The Americans warned Iraqi officials that if they wanted to continue receiving military aid, Mr. Maliki had to fulfill an agreement from 2010 that required the Sunni bloc in Parliament to have a say in who ran the Defense and Interior Ministries. But despite a pledge to do so, the ministries remain under Mr. Maliki’s control, angering many Sunnis.

Corruption, too, continues to pervade the security forces. American military advisers have said that many low- and midlevel command positions in the armed forces and the police are sold, despite American efforts to emphasize training and merit, said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Security and International Studies in Washington.

Pentagon and State Department officials say that weapons sales agreements have conditions built in to allow American inspectors to monitor how the arms are used, to ensure that the sales terms are not violated.

“Washington still has considerable leverage in Iraq by freezing or withdrawing its security assistance packages, issuing travel advisories in more stark terms that will have a direct impact on direct foreign investment, and reassessing diplomatic relations and trade agreements,” said Matthew Sherman, a former State Department official who spent more than three years in Iraq. “Now is the time to exercise some of that leverage by publicly putting Maliki on notice.”

Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the head of the American Embassy office that is selling the weapons, said he was optimistic that Mr. Maliki and the other Iraqi politicians would work together and that the United States would not end up selling weapons to an authoritarian government.

“If it was a doomsday scenario, at some point I’m sure there will be plenty of guidance coming my way,” he said in a recent interview.

A spokesman for the United States Embassy declined to comment, as did the National Security Council in Washington.

As the American economy continues to sputter, some analysts believe that Mr. Maliki and the Iraqis may hold the ultimate leverage over the Americans.

“I think he would like to get the weapons from the U.S.,” Mr. Pollack said. “But he believes that an economically challenged American administration cannot afford to jeopardize $10 billion worth of jobs.”

If the United States stops the sales, Mr. Pollack said, Mr. Maliki “would simply get his weapons elsewhere.”

Michael S. Schmidt reported from Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

Weapons Sales to Iraq Move Ahead Despite U.S. Worries, NYT, 28.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/middleeast/us-military-sales-to-iraq-raise-concerns.html

How to Save Iraq From Civil War

December 27, 2011
The New York Times
By AYAD ALLAWI, OSAMA AL-NUJAIFI
and RAFE AL-ESSAWI

Baghdad

IRAQ today stands on the brink of disaster. President Obama kept his campaign pledge to end the war here, but it has not ended the way anyone in Washington wanted. The prize, for which so many American soldiers believed they were fighting, was a functioning democratic and nonsectarian state. But Iraq is now moving in the opposite direction — toward a sectarian autocracy that carries with it the threat of devastating civil war.

Since Iraq’s 2010 election, we have witnessed the subordination of the state to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Dawa party, the erosion of judicial independence, the intimidation of opponents and the dismantling of independent institutions intended to promote clean elections and combat corruption. All of this happened during the Arab Spring, while other countries were ousting dictators in favor of democracy. Iraq had a chance to demonstrate, for the first time in the modern Middle East, that political power could peacefully pass between political rivals following proper elections. Instead, it has become a battleground of sects, in which identity politics have crippled democratic development.

We are leaders of Iraqiya, the political coalition that won the most seats in the 2010 election and represents more than a quarter of all Iraqis. We do not think of ourselves as Sunni or Shiite, but as Iraqis, with a constituency spanning the entire country. We are now being hounded and threatened by Mr. Maliki, who is attempting to drive us out of Iraqi political life and create an authoritarian one-party state.

In the past few weeks, as the American military presence ended, another military force moved in to fill the void. Our homes and offices in Baghdad’s Green Zone were surrounded by Mr. Maliki’s security forces. He has laid siege to our party, and has done so with the blessing of a politicized judiciary and law enforcement system that have become virtual extensions of his personal office. He has accused Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, of terrorism; moved to fire Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq; and sought to investigate one of us, Rafe al-Essawi, for specious links to insurgents — all immediately after Mr. Maliki returned to Iraq from Washington, wrongly giving Iraqis the impression that he’d been given carte blanche by the United States to do so.

After Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. urged all parties to maintain a unity government on Dec. 16, Mr. Maliki threatened to form a government that completely excluded Iraqiya and other opposition voices. Meanwhile, Mr. Maliki is welcoming into the political process the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, whose leaders kidnapped and killed five American soldiers and murdered four British hostages in 2007.

It did not have to happen this way. The Iraqi people emerged from the bloody and painful transition after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime hoping for a brighter future. After the 2010 election, we felt there was a real opportunity to create a new Iraq that could be a model for the region. We needed the United States to protect the political process, to prevent violations of the Constitution and to help develop democratic institutions.

For the sake of stability, Iraqiya agreed to join the national unity government following a landmark power-sharing agreement reached a year ago in Erbil. However, for more than a year now Mr. Maliki has refused to implement this agreement, instead concentrating greater power in his own hands. As part of the Erbil agreement, one of us, Ayad Allawi, was designated to head a proposed policy council but declined this powerless appointment because Mr. Maliki refused to share any decision-making authority.

After the 2010 election, Mr. Maliki assumed the roles of minister of the interior, minister of defense and minister for national security. (He has since delegated the defense and national security portfolios to loyalists without parliamentary approval.) Unfortunately, the United States continued to support Mr. Maliki after he reneged on the Erbil agreement and strengthened security forces that operate without democratic oversight.

Now America is working with Iraqis to convene another national conference to resolve the crisis. We welcome this step and are ready to resolve our problems peacefully, using the Erbil agreement as a starting point. But first, Mr. Maliki’s office must stop issuing directives to military units, making unilateral military appointments and seeking to influence the judiciary; his national security adviser must give up complete control over the Iraqi intelligence and national security agencies, which are supposed to be independent institutions but have become a virtual extension of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa party; and his Dawa loyalists must give up control of the security units that oversee the Green Zone and intimidate political opponents.

The United States must make clear that a power-sharing government is the only viable option for Iraq and that American support for Mr. Maliki is conditional on his fulfilling the Erbil agreement and dissolving the unconstitutional entities through which he now rules. Likewise, American assistance to Iraq’s army, police and intelligence services must be conditioned on those institutions being representative of the nation rather than one sect or party.

For years, we have sought a strategic partnership with America to help us build the Iraq of our dreams: a nationalist, liberal, secular country, with democratic institutions and a democratic culture. But the American withdrawal may leave us with the Iraq of our nightmares: a country in which a partisan military protects a sectarian, self-serving regime rather than the people or the Constitution; the judiciary kowtows to those in power; and the nation’s wealth is captured by a corrupt elite rather than invested in the development of the nation.

We are glad that your brave soldiers have made it home for the holidays and we wish them peace and happiness. But as Iraq once again teeters on the brink, we respectfully ask America’s leaders to understand that unconditional support for Mr. Maliki is pushing Iraq down the path to civil war.

Unless America acts rapidly to help create a successful unity government, Iraq is doomed.

Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya coalition,

was Iraq’s prime minister from 2004-5.

Osama al-Nujaifi is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament.

Rafe al-Essawi is Iraq’s finance minister.

    How to Save Iraq From Civil War, NYT, 27.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/opinion/how-to-save-iraq-from-civil-war.html

U.S. Embraces Low-Key Plan

as Turmoil in Iraq Deepens

December 24, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — As Iraq erupted in recent days, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in constant phone contact with the leaders of the country’s dueling sects. He called the Shiite prime minister and the Sunni speaker of the Parliament on Tuesday, and the Kurdish leader on Thursday, urging them to try to resolve the political crisis.

And for the United States, that is where the American intervention in Iraq officially stops.

Sectarian violence and political turmoil in Iraq escalated within days of the United States military’s withdrawal, but officials said in interviews that President Obama had no intention of sending troops back into the country, even if it devolved into civil war.

The United States, without troops on the ground or any direct influence over Iraq’s affairs, has lost much of its leverage there. And so the latest crisis, a descent into sectarian distrust and hostility that was punctuated by a bombing in Baghdad on Thursday that killed more than 60 people, is being treated in much the same way that the United States would treat any diplomatic emergency abroad.

Mr. Obama, his aides said, is adamant that the United States will not send troops back to Iraq. At Fort Bragg, N.C., on Dec. 14, he told returning troops that he had left Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi people, and in private conversations at the White House, he has told aides that the United States gave Iraqis an opportunity; what they do with that opportunity is up to them.

Though the president has been heralding the end of the Iraq war as a victory, and a fulfillment of his campaign promise to bring American troops home, the sudden crisis could quickly become a political problem for Mr. Obama, foreign policy experts said.

“Right now, Iraq, along with getting Osama bin Laden, succeeding in Libya, and restoring the U.S. reputation in the world, is a clear plus for Obama,” said David Rothkopf, a former official in the administration of Bill Clinton and a national security expert. “He kept his promise and got out. But the story could turn on him very rapidly.”

For instance, Mr. Rothkopf and other national security experts said, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq is swiftly adopting policies that are setting off deep divisions among Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites. If Iraq fragments, if Iran starts to assert more visible influence or if a civil war breaks out, “the president could be blamed,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “He would be remembered not for leaving Iraq but for how he left it.”

Already, Mr. Obama is coming under political fire. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that Mr. Obama’s decision to pull American troops out had “unraveled.” Appearing on CBS News on Thursday, Mr. McCain said that “we are paying a very heavy price in Baghdad because of our failure to have a residual force there,” adding that while he was disturbed by what had happened in the past week, he was not surprised.

Administration officials, for their part, countered that it was hard to see how American troops could have prevented either the political crisis or the coordinated attacks in Iraq.

“These crises before happened when there were tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq, and they all got resolved, but resolved by Iraqis through the political process,” said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. “The test will be whether, with our diplomatic help, they continue to use politics to overcome their differences, pursue power sharing and get to a better place.”

So far, the administration is maintaining a hands-off stance in public, even as Mr. Biden has privately exhorted Iraqi officials to mend their differences. Several Obama administration officials have been on the phone all week imploring Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi officials to quickly work through the charges and countercharges swirling around Mr. Maliki’s accusation that the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, enlisted personal bodyguards to run a death squad.

Aides said that Mr. Biden talked to Mr. Maliki; Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni political leader; and Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader. He urged the men to organize a meeting of Iraq’s top political leaders, from Mr. Maliki on down, conveying the message that “you all need to stop hurling accusations at each other through the media and actually sit together and work through your competing concerns,” a senior administration official said. That official, like several others, agreed to discuss internal administration thinking only on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

American officials say they believe that Mr. Talabani is the best person to convene such a meeting, because he is respected by the most Iraqis.

Mr. Biden is not the only high-ranking American official who is actively involved in discussions with Iraqi officials. David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. who formerly served as the top commander in Iraq, traveled to Baghdad recently for talks with his Iraqi counterparts.

Beyond that, Obama administration officials have conveyed to Mr. Maliki that the American economic, security and diplomatic relationship with Iraq will be “colored” by the extent to which Mr. Maliki can hold together a coalition government that includes Sunnis and Kurds, one administration official said.

Even without a military presence in Iraq, the United States maintains at least some leverage over Iraqi officials. Iraq wants to purchase F-16 warplanes from the United States, for example, and the Obama administration has been trying to help the government forge better relations with its Sunni Arab neighbors, like the United Arab Emirates, which recently sent its defense chief to Baghdad to talk about how the Iraqis could participate in regional exercises.

Pentagon officials and military officers had hoped a deal could be struck with the Iraqi government to keep at least several thousand American combat troops and trainers in Iraq after Dec. 31. But domestic politics in Iraq made that impossible, and the outcome also fit with Mr. Obama’s narrative of a full withdrawal from a war he vowed to end.

Even plans quietly drawn up for the continued deployment of counterterrorism commandos were just as quietly pulled off the table, to make sure that Mr. Obama’s pledge to reduce American combat forces to zero would be met, according to senior administration officials.

The only American military personnel remaining in Iraq today are the fewer than 200 members of an Office of Security Cooperation that operates within the American Embassy to coordinate military relations between Washington and Baghdad, particularly arms sales.

The United States has about 40,000 service members remaining throughout the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region, including a ground combat unit that was one of the last out of Iraq — and remains, at least temporarily, just across the border in Kuwait. Significant numbers of long-range strike aircraft also are on call aboard aircraft carriers and at bases in the region.

As the responsibility for nurturing bilateral relations shifts to the State Department, the responsibility for security assistance moves to the C.I.A., which operates in Iraq under a separate authority, independent of the military.

Although the United States military is unlikely to return to Iraq, it is possible that military counterterrorism personnel could return, if approved by the president, under C.I.A. authority, just as an elite team of Navy commandos carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden under C.I.A. command.

The C.I.A. historically has operated its own strike teams, and it also has the authority to hire indigenous operatives to participate in its counterterrorism missions.

“As the U.S. military has drawn down to zero in terms of combat troops, the U.S. intelligence community has not done the same,” a senior administration official said. “Intelligence cooperation remains very important to the U.S.-Iraqi relationship.”

The official acknowledged a risk punctuated by the recent unrest. “There are serious counterterrorism issues that confront Iraq,” the official said. “And we don’t want to let go of the very solid relationships we have built over the years to share information of importance to both countries.”

Even if the unrest rose to levels approaching civil war, American officials said, it was unlikely that Mr. Obama would allow the American military to return.

“There is a strong sense that we need to let events in Iraq play out,” said one senior administration official. “There is not a great deal of appetite for re-engagement. We are not going to reinvade Iraq.”

    U.S. Embraces Low-Key Plan as Turmoil in Iraq Deepens, NYT, 24.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/world/middleeast/us-loses-leverage-in-iraq-now-that-troops-are-out.html

Clash Over Regional Power

Spurs Iraq’s Sectarian Rift

December 23, 2011
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

BAQUBA, Iraq — The governor has fled this uneasy city. Half the members of the provincial council are camped out in northern Iraq, afraid to return to their offices. Peaceful protesters fill the dusty streets, though just days ago angrier crowds blockaded the highways with burning tires and shattered glass.

All of this because the local government here in northeastern Diyala Province recently dared to raise a simple but explosive question, one that is central to the unrest now surging through Iraq’s shaky democracy: Should a post-American Iraq exist as one unified nation, or will it split into a loose confederation of islands unto themselves?

A dire political crisis exploded in Baghdad this week, after an arrest warrant was issued against the Sunni Arab vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, accusing him of running a death squad. But years of accumulated anger and disenfranchisement are now driving some of the country’s largely Sunni Arab provinces to seek greater control over their security and finances by distancing themselves from Iraq’s Shiite leaders.

Many Sunni leaders have rallied to the cause while top Shiites in Baghdad have fought the efforts, aggravating the sectarian divisions among the country’s political elite.

“They feel that they have no future with the central government,” said Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni.

This development comes at a moment of rising tensions and could herald a near-breakdown of relations between the countryside and the leaders behind the concrete walls and concertina wire guarding Baghdad’s Green Zone. It has splintered communities within provinces along religious lines, while deepening the sense of political uncertainty pervading Iraq in the days after the American military’s withdrawal.

“We’ve reached a point where the exasperation with the entire political process is so big in Sunni majority areas,” said Reidar Visser, an expert on Iraqi politics and the editor of the blog historiae.org. “They are just fed up and disillusioned.”

On Friday, thousands of protesters marched through largely Sunni cities to condemn the warrant for Mr. Hashimi’s arrest. In Samarra, where the destruction of a Shiite shrine in 2006 set off waves of violence, 2,000 demonstrators filled the streets after Friday Prayer, waving signs that declared, “The people of Samarra condemn the fabricated charges against Hashimi.”

The schism is one thread of a growing battle between Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, and politicians from the political opposition and Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority.

Security forces who take orders from Mr. Maliki — sometimes personally — have arrested dozens of people tied to opposition politicians in recent weeks. The government accused Mr. Hashimi, the Sunni vice president, of running a death squad from his offices in central Baghdad, a charge he denies. And Mr. Maliki has urged Iraqi lawmakers to unseat his own deputy, Mr. Mutlaq, who frequently inveighs against the prime minister.

A leading political coalition supported by many Sunnis and secular Iraqis has boycotted Parliament, refusing to attend sessions, and its ministers and lawmakers have threatened to resign en masse. An American-backed partnership government uniting Iraq’s three main factions — the Shiite majority, Sunnis and Kurds — appears poised to fall.

That discord is resonating in the largely Sunni provinces around the capital, places that once hewed to a rigid nationalism cultivated by Saddam Hussein.

In recent months, Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala Provinces have each pushed for a public vote on creating their own regional governments.

Mr. Maliki has pushed back harder. His supporters contend that the movement threatens to destabilize the central government. They say that regions controlled only by local security forces would provide safe havens for Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Baath Party and other Sunni-aligned militant groups at a tenuous moment so soon after the American military withdrawal.

During a trip to Washington this month, Mr. Maliki was asked in a meeting about the movement for greater regional control and offered a brusque reply, according to an American who met with Mr. Maliki during his visit.

“His response was: ‘Everything those people are doing is illegal. The only way to deal with them is through a legal process, and not a political process,’ ” said the American, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing access to Iraqi leaders. “This is not a guy who has any interest in compromising.”

Early Friday morning, Iraqi police commandos arrested a leading advocate of Salahuddin Province’s push for regional status and seized his computer and reams of documents, security officials said. They did not say why he had been detained.

The provinces are not seeking a total divorce from the rest of Iraq, just a wider separation in the mold of Kurdistan, the relatively prosperous and safe area in northern Iraq. The Kurds, who have lived for decades as a people apart from the rest of Iraq, have their own Parliament and president, command their own security forces and have signed lucrative oil deals with foreign companies without Baghdad’s approval.

It is not a new idea. Iraq’s Constitution gives provinces the right to carve out their own regional governments. In 2006 and 2007, during Iraq’s civil war, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested partitioning the country into three federal states to calm the sectarian bloodshed.

But could Iraq still stand if it were divided into Kurdistan, Shiitestan and Sunnistan? Even raising the issue unleashes a torrent of emotion.

On Dec. 12, a majority of the members of the Diyala provincial council announced that they were asking Iraq’s central government to hold a referendum on whether the province could form its own semiautonomous region. Diyala is about 60 percent Sunni, 20 percent Shiite and 20 percent Kurdish, and its government roughly reflects that breakdown.

Distrust of the central government runs deep here among the snaking rivers and palm plantations that once served as battlegrounds and hide-outs for Qaeda insurgents. Last year, three of the Sunni members of the provincial council were thrown into jail by Iraqi security forces. Others were threatened.

But the abrupt announcement of a potential Diyala region angered and frightened some of the province’s Shiites. It was read as a power grab that would put Shiites and Kurds in the province at the mercy of unknown new security forces, and could presage the fragmentation of Iraq.

On Dec. 15, about 1,000 outraged demonstrators, most of them Shiites, streamed past the Shiite-dominated national police forces and into the provincial council’s headquarters. They occupied the building for a few hours, then set up roadblocks and tents in the streets. Half the city’s elected officials fled for safety.

Protesters said they had acted spontaneously, but several Sunni officials believed that Iraq’s central government had mobilized the protesters and stoked their outrage to kill the proposal.

“We left the city because of the chaos and insecurity,” said Rasim al-Ugaili, a member of the provincial council who supported the proposal for a new region. “We feared for our lives.”

A few days later, the roads were clear, but the fate of the Diyala region was anything but. The Kurds on the provincial council withdrew their support for the referendum after the protests erupted, and much of the council was still missing.

The deputy governor, Furat al-Tamimi, was filling in until his boss returned. Mr. Tamimi, a Shiite, said he was pleased to see the banners and protesters shouting passionately through the afternoon. “This is all about democracy,” he said.

 

Reporting was contributed by Omar al-Jawoshy from Baghdad, Duraid Adnan

and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Baquba,

and an Iraqi employee of The Times from Samarra.

    Clash Over Regional Power Spurs Iraq’s Sectarian Rift, NYT, 23.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/world/middleeast/iraqi-sunnis-and-shiites-clash-over-regional-power.html

The End, for Now

December 20, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

With the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Iraq, we’re finally going to get the answer to the core question about that country: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is — a collection of sects and tribes unable to live together except under an iron fist. Now we’re going to get the answer because both the internal iron fist that held Iraq together (Saddam Hussein) and the external iron fist (the U.S. armed forces) have been removed. Now we will see whether Iraqis can govern themselves in a decent manner that will enable their society to progress — or end up with a new iron fist. You have to hope for the best because so much is riding on it, but the early signs are worrying.

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track? After 9/11, the idea of helping to change the context of Arab politics and address the root causes of Arab state dysfunction and Islamist terrorism — which were identified in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report as a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and a deficit of women’s empowerment — seemed to me to be a legitimate strategic choice. But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: “No” and “Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.”

I say “no” because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it. And, for that, I have nothing but regrets. We overpaid in lives, in the wounded, in tarnished values, in dollars and in the lost focus on America’s development. Iraqis, of course, paid dearly as well.

One reason the costs were so high is because the project was so difficult. Another was the incompetence of George W. Bush’s team in prosecuting the war. The other reason, though, was the nature of the enemy. Iran, the Arab dictators and, most of all, Al Qaeda did not want a democracy in the heart of the Arab world, and they tried everything they could — in Al Qaeda’s case, hundreds of suicide bombers financed by Arab oil money — to sow enough fear and sectarian discord to make this democracy project fail.

So no matter the original reasons for the war, in the end, it came down to this: Were America and its Iraqi allies going to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies in the heart of the Arab world or were Al Qaeda and its allies going to defeat them? Thanks to the Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, and the surge, America and its allies defeated them and laid the groundwork for the most important product of the Iraq war: the first ever voluntary social contract between Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites for how to share power and resources in an Arab country and to govern themselves in a democratic fashion. America helped to midwife that contract in Iraq, and now every other Arab democracy movement is trying to replicate it — without an American midwife. You see how hard it is.

Which leads to the “maybe, sort of, we’ll see.” It is possible to overpay for something that is still transformational. Iraq had its strategic benefits: the removal of a genocidal dictator; the defeat of Al Qaeda there, which diminished its capacity to attack us; the intimidation of Libya, which prompted its dictator to surrender his nuclear program (and helped expose the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear network); the birth in Kurdistan of an island of civility and free markets and the birth in Iraq of a diverse free press. But Iraq will only be transformational if it truly becomes a model where Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the secular and religious, Muslims and non-Muslims, can live together and share power.

As you can see in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, this is the issue that will determine the fate of all the Arab awakenings. Can the Arab world develop pluralistic, consensual politics, with regular rotations in power, where people can live as citizens and not feel that their tribe, sect or party has to rule or die? This will not happen overnight in Iraq, but if it happens over time it would be transformational, because it is the necessary condition for democracy to take root in that region. Without it, the Arab world will be a dangerous boiling pot for a long, long time.

The best-case scenario for Iraq is that it will be another Russia — an imperfect, corrupt, oil democracy that still holds together long enough so that the real agent of change — a new generation, which takes nine months and 21 years to develop — comes of age in a much more open, pluralistic society. The current Iraqi leaders are holdovers from the old era, just like Vladimir Putin in Russia. They will always be weighed down by the past. But as Putin is discovering — some 21 years after Russia’s democratic awakening began — that new generation thinks differently. I don’t know if Iraq will make it. The odds are really long, but creating this opportunity was an important endeavor, and I have nothing but respect for the Americans, Brits and Iraqis who paid the price to make it possible.

    The End, for Now, NYT, 20.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/opinion/friedman-the-end-for-now.html

Sunni Leader in Iraq

Denies Ordering Assassinations

December 20, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — The political crisis in Iraq deepened on Tuesday, as the Sunni vice president angrily rebutted charges that he had ordered his security guards to assassinate government officials, saying that Shiite-backed security forces had induced the guards into false confessions.

In a nationally televised news conference, the vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, blamed the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for using the country’s security forces to persecute political opponents, specifically Sunnis.

“The accusations have not been proven, so the accused is innocent until proven guilty,” Mr. Hashimi said at the news conference in Erbil, in the Kurdish north of Iraq. “I swear by God I didn’t do this disobedience against Iraqi blood, and I would never do this.”

He added: “The goal is clear, it is not more than political slander.”

Standing in front of an Iraqi flag, Mr. Hashimi questioned why Mr. Maliki had waited until the day after the American military withdrew its troops from Iraq to publicly lay out the charges.

Almost as significant as what Mr. Hashimi said was where he said it: in Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous northern region of Kurdistan. Because of the region’s autonomy, Mr. Maliki’s security forces cannot easily act on a warrant issued Monday to arrest Mr. Hashimi.

Mr. Hashimi said he would not return to Baghdad, effectively making him an internal exile. The case against him should be transferred to Kurdistan where he could face a fair trial, he said.

The response from Mr. Hashimi came a day after the Shiite-led government ordered him arrested and played videotaped confessions on national television from three men who said they had worked as his bodyguards and had been ordered by him to commit murders. The men claimed to have used roadside bombs and silencer-equipped pistols to kill Iraqi government officials and security officers. Mr. Hashimi, they said, rewarded them with money.

Shortly before the news conference on Tuesday, the speaker of the Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, one of the most respected Sunni leaders in Iraq, issued a statement saying that the playing of the videotapes had a “sectarian” tone that tried to exploit the historic divide between Sunnis and Shiites.

Mr. Nujaifi’s statements were striking because he has said little publicly about the growing crisis, and in recent years has cast himself as a nationalist, developing close relationships with Mr. Maliki and other Shiite leaders.

Since the accusations surfaced over the weekend, there has been no noticeable increase in violence. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether the political tension would galvanize Sunnis and insurgents against the government or would be a political drama that plays itself out in televised news conferences.

Mr. Hashimi, a close ally of the United States, criticized President Obama, who ordered American troops in October to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

“I’m surprised by the statement of President Obama when he said that the United States had left a democratic Iraq,” he said.

“Is that the reality of Iraq? I’m sad. Either the American president is deceived or he is overlooking the facts existing here. Today my house is surrounded with tanks. I’d ask him, what democracy are you talking about President Obama?”

As Mr. Hashimi’s news conference was broadcast on several Iraqi television channels, the state-run channel replayed the confessions from his guards at least twice.

In the confessions, one of the men said that Mr. Hashimi asked him whether he would carry out attacks on his behalf. After saying he would, the man said he received orders from one of Mr. Hashimi’s deputies.

Among the attacks the man said he committed was planting a bomb in a busy traffic circle and assassinating an official from the Foreign Ministry with a silencer pistol.

“The vice president called us, and he thanked us,” said the man, Abdul Karim Mohammed al-Jabouri. “He gave us an envelope with money, and I thanked him.”

Yasir Ghazi and Zaid Thaker contributed reporting.

Sunni Leader in Iraq Denies Ordering Assassinations, NYT, 20.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/world/middleeast/sunni-leader-in-iraq-denies-ordering-assassinations.html

Arrest Order for Sunni Leader in Iraq

Opens New Rift

December 19, 2011
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government was thrown into crisis on Monday night as authorities issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice president, accusing him of running a personal death squad that assassinated security officials and government bureaucrats.

The sensational charges against Tariq al-Hashimi, one of the country’s most prominent Sunni leaders, threatened to inflame widening sectarian and political conflicts in Iraq just one day after the last American convoy of American troops rolled out of the country into Kuwait.

The accusations were broadcast over Iraqi television, in a half-hour of grainy video confessions from three men identified as Mr. Hashimi’s bodyguards. They spoke of how they had planted bombs in public squares, driven up to convoys carrying Iraqi officials and opened fire.

Under the direction of Mr. Hashimi’s top aides, the men said, they gunned down convoys carrying Shiite officials and planted roadside bombs in traffic circles and wealthy neighborhoods of Baghdad, then detonated them as their targets drove by. One of the men said Mr. Hashimi had personally handed him an envelope with $3,000 after one of the attacks.

It was impossible to substantiate any of the accusations aired in the confessions.

An aide in Mr. Hashimi’s office said the three men had indeed worked for the vice president, but he denied all of the allegations. The aide said Mr. Hashimi was in the northern region of Kurdistan, meeting with Kurdish officials to defuse the worsening political standoff with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Reidar Visser, an analyst of Iraqi politics and editor of the blog historiae.org, called the situation the worst crisis Iraq had faced in five years.

“Any leading Sunni politician seems now to be a target of this campaign by Maliki,” Mr. Visser said. “It seems that every Sunni Muslim or secularist is in danger of being labeled either a Baathist or a terrorist.”

The last week has yielded a near breakdown of relations between Mr. Maliki, a religious Shiite, and his adversaries in the Iraqiya coalition, a large political bloc that holds some 90 seats in Parliament and is supported by many Sunni Iraqis.

Members of the Iraqiya coalition walked away from Parliament on Saturday, accusing Mr. Maliki of seizing power and thwarting democratic procedures through a wave of politically tinged arrests in recent weeks. The boycott was the culmination of months of political discord, and signaled the near breakdown of relations between two of the country’s most powerful political adversaries.

Earlier on Monday, Iraq’s high court — a body often seen as beholden to Mr. Maliki — announced it was barring Mr. Hashimi from leaving the country. For days before the confessions were broadcast, several of Mr. Hashimi’s bodyguards were detained while state-run television and government surrogates promised to reveal evidence tying Mr. Hashimi to criminal acts.

On Sunday, Mr. Maliki sent a letter to Parliament seeking a no-confidence vote in one of his deputies, a prominent Sunni politician who has also been a vociferous critic.

The American Embassy said Ambassador James F. Jeffrey was in contact with Iraqi officials, but declined to comment further.

    Arrest Order for Sunni Leader in Iraq Opens New Rift, NYT, 19.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/world/middleeast/iraqi-government-accuses-top-official-in-assassinations.html

Iraq, a War Obama Didn’t Want,

Shaped His Foreign Policy

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama has made good on his campaign pledge to end the Iraq war, portraying the departure of the last troops as a chance to turn to nation-building at home.

But from Afghanistan to the Arab Spring, from China to counterterrorism, the lessons of that war still hang over the administration’s foreign policy — shaping, and sometimes limiting, how the president projects American power in the world.

The war that Mr. Obama never wanted to fight has weighed on internal debates, dictated priorities and often narrowed options for the United States, according to current and former administration officials.

Most tangibly, the swift American drawdown in Iraq will influence how the United States handles the endgame in Afghanistan, where NATO forces have agreed to hand over security and pull out by 2014. The fact that the troops are leaving Iraq without a wholesale breakdown in security, some analysts said, may embolden a war-weary administration to move up the timetable for getting out of Afghanistan.

It has also shifted the balance of power in Washington, from the military commanders, who were desperate to leave a residual force of soldiers in Iraq, toward Mr. Obama’s civilian advisers, who are busy calculating how getting them all home by Christmas might help their boss’s re-election bid.

“There used to be a hot debate over even setting a timetable,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. While he cautioned that Iraq is not a perfect precedent for Afghanistan, “there should be no doubt about our commitment to follow through on the timelines we set in Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr. Rhodes, who wrote Mr. Obama’s foreign policy speeches during his 2008 campaign, said Iraq was a “dramatically underrepresented element of the way in which people look at Obama’s foreign policy.” As a candidate whose opposition to the war helped define him, Mr. Rhodes said, “Senator Obama constructed an entire argument of foreign policy, based on Iraq.”

His argument had two central pillars: that Iraq had taken the United States’ eye off the real battle in Afghanistan, and that it had diminished the United States’ standing in the world. This led directly to two of the administration’s most significant foreign policy and national security projects: Mr. Obama’s lethal counterterrorism strategy and his recent series of diplomatic and military initiatives in Asia.

The drone strikes and commando raids that the president recently boasted had killed “22 out of 30 top Al Qaeda leaders,” including Osama bin Laden, were honed in the night raids by American troops on militants in Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s emphasis on restoring the United States’ place in Asia grew out of a post-Iraq “strategic rebalancing” pushed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon. The war, they contend, sucked American time and resources from other parts of the world, allowing China to expand its sway throughout much of the Pacific Rim.

In the early days of his presidency, as Mr. Obama weighed more troop deployments in Afghanistan, he was still heavily influenced by commanders like Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was fresh off his successful “surge” in Iraq and pressed for an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

“Here was a general who, in Petraeus’s case, had turned around a situation dramatically in Iraq, and was offering to do it again,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who ran the White House’s initial policy review on Afghanistan.

By 2011, however, Mr. Obama had developed his own views about the use of military force. His reluctant intervention in Libya — only after receiving the imprimatur of the Arab League, and then with limited military engagement — bore the hallmarks of a post-Iraq operation. In Syria, where a dictator in the Baathist tradition of Saddam Hussein has killed his own people, the United States has not considered a no-fly zone, let alone broader military intervention.

“The larger legacy of Iraq was that the U.S. military cannot shape outcomes,” said Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser in the State Department. “That led to skittishness on our part about using the military.”

Mr. Obama made much of his commitment to a multilateral foreign policy, in contrast to President George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq. That, his advisers say, grew out of a conviction the United States needed to work with others and forge consensus to restore its moral standing.

But it also reflects a sober economic reality: with more than $800 billion in costs from the Iraq war — and nearly $450 billion from Afghanistan — the United States can no longer afford another big, go-it-alone military campaign.

“The impulse toward multilateralism is more complicated,” said Dennis B. Ross, who until last month was one of Mr. Obama’s senior Middle East advisers. “There is a desire, understandably, for our actions to have greater legitimacy on the world stage. But there is also an interest in burden-sharing and sharing the cost as well.”

Some analysts argue that the administration’s multilateral approach owes less to Iraq than it does to traditional Democratic Party philosophy.

“No doubt, Iraq contributed to his view that we should wield power less, should not act without U.N. resolutions and multilateral support, and should try to ‘engage’ with hostile regimes, but I suspect the president held those views years earlier,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked in the George W. Bush and Reagan administrations.

“That’s pretty standard stuff on the left,” he added. “Iraq made them more central to his actions as president, but I doubt it taught him much.”

The Bush administration had hoped that Iraq would be a catalyst for democratic change across the Arab world. But there is little evidence that Iraq prepared the United States for the political changes that swept over the Middle East and North Africa this spring, eight years after American troops toppled Mr. Hussein.

The Obama administration’s initial response to the upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere was halting, as it balanced its support for the protesters with its fear of losing strategic allies. Mr. Rhodes said Iraq’s legacy was visible in the administration’s insistence on homegrown, rather than externally imposed, democratic change. That is likely to mean coming to terms with rulers it views as less than ideal, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties, which made striking gains in Egypt’s recent parliamentary elections.

“Iraq has taught us we can live with Islamists,” Mr. Nasr said. “We can live with a Maliki in Egypt,” he said, referring to Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “Iraq exorcised the way we latched on to secular dictators.”

Iraq, a War Obama Didn’t Want, Shaped His Foreign Policy, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/us/politics/iraq-war-shaped-obamas-foreign-policy-white-house-memo.html

Last Convoy of American Troops

Leaves Iraq,

Marking an End to the War

December 18, 2011
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — The last convoy of American troops to leave Iraq drove into Kuwait on Sunday morning, marking the end of the nearly nine-year war.

The convoy’s departure, which included about 110 vehicles and 500 soldiers, came three days after the American military folded its flag in a muted ceremony here to celebrate the end of its mission.

In darkness, the convoy snaked out of Contingency Operating Base Adder, near the southern city of Nasiriyah, around 2:30 a.m., and headed toward the border. The departure appeared to be the final moment of a drawn-out withdrawal that included weeks of ceremonies in Baghdad and around Iraq, and included visits by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, as well as a trip to Washington by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

As dawn approached on Sunday morning, the last trucks began to cross over the border into Kuwait at an outpost lit by floodlights and secured by barbed wire.

“I just can’t wait to call my wife and kids and let them know I am safe,” said Sgt. First Class Rodolfo Ruiz just before his armored vehicle crossed over the border. “I am really feeling it now.”

Shortly after crossing into Kuwait, Sergeant Ruiz told the men in his vehicle: “Hey guys, you made it.”

Then, he ordered the vehicles in his convoy not to flash their lights or honk their horns.

For security reasons, the last soldiers made no time for goodbyes to Iraqis with whom they had become acquainted. To keep details of the final trip secret from insurgents, interpreters for the last unit to leave the base called local tribal sheiks and government leaders on Saturday morning and conveyed that business would go on as usual, not letting on that all the Americans would soon be gone.

Many troops wondered how the Iraqis, whom they had worked closely with and trained over the past year, would react when they awoke on Sunday to find that the remaining American troops on the base had left without saying anything.

“The Iraqis are going to wake up in the morning and nobody will be there,” said a soldier who only identified himself as Specialist Joseph. He said he had immigrated to the United States from Iraq in 2009 and enlisted a year later, and refused to give his full name because he worried for his family’s safety.

Fearing that insurgents would try to attack the last Americans leaving the country, the military treated all convoys like combat missions.

As the armored vehicles drove through the desert, Marine, Navy and Army helicopters and planes flew overhead scanning the ground for insurgents and preparing to respond if the convoys were attacked.

Col. Douglas Crissman, one of the military’s top commanders in southern Iraq, said in an interview on Friday that he planned to be in a Blackhawk helicopter over the convoy with special communication equipment.

“It is a little bit weird,” he said, referring to how he had not told his counterparts in the Iraqi military when they were leaving. “But the professionals among them understand.”

Over the past year, Colonel Crissman and his troops spearheaded the military’s efforts to ensure the security of the long highway that passes through southern Iraq that a majority of convoys traveled on their way out of the country.

“Ninety-five percent of what we have done has been for everyone else,” Colonel Crissman said.

Across the highway, the military built relationships with 20 tribal sheiks, paying them to clear the highway of garbage, making it difficult for insurgents to hide roadside bombs in blown-out tires and trash.

Along with keeping the highway clean, the military hoped that the sheiks would help police the highway and provide intelligence on militants.

“I can’t possibly be all places at one time,” said Colonel Crissman in an interview in May. “There are real incentives for them to keep the highway safe. Those sheiks we have the best relationships with and have kept their highways clear and safe will be the most likely ones to get renewed for the remainder of the year.”

All American troops were legally obligated to leave the country by the end of the month, but President Obama, in announcing in October the end of the American military role here, promised that everyone would be home for the holidays.

The United States will continue to play a role in Iraq. The largest American embassy in the world is located here, and in the wake of the military departure it is doubling in size — from about 8,000 people to 16,000 people, most of them contractors. Under the authority of the ambassador will be less than 200 military personnel, to guard the embassy and oversee the sale of weapons to the Iraqi government.

History’s final judgment on the war, which claimed nearly 4,500 American lives and cost almost $1 trillion, may not be determined for decades. But it will be forever tainted by the early missteps and miscalculations, the faulty intelligence over Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs and his supposed links to terrorists, and a litany of American abuses, from the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal to a public shootout involving Blackwater mercenaries that left civilians dead — a sum of agonizing factors that diminished America’s standing in the Muslim world and its power to shape events around the globe.

When President George W. Bush announced the start of the war in 2003 in an address from the Oval Office, he proclaimed, “we will accept no outcome but victory.”

But the end appears neither victory, nor defeat, but a stalemate — one in which the optimists say violence has been reduced to a level that will allow the country to continue on its lurching path toward stability and democracy, and the pessimists say the American presence has been a bandage on a festering wound.

The war’s conclusion marks a political triumph for President Obama, who ran for office promising to bring the troops home, but is bittersweet for Iraqis who will now face on their own the unfinished legacy of a conflict that rid their country of a hated dictator but did little else to improve their lives.

    Last Convoy of American Troops Leaves Iraq, Marking an End to the War, NYT, 18.12.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/middleeast/last-convoy-of-american-troops-leaves-iraq.html

An Unstable, Divided Land

December 15, 2011
The New York Times
By REIDAR VISSER

Noordwijk, the Netherlands

WHEN the last remaining American forces withdraw from Iraq at the end of this month, they will be leaving behind a country that is politically unstable, increasingly volatile, and at risk of descending into the sort of sectarian fighting that killed thousands in 2006 and 2007.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has overseen a consolidation of military force, but the core of his government is remarkably unrepresentative: it is made up of mostly pro-Iranian Shiite Islamists. The secular Iraqiya Party, which won a plurality of votes in the March 2010 parliamentary elections, has been marginalized within the cabinet and was not represented when Mr. Maliki visited Washington on Monday.

This Shiite Islamist government bodes ill for the country’s future. And unfortunately, it is a direct product of America’s misguided thinking about Iraq since the 2003 invasion — an approach that stressed proportional sectarian representation rather than national unity and moderate Islamism.

This flawed policy has been more important in shaping today’s Iraq than the size of the original force that occupied the country in 2003, the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal in 2004 or the “surge” of 2007. And it is to blame for the precarious condition in which the United States is leaving Iraq today.

In the 1990s, America envisaged post-Saddam Hussein Iraq as a federation of Arabs and Kurds. At the time, Kurds focused on their own autonomy; Shiite Islamists rejected federalism south of Kurdistan; and many other Shiites explicitly ruled out an Iranian model of government for fear that it might alienate secularists and the Sunni minority.

The fateful change in American thinking came in 2002 as the Bush administration was preparing for war. At conferences with exiled Iraqi opposition leaders, Americans argued that new political institutions should reflect Iraq’s ethno-sectarian groups proportionally. Crucially, the focus moved beyond the primary Arab-Kurdish cleavage to include notions of separate quotas for Shiites and Sunnis.

When Americans designed the first post-Hussein political institution in July 2003, the Iraqi governing council, the underlying principle was sectarian proportionality. What had formerly been an Arab-Kurdish relationship was transformed into a Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish triangle. Arabs who saw themselves first and foremost as Iraqis suddenly became anomalies.

Remarkably, Iraqis themselves turned against this system. After the violent sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, Iraqis rediscovered nationalism. The American surge and growing nationalist criticism of the country’s new constitution provided the necessary environment for Mr. Maliki to emerge in 2009 as a national leader who commanded respect across sectarian lines. Some Sunnis even began considering a joint ticket with Mr. Maliki.

But in May 2009, with President Obama now in the White House, Shiite Islamists who had been marginalized by Mr. Maliki in the local elections regrouped in Tehran. Their aim was a purely sectarian Shiite alliance that would ultimately absorb Mr. Maliki as well. The purging of Sunni officials with links to the former government, known as de-Baathification, became their priority.

By this time, however, Washington was blind to what was going on. Instead of appreciating the intense struggle between the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s sectarian Shiite followers, and moderate Shiites who believed in a common Iraqi identity, the Obama administration remained steadfastly focused on the Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish trinity, thereby reinforcing sectarian tensions rather than helping defuse them.

After faring poorly in the 2010 parliamentary elections, Mr. Maliki switched course and adopted a pan-Shiite sectarian platform to win a second term as prime minister. But Obama administration officials failed to see how Mr. Maliki had changed. Nor did they appreciate the chance they’d had to bring Mr. Maliki back from the sectarian brink through a small but viable coalition with the secular Iraqiya Party — a scenario that could have provided competent, stable government to Iraqi Arabs and left the Kurds to handle their own affairs.

Instead, an oversize, unwieldy power-sharing government was formed, with Washington’s support, in December 2010.

The main reason Mr. Maliki could not offer American forces guarantees for staying in the country beyond 2011 was that his premiership was clinched by pandering to sectarian Shiites. As a result, he has become a hostage to the impulses of pro-Iranian Islamists while most Sunnis and secularists in the government have been marginalized. His current cabinet is simply too big and weak to develop any coherent policies or keep Iranian influence at bay.

By consistently thinking of Mr. Maliki as a Shiite rather than as an Iraqi Arab, American officials overlooked opportunities that once existed in Iraq but are now gone. Thanks to their own flawed policies, the Iraq they are leaving behind is more similar to the desperate and divided country of 2006 than to the optimistic Iraq of early 2009.

Reidar Visser,

a research fellow

at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs,

is the author of “A Responsible End?

The United States and the Iraqi Transition, 2005-2010.”

    An Unstable, Divided Land, NYT, 15.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/an-unstable-divided-land.html

In Iraq, Abandoning Our Friends

December 15, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK W. JOHNSON

West Chicago, Ill.

ON the morning of May 6, 1783, Guy Carleton, the British commander charged with winding down the occupation of America, boarded the Perseverance and sailed up the Hudson River to meet George Washington and discuss the British withdrawal. Washington was furious to learn that Carleton had sent ships to Canada filled with Americans, including freed slaves, who had sided with Britain during the revolution.

Britain knew these loyalists were seen as traitors and had no future in America. A Patriot using the pen name “Brutus” had warned in local papers: “Flee then while it is in your power” or face “the just vengeance of the collected citizens.” And so Britain honored its moral obligation to rescue them by sending hundreds of ships to the harbors of New York, Charleston and Savannah. As the historian Maya Jasanoff has recounted, approximately 30,000 were evacuated from New York to Canada within months.

Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, President Obama is wrapping up our own long and messy war, but we have no Guy Carleton in Iraq. Despite yesterday’s announcement that America’s military mission in Iraq is over, no one is acting to ensure that we protect and resettle those who stood with us.

Earlier this week, Mr. Obama spoke to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., of the “extraordinary milestone of bringing the war in Iraq to an end.” Forgotten are his words from the campaign trail in 2007, that “interpreters, embassy workers and subcontractors are being targeted for assassination.” He added, “And yet our doors are shut. That is not how we treat our friends.”

Four years later, the Obama administration has admitted only a tiny fraction of our own loyalists, despite having eye scans, fingerprints, polygraphs and letters from soldiers and diplomats vouching for them. Instead we force them to navigate a byzantine process that now takes a year and a half or longer.

The chances for speedy resettlement of our Iraqi allies grew even worse in May after two Iraqi men were arrested in Kentucky and charged with conspiring to send weapons to jihadist groups in Iraq. These men had never worked for Americans, and they managed to enter the United States as a result of poor background checks. Nevertheless, their arrests removed any sense of urgency in the government agencies responsible for protecting our Iraqi allies.

The sorry truth is that we don’t need them anymore now that we’re leaving, and resettling refugees is not a winning campaign issue. For over a year, I have been calling on members of the Obama administration to make sure the final act of this war is not marred by betrayal. They have not listened, instead adopting a policy of wishful thinking, hoping that everything turns out for the best.

Meanwhile, the Iraqis who loyally served us are under threat. The extremist Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr has declared the Iraqis who helped America “outcasts.” When Britain pulled out of Iraq a few years ago, there was a public execution of 17 such outcasts — their bodies dumped in the streets of Basra as a warning. Just a few weeks ago, an Iraqi interpreter for the United States Army got a knock on his door; an Iraqi policeman told him threateningly that he would soon be beheaded. Another employee, at the American base in Ramadi, is in hiding after receiving a death threat from Mr. Sadr’s militia.

It’s not the first time we’ve abandoned our allies. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford and Henry A. Kissinger ignored the many Vietnamese who aided American troops until the final few weeks of the Vietnam War. By then, it was too late.

Although Mr. Kissinger had once claimed there was an “irreducible list” of 174,000 imperiled Vietnamese allies, the policy in the war’s frantic closing weeks was icily Darwinian: if you were strong enough to clear our embassy walls or squeeze through the gates and force your way onto a Huey, you could come along. The rest were left behind to face assassination or internment camps. The same sorry story occurred in Laos, where America abandoned tens of thousands of Hmong people who had aided them.

It wasn’t until months after the fall of Saigon, and much bloodshed, that America conducted a huge relief effort, airlifting more than 100,000 refugees to safety. Tens of thousands were processed at a military base on Guam, far away from the American mainland. President Bill Clinton used the same base to save the lives of nearly 7,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1996. But if you mention the Guam Option to anyone in Washington today, you either get a blank stare of historical amnesia or hear that “9/11 changed everything.”

And so our policy in the final weeks of this war is as simple as it is shameful: submit your paperwork and wait. If you can survive the next 18 months, maybe we’ll let you in. For the first time in five years, I’m telling Iraqis who write to me for help that they shouldn’t count on America anymore.

Moral timidity and a hapless bureaucracy have wedged our doors tightly shut and the Iraqis who remained loyal to us are weeks away from learning how little America’s word means.

Kirk W. Johnson,

a former reconstruction coordinator in Iraq,

founded the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies.

    In Iraq, Abandoning Our Friends, NYT, 15.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/in-iraq-abandoning-our-friends.html

A Formal End

December 15, 2011
The New York Times

It is a relief that the American role in the misguided Iraq war is finally over. It came to an official close on Thursday with an appropriately subdued ceremony in Baghdad. We mourn the nearly 4,500 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis who lost their lives.

After so much pain and sacrifice, Iraqis now have the responsibility for making their own better future. The fighting is not over, and success is still a long shot. The United States has a major role to play: encouraging, supporting and goading Iraq’s leaders to make the long-delayed political compromises that are their only hope for building a stable democracy.

The fact that Saddam Hussein is gone is a genuine cause for celebration. But the list of errors and horrors in this war is inexcusably long, starting with a rush to invasion based on manipulated intelligence.

The Bush administration had no plan for governing the country once Saddam was deposed. The Iraqi economy still bears the scars from the first frenzied days of looting. The decision to disband the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army helped unleash five years of sectarian strife that has not fully abated. Iraq’s political system remains deeply riven by ethnic and religious differences.

America’s reputation has yet to fully recover from the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The country is still paying a huge price for President George W. Bush’s decision to shortchange the war in Afghanistan. American policy makers, for generations to come, must study these mistakes carefully and ensure that they are not repeated.

As for Iraq today, the authoritarian tendencies of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki are deeply troubling. A member of the Shiite majority that was badly persecuted under Saddam, he has been far more interested in payback than inclusion.

Washington has pushed him over the years — but, often, not hard enough.

The Baghdad government promised jobs to 100,000 members of the Sunni Awakening movement — insurgents whose decision to switch sides helped end the civil war — but only half that have been hired. Parliament still needs to enact a law, called for in the Constitution, that would provide a legal basis for determining who should be prosecuted for supporting Saddam’s Baath Party or other extremist ideologies. Iraq’s leaders have many more issues to resolve. Incredibly, they have still not decided how to divide the country’s oil wealth. There is no agreement on who will control the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by both Baghdad and the semiautonomous Kurdish regional government.

Iraq’s oil production still has not rebounded, and basic services like electricity are still woefully inadequate. Iraq needs an impartial justice system. Washington has pressed Baghdad for years to end corruption and build a representative government. It will need to keep pressing.

After investing billions of dollars, the United States has had more success rebuilding Iraq’s security forces. But Iraqi and American commanders say these forces are not ready to fully protect the country against insurgents or potentially hostile neighbors. There are critical weaknesses in intelligence, air defenses, artillery and logistics.

The Obama administration was unable to reach a new defense agreement with Baghdad that would have allowed several thousand American troops to stay behind as backup. We hope that the Iraqi Army will do better than expected. The administration must be prepared to offer limited help if the army does get into serious trouble.

President Obama, who first ran for office campaigning against the war, has never wavered on his promise to bring the troops home. The last few thousand will be out of Iraq by year’s end. We celebrate their return. But this country must never forget the intolerable costs of a war started on arrogance and lies.

    A Formal End, NYT, 15.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/a-formal-end-to-the-iraq-war.html

U.S. Officially Ends Its Mission in Iraq

December 15, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — The United States military officially declared an end to its mission in Iraq on Thursday even as violence continues to plague the country and the Muslim world remains distrustful of American power.

In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta thanked the more than one million American service members who have served in Iraq for “the remarkable progress” made over the past nine years but acknowledged the severe challenges that face the struggling democracy.

“Let me be clear: Iraq will be tested in the days ahead — by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself,” Mr. Panetta said. “Challenges remain, but the U.S. will be there to stand by the Iraqi people as they navigate those challenges to build a stronger and more prosperous nation.”

The tenor of the farewell ceremony, officially called "Casing the Colors,” was likely to sound an uncertain trumpet for a war that was launched to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction it did not have and now ends without the sizable, enduring American military presence for which many officers had hoped. The tone of the string of ceremonies culminating with the final withdrawal event on Thursday has been understated in keeping with an administration that campaigned to end an unpopular war it inherited. Although the ceremony on Thursday marked the end of the war, the military still has two bases in Iraq and roughly 4,000 troops, including several hundred that attended the ceremony. At the height of the war in 2007 there were 505 bases and over 150,000 troops.

According to military officials, the remaining troops are still being attacked on a daily basis, mainly by indirect fire attacks on the bases and road side bomb explosions against convoys heading south through Iraq to bases in Kuwait

Even after the last two bases are closed and the final American combat troops withdraw from Iraq by Dec. 31 under rules of an agreement with the Baghdad government, a few hundred military personnel and Pentagon civilians will remain, working within the American Embassy as part of an Office of Security Cooperation to assist in arms sales and training.

But negotiations could resume next year on whether additional American military personnel can return to further assist their Iraqi counterparts. Senior American military officers have made no secret that they see key gaps in Iraq's ability to defend its sovereign soil and even to secure its oil platforms offshore in the Persian Gulf. Air defenses are seen as a critical gap in Iraqi capabilities, but American military officers also see significant shortcomings in Iraq's ability to sustain a military, whether moving food and fuel or servicing the armored vehicles it is inheriting from Americans or the jet-fighters it is buying, and has shortfalls in military engineers, artillery and intelligence, as well. The tenuous security atmosphere in Iraq was underscored by helicopters that hovered over the ceremony, scanning the ground for rocket attacks. Although there is far less violence across Iraq than at the height of the sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, but there are bombings on a nearly daily basis and Americans remain a target of Shiite militants.

During a 45-minute ceremony that ended the military mission, Mr. Panetta acknowledged that “the cost was high — in blood and treasure of the United States, and also for the Iraqi people. But those lives have not been lost in vain — they gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq.”

The war was launched by the Bush administration in March 2003 on arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda that might grow to an alliance threatening the United States with a mass-casualty terror attack.

As the absence of stockpiles of unconventional weapons proved a humiliation for the administration and the intelligence community, the war effort was reframed as being about bringing democracy to the Middle East.

And, indeed, there was euphoria among many Iraqis at an American-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. But the support soon soured amid a growing sense of heavy-handed occupation fueled by the unleashing of bloody sectarian and religious rivalries. The American presence also proved a magnet for militant fighters and an Al Qaeda-affiliated group took root among the Sunni minority population here.

While the terror organization had been rendered ineffective by a punishing series of Special Operations raids that decapitated the organization, intelligence specialists fear that it is in resurgence. The American military presence here, viewed as an occupation across the Muslim world, also hampered Washington's ability to cast a narrative from the United States in support of the Arab Spring uprisings this year.

Even handing bases over to the Iraqi government over recent months proved vexing for the military. In the spring, commanders halted large formal ceremonies with Iraqi officials for base closings because insurgents were using the events as opportunities to launch last ditch attacks on the troops. “We were having ceremonies and announcing it publicly and having a little formal process but a couple of days before the base was to close we would start to receive significant indirect fire attacks on the location,” said Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the military in Iraq. “We were suffering attacks so we stopped.”

Across the country, the closing of bases has been marked by a quiet closed-door meeting where American and Iraqi military officials signed documents that legally gave the Iraqis control of the bases, exchanged handshakes and turned over keys. As of last Friday, the war in Iraq had claimed 4,487 American lives, with another 32,226 Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey of the Army, has served two command tours here since the invasion of 2003, and he noted during the ceremony that the next time he comes to Iraq he will have to be invited.

“I kind of like that, to tell you the truth,” General Dempsey said.

    U.S. Officially Ends Its Mission in Iraq, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/middleeast/panetta-in-baghdad-for-iraq-military-handover-ceremony.html

Obama Praises Troops

as He Ends the War He Opposed

December 14, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — President Obama observed the end of the war in Iraq on Wednesday before an audience of those who fought in it, telling a crowd of returning war veterans that the nearly nine years of conflict in Iraq, a war now indelibly imprinted on the national psyche, had come to a close.

“As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I’m proud to finally say these two words,” Mr. Obama told a crowded hangar at this famed North Carolina army base that is home to the 82nd Airborne Division: “Welcome home.”

Calling it a “historic moment,” Mr. Obama, who has over the years of his presidency had his ups and down with his own military leaders, if not the enlisted men and women, infused his remarks with far more accolades for the military than the usual few that he dispenses to local politicians at the beginning of most of his standard speeches.

This time, he thanked the “legendary” 82nd Airborne Division. He thanked senior enlisted leaders. And the Sky Dragons of the 18th Airborne Corps. And the Special Operations Forces. And military families. In fact, the president wrapped himself in all of the storied patriotism and history of the country’s armed forces, congratulating the assembled troops for the job they did in Iraq — a war which he himself never approved.

It was a tough balance to strike. Mr. Obama had to speak of legendary battles in places like Falluja without referencing the weapons of mass destruction that were never found; he noted the sectarian violence without bringing up the years of fear that gripped the United States and the rest of the world back in 2004, 2005 and 2006, when it looked as if the American invasion of Iraq would engulf an already volatile region.

“We remember the early days — the American units that streaked across the sands and skies of Iraq,” Mr. Obama said. “In battles from Nasiriya to Karbala to Baghdad, American troops broke the back of a brutal dictator in less than a month.”

And yet, Mr. Obama said, “we know too well the heavy costs” of the Iraq War: “Nearly 4,500 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice, including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg. 202.”

The speech was the latest in a series of public appearances orchestrated by the White House to signal the end of the conflict and to drive home the point that Mr. Obama fulfilled one of his 2008 presidential campaign promises. At times somber, at times ebullient — there were plenty of “Hooahs” during his speech — the president tried to project an understanding of what the people, who have seen their family members go off to fight a war that most Americans came to oppose, have been through.

“There have been missed birthday parties and graduations,” Mr. Obama said. “There are bills to pay and jobs that have to be juggled with picking up the kids. For every soldier that goes on patrol, there are the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters praying that they come back.”

Mr. Obama made the trip to Fort Bragg, his first since taking office, as both the commander in chief who has brought soldiers home and as a presidential candidate. He brought along his wife, Michelle, who has been working with veterans’ families since Mr. Obama took office. At times, the visit seemed like a campaign swing.

While he eschewed any of the usual criticism of Republicans and never even mentioned the names of either of the front-runners in the Republican primaries, Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama spent a long 20 minutes after his speech pressing the flesh. He plunged deep into the crowd of army fatigues and burgundy berets — signifying active-duty service members — seeming determined to shake hands with each and everyone there.

Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers see North Carolina, a traditionally red state that Mr. Obama unexpectedly won in 2008, as a potential key to the president’s re-election path.But Fort Bragg and neighboring Fayetteville, with its large African-American population full of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, will need to join urban areas like Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham in turning out for Mr. Obama if the president is to have a chance of repeating that unlikely victory next year.

On Tuesday, Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, presented reporters with a slide show mapping out several Obama pathways to victory next year. One crucial path, he said, included winning North Carolina and Virginia — both states that John Kerry lost in 2004, but that Mr. Obama won in 2008. Already, the Obama campaign has opened up operations in North Carolina, and it is banking on the state’s changed demographics, including an influx of young, college-educated people. The Obama campaign is also hoping for high turnout among African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the state’s population and 41 percent of Fayetteville’s population.

Charlotte will host the Democratic National Convention next September. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has already taken out television advertisements here in North Carolina, including one that ran this week, targeting Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

Mr. Obama has been working hard to get credit for ending the Iraq war, a promise that was a centerpiece of his 2008 campaign. But it remains to be seen whether his successful completion of his promise to end the war will have much resonance next year, as the country continues to struggle through the fragile economic recovery.

Fort Bragg is home to a variety of troops, including the Army Special Operations, the 18th Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne Division. Fort Bragg soldiers have been in the thick of the fighting in the Iraqi theater from Day 1 of the American invasion in 2003.

“For all of the challenges that our nation faces, you remind us that there’s nothing that we Americans can’t do when we stick together,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s why the United States military is the most respected institution in our land. It’s why you, the 9/11 generation, have earned your place in history.”

He concluded with “I am proud of you.”

    Obama Praises Troops as He Ends the War He Opposed, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/us/at-fort-bragg-obama-showers-praise-on-troops-back-from-iraq.html

Junkyard Gives Up

Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq

December 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.

But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand. In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

Charges were dropped against six of the accused Marines in the Haditha episode, one was acquitted and the last remaining case against one Marine is scheduled to go to trial next year.

That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.

Told about the documents that had been found, Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, said that many of the documents remained classified and should have been destroyed. “Despite the way in which they were improperly discarded and came into your possession, we are not at liberty to discuss classified information,” he said.

He added: “We take any breach of classified information as an extremely serious matter. In this case, the documents are being reviewed to determine whether an investigation is warranted.” The military said it did not know from which investigation the documents had come, but the papers appear to be from an inquiry by Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell into the events in Haditha. The documents ultimately led to a report that concluded that the Marine Corps’s chain of command engaged in “willful negligence” in failing to investigate the episode and that Marine commanders were far too willing to tolerate civilian casualties. That report, however, did not include the transcripts.

 

Under Pressure

Many of those testifying at bases in Iraq or the United States were clearly under scrutiny for not investigating an atrocity and may have tried to shape their statements to dispel any notion that they had sought to cover up the events. But the accounts also show the consternation of the Marines as they struggled to control an unfamiliar land and its people in what amounted to a constant state of siege from fighters who were nearly indistinguishable from noncombatants.

Some, feeling they were under attack constantly, decided to use force first and ask questions later. If Marines took fire from a building, they would often level it. Drivers who approached checkpoints without stopping were assumed to be suicide bombers.

“When a car doesn’t stop, it crosses the trigger line, Marines engage and, yes, sir, there are people inside the car that are killed that have nothing to do with it,” Sgt. Maj. Edward T. Sax, the battalion’s senior noncommissioned officer, testified.

He added, “I had Marines shoot children in cars and deal with the Marines individually one on one about it because they have a hard time dealing with that.”

Sergeant Major Sax said he would ask the Marines responsible if they had known there had been children in the car. When they said no, he said he would tell them they were not at fault. He said he felt for the Marines who had fired the shots, saying they would carry a lifelong burden.

“It is one thing to kill an insurgent in a head-on fight,” Sergeant Major Sax testified. “It is a whole different thing — and I hate to say it, the way we are raised in America — to injure a female or injure a child or in the worse case, kill a female or kill a child.”

They could not understand why so many Iraqis just did not stop at checkpoints and speculated that it was because of illiteracy or poor eyesight.

“They don’t have glasses and stuff,” Col. John Ledoux said. “It really makes you wonder because some of the things that they would do just to keep coming. You know, it’s hard to imagine they would just keep coming, but sometimes they do.”

Such was the environment in 2005, when the Marines from Company K of the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment from Camp Pendleton, Calif., arrived in Anbar Province, where Haditha is located, many for their second or third tours in Iraq.

The province had become a stronghold for disenfranchised Sunnis and foreign fighters who wanted to expel the United States from Iraq, or just kill as many Americans as possible. Of the 4,483 American deaths in Iraq, 1,335 happened in Anbar.

In 2004, four Blackwater contractors were gunned down and dragged through the streets of Falluja, their bodies burned and hung on a bridge over the Euphrates. Days later, the United States military moved into the city, and chaos ensued in Anbar Province for the next two years as the Americans tried to fight off the insurgents.

The stress of combat soon bore down. A legal adviser to the Marine unit stopped taking his medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder and stopped functioning.

“We had the one where Marines had photographed themselves taking shots at people,” Col. R. Kelly testified, saying that they immediately called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and “confiscated their little camera.” He said the soldiers involved received a court-martial.

All of this set the stage for what happened in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005.

 

A Tragedy Ensues

That morning, a military convoy of four vehicles was heading to an outpost in Haditha when one of the vehicles was hit by a roadside bomb.

Several Marines got out to attend to the wounded, including one who eventually died, while others looked for insurgents who might have set off the bomb. Within a few hours 24 Iraqis — including a 76-year-old man and children between the ages of 3 and 15 — were killed, many inside their homes.

Townspeople contended that the Marines overreacted to the attack and shot civilians, only one of whom was armed. The Marines said they thought they were under attack.

When the initial reports arrived saying more than 20 civilians had been killed in Haditha, the Marines receiving them said they were not surprised by the high civilian death toll.

Chief Warrant Officer K. R. Norwood, who received reports from the field on the day of the killings and briefed commanders on them, testified that 20 dead civilians was not unusual.

“I meant, it wasn’t remarkable, based off of the area I wouldn’t say remarkable, sir,” Mr. Norwood said. “And that is just my definition. Not that I think one life is not remarkable, it’s just —”

An investigator asked the officer: “I mean remarkable or noteworthy in terms of something that would have caught your attention where you would have immediately said, ‘Got to have more information on that. That is a lot of casualties.’ ”

“Not at the time, sir,” the officer testified.

General Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, said he did not feel compelled to go back and examine the events because they were part of a continuing pattern of civilian deaths.

“It happened all the time, not necessarily in MNF-West all the time, but throughout the whole country,” General Johnson testified, using a military abbreviation for allied forces in western Iraq.

“So, you know, maybe — I guess maybe if I was sitting here at Quantico and heard that 15 civilians were killed I would have been surprised and shocked and gone — done more to look into it,” he testified, referring to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “But at that point in time, I felt that was — had been, for whatever reason, part of that engagement and felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”

When Marines arrived on the scene to assess the number of dead bodies, at least one Marine thought it would be a good time to take pictures for his own keeping.

“I know I had one Marine who was taking pictures just to take pictures and I told him to delete all those pictures,” testified a first lieutenant identified as M. D. Frank.

The documents uncovered by The Times — which include handwritten notes from soldiers, waivers by Marines of their right against self-incrimination, diagrams of where dead women and children were found, and pictures of the site where the Marine was killed by a roadside bomb on the day of the massacre — remain classified.

In a meeting with journalists in October, before the military had been told about the discovery of the documents, the American commander in charge of the logistics of the withdrawal said that files from the bases were either transferred to other parts of the military or incinerated.

“We don’t put official paperwork in the trash,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas Richardson, at the meeting at the American Embassy in Baghdad.

The documents were piled in military trailers and hauled to the junkyard by an Iraqi contractor who was trying to sell off the surplus from American bases, the junkyard attendant said. The attendant said he had no idea what any of the documents were about, only that they were important to the Americans.

He said that over the course of several weeks he had burned dozens and dozens of binders, turning more untold stories about the war into ash.

“What can we do with them?” the attendant said. “These things are worthless to us, but we understand they are important and it is better to burn them to protect the Americans. If they are leaving, it must mean their work here is done.”

Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting.

    Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/world/middleeast/
    united-states-marines-haditha-interviews-found-in-iraq-junkyard.html

Detainee in Iraq Poses a Dilemma

as U.S. Exit Nears

December 11, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — As United States troops prepare to exit Iraq at the end of the month, the Obama administration is facing a significant dilemma over what to do with the last remaining detainee held by the American military in Iraq.

The detainee, Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese suspected of being a Hezbollah operative, is accused of helping to orchestrate a January 2007 raid by Shiite militants that resulted in the death of five American soldiers. The administration is wrestling with either turning him over to the Iraqi government — as the United States did with its other wartime prisoners — or seeking a way to take him with the military as it withdraws, according to interviews with officials familiar with the deliberations.

But each option for dealing with Mr. Daqduq has drawbacks, officials say, virtually guaranteeing that his fate will add a messy footnote to the end of the Iraq war. Mr. Daqduq is likely to be a subject of negotiation when Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq meets with President Obama at the White House on Monday.

“There are serious and ongoing deliberations about how to handle this individual to best protect U.S. service members and broader U.S. interests,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Mr. Maliki’s visit comes as the United States is joining a series of ceremonies here and across Iraq to proclaim — with a clear sense of uncertainty — the end of the war.

Even after the final American combat troops withdraw from Iraq by Dec. 31, a few hundred military personnel and Pentagon civilians will remain, working within the American Embassy as part of an Office of Security Cooperation to help in arms sales and training. Negotiations are expected to resume next year on whether additional American military personnel can return to further assist their Iraqi counterparts.

Hanging over the decision on what to do with Mr. Daqduq is the 2012 presidential campaign. Polls show that Americans approve of the withdrawal from Iraq by a ratio of three to one, and Mr. Obama is poised to leverage that sentiment by emphasizing the idea that Republicans were responsible for invading Iraq, while he guided the United States out.

Republicans, however, are seeking to frame the withdrawal in different terms: that Mr. Obama endangered national security by pulling out of Iraq too soon, and that he should have persuaded the Iraqis to allow United States troops to stay beyond the deadline agreed to by the Bush administration three years ago. Elevating the profile of Mr. Daqduq and highlighting any unsatisfactory outcome to his case could bolster such efforts to cast Mr. Obama’s Iraq record in a negative light.

The decision about what to do with Mr. Daqduq is complex, and time is running out. The ability of the military to hold any prisoners in Iraq is fast evaporating as it closes detention facilities and sends its remaining guards home, and so the military has been asking the administration to resolve his fate well before Dec. 31.

Under the status quo arrangement, Mr. Daqduq would be turned over to the Iraqis for possible prosecution. Officials are wary, however, because many former detainees have either been acquitted by Iraqi courts or released without charges, and Mr. Maliki could face political pressure to free Mr. Daqduq.

The administration, officials say, wants to find a solution in which Mr. Daqduq remains locked up — not only because of his suspected role in helping attacks on American troops, but also because his release could become a propaganda victory for Iran and Iraqi Shiite militants at a time of significant tensions.

It is not clear whether some important evidence of Mr. Daqduq’s suspected involvement in attacks on Americans — like a confession to American interrogators — would be admissible in an Iraqi court. Still, officials said, Iraqi prosecutors might be able to win a lengthy prison sentence on other charges, like entering Iraq illegally.

The alternative would be for the United States to take Mr. Daqduq out of Iraq and prosecute him in one of three venues: before a civilian court, before a military commission at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or before a tribunal somewhere else. One site under consideration is the naval base at Charleston, S.C.

Republicans have made clear that they think Mr. Daqduq should go to Guantánamo. At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. against any other outcome.

“Mr. Attorney General, if you try to bring this guy back to the United States and put him in civilian court, or use a military commission inside the United States, holy hell is going to break out,” Mr. Graham said. “And if we let him go and turn him over to the Iraqis, that is just like letting him go. I think this would be a huge mistake.”

But within the administration, the Guantánamo option has been seen as unacceptable — not only because Mr. Obama has resisted adding to the detainee population there and still hopes to close the prison, but also because the facility is anathema in the Middle East and Mr. Maliki would not approve sending someone there, one official said.

It would violate Iraq’s sovereignty to remove him from the country without the Iraqi government’s permission. Under the Status of Forces Agreement the Bush administration struck with Iraq in late 2008, decisions on the disposition of any detainees in Iraq are ultimately up to the Iraqis, and the United States pledged to respect Iraq’s laws and sovereignty.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Maliki might grant permission for the United States to take Mr. Daqduq to one of the other venues — or, in a variant of that plan, agree to support a request to formally extradite him to the United States, which would require at least temporarily transferring him to Iraqi custody. But Mr. Maliki is facing pressures not to do anything that could be seen as subordinating Iraqi sovereignty to American interests.

Some conservatives have argued that since the United States has physical control of Mr. Daqduq, it should just put him on a plane, without seeking Iraq’s permission — essentially, a rendition instead of an extradition. They contended that Iraqis would complain but that it would not ultimately matter.

But administration officials said that solution would be a prominent violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, undercutting the strategic relationship at a moment when the primary goal is to relegate the war and occupation to the past, and establish the kind of normal diplomatic relationship that exists between two sovereign states.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

Detainee in Iraq Poses a Dilemma as U.S. Exit Nears, 11.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/world/middleeast/militarys-last-detainee-in-iraq-poses-dilemma-for-obama.html