Accepting Realities in Iraq

MIDDLE EAST PROGRAMME BRIEFING PAPER MEP BP 07/02



MAY 2007
Gareth Stansfield, Chatham House and University of Exeter

Summary

Iraq has fractured into regional power bases. Political, security and economic power has devolved to local sectarian, ethnic or tribal political groupings. The Iraqi government is only one of several ‘state-like’ actors. The regionalization of Iraqi political life needs to be recognized as a defining feature of Iraq’s political structure.

There is not ‘a’ civil war in Iraq, but many civil wars and insurgencies involving a number of communities and organizations struggling for power. The surge is not curbing the high level of violence, and improvements in security cannot happen in a matter of months.

The conflicts have become internalized between Iraqis as the polarization of sectarian and ethnic identities reaches ever deeper into Iraqi society and causes the breakdown of social cohesion.

Critical destabilizing issues will come to the fore in 2007–8. Federalism, the control of oil and control of disputed territories need to be resolved.

Each of Iraq’s three major neighbouring states, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has different reasons for seeing the instability there continue, and each uses different methods to influence developments.

These current harsh realities need to be accepted if new strategies are to have any chance of preventing the failure and collapse of Iraq. A political solution will require engagement with organizations possessing popular legitimacy and needs to be an Iraqi accommodation, rather than a regional or US-imposed approach.

Introduction: appreciating the scale of the problem

A critical time has now arrived for the future of Iraq. The situation continues to deteriorate markedly, not just in terms of the numbers of bombs exploding and corpses being found on the streets, but in terms of the nature of the violence – including the brutality of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. This internecine fighting is perhaps the greatest threat to the preservation of some social cohesion upon which a future can be built.

Some analysts contend that the level of violence in Iraq has in fact declined, particularly since the onset of the US-led military surge designed to improve the security situation in Baghdad.¹ However, if numbers of bomb attacks can be used as an indicator, then it can reasonably be assumed that the security situation remains as perilous as before the surge. The number of multiple fatality bombings in Iraq remained constant in March and April 2007 and, according to the Iraqi authorities, 1,500 civilians were killed in April alone.²

Although the number of civilian deaths in Baghdad has declined since the surge, the continued activities of Al-Qaeda and other groups have ensured that overall fatality rates across the rest of Iraq have, if anything, increased.³ In addition, the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq since January 2007 also rose, with 104 deaths in April alone....

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