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Part 2 OF 3
Castles Built of Sand: US Governance and
Exit Strategies in Iraq
By Christoph Wilcke
Middle East Research and Information Project
Fall 2004 www.merip.org
Legitimacy Deficit
The occupation's legitimacy deficit can be traced to two trends in
national and local governance. Instead of holding free elections, the
US appointed national and local councils to govern at its
behest. Instead of nurturing the popular legitimacy of these councils,
the occupation authority opted for representational formulas based on
the sectarian and ethnic composition of the country.
Maj. Gen. David Petraeus established the model for the first US
efforts at local governance in the northern city of Mosul in May
2003. Petraeus invited the dignitaries of Mosul, including judges,
health workers, teachers, businessmen, and tribal and religious
leaders, to convene in professional caucuses to select a city
council.[3] This council, which initially did not include women,
agreed prior to the caucuses that certain positions and proportions of
seats would go to each of the city's communities of Arabs, Kurds,
Turkmen, Christians and Yazidis.[4] Some political parties managed to
place candidates in the council through the professional caucuses, but
otherwise they held little influence over city affairs. This council's
appointed head, the governor, was the primary interface between the
occupation forces and the population.[5]
When Bremer took charge of the occupation authority, he abandoned his
predecessor Lt. Gen. Jay Garner's hinted plans to turn over the reins
to favored Iraqi exile groups. Expatriate Iraqis who had come into the
country as expert advisers to the invaders were quickly reduced to
interpreters.[6] The American proconsul reluctantly agreed to
establish an Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) with advisory powers,
partly composed of the former exiles, in July 2003. The IGC helped the
US to secure pledges of international assistance at the Madrid donors'
conference in October, and, though it fell far short of being a
successful Iraqi governance body, it also had its domestic uses for
the Americans. Its members appointed ministers in September, greatly
alleviating the CPA's task of governing by proxy. But Bremer brooked
little dissent from the IGC politicians when they proposed an
enlargement of the council to include other important representatives
of religious and political trends,[7] and when their constitutional
preparatory committee, which Bremer had ordained, foundered on the
opposition of Sistani. Another of Bremer's first acts was to cancel
scheduled local elections in Najaf, for fear that they would empower
elements unfriendly to the US project.[8] Iraqi Kurdistan's two main
factions were inching toward merging their separate administrations
and holding elections for a regional parliament before the war, but
promises of elections were cut short once the CPA arrived.[9] In
Basra, British CPA officials were open about their disappointment that
Bremer himself had canceled their plans to hold ration card-based
district elections. Islamist parties in Basra did not take well to the
news and promptly organized their own elections, forcing a standoff
with the British. While a secular party spokesperson dismissed the
Islamists' efforts as undemocratic because they were poorly organized,
barred women and were held in mosques, the British nevertheless
conceded to creating a "virtual" neighborhood, whose representatives
would be the elected leaders. Disappointed, the Islamists began to vie
for control of the entire city.[10]
A major blunder at the national level was the sectarian-ethnic formula
used to establish the Iraqi Governing Council and allocate posts in
the ministries.[11] This maneuver rendered sectarian and ethnic
affiliation the organizing principle of Iraqi politics for the first
time, and strengthened centrifugal communal forces at the local
level. In Kirkuk, the US commander assigned seats on the city council
by dividing them proportionally among the city's ethnic
groups. Although this system has been credited with preventing Kirkuk
from slipping immediately into civil war, Kirkuk's council has seen
bloc votes and walkouts that have frozen the council's work. In April
2004, the Turkman and Arab groups jointly suspended their membership
for several months. In other cases, the CPA more or less randomly
added minorities -- such as a Sunni in mostly Shi'i Arab Nasiriyya --
to enhance the councils' representativeness. Although they have been
partially successful in Kirkuk, many Iraqis see the sectarian and
ethnic quotas as an undemocratic measure imposed by the Americans
without a genuine civic dialogue about representation of minorities
and protection of different ideologies, such as secularism. As a
result, communal power sharing in Iraq is currently by American fiat,
not by consensus.
Building Blocks of Stability
Adherence to the Mosul model, moreover, encouraged a top-down approach
to local governance. All across Iraq, the US moved to set up councils
in provincial capitals, in some cases opting to recognize existing
councils that appeared spontaneously after the war or were organized
by Kurdish and Shi'i religious parties in the northern and southern
parts of Iraq. In Kirkuk, two rival councils declared themselves in
charge before the arrival of the Americans. In Kut, followers of Shi'i
cleric Kadhim al-Ha'iri, took over official buildings in mid-April
2003. In Ba'quba, a mixed Sunni-Shi'i city north of Baghdad, and Majar
al-Kabir, a small southern town, officials of the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq took over local control after their
Badr Brigades had fought its way into or simply entered Iraq from
Iran. Existing governance structures in Ba'quba and Kut are the result
of shaky compromises between the US and the local forces. But
following the establishment of city councils, few lower-level
neighborhood or district councils were established until December
2003.
From the beginning, the US-appointed local councils faced their own
legitimacy deficits. Some Iraqis rejected the councils because they
are appointed or self-selected, rather than democratically
elected. Many other Iraqis simply refuse to acknowledge that these
bodies represent them because they were set up at the instigation of
the Americans.
The focus on the educated middle class encouraged by the Mosul model
failed to win the support of the large numbers of disenfranchised
urban poor. In the end, outside Baghdad, the occupation authorities
used the local councils as proxies through which to gather
information, project power and, at the same time, devolve
responsibility for governance to Iraqis and create building blocks of
a stable internal order.
But the new council members were not experienced in government
administration and had no staff or budgets. They were unable, on the
whole, to carry out reconstruction projects aside from small tasks in
cooperation with the military and CPA, which held the purse
strings. The councils were neither linked to one another nor to the
Baghdad ministries that had controlled their budgets under the old
regime. The foremost result was slow reconstruction. Occupation
authorities did not take advantage of the opportunity to rehabilitate
the dilapidated electricity, water and irrigation infrastructure at
the local level. In the absence of improvements in material conditions
or responsive local Iraqi officials or coalition commanders to whom to
turn for help, Iraqis began to turn hostile toward the occupation.[12]
Demonstrations for salaries, jobs and electricity in Baghdad, Basra
and elsewhere in December 2003 were early indicators of the mood
shift. The stalling of reconstruction efforts and the exclusion from
power of those first on the spot -- Islamist parties, for the most
part -- created a vacuum at the local level that the military and its
appointed proxies could not readily fill. Instead, both reconstruction
efforts and political opposition turned to broad-based popular
movements affiliated with Islamist parties.
Rather than encourage "democracy" -- the rule of elected
representatives for the benefit of citizens -- the US chose to
constitute "representative" bodies according to certain procedures and
quotas for the purpose of stabilizing Iraq politically. Representative
of Iraq's diversity, but not its people's wishes, the local councils
floated in a policy and power vacuum between the Iraqis they were
supposed to represent and their US overlords.
Baghdad First
By accident, Baghdad proved a partial exception to the CPA's model of
local governance. Baghdad's mayors held ministerial rank under Saddam
Hussein and controlled the municipal budget; elsewhere in Iraq, the
national ministries set the budget. Baghdad houses about one fourth of
Iraq's population and is said to be among the world's most sprawling
metropolitan areas. The credo of "Baghdad First" that captured the
CPA's hope of producing a democratic domino effect throughout Iraq
flowed not only from the historical administrative autonomy of the
capital but also from the resources -- CPA, military and NGO --
amassed there. Beginning in May 2003, the First Armored Division and
other divisions, together more than 39,000 soldiers, spread the word
over loudspeakers and in face-to-face interactions that Baghdadis
should convene at predetermined times to select neighborhood
leaders. The soldiers operated under the guidance of the Research
Triangle Institute (RTI), a think tank that had won the contract from
the US Agency for International Development to provide assistance in
local governance.
Over the course of several months, the military formed 88 neighborhood
councils. In a bottom-up approach not replicated in the provinces,
these lower councils selected members of district councils who in turn
formed a Baghdad city council. Members included Iraqis of all
political stripes. Some vented their fury at Saddam Hussein's deposed
regime, while others were hangers-on of that regime. Still others were
religiously motivated and had naturally settled into official
positions after having worked informally to restore order, security
and basic services in the immediate aftermath of the war. Many of
these leaders were never integrated into the "Baghdad First" vision.
In Shu'la and Sadr City, two poor Shi'i neighborhoods comprising
perhaps half of Baghdad's population, popular councils had formed
spontaneously following the fall of the regime. In Shu'la, the council
consisted of religious men, some of whom were accused by the CPA of
having been informers for Hussein's security services. In Sadr City,
representatives of the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr gathered male
heads of households to elect a district council following the fall of
the regime. Nevertheless, the US military, together with RTI,
attempted to install councils following the example set by Petraeus in
Mosul.
In Sadr City, however, the "elected" council did not cooperate with
the occupying forces. Only a long standoff and protracted negotiations
led to the disbanding and integration of the Sadrist council. Sadrist
representatives repeatedly did not show up for meetings of the
all-Baghdad city council and other functions convened by the
occupation authority. Further setbacks occurred when a US helicopter
crew tore down a banner inscribed with the name of Muqtada's uncle
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in August and when US soldiers shot dead
"their" council's leader, Muhannad Kaabi, in November.[13] These
events were part of the background of the eventual decision of the
Sadrists to take up arms against the occupiers in April 2004 and again
in August.
Dead Letter
CONTINUED ON FINAL PART 3.
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