Page 2 of
2 The
fateful Battle of Baghdad By
Michael Schwartz
barrier with a handful of
heavily armored gates would be put in place,
effectively separating the community from the rest
of the city. The dislodged insurgents retreated
into intermittent guerrilla war, organizing some
20 attacks on the Americans each month - a sharp
reduction from the 74 much larger battles they had
fought in January. US forces would mount an
average of 34 combat patrols each day aimed at
capturing or suppressing them. In January 2008,
plans for an American departure from Haifa Street
were still tentative.
The results of
the 'surge' Haifa Street would become
typical of many Baghdad communities that soon felt
the full impact of the "surge" offensive. A year
later, the neighborhood would still bear all the
marks of battle. There
had been no effort to restore
public services, including the electrical grid or
the system that should have supplied potable
water; there were no medical services, nor was
there any public transportation.
The New
York Post's Ralph Peters summarized the posture of
the Maliki government inside the Green Zone
bluntly: "Iraq's government isn't much help -
none, as far as Haifa Street's revival is
concerned." The American military commander on
Haifa Street told him that the US was relying on
"spontaneous economic development" - local
citizens were expected to develop the area through
their own efforts, with the help of a limited
number of "micro-loans" (a few hundred dollars
each) from the military's meager non-combat funds.
It was no surprise, then, that, aside from a few
food markets, there was no economy to speak of.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of
mainly Sunni residents had left, with large parts
of the area transformed from Sunni to Shi'ite, and
smaller sections moving in the other direction.
In January 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Tony
Aguto, the US commander in Haifa Street, estimated
that some 50,000 of the area's 150,000 residents
had been displaced in the previous year. In
Baghdad as a whole, the United Nations High
Commissioner on Refugees would estimate that the
heavy "surge" fighting in the first half of 2007
was producing 90,000 refugees a month, the bulk
from Baghdad; the 2007 total reached 800,000.
As ethnic cleansing in Haifa Street and
elsewhere was completed, the rate of refugee
production began to drop, declining to 30,000 by
December 2007. Displaced Baghdadis searching
desperately for places to settle faced the
overwhelming challenge of supporting families in a
largely dormant economy with dwindling government
support. This was not, commented Lieutenant
Colonel Aguto, a problem the Americans needed to
address. "It is," he said, "the job of the Iraqi
government to sort this out." The Iraqi government
remained mute on the subject.
The ebb
of the 'surge' As the battle of Haifa
Street illustrated, the "surge" amplified violence
in the capital significantly, as for six months
the Americans moved in on one neighborhood after
another, using all the firepower at their command.
When the heavy fighting ended in an invaded
neighborhood, the Americans sought to consolidate
their military victory by erecting those
now-ubiquitous concrete barriers, ensuring the
ethnic segregation of each neighborhood or partial
neighborhood. These became demarcation lines and
no-go boundaries in the city's civil war, the
borders of a dis-integrated city.
The
walls insured that there would be little or no
physical, social, or economic contact among
ghettoized, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods,
even ones that had previously depended upon such
intercourse for daily sustenance. The city's
already compromised economy thus suffered another
body blow. Residents of these newly defined
ghettos, unable to get to jobs, became
increasingly desperate, and, searching for
solutions, lent support to the local militias that
spoke and acted on their behalf.
As
displacement efforts continued, the Shi'ite
militias essentially moved east to west across
Baghdad, creating ever more Shi'ite areas from
previously mixed and Sunni neighborhoods. Mainly
in the western and southern parts of Baghdad, the
Sunni militias persevered, consolidating their
control in areas that the Americans did not
invade.
The ghettoization of Baghdad,
which had begun relatively modestly in early 2005,
reached a crescendo in early 2007 with the
American surge and was largely completed by the
fall of 2007. By that time, what had once been a
city split between Sunnis and Shi'ites had been
transformed into a 75% Shi'ite capital. The
American military made its presence felt at
checkpoints, at many small bases established
around the city, and by patrols into neighborhoods
now demarcated by cement barriers. The localities,
however, were still governed by the local militias
in what was no longer a city, but a ghettoized
collection of micro-city-states.
The
end of the 'surge' After a spring and
summer of heavy fighting, however, the Americans
were hardly close to pacifying the city. In a way,
the "surge" had worsened the situation. Before it
began, in many neighborhoods neither Sunni nor
Shi'ite militias were dominant; by the middle of
2007, virtually every community had its own
mini-government, usually dominated by a militia
that was hostile both to the occupation and the
central government. To assert centralized
authority over the city, each neighborhood would
have had to be invaded again.
Without
announcing a change in policy, the Americans
functionally abandoned the "surge" in the late
summer 2007 in favor of a "live and let live"
program of cooptation. On the Sunni side of the
street, the Americans adopted a version of the
Sunni "Awakening" movement that had arisen without
American encouragement in Anbar province the
previous year, negotiating armed truces with their
insurgent adversaries on a community-by-community
basis.
The Americans conceded to the
militias the right to police their own
communities, discontinued American offensives
aimed at dislodging them, and halted the hated
home invasions aimed at arresting or killing
suspected insurgents. In exchange, the insurgents
were to rein in attacks on American troops and
suppress jihadist activity in their neighborhoods,
thus curtailing the planning and execution of car
bomb and other terrorist attacks on nearby Shi'ite
communities.
On the Shi'ite side, the
Americans essentially negotiated a ceasefire with
the Mahdi Army, announced publicly as a unilateral
stand-down by its leader Muqtada. The Sadrists
curtailed the planting of lethal roadside bombs
against the Americans and no longer sought to
ambush American and Iraqi army troops moving
through their neighborhoods. The Americans
curtailed their raids and offensives in Sadrist
neighborhoods and spent far less effort hunting
down and arresting Sadrist leaders, except when
they specifically broke the ceasefire.
The
result of this double detente was a dramatic
reduction in violence in Baghdad. With the
Americans keeping their side of the bargain, the
huge running battles associated with American
attacks on Sunni strongholds like Haifa Street
disappeared, and even the smaller battles
resulting from American attempts to capture
specific insurgents subsided. In return, attacks
against American forward bases and convoys in
Baghdad dwindled, and the jihadis, largely
expelled from Sunni insurgent communities, either
demobilized or moved to northern Iraq where
negotiations with the insurgents had not taken
place.
This was, however, little more than
an armed truce among enemies, a truce that
actually strengthened the militias within their
own communities. The Sunni insurgents, now
validated as legitimate police and even paid and
armed by the Americans, began making political
demands for the restoration of services, as well
as for infrastructure reconstruction and
job-creation programs for their desperate
constituents, all the while denouncing the Iraqi
government as a creature of US and Iranian policy.
The Mahdi Army militias, having extended
their influence into previously mixed
neighborhoods, used the truce to spread their own
meager but meaningful social service programs and
demand increased access to resources that might
revive the economy of the city. Their national
spokesmen continued to insist that the country
could not begin genuine reconstruction until the
Americans left, and that the barriers they had
played such a role in erecting - sectarian as well
as cement - were removed.
Though many
Baghdad communities are now experiencing their
lowest levels of violence in two years, their
situations are neither viable, nor stable. The
cement barriers, which help to reduce violence,
also make social and economic life nearly
impossible. Most Baghdadis are now locked into
their individual ghettos, terrified of strangers,
often afraid to send their children to schools
across barriers and neighborhoods, and unable to
reach previously held jobs. Employers, deprived of
needed workers and customers, have shuttered their
establishments. The economy has largely ground to
a halt.
For most of Baghdad, the Iraqi
government is simply irrelevant. It has no
administrative apparatus in any of these
communities or the capacity to restore needed
services. Its only visible presence, the Iraqi
army, is commanded or controlled by American
officers; insofar as Iraqi soldiers do act
independently, they follow the leadership of
Shi'ite militia commanders, not the central
government. In neighborhoods even a few hundred
feet from the Green Zone, the Iraqi government
does not exist.
The Americans remain a
major presence, but not a sovereign one. They
maintain the most fearsome of the militias in
Baghdad, capable of militarily overwhelming any
adversary, but incapable of creating stable rule,
even in cement-encircled ghost areas like Haifa
Street. They cannot deliver electricity, or water,
or jobs, or even, often enough, safe passage to
the next neighborhood.
As early as May of
2006, Nir Rosen, one of the most informed and
insightful journalists writing about Iraq,
presciently described the American military's
unenviable position in this way: "[T]he American
Army is lost in Iraq, as it has been since it
arrived. Striking at Sunnis, striking at Shi'ites,
striking at mostly innocent people. Unable to
distinguish between anybody, certainly unable to
wield any power, except on the immediate street
corner where it's located ... [T]he Americans are
just one more militia lost in the anarchy." This
description was never truer than today in Baghdad.
The residents of Baghdad are waiting. They are
waiting for the walls around their neighborhood to
come down, public transportation to be restored,
and roads to be re-opened so they can begin to
move around the city in something like a normal
fashion. They wait for public services to be
rebuilt so they can count on turning on the
lights, having clean water come out of taps, and
perhaps even being able to contribute to
"spontaneous economic development." They wait for
employers to begin rehiring, so they can begin to
support their suffering families.
They
wait for the Americans to leave.
In a few
weeks, Petraeus will tell the president and
Congress that violence is dramatically reduced in
Baghdad, that there are signs of political
progress inside the Green Zone, and that these
gains will be lost if the United States does not
"stay the course". He will not say that Baghdad is
an urban desert of half-destroyed buildings and
next to no public services, dotted by partially
deserted, mutually hostile mini-ghettos that used
to be neighborhoods, surrounded by cement barriers
reminiscent of medieval fortifications.
Michael Schwartz, professor of
sociology at Stony Brook University, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency.
This report on the battle of Baghdad is adapted
from his forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War
Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context
(Haymarket Books, June 2008). His email address
is Ms42@optonline.net.
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