What Went Wrong in Iraq

Larry Diamond

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Summary:  Although the early U.S. blunders in the occupation of Iraq are well known, their consequences are just now becoming clear. The Bush administration was never willing to commit the resources necessary to secure the country and did not make the most of the resources it had. U.S. officials did get a number of things right, but they never understood-or even listened to-the country they were seeking to rebuild. As a result, the democratic future of Iraq now hangs in the balance.

Larry Diamond is Co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. From January to April 2004, he served as a Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

These four elements interact in intimate ways. Without legitimate, rule-based, and effective government, economic and physical reconstruction will lag and investors will refuse to risk their capital to produce jobs and new wealth. Without demonstrable progress on the economic front, a new government cannot develop or sustain legitimacy, and its effectiveness will quickly wane. Without the development of social capital-in the form of horizontal bonds of trust and cooperation in a (re)emerging civil society-economic development will not proceed with sufficient vigor or variety, and the new system of government will not be properly scrutinized or supported. And without security, everything else grinds to a halt.

In postconflict situations in which the state has collapsed, security trumps everything: it is the central pedestal that supports all else. Without some minimum level of security, people cannot engage in trade and commerce, organize to rebuild their communities, or participate meaningfully in politics. Without security, a country has nothing but disorder, distrust, and desperation-an utterly Hobbesian situation in which fear pervades and raw force dominates. This is why violence-ridden societies tend to turn to almost any political force that promises to provide order, even if it is oppressive. It is a big reason why the CPA was unable to spend most of the $18.6 billion for Iraqi reconstruction appropriated by Congress last fall. And it explains why a country must first have a state before it can become a democracy. The primary requirement of a state is that it hold a monopoly on the use of violence. By that measure, the body that the United States transferred power to in Baghdad on June 28 may have been a government-but it was not a state.

Even though insufficient forces were deployed to Iraq, much more could have been done with them to build security and contain the forces of disorder before the handoff. Unfortunately, not only did the CPA lack the resources for the job, it also lacked the understanding and organization. The effort to create a new Iraqi police force, for example, withered from haste, inefficiency, poor planning, and sheer incompetence. Newly minted Iraqi cops were rushed onto the job with too little training, insufficient vetting, and shamefully inadequate equipment. Although most had uniforms (of a sort), they lacked cars, radios, and body armor and were often outgunned by the criminals, terrorists, and saboteurs they faced. As vital symbols of the new Iraqi state, the police also quickly became "soft targets" for terrorist attacks, and coalition forces did too little too late to protect them.

Iraqi politicians, civic leaders, and government officials, as well as civilian coalition officials and their Iraqi aides, paid a heavy price for the lack of security. More than 100 Iraqi government workers were killed during the occupation, including several high-level officials and the occupant of the Governing Council's rotating presidency. Iraqis collaborating with the occupation (including those lining up for jobs) became targets-especially translators, a fact that worsened the CPA's already severe language gap. Although few CPA officials themselves were killed, many were attacked, and numerous civilian contractors were slain or kidnapped.

Insecurity drove the political occupation into a physical and psychological bunker. Already separated from Iraqis by the formidable security around the three-square-mile "Green Zone" (where the CPA was based) and around the CPA's regional and provincial headquarters, coalition officials began to travel less and less with every passing month. By the early spring of this year, foreign officials and contractors could no longer safely move around the country without an armored car and a well-armed escort. And even these precautions failed to protect them from well-placed and powerful roadside bombs. The most secure means of transportation, helicopters, were usually unavailable to all but the highest officials-one of many shortages that lasted throughout the occupation and that the Pentagon was very slow and very inefficient in addressing.

Also absent was the determination to face down political threats, as the case of Muqtada al-Sadr made painfully clear. Sadr, a radical young Shiite cleric, sought to fan and exploit anti-American, nationalist, and Islamist sentiments in a bid for power. Although he lacked the religious knowledge and authority of his father (who was assassinated in 1999) or of more senior and respected Shiite clerics, Sadr managed to build a following among disaffected, unemployed, and poorly educated young men in Iraq's cities. The coalition should have quickly developed a strategy to counter him and his al-Mahdi militia. Some Shiite leaders urged that Sadr be co-opted into the political process, while many moderate Shiites and CPA officials urged that he be dealt with through legal or military means. But the CPA did none of these things; instead, it vacillated. In August 2003, the Iraqi Central Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Sadr and 11 of his top henchmen (for the April 2003 murder of a moderate Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Majid al-Khoei). But the CPA kept the arrest warrants sealed, and over the subsequent months, as Sadr kept pushing, U.S. officials waited, warned, wavered, hesitated, and debated. Although coalition figures knew that Sadr's organization had to be put out of business before any kind of decent political order could arise in Iraq, the various plans drawn up to take him down were never executed, apparently because Washington decided that the risks were too great. The same administration that was bold enough to launch an unpopular war against Saddam blanched at the prospect of confronting a bully such as Sadr-even though he was reviled by the majority of the Shiite population and the religious establishment.

There was certainly no shortage of warning signs, provocations, and justifications for removing Sadr. In October 2003, coalition forces intercepted dozens of busloads of his heavily armed followers as they headed to Karbala to seize control of the city and its holy shrines. On March 12 of this year, Sadr's forces leveled the Gypsy village of Qawliyya, sending most of its 1,000 residents fleeing. That same month, Sadr's organization publicly called for the assassination of Sayyid Farqad al-Qizwini, the most influential pro-U.S. cleric in Iraq's Shiite heartland, and a number of his associates in a U.S.-supported pro-democracy movement. For six months, Sadr's army and organization grew alarmingly in size, muscle, and daring. In a Taliban-style bid for social power, they seized public buildings, beat up moderate professors, took over classrooms, forced women to wear the hijab, set up illegal sharia courts, and imposed their own brutal penalties. Meanwhile, new Mahdi army recruits openly trained for terror and mayhem.

Yet when the coalition finally decided to act against them, its approach was impromptu and incomprehensibly chaotic. On March 28, Bremer ordered the closure of Sadr's incendiary newspaper, Hawza, but did nothing to strike against the more dangerous elements of Sadr's organization. The cleric reacted by ordering his followers to rise up against the occupation. A few days later, on April 2, coalition forces arrested a top Sadr aide, Mustafa al-Yaccoubi, and Sadr responded by unleashing a full-scale insurgency in the Shiite south, for a time seizing control of Najaf, Karbala, and many other strategic sites and forging tactical ties with the Sunni insurgents who had taken control of Fallujah. In the subsequent weeks, after conceding control of Fallujah to a hastily constructed local militia that promised to reassert order, U.S. forces finally went to war with the Mahdi army, evicting it from most of its strongholds, killing or arresting many of its leaders, and largely defeating its troops. But Sadr remained at large, mocking the coalition's demand for his arrest and maneuvering for power.

Not only did the fighting in April and May fail to eliminate Sadr's forces, it also did nothing to counter Iraq's other heavily armed militias. These include not only the battle-hardened Kurdish Pesh Merga (which number at least 50,000 fighters) but also the large and well-armed militias of the two most important Shiite religious parties, SCIRI (the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and Dawa. At the beginning of 2004, the CPA began negotiating an agreement with these militias for their disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) into the new Iraqi police and armed forces. The CPA's plan was intelligent and comprehensive in design. But the Kurds, understandably wary of any new central Iraqi government, refused to agree to anything more than a superficial integration of their forces (with command structures intact) into the new Iraqi military, and it remains unclear whether the other large militias will truly demobilize and disarm or just warehouse their heavy weapons while temporarily joining the new armed forces. The ddr plan was supposed to have been finalized and announced on May 1. But it was set back seriously by the outbreak of twin insurgencies in Fallujah and the Shiite south in April. The U.S. military was forced to rely on the cooperation (or at least forbearance) of the SCIRI and Dawa militias to evict and defeat the Mahdi army, and this sharply reduced the CPA's leverage over them. The plan was finally released in early June, but with little time left to implement it before the transfer of power. Even as the CPA insisted that the Mahdi army's failure to comply would disqualify Sadr from participating in electoral politics, other Iraqi political leaders began negotiating with him to try to bring him into the political game.

It now seems unlikely that the weak and besieged new Iraqi government will have the will or capacity to enforce the demobilization plan. In fact, the new Iraqi state is caught in a Catch-22: to be viable, it must build up its armed forces as rapidly as possible. But the readiest sources of soldiers and police are the most powerful militias, which will probably allow their fighters to join the new military only if their command structures remain intact. Thus, if the fledgling Iraqi state hopes to truly defeat the militias, it may have to go to war with itself. That seems hard to imagine. Yet if Iraq tries to hold elections while the militias remain intact (in one guise or another), the campaign is likely to become a very bloody and undemocratic affair. Candidates will face assassination, weaker political opponents will be run out of town, and the electoral machinery will be hijacked by those with the most guns.