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.

Even if the security situation improves enough to allow elections to go forward on time, Iraq could still get into further trouble if it follows the UN's recommendation and uses a national-list system, apportioning seats in parliament on the basis of nationwide voting, since this would give the big regional and religious parties an added incentive to inflate their numbers through force and fraud. Should that occur, the biggest winners will be the best-armed and most-organized forces-the Kurds in the far north and the Iranian-backed Islamist parties in the Shiite south. The American occupation could wind up paving the way for the "election" of an Iranian-linked Islamist government in Baghdad.

CLOSING THE LEGITIMACY GAP

As the last year in Iraq has made clear, decent governance is not possible without some minimal level of security. But security could not have been improved without significant progress on the political front. This was true in several respects. First, although some of the terrorist violence (particularly the suicide car bombings) was organized by outside forces, as the Bush administration claimed, much of it (including roadside bombings, the killing of contractors, and other forms of sabotage) was committed by Iraqis, mainly Sunnis who turned against the occupation because they believed it excluded them politically. Second, young Shiite men rose up in arms when their lack of access to jobs and other opportunities rendered them vulnerable to the appeals of militants such as Sadr. Third, political tensions raised the worrisome prospect of violence between Iraq's Kurds and Arabs, both on the volatile boundaries of the Kurdistan region (especially Kirkuk, where militant Kurds wanted to expel Arabs who had settled there during Saddam's campaign of "Arabization") and in the larger struggle over the future shape of the country. And fourth, the challenge of demobilizing the militias while building up the new Iraqi armed forces was largely a political problem. In all these cases, containing the violence required not only a strong and adept military response but also a sustained political effort to construct a broad-based, inclusive system with which all major Iraqi groups could identify.

The United States, however, lacked an effective political strategy for postwar Iraq, as became clear almost immediately after the invasion, when former General Jay Garner's ill-fated Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance took charge in Baghdad. Part of the problem was that both Garner and Bremer never comprehended how Iraqis perceived them. Throughout the occupation, the coalition lacked the linguistic and area expertise necessary to understand Iraqi politics and society, and the few long-time experts present were excluded from the inner circle of decision-making in the CPA. Thus the coalition never grasped, for example, the fact that, although most Iraqis were grateful for having been liberated from a brutal tyranny, their gratitude was mixed with deep suspicion of the United States' real motives (not to mention those of the United Kingdom, a former colonial ruler of Iraq); humiliation that the Iraqis themselves had proved unable to overthrow Saddam; and unrealistic expectations of the postwar administration, which Iraqis expected to quickly deliver them from their problems. Too many Iraqis viewed the invasion not as an international effort but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers, and this evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraq's former overlords.

The CPA also failed to grasp that Saddam retained a base of popular support in Iraq even after his overthrow. Although he had brutalized plenty of Sunnis, much of the Sunni Arab population either supported him or opposed his ouster for fear that regime change would cost them-a 20 percent minority of the population-their historic monopoly over the state and its precious resources.

The occupation compounded its original errors of analysis with two strategic miscalculations. First, it launched a de-Baathification campaign that was much too broad, excluding from any meaningful role in the future state anyone who had held any kind of high-level position in the party, regardless of whether they were directly involved in serious crimes. And the most aggressive and politically ambitious advocate of radical de-Baathification, the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, was put in charge of the program.

The second mistake was made in May 2003, when, as one of his first official acts, Bremer ordered the dissolution of the Iraqi army. The army had already collapsed and scattered at the end of the invasion, and intensive vetting of its officer corps would have been necessary before it could have served any positive function in the new Iraqi state. Still, by formally dissolving it, the CPA lost the opportunity to reconstitute some portions of it to help restore order, and it left tens of thousands of armed soldiers and officers cut out of the new order and prime candidates for recruitment by the insurgency. Indeed, the American occupation created a context in which former Baathists, mainly Sunnis, not only faced the loss of their previous dominance but were excluded from any real share of power and resources. This situation pushed some Iraqis who might otherwise have been co-opted into the new system toward violent resistance, which came to seem like a rational strategy for driving away the Americans or at least changing the terms they were offering.

The United States also faced a more diffuse political problem in Iraq. Deep local suspicions of U.S. motives combined with the memory of Western colonialism and resentment of the U.S. stance in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle to generate a massive lack of legitimacy for the occupation authority. Washington should have done two things to fill this gap: increased international participation in the political administration of the country (although this would have been difficult given international opposition to the war), and put legitimate Iraqi leaders in visible, meaningful governance roles as soon as possible.

The most straightforward way to do this would have been to hold elections. That was what Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most revered and influential Shiite religious leader in Iraq, wanted from the beginning. The experience of other postwar transitions, however, counseled strongly against a rapid move to national elections. With no electoral register, no administrative framework to organize balloting, no electoral rules, and no time or space for new political parties to emerge and mobilize, early national elections (any time within the first year of occupation) could well have precipitated a disastrous slide toward violence and polarization-even civil war. And they would likely have been swept in the south by Islamist parties, which enjoyed the huge initial advantage of having pre-existing organizations built up either underground or in exile in Iran.