The city of Irbil in the spring of 1991 had little electricity or drinking water, not much petrol and a scrappy supply of food. People scavenged for water from the cooling tanks of office air-conditioning units, and the only things you could buy to eat in the city center for a time were hard-boiled eggs, flat bread and mint, which soon soon ran out. But the city's Kurdish population was in a mood of extraordinary jubilation, expecting then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to be swept away at any moment.
However, in late March that year Saddam swept back north after he had warned the Kurds that rebellion in the past had "brought only death and destruction to our Kurdish people. If they persist in their game, their fate, God willing, will inevitably be the same as the fate of those who came before them."
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Saddam never came all the way north, because of action by the Gulf war allies. The Kurds kept a precarious autonomy, but suffered nevertheless from Baghdad's campaign of bombings, assassinations and divide-and-rule incursions. They worried, always, that the Ba'athist regime might one day fully reassert itself.
That anxiety could finally be put aside after a second liberation in 2003. Yet today the Kurds face another dangerous threat to their national project. The terrible bombings in Irbil have slashed into the ranks of Iraqi Kurdistan's relatively small cadre of leaders and experts. They have also reinforced the strong feeling among Kurds that they should control their own security affairs, and their own borders with the rest of Iraq, even if the first claims of responsibility for the massacre suggests that Kurdish Islamists may have been the bomb carriers.
The attitude may be that unless and until the Sunni community controls its own extremists and the foreigners who have come in to join them, a degree of sealing off may be necessary. All this increases the possibility that the political paths of the three main Iraqi communities may diverge, precisely what the coalition and most Iraqi leaders want to prevent.
Irbil could be an example of insurgents beginning to target the leaders of other communities as well as the US military and the Iraqi security forces.
Many see the insurgency in Iraq as entirely a product of occupation, but the hard question is what the insurgents are trying to achieve.
Get the US out, but then what? Indeed, if the aim is to get the US to leave it would, objectively, be better to offer them some cooperation. They are pretty desperate to go, and are, arguably, no longer so attached to remaining a permanent power behind the scenes, at least not at the price they might have to pay.
If the objective is to reassert a secular Sunni dominance -- a new Ba'athism -- that is patently not a realistic aim. The country's Shiite majority will never let go of the opportunity that the US invasion created for them. They expect to have that influence in a new political dispensation to which their numbers entitle them. If they were blocked, they would surely find the means, military if necessary, to remove any obstacle. If the objective is to create a Sunni fundamentalist state -- and most or perhaps all of the fundamentalist insurgents appear to be Sunnis -- then that is equally unrealistic.
What is a possibility, of course, is that the Shiites under Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani, influenced by the Iranians, will end up urging a watered-down version of Iran's own muddle between theocracy and democracy. But that, if it happens, would be a Shiite plan and of no interest to most of the groups involved in the insurgency.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the aim of most insurgents, or at least of those who finance them and hurl them into the fray, is entirely destructive. They wish to break down and disrupt by violence any constructive effort of whatever kind in any part of Iraq. The aim is the failure not only of the US project but of the Iraqi project. The targets are not only US soldiers but any Iraqi, from party leader to traffic policeman, engaged in the work of bringing Iraq back to something like normal life.
In order to pursue such a course, you have to believe that the principal function of Iraq is to be the battlefield between the forces of true Islam and the forces of evil.
Its people can, and should, be sacrificed to that end if necessary. That is why the insurgents so frequently break the rules that other rebels have usually observed, like trying to keep public opinion on their side or not provoking other communities.
Twelve Islamist groups recently issued a joint statement saying that after the US had gone, there would be a three-day period during which all those who had helped the invader would be arrested or liquidated. The ruthlessness, the cruelty, and the life-denying viciousness of such ideas chill the bones.
But even here there is an ultimate lack of realism, however twisted. The US is, at the moment, essentially acting as a buffer between Sunni insurgents and the Shiite and Kurdish communities.
Remove the US, or reduce its forces, and the insurgents would face a choice between attacking Dutchmen and Pakistanis or directly attacking the Shiites or the Kurds on a systematic basis.
The Kurds can almost certainly look after themselves in their part of the country. But can the insurgents afford to attack the Shiites who, in spite of their divisions and confusions, clearly see their future as within a united Iraq? Even if there were no physical attacks on the Shiites, insurgent activity in the Sunni zone is undermining Shiites' arguments for early direct elections. The Sunni insurgents and their foreign allies, in other words, stand between the Shiites and what they want. If it ever came to a trial of strength between the two, who can doubt that the Shiites would win?
But the trouble is that, in the process, sectarian differences would be further deepened, perhaps irretrievably. Iraq needs a compact between Shiites and Sunnis, and an arrangement for the Kurds that would satisfy them and allow them to occasionally perform a mediating role.
It is this three-way bargain that the insurgents are out to sabotage. They have been helped by US mistakes, like disbanding the Iraqi army -- an act that released a host of potential recruits to the insurgents. Refusing to have any contact with the Ba'ath party, even in purged form, may also have been an error.
The insurgents have also been helped by the US' heavy-handed military style, and the deaths it has caused. But while the cry of "foreigners on our soil" may be the motivation of some in the rank and file, it is important to recognize that this is essentially a nihilist and not a nationalist campaign.
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