Slide Rules

is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. Indeed, by one common social science definition--at least 1,000 dead (with at least 100 on each side) from internal hostilities in which one side tries violently to change the state or its policies--Iraq's civil war began in the first year of the "postwar" era and has been particularly bloody. The Brookings Institution estimates that somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 Iraqis have been killed by violence since "major combat operations" ended on April 30, 2003. That is somewhere between 350 and 600 Iraqis a month--or, in terms proportional to the U.S. population, the equivalent of two September 11 catastrophes every month. And this calculation does not account for the hundreds killed in the days following last week's Askariya shrine bombing.If the civil war began as a largely Sunni insurgency killing and terrorizing mainly Shia, Kurds, and Sunni "collaborators," it has long since taken on a more viciously reciprocal form. Since the spring of 2005, when the United Iraqi Alliance (the coalition of Shia religious parties) took control of government-- and of the Interior Ministry, which controls the police--there has been a marked increase in killings, abductions, torture, and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis. Much of this has been conducted by Shia death squads operating in and alongside police units. Not coincidentally, the Interior Ministry has been headed by a leading figure of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (sciri) with ties to its fearsome militia, the Badr Organization. Iraq's conflict is not about ideology or class, and it is not just about nationalist resistance to the U.S. presence. At root, it is a battle of identities, a struggle not just for power and resources but for dignity and legitimacy. When old hierarchies are disrupted or groups feel threatened or violated, the quest for group security and respect easily mutates into a drive for domination, separation, vengeance, or--at its horrific worst--annihilation. Often, these conflicts are manipulated and mobilized by ethnic elites or rising ethnic challengers as a means to establish and consolidate personal power. Think of Slobodan Milosevi*c, for example, who used elections to deepen polarization between not just parties but peoples. Think of Nigeria's ethnic political parties and their repeated, increasingly bloody contests for political control during the five turbulent years that followed independence in 1960--until the frayed center could no longer hold and the military overturned the wobbly system in early 1966. Think of the consequences: as many as one million dead in the Nigerian civil war. Like cancer, civil war takes many forms, follows many different courses, and has widely varying etiologies. There is no one set of signals showing a country is sliding into civil war--or descending from chronic deadly conflict into all- out civil war. But there are characteristic omens one can look for. And, in Iraq today, these portend an ugly downward spiral. Ahollow state. Civil wars engulf hollow states, with shallow legitimacy and weak coercive and administrative capacity. Stanford political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin also find they are significantly more likely in countries that are poor, heavily populated, and politically unstable (because of, say, decolonization or some recent change in government). These structural conditions augur poorly for Iraq, with its depressed national income and marked inability to deliver basic services or economic development. Perhaps even more worrisome has been the inability of the new Iraqi state to build up coherent security forces that are loyal to it, rather than to the very ethnic and sectarian factions that need to be contained. Militia penetration of Iraqi police and commando units (whose uniforms are often worn by those carrying out deadly attacks) is a key factor heightening the prospects of civil war. Indeed, the path to civil hell is often marked by a growth in militias-- irregular, well-armed, nonstate forces--loyal to contending political parties or identity groups. The growth in these armed ethnic and sectarian forces has been one of the defining aspects of Iraq's postwar order. The problem has not only been the dizzying welter of insurgent groups fighting both the U.S. (coalition) Armed Forces and the new Iraqi state, but also the militias of the parties and movements that have positions in that state, such as the Kurdish peshmerga, the Badr Organization, and Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army. For many who worked with the U.S. occupation administration, including myself, one of its most telling and bitter failures was its inability to disarm and demobilize these militias, despite a conceptually elegant plan for this purpose, painstakingly negotiated during the first half of 2004. One of the most alarming aspects of the current situation is the degree to which most informed scenarios to preempt all-out civil war depend on a painful step--disbanding the militias--to which their leaders and political sponsors are now more unlikely than ever to agree. Indeed, the trend is moving in the other direction, as militia recruitment steps up, violence accelerates, and embattled Sunni communities outside the insurgency begin to organize their own militias in response. Political polarization. When there are parties and elections in the mix, civil wars are preceded by deepening polarization. Voters rally around their ethnic solidarities, and parties that try to transcend them are crushed. In Iraq, Kurds have voted almost unanimously for the Kurdistan Coalition (or a small Kurdish Islamic list), most Sunnis boycotted in January 2005 and then voted for one or another Sunni list in last December's elections, and some three-quarters of Shia have voted for the United Iraqi Alliance. From the January transitional election, running through the October 2005 constitutional referendum, to the December 2005 parliamentary election, voting in Iraq has increasingly become an identity referendum. Liberal, secular, and nonsectarian alternatives were routed in January, save for Iyad Allawi, who scored poorly for an incumbent prime minister (his bloc won only 15 percent of the seats). In December, Allawi and his list absorbed many of the smaller nonsectarian groups and ran as outsiders, critical of drift and misrule in the Iraqi government. Yet, despite this attempt to transcend identity politics, Allawi's coalition lost nearly half its seats in parliament. Virtually all of the other 250 seats in Iraq's National Assembly are now held by lists based on religious or ethnic identity. Inflammatory rhetoric. Political party and identity group leaders frame the context through which their followers perceive troubling events. If they depict those events as a struggle for group dignity or even survival, their followers will respond in kind, with group-on-group violence. If, instead, they paint acts of outrageous violence as the work of extremists who must be marginalized, then there is at least a chance for the center to hold against the extremes. For nearly three years now, what passes for stability in Iraq--its ability to avert a slide toward all-out war--has owed much to the calming appeal of Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, who has urged his devoted Shia followers not to be goaded into violent retaliation, despite appalling acts of terrorism and mass murder. For many months now, that patience has been wearing thin, and Sistani's command over the Shia faithful has been challenged by younger, more radical clerics like Sadr. A more apocalyptic framing has emerged, in which terrorist acts are seen as "a war against the Shia." The day after the Askariya bombing, a Shia newspaper called for war in return "against anyone who tries to conspire against us, who slaughters us every day. It is time to go to the streets and fight those outlaws." In fact, Sunni and Shia political leaders have been torn between bitterly blaming one another for the crisis, blaming "the troublemaker in the middle" (the Americans)--something it seems all sides can agree on--and calling for restraint and nonviolence. After the initial wave of violent retaliation, prominent Sunni and Shia political and religious leaders did reach across the divide to pray together and dampen the fires of violence. But, with each new incident of mass violence and symbolic desecration, the hotheads become more difficult to contain. As Iraqi liberal elder statesman Adnan Pachachi recently lamented, "I think people are rapidly losing confidence in the political class, and I don't blame them." Maximal and irreconcilable demands. The struggle over rules, policies, and resources becomes further polarized as compromise and conciliation give way to maximal and incompatible demands. In Iraq, that process has been accelerated by the constitution approved by Iraqi voters last October. Particularly worrisome are two changes, seen by many Iraqis as destabilizing power grabs, that sciri leader Abdul Aziz Al Hakim insisted on during the negotiations last summer. One lifts the previous limit on the number of provinces that could coalesce to form a nearly autonomous region (three in the interim constitution). The other gives the "producing regions and provinces" implicit control over revenue from future oil and gas fields. Together, these raise for Sunni Arabs the nightmare prospect of an Iraqi "federation" with a Kurdistan to the north that has absorbed oil-rich Kirkuk; a massive "Shiastan" region to the south, spanning all nine southern provinces and controlling 80 percent of the country's oil and gas wealth; and a fragmented and impoverished Sunni center left with the desert. If their fears are not allayed, Sunnis could make Iraq bloody and ungovernable for years, if not decades, to come. Without a constitutional compromise over how to share power and resources, distrust and alienation will intensify between groups, and so will the violence. This is why American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad worked so hard to broker a last-minute compromise--announced just four days before the October 15 referendum--that provides a constitutional review within four months of when the new parliament convenes. Human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing. As countries slide toward civil war, the ethnic other is demeaned as less worthy, less moral, and even less human. Once this psychological and moral descent has occurred, gross abuses of human rights follow. By the fall of 2005, accounts were accumulating of several hundred targeted assassinations and disappearances of Sunni Arabs. Often, their horribly abused bodies would be discovered in fields some days later. Numerous reports pointed to the Shia Islamist militias (particularly the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army), which were believed to have infiltrated the police. Suspicions of official complicity deepened in November with the discovery (by the U.S. military) of a secret underground torture and detention center run by the Interior Ministry. In addition, Iraq's urban districts and neighborhoods are gradually being "ethnically cleansed." If the process is not yet quite as ruthless as it was in the former Yugoslavia, the same methods of threat, aggression, and forced eviction are evident. The trend began during the final phase of combat, as the peshmerga poured into Kirkuk and began reversing Saddam Hussein's campaign of forced "Arabization" that had driven Kurds from their homes and businesses in preceding decades. More recently, mixed Shia and Sunni Arab neighborhoods have steadily become unmixed through intimidation and violence, and even mixed families have had agonizing identity choices thrust upon them. With each new round of warning and killing--including the most recent violence--the population transfers have accelerated. Meanwhile, Islamic sharia courts established by Sadr's militants and other radical Islamists have been punishing secular Shia, Sunnis, and Christians. Many Iraqi Christians and middle-class professionals have left the country altogether. But, if Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, it is not yet in the midst of a total ethnic conflagration. It is vital--not only in simple, humanitarian terms, but for the stability of the region and thus the national security of the United States--that the one not be allowed to morph into the other. If the dam of mass violence bursts, U.S. forces will be (even more than they have been since Saddam fell) too few in number and too weak in legitimacy to stop the flooding. The key remains a political settlement that isolates the extremes and avoids a zero-sum logic of power. This requires broad sharing of power among all the major parties and coalitions, the reversal of sectarian militia penetration of the security forces, and revision of the constitution to produce a more viable federal bargain. It is precisely these three goals that Khalilzad has courageously and doggedly pursued since his arrival last summer. But he is an overstretched mediator, lacking the diplomatic resources, legitimacy, and time to broker a comprehensive deal on his own. And he is still burdened with a U.S. posture that feeds the Sunni-based insurgency (and thus, increasingly, the Shia counterinsurgency) and the deepening civil war. To get a grip on what is now a bewilderingly fragmented Sunni insurgency, we need a broad dialogue with as many elements of it as possible. Mediation of the scope, complexity, and delicacy now necessary urgently requires a team effort, involving as well the United Nations and the European Union. In fact, the United Nations has the perfect person to partner with Khalilzad. He is the one person who was able to come from the outside before and reason with Sistani, achieving a compromise that saved the transition to sovereignty when it was unraveling. He is the same man who partnered with Khalilzad himself in bringing about a far more successful transition in Afghanistan: Lakhdar Brahimi. Even a mediator of Brahimi's prodigious and proven talents (he also mediated the Taif accord, which helped end the Lebanese civil war) would need help and luck. Part of this must come in the form of more far-reaching changes in U.S. policy. Any agreement that pulls significant elements of the Sunni-based insurgency away from violence will require an unambiguous commitment from the Bush administration to eventual withdrawal from Iraq. This means renouncing any intention to seek long-term U.S. military bases in Iraq and a willingness to negotiate some plan for U.S. military withdrawal, even if it stretches over several years and is tied to flexible goals rather than to a fixed timetable. This is not a time for the United States to throw in the towel in Iraq. The consequences of all-out civil war--which would now surely follow a precipitous U.S. withdrawal--would be too disastrous for everyone except the extremists. It is still possible to find or reconstruct some political common ground. It is still conceivable that the Shia politicians who are now set (in one combination or another) to rule Iraq for the indefinite future can be persuaded to make concessions on the big issues, by the logic that less is more in circumstances when seeking to win everything means civil war. There is still time for far- reaching mediation to avert the slide. But the hour is growing late.

By larry diamond