Tony Kevin is a former Australian diplomat who has led the campaign for answers on the sinking of SIEV-X during the 2001 election, drowning 353 people. He is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. This piece was first published in the Canberra Times today, and is republished with the author’s permission.
The latest conventional wisdom says we are “at the tipping point” in Iraq. The US experiment in “democracy-building” in Iraq is now finely poised between success or failure. The UN has brokered a diplomatic solution, winning unanimous UN Security Council support. It is now said to be “up to the world to support it”. But actually, from now on, the views and policies of foreign governments have little relevance. This is a rare moment when the course of history will be determined by ordinary people: by how Iraqi resistance fighters and their American military adversaries handle themselves in the cities and towns of Iraq.
It is down to the Shia militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr and their Sunni counterparts, and to the notoriously trigger-happy US soldiery in Iraq.
Under the compromise UN Security Council resolution passed on Tuesday, the US-led occupation formally ends on June 30, replaced by a claimed-to-be-sovereign interim Iraqi government under appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. US troops (renamed the MNF, or multinational force) will remain as security support. Following elections by end of 2005, the MNF must leave.
Letters exchanged between Allawi and US Secretary of State Powell establish a new “security partnership” between the Iraqi Government and the MNF, promising coordination between the two sides.
This is not full sovereignty, but the proof of this pudding will be in the eating.
Even the most senior Shia religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who commands public respect, while not joining this new government, is giving it his provisional cautious endorsement.
How will the MNF respond to insurgent provocations under the new order? What will happen if large numbers of US troops go on being killed by insurgents?
The MNF will have to be out there in the streets, because the Iraqi interim government has no credible security forces – previous efforts to train and motivate Iraqi forces failed. If militarily challenged, Allawi will have to call in the MNF for support. The MNF does not have the option of sheltering in a cantonment.
Yet if US forces go in again boots-and-all Fallujah-style, the present fragile credibility of the interim administration will be lost for good. If the interim Iraqi administration is unable to restrain more Fallujahs, it will be seen correctly as a hollow occupiers facade, a Vichy or Quisling administration.
Will the interim Iraqi leadership use the security consultation powers the UN Security Council has negotiated for it, to restrain US military over-reaction in Iraq? If the interim administration can convince the Iraqi people that it is using its limited powers to hold back abusive use of overwhelming US military power, it may slowly earn some respect and confidence. A general peace – punctuated by insurgent incidents of violence – might gradually consolidate.
But it is hard to believe that after so many gross blunders, US political and military commanders can suddenly discover the necessary tact and military restraint so obviously lacking in their conduct as occupiers in Iraq to date. Can the people responsible for Abu Ghraib and the recent missile attack on a wedding party suddenly change their behaviour so radically?
I would not mortgage the house on it, but then the stakes now for President Bush are very high, and this fact must concentrate administration minds. The collapse of the Iraqi interim administration’s credibility in Iraq in new rounds of major violence involving massive engagement of US armed force would certainly mean the end of the Bush presidency.
The Bush administration may be learning. There is a new (and welcome) US leadership reticence. The aggressive rhetoric barometer is down. We have seen little lately of Paul Bremer. There is acceptance of the need to confront the horrors of Abu Ghraib at the judicial level.
But this may be too late. In the end now, it will be decided on the streets. The battle-hardened and embittered men fighting for the Iraqi resistance, impatient of diplomatic hair-splitting and deal-making in New York, will use their guns and bombs to test the will and patience of the occupiers and their vulnerable local supporters. There will be major violent incidents and more US casualties.
And the men and women soldiers and junior officers of the US Army, with their sophisticated weaponry, will probably want to respond in kind against suspected insurgent concentrations.
These two groups will decide Iraqs fate now. The people of Iraq will observe, and will make up their minds. The test will not be good intentions. It will be military behaviour on the ground.