“The ones who are living in Iraq know it too well now, the worst is always possible and hell may come on earth, as for heaven you may not have to wait too long to see it.”
Iraqi refugee in Damascus

 In the jaws of the Dragon

As we approach summer, the weather is slightly changing in Baghdad. Everyday is being hotter than the previous and at night the air is less and less fresh making you feel as if you were in the jaws of a dragon. In less than a month, Baghdad will be burning under more than 45° during day and no less than 30° during night. Since there is not more than four hours of electricity a day—when there is some—forget about the fridge and things alike; people are now gathering ice in order to be able to keep some fresh water and food for the day to come. Then, like their great-grand-parents during the 1940s, they are buying big ice cubes in sometimes old factories that were re-activated by clever people. Because there is not an ice factory in every area, they may have to take dangerous trips passing through American checkpoints, national Iraqi guards checkpoints, “Son of Iraq” checkpoints, militia checkpoints, and through walls which are now surrounding almost every neighborhood. In fact, Baghdad has become a strange labyrinth, the streets direction sometimes changes, at other times they are closed by barricades, or roadblocks, full of garbage, because the garbage collection service stopped or nearly stopped five years ago. It is a strange labyrinth where you have to avoid entering areas of your own city because you are Sunni or Shi’a or Christian, or simply because the neighborhoods which were known to be quiet suddenly turned into turmoil and violence. And death, violence, kidnapping are ebbing and flowing, sometimes as strong and fast as a tsunami and sometimes as merciless as a flood.
There is so much violence and death, and not only as the result of the civil war and occupation, but also because of chaos and a failed state situation. The Brookings Institution which tried to differentiate deaths related to criminal activities and these related to act of war; finally gave up in the summer of 2006, stating: “It is no longer practical to differentiate between crime-related deaths and war-related deaths, as the nature of the conflict has blurred the distinction between these categories “. But their last account of the criminal violence in Iraq indicated that it was three times the rate of Washington DC, the most violent state in the US [1]
. And the most conservative numbers of civilians deaths since the beginning of the US-led invasion is estimated around 80 to 90 thousands. Nearly one 9/11 every month… [2]

Iraqis have been living hell for five years now and there is not a city, so small it may be, that has not heard the loud noise of a gun, and there is not a street in Baghdad that has not seen fresh blood spilled on the ground. So much so that the UN and other agencies estimate the number of exiled people, refugees, and internal displaced persons who flee their city, their neighborhood or their house around four millions—one sixth of the entire Iraqi population [3]. So terrible that sometimes, people trying to escape the nightmare of war and occupation hurryingly settled their own refugee camp outside their city or village. And the situation is not getting any better, neither politically, economically nor from a security point of view. Just to get the facts straight, it is worth knowing that since 2003 the price of domestic fuel was multiplied by 35 [4].
, or that the average inflation rate since 2003 was around 50% to 60% a year and that the unemployment rate is estimated around 60% [5]. Also, it may be worth knowing that after five years, 60 % of the Iraqi population is still consuming the monthly food rations of the World Food Program and that 25% (nearly 6,5 millions people) are highly dependent on this program which was set up by the UN, during the twelve infamous years of international economic sanctions following the first Golf war, and, last but not least only 32% of the Iraqi population has access to drinking water [6].
From a political vantage point, it does not improving either. More than a third of the ministers of the cabinet resigned in the last year or so, and Prime Minister Al Maleki is governing by decree mainly, because most of the time he does not have a majority to pass the laws at the assembly. Furthermore, all the real political sources of the Iraqi crisis, the issue of federalism and the constitution, the law on oil production and repartition, the issue of Kirkuk and Kurdistan, the issue of national reconciliation, and of course, the issue of the occupation forces’ withdrawal, are still unresolved issues and stack one upon the other.
As for the security, the last months’ battles in the entire region of the South and in Sadr City in Baghdad between Al Sadr faction on one side and the Americans forces, the Maleki government and the IISC militia [7]
on the other side have caused at least thousands of deaths—mostly civilians. Few days ago, it was the turn of Mossul to be in the eye of the cyclone, as the Americans forces and the government decided to destroy the so-called Al-Qaeda positions there, “once for all”. Thus, as an American film-maker put it as the title of his documentary about the major failure of the American occupation in Iraq, there is: “no end in sight”. [8]

 The tragedy of Iraq

But what about the famous result of the “surge”? What about the decrease of violence against Americans troops? What about the halt of the sectarian war in Iraq and especially in Baghdad? Yes, true, something happened.
The sectarian conflict calmed down a little bit. And for a simple thing: the first round is over. “The battle of Baghdad”, as people named it, was fought from the end of 2005 until the summer of 2007 and was won by the Shiia’ sectarian militia and by the sectarian government, his army and the police which represent a good majority of them. So the Sunni sectarian militia and organizations lost. But who really loses? It is the vast majority of the population, whatever they were, Sunni, Shi’a, Christians, or Kurdish, who was caught in the bloodbath, between the Americans, the militias, and the Iraqi army. More than one million of them fled Karada, Doha, Zeitouny, The University neighborhood and all the mixed area of Baghdad and dozens of thousands in the South, and Samara, Baquba in the North West and countless mixed families from all over Iraq…And how many Iraqis, who did not have the chance to flee, lost their live at that time? The most conservative numbers estimate an average of 2.5 000 per month during that period of time [9]
. So, yes, now it is a little bit calmer, because in almost all of Iraq, there is no more mixed neighborhood, and everybody is waiting for the next round.

As for the number of attacks against Americans soldiers, it is true that they have decreased mainly in Baghdad and in the north-west of Iraq. There is a reason for this too - the Americans opted for the English formula of 80 years ago when confronted by the armed revolt of the 1920 revolution, which embroiled all the country against the British colonization of Iraq. Back then, the British enrolled and bribed. Now, the American administration is paying hundreds of millions to provide weapons, salaries and cars to more than 90,000 fighters [10]
. These fighters do not belong to the Iraqi army or to the police. Known as “the son of Iraq”, they are mostly Sunni tribes militia, loyal to dozen of sheikhs and to the Americans as far as they are willing to pay, but not to the Iraqi state. So what will happen when the Administration stop paying? What will all these sheikhs, new warlords of this part of the country, decide? They may turn against their former cash payers, namely the Americans, but there is also a great deal of chance that they will use this force to conquer the political space or engage other actors to the conflict whether the sectarian political organizations, militias or finally the state itself. As professor, Gilbert Achcar of London University notes: “The Americans are sowing the seeds of a long-term tragedy in Iraq”. The second round is about to come, it will be a mixture of sectarian and tribal conflict and it will complete the tragedy of Iraq.

But one could ask, and lots of people in Washington are already asking it: “is it the American administration’s fault if these people who hate one another are killing each other?” For sure, if one wants to find the roots of “the battle of Baghdad” in the history of Iraq, one may find plenty of factors and reasons. For instance, the twenty terrible years of Saddam Hussein’s crazy regime, also the twelve purgatory years of the embargo and so on and so forth…But the truth is that such things as “the battle of Baghdad” and the sectarian cleansing in every part of Iraq at this scale have never ever existed during the whole history of this country since the Abbasid era, more than one thousand years ago. In fact, the Iraqi society was already wounded by Saddam Hussein’s regime, especially after the 1991 war, in which he used everything he could to divide and rule the society, not only on sectarian or tribal bases, but also using the opposition between the urban area and the countryside, and between the classes of the society themselves [11]
. And this society was also wounded by the twelve years of international embargo, which cost the lives of more than 500,000 Iraqis. But also, as former coordinator of the UN “Food For Oil” program Denis Halliday, said in 1999: “the sanctions have bitten deeply into the fabric of the Iraqi society and norms” (…). Meaning that during this time, Iraq saw the raise of corruption, criminality, prostitution, divorces, children work and illiteracy at a rate which will only be surpassed during the present time, under the American occupation.

Basically, what the American occupation did was to destroy every single thing which kept holding the society together.
Firstly, they destroyed and let destroy and loot all the remaining structures of the Iraqi State, like hospitals, schools, plants, sewage services, and even museum, which were not only Saddam’s or the Bassist’s estate but which provided to a feasible extent, sometimes with discrimination and corruption, electricity, healthcare, education, food, security and jobs for the entire society.
Secondly, with a “De’baathification program” and the disbanding of the army led on a very ideological stance, they erased the very central structure of the nation and fired hundreds of thousand of people, not only soldiers or policemen, but also nurses, teachers, civil servants and ministry specialists, without taking a minute neither to consider the chain of command inside the State Party and the different levels of guilt of the millions of members, nor to consider the chance of a reconciliation process and finally without considering the necessity of assuring a viable transition for the public sector and the Iraqi administration,
Thirdly, the American occupation decided to change the Iraqi state-dominated economy to: “(…) a sustainable market-driven economic system” (…) [12] So they completely opened the economy to the most fundamentalist forms of capitalism and “laissez-faire” system. As Naomi Klein retraced it in a series of articles in Harper’s Magazine [13], Paul Bremer, head of the former CPA, issued an unprecedented set of laws in maybe all the history of nation-states in the world [14]. Iraqi Borders were completely opened to any kind of imports, without taxes or inspections, the corporate taxes rate was down from 40 to 15%, and more importantly, foreign companies would be able to own 100% of Iraqi assets without having to invest even 1% of the benefits in Iraq! Of course, they decided to wait a little bit for the natural resources sector. Giving the oil of Iraq to Exxon or one of the other Seven Sisters would have been making their greedy stance too obvious [15]. But the plan was put forward as for the privatization of the other two hundred state-owned companies and their hundreds of factories which were producing from olive oil, soap, food and agricultural products, matches, to clothes, concrete or washing-machines. Unfortunately, as the privatization plan was not going well because of the lack of foreign investors, which were afraid by the quagmire that Iraq soon became, the American administration let all state factories die, idle or half working, preventing them from receiving any subvention or help. Instead the Iraqi market is now flooded with foreign products, from everywhere in the world at an exorbitant price with Halliburton and Bechtel selling concrete for $1000 a ton and making billions of benefits. So, few months after the invasion, the Iraqis woke up without operative schools, hospitals, electricity or water system, police or ministries, but with chaos in the street and outbreak of cholera, like in September 2007 [16]
, and millions of unemployed people.

Last but not least, by trying to keep control of the political transition they set in Iraq, the American occupation reinforced and used the “sectarianisation” of both the State institutions and the political space since the very beginning [17]. One example is the creation at the end of 2003 of the first Interim Governing Council, which was supposed to be the Iraqi body preparing a real transition toward sovereignty and advising ministries under the control of the CPA. The ICG was not based on a political project but on two conditions: the sectarian affiliation and the approval of the occupation of Iraq by the American forces. Thus, the old Iraqi Communist Party, with a long story of secular ideologies and rhetoric, mixing Sunni, Shi’a, Christians and Kurdish militants, suddenly became a Shi’a Party in order to be able to enter the ICG! And this trend encouraged by the American administration did not stop there. The administration distributed positions filling the empty and destroyed ministries, the new army, and the police by sectarian affiliation of each political group and according to the kind of alliance, the American occupation was making with each of these factions. So each of the dozens of communities which existed in Iraq became a political actor and, controlling or representing a community became the way to get money and power inside the institutions of the new Iraq. In turn, this transformation pitted one faction against the other in a power grab rather than power-sharing climate thus aggravating the sectarian trend and sentiment of the population But in a context of failed state, social chaos and military occupation, the political field turns out to be quickly and easily replaced by the military field as each actor begins to rely more and more on weapons and violence to achieve political gain and influence. And it is exactly what happened in Iraq, with the American occupant remaining sole referee of what became a violent and dangerous encounter especially between the three major communities of Iraq, the Arab shi’a, the Arab Sunni and the Kurdish. The result was that less than three years after the invasion of Iraq by the American forces, the infamous “Battle of Baghdad” began.
So yes, it is the great fault, the unforgivable fault of the American administration that invaded Iraq five years ago, and did everything and every mistake to pave the road to this tragedy.

 The living memories of Iraq

Finally, to understand the complexity and the tragedy of what was few decades ago a beautiful, rich, highly educated nation that represented thousands of years of a history, there are two prerequisites: first, reading the vast and comprehensive study of modern Iraq history and society led by Hanna Batatu [18]
. Second, listening to the Iraqis themselves. As the Iraqi nation is being ravaged by an unprecedented level of violence, as the country is undergoing a bloody and destructive occupation, as the society itself is in a process of being disintegrated by sectarian and political turmoil, we should listen to the Iraqis. Abroad or inside, they are the only living memories of a nation, Iraq, which may no longer exist. But also and before all, they are the only hope and future of this country.