If Iraq is the central front on the "War on Terror", then unfortunately, terror is winning. Fuad is a braver man than you and me put together, and he is terrified. East of the Tigris River, where he lives, the militias rule, the government a joke. His neighbors are being kidnapped, killed. Fighters dressed in Iraqi Police uniforms (or are they police?) break into houses, take away the men and kill them. Usually they torture them first. A few days later, their families find their bodies in empty lots or at the morgue. "It was never like this under Saddam." Fuad spent 6 years in Saddam's jails and still thinks life was better before the invasion.
Saddam's regime, despite (or perhaps because of) its tyrannical excesses, fulfilled the function of Hobbes' Leviathan, cowing other groups into quiescence by monopolizing the use of violence to itself. The beginning of the insurgency has been variously explained as Ba'athist "dead-enders" scheming to regain power, foreign fanatics hoping to create a caliphate, Iraqi nationalists hating foreign occupation, even criminals released from Saddam's jails just making a living. All these explanations contain an element of truth but today, the violence feeds on itself, it has become its own explanation, its own cause and effect.
Sectarian violence, the murder of men just because their name is Omar or Ali would have been unthinkable a few years ago in a city where intermarriage between Sunni and Shia was common. Most Baghdadis I talk to can claim a relative from the other sect. But now, with nothing to prevent militia murder, torture and executions are so common they are barely newsworthy. Today, just to protect themselves, neighborhoods band together and form their own militias, which sometimes means they will kill interlopers who actually mean them no harm, occasionally leading to further retribution. Baghdad today demonstrates anarchy is no utopia. Without real state power, the police are just another militia, often weaker than others, trusted by none. In this Hobbesian world, the state cannot protect you, you must do that yourself.
It didn't have to be this way. Despite the growing evidence that this war was both unnecessary and built on lies, few Iraqis expected that the American invasion would culminate in disaster. Iraqis will tell you that the Americans took Baghdad so quickly back in 2003 essentially because the Iraqi Army did not fight. After 20 years of incompetent and tyrannical rule, few supported the regime; most hoped that the US invasion, by ending sanctions and plowing money into the Iraqi economy, would improve their lives. In upper middle class Baghdad neighborhoods, invading American soldiers were indeed greeted with flowers and sweets, just as Cheney and Wolfowitz had predicted. But the Americans did not provide security and little of the money we spent ended up in Iraqi hands.
A small example: after the invasion, the US military hired American truck drivers to bring supplies up from Kuwait. They paid them over $100,000 a year. If instead, we had hired Iraqis and paid them say $12,000 a year, we would have created a sizeable class of people who gained economically from the occupation; we would have bought their loyalty and the loyalty of their extended families. Instead we made profits for KBR, the omnipresent Halliburton subsidiary, hired by the US military to do everything from feed the troops to coordinate helicopter flights.
An American Lieutenant Colonel explained the insurgency in socio-economic terms "Unemployment is high. So they can't get jobs. So they can't get married. So they can't get laid. So you have all these young men with all this testosterone with no where to go." The American Army, unlike their leadership in Washington, seems to have learned this lesson. The buzzword among officers here is "non-kinetic warfare". They now realize that a purely military solution will not provide stability. We need to create a situation where Iraqis trust us and can see that the regime change will ultimately better their lives. This strategy probably would have worked back in 2003. Now, it is probably too late.
As a westerner, I may be among the safest people in Baghdad. Of course, if I strolled through the streets, within 15 minutes someone would call the insurgents or militia or criminals and I would be kidnapped, but as long as I stay behind walls, and travel protected by armed men, I am pretty safe. Ordinary Baghdadis live much more dangerous lives. They don't have my security detail.
I live in a villa, guarded 24 hours a day by three shifts of a dozen armed guards. The first protective barrier is a high wall and steel gates. Then blast walls (huge concrete bollards you see everywhere that will remain a major feature of Iraqi architecture for years to come), then another steel gate manned by Kalashnikov toting guards. Once you leave our compound, you will hit at minimum two private security checkpoints before you exit our neighborhood and arrive in the Iraq most Baghdadis live in.
On a short trip from our enclave to the green zone, I saw more guns than in most Hollywood movies. Iraqi police, private Iraqi security, western bodyguards manning machine guns on armored vehicles, US soldiers, Interior ministry militias in unmarked cars without any license plates, and random guys in civilian clothes, all armed and dangerous. I asked our driver "is it like this everywhere?" He said, "Downtown it is even worse".
A few minutes after we crossed it, a guard manning the main checkpoint into our upscale neighborhood was shot. At first we thought it was a drive-by shooting, a little worrisome but certainly not unexpected. Then we learned his assailant was another guard. Evidently, the shooter had been fired in a cost-cutting move and decided to take his vengeance on a former colleague who still had his job. Clearly, any recession in the security industry could be devastating to public safety. High unemployment combined with an armed population and no state guarantor of security is vicious cocktail. Already the Mahdi Army is splintering with freelance gangsters committing atrocities even Muktadar al Sadr cannot stomach.
All these checkpoints, all these security forces cannot deter suicide bombers. In fact they attract them. The three cafes within a five-minute walk from my house, all frequented by policemen who man the nearby checkpoints, have been bombed at least once. They are now closed. All that security cannot prevent one angry man with a bomb. Now the police have to bring their coffee from home.
The evidence from Baghdad confirms the second law of thermodynamics: blowing stuff up is easy, preventing it is much harder. In Kurdistan, or Amman, you travel in soft skin vehicles, walk around the markets, see fewer checkpoints and feel infinitely safer than you do here, surrounded by blast walls, guarded by armed men, traveling in armored cars, wearing body armor. A man from Mars, observing Baghdad could confuse cause and effect, and determine that all our security measures create the danger. Of course that is absurd and of course without security measures Baghdad today would be even bloodier but it is vital to remember that Amman and Erbil are safe not because of checkpoints and searches but rather no one has much of an interest in blowing things up.
This is rather relevant to western policy at home. Our leaders tell us if we want security from terrorist attacks we need to jettison some of our democratic rights and we need to attack the terrorist enemy wherever he lives. In fact, the only way to limit the terrorist threat is to reduce the incentive to become a terrorist. Anyone who lives in New York or London knows how easy it would be smuggle a bomb onto the subway. No security measures can stop someone from blowing up the subway; the best thing to do is to lessen the likelihood that any one would want to.
Thus, if his goal was to make Americans safer from terrorist attack, Bush's reaction to 9/11 is precisely the most wrongheaded imaginable. I was in New York that day and despite the shock and horror of the murderous attack, north of Houston Street, in most fundamental ways, the city was unaffected. Markets still stocked exotic produce, electricity and water still functioned, the Chinese restaurants still delivered, the subways still ran. As the press told us over and over again, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed fewer Americans that did 9/11, but by destroying much of the American Pacific battle fleet, the Japanese Navy seriously diminished American ability to project military power. 9/11 did no such thing. It did not threaten our way of life, it did not limit American military strength, it just killed many Americans, albeit fewer than have died in traffic accidents since then, albeit fewer than have died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit fewer than civilian Iraqis have died last month.
If Bush had said in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that despite the murder of 3000 Americans the terrorist threat remained trivial, that it would have no effect on American power or policy, that it was the action of pathetic amateurs whom we did not fear but would eventually catch and punish, he would have reduced the glamour Al Qaeda's action might have had for disaffected Muslim youth. Instead, by proclaiming a civilizational conflict, by making "the Global War on Terror" the centerpiece of his administration, by pursuing unnecessary wars against Muslim countries, he made terrorism seem much more appealing for those unemployed lonely losers.
I don't think George W Bush and Tony Blair actually are recruiting sergeants for Al Qaeda but if they were, they couldn't be doing a better job. Their policies seem almost designed to increase the pool of potential terrorists. Their hysteria increase the sense of drama, of purpose such enemies of the West might feel. Perhaps protecting us from terrorist attacks is not their most fervent goal. Perhaps increasing our feelings of fear further their deeper purposes. Either that or their incompetence is truly terrifying.