U.S. Army Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, is a historian who served as an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He is also author of Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance (Hoover Institution Press), a thorough account of what’s happened in Iraq since President Obama’s December 2011 withdrawal of American troops. The book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of Iranian influence in Baghdad, or how the Islamic State came to be. Recently I spoke with Rayburn about his book and Iraq today.
What’s happened in Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal three years ago?
In 2011-2012, then Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki fractured the moderate Sunni political coalition that had come so close to unseating him in the 2010 elections. He used terrorism charges to sideline Iraq’s Sunni vice president and several other Sunni leaders, which created broad Sunni opposition to the government. But because Maliki had fractured the Sunni political center, the leadership of this popular opposition migrated to Sunni radicals like ISIS and the former Ba’ath, who stepped up their militant campaign inside Iraq.
At the same time, the Syrian civil war drew in all Iraq’s main political factions—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—on opposite sides, making it only a matter of time before the civil war spilled back into Iraq. That is what happened in spring 2013, when widespread Sunni demonstrations against Maliki escalated into violence between Sunnis and Maliki’s security forces. By summer 2013, the Sunni militant opposition was being led by ISIS, which had also become the strongest faction in the Syrian rebellion.
Finally, since 2011, the Iranian regime’s militant representatives, who had been chased underground by the U.S. military, returned to Baghdad and began operating in the open again, both as militant groups and as political factions. Iranian political influence grew stronger than ever, especially through Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.
You write that Maliki was a huge problem as prime minister, his sectarian and pro-Iranian policies. Could U.S. policymakers, from both Bush and Obama administrations, have managed him better?
In my view, we made the mistake of signaling enduring support for Maliki the man rather than for the Iraqi constitutional system. By 2010, the biggest threat to Iraq’s democratic system was Maliki himself, yet we effectively signaled to Iraqis that we would continue to support Maliki personally rather than support whomever the democratic process brought to the PM position. Maliki lost the election of 2010 but was able to hold onto power, after which he was able to co-opt or sideline the other democratic institutions and nullify the checks and balances built into Iraq’s constitution.
Will the new Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi make any difference? Or is he, too, part of the pro-Iranian security apparatus in Iraq?
By all accounts Abadi does not have the authoritarian bent that Maliki has, which indicates that he will be more inclusive in his decision-making. He also spent much of his adult life in the west and reportedly understands the west much better than Maliki or some other Shia sectarians do, which means he is unlikely to share the Iranians’ anti-western worldview. So far he has taken a number of positive steps to try to reform the security sector and undo some of the unhealthy consolidation of power that Maliki had effected.
Abadi’s problem, though, is the strength of Iranian influence in Iraq. Maliki was much more politically powerful than Abadi is now, yet Maliki could not really resist the Iranians when their interests diverged from his. Abadi is even weaker relative to the Iranians than Malilki was.
Where did the Islamic State come from and should we have seen this issue developing?
The Islamic State is simply a continuation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which by 2010 became a fusion of Zarqawi-type salafi jihadists and former Ba’athist military and intelligence operatives. We can see both salafis and former Ba’athists among ISIS’s top leaders.
The Islamic State’s emergence was not a surprise to people who were watching Iraq after 2011, both inside and outside the government. The first time I noted that they were regenerating into a serious threat was in the fall of 2011, when they stepped up their attacks on mainstream Sunni politicians and the leaders of the Sunni Awakening. They gathered momentum after U.S. troops left Iraq, and by January 2013 their followers could be seen in public in Fallujah and elsewhere. In summer 2013 they pulled off a huge jailbreak at Abu Ghraib that flooded their ranks, and within months they were conquering territory in both Syria and Iraq.
Can Iran help the administration solve the Islamic State problem?
Iran has thus far played a very destabilizing role in the Iraq conflict. The Iranian regime’s militant proxies have responded to the Islamic State by carrying out sectarian “death squad” activities against the Sunni population in some contentious mixed-sect areas, especially in the greater Baghdad region. Until the Iranians can be forced to stop this kind of activity, relations between Sunni and Shia Iraqis will continue to deteriorate.
Is it in US interests for Iraq to stay unified or are we better off if it’s divided between Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions?
The breakup of Iraq into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish enclaves would be a very messy process, because the populations are mixed in so many places, and the dividing lines would be fought over intensely. It’s also likely that the resulting enclaves would then fight amongst themselves over natural resources and disputed territories. It would be like the separation of India and Pakistan or the breakup of Yugoslavia, except that it would likely be more bloody than Yugoslavia and would likely spill over into the surrounding region. Everyone in the region knows this.
On the flip side, keeping Iraq unified will be extremely difficult. The Iraqi state doesn’t govern much of the Sunni lands of western and northern Iraq, and it would take a great deal to reintegrate those areas into the state. Perhaps what is most feasible is to move toward federal regions in Sunni areas, using the Kurdistan region as a partial model. But for that to happen would require a lot of political work that Iraqis aren’t doing right now. So on the whole, I am pessimistic about Iraq’s chances of remaining intact, but I am horrified about how badly its breakup could become.
The views Colonel Rayburn expresses here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense.
