Like a Country Without Oxygen by Fareed Zakaria

May 16, 2005 U.S. Edition

Like a Country Without Oxygen
One of our security guards decided things were getting too risky, so he sent his family to Jordan. They were robbed on the highway.
By Fareed Zakaria

It might seem obvious to say that Baghdad is in bad shape, but that's the first thing I noticed when I was there recently. I don't mean the effects of bombs and mortars. I mean it just looks shabby—the poorest oil-rich capital I've ever seen. It reminded me more of a South Asian or African city than the capital of what was for decades the world's second largest petroleum exporter. Saddam Hussein built grand palaces for himself, more than 50, including one in Tikrit that reportedly has over 250 buildings. He made sure that there were excellent roads so that his Army could move freely across the country. And that's it. But there is little evidence of the oil wealth anywhere else. Add to Saddam's ruinous reign 13 years of sanctions, three wars and an insurgency, and you have a country that is truly devastated.

Moving around the city also brought home a comment from Harvard's Joseph Nye. "Security is like oxygen," he used to say. "You tend not to notice it until you begin to lose it, but once that occurs there is nothing else that you will think about." In Iraq today, everyone thinks about security. That's especially true of Americans, other Westerners and anyone involved with the Iraqi government. The insurgency targets them specifically and brutally.

The week that I was there began with the car bombing of an American aid worker, Marla Ruzicka. Two of the people I met with—the then Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, and the Sunni leader Mishan al-Jabbouri—were targets of assassination attempts. The day before I left, three of our next-door neighbors, highly trained security professionals, were gunned down on the road to the airport.

Security is also the paramount concern of ordinary Iraqis. They don't face much of a threat from insurgents, though there is some targeting of civilian Shiites, but they live in an atmosphere of general lawlessness in which criminals and gangs flourish. A few days before I arrived, one of our security guards (an Iraqi) decided that things were getting too risky for his family (his mother, father and sister), and he had them pack their bags and arranged for them to be driven to Jordan. Along the way, they were stopped on the highway and robbed of all their possessions.

This lack of security is an obstacle to all progress in Iraq. Reconstruction efforts falter, institution-building takes a back seat and anti-corruption efforts fail as the government centralizes and keeps on a war footing.

For much of the first year of the insurgency, the United States insisted that it could be handled purely by military means. "Bring them on," President George W. Bush said in July 2003. "We have the force necessary to deal with the security situation." The administration's oft-expressed view was that the violence was the work of a small group of dead-enders. Later, officials claimed it was fueled by a handful of foreign terrorists. They refused to accept that there was a political dimension to the insurgency, which fed off the anger of Sunnis as they saw themselves being displaced from power, disbanded and de-Baathified.

The United States learned the hard way that military means alone wouldn't work. It was mightily helped in its political outreach by Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who opened up some communication with insurgents. This strategy worked at dividing the insurgency and defeating it in Fallujah and Samarra, among other places.

The link between the political situation and the violence can be seen most clearly in recent events. The elections produced a downward trend in the violence. There was hope of a political breakthrough, especially given that the Shia announced that they would give Sunni leaders important posts in the new government. But for the last month negotiations were deadlocked, incoming Shia politicians talked about purging the military, and Sunnis worried about their future. Violence spiked.

This is unfortunate because there is good evidence that the insurgency was losing steam and that Sunnis were joining the mainstream political movement. Important clerics have urged Sunnis to join the Army and police force. Political parties have said that they would contest the next election. And the rash of suicide bombings, often killing ordinary Iraqis, make the insurgents less and less popular.

Now it is the United States that is preaching the message of inclusion to the new government. Donald Rumsfeld pressed the incoming regime on this when he visited Baghdad last month. Yet it is not simply a matter of including Sunnis in the government, Ayad Allawi told me. What's important are the policies the government follows. If Iraqis engage in de-Baathification, displacing people from the ministries and other such moves, it won't matter if there are Sunni ministers. They will simply be discredited.

But the United States has more limited control over the new government in Iraq than people realize. One of the most important Shia politicians, Hussein Shahristani, responded to Rumsfeld's advice by saying, "Thank you, but Iraqis know better what to do." An American official in Baghdad told me that his greatest fear was that the new government would have to learn from its own mistakes. "Much better to learn from ours," he said.