Who's Really Running Iraq?

American politicians and journalists have repeatedly made the same mistake in Iraq over the past five years. This is to assume that the United States is far more in control of events in the country than has ever truly been the case. This was true after the fall of Saddam Hussein when President Bush and his viceroy in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, believed that what Iraqis thought and did could safely be ignored. Within months, guerrilla war against American forces was raging across central Iraq.

The ability of America to make unilateral decisions in Iraq is diminishing by the month, but the White House was still horrified to hear Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appearing to endorse Barack Obama's plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops over 16 months. This cut the ground from under the feet of John McCain, who has repeatedly declared that "victory" is at last within America's grasp because of the great achievements of "the Surge," the American reinforcements sent to Iraq in 2007 to regain control of Baghdad.

The success of "the Surge" is becoming almost received wisdom in the United States. This is strange, because if the U.S. strategy did win such an important victory, why do American generals need more soldiers, currently 147,000 of them, in Iraq than they did before "the Surge" started? But belief in this so-called victory is in keeping with the American tradition of seeing everything that happens in Iraq as being the result of actions by the United States alone. The complex political landscape of Iraq is ignored. U.S. commentators have never quite taken on board that there are not one but three wars being fought out in the country since 2003: The first is the war of resistance against the American occupation by insurgents from the Sunni Arab community; the second is the battle between the Sunni and Shia communities as to who should rule the Iraqi state in succession to Saddam Hussein; the third is a proxy war between the United States and Iran to decide who should be the predominant foreign power in Iraq. The real, though exaggerated, fall in violence in Iraq over the last year is a consequence of developments in all three of these wars, but they do not necessarily have much to do with "the Surge."

The reduction in violence is in any case only in comparison to the bloodbath of 2005-'07, when Baghdad and central Iraq were ravaged by a sectarian civil war. There were 554 Iraqis killed in the fighting in June 2008, which is only a third of the figure for the same month a year earlier. This is progress, but it still makes Baghdad the most dangerous city in the world. Asked on television about the security situation, Iraqis often respond that "things are getting better," and so they undoubtedly are, but people usually mean that things are better than the terror of two years ago. Foreign television correspondents laud the improved security in the Iraqi capital and are pictured apparently strolling down a peaceful and busy street. What the television viewer does not see are the armed guards standing behind the cameraman, without whom the correspondents would not dare set foot outside their heavily guarded offices.

I do drive around Baghdad without armed guards and have always done so. But I sit in the back of a car with an Arabic newspaper and a jacket or shirt on a hanger masking the window next to me. I have a second car behind me in contact with us by field radios to make sure that we are not being followed. It is true that security is better, but this can be overstated. Each district in Baghdad is sealed off by concrete walls. There are checkpoints every few hundred yards. Sunni and Shia do not visit each other's areas unless they have to. The best barometer for the real state of security in Baghdad is the attitude of Iraqi refugees, particularly the 2.4 million people who fled to Jordan and Syria. Though often living in miserable conditions and with their money running out, the refugees are generally not coming home to Iraq, and when they do, they seldom return to houses from which they had been forced to flee. If they do try to do so, the results are often fatal. Baghdad has few mixed areas left and today is a 75 to 80 percent Shia city. The demographic balance in the capital has shifted against the Sunni, and this is unlikely to change. The battle for Baghdad was won by the Shia and was ending even before "the Surge" began in February 2007.