Continued from previous page power to the U.S., ought to know this best, insofar as Washington pursued this approach before, concluding that it would not succeed.” Peter Harling, Middle East project director with the International Crisis Group, says that Maliki — a Shiite — must do more to integrate Sunni Arabs in the Iraqi political process, negotiate local ceasefires with Sunni officials, and “cooperate with local actors to build an effective security strategy within their provinces and along the Iraq-Syria frontier” as the country’s prepares for next year’s parliamentary elections. “This time around, U.S. firepower would not be available, and Iraq’s volatile strategic environment would present far greater challenges than a weak state could hope to overcome,” Harling warned.“Maliki’s strength typically has resided in his ability to present himself as a national leader. He would be well advised to do so again.” Some 97 percent of Iraq’s 32 million inhabitants profess Islam; of these, roughly 65 percent are Shiite and 35 percent Sunni. But many Sunni leaders say they are marginalized in Iraq’s political order — a feeling of discontent that only seems to be growing stronger by the day. Yet Faily insists that “the primary issue is terrorism, not the Sunni-Shiite divide.The people of Iraq have shown again and again that they don’t want sectarianism.” To make his point, Faily pointed to the recent gubernatorial elections in Anbar, geographically the largest province in Iraq. “Extremists have not won elections, the moderates have won elections — which proves the issue of Iraq is way beyond that,” he told us. “Terrorist organizations are promoting, enticing and cajoling society to push away from democracy and the rule of law. Some people are not happy that our prime minister is a Shi’a. But the constitution allows for diversity; it doesn’t even
CReDIT: U.S. AIR FORCe PHOTO BY STAFF SGT. LUKe P. THeLeN
PHOTO: ROBeRT SMITH
baghdad has been the site of near-daily bombings and attacks. According to the united Nations, nearly 5,000 Iraqis have been killed since the start of 2013. Attacks used to primarily target Iraqi police officers and recruits but have spread to markets, mosques, school playgrounds, soccer fields and funerals.
mention the words Sunni or Shi’a. We want to coexist and live in harmony. However, we have to admit that the region itself is becoming more sectarian.” Ambassador Faily, who is both a Shiite and a Kurd, concedes that Iraq faces enormous obstacles as a struggling democracy, but that “the vast majority of incidents are not people shooting each other. It’s not a war mentality. It’s terrorist activity — car bombings of mosques and churches, terrorists blowing themselves up.”
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But Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, doesn’t buy the argument that terrorists are to blame for the dramatic uptick in bloodshed this year. “The violence is not simply the product of extremists and terrorist groups. Iraq’s growing violence is a product of the fact that Iraq is the scene of an ongoing struggle to establish a new national identity — one that can bridge across the deep sectarian divisions between its Shiites and Sunnis as well as the ethnic divisions between its Arabs and its Kurds and other minorities,” he argued in a report published Sept. 9. “Iraq does have great potential, and its political divisions and ongoing low-level violence do not mean it cannot succeed in establishing stability, security and a better life for its people. Iraq cannot succeed, however, by denying the problems it faces, the growing level of violence and the responsibility of Iraq’s current political leaders for its problems.” Faily said his government is confronting the country’s problems head on,“working on a number of fronts” along the road to reconciliation. “We’re trying to dry the wells which feed into terrorism. We have a great deal of appreciation for the effort, resources and money — and sweat and blood — of the Americans,” he told The Diplomat. American taxpayers forked over about $60 billion for reconstruction efforts in Iraq (in addition to roughly $1 trillion for the war itself). “We have also paid dearly ourselves,” the ambassador added. (Estimates of Iraqi deaths during the war range anywhere from 100,000 on the low end all the way up to 600,000.) “We are not letting anybody else do the fight,” Faily said. “We’re moving from a dictatorship to democracy, and this is costing us a great deal. What we are going through may take decades for other societies to go through.” It helps that Faily’s country has oil in the ground — lots of it. More than twice the size of Idaho, Iraq boasts the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves and is now the world’s third-largest petroleum exporter after Saudi Arabia and Russia, and ahead of Norway, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Every day, its oilfields produce 3.4 million barrels, of which 2.75 million barrels are exported. “We’re likely to substantially increase those numbers,” the ambassador said. “The IEA [International Energy Agency] has projected that in the worst scenario, we’ll be around 5 to 6 million barrels a day by the end of this decade. In the best scenario, we’re talking about 10 million barrels [per day] by 2025.”
Faily said Iraq is determined to avoid the “oil curse” suffered by countries that are totally dependent on petroleum exports. It’ll do so, he said, “by establishing our agricultural sector, so that we don’t need to import food. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in agriculture and infrastructure.” Oil exports alone account for $100 billion in annual revenues, or 95 percent of the total. That gives Iraq a fairly large safety cushion — and makes it a lucrative customer for U.S. defense contractors, construction companies and telecom firms. Faily said Iraq already enjoys one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Iraq’s GDP grew 9 percent in 2011 and 8.4 percent in 2012, according to the World Bank. In 2013, growth will clock in at 8.2 percent, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Yet corruption remains a huge issue. In early August, the United Nations revealed that more than 50 percent of the 31,000 civil servants participating in a recent U.N. survey said corruption is getting worse, not better. Despite billions of dollars invested in Iraq’s security forces, some Iraqis (mostly Sunnis) view the police as more predators than protectors, accused of bribery, extortion and even extrajudicial killings. And the fact that al-Qaeda insurgents easily overran Abu Ghraib prison in July, freeing hundreds of hardcore fighters, doesn’t exactly speak to the competence of Iraq’s security forces. Faily said corruption is an enduring legacy of the war that the government must root out.“One of the key reasons we have corruption is that it was inherited. That created a culture of corruption, and now we have more revenue from oil and the political situation is unstable.” But Faily’s government is pressing ahead in its bid to boost investment. “We’re already talking about spending $500 to $600 billion for redeveloping our infrastructure and repairing the devastation of the last 30 years,” he said. “We have quite a shopping list with the United States for military hardware.” And what a shopping list it is. Since July 25, reports Defense News, the Pentagon has notified Congress that it’s on the verge of selling Iraq billions of dollars worth of military equipment and maintenance support to help the country fight a resurgent al-Qaeda movement at home as well as a potentially explosive Kurdish independence movement in the north, Syria’s civil war to the west, and “the potential of a nuclear Iran along its eastern border.” Among the deals: a $2.4 billion package for 681 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and 40 truckmounted launchers, Sentinel radars and three Hawk anti-aircraft batteries with 216 Hawk missiles. There’s also an additional $1.9 billion in potential deals that include 50 Stryker infantry carriers, 12 helicopters and hundreds of millions of dolOctober 2013