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Tribe and State in Post-Ba'athist Iraq by Jakub Wrzesniewski A

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Tribe and State in Post-Ba'athist Iraq by Jakub Wrzesniewski A Tribe and State in Post-Ba‘athist Iraq By Jakub Wrzesniewski A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor John Zysman, chair Professor Stephen Cohen Professor Steven Weber Fall 2014 Tribe and State in Post-Ba‘athist Iraq © 2014 By Jakub Wrzesniewski Abstract Tribe and State in Post-Ba‘athist Iraq by Jakub Wrzesniewski Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Berkeley Professor John Zysman, Chair In 2003, an erstwhile successful state apparatus – the security party-state of Ba‘athist Iraq – collapsed as a result of the US-led Operation Iraqi Freedom. The breakdown of the state apparatus was then exacerbated by early occupational policy, which swept away the foundations of both the armed forces and the civil services. As a result, Iraq was faced with a condition of near-total anarchy, as US occupational institutions proved themselves unequal to replacing the state structures they had eliminated. That governance vacuum enabled non-state coercive actors to compete for authority in the shadow of the US occupation. In much of the country, the result was protracted, multi-sided struggle, but in al Anbar tribal leaders were able to establish themselves as the supreme authorities, carving out a tribal quasi-state in the governorate. This dissertation examines the process of state failure and the nature of politics in the absence of stable state structures, and in doing so concludes that the institutional configuration of the non- state coercive power competitors is the crucial deciding factor separating winners from losers. In al Anbar, it was two characteristics of the tribes - their hierarchical authority, forged out of long- term historical forces, and the more recent legacy of collusion with the Ba'athist state in the two decades prior to the US-led invasion. The central government in Iraq, like the proverbial stranger in the Alps, has been buffeted by blows from all directions, with unsure governance even in its core territories, while the tribes of western Iraq have only each other as significant rivals. The paper concludes with thoughts on generalizing this framework beyond al Anbar to the other regions of Iraq, and to other failed states. 1 for TW and PW, my first and finest teachers and JZ, professor, mentor and friend i Table of Contents Abstract 1 Introduction iii Acknowledgements xv PART I 1 Chapter 1: State 2 Chapter 2: Tribe 23 PART II 48 Preface to the Empirics 49 Chapter 3: The Anarchic Environment 52 Chapter 4: Origins of Iraqi Tribalism 68 Chapter 5: The Emergence of the al Anbar Tribal Quasi-State 92 Conclusion 115 Bibliography 140 ii Introduction The 2003 invasion of Iraq by US and coalition forces triggered the collapse of the Ba’athist state that had ruled the country since its seizure of power in a 1968 coup. As a result of the invasion, the Ba’athist party-state and security apparatus broke down completely, creating a security vacuum, into which the entire country was pulled.1 In the Kurdish north, this vacuum permitted the regional government of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to consolidate its rule over the region. Elsewhere, in areas where the Ba’athists had maintained control beyond the first Gulf War, a general breakdown in authority ensued, creating an emergent tide of anarchy which US occupational forces proved unable to master. Al Anbar, in Sunni-dominated Western Iraq, is the largest single governorate of the country, occupying a third of its land area and containing a largely urban population of 2.5 million. There, sheikhs succeeded in exploiting traditional structures of tribal authority by organizing themselves and pooling the coercive resources at their disposal (manpower, weapons and capital) to assert their authority over the territory. 2 In their success, they proved capable of excluding rival claimants (the central government in Baghdad, US occupational forces, al Qaeda insurgents) to the territory, of organizing local administration over civil matters, and of negotiating with outside powers. The result was a tribal polity that operated with de facto sovereignty over al Anbar from at least 2006 onwards, despite the territory’s formal inclusion as part of Iraq. The leadership of 1 Iraq’s descent into chaos occurred in plain sight, and has been covered extensively in a variety of media, including journalistic non-fiction (Packer, The Assassins’ Gate), documentary film (Ferguson, No End in Sight), and, least vividly, academic reports (Stansfield, Accepting Realities in Iraq). For a valiant attempt at quantitative measurement of post-invasion upheaval, see Baker, Iraq as a Failed State: A Six Month Progress Report. 2 A remarkable unanimity exists among all the major actors — US occupational forces, the Iraqi government, tribal leaders, even al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — on the general facts regarding the al Anbar awakening. My first-hand experiences with tribal leaders match the accounts found in McWilliams and Wheeler, Al-Anbar Awakening, a two- volume collection of interviews with the US and Iraqi leadership in al Anbar during the rise of the Salvation Council. A remarkably similar story is told, albeit with inverted value judgments, in Al-Furqan’s Media – Spring Of Al-Anbar #1, a series of youtube videos compiled and uploaded onto youtube as Salafist propaganda. iii tribal authority stabilized the province, allowing American occupation officials and the elected Iraqi government to reconstitute the central state sufficiently for US withdrawal in 2012. Following the US withdrawal, much to the chagrin of both the central government in Baghdad and the United States (which had hoped for an orderly transition towards a more regular state form, with a monopoly on legitimate violence enjoyed by the central government), the tribes maintained their preeminent role in the governorate. Currently al Anbar is embroiled in a civil war between rival tribal factions with uncertain prospects for which side — Ahmed abu Risha’s Awakening Council, aligned with the central government, or Ali Hatem al Suleiman’s Tribal Revolutionaries supported by ISIS — will emerge to control the territory. (A further discussion of the current state of the conflict can be found in the conclusion.) Successful Tribes, Failed State The concentration of organized political authority in the hands of tribal leaders challenges a number of preconceptions concerning traditional forms of authority and the stabilization of security in post-state collapse scenarios. First, the dramatic collapse of the Ba’athist state and the powerlessness of its residual institutions (provincial governments, local police) to play a stabilizing role in cooperation with US occupational forces challenges assumptions about the preeminence and durability of modern state structures of authority.3 Theories of modernization present the modern rationalized state as the ultimate form of political organization, superior to any traditional form in its efficiency at deploying coercion to defend its sovereignty and project power internally. Post-occupation planning on the part of the US occupation forces (though not unchallenged) relied heavily on using those existing structures of the modern Iraqi state (once purged of the Ba’athist leadership) to aid in governing the country.4 This proved to be a fatally flawed strategy. In fact, the cadres and institutions that ended up playing the leading roles in organizing coercion in post-conflict Iraq emerged not from inside the former state apparatus but from outside, from social groups unassociated with formal government structures.5 3 This perspective derives from 19th-century social science and philosophy of history, with their emphasis on progress and teleological political and social development. While among contemporary scholars there are those who evince greater skepticism about the inevitability of particular patterns of development, it is only necessary to mention Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man to note the persistent influence of convergence and modernization theory. 4 That is, to the extent that any serious attempts at planning were made. Fallows, Blind Into Baghdad argues that no real efforts were made to plan for different political or security contingencies out of political expediency and a discomfort with predictions. 5 After the outbreak of the insurgency, US officials identified Ibrahim Izzat al Douri, a senior security official in the Ba’athist regime, as its leader. Though he likely had some role in the insurgency, it paled in comparison to that of al Zarqawi (a Jordanian civilian, a paradigmatic “foreign fighter”) and al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his influence dwindled to his ancestral village. Reuters, “Iraqi Troops Close in on Saddam Ally Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri.” More recently, he seems to have staged a revival through the unlikely vehicle of the Freemason-like Naqshabandi Order. Ford, “The Fractured Caliphate.” Nouri al Maliki and his cadres emerged from the Iran-based al Da’wa Shi’a party, iv Second, traditional leaders significantly over-performed expectations in terms of their ability to compete politically, to deploy coercion against rivals, and to claim authority over their whole territory. The experience of political and social modernization elsewhere in the world has been the story of the marginalization of traditional social structures.6 In the West, the only conceivable analogue to tribal governance are the vestiges of the Scottish clan system, which survives exclusively as a type of cultural nostalgia, bereft of any political substantiation.7 Similarly, in other regions where modern states supplanted traditional forms of government — East Asia and the former Soviet Union — tribal structures were effectively marginalized, moving irrevocably from the realm of politics and society into folklore.8 Third, the capacity of tribal leaders to stabilize their home regions can be put forth as a potential alternative to the dominant strategies of re-establishing security under conditions of state collapse.
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