From Dictatorship to Democracy: under Erasure

Abeer Shaheen

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2015

©2015

Abeer Shaheen

All rights reserved

ABSTRACT

From Dictatorship to Democracy: Iraq under Erasure

Abeer Shaheen

This dissertation examines the American project in Iraq between 1991 and 2006. It studies the project’s conceptual arc, shifting ontology, discourses, institutions, practices, and technologies in their interrelatedness to constitute a new Iraq. It is an ethnography of a thixotropic regime of law and order in translation; a circuit through various landscapes and temporalities to narrate the 1991 , the institutionalization of sanctions and inspection regimes, material transformations within the American , the 2003 war and finally the nation- building processes as a continuous and unitary project. The dissertation makes three central arguments: First, the 2003 war on Iraq was imagined through intricate and fluid spaces and temporalities. Transforming Iraq into a democratic regime has served as a catalyst for transforming the American military organization and the international legal system. Second, this project has reordered the spatialized time of Iraq by the imposition of models in translation, reconfigured and reimagined through a realm of violence. These models have created in Iraq a regime of differential mobility, which was enabled through an ensemble of experts, new institutions and calculative technologies. Third, this ensemble took Iraq as its object of knowledge and change rendering Iraq and Iraqis into a set of abstractions within the three spaces under examination: the space of American military institutions; the space of international legality within the United Nations; and, lastly, the material space of .

Part one examines the pre-invasion political, military, and legal practices that enabled the

2003 invasion and the so-called nation-building projects that ensued. In the American military space, the dissertation focuses on the 1991 and the 2003 military campaigns and operations and traces both campaigns in Iraq in terms of discourses of spatialization and temporalization to historicize the emergences of the so-called ‘revolution in military affairs’ and its progression to a full-fledged theory of cyber-war renowned as network-centric warfare (NCW). In the UN space, this dissertation studies the forms of sovereignty that emerged through the political, legal, and military processes of the 1990s and early 2000s. The 1991 military campaign; post-1991 deployment of the United Nations’ authority in order to establish, as an institution, the sanctions and inspection regimes; the 2003 invasion itself; and, finally, the re-siting of the Iraqi Archive:

These events are the work of various technologies of violence and control which led to extensive asymmetrical movements of people and things in and about Iraq resituating the sovereignty of the state not within the territorial borders of Iraq but at the level of the globe.

Part two studies the post-invasion regime of law and order imposed by the American occupation, its role in reconfiguring the architectural and social space of Baghdad, the identity of the city’s population, and the persistent crisis in which the city was subsumed. The Iraqi legal system was flattened and remade with speed and intensity as a prerequisite for a new democratic

Iraq creating a new set of laws to be administered by reorganized government institutions, and a new lexicon of political categories that has divided the city’s population and mapped them onto the divided city-scape. In Bagdad’s urban space, architectural barriers, empowered by new technologies of surveillance, targeting and identifications, have become a permanent element of the post-invasion system as spatial signifiers of law and order.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

LIST OF GRAPHS, IMAGES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS: ...... iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS: ...... v

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION: …………………………………………………………………………….… vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: ...... viii

DEDICATION: ...... xii

INTRODUCTION: ...... 1

PART ONE: IRAQ UNMADE ...... 15

CHAPTER ONE: Technological Warfare and the Omission of Human Content……………………………... 16

1.1. Introduction: The of 73 Easting to Where? ...... 16

1.2. Models in Translation: Transforming the U.S. Military Organization ...... 21

1.3. Transformation in a Historical Perspective and the on Iraq: ...... 27

1.4. Vacillation between the Laboratory and the Field: The Making of Network Centric Warfare ...... 37

1.5. Atmospheric Explication from the Virtual to the Real: The Wars on Iraq ...... 51

1.6. The Making of Network-Centric Warfare and the Unmaking of the Human Element ...... 63

CHAPTER TWO: Iraq: The Making of Necro-Sovereignty ...... 71

2.1. Introduction: Boundaries Displaced ...... 71

2.2. Theories of Sovereignty ...... 80

2.3. Concatenated Spaces of Necro-Sovereignty ...... 87

2.4. United Nations in Iraq: Legitimacy of Violence ...... 100

2.5. The Iraqi Archive between Dispersal and Fragmentation ...... 120

2.5.1. A Violent Itinerary of Documents ...... 126 i

2.6. Conclusion ...... 134

PART TWO: IRAQ DEMOCRATIZED ...... 136

Post-Invasion Baghdad: Scene I ………………………………………………………………………………….137

CHAPTER THREE: Redefining the Legal Space of Baghdad ...... 142

3.1. Who Governs? Which Law and Order? ...... 142

3.2. The CPA Engineers Law and Order! ...... 148

3.3. Institutions of the New Iraq Pronounce Sectarianism ...... 153

3.3.1. De-Ba‘athify and Rule: Establishing the Higher National De-Ba‘athification Commission ...... 157

3.3.2. Constitutionalizing Violence: A Spatialized Time of the New Constitution of Iraq ...... 167

3.3.2.1. Constitution-Making Process Inscribes Sectarianism ...... 176

3.3.2.2. The Break Down of the Participatory Constitutional Process – Sunnis Were No More Welcome ...... 192

3.3.2.3. A Failed Modus-Vivendi ...... 196

3.4. Conclusion ...... 198

CHAPTER FOUR: A Nation at War: Disfigured “Iraqi-ness” ...... 200

4.1. Insurgency not Resistance ...... 205

4.2. Insurgency in a Political Perspective ...... 209

4.3. Institutionalized Violence of Counterinsurgency and the Fetish for Legitimacy ...... 213

4.4. Baghdad: “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” ...... 238

4.5. Deferred Time and the Recalcitrant Space of the Counterinsurgency: A Successful Failure! ...... 248

CHAPTER FIVE: Transparent Baghdad: Scene II ...... 260

5.1. Prologue ...... 262

5.2. What Has Become of Baghdad! ...... 274

5.3. Reflections on Technologies of Law and Order ...... 283

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CONCLUSION: Logistics of Violence ...... 288

BIBLIOGRAPHY: ...... 295

APPENDIX: ...... 330

Document 1: A Letter to the Archivist of the on May 9, 2002...... 330

Document 2: Letter from National Archive at College Park in response to the DIA request to destroy the captured

Iraqi Archive in 1991, July 29, 2002...... 331

Document 3: Foreign Internal Defense Manual – Civilian Self-Defense Forces, 2003, D-1………………………….334

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LIST OF GRAPHS, IMAGES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS:

Figure 1: Real or simulated battlefield? ______19

Figure 2: Table of selected munitions employed in the 1991 war, January, 17 - Februrary 28, 1991 ______54

Figure 3: No-Fly Zone map, Iraq ______60

Figure 4: Smoking rises above burning oil field, March 2004 ______200

Figure 5: Initiated attacks against the Coalition and its partners as of April 2007 ______202

Figure 6: Blast walls, Balad Airbase, March 2011 ______229

Figure 7: Baghdad, Iraq, ethnic composition in 2003 ______270

Figure 8: Baghdad, Iraq, ethnic composition by the end of 2009 ______271

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS:

ADST Advanced Distributed Simulation Technology BRCC Ba‘ath Arab Socialist Party Regional Command Collection CMATT Coalition Military Assistance Training Team CPA Coalition Provisional Authority CPATT Coalition Police Assistance Training Team DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DAT Digital Audio Tape DIA Defense Intelligence Agency DMG Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, Inc. DOCEX Document Exploitation Project DOD Department of Defense DSMA Decision Systems Management Agency GZ KDP Kurdish Democratic Party HNDC Higher National de-Ba‘athification Commission IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency ICDC Iraqi Civil Defense ICG International Crisis Group IGC IDA Institute for Defense Analysis IDC Iraqi de-Ba‘athification Council IIA Iraqi Interim Authority IMF Iraq Memory Foundation INA Iraq National Accord INA Iraqi National Alliance INC IRDC Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council ISC Iraq Sanctions Committee LGB Laser-Guided Bomb MNF-I Multi-National Force–Iraq MNSTC-I Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq NCW Network Centric Warfare NIDS North Iraq Dataset PGM Precision-Guided Munition PUK Patriotic Union of Kurdistan OIP Office of the Iraq Programme OFP Oil-for-Food Programme ORHA Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance ONA Office of Net Assessment OOTW Operations other than War RMA Revolution in Military Affairs SCIRI Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq SC Security Council SCR Security Council Resolution v

SIMNET Simulator Networking Project SOF Special Operation Forces UAV Unmanned Aerial Vehicle UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNAMI United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNMOVIC United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission UNSCOM United Nations Special Commission USAID United States Agency for International Development CENTCOM Central Command WMD Weapon of Mass Destruction VEREX Ad Hoc Group of Governmental Experts

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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION:

This dissertation is intended to address both specialist and general readers who are interested in

Iraq between 1991 and 2006. Therefore, I have tried to ensure that readers with little knowledge of the historical period under investigation can follow the arguments of the dissertation by providing historical details and technical background whenever possible. Moreover, I have avoided the use of terms as much as possible and translated them when used in the text and footnotes. I have used common English forms of names and places whenever possible and tried to transliterate uncommon names, places and resources according to the transliteration guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Generally, the transliteration reflects the standard written Arabic, not the Iraqi dialect

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Writing this dissertation has been a difficult task that would not have been possible without my mentor Timothy Mitchell who has guided me through the process. He has been not only a source of support and encouragement throughout the writing of the dissertation but also an intellectual whose work has immensely influenced and broadened its conceptual space. He has provided me the scholarly atmosphere which has made writing the story of death and wars that fills the following pages not just a confrontation with human agony and helplessness but also a struggle against the dominant metanarratives whose truth was forged in violence.

Muhsin al-Musawi has been my thinking conscience, who allowed me the time and space to grasp the extent of the destruction that has befallen Iraq. He dedicated time to listen to my ideas and to read the drafts of the dissertation as I expanded and unfolded my arguments. He was kind enough to introduce me to Iraqi intellectual circles where I have had the opportunity to engage with scholars on Iraq who had provided useful feedback on some chapters of the dissertation. From Partha Chatterjee, I have learned invaluable skills. He provided generous insights to the most challenging chapters of the dissertation. His continuous support and willingness to accommodate me at all times has been a source of comfort throughout the entire process. Above all, his work constitutes an indispensable resource on which this dissertation draws. As one of my first mentors at MESAAS, Sudipta Kaviraj has always been generous with his time and knowledge. This dissertation owes to him its methodology. Although late to the process, Ann Laura Stoler has been a guiding role throughout the writing of the dissertation.

Each time writing became an unsurmountable challenge, her work provided me a wider, more flexible analytical space to navigate my thoughts. As a friend, she has made every effort to be available at all times to listen and advise. This dissertation has grown from my intellectual viii

engagement and interaction with these outstanding scholars whether in the classroom, departmental colloquium or during office hours. Each has inspired the intellectual and political project at the core of this dissertation. I hope it will be a useful contribution to their own work no matter how small.

At the Hoover Institution, where a portion of the Iraqi archive has resided since 2009, archivist Ahmad Dhaia provided immeasurable assistance navigating the digitized though not yet catalogued files. Ahmad was available to answer my questions and to guide me even while he was away from the Institution. I extend my thanks to the Hoover Institution librarians who accommodated me during my archival research there. I am indebted to the UN Reference Team of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations Headquarters in New York who helped me locate many records related to the sanctions and inspection regimes.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the generosity of a number of other institutions. The Open Society Foundation had generously supported the largest part of my initial research period. The department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at

Columbia University funded two summer research trips to archives in the United States. The

Middle East Institute at Columbia University partially funded my last year of research and writing in 2013.

The love and support of countless friends has assisted me to put this dissertation together from the initial research questions to the final drafts. Aditi Surie has always been a great interlocutor and has discussed, read, and commented on several drafts despite being immersed in her own field research. In the most difficult moments of writing, Casey Primel developed an intimate familiarity with my frustration and writing dilemmas. His feedback helped improve the

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direction of particular arguments. His reading and editing of earlier drafts made incisive contributions to this dissertation. I am indebted to all my colleagues at MESAAS who have read and commented on earlier drafts during colloquia and workshops.

Without Maria Jagodka, this dissertation would not have been the same. Not only has she read and edited parts of this dissertation but she has also been my soulmate witnessing many moments of tears and despair. I am thankful for her unconditional love and support. Anna

Barskaya has been the most loving and generous friend over the years. She has kept me company for many long nights of writing in the library with an unprecedented care and sweetness that got me through moments of crisis.

Since I met him, Taoufiq Ben Amor has been my best friend and mentor who has not spared an opportunity to offer his support when it was most needed. Jessica Rechtschaffer constantly has had the right answer to all my bureaucratic questions and always offered solutions for emerging problems. She cooked dinners, fed me, and made me feel at home. Marta Santos has been my window to the world: she took me to dinners and showed me places. Her smile and positive attitude have been a constant source of comfort. Ouijdane Absi’s encouragement and support made the marathon of the last few months possible. Matan Cohen has been the breaker of solicitude: his text messages and regular visits to my library working station were invaluable at the most isolating moments. Ellen Cohen has made legal bureaucracy more tolerable with her welcoming smile and extremely professional yet supportive answers and advice. Since I joined

MESAAS, the team of the Arabic program has been a great source of love and encouragement. I am forever grateful for my friendships with each of these astounding friends who made the process less alienating and more tolerable.

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Finally, no words of thanks can be enough for my family. My parents, Nabeela and

Abdullatif Shaheen, put the pen in my hand and taught me that the sky is the limit. They have been an endless source of love and support throughout my graduate career enduring my absence for years without complaints. It is my sisters and brothers: Ola, Saed, Abdullah, and Shorouq who make life worth living. Without their unquestionable love and ceaseless encouragement, this dissertation would not have been accomplished.

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DEDICATION:

For the children of Iraq who were claimed by the wars …

For the children of Iraq who survived and are still able to dream

For my family

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INTRODUCTION: I can almost hear death saying: “I am what I am and haven’t changed at all. I am but a postman.” If death is a postman, then I receive his letters every day. I am the one who opens carefully the bloodied and torn envelopes. I am the one who washes them, who removes the stamps of death and dries and perfumes them, mumbling what I don’t entirely believe in. Then I wrap them carefully in white so they may reach their final reader – the grave. But the letters are piling up, Father! Tenfold more than what you used to see in the span of a week now pass before me in a day or two. If you were alive, Father, would you say that that is fate and God’s will? I wish you were here so I could leave Mother with you and escape without feeling guilty. You were heavily armed with faith, and that made your heart a castle. My heart, by contrast, is an abandoned house whose windows are shattered and doors unhinged. Ghosts play inside it, and the winds wail. - Sinan Antoon, excerpt from The Corpse Washer (2013)1

In 2003 the United States and its “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq. Some explain the war as an ideological project designed to bring democracy to Iraq as a model for democratic transition in the Middle East. Others explain it as a war for oil and economic dominance.2 On a rhetorical level, the American project represented itself as a project of democratization and liberation. From a broader historical perspective, the Middle East has been a continual site of oil- driven war and coups d’état orchestrated, if not led by, Western colonial and imperial powers.

Both narratives provide valid arguments that on their own partially explain aspects of the 2003 invasion and the subsequent war of occupation. Yet, they both sharply reduce the American project in Iraq to either a project for democratization or a project for oil exploitation. Equally

1 Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 3.

2 Let alone historical and theoretical accounts that reduced the 2003 moment into an economic-driven war – i.e. oil and economic liberalization, 76% of Russians, 75% of French, 54% of Germans, and 44% of British believed that the desire to control Iraq’s oil lied behind the 2003 war, according to the Pew poll. See J.F.O. McAllister, “Mad at America,” Time, January 20, 2003, accessed December 1, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2056217,00.html.

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problematic in these narratives is the linearized time of the project. Each of these narratives starts the clock with the 2003 invasion and marks their termination with the failure of either project to materialize: For Iraqis no democracy and, for the United States, no oil.

Yet, the war was much more than a means to an end. The sheer enormity of the 2003 war; the verisimilitude of its technological performativity and of its emancipatory discourse; the infringing post-invasion system of law and order; the disposability of the population; and the virtualization and de-territorialization of cities under siege: All of these characteristics hint at the significance of the war not in its purported finalities but in its duration and after-effects. Current narratives of the invasion and occupation are unable to account for the transformations wrought by the events outside the narrow confines of achieved ends.

This dissertation takes two critical moves away from the standard narratives of the and the occupation. Given the events building up to the invasion as well as the so-called nation building project that unfolded in its aftermath, neither arc of the standard narrative adequately accounts for the initial decision to invade Iraq; the overall strategy and techniques through which the invasion was carried out; the intricate and fluid spaces and times in which the war was imagined; or the historical trajectory that has delimited the possible futures of the Iraqi population. The first critical move aims to explore the occupation and the nation- building project which underwrote it: its specificity and peculiarity, its shifting topology, its pliability, and the interdependence of its elements. The second critical move investigates the spatial and temporal markers of the project. Accordingly, this dissertation maps the spatialized time of Iraq governed by a regime of differential mobility rendering it both joint yet severed, mobilizing yet incarcerating. This was accomplished through calculative technologies that

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enabled or were enabled through the conduct of war and occupation, reducing Iraq into an accumulation of abstractions – an abstract space of incarcerated cities and population, an abstract time of accelerated things and people, and an abstract democracy. In doing so, the dissertation seeks to lay out a theoretical framework to account for the project’s omnidirectional violence and its aspiration for total change, for a new Iraq.

As a conceptual beginning, this study proposes to think of this protracted American project, in which the 2003 invasion is only an historical instance, in terms of an American political rationality, where Iraq stands as the most distinctive zone of operations. In other words,

I want to examine the transformations of American political rationality towards Iraq since 1990.

Political rationality, as conceptualized in the work of Michel Foucault, describes the complex relationship between the accumulated knowledge that enables states to endure and strengthen themselves on the one hand, and the ways, methods, and techniques they invent to achieve such goals, on the other. In its relation to the state, political rationality emerged Foucault argues as the ensemble of the reason of state and the theory of police.3

The reason of state, as a distinctive feature of modern forms of government, is the deployment of rational knowledge about the state itself. In this sense, the strength and durability of the state become the purpose of politics. This finality presupposes the constitution of a certain type of knowledge about the “state’s capacity, and the means to enlarge it,” and about the strength of other states as well.4 The police, on the other hand, is that administration or apparatus

3 Michel Foucault, “Pastoral Power and Political Reason (1979): Lecture II,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 2013), 145.

4 Ibid., 147. 3

of the state, among other administrations, which sees to men and things. Inasmuch as it sees to men and things in their relations, “it defines the nature of the objects of the state’s rational activity; it defines the nature of the aims it pursues and the general form of the instruments involved.”5 It is this ensemble that precisely enables the government of the state according to

Foucault. This government is particularly concerned with the “right disposition of things” arranged towards ends, a process that requires both an accumulation of political knowledge and technologies of governance.6

Governmentality, the concept most often associated with Foucault’s discussion of political rationality, refers to the modes of thought and action which take as their object the population. Thomas Lemke argues that the semantic link in the word ‘governmentality’ between the verb ‘to govern’ and the noun ‘mentality’ makes it impossible “to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them.”7 Consequently, the two concepts are constitutive elements of a unified project that aims to examine and trace the more dispersed forms of power that reside outside the institutions typically referred to as the state.

Different readers of Foucault provide us with different and yet complementary definitions of political rationality in its liberal, neoliberal and colonial manifestations.8 Nikolas Rose and

5 Ibid., 145.

6 Ibid. See also Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 2000), 208.

7 Thomas Lamke, “‘The Birth of bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on neo- Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30 (2001): 191.

8 While Foucault’s work is an investigation of forms of power that governed the European political scene in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, his readers are more concerned with modern applications of power in the liberal, neoliberal and colonial spaces.

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Peter Miller define political rationality in liberal democracies as “the discursive fields within which the exercise of power is conceptualized, and the moral justification for particular ways of exercising power by diverse authorities, notions of appropriate forms, objects and limits of politics, and conception of the proper distribution of such tasks among secular, spiritual, military and familial sectors.”9 Importantly, they point out to the “inter-dependencies” between political rationality and technologies of governance, arguing that these inter-dependencies enable us to understand the multiple networks within which power functions in advanced liberal democracies.

Their suggestion, thus, is to think of political rationalities in terms of the following characteristics: moral forms, epistemological character, and idiomatic language. 10 It is this combination that endows liberal political rationalities with their capacity of translation: that is their capacity of “both a movement from one space to another, and an expression of a particular concern in another modality.”11 What can be deduced here is that political forces other than the state can and often act upon the state’s population and territory. The state as such is not necessarily the only or even the most influential center of political power. With particular reference to the liberal-welfare state, they argue, it should be understood as a complex and mobile outcome of discourses and techniques of rule, and political rationalities should be conceived as networks with “mobile and ‘thixotropics’ associations.”12

9 Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992): 175.

10 Ibid., 179-80.

11 Ibid., 181-2.

12 Ibid., 184.

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Although Rose and Miller extensively explain political rationalities’ capacity to translate within liberal spaces, their analysis fails to account for the relationship between this capacity of translation and warfare. To put it differently, how do these models translate outside liberal spaces?

Wendy Brown, on the other hand, argues that political rationality in the neoliberal context of the U.S. has emerged as governmentality – “a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social.” 13 Unlike Rose and Miller’s broad discussion of political rationalities and technologies of governance, Brown’s analysis of the concept of political rationality focuses on the formation of the subject within the domain of a neoliberal political rationality. She emphasizes that neoliberal political rationality constructs a neoliberal subject, which in turn leads to the establishment of a new form of social organization. It is this new social organization, according to Brown, that allowed the U.S. to pursue its imperial agenda in

Afghanistan and Iraq.14 Brown’s analysis can be viewed as an attempt to expand the space of neoliberal political rationality to include the spaces of the U.S. “imperial adventures in

Afghanistan and Iraq” at its heart.15 In so doing, she locates political rationalities in multiple spaces, demonstrating the heavy deployment of violence required to translate these political rationalities outside the neoliberal space.

13 Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37.

14 Ibid., 51.

15 Ibid., 47.

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However, in what seems to me an attempt to save liberal democracy from its sins, Brown claims that this new emerging neoliberal political rationality that had pervaded American politics during the Reagan-Bush and Clinton decades made the domestic soil fertile for the emergence of new political and social forms that are a “combination of neoliberal governmentality and imperial world politics.”16 The question remains here whether this neoliberal political rationality set the stage for an imperial agenda or whether this imperial agenda has always been an internal constitutive element of democracy, whether liberal or neoliberal.

David Scott, on the other hand, coins the term “colonial political rationalities.” He defines them as “those historically constituted complexes of power/ knowledge that give shape to colonial projects of political sovereignty.” Scott argues that political rationality “characterizes the ways in which power is organized as an activity designed to produce effects of rule.”17

Colonial political rationalities in Scott’s work are analyzed in terms of their targets, points of application, the objects they aim at, the means and instruments they deploy, and their fields of operation. What is critical for Scott here is that this formulation of colonial power is not concerned with its capacity to include or exclude a significant part of the colonized, or with its discursive capacity of epistemic violence, but is rather concerned with the organization of this power as “an activity designed to produce effects of rule.”18

16 Ibid., 51.

17 David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” in Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 25. Arguing against Chatterjee’s emphasis to locate violence at the heart of what he calls “colonial rule of difference,” Scott insists that modern colonial political rationalities are directed more towards producing governing effects on colonial bodies. This form of power as such ceases to be merely coincidental with colonialism, Scott maintains.

18 Ibid.

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In his Turner Lectures on Human Values, Foucault explains that the rationality of the state should be understood as a discursive and reflective process that “has grown and imposed itself all throughout the history of Western societies.”19 This conceptualization, thus, is very specific to the European context, in which the power of the state transformed to rely on less coercion, and to depend more on producing governing effects that reside outside the state and operate on broader levels. Consequently, a religious and literal deployment of political rationality is more problematic than helpful conceptually. For Bentham’s coercive Panopticon, as Timothy

Mitchell reminds us, was not built in Europe, but “on the colonial frontiers of Europe,” more precisely “in places like Russia, India, North and South America, and Egypt.”20

Building on the work of Foucault and his interlocutors, this dissertation, defines American political rationality towards Iraq as the interdependency between the knowledge accumulated about Iraq and the set of complex political technologies deployed by American administrations to achieve specific ends. A striking transformation regarding Iraq took place within the ensemble of discourse, knowledge, and institutions comprising the totality of the American political rationality in the late-1980s. The U.S. administrations’ discourse, their deployment of information on, about, and from Iraq, and their technologies of intervention: all switched from containment policies and political support throughout the Iran- in the 1980s to political antagonism and military confrontation. This was manifested in the 1990-91 , the

19 Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 3 (: Penguin, 2001), 325. See also Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence d. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 2013), 86.

20 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), x and 35.

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sanctions and inspection regimes, direct and indirect policies of regime change culminating in the “Iraq Liberation Act” of October 1998 and the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation.21

The dissertation examines the transformation of American political rationality towards

Iraq between 1990 and 2006. It deploys the concept of political rationality as an analytical point of departure rather than as its destination. For in the Iraqi context, political rationality is useful only insofar as it opens wide the analytical space available to account for the many forms of power’s application, the goals and objects it aims to achieve, and its fields of operations.22

Methodologically, the articulation of the American project in Iraq in terms of a political rationality facilitates the conceptualization of the project’s specific historical formation, its shifting sites, and marking the effects of its accelerated adaptability to emerging political and social conditions. Further, it allows for a critical examination of spheres of practice encompassing wide-ranging technologies of governance. Most importantly, these forms of power and technologies of governances are not uniquely owned and practiced by the state as the only or the most consequential center of political power. This, indeed, helps move toward a more useful term such as apparatus as opposed to the limited frame provided by the concept of ‘the state.’ For as the American project had proceeded in Iraq, it became clear that multiple apparatuses – military, political, academic, religious – had participated in its conduct.

21 Kenneth Katzman, “Iraq: U.S. Effort to Change the Regime,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, October 3, 2002).

22 David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 24-25.

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This study argues that with the total destruction of Iraq power came to function through a democratization of violence as opposed to the more centralized and institutionalized interventions that defined the exercise of power before the invasion. At this point, I stop borrowing in order to take the risk of writing. When Baghdad shocks the voyeur as a graphic intermediate site of violence rendering mutilated spaces and bodies a part of its everyday life, the concept of political rationality concerned as it is with subtle and disciplinary forms of power directed to produce effects of rule proves insufficient. My dissertation poses the question of how to engage with this formative historical moment in Iraq’s history. The analysis presented brings to the fore the “realm of violence” that has enveloped Baghdad.23 The realm of violence is composed of mutually reinforcing physical and discursive manifestations. The continuity of the realm of violence is conditional upon its unification with discourses of violence, insofar as the latter rationalizes its physical manifestations, and articulates its meaning within a righteous frame of legality. Between the realm of violence and its discursive coherence, there is an elastic set of intermediary appropriations of its meaning, a set of mutated truths. Therefore, the notion of political rationality that guides my analysis is a notion in translation. The translatability of these modalities into non-liberal spaces cannot but impose a topography of juxtaposition between resemblance and degradation; the originary model and its derived copy; a continuous time in motion and a broken time in mutation; and, a disciplined city and a city saturated with disfigured bodies.

23 Paul Ricoeur, “Violence and Language,” in Political and Social Essays, trans. Joseph Bien (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), 32-35. Any analysis of the governing effects of colonial conduct cannot exclude manifestations of violence through which this effect is produced. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 19.

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The dissertation proceeds to examine three spaces through which American political rationality in Iraq was projected: the space of American military institutions; the space of international legality within the United Nations; and, lastly, the material space of Baghdad. The discussion of these spaces is divided into two parts. The first covers the period between 1990 and

2003 and follows two sets of conceptual and material transformations within the American military as well as the international law under which the United Nations operates. The second covers the period between 2003 and 2006 examining the consequences of the 2003 invasion for legal and urban spaces of Baghdad and the emerging modalities of power expressed through mundane interaction with Iraqis.

PART ONE: Iraq Unmade

This part studies the pre-invasion political, military, and legal practices that enabled the

2003 invasion and the so-called nation-building projects that ensued.

Chapter 1 focuses on the 1991 and the 2003 military campaigns and operations. It traces both campaigns in Iraq in terms of discourses of spatialization and temporalization to historicize the emergences of the so-called ‘revolution in military affairs’ and its progression to a full- fledged theory of cyber-war renowned as network-centric warfare (NCW). The chapter examines how this emerging theory of war translated market models of transaction to arrive at notions of what military experts term “information superiority.” From where did this revolution emerge and how? How did the discourse of network-centric warfare efface and displace humans from its battlespace? And, how was the imaginary space of Iraq transformed through the two campaigns from the perspective of the U.S. military?

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Chapter 2 focuses on the constitutive space-times of the American project to delineate the forms of sovereignty that emerged through the political, legal, and military processes of the

1990s and early 2000s. The 1991 military campaign; post-1991 deployment of the United

Nations’ authority in order to establish, as an institution, the sanctions and inspection regimes; the 2003 invasion itself; and, finally, the re-siting of the Iraqi Archive: These events are the work of various technologies of violence and control which led to extensive asymmetrical movements of people and things in and about Iraq resituating the sovereignty of the state not within the territorial borders of Iraq but at the level of the globe. Thus, the chapter asks whether it is still legitimate to analyze sovereignty within the lenses of a singular temporality and fixed territoriality. What form(s) of sovereignty did the American project in Iraq construct and enable?

The chapter concludes with the American acquisition of the Iraqi Archive in 1991 and 2003 immediately after the military campaigns: What were the political and conceptual ramifications of the acquisition of this archive and its instrumental circulation? What is the fate of these documents? And finally, how does this acquisition fit into the paradigm of the emerging form of sovereignty?

PART TWO: Iraq Democratized

This part studies the post-invasion regime of law and order imposed by the American occupation, its role in reconfiguring the architectural and social space of Baghdad, the identity of the city’s population, and the persistent crisis in which the city was subsumed.

Chapter 3 diagrams the new legal regime and its material manifestation in the architectural framing of urban space. The pre-invasion legal regime was flattened resulting in a

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new legal regime, a signifier of a new democratic Iraq. The new legal order and its system of governance were structured through the sectarian and religious identities that served as prerequisite for representation in the new constitutional system. How did the American administration of Baghdad – drawing on a constellation of geopolitical technologies – profile, codify, and reproduce political identities and the urban terrain within which these identities interacted? Why was it even necessary for the occupying power to reimagine the space of

Baghdad in its entirety? How can we conceive of Baghdad’s temporal dimension under this process of legal transformation? Has it really been the time of freedom? This chapter engages the primary constitutive legislations issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), and traces the constitution-making process as a major element of so-called nation-building in its claims to

“legitimacy and multiplicity.”

Chapter 4 exposes the intimate relationship between power and violence in the occupation’s attempt to establish its legitimacy. More than any other space of the encounter, the counterinsurgency dictated an annihilation of the architectural and social space of Baghdad.

Resistance to the occupation stood not only as a space of denial but as an enigma of time. When could democracy actually be realized? When would the occupation become invisible whether displaced and disguised as the occupation authority desired, or terminated once and for all as the majority of Iraqis wanted? Who delineated the redrawn boundaries of legitimacy and lawlessness in post-invasion Iraq? To exit the political crisis of legitimacy, the occupation forces had to reinvent its position vis-à-vis the Iraqi population. It had to put to use a new strategy to discredit and demonize the resistance. The introduction of counterinsurgency warfare - often referred to as a “full-spectrum dominance” program – that saw an expansion and intensification of American

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military operations were perhaps the most decisive force in the disintegration of Iraq. This chapter traces the contours of the counterinsurgency doctrine, its discourses, its secret documents and its hidden facilities. How did this doctrine redefine battlespace? How did counterinsurgency discourse transform resistance against the occupation into a horrifying war against Iraqis, whose authors and victims were in most cases anonymous, yet both inscribed by sectarian identity?

Chapter 5 examines the architectural regime of the American occupation. It narrates the story of Baghdad’s emergence as a “battlespace” in need of “securing.” What does that definition entail? The military reconceptualized its mission around three interrelated objects: the insurgency, the city-scape and the population. This chapter investigates these three objects as elements of the emergent battlespace of Baghdad around which the program of full-spectrum dominance was articulated. It reads this campaign through the accounts of its engineers, available public documents and also those deemed classified. How did this program reimagine

Baghdad’s population in its spatial manifestation and through what kind of operations and technologies was this reimagination possible?

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PART ONE: IRAQ UNMADE

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CHAPTER ONE: Technological Warfare and the Omission of Human Content

[W]hen the Mongols several centuries before sacked Baghdad, they slaughtered over 200,000 inhabitants of the city. To my knowledge, we didn’t kill any civilians out there, and we saved a lot of Iraqi soldiers’ lives, because our infantry took the time and the trouble and very heroically swept them from the battlefield to keep them out of harms way[sic]. This is an ethical, tough, resilient, hard-fighting army. - Paul Funk, Keynote Address – 73 Easting Conference (August 27, 1991)24

1.1.Introduction: The to Where?

On February 26, 1991, the second day of the ground campaign against Iraq, Um el-

Maᶜaarik (The Mother of All ) or the Battle of 73 Easting began.25 Supported by air strikes, helicopter attacks and heavy support fire from the 201st Field Artillery Regiment, U.S. ground troops marched to cut off the ’s retreat from . Moving easterly as advance scouts, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) was assigned the mission of “finding and fixing” the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi , enabling the VII Corps of the

U.S. Army to engage and overcome the main Iraqi Forces to the north. This coordinated

24 Paul Funk, “73 Easting,” in 73 Easting: Lessons Learned from Desert Storm via Advanced Distribution Simulation Technology, ed. Jesse Orlansky and Jack Thorpe (Alexandria: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1992), I-48. In the Iraqi narrative, Um el-Maᶜaarik had followed a 43-day aerial campaign, which targeted almost every city and village in Iraq, resulting in more than 200,000 casualties among Iraqi soldiers and civilians and more than 63,000 captured soldiers. Al-Madīna Al-Munawara Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard was totally wiped out by air raids and Apache assaults. See Raᶜd Majīd El-Hamadanī, Qabla an Yughādiranā at- Tārīkh (Bayrūt: ad-dār al-ᶜarabya lil-ᶜulūm-Nashirūn, 2007) [Before History Departs Us (Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers Inc., 2007)]. Non-military historical accounts describes the aerial and the ground campaign as war crimes. See Ramsey Clark et al. “War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes against Iraq,” (Report to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal: Maisonneuve Press, 1992). Others describe the 1991 war as a desert holocaust. See William Blum, “Iraq, 1990-1991: Desert Holocaust,” in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2003), 320.

25 Military historians define 73 Easting as the north-south grid line on military maps of the Iraqi Desert. See Stephen Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells us about the Future of Conflict,” International Security 21 (1996); Orlansky and Thorpe 73 Easting; William M. Christenson and Robert A. Zirkle, “73 Easting Battle Replication: A JANUS Combat Simulation,” (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analysis, 1992).

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maneuver took place under weather conditions that restricted visibility and close air support, according to different U.S. military historians. After a series of fierce battles lasting for approximately forty-one hours and heavy fire support synchronized with the U.S. ground troops’ movement, entire divisions of the Iraqi army had been successfully “fixed” in the words of command staff, i.e., wiped out.26 The result was the total destruction of the military capabilities of the Iraqi units from the 12th Armored and Tawakalna Division that participated in that battle.

The battle was immediately taken up in American military circles as the most important modern battle in which the U.S. forces would be engaged. A very quick decision was made to record the minute details of the battle for the purpose of re-creating and simulating them afterwards.27 An obsessive scanning of the battlefield started immediately to collect all possible data by “walking the battlefield, interviewing the participants, and reviewing all available

26 See Christenson and Zirkle, “73 Easting Battle Replication”; Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting. Both documents provide an obsessive documentation of the military capabilities on both side in terms of number of soldiers, weapons, and technologies deployed in the battle. The U.S. reinforcing units were equipped with: M- IAl (123), M-2A2/M-3A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles (116), AH- 1 Helicopters (26), OH-58C/D Helicopters (34/5), AH-64 Helicopters (18), 155mm Howitzers (72), ILRS (9). These numbers, the reports claim, were less decisive in achieving a battle victory as much as the quality of the technology. Both documents emphasize that the role of air elements and the advantage of the thermal sights with which the U.S. tanks were equipped enabled a superior and more aggressive troops’ performance. The survey of the battlespace went as far as documenting and enlisting in minute details the losses of the Iraqi army in equipment [(Tanks (57), BMPs (28), MTLB (11), Trucks (45), ADA (3)]. See Christenson and Zirkle, “73 Easting Battle Replication,” A-5 and A-8. See also Clifton Berry, “Re-Creating History: The Battle of 73 Easting,” National Defense (1991).

27 The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) took as its responsibility collecting any data that became available during and after the battle. The data was made available for the military afterwards in two forms: reports and analysis papers and, second, simulated war games. Additionally, a conference was held between 27-29th of August 1991. The proceedings of the conference constitute the most important, even graphic, description of the battle, the consequences of this battle for the U.S. forces reorganization, technologies that needed to be developed, problems that emerged during the encounter, and suggestions for “what if” exercises. The conference was co-sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA], the Office of Military History of the Army, and the Engineer Topographic Laboratory at Fort Belvoir. See Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting. The Institute for Defense Analysis also published “73 Easting Battle Replication.” This report describes, step by step, the replication efforts that took place immediately after the battle in order to simulate it as a war game.

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records, including radio communications during the battle.” The data collected from the battlefield was used to recreate the events in distributed simulation (i.e., using “SIMNET” technology); the product was a “moving picture” that permits observers to review what actually happened at any moment from any position or vehicle on any side of the battle.28

28 Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting, iii.

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Figure 1: Real or simulated battlefield?

Image 1

Image of a destroyed Iraqi from 73 Easting battlefield: Source FReeper Foxhole.

Image 2

Replicated Image in SIMNET Distribution, post-battle research and information gathering.

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No battle in the history of warfare had been documented, recorded and reenacted in ways similar to the documentation and recordings of 73 Easting. The battle provided U.S. military experts an opportunity to collect raw materials and “facts” from the ground to research, review and conduct “‘what-if’ analyses.”29 How did 73 Easting affect the future of military operations?

And, how did the process of scanning and documenting this battlefield reproduce an abstract space of the battle and, specifically, of Iraq?

This chapter examines an emerging body of military literature on Network Centric

Warfare (NCW), and its attempts to recast theories of modern warfare as theorized and implemented before and during the 1991 and 2003 wars in Iraq. It investigates the vision for future joint warfare as defined by the Department of Defense (DOD) in preparation for the 2003 war on Iraq. It also traces how this emerging theory of war borrowed market models of transaction to arrive at what military experts termed “information superiority.” Most importantly, it shows that this emerging theory of war has successfully produced a military calculus that reduces human pain and suffering into a marginal by-product of war, at best, or into a virtual component in a near-real simulated environment. In sum, this emerging body of literature empties “the movement and action of war of human content” and represents the act of war as “a rarefied choreography of disembodied events.”30

29 Ibid., Abstract. In addition to its recreation in distributed simulation, the battle was reenacted in a documentary TV series and as a war game. See - The Battle of 73 Easting, directed by Paul Kilback (2010; US: WPA Film Liberty), TV Series; Greatest Tank Battles, developed by Breakthrough New Media (2010; Canwest).

30 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and the Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 70.

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1.2. Models in Translation: Transforming the U.S. Military Organization

Almost every aspect of network-centric operations … came to pass in some capacity during Operation Iraqi Freedom. These included improved information sharing, common operational and tactical pictures, enhanced shared situational awareness, and increased speed of command and self-synchronization with the net result being increased mission effectiveness. - John Garstka, Assistant Director for Concepts and Operations, (DOD)31

On April 9, 2003 the “pioneers of liberation,” under the command of General Tommy

Franks, toppled the statue of in Baghdad. An official declaration of the completion of Operation Iraqi Freedom was announced on May 1, 2003. From the beginning of the war on March 9, 2003 until its official completion on May 1, 2003, the American military launched one of the largest and most technologically advanced military operations in the history of modern warfare, simultaneously marking the end of traditional warfare operations and the beginning of a new military strategy known as a Network-Centric Warfare (NCW). The 2003 war on Iraq, according to its planners, emphasized “high-tech coordination, and high speed

[war], a war unlike any other.”32 This war, long in preparation and grounded in experimentation, illustrates how models travel through different national spheres, and further, exemplifies the intrinsic entanglement of science with political agendas and calculations.

NCW literature emerged from a rudimentary conceptual attempt to “translate” economic concepts and models into the military sphere becoming a dominant military discourse in which

31 John Garstka, Net-centric approach proven in Iraq. By Dawn S. Onley. CNN (April 27, 2004), accessed October 31, 2012, http://gcn.com/Articles/2004/04/27/Netcentric-approach-proven-in-Iraq.aspx?Page=1. It’s worth noting that Garstka has been the DOD’s Network-centric guru is currently the assistant director for concepts and operations in the DOD’s Office of Force Transformation.

32 National Geographic: 21 days to Baghdad, produced by Lori Butterfield (2003; U.S.: National Geographic), DVD.

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political agenda and visions were and continue to be articulated and disputed. In 1998, Vice

Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John J. Garstka 33 published a short article in which they theorized a new model of war.34 Their proposed model took its “antecedent in the dynamics” of the market and the new ways in which firms exploit new information and communication technologies in order to improve situation analysis and increase returns on investment. The centrality of information technologies, Cebrowski and Garstka claim, lies in the fact that such technologies fundamentally transformed from “platform-centric computing into network-centric computing” that allows “information ‘content’ to be created, distributed, and easily exploited across the extremely heterogeneous global computing environment.”35

The approach developed by Cebrowski and Garstka, which emulates economic models of transaction and the centrality of information to the making of economic decisions, is presented as an operational theory for warfare that seeks to achieve a quick lock-out of competition and lock- in of success. Following the calculus of the “big winners” in the economic field, Cebrowski and

Garstka argue that “network-centric operational architectures that consist of a high-powered information backplane (or information grid), a sensor grid, and a transaction grid” are essential for enabling the generation and sustainability of competitive space awareness which in turn translate into competitive advantage in any battle field.36

33 Arthur K. Cebrowski served as a president of Naval War College, from July 1998 till October 2001, then as a director of the Office of Force Transformation in the DOD.

34 Arthur K. Cebrowski and John J. Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” Proceedings, January, 1998, accessed February 3, 2012, http://www.comw.org/rma/fulltext/netcentwar.html.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid. 3.

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This study, although not the first of its kind to theorize and advocate the role of technology in warfare, was the first to theorize NCW as an economic model. Furthermore, it was the first to promote the futurity of warfare projects borrowing the conceptual framework from the economic sphere. It capitalized on a body of previous literature, which had emerged by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, emphasizing the need to capture information about battlespace in near-real space-time through networked sensors. As an emerging theory of war, NCW exploits the power of a network in which people, platforms, weapons, sensors and decisions are linked and synchronized to obtain a high level of shared battlespace awareness.37 It further exploits the power of information when synchronized across different nodes of a network.

The architects of NCW promote a model of organizing modern warfare that simulates economic models dominant in organizations of the private sector. This model, as a product of the information age, aims to achieve information superiority that “generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of self-synchronization.” 38 The “power” of this model is derived from the effective networking among different, geographically dispersed “knowledgeable entities” that share

37 Department of Defense: Office of Force Transformation, “The implementation of Network-Centric Warfare,” January 2005, 1 and 39, accessed November 15, 2012, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/transformation/oft_implementation_ncw.pdf.

38 David S. Alberts, John J. Garstka, and Frederick P. Stein, Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority (Washington, D.C.: DOD-Cooperative Research Program, 2000), 2, accessed November 15, 2012, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ccrp/ncw.pdf.

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information, collaborate to develop shared situational awareness, and collaborate with one another to achieve a degree of self-synchronization and self-coordinated responses to situation.39

In the economic sphere, the information age changed the ways of creating wealth, thus affecting the distribution of power, shrinking distances and compressing time. Furthermore, changes brought about by an overflow of information affected concepts of time and space. These changes not only revolutionized the domain of information but also altered the fabric of society.

Information, whether considered as a raw material or as value-adding product, was understood to reduce or even eliminate uncertainty. In the business world, institutions and organizations find ways of leveraging the wealth of information through information technologies to develop a competitive advantage over competitors. An information-enabled organization develops an awareness of its customers, competitors and of its environment contributing to “improved production, capacity, and logistics planning that, in turn, can improve product availability and reduce business risk.”40 By mobilizing information technology, organizations could exploit more than the real time-space by functioning within a complementary virtual space where it was possible to “bring the necessary people [geographically dispersed] and processes together to accomplish a particular task” and promote “virtual collaboration, virtual integration, and outsourcing.”41

39 Ibid., 7. See also Andrew W. Marshall, “Revolutions in Military Affairs,” Statement for the Subcommittee on Acquisition & Technology, Senate Armed Services Committee,” May 5, 1995; Cebrowski and Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future”; See also Paul K. Davis, “Military Transformation? Which Transformation, and What Lies Ahead?” (Santa Monica, Rand Corporation, 2010).

40 Ibid., 37.

41 Ibid., 38.

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The experiences of Wal-Mart and the London-based investment bank Deutsche Morgan

Grenfell, Inc. (DMG) served as models for the effort to transform the American military. In the case of the latter, the market and all its operations reside in the virtual domain making network itself become the market. DMG’s operational architecture, like Wal-Mart’s, revolves around three main elements of network-centric operation: a sensing capacity, transaction capabilities, and an information infrastructure (or infostructure). The success of these private organizations, argue NCW’s architects, results from the emergence of new organizational infrastructure and behavior. The accumulation of information technologies enables these organizations to achieve high competitive awareness in the market environment. Additionally, this networking allows

“the creation of new types of information-based relationships with and among organizations that are able to leverage increased competitive awareness”42 enabling the compression of time and an increased tempo of operations. This process accomplishes the cumulative performance of disseminating better information with a more optimal distribution. Furthermore, such a process results in more customer satisfaction, which aids these organizations in the domination of their competitive space. 43 Importantly, the capacity of these commercial private organizations to dominate their ecosystems “is driven by changes in their environment …, and by the capabilities they have at their disposal.”44

The military, they argued, needed to emulate commercial and financial firms like Wal-

Mart and DMG and transform into a network-centric organization capable of leveraging the sum

42 Ibid., 50.

43 Ibid., 51.

44 Ibid., 53.

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capacity of the military “to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting and/or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.”45 Such a position of information superiority would allow the military to reach full awareness of its operational environment and attain full-spectrum domination. Inasmuch as the architects of the network-centric warfare are concerned, this model could be imported into the military domain through a “simultaneous coevolution of organization and process.”46 This coevolution would require modification to the most fundamental military notions of: “command and control, unity of command, and the ability to exchange information with others.” 47 These transformations implied for the authors of NCW a historical process of profound changes that targeted the very structure of the American military and how it conducted war – in short, a revolution in military affairs.48 The following analysis will trace the recent history of this transformation, its attendant institutions, its discourse and its practical manifestations on the ground.

45 Ibid., 54.

46 For a detailed discussion of the effect of information age on the commercial versus military domains see Alberts et al., Network Centric Warfare, 17-30.

47 Ibid., 59.

48 See Marshall, “Revolutions in Military Affairs”; Davis, “Military Transformation?”; Davis et al., “Transforming the Force,” (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1998); Richard Hundley, “Past Revolutions, Future Transformations: What Can the History of Revolutions in Military Affairs Tell us about Transforming the U.S. Military?” (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1999). See also Theodor W. Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs? Competing Concepts, Organizational Responses, Outstanding Issues,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, December 11, 1995), accessed December 13, 2012, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/95-1170.htm.

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1.3. Transformation in a Historical Perspective and the Wars on Iraq:

In its efforts to realize this revolution in military organization and to fully exploit what the information age had to offer, the American military embarked on a massive process to redefine the concepts and procedures through which it operated: the way it planned and prepared for future engagements, how it defined the space where those engagements would take place and the ways it conceptualized its adversaries. While radical adjustments are not new to military thinking,49 the 1990s in particular provided a historical opportunity for the U.S. military to initiate a wholesale conceptual and practical transformation. The 1991 war on Iraq and the so- called “Operations Other Than War (OOTW)” that ensued provided the military with the opportunities to redefine its object of knowledge, experimentation, and analysis.

It was also during the 1990s that conversations about military transformation moved from internal discussions about military practices and procedures to become an academic discipline.

Since the 1991 war on Iraq and the OOTW that followed, military transformation became a political as well as intellectual project that brought together scientific knowledge, war conduct and political agendas. The emerging body of military literature referred to as Revolution in

Military Affairs (RMA) - later re-designated in the 1990s as network-centric warfare- took as its object the conceptualization, analysis, and progression of this transformation. This decade witnessed an intense collaboration between the military and academic institutions in addition to the establishment of new military and private research programs. These programs aimed to

49 See also Fred C. Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter, “Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on Long- Term Strategy,” (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1988), 2. See also Davis, “Military Transformation?” 11.

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develop NCW not only as an emerging theory of war but also as a field of study that assesses and evaluates previous military operations in order to expedite the transformation of the military.

Following the 1991 war on Iraq and drawing on the data collected from the battlefield, the U.S. military started evaluating the way in which Operation Desert Storm was fought. The evaluation was implemented under Andrew Marshall, the director of the Office of Net

Assessment (ONA), who hired Andrew Krepinevich (then Army Lieutenant ) to undertake an evaluation project of the scope and limits of the U.S. army transformation which culminated in the 1992 Military-Technical Revolution Assessment (the 1992 MTR).50 The report emphasized the mounting evidence “of the efficacy of ‘stealthy’ F-117s and F-111 … delivering laser-guided bombs (LGBs)” against key Iraqi targets. An efficacy that not only rendered

“fighting forces marginally better in fighting with existing operational concepts and organizations,” claims Krepinevich, but also had the potential to revolutionize war conduct in general.51 The 1991 war on Iraq and the following the 1992 MTR report precipitated a debate within different apparatuses over the revolution in military affairs and consequent transformations of the U.S. mentality towards defense.52

50 Barry D. Watts, “The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs,” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2011), 2.

51 Ibid.

52 Andrew F. Krepinevich, “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2011), iv.

The debate on military transformation became a fashionable topic in different military branches of the DOD (e.g. the Office of Net Assessment, DOD’s Revolution in Military Affairs Initiative that was approved in September 1993 and the office of force transformation), military and private academic institutions and think tanks (e.g. U.S. Army War College, Naval Institute, National Defense University, Rand), and finally individual researches drawing on personal experience in the 1991 and the 2003 wars on Iraq.

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The idea of a revolution in military affairs evolved from the concept of the military technical revolution coined by Soviet military theorists, which advocated the deployment and integration of information technologies into the military sphere which, it was argued, would render possible a revolution in military practices and outcomes. However, this technical revolution could be achieved only through the development of new operational concepts simultaneous to the creation of new military organizations.53 For Krepinevich, the revolution is the sum of the deployment and integration “of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combined with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict.”54 RMA thus emerged as a new analytical trend in the military circles during the 1990s, and was characterized as “a paradigm shift” in military thinking and operations.55

The Office of Net Assessment and its director Andrew Marshall were the main initiator of this “paradigm shift,” in which post-1991 Iraq came to occupy a strategic place. Building upon the assumption that the post-1991 period was “equivalent to that immediately after the end of in which the technologies, doctrines and organizations which were to win World

War II were just being formed,” Marshall’s office financed different studies and roundtable discussions concerning the history of military transformation and technological advancements in addition to sponsoring war games programs and other studies. As early as 1994, the Science

53 Watts, “The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs,” 3. See also Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs?”

54 Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions,” The National Interest (1994): 30, accessed December 10, 2012, http://nationalinterest.org/article/cavalry-to-computer-the-pattern-of- military-revolutions-848.

55 Hundley, “Past Revolutions, Future Transformations,” 9.

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Applications International Corporation (SAIC), contracted by the Office of Net Assessment, convened a series of roundtable discussions and issued a report concluding that information technology should be fully exploited for future military and strategic planning. The report emphasized the centrality of orbital and atmospheric activities for the future of warfare and the need to foster a culture of innovation and collaboration in the military organization.56

In 1993-4, simultaneous to the work of the Office of Net Assessment, the Department of

Defense (DOD) approved the Revolution in Military Affairs Initiative, a project tasked with putting together a comprehensive plan for transforming the military to be carried out in three stages. The first stage included data collection and identification of the most influential and promising technologies and operational concepts. The second stage consisted of computerized simulations and war games to be held between June and October 1994 through which the military could examine the results of the previous stage. Finally, the third stage would be the production of a summary to analyze the results of phases one and two.57

The DOD embarked on a wholesale institutionalization process through which numerous new institutions and bodies were created to foster the proposed transformation. The first among these was the Joint Requirement Oversight Council (JROC) which became the focal point for furthering the capability of the different parts of the military to act together and assessing future requirements needed for further transformation. Several academic and research institutions were established including the Information Resources Management College and the School of

Information Warfare and Strategy, both created at the National Defense University between 1994

56 Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs?”

57 Ibid.

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and 1996. The U.S. Army, being the most “aggressive party” in the process of transformation, published a new detailed Army Field Manual 100-5: Operations, in June 1993 demonstrating its vision and philosophy of transformation and change. It also incorporated strategies of transformation and how operations such as: “Just Cause in Panama, Desert Storm in Kuwait, and the follow-on activities in Iraq” (generally described in military jargon as Operations Other Than

War) offer lessons for future warfare and reflect the shift to stronger joint operations.58

On June 21, 1991, General Gordon R. Sullivan, a strong believer in force transformation, took office as Chief of Staff of the . In late 1991 into early 1992, he worked with a group of advisers to develop a plan for iterative experimentation that would exploit

“computer based simulations to test proposed doctrine, procedures, organizations, and equipment.”59 The Louisiana Maneuver (LAM) project initiated by Sullivan was the first and most tangible attempt in the U.S. Army to deploy the emerging conceptual frameworks in practice. The LAM project’s major outcome was the development of Force XXI. The culmination of two years of investigative experimentation, Force XXI was a modular unit designed to reflect the image of the future U.S. army in terms of downsized forces, more horizontal, less fixed, and more flexible organization; as well as more resilient, versatile, and agile units, which are more dependent on electronic connectivity. Among the major organizations that were established to support the development of Force XXI were Battle Labs in

1992 and the Future Technologies Institute in 1995.

58 See U.S. Headquarters Department of Army, The U.S. Army Field Manual 100-5 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, June 1993), Operations 3-2. (U.S. Army Field Manual 100-5 hereafter).

59 James L. Yarrison, The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers (Center for Military History: U.S. Army, 1999), vi.

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This development mirrored the newly emerging literature on force transformation in which downsizing, new doctrine and training capabilities, the acquisition of “post-industrial” technology, force planning, and the institutionalization of ability to assess change were major elements. Simultaneously, a new Army Digitization Office was created in 1994 to implement various aspects of the Force XXI design.60

Nine battle laboratories were established during 1992. As identified by these lab’s mission statement, some of the responsibilities assigned to them were to “[i]dentify, develop and leverage technologies that would enhance the warfighter's capabilities.” They aspired to “provide direct support to the Ground Component Commander to enhance network/communications capabilities … [to] deploy advanced communication networks to support the tactical warfighter as well as to support live force play in exercises and demonstrations. [And finally, to] provide

Modeling and Simulation to support Communications Network & System Performance

Analysis.”61 These labs were crucial to the development of Force XXI organizing and conducting

“equipment and organization-specific experiments that contributed … to the resolution of

Louisiana project’s issues.”62 For instance, one of the major problems that was identified during

Desert Storm was the lack of night visibility when Iraqi forces moved and redeployed.63 This problem became a priority to be solved in the battle labs under what was termed enhancement

60 Susan J. Wright, History of the Army Digitization Office (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analysis, 2000), accessed November 10, 2011, http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA384101.

61 See Battle Lab’s Mission Statement as described by the CDID Experimentation Division: Network Battle Lab: http://www.signal.army.mil/index.php/exp-mission. According to Battle Lab’s website the number of labs in action was 10 not 9.

62 Yarrison, The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers, vii.

63 See Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood”; Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting.

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programs, such as “Total Asset Visibility,” which solved the visibility problem by recommending the “[integration] horizontally across the force the development of Second

Generation Forward Looking InfraRed and other night-fighting technologies.”64 The “Own the

Night” series of experiments that were performed in these Labs proved essential for military strategies and planning for the 2003 war and the following operations in Iraq.

At the same time as the U.S. Army created new institutions and initiatives, both the U.S.

Air Force and the U.S. Navy initiated similar institutional transformation processes utilizing the same conceptual frameworks. Among the main initiatives for transforming and modernizing the

U.S. Air Force was the publication of Spacecast 2020 and the creation of a three-phase revolutionary planning process through the initiation of the project Air Force 2025. In September

1993, the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base began the Spacecast 2020 project in which

350 faculty members, students, scientists, military personals, independent scholars from different military academic institutions and research centers, government agencies and laboratories, universities, and think tanks participated.65 The unclassified part of the project’s final report (a collection of research papers and initiative proposals for modernizing the U.S. Air Force) focused the discussion on promoting a “‘science’ of warfare at the operational level,” in addition to the dominant trend which promotes an “‘art’ of warfare at the strategic level.66 Since space possessed unprecedented vantage and operations “in the transatmosphere and space promote

64 Yarrison, The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers, vi.

65 Air University Archive, SPACECAST 2020 Process (Alabama: Maxwell Air Force Base, 1992). See Also Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs?”

66 Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs?”

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stability and enhance the security and interests of the United States and [its] partners,”67 the

“science” of space warfare, the report emphasized, should be developed in three major arenas described as Global Presence (or Global View), Global Reach, and Global Power.68

Global Presence would furnish the ground for “space superiority” as a reality through

“[the] creation of an integrated on-demand information system for command users, development of increased and improved sensing capabilities, and availability of relatively inexpensive space lift.” 69 It provided the basic mechanisms for data collection, better surveillance and reconnaissance through the creation of a Super Global Positioning System, as well as more agility in replacing equipment and early prediction of any communication disturbance that might be caused by solar activities. Global Reach, as the second step for achieving space superiority, focused on the concept of a vehicle capable of carrying 5,000lbs into the low-earth orbit and developing unconventional future “methods of getting into space.”70 Both Global Presence and

Global Reach would set the stage for the Global Power project which would aim at satellite superiority in space and examine a potential future capacity of reaching ground and atmospheric targets from space.

The second stage in transforming the U.S. Air Force was a three-phase planning process:

Generate, Investigate, and Integrate. The generation phase “used multiple sources to generate and evaluate ideas that could have a revolutionary impact on the Air Force.” The investigation

67 Air University Archive, SPACECAST 2020 Process.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid. See also Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs?”

70 One of the most unconventional methods was an aerospace that included “a squadron of rocket-powered transatmospheric vehicles.” See Galdi, “Revolution in Military Affairs?”

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phase used “analyses, simulations, war games, and exercises to evaluate and test the merit of each selected idea.” The project would conclude with the integration phase that would determine which ideas to fund for basic research. In order to ensure the proper development of the three- phase planning process, a panel of experts was assembled to meet every five years to review previous ideas and offer new options. Air Force 2025 was the first main effort of this project. 71

Air Force 2025, similar to Spacecast 2020, was launched by Air University in 1995 and served as the generation phase of the proposed three-phase revolutionary process. A study team composed of more than 200 “students and faculty from the Air University's Air War College

(AWC) and Air Command and Staff College (ACSC); scientists and technologists from the Air

Force Institute of Technology (AFIT); and selected academic and business leaders in the civilian community” from different regions across the United States participated in this study. This group served as a think tank to identify the innovative, high-leverage technologies and systems that could conceivably enable the United States to continue developing its air and space power capabilities to meet future security challenges.72

Simultaneous to the projects initiated by Air University, the Air Force Information

Warfare Center (AFIWC) was brought into the project in 1993 after its “success” with the Air

Force in exploiting enemy information systems during the 1991 war.73 The role played by Air

Force Information Warfare Center in the 1991 war facilitated the expansion of the strategies and

71 Jay Kelley, Air Force 2025: Historical Background (Alabama: Air University Press, 1996), accessed November 2, 2012, http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2025/es/e-s.htm.

72 Ibid.

73 U.S. Air Force Fact Sheet, “688th Cyberspace Wing,” (San Antonio: Cyberspace Wing, December 2013), accessed November 20, 2012, http://www.24af.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet_print.asp?fsID=15333&page=1.

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tactics of command and control warfare to the entire information spectrum and its implementation as information warfare. Similar to other institutions that were created in response to modernizing the U.S. Army, the AFIWC hosted: Information Warfare Battle-lab, Advanced

Programs, Computer Systems, Engineering Analysis Unit, Computer Emergency Response

Team, Mission Support, Systems Analysis, and Operations Support.74

The U.S. Navy was the slowest in its transformation process. Published in 1992, From the Sea constituted the first major conceptual document attempting to realize processes similar to the ones that were initiated by the other branches of the American military. However, its scope was limited to the present and the very near future. It was not until 1994 that the second conceptual document entitled Forward ... From the Sea appeared and offered a guide for the transformation of the Navy in to the 21st century.75 The U.S. Navy’s transformation process was initiated during two strategic concepts war games in 1994 and continued by reactivating the

Strategic Studies Group based at the Naval War College in Newport. The Naval War College assumed a very active role in “conducting war games and simulations on future warfare” under the command of the DOD and the Office of Net Assessment on behalf of the Navy. Furthermore,

74 It is interesting to note that the Computer Emergency Response Team developed one of the most advanced spy softwares. Automated Security Incident Measurement, known as the ASIM, is both a hardware and software system that “sits on Air Force networks ‘listening’ for ‘suspicious activity’ that is characteristic of intruder techniques.” In the beginning of 1996 only 26 Air Force bases were covered by ASIM, while later in the same year 52 bases were covered. According to the Air Intelligence Agency, in August 1997 the Computer Emergency Response Team monitored 107 Air Force and three joint ASIM sites. For the same period, the team estimated that the ASIM detected over 100 million suspicious Internet connections a month. See Air Intelligence Agency, AIA ALMANAC 4 (1997), 12, accessed January 5, 2013, http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/aia/cyberspokesman/97aug/index.html.

75 U.S. Navy, From the Sea (Washington, D.C.: the Navy Office of Information, 1992), accessed January 3, 2013, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/fromsea/fromsea.txt; U.S. Navy, Forward . . . From The Sea (Washington, D.C.: the Navy Office of Information, 1994), accessed January 3, 2013, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/fromsea/forward.txt.

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an elective course on the revolution in military affairs was offered for Naval War College students. Fleet Information Warfare Center and Marine Corps Commandant’s Warfighting

Laboratory were established in 1995, and both were essential and active institutions in modernizing and transforming the U.S. Navy.76

1.4. Vacillation between the Laboratory and the Field: The Making of Network Centric Warfare

As the previous section demonstrated, the American military had undertaken a massive process of conceptual and institutional transformation during the 1990s. The rationale for modernizing the military drew on the performance of the 1991 War: the “success” of the

American forces in manipulating new information technologies and denying the “enemy” equal access to such resources of information and mobility opened the door for a new mode of theorization and strategization within military circles. Concepts such as the revolution in military affairs (RMA) and information warfare became the main analytical tools for military researchers and planners. Rather than being a continuation of the dominant approach of “war as art,” in the post-1991 period, the military became subject to a “science of war.” 77 The introduction of

SIMNET as an operational system transformed how the military chose to think and act in emergent geographical terrains imagined now as abstract and three dimensional. From the virtual near-real time simulations in the U.S. Central Military Command in Florida in the summer of

1990 to a remote local in the Iraqi desert: A long story had begun.

76 Air University Archive, “Naval Transformation Roadmap 2003: Assured Access and Power Projection from the Sea,” (Department of the Army, Marine Corps, and Navy 2003), accessed January 5, 2013, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/naval_trans_roadmap2003.pdf.

77 Michael E. O’Hanlon, The Science of War: Defense Budgeting, Military Technology, Logistics, and Combat Outcomes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Milan Vego, “Science Vs. The Art of War,” Joint Force Quarterly 66 (2012).

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The annual war game for Central Command’s staff, as well as the staffs of the Army,

Navy, Air Force, and Marines, were scheduled for the summer of 1990 under the name

Operation Internal Look. However, it was originally a computer-based simulation intended to practice a running war: “developing and issuing orders, sorting out battlefield reports, directing flows of ammunition and supplies, and coordinating the maneuvers of air forces, armies, and fleets”78 premised on the scenario that the Soviets would be coming through the Iran-Zagros

Mountains. Norman Schwarzkopf was placed in charge of the operation. Unsatisfied with the targeted terrain and enemy, he campaigned with Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz to secure support for last minute changes in the war game that was about to be launched in July 1990 at

Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. In Schwarzkopf’s words, “I was determined that the scenario we’d rehearse that summer would be one in which the enemy was not the Soviet

Union, but Iraq.” 79 A few weeks before playing Operation Internal Look, data that paralleled

Iraq’s military capacity and “real-world” ground and air forces was provided to the system. To make the drill more realistic, Schwarzkopf ordered his message center to start sending “streams of fictional dispatches” about military and political development in Iraq to all participating headquarters. Shortly after the exercise began, the message center broadcasted real routine intelligence bulletins about “the real Middle East.” 80

When the crisis between Iraq and Kuwait intensified, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites tracked Iraqi convoys of troops and trainloads of tanks as they moved from Baghdad to

78 Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (New York: Batman Books, 1993), 336.

79 Ibid., 336.

80 Ibid., 337, italic is mine. According to Schwarzkopf, the war game envisioned “some 300,000 men, 3,200 tanks, and 640 combat planes” to mass from southern Iraq to attack several targets in the Arabian Peninsula.

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Basra in Southern Iraq on a daily basis. According to Schwarzkopf’s autobiography, Central

Command Headquarter was aware of the movement of the Iraqi Army towards the Kuwait borders as soon as these forces left their exercise zone.81 Gary Ware, the designer of the game

Operation Internal Look, continued compiling enormous cartographic and military data on both

Iraq and Kuwait,82 which was continuously fed to the war game model by the time of the conflict. Soon after the , Operation Internal Look had transformed itself into

Operation Desert Shield: More specifically, as was fought in the battle of 73 Easting. From a simulated model in the lab of the U.S. Central Military Command in Florida to an applicable war plan in the battle terrain 73 Easting, one could trace the first real political and military validation of the purported scientific “success” that preceded this application in many virtual simulated spaces.

The Battle of 73 Easting was the ground assault that officially concluded the war on

February 28, 1991. Described as a tank battle, 73 Easting followed the aerial campaign that commenced on January 17, 1991 and through which Iraqi cities and villages were bombarded with around 225,060,000 bombs and missiles with a total cost of $1,290,350,275.00. The battle, for sure, was a constitutive moment in the path of the military transformation. Recognizing the need for a real-war scenario that verifies war strategies, technologies, and field conducts, the military leadership sized the “opportunity” of the Iraqi army defeat in order to transform the space over which 73 Easting was fought into a mobile research lab and forensic site.

81 Ibid., 340.

82 Timothy Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theaters of War: the Military-Entertainment Complex,” In Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century (Theatrum Scientiarum: English Edition), ed. Helmar Schramm et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Publishers, 2005), 434.

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To that effect, General Sullivan decided to send a team to the Iraqi desert to capture the engagement led by Jack Thorpe whose team had built SIMNET in the early 1980s. 83 The team was assembled once again to digitally reenact 73 Easting in the virtual world in 1991. Thorpe and his team in collaboration with the Institute for Defense Analyses Simulation Center under the supervision of Lieutenant Neale Cosby, the Army Office of Military History, and the Army’s

Engineer Topographical Laboratories managed to reproduce the 73 Easting battlefield in three- dimensions, which enabled any participant to view the 3-D virtual landscape of the Iraqi desert from any angle during any moment of the battle. The main element of the model was the Flying

Carpet which, in Thorpe’s words, “can free fly… It has dynamics that allow it to go anywhere and stop in midflight. It’s in that regard not exactly like any known combat vehicle. It’s really an eye on the simulated world.”84

The Flying Carpet was also the result of assembling together testimonies of the American participants who were thoroughly interviewed by army historians and simulation modelers.

These interviews focused on participants’ experiences of how they felt, thought, and reacted to the dynamics unfolding of the events. 85 Overhead photography, battle site surveys and

83 Jack A. Thorpe established DARPA SIMNET program, then became one of the leading military scientists to develop these simulated models with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. See Jack Thorpe, “Future Views: Aircrew Training 1980-2000,” unpublished concept paper at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 15 September 1978, discussed in Richard H. Van Atta, Sidney Reed, and Seymour J. Deitchman, DARPA Technical Accomplishments: An Historical Overview of Selected DARPA Projects, 3 Volumes (Institute for Defense Analysis, IDA Paper P-2429, 1991): 10. See also Timothy Lenoir, “Programming Theaters of War: Gamemakers as Soldiers,” in Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship between Information Technology and Security, ed. Robert Latham (New York: New Press, 2003); Neale Cosby, “SIMNET: An Insider Perspective,” (Institute for Defense Analysis, IDA Document D-1661, 1995), accessed November 10, 2012, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a294786.pdf.

84 Bruce Sterling, “War is Virtual Hell,” Wired Magazine, March, 1993, accessed on November 11, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/virthell.html?pg=6&topic=.

85 See for example the transcription of tapes collected from soldiers while in the battle field, and post-battle interviews with soldiers. Sample material is provided in Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting, 31-33.

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interviews, recordings of radio communications of the battle itself, and personal recordings collected from participant soldiers were assembled in the labs of the IDA – involving military historians, technicians, computer scientists, animators, terrain analysts, and technologists – to produce a “fully interactive, network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting.”86

However, a total digital reenactment of the battle terrain had to use the already built components of project ODIN. This project was DARPA’s initial rapid response for Operation

Desert Shield and was fully supported by General Sullivan. It was mainly a three-dimensional representation of the Kuwait Theater of Operation using SIMNET computer image generation

(CIG). This database was part of a much larger database designed by Army Engineer

Topographic Laboratories (ETL) – the so called SAKI database, in which the terrain of Saudi

Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq was digitally constructed. George Lukes, an engineer of the ETL, states that for operational reasons, “a tailored 73 Easting terrain database was extracted from this much larger SAKI (-Kuwait-Iraq) terrain database and then intensified to incorporate features of tactical significance (e.g., berms, bunkers, trenches, barracks) using information collected from field survey and reconnaissance imagery.” 87

According to military records, the Flying Carpet and what it represents – the battle of 73

Easting – was viewed and evaluated in many ways. Some viewed the model as “a simulacrum of the war itself.” Others evaluated the model as a historical record that captured the event as “it

86 Sterling, “War is Virtual Hell.” One of the most interesting consequences of this war was that the Pentagon acquired the so called SAKI database (the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait-Iraq database). It has the three countries “mapped meter by meter, pixel by pixel, in 3-D, with weather optional.” According to Sterling “You can climb into one of Col. Thorpe’s tank simulators and you can drive across that cyberspace …exchanging gunfire with the polygonal ghosts of Iraqi T-72 tanks.” See also Jack Thorpe, “Trends in Modeling, Simulations, & Gaming: Personal Observations about the Past Thirty Years and Speculation about the Next Ten,” (Paper presented to Interservice Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference, 2010); George Lukes, “Methodology: Terrain Data–Base Development,” in Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting, II-7.

87 Ibid., II-9.

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actually was.”88 It was also viewed as “a paradigm shift” with the potential to historically change the way the military thought about combat, training for combat, and procurement of new weapon systems.89 Finally, 73 Easting itself and the ensuing models and simulacra were viewed as an

“opportunity… that comes at a time when sensors, data collection, information processing, communications and display technologies are coming together, or can be brought together, to provide a new capability …that will win in the future.”90

The Battle of 73 Easting laid the ground for new technologies of classifying and enumerating. Not only did it instigate a new bureaucracy but it also granted the old one with authority and continuity to deploy technology. Whereas the physical terrain of battle itself with all its elements was enumerated, tabulated and published, the ensuing SIMNET models encoded and transferred into computer codes a massive and enormous amount of data collected from the field in an attempt to predict natural and human behavior. This mode of experimentation was promoted after the event in a very clear attempt to alter the course of future wars. The many simulations of that battle were attempts to train commanders, officers, and soldiers how to behave, calculate, and make decisions during fleeting moments of battle. These simulations were efforts to tame emergent possibilities of future combats. Additionally, 73 Easting and its subsequent virtual instantiations signaled the beginning of a deeper collaboration between military, commercial designers, the entertainment industry, and academic institutions to develop high-tech equipment, virtual models, and computer simulations for military training purposes. 73

88 Michael D. Krause, “Representation of the 73 Easting Battle,” in Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting, I-86.

89 Vic Reis, “73 Easting: Strategic Overview,” in Orlansky and Thorpe, 73 Easting, I-21.

90 Ibid., I-I9.

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Easting was the very event that stimulated a wholesale discourse of military transformation and the ensuing efforts in different military circles to realize such a transformation post-1991.

While the swift war of 1991 on Iraq provided a terrain upon which some nascent abstract concepts of conducting war could be experimented and materialized, the post-war period witnessed the proliferation of conceptualization, analyses, simulations, and war games, all of which aimed to develop a full-fledged science of war by bringing back to the laboratory a field of research that encoded rules, data, and procedures through the virtualization and statisticalization of that battlespace. The flexibility with which the American military facilitated and enabled the emergence of this science was remarkable on two levels. First, new educational and research institutions proliferated. Between 1992 and 1997 various branches of the military opened new colleges within existing military universities, established new research centers and activated old ones, revamped curricula and offered new courses, initiated new task forces around new training strategies and technologies. Second, the openness of the military to include non- military institutions and individual analysts (independent scientists, fiction writers, leaders in both industrial and technological sectors, etc.) constituted a major transformation in the culture of circulation and consumption of new military ideas and models.

These old and new institutions alike focused on developing a field of research in their laboratories that deployed historical knowledge and experience of the war terrain in an attempt to create a futuristic knowledge. 91 Together, these labs and the advanced technologies they

91 See Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (: the University of Chicago Press, 2001), 20. Abu El-Haj argues that a field science needs specific terrains to reveal a historical knowledge. In the field of Archaeology, historical objects become objects of science and means of accumulating knowledge of the past that needs to be resurrected on a specific terrain, Abu El-Haj maintains. Thus, it is a resurrected past that gives meaning to the present. While the point I want to make here builds on her assumption, its time direction is different. It is a constructed present that would eliminate future chances. The 1991 war and the so-called Operations other than War against Iraq 43

represented carried significant weight in reconfiguring the relationship between science and politics, and between technical expertise and political calculations. As much as scientific processes inside these laboratories required social legitimacy, their purported success required both simulated terrains (i.e., war games) and real ones. At the social level, the military justified its transformation as responding to a wider social transformation taking place in the economic and cultural spheres. At the institutional level, the large scale entanglement between the many labs, academic institutions, and private industry opened the analytical sphere to consider experimental activities not only as scientific objects that “are ‘technically’ manufactured in laboratories but are also inextricably symbolically or politically construed.”92

The products of military studies and laboratory experiments were important as mechanisms and processes that account for “success” in that science.93 Motivated by the need for political validation for this success, the military had to create both simulated and real terrains.

Simulation exercises and war games were the first step in this process of validation. In its attempts to develop new conceptual frameworks and new technologies of warfare, the military did not have to fight the war “as it is; it [could] substitute all of its less literal or partial versions.” Second, it did not need to account for the enemy and its environment “where it is.”

Rather, the terrain of war was replicated at home or in virtual reality and manipulated in terms of affected the future path of military science drastically. For this battlefield provided a perfect experimental field for this science, where experiments and researches were designed to eliminate the uncertainty of the future by rendering the battlefield fully visible. Both scientists and army Generals agreed that by making visible the terrain of the battle and by rendering knowable the course of action in combats, the U.S. army would guarantee its performance superiority through eliminating any possibility of chance. Thus, for the sake of my argument, geographical terrains have a different value for military science.

92 Cetina Knorr, “The Couch, the Cathedral and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 115.

93 Ibid., 116.

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“when it happens.” 94 The apparatus of the American military in collaboration with private industry ensured that these experiments and exercises happened frequently enough for continuous study.

As early as 1986, RAND – deeply rooted in decades of military sponsored war game designs – prepared a report for the U.S. Air Force and for the U.S. Army as part of a “Middle

East War Gaming Exercise.” The report emphasized the role of these games in contributing to strategic planning and in educating officials in management positions. In these games, the participating units are assigned to RED or BLUE Team. (RED represents a potential real-life enemy and BLUE presents U.S. forces). Both teams are provided with a description of a situation they are likely to face in combat. This description “approximates the scope and degree of knowledge of a real-life counterparts would encounter if such a situation actually occurred.”95

The rules of these games are set up in a military fashion. Each team is expected to address the problem in a serious attempt to solve it and to make responsible decisions based on the available knowledge of the postulated situation. Generally, the teams that play in these sorts of games are managed by a control group that has a director. The control group is responsible for providing information to both teams at every juncture of the game.96 In order for these games to be productive, their strict objective is to explore or demonstrate important real-life problems and interactions. As such, what these participants learn in a controlled, quasi-laboratory, environment

94 Ibid., 117.

95 William M. Jones, “On the Adapting of Political-Military Games for Various Purposes,” (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1986), 1.

96 Ibid., 4-5.

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are supposed to be “called on to deal with a similar real-life situation.”97 War games, like other simulation exercises, are seen by military planners as powerful “vehicles for communicating the analytical results and eliciting military professional judgments about these results.” 98

These military activities are performative. They are performative in the sense that, while both vary in their elaborateness, both are the product of scripts that produce “an analogy with the various stages of a theater production.”99 Their success depends on the reiteration of these scripts whether by reading the script or by playing one of the assigned roles. This process of reiteration not only provides a raw material that can predict the contours of the future and enhance the possibilities of winning, but also reproduces the play itself.

Consider the historical examples: War games were introduced to the military field early in the 1950s. The following decades witnessed some improvement on the previous war game models and by the 1970s the ground was furnished for an open military-commercial cooperation in the field of simulations and war gaming. Jutland is an example of these war games. It was designed by Columbia University student James F. Dunnigan for Avalon Hill Corporation in

1966. Late in the 60s, Strategy & Tactics magazine, under the supervision of Dunnigan, started publishing original war games. Later, Dunnigan had also founded Simulation Publication Inc.

(SPI) taking over Strategy & Tactics and emerging as one leading publisher of commercial war games. Dunnigan was one of the participants of “Theater Level Gaming and Analysis Workshop

97 Ibid., 18.

98 Kenneth Watman, “War Gaming and Its Role in Examining the Future,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 10 (2003): 53.

99 Ibid., 51-52. Watman explains the process of war games as follows: “Early in a theater production, the actors sit together with the text and read their parts. The purpose is to familiarize themselves with the script and perhaps to develop insights into the character and plot.”

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for Force Planning,” which was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research in 1977. Firefight and Revolt in the East: Warsaw Pact Rebellion in the 1970 are among the most important games that were designed for the military before their release as commercial games, known as

“historical simulations.” Firefight, published by SPI in 1976, simulated different potentials of

“future history of the NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict.” This war game constituted the first collaboration between the U.S. Army Infantry School and Dunnigan’s firm. This collaboration aimed “to invigorate military war gaming by injecting the design advances, research standards, and modeling of SPI’s historical simulations into a revived War Collage system.”100 In 1977,

Andrew Marshal, director of Net Assessment office of the DOD as one of the main promoters of that revolution, delivered a contract to SPI to design what later became the Strategic Analysis

Simulation (SAS). This was a computer-assisted simulation program that allowed participant officers to engage in post-game analysis of and reflection on their strategic decisions during the exercise, and to assess the consequences of these decisions in a real-time compact operations. In the 1980s more simulations were produced by commercial corporations for the military such as

“McClintic Theatre Model” (MTM) sponsored by the Army Chief of Staff. In the middle of the

1980s, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Rolands & Associate Corporation refined the MTM

100 For a comprehensive review of the history of the military-commercial collaboration in the field of war games and simulations, see Lenoir and Lowood, “Theaters of War: the Military-Entertainment Complex.” See also James F. Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook, accessed January 4, 2013, http://www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/6-3-gene.htm. 1997 (especially "Computer Wargames: Genealogy of Computer Wargames Technology"); Robert H. Bolling, “The Joint Theater Level Simulation in Military Operations other than War,” Proceeding (1995): 1134-1138 (The paper was presented originally at the 27 Winter Simulation Conference), accessed February 23, 2013, http://dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/research/mootw.pdf; Rolands & Associations Corporation, “Civil-Military Simulation and Analysis,” accessed February 23, 2013, http://www.rolands.com/jtls/j_over.html.

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simulation and released the “Joint Theater Level Simulation” (JTLS), which remained in use by the military through the middle of the 1990s.101

The other front of collaboration took place between military and academic institutions.

The Experimental Knowledge Systems Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts developed complex simulations and wrote “general simulation substrates.” These simulations were particularly well-suited to simulating a large number of agents in a dynamic environment more like a battlefield, in which players face problems such as “processing sensor information, reacting to a changing environment in a timely manner, integrating reactive and cognitive processes to achieve an abstract goal, interleaving planning and execution, distributed control, allowing code reuse within and across domains, and using computational resources efficiently.”102 By 1989, PHOENIX, a system in which agents fight fires in realistic simulated environment, was ready for the military. In 1999, a more complex system, called COASTER, was under production for military use. The advantage COASTER had over PHOENIX was that it was designed to “allow army commanders to design and evaluate high level plans (‘courses of action’) in a land-based campaign.”103 These model systems were considered a representation of reality simplified. In other words, they were approximations of reality as attempts to understand the phenomenon at hand and at the same time aim to predict behaviors in the real world based on that understanding.

101 Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook.

102 Marc S. Atkin, David L. Westbrook, and Paul R. Cohen, “Capture the Flag: Military Simulation Meets Computer Games,” AAAI Spring Symposium Series on AI and Computer Games (University of Massachusetts: AAAI Press, 1999), 1, accessed November 11, 2012, http://www.aaai.org/Library/Symposia/Spring/1999/ss99- 02-001.php.

103 Ibid.

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However, historians of military transformation, agree that the most meaningful and serious attempt to transform military operations in its generality in virtual simulations was the advent of the military’s distributed Simulator Networking project (SIMNET).104 It was initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1983. The project’s first proposal was to interoperate military simulators through the construction of a “large-scale, battle-engagement simulation technology,”105 and by the integration of a “new generation of high-tech, realistic, networkable, microprocessor-based simulators that cost 100 times less than existing simulators.”106 The concept of SIMNET was viewed as a success in the military circles due to the advances it generated in the fields of image generation technologies, low-cost simulator design, and networking technologies.107 After the approval stage in 1982 to prototypes and early experiments between 1988 and 1989, a full-fledged functioning program was completed in 1990 and it, SIMNET, was transferred to the Army. The program produced 260 simulators that were installed at 11 sites in the United States and Europe with a total cost of $300

Million by 1992.108

The 1990s witnessed interest in the production of war games and artificial intelligence.

After being introduced in its operational stage in 1990, Operation Internal Look was constantly modified and improved. Several versions of that training exercise were put in use in 1992, 1994,

1996, and 1998 respectively. Following one of the largest domestic training exercises in 1996,

104 It was developed by Jack Thorpe during his tenure with DARPA.

105 Lenoir and Lowood, “Theaters of War: the Military-Entertainment Complex,” 435.

106 Cosby, “SIMNET: An Insider Perspective,” 4.

107 Ernest H. Page and Roger Smith, “Introduction to Military Training Simulation: a Guide for Discrete Event Simulationists,” Proceedings Winter Simulation Conference (1998): 55-56.

108 Cosby, “SIMNET: An Insider Perspective,” 4.

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Internal Look was scheduled to become a biennial event.109 It is possible to view the way in which Internal Look 2000 was conducted as the ultimate, up-to-date, manifestation of network centric warfare as theorized and advocated through the 1990s and 2000s. The exercise itself introduced a new element called theater battle management core systems (TBMCS), which synchronized the flow of information among all units, and was extensively used by all the participating forces. To be sure, the major advantage described by its advocates was that “air mission commanders, planners and warfighters have the integrated capabilities needed to manage air power in theater.” This, in turn, enabled the creation, assimilation, manipulation of data and a quick distribution of that data through wide and local area networks, servers and workstations to all forces in their different locations. The so-called progress that Operation Internal Look made was in part enabled by the increasing digitization of U.S. Army Forces Central Command. 110 In

2002, about 1,000 members of the CENTCOM staff located at Camp As-Sayliyah in participated in Operation Internal Look 2002, forming the core of a planning group for the 2003 military campaign against Iraq. However, Internal Look 2002 was not the only simulated exercise the U.S. forces participated in before the 2003 war. Millennium Challenge 2002 was another famous war game that took place over the course of three weeks before the war. The total cost of the game was $250 million and 13,500 members of all services of the U.S. Army participated at 17 different simulation locations. According to Fred Kaplan, the game was

109 Global Security, accessed January 3, 2013, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/internal-look.htm.

110 Ibid.

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designed to test the capabilities of a transformed U.S. army composed of non-contiguous, more agile, and robustly networked units.111

1.5. Atmospheric Explication from the Virtual to the Real: The Wars on Iraq

Every member of the military would have “a picture of the battle space, a God’s-eye view.” - Robert J. Stevens, (2004)112

After the 1991 war, the contours of a new virtual military culture emerged. At the heart of that virtual culture lays the need for creating real-life “opportunities” of explication that now actively targeted the living environment of the “enemy” rather than the physical destruction of their bodies.113 For the encounters of 1991 and 2003 were almost fully experienced on a “post- militaristic” basis. Manipulating the enemy’s living environment became one of the main features of the American warfare against Iraq. This manipulation necessitated the act of design, an act in which the product was both more stealthy and more capable of disseminating death from a distance.

111 Fred Kaplan, “War-Gamed: Why the Army Shouldn’t Be so Surprised by Saddam’s Moves,” Slate Magazine, March 28, 2003, accessed January 15, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2003/03/wargamed.html. See also Sean D. Naylor, “War Games Rigged? General Says Millennium Challenge 02 ‘Was almost entirely Scripted’,” Army Times, August 16, 2002, accessed January 17, 2013, http://www.armytimes.com/legacy/new/0-292925- 1060102.php.

112 Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Quoted in Tim Weiner, “Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War,” New York Times, November 13, 2004, accessed December 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html?pagewanted=print&position=&_r=0.

113 The U.S. army discourse on revolutionizing the war fully exploits the concept of targeting the environment rather than the population to the extent that the population disappears altogether from its calculations. As such, this proposition should proceed with an extreme precaution.

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Post-militaristic interaction, as the main feature of American warfare in Iraq during the two wars, is not a new warfare technology. Since the first half of the 20th century, aerial bombardment has been present in warfare. Historically, aerial campaigns were viewed as a means of avoiding the act of “man-to-man” killing in a physical confrontation. As such, aerial campaigns were and still are ways of directly inflicting pain and damages on the enemy from a remote distance without physically mingling with an enemy army or population.

In the 1991 war, the U.S. took this post-militaristic strategy a step further. The use of

Advanced Distributed Simulation Technology (ADST), advanced intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities, and the introduction of precision guided munitions (PGMs) increased the destructive capacity of air campaigns to a level that drastically reduced the length and losses of ground campaigns. This allowed for a prominent role of special operation forces

(SOF), in turn, enforcing an even more extreme post-militaristic interaction in the 2003 war.

Aerial bombardment was the most notable element in the 1991 campaign against Iraq. A three- phase extended air campaign from January 17 to February 28, 1991, intended to shut off Iraqi surveillance of the U.S.-led Coalition ground forces and to envelop Iraqi ground forces retreating from Kuwait.114

114 Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report (Washington, D.C., 1993), 8-9. According this report, the number of Iraqi troops who were in the Theater of Operation was 680,000. The Defense Intelligence Agency claimed that, based on satellite images and reconnaissance, Iraqi military capabilities were more than 4,200 tank, 2,800 armored personnel carriers, and approximately 3,100 artillery pieces. Additionally, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported at the time that the Iraqi defense system had more than 700 combat aircrafts supported by a multilayered air defense system, a navy of missile- firing patrol boats, and Silkworm surface-to-surface missiles for coastal defense. However, after the war, these numbers ceased to be official and were considered an overstatement of Iraq’s military capabilities. The Survey states that after revision the total number of Iraqi troops was no more than 336,000 in January 1991, and much less armor, artillery and tanks. See also Eliot Cohen, ed. Gulf War Air Power Survey, Volume IV: Weapons, Tactics, and Training and Space Operations (Washington, D.C., 1993).

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The aerial campaign of the 1991 war completely cleansed the field for the ground campaign leaving in its wake destruction on a massive scale. The concentrated air assaults targeted military, leadership, and mixed civil-military infrastructural facilities as well as the population of Iraq. According to the Gulf War Air Power Survey, “even before the first shots were fired,” helicopters were attacking radar sites in southern Iraq, Navy ships on their part fired salvoes of Tomahawk land-attack missiles, and stealth F-117s attacked “airfields, nodes of integrated air defense system, known Scud sites, nuclear/chemical/biological production sites, and electrical power facilities.” On the second day, air attacks expanded to include Iraqi oil production, storage facilities and naval sites. B-52s, Stealth F-117, Tornados with JP-233 runway attack munitions, F-15Es, attack helicopters, drones, and traditional air-launched cruise missiles, air-to-air fighters (F-15Cs and F-14s), airborne warning, control and intelligence aircrafts (E-3s and RC-135s), electric jamming support aircraft (EF-111s and EA-6s), and aircrafts firing anti- radiation missiles (HARMs) were deployed in the skies above Baghdad in an unprecedented air campaign that held hostage, both, the urban space of Baghdad and the space above it . These aircrafts flew around “2,759 sorties the first day, including 432 refueling sorties” with a constant rate throughout the war of more than 1,000 fixed- and rotary-wing sorties during “Desert Strom” expending more than 222,479,000 explosive bombs of different kinds.115

115 Keaney and Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report, 181. The sum of the explosive bombs used here is my calculation of the Total column. As stated in Volume IV of the GWAPS the total number of bombs dropped from the Iraqi skies was 225,060,000 with a total cost of $1,290,350,275.00. See also Cohen, ed. Gulf War Air Power Survey, Volume IV, 224.

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Figure 2: Table of selected munitions employed in the 1991 war, January, 17-Februrary 28, 1991116

Munitions Air Force Navy Marine Corps Total

General Purpose Bombs Mk-82 (500lb) 59,884 10,941 6,828 77,653 Mk-83 (1,000lb) 10,125 8,893 19,081 Mk-84 (2,000lb) 10,467 971 751 12,289 Mk-117 (B52) 43,435 43,435 CBU-52 (fragmentation bomb) 17,831 17,831 CBU-87 (combined effects 10,035 10,035 munition) CBU-89/78 (Gator) 1,105 148 61 1,314 Mk-20 (Rockeye) 5,345 6,814 15,828 27,987

Laser-Guided Bombs CBU-12 (Lase/Mk 82) 4,086 205 202 4,493

Air-to-Surface Missiles AGM-114 Hellfire 2,876 30 159 3,065 (AH-64 and AH 1W)

AGM-65 All Models (Maverick) 5,255 41 5,296

The air operations of the 1991 war were considered among military circles as the ultimate exploitation of air superiority. The performative destruction from the air was not only a result of a detailed thematization and explication of air superiority by means of experimentation of new technologies, but also a driving force for further processes of thematization and explication.117

Until the 1991 war, penetrating enemy defenses under clouds and darkness by airpower

“unconstrained by weather and time of the day was an unattainable ideal”118 on a real battlefield.

116 Keaney and Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report, 103.

117 See Peter Sloterdijk’s treatment of air explication in modern warfare. Sloterdijk argues that modernity can be described as a process of atmosphere explication, in which our modern culture “produced and designed more or less precisely delimitable microclimata of death for other human beings.” Being-in-the-World now is Being-in-the-breathable where air, climate, breathing milieu, and atmosphere are all fields of science that serve as medians through which exterministic-atmoterrorist practices are delivered. See Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (University of Michigan: Semiotext(e), 2009), 47-50.

118 Cohen, ed. Gulf War Air Power Survey, Volume IV, 224.

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This capacity of manipulating the air superiority was a result of two main technological developments. The first was the “emergence of ground mapping and terrain-avoidance radars that made low-altitude penetration of radar-controlled, ground-based enemy defenses tactically feasible.”119 This new radar technology enabled A-6 and F-111 aircrafts to penetrate below enemy radar, generally below an altitude of 1,000 feet, and hit their targets with “precision,” claim military historians. The second was the advent of night viewing devices capable of detecting different targets. However, the most crucial development was the coupling of night-viewing devices, mainly forward-looking infrared, with designators for laser-guided bombs, which enabled aircrafts to hit from any altitude as long as the target was observable by forward-looking infrared and the laser designator.120 While this new technology was partially used before the 1991 war on

Iraq, such as precision-guided bombing performed with the Pave Spike System in the final stages of the Vietnam War, the length of usage and the results of these weapons prior to the 1991 war were “insufficient… to realize the full tactical potential of the system.” Subsequently, the Pave

Spike System underwent extensive modifications. The new version of that system, Pave Tack

System, was used in a high percentage of the aircrafts that participated in the 1991 war. Some aircrafts such as the F-117, F-111F, and A-6 E were provided with autonomous forward-looking infrared-laser designator capabilities. The same imaging infrared capabilities were added to different platforms, e.g. the AGM-65D Maverick missile, and naval cruise missiles TLAMs and

CALCM.121

119 Ibid., 105.

120 Ibid., 106.

121 Ibid., 110.

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The 1991 war was a theatre in which new all-weather capabilities were first deployed.

Their potential was established on the real-life battlefield. Design-minded, the labs of the U.S. military kept an open-eye to document the shortcomings of the new technology deployed in

Iraq.122 The massive post-war documentation and obsessive statistical analyses of the entirety of the battlespace aimed to modify and enhance unlimited aerial technologies of death, as well as to produce new ones.

In contrast, the war of 2003, it was claimed, was performed in a more precise and discriminate manner. Advocates of NCW claimed that a full deployment of new technologies of advanced intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities, in addition to the widespread use of PGMs, enabled American forces to strike Iraqi targets with greater discrimination and precision.123 This war also, unlike the previous war of 1991, was marked by another element: the heavy deployment of Special Operation Forces (SOF). Both advanced warfare technologies and

SOF enabled the achievement of air and information superiority.

Archival documents collected from different offices of the DOD, military and academic institutions show that although the 1991 war relied heavily on networks, sensors, and heavy connectivity among different platforms to achieve situational awareness, precision warfare, as

122 For example, “Owning the Night Program” continued after the 1991war to arrive at a total visibility. Documents collected from the military archive suggest that all-weather technologies, mentioned above, achieved a step forward in terms of solving visibility problems at night, haze, fog, smoky … conditions. However, that problem was not solved completely and the hoped-for 24 hour visibility had still faced significant limitations. See Andrew Krepinevich, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment,” (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2003); Cohen, ed. Gulf War Air Power Survey, Volume IV; Yarrison, The Modern Louisiana Maneuvers.

123 The concept of discrimination and precision of the new warfare technologies that were deployed in Iraq permeated the discourse of Force Transformation. I will discuss this issue in further details later in the chapter to show how this concept has completely eliminated any human element from the battlespace.

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performed in the 2003 war, itself “may represent a military revolution”124 that still requires validation.

The new warfare mentality that prevailed in the 2003 war was a result of discursive processes of transformation that emerged in the late 1980s and was known in the military circles as the revolution in military affairs (RMA), and later in the 1990s as network centric warfare.

From the battlefield of the 1991 war to the battlespace of the 2003 war, the U.S. military claimed superiority, albeit by massive destruction, over the space of Iraq from air, sea, and land. The war plan relied heavily on the existence and the working of small, highly distributed, and technologically well-equipped SOFs, who had been almost an “after–thought” to commanders and war planners during the 1991 war.125

Additionally, the war planners envisioned the war to be performed virtually. By virtually,

I mean, war operations came to rely on achieving near real-time situational awareness and disseminating that awareness through an advanced system of satellite communication among different participating units. While “air superiority,” with its capacities for massive destruction, facilitated the fast movement of SOFs, the working of these SOFs on the ground provided the military campaign against Iraq with vital information necessary to maintain that same air superiority. Another important element in the planning and executing of the war of 2003 was the

124 Krepinevich, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment,” 14.

125 These Special Operation Forces worked in the northern and southern areas of Iraq since 1991. Further, long before the launch of the 2003 war operations, the CIA worked intensively with the so-called Northern and Southern Iraq Liaison Elements, followed by the deployment of around 10,000 SOFs. Both CIA agents and SOFs worked in different areas in Iraq, before the official declaration of the 2003 war. See Krepinevich, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment”. See also Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 208-212; Catherine Dale, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategies, Approaches, Results, and Issues for Congress” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, 2009), accessed November 17, 2012, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL34387.pdf.

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nonlinearity of ground forces. The concept of nonlinearity was a major consequence of force transformation efforts at operational and structural levels. It aimed to make it difficult to point out front or rear lines of ground forces so as to produce more agile forces.126

Jointness, as a major factor in the agility of forces, was emphasized in the planning period. This jointness of forces also distinguished the 2003 war from its forerunner in 1991. The

1991 war began with a sustained 38-day air campaign, followed by a brief ground attack, the

2003 war started with thousands of SOFs on the ground leading the war against important Iraqi targets, and then a simultaneous application of air power and ground forces continued.

However, there are different narratives of how the 2003 war operations were conducted, at least after the formal declaration of war. According to Dale’s report to Congress, the debate over the sequence of operation continued for months and after a decision was made to launch a short air campaign followed by a ground campaign, the plan shifted at the last minute due to

“concerns that the Iraqi regime would deliberately destroy its southern oil wells,” and also due to information about the location of Saddam, at Dora Farm near Baghdad. 127This information

126 It is curious to note that the prewar planning was a process of debate over how to fight the war. Some argued that to have a plan to fight is something and to have a plan for how to stabilize Iraq after the invasion is something else. The initial recommendation of the number of the troops needed was between 400,000 and 500,000 U.S. troops. This number was proposed by Marine General Anthony Zinni, who conducted a series of war games in 1999. “Desert Crossing,” as the war game was known, was an initial attempt to explore the contours of a military invasion of Iraq, and to assess the potential future of Iraq after Saddam’s removal. See National Security Archive, “Post-Saddam Iraq: The War Game: Desert Crossing 1999 Assumed 400,000 Troops and Still a Mess,” accessed December 1, 2012, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/index.htm. While General Zinni claims that the recommendations of the war games he conducted were completely forgotten, a report to the U.S. Congress states that in 2001 General used the same data to brief Rumsfeld, who, in turn, asked for a “completely new version-with fewer troops and a faster deployment timeline.” See Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story and the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 32-33.

127 Dale, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategies, Approaches, Results, and Issues for Congress,” 40-41.

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caused an operational shift from the original plan. According to Hanson, however, the land invasion went “in tandem with precision strikes on the [Iraqi] regime’s grandees.”128

Regardless of the sequence of air and ground operations, the air campaign in 2003 was fully synchronized, joint, and combined with other forces – Ground Forces, Navy, and Marine

Corps. Further, this sequence was essential for the 1991 war tactically and strategically to establish a long-term destruction and dominance. It is fair to assume that Iraq in 1991 was more or less an uncharted territory for the Americans, and that information about Iraq in its generality belonged to the realm of intelligence speculations, or to the specific aspects of previous cooperation between the Iraqi regime and the United States.

However, the 2003 war against Iraq was conducted under different political and military conditions inherited from the previous war. For twelve years, American air power had been fully in control the two no-fly zones in the northern and southern parts of Iraq. The Operation

Northern Watch denied Iraq’s ability to fly above the 36th parallel in the northern Iraqi airspace.

Simultaneously, enforced the no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel.129

These operations, continuous since 1991, left the Iraqi regime a narrow range of for its own air operations.

128 Victor Davis Hanson, “Lessons of the War,” Commentary (2003): 18, quoted in Major J.R. McKay, “Mythology and the Air Campaign in the Liberation of Iraq,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 3 (2005).

129 Ibid., 4. Note that the southern no-fly zone was extended to 33rd parallel in 1996 to give American and European forces more access to central areas of Iraq with the capacity to strike southeastern defenses of Bagdad itself. See Global Security, accessed January 11, 2013, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/images/020930-d-6570c-006.jpg.

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Figure 3: Iraq No-Fly Zone map 130

The 2003 war’s air campaign, notwithstanding these conditions, was a show of power, an explication of the air superiority. American aircrafts flew around 38,358 sorties (of the 41,404 total sorties flown) and struck approximately 19,950 targets, delivering more than 29,900 munitions of which 19,948 were PGMs and 9,251 were unguided.131

130 Ibid.

131 Michael Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom – By the Numbers,” 11, accessed December 1, 2012, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2003/uscentaf_oif_report_30apr2003.pdf. According to Moseley, 1,801 aircrafts were deployed, of which 1,643 were American combat aircraft.

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Once again, immediately after the 2003 war on Iraq, Andrew Krepinevich was involved in the business of assessing and evaluating the role technology played in the war.132 According to his report, the military managed to solve several problems encountered in the 1991 war. The first of these problems was achieving full air-superiority and information advantage. While this was partially the case in the 1991 war, the second war on Iraq depended completely on deploying nonlinear forces that were capable of exploiting information technology to the fullest. Secondly, war satellites, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), and Predators drastically compressed the engagement cycle, the time forces have between identifying and striking targets. In the 1991 war

“it typically took about 72 hours to compile the Air Tasking Order (ATO), which, among other things, decided which targets would be struck. The cycle of target generation, attack execution and battle damage assessment often took several days, as did targeting Tomahawk cruise missiles.” However, the introduction of different types of drones allowed almost a real-time scanning and imaging of the field which could be fed live to AC-130 gunships. In Krepinevich’s words:133

Once a specific target was identified, a laser-designator could be used to “mark” it for destruction by a laser-guided bomb (LGB). More frequently, however, specially trained combat controllers determined the target’s precise geo-location by using a laser range-finder unit connected to a hand-held global positioning system (GPS) receiver. The coordinates could then be passed by radio to aircraft loitering overhead and plugged into GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).

132 As stated earlier in this chapter, Krepinevich prepared the most authoritative assessment of the 1991 war, in which he promoted RMA and its decisive role in winning the war.

133 Krepinevich, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment,” 16. See also Dana Priest, “Team 555 Shaped a New Way of War,” Washington Post, April 3, 2002, 1; Thom Shanker, “Conduct of War Is Redefined by Success of Special Forces,” New York Times, January 21, 2002, 1.

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It is important to note that, in the 1991 war, Pioneer was the only available reconnaissance drone (UAV). However, the 1990s witnessed a proliferation in production of these UAVs, or robotic aircrafts, which were first tested in the war on Afghanistan in 2001 and then used in an unprecedented number in the 2003 war on Iraq. 134 The Hellfire-equipped

Predator was the most intensively used UAV in different military services and CIA operations.

According to Krepinevich’s assessment report, ten different types of UAVs were deployed in the

2003 war battlespace to enable near real-time situational awareness and synchronization among different forces maintaining both air superiority and information advantage while at the same time denying the enemy any access to their communication network. 135

The climate and atmosphere design, to borrow Sloterdijk’s description, which was ingrained in the 1991 and the 2003 wars, enabled the U.S. air campaigns to abolish “the immunizing effects of spatial distance,” and to force “access to objects which are inaccessible from the ground, or accessible only with a high causality–rate.”136 These immunizing effects, achieved by a prolonged aerial bombardment, brought the air conditions pertaining to “enemy” life to a new level of explication. The conditions of explication, to which a constant operational manipulation of space technology, military airplanes, artillery, and guided munitions in open

134 The Department of Defense spent over $3 billion on UAV programs during the 1990s. Although, there are ten different types of UAVs, the most common, which were used in different military operations, are: the MQ- 1 Predator, the MQ-1C Sky Warrior, and the MQ-9 Reaper (or Predator B). See Andrew Callam, “Drone Wars: Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” International Affairs Review XVIII (2010), accessed December 2, 2012, http://www.iar-gwu.org/node/144.

135 Krepinevich, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: A First-Blush Assessment,” 17.

136 The development of new technologies of death that were no longer limited to time-specific targets or weather conditions can be viewed as a step forward in what Sloterdijk defines as atmoterrorist explication. See Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 50.

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terrain is central, witnessed massive “product-design-type”137 tasks in the U.S. army labs. The artificial intelligence, war programs and games, and finally the two wars themselves demanded an efficient coordination among different expertise of computer programmers, military engineers, private industries, meteorologists, and topologists.

These conditions of explication also demanded the expansion of combat zones where they became no longer referred to as battlefield but rather as battlespace. In this battlespace, the enemy was reduced to an object in the environment and was defined from the view point of their exterminablility. Against this background, the environment too is explored from the perspective of its destructibility. The sea, the desert, the skies, weather conditions, natural resources, and cultural artifacts all were made objects of exploration and targets of explication.138 Central to these conditions of exploration was the fact that ordinary people have user relationships to their environment. Thus, the destruction that was brought about by the 1991 and the 2003 wars on

Iraq, and the military operations between them, assumes a more analytical character than use of the environment. Although intermittent and scattered, the processes of destruction which started in 1991 have been systemized and ongoing. They have engendered a prolonged climate of fear, placing [Iraqis] in a permanent state of readiness against attacks on their living environment.

1.6. The Making of Network-Centric Warfare and the Unmaking of the Human Element

Since the late 1980s, the DOD has been occupied with understanding, studying, and evaluating what was known as the Revolution in Military Affairs, then as Network Centric

137 Ibid., 23.

138 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 25-28.

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Warfare in the late 1990s. Efforts to transform military organization, its structures, conceptual frameworks, and operations have taken place both in U.S. Army labs and in real wars. “Network-

Centric Enterprise,” as described by many advocates, “is characterized by an information-based strategy for creating and exploiting information superiority.” Further, this approach presupposes that power should be moved from the center to the edge in order to achieve control indirectly, rather than directly. 139 NCW, as an emerging theory of war, has managed to emulate transformation in the economic sphere. The architects of NCW wanted to deliver the experience of Wal-Mart and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, Inc. to the battlefield.

NCW literature defines and describes a neat and sophisticated model of warfare that borrows economic modalities and synchronizes its operations within a cyber-sphere where information is the most important commodity. From the onset and in the immediacy of its enunciations, the definition and descriptions of NCW appear to hold ideal military strategy at a remove from the activities of war itself, and displaces those ideals from the act of killing. This theoretical removal of war as an ideal strategy from the war activities often produces formal and informal descriptions of war as a form of transaction that speaks the language of markets and, in turn, will be transformed into a final product, e.g. winning a victory. Thus, such a final product achieves a double removal from war activities as performed in the field. Second, pre-war planning and descriptions – and for that matter post-war representations – set the stage for presenting war activities as games. As such, war becomes a theatre of play and games constructed to become a consumable and entertaining phenomenon.

139 Alberts et al. Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, 35. See also David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes, Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age (Washington, D.C.: DOD-Command and Control Research Program, 2005), 7.

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The ultimate consequences of this presentation and description of war, as Elaine Scarry maintains, are redescription and omission.140 Scarry argues that while the ultimate “outcome of war is injuring,” and it is neither a form of transaction nor a game, modern war narratives succeed in making human elements disappear altogether by means of redescription and omission. 141 Indeed, one can read thousands of pages describing and celebrating the final triumph of network centric warfare, its conceptual frameworks, strategies, structures, technologies, weapons and platforms, potentials and vulnerabilities and strategic deployment in different regions – mainly the two wars on Iraq – without encountering a single reference to the fact that winning a smart war by means of high-tech weapons means altering, rupturing, and destroying human tissue. The very technical use of language and the emphasis on artificial intelligence and distance control and surveillance mask the intensity and scale of damage and pain directly inflicted on the enemy by means of redescription. This discourse effaces, altogether, the humanity of the enemy by omission, since the soldier now does not need to see the enemy physically in order to kill him.

Two narratives can be traced in the military transformation literature as manifested in the discourse of network centric warfare. The first is war as a transaction that emulates economic models and exploits virtual space in order to arrive at information superiority and to conduct wars according to the standards of the information age. The second is war as a game or

140 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 67.

141 Ibid., 63-64.

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simulation. Both narratives demanded an abstract level of technical language in which “injuring” and violence achieves total “invisibility.”142

In the instance of war as a transaction, one can identify a language of transaction that takes place in the cyber-sphere and in which the accumulation of information is key to winning and achieving a superior position. Much more important, one can identify sets of descriptions that explain “operational effectiveness,” “competitive advantage,” “improved information sharing,” “situational awareness,” “collaboration and self-synchronization,” and “leveraging and exploiting information and information technology.”143 In these instances of describing the new war conducts and its technology, one encounters sentences that describe the progress that has been made towards transforming the U.S. military into a network centric organization. For example, Arthur K. Cebrowski introduced a pamphlet published by the Office of Force

Transformation by writing: “Recent progress in developing network-centric capabilities throughout the U.S. Armed Forces, evident in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, is most encouraging.”144 Similarly, wrote that “U.S. forces must leverage information technology and innovative network-centric concepts of operations to develop increasingly

142 Ibid., 69.

143 Department of Defense, “The Implementation of Network-Centric Warfare,” accessed October 20, 2012, http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/sale.html. See also David Alberts, Information Age Transformation: Getting to a 21st Century Military (Washington, D.C.: DOD-Command and Control Research Program, 2002); Alberts et al., Network Centric Warfare; Alberts et al. Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority; David Alberts et al., Understanding Information Age Warfare (Washington, D.C.: DOD-Command and Control Research Program, 2001); Cebrowski, Speech to Network Centric Warfare 2003 Conference; Martin Burke, Information Superiority Is Insufficient To Win In Network Centric Warfare (Salisbury: Defense and Technology Organization, 2001), accessed November 10, 2012, http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2000/5th_ICCRTS/cd/papers/Track4/024.pdf; U.S. Department of Defense, Network Centric Warfare, accessed January 10, 2013, http://www.defenselink.mil/nii/NCW/ncw_sense.pdf.

144 Department of Defense, “The Implementation of Network-Centric Warfare.”

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capable joint forces. New information and communications technologies hold promise for networking highly distributed joint and multinational forces.”145

In the instance of war as a game or simulation, a different set of vocabulary is put to use.

Simulators, distributors, sensors, networks, codes, systems, algorithms and computational models, databases: these are the major elements that describe the systems within which these simulated exercises are experienced. Although these war games are serious military exercises, war activities are reduced in these simulations to cinematographic techniques and two and three- dimensional imagery akin to entertainment. In the case of simulation exercises, the enemy remains faceless, placeless, and nameless. Simply put, the enemy in these games is a virtual point ready to be hunt down. This was evident by the deployment of different networked platforms in the field.

Among major technologies that reproduces an abstract enemy is the battlefield Forward

Looking Infrared systems. This technology produces thermal 2-D image using mechanical scanning tracing any source that emits heat and, in turn, creating a picture assembled for video output on a screen. The resulting image is of high-angular resolution during both day and night allowing for detailed identification of the object. Another technology that was put in use is a laser radar that scans the scene with a coherent light source and produces a narrow beam-width, which allows similar high-angular resolution for day and night operations and countermeasure resistance. Yet another technology is millimeter wave scanning which directs range measurement by scanning and can produce range, intensity and velocity data. This technology functions for

145 Donald H. Rumsfeld, forward to Transformation Planning Guidance (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, April, 2003).

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both day and night operations and is less sensitive to weather effects than laser sensors. It is even capable of a very long atmospheric range and its capacity to penetrate foliage at lower frequencies. These three types of sensors, together with visible and acoustic sensors, constitute the main elements of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system, a system in its early stages of research and investigation.146

Whether this technology was introduced in a war game like Internal Look, Desert

Crossing, Millennium Challenge 2002 or if it was deployed in the field, the enemy and his/her environment, in both cases, were reduced to a two or three-dimensional image in the first instance, or into a source of heat that registers on the screens of different types of sensors. In both cases, the focus is shifted from war as an act of killing the enemy to how advanced and technologically sophisticated the war machine has become. This shift has made invisible the physical existence of the enemy who is no more than a character in a simulated game or a source of heat that moves on the screens of different networked platforms.

Although we may become lost in the intricacies of networks and how information could lead to self-synchronization, situational awareness and competitive advantage, what is being masked here and made completely invisible is the capacity of the network to transform through different and multiple platforms not into an economic model, but rather, into a medium of death.

What is continually being omitted from this description is the capacity of a robustly networked

146 For more details on Automatic Target Recognition System and Image Understanding technology see Bir Bhanu and Terry L. Jones, “Image Understanding Research for Automatic Target Recognition,” Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, IEEE 8 (1993): 15-17. For a discussion of the role of Cascade ATR and its role in the so-called see Bradley Walls, “Cascaded Automatic Target Recognition (Cascaded ATR),” Proceeding Conference (2010). SPIE 7696, Automatic Target Recognition XX; Acquisition, Tracking, Pointing, and Laser Systems Technologies XXIV; and Optical Pattern Recognition XXI, 76960W.

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platform to alter the very conditions of enemy life. To find the enemy, to indirectly control the environment of the enemy, or to bomb the enemy from a distance are all means to tamper with and damage human tissues and human bodies. If we assume that people have user relationships to their environment, then tampering with that environment is a way of inflicting pain and damage on human bodies. In other instances, by analyzing a robustly networked platform from the perspective of its capacity to produce and achieve synchronization, decision superiority, and high tempo of operations as final products, one is at risk of obfuscating the injury of human bodies by that platform as an “intermediate product.”147

To conclude, both narratives - war as an emulation of economic models, and war as simulations and games - omit the human component from the activity of war by shifting the focus to the “progress” made in the science of war. When formal and informal descriptions of war recognize war either as successful translation of economic models or as game exercises, then the movement of war ceases to become a movement of human bodies in conflict and transforms into a mere act of translation from one national sphere to another, a mere movement of algorithms among different networks. A multilayered process of omissions and abstractions shocks the reader of this history of transformation. The omission of the very humanity of those to whom all these smart bombs are being delivered and the omission of the capacity of this war to injure and kill. Its planned and calculated simulation programs and its smart technology and guided munitions displace and make invisible its killing capabilities and destructive powers.

When subjected to this apparatus, Iraq in its entirety – geography and population – was abstracted. Its space had been scanned, visualized, and reduced into maps, reconceptualized as

147 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 73.

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models and distributed simulations. But these models are the sum of Iraqis and their cities transpired into data that takes shape on the multiple and synchronized screens delivering death at a distance.

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CHAPTER TWO: Iraq: The Making of Necro-Sovereignty

2.1. Introduction: Boundaries Displaced

[S]o not the king in his central position, but subjects in their reciprocal relations; not sovereignty in its one edifice, but the multiple subjugations that take place and function within the social body.

- Michel Foucault, Society Must be defended (1997).148

In January 2012, I was driving from San Jose airport to Stanford University to examine the Iraqi Archive at the possession of the Hoover Institution. While my GPS was guiding me to

Stanford University; few questions were unavoidable: why is the Iraqi Archive located here?

Would a ride to the Iraqi National Library and Archive be as smooth as a ride to the Hoover

Institution?

How to theoretically conceive of the nature of this possession of another nation’s archive? And what are the implications of this acquisition on the sovereignty of Iraq? Most importantly, what does it tell us about the sovereignty of the United States? The scope of this chapter, however, is to think of these questions in the broader historical context of Iraq. By historically contextualizing these questions, it traces emerging forms of sovereignty which are very peculiar to the colonial context of Iraq. This chapter argues that the 1991 war on Iraq forced the emergence of new political and legal possibilities that turned Iraq into an “intersection of moving bodies,” 149 and into a territory defined by an extensive ensemble of asymmetrical

148 Michel Foucault, Society must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 1997), 27.

149 Achille Mbembe, “At the Edge of the world: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 261.

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movements not only taking place within it,150 but also around and about it. The new terms imposed on Iraq after the 1991 war had helped change the visible and symbolic sovereignty of the state in the light of the massive territorial redefinition of the northern and southern areas of

Iraq. Importantly, these new political and legal conditions allowed the emergence of new claims by a network of internal and external actors, and new forms of violence.

Accordingly, there is a need to reformulate my previous questions to reflect the mutable nature of the American project in Iraq, which, in turn, produced multiple edifices, sites and forms of sovereignty. One way of posing the question is: What form of sovereignty did the American project in Iraq require, and through what means could this project be achieved? Implicit in this reformulation of the question of sovereignty is that we cannot theoretically grasp the abstract nature of the sovereign, whether legally or politically, without tracing its mundane manifestations, sites of action, and technologies of violence, all of which assume a fluid spatiality and multiple temporalities.

Most accounts that attempted to study and theorize the concept of sovereignty in relation to the Iraqi case often start with the 2003 war as a moment of suspended, or deferred, or divisible sovereignty. 151 Additionally, these accounts limit the analysis to visible state institutions

150 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 117. In his analysis of space de Certeau tells us that “space is a practiced place.” Thus, for de Certeau, the street while defined by processes of urban planning, it is simultaneously transformed into a space by walkers. This ensemble of movements that produces the street as a place in de Certeau’s account seems to by symmetrical in which an urban planner and a walker both take part in the making of space. In the Iraqi context, however, space is oriented, resituated, and temporalized by asymmetric operations, leaving de Certeau’s proposition insufficient by itself to account for the modalities of power that orient, shape, and temporalize that space. Thus, my analysis postulates that the American project has produced spatial sovereign forms marked by extensive and accelerated asymmetrical movements maintained through a realm of violence.

151 Dario Battistella, The Return of the State of War: A Theoretical Analysis of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2008). Battistella is among very few International Relations scholars who attempted to construct a comparison between the 1991 war and the 2003 war to show that the former, unlike the latter, was decided within the legal framework of the UN. The logic of the 1991 war, according to Battistella, 72

insomuch as they monopolize the legitimate exercise of violence, or “illegitimate” in the case of

Iraq. Finally, the few attempts to conceptualize the effect of the 2003 war on theoretical discussions of the concept of sovereignty focused the gaze on Iraq with very little attention paid to how to conceive of George W. Bush’s declaration, at the eve of the 2003 war on Iraq as part of the U.S. War on Terror, that the “United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security.”152 To put it differently, most conceptual approaches neglect historicizing forms of sovereign mentality that has dominated the discourse of different

followed a long tradition of both internalization and internationalization of Lockean values by states in the international system. The 2003 war, on the other hand, was a tantamount to a retreat from Lockean values to signal a return of Hobbesian behavior.

For an interesting attempt to reconceptualize the traditional concept of sovereignty as suspended or deferred, see the edited volume Re-Envisioning Sovereignty: The End of Westphalia. The volume discusses “metaphysical sovereignty; extraterritorial sovereignty; deferred sovereignty; internationalized sovereignty; incipient Sovereignty; and deterritorialized sovereignty” all of which are attempts to understand “abnormalities” in the field of international politics. See Gerry Simpson, “The Guises of Sovereignty,” in Re-Envisioning Sovereignty: The End of Westphalia, ed. Trudy Jacobsen et al. (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), 64-65; Trudy Jacobsen et al, eds, Re-Envisioning Sovereignty: The End of Westphalia (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008), 4. See also Alexandros Yannis, “The Concept of Suspended Sovereignty in International Law,” European Journal of International Law 13 (2003): 1032–1054. On the concept of divisible sovereignty, see Rolf Schwarz and Oliver Jutersonke, “Divisible Sovereignty and the Reconstruction of Iraq,” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 649-665.

152 Emphasis is mine. George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, the Cross Hall, March 17, accessed July 7, 2013, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html. The major consequence of this declaration was the conceptualization of the 2003 war as a preemptive attack to the main purpose of self-defense against a “rouge state” that had continually attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction, according to the official discourse of the war makers. The concept of preemptive attack as manifested in the 2003 war extended the concept of self-defense beyond its traditional applications in international law. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter states very clearly that states do have the right to declare war on one another in “self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” By the letter of international law, the United States did NOT have the sovereign authority to invade Iraq since no “armed attack” occurred. David A. Lake eloquently articulates the failure of the IR field to account for new and emerging forms of sovereignty. Lake argues that the IR concept of sovereignty fails completely in understanding hierarchic relationships in international relations, and thus there is an urgent need to think of an alternative mode of theorization that can “identify continua of hierarchic relationships that make sense of the various forms of mixed or restricted sovereignty that we observe in world politics” in order to account for the 1991 and 2003 wars on Iraq. David A. Lake, “The New Sovereignties in International Relations,” International Studies Review 5 (2003): 304.

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American administrations, and instead attempt to understand Iraq in isolation from its historical and imperial contexts.

This chapter asks whether the 2003 war on Iraq was the shock moment in which the sovereignty of the state was reconfigured once and forever. As its entry point, it examines the effects of the 1991 war followed by more than a decade of sanctions, and how various technologies of violence transformed the very visible sovereignty of Iraq. It traces the emergence of new forms of sovereignty since the 1991 war in order to reflect the mutable and elastic nature of the American project in Iraq. It studies these new forms of sovereignty by analyzing the ways in which power and violence had functioned throughout the last three decades–the1991 war, the sanctions period, and after the complete dismantling of the sovereign state in 2003. It argues that in the historical context of the dismantling of Iraq, power came to function through a democratization of violence. Intertwined throughout the history of the American project in Iraq, power and its democratized violence cannot be conceived of as centralized in one sovereign form, whether imperial or national, but rather in dispersed forms functioning within localized institutions with material means and techniques of intervention. This proposition for analyzing decentralized processes neither negates the centrality of the state, nor confirms a fixed territoriality and singular temporality of the project of the sovereign. Rather, it traces how state sovereignty in Iraq has been constantly altered by the conditions of possibility that were opened up in Iraq after the 1991 war, which produced an inherent structural instability in the capacity of the sovereign state to effectively control its territory, and to function both as the ultimate source of law and as the exclusive repository of coercion in determining when, where, and how to

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govern and/or protect its citizens.153 Consequently, what is at stake here is not an eroding, deferred, suspended, or divided state sovereignty per se – which signals a rupture in the exercise of that sovereignty – but rather a transformation in that sovereignty.

That said, this chapter suggests, from an analytical point of view, that the 2003 war was not a moment of rupture that suspended the Iraqi state sovereignty. Rather, the military intervention of 2003 was the crowning moment of a continuous re-situation and transformation of both national and imperial sovereignty that transcends the internal/external dichotomy, and in which short and long-term temporalities overlap and redefine each other. These temporalities, lay at the heart of sovereign powers, to borrow Mbembe’s words, “are not necessarily either separate or merely juxtaposed. Fitted within one another, they relay each other; sometimes they cancel each other out, and sometimes their effects are multiplied.”154

As such, I propose reading Iraq from 1990 to present as a space in which a form of

(de)moralized necro-sovereignty has emerged.155 In that space of necro-sovereignty – where armies had been deployed, new legal frameworks and international laws had been established, bureaucracies had been formed, and new modes of governance and military technologies had been experimented – Iraqis have been forced to die, while simultaneously being freed from the

153 I do refer here to a traditional dominant definition of sovereignty in the field of International Relations. At least one stream of thoughts in the field of IR posits that in order for the state to be recognized in an inter-state system it must have the capacity to effectively achieve domestic control. However, this normative condition of sovereignty has changed lately. I will discuss this in more details later in this chapter. See Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law (Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 1989).

154 Mbembe, “At the Edge of the World,” 260.

155 I would like to mention here that I originally suggested a moralized form of necro-sovereignty. I am thankful for Prof. Lila Abu-Lughod for her suggestion to add the (de). As such, a (de)moralized necro- sovereign becomes a legitimate space for action, i.e. a space to be uplifted and moralized.

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dictatorship of the Ba‘athist regime. If post-WWII area witnessed an “economization of sovereignty,”156 in which levels of economic development and progress were the main markers of a positive sovereignty, then the post-Cold War era has added another criterion: the moralization of sovereignty as a condition of international recognition and a rule for non- intervention. In the post-Cold War era sovereign powers are moralized, or demoralized, according to their adoption of certain political institutions and their respect for human and minority rights. The incapacity of these sovereign powers to conform to a certain moral order of things, as defined by the empire, renders these spaces ideal for intervention and transformation.

The emergence of Iraq as a demoralized sovereign state, since 1990, best exemplifies this post-

Cold War dictum.

Before embarking on this project, however, I need to make few cautionary remarks about the limitation of its scope. Theoretically, this chapter is neither an attempt to redefine concepts of sovereignty, nor to show the discrepancy between norms and practices in international relations.

Rather, it chooses critical moments and sites of the encounter and traces how the concept is spoken of in the political and legal texts about Iraq.157 In doing so, this chapter explicates a bias

156 See Antony Anghie, Imperialism Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 156 and 188. Anghie has maintained that the Mandate System had developed new disciplines and produced a set of technologies to manage the native populations, which ultimately resulted in a new understanding of territory, population and government. “Territory is understood now in terms of resources and economic development; population is understood in terms of health issues, mortality rates, hygiene and labour concerns; and government is conceptualized in terms of the reform of native political institutions.” He provisionally terms these processes as the “economization of government” or the “economization of sovereignty.”

157 Due to space limitations, this chapter examines only three constitutive UN security resolutions as legal documents: UN Security Council Resolutions 661, 678 and 687 – with their attendant armies, bureaucracies, legal procedures and technologies. I chose these resolutions for two interrelated reasons: First, their scope of action and attendant bureaucracy had shaped the contours of a novel understanding of sovereign powers beyond Iraq itself. Second, they established universal regimes of sanctions and inspection that emerged as tools of intervention in other cases (e.g. Iran and among others). However, the list of issues one can 76

examine to trace a transformed understanding of sovereign powers in the context of Iraq is very long and complex. Some of the examples that this chapter does not engage are: The No-Fly Zones [NFZs] that were imposed on Iraq after the 1991 war and the deployment of private security companies in the 2003 war.

These NFZs were imposed by the U.S., UK and France following the UN Security Council resolution 688, which never formally established these zones. The first NFZ was situated north of latitude 36° N, which included the city of and was established on April 7, 1991, following the Kurdish uprising in the north on the pretext of protecting the Kurds from Saddam. The second NFZ, which was imposed on the pretext of protecting the Shi’a in the south following the Shi’a uprising, was situated south of latitude 32° S and began on August 27, 1992 to include the southern city of . In September 1996 the southern NFZ was enlarged up to the 33rd degree.

These NFZs, which expanded over more than half of Iraq’s territory, were never explicitly authorized by the UNSCR 688. It was an American-led interpretation and enforcement of that resolution. Iraqi aircrafts, whether military or civilian, were forbidden from flying inside these zones. American, British and French aircrafts patrolled over these zones jointly until September 1996. However, in September 1996 France objected to the expansion of the southern NFZ and as a result decided not to participate in these patrols in 1997. Surely, the U.S. provided most of the technologies and manpower to enforce the two NFZs. The two components of the Iraq NFZs, known as Operation Northern Watch and Operation Southern Watch, covered a combined land area of some 104,600 square miles and cost the U.S. an average of $1.0 billion per year. See Alfred B. Prados, “Iraq: Former and Recent Military Confrontations with the United States,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, September 6, 2002), 2-9.

Equally important, soon after the imposition of the NFZs, Iraqi intelligence sources reported that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] under the leadership of Jalal Talabani offered American and British oil companies concessions to start drilling in the Khābūr River region in Zākho. See 032-1-1 (0094), Ba‘ath Regional Command Collection [BRCC], Ḥizb al-Baᶜth al-ᶜArabī al-Ishtirākī Records, Hoover Institution Archives; 032- 1-1 (0123), BRCC, Ḥizb al-Baᶜth al-ᶜArabī al-Ishtirākī Records, Hoover Institution Archives. The same sources reported that military camps were opened under the supervision of American military units to train Commando units in the North to fight against the central government in Baghdad. See 032-1-1 (0136), BRCC, Ḥizb al-Baᶜth al-ᶜArabī al-Ishtirākī Records, Hoover Institution Archives; 032-1-1 (0172), BRCC, Ḥizb al- Baᶜth al-ᶜArabī al-Ishtirākī Records, Hoover Institution Archives. Interestingly, the NFZs, which were originally declared as humanitarian operations in order to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shi’as in the south, soon enough were transformed into military operations in the second Clinton’s administration. They were also utilized by the Bush administration to prepare the battlefield long enough before the start of the 2003 war. The involvement of multiple actors and the opening up of Iraqi territories to the intervention of international, regional and local forces not only challenged the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, but violently reshaped and resituated that sovereignty.

The second relevant topic that this chapter does not discuss, which is of extreme importance to the making of the necro-sovereign project, as this chapter proposes, is the intense reliance on private military and security companies. As a modern phenomenon these mercenaries, private and security companies are transnational corporations legally registered within their home countries. They obtain contracts from governments, private firms, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. Their employees, contracted as civilians but armed as military personnel, operate in “grey zones” as unlawful combatants without oversight or accountability, under murky legal restraints and often with immunity. See Robert Y. Pelton, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 342.

The reliance on private companies in colonial wars is not a new phenomenon, for the colonial merchant companies, such as the East India Company, provide a historical example of modern private military and security companies. However, the ratio of private contractors to troops has increased dramatically in the past 77

in the literature that follows a general pattern of our knowledge. For if, as Jens Bartelson argues,

“sovereignty and knowledge implicate each other logically and produce each other historically,”158 then we are, once again, facing the questions of how to explain the historical

“abnormalities” that do not fit neatly in the universal paradigm of Europe, and how to deconstruct this paradigm’s modes of categorization. Therefore, this chapter departs from dominant definitions and modes of categorization of sovereign states, quasi-sovereign states and failed states – essentially a product of our knowledge bias. It postulates sovereignty as an extraterritorial project capable of tactilely acting upon and transforming demoralized spaces, necessarily outside Europe, through deploying a myriad of technologies of rule and violence.

Methodologically, insomuch as methodologies are intimately united with forms of knowledge, any work that studies Iraq needs to scrutinize its sources instead of celebrating “the access” that has been granted to a vast community of scholars especially after 2003. This means

fifteen years. In the 1991 war, the ratio was one in a hundred; in the 2003 war, the ratio was one in ten. See Laura A. Dickinson, “Government for Hire: Privatizing Foreign Affairs and the Problem of Accountability under International Law,” William and Mary Law Review 47 (2005): 149. In general, these firms maintain technological and military capabilities that enable them to inflict violence on a scale previously reserved to sovereign states. This, in fact, has altered the very definition of the state as the sole entity bearing monopoly of violence. In the context of the American wars on Iraqi, these companies call into question the once impenetrable notion of state sovereignty and its supremacy. Not only these companies were granted immunity from “Iraqi Legal Process” by the Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 17 of 2004, but also they remain private businesses and thus fall outside the military chain of command and justice system inside the U.S. due to their ambiguous legal status. More importantly, by contracting these companies the U.S. government does not need congressional notification, oversight or approval.

See Ian Traynor, “The Privatization of War,” , December 10, 2003, accessed September 15, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/10/politics.iraq; Jackson Nyamuya Maogoto, “The Private Military Firm-Subcontracting Sovereignty: the Commodification of the Military Force and the Fragmentation of the State’s Authority,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 13 (2006): 7-9. See also Jennifer K. Elsea, “Private Security Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Legal Issues,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, December 22, 2009), 17-18; Sheila S. Kennedy and Laura S. Jenson, “Outsourcing Patriotism: Privatization, Sovereignty and War,” in The End of Sovereignty: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. David J. Eaton (Hamburg: LIT Verlag Münster, 2006), 375-392.

158 Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.

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that as much as scholars had previously complained about the scarcity of information about Iraq due to the closure of its archive under the Ba‘athist regime, this chapter enunciates a different concern that questions the instrumentality with which the Iraqi archive has been made available to scholars since 1991. Section 2.5 of this chapter problematizes the Iraqi archive as a source of knowledge. Perhaps what I call “instrumental circulation” of that archive and the forms of knowledge this circulation has produced about Iraq form a constitutive juncture in the time-space of the emerging forms of sovereignty.

In summation, this chapter examines the making of a mode of necro-sovereignty as manifested itself in the American project in Iraq since 1990. It examines a mode of sovereignty that does not conform to a dominant definitional logic, but transforms itself according to historical contingencies insomuch as it is capable of deploying various technologies of violence and domination that sought to control and manage Iraq as a regional power. Given the territorial, legal, and political fuzziness of the working of the sovereign – and its constant contestation in multiple sites – in the historical context of Iraq one is obliged to analyze moments of formation

(territorial, legal, and political) not so much as “securely bounded and…firmly entrenched,”159 but as mutable formations that set forth “new choices” and by doing so erase old ones.160

This chapter proceeds as the following: First, it reviews theories of sovereignty and shows the limits of existing explanations. Second, it investigates the new political conditions imposed on Iraq following the 1991 war and how they put to a different use the space and time of the sovereign Iraqi state by tracing constitutive moments and spaces of the American project.

159 Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18 (2006): 136.

160 Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, ed. Christine Gailey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 335.

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Third, it traces other sites in the U.S. to follow the dispersed Iraqi Archive as one of the major manifestations of these new forms of sovereignty.

2.2. Theories of Sovereignty

It is no secret that sovereignty, in traditional discourses, is a modern political and legal product of European wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.161 It is also no secret that, as some recent studies show, 162 a closer examination of discourses on the nature of sovereign powers reveals the contingent, unstable, and contestable character of the concept, as well as the impossibility of tracing the “thing-ness” of the concept, or its natural boundaries. Some theoretical accounts focus their attention on the relationship between the sovereign and its subjects, i.e. the internal dimension of sovereignty. Others focus their attention on “how sovereigns are to exist with and relate to each other,” 163 that is the external dimension of sovereignty. It is the later aspect of sovereignty that demanded the creation of the international law in order to regulate relation between sovereigns.

Sovereignty, International Law and the Failure Paradigm:

161 This view is dominant in the discourse of political science and political theory. It has been recently challenged by some scholars who have attempted to locate the formative moments of sovereignty, both as a concept and an institutional practice, in wider discursive wholes that extend beyond Europe to include the colonial encounter. See for example, Antony Anghie, Imperialism Sovereignty and the Making of International Law; Antony Anghie, “Western Discourses of Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility, eds. Julie Evans et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013); David Scott, “Norms of Self-Determination: Thinking Sovereignty Through,” Middle East Law and Governance 4 (2012): 195-224; R.B.J. Walker, “Space/Time/Sovereignty,” in Perspectives on Third-World Sovereignty: the Postmodern Paradox, eds. Mark E. Denham and Mark Owen Lombardi (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

162 See for example Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty; Quentin Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, eds., Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

163 Anghie, “Western Discourses of Sovereignty,” 19.

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Some scholars define sovereignty as a “supreme power over a body politic” and a

“freedom from external control.”164 Francis Hinsley argues that “sovereignty originally and for a long time expressed the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community… and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere.”165 Daniel Philpott defines it as the exercise of supreme political authority within demarcated borders by a single source, be that “a liberal constitution, a military dictatorship, a theocracy, or a communist regime.”166 In his analysis of the modern state system, Hendrik Spruyt writes, “if politics is about rule, the modern state is verily unique, for it claims sovereignty and territoriality. It is sovereign in that it claims final authority and recognizes no higher source of jurisdiction. It is territorial in that rule is defined as exclusive authority over a fixed territorial space.”167 Indeed, authority – defined as the administrative control over a fixed territory – of the sovereign state is delimited vis-à-vis other sovereign states by the mere fact of its territorial demarcation.168

As such, sovereignty of the state, for Spruyt, is organically linked to its territoriality.

Therefore, external and internal claims follow from this definition. That is, the state is externally demarcated from other states by its borders, and it does not make any claims to rule beyond these borders. Internally, state is “the final locus of jurisdiction,” and the sole holder of political and

164 Eaton, The End of Sovereignty, 1; Stephan Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

165 Francis H. Hinsley, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 2nd ed., 1.

166 Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1.

167 Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 34.

168 Ibid., 36.

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legal authority.169 However, these treatments of sovereignty have been criticized, from within the

IR field, for their unitary view of the nation-state that focuses on sovereignty’s internal dimension.170

Other IR theorists insist that sovereignty should be defined based on its internal and international dimensions, or based on its different manifestations.171 Janice Thomson, on the one hand, argues that sovereignty’s international dimension equally matters as its internal elements.

For interstate relations constitute the sovereignty of the state as much as “do the relations between individual states and their societies.” Thomson views sovereignty as an institution to which “the domestic-international dichotomy and the interplay between the two are crucial” in that they play an important role “in constituting, defining, and shaping sovereignty, the state, and state-society relations.” 172 According to Thomson, the domestic-international dichotomy is useful in that it explains sovereignty in terms of state’s authority, not control. As such, Thomson insists on bringing sovereignty back into International Relations so it could be defined as the product of “the recognition by internal and external actors that the state has the exclusive authority to intervene coercively in activities within its territories.”173

169 Ibid., 34-35.

170 Janice Thomson argues against this unitary view of the concept of sovereignty offered by both liberal interdependence and realist theorists. For the first, according to Thomson, views sovereignty as “the state’s ability to control actors and activities within and across its borders;” and the second conceives of sovereignty as “the state’s ability to make authoritative decisions – in the final instance, the decision to make war.” See Janice Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research,” International Studies Quarterly 39 (1995): 213.

171 See Krasner, Sovereignty; Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations,” 23-33.

172 Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations,” 214.

173 Ibid., 219.

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Stephan Krasner represents another line of thought which insists on defining sovereignty based on its different manifestations in the international arena. He constructs what seems to be four ideal definitions or meanings of sovereignty. The first refers to “the organization of public authority within a state and to the level of effective control exercised by those holding authority,” to which he refers as domestic sovereignty. The second refers to the capacity of that authority to exercise control over “transborder movements,” which he terms interdependence sovereignty.

The third meaning is associated with “the mutual recognition of states or other entities,” and is described as international legal sovereignty. The forth is Westphalian sovereignty and it “refers to the exclusion of external actors from domestic authority configuration.”174

Implicit in these four categories, according to Krasner, is “a fundamental distinction between authority and control.” Nevertheless, in his attempt to justify the four different definitions based on the distinction between authority and control, he seems to construct two more ideal categories of authority and control. According to Krasner’s logic, both international legal sovereignty and Westphalian sovereignty deal with issues of authority and legitimacy – defined as the mutual recognition of actors’ rights to engage in specific activities. However, the domain of domestic sovereignty is both authority and control in the sense that a polity seeks to establish a legitimate authority and the extent to which the exercise of that authority – control – is effective. Interdependence sovereignty is mainly concerned with control, which can be maintained, in some cases, by the use of brute force without the need for mutual recognition.175

Although Krasner qualifies his argument by proposing that the demarcating line between

174 Krasner, Sovereignty, 9.

175 Ibid., 10.

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authority and control can be muddled, he emphasizes that when a state exhibits its inability “to establish a structure of authority or to exercise control” within its territory the result will be a

“failed state,” 176 although that state still maintains other aspects of its sovereignty such as international legal sovereignty. Krasner’s paradigm is paradoxical at best. For he insists on maintaining a strict distinction between the four manifestations of sovereignty, yet emphasizing the fact that violations of these categories have taken places throughout history, whether through coercion or consent. Resultantly, his account intentionally ignores the role of these practical violations in producing inequalities in global power, which in turn leads to what he describes as

“failed states.”

These discourses on sovereignty, whether they examine internal or external – or both – dimensions of sovereignty, concentrate on studying the history of modern European state- system, and attempt to theorize modern international law insomuch as it had emerged in that context. This approach, whether it defines the nature of the sovereign powers as it emerged in certain historical trajectories in Europe, or whether it is concerned with historicizing forms of interactions among formally defined sovereign powers in the international arena, not only limits the capacity of the conceptual space to account for other forms of interaction within the international order, but rather produces a problematic narrative in several aspects.

First, they exclude from the analysis forms of interaction among sovereigns and other political communities/actors organized around alternative politico-legal basis. Furthermore, by locating sovereignty within a strictly demarcated state system, this approach overlooks imperial

176 Ibid., 4. The resort to categories as “failed” or “rouge” states is a general attitude in the field of Political Science. It seems to not only reflect the discipline prejudice, but also to provide an easy analytical category within which falls any deviation from the European historical experience.

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systems and obscures the relations of global power in these systems. Second, this approach has managed to produce a universal set of conceptual and operational definitions of sovereignty to which all forms of political communities should conform, disregarding the anarchical nature of international order, discrepancies in states’ capabilities, and most importantly the historical conditions under which some sovereign states emerged. Consequently, states that do not meet these universal Western standard of being sovereign are often labeled as “quasi-sovereign,”177

“failed states,” or “rouge states.” Third, while the norms of sovereignty within European territories seem to remain firm – at least from the perspective of international recognition – the sovereignty and territoriality of Third World countries have been questioned based on changes in the recognition criteria.

Thomson suggests that in different historical eras “there is a standard or norm of sovereignty.”178 In the post-WWII era, the norm of sovereignty was, for liberal interdependence theorists, the capacity of the state to control within and across its borders. For realists, what defined the sovereign was its ability to make authoritative decisions, mainly the decision to make war. As such, these norms had governed the rules of international public law, insomuch as they had mediated the relationships between sovereigns, and constituted the basis for international recognition and legitimacy of the sovereign – in which non-interventionist politics was the norm.

Thomson argues that IR theory needs to bring back the question of recognition to forefront of its analysis. In doing so, she brings back politics of intervention “to prevent the persecution of particular group.” Thomson and others who lament the failure of democratic sovereigns to

177 Robert Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

178 Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations,” 228.

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intervene in “numerous cases of mass repression, slaughter, and even genocide” 179 fail to problematize the very concept of recognition, its colonial roots, and its repercussions, or to locate it in the historical perspective of the fall of the Soviet Union.

The question of recognition thus heralds a transformation in the jurisdictional prerogatives of sovereign states – I insist on the distinction between European sovereignty and other regions’ sovereignty, e.g. non-European, for the latter is the one at stake here. This suggests, as Jean Cohen argues, that the sovereignty-based model of international public law has yielded not to “cosmopolitan justice but to a different bid to restructure the world order: the project of empire.” It is this project of empire, Cohen concludes, that renders discourses about international public law in its relationship to sovereignty an outdated paradigm.180

Indeed, new normative conditions for recognition of sovereign powers have emerged since the 1990s. David Scott argues that the post-Cold War and the post-9/11 eras brought about political conditions that reshaped “the normative moral and legal framework” of sovereignty,

“through which international personality is defined and international action enabled or constrained.” 181 To be sure, Third World sovereignty post-1990 has been questioned and international recognition – including, but not limited to, the Third World, e.g. new Eastern

European states – has been hanging upon the observance of democratic governance and the

179 Ibid., 228.

180 Jean L. Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty? Empire versus International Law,” Ethics and International Affairs 18 (2004): 2.

181 Scott, “Norms of Self-Determination,” 197. Emphatic is in the original text.

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development of minority rights in a wider liberal form of governance.182 It is important to note that international recognition of a sovereign power based on its internal personality has been nothing but instrumental. This instrumentality has opened the door widely for several forms of political interference, among which military intervention/invasion is one form.

2.3. Concatenated Spaces of Necro-Sovereignty

Today, America’s armed forces continue to be engaged in a major military campaign against Iraqi forces in both Kuwait and Iraq. But in reality the battleground in which we now fight extends far beyond the deserts of the Middle East.

- U.S. Congress, 102nd Cong. 1991.183

Against this background, and in the context of Iraq, how do we conceive of sovereignty as an idea and as a set of political and legal practices in the light of the American project? How to map different available definitions of the concept of sovereignty onto the space of Iraq? Or more precisely, how did Iraq, standing as a major site of intervention, help crystallize the new normative conditions under which the conceptual framework of the international order has changed?

After the 2003 war on Iraq, and for that matter before, one is obliged to contest what many view as the death of classical colonialism and the emergence of sovereign states from the debris of old empires. The contestation extends to examine the density and proliferation of discourses on the sovereignty of states, as manifested in the post-Cold War era, and its organic relationship to democracy discourses.

182 Ibid., 199. See also Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty?”; Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations.”

183 U.S Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Commerce, Seizure of Iraqi Assets, 102nd Cong., 1st sess., February 21, 1991.

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The 2003 invasion of Iraq was carried out under the justifications of liberation and democratization. The “civilized man burden” was yet again activated. In the American and

British media and the official political discourses, they were the liberators bringing democracy to the oppressed masses. Iraq, it was said, would be ushered into the light of history as it moved from the despotism of Saddam and his cronies into the light of “democracy” and “progress.” In other words, this was an historical process that carried an “emancipatory” project for Iraqis from the absolute subjugation of the “Ba‘athist authoritarian” regime, which not only had a long history of human rights abuse, but also had several times “breached” international peace and security. Iraq would become, it was further prophesized in the Western media, the envy of other countries in the Middle East and as such a catalyst for progress and freedom for those oppressed peoples.

For the purpose of uplifting, developing, and democratizing Iraq, a massive scale mobilization took its ground in a set of political, economic, and social institutions in the participant countries under the lead of the United States. The international scene at the eve of the

2003 war on Iraq was beating the drums of a third World War between “good” and “evil” through the deployment of: Armies equipped with the most technologically advanced war machines, international institutions and laws, material resources, and “demeaning generalizations and triumphalist cliché.”184 To be sure, since 1990 Iraq had emerged as a demoralized sovereign site that had to be transformed from a dictatorial to a democratic sovereign in order to set the rules of the new world order, in which only democracies are allowed to live. Consequently, what are the spatial and temporal markers of this sovereign project?

184 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003), xviii. 88

Democratizing Violence – Iraq:

“Excess death”185 has emerged as the main spatio-temporal element of the sovereign project in post-2003 Baghdad. For more than a decade since Iraq has been transformed into a

“democratic sovereign” state, the country is still swimming in a sea of blood rather than on “a sea of oil.”186 Its nation, as much as its history, has been ripped apart by the war machine and the so-called sectarian violence that ensued after the wholesale dismantling of Iraqi state sovereignty. Estimates for the death toll in Iraq speak for themselves. Iraq Family Health Survey, published by the World Health Organization, reported 151,000 deaths between March 2003 and

June 2006. This survey emphasized the inherent uncertainty of the calculations and estimated the number of violence-related deaths among Iraqis during that period to be “between 104,000 and

223,000.”187 For the same period, the Lancet Survey reported 601,027 violence-related deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths. 188 In 2006, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq [UNAMI] published a report that covered violence-related deaths stating that during 2006 a total of 34,452

185 The above estimates of “excess death” are confined to the post-2003 war period. The 1991 war and the sanctions death-related estimates are not included here. It is important to note that this chapter deploys these estimates as spatio-temporal markers of the emerging sovereign project without an intention to engage in an in- depth analysis of their accuracy, or the politics involved in constructing these statistics. Rather, the chapter traces their authoritative role in understanding post-invasion Iraqi politics and institutional setting. I use Mamadani’s definitions for “excess death” here, where excess is defined as “deaths beyond what would ordinarily be expected.” See Mahmood Mamdani, Savors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 5.

186 Wolfowitz’s address for delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore. Quoted in Georg Wright, “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil,” The Guardian, June 4, 2003, accessed August 20, 2010, http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/aboutoil.htm?q=aboutoil.htm.

187 World Health Organization, “New Study Estimates 151,000 Violent Iraqi Deaths since 2003 Invasion,” January 8, 2008, accessed August 20, 2013, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/index.html.

188 Gilbert Burnham et al., “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: a Cross-Sectional,” Lancet 368 (2006): 1421–28.

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civilians had been violently killed and 36,685 wounded. 189 The Opinion Research Business survey reported around one million violent deaths for 2007 and 1,033,000 conflict-related deaths in an updated survey for 2008.190 Additionally, statistics and estimates referred to the existence of around 4 million Iraqi refugees internally and externally.191

Regardless of the variation of these statistics, which seem to reduce Iraq into a body count project, among other projects, the ubiquity of death and “the material destruction of human bodies,”192 were the most obvious activities taking place in the space of necro-sovereignty, expounding their relationship to the emerging law and moral order. Thus, to propose a space of necro-sovereignty is to precisely navigate how the non-sanctioned excessive violence, insomuch as it is a consequence of legal order, is ultimately lawmaking and law-producing. As a spatial marker, excess death is informative in two manners. First, it illustrates the capacity of power for metamorphosis and explicates its differential application in relation to space – liberal space vis-

à-vis its other. Second, death becomes a means of reorganizing the space of necro-sovereign, whether by exercising the act of killing or by preventing or controlling it.193 As a temporal

189 See United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) Report, January 2, 2007, accessed August 20, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html.

190 Opinion Research Business (ORB) January 28, 2008.

191 Rhoda Margesson et al., “Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: A Deepening Humanitarian Crisis?” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, March 23, 2007). According to this report, the number is around 4 million refugees (2 million internally, 2 million in , Syria, and Lebanon). According the UNHCR Iraq Factsheet 1,212,108 million were displaced internally by December 2005. However, the number has increased to 2,808,556 million Iraqis in February 2006. See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “UNHCR Iraq Factsheet,” September 1, 2008, accessed August 15, 2012, http://www.unhcr.org/4919572d45.html; and http://www.unhcr.org/491956e32.html.

192 Achille Mbembe “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003):14.

193 See chapter four for a detailed discussion of how death reorganizes that space.

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marker, death becomes a technology of time management in which life or death are the only two uses of time in the space of necro-sovereignty. 194 The sovereign time here is defined by democratized acts of killing, i.e. by the annihilation of life time. Consequently, its progress and development is measured by the increase or decrease of deaths.

To understand the phenomena of “excessive death” in Iraq as a spatio-temporal marker of the emerging sovereign forms, one has to examine its history, institutions and bureaucracy, and their conducts. Over the past three decades – following the 1991 war, the imposition of sanctions regime, inspection regime, the no-fly zones, and finally the 2003 war – Iraq has been constructed as a site of intervention, in which the new normative conditions of sovereignty have been crystallized. The American project in Iraq since 1990 not only put to a different use the time and space of Iraq and allowed for the emergence of new political claims, but also transformed the norm of international law which emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s as a result of the disintegration and the defeat of empires and decolonization wars. The consequence of this reversal of momentum of the 1950s and the 1960s is described as a “revolution” in the normative conditions of international law that forced a global expansion of what Philpott calls “the

Westphalian constitution of international society.” 195 The 1960 UN declaration on colonial independence marked a new phase in international relations which enforced the rule of non- intervention in the post-WWII era – at least in theory.

194 Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 43.3.

195 Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty, 153.

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However, the reconfiguration of power after the fall of the Soviet Union imposed a reordering of the international system, not by an amendment to the charter of the United Nations, but through the imposition of new conditions by the United Nations on states’ sovereignty – under the control of the U.S., which seems to have established an unspoken of agreement with other Western influential powers in the international institution. United Nations resolutions emerged as new tools of intervention that hold states accountable for certain political practices and standards of civilized behavior as defined by the U.S. and its Western allies. To be sure, the traditional hardline realist interpretation of sovereignty that dominated the United Nations’ thinking was replaced by new standards upon which international recognition hangs, and these standards were “those of liberal democratic states.”196 Despite the fact that the new standards of recognition are being tailored by liberal democratic states, different theoretical accounts attempt to explain a universal interplay between the hardline realist interpretation of sovereignty and the post-Cold War conditions of international recognition of the sovereignty of the state. This interplay, argues Paul Taylor, does not propagate for the abandonment of sovereignty as a conceptual framework but instead aims to understand its adaptation to new circumstances.

Philpott, on the other hand, historicizes for a post-Cold War revolution in the Westphalian constitution of international society; a revolution in which only a handful of states, acting through international organizations, decide how, where and when to intervene. These instances of intervention, Philpott maintains, revised the constitution of international relations. 197 Both accounts seem to universalize the new normative conditions of sovereignty without

196 Paul Taylor, “The United Nations in the 1990s: Proactive Cosmopolitanism and the Issue of Sovereignty,” Political Studies XLVII (1999): 538-565. See also Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty; Scott, “Norms of Self- Determination.”

197 Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty, 40-41.

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distinguishing between different locales of sovereign powers and how the interplay between the conventional and the post-Cold War understanding of sovereignty is irrelevant to many sovereigns.

It seems that the diagnosis of the anomaly of the post-Cold War international system, in which sovereignty needs to be re-examined, obscures a structural and institutional continuity of the historical conditions of many sovereign states. As such, the argument that one can forcefully make is that international law – the tool that served the alliance of different couriers, concerting in different locales and under different colonial circumstances, exerting different forms of political and social power against different Empires in the 1950s and 1960s – itself served new forms of power functioning under the new political and economic conditions of the post-Cold

War era. The instrumentality of International Law is anything but new. It has always been a tool of governmentality that manipulated and appropriated the sovereignty of states that were incapable of dictating the normative conditions under which International Law functions in a hierarchical order of power. Moreover, states that were the subject of interventionist politics have been prone to such interventions by the very conditions under which they emerged, and their vulnerability to the instrumentality of International Law has been inscribed in their constitutions.

Indeed, since early 1990s, the international order has witnessed a massive redefinition of the legal, political and economic conditions under which political pluralism can no longer thrive.

This redefinition has most fundamentally altered the core values of sovereignty as instituted in the post-WWII era. To tell the story of the evolution of the current international legal and political norms, as Scott rightly argues, “is to tell it as a normative-progressive story of the

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steady evolution of the concept of self-determination away from the “narrow,” “selective,” and

“ideological” constraints of socialist internationalism and anti-colonial nationalism toward the acceptance of liberal democracy as the only form of state that guarantees what it means to be human.”198 The remainder of this section will show how Iraq has been a central site for this evolution to take place and how the story of liberal democracy, as the best form of government, materialized.

On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait after long negotiations, in which many Western and Arab countries were involved, to solve the crisis between the two countries by diplomatic means failed. 199 The immediate international response to this act of aggression against the

198 Scott, “Norms of Self-Determination,” 214.

199 It is important to note that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a culmination of chain of events that extend back in history to the British colonial rule, then to the Iran-Iraq eight year war and the subsequent financial crisis in which Iraq found itself. Regarding the first point, the roots of conflict between Iraq and Kuwait trace to the arbitrary, yet intentional, colonial design of the borders between Iraq and Kuwait, as a result Iraq was denied access to the sea. This issue remained destabilizing for Iraq and constituted the core problem of major crises that erupted between the two countries. While Iraq maintained a historical claim over Kuwait, in several occasions it refused to recognize the sovereignty of Kuwait arguing that Kuwait had been historically an indivisible part of Iraq. The 1961 and 1973 instances in which Iraq occupied small parts of northern Kuwait were affirmation of that historical claim of Iraq over Kuwait as part of its historical territory.

On the other hand, by the end of the Iran-Iraq war, it was evident that Iraq had run up huge debts in forms of loans made to the Iraq government by its Arab and Western allies – mainly Gulf States – and that these allies not only refused to write off these loans, but also refused to renew an expiring ten year-pledge of financial assistance to Jordan and Iraq. See Festus Ugboaja Ohaegbulam, A Culture of Deference: Congress, The President, and the Course of the U.S.-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 104-105; Musallam Ali Musallam, The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Saddam Hussein, his State and International Power Politics (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996); Charls Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1999); Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Iraq, among several other governments, complained against Kuwait and the UAE to OPEC arguing that both countries overstepped their oil production quota rending oil prices very low, which in turn affected the Iraqi government’s returns and intensified its financial crisis. Additionally, Iraq reported that “an American company was steeling its oil from the northern part of Kuwait through using slant drilling technology.” According to Al- Hamadaani’s memories, the same company, whose name he did not mention, reported that to the Iraqi government. See, See Raᶜd Majīd El-Hamadanī, Qabla an Yughādiranā at-Tārīkh (Bayrūt: ad-dār al-ᶜarabya lil-ᶜulūm- 94

sovereignty of Kuwait – as defined by International Law – was the 2932 meeting of the Security

Council [SC] based on two letters addressed to the president of the SC by the permanent representatives of both Kuwait and the United States to the United Nations [UN], in which SC

Resolution 660 was passed and adopted by fourteen votes to none with the abstention of Yemen.

The Resolution condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as a breach of international peace and security and demanded an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces to its pre-

August 2 positions.200

Simultaneously, on August 2, the United States declared the freezing of all Iraqi and

Kuwaiti assets under the control of the U.S. government, which escalated to unilaterally imposing economic sanctions on Iraq. 201 At the time of declaring these economic measures

Nashirūn, 2007) [Before History Departs Us (Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers Inc., 2007)], 192. Other sources report that Santa Fe International Corporation, which was bought by Kuwait Petroleum Corporation in 1981, was drilling in the Rumaila oilfield, immediately adjacent to the Iraqi borders. See Thomas C. Hayes, “Confrontation in the Gulf: The Oilfield Lying Below the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute,” New York Times, September 3, 1990. All these factors, which were described by the Iraqi government as economic warfare against Iraq, exacerbated the crisis of 1990 between the two countries, let alone the American green light for Iraq to go ahead in its military plans against Kuwait. Saddam in several occasions prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait pointed to the collaboration between the U.S. and the Kuwaiti government to harm Iraq’s economy. See for example U.S. Department of Justice, “Saddam Hussein’s FBI interviews,” Interview session number 11, March 3, 2004, accessed June 9, 2013, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/12.pdf.

200 United Nations, Security Council Resolution 660 (1990).

201 George Bush, “Executive Orders 12722 and 12723,” In “Iraq Sanctions Act of 1990,” 1990, Chapter 35: International Emergency Economic Powers of 01/03/2012, (112-90), accessed, March 15, 2013, http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/50C35.txt. The Iraq Sanction section provides a history of the executive orders by the presidents of the United States against Iraq since August 2, 1990. It is important to note that in 1977 the U.S. Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] as a refinement of the Trading with the Enemy Act [TWEA], both TWEA and IEEPA provided a source of presidential emergency authority, as well as wartime authority. IEEPA, which substituted the former TWEA, gave the president a sweeping power over exports, imports, and private financial transactions. Due to the vague criteria by which the president can invoke IEEPA, it is considered the broadest legal statute under the disposal of the president to impose economic sanctions. See Barry E. Carter, “International Economic Sanctions: Improving the Haphazard U.S. Legal Regime,” California Law Review 75 (1987).

The engineering brain behind invoking IEEPA to freeze both Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets was Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security advisor, a former member of the corporate board of the Kuwait Petroleum 95

against Iraq by the president of the U.S., all American banks and their overseas branches froze all Iraqi accounts, with minimal discussions of whether these banks were bound by laws of the

U.S. or by those of the country where they are located. The decision to freeze all Iraqi assets, which were estimated around $1.7 billion,202 although not the first of its kind, has created “a norm of customary international law … that recognizes the validity of extraterritoriality.”203 The decision to freeze all Iraqi and Kuwait assets, even before any legal procedures were taken by the

UN, is legally more complex than the mere freezing of bank accounts. First, it shows the elastic nature of the legality of the International Law, for the unilateral decision that was taken by the

U.S. to freeze these assets transgressed the territorial boundaries of the U.S. American banks and their overseas branches assumed that they were bound by the American law, and therefore transgressed over prerogative sovereign powers of the hosting states. Second, if that case has set forth “a norm of customary international law,” as Newcomb argues, in which extraterritoriality

Corporation’s Santa Fe International U.S. subsidiary, the company that did the slant drilling to extract Iraqi oil from the Rumaila oilfield. Immediately after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Scowcroft proposed two recommendations to intervene. First, the U.S. should be willing to intervene militarily by sending American troops to the region, mainly to Saudi Arabia. Second, to initiate covert CIA operations to topple the Iraqi regime. See Laura Flanders, “Restricting Reality: Media Mind-Games and the War,” in Beyond The storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader, eds. Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushbeck (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1991), 168; see also Bob Woodward, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

202 Michael Quint, “Freeze on Iraqi Assets Expected to Cost U.S. Banks little,” New York Times, August 13, 1990, accessed March 28, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/13/business/freeze-on-iraqi-assets- expected-to-cost-us-banks-little.html. See also, Edmund L. Andrews, “A Nation at War: Iraqi Assets; Bush Asks Seizure of $1.7 Billion Held in U.S.,” New York Times, March 22, 2003, accessed March 28, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/22/world/a-nation-at-war-iraqi-assets-bush-asks-seizure-of-1.7-billion-held- in-us.html.

203 Danforth Newcomb, “Old Tools for a New Job: U.S. ,” in The Impact of the Freeze of Kuwaiti and Iraqi Assets, eds. Barry R. Campbell and Danforth Newcomb (London: Graham and Trotman, and International Bar Association, 1990), 27, quoted in Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1998), 35. In 2003 all the frozen Iraqi assets were seized and turned over to a new American-controlled fund. Further, the American government asked eight other countries to seize additional $600 million in frozen Iraqi assets, and to turn it over the newly established fund. That request was backed up with economic threats to cut off all foreign banks from doing business in the U.S. in case they refuse to turn over any Iraqi money to the U.S. government. See Andrews, “A Nation at War.”

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boldly became the new normative condition that governs international relations, then this illustrates the instrumental and controversial nature of International Law.

Four days later, on August 6, 1990, the Security Council passed Resolution 661, as a consequence of “the armed attack by Iraq against Kuwait, and in accordance with Article 51 of the Charter.” The Resolution called for an end to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and for the restoration of “the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Kuwait.” The occupation of Kuwait was viewed in legal terms as an act of aggression and a breach of international peace, and thus demanded that the UN respond with the appropriate measure available to it under

Chapter VII of its Charter. As such, Resolution 661, by invoking Chapter VII, imposed broad economic sanctions on Iraq.

The provisions of these sanctions were comprehensive and included almost every economic activity that a sovereign state could be engaged in. It prohibited the import of all

“commodities or products originating in Iraq or Kuwait exported therefrom after the date of the resolution.” Moreover, it prevented all states and their nationals from exporting “any commodities or products … not including supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs” to Iraq or Kuwait, directly or indirectly. Additionally, the Resolution prohibited all states, members and non-members, from transferring funds to either country. Finally, the same resolution established a committee of all members of the Security

Council – under the appellation of the Iraq Sanctions Committee [ISC] – to report on the

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implementation of all the resolution’s provisions and to gather information regarding the actions taken by all members to ensure the enforcement of the sanctions.204

The adoption of this resolution marked the beginning of a new mode of international governance, which demanded the participation of a labyrinth of existing institutions and the establishment of new ones, e.g. old and new UN, national and international institutions. To be sure, the sanction system that had been imposed by that resolution required a massive bureaucracy to ensure the sanctions’ implementation and modification, and to guarantee the gathering of tens of thousands of pages of information on Iraq and the role of international community in sanctioning Iraq. Following this, indeed, one could trace a structure of the sanctions regime, one that not only signaled the most severe and draconian economic measures, but also the most complex.205 SCR 661 and the ensuing sanction regime were the de facto measure through which the Iraqi State sovereignty, traditionally defined, was dismantled.

However, regardless of different reports that showed the instantaneous effect of sanctions on Iraq in less than three months, the ensuing SC discussions and resolutions emphasized that the economic sanctions already imposed against Iraq had proven to be inadequate to achieve the removal of Iraq from Kuwait.206

204 United Nations, Security Council Resolution 661 (1990).

205 Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam; see also Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). It’s worth mentioning that following the imposition of sanctions on August 6, 1990, the UN adopted sixty one resolutions on Iraq.

206 United Nations, Doc. S/PV.2963 (1990). This was the position of several countries, which later on formed the coalition forces against Iraq. The discussions on the inadequacy of sanctions against Iraq continued until the UN passed SCR 678 which authorized the use of force against Iraq. See also United Nations, “22 Items relating to the situation between Iraq and Kuwait: Initial Proceedings,” 630, accessed March 28, 2013, http://www.un.org/en/sc/repertoire/89-92/Chapter%208/MIDDLE%20EAST/item%2022_Iraq-Kuwait_.pdf. 98

Equally important, since the very beginning of the Iraqi-Kuwaiti crisis, the U.S. had monopolized the drafting and interpretation of almost all SCRs concerning Iraq, which emerged as tools to impose certain choices, not only on Iraq, but also on the international community, and to pass certain imperial agendas of the U.S., which was acting as the leading power of the precarious coalition’s forces.

The sixty two UNSCRs on Iraq,207 which – among other things – authorized the 1991 war, put to practice the most severe and complex sanction system that had been enforced for more than a decade, served as a legal ground for intermittent military operations – e.g. the 1996

Operation and the 1998 Operation Desert Fox, and finally served as the legal ground for the 2003 war, which predictably enough, were the legal techniques deployed for restoring Kuwait’s sovereignty and for addressing the Iraqi problem. These resolutions, deployed to restore – by “all necessary means” – Kuwait’s sovereignty, were the legal paths of “legally” dismantling the Iraqi

State, let alone its population. Within this emerging form of legality, it has become impossible to think of the prerogative sovereign powers of the state, as defined by International Law, within a demarcated territory. Indeed, the 1991 war was a historical event that not only called into question the traditional internal/external dichotomy of the traditional discourse of sovereignty, but also illustrated the violent nature of the project of sovereignty and the instrumentality of

International Law. As manifested itself in Iraq, a central site of intervention, sovereignty has

The document lists all SCRs on Iraq and the proceedings of the SC discussions before voting on each resolution.

207 The discussion here is strictly relevant to UNSCRs between August 2, 1990 and March 20, 2003, the official beginning of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. It does not deal with any resolution after the 2003 occupation.

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reaffirmed its intimate relationship with transmuting forms of power capable of deploying many technologies of violence that divide spaces and control mortality.

2.4. United Nations in Iraq: Legitimacy of Violence

Some argue that since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the 1991 war on Iraq, the

UN has assumed a more assertive and active role in international politics.208 I argue that the ways in which Iraq has been destructed since 1990 show that the character and the scope of the

UNSCRs had often been single-handedly redefined, shaped, and calculated by the United States, despite the vehement opposition to this singular influence in many instances. This proposition, however, does not negate that the UN – as a source and reservoir of International Law – has continued to be an important site that had defined and, to a certain extent, negotiated some of the main characters of the American project in Iraq. Yet it had simultaneously served as a space that offered the American project necessary tools to moralize and legitimize a realm of violence that transcended the physical geography of Iraq. The U.S. administrations’ concern with legitimacy conform to a historical pattern of conducting business within and through this international body.

The U.S. quest for legitimacy, nonetheless, should be conceived as a quest for reconciling differences with influential western players within this institution, and thus it should be distinguishable from a pursue for universal legitimacy writ large. Therefore, the UN granted legitimacy should be understood as a product of an ontological space historically dissociable from the international community and exclusive of its western origins. Only against this back ground, the active deployment of the UN space exhibits a historical continuity in the role of this institution in redefining the already elastic concept of sovereignty at each historical juncture, in

208 Michael Byers, War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 26.

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which a reconfiguration of power takes place. This continuity, however, is not paradoxical with the UN capacity of producing novel tools to govern the interaction among its members, but rather necessitates these novel techniques.

Following the 1991 war, all SCRs – paradoxically affirming the independence, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Iraq, while condemning human rights violations – once again were deployed as legal techniques of intervention, which in turn brought more indiscriminate structure of violence than the one they were intervening against.209 The “excess” of violence against Iraqis that ensued after the adoption of each of these resolutions suggests that the working of International Law and international institutions has been tailored, since their very formative moments, to dictate who may live and who must die. What is extremely important to emphasize here is that the UN granted legitimacy had empowered this project with a capacity of violence that is neither abstract nor theoretical. Rather, at each historical juncture since August 2,

1990, this violence had engendered its own morality, knowledge, sets of bureaucracies, rules, and technologies of action.

This section traces the history of three main SCRs and examines their effects at two levels: First, insomuch as international society claims, at least theoretically, to adhere to a set of rules that govern the conduct of states in the international arena, these resolutions constitute a novel model of interaction among these members. Through a system of incentives and threats, the U.S. dominated the space of many international organizations to establish not only a

209 The point I want to stress here is that the use of the phrase “indiscriminate structure of violence” by no means claims that this structure is less racist. For racism lies at the very heart of the American project in Iraq as manifested itself in the discourse of “liberation,” “progress” and “uplifting”.

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universal “false consensus,” but also a system of “legitimacy through defiance.”210 Hence, the effect of these resolutions extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the U.S. and Iraq, redefining and stretching the SC’s scope of competence and legal authority. Complementary to its role in the UN, was the U.S. control over other financial international institutions in terms of granting or canceling loans to members, depending on their political position, both of which enabled the emergence of the new world order as envisioned by American policy-makers.

Second, these resolutions, as drafted, interpreted, and implemented by the U.S., succeeded in creating a demoralized enemy reduced to the personality of Saddam Hussein and his repressive regime, thus, suppressing the production and circulation of certain truths about the mundane effect of these resolutions on Iraqis lives. Significantly, then, these resolutions constituted an important technology that played a pivotal role in redefining the concept of an enemy and its legal personality.

Security Council Resolution 661:

On August 2, 1990, the SC passed Resolution 660 that condemned the Iraqi invasion of

Kuwait, and demanded an immediate and unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The

Resolution resonated with the statement previously made by George Bush, in which he called for

“the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces” from Kuwait.211 In less than 24 hours the Legal Adviser Office of the State Department drafted two executive orders that

210 See Phyllis Bennis, “False Consensus: Georg Bush’s United Nations,” in Beyond The storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader, eds. Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushbeck (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1991), 112-128. Nathaniel Berman, “Legitimacy through Defiance: From Goa to Iraq,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 23 (2005): 93-125.

211 Woodward, The Commanders, 223. See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).

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imposed a unilateral U.S. regime of economic sanctions on both Iraq and Kuwait. Additionally, the Legal Adviser Office provided the U.S. administration with legal guidance on a range of international legal matters – including the possibility of international sanctions – to navigate not only the channels established by legal principles, but also how to pragmatically depart from these requirements. According to Edwin Williamson, the Legal Adviser at the time, the two executive orders were announced at 8:00 on August 2 and “it is no exaggeration to suggest that by 8:01” the Office embarked on a wide-range clarification of these orders to different public and private institutions and investors to ensure a proper implantation of these executive orders.212

This, however, was the buildup for a wider international regime of sanctions. The

American administration sought to pass Resolution 661 in the UN by stick and carrot policies.213

A deal was made with the Chinese government to secure its support for the resolution in exchange for the American administration’s moderate criticism of the previous year’s slaughter of students in Tiananmen Square.214 Less than a week later, was given access to $114 million in economic aid from the World Bank.215 Simultaneously, James Baker was working with the Soviets to secure their support for the Resolution in exchange for maintaining a good

212 Edwin D. Williamson, “International Law and the Role of the Legal Adviser in the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting: American Society of International Law 85 (1991):377-78.

213 United Nations, Security Council Resolution 661 (1990). This resolution called for an immediate freezing of all Iraqi financial assets abroad and banned all economic activities that the Iraqi state could exercise as a sovereign power. Consequently, under its provision, Iraq was not allowed to import or export any item, except for necessary medical supplies, which were subject to the Iraq Sanctions Committee approval.

214 Woodward, The Commanders, 226.

215 Phyllis Bennis, “False Consensus,” 119-120.

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standing relationship with the West and a credit line of $4 billion from Saudi Arabia.216 Seeking universal approval of SCR 661, the U.S. had offered economic aid for almost every developing nation on the Security Council. Columbia, Ethiopia and Zaire were “all offered new aid package” ranging from access to World Bank credit, rearrangement of International Monetary Fund grants and loans, and finally military deals and assistance. With the support of the U.S., Egypt, Jordan, and were offered loans made both by the World Bank and the International Monetary

Fund.217 Additionally, the Congress approved Bush’s request to write off military aid loans totaling $7 billion to Egypt.218 Yemen, the only Arab country on the UN Security Council at the time, was punished severely for abstaining from voting on SCRs 660, 661, and 678. A U.S. official was reported stating to the Yemeni ambassador to the UN that Yemen’s abstention “was the most expensive vote [Yemen] will have cast.” Consequently, the State Department reduced its planned aid to Yemen from a $22 million to less than $3 million.219 In coordination with the

U.S. procedures against Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cut off a more than $300 million aid

216 The Soviets at that time were happy with achieving positive relationship with the West, mainly with the U.S., and wanted to maintain that path. However, as things turned out later to be difficult to digest politically with the drafting of SCR 678, the Soviet’s approval included a demand that the American administration help arrange for the Saudis to extend $4-5 billion to the USSR in aid. James Baker, Secretary of the State Department at the time, negotiated with the Saudis an extension of $4 billion in credit for the USSR. The Soviets were duly grateful to U.S. role in facilitating that extension, which solidified their political support to the coalition throughout the crisis. See James Baker III and Thomas DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989-1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 294-5. For details on different financial and military packages see Gordon, Invisible War, 40-42; Bennis, “False Consensus”; Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, 56.

217 Phyllis Bennis, “False Consensus,” 119-120.

218 Larry Nowels, “Debt Reduction: Initiatives for the Most Heavily Indebted Poor Countries,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, February, 1, 2000), accessed April 11, 2013, http://cnie.org/NLE/CRSreports/international/inter-18.cfm.

219 Rick Atkinson and Barton Gellman, “Iraq Trying to Shelter Jets in Iran, U.S. Says,” Washington Post, January 29, 1991, accessed April 11, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/inatl/longterm/fogofwar/archive/post012891.htm.

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package to Yemen while between 800,000 and 1 million Yemeni workers were expelled from

Saudi Arabia.220

The SCR 661 was passed on August 2, 1990, under the illusion of a coherent international consensus. To ensure the enforcement of these sanctions and the compliance of member states, as well as non-member states, with the provisions of the SCR 661, the establishment of a massive bureaucracy had just begun. The Iraq Sanctions Committee [ISC] was formed immediately. 221 In its earliest stage, the ISC’s main tasks were to gather information from member states on the effective implementation of the provisions of SCR 661. The establishment of the ISC was the beginning of bureaucratizing the sanctions system, a process that can be best described as making an experimental science of administration. Initially, the ISC reporting obligations were, at best, vaguely defined. For the purpose of ensuring a strict implementation of the sanctions, information was gathered, processed, analyzed, stored and archived at the UN headquarters.222 Reports from almost all countries about their economic activities with Iraq formed new techniques of monitoring and managing the Iraqi regime and population, “who existed more vividly” in the UN headquarters in Geneva and in New York than

220 Marta Colburn, The Republic of Yemen: Development Challenges in the 21st Century (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), 2002), 30.

221 The Iraq Sanctions Committee is also known as the 661 Committee. Fifteen members comprised the ISC, including the five permanent members of the SC – U.S., UK, France, China and Russia – and ten other elected members.

222 Due to nature of the UN structure, all Iraqi case-related archives proved to be very problematic and hardly independent. The UN’s, SC’s, and all committees’ archives (that were established after August 2, 1990) had been accessible by the U.S. and its allies. As such, one can hardly speak of an independent organization, but rather of information gathering apparatuses that had constantly fed different intelligence agencies, mainly American and British.

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they did in Iraq itself. 223 However, an “effective” administration of the sanctions system demanded the expansion of the ISC’s mandate. The very general and unspecified provisions of

SCR 661 necessitated that the ISC decide on and specify how the sanctions would be enforced, who would enforce them and finally what counts as a humanitarian situation.224 Applications to import food, goods, and other items made by Iraq, UN organizations and other humanitarian

NGOs had been subject to the approval of the ISC’s fifteen members, representing the nations of the Security Council. Due to consensus decision-making procedure of the Committee, it took only one single vote to unilaterally veto an import request, even if the other fourteen members

223 Anghie describes the process of information gathering conducted by different mandate authorities as a pre- condition for the development of colonial science of administration, in which the native populations were subjects to different modes of experimentations and practical application of different theoretical administrative principles and standards. See Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 184.

224 The evolution of the ISC mandate can be traced through its legal and political tracks. Legally, the ISC assumed a legal explanatory capacity of SCR 661 and the ensuing SCRs, e.g. SCRs 665, 666. SCR 665, for example, permitted member states “to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping in order to inspect and verify their cargoes and destinations and to ensure strict implementation of the provisions of such shipping laid down in resolution 661 (1990).” See United Nations, Security Council Resolution 661 (1990). Theoretically, the Maritime Interception Forces, established by the SCR 665, were obliged to report to the ISC. However, in reality these Interception Forces had tenuous relationship to the Council, and had maintained minimal contact with the ISC. The same Resolution provided the legal cover of the de facto American naval forces already enforcing the sanctions in the gulf, which unilaterally stopped vessels carrying food for Iraq until mid- September 1990. See Paul Conlon, “Lessons from Iraq: The Functions of the Iraq Sanctions Committee as a Source of Sanctions Implementation Authority and Practice,” Virginia Journal of International Law 35 (1995): 636.

The ISC monopolized the definition of what counts as humanitarian circumstances, granting permission to certain relief shipments and aid groups, e.g. Indian Red Cross shipment, and denying it others, e.g. boatloads of food sent by the Vietnamese government to its laborers in Iraq. Throughout its life, the ISC had reflected the arbitrariness, inconsistency and lopsided legality of the SC decisions and resolutions.

Politically, the mandate of ISC represented an ad hoc development that reflected the fluctuating nature of political agenda as unfolded during the lengthy encounter between the U.S. and Iraq. In the beginning, the role of the ISC was to enforce an embargo to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. However, the restoration of Kuwait’s sovereignty did not bring to an end either the sanctions system or the mandate of the ISC. Rather a new set of reasoning emerged after the war to maintain the sanctions and to expand the mandate of the ISC. The sanctions, at that point, were described as a necessary measure to force Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and to comply with all SCRs. Ibid., 636; see also Charles B. Shotwell, Food and the Use of Force: The Role of Humanitarian Principles in the Persian Gulf Crisis and beyond (Société Internationale de Droit Militaire et de Droit de la Guerre, 1991).

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agreed.225 Joy Gordon maintains that the U.S. – playing the main role in the ISC – insisted that

“Iraq seeks permission for each item [to be imported] rather than approving categories of permitted goods,” and that each item to be “judged on case-by-case” with the absence of general criteria for approval. 226 Generally, denial patterns intensified during heated political confrontations between the U.S. and the Iraqi government, especially during the period that preceded the commencement of Oil-for-Food program in 1995. Two general observations can be made about the functions and the structure of the ISC. First, since its establishment in 1990 until its dissolution in 2003, the workings of the ISC lacked transparency and responsiveness to the old and emerging humanitarian needs called for by the many organizations working in Iraq.

Second, while the U.S. representatives to the ISC imposed the vast majority of holds, it was the elected members to the SC who challenged the U.S. agenda against Iraq in the committee.227

Throughout its thirteen years old life, the ISC had been an exemplary case that represents the ways in which the SC, as part of an international organization, had performed under the U.S. control – for the most part found itself in a conflicting position with almost every other organization in the UN. 228 Facing reports on the humanitarian disaster in Iraq, and

225 My account provides a very general reading of the Summary Records of the ISC. For a comprehensive review of decisions, items, voting patterns, holds, reforms, and negotiations among the Committee Members see Gordon, The Invisible War, 103-140.

226 Ibid., 61.

227 In many occasions, the elected members to the ISC voiced very strong and lengthy critiques against the arbitrary and inhumane pattern of voting exercised mainly by the U.S. and occasionally by the UK within the committee. Some members emphasized that Iraq was a sovereign state and not a U.S. colony. See for example Ecuador’s statement in the ISC meeting 74. United Nations, Security Council Committee established by Resolution 661, Summary Records, Meeting 74, S/AC.25/SR. 74, July 24, 1992.

228 Late July and early August of 1991 letters and reports from other UN bodies and affiliated organizations accused the UN-imposed sanctions of committing “systematic violation of human rights … against the entire population of Iraq… depriving it of food, water and medicine required to keep it alive.” See United Nations, 107

recommendations of UNDP and other organizations within the UN on the need for more materials and projects to restore basic services to the Iraqi population in the aftermath of the

1991 war, the ISC insisted on strict enforcement of the provisions of SCR 661 and denied importing goods to Iraq. The list of denied and blocked goods by the ISC includes, but not limited to: food, 229 medicine, 230 tires and fabrics, 231 agricultural equipment, burial shrouds, electric irons for household use,232 tractors breaks, tires for tractors and ambulances, women’s clothes, water purification and refrigeration, water treatment chemicals, fertilizers, papers,233 and the list goes on. During the life span of the ISC, the U.S. had been the most active member in blocking, denying and delaying approval for a myriad of items on the grounds that such items were either input for industry or possessed a possible dual use. Even after the approval of Oil- for-Food Programme [OFP] in 1995, and the establishment of the Office of the Iraq Programme

Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights, “Presentation by the Delegate of the International Progress Organization, Mr. Warren A. J. Hamerman, on the U.N. Sanctions against Iraq and Human Rights,” E/CN.4/Sub.2/1991/SR.10, August 20, 1991.

229 This decision was argued based on whether there was a humanitarian situation or not. See United Nations, Security Council Committee established by Resolution 661, Summary Records, Meeting 8, S/AC.25/SR. 8, September 11, 1990.

230 Michael Jansen writes that although medicine was exempt from the embargo, foreign producers refused to fill orders from Baghdad. In some cases, even though Baghdad placed and paid for orders of medicine before the sanctions were imposed, suppliers refused to deliver these orders. When the medical crisis in Iraq intensified after the war, Baghdad signed agreements in 1991 with Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Canada, and Sweden to grant credit against frozen Iraqi assets held by those countries. However, by the end of 1994, Britain had only sent “$22 million out of an agreed $70 million in drugs and food, Spain $1 million, Italy a quarter of the specified amount and Canada and Sweden were still negotiating deals.” See Michael Jansen, “Dire medical shortages,” Middle East International (1993): 9-10.

231 United Nations, Security Council Committee established by Resolution 661, Summary Records, Meeting 77, S/AC.25/SR. 77, September 17, 1992.

232 United Nations, Security Council Committee established by Resolution 661, Summary Records, Meeting 105, S/AC.25/SR. 105, December 22, 1993.

233 United Nations, Security Council Committee established by Resolution 661, Summary Records, Meeting 103, S/AC.25/SR. 103, November 1, 1993.

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[OIP] to manage and coordinate all UN humanitarian activities in Iraq, the ISC still assumed the most pivotal role in shaping major policies of the Programme. 234 Once again the U.S. had assumed the main role in denying and blocking goods for Iraq in forms of holds under the management of OIP. The Oil-for-Food Programme operated in six-month phases. Reviews of the general pattern of the holds on goods and contracts show that the U.S. generally unilaterally imposed 90% of the holds, Britain unilaterally placed 3-5% of the holds, while the remainder of the holds were placed jointly by the U.S. and Britain. Gordon writes that this was the case from the beginning of the Programme to its end and for all types of goods, with no other country to have placed any kind of holds on humanitarian goods.235

The provisions of SCR 661 and the working of the ISC – established by that resolution – constitute a remarkable case in the making of a new mode of extraterritorial and fluid sovereignty which by no means conforms to any traditional definition of the concept. The sanction system, as administered by the ISC, was no longer a form of punishment alone; rather, it signaled the application of new and formidable disciplines of management that sought not only

234 Although established by a different SCR (986, in April 1995), and functioned under the management of the Office of the Iraq Programme, the Oil-for-Food Programme was managed under “the procedures established by the Security Council and its Committee set up by Resolution 661[ISC].” The very description of the Programme itself granted the ISC a major role in shaping its policies and intervening in the work of different UN agencies responsible for its implementation. It is important to note that the implementation of the Programme did not start until December 1996, after the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the UN and the Government of Iraq on May 20, 1996. See United Nations, Office of the Iraq Programme, accessed April 15, 2013, http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/background/index.html. See also, United Nation, Memorandum of Understanding between the Secretariat of the United Nations and the Government of Iraq on the Implementation of Security Council Resolutions 986, May 20, 1996, S/1996/356.

235 Gordon shows that in June 2000 UNICEF identified 18 high priority on-hold contacts, for a total of $65 million. These contracts covered equipment for chlorinators and equipment for 300 water treatment plants, affecting 1.5 million Iraqis. Additionally, there was an urgent need for water tankers since a drought was taking place in that year. Of these 18 contracts, the U.S. blocked 11 and Britain blocked 1, while the other 6 were put on-hold jointly by the U.S. and Britain. See Gordon, Invisible War, 64.

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to transform the political regime in Iraq and the political identity of the whole population, but also to establish and institutionalize an intrusive transnational form of bureaucracy.

Security Council Resolution 678:

The second resolution this chapter analyzes is SCR 678, which was adopted on

November 29, 1990. It authorized the use of “all necessary means” to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty, and to maintain and preserve “international peace and security.”236 The drafting and implementation of the SCR 678, authorizing the use of force against Iraq, is another exemplary case of the elastic nature of International Law, and a testimony to the capacity of imperial powers to make new international rules and break old ones. Most importantly, it demonstrates how certain geographies are especially vulnerable to the violent project of sovereignty that deploys a network of laws, institutions, soldiers and arms to dictate who must die, how – i.e. by which means, why – i.e. for what reasons, and when.

To understand how the UN adopted SCR 678 less than four months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it is important to trace the build-up for that resolution inside the American

Administration as it materialized within intelligence and military circles in early July 1990.237

236 United Nations, Security Council Resolution 678 (1990).

237 Although there was a high level of economic, intelligence, and to a certain extent military cooperation between Iraq and the U.S. in the late 1980s, American intelligence agencies started warning against the Iraqi threat in the fall of 1989 right after the end of Iran-Iraq war. A secret National Intelligence Estimate, prepared by all the U.S. intelligence agencies, including the DIA and CIA, estimated Iraq’s military capabilities, and concluded that Iraq would possibly deploy its military capabilities in the Gulf region.

Notwithstanding these reports, the Bush Administration continued its covert support for Saddam’s regime. On October 2, 1989 Bush signed a top-secret National Security Directive that authorized closer diplomatic relations with Iraq and opened the way for additional aid. Four days later, Secretary Baker met with his Iraqi counterpart, , and promised him that the Bush Administration would not tighten restrictions on high- technology exports to Iraq. See Murray Waas and Craig Mission, “In the Loop: Bush’s Secret Mission,” New 110

Since Iraqi forces started amassing towards the borders with Kuwait on July 16, W. Peter Lang, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], was reporting to the highest level in the

Pentagon, including Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, on the satellite photos that showed “a brigade of an Iraqi tank division of T-72 tanks … [and] all kinds of equipment …that could only belong to the Republican Guard” amassing north of Kuwait.238 In less than a week, Collin Powell

– the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time – asked Norman Schwarzkopf to prepare a two-tiered plan for possible U.S. responses to the Iraqi threat. By July 24, six U.S. Navy ships, previously sent to the region, were performing a short notice joint exercise in the Gulf with the

United Arab Emirates.

Simultaneous to Peter Lang’s reports on the Iraqi forces’ build-up north of Kuwait,

Schwarzkopf was discussing with the Administration the top-secret military Plan 90-1002 – also known as “Ten-oh-Two.” Ten-oh-Two was a contingency plan to move around 100,000 troops to the region to face any possible attack by the Soviet Union. The Plan was amended to project Iraq as the new target, not the Soviet Union.239 Logistically, the implementation of Ten-oh-Two required three to four months. It was in this period – needed to mobilize ground troops, prepare military basis, and ship munitions and equipment oversees – that a tremendous pressure was exerted on Saudi Arabia to “invite” the American troops to help protect the regime in Riyadh. On

August 6, 1990, only four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait and in the same day the UN adopted

Yorker Magazine, November 2, 1992, accessed April 20, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1992/11/02/1992_11_02_064_TNY_CARDS_000359993; see also Woodward, The Commanders, 207.

238 Woodward, The Commanders, 205-6.

239 Ibid., 220-222.

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SCR 661, the U.S. Administration secured Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of military bases on its territory, signaling that the implementation of “Ten-oh-Two” had just begun.240

Simultaneous to securing the Saudi approval of U.S. military bases in the country, and before publicly announcing its intentions to seek a UN authorization to use force against Iraq, the

U.S. administration was involved in a diplomatic marathon to guarantee that such an authorization would materialize in a unanimous approval for SCR 678. The immense diplomatic campaign that the State Department embarked on coalesced with the deals the U.S. administration offered for many different countries prior to the adoption of SCR 661 made it hard for SC members to stand in disagreement with Washington in the SC. Once James Baker had mobilized the necessary approval for SCR 678, the State Department formulated it. There was a disagreement between James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze on the language of the resolution. The State Department preferred very clear language that boldly authorized the use of force, while the Russians wanted an ambiguous language that, while authorizing force, encompassed all possible diplomatic means, e.g. all necessary means. Baker agreed on that condition, since the U.S. did not want a Russian veto. However, to avoid any ambiguity he made it clear for the Russians that, as the temporary president of the SC, he would explain that “all necessary means” indicates an unambiguous authority to use force. This, Baker explained, would remain a permanent part of the SC record, and it would stand as the legal interpretation of “all necessary means.”241 The resolution, as drafted by the U.S., was met the reservations of some SC

240 Ibid., 247-273.

241 Burns H. Weston, “Security Council Resolution 678 and Persian Gulf Decision Making: Precarious Legitimacy,” American Journal of International Law 85 (1991): 519; See also Woodward, The Commanders, 333-335.

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members and the objection of others. Notwithstanding these reservations, it was adopted on

November 29, 1990, by 12 votes to 2 (Cuba and Yemen) and with abstention of China. It gave

Iraq until January 15, 1991, as a pause of goodwill, to unconditionally withdraw from Kuwait.

Failing to do so would authorize “Member States co-operating with the Government of

Kuwait…to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660.”242

From a legal theoretical perspective, the implementation of the SCR 678 should rely on

Article 42 in its relation to Article 43 of the UN Charter. Article 43 clearly states that UN members should consent to “make available to the Security Council … armed forces, assistance, and facilities … necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.”243 In practice, the 1991 military campaign failed to initiate a process of intervention that meets the requirements of the UN charter under Articles 43, 44, 45, 46, and 47. For the U.S. – leading the international coalition – assumed a full responsibility of the campaign from the pre-planning to the post-execution stage. Even if it is possible to argue that the implementation of SCR 678 relied on Article 51 and thus to have constituted “a delegation of authority relative to the forceful exercise of collective self-defense, the adoption of Resolution 678 on these grounds would have represented an unprecedented interpretation of chapter VII.”244 Despite the unblemished flawed legality of the process, SCR 678 served as the tool that legitimized not only the conduct of the

1991 war, but also the resultant legal interpretations and historical narratives.

242 United Nations, Security Council Resolution 678 (1990).

243 United Nations, Charter, Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression, Articles 42-51, accessed March 28, 2013, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml.

244 Weston, “Security Council Resolution 678 and Persian Gulf Decision Making: Precarious Legitimacy,” 520.

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While in the space of the UN, SCR 678 had established an unprecedented norm of legality, in the space of Iraq and the region, it had established new ways of doing things. On

January 17, 1991, at 5:30 a.m. Saudi Arabia time, from the U.S.S. Bunker Hill – an Aegis-class cruiser in the Persian Gulf – the first Tomahawk missile was fired to its designated target signaling the beginning of a 42-day war against Iraq, comprised of a three-phase air campaign – extended over 38 days, and a ground campaign – executed for four days. The war claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, destroyed Iraq as a modern state, redefined the political identity of both southern and northern parts of Iraq, and altered the geopolitical face of the region through implanting American military bases in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

Security Council Resolution 687:

Following the 1991 war on Iraq, the SC adopted Resolution 687 on April 3, 1991, as the basis for the ceasefire that ended war. While recalling Iraq’s “prior use of chemical weapons,” the resolution decided inter alia that Iraq “shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless … all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities related thereto.” The resolution demanded that within 120 days the Secretary General should submit a comprehensive plan for an ongoing monitoring and verification process to ensure Iraq’s compliance with the provisions of SCR 687. Additionally, it called for the destruction of all Iraq’s ballistic missiles with range greater than 150 km, detailing their types, amounts and locations. Similar to the conduct of previous SCRs, it formed the UN Special

Commission [UNSCOM] to carry out an on-site inspection as well as to destroy Iraq’s aforementioned capabilities, jointly with the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA].

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Finally, it had fully reaffirmed the sanctions that were imposed by SCR 661, and granted more powers to the ISC.245

Two weeks later, the Secretary General reported the establishment of UNSCOM. The

Commission was an executive body with a chairman and a deputy. The working of UNSCOM had been performed under five groups. Each group consisted of a small group of experts responsible for planning the implementation of paragraphs 7-14 of SCR 687. Throughout its life, the UNSCOM relied heavily on technical experts and new reconnaissance technologies, e.g. inspectors, disposal teams, field support officers, air samplers, monitoring cameras, and dual-use equipment inventory control tags. Experts and technologies alike were made available to the

UNSCOM by member states, mainly the U.S. The negotiations between the Secretary General, the Executive Chairman of the UNSCOM and the Iraqi Minister for Foreign Affairs in May 1991 provided, in the language of a UN document, “the detailed modalities and legal basis on which such inspections would be conducted.”246

The case of the UNSCOM was particularly important and instructive. For the

Commission’s mandate qualifies as an external intervention in the most intimate sovereign site: the state’s control over means of violence; its military capabilities. As articulated by SCR 687, the mandate of the UNSCOM in Iraq was very clear and concise: to eliminate Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile delivery systems. To that end, and since the very beginning, the U.S. made

245 United Nations, Security Council Resolution 687 (1991).

246 For a brief history of the UNSCOM see: United Nations, United Nations Special Commission, accessed April 20, 2013, http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/General/basicfacts.html.

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available to the Commission high performance reconnaissance technologies to provide information not readily available to inspection teams on the ground.

Equally important, during its mission in Iraq, the Commission deployed a wide range of expertise and verification measures developed by an ad-hoc group of governmental experts, known as VEREX. Immediately after the end of the 1991 war, this group was established by the

UN Third Review Conference in 1991 to developed and “examine potential verification measures from a scientific and technical standpoint,” and to strengthen the effectiveness and to improve the implantation of the Biological Weapon Convention.247 Between 1991 and 1999, the

Commission designated the open space of Iraq as the first real opportunity to test many theories, techniques and methods of inspections and investigations to ensure the enforcement of the provisions of SCR 687 and the Biological Weapon Convention.

As the case of the ISC, forming the UNSCOM marked the beginning an ongoing bureaucratization process, leading to the construction of a persistent labyrinth of institutions.

This process included: opening of new offices in New York, Bahrain, and Baghdad (Baghdad

Monitoring and Verification Center); developing plans for future monitoring; setting up various groups of inspectors (i.e. ballistic missiles monitoring group, chemical weapons monitoring group – including lab technicians, biological weapons monitoring group, nuclear monitoring group, aerial inspection team, export/import monitoring group); generating operational plans to identify the aim of each mission; holding weekly meetings; scanning the terrain of Iraq to

247 It’s worth noting that Biological Weapon Convention was initially opened for signature on April 10, 1972, and entered into force on March 26, 1975. It was only after the 1991 war that the on-site and off-site verification measures, as theorized and developed by experts in the field during the life span of the Convention, were field-tested. See United Nations, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, accessed April 29, 2013, http://www.un.org/disarmament/WMD/Bio/.

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identify the locations of facilities to be inspected … etc.248 Once the UNSCOM’s offices, secure system of communication, experts and personnel were in place and ready to start the inspection processes, the second phase of UNSCOM’s work began.

The UNSCOM performed offsite and onsite inspection and verification processes. The offsite measures were massive information gathering processes, information monitoring and remote sensing. Field visits, facilities inspections, and the installation of long term monitoring technologies comprised the onsite measures. Most of the offsite measures were handled in the headquarters in New York where the UNSCOM’s Information Assessment Unit and

Export/Import Joint Unit (with IAEA) were located. The Information Assessment Unit’s mission was twofold: first, it was responsible for sorting an immense amount of information provided by

Iraq and other countries on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons. Second, it monitored the transfer of dual-use items to Iraq.

The Commission’s Information Assessment Unit was an information gathering apparatus par excellence. Under its provisions, more than two million pages, provided only by Iraq, in addition to information provided by other governments relating to supply or intelligence were archived, compartmentalized, and analyzed according to particular procedures in the UNSCOM headquarters. It is not surprising then that the unit formed the back bone of the UNSCOM’s offsite and onsite inspection operations. As information had been sorted in the headquarters office, reports were sent to the onsite inspectors who would determine the locations of facilities

248 Ibid., See also Stephen Black, “Verification under Duress: the Case of UNSCOM,” In Verification Yearbook 2000, ed. Trevor Findlay (London: The Verification Research-Training and Information Centre (Vertic), 2000). It’s worth mentioning that Stephen Black was the formal historian of UNSCOM for more than 6 years.

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and the kind of activities to be monitored. Pivotal to this information cycle was the regular updating of information gathered from Iraq, onsite inspectors and other governments.249

In sum, this unit was one of the particularly unique features of the inspection regime for it reconstructed Iraq’s most intimate sovereign site through a republic of reports unbounded by territoriality. Over the years, it managed to build a web of information that made Iraq its object.

Data was collected on Iraqi imports, industrial sites, military sites, and governmental procedures.

This data was assembled, compared, and analyzed through a comprehensive computer-based data-handling system, putting general and sensitive information about Iraq at the disposal of other parties through the role of seconded specialists (provided by member states). 250 The reconstruction of Iraq’s military capabilities, however, was only an introduction to destruct it by the onsite experts.

In just a few months, the Commission developed comprehensive plans and procedures and mobilized the needed resources to start its onsite measures and inspections. The first field inspection was carried out in May 1991, only one month after its establishment. Despite the

Commission’s speedy inception and the immediate implementation of inspection processes, the first two year of its life marked an experimental phase. During the two initial years UNSCOM’s teams “focused on developing operational capabilities, assessing Iraq’s declarations, and creating the organizational infrastructure needed to conduct more intrusive, complex investigative tasks.”

Further, through trial and error, its staff developed the experience of “anytime anywhere”

249 United Nations, Compendium of Iraq’s Proscribed Weapons Programmes in the Chemical, Biological and Missile Areas (United Nations, UNMOVIC, 2007), 1023.

250 Ibid., 1063. Almost all the Headquarter staff and inspection teams were seconded by member states.

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inspection, 251 which was made possible through the availability of high-tech reconnaissance technologies such as: surveillance cameras, sensor systems (such as remotely controlled air samplers), U-2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, low altitude aerial capabilities in the form of ch-53 helicopters and a ground support unit.252

The UNSCOM’s inspection regime, and that of its successor the UNMOVIC, constituted the most intrusive inspection mission in the history of the UN. Both Commissions enjoyed an unrestricted access to information on imports and exports, document collection and analysis, interviews, unlimited rights to aerial photography, authority to conduct biological sampling and analysis, and finally unlimited access to any site anywhere in Iraq. The opening up of Iraq’s space for inspections enabled both Commissions to accumulate expertise, acquire large range of inspection techniques, and to develop – or to test – inspection technologies. As such, under the provision of SCR 687, the UNSCOM and the latter UNMOVIC – backed up by military operations – took Iraq as its object of investigation and intervention to develop the inspection regime as a permanent institution of intervention.

The accumulated knowledge about Iraq and the open and unlimited access to its records, scientists, and facilities all established novel forms of control by creating a mode of transnational and transterritorial bureaucracy that demanded an intense reliance on expertise and technology.

Over thirteen years, this bureaucracy had transformed the Iraqi State, its territory and population

251 Black, “Verification under Duress,” 116.

252 Ibid., 116-7. See also Graham S. Pearson, UNSCOM Saga: Chemical and Biological Weapons Non- Proliferation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 202; United Nations, Compendium.

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into a set of data, and sites of inspections and destruction. By integrating a dense and comprehensive network of information, expertise, and technologies, the UNSCOM instituted an intricate and far-reaching information gathering apparatus that rendered the most intimate sites of the sovereign in Iraq – extending from farms, fields, villages, factories, and governmental offices to the whole national landscape – visible not only to the inspection teams, but to all western intelligence agencies. This visibility made Iraq vulnerable to the inspection regime not only in the realm of weapons and military capabilities, but also in the realm of economy. For the inspection regime – although operated in its offices and developed its own bureaucracy – operated closely with the sanction regime through an intimate and constant cooperation and exchange of expertise between the UNSCOM’s export/import unit and the ISC.

2.5. The Iraqi Archive between Dispersal and Fragmentation

The previous section demonstrated how the space of the UN, under the control of the

U.S., was generative of a multinational bureaucracy of control and domination. In that space, simultaneous processes of enabling and disabling took place: New international laws, norms and institutions were created, while old ones ceased to be relevant, or at best were altered to cater for the needs of the new world order. In another, yet still connected, space, the Iraqi Archive stood as an object to be deinstitutionalized, expropriated and appropriated, and in many cases, destroyed.

The case of the Iraqi Archive as a site of intervention – insomuch as it reflects a general problem of the archive – adds other problematic layers to the analysis of knowledge produced through the examination of that archive, for it represents a physically displaced and morally compromised site. As such, any project that takes this displaced archive as its commencement

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point should raise a deep moral concern regarding the processes of expropriation of that archive, the instrumental accessibility – granted to researchers and intelligence agencies – to selected historical events and episodes in the history of Iraq, and finally the negligence which the Iraqi national memory has been subject to since the beginning of the transfer of that archive to different locations and institutions in the U.S. in 1991.

For decades, scholars have been struggling to problematize the presupposed notions of

“objectivity” and “scientific” historiography as a product of examining and mining “original” and “authentic” archival materials. Some scholars have protested the “objective” and “scientific” nature of history based on the use of “authentic” materials that in and of themselves constitute an unmediated link to what happened in the past.253 Others have scrutinized the singularity of all- encompassing historical narratives – both as a practice and discourse – for they are situated in history, bound by operations and defined by functions. 254 Notwithstanding this clear problematization, archives still stand in the modern imaginary as an unchallenged repository of

“original” and “authentic” materials. Archival references and citations thus grant historical narratives an intermediate position between the reality of events and the scientific methodology through which these narratives claim truths. To mine the archive is to conduct an “objective process of uncovering historical truths whose very preservation in archival documents also

253 For an excellent intervention in the topic see Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87–109; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, “Archives in the Production of Knowledge,” in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from Sawyer Seminar, eds. Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

254 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, Columbia University Press, 1988), 20.

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represents them as authentic.” 255 The archive still represents an unchallenged source of knowledge retrieval; a source of “high” historical narrative.256

As an evidentiary paradigm,257 the Iraqi Archive yet layers two additional problems of capital importance to the aforementioned ones: These of time and space. To be sure, to evoke one is to invoke the other, for the time of the acquisition and circulation – i.e. the strategic deployment – of this archive is fundamentally connected to its working on both reshaping of knowledge about and memory of the space under investigation. The process of acquiring and circulating the Iraqi archive is of immediate and abstract reference to time. In its immediate reference, this process took place right after the 1991 war in order to achieve two objectives: first, to know Iraq, thus to enable the continuity of the project. Second, to validate and moralize the U.S. project in Iraq writ large. Conversely, the second wide circulation of this archive that began after the 2003 war can be viewed as a continuity of the attempts to legitimize the new order of things in Iraq. In its abstract reference to time, historical narratives that were constructed from the “original” and “authentic” archival materials brought about the intelligibility of a reconfigured time of the Iraqi national memory. A short survey of the literature circulated within a network of institutions – military, academic, NGOs, human rights – indicates the capacity of this archive to produce a mutated memory of Iraqi-ness, through projecting recent categories into the distant history of Iraq.

255 Francis X. Blouin, and William G. Rosenberg, “Archives in the Production of Knowledge,” 85.

256 Carlo Ginzburg, “High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Past and Present 73 (1976): 25.

257 Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989).

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The problem of space this archive engenders for the analysis is specific to its physical location and symbolic meaning. Physically, the Iraqi Archive was transferred to multiple locations in the U.S. such as the archives of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Defense

Intelligence Agency facilities, the Iraq Memory Foundation, the Hoover Institution – Stanford

University, and Pentagon’s several undisclosed locations. Although, the Hoover Institution currently contains the majority of these documents in their digitized forms, it is near impossible to point at a specific location of this archive. Additionally, at each location, documents underwent multiple processes from exploitation, to digitization, to destruction – in certain cases.

Symbolically, the space of this archive is symptomatic of the necro-sovereign space of Iraq. The archive has emerged as the first mutated site of the sovereign through processes of expropriation, physical displacement among many locations in the U.S., and destruction. In a sense, the fragmented topography of the nation is matched by the dissevered space of its archive.

Centered on the theme of access to “original” and “authentic” archival materials, analysts and scholars have produced a massive wave of intelligence reports and scholarly publications following the 1991 and the 2003 acquisition of the Iraqi Archive. Intelligence reports proliferated about: Iraq military capabilities, resources, maps and overlays, operations plans, camouflage, population, social structure …etc. Scholarly writings, mostly appeared post-2003 circulation of the archive, analyzed and theorized the brutalization of public culture in Iraq, the authoritarian nature of the Iraqi regime,258 minorities and human rights abuse, the terror network that emerged under the Ba‘athist regime and so on and so forth.259

258 See for example: Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Dina Rizk Khoury, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, “Saddam’s Delusions: the View from the Inside,” Foreign Affairs, May-June 2006, accessed April 12, 2013, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61701/kevin-woods-james-lacey-and-williamsonmurray/saddams- 123

Given the form of scholarship that has been a product of the instrumental circulation of a portion of the expropriated Iraqi archive since 1991, and its pivotal contribution to the moralization of the American project in Iraq afterword, one can point to a semi-universal failure in the field of Iraqi studies to critically engage with this archive. Almost all researchers who worked on documents from the Iraqi archive failed to question and interrogate that instrumentality. They failed to interrogate the mutated authority of that displaced and stolen archive in the making of the necro-sovereignty project in Iraq, and whose logic targeted not only the mortality of Iraqis, but also which memories and histories of the nation should emerge as a dominant historical narrative that would serve as moralizing discourse of “liberation” and

“emancipation.”

Absent from almost every work on Iraq – which benefited from the access to “authentic” archival materials expropriated from Iraq – is a careful consideration of the archival practices themselves: acquisition, classification, categorization, relevance, description, and access. To be sure, historians working on Iraqi archival documents in the U.S. failed to question how this archive has become a property of the empire, how accessible documents are selected, described, and declassified for public consumption, let alone the large sum of classified documents that were never released. Even less so has the discussion considered anything relevant to the preservation of these documents. Finally, most of the historical scholarship about Iraq that appeared following the “opening” of this archive failed to look to that archive in its wider

delusions-the-view-from-the-inside; Kevin Woods, Iraqi Perspective Project Phase II Um Al-Ma’arik (The Mother of all Battles): Operational and Strategic Insights from an Iraqi Perspective (Virginia: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2008); Kevin Woods et al., Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Military Perspective of the Iran-Iraq War (Washington, D.C.: Institute for National Strategic Studies, 2009).

259 Isam al Khafaji, “State Terror and the Degradation of Politics in Iraq,” Middle East Report (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), May-June 1992).

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context – against the pretext of two wars, where that archive serves as a site in which power relations are reconfigured and, which, in itself constitutes an intricate technology of rule.

In her description of a generic scene of the archive, Stoler writes:260

Kilometers of administrative archives called up massive buildings to house them. Government offices, filled with directors, assistant directors, scribes, and clerks, were made necessary by the proliferation of documents that passed, step by meticulous step, through the official ranks. Accumulations of paper and edifices of stone were both monuments to the asserted know-how of rule, artifacts of bureaucratic labor duly performed, artifices of a … state declared to be in efficient operation.

Entering the Iraqi archive – in any of its accessible locations in the U.S. – engenders the imagination of a different story than that of Stoler’s. At the Hoover Institution of Stanford

University, the major site in which most of the archival documents reside currently,261 I was struck by the fact that there were no kilometers of archival documents. Instead, all that the researcher can access is digitized copies of the “original” documents. More importantly, the rigid rituals that precede access to any file on the only two computers available for researchers is

260 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2.

261 In 1997, the Human Rights Initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder under the direction of Bruce P. Montgomery negotiated the acquisition of the original secret police files, seized by the Kurds during the 1991 war, and the digital database with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Kurdish political factions that seized the files in the March 1991 uprising in Iraqi Kurdistan. The release and transfer agreement was made with Senators Jesse Helms and Joseph Biden of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time. Currently, the University of Colorado at Boulder Archives has 5.5 million digitized documents of the captured Iraqi secret police archive, which is a larger version of the North Iraq Dataset [NIDS] available at the Hoover Institution – Stanford University.

The Boulder Archives do not clarify whether the documents that they acquired were the same documents under the custody of the DIA, or a different set of documents. There is a lack of clarity and transparency concerning which institution had what archive and the fate of that archive. On the one hand, Boulder Archives claim that the U.S. government transported the records to the custody of the Kurds in northern Iraq in 2007. On the other hand, a declassified DIA document stated that the archive under the DIA custody was destroyed due to different types of U.S.-originated mold. See University of Colorado Boulder, International Projects “Iraqi Secret Police Files Seized by the Kurds during the 1991 Gulf War,” accessed May 21, 2013, http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/archives/collections/international.htm. See also IMF Collection Summary, Ḥizb al-Baᶜth al-ᶜArabī al-Ishtirākī Records: 1968-2003, Hoover Institution Archive, 3. 125

particularly striking. Researchers who wish to work on that digitized archive are not allowed to use their personal laptops, cellular phones, or digital cameras. Additionally, they are not allowed to photocopy, photograph, scan, download, or duplicate in any manner any of the material from the Iraq Memory Foundation Collection. Researchers may only take notes using Hoover

Institution notepapers and pencils.

While such an archive lacks piles of accumulated papers, its digitized documents vigorously point not to a “state declared to be in efficient operation,” as in Stoler’s case, but rather to a state declared to be in an absolute lawlessness.262 Not surprisingly, there has been an extensive effort on the part of the Iraq Memory Foundation [IMF] to create an easily navigated and fully organized dataset for North Iraq – known as North Iraq dataset [NIDS]. 263 The remainder of documents, although generally being cataloged and indexed, are archived in a rudimentary, haphazard and chaotic fashion that makes navigating them an extremely difficult, lengthy, and unrewarding task. Beyond these logistical issues, there is no doubt that the use of this archive – violently sized, selectively organized and instrumentally circulated – should raise an ethical dilemma to researchers and historians of Iraq.

2.5.1. A Violent Itinerary of Documents

The violence that marked the processes of acquiring this archive, its itinerary and its instrumental circulation since 1991 illustrate not only a colonial arrogance; but also its negligence of the national value of this archive. During the Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi

262 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2.

263 The North Iraq dataset compiles documents that were created by security, intelligence, military, Ba‘ath Party, and other government agency offices in northern Iraq. It covers the period from 1980 to the prelude of the 1991 war. It includes documents on the Iran-Iraq, the Kurdish insurgency, and the Anfal campaign of 1987-88. Unlike other datasets, in the NIDS it is easy to trace a series of documents in terms of dates, demand for information, comments, to whom documents were addressed and in response to which documents.

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regime following the 1991 war and the territorial disintegration of northern Iraq, the Patriotic

Union of Kurdistan [PUK] and the Kurdish Democratic Party [KDP] “seized 18 tons of secret politics files,” which remained in their custody until an agreement to transfer this archive was reached between these parties on the one hand, and Kanan Makiya of the Iraq Memory

Foundation, 264 Peter Galbraith of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and representatives of Human Rights Watch/Middle East, on the other, in 1992.265

As soon as these documents were captured in 1991, the Army Department’s Decision

Systems Management Agency developed the Document Exploitation project [DOCEX]. The

DOCEX project was developed to avoid the unsatisfactory Panama experience, in which the U.S.

Army used microfiche-based system to scan around six million Spanish and English documents captured from Panama during “Operation Just Cause” in 1989. Only ten percent of the documents captured during this operation were digitized in a period of six months, rendering the digitization process an incomplete one. DOCEX was a system for recording the contents of Iraqi filing cabinets and other documentation captured during and after the 1991 war. Conversion

264 Although IMF was formally established in 2003, it is considered an outgrowth of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project, founded by Kanan Makiya in 1992 at the Center of Middle East Studies at Harvard University.

265 See “The IMF Binder: Hoover Institution Archives,” 8-11. The Binder includes a historical periodization of transferring different sets of documents under Custodial History Note. The PUK and the KDP were in control of the northern-Kurdish region of Iraq under the U.S. protection and support following the 1991 uprising, and remained almost fully autonomous from Baghdad since then. According to other sources, the U.S. military is said to have captured 300 cubic feet of records in Iraq and Kuwait. The U.S. forces “literally swept up these documents … removing paper documents from every possible source, from buildings to the pockets of dead soldiers.” The archival material, confiscated from different locations in Iraq, covers the period from 1978 until 1991. “The collection includes Iraq operations plans and orders; maps and overlays; unit rosters (including photographs); manuals covering tactics, camouflage, equipment, and doctrine; equipment maintenance logs; ammunition inventories; unit punishment records; unit pay and leave records; handling of prisoners of war; detainee lists; lists of captured vehicles; and other military records. The collection also includes some manuals of foreign, non-Iraqi weapons systems;” and finally, some of Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionary Command Council records. See the letter that was sent from the National Archives at College Park to Stakeholder Units, July 2002, accessed May 10, 2013, http://www.dcoxfiles.com/2002narareport.pdf. See Appendix, Documents 1 and 2.

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scanning of the more than twelve million pages was performed in several locations including

Kuwait and Dhahran before the transfer of the archival material to Washington. The scanned images were written to magnetic hard disks and then downloaded to digital audio tapes, which were transferred to the Defense Intelligent Agency to be stored in one of their computer system facilities.266

While according to the Department of the Army (Office of the Chief of Staff) around 12 million pages were expropriated and transported to Washington, a memorandum from the

Defense Intelligent Agency to the Archivist of the United States in 2002 mentioned that the approximate number of documents transferred to the Agency was 4 million pages. The same document mentioned that all of the captured documents were digitized and both the papers and the digitized versions were transported to the U.S. where they were kept in temporary storage for more than ten years. Since their capture until shortly after the 1991 war, once in the custody of the Defense Intelligent Agency, a comprehensive revision, translation, and exploitation of these archival materials occurred. During the 1991 war and shortly after, 495 Intelligence Information

Reports based on these documents were produced. After the war these documents provided inside information about Iraq for the U.S. armed services and the intelligence community who produced an unknown number of reports.

In the late 1990s, when the Department of State requested to review some of these documents, the Defense Intelligent Agency found that the digital audio tapes had become corrupted. Thus, another scanning project was performed, and documents were classified and

266 For more details on the DOCEX system that was specifically developed for handling the seized Iraqi documents see: Department of the Army (Office of Chief of Staff), “Captured Gulf War Document Exploitation (DOCEX) System,” in Technical Information Papers No. 12: Digital-Imagining and Optical Digital Data Disk Storage Systems: Long-Term Access Strategies for Federal Agencies, 1994, accessed May 10, 2013, http://www.archives.gov/preservation/technical/imaging-storage-appendix.html#five.

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declassified on compact discs. However, around eight years of storage have produced various types of mold on the paper of these documents which caused health problems to the staff who were working on the scanning of these documents for the second time. Both the health problems caused by mold and the cost of storage of these documents led to the DIA’s decision to destroy these archival materials.

Concerning this portion of the archive, it is not clear under what conditions these documents were stored or what procedures were taken to protect or maintain them, given that they constitute a part of the collective national memory of another nation, or whether all of these documents were digitized or only portions of them that would serve certain political agenda of the empire. These questions will remain unanswered since the original documents of that portion of the archive, under the custody of Defense Intelligent Agency, were destroyed.

To reiterate, paper documents stolen from different locations in Iraq were not the war only causality.267 Museums, monuments, and religious and archaeological sites all were targets of intervention and destruction since 1990. Among the most documented examples of the destruction inflicted on major archaeological sites are: serious cracks in the 4th century A.D. arch at Ctesiphon,268 which were caused by air attacks during the 1991 war. Tell al-Laḥm, a 6th century B.C. site south of Ur, 269 was drastically razed by U.S. bulldozers to create firing

267 In the military jargon, the damage inflected on these sites was described as a “collateral damage.”

268 Ctesiphon is the largest vaulted arch in the world created without a keystone centering device.

269 Tell al-Laḥm is considered the most strategic location to control two highways between Basra and Nāsiriyah city. Therefore, the American troops landed on that site in 1991, leveled it and created protected fire positions. In the process these troops found and stole an unknown number of relics and destroyed the remainder due to the heavy weight of bulldozers and tanks patrolling over the site. For more details on archaeological sites destroyed during and after the 1991 war see Asmā‘ ᶜUbayd, Tārīkh al-ᶜIrāq w Ᾱthāruho fī Mahab er-Rīḥ, Majalat Juhiyna, 2013 [“Iraq’s History and Relics: in the Blow of the Wind,” Juhiyna Magazine]; see also Khalid Nashif, Tadmīr at-Turāth al-Ḥaḍārī al-ᶜIrāqī: Fuṣūl al-Kāritha (Bayrūt : Dār al- Ḥamrā lil-Ṭibāᶜa wa an-Nashir wa at-Tawthīq wa at-Tawzīᶜ, 2004) [The Destruction of the Iraqi Cultural 129

positions. Brickwork on the famous ziggurat at Ur near the city of Nāsiriyah was damaged as a result of bombing and five large bomb holes were created around the ziggurat's tower, and some four hundred holes appeared in a reconstructed wall of the tower.270 Immediately after the end of the 1991 war and the beginning of the uprising in northern (Kurdish) and southern (Shi’a) parts of Iraq, eleven of the thirteen regional museums across the country were ransacked in one of the most extensive and organized theft in the history of modern wars. Different Iraqi resources reported that around four thousand pieces went missing during the two uprisings.271

The scale of looting and destruction of Iraq’s national memory and historical past intensified in the 2003 war. Once again, Iraq’s ancient and modern cultural heritage in its widest meaning was amongst the most important war targets. The destruction and burning of Baghdad’s

National Library (INLA) [dār al-kutub wal-wathā’q al-ᶜirāqiyya], the rampant looting and mass theft of the Iraqi ministries, public offices, presidential palaces, and national museums were simultaneous to the military operations targeting the archive. 272 Throughout a variety of operations, the American military gathered between 43,000 and 48,000 boxes of Iraqi state documents. The U.S. government collection of Iraqi state archival material amounts to around

Heritage: Chapters of the Catastrophe (Beirut: al-Ḥamrā for Printing, Publication, Documentation and Distribution]. See also Cultural Property Training Resource Program, “The Impact of War on Iraq’s Cultural Heritage: Operation Iraqi Freedom,” accessed April 12, 2013, http://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/chp04-12iraqenl.html.

270 Ibid.

271 Ibid., see also Khalid Nashif, Tadmīr at-Turāth al-Ḥaḍārī al-ᶜIrāqī.

272 “Stuff happens … freedom is untidy” came Rumsfeld’s reply, “free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things”. He joked, “Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over,” and added that he didn’t think there were that many vases in Iraq. Quoted in Lawrence Smallman, “Rumsfeld Cracks Jokes, but Iraqis Aren’t Laughing,” Al-Jazeera, April 12, 2003, accessed April 13, 2003, http://www.payk.net/mailingLists/iran-news/html/2003.1/msg00976.html.

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100 million pages, whose fate and location for the most part is unclear.273 The Iraq Memory

Foundation, on its own, captured around eleven million pages in addition to a hundred and eight

video files of a “sensitive archive” from the Ba‘ath Regional Command headquarters and from

third parties at different stages after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. These materials are

organized in six collections and datasets at the Iraq Memory Foundation Archive in the custody

of the Hoover Institution:274

1- Ba‘ath Arab Socialist Party Regional Command Collection [BRCC]: BRCC documents were

originally located at the headquarters of the Ba‘ath Party which fell within the Green Zone after

the fall of Baghdad. They were captured by core IMF personnel from September 23 to 25, 2003

and were relocated to an IMF processing facility.275

2- Baghdad Fall: 2004 Secondary Collection, 2005 Secondary Collection, etc.: these documents

belonged to various units of the Iraqi government and were captured by third parties both

individuals and organizations after the fall of Baghdad. 276 In twenty-three rounds from

September 22 to November 1, 2004, the IMF gathered these documents from different third

parties. Its staff digitized and relocated these documents.

3- North Iraq Dataset [NIDS]: this dataset (described above) was captured in 1991 after the Kurdish

uprising in the North. The majority of these documents were seized from the offices and

273 John Gravois, “Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution,” Chronical of Higher Education, January 23, 2008, accessed May 30, 2013, http://chronicle.com/article/Disputed-Iraqi-Archives- Find-a/426.

274 The description of these datasets, provided here, is based on the IMF’s “Information for Researchers” file (IMF Binder hereafter).

275 See “IMF Binder: Hoover Institution Archives,” 1 and 8.

276 The IMF binder describes the “collection” process of this set of documents as “opportunistic.” The main sites from where these documents were captured are: “Military bureau, Regional Command, and al-Qadisiyyah Newspaper,” IMF Binder, 9.

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buildings of: Ba‘ath party; al-Istikhbārāt al-ᶜAskariyya (military intelligence); Mudiriyyat al-

Amn al-ᶜAmma (general directorate of security);277 and the Revolutionary Command Council.

While the archival materials that were seized by the U.S. military were relocated directly in

1991, the materials the Kurdish parties captured were relocated to the U.S. in 1993. The total

number of seized documents that the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Documentation Exploitation

Division digitized by 1994 was 5.5 million documents. It worth noting that the U.S. government

gave only partial set of digital copies to the IMF who transferred them later to the Hoover

Institution.

4- Kuwait Dataset [KDS]: these archival materials were captured and digitized by the U.S. military

after the Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait in 1991. However, the U.S. government classified

the larger portion of these documents. Some documents were declassified by the Defense

Intelligence Agency upon requests from the Department of State Freedom of Information Act.

The IMF acquired only digital copies of these declassified documents and this dataset as of

September 2012 was not open to researchers.

5- Ministry of Information Selected Documents Collection: documents under this entry were

provided to IMF in July-August 2003 by an insider in the Ministry of Information who had

previously collected them.

6- Topical Collection: no description available.

The IMF, in coordination with the U.S. government and the Pentagon, had agreed with

the Hoover Institution at Sanford University to provide a “safe haven” for this archive in 2009.

The campaign, launched by the Iraqi National Library and Archive, to retrieve the “unlawfully”

277 Mainly from its three governorates in the North: Sulaymaniyyah, Arbil, and Dohuk.

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seized Iraqi Archive has failed thus far, as the American government and IMF argue that the situation in Iraq is still not stable enough to secure this sensitive archive.278

At the eve of Baghdad’s fall in April 2003, the Iraqi National Museum [al-Matḥaf al-waṭanī al-

ᶜirāqī], the Iraqi National Library and Archive [dār al-kutub wal-wathā’q al-ᶜirāqiyya] and all the archival collections in different Iraqi ministries were subject to destruction, burning, and massive theft. Abd en-Nabī Ṣabbār, an expert in the dār, maintains that “more than 3500 scripts, documents, and rare books are still missing since the American invasion of Iraq.” According to

Ṣabbār and other employees of the dār, the fate of some these archival collections was burning, however, others were stolen, while the majority of these documents, related to different historical periods of Iraq, were collected in 48 containers and seized by the American forces. The dār was able to retrieve around 460 documents and rare books, which were returned by Iraqis after the dār re-opened its doors.279

Bayt el-ḥikma [the House of Wisdom], one of the most important Iraqi cultural institutions faced the same fate of burning, destruction, and theft. According to the previous accountant of Bayt el- ḥikma, the losses of the Bayt were valued at around $170 million

(between damaged equipment and stolen relics, rare scripts, and historical documents).280 The looting of the Iraqi National Museum, according to its general director A‘mira ᶜAydān, was the

278 Hugh Eakin, “Iraqi Files in U.S.: Plunder or Rescue?” New York Times, July 1, 2008; Sa‘ad Eskander, “Records and Archives Recovery in Iraq: Past, Present and Future,” Iraq National Library and Archive, accessed September 29, 2010, http://www.iraqnla.org/fp/art/art1.htm; see also The Iraq Memory Foundation website, http://www.iraqmemory.org.

279 Al-Jazeera, “Wathā’q al-ᶜIrāq bayn al-Ḥarq wa an-Hab,” [Iraqi archival documents between burning and looting] accessed March 3, 2010, http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D55F35BF-A217-44F6-BA4A- B9F6D77F71C4.htm.

280 Al-Jazeera, “Suqūt Baghdad Yuṭīḥ bi Bayt al-Ḥikma wal Qaṣr al-ᶜAbāsī,” [Bayt al-Ḥikma and the Abbasid Palace: after the fall of Baghdad] accessed March 5, 2010, http://www.aljazeera.net/News/archive/archive?ArchiveId=52734.

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most devastating event, resulting in the theft of more than 15,000 relics. She adds that the looting was performed by different categories of thieves. Some of the lootings were random, but the most effective looting was performed by professional looters “who brought with them updated maps for the museum, and knew exactly where the most important and precious relics were, and what they would steal, and how to carry it.”281

In conclusion, the destruction, displacement and appropriation of the Iraqi archive since

1991 helped negate the Iraqi archive’s capacity of commandment and its validity as a commencement point for any national memory.282 However, these processes did not render that archive obsolete. Rather, the relocation and reclassification of these documents suited them for new governing strategies and new initiatives. The Iraqi Archive has transformed into an effective tool of governance and domination.

2.6. Conclusion

From the offices of the White House, the Pentagon, different U.S. Departments,

American think tanks, companies and other apparatuses, to the UN headquarters, regional offices, to Baghdad’s archives, palaces, governmental offices, industrial sites and streets, to the

Iraqi population wherever they existed, a mutable space of necro-sovereignty has been formed and performed. This mode of sovereignty has demanded that Iraqis exist vividly everywhere in the world as enemies, more than they exist in Iraq itself. In that space, armies have been deployed, new legal frameworks and international laws have been established, bureaucracies have been formed, new governance and military technologies have been constructed and

281 Al-Jazeera, “Āthār al-ᶜIrāq al-Mudamra wal Masrūqa,” [the destroyed and looted Iraqi relics] June 4, 2008, accessed May 28, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3EF08FE8-80AF-4B11-B12E- 62B4E48D71BD.htm.

282 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 1-4.

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experimented. In the necro-sovereign space, Iraqis have been forced to die, while simultaneously being freed from the dictatorship of the Ba‘athist regime.

Information about Iraq has been accumulated over the last two decades; new technologies of transnational and imperial governance have been deployed to govern and rule everything

Iraqi; physical and psychological violence has underpinned the working of this project of sovereignty, in which a fluency in the law in a world saturated with law was necessary not only to engender a sense of legality and legitimacy for that mode of sovereignty, but also to defy and alter existing rules, and to set forth a new set of rules that form the practices of states, international organizations and individuals in the new world order. Iraq has served as the most important post-cold War site in which the making of this space of necro-sovereignty was possible.

This analysis of Iraq does by no means suggest that the world before Iraq was just, or that the international system was symmetrical, or that colonial and imperial modes of governmentality were absent in the world politics. More importantly, it does not suggest that imperialism ceased to loom large in period between WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union.

However, since 1990 Iraq has formed a site in which the politics of the powerful, deploying an amalgam of techniques and technologies of violence and rule, re-asserted themselves in explicit forms that cannot be avoided.

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PART TWO: IRAQ DEMOCRATIZED

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Post-Invasion Baghdad: Scene I

One of the problems is Iraq is not a nation state. It is a state or government with territory that includes several different nations [of people] who think of themselves as belonging to these ethno- religious groups rather than primarily to the state. Iraq has been held together since 1921 by coercion. We unscrewed the lid on that bottle, and you see the fruits of that process in the streets of Iraq .

- Patrick Lang, New York Times (2006) 283

We sought hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder to create our new Iraq, the Iraq of the future free from sectarianism, racism, locality complex, discrimination and exclusion.

- The New Iraqi Constitution (2005) 284

There is no security. I say to the Americans, take back your democracy and give us our security.

- Iraqi Citizen, quoted in the Atlantic (2013) 285

As early as January 2004, a contingent of marines began erecting concrete blast walls around the Republican Palace, now home to the Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA], topping the barriers with new coils of razor. The walls were in part meant to limit traffic around the palace. In addition, new security measures were taken to limit the entry to the palace. The walling off of the Republican Palace was only the beginning of a process of transforming

Baghdad into isolated enclaves and walled-off neighborhoods.

283 Patrick Lang, “Q&A: Iraq's Political Process,” New York Times, February 28, 2006, accessed September 27, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot1_022806.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0.

284 The Iraqi constitution of 2005. I used the official English translation of the United Nations’ office for Constitutional Support that was approved by the Iraqi government.

285 Interview with an Iraqi citizen, quoted in Amanda Erickson, “10 Years after the Iraq War, How Has Baghdad Changed?” Atlantic, March 18, 2013, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/10-years-after-iraq-war-how-has-baghdad-changed/5011/.

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The Green Zone [GZ] emerged soon after the 2003 invasion as the first walled-off area in

Baghdad as the occupying authority walled itself in effectively separating itself mentally and physically from the population of the city and Iraqis, in general. Coils of razor wire, chain link fences, earthen berms and armed checkpoints emerged as new architectural forms across the urban landscape of Baghdad immediately after the fall of the city in April 2003. These architectural forms closed off the GZ to the general Iraqi population, disrupted the flow of

Baghdad’s traffic, and fragmented the city’s topography. 286 This construction of barriers included a variety of post-2003 structural techniques of separation: simple concrete walls, steel- reinforced blast walls, sandbag walls, barbed wire, concrete bunker complexes and trenches.287

To ensure the effectiveness of these separation structures new technologies of surveillance, targeting, and identifications were made available to the U.S. troops and the Iraqi security forces to control and secure the population.

By the end of 2007, barriers have become a permanent element of the post-invasion system as spatial signifiers of law and order. They stand as the most conspicuous intervention to

286 Long before erecting concrete walls in and around Baghdad due to the escalation of sectarian violence, earthen walls and trenches were common procedures to isolate small towns and villages. See for example the description of military strategies in all phases of any counterinsurgency campaign as describe by the Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2. U.S. Headquarters Department of the Army, Tactics in Counterinsurgency: Field Manual, FM 3-24.2 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, April 21, 2009). See also Donald P. Wright and Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008); James Paul and Céline Nahory, War and occupation in Iraq (Global Policy Forum, 2007); Haifa Zangana, “Walling in Iraq: The Impact on Baghdadi Women,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 4 (2010): 41–58.

287 See “Global Security,” accessed October 5, 2014, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/baghdad-green-zone.htm; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage Books, 2007); Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2; William Langewiesche, “The Mega-Bunker of Baghdad,” Vanity Fair, November 2007; Zangana, “Walling in Iraq”.

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restructure and control the spatial and temporal articulation of political futures through

Baghdad’s urban landscape.

The erection of these architectural barriers, while radically altering Baghdad’s urban space and social make-up, were constitutive of similarly radical transformations in the juridico- political space of Iraq. The Iraqi legal system was flattened and remade with speed and intensity as a prerequisite for a new democratic Iraq. This process created a new set of laws to be administered by reorganized government institutions, and a new lexicon of political categories that has divided the city’s population and mapped them onto divided fragmented city-scape. The post-invasion reordering of the legal space has not only reconstructed Iraq as a new juridico- political space, but also delineated a new framework for the maintenance of law and order in

Iraq.

The transformation of both urban and juridico-political space has been rendered and further defined by violence. As much as this transformation was enabled by a particular violent event, i.e. the 2003 invasion, it has unfolded in what Paul Ricoeur has described as a “realm of violence”288 that, since 2003, has enveloped Baghdad. To trace the American project in Iraq, one cannot reduce violence to one or more of its extreme expressions as a point of departure. These extremes are only manifestations and war is only one of its forms. Ricoeur proposes to think of violence through a wider lens that includes “its exterior nature against which we fight, through the nature within that overwhelms us, to, finally, the will to murder that, it is said, is nourished by each consciousness in its encounter with another.” The problem of violence - as Ricoeur

288 Paul Ricoeur, “Violence and Language,” in Political and Social Essays, trans. Joseph Bien (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), 32-35.

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constructs it - is its opposition with language and, more precisely, with coherent discourse.

Language is the other of violence and yet the field through which violence is signified. Violence and language, thus, stand in a formal opposition: they are “two contraries” each of which

“exactly adjusted to the whole extension of the other.” It is through language and the desire for meaning that violence reaches expression. Therefore, according to Ricoeur, the use of force has never been “brute and mute.”289

This “realm of violence,” to appropriate Ricoeur’s construction of the problem of violence, is intimately unified with language insofar as it is able to create a narrative that rationalizes its manifestations, and articulates its meaning. It is through articulating and delimiting the possible meanings of violence that discourse becomes a process of denying violence and a claim for truth through its internal coherence. It dominates and mutates the historical narrative of and about violence only to dislocate and obscure the source of the crisis itself. Between the realm of violence and its discursive coherence, there is an elastic set of intermediary appropriations of its meaning, a set of mutated truths.

This part of the dissertation, in the following three chapters, investigates the transformation of urban and juridico-political space in post-2003 occupied Baghdad. It traces the violent intervention of new forms of legality in its relation to urban space. The reconfiguration and reimagination of the city is one of the most perceptible implications of this violence. How did the new legality appropriate and disfigure historical notions of Iraqi-ness? How did this transformative moment alter the heterogeneous and inclusive spaces of Baghdad inverting them into segregated enclaves marked by sectarian identities based on ethnicity and religion? How did

289 Ibid.

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the American administration of Baghdad draw on a constellation of geopolitical technologies to profile, codify, and reproduce political identities and the urban terrain anew? A radically other

Baghdad has emerged through violence. Spectacles saturated with blood and punctured with ubiquitous death and graphic torture have paired the city with death. What forms of subjectivities and modes of sociality has this violence produced? Throughout the following three chapters, I venture to answer these questions.

Although the 2003 war and its aftermath signaled continuity of the American project in

Iraq since 1990, it nonetheless opened the terrain of Iraq to new interventions rooted in pre- occupation discourses and techniques of control. The occupation authority sought to fulfill the initial conditions for the establishment of long-term dominance delineating the political future of

Iraq. Law and order was the first condition. The horizontal and vertical re-imagination of the urban space of Iraqi cities and that of Baghdad in particular was the second condition. Caged in the newly fortified spaces and subjects to the new system of legality, Iraqis had to grapple with these new identities. This part approaches the preceding questions through the attempt to fulfill these two conditions and what that process generated: new legal categories (chapter three), modes of sociality (chapter four), and fortified urbanism (chapter five). The narrative of these chapters is stumbling for, despite the efforts, it could not escape deploying these identities that not only formed the foundations of the new system of law and order, but also produced a new vocabulary through which Iraq’s collective memory has been rewritten. It is the intimacy of violence and language that this part of the dissertation is struggling with.

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CHAPTER THREE: Redefining the Legal Space of Baghdad

This chapter argues that the post-invasion legal order generated new and distinctive socio-political categories which subsumed previous categorizations on the basis of “social and cultural” 290 differences among the Iraqi population. The CPA deployed these categories repositioning the nation’s sectarian differences into the fore of Iraqi politics. The immediate translation of CPA policy into institutional practices constructed sectarian identities as the grounds for inclusion and exclusion in the new Iraq polity using them as rationale for “righting the sectarian wrongs”291 of the previous regime to construct that polity around a maximized and militarized form of sectarianism. This process has incapacitated the Iraqi population to imagine possible political futures as much as the invasion and subsequent war of occupation itself. Post- invasion legality, relying heavily on the role of western experts, marked the beginning of a violent and chaotic process of reorganization of political practice and the urban space in Iraq.

This process took the law as an instrument to transform previous shared social modalities among

Sunnis and Shi’as into distinct and segregated social spaces, the boundaries of which have been policed by mistrust and fear. More importantly, new laws and legal institutions succeeded in shoving both Sunnis and Shi’as into cycles of sectarian violence both real and imagined.

3.1. Who Governs? Which Law and Order?

On May 2, 2003, George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations signaling the inauguration of a seven-year American occupation of Iraq. Scholars in the field of Iraqi studies universally agree that the U.S. invaded Iraq with no actual plan for post-invasion

290 International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict,” Middle East Report 52 (2006): 6.

291 Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Vision of Unity (London: Hurst & CO., 2011), 148.

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governance, which in turn had led the country to descent into an abyss of violence. This narrative falls victim to a political naivety lacking the conceptual ability to grasp a new scale of dispersed political engineering processes and operations which are shaped in multiple spaces and by different temporalities, and bring together different forces and elements. It is my contention that the apparent absence of a coherent design for the post-war period does not cancel out the existence of an extensive planning for post-war Iraq. Yet one of the most novel features of this planning is its dispersibility within time and space, and its contestability by different power centers, American and Iraqi alike.

Defining the contours of Baghdad’s future and the ability to reorganize its legal, political and social environment became a field of competition among different apparatuses – American and Iraqi alike – each of which channeled its legal, political, and economic experts to shape post- invasion governance of Iraq, based on its vision and political agenda. This in turn had introduced several pre-war scenarios as tools to carve Baghdad’s future, imposed yet negotiated dependent on the capacity of each apparatus to coordinate alliances and to impose its vision on the ground.

Indeed, the initial months of the American occupation of Baghdad were decisive in defining the winning mode of post-Saddam governance. The battle for Baghdad vacillated mainly between the agendas of the State Department – supporting the

[INA] on the one hand, and the Department of Defense and the Pentagon – supporting the Iraqi

National Congress [INC], on the other. These competing visions in their alliances with different

Iraqi exile groups, however, had to adjust to include and rally other Iraqi political parties such as the Daᶜawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI] among others. What remains remarkable here is that while each of these apparatuses had its

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distinct vision to render Baghdad a reordered space, all promoted their visions within a unified framework of change that took Baghdad’s juridico-political space, urban space, and population as objects to act on. The intricate apparatuses of governance that were erected in Baghdad after the invasion best exemplify an imposed yet negotiated network in which many U.S.

Departments, secular and religious Iraqi exile groups, international organizations, militaries, resistance, experts, new military and surveillance technologies, legal-political-economic frameworks, and urban designs interacted.

Two months before the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush signed the Presidential

Directive by which the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance [the Office of

Reconstruction hereafter] was established on January 20, 2003. The document gave the DOD an overall responsibility for post-war control and planning of Iraq. The U.S. Agency for

International Development [USAID] of the State Department assumed the responsibility of handling of much of post-hostilities humanitarian and reconstruction work. Theoretically, the

Office of Reconstruction was an interagency body that would supervise and fund all humanitarian assistance and aiding operations as part of the reconstruction of post-invasion Iraq.

Lieutenant General Jay Garner, a retired U.S. army general, was appointed to serve as the coordinator of the Office of Reconstruction operations. He reported to General Tommy Franks, then commander of U.S. Central Command.292 The newly established Office of Reconstruction, controlled by the Pentagon, was entrusted the entire process of managing Iraqi affairs.

292 See L. Elaine Halchin, “The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origins, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, September 21, 2004), 2-3, accessed September 21, 2014, http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs10420/m1/1/high_res_d/RL32370_2006Sep21.pdf. See also U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, “Contracts Awarded for the Coalition 144

In January 2003, Garner gathered six people around him to embark on a recruitment process to ensemble a governance team. By mid-March, Garner’s team grew to almost two hundred. After his arrival to Baghdad in April, Garner managed to bring the number of his team into four hundred. According to Gordon W. Rudd, the Office of Reconstruction official historian, most of Garner’s assembled team came from the Departments of State and Defense, U.S. Agency for International Development, and some representatives from the Departments of Treasury,

Commerce, Agriculture, Justice, as well as from the CIA. 293 Additionally, the Office of

Reconstruction recruited Iraqi-Americans and exiles, and British and Australian personnel.294

Upon his arrival to Baghdad, Garner divided Iraq into three regions. The management of the southern and northern parts were allocated to retired army generals, while central Baghdad was assigned to Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen. The Office of Reconstruction civil administration was assigned to Michael Mobbs of the DOD, who was in charge of selecting senior ministerial posts to staff Iraqi ministries.295

The Office of Reconstruction, often referred to as a failure in the literature, exemplifies a contested space in which the DOD, State Department, and to an extent Iraqi exile groups,

Provisional Authority by the Defense Contracting Command-Washington,” Report D-2004-057, March 18, 2004, 1; Mike Allen, “Expert on Terrorism to Direct Rebuilding,” Washington Post, May 2, 2003, A01.

293 See Gordon W. Rudd, Reconstructing Iraq: Regime Change, Jay Garner, and the ORHA Story (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2011), viii. See also L. III with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 32.

294 Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 99.

295 Ibid. According to Allawi, Mobbs was the legal advisor of Douglas Faith, then Under Secretary of Defense. It is important to note that he was the legal advisor who provided the legal opinion for incarcerating “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo.

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attempted to institute their vision for Baghdad’s future. Ironically, the Office of Reconstruction, which was supposed to be the civilian-led office in charge of post-war planning, in a matter of few days was staffed by active-duty military personnel. Garner was not only forced to reverse a number of appointments he made from the State Department teams, but also his attempts to recruit experts from other agencies were blocked by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith. 296 To complicate things further, during the initial phase of recruiting the post-invasion team by Garner, the Pentagon’s Office of

Special Operations contracted the Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council [IRDC] to embark on another separate recruitment process. At a short notice, Emad Dhai, the director of the

IRDC, was obliged to recruit a “professional ‘rapid deployment’ team that was to directly manage, or assist in the management of, Iraq’s ministries.”297 The recruited Iraqis – mostly Iraqi-

Americans and Iraqi exiles were offered subordinate positions, while senior posts were filled out with Americans.

During the short life of the Office of Reconstruction, the DOD attempted to maintain a full control over its staff and operations, rendering a particularly messy, intransparent, and

296 See Nora Bensahel, “Mission not Accomplished,” in War in Iraq: Planning and Execution, ed. Thomas A. Keaney and Thomas Mahnken (New York: Routledge, 2007), 131-132.

297 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 100; Michael Rubin, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: State vs. Iraq Planning,” National Review online, May 3, 2004, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f- news/1129093/posts. Interestingly, the IRDC brought together more than 140 Iraqi experts, originally to work with Iraq’s ministries in the background as advisors not as ministers. The role of the IRDC was to restore Iraq’s post-war damaged infrastructure - electricity, hospitals, water supplies and transportation routes - at least to its pre-war state. However, after the official establishment of the CPA, the IRDC role became very limited and marginalized. See Isam al-Khafaji, “I Did not Want to Be a Collaborator,” The Guardian, July 27, 2003, accessed September 29, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/28/iraq.comment; see also Warren Vieth, “Exiles Feel Shut out of Iraq’s Reconstruction,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2003.

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hierarchical recruitment process for both the Office of Reconstruction and for post-occupation posts in Iraqi ministries.

Initially, the Office of Reconstruction operations focused on humanitarian relief, reconstruction, civil administration and logistics, and finance. However, since its inception in

January 2003 until May 2003, many critiques were raised against the competence its staff, operations, and organizational and management style.298 It was unofficially dissolved by the creation of the Provisional Coalition Authority [CPA] under the Administration of Paul Bremer

III.

Despite the ephemeral life of the Office of Reconstruction, it was an indicative case and a testimonial to the American mentality that had dominated the shaping of Iraqi politics since 2003 for several reasons. First, the less than two months old Office of Reconstruction, with its limited staff and resources, was assigned the governance of the entire Iraqi population in post-war conditions.299 Second, Jay Garner lacked any political experience in Iraq except having led the relief efforts for the Kurds of northern Iraq after the 1991 war in “Operation Provide Comfort.”

Third, the ambiguous mandate of the Office of Reconstruction between the State Department and the Department of Defense made it an ideal battlefield for contradictory views of how to shape

298 For example John Sawers, ’s special envoy to Iraq, described it as lacking leadership, strategy, coordination, and inaccessible to Iraqis. “Transcript for Sir John Sawers Hearing,” , December 10, 2009, 59, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/40668/20091210amsawers-final.pdf; See also Bremer’s subtle critique of the ORHA operations in Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 23-37. For a comprehensive analyses of the critiques raised against the Office of Reconstruction see Rudd, Reconstructing Iraq.

299 Garner himself was aware of the challenges awaiting him given the very limited time he was given to form the ORHA. When Rumsfeld asked him to form the interagency organization that will oversee the reconstruction of Iraq, his reply came as: “Marshall had two years… you are giving me two months.” See Rudd, Reconstructing Iraq, ix.

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the post-invasion Iraq. Finally, once a plan had been agreed upon within decision-making circles in Washington as more appropriate, the on-going processes and operations in Iraq underwent an immediate chaotic reversal.

The early conflict between these different apparatuses over post-war restructuring of Iraq led to a massive frustration among Iraqi expatriates and exiles, who felt external to that process.

While Garner and the Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council were busy materializing and strategizing one plan, i.e. a short occupation that hands in power and post-war reconstruction to an Interim Iraqi Administration [IIA], other more aggressive plans were prioritized in

Washington favoring a long-term occupation subordinated by Iraqi exile groups. In Baghdad, negotiations were taking place among Iraqi leaders representing Iraq’s various “ethnic, religious, and political” groups in a series of conferences that followed the overthrowing of Saddam’s regime.300 In Washington, the Bush administration was interviewing Paul Bremer III for the role of the top civilian administrator in Iraq.301

3.2. The CPA Engineers Law and Order!

The appointment of Paul Bremer as the administrator of the CPA and as the new ruler of

Iraq was announced on May 6, 2003. This was an unofficial dissolution of the Office of

300 The largest conventions that took place after the war were the Nasiriya conference on April 15, 2003, and the Baghdad conference on April 28, 2003. See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 100-105.

301 Ibid., 102-104. See also Greg Muttitt, Fuel on the fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq (London: The Bodley Head, 2011), 85-86.

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Reconstruction and, indeed, an abortion to the underway political process to form an Iraqi body of politics, albeit shadowed by American advisors in every ministry and important posts.302

The CPA was officially established on April 9, 2003. However, its effective mandate to formally replace the Office of Reconstruction can be most accurately dated by the first regulation issued by Bremer on May 16, 2003. It ceased operations on June 28, 2004.303 The overnight dissolution of the extraneous Office of Reconstruction, and the establishment of the CPA was by no means incidental. At stake was a particular scheme designed to eradicate conditions of accountability, transparency, and power sharing in the post-invasion Iraq. More importantly, the critiques raised against the Office of Reconstruction operations during its short life, mainly by the U.S. major ally – Britain,304 and the so called reversal in Washington’s policy in Iraq, made it very arduous to pursue the status of occupying power disabused of a legal framework. This framework was needed as it would grant the CPA access to Iraqi resources and legitimize a prolonged U.S. military and civilian presence in Iraq. As such, the Bush administration resorted once again to the UN to authorize the CPA under the SCR 1483 that was adopted on May 22,

2003 by a vote of fourteen to zero with the absence of Syria.305 The Resolution granted the CPA

302 United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq: U.S. Ministry Capacity Development Efforts Need an Overall Integrated Strategy to Guide Efforts and Manage Risk,” (Washington, D.C.: Report to Congressional Committees, October, 2007). See also Henry Hamman, “US will Place Advisors in Iraqi Ministries,” Financial Times, March 20, 2003, quoted in Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq. See also Bremer, My Year in Iraq.

303 See Halchin, “The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),” 2-3; Jeremy M. Sharp, Melanie Caesar, and Adam Frost, “Post-War Iraq: A Table and Chronology of Foreign Contributions,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Services, March, 18, 2005).

304 Sawers Hearing, Iraq Inquiry. See also Allwai, The Occupation of Iraq, 105.

305 For a more comprehensive treatment of how several U.S. administrations deployed and controlled the UN as a legalizing space for the American project in Iraq since 1990, mainly regarding the sanctions and 149

the legal status of the “Authority,” allowing the establishment of “Development Fund for Iraq … to be held by the Central Bank of Iraq … and to be used in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, for the economic reconstruction and repair of Iraq’s infrastructure, for the continued disarmament of Iraq, and for the costs of Iraqi civilian administration, and for other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq.”306

Despite the UN granted legality, the CPA legal status as an occupying power was unclear and “shrouded with ambiguity,”307 for it was neither a federal agency nor a UN body. The infamous report to Congress of 2006, which investigated the CPA legal origins, failed to trace its legal origin, and indeed provided competing even conflicting explanations of how it was created.

The report states that:308

Some executive branch documents supported the notion that it [the CPA] was created by the President, possibly as the result of a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). (This document, if it exists, has not been made available to the public.) Another possibility is that the authority was created by, or pursuant to, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 (2003). Finally, two years after CPA was established, a Justice Department brief asserted that the then- Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had created CPA.

inspection regimes, see chapter two. See United Nations, Security Council Resolution 1483 (2003), articles 12 and 14, accessed October 17, 2013, http://daccessods.un.org/TMP/6945043.80226135.html.

306 Ibid.

307 Charles Babcock, “Judge Allows Suit Alleging Fraud in Iraq” Washington Post, July 12, 2005, accessed September 25, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/AR2005071101639.html.

308 Halchin, “The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),” Summary. What is striking about this ambiguity is that in the aftermath of occupying Iraq, contract fraud in Iraq continued since the U.S. government lacked the authority to police the spending of billions of dollars of Iraqi oil money. For example, in a lawsuit filed against Custer Battles, LLC (CB), a company contracted by the CPA, two former employees of CB alleged under the False Claims Act (FCA) that the company had defrauded the federal government. However, the federal Judge T.S. Ellis III of Alexandria had ruled that the CPA was not an instrumentality of the U.S. government. See also Babcock, “Judge Allows Suit Alleging Fraud in Iraq.”

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Entirely apart from the issue of its legality, the CPA was bestowed with “powers of government temporarily in order to provide for the effective administration of Iraq during the period of transitional administration, to restore conditions of security and stability, to create conditions in which the Iraqi people can freely determine their own political future.”309 As the first CPA Regulation states, responsibilities of the CPA included advancing “efforts to restore and establish national and local institutions for representative governance and facilitating economic recovery and sustainable reconstruction and development.” Most importantly,

Regulation no. 1 erased the old legal system and opened up the legal space of Iraq for a new mode of legality. Despite the fact that section two of this Regulation maintained that “laws in force in Iraq as of April 16, 2003, shall continue to apply in Iraq insofar as the laws do not prevent the CPA from exercising its rights and fulfilling its obligations,” its official and legal significance was the declaration of the CPA as the ultimate repository of all executive, legislative and judicial authority. 310 To put it differently, it was a declaration that signaled the total destruction of the Iraqi regime, i.e. its political, economic, social, and legal infrastructure. The unmaking of the Iraqi state juridico-political system initiated by the CPA Regulation no. 1, was autochthonous to a gradual enactment and construction of a new legal regime under the CPA supervision.

Throughout its tenure as the occupying power of Iraq, the CPA issued twelve

Regulations, one hundred Orders, seventeen Memoranda, and twelve Public Notices. Regulations

309 Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation Number 1, “The Coalition Provisional Authority,” May 16, 2003, accessed November 5, 2013, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030516_CPAREG_1_The_Coalition_Provisional_Authority_.pdf.

310 Ibid.

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were defined as “instruments that define the institutions and authorities of the Coalition

Provisional Authority.” Orders, conversely, were viewed as binding “instructions or directives to the Iraqi people” in order to “create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way

Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.” While Memoranda were considered as expansion on “Orders or Regulations that create or adjust procedures applicable to an Order or

Regulation,” Public Notices communicated the intentions of so-called “Administrator” to the

Iraqi public.311

CPA orders can generally be grouped under four major categories: Juridico-political, military, economic, and social. These orders, complemented with intermediate laws, extended the scope of change to an utmost and absolute institutional makeover of Iraq. A comprehensive treatment of these legal documents is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the following sections strategically engage with a number of these constitutive legal documents through which

I trace how these newly enacted legal frameworks not only enabled new categories of self- narratives, but rather opened new conditions of possibilities in which the sovereign project have been resituated for generations to come. De-Ba‘athification related orders – to include the

“Dissolution of Entities” Order that disbanded all Iraqi security apparatuses, the new Iraqi

Constitution of 2005,312 the CPA Orders related to the constitutional-making process, and finally the CPA Orders related to the establishment of the New Iraqi Army are the focus of my analysis.

311 According the CPA online archive, each category was defined separately. In doing so, Orders – as one legal category – were the most binding and indeed had incurred the most influential institutional, political and legal consequences.

312 The Arabic text of the new Iraqi Constitution of 2005 can be accessed through the Republic of Iraq, General Secretariat for the Council of Ministers website: http://cabinet.iq/PageViewer.aspx?id=2; The English 152

3.3. Institutions of the New Iraq Pronounce Sectarianism

The business of the CPA, as the occupying power of Iraq under the administration of Paul

Bremer, was anything but tentative. Upon his arrival to Baghdad, Bremer was determined to carry out and implement the “Freedom Message” with his apriori, rigid and one dimensional assumptions about religion, society and power in Iraq.313 In Bremer’s vision, not very different from the dominant line of thinking in the decision making circle in the U.S., the British, after

World War I, had 314

[C]obbled Iraq together from three provinces of the former Ottoman Empire … The desperate people of Iraq formed a patchwork with sharp ethnic and sectarian differences. In the south, the Shiite Muslim Arab majority… The Sunni Arab minority, about 20 percent of the population, was anchored on tribes and clans of central Iraq… Kurds and Turkmen, also Sunni Muslims, but not , dominated the north. And there were yet other minorities, such as Christians and Yazidis.

According to Bremer’s narrative, any “democratic” post-Saddam regime, as such, should represent these monolithic communities while outlawing the Ba‘athist loyalists and party members, who were overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs.315

translation can be accessed through website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/10/12/AR2005101201450.html.

313Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 39. After the occupation of Baghdad and the fall of the regime, Tommy Frank addressed the Iraqis with his infamous “Freedom Message” on April 16, 2003. The Message outlawed the Ba‘ath Party and was followed by the drafting of Orders Number 1 and 2: the “De-Ba‘athification of Iraqi Society,” and the “Dissolution of Entities.” Decision makers in Washington were aware of the consequences of dissolving the whole institutional apparatuses of the Iraqi regime by these order. However, regarding the de- Ba‘athification Order, Rumsfeld and Feith insisted that Bremer carry out this order “… even if implementing it causes administrative inconveniences.”

314 Ibid., 38

315 Ibid. See also International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?” 8.

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Against this background and line of thinking, Bremer arrived to Baghdad with two documents drafted in Washington, D.C. First, Regulation no. 1, discussed above, by which the

CPA was established as the new colonial administration of Iraq. Second, Order no. 1 that established the “De-Ba‘athification of Iraqi Society.” As the process of de-Ba‘athification unfolded, this Order initiated a full-fledged de-institutionalization process that targeted

Ba‘athists in all layers of management in Iraqi ministries, despite its clear target group – the so called “Senior Party Members.”

The order was the first act on the ground that categorized the Iraqi population. First, it criminalized members of the Ba‘ath Party holding the ranks of “‘Udw Qutriyya [Regional

Command Member], ‘Udw Far’ [Branch Member], ‘Udw Shu‘bah [Section Member], and ‘Udw

Firqa [Group Member],” who all were removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector. According to Bremer, American intelligence agencies estimated that “the top four levels of the party members … amounted to only 1 percent of all party members or approximately 20,000 people, [who were] overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs.”316

Second, while senior party members, mostly Sunni Arabs according to the American intelligence resources, were categorized as a potential threat to the security of the Coalition and were subject for evaluation for criminal conducts or labeled as threat to the security of the Coalition, individuals who held positions in the top three layer of management in every state institution, state-affiliated corporation and institution (e.g., universities and hospitals) were subject to

316 Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 40. 154

investigation for a possible affiliation with the Ba‘ath Party, in preparation for their removal from their employment.317

A two-staged process of de-Ba‘athification was fastidiously outlined by Memorandum no. 1. First, the Memoranda established Accreditation Review Committees to perform investigations, relying upon “trained and experienced” military investigative resources. Second, the Iraqi de-Ba‘athification Council [IDC] was established to ensure that “higher levels of the former Iraqi government undergo a reliable and rigorous de-Ba‘athification process,” under the

“authority, direction and control of the Administrator.” 318 Investigation committees were established in every Iraqi ministry to compile information concerning the possible Ba‘ath Party affiliations of their employees. Following the so-called factual finding process, investigators advised employees that they have the right to appeal this “factual finding.” However, final investigators’ judgments were forwarded to “Senior Ministry Advisors” for further action.319

The CPA Order no. 2 added another dangerous layer to the de-Ba‘athification process. It was this Order of May 23, 2003, that dissolved the , security services, party militias, and other organizations notorious for their roles in party affairs in an attempt to prevent any Ba‘athist element to return to power. The secret intelligence service (al-mukhabarat), the

Ministry of Defense, the army, navy, air force, the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of State

317 Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1, “De-Ba‘athification of Iraqi Society,” May 16, 2003, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030516_CPAORD_1_De-Ba_athification_of_Iraqi_Society_.pdf.

318 Coalition Provisional Authority Memorandum Number 1, “Implementation of De-Ba‘athification Order No. 1,” May 16, 2003, accessed October 15, 2014, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/.

319 Ibid., 2. According to the same Memorandum, exceptions where appropriate had to be reviewed case-by- case. When the investigator found that the employee in question is eligible, a case for an exception would be prepared.

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for Military Affairs, the Directorate of National Security (al-Amn al-‘Am), Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards – including companions (Murafaqin) and the special guard (al-Himaya al-Khasa), and paramilitary organizations – including Saddam’s Fedayeen, Ba‘ath Party Militia, Friends of

Saddam, and Saddam’s Lion Cubs (Ashbal Saddam), were all included in the list of the dissolved entities. Additionally, all military ranks and titles were abolished, conscripts were released, and employees were dismissed, in a further aggressive implementation of the “Freedom Message” of

April 16, 2003.320

Overnight, this Order rendered around 400,000, potentially armed, unemployed Iraqis on the streets, and dismantled the traditionally significant social prestige of the Iraqi armed forces.

Consequently, it infuriated a large segment of the Iraqi population both Shi’as and Sunnis, and was viewed to have immeasurably contributed to the deterioration of the security situation and the emergence of the so-called insurgency.321

320 Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, “Dissolution of Entities,” May 23, 2003, accessed October 17, 2014, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030823_CPAORD_2_Dissolution_of_Entities_with_Annex_A.pdf.

321 See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 155-159; Andrew Terrill, Lessons of the Iraqi de-Baathification Program for Iraq’s Future and the Arab Revolutions (Washington, D.C.: Strategic Studies Institute, 2012), accessed April 1, 2014, http://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo22478; Miranda Sissons and Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi, A Bitter Legacy: Lessons of De-Baathification in Iraq (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2013); Toby Dodge, Iraq: from War to a New Authoritarianism (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012), 32-33.

I do treat this order as an expansion of the scope of de-Ba‘athification. Other scholars and critics, however, viewed it as a separate order on its own, yet as another significant controversial order that intensified the disastrous post-war social and political consequences. Allawi for example has categorized it as a twin Order to the de-Ba‘athification, yet with far greater effects than the removal of the top-ranking Ba‘athists, which engendered more complex response from Iraqis.

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3.3.1. De-Ba‘athify and Rule: Establishing the Higher National De-Ba‘athification Commission

The de-Ba‘athification policies, in their various conceptual articulations, were introduced long prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Democratic Principles Working Group of the infamous Future of Iraq Project produced a whole section on de-Ba‘athification informed by the post-WWII Germany’s de-Nazification experience. In their final view, members of that group – including Ali Allawi who wrote the de-Ba‘athification paper – warned against an extreme de-

Ba‘athification policy that would disregard a future reintegration of former Ba‘athists into the

Iraqi society.322 Bremer’s de-Ba‘athification Order was universally accepted among Iraqi exile groups as a central component for the remaking of post-Saddam Iraq. However, the extent and the degree of de-Ba‘athification was a source of disagreement among these groups. The main

Shi’a Islamist parties, the Kurds, and the Iraqi National Congress [INC] – under the leadership of

Ahmad Chalabi – demanded thorough and severe de-Ba‘athification policies. Arab nationalists and former Ba‘athists, including the Iraqi National Accord – under the leadership of Iyad

Allawi, 323 expressed more skeptical views of the de-Ba‘athification program. 324 Finally, historians and experts on the process of de-Nazification warned against the application of this

322 See Future of Iraq Project: Transitional Justice Working Group, First Session, July 9-10, 2002, 3. Unclassified Document. Document No. 20020709, accessed October 20, 2013, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/.

323 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 151; Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 14. It’s worth noting that since early 2003, Iyad Allawi, of the INA, had opposed the sweeping de-Ba‘athification program. Upon his arrival to power in 2004, his government had cancelled the credentials for all but fifty of the two hundred members of the de-Ba‘athification commission, temporarily suspended its funding, and dislodged its members from their offices. Iyad Allawi took advantage of Bremer’s decision to soften his original decree against Ba‘athists, admitting that the policy had been “poorly implemented.”

324 Ibid., 84, 150-151. 157

policy voicing their concerns that such a policy would create serious divisions in the country in the case of poor and unfair implementation.325

The appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council [IGC] in July 2003, and the establishment of the Higher National de-Ba‘athification Commission [HNDC] in August 2003, under Ahmad Chalabi’s leadership of the Iraqi National Congress, were decisive events in significantly shaping the scope of de-Ba‘athification framework. Chalabi, supported by the

Pentagon’s office of Special Plans and the Vice-President’s office, soon accumulated funds, originally earmarked for the Iraqi secret intelligence service, and hired technical staff, most of whom belonged to Shi’a political factions, to embark upon a sweeping de-Ba‘athification policy.326

A very representative case of de-Ba‘athification was the one of the Ministry of Oil. It is representative inasmuch as it provides a general pattern in which de-Ba‘athification was

325 Ibid., 472. Allawi maintains that he raised this policy in the context of “comparing Iraq’s experience with the Ba‘ath to that of Germany’s with the Nazis,” which sought to provide practical mechanisms for dismantling the legacy of totalitarian rule. Yet, he was wary of the danger of de-Ba‘athification programs in the Iraqi context, a position that he had developed due to extensive consultations with scholars and experts on the de-Nazification of Germany, such as Rebecca Boehling.

326 Nouri al-Maliki was appointed as Chalabi’s deputy. In September of 2003, Chalabi also appointed Mithal al-Alusi, a Sunni political party colleague, as director of the HNDC. During his tenure, Alusi had become notorious for his vengeance and ideological distaste for Ba‘ath members without distinction. In an interview with Lee Anderson, Alusi has stated that “[t]here is a duality in Baathists. You can find a Baathist who is a killer, but at home, with his family, he’s completely normal. It’s like they split their day into two twelve-hour blocks. When people say about someone I know to be a Baathist criminal, ‘No, he’s a good neighbor!’ I believe them. The Baath Party is like the Nazi Party, or like the Mafia. If you meet them, they are simpatico. And this is why it’s very difficult for us to do our work, which is to change – really change – Iraqi society.” Any reconciliation or alternative path to a full and sweeping de-Ba‘athification, was an omission of truth for Alusi, and doing so is an omission for Iraqi history. See Jon Lee Anderson, “Letter from Iraq: Out on the Street, the United States’ de-Ba‘athification Program Fuelled the Insurgency, It Is too Late for Bush to Change Course,” New Yorker, November 15, 2004, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/11/15/out-on-the-street. See also Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 147-153, Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 12.

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implemented widely across the institutional spectrum of Iraqi ministries that amounted to a process of de-institutionalization of these governing bodies plunging the whole country into an administrative vacuum. The process did not only target the top figures of the toppled regime, but also eliminated mangers and technocrats, many of whom were only “nominal Ba‘athists.”327

Equally important, it is informative in that after the appointment of the new minister – and for that matter after the appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council on July 13, 2003 – a mass importation of American and European advisors and experts to run offices and operations, replacing Iraqi experts, was the new fashion of the post-Saddam regime.

Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, a U.S. trained petroleum engineer, was appointed as Oil Minister in September 2003.328 He was an Iraqi expatriate who participated in the Future of Iraq Project – a member of the State Department oil working group – and a protégé for Ahmad Chalabi. He returned to Iraq after the 2003 war with the Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council. Upon his arrival to the office, Bahr al-Uloum embarked on two grand projects of de-Ba‘athification and privatization of Iraq’s oil sector. To be sure, de-Ba‘athification constituted a necessary first step to pave the way for privatizing Iraq’s oil industry. Bahr al-Uloum viewed the nationalist ideology of the Ba‘ath as a “cultural issue”329 that had to be solved while planning for the future

327 Rudd, Reconstructing Iraq, 270.

328 See Coalition Provisional Authority Memorandum Number 6, “Implementation of Regulation on the Governing Council Number 6,” July 13, 2003 (amended on September 3, 2003), accessed September 1, 2013, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030903_CPAMEMO_6_Implementation_of_Regulation_on_the_G overning_Council.pdf.

329 Nicolas Pelham, “Oil to be Privatised but not just yet, Says Iraqi Minister,” Financial Times, September 5 2003, quoted in Greg Muttitt, “2006 Production Sharing Agreements – Mortgaging Iraq’s Oil Wealth,” Free Library, June 22, 2006, accessed October 18, 2014, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Production sharing agreements--mortgaging Iraq's oil wealth.-a0156001336; and Greg Muttitt, “Crude Designs: The Rip-off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth,” Platform, November 2005, 17.

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of oil resources in the new Iraq. Oil sector, therefore, had to undergo a radical transformation by adopting production sharing agreements (PSAs) for upstream (i.e. extraction of crude oil) development, which would open the oil sector to multinational oil companies – mainly “U.S. oil companies and probably European companies.”330 Additionally, Bahr al-Uloum was personally convinced that “there is nobody who knows anything in Iraq,” thus a replacement of the Iraqi technical expertise should take place in order to facilitate this transformation in oil policies.331

Therefore, planning and managing oil resources should be delivered to experts from multinational oil companies.

Replacement of Oil Ministry employees, as such, was based on two criteria. The first was employees’ affiliation with the Ba‘ath party. The second was employees’ opposition to privatization policies. Faleh al-Khayat, then a director general in the Ministry of Oil, was called to the Minister’s office. The minister informed him that regardless of the high recommendation about his performance, he needs to leave due to his affiliation with the Ba‘ath party. Mohammed al-Jibouri, then the head of the State Oil Marketing Organization, was newly elected to his position by an overwhelming majority votes of the organization senior staff. He was removed from his position shortly after opposing massive privatization plans and refusing to sell oil directly to traders. By the end of 2003 as a result of de-Ba‘athification program, 17 of the 24 pre-

330 Ibid. Bahr al-Uloum was only one among many advocates of production sharing agreement. Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, and Rob Mckee, CPA oil advisor were among a group of zealous supporters of PSAs.

331 Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire, 100-102; Muttitt, “Crude Designs: The Rip-off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth,” 17. See also Congressional Record, ed. U.S. Congress 153 (2007), 13680.

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war directors general were either removed or forced to leave their positions. Hundreds of mid- ranking technicians faced the same fate.332

Another striking example of de-Ba‘athification was that of the Ministry of Education.

Around 16,149 of senior party members were dismissed before June 2004, followed by 1,355 dismissed in the next 16 months.333 Additionally, “Tens of thousands” of school teachers were labeled as Ba‘athists and had been dismissed from their jobs, despite the fact that they were only low-ranking members of the Ba‘ath Party who had been forced to join the party as a condition of their employment.334 The impact on schools and administration was so severe that the CPA had to reverse the HNCD dismissal orders, and many thousands of school teachers were reinstated in

April 2004.335

In the Ministry of Higher Education, 4,361 senior party members were eligible for de-

Ba‘athification, 336 and thus were dismissed from their ministerial posts, in addition to the immediate firing of 1,700 university professors and staff throughout Iraq.337 The Ministry of health had de-ba‘athified 2,367 employees. The Ministry of Science and Technology and the

Ministry of Agriculture employed a significant number of party members, but had de-ba‘athified

332 For more on the de-Ba‘athification of the Oil Ministry based on personal interviews with the above mentioned ministry personnel, see Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire, 100-102.

333 Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 22.

334 Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 341.

335 In his speech, Bremer promised to speed the appeals of thousands of dismissed teachers to alleviate the crisis in the educational system. See Paul Bremer, “Turning the Page,” Baghdad, April 23, 2004, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1123503/posts.

336 Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 22-23.

337 Terrill, Lessons of the Iraqi de-Ba‘athification Program, 24.

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a far smaller proportion of staff than other ministries. The former dismissed only 120 senior party members, while granting exemptions for 2,351 senior party members. The latter de- ba‘athified 999 employees, less than a half of its senior party members. The Ministry of Atomic

Energy was dissolved, and 1,300 employees were transferred to the Ministry of Science and

Technology in August 2003.338

The pace of de-Ba‘athification was very fast from 2003 to mid-2004. An astute review of de-Ba‘athification programs ultimately shows that between 2003 and 2004 the process battered some 45,111 civil service employees from various ministries,339 who were labeled as senior party

338 UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, Iraq, Education in Transition: Needs and Challenges, 2004, 99.

339 Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 22. This figure is taken from a field study performed by the International Center for Transitional Justice. This study had constructed its statistics based on the HNDC internal data and interviews with some members of the commission. However, it is very important to question the authority of this figure on de-Ba‘athification programs for several reasons. First, before delegating de- Ba‘athification power to the HNCD, the CPA initiated an extensive dismissal program on the basis of the CPA de-Ba‘athification related orders. Letters of termination were sent to employees without any formal de- Ba‘athification-related documentation. As such, one can conclude that dismissals that took place between May and September 2003 were not documented. Second, the study itself emphasizes that sometimes it was impossible to verify information and data collected from members of the HNCD due to the lack of regular and transparent reporting on de-Ba‘athification programs across Iraqi civil service sector. The absence of official archive – reporting processes – on the HNCD’s activities makes it difficult to arrive at accurate statistics regarding dismissals, appeals, or reinstatements. It is also important to note that access to the Iraqi government documents, in general, is very difficult – and sometimes impossible – thus, personal interviews and access to personal records remain the main source of information.

In 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations published its study “IRAQ: Debaathification.” The study states that about “30,000 ex-Baathists from various ministries” had been de-ba‘athified. However, the study maintains that “some 15,000 were eventually permitted to return to work after they won their appeals.” It is not clear how Sharon Otterman obtained these statistics other than quoting Nibras Kazimi, a former adviser to the de- Ba‘athification commission, as the study defines him. See Sharon Otterman, “IRAQ: Debaathification,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 7, 2005. Other journalistic accounts refer to the dismissal of 150,000 senior civil servants between May and September 2003. See James Cogan, ““De-Baathification” Laws Modified by Iraq’s Parliament,” World Socialist Website, January 17, 2008, accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/01/iraq-j17.html.

During my archival research and through informal personal interviews and conversations with Iraqi colleagues and friends, I came to realize that, despite some methodological problems, the study performed by the International Center for Transitional Justice is, perhaps, the only rigorous study of its kind since 2003. On the 162

members and therefore dismissed from their positions or forced to retire. While de-

Ba‘athification followed a general pattern in almost all Iraqi ministries, the force by which it had been implemented varied according to the involved ministry, and – to certain extent – depended on the enthusiasm of the newly appointed ministers.

Unlike de-ba‘athifying Iraqi civil service sector, the de-Ba‘athification of Iraq’s military institutions, as per the CPA Order no. 2, immediately eliminated nearly 400,000 positions of conscripts, officials, officers, and members of government-formed militias. All military officers above the rank of colonel were barred from returning to work, as were all 100,000 members of

Iraq’s various intelligence services. The devastating effect of disbanding Iraqi military and security apparatuses had not only resulted in the elimination of 400,000 military jobs, but also in the release of around 3.2 million guns, once controlled by Iraqi security services, across the Iraqi society.340

The de-Ba‘athification project has emerged to become a new Iraqi political institution that, since 2003, has performed two main activities of dismissals and reinstatement. Surprisingly enough, and despite the fact that the period from 2003 to 2006 had witnessed intensive dismissal rates targeting previous Ba‘athists, reports state that Iraq’s public sector doubled to two million by the end of 2005 due to the enactment of Law Number 24 of 2005,341 which reinstated former

other hand, Reidar Visser’s “Iraq and Gulf Analysis” project is another serious attempt to document the current effect of de-Ba‘athification policies on political processes (i.e. parliamentary elections, local and provincial elections, new de-Ba‘athification laws). See Reidar Visser, https://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/.

340 In addition to the legally acquired weapons of Iraqi soldiers, the disbanding of Iraqi army led to the looting of its weapons stockpile estimated to be around 4.2 million firearms in 1989. See Graduate Institute for International Studies, Small Arms Survey 2004: Rights at Risks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 45- 47.

341 Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 23. 163

civil servants who were dismissed by Hussein’s regime for political, ethnic, or sectarian reasons.342

Theoretically, all senior party members were labeled as eligible for de-Ba‘athification regardless of their sectarian identity. Early de-Ba‘athification of Iraqi ministries targeted both

Sunni and Shi’a party members. Down the road, however, reports have showed that differential treatment among de-ba‘athified party members emerged based on their sectarian identity. For prominent Shi’a parties helped “sectarianize” the de-Ba‘athification process through allowing

Shi’a Ba‘ath party members of their communities to repent, while denying Sunni Arab members, thus excluding them from senior posts in the government and the security forces. 343 De-

Ba‘athified Sunnis viewed the de-Ba‘athification orders as partisan laws which only applied to

Sunnis. Reintegration and reinstatement had been viewed among the Sunni community as “solely benefited those who follow the lead of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or Sunni officers who pledged loyalty to the prime minister.”344

Since its formulation as a conceptual framework drafted by the Future of Iraq Project’s

Democratic Principles working group in 2002, its transformation into a legal framework, to finally emerging as a political institution in 2003, de-Ba‘athification laws and institutional practices engendered a new highly politicized definition of the sectarian differences among Iraqis

342 See the Iraqi Legal Database, “Law Number 24 of 2005,” accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.iraqld.com/AboutEn.aspx. The category of “dismissed” former civil servants includes those who lost their positions because they were forced to exile, arrested, or forced to retire.

343 See International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?”10.

344 Interviews with de-ba‘athified Sunnis, quoted in International Crisis Group, “Make or Break: Iraq’s Sunnis and the State,” Middle East Report 144 (2013): 22.

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for several reasons.345 First, the leadership in Washington, senior CPA officials, and Iraqi exile groups perceived the old regime as based in the Sunni Arab community. As such, the destruction of key institutions of the Ba‘ath had “a sectarian aura.” 346 Second, the absolute support of

Kurdish leaders and the Shi’a religious parties and other Shi’a community leaders for sweeping de-Ba‘athification policies, and their rejection for more moderate arrangements, was interpreted

– at the very beginning – as a strong and deliberate effort to marginalize the Sunni Arab

345 CPA de-Ba‘athification related orders:

- Order 1, May 16, 2003: Removed senior party members from current positions; banned them from public sector employment; banned images of Saddam Hussein from public places; offered rewards for the information leading to the capture of senior Ba‘ath party officials; implemented as per Memoranda no. 1.

- Order 2, May 23, 2003: Dissolved major government and Ba‘ath party institutions; gave the CPA control over their assets; dismissed government and military employees.

- Order 4, May 25, 2003: Expanded the provision of Order 2 by requiring all persons to provide on request information about government and Ba‘ath party assets; stated that all use of seized assets by the CPA will be subject to external audit; promised the establishment of appeal tribunal to deal with claims of unjust seizures.

- Order 5, May 25, 2003: Established the HNDC to locate Ba‘ath party property and personnel, and collate reports of criminal activity by Ba‘ath members; appointed a group of Iraqi citizens to lead the “De-Ba‘athification of Iraqi Society” who would report to the head of the CPA (implemented as per Memoranda no. 7).

- Order 34, September 19, 2003: Reinstated the Board of Supreme Audit, dissolved under Order 2.

- Order 48, December 10, 2003: Devolved to the Iraqi Governing Council the authority to “establish an Iraqi Special Tribunal to try Iraqi nationals or residents of Iraq accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or violations of certain Iraqi laws”; stated that in the event of any dispute between the CPA and the Governing Council or Tribunal, the decision of the CPA shall prevail.

De-Ba‘athification advocates succeeded in negotiating with the CPA both the Law of Administration of the State of Iraq of 2004, and the Iraqi Permanent Constitution, which resulted in the institutionalization of this program. De-Ba‘athification was included under article 49 of the Law of Administration. Moreover, since Sunnis boycotted the transnational elections of January 2005, the Kurdish-Shi’a alliance formed the new government, continuing de-Ba‘athification policies and inscribing them into the Permanent Iraqi Constitution of 2005 under article 131. See The Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period, March 8, 2004; and The New Iraq Constitution of 2005.

346 International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?” 8.

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population. Third, the appointment of the IGC on the basis of ethnic and sectarian identities, which in turn led to the establishment of the HNDC under Shi’a leadership, created a sense that de-Ba‘athification programs had transformed into “de-Sunnization,” or “de-Sunnification.”347

Despite the critiques that were made against the vague, corrupt, and inconsistent de-

Ba‘athification practices – often described as sectarian – i.e. vetting, hiring, appeal reviewing, or reinstatement procedures, the HNDC intensified its cleansing efforts not only of Ba‘athists occupying positions in Iraqi ministries, but also of potential candidates for the 2005 elections. At the eve of the general election of December 15, 2005, HNDC submitted to the Independent

Electoral Commission of Iraq a list of roughly 170 candidates to be banned from running under the pretext of being senior party members. After the Electoral Commission investigated the list, only 40 candidates were disqualified. 348 The de-Ba‘athification program and its attendant institutions, overlapped with a campaign of targeted assassination of former regime officials and suspected Ba‘ath party members,349 not only inscribed the Sunni-Shi’a divide in institutional forms and practices, but also transformed the previously coexisting social and cultural differences among Sunnis and Shi’as into distinct political differences. Consequently, both groups began to view their political status through manipulated and redefined sectarian lenses.

Sectarian and ethnic identities have become core markers of both political representation and

347 Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006), 280-283. See also Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 152; International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?” 10; Mona Damluji, ‘“Securing Democracy in Iraq’: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad, 2003–2007,” TDSR, 11 (2010): 73.

348 Sissons and Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy,” 15.

349 International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?” 2; Tareq Y. Ismael and Max Fuller, “The Disintegration of Iraq: the Manufacturing and Politicization of Sectarianism,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 3 (2008): 451; Terrill, Lessons of the Iraqi de-Ba‘athification Program, 29.

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violence in the “New Iraq.”350 Announcing the IGC on July 13, 2003 to the media, Bremer promised that the council “will represent the diversity of Iraq: whether you are Shiite or Sunni,

Arab or Kurd, Baghdadi or Basrawi, man or woman, you will see yourself represented in this council.” 351 Not long after Bremer’s announcement, the first Iraqi elected government took office, as of April 2005, to witness Iraq’s descent into the so called “sectarian” violence.

“Indiscriminate detention, torture and killings on the basis of religious belief, attacks on mosques, and families’ induced departures from towns and neighborhoods based on their religious identity” marked Iraqi politics since then.352

3.3.2. Constitutionalizing Violence: A Spatialized Time of the New Constitution of Iraq

The following analysis and historical account of the constitutional process carried under the occupation traces the most important moments in the making of the new Iraqi constitution.353

Although it mainly follows the new laws, il-legal processes, a network of political players and advisors, and the role of each of these elements in the making of this hybrid and distorted historical moment, it emphasizes the need to read this moment as an integral part of a unitary

350 This chapter proposes that the redefinition of sectarian-ethnic identities engendered a transformed, often violent, mode of sociality in the post-2003 Iraq. However, in order not be perceived as an apologetic for Saddam’s regime, it is important to remark that Saddam often manipulated sectarian identities, and promoted differential treatment of Iraqis based on their sectarian and ethnic identities in the state apparatuses and national policies that left visible impacts on the socioeconomic and political status of Shi’a and Kurdish communities. Yet, he maintained and promoted “Iraqi-ness” as an inclusive national-political category. To be sure, this differential treatment had rarely translated into violent daily confrontations among Baghdad’s residents. For similar arguments See Adeed Dawisha, “‘Identity’ and Political Survival in Saddam’s Iraq,” Middle East Journal 53 (1999): 559-62; Mona Damluji, “Securing Democracy in Iraq,” 73.

351 Hamza Hendawi, “Iraq’s New Governing Council Holds First Meeting, Giving a Measure of Control of Iraq back to Its People,” AP, July 13, 2003.

352 International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?” 1-2.

353 The constitutional process as used in this section generally refers to the creation of an all-encompassing legal framework, procedures, deliberation, drafting, ratification, and finally the resultant legalizing and criminalizing power of its attendant institutions.

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project of the American occupation – long in the making. This proposition, therefore, situates the constitution-making process under occupation and against the back ground of the de-

Ba‘athification institution, and the counterinsurgency military campaign against the Iraqi people and resistance. Theoretically, each of these institutions/processes can be independently analyzed in and of itself, each can be viewed as inhabiting its own isolated space – abstract or concrete.

However, this approach reduces the multiplicity of forces and technologies that enabled this expansive project, the institutional forms it produced, and their role in reordering the spatialized time of Iraqis. For humans and things Iraqi had simultaneously experienced these institutions/processes, synchronized, superimposed and layered, acting not only upon the nation’s time and space, but also upon Iraqi bodies.

I would like to further qualify my emphasis on treating the three institutions in the Iraqi context as a unitary process by asserting that while the constitutional process had been enabled by the de-Ba‘athification institution and the counterinsurgency campaign – insofar as these processes are different manifestations of violence and a continuation of war, it had become encompassing of both. Here, the constitutional-making process was derived by a reconfiguration of power, and by the emergence of new political forces with an institutional capacity to undo and redo the order of things: legal and political. It epitomizes a process of transformation. That is to say, it transformed from a theme in the pre-war discourse, which had inhabited the theoretical space of the American project, into procedures of intervention bringing changes through their legal framework and institutions. Whether in its initial form, i.e. the Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period [the Transitional Law hereafter], or in its later form, i.e. the new Iraqi Constitution, this process has dictated the fundamental norms, organized the

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powers of the new State since 2004, and redefined the nation.354 Equally important, the changes brought about by this constitutional process are nothing short of the capacity to define, limit, and reproduce the nation spatially and temporally. It had an expansive capacity of regulating and reorganizing its internal process within the nation’s old/new institutions, as a form of control over legality that demarcated its boundaries. Its second reorganized space is that of the nation.

The resultant laws, their procedures, and mundane implementations are reduced into a sectarian vocabulary mapped onto defined and limited territories. They, whether generating of or derived from other legal tools, must be incorporated into the established discourse of law and order. The singularity of the established discourse, albeit unremittingly resisted by Iraqis, is striking in that

354 The date here does not refer to the ratified new Iraqi Constitution of 2005, but rather to the Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period of March 2004, which for the most part formed the legal basis for the final draft constitution. Serving as a legal framework that governed the constitution- making process, the Transitional Law – equivalent to an interim constitution – was written by U.S. government lawyers in secretive deliberations with the participation of fewer than 100 Iraqis, mostly exile Iraqis and Kurdish parties. Amongst other, Larry Diamond (advisor to the CPA), Feisal Istrabadi (advisor to Adnan Pachachi), and Salem Chalabi (advisor to ) participated in drafting the Transitional Law, which was signed by a committee of 25 Iraqis who were appointed by the CPA.

The Bush administration was involved directly in drafting this Law to ensure the inclusion of particular provisions in the final document. See United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution-Making Process,” December, 2005 (unpublished paper, copy in possession of the author). See also Peter W. Galbraith, “How to Get out of Iraq,” New York Review of Books 8 (2004), accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/may/13/how-to-get-out- of-iraq/.

Andrew Arato for example considers the Transitional Law as an elaborate and complete interim constitution, whose provisions fully regulated the consequent processes of making the permanent constitution. See Andrew Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq, Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 65. See also Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 220-3; Jonathan Morrow, “Deconstituting : Cutting a Deal on the Regionalization of Iraq,” in Framing the State in Times of Transition: Case Studies in Constitution Making, ed. Laurel e. Miller (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2010), 565.

Not surprisingly, the Transitional Law, as drafted mainly by the U.S. State Department lawyers and the CPA advisors was problematic enough for a wide array of Iraqis including: Sunni Arabs, Arab nationalists, Sadrists and finally the Marji‘iyya led by Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani. Each of these forces understood this Transitional Law as a prelude for the process of writing the Iraqi permanent constitution, and the kind of American agenda that would be imposed on the long term through inscribing it in the permanent constitution.

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sectarian categories – as makers of the population, the federal vision – as a marker of space – and what that entails in terms of resource allocations and privileges, triumphed as a mode of governance in the new Iraq, where the rule of law as inscribed into the new constitution is particularly designed to maintain and institutionalize the newly established law and order.

Insofar as this constitutional process succeeded in becoming and/or producing a “constituted power,”355 an old definition of the nation, in a sense, is erased under its expansive power.

Now if the constitutional process has the power to reproduce the nation temporally, or to rephrase the question, if it is a historical moment that lays claims to the nation’s time, the question remains how?356 A possible answer might take as its beginning the self-proclaimed democratic narrative of the process. As its departure point, the American project represents itself as a democratic project and a project of liberation, even further a “revolution from above,”357 one

355 See Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt, and Brian Massumi, eds. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). A “constituted power” is the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. According to some accounts, it should be differentiated from the concept of “constituent power,” which generally describes an expression of the popular will, the power of the multitude. While the latter is associated with the forces of change, an open space for revolutionary processes, and tolerant of the myriad desires of the multitude, constituted power blocks the revolutionary potentials; it disciplines the revolution and brings it back to order. It is important to emphasize that the fine line distinguishing between constituent and constituted power is easy to blur for both overlap – to a certain degree – in their formation, manifestation of power, and their expansive capacity of change.

The term constituted power is very problematic in the Iraqi context because it bestows legitimacy on the occupation project. However, it is useful insofar as it describes the process in its “legal” terms. While I insist on treating the American project as an occupation project, it indeed busied itself with establishing a façade of legitimacy as one of its technologies to rule over Iraqis. Thus, I use the concept instrumentally for it conveys a lengthy process of acquiring legitimacy, yet it relays a constant challenge to that power by other claims and forces.

356 I will briefly address this questions here since I expand on the concept of temporality in chapter four. It is also intimately related to the form of sovereignty this project in Iraq has entailed, see chapter two.

357 In a total twist of the Marxist concept of revolution from above and in an attempt for an expanded-reach of violence, some conservative groups deployed the concept as a justificatory framework for the U.S. wars. For example, Christopher Hitchens promotes the concept of the war in general as an exportation of the revolution. “Revolution from above,” has been a repeated theme of the U.S. foreign policy and military institutions. As a 170

in which the constitutional process is democratic and inclusive in that it brings together under its rule all its organs in participatory constitutional politics.358 What follows then is that time of democracy is conceptualized within a schema of progress and development. Its prospective

“democratic” reorganization of Iraq’s space – the so-called nation building project – promises of a temporal progression of initiatives in which time is articulated in phases of transformation – political, economic, and social – geared toward future prosperity and uplifting of the nation.

Acceleration of inclusive multiplicity is the main characteristic of this time promised to the new

Iraq. Set against the stagnant and singular time of the authoritarian regime, it is the time of freedom for oppressed Iraqis: A negation of the past stands against an affirmation of futurity to bring Iraq into “the globalist orbit.”359 To ensure futurity, this time – or more accurately its processes – is measured and quantified. Above and beyond all these characteristics, time of a constitutional democracy –during and after the constitution-making – is sovereign.

This description, however, is extremely problematic as it had been defied throughout the history of Iraq’s constitutional transformation. In the Iraqi constitution-making moment,

“democratic” as a descriptive mode tumbles. For, the process was a product of neither liberation

political concept it has been promoted in a more far-reaching and subversive terms to mount to a “world revolution,” and “global democratic revolution.” In the military lexicon, the concept has done even more subversion and terror through propagating the U.S. wars as revolutionary wars from above – e.g. aerial superiority, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Christopher Hitchens and his Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008). For an excellent review on the appropriation of revolution from above, see Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above (: Arktos Media LTD, 2011), 56-100 and 228-260.

358 Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation, vii.

359 Michael Ledeen, “Creative Destruction: How to Wage a Revolutionary War,” National Review Online, September 20, 2001, accessed September 29, 2014, http://www.realnews247.com/Michael%20Ledeen%20on%20Creative%20Destruction.htm.

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nor revolution.360 It was a process imposed by the American occupation that left its prints on that constitution for generations to come. As such, how to conceive of its present and future time within the reality of a stubborn war, total state destruction, and a crumbling nation. Even more so, how to account for the capacity of this forced constitution-making process, under war conditions, to instrumentally internalize transformed and dislocated characteristics of the democratic constitution-making process?

Perhaps, the concept of time as a conduct can facilitate an explanation. A conduct of time

“is a number of world’s extensive movement;” time is encapsulated within this movement as it goes from the originary to the derived. In the movement of bodies, things, and ideas from the originary to the derived, there is a traceable distinction between past, present, and future. The further the extensive movement from moment zero is, the larger the possibility of a new derived time becomes.361 This, indeed, does not cancel a reverse movement – that is from the derived to the originary – nor drops the possibility of the autonomy, and perhaps a new authority, of the derived time, albeit dependent on the transformation of the derived time into time of power. It signifies repetitions yet its horizon is open for aberration. A conduct of time as an extensive movement creates the association between time and space necessary for that movement. In this formulation of time in its association with space, the internal-external dichotomy is surmountable,

360 For a comprehensive historical analysis of modern constitution-making and the formation of modern constituent power as a result of revolutions and/or insurgencies see Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). On a “postsovereign” constitution-making see Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation. For Arato, the transition in Iraq is neither democratic nor revolutionary. Rather, it a transition that occurred under conditions of state destruction. Thus, it should be distinguished from conditions of a revolution or that of a liberation. On neo-liberal enforced “revolutionary” transitions see Christopher Parker, “From Forced Revolution to Failed Transition: The Nightmarish Agency of Revolutionary Neo-Liberalism in Iraq,” UNISCI, Discussion Papers, 12 (2006).

361 See Gilles Deleuze, Forward to Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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if not totally diminishable, and within which the extensive movement signifies the force of time, and the everyday practice of power. It further intensifies the subordination of the derived to the originary time – as long as the former is in filiation to the latter, where this filiation is necessarily held by violence.

As a conceptual start, a conduct of time hints that the process undergoes extensive cyclical and repetitive movements, yet both processes maintain a potential of newness. It is this indetermination that differentiates a democratic constitutional process (or even a potential democratic process), one might label it as the originary, from an imposed constitutional-process, the derivative – an under occupation constitution. When the rules of the originary regulate its reproduced model – i.e. the Iraqi constitution – and many others for that matter, shared elements of time are justified, aberration is necessary. Against this notion of extensive movement of bodies from the originary to the derived given the limits of a reversal movement, and in contrast with “the time” characteristics of a constitutional democracy, I want to revisit “the time” of the occupation-imposed constitutional process, necessarily symptomatic of “the time” of the new

Iraqi.

An occupation-imposed constitutional process maintains a façade democratic procedure and instrumental inclusiveness. Its time is still orbiting within the schema of progress and development, in which the transformation to democracy and the embrace of capital is conceived of as both an arrival and a starting point. It is a movement in time to the future, an arrival to “the end of history;” to democracy from authoritarianism. It is a starting point in which democracy signifies the beginning of temporal series of transformation – political, economic, and social – geared toward futurity. Politics, institutions, economic structures, social norms, even geography

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are transforming with speed and velocity.362 Thus, acceleration of the time of the constitution- making will accelerate the arrival of democracy, the beginning of new extensive movements in, around, and about Iraq. This feature of the time of the imposed institution is crucial. For time here is accelerated and pushed to its maximum speed by the occupation forces not by Iraqi forces.

Its extensive movement is subjected to the needs and desires of the occupiers, destroying the very potential of the nation’s time – present and future.

The time of this moment, which encompasses the future time of the nation as shaped by its processes, is detached and removed from its national context; it is authored and guided by

Washington’s time. Its acceleration thus meant to mend any undesirable aberration in the time of the occupiers. As we will see in the following analysis, the totality of time of the constitution- making process was fully subject to the occupier’s conception of their time as well as of the Iraqi time, albeit not without being challenged, which had been a general pattern of action pursued by different American institutions involved in the project of democratizing Iraq. To ensure the futurity of this moment, it is measured and quantified through new infinite institutions, laws, operations, and movements enforced on occasions, and designed by negotiation on others, by foreign armies, bureaucracies, advisors, competing Iraqi forces, translatable models, urban designs, and military technologies. All these features, forces, and desires – orchestrated together

– produced a necro-sovereign constitution time that reeks with death and destruction – it

362 On the concept of speed and velocity and its concrete effects on political conducts facilitated by the technological revolution in several aspects (mainly war-making, communications, and information sharing) See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Marc Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006). See also Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2005); Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 2008).

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accelerated violence. A time in which death’s increase or decrease becomes a marker of futurity, is a time that does not belong to the nation. It is a conquered time.

Thus, it is possible to speak of a spatialized-time of the imposed constitutional process marked by divided geography, categorized population, and an accelerated time of change and death, a prerequisite for bringing third world nations to the globalist orbit. In this spatialized-time, it is also possible to speak of what Timothy Mitchell describes as “carbon democracy.”

Democracy as an idea is translatable in different spaces, bearing somehow similar features. Yet, in its movement through space and time, it frees itself from its originary conditions, local histories and material arrangements. It becomes an abstraction, a concept, Mitchell maintains.363

One can add that this abstraction is made concrete again as new material arrangements – at their heart is the making of a model citizen committed to that idea – are manufactured in these new places touched by democracy through a multiplicity of technologies, including but not limited to war. Indeed, one can speak of a conduct of democratic time with multiplicity of derivation, yet without the capacity of a reverse movement, at least in the foreseeable future. For the derived democratic model is still in a perverse filiation with the originary.

Then, why not dismiss analyzing the whole process all together? Dismissing this constitutive event in the history of Iraq obscures the intricacies of the American project, its attempts to fully establish the new regime’s legitimacy under the rubric of “nation-building” efforts,364 designed to lead to the formation of a “liberal democracy” in Iraq. A new constitution

363 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2001), 2-3.

364 The concept “nation-building” had recurred as a central theme in the discourse of the American occupation. It immediately incites some sort of legitimacy rather than its lack. A quick reference to the counterinsurgency discourse is helpful here: the dominance of the concept “nation-building” in that discourse is useful not only 175

then occupies the very heart of this legitimizing process. More importantly, tracing this process uncovers aggressive impositions of the occupation’s agendas – only to expose the emptiness of the derived model; weak bargaining capacities among the nation’s main political and social groups on the one hand, and the latter’s capacity to bargain with the occupying power on the other; and finally the politics of instrumental inclusion/exclusion that exempted significant groups from participation. As such, the outcome is a façade desirability for a democratic constitutional process, leading to the establishment of a subordinate constituted power

(government). To put differently, the pressure to institutionalize the new Iraqi Constitution – i.e. writing, enactment, and ratification – aimed to construct new political conditions that maintains

Iraq in the global orbit of the U.S.

3.3.2.1. Constitution-Making Process Inscribes Sectarianism

As the defining moment of the Iraqi constitution time, the CPA’s Law of Administration set December 31, 2005 as the deadline for the post-invasion transitional period. It designed a two-stage process of constitution-making. The first stage consisted of the formation of an interim

Iraqi government that assumed its power on June 30, 2004 – in accordance with the Transitional

Law. The timetable for the second stage required the holding of general national elections in

January 2005, the formation of an Iraqi national assembly, and the creation of an Iraqi government pursuant to a permanent constitution by December 31, 2005 – the end of the transitional phase. The Transitional Law formed the legal framework that governed the constitution-making process, under which the Transitional National Assembly was formed

that it bestowed counterinsurgency operations with legitimacy, but also in forming an elastic concept under which many political and military processes can be fit. See the section on counterinsurgency and legitimacy, chapter four.

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following the national election in January 2005. This elected Assembly had to write a

“democratic” constitution acknowledging Iraq’s regional, sectarian, and ethnic makeup by

August 15, 2005. According to the same timetable of the Transitional Law, the permanent constitution had be submitted to the people two months before the scheduled ratificatory referendum on October 15, 2005, and finally a new parliamentary elections would be held by

December 15, 2005.

Theoretically, had this process been truly democratic and inclusive – in which all Iraqi social and political groups were fairly and freely represented – it might have alleviated some of the sever political problems engulfing Iraq’s political landscape. However, in the calculative spaces of the U.S. occupation – i.e. legal and military – this scenario was very remote from reality. On the national level, the CPA initiated direct and isolated negotiations with each of the major Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups to cut a deal over the provision of the Transitional Law.

Andrew Arato, for example, maintains that Bremer’s bargains with the Kurdish parties finalized in a deal in which “Kurdistan was one and Iraq was one, and the two were negotiating their federation.” 365 The consequences were more than grave for the future of Iraq’s territorial integrity to the extent Kurdish parties viewed themselves as a separate political entity entering in a “voluntary union between the Kurdish and Arab peoples.”366 The CPA’s negotiations with

365 Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation, 144.

366 See Mas‘ud Barzani, “The Voluntary Union within a United Federal Iraq is not just a Settlement for the Kurdish Issue but a Settlement for the Iraqi Issue as Well,” At-Ta’akhi, December 21, 2003, accessed October 1, 2013, excerpts of the article available on Al-Iraqi website: http://www.aliraqi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26820.

Explicit in this deal, indeed, was the status of , which mounted to threaten the Kurdish-Shi’a alliance. The Transitional Law referred to Kirkuk problem and the need to “act expeditiously to take measures to remedy the injustice caused by the previous regime’s practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk.” However, Ibrahim al-Ja‘afari’s government was prepared neither to accept the 177

Shi’a parties in and through the Iraqi Governing Council were more than visible in all stages of the American project in Iraq, let alone writing the Transitional Law and the permanent constitution. To all these parties the alienation of Sunni Arabs – among other groups – was taken for granted and became part of an orchestrated process designed and led by the American occupation, with occasional participation of the newly ensemble of Iraqi institutions. For in the background of the constitution-making process, the occupation authority had initiated two major campaigns against the “Sunnis Arabs” of Iraq, as Bremer refers to them: the de-Ba‘athification process and the counterinsurgency military campaign. The de-Ba‘athification institution not only cleansed Iraqi Institutions from Sunni Ba‘athists, but also attempted to disqualify Sunni candidates from the national elections of 2005 and 2010.367 The counterinsurgency campaign, on the other hand, pounded Sunni neighborhoods, cities, and communities. The violence that

Kurdish claims to Kirkuk given that its oil fields produce nearly 15 percent of Iraq’s oil, nor to initiate a wholesale process of redefinition of the demographic and the political identity of Kirkuk – including the relocation of about a million people, both Arabs and Kurds, from and into Kirkuk. See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 410-12. Conversely, the Kurds were determined to bring to an end the uncertain status of Kirkuk through enforcing a constitutional bargain benefiting from concluding their deal with the CPA, and drawing on their reserve of expertise including American, British, Irish, Canadian and Kurdish exiles. See Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation, 142.

Although the Kirkuk problem was not solved during the constitutional bargain due to the very tight American deadline, it had been transferred to the permanent constitution under the provision of Article 136. This provided a guarantee that the stipulation of permanent constitution will force the elected Iraqi government to solve this problem. To be sure, Article 136 (Second) required that the elected executive authority would complete a census and conclude with a referendum in Kirkuk before December 31, 2007. See The Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period, Article 58; and The 2005 Iraqi Constitution, Article 136: Second.

367 A replication of the 2005 scenario to disqualify the candidacy of 170 Sunni candidates took place on the eve of the 2010 elections. This round, the number of the sanctioned candidate was around 500 candidates. The candidates were disqualified from the elections due to their alleged affiliation with the Ba‘ath party. According to the Washington Post, “a panel of judges signed off on most of the disqualifications. But before the appeals process, all but 171 were replaced by their parties or withdrew. Only 25 prevailed upon appeal.” See Leila Fadel, “Popular Sunni Political Party to Boycott Iraqi Elections,” Washington Post, February 21, 2010, accessed October 2, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/20/AR2010022000651.html.

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engulfed the Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, for example, made it impossible for a safe participation of the Sunni community in the 2005 national elections. Some Sunni political parties called for a six month delay of the elections hoping that the security situation would improve.

The request was rejected by Americans and leading Shi’a figures,368 leading to an effective disenfranchisement of the Sunni Arabs in the whole process. Both campaigns led the Sunni Arab community to boycott the January 31, 2005, elections.

As an element of the engineered process, the electoral law that governed and organized the national elections of 2005 did square the exclusion process of the Sunni Arabs, by making

Iraq as a one single electorate with a system of proportional representation. By framing Iraq as a single electorate, the electoral law eliminated a major problem for the CPA that could have emerged if Iraq was divided into eighteen provinces – each of them constituting an electorate that could in the future, through their representatives, lead to the Sunni Arabs’ participation in and influence over the draft constitution.

It is particularly important to make a reference here to the role played by the electoral law to marginalize the Sunni Arabs and the Islamists votes. The electoral law design was wary of two major issues that could emerge after the elections in relation to Article 61: C of the Transitional

Law; both issues could have reversed or drastically altered the path of the constitutional process.

The Article states that: “The general referendum will be successful and the draft constitution ratified if a majority of the voters in Iraq approve and if two-thirds of the voters in three or more governorates do not reject it.” If, at that stage, Iraq was divided into eighteen electorates governed by proportional representation system, some elected Sunni leaders would have

368 See Michael Howard, “Main Sunni Party Pulls out of Iraqi Elections,” The Guardian, December 27, 2004.

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emerged in the Sunni dominated provinces such as Anbar, Salahiddeen, and Nineveh, which in turn could have challenged major provisions of the draft constitution while in the making, thus negotiated and affected the whole process.369

Equally important, the same article implied that if the draft constitution is rejected by two-thirds of voters in these Sunni Arab provinces – out of the eighteen Iraqi provinces – the draft would not be ratified, and the whole constitution engineering process would fail. In other words, the Iraqi ratification referendum required the approval of a simple majority of all those voting, as well as approval by more than one third of all registered voters in sixteen out of eighteen governorates. The latter problem had to be solved through the inclusion of more Sunni

Arabs in the Constitution Drafting Committee, albeit as late as July 2005. Ironically, this article in the Transitional Law was specifically designed to grant the Kurds an extra negotiation power and influence over the path of the final constitution to maintain their autonomous status and regional independence.

Pursuant to the CPA Order no. 92,370 the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq was established. At the request of the Iraqi Governing Council and the CPA, a team of UN electoral experts was assigned to advise and support the Electoral Commission. To that end, Carlos

Valenzuela was appointed as an international commissioner to the Electoral Commission in order

369 See Jonathan Morrow, Iraq’s Constitutional Process II: An Opportunity Lost (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2005), 6-8; Morrow, “Deconstituting Mesopotamia,” 569-71. See also Michele Brandt et al., Constitution-Making and Reform: Options for the Process (Switzerland: Interpeace, 2011). 299; U.S. Institute of Peace, “Iraq’s Constitutional Process: Shaping a Vision for the Country’s Future,” (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2005).

370 Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 92, “The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq”, May 31, 2004, accessed September 22, 2013, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20040531_CPAORD_92_Independent_Electoral_commission_of_Ira q.pdf.

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to head and coordinate the international Electoral Assistance Team. Simultaneously, a UN team comprised of fifty-six electoral experts under the lead of Carina Perelli was assigned to frame the electoral Law of January 30, 2005. Based on the UN official narrative, the system was opted for after a wide range of consultations with Iraqi actors from different backgrounds; legal analysis of previous Iraqi electoral practices and laws as well as taking into accounts the provision of the

Transitional Law. Based on their investigations and consultations, the UN team presented to the

Electoral Commission a set of three options for discussion, which in its turn opted for the single constituency proportional representation system. After presenting it to the Governing Council, it was adopted with twenty one vote in favor and four votes against.371

The argument goes that the single consistency proportional system was the first choice of the UN team due to four major reasons, some of them internal to its procedures, others catered to the CPA’s needs and requirements. First: The team viewed Iraq as a very proportional system of representation due to the many small political groups with different interests, thus the constitutional assembly governability becomes more manageable. Second: The smaller the district becomes, the more likely it is to exclude – from the distribution of seat – parties that won an appreciable number of votes, yet not enough to translate into seats. The two-third system compensates through an additional distribution of seats after the district slots are allocated.372

371 See United Nations, “Iraq Electoral Fact Sheet,” accessed October 2, 2014, http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/iraq/election-fact-sht.htm.

372 Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Owl Books, 2006), 269. The argument that was made on behalf of the single district proportional representation system is that it is: Inclusive; simple and transparent; no census data required; best for women and minorities; encourages alliances and moderate positions; permits local representation; least vulnerable to security problems; and most accommodating to out of-country voting. According to its advocates, it had been previously implemented in other places like Afghanistan and East Timor. See United Nations, “Iraq Electoral Fact Sheet.”

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Third: Larry Diamond, senior CPA democracy and election advisor and his team conceived of the single electoral district option as a guarantee against the winning of an Islamist a majority in both sects – a very possible outcome in provincially based electoral districts.373 Fourth: due to the short time-frame prior to the national elections, there appeared to be major difficulties in organizing Iraq into electoral districts given the lack of any recent census of the Iraqi population at the time, and the absence of clear and politically agreed upon consistencies boundaries.374

Arato argues that the team of UN electoral experts was responsible not only for framing the electoral law, but also for making the choice over which system should be adopted to govern the procedures of the 2005 elections, a process that somehow dictated its results. Following the

UN recommendation, the CPA decreed Order no. 96 on the electoral law. This, indeed, is a claim that the UN team was complicit in plunging the country into “a disastrous choice.”375

The process, however, was narrated differently by Allawi. He argues that the CPA Order no. 96, was the framework that defined the electoral system of 2005 elections, based on the CPA senior advisors’ recommendations – mainly Larry Diamond’s position on this issue, which

It’s worth noting that since the establishment of the CPA, a number of constitutional experts such as Larry Diamond and Noah Feldman were appointed not only to draft the Transitional Law, but also to guide Iraqis draft the permanent constitution of the country. See Jennifer Lee, “After Effects: the Law, American Will Advise Iraqis on Writing New Constitution,” New York Times, May 11, 2003, accessed August 27, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/world/aftereffects-the-law-american-will-advise-iraqis-on-writing-new- constitution.html. See also Larry Diamond, “What Went Wrong in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs 5 (2004); Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

373 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 335.

374 Allawi The Occupation of Iraq 335; Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation, 209; Morrow, “Deconstituting Mesopotamia,” 569.

375 Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation, 209.

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resulted in a confrontations between the CPA and Sistani’s office, and intensified the Sunni exclusion problem.376

Despite the identity of the Electoral Law engineer, the election system was chosen from three models submitted to the Governing Council. According to many commentators, it was a disastrous choice that led to disastrous results. The question then becomes not who was responsible for this system? But rather how this system coherently made its way to the political landscape. I would like to situate this issue within my extended argument about the spatialized- time of Iraq. In the necro-sovereign context, spaces are concatenated and boundaries overlap eliminating the internal external dichotomy. In this context the distinction between a UN proposal, a Governing Council decision, or a CPA Order becomes difficult, if not unintelligible.

Since 1990, in regard to Iraq, the UN space has served as a legitimizing institution for the

American project. Relatedly, since its appointment, the Governing Council’s decision were orchestrated with the CPA and mainly taken under the latter’s provision. The blurred boundaries between these three bodies makes tracing the authorship of disastrous choices and disastrous consequence a secondary point.

Regardless of the motives behind opting for this electoral model, which are of capital importance, the Electoral Law was neither the first in the series of engineered exclusion and dividing processes, nor the last. It can only be situated within an active project of unmaking the

376 The Law established Iraq as a single electoral constituency in which all “seats in the National Assembly will be allocated among Political Entities through a system of proportional representation.” It was designed to guide the election procedures to elect 275 members of a Transitional National Assembly. See Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 96, “The Electoral Law,” June 15, 2004, accessed November 3, 2013, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20040615_CPAORD_96_The_Electoral_Law.pdf. See also Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 335.

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nation; on occasion complementary and on others simultaneous to the other procedures – e.g. the persistent de-Ba‘athification program, the counterinsurgency campaigns (both went uninterrupted throughout 2003-2004), and finally the whole constitutional project to which the designed Electoral Law is only a prelude.

Politically excluded and militarily targeted, Sunni Arabs threatened to boycott the national elections of January 2005 hoping to pressure the CPA and other Iraqi political forces to delay the time of the elections until the security situation would allow Sunnis to participate. They further wanted to eliminate the single consistency structure of voting.377 However, there was no sign that the elections would be postponed to allow the participation of a 20 percent of the population in the national elections under more just and safe conditions. Despite the Sunni Arabs boycott, the elections took place on January 30, 2005, resulting in only seventeen Sunni Arabs elected to the 275-member National Assembly – none elected to explicitly represent the Sunni ticket, while seventy-five seats were won by the Kurdistan Coalition list, and a hundred and forty seats were won by the Shi’a United Iraqi Alliance. Evidently, Sunni Arab parties rejected the results on the grounds that the elections were held under the occupation. This, however, did not bring to a halt the constitution-making process, which was supposed to begin immediately after the conclusion of the national elections.

377 See Matthew Frankel, “Threaten but Participate: Why Election Boycotts Are a Bad Idea,” (Policy Paper No. 19: Foreign Policy at Brookings, 2010), 1. To be sure, the Sunni Arab boycott was partially a reaction to the CPA and the Iraqi government aggressive policies against them. However, this decision transpired partially as potential Sunni voters faced intensified threats of the resistance on the grounds of the illegitimacy of the national elections under the American occupation. Consequently, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the , and the Iraqi Federation of Tribes decided to boycott the election.

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Albeit stumbling and mostly secretive, the drafting of the new constitution had commenced following the national elections, signaling a total exclusion of the Sunni Arab population, Iraqi nationalists, and other Iraqi groups and citizens from the process. A seventeen- month timeframe was allocated by the occupation for a nation, not yet recovered from the major military campaign of the 2003-war, and still under a persistent and dire staged sectarian political turmoil, to complete the whole process of the constitution-making – e.g. setting up committees and offices, bargain, drafting and ratification. Amidst the American unceasing pressure to draft and ratify the permanent constitution, the U.S. administration and its proxy Governing Council

(the Kurdish and Shi’a political parties) were aware of the possible danger that Sunni governorates, grossly underrepresented in the National Assembly, would veto the draft constitution in the October referendum, which would highly likely block the constitution at the juridical level. This, in turn, necessarily entailed a further deterioration in the political and security crises of Iraq.

It was this constitutional crisis – coalesced into other crises – that required a speedy resolution, not to guarantee the emergence of an “inclusive and democratic” political space in

Iraq, but rather it was an attempt to calm down the Sunni exploding centers of resistance – e.g.

Baghdad, , Mosul, Anbar, Salahiddeen, , and among others – and to ensure the ratification of a permanent constitution through which the contours of a long term U.S. control over Iraq could be drawn. The question, then, was: how to solve the problem of Sunni

Arabs participation in drafting the constitution to avoid a future nullification of the draft and to bequeath legitimacy to the purportedly democratic constitutional process?

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A remarkable number of constitutional experts, advisors, and consultants were brought onto the process to help Iraqis solve this juridical and political crisis and to proceed with a draft constitution that could actually be ratified in the October 15 referendum – that is how to incorporate Sunnis in the process? In February 2005, the United States Institute of Peace and The

American Bar Association organized a meeting in Jordan in which a group of Iraqi lawyers, political advisors, and senior UN officials convened to discuss the question of Sunni Arabs inclusion in the constitution-making process to ensure the “legitimacy” of the permanent constitution among excluded Iraqi groups.378 The recommendations and legal opinions of the

February meeting were not met by enthusiasm from the Iraqi government nor were taken seriously at the time in a signal that some CPA and Iraqi officials were not very comfortable with the inclusion path. It was the outbreak of a high wave of violence mid-2005 and the failure of counterinsurgency campaigns that forced change the scene. Calls for more Sunni inclusion became louder from inside the U.S. administration (e.g. from Condoleezza Rice – U.S. Secretary of State, and Robert B. Zoellick – Deputy Secretary at the State Department), and from international institutions (e.g. the European Union, and the United Nations’ Office of

Constitutional Support).379

378 See Morrow, “Deconstituting Mesopotamia,” 572; Mona Iman, “Draft Constitution Gained, but an Important Opportunity Was Lost,” (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, October 11, 2005), accessed June 4, 2013, http://www.usip.org/newsmedia/releases/2005/1011_draft.html.

379 See “Rice Pushes Role for Iraq Sunnis,” BBC News, May 16, 2005, accessed October 28, 2014, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4548393.stm; John Burns, “Shiites Offer to Give Sunnis Larger Role on Broader Panel Writing a Constitution,” New York Times, May 26, 2005, accessed November 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/international/middleeast/26politics.html?pagewanted=print; “Parliament, Sunnis Reach Deal on Iraq’s Constitutional Process,” USA Today, June 16, 2005, accessed October 24, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-06-16-constitution-deal_x.htm.

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The calls for including Sunnis inside the U.S. administration emanated from the Bush administration adamant intention to save the constitutional process by securing the Sunni Arabs votes to reduce the chance of a second boycott – that is, a boycott of the constitution referendum, which this time would be of piercing consequences for the Iraqi political process in the near and far future. In the near future, the gentle push for integrating Sunni Arabs might be conceived as a strategy that would weaken the insurgency, which would grant the occupation projects the required legitimacy at home and internationally, provide a success story for the American domestic consumption, and neutralize the Sunni population. Most importantly, the power of a ratified constitution with a Sunni vote is performative; it would displace the status of the U.S. occupation in Iraq by transforming it role into a more subtle engagement contributing to its evolution into a project less visible politically and militarily.

The drafting committee that was officially formed on May 10, 2005, originally included two Sunni members of its fifty-five members.380 On June 9, 2005, Jalal Talabani, then Iraqi

President, announced that the Iraqi government “decided to include 25 Sunni members in the constitutional drafting commission with full rights like the other members elected by parliament.” However, his statement was reversed later by Sheikh Humam Hamoudi’s announcement that Sunnis would only have 13 seats, a position that was endorsed by the Iraqi

Prime minister Ibrahim Ja‘afari. The deal was rejected by Sunnis, forcing the Kurdish-Shi’a bloc

380 The distribution of the drafting committee seats was as the following: United Iraqi Alliance 28, Kurdistan Coalition List 15, Iraqiya List 8, National Rafidain List 1, Front of Iraqi Turkomans 1, People’s Union 1, and Patriotic Cadres and Elites 1. On May 23, 2005, the following nominations took place in the drafting committee: Sheikh Hamam al-Hamoudi of the United Iraqi Alliance – as the president; Fouad Maassoum and and Adnan Al-Janabi – as deputy presidents (deputies belonged to the Kurdish Alliance, and to the Transitional National Assembly, respectively), see “Shiite to Head Constitutional Panel,” Daily Star, May 25, 2005, accessed October 28, 2014, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=15352.

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to reach a compromise with them to include fifteen voters in the drafting committee and additional 10 non-voting members.381 Under the American pressure, and after a lengthy process of negotiations among the Kurdish, the secular and the religious Shi’a parties, twenty-five Sunni

Arabs were included in the constitution drafting committee. Ten of them were given the status of non-voting counselors, bringing the total of the voting Sunni Arab members of the committee to seventeen. The negotiating Sunni parties accepted the deal on two conditions: First, unanimity on the committee’s decisions; second, the CPA’s Transitional Law would not form the basis of the draft constitution. 382 These members were selected from the Sunni political parties who expressed their willingness to engage in the process without even a wider consultation with the

Sunni community.383

A symbolic and selective inclusion, at best, is what was granted to the Sunni Arabs who were included in the process as late as July, 2005. The drafting committee held its first meeting with the participation of the Sunni members on July 8, 2005. Sunnis participation in drafting the

381 See “Sunnis Win Demand for 25 Seats on Panel to Draft Iraq Constitution,” Agence France-Presse, June 9, 2005, http://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/sunnis-win-demand-25-seats-panel-draft-iraq-constitution.

382 UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution-Making Process,” 27. The Sunni parties’ position echoed Ayatollah as-Sistani’s position on the Transitional Law. He was the first Shi’a force to challenge Bremer’s recipe for the Transitional Law and insisted on negotiating it as a transitional document, fearing that this Law – with an interim constitution power – would become the basis of the Iraqi constitution. Generally, his stand – as one of the major political forces in the post-invasion Iraq – forced the CPA to compromise its design for the constitutional process, to initiate the two-stage formula, and to publically halt its policy of appointed constitution-writing bodies. Despite his relative strength as a negotiating power, as-Sistani had to make serious compromises in his negotiation over the constitutional process with Bremer. See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 204-218; Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation, 99-110; Morrow, “Deconstituting Mesopotamia,” 567.

383 Some of the Sunni Arab participants came from: The Iraqi Islamic Party, The National Dialogue Council – represented by Saleh al-Mutlaq, and the Sunni Endowment Trust – represented by its head Adnan al-Dulaimi. These three parties agreed on a list of candidates, albeit single handedly, to be included as participants in the drafting process. However, their list of candidates were scrutinized and some of the names were rejected on the grounds of their alleged affiliation with the Ba‘ath party. See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 405-6.

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constitution had been tremendously thorny for the Kurdish-Shi’a alliance. These parties’ position vacillated between an astute acceptance and aggravated rejection, marking their fear from the consequences of bringing Sunnis to power. For Sunnis, on the other hand, their integration in the process only six weeks before the August 15 deadline was particularly challenging.384 They were confronted by the many different ready drafts of the constitution, Iraqis and Americans – each reflected the preparing party’s political preferences and vision for the new Iraq. There was a mounting realization among them that major bargains had already undergone thorough negotiations among the Kurds, the Shi’as, and the Americans.

The general feeling that had developed among Sunnis over the few weeks after assuming their role in the committee was that by the time they were brought onto the drafting process, the draft constitution – or its most important provisions – had already been a fait accompli. They registered their opposition to the dividing nature of the proposed federal system; licensing the emergence of new regions (resulting from up to three governorates decision to join together);385 the reallocation of national resources; religion and state structure; and water rights. Throughout

384 See Iman, “Draft Constitution Gained, but an Important Opportunity Was Lost.” For example, after the deal was made with the Sunni leaders about the final number of their seats and their voting capacity in the committee, a surprising statement was made by Sheikh Hamam Hamoudi, the head of the committee, to the National Assembly. He stated that “the Sunni representatives were to participate in the drafting of the constitution outside the context of the official committees, which grouped together the 55 members that were elected by the TNA.” He added that “the Sunni members would not have voting rights within the Committee.” In response, Sunnis threatened to resign as a group before even having assumed their position in the committee. See also UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution-Making Process,” 28.

385 This provision appeared in the very early draft of the Transitional Law, then it was dropped. However, before publicizing the Law, Bremer met with the Shi’a members of the Governing Council who proposed a number of demands to be added to the Transitional Law, among which was the right of provisional governments to form regions. Resultantly, licensing new region formation was re-included in the Transitional Law and made its way to the final draft of the Iraqi Constitution. See Diamond, Squandered Victory, 172; The New Iraqi Constitution: Section Five: Powers of the Region, Chapter One: Regions, Articles: 113 (Second), 114, 115 (A & B). See also UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution- Making Process,” 15.

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the brief time of their participation in the committee, all of these issues remained unsolved due the deals that were made among different Iraqi political forces and the CPA. Therefore, Sunnis supported the calls for a six-month extension of the constitution-writing process – initiated by the

International Crisis Group, then by the UN in Baghdad – hoping to accelerate their political efforts in mobilizing the Sunni Arab community, and to negotiate with other political forces some of the above plaguing elements of the constitution.

Sunnis request for an extension of the draft deadline had created yet another crisis in the already sprawling process. The U.S. administration’s position on the extension of the process was audaciously articulated by Rumsfeld’s statement: “We don’t want any delays … They’re simply going to have to make the compromises necessary and get on with it. That’s what politics is about.”386 Other Iraqi political leaders echoed Rumsfeld’s rejection. The Kurdish leaders expressed a firm stand against the suggested extension. Under pressures from the United Iraqi

Alliance, the head of the constitution-drafting committee, Sheikh Humam Hammoudi declared on July 27, 2005 that an agreement had been achieved over important chapters of the constitution, thus signaling a smooth and an uninterrupted constitution-writing process, despite the four-day

Sunni boycott of the committee deliberation due to the security situation.387 As of August 1,

386 Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Presses Iraqi Leaders on Constitution and Insurgency,” New York Times, July 28, 2005, accessed September 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/international/middleeast/28rumsfeld.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

387 See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 408. The security situation was another issue that Sunni drafters had to grapple with. After the killing of one member together with two Sunni politicians, Sunni members of the committee suspend their participation in the Committee’s deliberations for four days, meanwhile requesting the government to provide them more security. Despite their absence, Sheikh Hammoudi announced that a “draft will be presented to the national assembly in the first week of August.” He added that “[a]fter it is discussed by the national assembly and final changes are made, five million copies will be distributed to households... on August 15.” See “Iraq Constitution ‘on Schedule’,” BBC News, July 20, 2005, accessed September 10, 2014, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4700741.stm.

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2005, which was the legal deadline for any extension request as defined by the Transitional Law, the drafting committee formally announced to the National Assembly that there was no need for the suggested extension, not only in response the enormous pressure exerted by the U.S. administration to meet the Transitional Law deadline, but so as not to grant Sunnis more time for regrouping, which would possibly empower them during deliberations. 388 On August 8, the committee unofficially ceased its official meetings as these meetings became more secretive to exclude the Sunni presence.

Since then, the negotiations and deliberations over the draft constitution transpired into an informal meetings of the “Leadership Council,” mainly comprised of Americans, Kurds, and

Shi’as. Leaders convened in the homes and offices of Kurdish and Shi ‘a leaders, and sometimes in the U.S. Ambassador’s house – rather than in the Constitutional Committee office with the presence of all its members. When the clock started ticking for the August 15 deadline, these meetings were attended by Jalal Talabani – the president, Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim – the leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Masoud Barzani – the president of the

Kurdistan region, Zalmay Khalilzad – the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Peter Galbraith – a former

U.S. Ambassador who was serving as an adviser to the Kurds, as well as other Iraqi leaders who frequently joined these deliberations.389

388 See International Crisis Group, “Iraq: Don’t Rush the Constitution,” Middle East Report No. 42, June 8, 2005, 8-9; Morrow, “Deconstituting Mesopotamia,” 571.

389 See International Crisis Group, “Unmaking Iraq: A Constitutional Process Gone Awry,” Middle East Policy Briefing No. 19, September 26, 2005, 3; UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution-Making Process,” 33.

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The sudden yet undeclared transformation in the nature of the committee meetings and procedures produced three major outcomes. The first was an unprecedented U.S. intervention in the process. 390 The second was a semi exclusion of Sunni members from the “Leadership

Council” meetings, which had literally limited the life of an active Sunnis participation in the process to only three weeks.391 The third was that the Council failed to maintain a reliable reporting system on these secretive meeting. As such, it became difficult to officially document which parties had still been involved and which parties were voted out. Equally important, several drafts of the constitution circulated simultaneously, to the extent that “it was difficult to determine which was the authoritative draft.”392

3.3.2.2. The Break Down of the Participatory Constitutional Process – Sunnis Were No More Welcome

By August 1, it became apparent that the Sunni Arabs hopes for a further extension evaporated, thus eliminating any potential influence from their side on the outcome of the constitution-writing at that stage. Equally important, they realized that they lacked the necessary

390 The American involvement in the draft constitution at this stage was unprecedented as described by some drafters. In Mahmoud Othman’s words, a Kurdish member of constitutional committee, “It [was] the full constitution but with the American points of view on the main points where we have differences.” See Alissa J. Rubin, “Envoy Delivers U.S. Vision for Iraqi Constitution,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2005, accessed September 28, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/aug/12/world/fg-constitution12.

391 Only Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported the participation of Saleh al-Mutlak as a representative of 15 Sunni members of the committee on August 7, the last meeting in which Sunnis participated. Filkins maintains that a-Mutlak was the only person in the meeting opposing the expansion of governorates into semi-independent regions. Al-Mutlak argued that this arrangement “could fragment the state,” adding that “Iraq would be too weak.” See Dexter Filkins, “Iraqis Meet to Break Impasse on Drafting of a Constitution,” New York Times, August 8, 2005, accessed October 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/middleeast/08iraq.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0.

392 See UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution-Making Process,” 40. A Los Angeles Time article reported that at that point of negotiations each political group had its own draft. “I guess you could say there’s a Kurdish version, a Sunni [version], a Shiite [version] and an American one,” the article added, quoting an anonymous insider. During the last weeks of negotiations, several versions of the constitution were leaked. See Rubin, “Envoy Delivers U.S. Vision for Iraqi Constitution.”

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political organization and power to modify any of the constitutional deals that had already been finalized among the main designers of the new constitution, who in turn noted the Sunni Arabs’ stands on major constitutional problems without any obligation to act upon these concerns.

Sunnis’ official request for an extension was conceived by the U.S. administration as well as by most leading figures of the Kurdish-Shi’a alliance as part of an orchestrated effort to reverse, if not thwart, the constitutional process.

The three weeks of the Sunni participation in the drafting committee were marked by their fierce rejection of the constitutional federal arrangements, refusal to grant licenses to governorates to form large regions that would enjoy a semi independence from the Iraqi state, and their reservation against the unclear structure of state power. Met with this fierce rejection, twenty minutes to the deadline of August 15, the head of committee requested that the General

Assembly grants the drafting committee a week extension to arrive at an agreement among the three political forces. By the end of the extended week, another three-day extension was sought by the committee.393 On the eve of August 15, “The differences [were] huge, and there [was] not enough determination from the political leaders to solve the problems. Almost 50 percent of the constitution [was] not finished yet,” Salih al-Mutlaq stated to New York Times reporters. 394

However, according the Allawi, to relax the confrontation Bush called Sayyid Abd el-Aziz al-

Hakim, the head of the United Iraqi Alliance, and demanded that Kurdish-Shi’a block

393 See Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation; International Crisis Group, “Unmaking Iraq,” 2; International Crisis Group, “Iraq: Don’t Rush the Constitution”; Morrow, “Deconstituting Mesopotamia”; UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “History of the Iraqi Constitution- Making Process.”

394 See Dexter Filkins and James Glanz, “Leaders in Iraq Extend Deadline on Constitution,” New York Times, August 16, 2005, accessed April 11, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/international/middleeast/16iraq.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

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compromises with the Sunni Arab drafters.395 In contradiction to Allawi’s narrative, reports and statements by the UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support Staff indicate that Sheikh

Hammoudi, despite his public announcements, reportedly stressed the need for an extension. He intended to ask Parliament for an extension on August 1. However, Bush’s phone call to party leaders came the next morning, and in fact the official announcement was made: There was no extension.396

After two “illegal” extensions, on August 28, 2005, members of the committee signed the charter, without its Sunni members’ approval and a “final” draft was submitted to the National

Assembly with the attendance of only three Sunni members. The draft then was accepted by the

National Assembly as final, without a vote. Sunnis contested that draft for two reasons. First, they argued that the two extensions granted to the drafting committee were illegal as the committee secured them after the legal deadline allowed by the Transitional Law. Ironically, the parties that refused the Transitional Law as a basis for the constitution, used the same Law as legal reference to reject these extensions in order to abort the draft constitution. The Transitional

Law states that for an extension to be legal, it should be applied for by August 1, which entails

395 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 414. However, Allawi’s account is very problematic here. For it omits altogether the details of the last and the most important week of the constitutional deliberations within the exclusive “Leadership Council” from which the Sunnis were almost totally blocked. This week mounted, according to several reports, to a rewriting of the constitution. Additionally, he fails to mention that before August 28, when the draft was submitted to the National Assembly, the whole process of bringing the Sunnis onto the constitutional process broke down miserably due to the declaration of the Kurdish-Shi’a block in the committee that a compromise with Sunnis appeared impossible. Therefore, they considered the submitted draft of August 28 as final, despite the absence of the Sunni draftees.

396 See Justin Alexander, “Iraq: Justice and Withdrawal, Iraq Needs a Better Constitution on Its Own Terms and Timescale,” (UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support – unpublished paper, copy in possession of the author); UNAMI’s Office of Constitutional Support, “The Making of the Iraqi Constitutional Process,” 38.

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the illegality of any extension granted after that deadline.397 Second, the reign of even more sever exclusionary procedures, secretive meetings of the Leadership Council, and the semi-official dissolution of the drafting committee during the first week of August forced the Sunni participants to officially announce that they were withdrawing from the negotiations on August

28, 2005. Tareq Al-Hashimi, secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, stated that “[d]uring the last weeks, we struggled to participate in the draft, but at the end of the day our role was one of advisers at most. We are very frustrated and disappointed.”398

Yet, in another striking twist, a second modified version of the draft was submitted to the

National Assembly on September 14, signifying that deliberations and amendments on the earlier draft constitution had continued after the submission of the first one. The National Assembly signed it off on September 18 – again without a call for legislative approval of the amendments – and approved it for printing. Five million copies of the constitution were then distributed.

Absurdly enough, on October 13 only two days before the referendum, more changes were made to the draft reflecting a last minute deal made between Kurdish and Shi’a leaders and one Sunni party – the Iraqi Islamic party – to maintain a façade Sunni element in the political structure of the new Iraq. These changes were mainly designed to recruit more Sunni governorates votes, promised by the Iraqi Islamic Party. The October 13 draft was approved by the National

Assembly on the same day, to conclude the nation’s “democratic” constitution-making process.

Since the beginning of August, it became clear that the inclusion of Sunnis only meant to gain the draft a majority of votes in the referendum, and to bring the more radical Sunni parties

397 See the Transitional Law, Article 61(F).

398 See International Crisis Group, “Unmaking Iraq: A Constitutional Process Gone Awry,” 4.

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onto the political process to accept certain deals – mainly between the American and the Kurds.

It was also obvious that the committee role was extremely minimized and its official mandate was expropriated by the “Leadership Council.” Kurdish and Shi’a members repeatedly stated that Sunni Arabs had no intention of creating common ground. Conversely, with the strikingly notable absence of the National Assembly from this project of the new constitution, Sunni members, on their part, started accusing Kurdish and Shi’a parties of facilitating the imposition of a constitutional document designed by the occupation authority to compromise the unity of

Iraq. They called Iraqis to vote against the constitution.

The referendum took place on October 15, 2005. However, the results were delayed until

October 24. The constitution passed in the Shi’a majority governorates and in Kurdistan. In the

Sunni centers of gravity, 97 percent of Anbar’s voters, 82 percent of Salahudine’s voters, and 55 percent of Nineveh votes casted a NO vote for the draft. The voting percentage of Nineveh didn’t reach the two-thirds threshold. The Independent Electoral Commission ruled out accusations of elections fraud and irregularities in Mosul and Kirkuk. Despite the documented irregularities of the process in certain areas and the Sunni veto, the draft constitution was ratified through the

October 15 referendum.

3.3.2.3. A Failed Modus-Vivendi

Reciting and reinstating all the categories of Iraqis that were re-exposed by the CPA and the U.S. army, the preamble of the new Constitution promises Iraqis of a sectarianism-free future

Iraq. Invoking their immanence to the natural history of Iraq, the preamble graphically conjures up Sha‘abaniyya, the marshes, Al-Dujail, Halabcha, Barzan, Anfal, the Fayli Kurds, and Basheer of the Turkmen. It is these categories and this history that the new project of legality has

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activated, and through which the needs, desires and forces of Iraqis have been directed to the future. The Constitution offers one of the most progressive and encompassing bills of rights, even extending the scope of some of these rights to non-Iraqis. Yet the extreme progressiveness of rights and liberties did not make available to Iraqi a say over their design. The crisis of the constitution, despite its progressive bill of rights, spells itself out in Iraq’s fragmented space and acts on the bodies of Iraqis caged behind concrete walls, electronic gates, detained in secret facilities, tortured, killed and disfigured, while their rights were meticulously defined by constitutional experts.

The Constitution is neither a national pack nor a legal framework for reconciliation. In many aspects, it mirrors the terms set forth by the Transitional Law, despite an apparent change in the articulation of its provisions. It promoted a central government within asymmetrical federal democracy. It grants the central government exclusive powers over: foreign affairs, fiscal policy, and defense. However, the central government is doomed as week if not failing due to limitations on its power regarding: taxation, control over Iraq’s natural resource allocation, the capacity of one or more governorates to come together and form a new federal region at any point in the future, threatening the territorial unity of the federation.

From a theoretical and political perspectives, one of the main problematic aspects of the

Constitution is its general laissez-faire stand. In six sections that include 139 articles, the constitution leaves undefined 29 issues of governance. Whereas the deferral of some issues is justified as they are merely technical issues, others form the core of governance and regulate the very exercise of power. They are core requirement to establish a functioning government, to cultivate a sense of nationhood, and to maintain the territorial integrity of Iraq. Some of the

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major issues that the constitution defers to be regulated by future laws, and would consistently recur as destabilizing issues are: the electoral system, powers of Prime Minister within the period of the state of emergency and war, Federation Council formation, conditions and specialization of its membership, the central government relationship with and powers over regions, the ratification of international treaties and agreements, the work of the security institutions and the

National Intelligence Service, the formation of ministries – their tasks, their responsibilities and the authorities of the minister, the military judiciary and the jurisdiction of military courts, the

Central Bank of Iraq, Board of Supreme Audit, Communication and Media Commission, the

Endowment Commissions, the Independent Electoral High Commission, the Commission on

Public Integrity, the executive procedures to form regions, and the status of the capital.

3.4. Conclusion

The institution of de-Ba‘athification emerged as the most influential marker of Baghdad’s legal personality under the occupation. As a prologue for the new Iraqi Constitution, de-

Ba‘athification claimed an institutional space that extended to force changes in Baghdad’s urban space and patterns of sociality. Conceptualized and designed in Washington D.C., and negotiated through an asymmetrical network of forces, it redefined the legal personality of Iraqis in its mundane practices, inscribing a crisis of its production into the psyche of the nation. Politics in the post-invasion Iraq had become identified with, yet defined by de-Ba‘athification, embedded now in the new Iraqi Constitution.

The project of the constitution, the law that produces all other laws, was the second part of the legal sequence. The new Iraqi Constitution stands as a testimony to models in translation.

The constitution-making process exemplifies the levels that can be transgressed for democracy to

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transplant itself by a military occupation. It is the American project’s democracy, which claimed to grasp the concreteness of the nation, concretized its expertise and military might delivering the nation a debris constitution.

In the historical calculus of nations, the constitutional process in sum is an invention and an imagination of a pact where it even does not exist. The projected validity of the constitution – as an ordering mechanism and an actual negotiated formal power – lies in its ability to account for the resistance of real conditions and forces that exist and compete within the spatialized-time it attempts to order and accelerate. Beyond and above national myths, yet derived through knowledge of their history, the constitution must function as intermediate determination between different orders of reality. Only then the constitution can claim itself a power of the future.

Perhaps now it is time to tell that this story is not the story of a constitution made under occupation.

If the wars, with their technological superiority and through the many forms of violence, managed to destruct the Iraqi regime’s political, economic, and legal infrastructure, the

CPA discourse and legal frameworks managed to destruct “Iraqi-ness” as a defining category of the country. Since 1991, the American project in Iraq had attempted at disfiguration of “Iraqi- ness” as a national category to finally break its singularity into fragments, transforming it into a shadow of its former self.

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CHAPTER FOUR: A Nation at War: Disfigured “Iraqi-ness”

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward.

- Riverbendblog, Baghdad Burning, (April 26, 2007) 399

Figure 4: Smoking rises above burning oil field, March 2004 400

399 Baghdad Burning, April 26, 2007, accessed October 20, 2014, http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html.

400 Shawn Baldwin, Burning Oilfields, March 2004. Picture used by special permission.

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According to a study conducted by Rand, most of the attacks performed by the resistance movement during 2003 and 2004 targeted U.S. forces, infrastructure, and Iraqi employees of the coalition.401 An International Crisis Group’s report pointed to the existence of intermittent and isolated events of sectarian tension and violence during that period.402 Other military narratives maintain that it was not until early 2006 that changes in “the operational environment” of

Baghdad began to take place, whereas violence prior to 2006 had mainly targeted coalition convoys, routes, and patrols.403 The Iraq Index study shows that in 2004 and 2005 the number of attacks against U.S. forces intensified drastically with a rise in attacks against Iraqi security forces and civilians. However, the study qualifies that the data for 2006 and 2007, as reflected in

Figure 5, does not separate attacks against Iraqi government officials from attacks against Iraqi civilians.

401 Dobbins et al, Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2009), 91-100.

402 International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict,” Middle East Report 52 (2006): 1.

403 Adrian T. Bogart, “Block by Block: Civic Action in the ,” (Florida: The JSOU Press, 2007), 25-27. Drawing on his service in Baghdad, Bogart maintains that until early 2006, both the local population and all factions of the “insurgent groups” considered the U.S. forces “the predominant target.”

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Figure 5: Initiated attacks against the Coalition and its partners as of April 2007 404

Attacks on Iraqi security forces

Attacks on civilians

Attacks on coalition

It was not until early 2006 that violence in the city became universally described as sectarian violence. Much has been written providing assiduous explanations for the country’s descent into “sectarian violence” and an incipient state of “civil war.” Such narratives emphasized the historical and socio-political roots of sectarian violence in the Ba‘ath regime’s war machine which had brutalized Iraqi culture for decades. The Iraqi state role in intensifying and feeding sectarian identities through its differential treatment towards the Kurds and Shi’a and its persistent oppression of other minorities, it is argued, helped unleash the sectarian divisions that emerged after its disintegration. The lack of post-war planning on the part of the

404 Michael O’Hanlon and Jason Campbell, The Iraqi Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security in Post-Saddam Iraq (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2007).

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U.S. then contributed to the hijacking of the so-called insurgency by radicalized Sunni

Islamist.405

There is a grain of truth in these narratives. However, neither the historical roots of violence nor the lack of post-war planning sufficiently explains the Hobbesian state of affairs that emerged in Iraq after 2003. Iraqi society had coexisted for many decades despite the frequent exploitation of its multiple sectarian identities by the previous regime. These narratives resort to an easy and ready formula that relieves the occupation bureaucracy from its historical and moral responsibility for the crimes committed against Iraqis writ large. The narratives they have produced cannot but retrace the limits of the occupation’s own discourse. In an attempt to avoid its trappings, I opt for an alternative beginning. I interrogate the narratives and procedures of the counterinsurgency campaign in order to trace the institutionalization of its discourse and operations within the reordered space of Iraqi institutions. What follows then is a different set of questions whose answers might guide an interpretation for the violence that annihilated the social space of Baghdad mutating and disfiguring the social identities of Iraqis. How did the counterinsurgency doctrine redefine Baghdad and Iraqi-ness? How did the counterinsurgency discourse transform resistance against the occupation into a horrifying war against Iraqis

405 Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006); Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Amatzia Baram, “Who Are the Insurgents? Iraq’s Sunni Arab Rebels,” USIP Special Report 134 (2004), accessed August 25, 2014, www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr134.html; Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq: Too Uncertain to Call (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 14, 2003); David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess,” New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003; Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Vision of Unity (London: Hurst & CO., 2011); James Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad,” Atlantic Monthly 293 (2004): 52–74; Joshua Hammer, “Tikrit Dispatch: Uncivil Military,” New Republic March 1, 2004; Mona Damluji, ‘“Securing Democracy in Iraq’: Sectarian Politics and Segregation in Baghdad, 2003–2007,” TDSR 11 (2010); Steven Metz, “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” Washington Quarterly 27 (2003); Toby Dodge, Iraq: from War to a New Authoritarianism (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2012); Zuhair al-Jezairy, The Devil You Don’t Know: Going Back to Iraq (London: Saqi, 2009).

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themselves, the authors and victims of which were anonymous except for their officially inscribed sectarian identities?

The previous chapter proposed treating the spaces and operations of the American occupation as elements of a unitary project demonstrating that amongst the project’s main characteristics is its oscillation through a network of humans, things, technologies, and discourses across different time-spaces. It examined the CPA operations that rendered Baghdad’s legal space anew. The CPA’s operations delivered to Iraqis a new legal order and a system of governance based on sectarian and religious identities as a prerequisite for representation in the new constitutional democracy. From May 2003 to June 2004, the new legal order and its attendant system of governance legalized and politicized sectarian identities, a process which was rejected by a majority of the Iraqi population. In the light of this resistance, the post-invasion system of law and order should be understood in its relation to the theories and practices of counterinsurgency that militarized these identities and deployed them in an instantiation of divide and rule. This chapter analyzes this process and the theories and practices of counterinsurgency that generated it.

In what follows, I show how counterinsurgency operations overlapped with and complemented the CPA new legal order as well as how each managed to exploit the emerging political categories and to reintroduce them in the form of a politics of sectarian cleansing. I start with some reflections on the deployment of sectarian terminology. Then, I trace the resulting political ramification of the application of counterinsurgency doctrine to dictate the future of the nation.

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I draw mainly on three U.S. military documents and their applications during the occupation: Tactics in Counterinsurgency: Field Manual – FM 3-24.2 (Tactics in

Counterinsurgency Manual hereafter), the classified Foreign Internal Defense Tactics,

Techniques, and Procedures for Special Forces: Field Manual – FM 31-20-3 (Foreign Defense

Manual hereafter), and Human Terrain Team Handbook (Human Terrain hereafter).406

4.1. Insurgency not Resistance

The term insurgency stands at the beginning of the conceptualization of Iraqi society after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Beginnings, we are told, are important. For a “beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness… It is pragmatic … and it is theoretic.”407 The Tactics in Counterinsurgency’s definition of insurgency

– insomuch as it formed a beginning for a prolonged historical cycle of violence – allows a reflection on the theoretical and pragmatic powers of insurgency as a concept, and the divisive nature of the discourses, institutions, operations, and tactics of counterinsurgency that rose to neutralize and eliminate it. The manual defines ‘insurgency’ thusly: “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict ... The key distinction between an insurgency and other movements is the decision to use

406 See U.S. Headquarters Department of the Army, Tactics in Counterinsurgency: Field Manual, FM 3-24.2 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, April 21, 2009). U.S. Headquarters Department of the Army, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Special Forces: Field Manual, FM 31-20-3 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, December 5, 2003), the original version circulated in 1994, a revised version was reintroduced in 2003 (this is a classified document, copy in possession of the author). Nathan Finney, Human Terrain System: Human Terrain Team Handbook (U.S. Unclassified document, 2008).

It should be noted that due to the public nature of the Tactics in Counterinsurgency, it is more political in that it is restricted in its formulation. The sanitization of the public manual completely fades in the classified version of the Foreign Defense Manual.

407 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xv.

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violence to achieve political goals. An insurgency is typically an internal struggle within a state, not between states. It is normally a protracted political and military struggle designed to weaken the existing government’s power, control, and legitimacy, while increasing the insurgency’s power, control, and legitimacy.”408

To conceptualize the protracted violence of post-invasion Iraq as an insurgency is not simply of theoretical importance but also contains strategic and pragmatic corollaries. From a theoretical perspective, insofar as insurgency is a concept that signals a crisis, it is territorially bounded to the nation-state despite the globalized world in which the concept is deployed. That is, the struggle is not associated with the physical presence of occupying forces but rather with a constituted government challenged and threatened by the orchestrated violence of the insurgents.

Therefore, an affirmation and denial are embedded in this definition. It is an immediate affirmation of the existence of a constituted government entailing the government’s legitimacy and power to make a constitution and therefore to dictate the fundamental norms that organize the powers of the state. It is this constituted government that regulates the juridico-political relationships within the nation. A constituted government with power, control, and legitimacy – as described by the counterinsurgency manual – projects an “image of a sovereign jurisdictional power and an aura of the bounded and secure nation.”409 This definition, however, by affirming the legitimacy of the constituted government, confines the insurgency to the categories of lawlessness and criminality, thus denying Iraqis the right of resistance to elided occupation.

408 Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2, 1-1.

409 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 25.

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In its claims to power – or more accurately through its attempts to contest the existing power matrix – insurgency, as much as it is generated by historical forces, is itself generative.

Tenuous or omnipotent, insurgencies have historically manifested themselves on the ground in the forms of alternative discourses, military and psychological operations, and territorial demarcations. In each of these spaces of action, an insurgency’s capacity to attain and maintain durability, visibility, and audibility signifies its capabilities to challenge or even subvert the singularity and constituent powers of the “legitimate” government. As a manifestation of the crisis, yet contingent on its continuity, insurgency is generative insofar as it becomes the source and condition for accelerated political processes – necessarily militarized and violent discourses and institutions. In its protracted encounter with the constituted government, the insurgency seeks to present itself as a constituent power in the making. As a form of dynamic and productive power, not yet absolute vis-à-vis the state’s power, it lays claims to territories and populations, albeit in a limited manner. It is, necessarily, enframed by counterinsurgency as a network of terror. It places itself above the law, suspending it. “[P]rotect[ing] and punish[ing],” it becomes a new source of law.410 Given the shifting ontology of the crisis, and the intricate nature of power, violence, and legitimacy in Iraq, the insurgency – in its desire to accelerate processes in order to bring itself to a position of equality with the “legitimate government” – is forced to swing between the utopia of liberation and a network of terror.

410 Brown’s treatment of early modern political sovereignty is particularly interesting. She maintains that state sovereignty emerged as a product of early modern religious wars. While it was a reaction against religious authority, it was, nonetheless, an attempt to appropriate that authority. In reproducing God-like characteristics, this power represents itself as “supreme, unified, unaccountable, and generative. It is the source, condition, and protector of civic life and a unique form of power insofar as it brings a new entity into being and sustain control over its creation. It punishes and protects. It is the source of law and above the law.” Brown, Walled States, 58.

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The Iraqi context necessitates an alternative conceptualization of the nature of this protracted violence that repudiates the insurgency discourse altogether. For insurgency, as a crisis of legitimacy and control within the boundaries of the nation, constitutes a beginning that effectively and continuously masks and defers beginnings, or in other words, the occupation.

Once we are confronted with the insurgency – a conceptual framework that necessarily entails a specific pragmatic and political course of action – and faithfully treat it as a foundation and as a beginning of a new historical terrain, the product will be – at best – a disfigured and mutated narrative of the self that internalizes, reproduces, and institutionalizes crisis. Those demarcating and narrating this new historical terrain will have to pass through the maze of counterinsurgency and dig in its narratives to reconstruct a historical narrative of Iraq; however, they might not be able to trace its imprints on the psyche of the Iraqis.

These theoretical reflections are more than conceptual anxieties. Insurgency and counterinsurgency as terms have produced their own discourses through which the struggle over

Iraq has been narrated and framed. In the political space, they emerged as models of political action and military intervention to create law and order drawing boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate forms of power. In the urban space, the struggle against the insurgency translated into distinctive material facts on the ground: checkpoints, guard towers, cordon searches, walls, fences, and other forms of physical barriers – supplemented by aerial forces and surveillance technologies. These material facts transformed Baghdad into a discontinuous, flat, and abstract

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space engendering a new notion of space made visible and transparent. In so doing, they radically altered the psychic landscape of the nation.411

4.2. Insurgency in a Political Perspective

From a political perspective, what does it mean to depict violence in Iraq as an insurgency? What are the implications of representing the violence unleashed by the 2003 war as

“an internal struggle within [the Iraqi] state”? To answer this question, I engage with U.S. counterinsurgency discourse and practices as they were shaped and revised during the occupation of Iraq. I use this militaristic discourse to demonstrate how the interplay of its elements reconstructed Baghdad as a battlespace, legitimate and visible to the constitutive practices of counterinsurgency.

A legitimate battlespace is one in which national forces of a constituted government are fighting lawless insurgents within the territorial space of the nation-state. It is maintained through a myriad of psychological operations to change public perceptions of the conflict itself, improve the image of the national government, and discredit the insurgents. In military speak, these processes are described as “internal defense and development operations” referring to a

“full range of measures taken by [a national government] to promote its growth and protect itself

411 I would like to draw attention here that my account specifically examines the transformation of Baghdad’s urban space. However, very similar and sometime more abrasive urban transformation took place in other major Iraqi cities. For example, Fallujah city – 35 km west of Baghdad – and Al Qaim city – near the Syrian border – were totally walled-in. The U.S. forces constructed a huge sand barrier around the city of Tal Afar. city was walled-in by a 20km long and 4m high sand wall that sealed off the city’s 80,000 inhabitants. and Beiji cities were also foreclosed by different forms of physical barriers. See Haifa Zangana, “Walling in Iraq: The Impact on Baghdadi Women,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 4 (2010): 43.

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from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency.”412 In the struggle against insurgency, the course of action is then twofold. First, the national government is required to mobilize the population and push for their participation in the struggle against the insurgents. Second, an insurgency calls for counterinsurgency activities in which the U.S. Special Forces are covertly involved under the rubric of foreign internal defense operations. According to the classified Foreign Defense

Manual these operations are identified as a “U.S. security assistance” to subdue an insurgency against a friendly government. The Manual further promotes these operations as critical to sustain U.S. national interests abroad.413

The success of foreign internal defense operations, the Foreign Defense Manual maintains, is contingent on two factors. First, Special Forces should develop an understanding of the fluid and unstructured operational environment of the host government and the insurgency.

Second, these Forces should act to ensure the legitimacy and credibility of the host government through sustained control over psychological effects. Public relations campaigns, combat operations, and civic action programs are categorized as the most common examples that achieve desired psychological effects.414 Effectiveness of these operations, to a great extent, relies on the

Special Forces’ capacity to perform an indirect application of military capabilities through the active and continuous inclusion of the host government forces in its operations.

412 The above definition is extracted from Foreign Defense, FM 31-20-3, 1-2. The following analysis relies heavily on this Manual as well.

413 Ibid., 1-2

414 Ibid., 1-4/5.

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Under the rubric of indirect application of military capabilities, the primary role of these

Special Forces “is to advise, train, and help Host Nation forces” in order for national forces

(existing military personnel, new military personnel, regular forces, paramilitary and police forces) to assume authority and responsibility over the success or failure of counterinsurgency operations.415

The most important element this Manual introduces is what it terms Civilian Self-

Defense Forces program. This program is “designed primarily as a denial operation rather than as a populace-control method or offensive counterinsurgency program, although the latter are incorporated into the overall concept.” Applicable to villages and small urban areas, 416 the program actively seeks to involve the population and transform these areas into a barrier to the insurgents isolating them from their source of support - the populace. By incorporating these areas under the protection of the government, the program turns into a very “effective tool” in countering the insurgency in exchange for their cooperation and other political incentives.417

What is the effectiveness of this program then? The Manual illustrates that the willingness of an area such as a village or segment of the population to accept the clandestine civilian self-defense program, knowing they will go unpunished, leaves the insurgents with no choice but to attack the area in an attempt to deter others from exercising the same option. This,

415 Ibid., 3-1, 3-15, 1-24. The Manual states that in unconventional Warfare, U.S. forces “foster and/or support insurgencies against an established government,” through a variety of law visible, covert, and clandestine operations.

416 The idea behind rural areas is that clustering the population into smaller groups makes the concept of defense applicable to the very existence of that group, rather than defending and dying for the national government.

417 Ibid., D-1.

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consequently, will reverse the insurgents’ strategy by forcing them “to cross a critical threshold – that of attacking and killing the very class of people they are supposed to be liberating.” The psychological effectiveness of this program is its capacity to reverse the image of the government as a repressor.418 Conversely, once it is put to practice and the insurgents are blamed for “indiscriminately” targeting the civilian population, the political effectiveness of these operations grants legitimacy to military operations against the insurgents.419

A visible battlespace is transparent and coordinated. Both the Tactics in

Counterinsurgency Manual and the Foreign Defense Manual describe a transparent space as a mapped and divided space420 made visible through “electronic warfare surveillance” capabilities such as high-altitude drones, radar, remotely monitored sensors and other technical surveillance systems.421 Equally important, it is a space in which U.S. and national combat forces, regular as

418 Ibid., D-1-4. Volunteers for this program are designated to “construct defenses, emplace booby traps or warning devices, perform messenger duties, collect intelligence, and provide medical aid.” In return, the national government provides them with certain benefits such as priority of hire. In El Salvador, for example, volunteers were given a U.S.-funded life insurance policy with the wife or next of kin as the beneficiary.

419 Ibid., 1-9.

420 Ibid., B-5. The Manual describes a map-generating program that is capable of generating multi-usage maps. Through recoding large amounts of information, these programs can produce annotated maps such as: the incident map, the insurgent situation map (SITMAP), the trap map, and personalities and contact maps.

421 Ibid., 3-15 and B-6. According to the Manual, prisoners’ interrogations are labeled as another means of securing the battlespace, another means of gathering intelligence and obtaining information on the operational environment. Since most detainees can’t read military maps, the interrogator should ask the detainee to sketch his/her journey – in terms of movements, direction from the base camp to the point where he/she was captured – and to identify significant terrain features he/she saw on each day of his journey (rivers, open areas, hills, rice paddies and swamps).

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well as clandestine, coordinate and use their human intelligence. In this space of “constructed visibility” emerges what Derek Gregory calls “a new ecology of reporting.”422

4.3. Institutionalized Violence of Counterinsurgency and the Fetish for Legitimacy

Your company has just been warned for deployment on counterinsurgency operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. You have read David Galula, T.E. Lawrence and Robert Thompson. You have studied FM 3-24 and now understand the history, philosophy and theory of counterinsurgency. You watched Black Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers, and you know this will be the most difficult challenge of your life.

- David Kilcullen, Excerpts from Twenty-Eight Articles (2006)423

As early as September 2003, evidence suggested the emergence of a more coherent and organized resistance movement in Baghdad and the provinces. Despite the difficulties in tracing a coherent nationalist discourse of the resistance, scattered resistance groups both Sunnis and

Shi’as expressed their commitment to liberate Iraq from its current occupiers 424 through intensified attacks against U.S. forces to make “losses in personal and equipment great enough to

422 See Derek Gregory, “Seeing Red: Baghdad and the Event-ful City,” (lecture presented at the Critical Geopolitics conference, Durham, September 2008), 26. For more on the concept of “constructed visibility,” see John Rajchman, Philosophical Events: Essays of the 80s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

423 David Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars 1 (2006).

424 See Zaki Chehab, Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006); Hasim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency, 13-14. See also Bogart, “Block by Block,” 25; Donald P. Wright and Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008), 104; Tareq Y. Ismael and Max Fuller, “The Disintegration of Iraq: the Manufacturing and Politicization of Sectarianism,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 3 (2008); Zangana, “Walling in Iraq.”

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force a withdrawal.”425 In the “Battle for Baghdad,” the center of gravity for both American forces and resistance groups, U.S. military forces “were still in a siege … [the resistance] had laid in a counter siege and any civic actions were vulnerable to attack.”426 There was a growing realization of the emerging power of the resistance movement in the CPA and among senior

American policymakers which were reinforced by the growing dissatisfaction of Baghdadi’s with and anger at the CPA policies and the U.S. forces rampant killing and humiliation of civilians. It also became clear that the U.S. military was incapable of defeating this insurgency on its own.

This failure, according to the military narrative, was explained by a training gap. U.S. forces had only been trained to conduct full-spectrum dominance operations. They had neither the experience nor the training to conduct guerrilla warfare or the type of complex operations necessary to defeat the insurgency (the exception being the U.S. Special Forces). The eruption of the resistance, therefore, uncovered the U.S. forces’ vulnerability in a non-virtualized and non- simulated battlespace and necessitated a rethink of the conduct of war through serious and engaging revisions of counterinsurgency strategies and tactics.

The all-powerful and expansive norm that began to dominate military thinking and planning by the end of 2003 early 2004 was: a culture-centric warfare, a mixture of military operations and political action (20 and 80 percent respectively) designed to win the “hearts and minds” of the population, as well as battles. Failing to “fix and defeat” the insurgency by the end of 2003, military planners and strategists were under pressure to develop a better understanding

425 Bogart, “Block by Block,” 26.

426 Ibid., 10.

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of the “Iraqi threat.”427 Guided by previous theories of counterinsurgency, experts began to revise and re-appropriate U.S. Army counterinsurgency strategies and tactics.428 The aim was to produce a culture-centric counterinsurgency campaign that would comprehensively engage the

Iraqi insurgency. There was an agreement among culture-centric warfare advocates for the need to initiate a comprehensive and simultaneous political, economic, social, and military campaign to nurture the legitimacy of the occupation and its institutions.429

In what called a “population-centric” approach of counterinsurgency, the population resists too. To neutralize the population, combat units require the expertise of cultural anthropologists and social scientist to fill the military cultural gap. To that end, a program of embedded anthropologists and social scientists – renowned as the Human Terrain System (HTS)

– was reintroduced.430 The aim of the program is to assist “planning consideration for every

427 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 114-115.

428 Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2, 3-10. As its references, the Manual lists three historical cases of “counterinsurgency” and their principles for successful counterinsurgency operations: Robert Thompson’s principles based the case of Malaya, David Galula and Roger Trinquier’s doctrine based on their involvement in Algeria, Charles Callwell’s principles for counterinsurgency based on his involvement in many wars of the British Empire.

429 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 116.

430 The integration of anthropology and social sciences and other branches of knowledge into the projects of Empires – American and otherwise, e.g. British and French, is anything but new. This intimate relationship between imperial projects and colonial conquests on the one hand and hard and social science on the other has a long genealogy. Suffice it to refer here to the role of two main anthropologist: Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict during the WWII. This however, amplifies, once again, the moral and ethical dilemmas of social science as complicit enablers of endless colonial regular and irregular wars, the enterprises of genocides, ethnic and sectarian cleansing and mass population displacements … etc. Due to time-space constrains, I will not engage in a lengthy discussion about the U.S. military (and their private military contractors) deployment of social sciences in the current war on Iraq, although this topic deserves a further investigation. Military journals, the Pentagon’s Minerva research initiative (a ghost of Project Themis – a DOD project that aimed to mobilize academic institutions in support of the Cold War), research and think tank institutions, conferences’ publications, and personal blogs – e.g. Minerva, Military Review, Small Wars Journal, Joint Publication, U.S. Army War College, Multi-National Force Official Website, Institute for Defense Analyses, Parameters, Stars and Stripes, Foreign Policy, Montgomery McFate’s official Website, Human Terrain System, Army’s Official Website, among others – have become saturated with military anthropological analyses and studies that 215

operation,”431 support field commanders by filling their cultural and knowledge gap about the local operating environment, and provide a coherent analysis of the local population. Integrated and deployed within individual units, Human Terrain Teams conduct unclassified, open-source field research and provide operationally-relevant human terrain information in support of the planning, preparation, execution, and assessment of operations. The teams’ objective is to provide commanders information about the host nation’s social groups, interests, beliefs, leaders, and the drivers of individual and group behavior necessary to conduct effective counterinsurgency operations.432

promote the role of social science in winning the battlespace; the importance of understanding the cultural, social, economic, political, and psychological landscape of the enemy in order to pacify the population as an essential base and network for insurgents; and the need to “integrate the local populace” in the civil aspect of full spectrum operations.

The argument has been made by a number of studies that critically examined the topic and raised many ethical and moral concerns about the deployment of anthropologists in the context of War on Terror. Some examples, not a comprehensive list: Ann Laura Stoler with David Bond, “Refractions off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times,” Radical History Review 95 (2006); George. R. Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (Maryland: Littlefield Publishing group, 2009); Maximilian Forte’s articles, “Militarizing Anthropology, Researching for Empire,” Culture 2 (2009); “‘Useless Anthropology’: Strategies for Dealing with the Militarization of the Academy,” Zero Anthropology (2009); “(Re)Imperializing Anthropology and Decolonizing Knowledge Production,” Zero Anthropology (2009); Nicola Perugini, “Anthropologists at War: Ethnographic Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan,” International Political Anthropology 1 (2008).

431 A statement by Peter Chiarelli, Commanding General, Multi-National Corps-Iraq, 2006–2007, quoted in Nathan Finney, The Human Terrain Team Handbook (U.S. UNCLASSIFIED, 2008), 1.

432 Within their designated units, Human Terrain Teams gather information through a deployment of classic anthropological and sociological research methods such as: “semi-structured and open-ended interviews, polling and surveys, text analysis, and participant observation.” Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are used, based on the research requirements. They, then, transform the acquired information into an operationally-relevant data. At a final stage, they provide an analytical framework from a cultural perspective to help guide planning, decision making and assessment. Finney, The Human Terrain Team Handbook, 1-4. See David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, October 5, 2007, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

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The U.S. forces’ inability to defeat the resistance or reduce the number of attacks in 2003 and early 2004 yielded an infinite fetishism for a well-articulated counterinsurgency doctrine among military circles. Such a doctrine would not only dislocate the occupation’s legitimacy crisis but also render it invisible. In order for this to succeed, legitimate Iraqi security forces representing the constituted government of Iraq had to play a critical and immediate role in engaging the threat of the insurgency by claiming the role of enforcer of law and order. This national face, it was argued, would grant counterinsurgency operations the required legitimacy.

Training, advising, building, and employing Iraqi security forces thus became a critical element for the success of counterinsurgency operations, as well as part of the planning for a full spectrum campaign.

The enframing of Baghdad as an insurgent space marked the very moment in which this discourse ceased to be a theory of fighting the enemy and instead a complex and byzantine set of overt and covert military institutions and processes to consummate a full spectrum campaign in

Iraq with Baghdad as its center of gravity.

The process of creating the new Iraqi security forces was nothing short of competition among different parties (the CPA, the U.S. Military, and the IGC), to say the least. It implied not only a radical restructuration of these forces’ sectarian composition and culture but also an establishment of new forms of legality to be vested in these forces. Participation in this critical process was pivotal to all involved political actors – Americans and Iraqis alike – in order to maintain control over the future course of the country by creating allegiances within the new army units. Because of this fact, the story of creating and institutionalizing the Iraqi security forces, as much as the rest of Iraq’s story, has been narrated and historicized by personal memoirs, and by the U.S. Army’s highly sanitized public documents. Since the publication of the 217

U.S. Army’s Tactics in Counterinsurgency manual, counterinsurgency discourse has promoted

America’s way of fighting insurgents in Iraq. Its practices and tactics, including civic action programs and the establishment of the Iraqi Armed forces, have brought the object of the

“population” back to the battlefield, redefined as an integral element to the success of counterinsurgency. Unlike the preceding network-centric revolution, this is a “population- centric” warfare that reintroduces the human community to combat after it had been actively pushed beyond the bounds of warfare. Severely caught in its obsessive desire to restore a

“controlled, fixed, and secured” populace, the narrative of counterinsurgency in Iraq is a denial of violence by the very choice of its descriptive language. It is a “violence that speaks … trying to be right: it is a violence that places itself in the orbit of reason,” and thus it continually

“negate[s] itself as a violence.” 433 It is through this language that acculturation of and normalization through the excessive use of violence becomes possible. What follows then is not a war of occupation but counterinsurgency.

433 Ricoeur, “Violence and Language,” 32-33. My project is not intended as an analysis of counterinsurgency discourse; however, it is striking how heavily this discourse relies on medical lexicon and technical terms. A counterinsurgent diagnoses the problem; he is described as “a surgeon cutting out the cancers while keeping the vital organs intact.” Acts of killing are, thus, twisted as “surgical elimination” and “surgical strikes” that require high levels of “precision.” See David Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company- level Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars Journal, March 29, 2006, 2; David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgencies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1; Conrad Crane, Jan Horvath, and John Nagl, “Principles, Imperatives and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, March-April, 2006, 50; Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2, 5-31.

In an interesting twist, Susan Sontag inverses this logic. She maintains that the controlling metaphors describing diseases such as cancer are drawn from the language of warfare. As such, there is a need to obliterate “invasive” cancer cells that colonize from the original tumor to far sites in the body. Cancer, for example, has been equated with death. Severe measures seem justifiable to not manage or treat this disease; but to attack it. The deployment of medical metaphors in the political realm – i.e. to describe a phenomenon as a cancer – is an incitement to violence. It is a mere justification for the use of severe measures. See Susan Sontag, Illness as metaphor and AIDS and Its metaphors (New York: Picador, 1989).

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The relationship between violence and discourse is one not marked by anxiety but rather by the intimacy between the two realms. The intertwinement of both unfolds through the multiple intermediaries between violence and discourse. This intimacy between violence, in its capacity to “exploit a single narrative,”434 and discourse, in its capacity to displace violence from its own realm into other realms, is a prerequisite for constructing a historical narrative inhabited by an abundant yet invisible and anonymous death. To escape entrapment in this discourse of denial, on occasions, I intervene. It seems to me that permitting this intervention, is an act of violence against a violent narrative. On others, I rely on other accounts, as much as I can, to provide an alternative narratives insofar as I trace and verify them. In so doing, I show how counterinsurgency doctrine, tactics, and its attendant institutions constructed, trained, and supervised Iraqi national security apparatuses that have turned Iraq into a space of unruly political pathologies.

In May 2003, as the Presidential envoy, Paul Bremer assumed responsibility for building and training the Iraqi army, police, and security services. He assigned Walter Slocombe,435 the

CPA senior security advisor, and Bernard Kerik,436 a former chief of the New York Police

434 Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles,” 7.

435 See Wright and Reese, On Point II, 430. In addition to his advisory role to the CPA, Slocombe became responsible for the creation of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and its new armed forces. Additionally, he coordinated with Bernard Kerik the establishment of the and intelligence sectors, under the provision of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

436 The story of Bernard Kerik is particularly an ambiguous one. He remained in Iraq only for few months until he was replaced by Steven Casteel to supervise Iraqi police program in September 2003. Kerik, as many Americans who went to liberate Iraq, had no experience in or about Iraq. According to an interview with the New York Times, he was reported saying that in the very little time he was given before leaving to Baghdad, he partially prepared for his assignment “by watching A&E Network documentaries on Saddam Hussein.” See Michael Moss and David Rohde, “Law and Disorder: Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police,” New York Times, May 21, 2006, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/world/middleeast/21security.html?pagewanted=print.

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Department under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, to oversee the building of Iraqi security services under what would become two distinct institutions. The first command was the Coalition

Military Assistance Training Team [CMATT], led by Major General Paul Eaton. It took the responsibility of forming, training, and advising the new Iraqi army. The second was the

Coalition Police Assistance Training Team [CPATT], supervised by Kerik, to build and train

Iraq’s police forces.

The training and incorporation of Iraqi forces became a priority for the Department of

Defense due to the urgent need for a national face to lead off counterinsurgency operations.

Reports spoke of approximately 500 attacks against U.S. forces in August 2003, tripling in

December 2004 to 1500 attacks. Dissatisfied by the slow pace of the Iraqi army’s training and alarmed by the growing momentum of the insurgency, Rumsfeld expanded Iraq’s armed force on

September 5, 2003, two years earlier than what was originally planned.437 In addition to the 27 battalions and three divisions of the New Iraqi Army required by the original plan, Rumsfeld mandated the creation of two additional Iraqi military units: an Iraqi Coastal Defense Force for river and coastal patrolling and an Iraqi Air Force initially equipped with eight C-130 transport aircraft and 12 UH-1 “Huey” helicopters.438

According his website and other several sources, Kerik, dubbed himself “the interim minister of interior.” The interesting part of Kerik’s C.V. is that was assigned to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration fighting the Cali Cartel, and was a potential node of the network that created death squads within the Iraqi police forces. See Bernard Kerik website: http://www.thekerikgroup.com/speaking.html. See Michel Chossudovsky, “Terrorism with a ‘Human Face’: The History of America’s Death Squads,” Global Research, September 6, 2014, accessed November 11, 2014, http://www.globalresearch.ca/terrorism-with-a-human-face-the-history-of- americas-death-squads/5317564. Kerik was called by British police advisors as “the terminator of Baghdad.” See Sidney Blumenthal, “The Terminator of Baghdad,” Salon, December 9, 2004, accessed November 11, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2004/12/09/kerik_6/. See also, Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 80.

437 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 122.

438 Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2009), 63-6; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 430. 220

By November 2003, clear contours of the new counterinsurgency strategy, as theorized later by both the Tactics in Counterinsurgency Manual and Foreign Defense Manual, began to take shape through the establishment and deployment of the new Iraqi security forces. The CPA refurbished police academies in Baghdad and Basra and equipped 26 police stations in Baghdad to help maintain law and order.439 Equally important, the Combined Joint Special Operations

Task Force, Arabian Peninsula – under the command of Combined 7 – began training the 36th Iraqi Commando Battalion to become the backbone of Iraqi Special Forces.

Three more U.S. Army Special Forces Operational Detachments were assigned to train an additional three Iraqi battalions to join U.S. forces in security operations.440

From mid-2003 to mid-2004, the CPA failed to centralize the process of building Iraq’s security forces under its two command units – the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team

[CMATT] and the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team [CPATT]. Other institutions then became involved in the process. For example, the Ministry of Interior controlled three other security organizations: the Facilities Protection Service, the Iraqi Highway Patrol, and the

Department of Border Enforcement.441 The Ministry of Defense commanded conventional Iraqi

439 See Executive Office of the President, “Pursuant to Section 1506 of the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2003 (Public Law 108-11),” (Washington, D.C.: Report to Congress, 2003).” According the New York Times, by 2006 fewer than half of the 1,000 police stations in Iraq that the CPA made ready for training were under its control. See Michael Moss and David Rohde, “Law and Disorder,” New York Times, May 21, 2006.

440 The first Iraqi battalion was deployed along the 4th Infantry Division, operating in central Iraq; the second Iraqi battalion was employed with 1st Armored Division in Taji area; while the third battalion was deployed with the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul. See Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 65; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 430.

441 Before leaving Baghdad, Garner – according to some resources – was able to persuade Bremer to take the Ministry of Interior off the list of disbanded entities as per the CPA Order Number 2, “Dissolution of Entities,” May 23, 2003. See Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 195; Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 56; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 430.

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Armed Forces. By mid-2004, other Iraqi military units - Iraqi Intervention Force, and the counterterrorism unit, known as the Iraqi Special Operations Forces Brigade - had been formed: which reported to the Defense Ministry independently of the Iraqi Army. Additionally, Kurd and

Shi’a parties refused in many cases to integrate their own militias into the formal security forces.442

The establishment of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps [ICDC] was particularly interesting and controversial. On September 3, 2003, Bremer issued CPA Order no. 28, which established a paramilitary organization called the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. It was created as a temporary institution to help address immediate security issues in the face of the growing insurgency. While this paramilitary would theoretically complement both the Iraqi police force and the new Iraqi army, it was granted an independent status neither subject to the control of the police force nor to the orders of the Iraqi army’s chain of command. It was placed under the direct authority of the

CPA administrator or his designee.443 However, it is not clear whether these paramilitary units were established after the issuance of Order no. 28, or the Order itself came as a result of a process initiated by individual U.S. Army units which had already begun forming and training their own Iraqi paramilitary units after receiving a direct order from General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-7, in violation of the CPA authority over the establishment of new Iraqi forces.

The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps program expanded in early 2004 to cover the 18 Iraqi provinces after the issuance of Order no. 28. By the end of the year, the program mushroomed to

442 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 431-433.

443 Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 28, “Establishment of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps,” September 3, 2003, accessed October 2, 2014, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030903_CPAORD_28_Est_of_the_Iraqi_Civil_Defense_Corps.pdf.

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comprise 60 battalions and was redesignated the Iraqi National Guard in 2004. The CPA and the

American military viewed this program as a legitimacy generator describing it as the Iraqi face of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency operations.444

Despite the establishment of the new Iraqi security forces, the creation of numerous training programs (police-training programs and army-training programs), and the partial deployment of these forces in military operations against the insurgency, many viewed the CPA efforts as a failure following multiple desertions in the midst of battle. These critics gave several reasons.445 According to an evaluation by CPA’s training teams, these security forces needed to be reconstituted in order to render them efficient and accountable.446 Additionally, the Combined

Joint Task Force-7 had originally wanted to take over responsibility of forming and training the new Iraqi army. However, Bremer assumed this responsibility. This created some tension between the CPA and the Combined Joint Task Force-7 over the scope and the provision of training programs, resulting in the CPA’s failure to meet the emerging security challenges. This situation was not solved until Rumsfeld ordered a transfer of these training programs to the U.S.

444 Following the CPA Order Number 22: “Creation of a New Iraqi Army,” of August 18, 2003, training of the new army was conducted at three fronts: first Slocombe and Kerik’s training programs that represented and reflected the CPA’s vision of the new army. Second, the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team (CMATT), headed by Major General Paul Eaton, who also provided help for the CPA security advisor. Third, the training conducted by the Vinnell Corporation’s team of military contractors who arrived in Iraq late 2003. The team provided planners, operation officers, unit trains, and translators. Other private security companies such as Blackwater and DynCorp International soon started to contract their security services in terms of training, convoy security, and protective security. See Andrew Rathmell et al., Developing Iraq’s Security Sector: The Coalition Provisional Authority’s Experience (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2005), 38; Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 62-4; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 430.

445 Some of these battalions refused to fight during the first assault on Fallujah, the so-called Operation Vigilant Resolve. Again, during Al-Sadr revolt, over 1,000 of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps at and an- had deserted. See Kenneth W. Estes, U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq 2003-2006 (Virginia: United States Marine Corps Quantico, 2009), 46; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 449.

446 Rathmell et al., Developing Iraq’s Security Sector, 45.

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military. 447 Also, the CPA advocated the view that the former regime’s army should by reintegrated slowly into the new army. This proposition, however, became a source of fierce disagreement between the CPA and the IGC, as the later viewed these forces as the previous regime’s instrument of repression and thus responsible for many crimes against the Iraqi population.448

After the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim Government on June 30, 2004, the institutionalization of the Iraqi security forces underwent major structural changes. The departure of Bremer and the assignment of John Negroponte as the first American ambassador to the Iraqi

Interim Government marked another even more radical shift in the formation of both Iraq’s

Security Forces and its internal politics. Baghdad became a theater for major political transformations. The occupation was consolidated and transformed into a “diplomatic representation” intervening into the politics of the new Iraqi state from its lavish compound on the banks of the . At the same time, the Interim Iraqi Government theoretically assumed its

“sovereign powers.” Despite the many critiques against the CPA’s security building and training programs, the Iraqi national forces emerged as the strongest institution in the new Iraq.

447 Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 62.

448 Statements – and even demonstrations – against the reintegration of former regime officers were made by Shi’a and Kurdish leaders alike. For example, in the context of establishing a special army brigade under the command of the disbanded Ba‘athist Major General Jassim Muhammad Saleh Al-Muhammad, in Fallujah, Ahmad Chalabi’s newspaper Al-Mutamar reported him stating that “the terrorists in Fallujah are enjoying themselves, sending one car bomb after another.” Al-Mu'tamar (Iraq), May 19, 2004.

Another public statement by the Islamic Da‘wa Party rejected this move in order to prevent any return of the circle of violence. Al-Bayan (Baghdad), April 29, 2004. Muqtada Al-Sadr was reported to make a strong public statement against this policy of reinstatement in his Friday sermon. Al-Quds Al-Arabi (London), April 30, 2004. Meanwhile, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq organized demonstration against the CPA’s reinstatement of previous Ba‘athist officers. See Nimrod Raphaeli, “The De-Ba’thification of Iraq-Pros and Cons,” The Middle East Media Research Institute 176 (2004).

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In the shadow of the “Sovereign Iraqi Interim Government” from America’s fortress embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone, Negroponte – with DOD support – began restructuring both the U.S. military strategy in Iraq and the Iraqi security forces. To that end, a major reassessment of military and police training programs were performed by the new Multi-National Force–Iraq

[MNF-I], designated as the senior military headquarters under the command of General George

Casey. This unit took over planning and the conduct of operations against the insurgency.

Another major change was the creation of the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq

[MNSTC-I], under the command of lieutenant General David Petraeus, who refocused military and police training programs on practical survival skills, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency techniques. Under Petraeus’ command, the Multi-National Security Transition

Command-Iraq managed to centralize the arming, training, and advising efforts – with a special attention given to increase the capabilities of Iraqi Special Forces.449 The new American teams – diplomatic and military – were preparing for the future make-up of Baghdad. Thirty days after the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis, General Casey declared a new campaign to subject Iraq to

“full spectrum counterinsurgency operations.” From that point on, Casey began a two-tier process of coordinating and synchronizing civil and military counterinsurgency operations. Civic

449 Petraeus hailed by many as the man who changed the American military thinking about insurgency. By developing his population-centric approach, it is claimed, he “succeeded” in subduing and stabilizing the surge by the end of 2007. Based on his experience in Baghdad and Mosul, with the help of the team he recruited headed by the military historian Conrad Crane, a former West Point classmate, a draft of the counterinsurgency doctrine was prepared. John Nagl, a Rhodes Scholar with a Ph.D. from Oxford was appointed as the lead editor of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual. Others like: Montgomery McFate, a Ph.D. from Yale University (notorious for a dissertation that raised the question: does good anthropology contribute to better killing? Quoted in Zero Anthropology and Counterpunch); and David Kilcullen, a Ph.D. from the University of the New South Wales (described as the one of the main designers of the new U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine) were very influential in shaping the contours of the culture-centric or population-centric warfare.

To better understand his situational environment, Petraeus also employed Arabic speaking advisors in his team, such as Emma Sky. See Peter Bergen, “How Petraeus Changed the U.S. Military,” CNN, November 11, 2012, accessed November 11, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/10/opinion/bergen-petraeus-legacy/.

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programs were coordinated with the Iraqi Government and Negroponte. Military operations required coordination among the three leading military units: the Multi-National Force–Iraq

[MNF-I], the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq [MNSTC-I], and the U.S. Army

Corps of Engineer’s Gulf Region Division.450

2003 witnessed a subtle manifestation of counterinsurgency doctrine on the ground but by 2004 a thorough implementation of “Clear, hold, and build” operations had started to drastically reorganize Baghdad’s social fabrics and urban space through overt and covert military operations. After the fall of Baghdad, throughout 2003 and early 2004, “enabling operations” were the most commonly performed operations. On almost daily basis, units conducted counter- improvised explosive device [IED] and counter-mortar operations.451 In addition to hundreds of daily small-scale operations across the country, several major combat operations were launched by U.S. forces across Iraq in 2003. The most important of these operations were Operation

Peninsula Strike (May and June 2003), 452 Operation Desert Scorpion (June2003), 453 and

Operation Soda Mountain (July2003). 454 However, between June 2003 and March 2004, an

450 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 42.

451 In May 2003 the average IED daily attacks was 20. In April 2004, it was between 40 and 60. The normal daily IED attacks in Baghdad was 10. In response, the 1st Armored Division, operating in Baghdad, began more aggressive patrolling to keep routes clear. Intelligence collection, route reconnaissance, route sweeping to include trash removal, information operations, traffic control points and snipers become common counter IED operations. On the other hand, imagery intelligence, UAVs, human intelligence, and analysis comprised counter-mortar operations. See Wright and Reese, On Point II, 315-317.

452 Ibid., 318. Cordon and Search operations targeted the Sunni triangle, but excluded Baghdad city. Following this operation military units began to deploy “sensitive site exploitation teams” that consisted of: military intelligence, Soldiers, and other specialists in order “to exploit the documents and other materials found during these missions.” Around 400 Iraqi men were captured, large caches of small arms weapons and ammunition had seized.

453 Ibid. The operation was conducted simultaneously throughout much of Iraq, including Baghdad. Raids, cordon and search operations resulted in the detention of hundreds of Iraqis.

454 Simulating Operation Desert Scorpion, it was conducted throughout Iraq, including Baghdad. 226

additional 11 major operations were launched by the 1st Armored Division [1st AD] in Baghdad alone, in which the division conducted raids, cordon and searches, and other offensive-oriented operations.455

How then could counterinsurgency eliminate the threat in Baghdad? A U.S. military unit concluded its briefing about the Iraqi threat with this statement: “Defeating [the Iraqi] threat requires precision. There is no ‘template’ that fits over the 88 neighborhoods of Baghdad.”456 It needed to be cleared of the insurgents. For, to secure Baghdad was to secure the nation and build democracy. Raymond Odierno, the commanding General of the 4th Infantry Division, had meticulously described the plan for Baghdad:457

[T]o create stability and security to protect the Iraqi people, first and foremost in Baghdad. The population and the government of Iraq are the center of gravity. Creating a stable environment in Baghdad should provide time and space for the Iraqi government to continue to mature as a government and continue to build its capacity.

One of the major operations that targeted the city, in order “to protect the Iraqi people …

[and to create] a stable environment in Baghdad” was Operation Iron Hammer in November

2003. Ground troops, the U.S. Air Force, and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps attacked suspect sites used by insurgents. The army narrative describes a two-stage operation. The first stage was intelligence gathering and deployment of aerial and ground reconnaissance. The second stage featured aerial bombardment, destruction of buildings, cordon and searches, and detention of many Iraqis, who were described as insurgents or suspected insurgents. Unlike previous

455 Ibid., 314.

456 Ibid., 115.

457 Raymond Odierno, quoted in Kimberly Kagan, The Surge: A Military History (New York: Encounter Books, 2009), 1982.

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operations, Iron Hammer featured two new elements: the participation of Iraqi Civil Defense

Corps and the introduction of concrete walls to the battlespace, one of the new technologies deployed along the perimeters of the operation. “We are putting up the cement T-barriers between the road and the river tonight,”…“a very high, very thick wall.”458 These barriers were introduced following previous military assessments that concluded that the U.S. forces needed to diversify its military strategies to secure neighborhoods against the “ethnic, religious, tribal and economic differences among those neighborhoods.” 459A parallel Iraqi narrative of the same operation denied the existence of any use of the area by insurgents for mortar and rocket launching. Further, reporters were led to a farm in the vicinity of the operation to show that the operation, like many others, targeted humans, animals, and their living environment.

458 See Jen Banbury, “Operation Iron Hammer: Make Noise, Kill Cows.” Salon, November 21, 2003, accessed November 12, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2003/11/21/baghdad_diary_2/.

459 In news briefing on Operation Iron Hammer, General Martin Dempsey stated that through gathering intelligence and deploying reconnaissance, the military identified six of Baghdad’s 88 neighborhoods to be “less secure than we want them to be.” See John D. Banusiewicz, “Enemy Attacks Drop 70 Percent since Iron Hammer’s Start,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 20, 2003, accessed November 12, 2014, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=27746.

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Figure 6: Blast walls, Balad Airbase, March 2011 460

In April 2004, while the CPA was busy preparing the handover of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, Baghdad had become a theater for the “clear” phase of counterinsurgency doctrine. The , synchronized with other resistance groups, had brought the American occupation to the edge of failure. Resistance operations had become barriers to the mundane occupation operations in “controlling” violence and establishing “law and order” thus challenging the perceived superiority of the U.S. Army. At a conceptual level, the resistance intensified the occupation’s crisis of legitimacy interrupting its progress. In order to achieve law and order, secure the population, eliminate insurgents, and proceed with the political project of designing the new Iraqi government and securing the 2005 elections,

460 Shawn Baldwin, Protection Blast Walls, March 2011. Picture used by special permission.

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counterinsurgency forces manufactured a set of operations referred to as the Extension

Campaign. Most probably, the Extension Campaign stands as the most performative and expansive campaign of 2004. It started in Baghdad and expanded out.461

After initial military confrontations with the U.S. forces and as-Sadr’s call for resistance and civil disobedience in his official newspaper al-Hawza and Friday prayers, the CPA arrested one of his senior aides and shut down his newspaper. In reaction, his followers embarked on an uprising against the American occupation. The initial CPA and U.S. operations to regain control over in Baghdad resulted in the killing of 7 American soldiers by as-Sadr’s Mahdi

Army. The resistance expanded its attacks to target Iraqi government buildings and police stations that were viewed as an integral part to the occupation. In response, the 1st Armored

Division and the nascent Iraqi Security Forces mounted large offensives against as-Sadr’s Mahdi

Army. The campaign swept through Baghdad to the cities of An-, Karbala, An-Najaf,

Kufa, and Al- and continued through April and May 2004 to eliminate the Sadr resistance movement and deter further resistance in other possible flashpoints. Soldiers and equipment had been redeployed from Germany and Iraq in anticipation of a long battle extending over four months.

The Extension Campaign was the most mature exemplification of a techno-political campaign bringing together a network of humans, ideas, discourses, strategies, and technologies.

All manifested in particular concurrent operations that ranged from combat operations, information operations, the reestablishment of the Iraqi Security Forces, to stability and reconstruction operations. Soldiers began marching through the urban space of Baghdad

461 The Extension Campaign plan started with Operation Iron Sabre performed by the 1st Armored Division and expanded to include other military division under the name Resolute Sword.

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empowered by advanced military technologies allowing them to reconstruct its neighborhoods through checkpoints, physical barriers, destroyed bridges, and population displacement and thus reconfiguring its social structure. They were performing the first full spectrum counterinsurgency campaign, a model that military architects had spent years theorizing on paper and experimenting within simulated exercises.

The Extension Campaign, as conducted in Baghdad and other locations of the operation, put to practice a model of action for future operations. It was marked by an excessive use of military force performed through deploying a range of technologies, munitions, and tactics on the ground and from the air such as: Insertion (by airborne, air assaults, raids at an unexpected time/place, and snipers), full closure on the targeted neighborhoods/cities through sealing off techniques (outer cordon and search, curfews, checkpoints and roadblocks, closing of highways, aerial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), hardening (sandbags, concrete slabs, earthen barricades, and razor wire), and assault the objective (through quick, violent, precise, and audacious actions).

The violence of these assaults varied from destruction of bridges to whole neighborhoods and holy sites. Additional procedures featured close air support. For example, the Iron Eagle Express: an air bridge in which UH-60 and CH-47 helicopters transported 250 tons of rations, ammunition, and other critical supplies from Baghdad to Karbala and An Najaf, aerial and ground reconnaissance, and forced evacuation (noncombatant evacuation operations). In total, these operations caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands between 2003 and 2006, and around 2.8 million Iraqi by March 2010.462

462 The above procedures are documented in a very technical manner the Tactics in Counterinsurgency Manual. See for example: Seal off the objective (FM 3-24.2/5-25); hardening (FM 3-24.2/6-8); assault the objective (FM 3-24.2/5-24); and zones (include forced relocation under military necessity – FM 3-24.2/3-13). For a full survey of military operations, tactics, and technologies that took place between 2003 and 2006 see Estes, U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq 2003-2006; Wright and Reese, On Point II. 231

To further manufacture the space of the campaign, psychological operations were used to complement overt military actions through the heavy use of air-dropped leaflets and noncombatant evacuation operations (i.e., encouraging noncombatant civilians to leave the city). 463 Both these tactics of the psychological campaign focused on representing these operations as a form of protection for civilians from the terrors of the insurgents and positioning the latter as the main target of the counterinsurgency. The political and civic operations of the campaign followed immediately in the wake of destruction of targeted cities. Funds and technical expertise rearranged post-operation sites to establish legitimacy and render them more secure.

Funds were immediately allocated to the Iraqi Governing Council to restore services and identify future projects in major combat zones. This maneuver was partially to maintain the legitimacy of the Iraqi government.464 Yet, it aimed to “demonstrate the IIG and Coalition’s commitment to improving the lives of Iraqis by initiating immediate efforts to rebuild areas disrupted by violence as part of the counterinsurgency’s political campaign.”465 While U.S. Army explosive

463 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 285. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Center, around 190,000 Iraqis had been internally displaced between 2003 and 2006, and 1.55 million in the following years as of 2010. See “Iraq: Little New Displacement but Around 2.8 Million Iraqis Remain Internally Displaced,” International Displacement Monitoring Center, March 4, 2010, 8. A report to Congress states that the number of Iraqis who had been displaced before 2006 is around 1.2 million, while about 1.5 million Iraqis had been displaced between 2006 and 2007. See Rhoda Margesson, Andorra Bruno, and Jeremy M. Sharp, “Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: A Deepening Humanitarian Crisis,” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2009).

464 According to an AP report, $90 million had been earmarked by the U.S. government for cleanup operations, with an additional $50 million in projects from the Iraqi Interim Government. Associated Press, “Surveying the Ruins, Making Plans for Fallujah: Despite ‘Pinpoint Targeting,’ Fight Left City in Shambles,” November 15, 2004, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6495840/ns/world_news- mideast_n_africa/t/surveying-ruins-making-plans-fallujah/#.VGb0U010y70. See also Dexter Filkins, “A Region Inflamed: Strategy; Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns,” New York Times, December 7, 2003, accessed November 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/world/a-region- inflamed-strategy-tough-new-tactics-by-us-tighten-grip-on-iraq-towns.html; James Paul and Céline Nahory, War and Occupation in Iraq, 55-65.

465 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 337.

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experts began scanning among the bodies of dead Iraqis laying out in the open at post-operation sites for potential mines and explosives and initiated cleanup projects, U.S. Marine engineers were scanning and assessing the damage to understand the urban environment of the conflicts and recommend reconstruction projects.466

To be sure, this campaign was pivotal to test the new Iraqi security forces and new military equipment. According to one military source, during the initial operations against the

Sadr city for example – with the exception of the 36th Iraqi Commando Battalion (around 400 soldiers, fought along 17 U.S. Special Forces advisors) – many Iraqi soldiers reportedly entered insurgent ranks. Others refused to go into action at all with 38 percent disappearing at once. The

Iraqi Civil Defense Corps proved unsteady during firefights but was useful at manning exterior checkpoints.467 In An-Najaf city, according to another military source, Iraqi Civil Defense Corps deserted the battle early on in the campaign. However, in a later stage, they “proved very useful in dealing with the local population and in the hunt for weapons caches that Sadrist forces hid in mosques. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps counterterrorist teams in An Najaf were especially effective in these missions.”468 The inclusion of these forces served to legitimize the operations and to give them an Iraqi face alongside the political-economic activities initiated by the Iraqi government after the end of the battles. The battlespace served well as a laboratory in which new military equipment was tested. The Ghost Riders Vehicle and System Enhancement Package that

466 Associated Press, “Surveying the Ruins.”

467 Estes, U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq 2003-2006, 35.

468 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 336. 233

was installed in M1A2 Abrams tanks were two main new technologies, among others, that were examined in real combat operations.469

These operations continued throughout the second half of 2004 to “secure elections”470 and “deliver democracy” by stabilizing and preparing Iraqi cities for the national elections of

January 2005. The two ultimate objectives of these operations were to secure elections

(Operation Citadel II) and restore the regions that had fallen under the control of insurgents in the city of Samarra (Operation Baton Rouge) and the city of Fallujah (Operation New Dawn (al-

Fajr), the second campaign against Fallujah during 2004). Operation Citadel II was a nation-wide operation that aimed to secure the boarders and the election process in major sites mainly the capital. Anticipating a “spectacular attack”471 by insurgents in Baghdad, U.S. military mobilized the so-called “election support” troops and Iraqi security forces to counter insurgents’ moves and activities in Baghdad’s neighborhoods, to select offensive actions against known targets, to erect multiple cordons of security for polling sites, and to organize the logistical support for the election process. Approximately 130,000 Iraqi Security Forces backed up by around 184,500 U.S. troops (deployed from marines and sailors of the 1st Force Service Support Group, the Marine

Expeditionary Force Engineer Group, other U.S. Army units, and other coalition forces around

Iraq with the majority of these forces in the Capital) hardened the polling sites with field fortification and highway barrier materials. They also received and transported election polling materials and provided life support equipment to the polling sites for the poll workers and the

469 Ibid., 332, 334, 337.

470 Estes, U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq 2003-2006, 69; Kenneth Estes, U.S. Marines in Iraq 2004- 2005: Into the Fray (Washington, D.C.: History Division-United States Marine Corps, 2001), 81; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 473.

471 Estes, U.S. Marines in Iraq 2004-2005: Into the Fray, 88.

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Independent Election Commission personnel who would train and supervise the workers’ actions.472

Operations Baton Rouge and New Dawn were conducted under the pretext of regaining control over areas that had fallen under insurgents’ control in order to enable the population to participate in the 2005 national elections. Both operations epitomized full spectrum doctrine in terms of concepts, tactics, and technologies deployed to win the battle. Despite local and international critiques against the heavy engagement “with largest size of ordnance” and the heavy dependence on the expertise of demolition engineers to clear urban areas which left the city of Fallujah in ruins, the military evaluated the “success” of these operations in relation to the extensive deployment of Iraqi army units.473

The list of purportedly sophisticated, technologically superior, and surgical military operations that targeted Baghdad and other Iraqi urban centers during 2004 “to secure and protect the population” is long. The operations I have surveyed provided the model for conducting the war and for conceptualizing and shaping the battlespace. A model for the conduct of war had been shaped throughout 2004 by means of the exaggerated use of military force and soft politics and humanitarian operations. These selected operations were distilled in the official

U.S. Government edition of On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign as well as U.S.

Marines in Iraq, 2004-2005: Into the Fray and U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq 2003-2006, both published by the History Division of the United States Marine Corps. Despite the fact that the latter two limit themselves to the history of U.S. Marine operations in Iraq, they together

472 Estes, U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq 2003-2006, 68; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 474-5.

473 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 355-6.

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describe a single nearly identical narrative account for the same operations.474 Insofar as they inform and shape later works on Iraq – be that assessment reports, policy papers, or historical accounts – they disseminate a highly clean and sanitized military discourse in which violence is divided along the lines of civilized and legitimate violence of liberation versus barbarian and lawless violence of the insurgents.

Coherent efforts had been orchestrated to produce a narrative of denial in which scenes of destruction and death disappear altogether giving way to the primacy of highly sophisticated military campaigns with their precision strikes and impressive technologies. This history reads as an account of leadership, strategies and planning, military operations (in terms of tactics, technologies, vulnerabilities, lessons learned, etc.), psychological operations, and civic actions.

In a sense, there is an investment in re-appropriating the historical narrative in which concepts, cities, and the population are subject to a dual process of concealment and representation. The process ascends to an asymmetrical obliteration of the previous history of the nation. Once this historical narrative has established its authority, the recent history of Iraq reads as a history of insurgency rather than of resistance, a history of counterinsurgency and nation-building not of occupation, a history of the Sunni triangle and Shi’a dominated cities not of Iraq, a history of liberated or secured not of occupied or dead Iraqis. These documents are only representative of a general military discourse in which the historical narrative of counterinsurgency is nothing but a lucid performance of modern warfare technologies. This history is remarkably dislocated of the occupation, its repressive policies and genocidal enterprise. Another abstraction yet added,

474 On Point II is a comprehensive historical document that covers the political and the military aspects of the United States Army operations in Iraq from May 2003 to January 2005. Due to the blurred boundaries between the civilian/political and the military operations of the occupation, the document transpired as a history of the CPA’s and the U.S. military’s programs and operations. Conversely, both volumes of U.S. Marines in Iraq limit themselves to chronicle Marine Corps operations in Iraq between 2004 and 2006.

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through the conduct of the American project in Iraq masking violence and now reproduced as an enterprise of delivering law and order to Iraqis.475

The full spectrum campaign’s efforts to constitute the legitimacy of the new political order failed to come to its realization, only to intensify and accelerate the crisis, despite the multitude of psychological campaigns, the Iraqi-national face of military operations, and the political role and funds granted to the Iraqi government to initiate political processes, rebuilding efforts, and economic projects. Most Iraqis, regardless of their new political “sectarian identities,” viewed the American presence in Iraq as an occupation, pure and simple, albeit one restricted often to the $750 million embassy fortress by the end of 2004. For Iraqis generally and

Baghdadis particularly, it was possible to visualize and experience that occupation through many mediums: the ascending death toll evidenced in Baghdad’s morgue; the emergence of a system of checkpoints; the proliferation of spatial technologies of separation and compartmentalization of cities’ urban spaces to secure the population and the nascent democracy; and finally the persistence of the previous regime’s prisons in the new Iraq to cope with the thousands of detainees. Colonel Nathan Sassaman’s less subtle prescription for defeating the insurgency by “a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects,”476 had not yet brought the long-waited results of “defeating the insurgency.”477

475 Consider few examples from the Tactics in Counterinsurgency Manual: Fix insurgents not kill insurgents; support the population not occupy them; know the population not divide and/or kill them; secure the population not incarcerate them; clear operations not annihilation of neighborhoods and residential areas etc…

476 Quoted in Filkins, “A Region Inflamed.”

477 It is informative here to sum up “the Iraqi threat in numbers.” According to The Iraq Index: as of December 2004, Baghdad had been the most frequent location of U.S. military fatalities in Iraq since May 2003 (240 occurrences of attacks in Baghdad alone, almost half of the overall attacks against U.S. forces throughout the country for the same period). The total number of resistance attacks tripled from 735 in November 2003 to 2400 in October 2004, with Baghdad as a center of these attacks. As of October 2004, 1500 Iraqi security forces recruits were killed. A total of 159 mass casualty bombing – car and suicide bombing had killed 1623 237

4.4. Baghdad: “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice”478

He [Petraeus] knew the commandos were officers and soldiers who had served Saddam Hussein, he knew many of them were Sunni and he certainly knew they were not under American control. But he also sensed that they could fight.

- Peter Maass, The Way of the Commandos (2005)479

The detainees were separated by religion, with members of predominantly Shia tribes in one group, and Sunnis in the other.

- Mustafa Mohammed Ali (2005)480

In 2004, counterinsurgency operations were preparing the battlespace for further interventions into Iraq’s urban spaces. There was yet another effective counterinsurgency tool that has not yet been deployed - “Civilian Self-Defense Forces.” As envisioned by the Foreign

people by December 2004. The number of detainees increased from 1000 in May 2003 to 3000 in November 2004 – making the total number of Iraqi prisons population 8300 as of November 2004. The estimated strength of the Iraqi resistance nationwide was more than 20,000 fighters as of December 2004. The estimated number of foreign fighter raised to 3000 in November 2004. See Michael O’Hanlon and Jason Campbell, Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2004).

478 Terrorism in the Grip of Justice was a widely watched reality TV show on Al-Iraqiya, the American- financed national TV station. It was first broadcast in January 2005, right before the national elections. It featured detainees, who were labeled as insurgents or suspected insurgents, trembling on camera, and confessing to various crimes from contract murders to sodomy. It was considered by the American military advisors as the most effective psychological operations of the war against the insurgency. The program was designed to send a clear message to the Iraqi population as well as to the insurgents: “there is now a force more powerful than the insurgency: the Iraqi government.” See Peter Maass, “The Way of the Commandos,” New York Times, May 1, 2005, accessed November 9, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0.

479 Ibid.

480 Mustafa Mohammed Ali, quoted in Awadh al-Taee and Steve Negus, “Sunnis Feel Full Force of Lightning Strike,” Financial Times, June 29, 2005, accessed August 30, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d16f32c- e83a-11d9-9786-00000e2511c8.html#axzz3JUjc2lMt.

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Defense Manual, this tool needed to be institutionalized and activated against the insurgents.481

In other words, Iraqis had to engage Iraqis. This tool came to be translated through an emergent sectarian politics and the divisions within Iraqi society which it exploited. The result was sectarian groups trained, militarized, and deployed against one another or what would come to be referred to as death squads.

Prior to reconstructing a story of the Iraqi death squads, I want to make clear a methodological dilemma regarding my efforts to historicize the development of these units euphemistically described by officials as “Civilian Self-Defense Forces.” Unlike the celebrated history of the U.S. high-tech military campaign in Iraq, the history of the American backed Iraqi death squads remains a suppressed and marginalized narrative and, therefore, highly controversial and incomplete. Millions of classified U.S. military documents leaked by

WikiLeaks have aided journalists, academic researchers, and anti-war activists to gain a partial image of the death squads and their operations. Including this narrative involves a degree of methodological risk considering the complete anonymity of these units in officially published records, the direct involvement of the Ministry of Interior, and the lack of any investigative work on the subject by citizens or journalists due to campaigns of intimidation. None of the official

U.S. military’s history of the period alludes to the U.S. Special Forces’ involvement in or engagement with these death squads in any capacity. However, a close reading of documents pertaining to the CPA and U.S military training programs shows that all these units – later notorious for conducting extrajudicial executions, killings, kidnapping, torture, and sectarian

481 Foreign Defense, FM 31-20-3, Appendix D, D-1. The structure, functions, and effects of these unites in Iraq followed religiously the vision of the Foreign Defense Manual for “Civilian Self-Defense Forces.” I included a copy of the introductory page of the Manual’s Appendix D that explains the notion of the Civilian Self-Defense Forces, see Appendix, Document 3.

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cleansing operations – were enlisted as part of the “legitimate” American-trained Iraqi security forces. Some of this I have pointed out in the previous section of this chapter while documenting the institutional history of what became the Iraqi National Guard (originally known as the

Civilian Self-Defense Forces), the Iraqi Army’s 36th Commando Battalion and its 40th Brigade in

Baghdad, and the Special Police Commandos.

Iraqis, on the other hand, have insisted that these death squads were American led, trained, and funded units. The personal and collective experience of these secret police and

Special Forces units is one of terror. Glossing over such a central component of the American project is to suggest complicity with a realm of violence that has always been brutal and silencing. The core of its discursive coherence is an enterprise of mutation and mutilation which precisely hangs upon the complicity of this silence in the lack of “official documents” and

“authentic” archival material. Max Fuller, one of the earliest voices to reject the sectarian narrative of the counterinsurgency, attempted through many investigative reports to reconstruct a narrative that escaped the entrapment in this discourse. Instead, he relocated the responsibility for Baghdad’s horrors at the hands of the occupation itself.

In the shadow of the military campaign during 2004, a number of special military units notorious as death squads were in the making. To be sure, the emergence of these squads and their prospective primacy in shaping the new Iraq was a continuity of the American war against

Iraqis, a direct consequence of counterinsurgency doctrine. This new political phenomenon marked another transformation in the practice of violence and a dislocation of its discursive terrain.

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On May 29, 2004, at the Police Academy in Baghdad, Steven Casteel, CPA Senior

Advisor to the Ministry of Interior,482 challenged thirty veteran Iraqi police officers in their graduation ceremony: “Every morning you should think to yourself, ‘I can make a difference …

But the one thing we can’t give you is leadership.” Casteel continued, “I now challenge you to step forward and lead.”483 The challenge, it seems, was not the training program from which these officers had just graduated but the clandestine program that would very soon annihilate the notion of Iraqi-ness. Steven Casteel was profiled as the program’s first man.

As early as January 2004, reports began to surface about the existence of secret units connected to a network of active and retired U.S. military generals who had accumulated considerable experience in fighting “insurgencies” in Latin America. Colonel James Steele, a less famous figure in the history of the CPA, led the new training program and oversaw the establishment “Pentagon-backed” Iraqi death squads. He was sent to Iraq in 2003 as the personal envoy of Rumsfeld to help organise and supervise Iraq’s paramilitaries. Like Casteel, Steele had

482 Casteel was a former Drug Enforcement Agency Intelligence Chief. He accepted the position of the senior adviser to the Ministry of Interior to replace Bernard Kerik, only four months after the establishment of the CPA. See Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2008), 124. In the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, He was in charge of overseeing a wide network of senior police advisors, below whom another layer of police advisors. Some of these less senior advisors worked at the level of the detention facilities. See Human Rights Watch, “The New Iraq? Torture and Ill- Treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody,” 17 (2005): 77. Casteel was well-known for his close cooperation with regimes’ forces in Peru, Bolivia and Columbia against drug cartels.

483 Coalition Provisional Authority, Press Release “Thirty Iraqi Police Officers Graduate from Leadership Training Course,” May 29, 2004, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.iraqcoalition.org/pressreleases/20040529_cops.html.

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for many years led U.S. Special Forces’ missions in El Salvador during that country’s brutal civil war in the 1980’s.484 Steele was profiled as the program’s second man.

Casteel was not particularly happy with Bremer’s administration of the training programs because he promoted the transfer of security training programs to the military.485 He worked closely with Steele to initiate a secret training program at a bombed army base at the edge of the

Green Zone right after the fall of Baghdad. Among those who were involved was Colonel James

Coffman, another U.S. Special Forces veteran. Coffman was the second special advisor to the

Iraqi Ministry of Interior and oversaw the Ministry’s detention centers. Although he worked closely with Steele, he reported directly to General David Petraeus. Coffman was labeled as the third face of the program. Several sources emphasized that upon his arrival to Iraq mid-2004,

David Petraeus, commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq, was introduced to the program and granted his consent.486

484 Maggie O’Kane, “Searching for Steele: An Investigation into the Role Played by a Retired U.S. Colonel in Iraq’s U.S.-Funded Sectarian Interrogation Units,” Aljazeera, March 20, 2014, accessed November 20, 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2013/09/201392103333392771.html; Noma Mohmood, “Revealed: Pentagon’s Link to Iraqi Torture: General David Petraeus and ‘Dirty Wars’ Veteran behind Commando Units Implicated in Detainee Abuse,” The Guardian, March 6, 2013, accessed November 11, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link; Maass, “The Way of the Commandos.”

485 In a comment to General Ricardo Sanchez, Casteel expressed his happiness with the DOD decision to move these programs under the provision of the military by saying: “Boy, I am glad we’re working with you all now. We can’t get a damn thing done over at CPA. Maybe now, we’ll get this stuff moving.” See Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 80.

486 See Maass, “The Way of the Commandos”; Max Fuller, “Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq,” Center for Global Research, November 10, 2005; O’Kane, “Searching for Steele”; “Searching for Steele: Did the U.S. and Its Allies Sponsor the Use of Torture Methods in Iraq?” ABC News, Documentary, February, 4, 2013, accessed August 12, 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2013/s3728215.htm; Wright and Reese, On Point II, 468.

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On the Iraqi side of the counterinsurgency, two men were repeatedly implicated, along with their American advisers: Falah al-Naqib, the interior minister, a former Ba‘athist, and

General Adnan Thabit, the man who “commands respect.”487 Both men were profiled as the Iraqi face of the counterinsurgency. Additionally, in what has been described as “the El Salvador

Option,” some journalists went to suggest that the Pentagon might have approved the program even associating the expansion of the scope and activities of these death squads with the arrival of John Negroponte who himself had helped train Honduras-based Nicaraguan Contras during his tenure as the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85. 488 Based on the Iraqi government’s silence and the several statements delivered to the media by General Muhammad

Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, several commentators concluded that ’s Interim government might have been a major supporter of the policy. According to Maass, the interim interior minister was the first to create the units.489

Putting faces to counterinsurgency enforcers is informative only that much. This network extended beyond these individuals. A quick reference to the funds allocated for the declared Iraqi

487 Steele speaks of Adnan Thabit, who brought back “terrorism” in Baghdad under the control of “justice,” i.e. counterinsurgency. Quoted in Maass, “The Ways of Commandos.”

488 See for example Peter Kornbluh, edit., “The Negroponte File: Negroponte’s Chron File from Tenure in Honduras,” National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 151, accessed November 18, 2014, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB151/; Michael Hirsh and John Barry, “‘The Salvador Option’ The Pentagon May Put Special-Forces-Led Assassination or Kidnapping Teams in Iraq,” Newsweek, January 8, 2005; Robert Parry, “Bush’s ‘Death Squads’,” In These Times, January 11, 2005; Michael Hastings, “Iraq: The Death-Squad War Seeking Justice among Corrupt Cops, Crooks and Torturers,” Newsweek, February 27, 2006.

On several occasions, John Negroponte’s name was flagged as a direct supporter of “the Salvador Option” policy in Iraq due to his well-known history in Central America. Negroponte, as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, denied any involvement on his part and called the insertion of his name into [the Newsweek] report “utterly gratuitous.”

489 Maass, “The Ways of Commandos.” See also also Max Fuller, “Crying Wolf.”

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military forces is a useful reference here. The 2004 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense allocated $3 billion for defense, reconstruction, management and operations, among other operations for both Iraq and Afghanistan. Wright and Reese state that the cost of Iraq’s new security forces reached 2.2 billion for phase II which concluded in September 2004.490

Congressional Record no. 109, of 2006, might help us account for the rest of the money. It states that member of Congress Dennis J. Kucinich sent an official letter to Rumsfeld highlighting the suggested involvement of the Pentagon with the secret death squads program through channeling funds and advisors. He requested a copy of all records pertaining to Pentagon’s use of U.S.

Special Forces in Iraq.491 More interestingly, by the end of 2004, the reassessment of the Iraqi security forces program under the new political and military leadership emphasized the need for

490 An Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense and for the Reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004 - Makes emergency supplemental appropriations, for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2004, and for Other Purposes. Public Law 108-106. U.S. Senate at Large 2003. Library of Congress, accessed November 9, 2014, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/108/hr3289#summary/libraryofcongress. The bill is composed of three main chapters. The first chapter is directly related to the DOD operations and funding that deal with national security matters and makes appropriations to the DOD for: military personnel; operation and maintenance; overseas humanitarian disasters, and civic aid; the Iraq Freedom Fund; procurement; research, development, test and evaluation; Defense Working Capital Funds and the National Defense Sea lift Fund; the Defense Health Program; drug interdiction and counter-drug activities related to Afghanistan; and the Intelligence Community Management Account.

According to a report presented to Congress, 2.7 million U.S. dollars were allocated to support activities of several American agencies in Iraq – including but not limited to CPA operations – came from Iraqi state vested and seized assets (totaling about $750 million), and U.S. appropriated funds (totaling $2.0 Billion). See Report to Congress, “Pursuant to Section 1506 of the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2003 (Public Law 108-11),” Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, July 14, 2003. See also Wright and Reese, On Point II, 442.

491 Dennis J. Kucinich, Congressional Record 109 (May 4, 2006): E727, accessed November 9, 2014, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r109:E04MY6-0027. Kucinich’s letter suggests that the bulk of this money, i.e. $ 3 billion, “was designated for the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups.” It referred to $87 million that might have been used to fund establishing and training the new Iraqi army, nationalist paramilitaries, and Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance. Additionally, it confirmed the involvement of U.S. Special Forces in advising, supporting and training highly organized Iraqi commando brigades, who had operated as death squads abducting and assassinating thousands of Iraqis.

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additional funds. Ambassador John Negroponte and General George W. Casey, allocated additional $1.8 billion for these programs.492

As later investigations revealed, the official training programs served as a disguise for

U.S. Special Forces programs that had started training paramilitary and secret police units soon after the fall of Baghdad. Only after mid-2005 were the units unleashed onto the streets of

Baghdad to defeat the “terrorist Sunni insurgency” by making the Sunni population pay the price for supporting the insurgency.493 Many reports associated the enormity of unsanctioned violence in Baghdad’s street to the activation of these secret units, and even hinted towards their role in staging some of the major attacks that fueled the sectarian cycle of abduction, killing, and displacement.

The perpetrators of attacks and car bombs that occurred in late April and early May of

2005 targeting civilians were immediately assigned a Sunni identity. To crush these attacks, a major sweep codenamed Operation Lightning featured 40, 000 “Iraqi troops backed by U.S. forces [had] stormed through Baghdad’s predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhoods,” writes the

Financial Times.494 New York Times covered a test of the operation performed in “Abu Ghraib,

492 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 453.

493 See Hirsh and Barry, “The Salvador Option.” Hirsh and Barry quoted al-Shahwani stating that “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists …From their point of view, it is cost- free. We have to change that equation.” Max fuller, on the other hand, points to a geographical pattern of the emerging squad-style execution – locations in which Iraqi forces successfully performed joint operations with the American forces, Mosul and Samarra, witnessed systematic mass killing, after abducting and torturing the victims. See Fuller, “Crying Wolf.” See also James Cogan, “Journalist Killed after Investigating U.S.-Backed Death Squads in Iraq,” World Socialist Website, July 1, 2005, accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/07/iraq-j01.html.

494 Al-Taee and Negus, “Sunnis Feel Full Force of Lightning Strike.” Most news sources reported the deployment of 40,000 Iraqi forces. Anthony Cordesman is the only one who reported the deployment of 245

a Sunni Arab suburb … more than 2,200 Commandos – largely Shiite and Kurdish – and arrested

480 people in about two days.”495 Generally, American and Western media covered the operation as a major Shi’a offensive against Sunnis. Media coverage of this operation heavily deployed the categories of Sunni and Shi’a was an incitement to more sectarian violence.496 These reports resorted to narrate American operations against Iraqis as a sectarian conflict had helped mask the occupation’s role in creating the new Iraqi Army and its secret units comprised of both Sunnis and Shi’as. These reports failed to see how counterinsurgency operations reinvented the sectarian divide and repositioned it to the fore but in doing so, they enabled a new way of historicizing these events.497

70,000-75,000. See Anthony Cordesman, “Securing Baghdad: Understanding and Covering the Operation,” accessed November 25, 2014, http://csis.org/media/csis/pubs/060614_securing_baghdad.pdf.

495 Sabrina Tavernise, “Iraqis Plan a Major Sweep against Rebels in Baghdad,” New York Times, May 27, 2005, accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/international/27iraq.html?_r=0.

496 Carol J. Williams, “Rebels Confront Baghdad Operation,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2005, accessed November 30, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/30/world/fg-iraq30; Joel Roberts, “Iraqis Set for Operation Lightning,” CBS/AP, May 29, 2005, accessed June 15, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraqis- set-for-operation-lightning/; John F. Burns, “Rebels Strike Town as Iraqi Forces Continue Baghdad Offensive,” New York Times, May 30, 2005, accessed November 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/international/middleeast/30cnd-iraq.html; Paul Garwood, “Operation Lightning Appears to Have Blunted Violence, Saddam to be Charged with War Crimes,” Associated Press, June 7, 2005; accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.boston.com/dailynews/158/world/Operation_Lightning_appears_to:.shtml; Thomas L. Friedman, “Outrage and Silence,” New York Times, May 18, 2005, accessed October 10, 2014, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9504E4D91639F93BA25756C0A9639C8B63; U.S. Launches “Operation Lightning,” USA Today, May 29, 2005, accessed September 2, 2013, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-05-29-iraq_x.htm.

497 I would like to emphasize that this narrative has seeped through the work of some serious scholar who partially embraced it without scrutinizing it, or at least without any attempt to entertain an alternative explanation for Iraq’s descent to sectarian violence. We are told that the emergence of Tawhid and Jihad organization under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – which became the operating arm of Al-Qaeda – as it gained popularity and further support among the Sunni population, was a strong factor in fueling the sectarian conflict. The Zarqawi organization had managed exploiting a number of Sunni Arabs, advocated the wholesale murder of the Iraqi Shi’a, and deployed the vicious and deadly force of indiscriminate suicide bombing. In doing so, the organization had instigated a relentless battle with the government forces. According to the International Crisis Group, suicide attacks on Shi’a crowds were “countered by sweeps through 246

Operation Lightning was particularly significant for several reasons. First, around 40,000

Iraqi security forces were deployed to engage the insurgency in the largest military operation involving Iraqi troops to date. The involvement of these forces of “the constituted government” of Iraq effectively deferred the occupation’s crisis by displacing its role as the oppressor to the margins of the battlespace. It was also a constitutive moment in the narrative of violence.

Statements form Iraqi officials, U.S. military personnel, and media coverage all spoke a coherent sectarian discourse in which a Sunni-led insurgency and a Shi’a-Kurd-led counterinsurgency forces were antagonists. The links to questions of legitimacy were also made explicit with U.S. officials expressing their fears that Operation Lightning would “further erode public support for the Jafari’s government.”498 In the political realm, Operation Lightning was a restructuring of the reality of the occupation and the struggle against it. The violence of the operation performed by national forces spoke through a nationalist voice only to situate itself in the orbit of legitimacy and to dislocate the occupation through which it was constituted to the margins. The operation inscribed the struggle with a new sectarian meaning marking the beginning of sectarian war.

While the operation failed to reduce violence, it did introduce two units to the battlespace: Steele’s Wolf brigade and the Commandos of the Ministry of Interior. The trainers and advisors for both of these units were American and were based in the Ministry of Interior.

predominantly Sunni towns and neighborhoods by men dressed in police uniforms accused of belonging to commando units of the ministry of interior,” under the control of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its , since April 2005. See for example Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, 240; Amatzia Baram, “Who Are the Insurgents? Iraq’s Sunni Arab Rebels”; International Crisis Group, “The Next Iraq War?”; Damluji, “Securing Democracy in Iraq,” 74.

498 Williams, “Rebels Confront Baghdad Operation.”

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The units were composed of both Shi’a and Sunni members and reported along with their

American advisors and Iraqi commanders to the DOD.

Following Operation Lightning, waves of mass killings and torture engulfed Baghdad becoming part of the everyday life of the city. The operation of the death squads were marked with a unique regularity reminiscent of the Latin America counterinsurgency campaigns: the synchronized abductions, squad-style executions, use of torture, mutilation, and disfiguration of the executed, and the purification of mixed-sect neighbourhoods. Between U.S. military forces, the newly trained Iraqi security forces, with its declared and secret units, and the resistance forces, Baghdad witnessed a democratization of death. Iraqis – Sunni and Shi’a – were made to die, until “[t]here was no one left to kill.”499

4.5. Deferred Time and the Recalcitrant Space of the Counterinsurgency: A Successful Failure!

From May 2005 through 2006, Baghdad was declared to be in a state of civil war between Sunni and Shi’a. Countless ‘clear and hold’ operations had been performed to “protect the population” and consolidate the counterinsurgency’s strategy to once and for all clear

“insurgent-infested areas.” Neither the uninterrupted military campaigns to secure the population nor the ubiquitous death squads operations to terrorise it could enable IGC or occupation authorities to gain a perception of legitimacy. The prolonged timeframe of ‘clear and hold’ operations exhibited an apparent failure to dismantle the resistance groups and their local

499 Matthew Sherman, a former civilian adviser to the U.S. Army, quoted in Dexter Filkins, “What We Left Behind,” New Yorker, April 28, 2014, accessed October 6, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/what-we-left-behind.

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networks which were now described as “the insurgent shadow government.”500 Unable to clear the battlespace, it became necessary to defer the build phase designed to win the hearts and minds of the population. This deferment radically negated the occupation authority’s capacity to shore up the IGC as the legitimate government through which it could direct the reconstruction of Iraq. “Turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East” had ceased to be an end per se; rather, success had to be redefined in a much more modest way as “‘sustainable stability.’”501 Counterinsurgency denounced the goal of “Jeffersonian democracy” for Iraqis, and began designing conditions that would allow U.S. forces to leave.502

Facing this crisis, the counterinsurgency strategy had to undergo a harsh re-assessment under the provision and expertise of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams503 and the Human

Terrain Teams.504 The re-assessment programs aimed to render counterinsurgency efforts to secure and pacify the populace and reconstruct the country’s civil infrastructure more visible to

Iraqis and American citizens at home. The review teams, working closely with Gen. Petraeus,

500 “Iraq: Insurgency Paralyses Life in Diyala,” IRIN News, March 22, 2007, accessed June 27, 2014, http://www.irinnews.org/report/70864/iraq-insurgency-paralyses-life-in-diyala; James M. Few, The Break Point: AQIZ Establishes the ISI in Zaganiyah,” Small Wars Journal, 1, accessed October 5, 2014, www.samllwarsjournal.com.

501 Over the course of last few weeks of 2006 the whole concept of success in Iraq was redefined according Emma Sky, top adviser to General Raymond T. Odierno, the designer of the surge strategy. Quoted in Ricks, “The Generals’ Insurgency.”

502 Petraeus’ report to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Quoted in Ricks, “The Generals’ Insurgency.”

503 In what seems to be a complementary twist of the Human Terrain Teams, the U.S. military created The Office of Provincial Affairs – attached to the American Embassy – and appointed the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams to assess the counterinsurgency strategy and provide insights for a more successful application of the counterinsurgency doctrine. Each multidisciplinary team comprised of military, civilian, and locally employed staff with expertise and academic training in: language and Iraqi culture, an advanced degree in engineering, public administration, or law. See Iraq Provincial Reconstruction Team Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, November, 2010), 39-40.

504 Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones.”

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attempted to reinvent the practices of counterinsurgency’s ‘clear and hold’ operations in order to facilitate the final build phase. The first proposed change was that U.S. forces should retain control of the battlespaces rather than handing them over to Iraqi forces since delegating responsibility had failed to secure these sites for reconstruction. U.S forces had to be brought back once again to the same spaces to re-‘clear and hold.’ U.S. troops could no longer operate from their Forward Operating Bases but would have to engage their new public in order to protect the cleared areas from falling back into insurgent control. Most importantly, they would have to participate in the building and reconstruction projects in order to present a new face of the occupation to the Iraqi population. Counterinsurgency operations changed “from focusing on clearing an area of insurgents to focusing on holding secured areas and building upon security improvements through political and economic efforts,”505 with more emphasis on population security.506

The Army’s public relations apparatus began celebrating the success of Petraeus’s “surge strategy” and the decrease in “sectarian violence” in Baghdad later in the summer of 2007. Three major factors were behind this success according to the military’s narrative. First, the changes to

‘clear and hold’ operations consolidated the control of cleared areas in American hands allowing more frequent engagement with the local population around building and reconstruction projects.

Second, U.S. forces helped to establish local governance stabilizing areas where the insurgency had been able to establish their own shadow government outside the purview of the Iraqi

505 James M. Dubik, “Operational Art in Counterinsurgency: A View from the Inside,” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of War, Report 5, May 2012), 20.

506 Kimberly Kagan et al., “Iraq Situation Report,” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of War, February 7, 2008).

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government. In one instance, the commander of Diyala province described counterinsurgency efforts under his command as bringing “the government of Diyala back to work.”507 Third, U.S. forces were able to continue training Iraqi forces growing the latter’s capabilities and creating a partnership with U.S. forces to maintain security and to protect the population. The achievements of this “surge” strategy were, according to Petraeus’s report to Congress, a decline in security incidents (including civilian deaths), car bombings, and suicide attacks.508

The less emphasized side of this “success” story was the nearly 140 Iraqi army, National

Police and Special Forces battalions in the fight.509 During the period of the surge, the number of

Iraqi security forces grew from 390,000 in 2006 to 491,000 in 2007 and army training programs were expanded. 510 This dramatic growth in the number of Iraqi security forces occurred alongside the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq totaling five surge brigades, three of which were deployed in Baghdad’s neighborhoods, mainly in the Sunni areas, with support units placed in Baghdad’s peripheral zones.511

In late 2006, Baghdad was officially divided into nine districts according to sectarian identity. Operations Together Forward I and Together Forward II targeted three districts. The first one, Mansour, is located west of Baghdad and includes the neighborhoods of Ghazaliyah,

507 Colonel David Sutherland, the brigade commander responsible for Diyala province during the surge, quoted in Dubik, “Operational Art in Counterinsurgency,” 20.

508 Ibid., 21; Petraeus, “Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq,” 2-5.

509 Ibid., 5.

510 Kagan et al., “ Iraq Situation Report,” 2.

511 Ricks, “The Generals’ Insurgency”; “Timeline: The Iraq Surge, before and after,” Washington Post, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/thegamble/timeline/.

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Ameriyah, Khadra, Jamia, Yarmouk, and Hateen.512 The second, Dora, is located northeast of al-

Rasheed and consists of the neighborhoods Masafee, Jazeera, Hadar, and Mechanics. The third was the neighborhood of located in the middle of a Shi’a dominated area to the east of Baghdad. The three districts were labeled as strongholds of the Sunni insurgency. In 2006,

Adhamiyah had become a target of what was described by the authors of the Iraq Situation

Report as Shi’a death squads. Sadr City, Kadhimiyah, and West Rasheed were Shi’a dominated areas, in which Jaysh al-Mahdi – one of the groups purported to be a Shi’a death squad - was operating freely killing Sunni residents and clearing Sunni families from these neighborhoods before expanding to Nissan, Karadah, and Rusafa in east Baghdad.

In an effort to stem this “sectarian war,” part of the surge strategy included what was often referred to as the “Baghdad Security Plan” or Operation Fardh al-Qanoon [Operation

Imposing law]. The operation began in Adhamiyah first clearing the neighborhood of other forces and hardening it. A huge concrete barrier wall was constructed around the whole neighborhood totally sealing it off as part of the operation’s “Safe Neighborhood” project.513

Similar clearing and hardening operations expanded throughout Baghdad from the northwest to the west until it finally targeted the Dora district, the center of the insurgency. Clearing and hardening operations had continued throughout 2007. U.S. Army engineers, private contractors and Iraqi security forces encircled the Dora’s market perimeters with concrete blast walls just as

512 According the Iraq Situation Report, these two operations aimed to clear the district from insurgent, “but instead introduced elements of the Shi’a-dominated National Police that carried out sectarian killings and kidnappings.” Kagan et al., “Iraq Situation Report,” 17.

513 Multi-National Force-Iraq Press Release No. 20070604-02, “Construction Complete on ‘Safe Neighborhood’ Project in Adhamiyah,” June 4, 2007. See also Kagan et al., “Iraq Situation Report,” 17; MIT Department of Architecture, 35: Thresholds Difference (Cambridge: Puritan Press, 2009).

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they had done throughout other market areas throughout the city over the preceding period.

Under the rubric of the surge, Operation Safe Market brought the most aggressive transformation of Baghdad public and commercial space. Blast walls were erected around the areas of the Shorja,

Palestine, Sadriya, and Abu Numas markets in Rusafa. This civic component of Operation Safe

Market earmarked funds to “enhance governance and strengthen the rule of law.” The erection of the Rusafa Rule of Law Complex, also known as the Rule of Law-Green Zone was a heavily- fortified, arms-free zone, housing legal facilities and a courtroom, as well as judges, jurists, their families, and the Baghdad police college. The most important element of the project was its new detention center, designed with a capacity of approximately 4,000 detainees.514

Soldiers and engineers continued walling residential neighborhoods. T-walls were placed to encircle Rasheed district, then Sadr city. After that, they were placed between north and south

Ghazaliya and around Amiriyah. The pretext of the Amiriyah wall, as narrated by military sources, is particularly shocking. The “success story” of gating off the whole neighborhood of

Amiriyah, the brigade commander in northwest Baghdad J.B. Burton states, was the result of

U.S. forces collaboration with Iraqis to construct the wall. Discussions over erecting the walls of

Amiriyah, Burton continues, constituted a “great dialogue and this great waltz [sic]…It wasn’t just American ideas, it was partnership with the Iraqis, constant dialogue on what was working, what wasn’t working.”515

514 Marisa Cochrane, “Backgrounder, Baghdad Neighborhood Project: Rusafa,” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of War), accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/reports/Backgrounder12.pdf.

515 Dubik, “Operational Art in Counterinsurgency,” 15. See also Multi-National Force-Iraq Press Release No. 20070617-18, “Coalition forces, Iraqis team up for security clearing mission, barrier emplacements in Rusafa.” June 17, 2007.

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By trial and error, the counterinsurgency operations opened the space of Baghdad for the imagining of a new political future mediated by a top-down, horizontal visuality constructed by new visible and invisible forces – e.g. occupation forces, national forces, secret units, and undeclared death squads – and new political identities materialized through physical barriers. A new history of the nation appeared possible and iterable: the struggle over the terrain of Baghdad had become a struggle over the shaping and reconfiguring of the visible infrastructure. The enormity of the future envisioned through the counterinsurgency project compelled the semi- annihilation of a city and its inhabitant and required the disfiguring of a national identity. The surge enabled the very physical and psychological embodiment of this mutilated identity that came to be a persistent reminder built into the cityscape itself - the walls. The occupation’s counterinsurgency inflected abundant pain on Baghdad’s humans, forced mass displacement of its population, deracinated and mutated the social fabrics of the city. Transformed into a shadow of itself and severed from all that has sustained and defined it, Baghdad psyche had been humiliated and betrayed by the combined effect of death and walls.

In an inversion of the philosophy of network-centric warfare, counterinsurgency managed to produce and speak a population-centered discourse with fluid and blurred boundaries, whose application in the battlespace paradoxically negated the very population it aimed to “liberate” and “secure.” Under the framework of a “full spectrum campaign,” counterinsurgency forces should aim to win the hearts and minds, the building of popular support through social and economic programs that contribute to the overall betterment of the population. Though this discourse had promised to democratically enable the population, it had actually disabled it vertically and horizontally through new forms of violence. At the same moment that its civic

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programs promised to open the social space of Iraq for all, its military component used spatial technologies to block the horizon of shared possibilities.

To distance oneself from the scientific, tactical, and technological terminology of the counterinsurgency discourse, allows one to think historically. Only then can one disdain the technological sophistication of the counterinsurgency, scrutinize its medical lexicon and therapeutic discourse, and accurately historicize its internationalized humanitarian and philanthropist projects to redeem the population. Only then can one expose the bare face of occupation in morgues, refugee camps, and ruined cities. This history is marred by violence that speaks a coherent discourse in which strategic deployment of terminology and specific use of language obscure the very complex realities they describe. It is this intimate association between discourse and violence that renders counterinsurgency capable of such a brilliant allocation of resources to help reinvent itself so to conceal the unraveling of Iraqis’ lives and cities in the guise of a project of liberation, to negate its failure through the redefinition of “irregular warfare” as stabilization and nation-building. Such an intimacy only allows an unequivocal construction of history which cannot be constructed through the intermediaries of discourse and violence or by the reordered space and time of counterinsurgency. Instead, it is necessary to construct it through the mutated representation of its mundane “civilized” and “smart” violence.

It is not surprising then that in the reordered space-time of counterinsurgency death surfaces as a constant, absent intermediary. The enigma of death, a haunting intermediary, reproduces the mystification of acts of destruction, imprisonment, and killing. Death is done in the narrative of counterinsurgency either as an act of ‘securing,’ ‘fixing,’ or ‘protecting the population.’ It is made invisible and anonymous in the cleared and hardened sites of security

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operations516 to the extent that it is omitted from the history of these operations - a feature symptomatic of other sites of counterinsurgency as well – in the form of classified documents, invisible armies, and secret detention centers.517

As an intermediary, death claims a central position in the space-time of counterinsurgency. Sites that are considered as strongholds of insurgency must either be aided or repressed. The very existence of insurgents in these areas makes death emerge as a form of

“punitive terror” that facilitates the reordering of sites and populations linked to the insurgency.

When the time of counterinsurgency is deferred, death transmutes518 into a technology of time

516 This formulation of the concept of death is by no means a referent to Iraqis experience of it. For death has been nothing but visible in its daily encounter with Iraqis whose mundane struggle for many years has been how to stay alive in a mystified terrain loitering between life and death “m‘alqeen bayn el-haya wil muut.” (In several conversations with Iraqi refugees in Jordan in the summer of 2014, they described to me their post- occupation life in Baghdad before their departure to Amman as “m‘alqeen bayn el-haya wil muut”). Death in Iraqis’ lexicon is either a state of being or a state of becoming, i.e. a deferred state of being. Ahmad, an Iraqi refugee in his forties, described his daily struggle before leaving with his family from Ameriyah neighborhood, in July 2007, as “if you don’t die today, then it might be tomorrow or the day after.” He continued, “you don’t know which form of death you will experience: a car bomb, a sniper shooting at you, unknown men break into your house in the middle of the night, or an aerial strike that might level the building.” Buthyana, the wife, on the other hand, stated that “before leaving the house members of the family say their goodbyes, for they may never return.”

517 Some of the uncovered secret detention facilities are: Camp Nama near Baghdad, Camp Diamondback at the Mosul Airport, U.S. Joint Special Operations Command’s secret facilities (the unit according to Washington Post have hidden behind several names: the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Task Force Green, Task Force 11, and Task Force 121). See Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September 2, 2011, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-secret-america-a-look-at-the-militarys- joint-special operationscommand/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html; Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall, “Task Force 6-26: In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse,” New York Times, March 19, 2006, accessed October 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

518 Death really and physically transmutes in the logic of modern simulation of warfare and their semi universal distribution that acculturates citizens to and normalizes them with death as only inhabiting a virtual space, yet disseminating and perpetuating a culture of fear. Sim3 is one of the most interesting video games in this regard. As a simulation of a battlespace, it enables the soldier-player to choose a method of death and transmutation. The Sim can actually be forced to die, and the player can transmute his death into gold as one of several options for a transmuted death.

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management when there is only two uses of time: “life or death.” 519 Insurgents and their networks in this moment are forced to die in order for the time of counterinsurgency to accelerate. Death here is a necessary technology for the teleological progress of the time of counterinsurgency to be materialized in the phase of reconstruction. Only then can “liberated” societies who are “completely unfamiliar with democracy and civil society” progress in time to arrive to the end of history.520 However, the centrality of death transcends its capacity to defer the present time of counterinsurgency. The “scopic regime” of the counterinsurgency attempts to construct its dominance and its legitimacy not only through a full visuality of the battlespace but also via a totalized de-visualization of the enemy. It is this de-visualizing process that renders the extermination of a faceless enemy less costly and robs from them any pretense of legitimacy.

The persistent de-visualization of the enemy and their death is a central and distinguishing motif in the reconstruction of counterinsurgency history.

The formula of “life or death” as the only two uses of time is descriptive and informative. Yet, it simply stands as an opposition of two modes of being each of which cancels

In addition to the fact that it is a commercial simulation of a battlespace, two things make this game related to my above discussion: First, the official website of the game posts two “real” battlespace pictures. Both are under the title “there’s always time for tea.” One picture is from an old battlespace in which the sniper is ready to shoot, while a woman is serving him a cup of tea. We don’t see the enemy in the picture. The second is a picture of two American soldiers taking their position and ready to engage with an enemy that we also cannot see; he/she is a faceless enemy. The picture features a local old man bringing tea to the soldiers. One can go limitless here theorizing the gender and racial implications of both pictures that place the white man soldier served tea by a woman and a local brown man. Yet, to an even more disturbing level is the image of the main fighter in the game, whose face is covered with blood. His major statement on the game website reads: “Part of growing up is doing what’s best for the people you care about, even if sometimes, that means hurting someone else.” See the official website of Sim3, Transmuted Death: http://games4theworld.bestgoo.com/t14374- transmuted-death.

519 In the Machiavellian logic the “use of punitive terror” against the rebel cities is “nothing but a technique of time.” Quoted in Negri, Insurgencies, 43.4.

520 Wright and Reese, On Point II, 403.

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out the possibility of the other. What if we account for a time interval that stands between life and death? This entails a reformulation of the juxtaposition between life and death through an expanded time of transmutation from life to death. If “to kill or to be killed” are the only two actions offered by counterinsurgency, then between the two acts there awaits the projects of history and of subjectivity. History and subjectivity form two different beginnings. The dilemma then emerges: Which beginning? Which history?

Given the recent unfolding events in Iraq and Syria, one might complicate this further by posing some urgent questions to which this dissertation cannot sufficiently answer. How does counterinsurgency through its reimagination of socio-political reality produce its subject? If this discourse in its intimate relationship with violence forms an absolute power that produces its subjects, what, then, “is the ontology of its becoming?” 521 Is it a subjectivity that claims emancipation through parochialism and militarism?522 The product, it seems, will necessarily be a liberal subjectivity informed and guided by the very logic of violence that produced it. Such subjectivity will remain in the realm of being that, at best, aspires for its recurrence in the position of power only to repeat the cycle of violence exercised against it. This repetition could be informative of what such subjectivity aspires to become – the political power that will suspend politics, the sovereign who can suspend the law!523 Or, is it a subjectivity that will reaffirm its independence through the reduction of its enemy’s oppression, simultaneously

521 Negri, Insurgencies, 29.0.

522 Brown, Walled States, 40.

523 The suggested routes to investigate the concept of subjectivity are mere beginnings of a consequent research project. By articulating these questions here, I hope to think collectively of an expanded conceptual and political space in which liberation projects can escape vacillating between utopia of liberation and a network of terror. Given the current state of affairs in the Middle East, in a sense, I am trying to reconstruct a reading through which the Iraqi subjectivity can exit and escape its ontological entrapment. 258

accumulating and organizing its own power in order to reinvent itself under new political conditions of its own making!524 That is, a subjectivity capable of reimaging itself by denouncing the occupation’s project as a beginning and as an ontology of becoming!

524 Negri, Insurgencies, 29.0

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CHAPTER FIVE: Transparent Baghdad: Scene II

Stands, it is claimed, as the landmark manifesto of liberation, the 2003-war eliminated the

Ba‘ath regime and declared a new historical path for a liberal and liberated Baghdad. Unlike the

1991-war or the sanctions period during the 1990s, what surfaced in the post-invasion Baghdad is the materialization in actuality of synchronized and accelerated transformations of the juridico- political and urban environments. New formations transfigured the very familiar self- identification in relation to city-space as Iraqis knew it. Reordered legal categories struggle to recognize the reimagined physical terrain of their cities.

Baghdad is a space that has come to designate a new topography of nation mediated by horizontal and vertical warfare. It epitomizes a familiar yet unique urban terrain that reveals how the two contrary categories of the abstract and the intimate are fitted within one another.525 It vacillates between two ontological states of being: the flat and the featureless space, located by grid references, is the horizontal; and the intimate mundane physical components of this space – i.e. alleys, streets, towers of steel and cement, and downward into sewers, tunnels, communication tunnels, and population – is the vertical.526

525 On the concept of intimacy see Ann Laura Stoler, “Haunted by Empire: Domains of the Intimate and the Practice of Comparison,” in Haunted by Empire: Race and Colonial Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Ann Laura Stoler with David Bond, “Refractions off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times,” Radical History Review 95 (2006); Derek Gregory, “‘The Rush to the Intimate’: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn in Late Modern War,” Radical Philosophy 150 (2008).

526 The flat and featureless space is a product of Network Centric Warfare discourse (NCW), according to which modern battlespace is divided into two distinct categories: the horizontal non-urban and the vertical urban terrain. Each of these categories dictates a different way of conducting the war. More importantly, each requires a unique re-imagination of that space, as proved in the wars on Iraq. This discourse, however, had undergone a radical transformation through its need to establish a new level of intimacy with the war geography. See chapter one and chapter four. See also Ralph Peters, “Our Soldiers, their Cities,” Parameters (1996): 1-7; Derek Gregory, “Seeing Red: Baghdad and the Event-ful City,” (lecture presented at the Critical Geopolitics conference, Durham, September 2008); Gregory, “‘The Rush to the Intimate’”; Eyal Weizyman, 260

It is in post-invasion Baghdad that the quotidian space of the city, now the battlespace, is shaped by the very practices and technologies of the two concepts, informed by the occupation discourse and negotiated by a multitude of forces and desires. This chapter concludes, temporarily, the investigative spaces of chapter one and four. Chapter one historicized the emergence of Network Centric Warfare (NCW), its conceptual and institutional apparatuses, and its fuzzy and fluid spaces of formation. Further, it demonstrated how NCW had been enabled through the two previous wars on Iraq by claiming an aerial domination and superiority, i.e. one dimension of space. Conversely, chapter four has traced a transformation in the genealogy of

NCW, its political discourse and spatial technologies, as dictated by the encounter with Iraqis in

Baghdad’s physical space, i.e. a second dimension of space. It demonstrated how NCW, although had been mainly enabled through its operations in Iraq, it had been negotiated on the ground in Iraq, albeit asymmetrically. This negotiation brought into a rupture its revolutionary high-tech omniscience, which in turn embarked on a project of redefinition of the self, i.e. NCW conceptual apparatus and practices, and of the world upon which it acts, i.e. Baghdad. In the battlespace of Baghdad, NWC had to be “revolutionized” once again to emerge as a counterinsurgency doctrine.

This chapter continues narrating the story of Baghdad’s emergence as a “battlespace” in need of “securing.” It traces three interrelated elements of this battlespace that form the contours of the reconstituted space of Baghdad as envisioned by the full-spectrum program:

Hollow Land: Israeli Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007); Stephan Graham, “Vertical geopolitics: Baghdad and after,” Antipode 36 (2004): 13; Stephan Graham, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2010).

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counterinsurgency, the city-space, and the population. It examines the architectural regime of the

American occupation in its attempts to resituate Baghdad’s population spatially.

This chapter seeks to reformulate the very conceptual divide between the horizontal and the vertical by proposing an interlacing of the two. In doing so, it articulates a new way of thinking about horizontal and vertical dimensions of space enabled by the multitude of new technologies. It emphasizes that the very same battlespace signifies two different experiences of space, one that is of the occupier and the other is that of the occupied. What does this interlacing mean in relation to the understanding as well as to the practice of the geography of the battlespace? In a sense, this battlespace transpires into logistics; an ensemble of human forces, laws, concepts, measuring and mapping, and technologies of control and domination. This chapter starts briefly from the horizontal, and moves through the burnt sites and renamed areas and facilities. It swings between the Green Zone and the Red Zone, i.e. the rest of Baghdad, between the counterinsurgency doctrine and its acts on Iraqis, it passes through a million walls and infinite checkpoints, to finally examine the dark depth of the battlespace.

5.1. Prologue

If you line up the leaflets end-to-end they would stretch from Fort Worth, Texas to Anchorage, Alaska; or make 120,454 rolls of toilet paper.

- Michael Moseley, Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)527

2003 onwards, horizontal and vertical warfare operations targeted Baghdad’s material infrastructure, population, and symbolic meanings. Horizontally, the American military targeted

527 Michael Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom-by the Numbers,” (Assessment and Analysis Division: USCENTAF, April 30, 2003). Unclassified document.

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Baghdad by launching one of the largest and most technologically advanced military operation in the history of modern warfare, to wipe out all the regime leaders and infrastructure. The 2003 war on Iraq, according to its planners, emphasized “high-tech coordination, and high speed

[war], a war unlike any other.”528 In the more than two weeks of air attacks, earth-shattering thud of bombs, missiles and rockets, Baghdad was being liberated from the past. Operation Iraqi

Freedom exploited the superiority of its aerial surveillance and targeting systems, assembled the largest joint search and rescue center in history of warfare, and deployed 466,985 personnel to result in the recording of 42,000 battlefield images, 3,200 hours of full motion videos, 15,592 killbox interdiction of desired mean point of impact, flying 1,801 aircrafts that performed 41,404 flown sorties, dropping 31,800,000 leaflets, delivering to Iraqis 19,948 guided munitions and

9,251 unguided munitions, and spending a total of $917,744,361.55.529

The destruction and burning of Baghdad was monumental. The scenes of rampant looting and mass theft (by both Iraqis and American soldiers) of the Iraqi ministries, public offices, presidential palaces, national library and national museums were autochthonous to the completion of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was an act of purification. Down with the old

Baghdad, up with the new one. The 2003 aerial campaign was the spectacle that marked the end of traditional warfare operations and the beginning of a new military strategy.

Vertically, the U.S. army entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. In a symbolic move the victorious U.S. troops pulled down the 20 foot-tall Saddam statue. In the following days,

528 National Geographic: 21 days to Baghdad, produced by Lori Butterfield (2003; U.S.: National Geographic), DVD.

529 Moseley, “Operation Iraqi Freedom-by the Numbers.”

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Baghdad and other Iraqi cities had been cleared from all other statues of the regime, marking the end of an era that belongs to the past. In the following months, the CPA embarked on a renaming project that targeted major facilities in the city space, simultaneous to a massive project of replacing residents and political functions of major facilities and sites in the GZ in order to offer

“Baghdadis” a new urban experience of their city.530

The invasion of Iraq, the dismantling of the country’s infrastructure and institutions – including the army, the brutality with which the American forces treated Iraqis on a daily basis, and their trampling on local customs and tribal honor in standard operating procedures instigated a resistance movement that strongly declared its rejection of the newly reconfigured political matrix. The Iraqi resistance movement emerged as early as of April 2003. During the first few months, its persistent attacks against the occupying forces began to expose a new set of vulnerabilities of U.S. forces and of the conceptual underpinning of NCW, now displaced from the air to the ground. Iraqi resistance was a contestation of their occupier capacity to control violence, and thus to command the battlespace. Faced with these daily attacks, the occupying authority began to wall-off itself inside the GZ, which has emerged as the first and the most fortified area in Baghdad. The area was first surrounded by a 17-foot blast wall and a menacing

530 Some examples: “Saddam International Airport” was renamed as “Baghdad International Airport,” “International Saddam Tower” was renamed as “Baghdad Tower.” For more details on renaming some of the major facilities and neighborhoods in Baghdad see Global Security, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq; Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 267; Matthew Price, “Confusion on the Streets of Baghdad,” BBC, August 4, 2003, accessed September 1, 2014, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3122729.stm; Richard H. Houghton III and Patrick J. McDonald “A Visitor’s Guide to Baghdad’s: Green Zone,” accessed April 12, 2012, http://mattlesnake.com/files/IZ_Guide.doc.

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set of concrete barriers and military checkpoints. Inside the GZ, each of the 30 Iraqi ministries was walled by concrete barriers.531

The CPA and the U.S. forces began to perceive a new dimension of battlespace that is of the city-space. As such, there was a need to revisit the one-dimensional aerial superiority and to resituate concepts and technologies on the surface of the earth, in their quotidian intimate interactions with Iraqis. Fundamentally linked to the project of the sovereign and its legal order,

Baghdad was reimagined and redefined as a battlespace in need of coordination to enable the control over the application of violence while simultaneously establishing a sustainable infrastructure supported by a strong government developing a free-market system. This coordination of the “battlespace” necessarily required an information operations campaign that supported the cultural realities of the area of operations. This suggests two simultaneous processes: first, a reordering of the conceptual conduct of the war. Second, a spatial reorganization of the battlespace and an expansion of its elements, i.e. taking the population into account, yet secured and controlled.

It is walling the GZ that demarcated the beginning of redrawing processes of the urban terrain of the city in order the secure control over the “application of violence.” Yet, securing control over violence in the complex, congested, and contested terrain of Baghdad was arduous, as urban military analysts have argued, due to the limited effectiveness of high-tech weapons and

531 As of 2011, several former entrances of the main external wall of the GZ were entirely walled off, sharply limiting the number of access points to the 5-square-mile compound. Until today only Journalists and government workers can make their way into the GZ by flashing the proper IDs and passing through an extensive series of checkpoints. Ordinary Iraqi citizens with business inside must get clearance beforehand and have an escort while in the GZ. Yochi Dreazen, “Baghdad’s Green Zone a Forbidden Fortress,” Pulitze Center on Crisis Reporting, 2011, accessed October 10, 2014, http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/iraq-green-zone- baghdad-maliki-government-united-states-occupation.

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surveillance systems that were available for the preceding aerial campaign.532 According to this military rhetoric, the complex urban terrain of battlespace necessitated the emergence of an alternative perspective that takes into account the “nature of the urban populations.” 533 The implication of this shift in the military thinking is that there was a need to initiate concomitant legal, political, and military processes and operations to secure the urban space of Baghdad in the face of the resistance.

Indeed, Baghdad had become the urban theater of what has emerged in the military circles as counterinsurgency doctrine. This counterinsurgency doctrine perhaps became more articulate when teams of experts were assembled to exploit the “cultural realities of the area of operations [Baghdad and other Iraqi cities],534 and to profile and map the population of this urban space. In the years to come, these teams, both civil and military, had put into practice what

Robert Scales called culture-centric warfare, comprised of political and military operations.535

Whereas the new doctrine is a reformulation of the NCW doctrine, its battlespace should be coordinated and subdued by a multitude of operation vacillating between the horizontal dimension of NCW operations and the vertical dimension of the counterinsurgency operations.

532 Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly, 2 (1994), 123–143; Russell Glenn, “Cleanse the Polluted Urban Seas,” 2002, accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.rand.org.

533 Glenn, “Cleanse the Polluted Urban Seas.” See also Peter W. Chiarelli and Patrick R. Michaelis, “Winning the Peace: The Requirement for Full-Spectrum Operations,” The U.S. Army, 2005.

534 The counterinsurgency doctrine, as was rediscovered and revived in the face of Iraqi resistance, was developed with the help of embedded anthropologists (known as the Human Terrain Teams) in combat units in different Iraqi regions, who worked under the supervision of “a small band of warrior-intellectuals.” See Thomas E. Ricks, “Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort,” Washington Post, February 5, 2007, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020401196.html. See also Bremer, My Year in Iraq; Chiarelli, and Michaelis, “Winning the Peace”; Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2. See also chapter four.

535 Robert Scales, “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings (2004).

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In the juridico-political realm, Bremer’s entire governance team began to exploit the

“cultural realities” of Baghdad’s urban space, needless to say as the Americans perceived them, sketching the contours of civic action plans – broadly defined to include any non-military operation. Baghdad’s legal space was viewed as a momentous beginning and pivotal entry point to coordinate and secure the city-space. The new legal framework reduced the multiple significations and articulations of Baghdad’s – and for that matter, of Iraq’s – extremely complex social and political realities into the Sunni-Shi’a dichotomy, providing a solution through inscribing this sectarian divide into the juridico-political institutions of the new Iraq.

As chapter three has demonstrated, the legal system has become saturated with emergent legal categorizes describing different social Iraqi groups based on sectarian-ethnic-religious identities. The CPA administration, indeed, insisted on maintaining these categories as a prerequisite for political representation in the new Iraq. Equally important, the designers of this legal framework envisioned that liberalizing the Iraqi economy would provide a solution for most of the population’s problems – with reconstruction and economic prosperity around the corner. In its efforts to lead a one-dimensional nation-wide “civic action,” the CPA insisted on promoting itself as a liberation force welcomed by the vast majority of Iraqi; neglected the existence of real resistance forces, viewed Iraqis in the lenses of sectarian identities; resorted to categorize resistance forces as terrorists, jihadist, or Saddamists; and trivialized all its opponents.536

536 Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 185-6. Allawi argues that the CPA and its Washington overseers refused to engage in a nuanced thinking about Iraq’s complex conditions. This in turn, resulted in the CPA’s blind optimism and a total denial of the existence of alternative cultural, historical, and political realities.

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The scope and the nature of the CPA engagement with the cultural and political realities of Iraq were instrumental in charting friendly and inimical spaces in Baghdad’s urban terrain. To that end, the CPA information machine began labeling the urban population of Baghdad accordingly. Initially – during the second half of 2003 – Shi’as, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians,

Turkmen were the official legal categories required for political representation. Additionally, the so-called insurgents were politically defined – at an early stage of 2003 – as the “former regime loyalists” or “elements.” They were in Rumsfeld’s words “dead-enders.” 537 However, these

“former regime elements,” went underground making it difficult for the CPA and the military circles to physically map their territory on the urban space of Baghdad.

By the end 2003, with the increase in the scale and the number of attacks against the U.S. forces, the category of dead-ender had transformed to become “Sunni Arabs,” not to be conflated with Sunni Kurds or non-Arab – a friendly category. Ahmed Hashim traces the beginning of the

“insurgency” to “the outbreak of violence by the Sunni Arab population in what has come to be known as the “Sunni Triangle,” an area bounded by the city of Baghdad, and

Fallujah.”538 This narrative of the insurgency succinctly sums up the process of categorizing then

537 As of November 2005, the word “insurgency” became widely used in the media and in the military circles to describe the Iraqi resistance. However, even the term “insurgency” was rejected by Rumsfeld as it bestows on the resistance some sort of legitimacy. According to Rumsfeld, “[t]hese people aren’t trying to promote something other than disorder.... This is a group of people who don’t merit the word ‘insurgency.’” See Paul Richter, “Rumsfeld Hasn’t Hit a Dead End in Forging Terms for Foe in Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2005, accessed September 30, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/nov/30/world/fg-words30. See also “Rumsfeld Blames Iraq Problems on ‘Pockets of Dead-Enders,’” USA Today, June 18, 2003, accessed November 5, 2014, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-06-18-rumsfeld_x.htm; “Rumsfeld Pushes New Description for Iraqi Insurgents” Seattle Times, November 30, 2003, accessed September 14, 2014, http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2002654714_rumsfeld30.html.

538 Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1-15; Ahmed Hashim, “The Iraqi Insurgency, 2003-2006,” in War in Iraq: Planning and Execution, ed. Thomas G. Mahnken and Thomas A. Keaney (New York: Routledge, 2007), 148-150. According to Hashim, the former Ba‘athist element of the “insurgency” represented the secular-minded nationalist stream infused 268

mapping the urban population, as part of the occupying power’s civic action, which had been, in actuality, enabling for “strike operations to kill or capture the insurgent[s],”539 in order to secure the city and annihilate any resistance.

Between 2003 and 2005, the juridico-political space of Baghdad had been saturated with sectarian markers due to several factors: The unique force of the de-Ba‘athification program, with all its attendant categories and differential politics of dismissals and reinstatements based on sectarian affiliations; targeted assassinations; the appointment of the Interim Governing Council on the basis of ethnic, sectarian, and religious identities; the shi’a leadership winning of the first general elections in January 2005 – reflecting the CPA legal design for a representative government, which was boycotted by the majority of Sunni political leaders and community; and finally the exclusion of the Sunnis from drafting the new Iraqi constitution.

Such sectarian markers, insofar as translated into highly politicized legal categories as the case of Sunni and Shi’a identities, have been dramatically exploited in the political realm. Soon

with Sunni . Figures such as Ibrahim Izzat al-Duri (a long-time pious Ba‘athist), Hashim maintains, had “helped solidify the ideological links between a rising Islamic sentiment among many former party members, former security and military personnel, and their official adherence to the Ba‘ath Party’s principles,” thus mobilizing more people to fight the occupation. Sunni Islamists (or Salafists), on the other hand, deployed a mixture of nationalist and Islamist rhetoric in promoting themselves as the leaders of the “insurgency.” It’s worth noting here that Sunni Islamists were among the political groups whom the previous regime excluded and mistreated. The argument goes that the alliance between the former Ba‘athists and Sunni Islamists was derived from their mutual fear that the CPA would hand over Iraq to the Shi’a.

This reflects the CPA narrative which insisted on labeling the resistance as Sunni Arab “insurgency,” and became widely used among many scholars studying the “insurgency,” its development and transformation into “civil-war.” Compare this with a security update to Bremer on July 18, 2003: “the attack patterns show emerging regional coordination in: Baghdad, Karbala, Fallujah, Mosul, and Tikrit.” See also James Dobbins, et al., Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2009), 96.

539 Adrian T. Bogart, “Block by Block: Civic Action in the Battle of Baghdad,” (Florida: The JSOU Press, 2007), 1-3.

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enough, these manufactured categories were inscribed into the urban space of Baghdad, mirroring its juridico-political space. By the end of 2003, the U.S. forces began to circulate military maps in which Baghdad’s neighborhoods were divided and identified based on the sect of their population.

Figure 7: Baghdad, Iraq, ethnic composition in 2003

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Figure 8: Baghdad, Iraq, ethnic composition by the end of 2009 540

If the first element of the counterinsurgency doctrine was to attain a comprehensive understanding of the battlespace, Baghdad, then, had to become an oversimplified and clear political formula in which the Sunni population has been marked as the inimical force. The following step for the CPA and the U.S. military forces was to categorize insurgent groups by their components, elements, dynamics, and strategies. The insurgent groups, according to this rhetoric, acquired the Sunni-Arab-Islamist identity and character, who form a minority of Iraqis.

540 See Michael Izady, Project Gulf 2000, Columbia University, accessed October 11, 2014, http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Baghdad_Ethnic_2003_sm.jpg. Maps are used with the permission of Michael Izady, director.

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As such, the Sunni population that forms the base and the support network for most of these insurgent groups had been charted in certain areas of Baghdad, an initial step to targeting it.

In the summer and autumn of 2003, the resistance performed a number of strategic attacks on key infrastructure, such as railroads and pipelines, the matter that disrupted oil exports, electricity production, and fuel distribution, culminated by targeting the UN headquarter, killing Sergio de Mello, the special representative of the UN Secretary-General.541

In response, the U.S. forces performed large-scale raids and military operations in Sunni areas and mosques, which resulted in the killing and arrest of many Iraqis, who were described as

Sunnis.542 It was after the attack against the UN headquarter on August 19, 2003, that the CPA and the U.S. forces resorted to a more comprehensive and aggressive implantation of the counterinsurgency strategy, rather than only relying on “lethal force,” as an essential step to restore law and order. 543 The result was a comprehensive activation of a second step in securing the city. As described by the Tactics in Counterinsurgency Manual, it is the establishment of

541 See Dobbins et al, Occupying Iraq, 100.

542 Ibid., 96. Operations Desert Scorpion, Sidewinder, and Soda Mountain were the largest offensive operations conducted by the U.S. forces late 2003 to disrupt resistance activities.

543 Ibid., 102. In response to the Fallujah resistance movement – anther Sunni dominated area – Keith Mines, the CPA’s al Anbar governance coordinator, argued that CPA needed to rethink its strategy by implementing “a multifaceted approach that included: creating jobs, reconsidering CPA’s de-Ba‘athification policy, reviewing the composition of the Governing Council, increasing projects in Al Anbar, and equipping and training the Iraqi police.” He added that “[w]e are dealing with an urban insurgency.” The fighters who were confronting the U.S. forces in Iraq bore similarity to “the kind that successfully fought the British for decades in Northern Ireland and caused the British to quit Palestine, and continues to defy the Israelis throughout the and Gaza.” As such, for Mines, success required not just military action … but simultaneous aggressive new political and economic activities.

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control over these “area[s] and secure the population continuously,” through the conduction of joint operations, in which U.S. military forces and Iraqi forces participate.544

This encounter with the Iraqi resistance in the city-space enforced U.S. military planners to revisit their conceptual understanding of space and of its practices. At the conceptual level, sweeping processes of redefining military strategies, resistance forces, and the population had begun. At the institutional level, an aggressive process of creating and putting to use a new Iraqi army was in the making.

These processes took Baghdad’s space as their object, to verticalize the horizontal and horizontalize the vertical. That is to bring to the surface from the air and to exploit all what NCW has to offer in order to secure the city in its intimate details and intricate places – under and above the ground, only to render the verticality of the city horizontal. To put it differently, securing Baghdad is only attainable through bringing together the flat and featureless space that soldiers locate on their sensors and screens by grid references, and the intimate details of the under and above-ground: tunnels, bunkers, streets, allays, buildings, cement towers …etc.545 This process rendered Baghdad’s space doubly knowable as the horizontal/abstract and the vertical/intimate at once. Deeply connected as practices of space, the imagery of space and its materiality ushers thinking of space as volumetric.546 Baghdad’s space as a volume is a claim to

544 Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2- 3-1.

545 See Ryan Bishop, “Project Transparent Earth and the Autoscopy of Aerial Targeting: The Visual Geopolitics of the Underground,” Theory, Culture and Society 28 (2001): 270.

546 On the concept of the volume see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Semiotest(e), 1989); Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (University of Michigan: Semiotext(e), 2009); Peter Sloterdijk, “The Eirquakes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009); Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 273

its skies, distance and depth of the earth, three homogenized frontiers in which the under is seen and controlled from the above.

5.2. What Has Become of Baghdad!

Without consideration, without pity, without shame They have built great and high walls around me. And now I sit here and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind; For I had many things to do outside. Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls? But I never heard any noise or sound of builders. Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world

- Nermin al-Mufti 547

The amount of concrete consumed in the blast walls in Iraq can build three towers like Burj Khalifa.

- Mohammad Fityan 548

Baghdad has become a city of thousands of walls, lines of anonymous gray blocks running through its neighborhoods, scars to be beautified and awaiting removal. It “has become a desperate city of walls separating Sunni from Shi’a.”549 Baghdad walls look identical, each wall has one entry checkpoint and one exit, manned by Iraqi security forces.550 Each concrete barrier cloisters either a Sunni or a Shi’a neighborhood. Behind these concrete curtains remained a

547 Nermin al-Mufti, an Iraqi journalist, quoted in Haifa Zangana, “Walling in Iraq: The Impact on Baghdadi Women,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 4 (2010): 53.

548 Mohammad Fityan, text message to author, October 27, 2014.

549 Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Baghdad: City of Walls (The Guardian, 2009), DVD. Also available on the Guardian website: http://www.theguardian.com/world/series/baghdad.

550 Before the withdrawal of the U.S. forces, checkpoints on these walls were manned by both American and Iraqi forces who controlled entry and exit roads.

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homogenous sect, abandoned homes, and closed stores. 551 Physical search for cars and pedestrians is a routine procedure before passing through the only one entry checkpoint to the area behind any wall. These spatial structures set the limits of “safe” movements for communities that reside inside them, beyond which death or kidnapping is almost sure. The walls are designed like a prison, and they often close, like a prison, when the security situation deteriorates. Raids, detention, houses and neighborhoods searches, exertion of violence, and depopulation of schools, hospitals, neighborhoods and city center have remained part of the routine experienced by communities incarcerated by these walls.

Between 2005 and 2008, walls had mushroomed in Baghdad. It had become difficult to find “a street in Baghdad without a wall – or a cheaper substitute like barbed wire, palm tree trunks, mounds of dirt or piles of rocks.”552 Private contractors553 and U.S. forces engineers554 – following tactics designed by the military anthropologists, planners, and engineers – had built these walls mostly at night while massive cranes and bulldozers were digging construction sites demarcating territories along sectarian boundaries, segregating Baghdad’s Sunni from Shi’a communities, and enforcing the transformation of the previously mixed areas – which had

551 Jack Healy, “Baghdad Neighborhood Celebrates as a Wall is Taken away,” New York Times, March 6, 2011, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/world/middleeast/07baghdad.html. See also Anthony Shadid, “An Iraqi City Divided, and Defined, by Its Walls,” Washington Post, December 31, 2008, accessed November 11, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/12/30/AR2008123003222.html.

552 “Baghdad’s Walls Keep Peace but Feel like Prison,” USA Today, June 27, 2008, accessed February 22, 2013, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2008-06-27-iraq-inside-walls_N.htm.

553 Ullrich Fichtner, “Baghdad Babylon: Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq,” Spiegel International, August 10, 2007, accessed October 4, 2014, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/baghdad-babylon-hope-and- despair-in-divided-iraq-a-499154-5.html.

554 Monte Morin, “Under Cover of Night, is Built,” Stars and Stripes, June 6, 2007.

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already gone through sectarian cleansing – by means of high concrete elements into segregated neighborhoods. By the end of 2008, 50 areas in Baghdad were totally enclosed, in addition to 65 markets and public spaces, hospitals, schools, holy shrines that were either totally or partially enclosed.555 Checkpoints, roadblocks, raids, military working dog teams, and random cordons and searches – both day and night, of people, cars, homes, shops and buildings – were all techniques of inspections that Iraqis had to experience daily.556

Walls, sandbags, shields, barbed wires and berm punctured Baghdad. They stood as vertical claims to the ability of the occupation to read and map a constellation of social identities divided and incarcerated behind them. As technologies of separation, indeed walls in their multiple forms are conceptualized differently by those who install them and by those who are incarcerated by them – or by those who enabled them, and by those who are disabled by them.

The U.S. occupation forces promoted them, at an early stage, as protection procedures for the local population from “Saddamists” and “foreign fighters.” The increase in resistance activities, and the escalation of violence among the Sunnis and Shi’as in Baghdad transformed the functions of walls in the occupiers discourse. They became “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”557

The plenty of walling practices like sandbags, walls, shields, and berm were promoted by the Tactics in Counterinsurgency Manual as means of protection. They are, thus, tactical

555 Zangana, “Walling in Iraq,” 44.

556 See for example the Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2, 3-27 (see mainly tactics section).

557 Naomi Spencer, “Baghdad Residents Protest U.S.-Erected Dividing Wall,” World Socialist Website, September 18, 2007, accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/09/bagh-s18.html.

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procedures not only to protect soldiers behind them, but rather to “secure” the population against insurgent attacks. Another way to justify walls, in the occupier logic, is by viewing them as means of advancing the safety of the Iraqis, and as a means to promote reconciliation between the warring Sunni Arabs and Shi’a Arabs by reducing violence. Walls, we were told, were built as temporary tactics to reduce the sectarian violence across the city. However, eleven years passed while Baghdad walls are commissioned by the Iraqi government for “urban beautification.”558

Conversely, since the erection of the first walls around the GZ – and their onward infinite multiplications in the urban terrain of the city, Iraqis have conceptualized these walls as spatial markers designed to divide Baghdad and to intensify the manufactured sectarian divide in the juridico-political sphere. Baghdad walls are partition and separation tools through which the physical terrain of the city mirrors its legal and political spaces. As such, walls are unilaterally imposed architectural barriers to dominate Baghdad’s residents and to fragment their identity. As eloquently put by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad “there is no such a thing as a Baghdadi any more, there is either a Sunni or a Shi‘i.”559 In her blog, Riverbend – the Iraqi blogger – describes them as “the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn’t enough, apparently… It’s time for America to physically divide and conquer.”560 Other Iraqis think of these walls as an enforcement of a state of siege, turning the previously accessible space of

558 Caecilia Pieri, “Can T-Wall Murals Really Beautify the Fragmented Baghdad?” Jadaliyya, 2004, accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17704/can-t-wall-murals-really-beautify-the- fragmented-b.

559 Abdul-Ahad, Baghdad: City of Walls.

560 Baghdad Burning, April 26, 2007, http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html.

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Baghdad into small, disconnected and sealed-off islands. Others view them as nothing but a political strategy of humiliation and abuse in the frequent deliberate gridlock, and a mere replication of the Israeli occupation walls.561

Above and beyond their physicality and their dividing functions, walls and checkpoints, as technologies of mapping and incarcerating the Iraqi population, emerged as means to horizontalize the vertical terrain of Baghdad. For these technologies were still controlled on the ground, i.e. part of the vertical space of the city. Additional “operational techniques” were introduced to further secure the city by monitoring its vertical space through horizontal technologies. In a further twist, walls and checkpoints functions, in a sense, are now directed to a new mission: to verticalize the “God’s-eye view” that were made available for soldiers manning aerial technologies in the skies and behind monitoring screens.562

Soon after the proliferation and mushrooming of walls in Baghdad, and restricting entry and exit points of these walls through checkpoints, a new technology of biometric screening

(retina scan and finger printing) was introduced. The “Biometric Identification System for

Access [BISA]” is one of the most significant technologies tested and developed in Iraq. It is a system of tracking, surveillance and targeting of local nationals. It compares unique physical traits of individuals to a criminal database. As part of the screening process, the applicants have their photos, fingerprints, handprints and iris scanned stored into a database. After three days of

561 Zangana, “Walling in Iraq,” 52. See also Wendell Steavenson, “Dispatches from Iraq,” Slate Magazine, May 14, 2004, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2003/dispatches_from_iraq/the_green_zo ne_a_gated_american_community_with_iraqi_residents.html.

562 Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, quoted in Tim Weiner, “Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War,” New York Times, November 13, 2004, accessed December 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html?pagewanted=print&position=&_r=0.

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background checks, applicants would receive a special badge (mainly local nationals hired by the

American military or American private contractors) to ensure these workers have not been involved in “insurgent” activities.563

The so called “Command, Control, and Computers (C3) Biometrics Cell” was a military

Task Force that had been assigned to create and enforce the “Coalition Forces” policy related to data including fingerprints, iris scans, and other forms of biometric identification. Additionally, personnel from the Biometrics Cell had been tasked to assist the Iraqis “with developing their own biometric capabilities both at the borders and throughout the country.”564

Biometric systems were emphasized as “enabler” technology for civil security and control. Numerous biometric system underwent several experimentation stages. Once these systems matured, in terms of enhanced connectivity to DOD databases, reduced errors of reading data, and the development of mobile devices that could be used by soldiers in the battlespace, they became a means to horizontalize the urban space of Baghdad.

In 2006, biometric screening was a prerequisite to access areas like the GZ or U.S military bases. By 2007, U.S. forces had created four crime labs in Iraq that were specialized in lifting fingerprints. These labs were connected to the DOD databases to which data from Iraq

563 ABC News, “Baghdad Journal: Getting My Credentials,” June 7, 2006, accessed March 23, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2006/06/baghdad_journal/. See also Delanty Brown, “Soldiers Use Biometrics to Increase Force Protection,” U.S. Army, September 17, 2008, accessed October 2, 2014, http://www.army.mil/article/12510/soldiers-use-biometrics-to-increase-force-protection/; Patrick Marshall, “DOD Brings Biometrics to Bases in Iraq,” GCN, 2010, accessed September 20, 2014, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/10/18/gcn-award-dod-biometrics.aspx. See also Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2, 5-11.

564 Delle C. Lambert, “Biometric Assignment in Iraq Results in Dramatic Job Focus for Major,” U.S. Army, 2010, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.army.mil/article/35082/Biometric_assignment_in_Iraq_results_in_dramatic_job_focus_for_major/.

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was fed. Simultaneously, soldiers operated handheld devices to match fingerprints of detainees to prints downloaded from a DOD database. 565 According to some resources, residents were required to have smart-card ID badges with iris scan and fingerprints in addition to a permission to travel outside the walls of their town or city.566 In order to ensure the establishment of full

“control measures” over the “populace” in areas where biometric screening technology was in use, U.S. troops had ordered Iraqi men, women, and children out of their villages or residential areas and recorded their fingerprints and iris images before allowing their return.567 By the end of

2009, due to extensive background checks and daily screening processes of Iraqis, the American biometric Task Force complied identification information on more than 2.5 million Iraqis, creating vast biometric databases. These databases allowed soldiers to screen fingerprints and irises against prints or irises of wanted individuals before Iraqis were allowed to pass checkpoints or access other facilities.568

Under the divided surface of Baghdad’s urban space, there was yet another dimension of a paradoxical space, the underground. The depth exemplifies a multifaceted process of exposing and fortifying. Exposure in this sense should be understood in relation to the unknown deep

565 Richard Willing, “Fingerprints, Eye Scans Stop Suspects in Tracks,” USA Today, November 12, 2007, accessed August 15, 2014, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-11-11-dna-intel- inside_N.htm. According to Willing, A Pentagon working group presented a 244-page report to the DOD recommending the expansion of the biometric screening program in Iraq and Afghanistan – with an original cost of $195 million – in which the group proposed an extensive use of iris scans, fingerprints, DNA and other traditional as well as novel crime lab tools. The Pentagon group maintained that these procedures “have been valuable in verifying identities of suspected insurgents and in identifying potential intelligence targets.”

566 Zangana, “Walling in Iraq,” 44. She maintains that even members of the Parliament had to go through an extensive physical and vehicle search before entering the GZ. The U.S. administration issued them green badges which are less privileged than the blue badges of ministers.

567 Lambert, “Biometric Assignment in Iraq.”

568 Ibid.

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lurking beneath the occupation forces that hindered the mastery of the cutting-edge aerial and vertical technologies of control and exposure. The up-down system of near total visibility erected through the visual and surveillance technologies in the air and information gathering and screening apparatuses on the ground meet their limits, that is the surface of Baghdad albeit divided and horizontalized. Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear scientist who escaped Iraq during the

1991 war, spoke of more than 100 kilometers of a very complex and multi-layered network of tunnels below Baghdad. The bunker complexes under presidential palaces were protected by thick layers of concrete, steel and blast doors. Some of them were designed to withstand a

Hiroshima-size explosion, according to Wolfgang Wendler, the German engineer who helped design some of them.569

Exposure of and control over the underground threat coming from the elaborate series of tunnels and bunkers under and around Baghdad haunted the occupation forces long before the beginning of the occupation. An originally secret paper written by Lieutenant Colonel Eric Sepp of Air War College, based on the U.S. forces experience in the 1991, examined the problems that faced U.S. forces in detecting the unknown underground space. The paper suggested a set of technologies to be developed in order to meet the security challenges of these invisible underground spaces, as they represent a secure escape for the so-called rogue regimes as Libya,

Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Among the detection technologies that Sepp suggested and had been developed by several scientific labs and research agencies are: gravity field mapping, magnetic

569 Dana Priest, “Baghdad Battle May Rage Deep Underground in Tunnels, Bunkers,” Washington Post April 6, 2003, accessed December 23, 2014, http://old.post-gazette.com/World/20030405tunnels0406p6.asp.

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field mapping, ground penetrating radar, seismic sensors, electromagnetic sensors, electrical conductivity sensors and radioactivity sensors.570

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency, well-known for producing technologies that map the world’s surface in great detail, was put in charge to chart the earth’s underground. The

Agency made available to the military seismic devices similar to big hammers that pound the ground and bounce back a signature like a radar does. Additionally, thermal energy and chemical releases coming from the underground space are measured and detected by a special high-flying spy camera that was especially designed to meet Baghdad’s underground threat. Military engineers used the gravimeter to sense unseen underground installations, a device that measures the variations in the gravitational field between two or more points to help pinpoint the presence of such installations. 571 To obtain vision below the earth, the military deployed the tele- synaesthesia technology. It is a combination of two or more senses technologically enhanced and modified to perceive sound waves then render visible in imagery what lays underground through transforming sound waves, sensed by deployed devices, into images.572 U.S. forces conducted infinite operations using these technologies to uncover and destroy these underground spaces.

570 Eric Sepp, Deeply Buried Facilities: Implications for Military Operations (Alabama: Air University Press, 2000), 17-21. (Declassified research paper, copy in possession of the author).

571 Priest, “Baghdad Battle May Rage Deep Underground in Tunnels, Bunkers.”

572 Bishop, “Project Transparent Earth and the Autoscopy of Aerial Targeting,” 273; Ryan Bishop and John Phillips, Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 110-112.

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The U.S. forces claimed uncovering thousands of munition storage bunkers between 2003 and

2005.573

In juxtaposition of the gigantic tumult of Baghdad’s underground, there exists infinite possibilities merely explored and vaguely defined by the occupier. It was another layer of enforcing the sovereign. Each military base dug deep its outer trenches to reinforce its security against resistance attacks. Hundreds of bunkers with command and control capacities around military bases in Baghdad were carved to ensure safe storage for ammunitions, and possibly to function as shelter in situations of extreme danger. The occupation was well-aware that the destabilizing underground of Baghdad is the same space where massive resources of wealth exist, i.e. the super-giant East Baghdad oil field.

5.3. Reflections on Technologies of Law and Order

The counterinsurgency campaign, with the aim of reproducing the vertical space of

Baghdad, desired to manufacture an ontologically “coordinated” and multi-dimensionally controlled urban terrain where the rule of law and order – ushered by these technologies – would prevail, advertently rendering Baghdad’s space in its entirety de-verticalized militarily and dysfunctional socially and economically. The urban terrain of the city has metamorphosed under the pressure of explosive highways, mortar attacks, and car bombs574 into discontinuous lines of

573 Donald P. Wright and Timothy R. Reese, On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003–January 2005 (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2008), 128, 500, and 518.

574 The number of the insurgents rose from more than 15,000 to approximately 20,000 in April 2006 and the number of daily attacks to 185 per day by the end of the year. See Michael O’Hanlon and Jason Campbell, Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2007), 16-20. The average number of attacks carried out against all targets in Iraq roughly quadrupled from June 2003 to June 2004. See Dobbins et al., Occupying Iraq, 93-4. Additionally, 2005 witnessed some 500 car bomb attacks, with 143 car bomb attacks in May 2005 alone. See Mike Davis, 283

fences, concrete walls, and intrusive checkpoints.575 The paradox here – to say the least – is of a bemusing nature: Baghdad walls emerged as visual manifestations of the American power, and as a signifier of its control; yet their proliferation came in response to a fierce resistance constantly challenging that very control. In the effort to defy the CPA imposed law and order, the resistance – through deploying multiple and shifting tactics – formed “a moving, mutable … and mutating” target that constantly reshaped its character “as adaptive, emergent and, above all, malignant: a scopic regime that [in its turn] reinforced the re-enchantment” of America’s war.576

In order to defeat insurgents, “securing” the city’s legal and urban spaces has become the main target of the counterinsurgency doctrine in its two elements: Civic action and strike operations. For, theoretically, securing the city and maintaining law and order would win the hearts, minds, and acquiescence of the population, and reduce their support for insurgents. What is remarkable in this logic is that in these operations’ attempts (civic and military) to secure the city, the city – as a specific spatial formations – has disappeared altogether. In a monograph that draws on his service in Iraq, Adrian Bogart writes: 577

This monograph looks at the Battle of Baghdad during 2006 and the civic-action program that provided for the societal underpinnings of 11 million people in four Iraqi provinces, consisting of 16,664 square miles. This area included the capital city of Baghdad, the center of gravity of the campaign in Iraq. The name “block by block” came from a variety of sources:

“The Poor Man’s Airforce: A Brief History of Car Bombs,” in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Security Stat, edit. Michael Sorkin (New York: Routledge, 2008), 375.

575 In 2010, there were 1400 checkpoint inside the city. See Ali Al-Mawsawi, “1,400 Checkpoints inside Iraqi Capital Baghdad,” Azzaman, March 27, 2010, accessed August 25, 2014, http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64635&hd=&size=1&l=e.

576 Gregory, “Seeing Red: Baghdad and the Event-ful City,” 8.

577 Bogart, “Block by Block,” 2-3. Italic is mine.

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a. Epitomizes the strategy for civic action in an urban environment or city by focusing efforts on the neighborhoods, which are the core foundation of a city society and the lowest organized congregation of the populace. b. Reflects on the Iraqi government’s desire to rebuild Iraq “block by block,” which refers to building construction using masonry blocks or bricks. c. Delineates how to secure a city using a city block as the geographic reference. We battle-tracked civic action by using the muhallahs or neighborhood blocks of the City of Baghdad.

Curiously, in order for the U.S. forces to win the Battle of Baghdad against the insurgents, the city had to be – albeit temporarily, we are told – re-imagined, reassembled, and reduced into its smallest component, the block. It is the block – limited, closed, visible, and controlled – that, then, emerges as the new political and social unit. Each major military operation, intimately involved with the city alleys and blocks, participated in splitting the city further, dislocating it more and more from its reality into the realm of abstract geometry on the screens of U.S. military forces computers and devices. Here is an example of the effect one major counterinsurgency operation in May 2005. In the beginning, it is the split of Baghdad into two large regions –

(west Baghdad) and Rasafa (east Baghdad) – with the Tigris River separating them. This was followed by dividing Karkh into 15 smaller areas and sub districts, and Rasfa into 7 sub-districts, according to the plan of Operation Lightning. Checkpoints proceeded afterword, with more than

800 checkpoint, of which around 200 permanent checkpoints, these areas became totally disjointed.

Implicit in this articulation is that – for the occupiers – the urban terrain of Baghdad, with all its political, cultural, and historical connotations, has emerged not only as a medium for warfare, but also as an elastic one. It forms a dynamic and flexible territory whose boarders has

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fragmented into “multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable, and removable border.”578

Separation walls, barriers, blockades, checkpoints, and biometric screening processes among other technologies of spatial coordination and domination, penetrated the very design of

Baghdad’s urban terrain. Demarcating and enclosing homogenous sectarian identities and isolating the insurgency, these spatial markers represent the most intimate mode of governance of the city.

However, these physical barriers demonstrate only an intermediate and physical stage of enforcing a spatialized and mechanized system of law and order as envisioned by the military planners – i.e. the final phase of “Clear-hold-build” operations.579 Their role in reordering the city, and enabling or disenabling the population on the ground and within the city-space should be perceived in their relationality to two parallel yet less visible spaces of the counterinsurgency: above and below.

The above is a bricolage of aerial surveillance, flying killing machines and robots. The above is a militarized airspace – an open sky – that epitomizes an aerial panoptical visibility, maintained by a sky saturated with sensors, networks, reconnaissance, and intelligence satellite.

The above is a visual prosthesis of death machines; it is a God’s-eye of violence. The below is the dark space, perceived by thermal energy and chemical releases, measured by the acceleration of gravity, and visualized by sound frequencies. It is, as many military strategists define it, the last frontier, whose domination is facilitated by the above.

578 Weizmann, Hollow Land, 6.

579 Tactics in Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24.2, 3-18-24 and 7-2.

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In its attempt to redefine Baghdad as battlefield, the counterinsurgency doctrine and practice sought a full spectrum domination of a three dimensional space. Thus, securing the city is practicing space as a volume of the horizontal, the vertical, and the deep. Sieged from above and below, Baghdad’s space, whether by erasing and/or sieging its built environment, had been denied urbanity, and rendered “overexposed,” and visible.580 Through infinite military operations to eliminate the insurgents, counterinsurgency forces deployed an ensemble of surveillance technologies in the three dimensions of space to control and barricade the population, and relocated and displaced them to segregate the warring sects, only to render anew the very battlespace of Baghdad.

580 Paul Virilio, The Overexposed City, ed. G. Bridge and S. Watson (Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

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CONCLUSION: Logistics of Violence

This dissertation is about what I call the American project in Iraq. I resorted to the word project to distinguish its domains and scope of examination from those frequently proposed in the literature on Iraq, e.g. colonialism, imperialism and neoliberalism, which have become very general and demystifying categories. The etymology of the word project, despite it appearing in

Raymond Williams’ Keywords, is particularly important to the context of its deployment throughout the dissertation. In classical Latin (2nd cent. a.d.) prōiectum refers to structure, while prōiectus refers to what extends beyond a surface or edge. In post-classical Latin (4th or 5th cent.) prōiectum refers to something uttered. According to the OED, the word acquired a new meaning after Middle French projetter, projecter which came to mean to plan. Modern English offers six interrelated different usages of the word.581 In one sense “project” refers to: A plan, draft, scheme, or table of something; a tabulated statement; a design or pattern according to which something is made. It could also mean: A mental conception, idea, or notion; speculation.

In a third sense it describes: A collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. Finally, it could literally mean something projected or thrown out; a projection, an emanation (of some being or thing). There is yet another set of connotations that could be imported from the modern engineering usage of the word project that ranges from concepts, to designs, to expertise, to technologies, to concrete buildings, blocks, and cities.

581 I provide the most related definitions of the word to my work. For a full sentry see “Project, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2014, accessed January 5, 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/152265?result=1&rskey=47821I&.

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As this dissertation conceives of it, project is a noun that describes a particular mode of linkage between a structure(s) and its utterance and/or its unfolding on the ground or both. It implicates the performativity of a design that extends beyond the surface or edge. It is intended to encompass concepts and practices in their literal and figurative emanation in a duration of time. Further, the materialization of a project (or portions of it) takes place in space. The essence of a project, in this sense, is that it resides in the conceptual sphere and in the material world.

Therefore, it acquires a spatial and temporal dimensions through its progress, or its lack thereof, towards its finalities. By this very definition, a project always relays a notion of déjà vu, a unique familiarity.

Bearing this familiarity with other historical cases, the American project in Iraq transpired as one of both filiation and rupture of spaces, concepts and practices. It is, above all, a project that is filiated with the ruptured body in its relations to technology, distanced as it is in the skies or buried in the deep. It is these characteristics of the project that the dissertation took as its object of investigation: Its conceptual arc, shifting ontology, discourses, institutions, practices, and technologies in their interrelatedness to constitute a new Iraq. The argument this dissertation makes is that the American project in Iraq, throughout several stages of implementation and via different modalities of intervention “the war of liberation and the nation- building,” among others, brought with it familiar models (concepts and practices), destitute from their historical legacies and isolated from conditions that ensure their functionality. These are simply models in translation, reconfigured and reimagined through a realm of violence. Another immediate problem resides in that these models are detached from Iraq’s space and time yet

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converting that space into discontinuous islands in which suspended or accelerated time no longer belongs to Iraqis.

The dissertation is an inquiry that sought to diagram a topology of the project’s elements mingled with bodies of Iraqis. It is in a sense an ethnography of a thixotropic regime of law and order in translation; it is a circuit through various landscapes and temporalities to narrate the

1991 war, the invention of sanctions and inspection regimes, material transformations within the

American military, the 2003 war and finally the nation-building processes as a continuous project. That said, this research is neither intended as a comprehensive history of Iraq nor as a history of the U.S. interventionist project throughout the same period. Rather, it is a strategic involvement with constitutive historical moments of that project to lay out the contours of a novel mode of intervention, to which the importance of Iraq is quite visible. The typology of uses and abuses of Iraq’s space to conduct politically valid modes of experimentations had coincided with a parallel typology of creating a massive military and administrative bureaucracy to overthrow the Ba‘athist regime and to consolidate a new post-invasion regime of law and order.

Whereas the dissertation began as investigation of a transformed Iraq, it found itself transform to be about us as much as it is about them. It became immediately clear that to apprehend Iraq’s general environment and the sudden shift in the American political rationality toward Iraq, a sort of circuit between transformed spaces in multiple sites, entangled by contiguity, would be the path of the research.

Part one of this dissertation is an examination of concepts and logistics that enabled the project of liberation. But logistics here relay the end of geography and an extended mode of visibility. Since 1991, Iraq has become a signifier of change. A “new Iraq” emerged as a theme

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within American political, military, and academic circles. These apparatuses mobilized their knowledge of Iraq to create conditions for a post-Saddam democratic regime. Under the rubric of democratic change, each apparatus assembled teams of experts, established new institutions, and deployed wide-ranging technologies of governance to materialize some sort of vision for the new

Iraq. The sum of these interactive visions, initiatives, bureaucracies and technologies of governance formed an all expansive and unitary project that took Iraq as it is object of change.

The 1991 war was the spectacle during which the globe, and its above, had become an open and fluid space to be mobilized in support of the American project. The compression of time and space by new technologies of governance marked new practices of space, i.e. battlespace and sovereign space.

In the DOD, the process of revolutionizing the U.S. military acquired a new momentum after the 1991 war, which had enormously helped accelerate conceptual and practical transformation in the U.S. military. The new techno-science of war opened itself up to mimic the efficient model dominating the economic sphere. An information superiority driven model of warfare that operates through a network of platforms became a condition of winning wars. The virtual space of this network has become a complementary space accommodating virtual operations and bringing geographically dispersed people together to ensure a synchronized knowledge of the battlespace. These virtual operations transpired to new forms of calculations in which the concrete battlespace integrates with the geometrical abstract one. The science of war was the fruit of a collaborative military-industrial-technological complex of old and new research institutions and experimental labs. The Iraqi battlespace enabled this complex to develop a number of technologies that range from advanced intelligence, to reconnaissance and

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surveillance capabilities, to guided munitions. Additionally, major visibility problems were solved thanks to this experimental space. Network Centric Warfare marks a new threshold of violence: cities of the enemy are battlespaces with open skies, these battlespaces are emptied from humans who disappear through the sheer distance at which killing and injuring take place.

The sovereign space has been another space wrought by the American project. The sum of military and political operations performed within and through multiple sites of action throughout the 1990s have resituated and reimagined the boundaries of the sovereign and its powers on both sides. Since 1991, the sovereign powers of the U.S. have expanded globally to dictate new normative conditions and political practices as a precondition for international recognition of sovereign states. Non-conformity to these new norms has essentially created demoralized sovereign powers over a vulnerable territory subject to an abrupt contraction. One of the main legacies of this demoralization of sovereign powers has been a proliferation in the modalities of state penetration, particularly through deploying the space of the UN. The legalization of the 1991 war and the carving up of Iraq’s space were just examples of these modalities of interventions. Both materialized through a system of incentives and cooptation and the inception of a new bureaucracy within the UN organization to enforce the sanctions and inspection regimes. The institutionalization of the sanctions and inspection regimes and their conduct on and within Iraq had dismantled conceptually and in practice the singularity of the sovereign state and its fixed territoriality with speed and intensity. It is the unlimited extraterritorial sovereign powers of the U.S. on the one hand, and the demoralized necro- sovereign space of Iraq, on the other, that had surely given rise to the post-Cold War new order.

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Part two of the dissertation diagrams a topography of the transformed urban and juridico- political spaces of post-2003 occupied Baghdad by focusing the gaze on extensive and asymmetrical micromovements of concepts, forces, institutions, and legal and spatial technologies across spaces. It identifies the formation of a new legal regime constitutive of a fortified landscape. The de-Ba‘athification institution and the constitution-making processes epitomized the nature of the post-invasion engineering of institutions reproducing sectarianism at the level of micromanagement. The reconfiguration of power in the political landscape, the institutionalization of political categories and the infringement of legal and human rights of

Iraqis all prepared the stage for a persistent resistance against the occupation. Within such a boiling landscape, what was at stake was the “democratic project” that the U.S. occupation emanated from the skies via aerial bombardment and American experts. Against this background and against the failure of the U.S. military to defeat the Iraqi resistance, a new wave of conceptual and institutional change within the U.S. military consummated the much celebrated new American way of war renown as full spectrum campaign. Counterinsurgency, as a new mode of governance, sought to redefine Baghdad’s space to facilitate control over its population.

In order to do so, the culture-centric counterinsurgency doctrine took the city-space and its population as its objects to fix and secure altering totally the spatialized time of Baghdad through infinite political and military operations.

Mediated by sectarian political institutions and horizontal and vertical warfare operations,

Baghdad has been suspended by walls. Its differential space was structured by, on the one hand, technologies which restrict and fix the movement of certain human bodies (sectarian identities, barriers, biometrics) and, on the other hand, technologies which make the city visible and

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amenable to new forms of intervention by others (the mapping of sects onto neighborhoods, scanning the subsurface). In other words, the full spectrum operations articulated the horizontal and the vertical in new ways, where space had been practiced as a three-dimensional frontier.

I want to conclude by making a final methodological remark. The analysis in some of the preceding chapters, to some extent, is determined by the very circumscribed nature of the available documents and by the location of my work. Writing about Iraq through the selectively released documents combined with the lack of any access to the country poses limits of capital importance to the analysis. A reference to such limits is relevant to displaying their paralyzing effects on writing and documenting major events that I had to grabble with throughout the research period. Relatedly, navigating through DOD documents has been an extremely challenging task. The singularity of these documents discourse and their mere technical description of war machines, killing technologies, and strategies and operations is entrapping.

Distanced as they are from the avalanche of change they unleashed in multiple spaces, and from ruptured bodies left behind, these documents speak of history in conformity with a dominant mode of knowledge that seeks to expose and subjugate. When one is caught within what they constitute as a mode of intelligibility, which seems to be neither ambivalent nor disputable, they stand as the limits of the thinkable.

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APPENDIX: Document 1: A Letter to the Archivist of the United States on May 9, 2002.

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Document 2: Letter from National Archive at College Park in response to the DIA request to destroy the captured Iraqi Archive in 1991, July 29, 2002.

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Document 3: Foreign Internal Defense Manual – Civilian Self-Defense Forces, 2003, D-1.

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