Last year, the Iraqis — and the rest of the world — were led to believe that the violence would subside once the Provisional Coalition Authority had been disbanded and power handed to an interim Iraqi administration. Then it was “once there were elections”; after that, it was “once an elected Iraqi government was in place.” These watersheds have come and gone — the last yesterday — but the killing has not stopped. Yesterday’s car bomb in the Kurdish city of Arbil was designed to send a bloody message that regardless of the new institutions Iraq creates, whether it is a democratically elected government or Parliament or anything else, the killing will go on.
The awful tragedy is that it probably will, even if the present problem of Sunni involvement in the government is sorted out, as it undoubtedly will be, because those who are behind the killings are not interested in peace in Iraq on any terms other than their own. Look at how long it took to end IRA violence in Northern Ireland; look at what is still happening after years of violence in Spain’s Basque province. ETA still embraces the bomb and the bullet. Yet both ETA and the IRA have always been tiny in actual membership. But they proved that a group does not have to be big to cause carnage and political mayhem.
There is, of course, a second agenda behind yesterday’s attack; it was not just a response in blood to the new government’s inauguration. Having tried and failed to provoke the Shiites into reprisals against the Sunnis in the hope of triggering a civil war, the insurgents yesterday tried it with the Kurds. We must hope that the Kurds too refuse to take the bait. If Iraq were to descend into civil war, all communities would suffer.
The new Iraqi government is now in power, but does it have power? Specifically does it have the power to provide security? At the moment, the answer is definitely not. The scale of yesterday’s attack reflects the size of the task facing Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Security has to be delivered. It is the issue on which he and his administration will be judged by ordinary Iraqis and the outside world. But there is no straightforward answer. It is a complex mix of building up the security forces, of ensuring that the Americans and other foreign forces leave as soon as possible, of developing Iraqi confidence in the new institutions. That last has no chance of happening while the Sunni community feels oppressed and excluded. An Iraq that is seen to be controlled solely by Kurds and Shiites is doomed from the start. As has been said, however, the issue of Sunni involvement in government will be resolved.
But that will not end the insurgency. A settlement, compromise, democracy, human rights — these are concepts alien to the militants. Violence is something Iraqis may thus have to live with for some time to come, just as the Northern Irish had to for years and Spain still has to. It becomes a matter of containment. That is so very different to what was promised but, realistically, it is probably the most that can be hoped for at present.
