Let’s hope the US troops will begin to pull out of Iraq and that the country does not revert to its old style of rule after 30th June 2009. Where does that leave the country's people, who are still reeling from decades of war? In Baghdad, it will not be surprising if the countries mullahs will continue to face a drought, sectarian conflict and the scramble for oil riches.
President Obama speaks to the dwindling numbers of troops during a recent visit to Baghdad. On 30 June the last US troops will pull out of the Iraqi cities. America's great adventure in Iraq is ending. Already there are few US military patrols in Baghdad. The American-held area of the Green Zone, for long a forbidden city in the middle of the capital, has been squeezed in size. The hotel that Baghdad taxi drivers fondly believed was the headquarters of the CIA has removed the concrete wall protecting it and reopened for public business. The knowledge that all US military forces will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011 immediately reduces American influence in Iraq. No Iraqi wants to nail his flag to the mast of a departing ship, which is one reason why Washington for so long resisted setting a timetable for a US troop withdrawal.
American forces leave behind a country which is a barely floating wreck. Its society, economy and very landscape have been torn apart by 30 years of war, sanctions and occupation. I first came to Iraq in 1977 when its future looked rosy, but it turned out I was visiting the country at the high tide of its fortunes, a tide that has been ebbing ever since. Iraqis have been engulfed by successive disasters: the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war starting in 1980; the defeat in Kuwait in 1991; the bloodily suppressed Shia and Kurdish uprisings the same year; UN sanctions amounting to a 13-year-long siege which ruined the economy and shattered society; the US invasion of 2003; the Sunni Arab war against the US occupation in 2003-7 and the Sunni-Shia civil war over the same period.
How many other countries in the world have endured such traumas? Is it any surprise that Iraqis are so heavily marked by them? The Iraqi government announces proudly that in May 2009 only 225 Iraqis died from war-related violence, a lower figure than we have seen in any month for at least four years. Of course this is far better than the 3,000 tortured bodies which used to turn up every month at the height of sectarian war in 2006-7. Baghdad is certainly a safer place these days than Mogadishu, though not perhaps as secure as Kabul, where violence, at least for the moment, is surprisingly limited. But the attitudes of Iraqis are not determined solely or even primarily by monthly casualty figures or even the current security situation. Their individual psychology and collective political landscape is shaped rather by the memory of the mass killings of the recent past and fear that they might happen again. Iraq is a country so drenched in blood as to make it next to impossible to reach genuine political accommodation between Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd, Baathist and non-Baathist, supporters and opponents of the US occupation. "How do you expect people who are too frightened of each other to live in the same street to reach political agreements?" asks one Iraqi friend in exasperation.
