Iraq:A lack of understanding of the Shia is the key US strategic failure in Iraq, a former Iraqi minister argues in his new book, writes Michael Jansen.
Monumental ignorance about the state of affairs in Iraq and refusal to plan a viable postwar strategy taking into account unintended consequences have led to the US debacle in Iraq.
In his new book, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace*, Ali Allawi, once minister of finance and defence in US-backed Iraqi governments and now an adviser to the prime minister, repeats the familiar list of faults, including lack of planning, mismanagement, and corruption.
But Mr Allawi makes an important new contribution when he looks at unintended consequences.
"George W Bush's war of choice in Iraq was. . . a litany of unintended consequences - a few astonishing, some surprising, some unwelcome, but most disastrous."
Mr Allawi says that Iraq is the "first casualty; then the region; and finally America itself."
"Iraqi society was severely jolted by the invasion and occupation . . . probably more so than at any other time in the past millenium . . . It would be necessary to return to the [ 13th century] Mongol invasion to discern a similar cataclysmic upheaval that spread to every corner of the country," he writes.
The greatest of unintended consequences, he argues, was the "Shia tsunami".
Washington expected the Shia majority would assume a leading role in Iraq after the war and, consequently, would be grateful to the US for empowering them. The administration also believed Shia gratitude would lead to acceptance by community leaders of the democratic, pluralist, federal model the US wanted to impose.
Washington was doubly wrong. The "fleetingly" grateful Shias turned against the US because it could not provide security, electricity, water and jobs. Washington could hardly hope to turn Iraq into a federal democracy because it had a long history of strong central control and authoritarianism.
Although pluralism had been practised there for centuries, when the US adopted sectarian and ethnic powersharing arrangements, Washington finished off pluralism.
Although the US had dealt with exiled Iraqi leaders since 1991, administration planners did not take into account that the most influential Shias belonged to fundamentalist parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
The planners also did not notice two Shia centres of power inside Iraq: the four grand ayatollahs in Najaf, and the underground Sadrist movement which became a populist force amongst the Shias after the 1991 US-led war and emerged as soon as the Baathist regime was toppled in 2003.
Ignorance was not an excuse because the exiles had openly adopted several concepts to which they adhered once they returned to Iraq.
Firstly, federalism was adopted in 1992, at the insistence of the Kurds, as the building block of the new Iraqi state and was forced on the Bush administration 11 years later.
The second concept, in this case imposed by the Shias, was that Iraq should have an "Islamic form of government".
Shia leaders, as representatives of the largest community, knew that most Shias are conservative and devout. Therefore, the leadership could count on widespread support at the ballot box, particularly since postwar Shia identity had been defined by communalism and religiosity.
Thirdly, in 2002 SCIRI secured support for a manifesto calling for a nine-province Shia autonomous region in the south to match the well-established Kurdish near-independent region in the north.
Finally, Shias and Kurds insisted the ousted Baath party should be totally dismantled and its members shunned.
The last concept negated pluralism and the idea that Iraq's democracy could embrace Baathists, Sunnis, secularists, non-fundamentalist Shias, Christians, Turkomen and others.
The ascendancy of Shia fundamentalists was partially contained during periods of direct US rule and of the interim government under Ayad Allawi when the US and secular-minded Iraqi allies tried to buck the "tsunami".
But once elected, governments under Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nuri al-Maliki took office, confessionalism became the building block, de-Baathification was pursued with vigour and SCIRI and Sadrist militias were drafted into the army and police forces.
The ongoing struggle between the rival forces in the country is over Iraq's very identity. Sunnis and secularists are seeking to hold Iraq together as a pluralist, unitary state while Shias and Kurds are striving for decentralisation and separate communal regions embracing at least 13 of the country's 18 provinces. This struggle is unlikely to be settled by outsiders or by Iraqis at the ballot box but by civil conflict.
Meanwhile, the US is pressing the weak Maliki government to abandon the four concepts by halting de-Baathification, dropping autonomy for Shias, revising the 2005 constitution which raises Islamic law above civil law, and dismantling militias which boost the political clout of Shias and Kurds.
But the Shia fundamentalists and Kurdish separatists are not prepared to acquiesce to US demands because to do so would diminish their power.
By projecting these groups into power, Washington has prepared the way for the dissolution of Iraq irrespective of the unintended consequences for the highly volatile Middle East and US standing in the world.
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Ali Allawi, Yale University Press.