Think Globally, Act Tribally

ATLANTA -- In its headlong rush into war, the Bush administration is evaluating the power of Saddam Hussein only by its well-known elements -- the Republican Guard, the internal security system and the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Its conclusion is that Hussein is so entrenched that only U.S. military power can remove him. But the administration is ignoring another pillar of Hussein’s power: an intricate set of alliances with Iraqi tribal leaders. These are allies who can be rented but not bought. The president and his hawkish advisors need to understand that the tribes could bring about the collapse of Hussein without America having to fire a shot.

The nature of Hussein’s regime is rooted in the nature of Iraq. In the aftermath of World War I, the British jammed Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and non-Arab Kurds, along with a cluster of other ethnic and sectarian groups, into a contrived state called Iraq. Most of the pieces composing this human mosaic contained powerful tribal elements. Although there were also strong urban traditions within each of these ethnic and sectarian groups, particularly among the Sunnis, Iraq was essentially a tribal society.

In 1921, the British created a monarchy to rule over what was technically a mandate assigned to London by the League of Nations. The search for a king by the British Colonial Office placed Faisal I, a Hashemite from Mecca, on a hastily contrived throne. From the day of his crowning, the king in Baghdad was defied by powerful tribal confederations that claimed their own law and leadership. During his 12-year reign, Faisal I spent an enormous amount of energy on tedious negotiations to keep the tribes loyal. His successors in the monarchy and every government that followed the 1958 revolution faced the same challenge -- control of the tribes.

Yet the urban tradition present since the days of the Ottoman Empire counterbalanced the tribalism in the countryside. Through the 1950s and the 1960s, one regime after another appealed to the increasing numbers of urbanites to give Baghdad the support that would move Iraq from a state to a nation. In the 1970s, the Baath government, of which Hussein was a part, used the riches that resulted from the explosion of oil prices in 1973 to woo every Iraqi to the authority of Baghdad. The party achieved a level of success as most ethnic, sectarian and tribal groups benefited from government largess that provided health care, education, housing and a vastly improved and expanded infrastructure.

The Baathists even dreamed up a new identity for Iraqis that was designed to cross the barriers of group, sect and tribe. Ignoring the historical truth -- that most Iraqis are either of mixed heritage born of centuries of conquest or are immigrants who arrived as late as the early years of the 20th century -- the Baath government declared all Iraqis direct descendants of ancient Mesopotamia.

In pursuit of this ideology, the Baath government poured millions of dollars into archeology. The walls of Nineveh, the Assyrians’ ancient capital, rose again out of the plain near the current city of Mosul. And Babylon, the seat of Nebuchadnezzar, was pulled out of the salt and mud of southern Iraq. Tying these symbols of ancient history to a socialist economic system, the rulers in Baghdad sold the idea that ethnic, sectarian and tribal rivalries should give way to Iraqi nationalism.

Even so, the forces of tribalism continued to challenge the Iraqi state. The Sunni Arab tribes west of Baghdad continued to hold sway over parts of the desert. The Arab Shiites of the south still gave their first allegiance to their tribal leaders, not to the central government. And the Kurds of the north staged one of their periodic rebellions against Baghdad from 1970 to 1975. Although the overarching cause was Kurdish demands for autonomy or independence from the Iraqi state, internal tribal politics infected the uprising. In cities where rural migrants pursued economic promise, tribalism was well established. Members of some tribes transplanted themselves from their villages to urban neighborhoods, where they replicated their tribal structure and pledged allegiance to traditional tribal leaders.

In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Hussein, by then the sole political authority in Baghdad, sacrificed the idea of Mesopotamia as the unifying theme of the Iraqi state. Instead of acknowledging the war for what it really was -- a contest between the two commanding personalities of Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini -- Baghdad turned the battlefield into a stage on which the epic struggle between Arabs and Persians was played out. The Kurds were not part of the equation that was to save the Iraqi state from the hated Persians. But neither was it a great national cause, only a bloodbath in which government conscription and tribal leaders sent Iraqis into the trenches to die.

The next war, the Gulf War of 1991, confronted Hussein with defeat and simultaneous rebellions by the Arab Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north. With only the Sunni center of Iraq behind him, Hussein jettisoned more than eight decades of effort by kings, military dictators, the Baath party and himself to nurture an Iraqi nation. No longer commanding enough loyalists to man either the military forces or security services necessary to police the country, the Iraqi president held on to political power by reviving the most basic element of Iraqi identity -- tribalism.

The dust of war and rebellion had yet to settle before tribal sheiks from the Shiite south and the Sunni midlands were summoned to Baghdad to publicly pledge their allegiance to Hussein. It was a deal based on mutual benefit. The tribal leaders won money, favors and guns from Hussein in return for holding their people in check for the Iraqi dictator. Even in what became the Kurdish autonomous zone patrolled by U.S. military aircraft, one Kurdish faction allied with Baghdad in 1996 to gain advantage over a rival Kurdish group.

Since the Gulf War, the urban neighborhoods that had organized themselves along tribal lines in the 1950s have been woven into Hussein’s network of tribal alliances. At the same time, the Iraqi president has created a new category of tribes. Non-kinship groups carrying labels of labor union, professional organization, trade association, student group, art school and every other conceivable economic or social organization now operate like tribes in alliance with Hussein. The result is that Iraq today is a more tribal society than it was at the time the country was pasted together by the British.

Yet the tribes have never totally surrendered to Hussein’s control. The Sunni tribes west of Baghdad govern Hussein as much as he governs them. In ordinary times, they are satisfied as long as they are allowed to control the trade routes to Syria. But they are not to be trampled on. One of these tribes, the Dalaim, is suspected of seriously wounding the president’s oldest son, Uday, in 1996 in retaliation for the arrest and execution of its principal sheik. Other tribes also can threaten the regime if they choose.

Hussein understands perhaps better than anyone else that the tribes pose a real danger to him. Because tribes ally themselves only with the strong, Hussein commands their allegiance only as long as individual leaders gain advantage in the relationship. Consequently, a perception of weakness undercuts the whole alliance. This is where the Bush administration has an opportunity to achieve regime change in Iraq without a war.

Put United Nations arms inspectors back into Iraq. Their mere presence, forced on Hussein by international pressure, creates the perception that Hussein’s power is waning. This, in turn, tempts tribal leaders to withdraw their support from the Iraqi leader before the alliance proves worthless and perhaps detrimental to their interests. Without the support of the tribes, Hussein may be able to retain control of the center of the country but not the periphery. Once one pillar of his support crumbles, others are likely to follow.

This will not happen by January, but over the time defined by the current arms-inspection regimen, Hussein is likely to topple. Allowing time for the forces of tribalism to destroy the regime of Hussein is something for the Bush administration to think about before it commits the lives of unknown numbers of American soldiers and billions of dollars to a war in the Persian Gulf, with all of its unintended consequences.