Additional background and resources: Search the News for Sabotage in Iraq New York Times on smuggling

June 20, 2003

The continuing security problems in Iraq are not just a simple case of "looting."  While opportunistic looting is clearly taking place, the overall situation is considerably more complex.

The discovery of pre-war Iraqi documents outlining plans for "stay-behind" resistance, guerilla warfare, and strategic attacks aimed at keeping the country in chaos does not seem to have percolated through the occupation establishment -- either military or civilian.  Instead, resistance activities are written off as "looting" when systematic and strategic sabotage appears to be the underlying reality.  With all the attempts at spinning the news, the reality on the ground is not being addressed.

This week's Washington Post has a story on the systematic attacks on the infrastructure.  It cites private security reports (probably from Bechtel) that point to systematic sabotage of the electrical infrastructure.  But the headline reads "Thefts Plague U.S. Contractor's Efforts in Iraq."  But that puts a happy face on the situation while obscuring the reality.

In the middle of the story, there is this telling passage:

Confidential internal reports from private firms working in Iraq point to specific cases of what appears to be organized looting and smuggling operations.

According to one report, more than 500 tons of copper, aluminum and steel stolen from the electrical transmission towers are being sold daily across the Iranian border. "Interrupting these very organized operations [is] a personal security threat," the report said, adding that some of the looting appears "at least partially, intended to disrupt restoration of the power system."  [emphasis added]

...For Bechtel, which has the main contract to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, including the Umm Qasr port, the problems have been particularly acute. In April, when the company first set out to assess the damage to Iraq's transmission towers on the southeastern leg of a line from Qurnah to Al Kut, it found 13 towers knocked down by looters in search of cooper, aluminum and steel. A month later, it discovered 52 more towers had been destroyed.

"When you find a substation that doesn't need a lot of attention, you go back the next day, and it's looted, it's destroyed, it's trashed," said Bechtel spokesman Howard N. Menaker. "Security of the infrastructure remains a very serious problem."

Other news stories have claimed that the flow of looted copper, aluminum and steel from Iraq is now so large that it constitutes 1/3 of the world supply of scrap metal.  An early story quoted a Kuwaiti scrap dealer saying that he was handling 100 tons a week and bemoaning the fact that competitors were getting much more than he.

Baathists, fedayeen, mafias, smugglers and looters

To understand what is going on, it is necessary to distinguish between the various players on the scene.  The Baathists are political players.  They are not fleeing the country or abandoning the power struggle.  They are indigenous and of any of the players on the political scene, the major claimants to legitimate national power.  The U.S. now that it has abandoned earlier plans to install a puppet "transitional government" is not seen as a legitimate power by Iraqis -- it is a foreign occupation.  They seek a return to power and have clearly stated -- well before the war started -- they intend to wage a war of resistance.  They haven't surrendered and they aren't going to give up.

The Saddam Fedayeen ("Saddam's men of sacrifice") are the paramilitary arm of the Baathist party.  When the Baathist regime was in power, these were the local "militia," paramilitary auxiliaries to the secret police.  The Baathist security state was intensely compartmentalized.  All the watchers had watchers watching them.  The fedayeen were mobilized as stay-behind resistance troops, guerillas really, well before the invasion occurred.  Saddam promised in numerous speeches that there would be resistance fighting, though the U.S. took this to mean some sort of last-ditch defense of Baghdad by house-to-house fighting.  When the advance on Baghdad got partly bogged down with repeated hit and run attacks along its route of advance, it became clear that the resistance was not going to be localized in Baghdad, but would be widespread throughout the entire country. 

It is also very clear that this widely dispersed guerilla resistance was not properly anticipated by the U.S. military planners.  Instead, most of the planning clearly anticipated large scale surrenders of organized resistance and the capitulation or even massive defection of the majority of the Baathist Party to the "transitional" puppet government.  The deeper the invasion went into Iraq the less the U.S. plans made sense.

In Baghdad, the systematic destruction of government offices by arson was almost certainly part of a pre-planned and coordinated effort to deny the occupation forces information about Baathist activities (to hinder the loudly-proclaimed intended war crimes trials of former regime members), complicate the task of reconstruction and conceal the identities of the nascent guerilla force.  The coalition forces response to the systematic destruction of government offices and records ascribed these acts to opportunistic looters.  As we shall see, this masked the first stages of a guerilla war intended to make the occupation impossible to sustain.  The inability to understand events highlighted a persistent lack of reliable intelligence and a parallel failure to react to new information showing that the pre-invasion intelligence assumptions were wrong.  This inertia of false assumptions continues to plague the occupation forces.

The complex and long-standing relations between the Baathist party and domestic criminal networks have not been properly explored or understood, at least publicly.  To date, I haven't found anything of any substance on them, only passing mentions in various articles.  However, we do know a considerable amount about criminal networks in totalitarian countries and the news in not good.  The Baathist regime was notorious for their brutality and corruption.  As is true everywhere, the state shapes but does not control criminal networks.  It is reasonable to assume that the combination of Baathist rule and the tribal nature of Iraqi society has bred some pretty fierce criminal networks.  Crime networks are often a symbiote with the uncivil side of the state and given the massively pathological macro-parasitic nature of the Baathist state, it is reasonable to assume that the convergence of crime and state power still persist in Iraq.

One recent mention of the role of criminal networks was their role in providing security for the numerous "arms bazaars" that sprang up in Baghdad during the brief period of Jay Garner's tenure as U.S. overseer.  Likewise, the large-scale theft of aid materiel, some of the more systematic "looting" and particularly the theft of electrical cables and covert copper-smelting are all linked to organized criminal networks because of the size of the gangs involved. 

The situation is complicated by the inferred presence of organized criminal networks among the indigenous opposition populations, particularly the Shiites (who have been doing a very large trade in scrap copper, aluminum and steel with Iran) and the Kurdish smuggling rackets in the north.  In the Basra area, it appears that there are alliances of convenience between pro- and anti-Baathist criminal networks, particularly regarding the theft and smuggling of copper and the diversion of refined petroleum products into the black market.

A special sub-group among Iraq's criminal networks are the smuggling networks.  These are the trans-national (as opposed to local) elements of Iraqi criminal networks and have played a very important role in sustaining the Baathist state.  In the north, the Kurdish factions (particularly the KDP) have long had alliances of convenience with the Baathist regime, particularly in regards to collecting "custom duties" on oil smuggled out of the country and strategic goods coming in.  A major source of dissatisfaction among the Kurds is the decline in smuggling and the consequence loss of revenue.  The U.N. sanctions played a central role in vastly enlarging both the size and scope of smuggling between Iraq and its neighbors. 

One aspect of the oil smuggling networks in southern Iraq is that after the war, they continue to move considerable quantities of refined products, in most cases obtaining their supplies by a combination of corruption and outright theft.  In the Basra area, the diversion of diesel fuel into the smuggling networks has been severe enough to cause a local shortage.

Last, and in many respects least, among these groups are the opportunistic looters.  While opportunistic looting received the majority of emphasis from the occupying power,  it is quite evident that it is a minor part of the overall problem.  The degree to which the U.S. administration misperceived the situation is captured in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's comments saying "things were untidy" and voicing the expectation that the looting, arson and attacks on infrastructure would cease in a matter of weeks.  The confusion of opportunistic looting with systematic attacks on infrastructure and organized looting conducted by pre-existing criminal networks (often working in parallel with the sabotage) hindered the efforts at establishing Garner's administration in the Baghdad area.

It was not until Garner was replaced by Bremer that new policies regarding disarming Iraqis, establishing patrols and discarding the "transitional government" model for a full-blown occupation began to address the strategic attacks.  Even so, the current statements from occupation authorities show a very muddled appreciation of the Iraqi resistance.

Heads of the Hydra

There are several dynamics simultaneously active:

• Systematic and strategic sabotage of the energy infrastructure.  Iraq's energy infrastructure of oil and electricity is remarkably intertwined.  The electrical plants consume natural gas and heavy oil (a refinery waste stream) as their source of energy.  The oil industry depends on the electrical grid to power pumps and control apparatus in production fields and refineries.  In addition, the production fields separate natural gas from the crude oil and pipe that gas to electrical generation plants.  If the electrical plants go down because of damage to transmission facilities, the flow of oil and natural gas is seriously upset.  Similarly, the refineries depend on electrical plants to consume the heavy fuel oil from the distillation process.  There is little storage capacity for this heavy oil and if the electrical plants do not consume it, the entire refinery process becomes backed up.  As a result of this high degree of interconnection, an attack on virtually any part of the energy infrastructure effects the whole.  The loss of an electrical transmission line, oil or gas pipeline can simultaneously shut down oil fields, refineries and power plants.
• The collapse of the Baathist government has seriously disturbed the Iraqi criminal economy.  Some of the pre-existing criminal networks are coping with the changing situation by expanding into new areas such as arms sales, black market fuel, wholesale movement of looted metals, and providing support and security to underground Baathists.
• Sabotage of the electrical grid has opened up an entire industry.  The scrap metal economy flowing out of Iraq is estimated to equal 1/3 of the entire world scrap flow.  Much of this is a by-product of the strategic sabotage being conducted by Baathist and fedayeen forces.
• Disruption and diversion of the complex smuggling networks.  The Baathist regime's response to U.N. sanctions was to encourage an enormous smuggling economy.  With the collapse of the regime, that economy is undergoing furious change and experiencing all sorts of pressures.
• The "decapitation" of the Baathist regime is causing new power relationships to spring up.  The long-standing relationship between the Kurds, Baathists and smugglers is just one of many power relationships undergoing upheaval.  Where local Baath networks maintain continuity or have reconstituted themselves, the forced decentralization brought about by the invasion is undoubtedly creating new leaders, transferring power downwards from the upper levels of the Baathist hierarchy and creating emergent and expedient command and control structures.

The net result is a highly centralized power structure is undergoing dynamic decentralization and reorganization.  The occupation authorities response to the systematic and strategic sabotage of the Iraqi energy infrastructure has so far been limited and uncomprehending.  The control has passed from civilian leaders to the military.  And the textbook military response to indigenous resistance is being played out:  arms confiscation, increased patrolling, raids on suspected resistance centers, etc.  The political fallout has been dodged by continuing to cling to the "looting" explanation and simultaneous disavowals that the resistance is "centrally controlled."  The first is nonsense since the attacks on the energy infrastructure are anything but opportunistic looting.  The second is correct, but not properly understood.

The Iraqi resistance is the result of forcible decentralization.  Saddam Hussein is now only one of many Baathist players trying to assert some control over the situation.  Regardless of whether or not Hussein is captured or killed, the decentralization of the Baathist resistance will proceed.  In a few months, say by early Fall, the "looting" explanation will have collapsed under the weight of facts and it will be apparent that there are numerous centers of command and control of the resistance.  Likewise, the various local and trans-national criminal networks that thrived under the Baathist regime will be carving out new niches under the occupation.

By removing Saddam, the United States has transferred power to many.  And wishing for a clearly defined opponent will not diminish the chaos in Iraq.  Given the vicious cycle unleashed by the systematic destruction of critical infrastructure, Iraq is likely only beginning a downward spiral into "untidiness."  And as things degrade, the Iraqis will increasingly look at the occupation as the root cause of their distress.