Al-Qaeda’s Iraq Leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is Killed, Hamas Wins Palestinian Elections and Faces International Isolation, Iran Defies the West on Nuclear Enrichment

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 July 2006 | Reporting Period: 3 April – 2 July 2006

Quarterly Briefing

• Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the principal orchestrator of its mass-casualty bombing campaign, is killed on June 7 in a targeted US airstrike on a safe house near Baquba; the killing is the most significant tactical success against al-Qaeda in Iraq since the invasion but produces no immediate reduction in violence; a successor is appointed within days.
• Hamas, which won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January with 74 of 132 seats, faces a western-led international boycott; the United States and European Union have suspended direct aid to the Palestinian Authority; Hamas refuses to recognise Israel or renounce violence; the population of Gaza and the West Bank faces mounting humanitarian hardship as a result of the financial blockade.
• Iran rejects an EU3+3 offer of incentives in exchange for suspending uranium enrichment; Ahmadinejad’s government insists on Iran’s right to civilian nuclear power and refuses to concede enrichment suspension as a precondition for talks; the UN Security Council prepares to discuss sanctions; the confrontation between the West and Iran over its nuclear programme intensifies.
• Iraq’s unity government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, formed in May after months of post-election negotiation, faces the full force of sectarian violence from its first day; the Samarra mosque bombing in February has unleashed a cycle of Sunni-Shia killings that the government and US forces cannot contain; monthly civilian deaths are running at more than 3,000.
• The FIFA World Cup in Germany draws a global audience of billions to a tournament won by Italy over France on July 9 — just after our period; the tournament, remarkably given the global political context, provides a month of relative geopolitical détente as nations compete in football rather than conflict.
• The global oil price hovers around $70 per barrel, sustained by Iraq’s instability, Iran’s nuclear confrontation and tight global supply; Venezuela’s Petrocaribe scheme — under which Hugo Chávez supplies Caribbean nations with oil at preferential prices repayable over 25 years at low interest — is providing critical relief to Jamaica and other island economies unable to finance full market-rate energy imports.

Prologue: Democracy’s Unexpected Results

The second quarter of 2006 illustrated a tension at the heart of the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda”: it had promoted elections across the Middle East on the assumption that democratic processes would produce moderate, pro-Western governments; the actual results — Hamas in Palestine, a Shia-dominated and Iranian-aligned government in Iraq — did not confirm the assumption. Hamas’s January election victory had been clean, observed and internationally certified; the international community’s response was to impose a financial blockade on the Palestinian Authority because it disliked the result. The logical incoherence of promoting democratic elections and then refusing to accept their outcomes was not lost on the Arab public, on Chávez’s Venezuela, or on any Caribbean government that had been lectured about democratic governance by the United States. For the Caribbean, the Middle East’s dynamics mattered most through oil prices, and those prices remained stubbornly elevated by the region’s instability.

Zarqawi’s Death and Iraq’s Continuing Violence

The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on June 7 was a genuine military achievement and an important symbolic moment. Zarqawi had been responsible for the Samarra mosque bombing and for dozens of mass-casualty attacks that had deliberately targeted Shia civilians to provoke sectarian retaliation. His death was welcomed across Iraq’s political spectrum; the celebration was short-lived. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was a networked organisation, not a hierarchical one dependent on a single commander; it continued to function within days. More fundamentally, the sectarian violence that Zarqawi had worked to ignite had by mid-2006 achieved a self-sustaining momentum: Shia death squads were killing Sunnis in retaliation for Sunni bombings, which provoked further retaliatory killings, in a cycle that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s leadership.

Venezuela, Petrocaribe and Caribbean Energy Security

Chávez’s Petrocaribe energy cooperation agreement, launched in June 2005 and now operational, represented the most significant Caribbean energy security initiative since the formation of the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative. Under its terms, Venezuela supplied oil to member states — which included Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Guyana and several eastern Caribbean nations — at market prices but with generous financing terms: 40 per cent paid immediately, the remaining 60 per cent financed over 25 years at 1-2 per cent interest. At $70 per barrel oil prices, this arrangement was providing Caribbean governments with financing worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually in aggregate. The political quid pro quo — diplomatic alignment with Venezuela’s foreign policy positions in multilateral forums — was implicit rather than explicit, but not unnoticed.

Looking Ahead

Iraq’s new unity government has its authority but not the security forces or political consensus to exercise it effectively; the summer will test whether Maliki’s administration can begin to reduce the sectarian killing. Iran’s nuclear confrontation with the West will move to the UN Security Council; the question of whether Russia and China will support meaningful sanctions will determine whether diplomacy has any remaining tools. The Caribbean hurricane season is now beginning; the 2005 season’s record damage has raised awareness of the need for regional preparedness investment; whether that investment has been made in the year since Katrina, Rita and Wilma is a question the coming months will answer. And the World Cup’s conclusion — and with it, the brief global armistice from geopolitical tension — returns attention to the world’s actual crises.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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