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Sadr City, Baghdad. (Zoriah - zoriah.net) |
Consider this comical scene described by Peter Van Buren, a former US
diplomat, who was deployed to Iraq on a 12-month assignment in 2009-10:
Van Buren led two Department of State teams assigned with the
abstract mission of the “reconstruction” of Iraq, which was destroyed in
the US-led wars and sanctions. He describes the reconstruction of Iraq as such:
“In practise, that meant paying for schools that would never be
completed, setting up pastry shops on streets without water or
electricity, and conducting endless propaganda events on
Washington-generated themes of the week (‘small business,’ ‘women’s
empowerment,’ ‘democracy building.’)”
As for the comical scene: “We even organised awkward soccer matches,
where American taxpayer money was used to coerce reluctant Sunni teams
into facing off against hesitant Shiite ones in hopes that, somehow, the
chaos created by the American invasion could be ameliorated on the
playing field.”
Of course, there is nothing funny about it when seen in context. The
entire American nation-building experiment was in fact a political
swindle engulfed by many horrifying episodes, starting with the
dissolving of the country’s army, entire official institutions and the
construction of an alternative political class that was essentially
sectarian.
Take the Iraqi Governing Council
(IGC), which was founded in July 2003 as an example. The actual ruler
of Iraq was the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed first by
General Jay Garner, then by Paul Bremer, who, effectively was the
governor of Iraq. The figureheads of the IGC were mostly a conglomerate
of pro-US Iraqi individuals with a sinister sectarian past.
This is particularly important, for when Bremer began mutilating
Iraqi society as dictated to him from Washington, the IGC was the first
real sign of the American vision for Iraq with a sectarian identity. The
council was made of 13 Shias, five Sunnis, five Kurds, a Turkmen and an
Assyrian.
One would not dwell on the sectarian formation of the US-ruled Iraq
if such vulgar sectarianism were embedded in the collective psyche of
Iraqi society. But, perhaps surprisingly, this is not the case.
Fanar Haddad, author of Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity,
like other perceptive historians, doesn’t buy into the “ancient hatred”
line between Sunnis and Shia. “The roots of sectarian conflict aren’t
that deep in Iraq,” he said in a recent interview.
Between the establishment of the modern Iraqi state in 1921 and for
over 80 years, “the default setting (In Iraq) was coexistence.” Haddad
argues that “Post-2003 Iraq ..identity politics have been the norm
rather than an anomaly because they’re part of the system by design.”
That “design” was not put in place arbitrarily. The conventional
wisdom was that the US army is better seen as a “liberator” than an
invader, where the Shia community was supposedly being liberated from an
oppressive Sunni minority. By doing so, the “liberated” Shia majority
were armed and empowered to fight the “Sunni insurgency” throughout the
country. The “Sunni” discourse, laden with such terminology as the
“Sunni Triangle” and “Sunni insurgents” and such, was a defining
component of the American media and government perception of the war. In
fact, there was no insurgency per se, but an organic Iraqi resistance
to the US-led invasion.
The design had in fact served its purposes, but not for long. Iraqis
turned against one another, as US troops mostly watched the chaotic
scene from behind the well-fortified Green Zone. When it turned out that
the US public still found the price of occupation too costly to bear,
the US redeployed out of Iraq, leaving behind a broken society. By then,
there were no more Shia vs. Sunni awkward football matches, but rather
an atrocious conflict that had claimed too many innocent lives to even
be able count.
True, the Americans didn’t create Iraqi sectarianism. The latter
always brewed beneath the surface. However, sectarianism and other
manifestations of identity politics in Iraq were always overpowered by a
dominant sense of Iraqi nationalism, which was violently destroyed and
ripped apart by US firepower starting March 2003. But what the American
truly founded in Iraq was Sunni militancy, a concept that has until
recently been alien to the Middle East.
Being the majority among Muslim societies as a whole, Sunnis rarely
identified as such. Generally, minorities tend to ascribe to various
group memberships as a form of self-preservation. Majorities feel no
such need. Al-Qaeda for example, seldom made such references to being a
Sunni group, and its targeting of Shia and others was not part of its
original mission. Even its violent references to other groups were made
in specific political contexts: they referred to the “Crusaders” when
they mentioned US military presence in the region, and to Jews, in
reference to Israel. The group used terror to achieve what was
essentially political objectives.
But even al-Qaeda identity began changing after the US invasion of
Iraq. One could make the argument that the link between the original
al-Qaeda and current group known as the Islamic State (IS) is Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. The Jordanian-born militant was the founder of al-Tawhid wa
al-Jihad group, and didn’t join al-Qaeda officially until 2004. A merger
had then taken place, resulting in the creation of al-Qaeda in Iraq
(AQI)
While Zarqawi’s move to Iraq had originally targeted the US
occupation, the nature of his mission was quickly redefined by the
extremely violent sectarian nature of the conflict. He declared “war” on
the Shia in 2005, and was killed a few months later at the height of
the civil war.
Zarqawi was so violent in his sectarian war to the extent that al-Qaeda leaders were allegedly irritated with him.
The core al-Qaeda leadership which imposed itself as the guardians of
the Muslim ummah (nation) could have been wary that a sectarian war
would fundamentally change the nature of the conflict – a direction they
deemed dangerous.
If these dialectics ever existed, they are no longer relevant today.
The Syrian civil war was the perfect landscape for sectarian movements
to operate, and, in fact, evolve. By then, AQI had merged with the
Mujahideen Shura Council resulting in the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI),
then the Levant (ISIL), which eventually declared a Sunni-centred
Caliphate on land it occupied in Syria and, more recently in Iraq. It
now simply calls itself the Islamic State (IS).
Sunni militancy (as in groups operating on the central premise of
being Sunni) is a particularly unique concept in history. What makes IS
an essential sectarian phenomenon with extremely violent consequences is
that it was born into an exceptionally sectarian environment, and could
only operate within the existing rules.
To destroy sectarian identities prevalent in the Middle East region
today, the rules would have to be redesigned, not by Paul Bremer type
figures, but through the creation of new political horizons, where
fledgling democracies are permitted to operate in safe environments, and
where national identities are reanimated to meet the common priorities
of the Arab peoples.
While the US-led coalition can indeed inflict much damage on IS and
eventually claim some sort of victory, they will ultimately exasperate
the sectarian tension that will spill over to other Middle Eastern
nations.
- Ramzy Baroud is a PhD scholar in People’s History at the
University of Exeter. He is the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye.
Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant,
an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is
My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press,
London).
Source: The Palestine Chronicle
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