by Harrow
Since Saddam’s government was toppled, Iraqis have endured a series of events that have eroded their faith in the Americans. First it was the mass looting and inability to enforce law and order, then the indiscriminate sacking of soldiers and low-level Baathists, later the abuses at Abu Ghraib and several ferocious battles that caused widespread collateral damage. Before things started going truly and horribly wrong last April, polls showed a small majority of Iraqis were still supportive of the American presence. And yet, even early on, there was a noticeable difference between the attitudes of the three major ethnic groups, with the Kurds being strongly supportive, the Shia lukewarm and the Sunni Arabs opposed.
Academic blogger Juan Cole has been extremely critical of the occupation and Bush’s screw-ups. But even he is skeptical about the intentions of the Sunni Arabs.
I don’t think they primarily want elections, which would bring the Shiites and Kurds to power. I think they want the Americans gone so as to find a way to regain Sunni Arab supremacy in the country. That actually makes them more dangerous, because if that is their motive then they will likely go on blowing up things for a long time to come.
He also quotes a journalist who notes a severe hardening of opinion among the Sunnis. The Association of Muslim Scholars, the biggest Sunni body in the country, has announced it will boycott the elections. Muqtada al-Sadr has raised stupendous hell for much of this year, but his hardcore supporters form a minority of Shia. He was not able to mobilize the majority of Shia into supporting open rebellion.
Why is that? The title above says it all. Obviously the US is not anti-Sunni on principle, and has included several in the Iraqi government to make it representative. Washington has vigorously promoted six cooperative political parties, where Sunnis form a very small minority, but their common feature is being pro-American or exiles who were against the old establishment. The truth is, Saddam has made the job of ruling Iraq laughably easy for the American government. The memories of his massacres are still fresh for the Kurds, who faced genocide in 1988. As a “final solution” to never-ending Kurdish rebellion, especially during the war with Iran, soldiers were ordered to interrogate and execute all people between 15 and 70 in rebel-held areas. Captured civilian men and teenage boys were separated from other Kurds, trucked off to giant pits in the countryside, and summarily executed. In total 50,000-100,000 Kurds were murdered or died. In 1991, Saddam carried out reprisals against rebellious Shias that were nearly as vicious; large parts of Karbala were razed, and the huge marshes in southern Iraq were completely drained and turned into desert to flush out Shia rebels taking refuge there.
And even before Saddam, sectarian distrust and the history of Sunni supremacy made unity difficult. This is from Militant Islam, a book by writer and journalist G.H. Jansen. Keep in mind Jansen is sympathetic to radical Islam, vehemently critical of the colonial powers and wrote this 25 years ago.
The ulema {religious establishment} in Iraq, as we have seen, did play the usual leading role in the 1920 uprising, but that was possible because beforehand the religious leaders of the Sunnis and Shiahs had formally decided to cooperate to face a national emergency. It is because these two communities are evenly balanced in Iraq (only officially so, the Shiahs have long claimed to be in the majority and almost certainly are) that the Iraqi national movement never again had recourse to Islamic support: the delicate equilibrium might not have been achieved again, one or the other community would have been forced into opposition.
If it was a challenge in the 1920s, just imagine what it would be like today.
The good news is, despite the fierce Sunni resistance against the interim government, there’s not much evidence of the civil war that so many have warned of. In spite of horrific attacks against Shia pilgrims and other civilians, most Iraqis seem to believe the worst terrorist attacks are carried out by foreigners (Iranians, Kuwaitis, Israelis, Americans), and there has been some degree of cooperation between Sunnis and Sadrists when one side or the other was engaged in battle with the Americans.
All the same, if the elections go ahead in January and aren’t a complete debacle, there’s the danger that a serious national rift could start to grow. Right now it seems most Sunnis will either boycott the elections or be too afraid of terrorist reprisals to go to polling stations. A nominally democratic government might be seen as an expression of Shia and Kurdish will to keep the Sunnis down. The Shia will probably continue to tolerate a large American presence for the same reason they do now – they fear the intentions of the Sunni Arabs more than they hate the American occupiers.
Rahul Mahajan believes the real danger is a long, savage war between religious extremists and a repressive government.
Unfortunately, the United States, by its continuing presence and operations, is creating another force that offers an even more frightening prospect of civil war, with a clear religious basis. The model for potential civil war in Iraq is not, or at least not primarily, Lebanon; it is Algeria.
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The GIA was distinguished by the extremism of its ideology, even among Wahhabis; at one point, bin Laden dissociated himself from them because of their extremism.In Iraq, that role is to be played by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). By “monotheism,” they mean primarily anti-Shi’ism. They are not primarily an anti-occupation force; they target Shi’a directly, with American soldiers occasionally as collateral damage.
But there are problems with this: al-Tawhid may have had a chance to start growing by the American failure to provide order, but an American departure would do nothing to lessen the danger of extremists. More importantly, these ultra-violent nihilists are said to make up only a few hundred (at most, a few thousand) of the 10,000-20,000 Sunni rebels in Iraq. It’s true that the continuing American presence has helped to create them, but the other insurgents will not go away either. As American forces begin falling next year or 2006, the next prime minister of Iraq will have to be a genius of national reconciliation with an iron will, or the *best* that can be hoped for is a feudal state ruled by petty local warlords and religious zealots. Since it’s unlikely that there will be an Iraqi government that is both strong and indefinitely friendly to the US, divide and rule it will be. And because of Iraq’s history, Washington may never have to lift a finger to inflame it, even if it willingly acts as a catalyst.