By Paul Starobin, National Journal Friday, Dec. 9, 2005
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It is not possible, at this early and indeterminate stage, to offer a seamless chronicle of the civil war that Iraq is experiencing. But a rough narrative, taking note of the milestones and the dynamic that are propelling the civil war, can be assembled. It is a story not so much of a country's liberation, but of its fragmentation.
The "hammer blow," to use the historian Stoyle's term, was the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in March 2003, which shattered Saddam's regime, drove him from power and put the United States in charge as the provisional authority. Washington did not intend to create the conditions for civil war -- the White House seemed to believe that it could decapitate the regime by removing Saddam and still preserve order. But that was not to be. The decapitation created a power vacuum, which began filling up with a complex brew of resentments and ambitions.
An obvious target of resentment, particularly for Iraqi Sunni Arabs used to running things in the country, were the U.S. soldiers. But American troops soon came under attack from not only determined Sunni partisans, but also Shiite Arab militants such as the recruits from the slums of Baghdad who pledged allegiance to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Indeed, the Iraqi conflict at first looked like a classic anti-imperial or anti-occupier insurgency, with the U.S. in the same role that the British had played in Iraq decades earlier and the French had in Algeria. Something like an Arab nationalist revolt, fanned by the flames of anti-American media coverage in the Arab world, seemed to be under way.
But by the end of 2003, close observers of Iraq were seeing in the conflict a localized, sectarian element that was separate and apart from Arab or Iraqi nationalist stirrings against the United States as occupier. For three decades, W. Patrick Lang has been an Arab specialist in the U.S. government, in positions including intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first professor of Arabic language at West Point. Now a consultant in the private sector, Lang has visited Iraq some 20 times over the years. Less than a year after the U.S. invasion, "it became clear," Lang said in a recent interview, that a civil-war-like conflict was under way. (Stanford political scientist Laitin says he would backdate the onset of civil war, more formally, to the point of legal transition from foreign occupation to self-rule: the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004.)
At the root of the civil war, Lang says, are Sunni Arabs contesting for control of an Iraq in which Shiite Arabs feel newly empowered. Like Bosnia under the Austro-Hapsburg Empire, Lang says, pre-invasion Baathist Iraq was a kind of "ecumenical melting pot." And even though Sunnis were largely in control, secular Shiites occupied important posts in institutions like the police force, the civil service, the universities, and the army. It was "a pressure-cooker approach to forming national identity," Lang says, and "we interrupted this process of amalgamation.... By taking the lid off this pressure cooker, we have allowed these various elements to resolve themselves into their basic form." Some 20 cities and towns around Baghdad, once mixed, are segregating along Shiite and Sunni lines, according to a recent New York Times count.
As the journalist Anthony Shadid illustrates in Night Draws Near, his nuanced account of post-invasion Iraq, it is not only Iraq's Shiite community that has recovered a kind of missionary religious identity since Saddam's fall. In the "vacuum" that resulted "when nearly every institution that had ruled the country for a generation was overthrown," Shadid writes in his book, "religious influences that had been sweeping the Arab world for decades but had lain underground in Iraq emerged into the open and began to fill the void" among young men in Sunni towns like Khaldiya. It was not the desire to return Saddam to power or avenge his fall, Shadid says, that was motivating a new cadre of Sunni fighters. It was the "strains of political Islam."
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