Whose War Is This Anyway?

The official Western view of Shiite-Sunni relations in Iraq obscures a more complex web of geographic, sectarian, tribal, and class relationships. In 1922 it was actually the Shiites who boycotted Iraq’s first election, which had been carefully designed by the British to produce a Constituent Assembly that would support the British mandate. Since then, the history of Iraq has had more than its share of tragedy, but one thing that has never happened is a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. The two sects co-exist and frequently intermarry in many parts of the country. Certain Sunnis were privileged under Ottoman rule and others who had fought in the Sharifian forces with the British against the Turks formed the officer corps of the Iraqi Army and a new privileged class under King Faisal. Shiites, however, were prominent in opposition parties during the monarchy and were well represented in the republic that was formed after the military coup of 1958. 

Shiites also occupied a majority of leadership positions in the Baath Party before it came to power in 1963 and they continued to be represented at all levels in proportion to their numbers in the population and to hold a majority on the Revolutionary Command Council until the first Gulf War. When Iran invaded Iraq in 1982, its army was turned back by a predominantly Shiite Iraqi force under a Shiite general. The Shiites then supplied 75 percent of the lower ranks throughout the war without any widespread mutiny, in spite of intense Iranian propaganda appeals to their Shiite brothers to join their Islamic Revolution. The disastrous Shiite revolt in 1991 did lead to a reduction of their role in government and the surviving leaders of the revolt now view their central mistake to have been their failure to involve Sunnis and Kurds in the uprising, which was politically motivated against the Hussein regime, rather than sectarian in character. 

In Iraq, differences between secular and religious groups and between urban populations and more conservative rural tribes generally run deeper than those between Sunnis and Shiites. In the later years of the Baath regime, Islamism became its principal rival ideology among both sects, and Islamists from Salafis to Sadrists are now the fiercest opponents of the U.S. occupation and are ready to take their share of power. The United States government is choosing to continue the war in an increasingly desperate effort to set up a government that will support U.S. interests and to recruit forces that will fight for it against Islamists and other opponents. 

The greatest danger facing Iraq today is that the United States will be partially successful in building and arming such a force, and that, with U.S. support, this force will continue to wage war against its own people, gradually destroying what is left of the country. U.S. efforts to isolate the Sunni resistance are a logical part of its misconceived strategy, but threaten to unravel the entire fabric of Iraqi society. In August 2003 former French Foreign Minister De Villepin correctly predicted that this process of “decomposition” would continue absent a true restoration of sovereignty. Monsieur De Villepin is not blessed with second sight. He simply accepted the objective analysis that U.S. leaders continue to ignore, that the source of this decomposition is not found in any preexisting differences in Iraqi society, but rather in the fact and the nature of U.S. occupation. The longer the occupation continues, the harder it will be for Iraqis to overcome the divisions it has created, and the only rational and legitimate policy is to withdraw U.S. forces as quickly as possible. 

The Kurds, the other major ethnic group, are heavily represented in the armed forces that are being recruited and trained by the U.S. Their participation in the destruction of Fallujah has led to bloody and continuing reprisals against Kurdish collaborators in Mosul and elsewhere. The longer the U.S.- sponsored decomposition of Iraq continues, the greater the incentive for the Kurds to go their own way, possibly annexing Kirkuk and the northern oil-fields . A U.S. retreat to bases in South Kurdistan, from where they could continue attacks against other parts of the country and the region, would be a fallback position consistent with the present strategy. 

However, such a course would only perpetuate the self-destructive pattern of U.S. policy in that part of the world, gaining military bases and isolated allies while generating more widespread popular hostility to U.S. interests. The legitimate course to a resolution of this crisis remains, as it has always been, a full restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, with UN assistance, and a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces. 

Americans have been led to believe that the persistent failures of U.S. military ventures in the Third World have been attributable to a lack of commitment of either money, blood, or political will, and that, given sufficient investment of these commodities, there are few limits to U.S. power. This is myth, not history. In reality, it is in the countries where the United States has made its most extensive commitments that it has experienced its greatest failures, from China in the 1940s to Korea, Lebanon (twice), Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Iran, Somalia, and now Iraq. In each case, policy has been formulated around myths of democracy and U.S. power in place of accurate analyses of resources and interests relative to the history, politics, and culture of the country in question, even though such analyses were always readily available. The result has been that popular movements in all these countries have frustrated U.S. ambitions and won military and political victories in spite of huge economic and military imbalances in favor of the United States. 

For some time to come, institutional myopia and vested interests will almost certainly continue to blind our leaders to the clearest lesson of our history, that war and militarism are not the answer to any of our economic or strategic problems and are in fact the cause of most of them. It is, therefore, more important than ever that we understand our own history, teach it to our children and grandchildren, and engage our fellow citizens in serious conversations about our country’s history and foreign policy. The dominant economic position of the United States in the 20th century permitted its leaders to make serious “mistakes” with relatively mild consequences to the country and themselves. The 21st century will not be so forgiving.