this old anvil

In the news today: “Iraqi government takes on Shiite militias.”

Wait a minute.  What is the “Iraqi government” except a glorified Shiite militia, with the benefit of US support?  Of course, it’s in the interests of US policy to portray Iraq as a country with a government in need of support (for freedom and democracy, not oil!) against terrorism.

But if you add up the supporters of the Sunni Ba’athists, the Shiite militias (encompassing followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the “Badr Organization,” and the Fadhila party – all more or less “pro-Iranian,” and all at each others’ throats), and the troublingly independence-minded Kurds (with their “black sheep” brethren of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the “terrorists” that have been driving Turkey crazy), what do you get?  You get the majority of the people, or more correctly, the peoples, that inhabit that place called Iraq.

Iraq is not a nation; Iraqi is not a nationality.  Prior to the late 1950s, the "country" had not been “independent” since it was known as the “Babylonian Empire,” 2,500  years ago.  Its borders were drawn by French and English diplomats in the aftermath of World War I as they carved up the remains of the Ottoman Turkish Empire into their respective “spheres of influence.”

From a colonialist point of view ethnic, social and cultural “diversity” is a plus.  Playing off one group against the others, doling out privileges to one or another helps block the formation of a united front against foreign rule.  The wave of nationalism that engulfed the world’s colonies after the Second World War, however, prompted a movement in Iraq that won nominal independence.

A largely middle class movement attempted to forge a nation out of those diverse materials.  That development was cut off by a Ba’ath Party coup in the early ‘60s.  While they employed nationalist and socialist phraseology, the Ba’athists were based on the wealthier layers of the Sunni Muslim community, the “favored” group under earlier British rule.

The brutal regime of Saddam Hussein was a brake on the centrifugal forces that have always been at work there.  His ability to hold those forces – potentially destabilizing for the whole Mideast - in check was the primary reason the first President Bush didn’t follow up his “victory” in Kuwait in 1991 with a triumphal march on Baghdad.

It wasn’t fear of the “elite troops” of the Iraqi Republican Guard.  It was fear of the political vacuum that would follow the end of the Ba’athist regime.  And the second President Bush “let the genie out of the bottle.”   The next two presidents we see here will be spending their time (and countless lives and dollars) trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle.

Good luck.