Tearing Iraq Apart

Iraqis are not grateful to the United States for the 2003 invasion.

RAED JARRAR: Correct. I mean, I mentioned previously how I’m half-Sunni and half-Shiite. Many Iraqis jokingly now refer to people like myself as “Sushis.” And, you know, like, it’s like it’s getting—our community is getting smaller and smaller, because there are less mixed marriages. Before 2003, I did not know who from my friends were Sunnis or Shiites, and we’ve never expressed any concerns, we’ve never heard any stories about this person being a Sunni or a Shiite—and not only from a personal experience. The example that I always give is the 55 deck of cards that was printed by the Pentagon and CIA when they went after the top 55 leaders in Iraq. Thirty-six out of those 55 were Shiites. It’s almost the same representation publicly. I mean, not to say that the former Iraqi government was all-inclusive and everyone was happy, but it was a dictatorship that was secular. So people’s ethnic and sectarian affiliations were not really a part of that oppression. If you supported the government, you were—you had a good life. And if you opposed it, regardless of your sectarian affiliation, you were destroyed, and your entire family was destroyed.

Unfortunately, these things changed completely now. They changed because of two reasons. The first one is the complete destruction of the Iraqi national identity. There is no—there is no civic identity in Iraq anymore. So people went—they regressed. They went to the other level that they can identify with, and that, unfortunately, was the sectarian affiliation. The second reason is that this is actually the system that was introduced by the United States in 2003. The Governing Council that was created by the U.S. in 2003 marks the first occasion where Iraqis were chosen to run the country based on their sectarian and ethnic affiliations in Iraq’s contemporary history. It never happened before the U.S. came.

Contrast this with the mainstream line, that the United States only “triggered” sectarianism.

The Hack in the Iraqi Shoe

Yes, Eli, we shouldn’t idolize Muntazer al-Zaidi. Maybe al-Zaidi even took a few pitches before he went to work. The point is not many Americans would stand on ceremony just to defend George W. Bush’s honor.

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Ode to Petraeus

I don’t post about the Iraq War much, but it’s still on my mind. Outgoing General David Petraeus caught my attention with these un-Bush-like comments.

This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not war with a simple slogan

Juan Cole evaluates Petraeus.

Petraeus has great virtues as a commander, the chief of which in my view is that he genuinely cares about people. He really, really wanted to stop shoppers in bazaars from being blown to bits, and by God if he didn’t in fact cut down on that sort of thing. He is too smart to think the ‘surge’ did it all, and knows that the situation is still fragile. Another of his virtues is that he understands the need to deal with people where they are. He did not try to ignore or crush the Sunnis and the Sadrists. He dealt with them. A lot of supporters of the Da`wa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, both fundamentalist Shiite parties, are annoyed with him for striking those deals, because they are convinced that they can crush their enemies. And as long as the new Iraqi government has that attitude, the peace is fragile indeed.

Of course, he’s a general so you also have to expect him to act like one, i.e to kill the enemy. We won’t know for some time all the on-the-ground policies he deployed, and of course Bob Woodward intimated that he presided over a Phoenix Project-like dirty war of assassination of Sunni insurgents. My own guess is that even if such a tactic was pursued, it was the politicking that made the real difference.

The comments section is also very interesting.

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