WASHINGTON, 23 March 2003 — Back in March 1991, when much of Iraq had risen in revolt against Saddam Hussein, posters of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini began appearing in southern Iraqi towns, where the population is overwhelmingly Shiite. Nothing could have been more calculated to give heart palpitations to the Bush administration of the day, since the posters signaled that the Shiite rebels were mere cat’s-paws of the ruling circle in Tehran.
Fearful that the Iranians might be poised to help themselves to a large, oil-producing chunk of a disintegrating Iraq, Washington withheld even moral support for the uprising, and Saddam survived to fight another day. So conveniently did the posters fit in with American preconceptions about sectarian loyalties and divisions in Iraq that knowledgeable Iraqis insist they were produced and displayed by Saddam’s own agents to stoke paranoia in Washington--and achieved precisely their desired effect.
Twelve years on, inhibitions about displacing Saddam have obviously evaporated, but misconceptions regarding Iraq as a fragile entity, riven with sectarian divisions and prone to disintegration, persist. What might be called the American version of “Iraq 101” depicts an artificial state created 80 years ago by order of the British out of three distinct vilayets — provinces — of the Ottoman Empire, in which the minority Sunni Arab population, most forcefully represented by Saddam Hussein, has always dominated the Shiite majority, and the ethnically distinct (Sunni) Kurds in the north, not to mention Turkomen and Assyrians and other small minorities. Hence it is conventional wisdom that Iraq could well fall apart if the Shiites were ever given the opportunity to secede.
But while non-Iraqi experts may have little problem with the idea of an Iraq with the fractured nationhood of Northern Ireland or Lebanon, Iraqis themselves tend to vociferously disagree, often reciting their personal ties to other communities for good measure. “My mother is Sunni, my father Shia,” says Fareed Yassin, who left Baghdad in the mid-’70s and now lives in Boston. “One-third of the Muslims in my high school graduating class were from mixed Sunni-Shia marriages, and that was typical of Baghdad — and remember that everyone in Iraq is at most two relatives away from Baghdad.’’
Nor does he think much of the idea that Iraq is too young to be a real country: “So what if Iraq only formally became a nation 80 years ago. De Tocqueville had no trouble discovering an American identity, and the US had only been going 50 years when he visited.’’
Indeed, Iraqi nationalism could be said to have manifested itself as early as 1920, when most of the territory that had been recently captured by the British from the Turks rose in bloody revolt against the new colonial masters. “The mistake we made in not adopting repressive methods earlier,” wrote the British military commander afterward, “threw...the Sunni townsmen and the Shiah countryfolk together.’”
Hussein Shahristani, a leading Iraqi nuclear scientist, who suffered years of torture and solitary confinement for telling Saddam Hussein to his face that he would not work on a bomb, hotly decries the notion that Kurds, Sunni and Shiites cannot work together in a democracy. Although there have been a handful of instances of inter-communal strife, such as Kurdish-Turkomen riots in Kirkuk in 1959, Shahristani notes that they are rare and politically inspired. “In Iraq there has never been a civil war,” he points out, citing not only the long centuries of tolerance between different sects but also different religions and races in what was once called Mesopotamia. “Iraq is a very old nation —multi-ethnic, multireligious, multisectarian for many millennia.”
Violence against particular communities, he insists, has always been the work of a dictatorial government. Even government campaigns against the ethnically distinct Kurds to quell their perennial efforts to achieve independence, argues Shahristani, never had popular endorsement. My friend Anwar Diab, a Shiite who can claim a Sunni wife and a half-Kurdish son-in-law in his immediate family, points out that while the Sunni population has tended to hold most of the political power, the Shiites have hardly been confined to the underclass as a group. While the vast slum of Baghdad’s Saddam City attests to the poverty of Shiite immigrants from the countryside, the Shiite community spans all social classes.
“Under the Ottomans and the British the Sunni went to school and became bureaucrats and army officers,” he explains. “But the Shia had the economic power, either as big landowners in the south or in business.”
Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, is not only a Shiite, but a scion of what was one of the richest banking families in Baghdad. Nor indeed, have the Shiites always been totally excluded from political influence. A few rose to senior positions in the days of the monarchy. More recently, many have been members in good standing of Saddam’s Baath Party.
