The Myth Of American Fingerprints

Here's an interesting point of view on Iraqi sectarianism, currently carving up the nation in undeclared civil war. It's from a Palestinian-born member of the Israeli Knesset and seems to suggest that American fingerprints are all over that civil war's origins.

Arab nationalists came under attack in the West, and in conservative and neo-conservative circles in particular, because they believed that the sub- regional states into which the colonial powers had carved up the eastern Arab world would not fill the identity vacuum and serve to build a nation in the proper sense. The result of this onslaught was that the Arab nationalist movement was marginalised and increasingly radicalised the more the Arab world fell into disunity and fragmentation, especially following the 1967 war. By the time that the Saddam regime had renamed its official gazette Babylon and begun to stress a discrete Iraq identity and distinct Iraqi history, the sub-regional state had come under the crosshairs of the very groups that had formerly attacked Arab nationalism. Now, they proclaim, the state has to be turned into a sectarian and denominationally based federation, ie the state has to be deconstructed, or terminated. The idea that Arab identity can serve as an overarching bond for the people and simultaneously accommodate non-Arab minorities simply does not occur to them.

After having identified Arab nationalism as enemy number one, they co-opted Arab nationalist criticisms of the sub-regional state and its dependence on tribal and sectarian groupings and then distorted and turned these criticisms against both the state and Arab nationalism. Now the Arabs are required to recognise tribal and sectarian divisions as the only structural basis for a pluralistic society and to stop thinking of these pre- modern allegiances as possible impediments to statehood and nationalism, as Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries concluded.

Today's Iraqi occupation ideologues have concocted three super-simplistic myths to which they have reduced contemporary Iraq history: a Sunni- based Baathist regime ruled over the Shia, the oppressed Shia appealed to the US and Britain for help, and the resistance to the occupation is really a sectarian war between the Sunni and Shia. Their need to invent a fiction in order to cover up their failure and to suggest that Iraq either has to go the way they say or else, is not all that different from the fiction of weapons of mass destruction, the major difference being that they are now producing a real weapon of mass destruction aimed at Iraq and the eastern Arab world.

Activist Shirrin Al-Mufti, who sent me the link to the article, has this to say:
This very important article spells out very nicely one of the vital points I and others have tried to emphasize repeatedly - that the "received truth" that there is not and never has been an Iraqi identity, spouted so very confidently by numerous "experts", and parroted mindlessly by one and all flies in the face of fact and reality. The notion promoted by these ignorant "experts", and blindly accepted as truth by one and all is that Iraq has been from the beginning a non-viable entity cobbled together from deeply incompatible groups who are forced by the western powers to live together against their will. Our "experts" assert that Iraq was held together only by the iron fist of Saddam Hussein, supposedly despite an implacable hatred for each other that goes back to the beginning of time.

It occurs to me that these "experts" never try to explain how Iraq managed to hold itself together very nicely, thank you, in the five or so decades before Saddam Hussein came along and supposedly kept it from falling apart, or how the rest of the Arab world was deceived into so admiring Iraqis' strong sense of identity. Perhaps these "experts'" knowledge of Iraq's history does not include anything that came before Saddam, so they just don't know - it does seem to be a common misconception that Iraq had no history at all before Saddam.

Now Shirrin has a point when she notes that the fifty years of Iraq before Saddam are ignored when Americans consider that nation - but the idea that sectarian warfare is simply a U.S. conceived myth seems to me to be contradicted by the number of dead bodies. If it is an artificial construct then it is one that has been wholeheartedly adopted as true by a whole slew of people willing to use drills and machine guns to kill their fellow Iraqis. To that extent, I see this as fitting into a certain mindset - a conspiracy theory that says America created the sectarian killing out of whole cloth as a counter to the Arab nationalist movement that aims to build one single Arab state. It doesn't fit the evidence - it seems unlikely to the point of absurdity that America's neocons could be so efficient at conspiracy or that so many Arabs would so gleefully participate in a foreign-grown conspiracy against themselves - but in a way that doesn't matter. The fact remains that many people believe America's fingerprints are all over Arab discord and chaos and will tend to act accordingly. That has an effect, both in Iraq and further afield. It will also exert a greater influence in times to come should the troubles in Iraq spill over into the region as a whole. Then, it will be incredibly tempting to utter a rationale for the bloodshed that both blames "the other" (America) and offers a hope of a shining future (a pan-Arabic nation). I can see several potential problems with such a development, as will others - especially from the "Clash of Civilisations" camp of neocon Islamophobes.