SWJED
09-03-2006, 12:25 PM
Colonel Pat Lang (USA, ret.) post at his Sic Semper Tyrannis blog - Civil War and Partition (http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2006/09/civil_war_and_p.html).
... "Sectarian groups?" What has been missing from the start of our Iraq venture has been a willingness to accept the idea that Iraq was and is a "state" but it has never been a "nation-state."
In fact, the country created by international agreement after World War One remains what it always was - an artificial construct built on the land that was always just "Mesopotamia" before.
If there can be said to be an Iraqi People, then that "people" are the result of the more or less forced union of several ethno-religious nations over the last eighty odd years. These people were subjected to "pressure cooker" efforts to develop "Iraqi Man." The schools were a major instrument in that effort. Police and media pressure were used as well as all the other instruments of successive governments. Progress toward "Iraqi Man" took place. In some segments of the population, a self-awareness of being Iraqi rather than Sunni Arab, Kurd, Chaldean, Shia Arab, etc. took root. This was most noticeable among army officers, the secular Shia and other more groups directly connected to the central government.
At the same time the masses of Iraqis retained their essential group identities in the categories now so familiar to us all. These groups are closely tied to similar categories throughout the Islamic and Arab worlds; Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Turcoman, etc.
The Americans who launched the war in Iraq imagined that none of this was real. Believing deeply in a Utopian vision of human social progress and inclined to think that Israel would be benefited by a Middle East no longer obsessed with a view of the world which involved a moiety of Muslims against all others, the American revolutionaries whom we generally call "neocons" openly called and still call for transformative westernization throughout the region. I would include President Bush and Condoleeza Rice in this group. It is unfashionable to call for "westernization" these days, so the rubrics of "democratization" and "globalization" are applied with the result that great and revolutionary outcomes have been expected from constitution writing and elections. These mechanisms of democracy do not yield the results the "neocons" had hoped for because these mechanisms are not transformative. They are merely expressive of what lies within the collective minds of the people voting.
What lies within the psyches of the peoples of Iraq is a belief that their communities are not "Iraq" as President Bush imagines it. He believes that these peoples see themselves as individuals, acting as individuals within the polity of Iraq, but most of them see themselves in far older and more deeply rooted categories.
These categories are now engaged in combat on the dusty plains of Mesopotamia. They are like lions fighting over the "kill" that our intervention has left for them.
... "Sectarian groups?" What has been missing from the start of our Iraq venture has been a willingness to accept the idea that Iraq was and is a "state" but it has never been a "nation-state."
In fact, the country created by international agreement after World War One remains what it always was - an artificial construct built on the land that was always just "Mesopotamia" before.
If there can be said to be an Iraqi People, then that "people" are the result of the more or less forced union of several ethno-religious nations over the last eighty odd years. These people were subjected to "pressure cooker" efforts to develop "Iraqi Man." The schools were a major instrument in that effort. Police and media pressure were used as well as all the other instruments of successive governments. Progress toward "Iraqi Man" took place. In some segments of the population, a self-awareness of being Iraqi rather than Sunni Arab, Kurd, Chaldean, Shia Arab, etc. took root. This was most noticeable among army officers, the secular Shia and other more groups directly connected to the central government.
At the same time the masses of Iraqis retained their essential group identities in the categories now so familiar to us all. These groups are closely tied to similar categories throughout the Islamic and Arab worlds; Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Turcoman, etc.
The Americans who launched the war in Iraq imagined that none of this was real. Believing deeply in a Utopian vision of human social progress and inclined to think that Israel would be benefited by a Middle East no longer obsessed with a view of the world which involved a moiety of Muslims against all others, the American revolutionaries whom we generally call "neocons" openly called and still call for transformative westernization throughout the region. I would include President Bush and Condoleeza Rice in this group. It is unfashionable to call for "westernization" these days, so the rubrics of "democratization" and "globalization" are applied with the result that great and revolutionary outcomes have been expected from constitution writing and elections. These mechanisms of democracy do not yield the results the "neocons" had hoped for because these mechanisms are not transformative. They are merely expressive of what lies within the collective minds of the people voting.
What lies within the psyches of the peoples of Iraq is a belief that their communities are not "Iraq" as President Bush imagines it. He believes that these peoples see themselves as individuals, acting as individuals within the polity of Iraq, but most of them see themselves in far older and more deeply rooted categories.
These categories are now engaged in combat on the dusty plains of Mesopotamia. They are like lions fighting over the "kill" that our intervention has left for them.