Ordinary Life On Planet Bush

by hilzoy

Michael Ware has done consistently great reporting from Iraq. So I was interested in his reaction to Bush's speech last night:

"MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, my first impression is, wow. I mean, it's one thing to return to the status quo, to the situation we had nine months ago, with 130,000 U.S. troops stuck here for the foreseeable future. It's another thing to perpetuate the myth. I mean, I won't go into detail, like the president's characterizations of the Iraqi government as an ally, or that the people of Anbar, who support the Sunni insurgency, asked America for help, or to address this picture of a Baghdad that exists only in the president's mind.

Let me just refer to this, what the president said, that, if America were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. They are now. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. They have that now. Iran would benefit from the chaos and be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. It is now.

Iraq would face a humanitarian -- humanitarian crisis. It does now. And that we would leave our children a far more dangerous world. That's happening now. (...)

COOPER: The U.S. -- but the U.S. talks about reconciliation and the need for -- for Shia-led government to -- to reconcile with Sunni, even former Sunni insurgents. Does this government -- do -- so the Sunnis want to reconcile?

WARE: Not the ones that I'm talking to, certainly not the power brokers. I mean, I'm talking about the heads of the largest Shia militias in this country, men who sit in the parliament, men who are the chairmen of the security and defense committees, the parliamentary oversight watchdog committees.

These men are not looking for reconciliation. What they want is America to get out of the way and let us loose."

The problem in a nutshell. Reconciliation depends on Iraqis' actually wanting to reconcile. And they don't. No military operations and no amount of troops can change that.

But my favorite comment is this one:

"BUSH: Today, most of Baghdad's neighborhoods are being patrolled by coalition and Iraqi forces who live among the people they protect. Many schools and markets are reopening. Citizens are coming forward with vital intelligence. Sectarian killings are down. And ordinary life is beginning to return.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: What he didn't mention is, there are four million Iraqis not in their homes. Neighborhoods here in Baghdad have been ethnically cleansed.

WARE: Absolutely.

And if by the -- if the president means by ordinary life, families essentially living locked up in their homes, in almost perpetual darkness, without refrigeration, or perhaps constantly struggling -- struggling for ever more expensive gas to run generators, if he means waiting in their homes, wondering if government death squads will drag them off and torture and execute them, if he means living in sectarian, cleansed neighborhoods where people who were your friends have had to flee, if he's talking about living in communities that are protected by militias, then, yes, life has returned to ordinary."

Dan Froomkin, who pointed me to this transcript, called his post today "It Came From Planet Bush". That sounds about right to me.

Comments

[Ugh]

Not to mention thousands of heavily armed foreign soldiers running around who don't speak your language, and don't share you religion, culture, or alphabet.

All normal.

[Adam]

Hilzoy,

I think it goes beyond not "wanting to reconcile." Iraq isn't a historic nation--it was carved out of the Ottoman empire by the British. The question should be, do Iraqis want to form a nation that's held together by something more than the historical iron fist of Saddam Hussien? (I think the answer is pretty obviously no.)

[Gary Farber]

"The question should be, do Iraqis want to form a nation that's held together by something more than the historical iron fist of Saddam Hussien? (I think the answer is pretty obviously no.)"

I think the answer is pretty obviously non-obvious, so there you go.

Certainly, other than the Kurds, few Sunnis or Shiites have expressed an interest in carving out only a regional identity, whether sub-Iraqi or pan-Arab, other than the remnants of Ba'athist pan-Arabism.

So far as I can tell, neither the SCII (Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the former SCIRI, and bosses of the former Badr Brigades), nor Sadr, nor the Fadhila Party, favor breaking up Iraq, and neither does any significant Sunni Iraqi group I'm familiar with. Can you name some significant specific groups in Iraq who "pretty obviously" favor not keeping Iraq intact?

Iraqis, at least the non-Kurds, seem far more interested in fighting over control of all of Iraq, and of specific assets and neighborhoods and areas and power centers of it, than in breaking up the country. Most polls of Iraqis that I've seen say that most Iraqis identify as "Iraqis," and want the country kept whole.

So why you think that it's "obvious" that they largely believe otherwise is unclear. Certainly the mere fact of fighting doesn't demonstrate your point in the slightest, as the relevant question is why are they fighting, and what for?

Incidentally, what's "a historic nation," exactly?

[Adam]

Wanting to control all of Iraq is not the same as wanting to hold it together as a polity, which is what I meant by "form a nation."

And by historic nation, I mean some group of people distinguished in some way from their neighbors, and existing as a nation through some period longer than a human lifetime. For example, China, Japan, Vietnam, or most countries in Europe.

[Gary Farber]

"And by historic nation, I mean some group of people distinguished in some way from their neighbors, and existing as a nation through some period longer than a human lifetime."

Iraq, which is no less homogenous than half the world's countries, has existed as an independent country, again, since 1921 (with Mosul added five years later); that's 86 years, which is longer than the lifetime of most humans.

Historically, generally speaking, the people of Babylon and Mesopotamia have had an extremely lengthy regional identity, with no greater fluctuating borders, or greater contiguity of ruling dynasties, than most countries either now extant, or that constituted previous entities and empires.

Which is to say that all countries lack some sort of absolute and fixed permanent "real" -- or "historic" single identity, but that Iraq is little different than most countries in being constituted of a variety of ethnic peoples, and yet possessing a considerable amount of longterm historic identity, as well. Look at how Saddam Hussein used that, for instance.

This isn't to contradict the exceedingly obvious point that there's a sectarian war going in Iraq, nor to say that the degree of identification of individuals in Iraq to "Iraq" isn't variable, but there's nothing particularly unusual about Iraq's history as a modern nation that makes it particularly less of a "real," or more of an "artificial," or, as you phrased it, less of a true "historic' nation, than most other modern nations.

Europe's borders, and the very existence of many countries, changed dramatically both during the Great War, at Versaille, then again during WWII, then again at the end, and even afterwards, Stalin was still shifting "his" peoples about, decolonization continued to form new independent countries, from India and Pakistan, to a number in Africa, for years to come. And, obviously, the Middle East also. (Quick, who remembers the United Arab Republic?)

If most of the world's nations don't fit the norm, there may be something questionable in the model.

[Gary Farber]

Marc Lynch on Sunni attitudes towards partition:

[...] Partition, soft or hard, has far fewer fans in Anbar than in Washington. Most Sunnis continue to support a unified Iraqi state, and have exaggerated expectations about the role they should play in such a state. A recent letter from the "Amir" of the Islamic Army of Iraq claimed that Sunnis made up 60 percent of the population of Iraq, and few Sunnis seem ready to accept the status of "tolerated minority" within a Shia-dominated state.

Neither do the Shia seek to divide or partition Iraq. A lot of Kurds do, to be sure, but they're a distinct minority.

[Jesurgislac]

Adam: For example, China, Japan, Vietnam, or most countries in Europe.

Anyone familiar with European history would know that, probably at any point in the last 400 years, and certainly at any time in the 20th or the 21st century, there existed countries in Europe which had not existed for as long as a normal human lifetime. The present Republic of Germany did not exist until I was 23, for example: and nor did Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, or Bosnia & Herzegovina. There are people alive today who remember Ireland before the Partition and the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. It may be in my own lifetime that the UK will cease to be England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and become two or three separate states.

This is not to say that Iraq was badly constructed at the start - it was: it was intentionally set up to give power to the Sunnis, who have always been a minority in Iraq, and deprive the Shi'ites of power, even though they are a majority. But as a unified country, Iraq is more of a "historic nation" than the present Republic of Germany, and is three years older than the Republic of Ireland.

[Hartmut]

It has been said that the "nation state" was the most toxic invention of European history. It is actually a pretty young one. Today Polish and German nationalists debate, whether Copernicus was a Pole or a German (he would not have understood the question) and Austria complained that Mozart was included in the list of most important Germans (ignoring that Mozart's hometown did not belong to Austria at the time of his birth either) etc. Historically states were extremly variable both in territory and population and more defined by their ruling dynasties than any "national" identity. Despite the "tribes" still having an identity (Bavarians still do), that was not necessarily what defined the state they lived in. The problem with the nation state is its exclusionary nature (exacerbating [ethnic] minority problmes) and the trouble it causes, if the "nation" and the "state" do not cover the same area. Imagine Israel demanding that Jewish quarters e.g. in New York should be part of the state of Israel or France demanding back parts of Louisiana and you get an idea about 19th century Europe (or in the real world Saddam claiming that Kuwait belongs to Iraq or the China/Taiwan problem) and the "nation state" ideology going wild.

[Adam]

I'm not communicating clearly. Please set aside my comments about historic nations, they're distracting from the point I was trying to make. Let me try again with my larger point: I see lots of evidence that Iraq is in the midst of a war to control everything inside a set of borders drawn up by the British after the first world war. I see very little that indicates to me that any of the major Sunni or Shia factions want to come to the set of tradeoffs that will allow people to live reasonably happily together as a nation. (The Kurds may want to, because of the threat of war with the Turks.)

When the USA was formed, there were a number of threats which caused us to make tradeoffs (between large states and small, slave and free, etc). Even with the British threat, it took 4 years from the treaty of Paris to the ratification of the Constitution.)

Contrast this with the Iraqi situation: are there people who are putting forward a vision of what comprimises might be made to allow the various communities to make up an Iraqi polity?

[Eric Martin]

So far as I can tell, neither the SCII (Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the former SCIRI, and bosses of the former Badr Brigades), nor Sadr, nor the Fadhila Party, favor breaking up Iraq, and neither does any significant Sunni Iraqi group I'm familiar with. Can you name some significant specific groups in Iraq who "pretty obviously" favor not keeping Iraq intact?

Actually, SIIC and, to a lesser extent, Dawa both favor a loose federalism that will likely serve as the de jure wedge that brings about actual or de facto partition. SIIC is the most aggressive in terms of pushing for a rump Shia state in the south.

This is not a very popular position for the Iraqi polity, however. And so SIIC and Dawa are publicly cautious at times. At other times, however, they are quite explicit about their plans.