Iraq and the Arabs' Future cont'd V
Fouad Ajami
foreignaffairs.org.
[continued...]
A new Iraqi political arrangement would also empower the Shi`a and the Kurds, and neither population owes fidelity to the pieties of Arabism. The Iraqi Kurds owe the Arab world little. The Iraqi opposition's solitude in the wider politics of the Arab world has been deep and searing. Saddam's opponents have had no Egyptian or Saudi sponsorship, nor have the Arab nationalists and "the street" embraced them. They have worked alone from London and Iran, and more recently, with American patronage. They are free to fashion a world with relative indifference to Arab claims.
A respected Kuwaiti thinker, Muhammad al-Rumaihi, has recently observed that the talk of Iraq as a model for other Arabs is overdone, that Iraq has never enjoyed such primacy in modern Arab life, either under the monarchy or under the radical regimes that have held sway since the revolution of 1958. There may be truth in what he says, for the country is idiosyncratic and lacks the cultural accessibility to other Arabs, such as those in Cairo, Damascus, or Beirut. But herein lies the prospect of Iraq's deliverance: freedom from the deadly legends of Arabism, from the lure of political roles that have wrecked Arab regimes that succumbed to them. Think of Cairo under the weight of its Arab calling and the undoing of the bright hopes of its Nasserist era. No country should wish for itself this sort of captivity.
The pan-Arabism that has played upon Iraq and infected its political life has been a terrible simplification of that checkered country's history, a whip in the hands of a minority bent on dominating the polity and dispossessing the other communities of their rightful claims. Iraq had been a country of Kurdish highlanders, Marsh Arabs, Sunnis, Shi`ites, Turkmen, Assyrians, Jews, and Chaldeans. But only the Sunni Arabs came into power -- the city people, the privileged community of the (Sunni) Ottoman state.
British rule had worked through the Sunnis, for the British had rightly assumed that a ruling community that included 20 percent of the population would be easily subordinated to foreign tutelage. In a cruel historical irony, the Sunni Arabs emerged with the best of alternatives: they were at once the colonial power's proxies and the bearers of a strident, belligerent ideology of Arab nationalism. The state remained external to the body politic, an alien imposition.
Oil and terror gave that state freedom from the society and the means to destroy all potential challengers. The regime grew more clannish, more relentless, more Sunni, and more Arab by the day. The Assyrians were destroyed in a military campaign in 1933. Then the Jews were dispossessed and expelled. There remained the Shi`ites, the Kurds, and the Turkmen to contend with.
The state also grew in power. The dominance of Saddam Hussein's fellow townspeople, the Tikritis, led to the gradual hardening that separated the regime from the larger society around it. In earlier, more benign days, the Tikritis had lived off the making of rafts of inflated goatskins. The steamships broke that industry. By happenstance, the Tikritis made their way into the military academies and the security services. There, they found a brand-new endeavor: state terror. Their rule had to be given ideological pretense, and pan-Arabism proved to be a perfect instrument of exclusion, a modern cover for tribalism.
The Fertile Crescent has always been a land of rival communities and compact minorities. Arab nationalism, the creed of Iraq's rulers, escaped from all that ambiguity into an unyielding doctrine of Arabism. The radicalism of that history wrecked the Arab world and gave the politics of the Fertile Crescent a particularly rancid and violent temper. Saddam did not descend from the sky; he emerged out of his world's sins of omission and commission. The murderous zeal with which he went about subduing the Kurds and the Shi`a was a reflection of the deep atavisms of Arab life. There, on the eastern flank of the Arab world, Iraq and its "maximum leader" offered the fake promise of a pan-Arab Bismarck who would check the Persians to the east and, in time, head west to take up Israel's challenge.
AN OPENING FOR DEMOCRACY
An Arab world rid of this kind of ruinous temptation might conceivably have a chance to rethink the role of political power and the very nature of the state. It has often seemed in recent years that the Arab political tradition is immune to democratic stirrings. The sacking of a terrible regime with such a pervasive cult of terror may offer Iraqis and Arabs a break with the false gifts of despotism.
If and when it comes, that task of repairing -- or detoxifying -- Iraq will be a major undertaking. The remarkable rehabilitation of Japan between its surrender in 1945 and the restoration of its sovereignty in 1952 offers a historical precedent. Indeed, the Japanese example has already turned up, in both American and Arab discussions, as a window onto the kind of work that awaits the Americans and the Iraqis once the dictatorship is overthrown. Granted, no analogy is perfect: Iraq, with its heterogeneity, differs from Japan. America, too, is a radically different society than it was in 1945 -- more diverse, more given to doubt, and lacking the sense of righteous mission that drove it through the war years and into the work in Japan. |
