the depths of Arab distrust, even hatred, of the United States over its support for Israel has personally shaken me. I dare say, with this kind of dominant 'life-view' in the Middle East, many Iraqis are having great difficulty accepting the Americans in their midst and as their de facto government. Their relationship to Israel has not changed at all IMO.
Much of what I've been hearing in the TV scenes from Iraq is expression, often distorted, of the Baathist version of Arab Nationalism. This article I posted the URL for earlier has interesting things to say about it.
Iraq was a case in point. Many Iraqi nationalists who had supported Abdel Nasser in his feud with the pro-British prime minister, Nuri as-Sa?id, were nevertheless very wary about such phrases as "the Arab people of Iraq."[12] Nasserists and Baathists ceaselessly invoked it, ignoring the existence of a non-Arab Kurdish community that constituted some 20 percent of the Iraqi population. Nor were many Arab Shi?ites sold on Arab unity, which they perceived as a cover for Sunni hegemony. Iraq's communal mosaic afforded Qasim the opportunity to fend off demands that Iraq join the UAR, even at a moment when Arab nationalism seemed unstoppable. Qasim promoted an "Iraq first" identity, emphasizing the country's historical status as the cradle of great pre-Arab civilizations. He deliberately added the Akkadian eight-point star of Ishtar to the national flag, and likewise incorporated the insignia of the sun god Shamash in Iraq's national emblem.[13] The prestige of Arab nationalism suffered much because Iraq, throughout the five years of Qasim's rule, pursued policies that were vehemently anti-unionist and zealous for Iraq's sovereignty.
Even when the Baathists seized power in 1968, their enthusiasm for Arab nationalist projects was tempered by a recognition of their country's own needs. A party resolution admitted that
there were deficiencies and mistakes in the understanding and definition of the dialectical connection between the local (watani ) tasks with which the party [was] confronted ... and [the Arab nationalist] tasks ... The party was pushed into the [Arab nationalist] arena ... in a way that largely exceeded its capability [before] many tasks were accomplished on the local Iraqi level ... such as stabilizing the regime ... and [fully] solving the Kurdish problem.[14]
It was not that the Iraqi Baathist regime had abandoned its commitment to Arab nationalism. Rather they felt that focusing on Iraq?achieving some form of political harmony, reviving the country's economy, building its infrastructure, and especially solving its ethnic and sectarian problems?was a more urgent priority than a full-fledged charge toward Arab unity. In instructing an educational committee, Saddam Hussein said:
When we talk of the [Arab] nation, we should not forget to talk about the Iraqi people ... When we talk about the Arab homeland, we should not neglect to educate the Iraqi to take pride in the piece of land in which he lives ... [Iraqis] consist of Arabs and non-Arabs, [so] when we talk of the great [Arab] homeland, we must not push the non-Arabs to look for a country outside Iraq.[15]
Could there be a clearer expression of the desire to reorient the ideological compass of party loyalists, indeed to subvert their lifelong Baathist beliefs? Arab nationalism was not discarded, but it yielded primacy of place to territorial nationalism. Saddam was pointing out realities: the internal condition of Iraq was the stuff of politics.
And,
In promising the Arabs freedom, Abdel Nasser echoed Husri's conception; it was not personal freedom and liberty, rather, it was freedom from Western domination. Liberal democracy had no place in this new order.[45] Abdel Nasser did not offer it; he disdained it. "The separation of powers," he once said, "is nothing but a big deception, because there really is no such thing as the separation of powers."[46] But neither did the nationalist multitude in those heady days ask for democracy, let alone demand it. The illiberal intellectual tradition of cultural nationalism, combined with the anti-Western struggle, which reached a crescendo in the 1950s and 1960s, justified the centralization of power in the minds of most Arabs, and contributed to the emergence of Abdel Nasser's popular, populist, and authoritarian rule.
The Baath Party, the other leader of the Arab nationalist march, followed a parallel route. The custodians of Baathist ideology focused their intellectual energies on "Arab unity" and the "anti-imperialist struggle" but said little about democratic institutions. While the constitution of the Baath Party did assert the principle of the people's sovereignty and Baathist support for a constitutional elective system, it also gave the Baathist party the central role in determining the scope and extent of political freedoms. From the very beginning, Aflaq's ideas were endowed with a "strong statist strain [in which] individual self-realization [would] derive from participation in the general will of the community."[47] Freedom would be associated with the struggle against imperialism rather than with individual liberty.[48] This illiberal orientation would be reinforced during the party's flirtation with political power in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the party's sixth national congress held in 1963, the Baath finally and unequivocally rejected the notion of liberal parliamentarianism, espousing instead the Soviet concept of democratic centralism, based upon the party's role as the "vanguard" political institution in the state.
meforum.org
My point is not that all the people I've heard are Baathist necessarily but that their general view of the West - and US in particular - has been coloured by the ideology.
Also many of the folk I've been hearing are Shiites bent on their particular (Iranian inspired) version of how Iraq should be.
I also think some of the folk I've heard are Baathist and can speak out in general terms about the unsatisfactory nature of the US occupation.
But, what the hell. Why on earth should we expect these folk to be friendly? Many Germans were not at the end of WW2. They didn't think they deserved what arrived. It took a while for things to sink in. |
