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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Andrew N. Cothran who wrote (602591)	8/11/2004 2:03:46 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

About Iraq. (Hope Dumbya reads this while eating a pretzel!) "Iraq is currently a contested space with no unifying political formula to focus a common identity. The three major contenders for power - the Shi'ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Sunni Kurds - have embraced overall strategies that lead them towards confrontation. Shi'ite Arabs seek to dominate a single Iraqi state; Sunni Arabs seek to recover the dominance that they once had or at least parity with the Shi'ites; Kurds seek to retain the autonomy - amounting to independence - that they had before the occupation, and extend their rule to oil-rich regions with large Kurdish populations that were outside their protected zone. Shi'ite aims are opposed by Sunni Arabs and Kurds; Kurdish aims are opposed by Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs; Sunni aims are opposed by Shi'ite Arabs and Kurds. With approximately 60 per cent of the population, the Shi'ite have mainly fallen into line with the strategy of their major spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of waiting for the results of free elections before they use extra-legal means to pursue their interests; if elections yield Shi'ite dominance, then their aims will be met without resort to force. Similarly, the Kurds are waiting to see how they fare in the constitutional structure of the new Iraq before they turn their militia to defensive warfare. Segments of the Sunni Arab community are already engaged in military insurgency, having the lowest expectations that the transition will benefit them. There is little room in this scenario for alliances between the major groups or for cross-ethnic alliances among factions within them. At most, there will be shifting coalitions of convenience, as the groups thrust and parry, and leaders vie for supremacy within them. Weakness of forces mitigating conflict Many analysts and commentators argue that understanding Iraqi politics through the perceived interests of its major ethnic groups oversimplifies the actual situation. They are correct that Iraq is a diverse and complex society with a panoply of political tensions, but they miss the point that the occupation has brought a hardening of group identities that dissolves other allegiances, partly because of the communal representation system imposed by the occupation authority that carried over to the transitional government, and partly because insecurity drives people under the protective cover of their ethnic groups. It would be a mistake to believe that the basic ethnic divide was not the formative structure of Iraqi society before the occupation - the deep fissures that had been barely covered by dictatorship have simply become wider. The intensification of rivalries between Iraq's three major ethnic groups diminishes the mitigating effects of crosscutting interests and loyalties. There is a genuine Iraqi nationalism, but it was concentrated in the Sunni Arab middle class of experts and apparatchiks, which has now been displaced and tends more and more to be driven by de-Ba'athification, unemployment, and fears of persecution into narrow group loyalty. The Kurds were never Iraqi nationalists and the Shi'ite are divided, with sub-national affiliation dominant in the lower classes and loosening in the middle class. Having suffered persecution and discrimination at the hands of Sunni Arab elites under the monarchy and the Ba'athist regime, Shi'ite Arabs and Kurds never developed as strong an Iraqi identity as did the Sunni Arabs. Similarly, secularism is rooted in the urban middle classes of all the groups, especially the Sunni Arabs, and sectors of the working class in the oil industry. For the Kurds, sub-nationalism overrides any commitment to secularism that would forge bonds across ethnic lines. The secularist strata of the Shi'ite Arabs have not been able to gain a popular following - the effective leadership of the Shi'ite community is clerical. The Sunni Arabs are split between secular sub-nationalism and a growing religious identification based on clerical power. The diminished power of nationalist, secular, and even moderate religious forces leaves each group with a more rigid definition of identity fusing religion with language for Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs, and intensifying linguistic and cultural identity for the Kurds. The stage is set for the kinds of aggressive intolerance that marked the breakup of Yugoslavia."