Describing the violence in Iraq

Amir Taheri:

THE claim that Iraq is in a state of civil war or heading toward it has been a staple of Washington political debate for four years now. More cautious commentators prefer "sectarian war," but implicitly draw the same conclusions: Iraqis are a bad lot, better left to stew in their juice of fanaticism and violence.

The truth, however, is that, although there is a great deal of killing in Iraq, there is no civil war in any reasonable sense of that term.

"Sectarian war" is also hard to sustain. Although there is killing prompted by sectarian hatred, what we have today is a war of the sectarians, not a sectarian war. The difference is not mere semantics.

In a sectarian war, the overwhelming majorities of rival religious sects subscribe to the aims of their own side and actively participate in their pursuit. I saw this in the '90s, when I covered the various wars in the former Yugoslavia.

You could be sure that almost all Serbs, from the taxi driver that took you from the airport to the hotel to the nation's leading poet, would be a sectarian - hating the Croats and the Muslims with passion.

And most Croats and Muslims (while also hating each other) dreamed of crushing the Serbs as a nation. Peasants, factory workers, the urban poor, bishops and muftis, artists and filmmakers, ballet dancers and chefs - all were sectarian.

Nothing of the sort exists in Iraq today. The deadly disease of sectarianism has not contaminated the majority of Iraqis. Shiites and Sunnis both organize on the basis of political affiliations and interests, rather than sectarian loyalties.

Iyad Allawi and Muqtada al-Sadr, both Shiite, have little in common politically. Nor does it make sense to bracket Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the Shiite vice president, with Dhia Abdul-Zahra, leader of the Army of the Heaven gang in Najaf.

...

Anyone closely familiar with the situation, rather than making judgments from thousands of miles away, would know of countless cases where Sunnis and Shiites protected one another against the violence of sectarian terrorist groups. In Anbar province, where Arab Sunnis are more than 95 percent of the population, several Shiite pockets owe their survival to the protection of local tribes. In some cases, Sunni tribes have fought al Qaeda terrorists to prevent the massacre of Shiites.

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What is happening in Iraq, however, is neither a civil nor a sectarian war (although elements of both exist within the broader context). This war is a political one - between those who wish Iraq to succeed as a new democracy and those who want it to fail.

Those who want the new Iraq to succeed represent the overwhelming majority of Iraqis of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. Those who want it to fail are made up of Saddamite bitter-enders, some misguided pan-Arab nationalists, death squads financed by Tehran - and a variety of non-Iraqi terrorist outfits who have come to Iraq to kill and die in the name of their perverted vision of Islam.

In short, the war in Iraq is part of the broader war against terrorism and its many dark forces.

Taheri has consistently shown more insight than most on what is actually happening in Iraq and he is right again. As I have often pointed out the people responsible for most of the violence in Iraq are not focusing on defeating the government forces or the US forces. They are all too weak to even consider that.

The Sunni killers main focus is on killing Shia non combatants. They are not even strong enough to take on the Shia militias. The Shia death squads are more focused on destroying the Sunni insurgency, but they are willing to kill without due process Sunnis they suspect of involvement. They then usually dump the bodies near the site of a previous Sunni atrocity. But these forces also are weak and as recent reports have shown, they are avoiding the surging forces of the US and Iraqi troops in Baghdad.

The Shia militia are even less threatening to the government, because they see themselves as providing a justice that the government cannot because the US wants it to offer due process.

The media tends to muddle the war by focusing on violence in general without looking at the specifics. They are looking for some quite law and order evolution as a sign of success and missing the big picture of the direction of the war. The Sunnis have clearly lost and the real question is whether the Shia can evolve into a stable government. Maliki is making baby steps in that direction now and his participation in the surge is encouraging.

It is important that we give the Iraqi government time.