Sectarian strife has captured media attention in the wake of the US occupation of Iraq, becoming a regional concern amid plans to forge a "new Middle East". Does present Sunni-Shia conflict find its root in the annals of Islamic history, triggered now by instability and change, or is it the outcome of imperial agendas or the arrogance and ignorance of meddling foreign powers? Politics versus creed The undeclared civil war raging in Iraq is not sectarian, but rather political, sparked and driven by US arrogance, writes Amr Elshobaki* Few could ever have imagined that the Sunni-Shia denominational divide would flare into the sectarian violence that, since the American occupation of Iraq, is claiming so many lives on either side. Certainly, there are doctrinal differences between the Sunni and Shia creeds that have led to acrimony. The Shia minority in the Arab and Islamic world has often felt that the Sunni majority has ignored some of their rights, while the resentment of some Sunnis towards Shia worship of Ali Ibn Abi Taleb as the sole rightful successor to the caliphate after Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, Abu Bakr Al-Seddiq and Othman Ibn Affan has sometimes expressed itself in terms of contempt. However, in spite of this history, which has also characterised the experience of other world religions (such as the Catholic-Protestant conflict), many found it difficult to imagine that such sectarian contentions could rear their head again, especially in such a bloody form, in the modern civil state which has at least partially taken root in the Arab world. Indeed, the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq seems such an anachronism that it is virtually impossible to regard it as a purely, or even a fundamentally, sectarian one. What is certain is that the manner in which the US handled Iraq following its occupation of Baghdad in 2003 is directly responsible for the rise of sectarian strife. After toppling the Saddam regime, Washington ruthlessly forged ahead with plans to dismantle all existing edifices of the state in order to install a new form of governing order that blithely ignored Iraq's long and complex history. The current US administration imagined that all it had to do was press a button (in the form of its brutal military machine) for the old to disappear and the new to take root and flourish. It thought that changing everything from the pinnacle of the despotic regime to the ethnic and denominational social structures would be a piece of cake. Reality proved otherwise. Perhaps tearing down the old was not all that difficult, but the way it tried to construct the new drove the country to the brink of a civil war that will undoubtedly be more ferocious and take a much higher civilian toll than the nightmare of the Lebanese civil war. The breakdown in the relationship between some Sunnis and Shias is not so much the product of abstract scenarios for partitioning the region, such as those devised by the US and Israel decades ago, or of any number of conspiracy theories that blind us to the facts and keep us from acting, as it is the result of concrete errors of criminal proportions perpetrated by the US administration. Perhaps the most flagrant of these errors is the dismantlement of the Iraqi state and army, which created an enormous power vacuum that Washington's regime substitution game simply could not fill in a country as complicated as Iraq. From the outset, the dismantlement of the old regime was perceived by as deliberately targeting a specific religious group. Although it is true that the Saddam regime inflicted its crimes against all sectors of the Iraqi people, Shias certainly suffered the most at the hands of that regime's tyranny and oppression. However, this was not because the former regime was based on a sectarian order, as is the case with Baghdad's authorities today, but rather because it had made it its business to avenge itself mercilessly on that segment of the populace that, more than any other, had demonstrated the courage and fortitude to rebel. Shias paid an enormous price in casualties, but not because they were Shia, as is the case with Sunni casualties at present, but because the Saddam regime's creed was to punish insurrection mercilessly, regardless of who had the audacity to rebel. Washington's scheme for instant social, political and cultural engineering was bound to run aground and create a vast social schism in the process. When uprooting the former Baathist order and replacing it with a new ethnic/sectarian based order, Washington made the Sunni-Shia divide explicit, so much so that many could not escape the impression that its aim was to destroy the Sunni power base and establish a Shia power base in its stead. Because this perceived favouritism seemed to be advancing their interests, many Shia were naturally reluctant to join the resistance, which to them appeared as a bid to restore the old "Sunni- based" order, as opposed to a concerted campaign to wrest the country from the grips of foreign occupation. So in the vacuum created by the dismantlement of the old regime there arose not the rule of law but the rule of rival militias, setting into motion one of the worst waves of ethnic cleansing in modern history. The US could have averted this tragic scenario had it realised the delicacy of Iraqi social balances. If, indeed, its premise was correct that there had existed a Sunni "arrogance" bent on the monopoly of power, then the very least it should have done was to establish an interim form of government based on equal power-sharing between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, formulated in such a way as to avert the impression that any particular party was favoured or had unfair advantages over the others. In the course of such an interim phase, Iraqis would have evolved a common heritage based on their joint experience and progress in developing a democratic culture in which all have equal share. This would have been a far cry from the denominational/ethnic ratio system of which the ruling coalition has boasted so vainly, even as that system propelled the country to unmitigated disaster. Clearly, that system was ostensibly based on the Lebanese model. However, it is important to remember that the Lebanese civil war was not resolved by a formula for proportional representation based on denominational census figures, but rather by a formula for denominational balances based on compromise (even if census figures were taken into account to a certain extent). The Lebanese formula brought an end to Maronite hold over both the executive and legislative branches of government. However, even though Muslims make up about 60 per cent of Lebanon's population, parliamentary seats were equally apportioned between Muslims and Christians, and the latter retained the presidency. With this compromise between the former status quo and contemporary demographic realities Lebanon succeeded in ending many bitter years of civil war. Rather than tearing down the old order entirely, it chose instead to minimise the excesses of the old order and pave the way for a new political culture based on the sharing of power. Perhaps Iraq required a more stringent formula than that applied in Lebanon. Whatever the case, the American scheme to simply bury Iraq's past overnight inflicted a great injustice on the Iraqi people and their country. The Americans pursued their drive to start afresh with such rigid and short-sighted determination that it was almost inevitable that the "new Iraq" would be voided of all democratic values, principles and culture, and give rise instead to a mentality of vengeance, the Mahdi's militias, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, and a reign of unparalleled Shia fanaticism and extremism. It is sadly ironic that the "victorious" party in Iraq should now be responsible for the worst forms of vindictive violence and murder that Iraq, and perhaps the entire region, has experienced for a century. One could perhaps understand the motives for this had this party still been excluded from power, as is the case with some Sunni groups in Iraq. But now that it is in power, instead of redressing the ills of the past it has transformed the state into a free-for-all for its militias, which are thinly disguised as the country's new security forces. It is patently obvious that democracy, to which so many of the Iraqi people had aspired, was stillborn. Of course it is impossible to turn back the clock. But any solution that has a hope of rescuing Iraq from its current plight is not to be found in a vamped up security policy or in abolishing the anti-Baath law. Rather, what are urgently needed are a new formula for sectarian equilibrium, the dismantlement of sectarian militias and terrorist groups, and a timeframe for American withdrawal. The Bush administration's magic plan for a "new Iraq" was an unmitigated disaster. It opened age-old sectarian wounds that many thought had long since been consigned to the remote past. But it is still inaccurate to perceive events in Iraq today as a religious/ ideological conflict. It is a political conflict par excellence. To describe the parties at each other's throats in the undeclared civil war that is currently raging in Iraq as Sunni, representing the old order, and Shia, representing the new, is at best inaccurate. The old order was not "Sunni", but rather a secular dictatorship, and the new order is not "Shia", but rather rule by a band of Shia fanatics. * The writer is an analyst at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
