Loading ...Iraq’s Arab dream
“The land you know as Iraq is history.” Falah Mustafa Bakir, the unofficial foreign minister of Kurdish Iraq, was very plain when he talked to a German journalist in May of 2005. “There will be no going back to a situation before the summer of 2014.”
What had happened in Iraq in the summer of 2014 was the Islamic State (IS) taking Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. One year later, IS controls a territory that stretches from outside Damascus to the suburbs of Baghdad. Admittedly the land of IS is mostly desert, but so is Saudi Arabia. The land we know as Iraq is eaten up from inside and outside and the Islamic State is one of the scavengers.
After the devastating six days war of 1967 and the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, Iraq was the Arab’s dream; a country that was supposed to be the new beacon of Arab prosperity and power. Egypt and Syria had been crushed and humiliated by Israel’s military might. Now all hopes laid on Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
“What did 1967 do to the Arab world?” I asked Bouchra Belguellil, a young researcher associated with l’Institut Prospective et Sécurité en Europe (IPSE) in Paris.
“In 1967,” Belguellil said, “the military defeat against Israel was not only about material and territorial losses. It was also the defeat of a project that had intended to reunite the Arab world, to restructure their economic production base and to regain sovereignty over a region that had lived under an imperialistic yoke for a long time.”
Israel’s triumph was a shock for the entire Arab world. It led to a widespread auto-flagellation, asking for the reasons for such a failure. “The result was an Arab mindset that was isolationist and increasingly confined around small ethnic, sectarian and tribal identities,” said Belguellil.
“Admittedly the land of IS is mostly desert, but so is Saudi Arabia”
Iraq tried hard and for some time it seemed to fulfill the hopes of the Arab world. Saddam Hussein believed in a revolution that mostly focused on development through education, investing in a health care system and strengthening the industrial capabilities. But after the Iraq–Iran war of the 1980s and the first Gulf war of 1991, his revolution was all but dead.“The State of Iraq was a failed construction from the beginning,” said Shakhawan, a doctor of Kurdish origin whom I had met to talk about Iraq. “The Kurds didn’t want to belong to Iraq and in the end, 18% of the population ruled over the other 82%. Such a state could never work.”
On a day of positive thinking, one might be ready to concede that the Americans, through invading Iraq in 2003, tried to push the country towards becoming a modern democratic state. The reasons why the forced democratization of Iraq didn’t succeed are manifold. Firstly Iraq is a very complex country with a heavy historical baggage that prevents the establishment of a common national conception. Iraqis are not Iraqis but Arabs, Kurds, Muslim, Christian, Yazidis, and members of tribe A or clan B first. The loyalty to a central state is very low.
The main conflict in Iraq, overshadowing all other conflicts, is the ages old enmity between the Sunni and the Shia. The Arab Sunnis are clearly a destabilizing factor for any political system in Iraq. They represent a minority in constant fear of being marginalized. Precisely for that reason the Sunnis of Iraq used an iron fist to rule over the majority Shia and the non-cooperative Kurds for a long time.
As if sectarian or ethnic tensions were not enough, Iraq is also markedly fragmented by its tribal structure. To survive, tribes must follow rigorous rules and enforce a strict codex of values that leaves a central government far away in Baghdad irrelevant.
These days Sunni tribes within the triangle Falluja – al Qaim – Mosul openly cooperate with the Islamic State. They have submitted themselves to the law of the strongest and act as the sword of IS when fighting the Iraqi army and the Shia militias. “The tribes carefully calculate their allegiances,” said Bouchra Belguellil, “measuring possible benefits and potential losses. They also take into account the material and financial gains when working with IS instead of Baghdad.”
In principle, things in Iraq should be different. On October 15, 2005, Iraqis took a step forward and voted in favor of a new constitution. The constitution was crafted based on the idea of a ‘consensus democracy’; it’s a good paper, promoting a multi party system, a balance of power between legislation and the executive branch, and a two chamber configuration of the new Iraqi parliament to better represent the people and the different regions of Iraq.
Source: www.yourmiddleeast.com