From the first day of the occupation, and whenever Iraq’s unity has been endangered, and whenever Iraqis could express themselves, Iraqis chanted slogans such as: “Neither Sunni nor Shiite, this country is not for sale!� Following the magnificent gesture of Muntather Al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist's shoe throwing at the disgraced outgoing US president, a wave of solidarity is sweeping the country and the Arab world, Iraqis across the territory demonstrating with the slogan: “Muntather, you will not be humiliated; Sunnis and Shiites are brothers.�
In a few seconds, this gesture destroyed the myth created by the occupation and reaffirmed that the dignity of Iraqis is indivisible. The nationalist, Islamist and leftist anti-occupation movements as well as the population all reject the occupation and its plan of fragmentation and partition.
"The shoe-throwing incident captured another failure of the administration — the inability to win the support and confidence of the Iraqi people," Julian E. Zelizer wrote on CNN.com.
Sectarianism Used for Political Gains
Throughout the 1990s, the United States pursued three parallel avenues: the imposition of economic sanctions crippling the central government along with the imposition of illegal no-fly zones on two thirds of Iraqi territory, creating de facto different realities on the ground with the Northern part of Iraq being exempted from sanctions and Kurdish autonomy allowed to flourish; the complete demonization of the Arabism of the Iraqi state, its army and of the governing Baath Party, deemed “Sunni�, itself associated with the entire public state system and its civil servants; and the promotion of sectarian exiled forces that have interests in the fragmentation of Iraq and agreed to the US plan of “regime change� by force.
By 1998, the United States officially funded and trained their respective militias that would participate in the illegal invasion and later be incorporated in the new military apparatus created under occupation.
From 1991 onwards, the United States developed an elaborate propaganda machine that systematically sought to negate the mere existence of the Iraqi people, aiming to destroy its unifying Arab Muslim identity. In 1991, the United States encouraged the “majority Shiites� in the South and the “minority Kurds� in the North to rebel against the central government, implying that they were both oppressed as “Kurds� and “Shiites� by the “Sunnis� that allegedly controlled the state and enjoyed privileges at both their expenses.
From that time on, so as to pave the way for Iraq’s fragmentation, and in order to justify a future US invasion, Iraq was systematically portrayed as an artificial creation comprised of three distinctive, conflicting regions, the people of which must be protected from the criminal “Sunnis�, the solution proposed being direct intervention and the imposition of federalism.
The United States conveniently blurred ethnic and religious concepts together and silenced the fact that Iraq never experienced civil strife, that more than 80 percent of its people are Arabs, 95 percent are Muslims, and that they share common values and interests as well as the existence of various national and cultural groups that have always enhanced the richness of Iraqi society.
Upon invasion, the United States disbanded the national army, leaving Iraq and its people unprotected, with no legitimate force to defend them. It dismantled all state institutions thereby making unemployed and outlawed 100,000 skilled civil administrative cadres. No possible means of economic survival was left open outside the economic system of the occupation itself. The Iraqi people were to be given the choice of either collaborating with the criminal plan of a foreign invading power or embracing destitution.
The occupation oversaw a campaign of systematic destruction of the Iraqi professional class, hundreds of thousands being forced to flee or face assassination, thereby decimating the secular-educated Iraqi middle class who had proven its capacity to manage Iraq’s resources for the benefit of all.
As the British attempted in the 1920s, the US aim was to create a comprador class whose finances, interests and very existence would be intrinsically linked to the presence of the occupation. This new class would be free to govern over a sectarian “political process� so long as it oversaw the dismantlement of the central Iraqi state and the dismemberment of the Iraqi social body while repressing the Iraqi people and its resistance.
So as to plunder other people’s resources, US imperialism routinely uses sectarianism so as to justify its intervention in other country’s internal affairs by pretending to defend the rights of a minority — whether its demands are justified or not — in order to control the majority and implement a strategy of fragmentation. Regardless of which US administration was ruling, it has attempted to break up Iraq both as a state and as a nation for the last 18 years.
Through these years, the assault on the Iraqi state and people took different forms, from disproportionate military operations to the imposition of economic sanctions combined with illegal no-fly zones, and finally through nearly six years of direct military occupation and orchestration of civil strife that led to the violent deaths of 1.2 million Iraqis and the forcible displacement of at least six million more.
US Hopes Put Into Action
The United States hoped to replace Iraq by three of more weak and conflicting entities, permanently requiring the political, economic and military domination of the US. It ensured that the forces it promoted were incompetent and at odds enough that there would be permanent instability and no capacity to build a functioning and viable state.
These forces agree only on one point: they accept the partition of Iraq along sectarian lines. Indeed, whether it is the Shiite-led religious government, which mainly represents the Shiite bourgeoisie, or the Kurdish warlords, both support the concept of Iraqi federalism even if each has a singular understanding of it. For example, the Kurdish idea of federalism is closer to the concept of con-federalism.
Through the “political process�, they hoped to constitutionally annex Kirkuk and declare their future independence. The Shiite leaders believed that their new status as the governing “majority� would allow them to impose a religious state similar to and allied with Iran. Due to this difference in understanding of federalism and the distribution of revenues that it entails, and as the Kurdish movement is secular, these two forces are permanently involved in bitter disputes.
No aspect of life was left free of the taint of sectarianism.
The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), imposed by Civil Administrator Paul Bremer soon after the US invasion, enshrines sectarian quotas in the organization of the state, its institutions, government and military apparatus.
Only those who accepted the TAL were allowed to participate in the illegal elections that followed, themselves based on sectarian lists.
The subsequent so-called permanent constitution does not depart from it; Iraq is taken out of its geopolitical reality and the concept of Iraqi citizenship is deliberately cancelled. Ministries are distributed according to sectarian quotas and ruled by nepotism. The new military apparatus is built upon the incorporation of sectarian militias that have no allegiance to the central state. Meanwhile, the occupation instrumented death squads and private military contractors in conducting black ops, all to terrorize the Iraqi people and push them towards civil war.
To break an ancient society living together for thousands of years, coupled with a very experienced and modern national movement, the United States had to destroy all what unites Iraqis. This intended destruction necessarily encompasses the following: the state, culture, history, material heritage, society, economic sustainability, institutions, the army, the education system, the health system, the judicial system, public infrastructure, the environment and ecology, communication facilities, national identity, indeed the very essence of Iraq.
For the US plan to succeed, the occupation must disrupt and destroy the existence of the living people and its moral values. It must ruin them for generations, if not all of history. It even needs to destroy the physical forms of cities. The occupation has offered nothing to the Iraqi people but an organized project of extermination based on the insanity of “creative chaos�.
Throughout the occupation, the repression of the Sunnis went unabated; from urbicides to assassinations to sweeping detentions, Baghdad was purged of its Sunni population. When the “Sunnis� rebelled against this repression it was used as proof that they were sectarian and opposed to the so-called democratic political process.
It is a tradition that Sunnis refuse to identify themselves as a sect. They are the majority among Arabs and Muslims in the world and they have neither the interest nor the culture of being a sect. The resistance first labelled as Sunni soon spread across the Iraqi territory, and the sectarian puppet government had to attack the Iraqi people from the North, to the center and to the South.
From 2006 onwards, the occupation resorted to a policy of population displacement by using sectarian militias to purge neighborhoods of their minorities. But as a minority can be a majority elsewhere, and as the United States has no loyalty to the different sectarian groups it promotes, and as it switches alliances according to its own interests, soon all sections of Iraqi society were forced to flee. One fifth of Iraq’s population has been made refugee both within and outside the country.
Iraq Destroyed but Not Defeated
The United States could not partition Iraq nor privatize its resources, and despite its overwhelming firepower it could not break the will of the Iraqi people to live in a united state peacefully together. We all know that hundreds of thousands of Arab Sunnis live with their Arab Shiite brothers in the South of Iraq, that Baghdad is historically a multi-ethnic city where no group is the majority and where one million Kurds live, that all major Iraqi tribes are both Shiite and Sunni, that 30 percent of Iraqi marriages are inter-communal. While Iraq, that used to be called Mesopotamia, is composed of a variety of national and cultural groups, Iraqis have always defined their identity as Iraqis first.
All Iraqis are the daughters or sons of this history and are inheritors of all the successive civilizations that flourished in this land. The Iraqi people are the expression of this heritage, regardless of their religion or ethnicity.
Being Iraqi is based not on ethnicity or religion or sect but on being Iraqi. Whenever Iraq could live in peace and have a stable state it proved it could participate in the enhancement of human culture and development and created great civilizations and regional orders.
The myth of Iraqis being sectarian can simply be dismissed by the fact that no such strife occurs outside the occupation in refugee communities existing in Syria, Jordan or Egypt that are host to millions drawn from all components of Iraqi society.
Despite these 18 years of assault and the murder of nearly three million Iraqi citizens, the United States succeeded in destroying Iraq but could not break nor defeat Iraq and the will of its people to live together in a united and free state of all its equal citizens, sovereign over their land, resources and future.
On the other hand, it seems that the coming administration would like us to accept the consequences of the US’ own criminal policies, and is promoting the idea of “soft partition". If it carries the same policies as the previous administration it will be faced with the same resistance and the same defeat, while Iraqis will continue to be murdered for nothing.
Peace and stability in Iraq is simple to attain: unconditional US withdrawal and recognition of the Iraqi resistance that by definition represents the will of the Iraqi people and the cancellation of all laws, treaties, contracts and agreements passed under occupation.
The interest of Iraq and its people remains to build a sovereign and democratic state of all its equal citizens nourished by its Arab Muslim identity and civilization, one that respects and protects the rights of all national and cultural groups which together constitute the greatness of the Iraqi nation and society.
Hana Al-Bayaty is an Iraqi-French documentary film maker and a regular contributor for Al-Ahram Weekly in Egypt. Based in Brussels, she is a coordinator of the Iraqi International Initiative on refugees (www.3iii.org) and a member of the Brussells Tribunal Committee (www.brusselstribunal.org )