Dismembering Iraq

The verdict is in. Saddam Hussein has been found guilty of crimes against humanity. News flash: the Butcher of Baghdad is guilty of being a butcher.

From the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, the United States faced a conundrum. It could either fight the fierce Iraqi nationalism or it could undermine it. However, undermining Iraqi nationalism required a disintegration of Iraqi society into sectarianism. The Bush Administration chose to try to undermine Iraqi nationalism. Weakening Iraqi nationalism meant that it was easier to enter Iraq, however, creating sectarian strife means that it will be harder to leave Iraq. Today’s verdict is another milestone in the dismemberment of Iraqi nationalism.

The Bush Administration has actively pitted the Shia and Sunni against each other in a bid to defeat the insurgency. The ascendancy of the Shia led government in Iraq is no accident – it was anointed by the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration has equipped a massive police force in Iraq comprised largely of the Shia militias (the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade). Faced with a rising insurgency, the Bush Administration has reportedly resurrected the Reagan era "Salvador Option" to try to deal with the Sunni insurgents:

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

As in El Salvador, the option of pitting one group against another in Iraq has also been a "success". It has transformed the war in Iraq from one that was primarily a nationalist struggle against occuppiers to a much more complicated affair that features a bloody sectarian civil war between Iraqi Shia and Iraqi Sunni. One can argue that this strategy, the "Salvador Option", succeeded spectacularly with the attack on the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006. Iraq has been spiraling into chaos ever since.

Iraqi nationalism, within the larger Arab nationalism, has always been a counter-balance to tribal and religious sectarianism. What bound Iraqi Shia and Iraqi Sunni together was that they were Arabs and Iraqis. Iraqi Shia are distinct from Iranian Shia in that the former are Arabs and the latter are Persian. That distinction is significant and has historically been the key to the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. When Iraq and Iran fought a bitter eight year war, Iraqi Shia fought along side their Sunni countrymen against the Iranians.

The rise of the Ba’th movement ( or "renaissance" ) in Iraq and Syria was an attempt to unify the Arab nation under a secular banner. For all its ills, the Ba’th party in Iraq represented the supremacy of Iraqi nationalism over religious sectarianism. The Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and then later de-ba’thification of Iraqi society unleashed tribal and religious forces that have now led to the near collapse of Iraqi society. Without a strategy to fill the vacuum of the Ba’th party, the Bush Administration opted for sectarian dismemberment of Iraq.

In the context of the ongoing sectarian violence, where Shia and Sunni are butchering each other, the Saddam Hussein trial and verdict will offer the last little push to Iraqi society on its path to chaos. Allowing the Shia leadership of Iraq to try the Sunni leader Saddam Hussein while a sectarian war is raging was a monumentally stupid decision by the Bush Administration. It has compromised the validity of the trial, which should have been held under an international tribunal, and it has poured fuel onto a raging sectarian fire. The guilt of Saddam Hussein was never in doubt. What was on trial was the trial itself. This trial and verdict will further divide Iraq’s Shia and Sunni populations.

Iraq’s future is being sacrificed at the altar of American domestic politics today. Mr. Bush is so intent on capturing the news cycle on the weekend before the mid-term elections that he has sacrificed untold American and Iraqi lives in the process. Vice President Cheney asserts that the violence in Iraq has increased because the insurgents are trying to influence the elections in America. The notion that Shia and Sunni are butchering each other to influence congressional elections in the United States is absurd. Yet, Mr. Cheney and his boss are quite content to add to the sectarian violence in Iraq for their own political purposes.

Mr. Bush has always looked at Iraq through the prism of domestic politics. Today the verdict is in on Saddam Hussein. On Tuesday, the American people will deliver a verdict on Mr. Bush.

[Cross posted on Taylor Marsh]