Nir Rosen and the omnipresence of fear in Iraq

Nir Rosen has a great piece of reporting/reflection about his most recent trip to Iraq in today’s WaPo “Outlook” section. He describes the trip as having taken place “a few weeks back.”
The headline there is simply Iraq is the Republic of Fear. That picks up on something Rosen wrote in the body of the piece. He recalled that “Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq ‘the republic of fear'”… Well, actually it was Kanaan Makiya who coined that term, writing a book by that name that catapulted him to fame, glory, and financial security back in 1990-91.
Makiya subsequently used his considerable public prominence in the US to urge on the (already weighty) pro-invasion lobby. He was one of three Iraqi oppositionists brought into one of those key meetings with Pres. Bush back in 2002.
As Rosen writes, the anti-Saddam dissidents hoped the “republic of fear”

    would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

He recalls some of the changes since he first went to Iraq to write about it in the early days after the invasion:

    At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military — with its towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad’s streets and its soldiers like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons — seemed overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.
    Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

In this piece, as in the long article Nir had in the March-April issue of Boston Review, he delineates the breaking-up of much of Iraqi society into sect-based sub-communities. This time, in even more sickening detail than before.
He writes:

    Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn’t unite Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.
    During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites’ indifference.
    But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad’s Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
    This is when sectarian cleansing truly began…

He concludes on a very pessimistic note:

    The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

Personally, I cannot be so gloomy. Firstly, because I guess by my psychological constitution and my moral-spiritual stance in the world I just am not (and cannot allow myself to be) that gloomy. And secondly because I truly do judge that a lot of the sectarian asabiyeh (sensitivity/ identification) that has arisen in Iraq in the past two years has been deliberately provoked and stoked by the occupation forces… In line with the infamous advice that Washington’s longtime pro-Israeli “Middle East guru” Martin Indyk gave back in April 2003, when he said publicly that the administration would have to play the imperialists’ traditional game of “divide and rule” in Iraq if it was to have any hope of “winning” there.
So if a lot of the inter-group hatred inside Iraq has indeed been stoked and provoked by the occupation forces and their more shadowy interventionist wings, then once the occupation ends, surely that stoking will also end?
Yes, it is true that inter-group hatred, once stoked, can all too easily acquire a life and cyclical dynamic of its own. It can’t “simply” be turned off– far less reversed. But in the absence of having the imperial (oh sorry, “occupation”) power always there, whispering fear-talk into people’s ears, and offering and making good on deliveries of lethal weapons to all sides, then at least there is more hope for an intentional message of national unity and national reconciliation to receive a decent hearing.
Also, if none of the people and leaders can any more harbor the hope that they can launch their own sectarian adventures while also receiving some protection from that outside power, then there is more chance that all Iraqis can sit down together and figure out more realistically how to deal with each other, with none of them any more relying on outsiders to put a finger on the scales in their support…
So though I have enormous respect and admiration for Nir Rosen, and feel quite confident that he was writing the truth of the situation in Iraq exactly as he saw it– still, I have also lived through and seen situations in which apparently deep-seated hatreds and cycles of violence have been overcome and transcended through the application of smart and compassionate policies of national unity. South Africa is one great example– how many of us, seeing the terrible inter-communal violence back in the 1980s, did not expect a continuation/exacerbation of the bloodbaths there? Mozambique is another. Lebanon, in its own quirky and radically unfinished way, is yet another. (How many people could have expected a Maronite-Sunni alliance such as we see today, or an Aounist-Hizbullah alliance, or indeed any of the literally scores of unlikely political configurations the country has seen since 1975? And still, there, none of the political forces has ever given any serious thought to the idea of secession… )
But anyway, my disagreement with Nir is mainly on the pessimism and fatalism of his prognosis. As for the observations and analysis in today’s article– why, everyone should rush to read them.