The War of All Against All

Nir Rosen wrote a remarkable piece for the Boston Review about the development of sectarian strife in Iraq. With numerous eyewitness accounts from Shias and Sunnis, he paints a grim picture. Violence increasingly radicalizes the respective communities and makes reconciliation within an Iraqi national framework less likely. Rosen’s article is also useful in detailing the way the two communities view various events that have occurred in the last three years. These events typically are hidden in the interior of American newspapers and are too easily categorized under the rubric of “more random bombings in Iraq” even among close observers of the war.

Rosen’s powers of description are evocative of the contradictions and horror of Iraq today, and a few passages stand out:

[Among Shias] Political posters on the walls featured the first and second Sadr martyrs. “Here they killed one,” my guides told me, pointing to more blood. We were interrupted by a guide’s mobile phone; its ring tone was an angry Shia sermon.

And . .

[Among Sunnis] They opened another coffin. ““This one was tortured before killing!” one man shouted. “They pulled out his teeth! He was helping his father. What is their crime that they were killed? Only that they are Sunnis?” He raised his hands and shouted, “God is great!” I looked at the corpse, a middle-aged man with a bruised face, missing some of his front teeth. “Even Jews wouldn’t do this!”

Rosen’s ultimate conclusions seems both correct and depressing; namely, that a civil war is inevitable and US mistakes had a significant role in setting up the framework in which it could occur:

Although the Bush administration has criticized the Iraqi government for not disarming the militias—and this is certainly the most important problem facing Iraq, apart from the occupation—this is an untenable first step. The militias exist because there is no security in Iraq. And when the Bush administration criticizes the Iraqi government for being weak, they forget that they deliberately made it weak and dependant on their dictates. The American failure to provide security has led to the militias. The American sectarian approach has created the civil war. We saw Iraqis as Sunnis, Shias, Kurds. We designed a governing council based on a sectarian quota system and ignored Iraqis (not exiled politicians but real Iraqis) who warned us against it. We decided that the Sunnis were the bad guys and the Shias were the good guys. These problems were not timeless. In many ways they are new, and we are responsible for them. The tens of thousands of cleansed Iraqis, the relatives of those killed by the death squads, the sectarian supporters and militias firmly ensconced in the government and its ministries, the Shia refusal to relinquish their long-awaited control over Iraq, the Kurdish commitment to secession, the Sunni harboring of Salafi jihadists—all militate against anything but full-scale civil war.

I was not previously familiar with Rosen, but he has been covering the Iraq War since 2003 and has recently started an inside baseball weblog about Iraq called IraqSlogger.com that aims to contain information unavailable from the mainstream media and even unavailable from the military’s slow-moving intelligence services.

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