In This Arab Time by Fouad Ajami

Author:Fouad Ajami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fouad Ajami, Middle East, Arab Spring, 9/11, history, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Spain, civil war
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2014-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

III.

It is the gift of Allawi’s narrative that his is not merely a story of American incompetence or the CPA follies. (He leaves this to the self-regarding Americans.) For beyond Bremer and the “wet behind the ears” crowd that came with the occupation and quickly gave up when Iraq confounded or “disappointed” them, there were deep changes within Iraq itself; and they would in the end determine Iraq’s destination. The ghost of Wardi would make its appearance with a vengeance: desert and town would descend into a new war. And this war would be fought in an Arab world where swords—and identities—were being sharpened and drawn in a new fight between the old Sunni hegemony and the Shia outcasts now pressing for a new place in the sun.

We owe to Allawi a clear account of the impact upon Shia consciousness—and its subsequent radicalization—of the discovery of mass graves during the first year of the occupation. The brutality of the regime toward the Shia, and the Kurds, was well known. But the mass graves—and the documentary evidence: the Baathists were meticulous about keeping records of their grim atrocities—were to “harden the determination of the Shi’a to carve for themselves a commanding role in the new Iraq.” The estimates of the scale of the terror were not precise. Human rights organizations put the victims at 300,000, while the American estimates ran to 400,000. Either way, the psychological impact of these mass graves on the Shia sense of righteousness and violation was immense.

These great crimes had taken place, the Shia knew, against the background of wider Arab indifference. The years since 1991, when Saddam’s regime survived the first American-led war and turned its wrath on the Shia and the Kurds, had been a time of great terror. The Kurds had made their way out of Iraq, psychologically and physically; the Anglo-American coalition had secured for them a separate state in all but name. But the Shia had remained in the big prison, and what little traces of mercy and restraint existed in Saddam’s domain had vanished. The psychological and physical terror unleashed on the Shia dwarfed the “traditional” brutalities of preceding Iraqi regimes.

Moreover, the Shia who had taken refuge in Iran had returned with accounts to settle. In an important distinction, Allawi remarks that the Shia had been loyal to the country but not to the state. Now the country was to be made fully theirs. Power would drift to the Islamists among the Shia; and men such as Chalabi and Ayad Allawi, Baghdad aristocrats with years of exposure to the West, would scramble to keep their place. The men of the Dawaa Party—the party of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the current prime minister—came into their own. The Baghdadi Shia, heirs to an urban mercantile tradition, would cede their primacy to political men born and reared in the Shia heartland of the southern and middle Euphrates.

This new Islamism among the Shia did not transpire overnight. The crucible had been the cruel interlude between the onset of the Iranian revolution in 1979–80 and the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

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