April 23, 2003

Iraq Repeats the Arab Legacy of Tribe, Religion and State

By Rami G. Khouri

Many today ask who's the next Anglo-American target in the campaign to (choose your favorite) fight terrorism, implement UN resolutions, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promote liberty, oppose tyranny and spread democracy throughout the Middle East. The better question to ask is “what's next” in this region, in terms of political sentiments and dynamics? Iraq offers important hints, and some previews.

The most hopeful but fanciful expectation is for a smooth transition to democracy in Iraq and a subsequent snowballing effect that sees democratic pluralism roll over the Middle East like a wave of righteousness. I wish it would happen. Many Arabs, Iranians, Turks and others in this area have spent our entire adult lives working for this — but this is probably not the moment, for we are not naÔve enough to expect democracy to emanate from the barrels of Anglo-American guns.

It is important to accurately grasp what is happening in Iraq today. The removal of Baghdad's Baathist regime has unleashed indigenous Iraqi political and social sentiments that have been bottled up for half a century. Iraqis consequently express a lively variety of identities, allegiances and ideologies. We witnessed something similar throughout the Arab world in the period 1986-93, when this region experienced a low intensity democratisation and limited political liberalisation. Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Lebanon and other countries saw the birth of dozens of newspapers, thousands of non governmental organisations, and scores of political parties. Many of these reflected rich local identities and traditions — religious, tribal, ethnic, ideological, national and regional. The most successful new groups were the Islamists, who tapped public resentment against the modern Arab security state system. But few of the new political groups survived, and fewer yet had any impact on the exercise of Arab political power.

That stunted political moment taught us hard lessons: we should not confuse freedom of association and expression with the real exercise of democratic decision making; and we should expect sudden political openings to be quickly filled by the strongest and oldest indigenous identities — namely, religion and tribe.

Iraq today repeats this pattern. As citizens are free to express themselves, Iraq seems like a marketplace of identities, rather than of ideas or ideologies. The Kurds in the north, long ago, made it clear that they wish to affirm their Kurdish cultural/national identity, in a loose federal association with the rest of Iraq. Elsewhere, the most powerful expression of Iraqi identity to assert itself since the Anglo-American armada attacked a month ago has been religious Shiism, the branch of Islam that defines Iran and nearly two-thirds of Iraqis. Crowds of a few hundred Iraqis emerged to cheer American marines and retired generals; over a million Iraqis gathered to commemorate the deaths of Shiite leaders some 14 centuries ago, as we witnessed Tuesday in the Shiite holy shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf.

Some here and abroad fear that Iraq may be moving towards a religious state. That is unlikely to happen, because the natural short-term expressions of religious identity will soon give way to negotiated political and national relationships among the main Iraqi groups. Also, several religious, tribal and political currents compete for supremacy within the Shiite community in Iraq (as we've already witnessed in the form of assassinations and political confrontations).

The shape of things to come in Iraq and the Arab world will reflect how religious, tribal, national, regional and ethnic identities are integrated into a national political system that incorporates all parties yet also fairly reflects real power balances. Observers of this region regularly make the mistake of badly confusing three primary forces that define the modern Middle East: religion, ethno-nationalism and statehood. These are three very different things and they usually do not coincide within our modern Arab states that the European powers created last century, which explains many of our chronic tensions.

In Iraq today, we see religion, ethno-nationalism and statehood competing to establish a more comfortable relationship than was imposed on them by the British in the 1920s. Iraqis on their own can work out a suitable governance system. It would be a cruel verdict if the United States were to make the same mistakes in Iraq in the early 21st century that the British made in the early 20th century — importing their preferred Iraqi leaders, midwiving an alien governance system, marginalising powerful indigenous religious, tribal and ethnic identities, hand-picking tribal and commercial elites who enjoy disproportionate local power, using local actors and then spitting them out when they are no longer needed and, eventually, precipitously leaving the land in the hands of local generals after generating a large amount of material destruction and political resentment.