A rchive Date
[ 27-02-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030101faessay10218-p30/fouad-ajami/iraq-and-the-arabs-future.html
Iraq and the Arabs' Future
by Fouad Ajami
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003
continued ...
For Pax Americana, Iraq may be worth the effort and the risks. America has been on the ground in Saudi Arabia for nearly six decades now, in Egypt for three. In both realms, there is wrath and estrangement toward America. What has been built in Arabia appears in serious jeopardy. The aid and help granted to Egypt has begotten nothing other than ingratitude and a deep suspicion among frustrated middle-class Egyptians that the United States wishes for them subjugation and dependence. There is an unfathomable anti-Americanism in Egypt -- even among those professionals who have done well by the American connection.
There appears to be no liberal option for Egypt, no economic salvation. This country of outward tranquility and seething internal radicalism is in the grip of deep frustration. Egyptian history has stalled; the military ruler is supreme, but he offers no way out for his country. As the political life of the land has atrophied, anti-Americanism has taken hold, offering absolution and a way of airing the rage of a proud population that has fallen short of its own idea of itself and its place among the nations. Iraq may offer a contrast, a base in the Arab world free of the poison of anti-Americanism. The country is not hemmed in by the kind of religious prohibitions that stalk the U.S. presence in the Saudi realm. It may have a greater readiness for democracy than Egypt, if only because it is wealthier and is free of the weight of Egypt's demographic pressures and the steady menace of an Islamist movement.
Iraq should not be burdened, however, with the weight of great expectations. This is the Arab world, after all, and Americans do not know it with such intimacy. Iraq could disappoint its American liberators. There has been heartbreak in Iraq, and vengeance and retribution could sour Americans on this latest sphere of influence in the Muslim world.
But America could still be more daring in Iraq than it was after Desert Storm. To begin with, the bogeyman of a Shi`ite state emerging in Iraq as a satrapy of the Iranian clerical regime -- the fear that paralyzed American power back in 1991 -- should be laid to rest. The Iranian Revolution's promise has clearly faded. The clerics there are in no position to export their "revolutionary happiness," for they would find no takers anywhere. Then, too, the Shi`a of Iraq must be seen for what they are: Arabs and Iraqis through and through.
Shi` ism was a phenomenon of Iraq centuries before it crossed to Iran, brought to that land by the Safavid rulers as a state religion in the opening years of the sixteenth century. But even long before that, it had been an Arab religious-political dispute. Moreover, the sacred geography of Shi`ism had brought Shi`a religious scholars and seminarians from India, Lebanon, and Persia to Iraq. Thanks to geographic proximity, the Persian component had been particularly strong: it had used the shrine cities of Iraq as sanctuary, checking the power of their own country's leaders in the ceaseless tug-of-war between rulers and religious scholars. But in their overwhelming numbers, the adherents of Shi`ism were drawn from Arab tribesmen. Arab nationalism, which came to Iraq with the Hashemite rulers and the officers and ideologues who rode their coattails, covered up Sunni dominion with a secular garb. As Iran was nearby, larger and more powerful, it became convenient for the ruling stratum of Iraq to disenfranchise its own Shi`a majority, claiming that they were a Persian fifth column of Iran.
This invented history took on a life of its own under Saddam Hussein. But before the Tikriti rulers terrorized the Shi`ite religious establishment and shattered its autonomy, a healthy measure of competition was always the norm between the Shi`ite seminaries of Iraq and those of Iran. Few Iraqi Shi`ites are eager to cede their own world to Iran's rulers. As the majority population of Iraq, they have a vested interest in its independence and statehood. Over the last three decades, they have endured the regime's brutality yet fought its war against Iran in 1980-88. Precious few among them dream of a Shi`a state. The majority of them are secularists who understand that the brutalized country will have to be shared among its principal communities if it is to find a way out of fear and terror.
There is a religiously based Shi`a movement, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), based in Iran, led by Ayatollah Mohamed Baqir al-Hakim. The choice of Iran as sanctuary by the al-Hakim family was dictated by the brutality of the Iraqi regime and by the lack of an Arab sanctuary where the Shi`a opposition could survive and function. Iran gave the clerics and laymen of sciri the resources and proximity for their war against the regime. What such men could bring to a new order is difficult to forecast with any confidence, but it is hard to see them building the necessary bridges to the Kurds and the Sunni remnants willing and able to break with the Tikriti legacy.
A more likely outcome would be the rise to power of a different kind of Shi`ism: more at home in the secular world, granting the clerics a political and cultural role of their own while subordinating them to secular authorities, as is the case in Lebanon. In the scheme of historical development of the Shi`a tradition, the triumph of clerics has been a relatively recent phenomenon -- more a feature of Iran since 1979 than of the Arab world.
FAREWELL TO PAN-ARABISM?
A new regime in Iraq might be willing to bid farewell to virulent pan-Arabism. The passion for a Palestinian vocation in a new Iraq may subside, if only because the Palestinians have been such faithful supporters of Saddam Hussein. The norm has been for Iraq, the frontier Arab land far away from the Mediterranean, to stoke the fires of anti-Zionism knowing that others closer to the fire -- Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese -- would be the ones consumed. A new Iraqi political order might find within itself the ability to recognize that Palestine and the Palestinians are not an Iraqi concern. A new ruling elite that picks up the pieces in Iraq might conclude that offering a bounty to the families of Palestinian suicide "martyrs" is something that a burdened country can do without.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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