Blame game begins as Iraq teeters on brink

World View/Paul Gillespie: Mess-opotamia

World View/Paul Gillespie: Mess-opotamia. The pun took on even grimmer meaning this week after the destruction of Samarra's sacred Shia shrine led to intensified sectarian fighting in Iraq, raising the possibility of a prolonged civil war.

In classical Greek, Mesopotamia was the name for the fertile area between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and surrounding regions - present-day Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey. It was the cradle of ancient civilisation.

The Sunni-Shia clashes suddenly impose deadly either/or identities on people who have normally been able to negotiate their way between them, recalling conflicts in former Yugoslavia, India or Northern Ireland. Similar and equally misleading essentialism is at work in the loose talk about western versus Islamic values over the Muhammad cartoon affair, when what is at issue is the success of mutually intolerant minorities within both camps in creating them. It as a great mistake to accept them at face value, but all too easy to do so in political or journalistic shorthand.

Writing in the New Republic Online, Indian economist Amartya Sen recalls how Gandhi resisted similar religious categorisation by the British imperial Raj at the 1931 Indian round table conference in London. He was assigned to a specific sectarian corner by the "Federal Structure Committee" and resented being depicted as a spokesman for "caste Hindus" when the political movement he led was staunchly secular and not community-based.

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While he saw that religion could be a distinguishing characteristic, other ways of dividing the Indian population were no less relevant. He made a special and far-seeing plea for the British to understand the plurality of diverse identities among Indians, saying he wanted to speak, not for Hindus in particular, but for "the dumb, toiling, semi-starved millions" who make up "over 85 per cent of the population of India".

He did not get his way at the conference and continued to resist "the vivisection of a whole nation" by its imperial rulers.

US policy intellectuals have looked increasingly to the British imperial experience in recent years as they debate optimal ways to ensure American global hegemony, and revived the old imperial discipline of geopolitics to do so.

Religious categories were put into play in Iraq. This is reflected in its recent constitution-making and the engineering of a political system designed to rule the country democratically, but in continuing compliant dependency on those who have "liberated" it.

Unsurprisingly its people have behaved according to them in negotiating how to share power - or divide and break up if it does come to a civil war. That outcome is made more likely by the comprehensive mess the occupation has made of the country. Its level of development is now much less than that in Latin America, central Europe or east Asia where democratisation has successfully occurred in the past 20 years. The population has been battered and brutalised by the years of dictatorship and war under Saddam, while the 1990s sanctions regime undermined its educated middle class. Its population is 40 per cent under 15 and 40 per cent illiterate.

The systematic underprovision of resources for security and redevelopment by the US-led occupation exacerbated these problems, while US Iraqi civilian administrator Paul Bremer's decisions to disband the 450,000-strong army and to de-Baathify the civil service compounded them further.

Foreign policy debate in the US on who holds responsibility for the mess there also intensified this week. Leading the pack were Francis Fukuyama's detailed self-criticism of neoconservative policy in the New York Times (and Irish Times) and a devastating attack on the Bush administration's policymaking by Paul Pillar, head of the CIA's Near East and South Asia division from 2000 to 2005, in the current Foreign Affairs Journal.

Pillar says the administration cherrypicked and manipulated intelligence in order to take the US to war. It ignored the CIA's advice that "deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept 'in his box' and that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections programme".

The decision to invade was driven, he says, by a desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region - typical neoconservative nostrums.

Disregarded was advice that preparations for a "messy aftermath" of war would include the likelihood that a deeply divided Iraqi society could erupt into violent conflict unless huge resources were devoted to reconstruction, and that radical Islamic movements would be boosted. Nor was there any intelligence advice supporting the administration's belief in a direct connection between al-Qaeda terrorism and the Saddam regime. This got so much attention because Bush "wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the 'war on terror' and the threat the American public fear most, thereby capitalising on the country's militant post 9/11 mood".

Neoconservatives on the Weekly Standard dismiss Pillar's criticisms as self-serving, since he had been sacked from his job last year and presided over an intelligence failure.

A rash of books on the war and the occupation say the mess is largely of the Bush administration's own making in executing the policy rather than misconceiving it. Fukuyama goes beyond this to agree with European criticisms that the administration "had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratise Iraq".

The neoconservatives' most basic misjudgment was to overestimate the threat to the US from radical Islam, he believes. Nor did they foresee Iran would be the most likely beneficiary from a weak Shia-dominated Iraq.

War is the wrong metaphor for the struggle against radical Islam; wars are fought at full intensity and have beginnings and endings, whereas this is more a contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. Fukuyama's conservative realist reading of this disastrous mess deserves a wide hearing.