Mick Hartley

As the vicious sectarian violence in Iraq continues, Amir Taheri sees it as a war of the sectarians, not a sectarian war:

In a sectarian war, the overwhelming majorities of rival religious sects subscribe to the aims of the struggle and actively participate in achieving them. I saw this in the former Yugoslavia when I covered its various wars in the 1990s. You could be sure that almost all Serbs, from the taxi driver that took you from the airport to the hotel to the nation’s leading poet, would be a sectarian, hating the Croats and the Muslims with uncontrollable passion. The inverse was also true. Most Croats and Muslims, while hating each other, also dreamed of crushing the Serbs as a nation. Peasants, factory workers, the urban poor, bishops and muftis, artists and filmmakers, ballet dancers and chefs were all sectarian.

Nothing of the sort exists in Iraq today. The deadly disease of sectarianism has, not contaminated the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, regardless of religious affiliations. Both Shiites and Sunnis are organized more based on political affiliations than sectarian loyalties….

Unlike ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq today has not been contaminated by sectarianism at the grass-root level. Iraqi grandmothers do not devote special prayers to ask God to destroy the rival sect. Iraqi poets do not write sectarian poetry. Iraqi artist do not portray members of other sects as devils incarnate. Not one of the gangsters who destroyed the golden domed shrine in Samarra was Iraqi.

Anyone familiar with the situation on the ground, rather than making judgments form thousands of miles away, would know of countless cases in which Sunnis and Shiites protected one another and saved each other from the violence of sectarian terrorist groups. In the province of Anbar, where Arab Sunnis account for more than 95 per cent of the population, several Shiite pockets owe their survival to the protection of local tribes. In some cases, the Sunni tribes have fought Al Qaeda terrorists to prevent the massacre of the Shiites.

People also forget that many Iraqi tribes include both Sunni and Shiite members. There are also tens of thousands of mixed families of Sunnis and Shiites, especially in Baghdad and Basra….

There is no doubt that there is a war in Iraq. It is important to know what kind of a war this is.

If it is a civil war, we should identify the two rival sides and decided which side we ought to support right down to victory.

If it is a sectarian war, the only way to end it is either by geographical separation, as was the case with Croatia and Serbia, or through massive foreign occupation, as is the case in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (There are over 50,000 NATO troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than a decade after Western powers intervened to end the sectarian war. Iraq is nine times larger than Bosnia-Herzegovina but hosts only 150,000 foreign troops.)

What is happening in Iraq, however, is neither a civil nor a sectarian war, although elements of both exist within a broader context.

The war in Iraq is a political one between those who wish the new Iraq to succeed and those who want to ensure its failure. Those who want new Iraq to succeed represent the overwhelming majority of Iraqis of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. Those who want it to fail are made up of Saddamite bitter-enders, some misguided pan-Arab nationalists, death-squads financed by Tehran, and a variety of non-Iraqi terrorist outfits who have come to Iraq to kill and die in the name of their perverted vision of Islam.