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Golems of
violence
By Mark LeVine
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001,
it has become commonplace that religious
extremism, particularly of the Muslim kind, lies
at the heart of the problems that seemingly
condemn the Muslim-majority world to political and
social backwardness, economic stagnation and
cultural oppressiveness. For the planners and
supporters of Bush administration policy in Iraq,
the actions of the country's Sunni minority, and
the thousands of foreign jihadis who have come to
fight the "Great Satan" between the two rivers (as
Musab al-Zarqawi has allegedly renamed his Iraqi
branch of al-Qaeda), have become a poster child
for all that is wrong with Islam.
Most
scholars of the Middle East and Islam would take
issue, strongly, with such simplistic
(mis)characterizations of contemporary Islam and
Muslims. But there is more than a grain of truth
to the accusation that religious beliefs and
motivations are among the biggest contributors to
the violence plaguing Iraq. Indeed, the attitudes
of religious leaders in the country, especially
Sunnis, has played a powerful and negative role in
the continuing violence that threatens to derail,
or at best seriously delimit the positive impact,
of the scheduled January 30 elections.
Of
course, the attitudes of senior US
religious-cum-political leaders (and can there be
any doubt George W Bush functions as both for
millions of Americans?) aren't helping much
either. Much attention has been devoted to the
numerous Bush administration errors - disbanding
the Iraqi army, not putting enough US forces on
the ground - that encouraged the current chaos and
violence in Iraq. Yet as important has been the
clearly religious - jihadi, actually - foundations
of the US invasion and occupation of the country.
Guiding US policy in Iraq and the larger Middle
East are several troubling dynamics, the
combination of which have led to 100,000 dead
Iraqis, well over 1,000 dead US soldiers, and
counting; not to mention hundreds of billions of
dollars literally wasted on useless violence (go
ask the victims of last month's tsunami what
better ways there are to spend that kind of
money).
Crusader mentality
First there is the "imperial" and "crusader"
mentality that has come to dominate US foreign
policy (the words are outgoing National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice's and Bush's
respectively, not mine). Next there is the belief
among some of the most important political figures
in the country, not to mention tens of millions of
God-fearing Christian Americans, that the war in
Iraq heralds the coming of the Apocalypse and is
therefore part of God's plan and beyond criticism
(no matter what the human and economic costs).
Most important, fin-de-millennium America has
witnessed the rebranding of Christianity as a
religion of large-scale, divinely sanctioned
violence that is specifically wed to a
hyper-consumerist market fundamentalism, which, as
Thomas Frank demonstrates in his best-selling
What's the Matter with Kansas?, has the
perverse ability to brainwash tens of millions of
Americans to support economic policies that are
manifestly against their class interests and
violate the most cherished tenets of the Gospels
(humility, serving the poor, struggling for social
justice).
Making the synergy work is the
ability of what could be termed
"market-fundamentalist Christianity" to redirect
Americans' anger at the life conditions it
produces toward a mythological bogeyman called the
"liberal elite".
While the above
discussion explains why Bush has been re-elected
despite an invasion gone terribly awry - legally,
politically and economically - it shouldn't blind
us to the fact that an equally disturbing
rebranding of Islam in Iraq and across the Muslim
world has enabled an equally disastrous decision
by the highest levels of Iraq's Sunni
establishment to use mass violence rather than
mass civil protest to confront the US-sponsored
occupation. As one of the country's most senior
religious figures blithely explained to me during
my travels through Arab Iraq last spring, the
Sunnis would "kill the infidels" without question
or remorse in order to defeat the occupation. The
blood of the occupation would be answered by the
blood of the insurgency, with little consideration
of the implications of unleashing such a wave of
violence across a country that had already lived
through "35 years of death", as a young Shi'ite
religious leader explained to me exasperatedly in
describing his despair at the turn to violence by
his Sunni colleagues and compatriots.
Of
course, Iraqi Shi'ites have their own militants.
Not just Muqtada al-Sadr, but numerous
higher-level Shi'ite religious figures, including
ayatollahs such as Ahmed al-Baghdadi (whose
message to America when I interviewed him in Najaf
was even more extreme than that of his Sunni
counterparts in Baghdad) also are prepared for
jihad to rid Iraq of the occupation. But such
views are clearly outweighed by the more pragmatic
and largely non-violent strategy of Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his disciples, young
and old, who realize that their majority status,
coupled with their belief that the United States
cannot sustain an occupation for very long at the
current costs in dollars and soldiers, has led
them to bide their time and strip the US of power
and authority one election, and one redrafted law,
at a time.
But the Sunni establishment by
and large does not have this view. Part of the
reason is, of course, that their minority status
leaves them naturally frightened of any new
political system that might marginalize or even
oppress them, as the country's Shi'ites have been
oppressed for centuries. As important, according
to several Iraqi students of the country's
religious establishment, is that the past decade
plus of sanctions succeeded in isolating the
country's Sunni establishment from the outside
world, and especially more modern and even
progressive currents within Islam, whereas their
Shi'ite counterparts spent these years either in
exile (and thus more open to outside influences)
or at least in close touch with the outside world
via Iran.
Golems of violence
Viewed broadly, then, it would seem that a
combination of ignorance about the other side and
arrogance about its own power and righteousness of
its goals has led conservative, even extremist
American and Sunni Iraqi leaders alike to create
what we could refer to as twin golems of violence
to protect and advance their opposing interests.
But like the monster in the old Jewish folk tale,
while originally created to protect and serve its
community, the Sunni and US golems quickly became
uncontrollable, instigating more violence than
either side could have done on its own.
In
Jewish folklore, the golem is either forced to
flee the town by its inhabitants or is destroyed
by its creator. Sadly, in real life, it seems that
neither the Bush administration nor the Sunni
leadership of Iraq is capable of or interested in
taking on its golem. This reality - a combination
of pride and moral cowardliness on both sides -
has left elections as perhaps Iraq's only hope for
an end to the violence. But this will only happen
if the Iraqi people surprise the world and use the
elections to run both golems - and with them, the
insurgents and the occupation forces alike - out
of town.
The ability of the vast majority
of Iraqis of all ethnic groups and sectarian
allegiances who are desperate for an end to both
the occupation and the insurgency to achieve such
a miracle will depend on who votes on election day
and what parties and candidates they vote for.
Specifically, women, secular, and non-sectarian or
ethnic (that is, "Iraqi" as opposed to "Sunni",
"Shi'ite" or "Kurdish") voters will have to come
out in large numbers to make the healing of Iraq
possible; yet this is a very tall order
considering that all three groups have been
largely shut out of the public sphere during the
past year.
Women have been largely
imprisoned in their homes because of the violence
and chaos of the insurgency, even though
beforehand Iraq had among the most socially
advanced female populations in the developing
world. And so while the electoral law stipulates
that one out of every three candidates for the
assembly be a women, if women are too scared to
vote or are otherwise prevented from doing so,
their elected representatives will have little
power or incentive to push to protect the
interests of half the population.
Iraq
also was once one of the most secular countries in
the Muslim world. However, the decade-plus of
sanctions, Saddam Hussein's patronage of the Sunni
religious establishment and the political
repression of the Shi'ites have all made it very
difficult for secular politics to thrive in
post-occupation Iraq. Similarly, while for most of
the past 80 years Kurds and Sunni and Shi'ite
Arabs have managed to sustain a surprisingly
resilient and deep "Iraqi" national identity,
perhaps one of the signal accomplishments of the
occupation has been the successful transformation
by the US of what had threatened to become a
countrywide Arab into a more manageable Sunni
revolt.
While such a splitting of Iraqi
allegiances to more narrow sectarian and/or ethnic
interests has a long imperial pedigree, the
blowback from it is that even as most Iraqis
prefer to remain united under one sovereign
government than break apart into what would surely
be three unsustainable states, the violence of the
occupation and insurgency are making it hard to
build a common, cross-ethnic and sectarian
political movement. The violence, the closed
public sphere and the power of ethnic and
sectarian parties are major impediments to Iraqis
voting their "Iraqi" rather more narrowly defined
conscience.
The Lebanon scenario
Because of these dynamics there is every
reason to believe that this month's elections will
at best produce a deeply divided assembly that
will have to overcome extreme odds to build a
common future for Iraq's diverse population. What
we'll likely see are several major blocs divided
among Shi'ites, Kurds and Sunnis, with women in
effect marginalized from or co-opted into the
emerging male and religiously defined power
structure - in short, the "Lebanon scenario" more
than one Bush administration official has declared
would be an acceptable and even preferred
outcome.
The problem with such an outcome
is that in Lebanon the post-colonial power
structure failed to chase away or disarm the
golems of ethnic and religious hostility so
carefully nurtured under French rule. It took a
14-year civil war to do that, and even today
Lebanon survives despite a barely functioning
state and a lack of substantial political
development or intercommunal reconciliation since
the war ended. And that's in a country with only
3.5 million people and no oil.
Of course,
with literally hundreds of parties and thousands
of candidates registered, Iraqis might surprise
the world and elect a legislature with enough
independent and non-sectarian members to forge the
national consensus that will be the sine qua
non for writing the country's new constitution
in the coming year. Let's hope such an outcome
comes to pass; if it doesn't, the blame will be
shared equally by the golems and their creators,
in Washington and Fallujah alike.
In his
recent surprise visit to Baghdad, British Prime
Minister Tony Blair exclaimed that the battle in
Iraq is "between democracy and terror". He and his
friend Bush keep leaving out one-third of the true
equation - empire. Iraq has become a battleground
among democracy, terror and empire. And empire has
always been sustained by religious chauvinism,
exclusivity and the violence they breed. Unless
and until imperialism and religious extremism are
removed from the equation, democracy will continue
to lose out to terror, in Iraq, in the United
States and across the globe.
Mark
LeVine (www.meaning.org/levinebio.html) is an
associate professor of history at the University
of California-Irvine and the author of Why
They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis
of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005). He is a
contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and writes
a weblog hosted by History News Network
(http://hnn.us/blogs/37.html).
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.) |
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