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Why Sunnis blow themselves
up
By Spengler
 Never
in the course of human conflict have so many done
so much so quickly to disillusion so few,
referring of course to President George W Bush and
his advisers. Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian and
Syrian leaders kicked away the props behind
Washington's stage-set for democracy in the Middle
East, all within the space of four days.
Hezbollah, after sweeping elections in the
south of the country on June 5 in Lebanon's
staggered polls, laughed at American demands that
it disarm. Hamas holds the balance of power in
Palestine after Mahmoud Abbas postponed
parliamentary elections scheduled for July 17.
Syria, meanwhile, went back to its usual business
of intimidating local as well as Lebanese
opponents. And on June 8, Iraq's Shi'ite and
Kurdish leaders embraced the ethnic militias now
engaged in a low-level civil war with the
country's Sunni Arabs.
What should
frighten Washington is not the quantity, but
rather the character of attacks against coalition
forces and their Iraqi auxiliaries. The resistance
lost its capacity for frontal assault after
Fallujah, but has undiminished capacity for
suicide attacks, a method that bespeaks incurable
desperation. As the chart below makes clear, the
consistency of the coalition casualty rate
suggests that a broader trend is at work, rather
than a few instances of die-hard fanaticism. It is
hard to obtain accurate monthly data for
casualties among Iraqi forces, but they scale the
same way.
 Blowing oneself up to
kill one's enemy is not the sort of gesture we
expect from groups that have given serious thought
to parliamentary democracy. The US authorities now
admit that foreign fighters comprise an
insignificant fraction of Iraqi resisters. It is
not only the Islamist fanatics, but also the
locals who walk into a crowd of Iraqi police
recruits with a bomb belt.
Washington
still refuses to believe that the Iraqis
themselves are driving the situation toward civil
war. Anthony Cordesman of Georgetown University's
Center for Strategic and International Studies, in
a May 12 draft entitled "Iraq's evolving
insurgency", argues:
Key insurgent elements include Arab
and Islamist groups with significant numbers of
foreign volunteers, as well as Iraqi Islamist
extremists, like the one led by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. It is unlikely that such groups make
up more [than] 10% of the insurgent force, and
may make up around 5%, but in some ways they are
the most dangerous element in the insurgency
since they seem to be deliberately trying to
provoke a civil war between Iraq's Arab Sunnis
and its Arab Shi'ites, Kurds, and other
minorities. The insurgency already has long been
a low-level civil war, and is being driven
towards a broader Sunni vs Shi'ite conflict by
Islamist extremists. [1] Cordesman, I
think, has missed the point. Even if foreign
Islamists provide more than their due share of the
cannon fodder, Iraqi Sunnis are willing to kill
themselves to get at their American as well as
their Iraqi enemies.
No more than a dozen
or so Sunnis engage in suicide bombings over the
course of a given month, to be sure, and one might
argue that these are singular individuals. But
here the singularity defines the situation. What
sort of population produces such a steady trickle
of suicide bombers, much larger than the
Palestinians sent against the Israelis? One cannot
dismiss the suicide campaign of the Iraq
resistance as Islamist extremism, because their
leaders derive from Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist
regime, which drew on Nazism more than on the
Koran. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri
Lanka staged fewer than two dozen such attacks
over the space of a decade. The Sunni rate of
political suicide appears to be the highest in
modern history, excluding a tribe or two of Amazon
aboriginals. [2]
Evidently, the Sunnis see
their prospects differently than does Bush. Rather
than Wal-Mart and the Parent Teachers'
Association, Iraq's Sunnis see an endless horizon
of poverty and humiliation, such as they inflicted
on the Shi'ites in the past. Since the British
installed the Hashemite dynasty in the
Mesopotamian province liberated from the Ottoman
Empire, the Sunnis have held the whip hand against
the Shi'ite majority. A few more seats in Iraq's
parliament will alter their circumstances not a
whit.
The Mesopotamian Sunnis, like
Hezbollah or Hamas, well may understand their
position better than does the president of the
United States. Minorities that have withstood a
thousand years of invasions, oppression and
massacres now face a new and deadlier threat.
During the past century, 2,000 ethnic groups have
gone extinct, but an equal or larger number will
go extinct during the next decade, as two spoken
languages disappear each week.
Prosperity
today comes at the price of leveling traditional
relationships of all kinds, everywhere, that is,
except for the oil-producing nations of the Middle
East, where petrodollars have kept traditional
society alive in a sort of iron lung. The oil
producers did not have to send their young men to
work in German factories, like Turkey, or their
young women to work in German brothels, like
Ukraine. The complex of tribal, religious and
linguistic associations that divide the peoples of
Iraq will not go out with a whimper, like cultures
that the global marketplace slowly has eroded.
Instead, they will go out with a bang.
Sudden impoverishment motivates men to
fight to the death. In the modern era the most
remarkable example is the American Civil War, in
which died an astonishing two-fifths of Southern
men of military age. The South fought for its "way
of life", that is, for the fact or opportunity of
membership in a leisure class supported by slave
labor. [3]
Gaming the odds on civil war in
Iraq has blossomed into a minor industry during
the past few months. I wrote in January 2004, "No
one in the Bush administration wants to let slip
the dogs of civil war. On the contrary, the White
House still hopes that Iraq will set a precedent
for democracy in the Muslim world. Yet civil war
is the path of least resistance." [4] This is
tragedy, not malice or forethought, even if Bush
comes across like an outtake from Aristophanes
rather than a character in Aeschylus. Some in the
Bush camp view the promotion of Arab democracy as
an asymmetric bet. "Either it will be very good
for us [if it works], or it will be very bad for
them [if it doesn't]."
America lacks the
cultural capacity to create the sort of military
and intelligence assets that would be required to
manipulate local events. Just 3,000 British
officers staffed the British Raj in India, Sir
John Keegan observes (in Intelligence in
War), and they "wore a version of native
dress, spoke Indian languages and prided
themselves on their immersion in the customs and
culture of their soldiers". No such imperial
adventurers can be found among the Shi'ite
militias (although there are a few advisers
working with the Kurdish peshmerga).
I continue to argue, as I have for two
years, that the meat grinder of civil war will
reduce the numbers of those who would rather die
than accept the mediocrity of their circumstances.
Washington will make gestures to Hamas, Hezbollah
and the Iraqi Sunni resistance to no avail; the
latter will demand that America fight them to the
death. Reluctantly, Washington will have to
oblige.
Notes
[1] See www.csis.org/features/050512_IraqInsurg.pdf
[2] See Live and Let Die, Asia
Times Online, April 13, 2002.
[3] See
Happy birthday, Abe – pass the
blood, Asia Times Online, February 10,
2004.
[4] See The Devil and L Paul Bremer,
Asia Times Online, January 21, 2004
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