Iraqis fail to seize their own destiny

Once again, Iraqis fail to seize their own destiny
Foulath Hadid International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2006

OXFORD, England The country that was once Iraq is facing meltdown after its "liberation" by the Americans. The Iraqis have to face some harsh realities.

First, they must come to terms with whether they have a national identity.

Then they must resolve the all-important question of why, given several opportunities in their 85-year history as a nation, they have not been able to take control of their own destiny. If anything, they have proven themselves to be spectacular failures at the job.

Iraqis have been unable to fuse the nine or 10 religious, sectarian and ethnic groups into a single identity that could have contributed to building the core of their country rather than tearing it apart.

The Iraqi "federalists" charged with writing the present Iraqi constitution exhorted the populace to unite in the preamble with words such as: "We the sons of the Land of the Two Rivers ... land of the prophets, resting place of the leaders of civilization and the creators of the alphabet" and so on. But these ringing words were not enough to unite Iraqis behind what has proved to be a seriously flawed constitution that highlighted Iraqi divisiveness from the outset.

Since the elections there has been an ongoing, low- intensity civil war that threatens to erupt into a full- fledged one with ramifications too horrible to contemplate for all parties concerned, including the occupying American forces.

Partition has now become an option. Several Kurdish and Shiite leaders have promoted the partition scenario already. One of the Kurdish region's two prime ministers, Bahram Salih, declared "As long as we Kurds are condemned to live in Iraq, I want to be a full citizen of my country." One can hardly describe that as a patriotic statement.

Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, said in reference to his vision of a federated Europe, "We are not uniting states, we are uniting men." In their failure to solve the identity issue, Iraq and Iraqis are enacting the exact opposite of what Jean Monnet recommended.

Iraqis failure to build their own nation when given opportunities to do so is harder to understand. The inhabitants of the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra rose in a major revolt against the occupying British forces in 1920. The rebellion was suppressed by the overwhelming use of British air power but the British were, nevertheless, forced to concede a limited degree of democracy, which the Iraqis had been clamoring for. But the cohesive leadership that the uprising spawned soon fizzled out under the new monarchy created by the British.

In 1936, a coup by General Bakr Sidqi promised to bring in much-needed reforms the people were demanding. Yet the Iraqis again failed to seize the opportunity to forge a united nation, despite the fact that the nationalist forces were all represented in government. Within a year, Sidqi was assassinated and the nationalist forces split, with some of their leaders persecuted and many forced into exile.

The revolution that toppled the monarchy in 1958 met with unprecedented support from all factions and presented the best opportunity for forging a nation-state. Its failure proved once again the inability of Iraqis to take control of their own destiny.

In almost three decades of living under Saddam Hussein's rule, experiencing the most tyrannical forms of coercion, Iraqis failed to rise in the way that other peoples have risen against tyrants. The Americans had to do the job for them in 2003. When given the chance yet again, they have managed to bring Iraq to the meltdown situation we are witnessing today.

King Faisal I, who was imported from the Hijaz, in what is now Saudi Arabia, to become Iraq's king in 1921, had this to say about the Iraqis shortly before his death in 1933: "There is still - and I say this with a heart full of sorrow - no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever."

Did Faisal know something we didn't?