You've probably heard the expression before. Nowhere is it more true than in Iraq -- and never has it been more true than now.
By geography, I don’t mean mountains, rivers and deserts -- although those can be important. I'm talking about ethnic and religious geography, how it shaped the American invasion of Iraq, and how it could shape the postwar occupation -- not necessarily for the better.
We all know the bulk of the Anglo-American coalition forces entered Iraq from the south, over the Kuwaiti border. And we all know the bulk of the fighting (at least so far) has been in the south, in and around the Shia cities of Basra, Nasiriyah, Nejaf and Karbala.
But of course, this was not the original plan. An armored force (the 4th mechanized infantry division) was supposed to cross the Turkish border, move through the oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul (keeping them out of the hands of our erstwhile Kurdish allies) and push down through the Sunni belt north of Baghdad.
But this northern offensive never happened -- thanks to the Turkish Parliament's quaint insistence on democratic principles. While U.S. airborne and special forces established a foothold in the Kurdish zone, they weren’t strong enough to attack the Iraqi defenses around Kirkuk and Mosul. So those cities didn’t fall until Wednesday – to Kurdish militia, not US tanks.
This has created a major political problem in the north, which the Pentagon is trying to address by rushing more GIs to the scene. These troops are supposed to encourage, if that’s the right word, the Kurds to withdraw from the oil towns before the Turks come down and make them leave.
This is all complicated enough. But I’m wondering if Turkey’s rejection of a Northern front might not create even bigger problems further down the road.
Because the invasion came out of Kuwait, its initial point of contact with the civilian population of Iraq was almost exclusively in the Shia south. And so establishing friendly relations with the Shias became a crucial part of the war plan – both for propagandistic purposes (flowers on tanks) and to get them to help Coalition forces root out Saddam loyalists.
But the rooting out part turned into a dirtier job than expected. Result: Lots of property destruction, lots of dead civilians, lots of human suffering – but an acute shortage of TV footage showing cheering Shias welcoming their liberators. Not because they loved Saddam, of course, but because they were too busy trying to stay alive to put out the welcome wagon.
So, suddenly, making nice with the Shias became even more of a priority – to offset the negative press coverage, secure over-extended supply lines and create at least a semblance of a “liberated” Iraq in the south. Good relations became even more critical as the American forces approached the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and had to deal with the prospect of waging urban warfare against Saddam’s guerrillas, without damaging the most important shrines in all of Shiadom.
Now winning over the Shia was and is a good thing – both as a short-term military goal and as a longer-term political objective. But the absence of a northern front meant the Shias got almost all of the TLC. Meanwhile, most of the Sunni belt remained firmly under Saddam’s thumb. Most of it is still unoccupied, at least as of Friday afternoon.
The net effect of all this, I think, has been to put a much stronger pro-Shia spin on US policy than was originally intended. And that is probably not a good thing. By appearing to ally itself so openly and so closely with one side of the sectarian division in Iraq, the Coalition risks alienating the other side. This could make it easier for Baathist remnants to regroup as a new, pro-Sunni ethnic faction hostile to the occupation government.
One part of the problem is the fact that the most favored US opposition group – the Iraqi National Congress – is heavily Shia influenced. It's also led by a Shia, Ahmed Chalabi. The military flew Chalabi and the rest of the INC leadership into southern Iraq earlier this week to form the nucleus, if not of an interim government, then of an advisory council in waiting.
By doing this, the Pentagon neocons (Pentacons?) may have neatly outflanked their State Department rivals. But they've also gone even further down the road of identifying the US occupation with the Shia.
Why is this a bad thing? After all, successful colonial regimes have used the same tactic – picking a favored tribe or faction as deputy rulers. The British relied on the Sikhs to staff their army in India. In Rwanda, the Belgians more or less created a tribe (the Tutsi) to rule over the majority Hutu. The Hapsburgs used Serbs to rule their Balkan provinces, while the Turks used Albanians. So why not use the Shia to rule Iraq?
Leaving aside the fact that this is supposed to be an exercise in democracy building, not colonialism, the budding US alliance with Iraq’s Shia majority is highly problematic.
To the neocons, it may appear the relationship can be used to undermine the influence of the Iranian mullahs and their Lebanese allies, the Hizbollah – thus winning another victory in the long twilight struggle to make the world safe for a Greater Israel. But the assassination Thursday of the leading pro-US cleric in Nejaf suggests these hopes are naïve – to put it mildly.
Within Iraq itself, the Shias probably wouldn't be the smart colonialist’s first choice as a comprador class. Since roughly 630 AD, every imperial power that has ruled, or tried to rule, Mesopotamia has relied on the Sunni minority to fill that role.
The theology of Shiism (in all its forms) is hostile to the very notion of secular authority, which is held to have lapsed when the line of Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet, died out in the eighth century. I’m not totally certain about this, but I don’t think there has ever been a Shia ruler – of any kind -- in Iraq. Certainly, Shia representation in the pre-Saddam regimes of independent Iraq was light, according to Kanan Makiya’s Republic of Fear.
In general (the Chalabis and a few other wealthy merchant families aside) the Shia are the poor, the uneducated and the chronically underprivileged. They are, in their own way, the Hutus of Iraq – an analogy that doesn’t need to be pushed very hard to be worrisome.
There is an exception to Shiism's anti-establishment bent: the Islamic Republic of Iran. But Shiism occupies a much different place in the Persian national identity – one that the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to exploit to overthrow the Shah. Even so, Khomeini’s political theology remains a source of tension within Iranian Shiism -- one of the factors that has contributed to the weakening of the regime since his death.
The Iranian example, however, also suggests the Shias are not the best instruments for an American neo-colonial order in Iraq.
While the Islamic Revolution’s political hold over the Iraqi Shiite imagination was always exaggerated – by the Baathists as well as by their enemies – the cultural influence is real and deeply rooted. Here, too, geography is destiny: Iran will always be near at hand and America will always be far away. Proximity eventually may trump raw imperial power – at least over the long run.
And the Sunni elite? It's living through the final moments of its historic domination of Mesopotamia, and probably wondering – if it has time to wonder about anything right now – if anything can be salvaged from the wreckage. The Baath is fading away. The future is . . . molten, like lava. Attitudes formed now, decisions made now, could endure after the lava cools. But the coalition is not, as yet, on the ground in the Sunni belt in sufficient strength to influence that pattern.
Elites driven from power usually have much to fear. Fearful people need protection. If the invaders are seen as fundamentally hostile – or worse yet, allied with a domestic enemy . . . well, the Reconstruction Era KKK wouldn’t be the first terrorist organization to flourish under such circumstances.Or the last.