Understanding Iraq's Insurgency

In the aftermath of the destruction of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, America has convinced many, probably most, Iraqis that it is not occupying their country to promote freedom but to engage in a new and more sophisticated form of imperialism. A recent independent public opinion poll holds that only 2 percent of Iraqi Arabs view the United States as liberators. This belief has evoked from them an outburst of nationalist ardor that today fuels a national uprising: during the summer of 2004 American forces were attacked by insurgents at least sixty times a day. "If we stay anywhere more than five minutes, they start shooting at us," said an officer in the First Cavalry Division. If Americans remembered their own history, they would not be surprised. Writing about another insurgency, the American Revolution, the English statesman Edmund Burke commented in 1775 that "The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered." As costly in lives and property as the Iraqi uprising has been --with more than fifteen thousand civilian deaths (and some estimates at several times that number) and about ten thousand Iraqi captives held in American prisons--it has created three new trends that will shape Iraq's future.

The first of these trends is that opposing foreign occupation has at least temporarily driven Sunni and Shia Iraqi Arabs together in common cause. That happened briefly in their opposition to the British in 1920, as then colonial secretary Winston Churchill commented, but under British occupation they were quickly driven apart. Sunnis were favored and Shiis were pushed out of participation in government. In 2004 the two communities are working together or at least in parallel against a common foe, the American occupation. Understandably, the Kurds have stood aloof from this nationalist struggle.

Despite their often bitter internal divisions, the Kurds have always aspired to independent statehood, and they have come close to that dream during recent years. Profiting from aid funds and from trade with Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Arab Iraq, they have made considerable economic progress. This has encouraged the vast majority of them to petition for a vote on independence and to deck their country with Kurdish flags. Thy have now more or less unified the various guerrilla organizations that fought against the Baath and often against one another into something like a national army that has become the only effective indigenous military force in Iraq. Their participation in whatever Iraq emerges will always be partial, but the dangers they face from Turkey and Iran will make affiliation the least unattractive of their current options. These quite different forces--Arab opposition to the foreign rule and Kurdish fear of foreign intervention--will cause Iraq to hang together as a single state, although it will probably be forced to acknowledge its deep schisms by becoming federal. Going further than federalism, attempting to "balkanize" Iraq is likely to turn it into an eastern Balkans--a maelstrom of ethnic groups. At the minimum, splitting Iraq into pieces will provoke flights of ethnic or religious groups from one area to another, disrupt public services, hamper trade, cause massive human rights abuses, and prevent healing of the wounds of the Saddam era.

National uprisings against foreign occupation, the second trend, strip away from both sides the thin veneer of civility that separates us all from the bestial. If the struggle goes on long enough, acquisition of the habit of violence causes a society to become unhinged: its basic institutions cease to function, neighbors fall apart, even families lose coherence, and the customary lines that separate acceptable behavior from crime are erased. Then whole societies falter. This happened in Algeria in the 1950s and early 1960, and in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, and is happening today in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechneya, and a dozen other countries. Depending on how long the struggle in Iraq continues and how violent it is, Iraqis could be dragged down into a kind of social incoherence from which they are likely to give up trying to attain a just and peaceful society. In such circumstances the rise of "warlords" (as in Afghanistan ) or a new dictator (the "ghost of Saddam") becomes almost inevitable. Thus, the very fact of American military involvement in Iraq accentuates tendencies that America has announced it wishes to avoid.

Apologists point to the fact that the occupation authorities moved progressively and with all deliberate speed from a "political council" to a "governing council" to an "interim authority" to an appointed assembly that approved American-appointed and American-"advised" ministers under an American-chosen prime minister. True, the latest stage in the process has left large "reserved" areas of government in American hands--just as the British did in the 1920s. Americans will exercise ultimate control over the military, finances, oil, and forcing affairs and will continue the influence the choice of senior officials. But, on paper, the record, given the circumstances of occupation, has a certain coherence, even a certain validity. However, it has two fatal flaws: the first is that it was all done by foreigners to Iraqis, and the second is that it started from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

This article is reprinted with permission from Mr. Polk's new book, Understanding Iraq. Copyright William Polk.