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The Policeman’s Fart, or the Politics of Modern Iraq

23 September 2005

By: Sabah Salih

This writing brought to mind a Kurdish joke.  One version goes like this: Long, long before the days of modern transportation, deep in the snow-capped mountainous region of Kurdistan, a beefy policeman on horseback arrives in a village of a few hundred to collect the taxes.  For the villagers, the policeman is the only face of government they have ever seen; for the policeman, the visit is an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of power.  That night he sits down on a thick Kurdish carpet, caliph-style, for a sumptuous dinner given in his honor, he in his western-style uniform, his hosts in their baggy trousers tapered at the ankles, perfect for floor sitting.  As he maneuvers himself awkwardly to grab the choicest piece of lamb, the policeman lets a fart, a hugely embarrassing and outrageously funny thing in Kurdish culture.  But nobody dares to laugh, for as the policeman pointedly reminds his timid audience, “Laughing at the government’s fart is no laughing matter.”

Up until the American intervention, modern Iraq had been ruled, or I should say misruled, by men very much like our farting policeman: always looking for one more opportunity to enrich themselves, always trying to bring harm to whoever they chose as their enemies, always demanding unconditional obedience to their authority, always trying to mould their world into the narrowest totalities. 

But perhaps these rulers’ biggest injustice was that they all had been operating with a big lie, the lie by which they defined and marketed the country as a cohesive bastion of Arab nationalism where in fact the country’s identity has always been too diverse ethnically for any once race to make it exclusively its own. This fact, however, has not prevented Sunni Arab political discourse from claiming the whole country as their own, even justifying in its name a brutally thuggish campaign of cultural theft and mass killing against the Kurdish people.  Today a similar campaign of brutally is being waged against all those on the Arab side who have courageously decided to take a stand against this lie and help bring it once and for all to an end.

But Sunni Arabs are not the only ones committed to the preservation of this lie. Opponents of the war, favoring simplifications over hard facts, cheap slogans over the resources of logic and dialect, endorse the very same thing.  From George Galloway’s hysterical ramblings in defense of Iraq’s so-called Arab identity, you cannot tell whose words you’re reading, Saddam Hussein’s or a British MP’s. Incredibly, even some policy makers and pundits in Washington continue to define success in Iraq in purely Sunni Arab terms: a strong centralized government in Baghdad.  As is the case with our farting policeman, here too for men like Francis Fukuyama and Leslie Clark, it is the lie, not the country’s reality, that they want policies to be based upon, just as the way it was during the long period of bad old days. This is not just because the lie’s simplicity is much easier to grasp than Iraq’s reality; it is also because, in an America obsessed with careerism and how-to manuals, there is a great deal of pressure on such men to make themselves relevant to an Iraq that has rendered them—and a whole slew of so-called Middle East experts—irrelevant.  To be fossilized by events into oblivion was the last thing they’d expected from this war.  

And now the lie’s defenders have marshaled the twin powers of national identity and Arab nationalism in its defense, with additional support coming from men and women in the west whose lazy incapacities won’t allow them to see anything outside the box they are in.  On the face of it, the Sunni Arab opposition to the proposed constitution appears to be an exercise in democracy.  But in reality it is an effort to bring back the very same old order, under which they were the farting policemen and the majority was the nameless, voiceless, timid subjects that they had for so long ruled over and treated very badly.  Their ultimate goal is to once again reduce Iraq’s diverse cultural identity to an all-encompassing Arab label, once again to make Arab nationalism the country’s blueprint for national thinking, once again to install themselves as the country’s farting policemen.  This is their definition of liberation and patriotism and one Iraq.

And they seem to be getting some hearing from the Bush administration.  For some in the administration these are not the bad guys; the bad guys are the Kurds.  These officials have even gone as far as doing everything in their power—and thankfully failing—to get in the way of Kurdish demand for federalism.  They have now persuaded themselves that if the Bush administration fails to bring about a strong centralized government in Baghdad—i.e. bring back the lie—the result will be a disaster, presumably for everyone.

But for these to be made the primary considerations in trying to shape Iraq’s future means avoiding the facts on the ground: Iraq is already and has always been divided along ethnic lines.  Now the country is almost exactly the way old Mesopotamia used to be before the British came in and with brute force tried to fashion a nation-state out of it.  This division is too deep to bridge; it’s too late for that anyway.  The lie cannot be brought back.   

So stop talking about saving Iraq: Iraq has already been saved twice over, once from tyranny and once from a big lie.  Regardless of what the constitution says, events on the ground indicate that the Kurds are going their separate ways: at the moment their push is for democracy and secularism and federalism but down the road self-determination is their goal, something they truly deserve.  For their part, most Shiites are heading in the direction of a theocracy modeled on Iran; the groundwork for that is already in place.  The Sunni Arabs, therefore, will have no choice but to make do only with what they are entitled to under democracy, the Sunni triangle. The days of their farting policeman are gone forever.