Two Irreconcilable Visions of Iraq

By: Sabah Salih

April 6, 2005

Beneath the political differences between the Kurdish and Arab sides over the formation of a new Iraqi government lies a much bigger difference: two fundamentally different notions of what Iraq is and is not.  The government will be formed; the Kurds will get represented, but this central issue remains unsolvable. 

(I use the term the Arab side rather than the Shiite-Sunni distinction because, when it comes to the Kurdish question, the distinction matters very little. Mention Kurdistan and the Shiite-Sunni schism quickly gives way to the more unifying and assertive program of Arab nationalism; and it is this nationalism that continues to define for both the Shiite and the Sunni Arabs what Iraq is and is not.  The problem is, this nationalism is not only oblivious to the way the Kurds see their history but also unwilling to give that history a fair hearing and plan for a future Iraq accordingly.)

In the Kurdish collective memory, Iraq exists only as a villain, a dreadful product of post-WWI imperial machinations presided over by Sir Percy Cox and Getrude Bell and their look-alikes—colonial crusaders with an incredibly flimsy grasp of Kurdish affairs and a decidedly anti-Kurd agenda.  Only in this capacity does the idea of Iraq make it into Kurdish folklore and literature.  That’s why for the Kurds, concepts like freedom, independence, nationalism, and patriotism can only mean something in conjunction with their Kurdish—not Iraqi—particularity.  For them, this was the whole point of their strong showing in the country’s recent elections; those who interpreted that as an indication of Iraqi people’s so-called sense of nationalism were sadly mistaken.  Separateness, not nationalism, has always been the country’s hallmark—something the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani wasted no time emphasizing following those elections; when Barzani robustly declared that his hope was to see an independent Kurdistan in his lifetime (I’m quoting from memory), he was not expressing a personal wish or some wacky idea: he was expressing a national sentiment deeply and permanently engrained in the people’s psyche and history.

For the Arab side Iraq is an entirely different story.   No doubt, the Arabs too have their own misgivings about the country’s colonial past, but, unlike the Kurds, they do not see Iraq as a haphazard colonial creation that must be broken up and remade in order to make it fair.  On the contrary, the Arabs remain resolutely committed to the idea of Iraq as their nation-state and no one else’s; that’s why so many Arabs are jittery about a Kurd for the President, even though the job is largely ceremonial. For the Arab side Iraq embodies not just a concrete reality whose borders they readily accept and, if need be, defend, but also a homeland through which such notions as independence, patriotism, freedom, and nationalism acquire meaning.  It is, therefore, not surprising that this version of Iraq has been glorified in art and literature in ways that make even the smallest criticism of it unsayable. Unlearning this Iraq requires a monumental task of re-education. 

The two sides also hold sharply differing views regarding the current U.S. involvement in their midst.  The majority of the Arabs see the American occupation as an ugly thing that needs to be reversed at the earliest possible opportunity—if only so that the Kurd can be cut down to size. The majority of Arabs have allowed themselves to be paralyzed by the negative baggage that comes with the term occupation; for them the term’s reach is totalitarian through and through and is always negative; as such, it is invoked only as a tool of oppression in the service of orthodoxy.  Honest debate about it is a taboo.

The Kurds, too, believe that ideally all occupations are wrong, that lurking beneath them all is the ever-present desire to see them replaced with liberation.  But the Kurds also believe that the world of politics hardly ever involve ideal circumstances and that there is something false about the notion to begin with.  And so, being pragmatic, the Kurds have come to recognize that high-minded criticism of the intervention is one thing and political realism is quite another.  This doesn’t make them hypocrites; it only shows that they understand how the world of realpolitik works, as those who felt comfortable with leaving Saddam’s tyranny in place did not, and as those who clamor these days for so-called “free Iraq” do not either. The Kurds see the American presence as an opportunity to lay down the groundwork for an eventual liberation from a different occupation.  They see it that way because they have learned from experience that notions like freedom and independence, as benign as they sound, are actually meaningless in the abstract.  America has gotten rid of Saddam, but in doing so, it has not replaced that tyranny with an American fiefdom.  On the contrary, it has unleashed forces, not by design of course, it can neither control nor manage. Occupation may be an ugly thing in a general sense, but in this particular case it has helped unbound suppressed voices.  This is the political framework within which the Kurds view the situation.

The two sides also differ on what federalism for Kurdistan ought to be like.  The Kurds rightly insist on a loose federation that promises to deepen, rather than lessen, their political and military clout.  The Arab side has never been keen on the idea of federalism in the first place.  Too weak to bring the Kurds into submission by force, it has now, somewhat reluctantly, accepted a watered down form of federalism, one designed to give the Kurds a limited degree of administrative authority while at the same time chipping away at their political and military power.  Arab agenda, in short, is to re-impose over Kurdistan the same old political arrangement that had kept Kurdistan under Arab control for so long.  The justification for that is still the same: national unity, the very same idea in whose name successive Arab governments felt justified in using some of the most horrific means of oppression against the Kurds.  An echo of the old undemocratic thinking can still be heard, and very frequently. When asked recently what if the Kurds decided to go their way, Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari said, “We will not allow [emphasis added] them.”  Notice the ease with which Mr. al-Jaafari falls back on the language of tyranny; even though he spent a good many years in the democraticWest, he still cannot bring himself to say, “We’ll try to persuade them not to do so.”    Or listen to these words from Ayad Allawi’s representative, Abdul Fahd al-Isawi: “Kirkuk has never and never will be a Kurdish city.”  There is more than an echo of Saddam here; it is a view shared readily by a great many in the Arab side.

There is then the question of Islam and its role in the government.  Here too the two sides could not be more far apart.  While Islam certainly continues to play an important role in Kurdish culture, religion has never been able to take the center stage in political life; that has always been secularism’s domain. For various reasons, today the opposite is true in much of Arab Iraq.  While for the majority of Shiite and Sunni Arabs Islam is inseparable from politics, for the Kurds the two are distinctly different and need to be kept apart.  All indications are that the other side is dead set on merging the secular and the religious into one.  The Kurds see that as a recipe for theocracy, which is steadily taking root in much of Arab Iraq, where these days to be a woman is to live apart from your body and mind and be in a constant state of fear and submission.  Just listen to this horrendous bout of vulgarity from one woman physician (Dr. Ubaedy) turned parliamentarian: “ . . . we say a husband can beat his wife, but he cannot leave a mark.” 

Colonialism was both Iraq’s creator and midwife; it gave the country all the trappings of a nation-state.  Successive Arab tyrannies then took it over and ruled it as a private fiefdom.  Right from the start, Arab nationalism put the new creation under its wing, insuring for years to come that the power of definition would remain exclusively in Arab hands. Now, this artificial creation is in the process of unraveling; those who did not have a voice before will have one now.  Rather than embarking on a campaign of demonization against the Kurd, as many in the Arab side are hysterically doing these days, they need to recognize that old Iraq is dead or dying, that the land is going to be a work in progress for years to come, that Kurdistan will never again come under Arab hegemony, politically or religiously, may even go its separate way, and that all that is a good thing for democracy. 

Dr. Sabah Salih is professor of English at Bloomsburg University, <Ssalih@bloomu.edu>