Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is dead, but not all Iraqis are celebrating. On the contrary, the way in which the various religious and ethnic groups in Iraq responded to his execution is emblematic of the difficulty of holding Iraq together as a coherent entity.
To the Shiite majority, long brutally oppressed by Saddam and all previous Sunni-dominated Iraqi regimes, Saddam's death symbolizes their attainment of political hegemony. Moreover, their triumphalist rejoicing is a cruel reminder that when the oppressed become liberated, they can very easily turn into oppressors themselves.
To the Sunni minority, pushed from power by the US invasion and giving vent to their frustration with daily attacks on the Shiite population and their holy sites, Saddam will remain a hero for a long time to come. The Kurds -- who, like the Shiites, were victimized by Saddam for decades -- quietly cling to their de facto independence in the north, making sure that they will never again come under Arab rule.
Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, representing the ruling Shiite-Kurdish coalition, expressed the hope that the dictator's end would help to heal the sectarian divides. But, however sincere his words may sound, reality is moving in the opposite direction, and the ugly verbal exchanges surrounding the act of execution itself will certainly do little to dispel the notion that this was "victors' justice" -- the victors being not the US, but the Shiites.
None of this augurs well for the future of what we should get used to calling "the former Iraq." Indeed, the Washington debate surrounding how to "fix Iraq" is irrelevant, because something that does not exist any longer -- namely, Iraq as a functioning state -- cannot be fixed. Under the guise of US-inspired constitutional arrangements, the Shiite majority has succeeded in arrogating near-absolute power to itself.
Thus, what only a few months ago had looked from Washington like a successful transition to some sort of representative government is obviously a travesty. Just as under Saddam, power today grows out of the barrel of the gun -- only now the state does not hold a monopoly on the means of violence. Every militia, every ministry and every Shiite political faction has its own guns, goons, and death squads -- while the Sunnis continue to use the stockpiles of weapons they accumulated under Saddam to fight a rear-guard action against the new order, apparently legitimized by elections.
There is no power -- save a new violent dictatorship -- that can bring Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to live in one body politic. The US' chimerical dream of democratizing overnight a deeply divided society accustomed only to violence and coercion has unleashed a terrifying array of political demons.
In these circumstances, the post-Baker-Hamilton debate in Washington is largely irrelevant to the future of Iraq -- though it continues to be crucial to the future of US power, prestige and standing in the world. The future of Iraq will be decided by the people of Iraq, but with bullets, not ballots.
The US and the entire international community are utterly unequipped to deal with this Middle Eastern version of Yugoslavia and its regional consequences. And -- unlike Yugoslavia's successor states, which could look to Europe -- the lack of a legitimate Arab democratic role model makes crafting a democratic order even more difficult.
Some Europeans and others may gloat over the US' failure in Iraq, and the ineptness -- or worse -- of US post-occupation policy cries to heaven. Yet the root causes of that failure go deeper, to Iraq's creation as an artificial entity in the 1920s by British imperialist planners, who stitched together three disparate provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into a state that never had a coherent identity.
Indeed, the very foundation of Iraq was based on victors' justice -- the British Empire, having vanquished the Ottomans, made the Sunni Arabs overlords in a country in which they were a minority. That arrangement has now come unglued following another cycle of victors' justice.
The consequences of this re-ordering of power are not yet clear. But a coherent Iraqi state -- whether unitary, federal or confederal -- will not grow out of a society in which one part of the population views Saddam, rightly, as a gruesome oppressor, while another part reveres him as a hero and martyr.
Wars always have unintended consequences and cruel ironies. In Iraq, only now is it becoming evident that some states cannot be saved without being destroyed.
Shlomo Avineri is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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