Anthony Shadid: Old Mistakes in Iraq Cast a Long Shadow
[Anthony Shadid is Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times.]
Fittingly, it was Order No. 1.
Five days after becoming proconsul in Iraq in May 2003, L. Paul Bremer III issued the decree with the imperial panache of a man partial to the combat boots of an occupier and the business suit of a bureaucrat. With it, he banned the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein and unleashed a process that continues today. In English, his euphemism was de-Baathification. But Mr. Bremer, who always seemed to indulge a supposed Iraqi proclivity for authority, never really understood the language of the country he inherited. In Arabic, a more descriptive language, the word that was used was “ijtithath” — to tear out or uproot.
Order No. 1 was a beginning that has yet to have an end, a little like America’s presence in a land it clumsily sought to cast in its own image....
There are no shortages of ironies in Iraq. Some border on the surreal. In today’s politics, it is erstwhile Baathists and the Communist Party that speak a secular language more familiar to Americans. Yet the Americans have empowered ardently religious Shiite parties; one longstanding Shiite partner of the United States here was reported to have laid a wreath on the grave in Lebanon of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah figure accused of planning the bombing of the United States Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.
But Order No. 1 may be the biggest irony. It was the first step in fashioning a system that seems to embrace brinkmanship, populated by once-exiled figures whom the United States brought to power. And in that system, perhaps only the United States can act as a broker to cut through the crisis and deadlock....
These days, nearly everyone in Iraq deems the United States an arbiter. Iraqi politicians ritually bristle at its intervention, especially when it runs against their interests. But even they acknowledge the role it plays, one that has in some ways grown even as the Obama administration signals that Iraq will not be this president’s war....
Not too far west, America may find a sobering lesson in another body politic shaped by another occupier.
In politics byzantine even by Middle East standards, competing sects in Lebanon — Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, Druze — struggle for accommodation under a notion of consensus. That is almost always fleeting. Instead, politics is usually zero-sum across a landscape that, in the words of an architect there, offers no community “guarantees of its survival.” For years after the civil war, Syria, often brutally, reigned supreme, arbitrating the disputes. In 2005, it withdrew and, since then, the Lebanese system, without a kingmaker, has endured more years of deadlock than not. Few miss the Syrians there, but many long for the stability....
In America’s twilight in Iraq, the imperial role of arbiter, in a system that may yet prove unworkable, still belongs to it....
Read entire article at NYT
Fittingly, it was Order No. 1.
Five days after becoming proconsul in Iraq in May 2003, L. Paul Bremer III issued the decree with the imperial panache of a man partial to the combat boots of an occupier and the business suit of a bureaucrat. With it, he banned the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein and unleashed a process that continues today. In English, his euphemism was de-Baathification. But Mr. Bremer, who always seemed to indulge a supposed Iraqi proclivity for authority, never really understood the language of the country he inherited. In Arabic, a more descriptive language, the word that was used was “ijtithath” — to tear out or uproot.
Order No. 1 was a beginning that has yet to have an end, a little like America’s presence in a land it clumsily sought to cast in its own image....
There are no shortages of ironies in Iraq. Some border on the surreal. In today’s politics, it is erstwhile Baathists and the Communist Party that speak a secular language more familiar to Americans. Yet the Americans have empowered ardently religious Shiite parties; one longstanding Shiite partner of the United States here was reported to have laid a wreath on the grave in Lebanon of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah figure accused of planning the bombing of the United States Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.
But Order No. 1 may be the biggest irony. It was the first step in fashioning a system that seems to embrace brinkmanship, populated by once-exiled figures whom the United States brought to power. And in that system, perhaps only the United States can act as a broker to cut through the crisis and deadlock....
These days, nearly everyone in Iraq deems the United States an arbiter. Iraqi politicians ritually bristle at its intervention, especially when it runs against their interests. But even they acknowledge the role it plays, one that has in some ways grown even as the Obama administration signals that Iraq will not be this president’s war....
Not too far west, America may find a sobering lesson in another body politic shaped by another occupier.
In politics byzantine even by Middle East standards, competing sects in Lebanon — Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, Druze — struggle for accommodation under a notion of consensus. That is almost always fleeting. Instead, politics is usually zero-sum across a landscape that, in the words of an architect there, offers no community “guarantees of its survival.” For years after the civil war, Syria, often brutally, reigned supreme, arbitrating the disputes. In 2005, it withdrew and, since then, the Lebanese system, without a kingmaker, has endured more years of deadlock than not. Few miss the Syrians there, but many long for the stability....
In America’s twilight in Iraq, the imperial role of arbiter, in a system that may yet prove unworkable, still belongs to it....