Iraq’s Last Patriot

Ayad Allawi, leaving a reception with Iraqi tribal leaders in October 2010

By ANTHONY SHADID
NYT

“We came in naïve about what the problems were in Iraq,” Gen. Raymond Odierno, the American military commander in Iraq, told me last August, a few days before he was to end his third tour. He had spent four years in Iraq. “I don’t think we understood what I call the societal devastation that occurred, we didn’t realize how damaged Iraq had been from 1980, in the Iran-Iraq war.” The list went on: Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 1991 gulf war, international sanctions that crippled Iraq’s middle class. “And then,” Odierno added, “we attacked to overthrow the government.” The same naïveté affected American efforts to mold Iraqi politics, with its ethnic and sectarian divisions. “We just didn’t understand it,” Odierno said.

I asked him if the United States had made those divisions better or worse. “I don’t know,” he said, with what felt like sincerity. “There’s all these issues that we didn’t understand and that we had to work our way through. And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe.”

As the U.S. completes its drawdown of military forces in Iraq, the country is solidifying its own sectarian and ethnic divisions — the culmination of a process that began with the invasion in 2003. Not that these divisions are new in Iraq. They simmered even as the country was created after World War I and assumed stark form under Saddam Hussein. He ruled by empowering members of his own Sunni tribe; he waged a genocidal war against Iraq’s Kurds in the north and crushed an uprising among the Shiite majority in the south. But after deposing Hussein and the Baath Party, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority constructed something unprecedented: a political system that ignored class, nationalist and other dynamics in favor of a simple calculus of Sunni, Shiite and Kurd.

(More here.)