Spencer Ackerman reports from Baghdad:
In response to a commenter on one of my Tapped posts, I asked S and A what they made of General Saleh's contention that Iraq's at the mercy of the Lost Generation born during the Iran-Iraq war. Not surprisingly, they felt it was overheated, but contained an element of truth. The roots of the country's present sectarianism, A said, are rooted not in some ancient struggle between Shiite and Sunni but in the disintegration of the nation as an ideal. Saddam ruined the very idea of national solidarity through his brutality and corruption, A said. Through two futile wars and a devastating era of sanctions, Iraqis learned to associate Iraq with Saddam, and so their hatred of Saddam transfered to a hatred of Iraq -- or at least reduced national identity to a more circumscribed sense of identity, located in tribe or sect or family. As a result, Iraq exploded with the invasion, and patriotism has become an outmoded virtue.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Iraq is a nation with very shallow historical roots, one that exists only because Westerners decided it should. The people of the region have their loyalties, but they are not to Iraq. Only our own ignorance prevents us from seeing this.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
