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This week, we'll be buried under a crush of analysis about an Iraq that's being ravaged by a religious civil war -- an incomprehensible war between "militants" of various stripes and "the Iraqi people." But Americans will be poorly served by the media's singular focus on Iraq's "sectarian violence." It obscures the fact that sectarian fighting is a symptom -- a street-level manifestation -- of a massive political conflict over what kind of country Iraq will be, who will rule it and who will control its enormous oil wealth.
And it obscures the great irony of the American project: that in that defining conflict over the future of the country, the Bush administration, with the support of Congress, has taken the same side as Iran's hardliners and the same side as the Sunni fundamentalist group called al Qaeda in Iraq. All are working -- separately, but towards the same ends -- against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis, who polls show want a united, sovereign country in control of its own resources and free of meddling by Washington, Tehran and other foreigners.
Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died violent deaths since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many of them as a result of the civil conflicts that have pitted Iraqi against Iraqi. But those conflicts have nothing to do with the differences that distinguish the different branches of Islam -- Iraq isn't struggling with a religious civil war.
Iraqis are fighting over fundamental questions about the future of their country. They're fighting over whether it will have a strong central government or be a weak confederation of semiautonomous states, over how soon and to what degree it will be independent of foreign influence, over who will control its massive energy reserves and under what terms they will be developed -- all of these things are tangible, concrete issues that are crucial in determining Iraq's future.
We refer to this central political conflict as one between Iraqi separatists and nationalists. Loosely speaking, separatists favor a "soft partition" of Iraq into at least three zones with strong regional governments, similar to the semiautonomous Kurdish "state" in Northern Iraq; they are at least willing to tolerate foreign influence -- meaning Iranian, U.S. or other powers' influence, depending on which group one is discussing -- for the foreseeable future; they favor privatizing Iraq's massive energy reserves and ceding substantial control of the country's oil sector to regional authorities.
Nationalists are just the opposite: They reject any foreign interference in Iraq's affairs, they favor a strong technocratic central government in Baghdad that's not based on sectarian voting blocs and they oppose privatizing Iraq's oil and natural gas reserves on the extraordinarily generous terms (to the oil companies) proposed by the U.S. government and institutions like the IMF. They favor centralized control over the development of Iraq's oil and gas reserves.
That's not to say that ethic and sectarian violence isn't real, or isn't a significant problem in Iraq. The point is that violence based on religious or ethnic identity -- Shiite or Sunni or Christian, Arab or Turkman or Kurd -- is an extension of these fundamental disputes over what the future of Iraq will hold.
Sectarian and political tensions overlap in a fluid, shifting dynamic. The Iraqi parliament began as an institution of largely sectarian coalitions, but over the past two years, as the occupation has continued to grind on, sectarian-based politics have become overshadowed by divisions between nationalists and separatists. The result of the media's singular focus on sectarian conflict is that most Americans are unable to grasp the changing terrain of Iraq's political landscape with anything approaching a sense of the context in which events occur.
Consider a recent development of some significance. At the end of August, five Iraqi parties -- representing Sunni and Shiite Arabs and Kurds -- signed a "unity accord" or a "five-party manifesto" that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed was a sign of new movement towards national reconciliation. The White House said it was "an important symbol of unity in Iraq," and congratulated "Iraq's leaders on the important agreement." A spokesman for the Iranian government called it "productive and positive." The truth, however, was that it was an agreement among parties that had long agreed -- among five Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatist parties that had been loosely allied since at least 2000, when all belonged to the London-based Iraqi exile group called the "Independent Iraqi Democrats." All five parties were strategic allies in the 2002 "London Conference," preparing and justifying a U.S.-led invasion. The five parties have long supported al-Maliki's regime. In fact, they are al-Maliki's regime, but the commercial media never took note of that fact.
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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
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