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August 4, 2005
Separation of Mosque and State
Before he was killed, Steven Vincent wrote extensively about the city of Basra, and these writings were destined to be the focus of a book.
There is no Sunni and foreign insurgency in Basra, yet his descriptions are troubling nonetheless:
Not surprisingly, given Basra's dilapidated condition, contracting is big business. Not only for the city's numerous contractors, but also for the crooked politicians, parasitical religious parties and criminal gangs who take their cut from every construction job, creating a business climate that combines the accountability of Tammany Hall with the law and order of 1920s Chicago . . .The corruption is not limited to the business world. As Vincent explained in his last article in the New York Times, the security sector is undergoing a sort of criminalization as well, albeit of a different sort:Not that I didn't know anything about Basra-style corruption. In our travels across the city, Layla and I have fielded ceaseless complaints of extortion, protection rackets, employment featherbedding, nepotism, bid rigging, influence-peddling--it's impossible to talk to Basra businesspeople and not hear such woes.
As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Recruited from the same population of undereducated, underemployed men who swell these organizations' ranks, many of Basra's rank-and-file police officers maintain dual loyalties to mosque and state.Perhaps from these observations we can glean a bit about the necessity of keeping Iraq unified as a nation, and not letting too much of its national power devolve into federalism. Zalmay Khalildad, the newly appointed US Ambassador to Iraq, writes in an opinion piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal [caught it in the print edition at work and have no subscriber link, sorry]:In May, the city's police chief told a British newspaper that half of his 7,000-man force was affiliated with religious parties. This may have been an optimistic estimate: one young Iraqi officer told me that "75 percent of the policemen I know are with Moktada al-Sadr - he is a great man." And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
Iraq needs a "national compact" enshrined in its constitution. One of the biggest challenges facing Iraqis is overcoming the loss of trust among its communitites. This underlies current political and sectarian tensions. In part, it underlies the insurgency. Fostering hatred was central to Saddam's rule. His was a personal tyranny, rooted in a narrow clique, not in a wider community. To overcome this dark legacy, Iraqis need to build bridges, not burn them . . .Taken together, what Vincent's microcosmic look, and Khalildad's macro-view suggest is that an Iraqi federalism will lead to more Basras dominated by Shi'ite religious police and Anbars ruled by Sunnis and foreign jihadis. Only national institutions will have the ability to draw in all members of Iraq's diverse community and forge a unified nation-state -- with all of the trappings of freedom that are the ardent goal of the Americans.This process of forging a national compact begins with an agreement on a new constitution; but it does not end there. If Iraq is to succeed, it needs to build truly national institutions . . . it is vital that Iraqis build institutions that all communities can have confidence in -- that are not instruments of revenge or fiefdoms of patronage of one group or another.
There seems to be some logic to this. All national institutions will be centered in Baghdad, the most diverse and largest city in the country. There, elements of all of Iraq's regions, ethnicities, sects, and religions already live together, yet their stabilizing security situation has not led to the introduction of religious police and such as is seen in Basra (though business corruption may very well be another story). Could it be that the diversity of Baghdad will lead to an incipient separation of mosque and state? That a civil society might develop there?
Could it further be that such a civil society is one of the goals of our intervention? Nowhere else in the Arab world do such diverse groups exist in such close quarters -- Lebanon is perhaps a close second, but Iraq has the distinct advantage of being at the geographic center of the region, not on its periphery. Basra may never be an Iraqi melting pot, but Baghdad might be, and its influence might be pressed throughout the country in the form of national power.
Posted by Chester at August 4, 2005 10:54 PM