To understand America’s difficulties in Iraq, it is necessary to understand the split in the Muslim world, Vali R. Nasr said in Monday night’s Bonner & Bonner lecture in Albert Taylor Hall.
“When we started to go to war in Iraq, we still thought it was about constructing a democracy,” said Nasr, a noted expert on Muslim politics at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. “We thought most of the resistance had to do with those resisting change, or who were part of the old regime. ... We didn’t think of it as a power play between two major groups.”
Those two groups, the Shiites and the Sunnis, first split about 1,500 years ago over the succession to the prophet Mohammad. But, Nasr said, the modern struggle between the two has little to do with religion and more to do with who will hold power — a conflict similar to the fighting in Northern Ireland, he added.
“The Protestants and Catholics in Ireland are not fighting over Martin Luther,” Nasr said. “They’re fighting over basic issues of power. Who is going to control Northern Ireland? Will it remain a British domain? Will it join its relatives to the south?”
Power in the modern Middle East has largely been held by the Sunnis, with the exception of the Shiite state created by the Iranian revolution in 1979. Iraq itself had been planned by the British as a Sunni-controlled state, Nasr said. The region’s large Shiite majority was counterbalanced by the inclusion of a Kurdish area to the north.
That balance began to shift after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. threw Iraq out of Kuwait and declared the Kurdish region a “no-fly” zone. Emboldened, Iraqi Shiites rose up in revolt only to be crushed by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard after expected Western aid never materialized.
After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Nasr said, it found itself as the midwife of the first Shiite Arab state. Seeing a chance to gain power through democratization, Shiite leaders largely called on their people to support U.S. efforts while the Sunnis found their prospects weakening. They began putting up a resistance to the transition that was much greater than anyone had expected.
“The U.S. was instrumental in shifting power from the Sunnis to the Shiites in Iraq,” Nasr said. “And Iraq is possibly the worst place this could have happened.”
In building a democracy, the support of the Shiites became vital. And early on, it was there, Nasr said, which was one reason the Shiite-dominated south of the country remained comparatively quiet. Shiites from other countries, including 1.2 million Iranians, soon began visiting holy sites in Iraq.
As late as 2005, Nasr said, things still looked like they could work out for America in Iraq. But the next year would turn a dark corner as the Shiites began to radicalize and pull away from the U.S.
“2006 was a bad year,” Nasr said. “It was a bad year for Iraq. It was a bad year for the U.S. It was a bad year for relations with the Shiites and Sunnis in the Middle East.”
The signal event, Nasr said, may have come on Feb. 22, 2006, with the destruction of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra by Sunni insurgents. That coincided with an effort by the U.S. to try to bring Sunnis into the political process that year. The effort failed and alienated the Shiites, some of whom had begun to lose faith in America’s ability to protect them. After a number of American forces were pulled out of the countryside and into Baghdad, Nasr said, many Shiites called it “the second great betrayal,” the first being the lack of support in 1991.
Now, with radicals on both sides sponsoring militias, Nasr said, things have become more complicated.
“A lot more blood has been spilled and violence makes its own rules,” he said. “Also, it’s very difficult to uproot the institutional bases of violence. Once you have a militia culture, a militia economy, it’s much more difficult to uproot.”
On top of that, he said, the situation turned Iran into a regional power. With the destruction of the Taliban and the Iraqi army, its traditional barriers were gone. And as America became tied down in Iraq, Iran found itself with more room to maneuver, especially in nuclear research.
“Many in Iran always said the difference between North Korea and Iran was that North Korea had (the bomb) and Iran didn’t,” Nasr said. “Iran has never openly said it wants a bomb ... but I’m sure they want a bomb. No two ways about it.”
Iran’s claim to regional power status comes from more than an expansionist president, he said. It’s a large, mostly educated country with a fairly vibrant economy. It’s even a player in the information age, Nasr said — right now, Persian is the third most-used language on athe Net after English and Mandarin Chinese.
A war in Iran would be a mistake, Nasr said. He estimated that even 400,000 troops might not be able to keep order if it came to fighting.
“What we found in Iraq is that we have a perfect capability to start wars, but we can’t finish them,” he said. “The U.S. military can smash any force in the world. We could demolish all the infrastructure in Iran in two weeks of bombing. But what comes next?”
“We’ve found that rogue regimes, bad regimes aren’t as bad as no regimes,” Nasr said. “Iran with no regime would be hell.”
Some in the audience asked what Nasr thought the next step should be in Iraq.
He responded that there are no silver bullets or easy answers. The situation has to be made more manageable, he said, and that can only be done through a political process, not through changes in troop levels.
“The reason Iraq is in the mess it is is because it doesn’t have a workable political framework,” he said. “Iraq is not a vacuum. Iraq is a country. Somebody’s going to control it. And as long as there’s conflict over who’s going to control it, there’s going to be fighting.”