Iraq in Fragments: A Self-fulfilling Prophecy?

The US Senate recently voted for a soft partition of Iraq. This was an unbinding resolution to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines into three federal governments. One wonders, who gave them to right to talk about dividing Iraq in the first place?! Who are they to decide the future of the Iraqi people? The US is part of the problem, not solution. As Juan Cole rightly says in his recent blog entry, "First they messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it. It makes no sense..." It seems to me that those in the US Senate are following a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, a false understanding or prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true.

Here is how a false understanding is fulfilling itself in the Iraqi case: You are a typical senator. You rely mostly on your staffers and mainstream media to learn about matters pertaining to foreign policy. Especially when you are not part of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Even when you are, you obviously don't have time to read the core scholarly research on all international conflicts and different regions by yourself. So you prefer to get a simplified, straightforward, summarized view of each issue and each region, including Iraq. But you start off wrongly, as in your quest for simplified understanding, you perceive the Iraqi society as fundamentally divided into three neat categories: the Shias, the Sunnis, and the Kurds. These people fall neatly into these 'distinct' categories in your imagination with clearly discernable 'differences' in beliefs, attitudes, dialects, cultures, life preferences, etc. There is not much fluidity or overlap among these identities. Further, you perceive these groups in existential opposition to each other: they hate each other, they do not want to live together, otherwise, how can you understand the current conflict. That they only needed a catalyst, such as a sudden break up of the political status quo and state structure, to start killing each other. In this simplified understanding, the policies of divide-and-rule of the current administration, such as the "The Redirection" (here) or "Shifting Targets" (here, both articles by Seymour Hersh), are supposed to have no effect in politicizing and transforming sectarian relations. As if politics had no role in generating hatred among these groups in Iraq. In this understanding, politics matters not as much as the supposedly primordial differences between Sunnis and Shias do. You see the people and their identities not in their complex social reality, rather, in simplistic categories that can help you make voting decisions, or at least, justify your voting track. This simplified image is very far from the ground reality, but you think that it is the truth.

The result: a) You neglect the role of politics, and consequently, the possibility of finding solution through politics. That is, through talks, through negotiations, through trust building, through just solutions. b) You miss the possibility of finding solutions in the common cultural resources, in the commonality of religion among the Iraqi groups, in their shared culture and history. Hence, you end up suggesting the old colonial solution of dividing up people through territorial boundaries. And how do you validate it? With a justification like this: ‘because they were divided in the first place, hence the divide-up solution.’ You justify and validate this logic by referring to none other than the logic itself. Talk about tautological reasoning! How a false perception is causing itself to become true!!

How should we perceive Iraq then? I refer the readers to an earlier post where I shared similar concerns. There I pointed out the dangers of focusing only on the ‘differences,’ and I stressed that we should not overlook the common cultural and religious factors that bind the Iraqi society together (See here).

It is so terrible to see that the public is also buying into this distorted imagery, this wrong portrayal of the Iraqi social reality. Even some Muslims, outside of Iraq, who are deeply saddened by the violence and bloodshed, have also started to see the division as the best solution. This is the power of media. It effectively distributes the public opinion messages, which reproduce themselves in the minds of the general public. Through these messages, these perceptions, these lens, the general audience interprets the news about Iraq and would judge political solutions like the division of Iraq. It is through this combined role of policy making (power) and media (knowledge) that the self-fulfilling prophecy about Iraq is materializing itself.

Another example of such this self-fulfilling prophecy can be found in the “clash of civilizations” theory by Samuel Huntington, which for many people has become the standard examining glass to interpret terrorism and the war on terror. (See its criticism here.)

In my next post, I want to look at James Longley's documentary, "Iraq in Fragments" (see image). This documentary is a good illustration of the concerns I share above.