Op-Eds

The U.S. military display of the images of the lifeless face of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most feared terrorist on June 8 sparked sustained applause from Baghdad to Washington. U.S. and Iraqi officials celebrated the death of the Jordanian Sunni militant, who aggressively promoted anti-U.S. and Shi'ite campaign since the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003, as a major blow to the insurgency. While expecting the violence to carry on without him, Mr. Bush hailed the event as a major victory for Iraq and the ongoing global War on Terror. Coincidently, the news of the death of al-Zarqawi was matched with a major announcement made by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who named three key posts of defense and interior ministers for his new government, marking the much needed turnaround in Iraq since the December 2005 elections.

The wheels appear to be turning, and this time in favor of those who predicated the defeat of the insurgency and the birth of a new Iraq. With al-Zarqawi out of picture and the new Iraqi government on the verge of forming what many hope will be the first national unity government, there is now a chance to create a momentum away from violence and toward consolidating a viable Iraqi state.

But the recent euphoria for the death of al-Zarqawi as a step in defeating the insurgency and bolstering the morale of the beleaguered U.S. military and the Iraqi government ignores the country's most daunting problem, that is, the rising tide of sectarian and tribal warfare. The trouble with Iraq is not the weakness or the strength of the Iraq's insurgent forces, in particular the al Qaeda organization, against the U.S. occupation, but the sectarian and tribal tension which is boiling beneath the surface of the recent victory against the insurgency.

Though much of the attention has been focused on his anti-occupation activities, the most important accomplishment of al-Zarqawi, during the period he led al Qaeda in Iraq from 2002 to 2006, was the use of Iraq as a base to set off sectarian conflict and tribal divisions as a way to destabilize the U.S. occupation. His most significant accomplishment was the launching of large-scale attacks on soft targets in the Iraqi Shi'ite community, like the bombing of a religious festivals in Karbala in March 2004 and the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, which has unleashed a new era of sectarian warfare in the modern Iraqi history. The Shi'ite sectarian militias, in particular the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army, who make up the bulk of the Iraqi police force, have in turn retaliated by raiding homes, torturing, and assassinating Sunni Arabs in cities like Baghdad and Samarra, committing one of the worst sectarian atrocities in Iraq's history. The early June 2006 Shi'ite fights that flared in the southern city of Basra are a good indicator that al-Zarqawi's dream of a divided, sectarian Iraq is slowly being realized. Though al-Zarqawi is dead, Iraq now lives in his shadow.

But the recent upheaval in Basra also signals something more problematic for Iraq. The recent clashes between the Fadhilla Sadrists, Moqtada Sadrists, and the SCIRI Shi'ite organizations in the southern city of Basra highlight an expanding Shi'ite versus Shi'ite conflict, underlining an unfolding intra-sectarian tension. Here, the problem mainly lies in the factional political landscape of Basra, where the three main Shi'ite groups, the Fadhilla, Moqtada Sadrist, and SCIRI, each spearheading a distinct militia organization, continue to battle over territory and military control over the oil-rich province. Although much of the hostilities have been between the Fadhilla and the SCIRI factions, Moqtada Sadr and his followers, which control Basra's police force and hospitals, continue to seek influence in a province where the young cleric does not maintain much grass-root support. While he aims to expand his political authority through the shaky United Iraqi Alliance, Iraq' ruling Shi'ite coalition, Moqtada Sadr's ambition to play a greater role in Iraq' political future primarily lies on his loyal militia, who have appeared to grow in number and military strength since the summer of 2004, when the Mahdi army was severely defeated by the U.S. forces in Karbala and Najaf.

However, the intra-sectarian tension may get worse as Mr. Maliki begins to assert Baghdad's authority over Basra, where not only the Shi'ite political parties, but also tribal chiefdoms surge to claim control over the oil-rich region and tribal territories like Umm-i-Qasr and Wasit. Since Maliki's most significant task will be to create security by using more troops in troubled cities like Baghdad and Basra, Iraq might began to see an increase of tension between the emerging state army and the various Sunni and Shi'ite marshland tribal factions, once loyal to the Baathist regime. But the tribal problem will be secondary to the problem of militias, who remain loyal to various Kurdish and Shi'ite political parties, and at various provinces make up much of Iraq's police and security forces. Such military structure reaffirms the ethnic and sectarian split inherent in the new post-Baathist Iraqi state. The sectarian makeup of the army, in turn, continues to spur further sectarian tensions as Sunni Arabs experience greater sense of fear and insecurity as Mr. Maliki will certainly face greater Shi'ite dissension as he moves to tackle not just SCIRI, but Moqtada Sadr and his millenarian militant organization.

Building a nation is the art of fostering a sense of nationhood, backed by a strong (non-sectarian) state that can provide security and safety for its citizens. Nation building requires the shaping of an imagined community in which its members can feel that they belong to a political community, that all citizens feel incorporated into a collectivity. At this stage, Iraq lacks both the nation and the state; it lacks that shared sense of national solidarity, which is increasingly being replaced by provincial tribalism and militant sectarianism, especially in the Shi'ite populated regions of southern Iraq. What is also missing is an autonomous Iraqi state, independent of U.S. army and solely dependent and transparent to the Iraqi people; a state that can govern beyond the green-zone bubble and operate without the "assistance" of U.S. forces against the onslaught of insurgency. Rest assured, the big elephant in Iraq is the U.S. occupation, causing the biggest problem for the legitimization of Maliki's unity government for years to come.

The next month or two are crucial. Maliki should now put forward a more aggressive policy to purge the army from militias loyal to various Shi'ite organizations, especially the SCIRI and the Sadrist factions, and put together a military establishment which is made up of various sectarian groups who are loyal only to the central state in Baghdad. If successful, this will not only strengthen the Iraqi army, with the backing of a more centralized authority, but also alleviate the sectarian tensions that are appearing to grow not only because of the insurgency but also the absence of a more credible and a central government. Once a non-sectarian army is in place, then Iraq can see a decline in violence as Sunni Arabs reintegrate back to the army by abandoning the insurgency.

More importantly, the new Iraqi government should also inaugurate new cultural and educational programs to propagate a post-Baathist Iraqi national identity. By "new cultural and educational programs" I refer to new cultural activities and national curriculums that promote an imagined community of new Iraqis who do not identify themselves with particular religious sects or political parties, but only would feel a belonging to a unified Iraqi nation, devoid of sectarian consciousness, ethnic and tribal rivalries. Since a non-sectarian nationalism has been thriving in Iraq since the 1950s when Abdul Karim Qassim initiated the first systematic attempt to structure an Iraqi national identity, the transition to a post-Baathist Iraqi nationhood should not be very difficult. What is central though is that this new form of nationalism should place greater emphasis on democratic values of accountability and pluralism, on civic participation and public discourse, than the revolutionary populist conception of a unitary Iraqi society, led by an authoritarian vanguard party or a charismatic person-figure who claims to represent the collective memory of the nation. The greatest challenge of a new Iraq will be the formation of a new national soul.

A post-Baathist nationalism can provide an alternative to the vacuum created by the U.S. occupation, which in itself is encouraging a portion of the Sunni Iraqi and non-Iraqi insurgency groups to continue their Shi'ite campaign to set off a sectarian warfare. Now while the Iraqi government secures more legitimacy among Iraqis (hopefully specially among the Sunni Arabs), it will also gain more courage to demand a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. At that moment, when the inevitable occurs, the U.S. should head way and prepare to pull out its troops from Iraq. This is only reasonable since for an Iraqi government to become a legitimate state it should first and foremost become autonomous.

If not, if the U.S. does not dramatically reduce its troop size after Maliki government calls for its withdrawal from Iraq, then the new permanent Iraqi government will undergo its most daunting experience, that is, a crisis of legitimacy. It is at that time that new al-Zarqawis and Moqtada Sadrs will be born, as the popularity of the older ones, both dead and alive, will continue to grow based on an anti-occupation agenda. It is at that time that Iraq will no longer live under the ghostly remains of al-Zarqawi, but the specter of a permanent U.S. occupation.