George Packer has a big, fat, 16 webpage article in The New Yorker about the Iraqis that decided to work with the occupiers Americans when they arrived in Iraq. His article starts out in the Palestine Hotel, which is the only place left in Baghdad where sane Iraqis are willing to be seen with an American reporter. Two secular Iraqis, one Shi’ite, one Sunni, have sat down with Packer in a hotel room on the eighth floor. These men are in their twenties, they are friends, they hate the religious extremists on both sides. I’m going to show you an exchange between them, so you can get an idea how bad the sectarian divide has become.
They had a strong friendship, based on a shared desire. Before the war, they had both longed for the arrival of the Americans, expecting them to change their lives. They had told each other that they would try to work with the foreigners. Othman and Laith were both secular, and despised the extremist militias on each side of Iraq’s civil war, but the ethnic conflict had led them increasingly to quarrel, to the point that one of them—usually Laith—would refuse to speak to the other.
Laith began to describe these strains. “It started when the Americans came with Shia leaders and wanted to give the Shia leadership—”
“And kick out the Sunnis,” Othman interrupted. “You admit this? You were not admitting it before.”
“The Americans don’t want to kick out the Sunnis,” Laith said. “They want to give Shia the power because most Iraqis are Shia.”
“And you believe the Sunnis did not want to participate, right?” Othman said. “The Americans didn’t give them the chance to participate.” He turned to me: “You know I’m not just saying this because I’m a Sunni—”
Laith rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”
“But I think the Shia made the Sunnis feel that they’re against them.”
“This is not the point, who started it,” Laith said heatedly. “Everybody is getting killed, the Shia and the Sunnis.” He paused. “But if we think who started it, I think the Sunnis started it!”
“I think the Shia,” Othman repeated, with calm knowingness. He said to me, “When I feel that I’m pushing too much and he starts to become so angry, I pull the brake.”
Frankly, I was just pleased to find out that these men are still friends and that one is a doctor and the other an engineer. But that is not much to cling to. Consider the following.
It had taken Othman three days to get to the hotel from his house, in western Baghdad. On the way, he was trapped for two nights at his sister’s house, which was in an ethnically mixed neighborhood: gun battles had broken out between Sunni and Shiite militiamen. Othman watched the home of his sister’s neighbor, a Sunni, burn to the ground. Shiite militiamen scrawled the words “Leave or else” on the doors of Sunni houses. Othman was able to leave the house only because his sister’s husband—a Shiite, who was known to the local Shia militias—escorted him out. Othman took a taxi to the house of Laith’s grandfather; from there, he and Laith went to the Palestine, where they enjoyed their first hot water in several weeks.
That is not the description of a functioning society. When it’s a capital offense to have been born to one sect or another, that is pure and simple sectarian cleansing. It’s a Holy War within Islam. Secular people don’t stand a chance.
