Kos's Heart of Darkness

The New York Times on Tuesday reported Shia claims that the US is pressuring Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to step down. According to the Times report, US Ambassador Khalilzad passed on a “personal message from President Bush” that Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Jaafari’s remaining prime minister when the new government is formed.

The reaction to this news at Daily Kos reveals prejudices common to much of Western thinking about the Third World. Kos rightly points out the hypocrisy of this initiative: pressuring the Iraqi government to select a prime minister that the US “supports” all the while declaring a new era of “self-determination” for Iraq. But the post proceeds with this, ‘observation’: “Perhaps we should have done a wee bit of homework about Iraq's bloody sectarian history before we threw all our weight behind the Shi'a, who have been operating death squads from the Interior Ministry.”

The casual reference to “Iraq’s bloody sectarian history” is indicative of current attitudes toward the uncivilized non-Western world. The implication appears to be that we should have known Iraqis couldn’t handle self-determination, given their propensity to slit one another’s throats. But this history is more imagined than real. Sectarianism in Iraq is highly complex and dynamic but was never simply conflictual. Of course, one might have predicted eventual sectarian violence (although even now it is not clear that the country is engaged in a civil war), not because of Iraq’s supposed bloody sectarian history, but because it was clear from the start that the US occupation would treat the Iraqi population as sectarian blocs, and begin to establish a political system based on this sectarian conception. In ignoring this, Kos imputes the current crisis to some inherent aspect of Iraqi culture. Quite apart from the disdain this shows towards Iraqis, it also does Bush the service of writing America out of the Third World’s “age-old ethnic hatreds.”