Dhari to the Iraqi tribes (with two comments)

This is from the open letter of Harith al-Dhari to the tribes of Iraq, posted on the AMSI site Saturday December 1.

First of all the occupation has to leave in order that we can manage our own affairs, because it is the occupation that places barriers among us so that we can't come together, talk, or agree among ourselves, and it is the occupation that sets off from time to time these outbursts of fitna among us, and sets up the many problems relating to sect, race, social groups, the economy, and so on. And regrettably they have some of our own flesh and blood to carry out their aims; and also very regrettably they have some neighboring [countries] who share their aims and assist in carrying out their policies, which come down to continuing in our country the state of violent upheaval, and [so as to foster a] feeling among us that we need the occupation, and that if it were to exit, then things would be worse, based on this argument: If problems aren't solved with the presence of their hundreds of thousands of fighters, then how can they be solved if they leave?

This they assert, and those who depend on them, and in fact many have fallen for this specious argument. For instance we now hear politicians who used to be for withdrawal, who are now for [having the foreign troops] staying, arguing that their staying will be a guarantee against the country sliding into internal war.

But this is a fiction, because the occupation is the source of the problems, and under it the crises grew worse and new problems arose. In the period of the occupation we have seen fighting and crimes such as Iraqis have never before seen, of a kind that were unknown to Iraqi history. And do you know why? It is because the occupation itself is behind that [fighting and crimes], and do you not see that each time we have succeeded in solving a problem and been on the verge of plucking out the root of it, another has been put in our path, so as to keep us in this cycle of occupation and fitna. ...But on the day that the occupation leaves, we will be able to isolate our problems, and solve them one after the other.

We Iraqis do not have great problems, because our land is broad and can hold double our present numbers, and it is fertile by the grace of God from the north to the south, its water is plentiful, and its resources are sufficient for us and for tens of generations to come, and in fact that is the reason the enemy has designs on us. So let us agree to throw them out, and to thwart them in their ambitions and the ambitions of the others....

More specifically in terms of the parallel history or "cycle" of occupation and sectarian troubles, Dhari notes among other things, first that already the initial acts of Bremer, in setting up an Interim Governing Council based on sectarian allocations (in addition to the dissolution of the army and the outlawing of the Baath party as a whole) laid the groundwork for a sectarian political system, and Dhari includes in this letter a lengthy explanation how the Lebanese system of sectarian allocations, which seems to have been the model for this, works to perpetuate and worsen the pattern of tit-for-tat antagonism in that country, and his point is that it is this same system that the occupation deliberately set up in Iraq.

Most recently--and this was the immediate motive for this letter--there has been a new manifestation of this same policy of sowing the seeds of fitna. Dhari puts it this way: Having accused the occupation of having set out to create a "second Lebanon", via the sect-allocation system, federalism, Biden and the rest of it, he writes:

And now the occupation is intent on a new technique in support of these plans, namely fragmentation--fragmenting of a single sect, of a single tribe, of a single region--and then the setting up of cantons, with armed regions fighting one another, and competing warlords, firing up in this way fitna in our beloved country in order to tear apart its limbs and leave the country weak, so that he [the occupier] will be the master, and those of the powers of evil who came with him, bringing the country in the final analysis to a civil war that will burn in every corner of the land.

And there is no doubt that tribespeople will be an important [target], on which they will spend a lot of effort and money, in order to create centers of polarization within a single tribe, and they will nourish this polarization with their money and their weapons, and naturally with the money of Iraq also, so as to go on from there to create bloody internal battles. And in fact they have already begun with this type of thing in the center and south of Iraq.

Beware, beware, you sons of our people, sons of our tribes, and all the sons of the two rivers, beware of these traps...which will turn the nation and its people into a pawn in the hands of the occupation. But our confidence in you is high, you Arab tribes and Kurdish tribes and Turkmen tribes and the tribes of all of Iraq, and the hopes of the ummah are focused on you and on your alertness and your efforts and on your jihad.

Two comments:

I would like to call attention to a couple of points out of many. First: The critique of the awakening-councils movement is only superficially similar to the Washington critique. The Washington debate goes like this: "Great way to kill AlQaeda". "Maybe, but in the absence of a national agreement, sooner or later those weapons could be turned against others (Shiites for instance, in the case of Sunni groups)". Dhari doesn't mention AlQaeda or Shiites or Sunnis. For him, that way of looking at it is part of the cycle of occupation and fitna that started with Bremer and is now being continued and escalated. Rather, his focus is on the method. At any given time in the process, the Americans are interested in finding new ways to drive wedges into what was originally an organic whole. And this is now down to the level of the individual sect, region, and even the individual tribe. It is a question of who you are and what you do: You can try to put the social fabric back together (which is what Dhari says Iraqis will do once the occupation is gone), or you can carry on trying to rip it into ever-smaller parts, which is what he says the Americans are doing.

Another point I would like to underline is the place of Lebanon in his argument, as an example of how a sectarian-allocation system works to perpetuate tit-for-tat fitna. The example had obviously been there for a long time prior to 2003 as a cautionary example of what happens with a sectarian approach. Personally I think this is a point that stands in the way of any arguments emphasizing ignorance over malice in the formation of US policy. They thought Iraq was located in some other part of the world, or of the cosmos?