Reliving History

"Al-Qaida is trying to return the country to the civil war era by killing Shias. So far they have not succeeded, but nobody knows how long for. When the rage comes, you cannot expect how people will react."
Iraqi MP Sami al-Askary

Civilians and security forces gather at the scene of a car bomb attack in Iraq. (File photo)

Perhaps it was, after all, inevitable. A lesson not learned well, is a lesson not learned. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat failures. When the West guided Iraq toward an interim government meant to unite all Iraqis into a common future, it was emphasized that government and the administration of the public weal should be a combined effort, embracing the inclusion of all sectors of the country.

Under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Iraq has become a country ruled exclusively by Shi'ites, with some influence from its Kurdish contingent. The ruling Shia majority lost no time in dismantling the coalition government that the United States in its diplomatic mission to aid Iraq become a functioning state representative of all its peoples' rights and entitlements, when the U.S. finally departed leaving Iraq to the Iraqis, as they had demanded.

The Maliki government is now struggling to contain the Islamist terrorists represented by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, reflecting the spread of al-Qaeda forces from Iraq into Syria, a new, expanded franchise. Mr. al-Maliki's aversion to having the United States interfere in any measure with his country's affairs was temporarily set aside when he met in Washington recently with U.S. officials to reinstate intelligence sharing agreements which he had spurned on the U.S. pullout in 2011.

He might have been spared all of this, and the ongoing, more frequent and life-destructive attacks now taking place in Iraq might have been far less numerous and successful had Iraq's Sunni demographic continued their Northern Awakening self-defence militias which had set out to battle al-Qaeda which had not discriminated in its atrocities committed against Iraqis, subjecting both Sunni and Shia to like treatment.

When Prime Minister al-Maliki disenfranchised the Sunni minority, by charging Sunni parliamentarians with corruption and crimes, causing vice-president Tariq al Hashemi to flee for his life into exile he sundered the coalition. The Sunnis, once favoured by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, complained of their treatment, relegated to second-class citizens by the Shia-dominated government.

The response from the followers of Mr. Maliki's government was that Sunnis had better get used to it; Sunnis treated Shias precisely in a like manner when they were in power.  Subsequently, the time between one series of mass attacks by al-Qaeda and another has dropped to a week. The death toll for 2013 stands at 7,000, twice the death rate when U.S. forces discovered Saddam in Tikrit in 2003 and took him into custody.

"It is not as bad as during the civil war, but whenever you leave your house, you can't be sure that you will be coming back. We are living in terror", said Shadi Karaqzi, a young Baghdad accountant.

Just as the Baathist Syrian regime violently broke up a largely peaceful protest of Sunnis two years previously, agitating against their second-class citizenship in Syria, leading to the increasingly vocal and demanding opposition and finally rebellion leading to outright civil war disrupting the lives of millions, so too did the current Iraqi Shia-led regime meet a peaceful protest of Sunnis by troops firing on people causing 40 deaths.

Iraqi Sunnis who once would never have dreamed of joining al-Qaeda, now find their mission acceptable; the overthrow of the Iraqi Shia government.