by Kanan Makiya
“Probably it is even simpler than that; he is escaping the dullness of life in the well-ordered societies that gave him refuge and opportunity.”
—
The citadel of Foreigner Iraqis in the new Iraq was something the Occupier called the Governing Council: twenty-five men and women not picked by the Occupier for their character or leadership abilities, or for their standing in the community, but by virtue of the tribe, sect, religion, sex, ethnicity, and foreign country whose interests they were deemed most likely to represent. What Uncle called “the politics of pretty pictures” determined why thirteen out of the twenty-five members of the Governing Council were Shiʻa.
Of all the politicians of Iraq, only our Sayyid had denounced the Council right from the outset, in the summer of 2003, calling its members “infidels” and “lackeys of the Occupier.” At the time, Uncle managed to convince him of the wisdom of moderating his hostility, better still concealing it, realizing that these Foreigner Iraqis had to be contended with and could be useful, particularly the thirteen members who now took to calling themselves the House of the Shiʻa.
This new House was established in secret to give de facto control of the Occupier’s Council to its Shiʻa members, all of whom had been carefully selected by the Occupier; the Thirteen would meet secretly before each crucial decision in the Council and present a united front—to thwart its Sunni Arab members.
Uncle’s moderation was purely tactical, however.
“They wear their Shi‘ism like an ill-fitted suit,” he said to me, “too tight in some places and too loose in others.” To further divisiveness of this kind in politics, he said, “a man must be well-rooted among his own kind first,” which none of the Foreigner Iraqis were.
He was in the room with them one day when a secular Sunni Arab Council member from London, a close personal friend of his Shiʻa Council members, also from London—they all went to the same clubs—realized his Shiʻa friends were up to something. Following a succession of speeches made by members of the House of the Shiʻa to cover up how they had secretly decided to vote, it suddenly dawned on this Sunni Council member that a hidden agenda was being advanced under his nose, and by his London Shiʻa pals. His face turned ashen in utter disbelief. In the deathly silence that filled the normally noisy room, sectarian politics was born.
From that moment until the end of the Occupier’s experiment with the Governing Council, Shiʻa agendas pitted against Sunni agendas were all that were on anyone’s mind in the plush gold-trimmed offices of the Council in the Green Zone. The citadel of Foreigner Iraqis misnamed the Governing Council had given up on governing themselves, much less a country called Iraq.
No one talked about sectarianism, thought like a sectarian, justified ideas in the name of sectarianism, argued like a sectarian, and then denied that they were sectarian more than the thirteen members of the House of the Shiʻa in the Governing Council—certainly no one from the House of Sadr or in the Army of the Awaited One.
Later, once sectarianism had been established as the way of doing politics in the new Iraq, our movement would champion it, and we would prove to be a thousand times better at being sectarian than any Foreigner Iraqi had ever been. But not in those first two years when Foreigner Iraqis were setting the tone and laying down the rules of the game. These appointees of the Occupier taught the Shiʻa of Iraq how to whine about their victimization under Sunni rule, which they equated with Saddam’s rule; they behaved as though all Baʻthis were Sunnis, and all Sunnis were Baʻthis, and therefore equally suspect. In the only institution that Foreigner Iraqis dreamed up and controlled, the De-Baʻthification Commission, they practiced sectarianism like no Iraqi in the history of the country had practiced it before.
“In a contest between them and Saddam over who is more sectarian,” Uncle asked me, “who do you think would win?”
“I couldn’t say,” I said.
“I will tell you,” he said, his big round face breaking out in a smile. “Saddam was less sectarian.”
“He didn’t have to shout it from the rooftops,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t sectarian.”
“Politicians turn sectarian when they are weak.”
“Do you think it was by design?” I asked Uncle. “Is this what the Occupier wanted?”
“Divide and rule is the Occupier’s way of doing things. Only the Americans call it democracy. But there is another explanation for what these Foreigner Iraqis brought to Iraq.”
“Which is?”
“Rootlessness. When you are without standing among your own, you need to invent enemies and spread fear, trick people in effect into thinking they need you for their own security. The Tyrant used this tactic all the time.”
“But the Baʻth were in power at the time; the Governing Council isn’t.”
“It is only about power. What these fools don’t realize is that you can only be truly sectarian when you have it, not if you merely appear to have it.”
The Cabal of Thirteen
A few weeks later, I found myself with Uncle and a small group of his colleagues seated cross-legged on the thickly carpeted floor of a room adjoining his office. They were Persian carpets of the finest quality—Uncle was a collector—laid one on top of the other, making the floor soft and rich. You were intended to feel Uncle’s station under your feet as you entered the room.
An old servant who had been with him for as long as I could remember was serving tea. Carrying a heavily decorated ceramic teapot in one hand, and a kettle of boiling water in the other, he topped each man’s glass teacup on its gold-laced saucer. Bowls of sugar and glasses of water were scattered around on silver trays within easy reach. A decision had been made before my arrival regarding an Iranian proposition that had come to Uncle by way of one of the thirteen members of the House of the Shiʻa in the Governing Council. It was the first I heard of it.
“So we are agreed,” Uncle was saying, “we will never get a better price for the arms and grenades than what they are asking for. We will tell this toad arriving any minute that we are going to make the purchase. But what should we do about these newfangled mines with shaped charges the Iranians want to try out on us? I hear they are designed in Iran.”
“I don’t see why we should not accept a few hundred of them,” an old colleague of Uncle’s named Hassan said. He had been at Uncle’s side for at least a decade, from the days of Sayyid Sadiq, our Sayyid’s father. “After all, they are giving them away at the moment. We can tell the Iranians we will pay for the next batch if we like them.”
“I don’t like it,” said an older man in spectacles sporting an immaculately trimmed graying short beard and dressed in shirt and trousers. “Why are they giving us weapons free of charge, sworn enemies of their closest allies, the House of Hakim?”
“It suits them that we fight one another,” Uncle replied, looking down at his tea before taking a very noisy slurp.
“The mines are useless in the battles to come with the House of Hakim,” said Hassan.
“It suits them even more for us to fight the Americans,” Uncle replied morosely. “They were specifically designed to penetrate their armored vehicles. The House of Hakim isn’t going to use them while they are in bed with the Americans in the Governing Council. The Iranians want us to test them out. Think of it as an Iranian investment in us, in our Iraqi future,” he said with a bitter laugh.
“Aren’t we putting too dark a spin on this?” I piped up. “There are weapons on offer from fellow Shiʻa in Iran. Why not assume they want us to be able to protect ourselves even if they don’t like our Sayyid? Perhaps they are trying to reach out. We are all Shiʻa after all. What proof do we have that it is Iranian manipulation? Maybe the House of the Shiʻa in the Governing Council negotiated the deal on our behalf. They are eager to improve relations. I hear they press the Americans daily to bring our Sayyid into the Council.”
Uncle paused, his glass of tea suspended in midair for a moment before it continued on its way for a
nother especially loud slurp. Then he turned and looked irritably at me. “Don’t call them that! The last thing they represent are the Shiʻa of Iraq. They are not a house but a cabal. I call them the Cabal of Thirteen.”
“How the Sayyid laughed,” Hassan chuckled, “when you coined that name. Now he refuses to call them by any other—”
“Sorry, Uncle…,” I said, interrupting Hassan because I was worried that I might have offended Uncle by contradicting him in front of his friends. “Why shouldn’t the Shiʻa set themselves up as a caucus inside the Governing Council?”
“Because Iraq is the prize, not just its Shiʻa community. Anyway, there is no such thing as a House of the Shiʻa. Just look around you! Only outsiders can come up with such a lie. The Cabal of Thirteen, by contrast, is real; that is what they are; it is how they behave inside the Governing Council, a name, incidentally, they insisted upon.”
“How so?” I asked.
“The Occupier wanted to call them an Advisory Council; they waged a fight to change the name. The Tyrant had just fallen, the ground was moving under everyone’s feet, and they squabbled for weeks over their name! They thought it made them important to be referred to as ‘Governing,’ even though they don’t govern anybody. In life as in politics, son, when you meet a man who is more concerned with how things look than with what they really are, it is a sign of weakness. Soon you are about to meet one of them, and you can judge for yourself. Incidentally, he is acting alone, without the knowledge of his fellow Council members.”
“No…,” I said, taken aback.
“Yes,” Uncle replied. “The man is a viper, one in a nest of thirteen. The Iranians like him because he is incapable of having an independent idea. He is coming in order to gain leverage with the Iranians over his friends. Can you imagine our Sayyid sitting in a council with such a man? You will find no Shiʻa solidarity in him.”
I remained unconvinced, turning to the tea to gather my thoughts, my spoon tinkling pleasantly against the sides of my glass as I stirred.
“But surely, Uncle,” I said after a pause, speaking as politely as I knew how, “the Shiʻa in the Governing Council, while being weak as you say, are seeking to defend Shiʻa interests. What is wrong with that? Do we Shiʻa not have the right, even the obligation, to respond to injustice? If I am attacked for being a Shiʻa, then am I not justified in defending myself by asserting I am the very thing I am attacked for being? Perhaps this commendable sentiment lies at the root of their sectarianism.”
“Why should anyone believe what these people say?” Hassan now interjected, looking toward me with affection. He had known me all my life and was trying to head off the irritation he sensed rising in Uncle. “Nobody attacked these men from London and Tehran,” he said; “they all live very well, thank you. And why are they conceding to the Kurds what they are unwilling to give to their Arab brothers?”
“You have lost me, Hassan. What are you talking about?”
“Federalism, of course. They are maneuvering even as we speak to find a formula in the interim constitution that will allow the Kurds to declare a federal region but not Sunni Arabs who come from the same tribes as they do.”
“Sunni Arabs don’t even want Federalism.”
“Now they don’t. But the House of the Shiʻa in the Governing Council is making sure that even if they change their minds at any time in the future, the constitution will be worded so as to preclude their ever being able to. That is why our Sayyid has opposed the whole idea of Federalism as a camouflage for dividing up Iraq.”
Hassan’s intervention had the desired effect. Uncle picked up the argument. “Son,” he said, “there is nothing commendable in reserving the quality of being a victim only to oneself. If you want to rule Iraq, you must start from the fact that all Iraqis were under attack by Saddam, not just the Shiʻa.”
“I am not denying that, Uncle.”
“Moreover, we Shiʻa are really a majority in the land. Inside the Governing Council we are a majority. So why are we behaving like an embattled minority?”
“Perhaps because we are a minority among Muslims worldwide.”
“But we don’t live in the whole world. We live in Iraq.”
Now the bearded older man, who was not a military commander but, as I later found out, a statesman and theoretician of our movement, decided to enter the conversation.
“We Shiʻa,” he said, “see ourselves as history’s victims. Victimhood defined who we are. We have adapted over the centuries to venting our bitterness at this condition on those around us. Sometimes we convince ourselves of what we in effect imagine, and almost need to be true. It has been so since the death of the Imam, whom we pledged our allegiance to and then abandoned. Since that time we Shiʻa have perfected the art of feeling guilty, and directing it outward, away from ourselves.”
“Are you saying that to be a Shiʻa is to be by nature discontented?” I said loudly, feeling under attack.
“Discontent arises from feeling yourself a victim combined with guilt at the conditions that made you one. That is what our learned comrade Abu Ammar is trying to tell you,” Uncle replied firmly, displeased at my tone of voice. “Hear him out.”
“You were right, young man,” Abu Ammar went on to say, “to surmise that we Shiʻa have been shaped by our minority status among Muslims worldwide. It has made us prickly and defensive, constantly trying to prove ourselves to other Muslims, to prove that we are good Muslims who only wanted authority to reside in the House of the Prophet. Combine those feelings with the many waves of persecution to which Caliphs have subjected adherents of our faith in times past, and you have all the ingredients for understanding that which shapes our worldview to this day.”
I turned toward Abu Ammar during this speech with a newfound respect. He looked back at me earnestly. With his folded hands resting on his crossed knees, he continued:
“We entered the world both as victims and as betrayers of the Imam, God’s Blessings Be Upon Him. Both are constitutive of who we are, and, perhaps, we were obliged to turn both into means of survival as a community. Do we not annually reenact our victimhood and his betrayal as a pageantry of mourning and theater in every city in which we have a presence? Guilt tortures a man, makes him unhappy, and breeds discontent in his heart. What is true of one man is true of all men. Ideas of rebellion, expectations of Absolute Justice, and exaltation of our victimhood come easily to us. It follows that we Shiʻa will tend to hold those who govern us responsible for our woes, irrespective of whether it is true or not.”
Concluding his lecture, Abu Ammar said: “I think what your uncle is trying to tell you is that to govern well requires an entirely different set of gifts from the ones we have inherited in our culture and our faith; it requires not the gift of great feeling, but the gift of flexibility and clear-headed reason. We have an ingenuity for feeling, but not the wisdom or flexibility that comes from experience of the world; it is why we Shiʻa turn out great artists and poets, but never great leaders or statesmen.”
The whole gathering was silent, held spellbound by Abu Ammar. I was unsure if that meant they agreed with him or not. The spell was broken when Uncle’s trusty old servant entered the room, bent over Uncle, and whispered into his ear.
“It seems our messenger boy has arrived. I will leave him to your good offices,” Uncle said to his colleagues. “My presence will only give him ideas above his station…Thank you, Abu Ammar. You have given us a lot to think about. What say you, my son?” he said, now looking at me.
“Hassan, make sure you tell the toad we want two hundred of those shaped charges at least, and don’t agree to pay anything for them, not now or anytime in the future. We will not be beholden to the Iranians. Make sure he understands that we are doing them a favor, not the other way around.”
Love of Self
Uncle turned to me after we were left alone in the room; he could see how upset I was. Abu Ammar’s erudition made me feel like a fool in front of Uncle and his friends.
> “Son, don’t take any of this to heart…it is just words and talk.”
“All these complex forces of the past and assumptions of current duplicity confuse me,” I blurted out. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“When that happens, just turn things around in your head and look at them from a different angle. Go back to where we started from: Iraq; it is the prize everyone seeks. Can we Shiʻa rule this land alone or do we need the support of our Sunni Arab brothers? What say you?”
“It goes without saying we need to rule together.”
“Then it also stands to reason that we should keep our Sunni brothers close to our chests, not push them into the arms of their worst fears. They have fears at the moment, justifiably so. The Tyrant was one of theirs. Everyone is blaming them for his excesses. Should we fan the flames of their fears, as does the Cabal of Thirteen, or should we dampen them?”
“Dampen them, of course! We are all Muslims. Why, we even descend from the same Arab tribes and intermarry all the time.”
“True. And in that truth good governance lies. But suppose we are not capable of it—and that remains to be seen. Then there are only two courses of action left for us Shiʻa now that the Tyrant has fallen: either desist from government altogether, as we have done for centuries, but go on to flourish in our neighborhoods, cities, seminaries, in culture, trade, and the free professions…flourish like we never flourished before. Or, be prepared to wage all-out war in the name of our sole right to rule, accepting that we will be hated for all time even if we win.”
I stared at him in astonishment, trying to imagine that stark choice.
“I take it you think the House of the Shiʻa—”
“The Cabal of Thirteen…yes, they have already made the latter choice,” he said, completing my sentence for me, “which is bad for Iraq.”
“How about the Kurds? They caucus separately. Why is that all right, but when we do it you say we are being vindictive? Are the Kurds being vindictive too?”