By Fahed Khitan
Everybody says the situation in Iraq is the US’s responsibility. This is true, however, it is not enough to explain what is going on there.
It is true because the occupation, which lasted for ten years, only brought Iraqis more horrors and destruction; reinforced the sectarian divide, allowed corruption and terrorism, and to left Iraq lost among the influences of regional powers.
But the occupation is gone. All the components of Iraq, without exception, were demanding the departure of the Americans, and calling, day-in and day-out for Iraq to be in a better shape as soon as the last American soldier leaves.
However, Iraq has become much worse; at the time of the occupation there was one force controlling the country, but now militias, parties, cities, and provinces have split it. “Protection” walls are creeping throughout Baghdad, and car bombs have transformed the lives of Iraqis to hell.
The Iraqis have exited the occupation phase, and before that, that of tyranny, but they switched to a failed society. They were not able to build an independent identity, remained hostages to sectarian and religious hatreds, and handed over their fate to politicians quite early on.
The occupation is gone, but the Iraqis have failed to rely on themselves. Many peoples in the world were under the scourge of occupation, but they did not give in to that culture; as soon as the occupation leaves, they grabbed their fate by the throat and regained their national character. Iraqis have failed, and I'm afraid that other Arab nations are on the same road.
When people give up their collective national identity for the sake of sub-identities, they are definitely on a road to perdition. A country such as Iraq no longer faces the risk of a failed state, it has surpassed that. Today Iraq is a candidate to be defunct or extinct; states such as organisms die and wither away.
Neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites in Iraq are able to build separate entities, similar to Syria and Lebanon. These entities will enter, if they could, into wars that will only end with extinction.
What is tragic in the Iraqi scene today is that the politicians and the elites of various denominations and sects — who have arisen in the face of the American occupation — are hoping for the master in the White House to save what remains of the shadow of an Iraqi state.
But America today is not the America of Bush and the neo-conservatives. The most Barack Obama could give them is some drone attacks, and promises to expedite arms shipments, despite the concern that they may end up with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) like what happened in Mosul.
The worst of our current situation is that the Arab world is tirelessly framing this as an on-going American-Zionist plot, and sometimes they add Iran to it.
However, they ignore — when they go through the chapters of the alleged plot — that the assailants were crowds of the nation. U.S. left Iraq and here it is now refusing to intervene; what prevents Iraqis from determine their own destiny?! Who prevents the Libyans, Yemenis, and Egyptians from building their free, stable country?!
Failures in Iraq rests with the people and politicians. If South American countries were still using the US’s bloody and blunt decades-long intervention as an excuse, they would not have been where they are today.
Many Arab countries today are in the process of destruction; not only the regimes, but the societies mired in extremism and illiteracy, and left captive to conspiracy theory.
@fahed_khitan
This article is an edited translation from the Arabic edition.
