The International Community, Iraq and the Iraqi Identity

In 2005, I served as one of the presiding officers for Iraqi's first democratically held elections. The elections were conducted for those Iraqis living overseas. Our voting area was located in the state of Maryland and covered northeast United States. One of the first thing that struck me about all the Iraqis that passed by our voting booth was their diversity. There was so many different groups and sub-groups, Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians, Shia, Sunni, secular, religious, men and women, old and the young.

The unfortunate part of this diversity was that instead of working on ways to strengthen it, the international community that was there to help Iraq to liberate itself, consciously or unconsciously did everything to weaken and undermine it.  Even the most united unit can start to breakaway if one group within that unit is told they are better than the other parts. And just like the "blue-eyed" vs "brown eyed" people experiment of 1968 which took place in a small American classroom, Iraqis were told that you are Shia, you are Sunni and you are Kurd . The justification for this policy was to give the previously oppressed groups under Saddam Hussein the chance to have a voice in the new Iraq. The problem was that somewhere during this obsessive like focus on emphasizing Shia, Sunni and Kurdish identity, the Iraqi national identity eroded and was lost. It led to divided families, divided neighborhoods, divided cities, divided provinces and eventually divided nation. Then in the midst of its struggle to function as a nation, the Iraqi government itself after the exit of the Americans from Iraq, continued the sectarian politics, further tearing Iraq apart, the culmination of which is ISIS and what we witness today.

Politicians and "experts" on Iraq, try to justify that this division in Iraq was inevitable that Iraq would become divided between different sects anyways, saying that Iraq was an artificial state from day one. Based on that logic, every nation on this planet was created artificially!! The international community had enough experts to try to help Iraqis to strengthen a national identity or at least not emphasis the differences that divides them, if that had been done Iraq would have been in a much better place.

Iraq is an ancient land that has seen the best and the worst. Like every other human being, the Iraqis deserve a life of hope, growth and progress and most important of all peace and security. Hopefully this time it will happen: Enshallah!