Sectarian violence, sectarian dating

September 12, 2006

One more post before I sign off from The Carpetbagger Report for today. Thank you all so much for making it a pleasant stay, not to mention for all your great comments.

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WaPo has an interesting story up on how the ravages of war in Iraq are affecting, of all things, Baghdad’s dating scene. Didn’t think Baghdad had much of a dating scene? Well, it does, and it makes sense that the vicious sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites, the one that sends so many bodies to the morgue, often so many more than reported, would produce casualties of love:

For decades, marriages between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq were as ordinary as the daily call to prayer. But the sectarian warfare gripping the country has created a powerful barrier to Sunni-Shiite romances.

Married couples have filed for divorce rather than face the scorn of their neighbors. Fiances have split up as a result of death threats. And, increasingly, young single Iraqis have concluded that it is simply easier to stick to their own kind when it comes to love and family.

In a country where intermarriage was long considered the glue that held a fragile multi-ethnic society together, the romantic segregation of Sunnis and Shiites is more than just a reflection of the ever more hate-filled chasm between the two groups. It is also a grim foreboding of the future.

And it isn’t just dating:

The new taboo on Sunni-Shiite romances is only one of many impediments to love in this war-ravaged country. Religious authorities have forbidden casual dating. Women fearful of the bloodshed have become prisoners in their own homes. Couples have shunned posh restaurants once filled with lovebirds because they fear suicide bombers or kidnappers.

Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t an argument in favour of Saddam-style tyranny, nor that life for Iraqis was so much better under Saddam than it is today. After all, like Tito in Yugoslavia, Saddam controlled long-standing sectarian strife with heavy-handed brutality. That is hardly the desired alternative to the chaotic retribalization that has gripped Iraq since Saddam’s fall.

No, what this is is just one more facet — and on a socio-cultural level a deeply important one — of the seemingly insurmountable obstacle, rejuvenated sectarianism, that threatends to block the “new” Iraq’s progress towards anything even remotely resembling liberal democracy.

I wonder if President Bush worries about Baghdad’s dating scene. It may not cross his mind, but he might want to think about the deeper problem its recent transformation reflects.

September 12, 2006 at 4:27 pm

Rwanda had inermarriage beteen Hutu’s and Tutsi’s, then came the genocide where husbands had to hide the wife and kid but maybe not the inlaws. I wonder if that is still the case.

I think Shakespeare mentioned something about this. Perhaps George could tell us the literary parallels since he reads so many Shakespeares.

People just want to be people. Their humanity is trampled in all this sectarian strife. O how I hate the politics of war! O how I hate the evil of religion! as Bill the Bard might have said.

Thanks Michael!

Haven’t been in a chat room in 3 years.
But if my memory serves me right…..

Stickings said: I wonder if President Bush worries about Baghdad’s dating scene.

Bush said: . o O (My mountain bike needs waxing)

Your comment about Yugoslavia & Marshall Tito is an echo of my thoughts for the past few years.
Models are a great way to predict, and we have 2 post Soviet models in Europe: Yugoslavia & Czechoslovakia.
Iraq seemed a better fit to the Yugoslavian model, but yours is the first post that I have seen make this connection.
I am an ordinary US ciizen, and I saw this. Why didn’t the so-called experts make this call. Well, not the on the neo-con side, we know what they wanted, and Leo Strauss would be proud of his intellectual progeny.
Thanks

“This isn’t an argument in favour of Saddam-style tyranny, nor that life for Iraqis was so much better under Saddam than it is today.”

I don’t know why there is such a taboo on saying this. It is clearly the case that life _was_ better for the average Iraqi under Saddam and dramatically better for the thousands who have been killed during and following his ouster.

Farinata X has hit on the great taboo, daring to say life was better under Saddam than it is now, which I think is a slam dunk. We’ve destroyed this country. Check Dahr Jamail’s latest report:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091206E.shtml

Life is unbearable for millions of Iraqis, and it’s not getting any better. By every measure we have, electricity, water, oil, violence and so on things have gotten worse, and remember, Iraq had been crippled by twelve years of sanctions, not by Saddam, before our invasion.

And think about all the things we don’t know, either because the truth is being kept from us, or because it’s so chaotic over there that nobody knows the answers. Like what’s Iraq’s GDP now per capita, what’s the unemployment rate etc.?

I know it’s heresy, and I’ll be stoned for suggesting that Iraqis had a better life under Saddam’s regime, as brutal as he was, but I have to believe it’s true, from everything I’ve read.

Does anybody know if all those stories that hit the media back before the war about the sexual predations of the two Hussein brothers were propaganda or real?

BuzzMon, you misunderestimate yourself. I seriously doubt that most ordinary citizens are familiar with the name of Leo Strauss nor can they properly define the term “neocon”.

“I don’t know why there is such a taboo on saying this. It is clearly the case that life _was_ better for the average Iraqi under Saddam and dramatically better for the thousands who have been killed during and following his ouster.”

“Rescuing” Iraqis from Saddam and his minions is a post-invasion reason for the war. If this Admin. did give a flaming f__k about the people it was determined to “save” before the invasion, they would have taken a second to talk with some analysts who would have told them exactly what to expect: The total break down of order, sustained sectrian violence (civil war?), the possibility of a nation splitting into distinct ethnic states.

But that might have taken time. And planning. And people might have asked such awkward questions as “After we rescue the Iraqis are we moving on to the ninety zillion other places run by tyrants?”

Really, we (in the US) think we get angry at Shrub. What must the average Iraqi feel when s/he hears President Mushmouth’s ever-shifting reasons for bombing the place to hell? I suspect that by comparison, Americans who dislike Bush are only mildly peeved at the man.

As a side thought. I wonder if some citizens of another country will one day have such a conversation about the US:

-“The Americans were much better off under Geedubya Bush.”

-“Are you kidding? Those bastards were miserable. I bet they danced in the streets when the bombs started to fall…”

For a while after the fall of Saddam, the Bushies were all talking about winning the battle for hearts and minds. Michael’s post showed where the situation stands with Iraqi hearts. The dating scene doesn’t just reflect what’s going on with young lovers, it shows how deep the wound is between Shiite and Sunni, not to forget the Kurds in this equation either. It took a long time to build the bonds between the sects before the war. Bush’s war is proving how easy it is to tear them apart.

If anything this post is proving how the faction sympathic to Iran is coalescing, furthering its shere of influence in Iraq.

It seems like a good rule of thumb that if someone needs to wage a campaign for hearts and minds, they have probably gone past the point where that campaign could be successful. No such campaign was necessary in 1945, even in occupied Germany, or in Kuwait in 1991. But the hearts and minds campaigns were necessary in Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Somalia…

Jews and Poles intermarried, before Hitler.
In Yugoslavia, people managed to marry — cross faith — until Tito died.
Sunni and Shia. Tutsi and Hutu. etc, etc, etc.

People are people, and love looks beyond surface, given half a chance. Killing off that half chance in Iraq is but one minor tick against the shrub and his puppet master.

The Anwer is Orange:

You are right.
There is a taboo on saying that.
Or was.

In fact that was one of those clubs that B & Sleeza & Rummy & Halliburton Dick beat people over the heads with:

“The world is better without Saddam… Naa… Naa… Naa… Naa.”

They always said that with a smug smirk.
As if they accomlished something in life.

Now even that club is starting to be used against them.

But that’s not where I want to go with this post.
Rather… I want to go towards this question:

What other taboos is this adminsitration reliant upon to cover its criminality?

Now that… is one hell of a good question.

Thank you all for your comments here. I thought it was a particularly interesting story that reflected a deeper divide in Iraq — one Bush and those who supported war have never seemed to have grasped, one that could very well stand in the way of peace. Bush talks about democracy and freedom, but I wonder if he even knows what either means beyond either abstraction or the personal freedom he has experienced as a wealthy, connected man living comfortably in the U.S.

By the way, BuzzMon, I’m a Straussian myself. I’ve studied with the students of Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Harvey Mansfield. I’ve even had the opportunity to talk to Bill Kristol, son of the founder of neoconservatism and a student, at Harvard, of Harvey Mansfield.

This isn’t the place to get into it, but there’s much to recommend Strauss. Even much to recommend some of his students. But much of what he wrote and taught — and, indeed, his very name — has been grossly distorted by some who call themseves neoconservatives, as well as by various factions of the Straussian community. I find it all quite disgusting.

I suppose I would call myself a liberal Straussian, and I find myself all the more disgusted at what is being done and said in Strauss’s name because Strauss was a man who encouraged the Socratic investigation into human nature and the human condition, not a man who would have wanted his name to be connected to an ideology that is running America, which he so admired, into the ground.

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