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By Root 1889 0

States’s own relatively successful—though halting and incomplete— history of ethnic assimilation, Americans don’t always understand the significance of ethnicity, both in the United States and especially in other countries. Interestingly, British colonial governments were fastidiously conscious of ethnic divisions. Of course, their ethnic policies are a dangerous model. When it was the British Empire’s turn to deal with nation-building and ethnicity, the British engaged in divide-and-conquer policies, not only protecting but favoring ethnic minorities, and simultaneously aggravating ethnic resentments. As a result, when the British decamped, the time-bombs often exploded, from Africa to India to Southeast Asia. By contrast, at least before the war, the U.S. government’s ethnic policy for Iraq was essentially to have no ethnic policy. Instead, U.S. officials seemed strangely confident that Iraq’s ethnic, religious, and tribal divisions would dissipate in the face of democracy and market-generated wealth. In President George W. Bush’s words, “freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred.”

But in countries as deeply divided as Iraq, everything—even freedom and wealth—has ethnic and sectarian ramifications. Who will comprise the police? Who has experience in engineering and oil or the skills to run a stock exchange? Given Saddam Hussein’s sadistically unfair and repressive regime, some groups—namely, the Sunni minority, particularly the Ba’athists—will almost certainly have a head start in terms of education, capital, and economic and managerial experience. Consequently, as is true in so many other non-Western countries, laissez-faire markets and overnight democracy in Iraq could well favor different ethnic or religious groups in the short run, creating enormous instability.

At the same time, because the United States is the world’s most powerful and most resented market-dominant minority, every move we make with respect to Iraq is being closely—and perhaps even unfairly—scrutinized. Despite Saddam Hussein’s barbarous gulags, gross human rights violations, and repeated refusals to comply with U.N. requirements, international public opinion was overwhelmingly against the United States going to war with Iraq, even in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, not to mention China, Russia, France, and the Arab states. It is important to see that this opposition to U.S. policies was closely bound up with deep feelings of resentment and fear of American power and cynicism about American motives.

Unfortunately, the latest developments in Iraq seem only to be fueling these suspicions. U.S. troops have not yet found weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, it has become clear that at best the U.S. government was operating on an oversimplistic view of what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like.

Instead of a gratitude-filled Iraqi people cooperating with the United States in a rapid transition to multiethnic free market democracy (which ideally would produce a domino effect across the Middle East), Iraq today teeters on the brink of lawlessness. In June 2003 in Najaf, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American military occupation in Iraq, unilaterally cancelled local elections, even though the Iraqis were eager and ready to vote. Mr. Bremer based his decision on the ground that conditions in Najaf were not yet appropriate for elections. A senior official in his office elaborated: “The most organized political groups in many areas are rejectionists, extremists, and remnants of the Ba’athists. . . . They have an advantage over the other groups.” Not surprisingly, the barring of elections in Najaf—and the U.S.’s decision more generally to postpone Iraqi self-government—has produced tremendous anger throughout Iraq. Attacks on coalition forces continue, and demonstrating crowds yelling “No Americans, No Saddam” and “Yes to Freedom and Islam” are increasingly common.

Deep ethnic and religious divisions remain in Iraq, but ironically one theme unifying the Iraqi people at the moment is