History, Rhyming and Repeating

"It was too small and cramped a place to withstand all the political projects, all the fears and passions that swirled around it."

Fouad Ajami

I have a standing disagreement with a friend of mine who subscribes to the "Iraq is the New Viet Nam" idea.

Up to now I have simply argued that the comparison isn't useful.  It may be emotionally satisfying to fling the words "Viet Nam!" into a political argument, but comparing Iraq to Viet Nam doesn't tell us anything we need to know.  It doesn't reveal any new ideas or describe a possible path of action.

"Viet Nam!" used in this case is just a fashionable new curse word.

But I had no analogy to offer in return.

Then Hezbollah and Israel began to make war on one another and I found myself immersed in a different tragic history.  And this was how I found the analogy I had sought:

Iraq is the new Lebanon.

People like to sound clever by saying, "History never repeats, but it rhymes."

In Iraq it is doing a bit of both.

Let's start with the repeats:

"The proliferation of militias and private armies...was to be the answer to the escalating disorder."

Fouad Ajami

Like the Beirut of the 1970s and 80s, Baghdad and other areas of Iraq have decomposed into violent fiefdoms run by various private militias and separated by armed checkpoints.

" 'Cantons' and turfs were being carved out.  Woe to those caught in the way."

Fouad Ajami

Whole neighborhoods are now segregating, either by force or in self-defense.  Trucks crossing into Iraqi-Kurdistan are asked to remove Iraqi flags and display Kurdish flags instead.  Iraqi Sunnis are disguising their religious identity by using Shiite ringtones on their cell phones and memorizing Shiite holidays to recite if they are stopped and questioned.

There are now plenty of places where having the wrong religious background is enough to get you killed.  Which brings us to another ugly repeat:

"It degenerated into a war in which the combatants tortured before they killed, maimed the dead, and rarely took prisoners.  Massacre followed massacre."

Fouad Ajami

The horrors of Beirut are recorded in dozens of powerful still photos- the fresh smear of blood on the wall above newly-executed bodies, shattered buildings forming a backdrop behind hollow-eyed children.  Iraq's horrors are preserved in crisp DVD images and in sound and color on websites, but they are the same- the rapes, the mutilated bodies dumped at the side of the road, the burned-out cars and gutted buildings.

The violence is caused by the same noxious mix of motives: sectarian hatred, private militias supported with funding from other nations (such as Iran, which is dabbling in this conflict just as it did in Lebanon 20 years ago.), and plain vicious street crime.

And now the ugly rhymes begin.

As in Lebanon, the current government in Iraq is based not on a national identity so much as a nervous cobbling-together of ethnic and religious identities.  This emphasis on power-sharing resembles the government originally put together in Lebanon, in which figures from a 1932 French census determined the representation Muslims, Christians and Druze.  This edgy balance was easily upset by both real and perceived changes in the population and resulted in a government unable to unite, much less serve and protect, its people.  Some officials believe Iraq's new government is similarly weak.  Will it be worthy of the citizens who risked life and limb to vote it into power?

More rhymes:

The United States has played a role in both countries.  Lebanon had already imploded and splintered under the pressure of the Israeli invasion when the Marines arrived in 1982 as peacekeepers.  They lasted just 18 months.  The bombing of the American Embassy and the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut in 1983(courtesy of Iran-backed Hezbollah) convinced President Reagan to order them home.

This time the United States does not have that option.  The toppling of Saddam Hussein ended a brutal dictatorship but also opened a series of fissures into which the poisons of an entire region have seeped.  "Neighbors" like Iran- and possibly Syria- seek to manipulate Iraq by instigating violence.  Shiites are trying to dominate Sunnis.  Christians are bombed and shot into retreating from the political scene.  Saudi Arabia heaves its own militants into the fray with a sigh of relief.  And all of this activity is squeezed primarily into the small area known as the "Sunni Triangle," which, like the Beirut of the 1970s and 80s, has become the proxy battleground for the obsessions of an entire region.

Do we really want to burden our troops and commaders with irrelevant examples from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and The Mekong Delta?  What has been unleashed in Iraq has nothing to do with Viet Nam.  What we are witnessing is the violent settling of long-postponed scores.  Civil war, if it comes, will not be the neat conflict between two discreet sides that Americans expect, but a bloody, blurry train-wreck of many forces and interests.  Lebanon is the experience that should instruct us, not Viet Nam.

But perhaps that would force some of us to look at it too closely. 

(All Fouad Ajami quotes are excerpted from: Beirut: City of Regrets. W.W. Norton & Co., 1988)