Middle East Politics Fall 2007

Paper #2

Due T Dec. 4 in class; presentations will be in class that day

Answer ALL of the following questions below in an 8-12 page paper. The paper should be double-spaced, in 12-point font, and should be paginated. Do not write more than 12 pages, as I will stop reading at the end of the twelfth page. Your paper will lose 5 points per day that it is late UNLESS your dean contacts me to request that you receive an extension. Anything more than a very small number of spelling or grammatical errors will result in points being deducted from your final grade, so proofread carefully. You need to submit TWO copies of your paper – one as an e-mail attachment to , and one hard copy. Your name should not appear anywhere on the paper EXCEPT on a title page which should be THE FINAL PAGE of the paper.

While in the post-2003 period the Kurdish areas of Iraq have largely been stable, overthe same period much of the rest of Iraq has been consumed by violence between Arab Sunnis and Shi’a. As a result, it is now commonly argued in the West that these groups cannot live together peacefully, and that the only hope for a stable Iraq is to decentralize power as much as possible to geographic regions in which each of these groups will live as separately as possible from the other group. This outcome seems particularly natural if it is also true - as is frequently suggested - that there have been deep differences between Arab Sunnis and Shi’a since the formation of Iraq in 1920 and that there is little evidence since that time of these groups cooperating.

However, polling data from 2003 and 2004 suggest that in the first years after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, most Iraqis did NOT prioritize their religion or sect as the most important part of their identity, and most preferred a strong central state to a deeply decentralized, federalized one. In Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy, Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala (p. 148) note that in summer 2003 polls indicated that only “29% of Iraqis believed it important or very important that a leader should represent ‘my sect.’ A poll a year later found that only 4.5% of Iraqis took as their most important consideration, in choosing a party to vote for, that it should be from ‘my religious’ group……(while) 79.1% agreed in a March 2004 poll that there should be ‘one unified Iraq with central government in Baghdad’ (as opposed to 18.6% who thought there should be ‘a group of regional states’)…….and 64.2% in October 2004 responded that ‘strengthen(ing) central control over Iraq’s regions’ would most improve the current situation in Iraq out of four constitutional options.” By the time of the December 2005 elections which elected the current Iraqi parliament, however, almost all Iraqi voters voted for parties based on their ethnic/religious group, and in the last two years Arab Sunnis and Shi’a have become increasingly dependent on armed militias made up of members of their religious group to ensure their physical safety.

Toby Dodge argues that the predominance of sectarian politics (in which Arab Sunnis gravitate toward Sunni parties and militias to represent and protect them, and Shi’a to Shi’a parties and militias) in Iraq today is due not to a supposed long history of Sunni and Shi’a differences in Iraq but to the collapse of the Iraqi state after 2003. When state authority collapses, he argues, people “look to whatever grouping, militia or identity offers them the best chance of survival in times of profound uncertainty. If the groups who provide the necessary security and resources are based on a sectarian identity, “then the struggle to survive, to gain a degree of predictability for yourself and your family…. becomes obtainable primarily through the increasingly militant deployment of ethnic or sectarian identity” (Toby Dodge, “State Collapse and the Rise of Identity Politics,” in Iraq: Preventing a New Generation of Conflict, eds. Bouillon, Malone, and Rowswell, 2007, pp. 26-7).

Your job in this paper is to assess, using readings and handouts we have covered in class as well as the readings below, the credibility of the argument that the current high levels of sectarian organization and violence a) do represent something new in Iraqi politics and b) are a specific response to conditions after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein government in 2003. In doing so, you must answer EACH of the following UNDERLINED questions.

1)In looking back over the history of Iraqi politicsfrom 1920 until the rise of the Ba’ath Party in 1968, were Sunnis, Shi’a and Kurds always parts of different political groups pursuing different political agendas?Make sure to include EACH of the following:

Did most political parties have members from all three groups, or were most parties comprised solely of one or two of these groups?

Were most governments comprised mostly of one group, or were members of all groups represented in proportion to their proportion of the Iraqi population?

Did members of these groups cooperate in or simultaneously pursue the same goals in particular political activities? (examples here could be nationalist uprisings or uprisings against the government, demonstrations, or other activities intended to influence decisions made by political leaders or to change the government itself.)

Note: In this section, make sure to make use of class lecture notes and handouts and class readings in addition to the new readings assigned below.

2)Why SPECIFICALLYdo Dodge and Herring and Rangwala think that Iraqis after 2003 became so closely tied to sectarian parties and dependent on sectarian militias?

3)Your last reading for this paper topic is selections from a blog called “Baghdad Burning” written by a Sunni woman who was 24 years old in 2003 and who goes by the pseudonym “Riverbend.” Does Riverbend think that Sunnis and Shi’a have always been separate groups with separate identities throughout Iraqi history? Does she think they have been since 2003? As a Sunni resident of Baghdad, does she seem afraid of Shi’a;if so, which ones? Who does she think is responsible for the polarization and increasing violence between Sunni and Shi’a since 2003?

4)Several authors that you have read for this paper make the argument that a) in pre-Saddam Iraq in particular Arab Sunnis and Shi’a frequently cooperated and did not see themselves as enemies, and b) it is the conditions of state collapse after 2003 that led these groups to organize within sectarian parties and depend on sectarian militias. Do you find this argument convincing? BE SPECIFIC.

The questions you need to answer in this paper cover a lot of ground; an entire book could be written in answer to Question #1. Therefore in order for you to be able to answer the questions within no more than 12 pages, it will be essential for you, BEFORE you start writing, to gather all the evidence and then SUMMARIZE it into an ARGUMENT. For example, in answer to Question #1 it will not be sufficient to throw in some examples of Shi’a-Sunni cooperation from the 1920s and some examples of differences in the 1940s – you need to assess the evidence that you find to make an argument in favor of a GENERAL trend but supported by SPECIFIC evidence.

Sources (all of these are on ERes):

Reidar Visser, “Other People’s Maps,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2007

Sami Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2002, pp. 211-214

Eric Davis, “The Uses of Historical Memory,” Journal of Democracy, July 2005

Toby Dodge, “State Collapse and the Rise of Identity Politics,” in Iraq: Preventing a New Generation of Conflict, eds. Markus Bouillon, David Malone, and Ben Rowswell, (Lynne Rienner Press, 2007)

Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy, Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala, (CornellUniversity Press, 2006), pp. 127-136 and 140-160

Excerpts from “Baghdad Burning” blog,