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The United States, Sectarianism & Iraq

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The United States, Sectarianism & Iraq Ghent University Faculty of political and social science The United States, Sectarianism & Iraq: An overview of US sectarian notions, origins and implementations in Iraq during the planning and occupation Word count: 25.721 Literature Study Sanders Arthur Thesis International Political Science Promotor: Prof. Dr. Christopher Parker Commissaris: Prof. Marlies Casier Academic year: 2017-2018 1 Acknowledgment First of all I would like to thank my promotor Professor Parker for the help he gave me during the difficult quest of finding a good and realistic subject for my thesis. Without his guidance my thesis would probably have handled a totally different, and too divergent subject. I also want to thank my friends Tillo, Taban and George for the many study hours together and the (sometimes too long) fun intermissions. I also want to thank my parents for their patience and constant backing. And last but certainly not least, thank you Jotka for your constant support, affection and for everything you had to withstand during the long process of my research and writing Abstract This thesis will focus on the fundamental US-assumptions that formed the basis for the implementation of the revolutionary transformational project after the 2003 Iraqi invasion. This project was based on certain sectarian and ethnic-based representations of what the Iraqi state and society were made up of. In this paper we will look where these images came from and compare them to other knowledge and narratives of Iraq and its history. We will focus how these assumptions were used and implemented. We will do this in three parts: the actors and networks that introduced these representations in US policy circles, how they were translated and planned into the projects that was eventually implemented in Iraq, and finally we will look to the implementation and results of these ideas in the project of constitution writing. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgment ..................................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 4 1.1 Contextual framework ................................................................................................................... 4 1.2 Problematique and research question. ......................................................................................... 6 1.3 Research design ............................................................................................................................. 7 2. Sectarianism as the key lens ................................................................................................................ 8 2.1 Academics ...................................................................................................................................... 8 2.2 The Iraqi Exiles ............................................................................................................................. 12 2.3 Iraq: a history of sectarianism? ................................................................................................... 17 2.3.1 Ta’ifiyya and its terminology ................................................................................................ 17 2.3.2 Iraq: a history of sectarianism? ............................................................................................ 19 2.3.3 Rejection of Sectarianism as dominant political paradigm, even after 2005 ...................... 24 2.4 Partial Conclusion: ....................................................................................................................... 26 3. The planning phase ........................................................................................................................... 28 3.1 The neoconservatives and the Straussian thought ..................................................................... 28 3.2 A Liberal “Peace” model? ............................................................................................................ 30 3.3 The planning ................................................................................................................................ 32 3.4 ORHA & Jay Garner ...................................................................................................................... 34 3.5 Paul Bremer: Chief civilian administrator (from April 2003 until June 2004) ............................. 36 4. The new Iraqi constitution ................................................................................................................ 38 4.1 The interim constitution and the making of the “Transitional Administrative Law” .................. 39 4.2 The transitional general elections of January 2005 .................................................................... 43 4.2.1 The Sunni boycott ................................................................................................................. 44 4.3 The “permanent” constitution .................................................................................................... 47 5. Conclusion: ........................................................................................................................................ 51 6. List of figures and tables .................................................................................................................... 53 7. Bibliography: ...................................................................................................................................... 55 3 1. Introduction 1.1 Contextual framework March 20 2003, the Anglo-American led coalition forces amass along the Iraqi border and commence it’s, to put it in the words of Frederick Kagan, ‘great surge’ on Iraq. The proclaimed goal of the invasion was to remove the Ba’ath government and its leader Saddam Hussein, who allegedly possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and bring freedom and liberal democracy to the country. Because the UN charter didn’t –and still doesn’t- approve of pre-emptive warfare the US acted without the UN Security Council approval. But the Bush administration, in the aftermath of 9/11, convinced a big part of the US citizens –and other countries like Italy, the UK and Poland- that pre-emptive war was the right and noble thing to do (Packer, 2008, pp. 63-65). This idea was based on the claim that Saddam –being part of the ‘axis of evil’- supported terrorism and could provide them with WMD’s. Because interventionism was the ‘imperial burden’ of a superpower, the hawkish neoconservative entourage of President G.W Bush stated in its new national security strategy document of 20021 –also known as the ‘bush doctrine’- it would take unilateral military action against Saddam2 (Ajami, 2003). The world’s superpower would no longer be neutral when looking at the domestic politics of other countries (Packer, 2008, pp. 63-65). The document was influenced by a dominant feeling in the international community that liberty triumphed over totalitarianism after the collapse of the Soviet Union3. This international optimistic feeling that ‘freedom and democracy’ should be actively spread around the globe was translated in a more proactive and interventionist evolution confined within the ‘liberal peace theory’ (Duffield, 2001). It was built around the belief that the “free” liberal, representative democratic model could be ‘injected’ into countries from the outside trough interventions. This “freedom” was also the core business of the 2002 Bush doctrine. Despite the proclaimed noble reasons that were given in public to justify the invasion, it quickly became clear that there was a broader project being implemented in Iraq than just the overthrowing of Saddam. Washington had big plans for Iraq. The goal was to transform the economy, society and politics of Iraq in a way that it would become possible to start from a ‘clean slate’ (Parker, 2006). Because there was this focus to rebuild Iraq from a year zero, we could also call it a “forced revolution” as Chris Parker (2006) and Andrew Arato (2007) did. The US policymakers succeeded in representing Iraq as an object ready to be ‘remade’ through a military intervention into a liberal democratic and free market model state in the region. This representation of Iraq had to be based on certain ideas, knowledge and assumptions of what the Iraqi state and society were made up of. But for this project to be applicable, the Iraqi state had to be ‘deleted’ and the society remade. In accordance with this idea the coalition forces started with a “shock and awe” bombardment on a massive scale to overwhelm and destroy the Iraqi military and infrastructure (Klein, 2007, pp.413-490). As the 1 This document was heavily influenced by the experience of the Bush administration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Packer, 2008) 2Regime change in Iraq was already an official policy objective under President Bill Clinton (Packer, 2008) 3 conform to Francis Fukuyama’s ideas in “the end of history” 4 government of Saddam collapsed and the state was dismantled4, the coalition forces swept through the country, leaving a big power vacuum –ready to be filled and used -in their wake. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator in Iraq, would fill
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