The fact that the Senate on Wednesday voted in favor of a measure -- albeit a non-binding one -- that would divide Iraq into sectarian regions shows how out of touch our well-meaning lawmakers are with what Iraqis, who make up what President Bush repeatedly refers to as a sovereign, democratic nation, want.
Fortunately, there are those who know the hearts of Iraqis, such as Raed Jarrar, a political analyst and consultant to the D.C.-based American Friends Service Committee's Iraq Program. In a recent piece he co-wrote for alternet.org, Jarrar said that those defining the civil war within Iraq as a religious conflict alone miss the point. Iraq's war is over control of the country and its energy supplies, not over Allah.
Jarrar writes, the "Bush administration, with the support of Congress, has taken the same side as Iran's hardliners and the same side as the Sunni fundamentalist group called al-Qaida in Iraq. All are working ... against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis." Indeed, a poll conducted by Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland show that the majority of Iraqis (61 percent) want a stronger central government, a wish supported even by Kurds, who already have their own region.
Separatists in Iraq want an Islamic government, whereas the nationalists call for a technocratic, centralized government.
The White House last week put on a show about disagreeing with the Senate measure, but in reality, our government supports the separatists, who control Iraq's Cabinet, not the nationalists, who want a unified Iraq and aren't keen to pipe out their energy resources as the U.S. sees fit, and who are frequently the targets of attacks by al-Qaida in Iraq. The parties in the Cabinet are the same parties that appeared at the London Conference in 2002, when the case for war on Iraq was being made. In other words, nothing has changed since that time.
Until we truly understand why Iraqis are fighting, we have no hope in helping bring about long-term peace required to bring the country back together, allowing Iraqis to heal.
