A bit of guilt might be needed in all of our societies. Indeed, only such an emotion pushes us to reflect on the harm that the powerful among us have inflicted, and continue to inflict, upon the weak, and to reassess how our social structures have colluded and continue to collude with brutal, murderous regimes that certainly didn’t fall out from the clear blue sky.
If recognizing our culpability is a path to a sense of responsibility, and behind it to civilization, then blaming foreign actors is a route that leads directly to the evasion of any responsibility and forsaking all civility.
An excessive sense of victimhood might be one reason behind exhibiting this symptom, nurturing a collective narcissism that has killed off any critical and textual reexamination of essential components of our cultural history. There is no doubt that a large segment of our intellectuals have helped take us in this direction by amplifying this sense of victimhood and attributing it to a single source, colonialism or imperialism, or by presenting a narrative of history in which our mistakes, setbacks, sectarianism, and strife begin with the "Occident’s" arrival to the "Orient."
In fact, the critique of Orientalism, which began decades before Edward Said and his work on literary texts, arose in opposition to Western scholars' attempts to critically examine our history and beliefs. In turn, our (mostly rhetorical) rigidity on religious/sectarian and Palestinian/Israeli questions provided us with the detergent we needed to wash away our neglect of both our duties and the rights of others.
However, if this lack is comprehensive and universal in our societies, Iraq provides the most flagrant case. This tormented country has undergone episodes that are impossible to overlook. It is no exaggeration to say that the many years of Baathist rule (1968-2003) should have transformed Iraqi culture into a vast workshop for probing into our memory and conscience, as well as unpacking issues that are of the same scale as dragging Iraq into catastrophic wars that turned hundreds of thousands into dust, squandering the country’s immense oil wealth, using chemical weapons against Kurdish citizens in Halabja, and the widening of the chasm between its sects in line with the sectarian configuration of the dominant political power.
However, with the exception of a few individual instances, no reassessment ever took place. Instead of trying Saddam in a manner that could serve as a lesson in citizenship, and inform the people of Iraq and the world of his regime’s horrors, he was sentenced before a local court that lacked credibility and seriousness. Saddam was then executed in what amounted to a vengeful ritual of wanton sectarianism.
Iraq then went on to build a democracy that, as immediately became obvious, would serve as a vehicle for sectarian polarization and effectively leasing the country to Iran.
Once the US withdrew its forces, this lease evolved into something resembling ownership. For years, the most important news stories coming out of Baghdad centered on corruption and political quotas, with the broad circulation of these reports rivaled only by those about bizarre televised fatwas that were coupled with the subjection of Iraq’s people and its politics to perverse individual whims. This remained the case until the emergence of ISIS, with all the accumulated and unspoken rot it had stored.
The response to its rise further weakened an already fragile state through the establishment of the Popular Mobilization Forces, which began to oversee the state and influence its decisions.
This rot peaked in the summer of 2014 with the tragedies faced by the Yazidis in what amounted to genocide. Five thousand people were killed, including entire families. A similar number were kidnapped; hundreds of thousands were displaced, and women were taken captive and sold as sex slaves, with many subjected to gang rape. Because the Yazidis are a small, vulnerable minority, Yazidi women were more vulnerable to the brutality of ISIS, which has not hesitated, since its inception, to stress that women are its number one enemy.
Instead of turning its attention to a reexamination of this heinous episode and “dealing with its demons,” Iraq surprised us with the revival of a draft law born in 2014, but suspended first by ISIS’s occupation of Mosul and then the reformist uprising of 2019. Instead of a long hard look at what happened to Yazidi women, this draft law targets all Iraqi women, even in childhood, that is, before they become adults. If such a criminal law is approved, it will become legal for men to marry a girl once she turns nine years old.
Iraq’s Shiite political forces are trying to present this as a joint proposal that Shiites and Sunnis intersect around, granting it comprehensive sectarian cover. Mind you, this is happening in a country that has had, since 1959, the most advanced Arab personal status laws in terms of recognition of women's rights and freedoms.
As for the only experience that could have shown another side of Iraq and pulled it out of the quicksand it keeps sinking deeper into, the 2019 uprising, the state’s security apparatuses and militias worked together to clamp down on it, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded.
Thus, the treatment given for Saddam's regime was atomizing inverted Saddamisms, the persecution of Yazidi women was treated through the persecution of all Iraqi women without exception, and Iraq’s disintegration and dependence on Iran is currently being treated through its integration into the resistance front and its arenas.
As for who is to blame if an Iraqi gets a headache, it is obvious: America’s occupation 21 years ago.
