American Pie

I thought for certain that, as my time drew near to depart this place, time would stretch, hours would seem like days and days like forever. Instead, that end date is rushing toward me at warp speed and I find myself concerned about being personally and professionally prepared to leave. Suddenly the 14-hour work days and the seven day work weeks seem inadequate to the tasks yet before me.

I rate that a good thing, because the tasks will get done and the time will melt away all the more quickly. I am ready to go home. I am weary beyond words.

The people that surround me here in Iraq are awesome to work with and fun to be around in the few off hours we have, but they are not the family and friends I want to return to and this is not a place you can ever truly relax. I am delighted to have been able to contribute to the cause, but doubly delighted to be done with it.

I shouldn’t leave here without some sort of after action review, some deeply-thought insights into where this whole Mideast adventure is headed. So, in that spirit, I’ll vouch to complete this and at least one more blog to lay out two scenarios that have the potential to quickly unravel all that was raveled in the last eight years.

The first scenario is the struggle between fundamentalist versus moderate Islam; rule of church versus rule of law; theocratic versus democratic; Iran versus Iraq. Baby boomer readers will understand how the title of this blog was derived as I wrap it up.

The elections in Iraq just over a year ago were, by most standards, highly successful. It’s been a pretty rocky road since then, but the government remains mostly intact. When viewed through the lens of recent regional unrest, Iraqis are looking pretty good as far as self-determination goes. But not all is well in their world.

There remains, by any reasonable standards, a lot of violence. The Iraq/Pan-Arab media reports are rife with the stories, though the press here does not tend toward editorializing and insights to any particular event are often lacking. Still, the oft-branded culprit is Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI), a nefarious enough group of zombies with pretty much no self-redeeming features. My guess is that they get more credit than is due them.

There are two primary camps of bad guys in this country: Shia extremist groups and Sunni extremist groups. AQI is one of several in the latter. Sunnis are the minority Arab sect and held all of the cards during the reign of Saddam Hussein, so many of them have axes to grind now that their influence is beholden to votes rather than brutal suppression. The Shia camp has a pretty formidable list of organizations that, on the surface, should be pretty happy with the current state of affairs. But they are not.

All that I’m about to wax eloquent about here is largely speculation, based on a fair amount of observation, some personal prejudices, and a dash of paranoia. Iraqis, in general, seem very desirous of pulling themselves out of the depths of cultural despair and establishing their country as a shining example of tolerance and enlightenment. They experienced, in a truly horrific fashion, the downsides of pursuing deeply rooted ethnic and sectarian grudges and they are not inclined to revisit the issue. They are currently consumed with the unenviable task of clawing their way up from the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy and have high hopes that this democracy thing is going to solve some vexing issues that are now stifling progress.

The government, however, is struggling to come to grips with democracy. You hope that by giving everyone a voice you build a choir, but the sad truth is that you are much more likely to just get a lot of noise. Machismo still rules in these parts, and wasta is the coin of the realm. Politicians prefer to control rather than guide, and it’s hard to control a bunch of people that believe they have the basic rights associated with personal freedom.

Freedom is the ticket. It may well form a fault line that could split the country. This brings us back to the unhappy Shia extremist groups. Here’s the rub: the Shia were suppressed, sometimes violently, under previous Iraq regimes. Now they form the majority of the government, but many of them are less than happy with the direction the country is moving with its newfound freedoms.

There is a healthy appetite within the population for singing, dancing, drinking, cinema, orchestra, and any number of other seemingly normal societal undertakings. The unhappy Shia tend to frown upon such activities. Theirs is a more strict interpretation of acceptable Islamic behaviors, typically accompanied by an equally strict interpretation of how such transgressions should be managed. These folks are often joined at the hip with Iran, another Shia majority nation that is quite openly working to exert their influence in Iraq, seemingly with the intent to control the country, at least by proxy, once the U.S. military leaves.

Thus theocracy creeps into the picture, the potential for Iranian-backed influential Iraqis to steer the population toward a lifestyle dictated by Islamic fundamentalism rather than popular urges. Secularism has no home in that world. The probability of a growing rift between Arab sects seems certain. At the moment, the typical Iraqi appears to have little love for Iran, or for any other country they believe might be trying to exert influence on them (like the U.S.!). The seeming disconnect between how the Iraqis feel and how their leaders behave could have some very negative consequences.

Protests and demonstrations are all the rage here right now, but I couldn’t guess the outcome of unrest triggered by a push toward fundamentalist influence in Iraq. My concern is that I think Iraqis seek to embrace more of the simple joys in life. They want to dance, they want to sing. But if the departure of the U.S. troops becomes the impetus of a fundamentalist revival, December 31, 2011 might be known in Iraq as the day the music died.