In Riverbend’s case, perhaps, we can excuse all this. As I said, she’s had to live with the situation, and we haven’t. But it also has to be kept in mind that she presents a special, one-sided, and in some ways quite misleading perspective–that of the Sunni Arab minority, and especially its urban professional classes. ~Jeff Weintraub

I don’t know Mr. Weintraub’s own views on the war, and it could well be that he has similarly taken to task as self-interested, U.S.-bought special pleading every utterance of Iraqi Shi’ite exiles on the U.S. dole.  We can hope.  Certainly there is nothing any less one-sided and biased about the perspective the exiles brought to the debate about going to war or what has happened in Iraq since the invasion.   

As with the other multiethnic state that Washington has helped to break apart in the last fifteen years (Yugoslavia), policymakers actively select which biased, tendentious accounts of the affairs in said state they are going to accept and then treat these accounts as if they were sacred truth.  Once a ‘good’ side, ‘our’ side, has been so anointed, many Americans have a very bad habit of adapting their perspective of events in their country as our own.  Thus when Albanian lobbyists and KLA spokesmen said that something was so, our political and media took it–and still take it–as gospel.  When representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which opposed the rule of Milosevic, would speak against U.S. Balkan policy and call it counterproductive and ignorant of political realities in the region (which had the virtue of being true), they would be denounced as apologists for the regime.  The point is not that the Serbs were necessarily always right and the Albanians always wrong in every instance, but that there was a near-automatic presumption that if a Serb or Serbian-American said something about Yugoslavia he was engaged in nothing more than an ethnic apology, while Albanians and Albanian-Americans were heroic and gallant defenders of human rights, etc.  I remember stories about Albanian-Americans going to Kosovo to join up with the KLA depicting them as if they were volunteers going to help fight for a free France against Hitler–had a foolish Serbian-American attempted to show the same solidarity with his cousins, he probably would have been thrown in prison.  That the observable reality of Kosovo was almost completely the reverse only made this unfortunate need to endorse one side’s narrative as reality that much more painful.  

It seems to me that something similar is going on here, where Riverbend’s credibility as a witness is being impugned (ever so gently, but impugned nonetheless) because she is a Sunni from the professional classes of Baghdad and for no other reason.  In other words, she represents precisely the kind of educated Iraqi that was supposed to be integral to the new Iraq, and might well have been one to contribute to that new Iraq had Washington not chosen quite deliberately to throw Sunni bureaucrats and soldiers out of work in an idiotic fit of “de-Baathification” and then empower the exiles in the provisional government (whom Riverbend correctly called the Puppets) and then ensure that Shi’ite majoritarian domination would follow.  It is hard to see how any Sunni, no matter how sanguine his or her view of the invasion, was supposed to respond to this “bottom rail on top now” approach to “liberation” except with bitterness and resentment.  More importantly, the account she gave in her final post, in which she said that the stories about eternal Sunni-Shia rivalries had no bearing on pre-war Baghdad, was all the more powerful for being rather obviously true.  Before the invasion, no one could doubt that Shi’ites were a marginalised and put-upon group that had suffered horribly in 1991, but likewise no one could doubt that intermarriage, coexistence and cohabitation in the same neighbourhoods were all part of the social fabric of pre-war Baghdad.  This is to be expected in any large city in which communalism is not mobilised for political purposes.  The reason why there has been such a hideous orgy of destruction and marauding in the name of driving sectarian enemies out of different neighbourhoods is that Sunnis and Shi’ites did live alongside one another, did intermarry and didn’t make their sectarian identities the most significant aspect of their lives.  Now having the wrong name (Omar instead of Ali) will mean that you end up in the river with a hole in your head. 

That is a major difference that the war created, and anything else you want to say about the war really has to take account of that.  When outsiders help precipitate conflict between different groups in another country, the outsiders are among the first to discover the “deep” structural causes behind these conflicts, as if to say, “These people have always been maniacs–but we had no idea until just now!  Why, of course, it all has to do with Karbala, and they have been killing each other for centuries.”  Except that they hadn’t been killing each other for centuries.  Indeed, I have heard very persuasive arguments that prior to the Safavid mobilisation of Shi’ism as its political weapon in Mesopotamia, and the resulting Ottoman mobilisation of Sunnism in response, the Sunni-Shi’ite schism had very little political significance and open sectarian conflict did not occur, because the political salience of these identities is closely tied to having powerful backers who are vying with the other group’s powerful backers. 

People in mixed societies caught in civil wars will always tell the story that the different groups used to coexist more or less peacefully, because the different groups often did coexist peacefully.  That isn’t to say that there weren’t always tensions, injustices and occasionally hostility and bitterness, but that rampaging sectarian death squads were unthinkable.  This is what civil wars do to diverse societies that fracture along ethnic or religious or political lines: people who once more or less normally lived cheek by jowl find that they are being told that they must slaughter one another or risk being slaughtered by their former neighbours.  (The explosive potential of multiethnic and multireligious societies in time of crisis should give every enthusiastic multiculti and open borders activist pause.)

Since SCIRI has long been known as a group in the employ of Tehran, it was hardly strange that she would regard many of the new leaders as agents of Iran.  That is to say, many of the people she accused of being Iranian agents were Iranian agents; many of the people she called U.S. dupes and puppets were exactly that.  Those she thought were out to feather their own nests through corruption often were corrupt.  She hasn’t said that things were “basically OK” under the old regime, but that they were manifestly better than they have been since the invasion.  No one can really dispute that, and no one even tries to do so anymore, which is why we get efforts to dismiss someone like Riverbend because she comes from the wrong background.