Iraq

Marshall Sahlins
Marshall Sahlins is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Chicago University. His email is m-sahlins@uchicago.edu.

The state-of-nature effect

Fig. 1. US soldiers hand out toys to children during a Human Terrain Team site survey mission in Kilabeen, Iraq, 15 Sep. 2009.

Iraq was once a remarkable mlange of beliefs, customs and traditions; the killings [at Our Lady of Salvation Church, Baghdad] on Sunday drew another border in a nation defined more by war, occupation and deprivation. Identities have hardened; diversity has faded.1

Another border in a nation defined more by war: clearly sectarian identities are not just surviving forms of traditional diversities. Largely configured and differentially advantaged in colonialism, become then the partisan factions of postcolonial politics, and embedded now in agonistic global forces of capitalism and imperialism, the sectarian identities of religion and ethnicity in states such as Iraq incorporate in their own definition the fear and contempt of the other that too readily turns difference into violence.2 Nor is Iraq, then, your grandfathers insurgency although the US Counterinsurgency (COIN) manual, with its shopworn definitions and examples, assumes it is (US Army & Marine Corps 2007). Iraq is not simply a war of resistance or national liberation. Neither is it a classic civil war. It is many-sided, not two-sided, with the government itself a factional participant endowed with the advantages of state power. At the local levels of the village and the city neighbourhood, a great variety of parties, recruited on different grounds and espousing diverse causes, sow violence from every quarter. Something of a Hobbesian bellum omnia contra omnes, the conflict has the quality of an up-to-date state of nature although it is the effect of a coercive sovereign power, the American invasion, rather than the precondition of it. With its ever-shifting and pullulating factionalism, its contending ideologies and reconfiguring identities, its authoritative and subaltern discourses, its cultural hybridizations and partisan primordializations, one might indeed think of the Iraq War as a postmodern state of nature. Consider just one of the myriad such incidents chronicled by Nir Rosen (2010) and Dexter Filkins (2009) in recent comprehensive works on American military incursions in the Middle East:
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In April, 2006 the [Sadrist] Mahdi Army attacked a number of high-ranking [Sunni] insurgents, including former Baathists in Baghdads Adhamiya neighborhood. They captured the suspects and left with them. Irate locals began shooting at the members of the Iraqi National Guard (ING), and they accused both the [Iranian-created] Badr Organization and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of being involved. In fact it was a Mahdi Army operation. In the days that followed, Iraqi police fired randomly in Adhamiya. They also shot at generators and power cables to punish the residentsIt was more evidence to Sunnis that the state was at war with them (Rosen 2010: 95).

Note the framing of the already polymorphic local violence in terms of national and regional forces. In a sermon a few days later, an elderly cleric set the neighbourhood travails on an even larger scale: This is how the [American] occupiers want to divide the Iraqi people, he said. This is how they want to plant sectarian division (Rosen 2010: 96). Stasis: Ancient and postcolonial versions For all its postcolonial and postmodern attributes, however, the current travails of Iraq in fundamental ways resemble similar conflicts going back to the original history of heteronomous democracies dissolving into indigenous anarchies: particularly the civil strife (stasis) at Corcyra in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, as famously described by Thucydides (1996: 3.70-85). Indeed, Hobbes was the first to translate Thucydides directly into English; and, as is sometimes remarked, his own notion of the state of nature was largely inspired by the ancient historians narrative of the Corcyrean horror. But what notably draws our attention now is the amount of cultural work political, economic, military and ideological that went into the violent disintegration of the Corcyrean polis. In ways much like the effects of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the internal conflicts in Corcyra and other Greek cities were magnified out of proportion by external interventions, with the similar consequence of transforming local diversities into lethal identities.
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BENJAMIN BOREN / US ARMY

In Corcyra, an oligarchic party revolted against the existing democracy. When the Spartans intervened on the part of the privileged few and the Athenians in favour of the democratic many, the matters at issue were amplified far beyond all civic considerations and formulated rather in the terms of absolute causes-to-die-for. Corcyra had become the site of a contest for pan-Hellenic domination, and accordingly an arena of oppositions that were effectively existential and uncompromisable: equality versus plutocracy, imperialism versus independence, even freedom versus slavery. Death then raged in every shape, Thucydides (1996: 3.81) wrote, and its indiscriminate toll made victims too of justice and religion, kinship and morality. Licensed one way or another by the showdown of absolute values, many preexisting scores were now settled in blood. Sons turned against fathers; suppliants were slain on the temple altars. As I read the text, the extreme violence was largely the counterpart of the redefinition of all sorts of privilege and inequality as supreme political evils, notably on the part of the democratic party that unleashed the final massacre. So creditors were slain by their debtors, said Thucydides, for crimes of attempting to put down the democracy (ibid.). The violence was transgressive insofar as the issues were transcendent. The specific conflicts of the adversaries had been folded into oppositions of greater stakes and higher purposes; accordingly, local animosities became global enmities. To judge from certain examples of civil strife in Aristotles Politics (1958: 1303b17ff), something analogous to the patronage politics of contemporary postcolonial regimes could generalize disputes within Ancient Greeces privileged classes into factional conflicts that mobilized large bodies of the populace on each side. It is also of interest in relation to postcolonial sectarian strife that among the causes of stasis adduced by Aristotle were election intrigues and dissimilarity of elements in the composition of the state (1958: 1303a9). For his own part, Thucydides was a student of the sophists fateful contrast of physis and nomos, opposing a covetous human nature to a vulnerable man-made culture an unhappy ontology from which the social sciences still suffer the effects. So the ancient historian found the true source of the atrocities he described in a lust for power arising from greed and ambition (1996: 3.82). Throughout Thucydides History, this inherent covetousness appears as the basis of human law, or else as the force that overthrows it. (In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority (1996: 3.84).) Yet by another reading, the notion of a natural basis of cultural order and disorder could well be reversed, for the disorder was clearly a cultural effect. Considering the large external forces brought to bear in Corcyra on the many civic differences, complemented by an ideological work so intense that words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them (1996: 3.82), one might preferably conclude that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature. And may not the like be said of modern versions of the ancient Corcyrean prototype among postcolonial societies of South Asia, Indonesia and Africa, as well as the Middle East? There follow a few summary examples. Veena Das (1996: 178,195) study of the massacre of a Sikh community in West Delhi following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards is a kind of microcosm of the state-of-nature effect. In a description reminiscent of Thucydides, Das tells how local antagonisms were integrated in the larger religious and nationalist narratives of the assassination and thereby given a
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fatal impulse.3 The slaughter was, nevertheless, selective, in that it engaged factions that were already at odds; a number of Sikh groups escaped with few or no deaths, in some cases because they were protected by Hindu neighbours. The primary victims were unusually wealthy Sikhs, whose ostentatious display of their wealth had aroused the envy of the poorer Hindu group that led the assault. In addition, they had built a temple on land the Hindus considered theirs. Yet note that such antagonisms of themselves did not lead to deadly violence nothing more than stone-throwing at the worst until they were conflated with larger national forces and issues. The trigger was a drunken exchange between the headmen of the two communities, who had been competing for the patronage of an important Congress Party official and the access to state resources this would give them. In the aftermath of Mrs Gandhis death, state power in the form of the police, supposedly implementing the law, joined in the attack on the Sikhs. Now, the whole tragedy was played out on the level of the nation although at the same time in kinship terms. The Hindu assailants represented themselves as sons of Mrs Gandhi and their local Sikh victims as her assassins. [B]lood must be avenged with blood, they cried, and you have killed our mother (Das 1996: 178,195). Describing a similar but more powerful amplification of local disputes into nationwide riots in South Asia, Stanley Tambiah labels the process transvaluation, referring thus to the assimilation of particular resentments to a larger, collective, more enduring and therefore less context-bound cause or interest (Tambiah 1996: 192). Specific incidents of parochial import get absorbed in burning issues of race, class, religion and/or ethnic differences which inspire all the more hostility in the measure they are abstract and unconditional. Tambiah also notes a corollary process of focalization, in which clashes are cumulatively aggregated into larger combats only indirectly connected to the initial triggering incidents, the particular character of which gets lost in the expansion. But perhaps not altogether. Note again the idiom of kinship in the retaliation on local Sikhs for the death of the Indian prime minister: you have killed our mother. The wider national crime is redoubled as the violation of the deepest interpersonal relationships. Indeed this kind of reciprocity between microhistories and macroidentities is a key structural dynamic of escalating violence, as Bruce Kapferer (2001: 53) so well observes in the Sri Lankan context:
A seemingly minor altercation, for example, through its dynamic has the effect of exposing or bringing forth its ethnic and religious possibility (the larger more abstract imaginations of reality that are already implicit in everyday activity), which then become the principles for establishing the relations of rioting persons and the spread of the conflict. . .The sources of the conflict may be in economic hardship or political context, but once they are realized in violent acts there is pressure towards their ultimate organization and expression in ethnic and religious terms. This is so, I suggest, because the social orders of economic and political life in local contexts engage processes which are connected to the more encompassing associational principles of Sinhala and Buddhist identity.

An account of the modern history of Sri Lanka would be a veritable textbook of the state-of-nature effect, the agonistic disintegration of the society through the intervention of transcendent causes and external forces. Here I can only gesture towards a few relevant themes, beginning with the classical British colonial moves of drawing ethnic boundaries and politicizing ethnic differences which ultimately issued not only in the bloody enmity of Sinhalas and Tamils, but in violent fragmentation and cruel reprisals within each side. For those (Americans) who think that democracy is elections and that elections cure all, it is notable that the cycles of violence have long been closely linked to the electoral process. Among the many reasons is
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an outsized government economic sector, largely recruited through patronage, which effectively puts the profit and livelihoods of people across the class spectrum at electoral risk, even as it has offered opportunities for turning political loyalty into factional thuggery. Then there is the development of a militant, nationalist Buddhism, so well recounted in Tambiahs Buddhism betrayed, that disengaged the religion from its traditional ethical moorings and synthesized it with the defence of Sinhala language, culture and territory. Militating for these causes, radical monks appear as protagonists of anti-government revolts as well as anti-Tamil politics, and a famously non-violent Buddhism becomes a rhetorical mobilizer of volatile masses and. . .an instigator of spurts of violence (Tambiah 1992: 92). The civil strife, moreover, takes on further cosmic dimensions when linked to partisan re-readings of ancient Sinhala chronicles, not to mention performances of popular rituals, that can assimilate Sinhalese presidents to heroic kings and Tamil others to traditional demons (Kapferer 1998; Obeyesekere 1993). Finally, some of the worst instances of civil strife have followed upon direct foreign intervention: in the form not only of Indian arms and political pressure, but also of the economic liberalization of the late 1970s, as pushed by the IMF and World Bank, among the usual deleterious effects of which was a widening disparity between rich and poor. Generalizing on the insertion of Sri Lanka and other postcolonies in such international forces of contention and disruption, Kapferer tellingly observes that the dominant form of global conflict is now civil war (2001: 36). How the occupiers divide the Iraqi people4 The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 set off a terrible civil strife in which a myriad of local forces killed each other, often in the name of global causes. For all its nation-building ideology, US policy supposed Iraq to be historically and inevitably divided into opposed religious and ethnic groups, mainly Sunni, Shia and Kurd, but also Turkmen, Arab, and others, such that national unity would now have to be a project of reconciliation involving parties essentially defined by their differences. The coalition of the willing (foreigners) would have to forge a coalition of the unwilling (Iraqis). Indeed there was a lot of essentialism informing the invaders conquer-and-divide policies which ignored a long history of intermarriage between the various groups, the mix of Shiites and Sunnis in the Iraqi army during the war with Iran, the contingent of Shiites in the ruling Baath Party, and other such preexisting conditions of national coherence. The Shiites, for all that they were victimized by the Sunni-dominated Saddam regime, were rather mistrusted by the American occupying power because of their supposed ties to Iran. This was in fact true of the Badr bloc of Shia, but they were then bitter opponents of the large Mahdi Army of the Sadrists, also Shia. As for the so-called Sunni Arabs who had been deposed from their dominant control of the state, they were largely and erroneously supposed by the initial American governing authority to be coterminous with Saddamists, the Baath Party, and the disbanded Iraqi army. This helped make the Sunni insurgents (aka Baathists) the toughest and most ruthless of Americas opponents in the early years of the war, more dangerous than the Mahdi Army. In the so-called Awakening of 2006, however, American policies toward the Sunnis were reversed, as it was discovered that Sunni tribes in Anbar province and western Baghdad had turned against the radical jihadists, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also Sunnis but largely of foreign origin. This alliance of mainstream Sunnis with the Americans never sat well with a central government that was now dominated by Shiites and long engaged in eliminating the Sunnis from political
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power often literally so by killing or ethnically cleansing them. Left to the strained mercies of the Shiites and the vengeance of the jihadists when the Americans began to withdraw, the Awakening movement dissolved into tribal fragments, some of them not above attacking each other. From the beginning, Iraqs civil strife had been marked by an ever-widening Sunni-Shia faultline and at the same time a progressive devolution of the violence to a variety of locally-organized tribal segments, political parties, neighbourhood militias and criminal gangs entities that were often indistinguishable from one another. US journalist Dexter Filkins lists 103 different insurgent groups claiming responsibility for attacks on Americans and Iraqis between May and October 2005 (Filkins 2009: 23438). For the week ending 7 October, there were on average 107 such attacks per day and this was before the socalled Sunni-Shiite civil war of 2006. As already noted, the quotidian violence of the street was joined by various government forces, including the national, regional and local police; the Iraqi Security Forces; the National Guard; and commando units (cum death squads) under the control of different government offices, particularly the Ministry of Interior. Many of these official combatants, moreover, were moonlighting for the two major Shiite militias, the Mahdi Army and the Iranian-affiliated Badr Organization. In Iraq, writes James Fearon (2007: 6), the police look like militia members in uniform probably because they are. For all the talk of civil war following the destruction of the important Shiite shrine of Al-Askari at Samarra in 2006, the engagement of a wide spectrum of armed groups practising a large variety of brutal tactics was more like a war of each against all. Only that their antagonisms were rendered all the more irreconcilable by being inscribed in the primordial terms of the conflicts that originally divided the Sunni cause from the Shia. Sermons and rituals directly related the present struggles to the cruel battles of succession to the caliphate that had broken out between descendants and companions of the Prophet. It was as if the current sectarian killings were the sequel to assassinations and usurpations of ancient memory. Then again, the sectarian antagonisms were compounded by their engagement in an international field of contending forces. Initially stirred up by the American occupation, the hostilities within Iraq motivated the interventions of regional powers on behalf of their co-religionists which is also to say in their own national interests. Most notably, Saudi Arabia on the Sunni side and Iran on the Shiite were fighting something of a proxy war in Iraq. Here again a certain dialogue of escalating violence came into effect, as the internal conflicts exacerbated the opposition of the external powers; and vice versa, the arms and warriors from other countries made the Iraqi schisms all the worse. Indeed, in March 2011, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent 2,000 troops to Bahrain to defend a Sunnidominated ruling group under protest from the Shiite majority of that island nation. In response, Shiites of Sadrist persuasion in Iraq staged mass demonstrations against the Saudis: which thereupon aggravated Iraqs ruling Shiites, who themselves had been fighting the Mahdi Army of the Sadr movement. Finally, as the American invasion became increasingly configured as an Islamophobic crusade, the reciprocal amplification of conflicts of lesser and greater structural order achieved global proportions. Relevant here is the direct relation between the scale of the contending forces and the high-mindedness of their opposing causes. The causes become as abstract and uncompromisable as the conflict is universal, the two together giving transcendental purposes to parochial differences. George W. Bush set this course towards transgressive violence by declaring
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1. Shadid, A. 2010. Church attack seen as strike at Iraqs core. New York Times, 1 November. 2. This article is fundamentally indebted to the work of Bruce Kapferer (especially 1998, 2001) and Stanley Tambiah (1992, 1996) on sectarian violence in South Asian postcolonial states. Further debts to classical anthropological concepts are noted in an earlier article (Sahlins 2005) on the dialogical relations of microhistories and macrohistories. 3. Commenting on this aspect of Das study, Jonathan Spencer writes: Local political antagonisms were recast in the language of national antagonisms: the capillaries of everyday agonismbecame channels for violence (2007: 133). 4. The discussion of Iraq that follows is almost exclusively concerned with civil strife south of the Kurdish area. Another abbreviation is the focus on the decisive American role, leaving aside the UK and other Coalition forces. 5. Dagher 2009. 6. Ibid. 7. Washington Post 2007. 14 September. 8. Dagher 2009. 9. Ibid. 10. Seemingly random violence has affected several professions: at least 450 academics have been killed since the invasion; many more have fled the country. NEAR (Network for Education and Academic Rights) 2011. New crackdown on Iraqi academic elite. 21 April. http://www. nearinternational.org/alertdetail.asp?alertid=588. 11. Wing, J. 2009. Columbia University charts ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. EPIC (Education for Peace in Iraq Center), 26 November; Guler, C. 2009. Baghdad divided. International Relations and Security Network (ISN) Security Watch, 9 November. http:// www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/CurrentAffairs/Security-Watch/ Detail/?lng=en&id=109316. 12. BRussells Tribunal 2006. Research on death squads in Iraq. December, p. 9. http://www. brussellstribunal.org.

the invasion of Iraq in the rhetoric of the Christian crusades, a misstep he then doubled and redoubled by constructions of the invasion as a crucial battle in the global war on terror, as a defence of freedom against an enemy that despises it, and ultimately as a showdown optimus maximus between good and evil. Fronted by al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Islamic opposition knew how to respond in kind by bringing in jihadist fighters from many foreign parts to attack the infidels who could be Shiites as well as Americans. They also seriously troubled the Sunni areas in which they were eventually installed, not only with the imposition of rigid sharia law, but also by assassinating local leaders and demanding their daughters as wives. (This was a major reason for the Sunni overtures to the Americans that created the Awakening Movement.) Neither did the American homeland escape the reciprocal effects. The country is now beset with a spreading Islamophobia, the latest symptom of which is a proposed congressional witch-hunt of terrorists, inspired no doubt by nostalgia for the late anti-communism. COIN of the realm
Weve made friends here, Lt. Rauch saidThey were wary at first, but when we started paying for things they started coming forward with requests. I take their money but I hate them, Alawi said. I am cooperating with the Americans for the sake of my country, the Americans are the occupiers. We are trying to evict them (Filkins 2009: 115). The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money, Adam Sperry told me when I visited his office in Forward Operating Base FalconThe ideological fight, forget about it, Captain Dehart, the units senior intelligence officer, saidWe bought into it too much. Its money and power (Rosen 2010: 246).

personnel drawing US government funds was greater than that of American combat forces.) Other American companies reap huge returns from so-called development projects that after eight years have failed to provide adequate electricity although sufficient amounts to electrocute at least 15 American soldiers taking showers. For Iraq the adage applies: developing countries, with American help, never develop. All the same, graft and profit from development projects have made rich men of many tribal and government leaders while making enemies for them and the Americans among those excluded from the game. The latter include members of tribal groups of ancient standing that are being sidelined by their foreign-backed, nouveau riche compatriots. When the Americas began paying former insurgents and tribal leaders to help enforce security, reads a report from Anbar province on the run-up to the January 2009 provincial elections, they favored some tribes over others, in many cases displacing the old for upstarts.5 In the event, the elections proved to be not so much the democratic turning point the Americans fecklessly imagined as another sectarian crisis attended by fears of violence, especially in regard to the aftermath:
Now the tribes are jockeying [for] power, and peoplecomplain bitterly that the machinery of democracy is gilding corruption, internal rivalries, and an intense feudal instinct [sic] that regards elected office . . . as a chance for a bigger cut of provincial resources and security forces.6

Money and power: from the beginning of the war, Iraqi society was deranged by a double dose of violent shock treatments, the shock and awe of the US invasion and the neoliberal shock therapy administered by the American governing authority (cf. Klein 2007). The looting and lawlessness that followed the first would have lingering effects. So too would the economic deprivations and disparities that attended the second, especially considering that the members of the disbanded Iraqi army were left without work or pay. Unemployment in general ran at an estimated 20 or 30 per cent throughout the American occupation. The resentments it evoked were redoubled when the Americans brought in workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh and elsewhere to do jobs Iraqis were perfectly capable of doing. Class antagonisms were significant conditions of the large Sadrist movement, whose Mahdi fighting corps was essentially an army of the poor. Yet whether or not the Americans were effectively responsible for Iraqi poverty, they found it a useful basis for the counterinsurgency strategy they developed in the country. Money could buy them friends and allies; and even apart from the added force, friends and allies could provide precious intelligence. Something the Americans know as bribery and corruption when other peoples do it became their own best military tactic which is also to say that they did not exactly practise the Friedmanite economics that they preached. The war has been fought largely with no-bid contracts, and no-question compensations ranging from hundreds to hundreds of millions of dollars, to the profit especially of the politically powerful. Not to forget the boondoggle it has represented for US corporations such as Blackwater and the others of their mercenary ilk. Performing military services that range from cooking to combat, and killings that include Iraqi civilians and US soldiers, these private forces make up a large complement of the American presence, although they are generally uncounted and unremarked as such. (By 2008, the number of private contract

Consider the case of Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha of Anbar. Sheikh Ahmeds brother, Sheikh Sattar, a reputed warlord and highway robber in his earlier career, founded the Awakening Movement in the province in 2006 and led it until he was assassinated by an al-Qaeda bomber in 2007.7 Ahmed, a rival sheikh complained, then inherited the Awakeningand turned it into an enterprise for deals and contracts.8 (Another of Sheikh Ahmeds critics, incidentally, is locally known as the Whale for the amount of American aid he has swallowed.) By January 2009, Sheikh Ahmed was living on an extensive estate guarded by Iraqi Army and police checkpoints. His sumptuous spread included a stable of Arabian horses, a camel farm, caged fawns, a fleet of armoured SUVs, and a fine pink mansion. From this estate the sheikh presumably kept in contact with his trade and investment companies in the UAE, while he pushed for a local natural gas project worth billions of US dollars and dreamed of turning Anbar into another Dubai. Sheikh Ahmeds acquisitions are particularly noteworthy given that his subtribe was not among the most powerful or prestigious in the region before the American invasion.9 Paying something like 100,000 Awakening fighters, letting development contracts large and small to Iraqis and mostly large to Americans, footing the bill for private paramilitary units, substantially underwriting the Iraqi government and military, compensating Iraqis for property damage and indemnifying them for injuries and deaths, the Americans thus made payoffs, bribery and corruption into a major counterinsurgency strategy. COIN was a wellchosen acronym for it.
Often it seemed as if the American strategy was merely to buy off the Iraqis temporarily, and they distributed microgrants to shop owners in their area. I wondered what would happen when this massive influx of American money stopped pouring in. Would the Iraqi state become a bribing machine? Would the ruling Shiites even want to pay Sunnis whom they had been trying to exterminate until recently? (Rosen 2010: 247)

Creation and resolution of the state of nature The spectre of Middle Eastern failed states dissolving into anarchy is a recurrent nightmare of the political science of the Iraq conflict. Lebanon 1975-76 is one oftcited example, beginning with clashes between PLO and
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Al-Mohammad, H. 2010. Relying on ones tribe: A snippet of life in Basra since the 2003 invasion. Anthropology Today 26(4): 23-26. Aristotle 1958. The politics of Aristotle (trans.) E. Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barfield, T. 2010. Afghanistan: A cultural and political history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. BRussells Tribunal 2006. Research on death squads in Iraq. December. http:// brussellstribunal.org. Dagher, S. 2009. Tribal rivalries persist as Iraqis seek local posts. New York Times, 19 January. Das, V. 1996. The spatialization of violence: Case study of a communal riot. In: Basu, K. and S. Subrahmanyam (eds), Unravelling the nation: sectarian conflict and Indias secular identity, pp. 157-203. New Delhi: Penguin. Fearon, J.D. 2007. Iraqs civil war. Foreign Affairs 86(2): 2-15. Filkins, D. 2009. The forever war. New York: Vintage Books. Hobbes, T. 1962. Leviathan. New York: Collier Books. Kapferer, B. 1998. Legends of people, myths of state: Violence, intolerance, and political culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. 2001. Ethnic nationalism and the discourses of violence in Sri Lanka. Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational and Crosscultural Studies 9(1): 33-67. Klein, N. 2007. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Henry Holt. Obeyesekere, G. 1993. Duttagamini and the Buddhist conscience. In: Allen, D. (ed.), Religion and political conflict in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, pp. 135-60. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rosen, N. 2010. Aftermath: Following the bloodshed of Americas wars in the Muslim world. New York: Nation Books. Sahlins, M. 2005. Structural work: How microhistories become macrohistories and vice versa. Anthropological Theory 5: 5-30. Spencer, J. 2007. Anthropology, politics, and the state: Democracy and violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 30

Christian militias that the army not only failed to resolve, but in the process fell itself into factionalism and became part of the problem. There then followed a long period of strife involving Christian, Sunni, Shiite and PLO forces fighting among themselves as well as with each other, this violence in turn being compounded by the intervention of the Israeli and Syrian military. A similar scenario, writes Fearon (2007: 7), is already playing out in Iraq; the Lebanonization of Iraq, Rosen (2010) calls it. Indeed a similar scenario has also been playing out cyclically in Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, mostly recently when the United States made the Cold War an overtime period of the Great Game, and then became the fourth foreign power to invade the country in 160 years (Barfield 2010, see especially 242ff). The sequence of events in these cases again suggests that Hobbes had the developmental course from the state of nature to the commonwealth rather back to front. Indeed he might have concluded so himself from the sectarian strife that followed upon the breakdown of royal authority in the England of his own day instead of putting it down to a rapacious human nature and projecting it back to an original human condition. In Hobbes version, the original war of each against all ended when men, motivated by fear and guided by reason, agreed to surrender their right to use force in their own interest in favour of a sovereign power who would keep them all in awe (1962: 100). But the shock and awe of American power produced just the opposite effect in Iraq. The looting that ensued not only signified the dissolution of the state; at the same time, in this lawless condition, it initiated the arming of the population at large. Soon the means of force would become accessible to all through the open sale of arms and ammunition in the marketplace, much of it stolen or confiscated from the disbanded Iraqi army. Instead of a reservation of legitimate force to a sovereign power, the citizens having renounced their own private rights thereto, the coercive instruments of violence had been redistributed to the people in general, even as the political instruments of safety and justice were suspended. Everything then happened as if the social contract had dissolved. Every kind of hostility, whether religious, political or commercial, familial or tribal, was potentially lethal. We Iraqis, said one of Filkins interpreters, we are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom (2009: 326). Just so in Basra, for example, where, as recently reported in ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY by Hayder Al-Mohammad, militias, tribes, gangs and groups with their own special interests were dominant in the city and province (2010: 23). Absent an effective state, the people have become reliant on their tribes to protect them and their family, homes and lands (2010: 26). In Basra as elsewhere, local gangs form around parvenu strongmen who assume the titles of tribal sheikhs and are publicly accorded the respects that are due such status even though privately they may be reviled as thieves and sons of thieves. Some of these groups indeed specialize in extortion, like the wellarmed Basra subtribe that drives into other peoples cars and demands immediate compensation on threat of violence (2010: 23-24). But around the country, many groups, even if operating as rogue outfits, take on the guise of sectarian political parties or else declare themselves branches of militias such as the Mahdi Army. Often confounding piety with brigandry, the effect, again, is to bring larger sectarian causes into the violence of the streets. Owing to its economic and military resources, including the money and arms furnished by the US, the central government, although it does not monopolize force, can be said to be the force majeure among the adversarial parties. Still, like all the major blocs, the Iraqi government

has been beset by infighting, and in fact it has had more than one army. Indeed by 2006, each of the 27 government ministries had its own facilities protection force (Filkins 2009: 322). The Ministry of Interior by itself was running an armed complement of around 100,000 men of notorious repute. At one time it was said that one floor of the ministry was staffed by the Mahdi Army and another by the Badr Organization. On at least one occasion, the ministrys troops would appear to have attacked the Ministry of Health, kidnapping around 100 employees, apparently Sunnis.10 Commando groups from the Interior Ministry operated as death squads in their own dirty wars in Sunni neighbourhoods. Those they did not kill outright might well be tortured to death in Iraqs gulag of secret prisons. In the anarchic condition into which Iraq had dissolved, where merely existing was a sufficient reason for one to die, the violence was accordingly generalized, but it was not altogether random. It followed tactics of reciprocal brutality adapted to its lawlessness, and strategies of intimidation consistent with its existential finalities. Especially in the struggles in the villages and the city neighbourhoods, the aim of Sunnis and Shiites alike was not so much to defeat an enemy force as to rout a despised population. For where the identity of the self is conditional upon hatred of the other, the endgame is to make the situation of the latter unlivable. In this regard, an attempt at extermination is not nearly as effective as acts of terror sufficient to drive off the detested others and allow ones own to claim the space. Sunnis were the first to rely on this tactic of displacement, but they were soon enough matched and more by Shiites. According to a United Nations report, more than 4.5 million Iraqis were displaced persons in 2007, more than half of these Sunnis (UNHCR 2008). Of the 4.5 million, more than two million had left the country. Mixed neighbourhoods of Baghdad were largely cleared of their minorities, whether Shiite or Sunni. By the end of 2008, the reduced Sunni population had been driven to a few peripheral districts on the western side of Baghdad, their own homes having been destroyed or occupied by Shiites.11 The tactical brutalities that achieved these effects amount to a dark form of symmetrical schismogenesis, based on the principle that anything you can do, I can do worse. From a report by the BRussells Tribunal (2006) on death squads in Iraq, one of many such testimonies:
The citizens of Al-Mohajarea Mosque Street in Al-Gazaliah quarter in Baghdad woke up on April 12th, 2006 to see a number of dead bodies of some (Sunnis) thrown on their street in order to scare people and provoke and force them to leave their homes. Miss Maysace, 19, stated that she saw corpse of [a] (9 or 10) year old who was killed because of suffocation by telephone wires, the other bodies were killed in the same way.12

Speaking likewise of children who had been kidnapped and killed and their bodies left on the streets as well as of kidnap gangs buying and selling their victims Dexter Filkins was indeed put in mind of Hobbesian anarchy. By 2006, Baghdad was a free-for-all; it was a state of nature. There was no law, no courts, nothing there was nothing at all (2009: 294). If there were an inferno for Iraqi sinners, it would be hard to determine what depths of hell and forms of punishment they deserved. The kidnapping, torture and murder of the innocents were among the worst of a lot that included arbitrary arrests and the disappearing of people; reciprocal assassinations; suicide bombings; car bombings; aerial bombings; drive-by shootings and other random killings; home invasions accompanied by theft and destruction of property; the blowing up of houses; protection and extortion rackets; the denial of water, fuel, electricity, bread and rubbish removal to whole neighbourhoods all of which left those who survived in a state of continual fear. In the latter connection, note that the violence was genANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 3, JUNE 2011

Fig. 2. A US Army sergeant provides security for a Human Terrain Team in front of a Stryker armoured vehicle in a village near Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan.

Tambiah, S.J. 1992. Buddhism betrayed: Religion, politics and violence in South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Leveling crowds: Ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thucydides 1996. The landmark Thucydides: A comprehensive guide to the Peloponnesian War (ed. R.B. Strassler). New York: Free Press. UNHCR 2008. UNHCR global report 2007: Iraq situation. US Army & Marine Corps 2007 [2006]. The US Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

erally not clandestine. Accompanied by dire threats and mean betrayals, designed to terrorize through demonstration effects, it could be undertaken in broad daylight and its gruesome results were typically left on public display. Mangled bodies were dumped in public spaces, sometimes to be fed upon by dogs, and severed heads placed in elevated spots where the sight of them could not be avoided. Of course, the American occupiers have been a major party to the violence, and in the event the tactics of the Iraqi streets have infected the hearts and minds of American counterinsurgency warriors. This is not only evident in random killing by mercenary and regular troops, and the imprisonment in the American gulag of thousands of Iraqis, very few of whom were ever charged or convicted of anything. It became fully apparent in the graphic images of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Why take photographs, one may well ask, if they were not meant to be displayed? The counterinsurgency adopts the mindset of the insurgency. And then, what is the current epidemic of so-called post-traumatic stress disorder among American veterans of Iraq but the subjective effect of returning to a state of society after participating in the fear and brutality of a state of nature? The institutional side of these cruel paradoxes of the American presence is the role taken by the democratic electoral politics that the US would impose in Iraq. The problem is that the all-round warfare of Iraqi politics already resembles the American system all too closely in respect of the eventuality that winners take all. Among other consequences, this makes the terror of ethnic and sectarian cleansing a useful electoral tactic, even as the access to money and force democratically obtained by the victors allows them to retain power by continuing to intimidate their opponents. No wonder then that reports of increased violence or nowadays a return to civil war intensify before and after provincial and national elections. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, in Iraq, as in similar situations elsewhere, democratic politics is the continuation of a war of terror by other means. Perhaps still more paradoxical, the long-term effect of the American imposed democracy has been to install an Iraqi regime whose power has depended on Saddamist tech-

niques of state terror by which means, if necessary, it seems destined to control the country indefinitely. In other words, Hobbes was right after all, at least in the sense that a state of nature is resolved by the emergence of an uncontestable ruling power something that would also be said of Sri Lanka, Corcyra, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and other instances of this same phenomenon. If, as the American generals now say, Iraqs civil war is over, it is because the central government (whoever is prime minister) is the only major faction left standing. Rosen (2010) makes a strong argument to this effect though for one reason or another, most commonly a pending or fraudulent election, other commentators in the know periodically warn of a return to the old troubles. Moreover, there are also ongoing issues between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the north. Still, the radical jihadists were significantly weakened by the American surge and the Sunni Awakening; while for their part, Awakening members fell into internal dissension, and once the Americans stopped supporting them, they suffered neglect and imprisonment at the hands of the Shiite central government. Taken together with the massive Sunni emigration and the driving out of Sunni from Baghdad by the Shiites, this has meant an end to an effective Sunni resistance. The Sadrists too have been weakened. Their Mahdi Army was defeated and neutralized by the Iraqi army, notably with American help in the Charge of the Knights campaign in Basra and other southern cities in March-April 2009; and the movement as a whole, never wholly controlled by its leader Muqtada al-Sadr, was subject to discord and defection. It seems the Badr Organization too was damaged in the Charge of the Knights, and in any case it disengaged from its alliance with the ruling Dawa Party and lost much ground in the 2010 parliamentary elections, only to then be effectively excluded from Prime Minister Nouri Malikis coalition government. Hence the Americans utopian dream of reconciliation is not how it all ends. Even the Kurds are reconciled only to the extent they remain autonomous, which is to say unreconciled. It all ends, then, as it began, with a sovereign power that can keep them all in awe. Yet what was a misery without end has turned into an end with misery. With the weakening of the large contending forces, violence has diminished significantly. But the larger causes having devolved upon local animosities, there remains a level of everyday violence that, as Rosen says, would be unacceptable in any other country. He writes:
I am often asked if it was all worth it. Would it have been better to leave Saddam in power?. . . I never know what to say. . . Under Saddam, the violence came from one source: the regime. Now it has been democratically distributed: death can come from anywhere, at all times, no matter who you are. You can be killed for crossing the street, for going to the market, for driving your car, for having the wrong name, for being in your house, for being a Sunni, for being a Shiite, for being a woman. The American military can kill you in an operation; you can be arrested by militias and disappear in Iraqs new secret prisons, now run by Shiites; or you can be kidnapped by the resistance or criminal gangs. Americans cannot simply observe the horrors of Iraq and shake their heads with wonder, as if it were Rwanda and they had no role. America is responsible for the chaos that began with the invasion and followed with the botched and brutal occupation. Iraqs people suffered under the American occupation, the civil war, and the new Iraq government, just as they did under the American-imposed sanctions and bombings before the war and just as they did under the years of Baathist dictatorship (2010: 9).

US ARMY

*** So now they ask anthropologists to join the American military occupation as Human Terrain specialists and make it nice. l
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