Iraq is more like N. Ireland than Lebanon, Reconciliation is Possible

http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/lebanon-reconciliation-possible.html

Iraq is more like N. Ireland than Lebanon, Reconciliation is Possible
By contributors | Jun. 19, 2014
By Jocelyne Cesari

The attack of The Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) on Mossul and its march on Baghdad has taken the international community by surprise and raised the possibility of another US intervention in Iraq, with the hope it could prevent the downfall of the country into a sectarian war. Such a scenario is highly improbable because of the nature of the Iraq crisis that is first and foremost political and not religious.

The rise of ISIS to preeminence is not due to its religious ideology but to the structural deficiencies of the Iraq state. As tempting as it can be to compare Iraq to Lebanon in the 1970s, the political reality is different.

First, sects or religious communities are not engrained in Iraq national history unlike Lebanon. While Lebanon was built on the explicit recognition of different religious communities, this has not been the case of Iraq. In my book, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity and the State, I describe how Saddam Hussein held his power through the Sunni minority over the Shia population, which implied an explicit denial of the religious diversity of the national community and even worse, a discriminatory use of religious groups and interests in the building of the state institutions. In these conditions, it is no surprise that the end of the Saddam regime opened a Pandora’s box of sectarian divides, since religious and ethnic diversity was negated at the very foundation of modern Iraq. As a consequence, after 2003, Shias previously persecuted, took on the power in a classical scenario of revenge.

In this regard, the Iraqi situation bears resemblance with the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland that were caused by the discrimination of one religious group (Protestants) over another (Catholics) as well as divergent views of the national community. It means that the conflict is about power sharing between different religious and ethnic groups and the inability and unwillingness of the successive Maliki regimes to create federal institutions that would allow the political inclusion of all groups.