New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

AL-AZMEH: After the Fact 37
values, and eager to distinguish Europe from America. 31 The model on
offer is clearly at variance with Arab and European notions, traditions,
and experiences of democracy, in short of democratic “values” outside
America, more attuned to citizenship than to the communalization of
individuals, though this is not absent, and more inspired by models
of French republicanism than the federalist communalism of communities
of birth and pressure groups. This notion, now being offered as
exemplary, was reflected in the communalist composition of the Iraqi
Provisional Ruling Council (P.R.C.) set up by Paul Bremer and
which, according to a benign reading of the American multiculturalist
Shangri-La, fosters diversity, equality, and so forth. The P.R.C. was composed
as an oligarchy of communal – sectarian and ethnic – worthies, in
the most part long-resident abroad, who find their party-political affiliations
smothered by their affiliations of blood. Thus the surreal spectacle
of a communist figuring on the Council as a Shiite, or a secular liberal
figuring as a Sunni, and so forth, as if the country were being politically
and socially engineered along a model of internal fragmentation which
will lead, at best, to a cold civil peace, at worst to civil war, in the image of
Balkanization or Lebanization, which is clearly not a formula appropriate
for nation-building. This holds true despite Bremer’s praise – fanciful,
implausible, but most unfortunately probably genuine – for the Lebanese
model, clearly heedless of Tocqueville’s preference for a power “so constituted
as to represent the majority without necessarily being a slave of its
passions.” 32 The electoral arrangements in 2005 and the resulting transitional
government were based on similar principles. As one U.N.
official commented after the election, “The election was not an election
but a referendum on ethnic and religious identity. For the Kurds, voting
was about self-determination. For the Shiites, voting was about a fatwa
issued by Sistani.” 33 More real an indicator of the consequences of such
communalization is the spectacle of mobile telephone contracts for Iraq
having been awarded by the occupation authority to three separate
companies, not competing with each other but rather each covering the
territory of a potentially independent political entity.
There is no denying the diverse composition of Iraq, as of any other
country, nor the fact, now harnessed to its own purposes by U.S. policy,
that in his last years Saddam Hussein did encourage the retribalization
of politics, starting with his own community of blood, his sons, and
maternal cousins. It is worth reminding you here that sectarianism – the