Matt Johnson

*Originally published in The Kansas City Star, June 19, 2014

To understand the dismal situation in today’s Iraq — the Islamic State’s unimpeded rampage, a government incapable of addressing bitter factionalism, and unbridled religious and ethnic hatred — it’s necessary to take a look at history. And not the narrow, decade-old conception of history that has become increasingly popular among commentators.

Some decry President Bush’s strategic blunders. Others lament President Obama’s withdrawal of American troops in 2011. But ultimately, Saddam Hussein’s incessant efforts to incite sectarianism in Iraq — a savage policy known as “divide and rule” — are to blame for the desperate situation today.

This vicious process started in 1968 (when Saddam was the vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council) with the violent marginalization of Iraq’s majority Shia population. The Shia were barred from holding public office, relegated to rural areas in southern Iraq and the worst parts of Baghdad, and tortured or killed for demonstrating against religious persecution. As this repression intensified, the Shia Iraqi Dawa Party became increasingly committed to the establishment of its own autonomous state in the country.

This was, of course, anathema to the regime — but instead of simply going after the Dawa Party, government forces launched a sustained campaign of coercion and violence against all Shia political mobilization. Members of the Dawa Party and other Shia organizations were routinely assassinated, the regime constantly broadcasted (and often fabricated) stories about attempts on government officials’ lives — as well as plots to overthrow the Ba’ath Party — and every “crime” was avenged with a public execution. This brutal, paranoid campaign escalated after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Joseph A. Kéchichian, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, recently argued that Saddam “played up religious and ethnic division at every turn. More than six years after his death, surging Sunni-Shia violence is a bloody consequence.”

During the Iran-Iraq War (1980 to 1988) — a time when spurring Arab nationalism was more important to the regime than catalyzing rampant sectarianism — Saddam was less aggressive toward the Shia. He had a pointless, devastating attrition war to prosecute, after all. But this was when he committed his most nauseating crime: the genocidal Anfal (“spoils of war”) campaign against Iraq’s Kurdish population. Both conventional and chemical weapons were used to exterminate as many as 180,000 people in northern Iraq, 90 percent of Kurdish towns were razed, and thousands of women and children were thrown into squalid internment camps. This ghastly atrocity — which created yet another bottomless political and social rift in Iraq — was met with American indifference, as Saddam was then an ally against Iran.

Then, after the Gulf War, an insurrection of Shia in the south and Kurds in the north — stirred by encouragement from President George H.W. Bush and the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq — resulted in the slaughter of more than 60,000 people (often via indiscriminate bombings, kerosene attacks, and the intentional massacre of civilians). Even though Coalition forces could have intervened and saved thousands of innocent lives, they were ordered to do nothing.

The atomization of Iraqi society, perpetually exacerbated by the state, is the foundation of today’s dangerous state of affairs. To blame the civil war on either the Bush or the Obama administration is to miss the point — these tensions were gurgling and seething beneath the surface of Iraqi society for half a century, all the while being deepened and protracted by the regime.

Even if you’re prepared to argue that Iraq would have been better off under Saddam Hussein or one of his verminous sons for the next few decades, you’re still not circumventing the problem of sectarianism. If the only bulwark against civil conflict in Iraq was a genocidal maniac and his sadistic family, who presided over what the Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya accurately called a “Republic of Fear,” the situation was both tragic and tenuous. Unless Iraq was going to remain in this terrorized, volatile state forever, severe civil strife was in its future.

Regarding the current disaster, blame Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for the grievous mistake of pushing Sunnis to the threshold of disloyalty and resentment with his myopic, exclusionary policies (even though this internecine madness is, in part, yet another holdover from the Saddam era). Blame the United States’ reluctance to intervene in Syria or at least reinforce the Iraqi border to stem the inflow of IS fighters. Blame the Bush administration for what the journalist and analyst Tom Ricks called “The worst war plan in American history.” But don’t blame the decision to remove the toxic glue of pre-2003 Iraqi society — the glue of totalitarianism, manipulation, and fear — for the enmity and disintegration we see today. It was sown by Saddam Hussein.

*This is an expanded and revised version of the original article.