ABSTRACT
News of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence and turmoil has become a permanent feature of media headlines. Amid the flood of coverage of near-daily killings, kidnappings, car bombs, and mayhem, there remains little doubt that the fall of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime did not mark an end to the suffering of a people that has long found itself sinking ever deeper into a cesspool of agony, anguish, and despair. If anything, the fall of Saddam has brought Iraq face to face with a cruel irony. It is an irony that is as much cruel in its violence that has plunged the country into a whirlpool of sectarian and ethnic bloodshed as it is cruel in the cynicism of the fact that efforts to devise a political order in post-Saddam Iraq have opened a Pandora’s box of sectarianism, communal hatreds, and intractable political struggles. Coming some nine decades after laying the foundations of a modern state
system in Iraq, the current turmoil in this country highlights the failure of the process of nation-building and state formation in crystallizing a common national identity. In fact, communal strife in Iraq has been fuelled by contradictory and divergent conceptions of political community, collective identity, national interest, historical memory, and frameworks for the country’s future. Despite the existence of a large body of popular lore disparaging sectarianism with open disdain and applauding communal diversity and intercommunal harmony, a lasting social peace seems to have eluded Iraq. In times of national distress and severe political crisis that gripped the country following the overthrow of Saddam, primordial attachments and old communal suspicions resurfaced intensely and the country teetered on the brink of all-out civil war and fragmentation.
