Sectarian loyalties undermine effort to build new Iraqi state

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Gunmen hold sway over streets lined with concrete bomb-blast barriers and razor wire. Entire neighborhoods are too dangerous for police to enter.

The government, holed up in a fortress behind layers of checkpoints, huddles in emergency meetings and issues proclamations that draw little attention on the streets or in foreign capitals.

And this might be the best Iraqis and the U.S. can hope for.

The surge of sectarian fighting after the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine last week has dealt a hard blow to hopes for creating a functioning Iraqi state. Instead of laboring to create a well-run economy or a participatory democracy, Iraqi and U.S. resources are being diverted into staving off a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.

Instead of an already difficult exercise in nation building, even Iraqi government officials say the formation of a new government probably will devolve into a series of capitulations to the various constituencies that have the power to plunge the nation, and the region, into chaos.

"We are dedicating all our time to ward off what might be dire consequences," said Hussein Ali Kamal, the interior minister's intelligence chief. "If the crimes and attacks increase, I do not think anyone in this country will survive."

The outlines of a future Iraq have begun to emerge: a nation where power is scattered among clerics turned warlords; control over schools, hospitals, railroads and roads is divided along sectarian lines; graft and corruption subvert good governance; and foreign powers exert influence over a weak central government.

The bleak prospects have serious implications for the United States. The U.S. government wants to tone down its overt political influence in Baghdad and decrease the number of troops — precisely at a time when the fledgling Iraqi government has shown itself incapable of keeping political or military control.

"This is something that's been leaning in this direction for some time, and the mosque incident has accelerated the process," said Edward Walker, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. "What we're talking about is people looking out for their own. I don't think it can be turned around."

Doomsayers long have warned that Iraq was turning into a failed state like Somalia or Taliban-era Afghanistan, a regional black hole. It's far too early to write Iraq off as a quagmire, but the threat of contagious instability looms large.

"The expectations of the United States and its allies have been lowered considerably," said Mark Sedra, a researcher specializing in rebuilding post-conflict countries at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, a German think tank. "Now the main goal is just creating a state that controls instability and contains the high levels of violence that prevail at the moment and prevents that violence from spilling over into neighboring states or destabilizing the region."

Even before last week's events, the power of Iraq's government had been overshadowed by an insurgency that shows no signs of letting up, a constitution that provides for a weak executive authority, and armed militias that run swaths of the country.

"All of this is creating great, great decentralization and a failure to provide services," said Phebe Marr, an Iraq specialist at the United States Institute for Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "Until they get a real central government, they're not going to provide any effective central authority. This is going to require some time, a long time."

Analysts say one of the major flaws in the three-year-old attempt to build an Iraqi government has been its reliance on religious and ethnic divisions.

Political parties, parliamentary blocs, army brigades and even ministries are breaking down along sectarian lines.

Keen to right the discrimination suffered by Shiites and Kurds under Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials encouraged sectarianism in an effort to ensure that all groups would be represented equally in the government. But many analysts say such governments are inherently unstable. Every political question turns into an existential threat or promise to one religious group or another.

Lebanon, too, cobbled together a sectarian system of political representation after its 15-year civil war. But what was intended as a temporary fix never has been vanquished. Years later, religious and ethnic identities still rule Lebanon, and remain a source of potential destabilization.

"They're really trying to take a shortcut by basing the whole thing on sectarian division," said U.N. adviser Timur Goksel, who watched Lebanon's civil war grind on and views Iraq's nation-building efforts with trepidation. "There's been almost no attempt to build institutions."

Signs of Iraq's "Lebanonization" abound.

Plans to crush militias long have been shelved. In Baghdad's Sadr City district, with 10 percent of Iraq's population, black-clad Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr rule the streets.

Even the U.S. military, which once clashed with the Mahdi Army in gunbattles in Baghdad and the country's Shiite south, grudgingly has come to accept it's here to stay. The Shiite militiamen could end up being melded into the official Iraqi security forces.

"Now is not the time for the Iraqi government to take specific action against the militias," Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said Saturday. "It's going to be worked over time."

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been trying to persuade Iraqis to appoint apolitical technocrats to head the sensitive ministries such as interior or defense. But with the recent outbursts of rage by Shiites and Sunnis who perceive themselves as victims, the best the United States and Iraqis might be able to hope for is to divide security forces along sectarian lines.

Parts of west Baghdad already are patrolled solely by Sunni-dominated army units, and parts of eastern Baghdad are patrolled solely by Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry units.

Repeatedly over the past few days, requests to police for information about damage to Sunni mosques in western Baghdad or the city's Sunni outskirts were met with a plaintive shrug: Police don't enter certain parts of the city or countryside.

"There has been a lot of movement of people of one sect or another into certain branches of the military or the police," said Walker, now president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "We've tried, but it's hard to integrate them. But I don't see that there's any mood to integrate at this point."

The United States hoped that qualified Iraqi politicians and professionals would emerge from the rubble of Saddam's regime and lead Iraq. Instead, once-exiled politicians with ties to political parties and militias run the country and divvy up its spoils.

The result has been a patronage system in which ministries are viewed as cash cows for supporters. Ministries have become rife with corruption and payoffs. Jobs are doled out to political supporters.

"It's expected that you reward your own," Walker said. "It goes down to the tribal base of these societies. You don't have a sense of nationalism."

Like Lebanon, whose sovereignty has been encroached repeatedly by more powerful neighbors, Iraq remains a geopolitical playground for foreign countries.

Iraq's weak central government and lack of strong national identity has led neighboring countries to support the interests of their sectarian or ethnic kin: Iranians back the Shiites; Turks back the Turkoman minority; Jordan and Saudi Arabia back Sunnis.

"It's clear that various states in the region are hedging their bets ... ," said Sedra, who has studied the Iraq, Afghanistan and Balkan conflicts. "The Iraqi government is trying to assert its own sovereignty, but it has failed."