When the war in Iraq began, it was America against the terrorists. We were fighting to protect our nation from an Iraqi leadership that aided the men responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The recent increase in Iraqi violence, however, is hardly related to the presence of American troops. Rather, this Middle Eastern nation is plagued by religious warfare between two sects of Islam, the Shiites, and the Sunnis. Although these two groups are plastered across articles detailing the upsurge in Iraqi kidnappings and bombings, Americans may still be mostly unaware of who the Shiites and Sunnis are, and why they have been unable to work together and achieve national harmony.
The Shiite/Sunni division spans back more than 1,000 years in history, to the death of Mohammed around 650 AD. Although both groups recognize Mohammed as the founder of Islam and therefore as having the utmost authority in religious teaching, the sects’ differences emerged with the question of who would take over Mohammed’s position of state leadership.
The group that would later become Shiites believed that upon Mohammed’s death, his cousin Ali deserved to take over the position of Islam leadership. The Sunni side dissented, instead supporting a close friend of Mohammed named Abu Baker. Abu was made leader, and that power stayed in Sunni hands until Ali’s appointment a few years later. In 661, however, Ali was murdered.
The strife between Shiites and Sunnis vying for governmental power continues into modern times; today, the battle plays out with bombings of one another’s religious sites and arguments over political representation. Under Sunni Muslim Saddam Hussein, the Shiite sect experienced closure of its mosques, and expressed resentment that although their sect made up 60 percent of Iraqi Muslims, the Sunnis still made up the majority of the Iraq government.
With the U.S.-led invasion and recent Iraq elections, Shiites seem closer to attaining that desired equality. The Shiite party now holds 128 seats on the Iraqi Council of Representatives, compared to the 55 held by Sunnis. Recent news stories detail the Sunni fear that future Iraq oil wealth will go primarily to a Shiite/Kurdish alliance. In the tradition of power shifts that have been occurring since the death of Mohammed, political control is once again changing hands between two religious sects.
And the new balance in who has the ruling power is coming at the expense of Iraqi citizens. Homicides have increased to more than 30 per day; bodies turn up daily in street gutters and dumpsters displaying gunshot wounds to the head and evidence of torture. The shootings and bombing are occurring along sectarian lines, meaning that the age old debate as to which man deserved to succeed Mohammed now determines which Iraqi citizen deserves to be murdered.
When the United States entered Iraq, our goal was simple: Remove the dictator, give power to the oppressed, establish a fair and functioning government, and get out. What our government failed to take into account was that Saddam Hussein was a product, rather than the creator, of Sunni/Shiite animosity. Hussein’s oppression of the Kurds and the Shiites during his reign was preceded by the fact of violence between the two groups; unfortunately, the United States attempted to remove a symptom of religious strife rather than addressing the Sunni/Shiite conflict itself. Saddam may be outsted, but it is obvious that peace in the Middle East is predicated upon ending religious rivalry and violence, rather than preventing authoritarian rule.
Now that the United States has entrenched itself in the battlefield between Iraqi sects, what is our nation’s next plan of action? In the past six months violence against the U.S. military has decreased by more than 50 percent, while Iraqi citizens were almost twice as likely to be murdered in March as they were in October. How can America win a war that is no longer for the sake of either terrorism or the United States?
Iraq will not be healed until the Shiites and the Sunnis can come together and discuss what each group wants, and how each sect wants to be treated. Rather than turning a blind eye to the possibility of all out civil war, as the Bush administration is currently doing, the United States needs to take a preemptive step and arrange a diplomatic setting wherein representatives from both sects of Islam can discuss what specific policies are necessary to end homicides and bombings against one another. If one out of every three American military personnel in Iraq were replaced by a trained diplomat, perhaps for the first time in over 1,000 years the Shiite/Sunni dispute might have a real chance at reconciliation.

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