The Message From the Sunni Heartland

[GoBlue]

What I saw was a society feeling its way into the future, almost blindly and without consensus. In those days, it wasn't unusual to come upon an argument between an elderly patriarch who wanted to cooperate with the occupation and a son who wanted to kill Americans. Other sons and cousins might want contracts with the American Army. Occasionally, I was asked to act as an intermediary to arrange such contracts for men who were themselves fighting the occupation to get money to support their families.

A country going through fast changes is bound to be opaque, especially from the outside. But when I read now about attempts to lure Sunni Arabs into the democratic process, I recall how this population can seem incoherent even to the Sunnis themselves. A mix of forces is at work within it: tribal divisions, sectarian differences, class tensions and an Arab nationalism with conflicting views of Saddam Hussein's regime.
-snip-

The Sunni Arabs have run Iraq since the Ottoman era under the same illusion that affects every group in controls of a society - that they are the natural rulers because they are more educated and harder working. They often view the predominantly Shia southern Iraq as lazy, corrupt and promiscuous. This is not so much a sectarian division as a cultural one, a north-south relationship with almost racist overtones. It is this attitude, combined with a fear of Iran, that allows many Sunnis to justify Saddam Hussein's oppression of the Shiites.

But the north-south relationship is complicated and not one expressed merely by contempt. For instance, people from Ramadi and Fallujah are fond of people from Basra because of the southern city's disarming friendliness and relaxed mores, which made it at one time a kind of Iraqi New Orleans.
-more-

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/weekinreview/22graham.html?pagewanted=1