What Muntadhar the Shoe Thrower Reveals About the Mistakes of the Iraq Invasion
I had to write about the shoe thrower. Aside from anything else, one running theme of the blog is about how broad social and cultural trends in the Muslim world towards resistance to the dominant Western power can and do influence law in the Muslim world. Well this might not be law, but it certainly is an extremely obvious demonstration of the resonance of the resistance paradigm in the Muslim street. In fact it's the reductio ad absurdum of the resistance, because this guy doesn't really stand for anything that anyone knows about other than resistance to the West. The broader Muslim world doesn't really know or care whether he is Sunni or Shi'i, Arab or Kurd, nationalist or Islamist, liberal or conservative, socialist or capitalist, the only thing they care about is that he threw a shoe at President Bush. That alone is supposed to be heroism. The idea that such silly and meaningless "resistance" can render a man into a hero, and that these powerful currents that effect this are not going to have an effect on the law, that the law remains the province of the classical doctors and may be safely divorced from politics, it just does not make sense to me.
But everyone knows I suppose how I feel about so many broader antiseptic attempts to interpret law separate from broader social, political, economic considerations (at least insofar as they are supposed to tell us something useful about legal outcome and law as applied as instrument of the state), so I thought I'd throw a different light on this subject. I think this story helps to show something else too, which is precisely why so many of us Iraqi expatriates were so terribly wrong about the course Iraq would take following the US invasion.
There is an early arresting scene in HBO's recent docudrama on the life of Saddam entitled The House of Saddam. (It actually is worth seeing, terribly entertaining and largely accurate, even if some of it is clearly dramatized for a Western audience. Saddam's wife did not burst into a Cabinet meeting to rail about Saddam killing her brother, that doesn't happen in macho Iraqi society.) Uday, Saddam's son has just killed Saddam's favorite staff man, a fixer and facilitator of sorts, by beating him to death at a party. Saddam is furious and screams at Uday, ARE WE BARBARIANS????
There is something telling about this scene, in that the person screaming has killed more Iraqis than any other regime in Iraq combined. But in Saddam's mind, there is a distinction. There is killing people to eliminate opponents, real or perceived, and there is bludgeoning a man at a party with a stick like a chimpanzee. Uday had done the latter, Saddam, in his mind, with his murder of hundreds of thousands, the former.
Saddam was trying to make a distinction I think he thought he had gleaned from particular classes of Iraqis, in particular the urban, educated elite Iraqis who pre-Saddam ran the place. Most of them are Sunni, but the Shi'a held their own within the merchant classes, not the government, for decades prior to Saddam. I am a product of this Iraq. Historically, these Iraqis traveled abroad, often were educated in Western Europe, were often secular though not always, some were clerics, and did not so much deny sect as not consider it the kind of thing you were supposed to say much about other than that it shouldn't matter--think educated white people in the US. It didn't mean sectarianism didn't exist, but certainly nobody in these circles went around asking if someone was Shi'i or Sunni, that's simply uncivilized. And certainly nobody went around dashing people's brains on the pavement at a party. And finally, and most pertinently for this post, nobody threw their shoes at someone else. In Baghdad, as a child, my cousin did once, at a neighbor's kid. It caused quite a ruckus I remember, I was terrified about what would happen. As expected, the neighbor brought over the shoe and told the story. As she smacked my cousin, my aunt shouted, you guessed it, are we barbarians?
But there is another Iraq, a poorer one, an angrier one, a more sectarian and tribal one, which seethed beneath the surface all of those years, emerging to the fore with the arrival of Saddam. In this Iraq, violence is cheap, and to kill a man not a matter of much broader concern to the state, or the elite. One's tribe is a central source of identity, one's sect a matter to be advocated to the end. (What, you guys think Muhammad left the caliphate to Abu Bakr???? Are you crazy???). This is a neglected Iraq, caught in slumlands or isolated villages, ignored by the jetsetting ultrarich elite as just some backwards parts of the country that eventually would catch up, or if not who cares. (Yes some of this attitude displayed by the urbanites is definitely elitist, but I've been to writers' conferences on either coast where I've heard somewhat similar things about West Virginians.) They threw the shoes. And THAT is the Iraq that Saddam hailed from.
Saddam may have spent enough time in Baghdad to fancy himself an urban elite, though I don't think he qualifies in the slightest. Nevertheless, as is well known (and you can see for yourself on the House of Saddam --actually buy my book on the sidebar and you get even a better idea and then I do get a royalty), he surrounded himself with henchmen who his own daughter Raghad in an interview from Jordan famously stated would never have become so much as village schoolteachers if her father had never come to power. These were the barbarians held in such contempt by the upper crust, shoe throwers, folks who beat people with staffs and didn't know how to behave properly.
So what did so much of the educated, urban elite do? Well they left. Not just because the henchmen who now ruled them were in fact barbarians, but more because of what barbarians do when they take control, they act barbarically. The level of killing and repression increased, and it was pretty much time to leave if you had any level of significance in the society. Meanwhile, through war and brain drain and sanctions after that, the country's economic condition declined, and the other Iraq began to assert itself more forcefully. It's numbers grew as the elite dwindled. And this poor was angry. No of course they weren't all ruthless barbarians who threw lots of shoes, I'm not saying that. I am saying that they lived in conditions where barbarity would naturally flourish, and so it did.
Urban Iraqis who were once in control and left when they were in control have had a hard time adjusting. I didn't even know my tribe when I returned to Iraq, why would anyone civilized ask something so silly? I come back to the US on a trip, shocked by it all, asking what tribe I was, and none in the diaspora believed me when I said it is important and I need to know. Only to the backwards and ignorant care, they might reply. In the US, Ahmed Chalabi is the bogeyman who sold the US a bill of goods on how easy the Iraq invasion would be, but the thing is, at least on the point of whether or not Iraqis would support the invasion (NOT on WMD), much of the diaspora would have said much of what Ahmed said. Some, particularly Sunnis, were not on board with the message of welcome, but certainly even they didn't expect the levels of appalling killing that we all witnessed, of Iraqi civilians. Indeed, in the diaspora, it was assumed, it is still assumed, that most of the killings must be by foreigners, because Iraqis are not barbarians.
These errors have led to significant numbers of errors of judgment on the part of the diaspora, at least in my view, as one who learned Iraq through their eyes and then went back and saw it for myself. It led to the death of a clerical leading light, Abdul Majeed al Khu'i, who came back from London to Najaf and in trying to protect the Najaf sanctuary appointee of Saddam from being ripped apart limb from limb in Shi'i Islam's Holy Center (he may have been a Saddam appointee, Khu'i no doubt thought, but are we barbarians?) found himself stabbed to death in the same Holy Place by the henchmen of Iraq's current Barbarian in Chief, the rough necked uncouth unclean Moqtada al Sadr who can't even speak gramatically correct Arabic (seriously). It led to their, actually our, failure to see that so much of Iraq now had descended into this barbaric madness, where our old parlor room politics and backroom business dealings had no place. It is now a place where a youthful and semi retarded gangster thug with a turban wrapped poorly around his head actually has one of the largest followings in Parliament and where a village can hang the charred bodies of American security contractors over a bridge and dance in the street to celebrate to the delight of many.
That isn't to say the old guard is entirely gone--Ayad Allawi's group is almost entirely that old guard. Hakim is old guard. Many have followings across the economic spectrum, again the point isn't all poor people or uneducated people or rural people are barbaric. So I don't mean to say the situation is hopeless or lost. I do mean to say there is much more to it than the diaspora has proved itself able to grasp.
And to me, Montadher the Shoe Thrower well demonstrates the fault line between the two sides. There are plenty of educated Sunnis among the elite, Awakening Council people, doctors, expats, who think of Montadher like Lincoln thought of John Brown (though I come out the other way on Lincoln and Brown)--as someone who was trying to fight an evil (slavery to Brown, the occupation to the Sunnis) but went about it in such a stupid and uncivilized and destabilizing fashion that he may well have done more harm than good. Maliki who negotiated a pretty tough agreement with Bush on the status of forces but is obviously more prone to Bush than Sunnis was horrified, and the words used ("shameful, disgraceful") by his office and others within the traditional elite ("barbaric, uncivlized") transcend the political spectrum. That's the old guard, the traditional elites, who decry the shoe throwing even as they might, or might not, oppose the American presence.
Then there are the Sadrists, the angry, menacing Iraqi street, the dispossessed, the poor, Sunni and Shi'i (again, transcending the sectarian line) who thought of the shoe throwing not as petulant, uncivilized and disgraceful but as an act of genuine and honorable protest against an illegitimate occupation. Clearly, based on what I've seen, the latter are quite a force, and no amount of YouTubing and blogging (I am guilty of this) about how inane and positively ridiculous Moqtada al Sadr sounds, no such contempt, is going to erase this central reality.
In a way, it's our fault, just like it was the Iranian liberals' fault that Ahmedinijad won, and the secularists' fault that AK is so popular in Turkey (though I actually like AK a great deal). In Iraq, we dropped the ball. We neglected the poor and dispossessed, held them in contempt, let them stay poor and dispossessed and while we might be excused from anything when Saddam was in power, we kept on with the contempt and neglect afterwards. We paid no attention, left them to seethe in poverty and anger. So they went with the guy who spoke to them, the one who was in Iraq when they were, who suffered with them and gave voice to their anger. So in a way, we helped create the conditions that let this barbarism explode so terrifyingly across the country. That must change, or we will all be barbarians soon enough.
HAH
But everyone knows I suppose how I feel about so many broader antiseptic attempts to interpret law separate from broader social, political, economic considerations (at least insofar as they are supposed to tell us something useful about legal outcome and law as applied as instrument of the state), so I thought I'd throw a different light on this subject. I think this story helps to show something else too, which is precisely why so many of us Iraqi expatriates were so terribly wrong about the course Iraq would take following the US invasion.
There is an early arresting scene in HBO's recent docudrama on the life of Saddam entitled The House of Saddam. (It actually is worth seeing, terribly entertaining and largely accurate, even if some of it is clearly dramatized for a Western audience. Saddam's wife did not burst into a Cabinet meeting to rail about Saddam killing her brother, that doesn't happen in macho Iraqi society.) Uday, Saddam's son has just killed Saddam's favorite staff man, a fixer and facilitator of sorts, by beating him to death at a party. Saddam is furious and screams at Uday, ARE WE BARBARIANS????
There is something telling about this scene, in that the person screaming has killed more Iraqis than any other regime in Iraq combined. But in Saddam's mind, there is a distinction. There is killing people to eliminate opponents, real or perceived, and there is bludgeoning a man at a party with a stick like a chimpanzee. Uday had done the latter, Saddam, in his mind, with his murder of hundreds of thousands, the former.
Saddam was trying to make a distinction I think he thought he had gleaned from particular classes of Iraqis, in particular the urban, educated elite Iraqis who pre-Saddam ran the place. Most of them are Sunni, but the Shi'a held their own within the merchant classes, not the government, for decades prior to Saddam. I am a product of this Iraq. Historically, these Iraqis traveled abroad, often were educated in Western Europe, were often secular though not always, some were clerics, and did not so much deny sect as not consider it the kind of thing you were supposed to say much about other than that it shouldn't matter--think educated white people in the US. It didn't mean sectarianism didn't exist, but certainly nobody in these circles went around asking if someone was Shi'i or Sunni, that's simply uncivilized. And certainly nobody went around dashing people's brains on the pavement at a party. And finally, and most pertinently for this post, nobody threw their shoes at someone else. In Baghdad, as a child, my cousin did once, at a neighbor's kid. It caused quite a ruckus I remember, I was terrified about what would happen. As expected, the neighbor brought over the shoe and told the story. As she smacked my cousin, my aunt shouted, you guessed it, are we barbarians?
But there is another Iraq, a poorer one, an angrier one, a more sectarian and tribal one, which seethed beneath the surface all of those years, emerging to the fore with the arrival of Saddam. In this Iraq, violence is cheap, and to kill a man not a matter of much broader concern to the state, or the elite. One's tribe is a central source of identity, one's sect a matter to be advocated to the end. (What, you guys think Muhammad left the caliphate to Abu Bakr???? Are you crazy???). This is a neglected Iraq, caught in slumlands or isolated villages, ignored by the jetsetting ultrarich elite as just some backwards parts of the country that eventually would catch up, or if not who cares. (Yes some of this attitude displayed by the urbanites is definitely elitist, but I've been to writers' conferences on either coast where I've heard somewhat similar things about West Virginians.) They threw the shoes. And THAT is the Iraq that Saddam hailed from.
Saddam may have spent enough time in Baghdad to fancy himself an urban elite, though I don't think he qualifies in the slightest. Nevertheless, as is well known (and you can see for yourself on the House of Saddam --actually buy my book on the sidebar and you get even a better idea and then I do get a royalty), he surrounded himself with henchmen who his own daughter Raghad in an interview from Jordan famously stated would never have become so much as village schoolteachers if her father had never come to power. These were the barbarians held in such contempt by the upper crust, shoe throwers, folks who beat people with staffs and didn't know how to behave properly.
So what did so much of the educated, urban elite do? Well they left. Not just because the henchmen who now ruled them were in fact barbarians, but more because of what barbarians do when they take control, they act barbarically. The level of killing and repression increased, and it was pretty much time to leave if you had any level of significance in the society. Meanwhile, through war and brain drain and sanctions after that, the country's economic condition declined, and the other Iraq began to assert itself more forcefully. It's numbers grew as the elite dwindled. And this poor was angry. No of course they weren't all ruthless barbarians who threw lots of shoes, I'm not saying that. I am saying that they lived in conditions where barbarity would naturally flourish, and so it did.
Urban Iraqis who were once in control and left when they were in control have had a hard time adjusting. I didn't even know my tribe when I returned to Iraq, why would anyone civilized ask something so silly? I come back to the US on a trip, shocked by it all, asking what tribe I was, and none in the diaspora believed me when I said it is important and I need to know. Only to the backwards and ignorant care, they might reply. In the US, Ahmed Chalabi is the bogeyman who sold the US a bill of goods on how easy the Iraq invasion would be, but the thing is, at least on the point of whether or not Iraqis would support the invasion (NOT on WMD), much of the diaspora would have said much of what Ahmed said. Some, particularly Sunnis, were not on board with the message of welcome, but certainly even they didn't expect the levels of appalling killing that we all witnessed, of Iraqi civilians. Indeed, in the diaspora, it was assumed, it is still assumed, that most of the killings must be by foreigners, because Iraqis are not barbarians.
These errors have led to significant numbers of errors of judgment on the part of the diaspora, at least in my view, as one who learned Iraq through their eyes and then went back and saw it for myself. It led to the death of a clerical leading light, Abdul Majeed al Khu'i, who came back from London to Najaf and in trying to protect the Najaf sanctuary appointee of Saddam from being ripped apart limb from limb in Shi'i Islam's Holy Center (he may have been a Saddam appointee, Khu'i no doubt thought, but are we barbarians?) found himself stabbed to death in the same Holy Place by the henchmen of Iraq's current Barbarian in Chief, the rough necked uncouth unclean Moqtada al Sadr who can't even speak gramatically correct Arabic (seriously). It led to their, actually our, failure to see that so much of Iraq now had descended into this barbaric madness, where our old parlor room politics and backroom business dealings had no place. It is now a place where a youthful and semi retarded gangster thug with a turban wrapped poorly around his head actually has one of the largest followings in Parliament and where a village can hang the charred bodies of American security contractors over a bridge and dance in the street to celebrate to the delight of many.
That isn't to say the old guard is entirely gone--Ayad Allawi's group is almost entirely that old guard. Hakim is old guard. Many have followings across the economic spectrum, again the point isn't all poor people or uneducated people or rural people are barbaric. So I don't mean to say the situation is hopeless or lost. I do mean to say there is much more to it than the diaspora has proved itself able to grasp.
And to me, Montadher the Shoe Thrower well demonstrates the fault line between the two sides. There are plenty of educated Sunnis among the elite, Awakening Council people, doctors, expats, who think of Montadher like Lincoln thought of John Brown (though I come out the other way on Lincoln and Brown)--as someone who was trying to fight an evil (slavery to Brown, the occupation to the Sunnis) but went about it in such a stupid and uncivilized and destabilizing fashion that he may well have done more harm than good. Maliki who negotiated a pretty tough agreement with Bush on the status of forces but is obviously more prone to Bush than Sunnis was horrified, and the words used ("shameful, disgraceful") by his office and others within the traditional elite ("barbaric, uncivlized") transcend the political spectrum. That's the old guard, the traditional elites, who decry the shoe throwing even as they might, or might not, oppose the American presence.
Then there are the Sadrists, the angry, menacing Iraqi street, the dispossessed, the poor, Sunni and Shi'i (again, transcending the sectarian line) who thought of the shoe throwing not as petulant, uncivilized and disgraceful but as an act of genuine and honorable protest against an illegitimate occupation. Clearly, based on what I've seen, the latter are quite a force, and no amount of YouTubing and blogging (I am guilty of this) about how inane and positively ridiculous Moqtada al Sadr sounds, no such contempt, is going to erase this central reality.
In a way, it's our fault, just like it was the Iranian liberals' fault that Ahmedinijad won, and the secularists' fault that AK is so popular in Turkey (though I actually like AK a great deal). In Iraq, we dropped the ball. We neglected the poor and dispossessed, held them in contempt, let them stay poor and dispossessed and while we might be excused from anything when Saddam was in power, we kept on with the contempt and neglect afterwards. We paid no attention, left them to seethe in poverty and anger. So they went with the guy who spoke to them, the one who was in Iraq when they were, who suffered with them and gave voice to their anger. So in a way, we helped create the conditions that let this barbarism explode so terrifyingly across the country. That must change, or we will all be barbarians soon enough.
HAH
This all makes sense, and is very illuminating for a non-Iraqi, but there is another dimension too. As a form of political protest, "the shoe" will be much more iconic I think than almost all acts of insurgent violent. It will be one of the enduring images of Bush's war, the bookend to his "Mission Accomplished" speech.
Personally, I think it is great to have a wider range of symbolic, effective and poignant - yet non-violent - acts of resistance and opposition. I hope Zeidi remains a hero; maybe it will push aside a bit the image of the suicide bomber video as a model for bravery and opposition.
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The woes in Iraq did not begin because you and the other diaspora "elites" abandoned the Iraqi downtrodden to people like Moqtada al-Sadr, failing to "guide" them. The suffering of Iraq began when the British colonial powers reared their heads along the Mesopotamian horizon. It is they who created that class of "elites" who began to look Westward, often looking down on their own people. The bloodshed in Iraq had been foretold in the Hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad as well as other pre-Islamic Scriptures dating to the Messiah 'Isa. The Muslims were warned that they should remain united and prepared for the impending invasion of the armies of the world that would come to divide them. In the 1920s, the British did everything in their power to oppose self-rule and Arab independence. They knew if they lost Iraq, they would lose Iran, India, and their empire. Moqtada al-Sadr, who you clearly look down upon, came from a long line of mujtahids, the highest Shi'ite authorities. In the early 1920s, they used their pulpits to stir up jihad against the invading infidels. Sunnis and Shi'ites put aside their ancient differences and joined forces all over Iraq. In Kadhimain, a suburb of Baghdad, resided a member of one of the most religiously educated Shi'ite families, namely Sayyid Hassan al-Sadr. He had extended family in Cairo, London, Rome, and Paris. He possessed a grand library, and he too (like Moqtada) wore a turban that kept falling on his face. He opposed the presence of the British, as well as the French in Syria and Lebanon. He knew that Islam forbade any alliances with the outside invaders. That was commanded by God, and all references are in Scriptures. Islamic law forbids any alliance with non-Believers, if it brings harm to the Believers. The Sadrs are the salt of the earth who know their religion. The shoe-throwing is not an act of barbarism, but an expression of how deep the hostility against the invaders runs in the blood of the Iraqi people. The true barbarian is the invader, not the defender of the faith. It is the outside invader, who uses false pretexts to seize the gates of his perceived enemy, who is "uncivilized." Abu Ghraib is a perfect example of how "uncivilized" this enemy is. When the shoes flew at the "uncivilized" George W. Bush, in the heart of the "cradle of civilization", it spoke volumes. Those Iraqi "elites" who identified enough with the West, and who brought the scourge of invasion upon the downtrodden people they left behind, joined the forces of the "uncivilized." They should have been paying attention to the Sadr clan of the 1920s who, in their humility and comprehension of their faith, knew that this was the enemy forewarned in their Scriptures, and only a fool would join forces with them or even stoop to the level of admiring them.
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Ah where to begin with the false information you've spouted. So many errors, so little time. Let's just focus on three.
FIRST, clearly you don't understand the Shi'a elite. I hate to embarrass you so publicly (actually, not really), but my father's "elite" family,adn the other large Shi'a merchant families like them, largely married with the Hakims, and the Sadrs. My uncle studied with Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr and was executed only days after him. Another married the daughter of Muhammad Baqer al Hakim, making him my cousin's grandfather. Some of my father's family married into the clerics, others married into the merchants, like the Chalabis and the Damircis. So this notion that somehow the Sadrs are "salt of the earth" and divorced from the elite Shia families for which you have such contempt is beyond ridiculous, it's flat wrong. What do you think supported the mujtahids of Najaf but the merchants of Baghdad and Basra?
SECOND, there's this notion you have of Moqtada al Sadr being a fulfillment of the family's dreams and ambitions, as if there is some Sadr monolith. (Wonder where you put Hussein al Sadr, the current one, the ALLY of the elite Ayad Allawi--Allawi, another prominent merchant family--my maternal uncle married one of them, yet another Sadr to elite merchant family link) Anyway, perhaps I shouldn't toot my own horn, but if you knew anything about any scholarship that exists in US universities and law schools respecting Iraq Shi'ism, you wouldn't be giving me lectures about the Sadr family. Google my name and the word Sadr and see what turns up, in the law journals, on SSRN, on the premier international law blogs, and the like. So I think I know a bit or two about Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr's work. And this jackass Moqtada does not have an intellect that comes close to comparing, the notion that you are going to equate Moqtada with Sayyid Muhammad Baqir or Sayyid Hassan or Sayyid Musa for that matter is really laughable. Read Iqtisaduna, get a transcript of ANY Friday speech of Moqtada (the murderer of holy clerics let me point out)) and I think if one is literate one will surely notice a slight difference in the intellectual capabilities of each author. One was a fertile and fecund mind and the other is mentally challenged.
FINALLY, and most absurdly, is your idea that Moqtada is somehow bringing about the uniting of the Muslims through resistance to the West while we elites believe in division, discord and aping the West. I really laughed out loud at that one. Muhammad Baqer clearly at times (as in Iqtisaduna) was ecumenical though at times, later in his life (his Lamha Tamheedia) less so. Sayyid Musa was absolutely trying to bring Sunnis into his Amal movement. (How'd that turn out in the end by the way?) And Moqtada's men slaughtered Sunnis in the streets the days following the bombing of the Askari mosque. Asked for ID's and slit the throats of anyone with the name Omar. Heap all the scorn upon the elites that you like in your misguided praise of Moqtada, my Omar friends are in no danger from me, nor I from them. But they should be as scared of getting near the Mahdi Army as I am getting close to Ansar al Sunna. Sectarianism doesn't come from the top.
HAH
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It may sometimes be hard for those whose heads or chests were not stepped upon by American soldiers to realize what would have pushed Muntazar Al-Zeidi to do what he did.
Personally, if i had my 70-years old father being pulled and beaten by an American soldier, while my father did nothing wrong to deserve that, except being an Iraqi; or if this same thing happened to me, then i won't hesitate to at least yell at Bush no matter where i'd see him!
It's a good thing he'll be movin' out in one month's time!
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Z, thanks for the email. Your inside Iraq perspective is always welcome and deeply needed.
I actually don't think you'd actually throw a shoe at Bush or anyone else, I think you sort of implicitly admit that in your comment by saying you would yell at him if the same had happened to your father. It shows how deeply mua'ddab you and Iraqis like you are, relative to the Sadrists. That was really what I was trying to get at in the post.
Anyway, I sort of view Muntadhar the Shoe Thrower like Joe the Plumber, not necessarily himself worthy of attention as an individual, but as a phenomenon quite interesting and revealing. So it's more the reaction to Muntadhar the Shoe Thrower than the person himself that I find worthy of investigation.
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