When I was in primary school, there were no children of Catholic parents in my school. Those children went to a separate Catholic school.
We viewed them with fear and suspicion, fuelled by our parents’ prejudices. We chanted silly, insulting songs at about them in the street and they chanted them back.
Fortunately, it was at the tail end of widespread religious intolerance in Australia. By the late 1960s children of Catholic and Protestant mixed more freely. By the 1980s religious sectarianism was over. Before that religion could influence careers and economic advancement generally.
Australia was lucky that its economic position was generally so good that Catholics did not suffer the sustained economic or political repression that erupts into violence as in Northern Ireland.
Children in Australia may have had powerful hatreds, fears and prejudices visited upon them by their parents, but they were usually not realised upon becoming adults. In so many other places – where the economic pickings are leaner that has not been so: the Indian sub-continent, Lebanon, the Balkans and now Iraq.
More Americans have been killed in the invasion of Iraq than in the attacks of 11 September, 2001, which generated the war. That milestone was reached this week.
In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died or fled.
Why did America imagine that once the dictator Saddam Hussein was removed Iraqis would be grateful to the Americans and live in peace, democracy and oil-supplying prosperity?
Once the Americans removed the notionally Sunni Saddam, the Shi-ite majority was bound to use the opportunity for revenge and to say it is now our turn to wield power and enjoy the economic fruits of it. After all, the Shi-ites (a majority in Iraq) had suffered years of repression and poor economic opportunity.
By removing Saddam, America has unleashed a religious civil war. The prejudices and different beliefs go back more than a thousand years and are equally or more fierce as the differences between Catholics and Protestants. And equally as silly.
The groups diverged after Mohammad died in 632. The Sunnis chose Abu Bakr, the Mohammad’s adviser, to become the first successor, or caliph, to lead the Muslim state. The Shi-ites preferred bloodline succession and chose Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali and his successors are called imams are considered to be descendants of Mohammad. The Sunni accuse the Shi-ites of murdering the third caliph and the Shi-ites accuse the Sunni of killing Ali’s son.
The Sunni Caliphs can be traced through to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The Shi-ites felt they had no single leader from the disappearance of the 12th imam in 931 until the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to leadership in Iran in 1978.
The American deaths are now but a side-show to a religious civil war. The Sunnis and Shi-ites are killing each other. It is not “ethnic cleansing” because their ethnicity is the same – it is religious cleansing. It is not “terrorism” or “sectarian violence”, but religious violence. It is stoked by generations of indoctrination, fear, desire for revenge and the desire to get out of poverty and get power and the oil wealth that might come with it.
The religious nature of the violence and the religious nature of divide in Iraq was made plain in the election at the beginning of this year when Shi-ites diligently observed the advice of their leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and voted for Shi-ite religious parties.
That was not effective democracy. Not even in America do voters follow their religious leaders’ edicts so slavishly.
The Shi-ites got control of the Government and game was up. The Sunnis were not going to tolerate it. A month after the election they bombed the Golden Mosque the mausoleum to 10th and 11th imams. And the religious violence has continued ever since.
In the face of this, there is not a great deal that the US, Britain and Australia can do.
Britain has certainly realised it and organised itself a face-saving exit. The US appears to be realising it and muttering about how the US can’t help it if Iraq cannot help itself.
That leaves Australia like a shag on a rock. No doubt we will do whatever the Americans do, but the trouble is we don’t know what that is right now. So our Government retains the clichés of only “staying the course” and leaving only “when the job is done” and not “cutting and running”.
But what is the “job” to be done? – What, sort out more than a thousand years of religious hostility and violence?
We know Australian soldiers like overseas service because they are paid very well when they do it, compared to their miserable pay at home. Maybe that’s why military advice is to “stay the course”. But the course is too long.
The whole adventure from destroying weapons of mass destruction which did not exist anyway, to toppling a tyrant (while leaving others in place everywhere) to emplacing a beach-head democracy in the Middle East was doomed and wrong from the start.
You cannot turn a society riven with religious fears and hatreds and poverty into a real democracy in a couple of years.
When the US goes, the religious civil war will go on for a while yet before they exhaust themselves and the mass of the population demand a political solution. But while ever the US stays, the Shi-ites and Sunnis will never work out a political solution.
Leaving may be messy but staying will be messier.