Iraqis on the Violence

This interesting article in the NY Times reports on the reaction of everyday Iraqis not to the bombing of the Shiite shrine, but to the violent outbursts that followed the bombing:

After a day of violence so raw and so personal, Iraqis woke on Thursday morning to a tense new world in which, it seemed, anything was possible.

The violence on Wednesday was the closest Iraq had come to civil war, and Iraqis were stunned. In Al Amin, a neighborhood in southeast Baghdad, a Shiite man said he had watched gunmen set a house on fire. It was identified as the residence of Sunni Arab militants, said the man, Abu Abbas, though no one seemed to know for sure who they were.

"We all were shocked," said Abu Abbas, a vegetable seller, standing near crates of oranges and tomatoes. "We saw it burning. We called the fire department. We didn't know how to behave. Chaos was everywhere."

It would seem many Iraqis felt as if they were on their own:

As the afternoon dragged on and law enforcers were nowhere to be seen, neighborhoods seemed to shrink into themselves, setting up makeshift roadblocks out of the trunks of palm trees and, pieces of castaway metal stoves.

It was behind such a barricade that a frightened group of Sunni men took refuge, blocking off the entrance to their mosque, Malik bin Anas, in Al Moalimin district. Men with machine guns stood on the roof, their faces wrapped in scarves.

One man describes how the bombing brought out the violent reaction on the part of the Shiites:

All the pain and anger of the past three years seemed to burst to the surface in the bombing of the Samarra shrine, said one marcher, Abbas Allawi Metheb, an employee in the Trade Ministry. It was as if the Shiites' heart had been torn out.

"You have a TV, you follow the news," he said. "Who is most often killed? Whose mosques are exploded? Whose society was destroyed?" Shiites are fed up, and heeded their leaders' calls for restraint only grudgingly. The anger, he said, is simmering. "Maybe this is just the beginning."

Violence can have a transformative effect, and in all political violence there is a point at which it feels to the participants as if all of the old rules and norms of conduct have vanished or melted away, to be replaced by the freedom to perpetrate acts of murder and mayhem which characterize so many civil wars, and often leads to some organized form of warfare between participants (Bosnia), but which can also just as easily lead to mass anarchy and chaos (Rwanda.) Even in the midst of often horrific violence, Iraqis seemed to have gotten somewhat used to the political instability, daily threats of attacks and bombings that have colored their lives for the past three years. So for the Iraqis to feel that something fundamental has changed almost overnight tell us how perilously close Iraq is to a real civil war.