On Sectarianism

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We start with a bang. Last night The Frontline Club brought together on the same stage three urbane envoys to the Court of St James (the Iraqi Ambassador, the Syrian Ambassador, and the US Deputy Head of Mission) and two expert journalists (The Times’s Richard Beeston and The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, author of “The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq”), with Channel4 News anchor Jon Snow in the chair. Their brief was to dissect the report of the Iraq Study Group (“The Baker Commission”), and to pass judgement on the Bush administration’s brazen response to it.

Readers of Richard Beeston’s and Patrick Cockburn’s dispatches and books will be familiar with their informed and tightly argued positions. They pulled no punches in representing them, with customary British-journalistic flair.

Naturally, the particular interest of the evening, for many, lay in the interaction between the three ambassadors. (Let’s call a spade a spade, the US Deputy Head of Mission is normally the career diplomat who’s the de facto ambassador. The official ambassador is all too often a mere Presidential appointee.) It was extraordinary to see these three share a stage (and if only an Iranian chargé d’affaires had been present). As Jon Snow observed (in our interview with him after the talk) it was even more extraordinary to see (and hear) them share a dinner table in the Frontline bar.

The other striking element of the evening was the passionate argument, among both panellists and punters, about the origins of today’s rampant sectarianism in Iraq. (See clip below.) The Iraqi Ambassador, an (ex-LSE) academician, suggested he might devote his retirement to the study of this complex question. He nevertheless essayed the speculation (averring that there’s actually not a single Iraqi family that’s not of mixed ethnic composition) that Western intellectuals and journalists have read too much into this phenomenon. In response Patrick Cockburn, scion of celebrated Anglo-Irish radical journalist stock, brought to bear his experience in Northern Ireland, noting that decent people in both Iraq and Ireland (may I add India?) shared an endearingly optimistic tendency to underestimate the salience of sectarian division. Palestinian academic Ghada Karmi (see our video interview with her below) continued this argument from the floow.

Visit our club front page at www.frontlineclub.com for streaming video of the whole debate. Here we’ll post salient clips of the debate and of conversations just afterwards with Jon Snow, Ghada Karmi and His Excellency Dr Salah Al-Shaikhly (The Iraqi Ambassador).