During a trip to Iraq a few years ago, I spent some time in Sulaymaniyah, where, among a variety of interesting people, I met with a group of Kurdish university students. At one point in our conversation, I asked the students, “What set of ideas, principles, history, and national narrative do you share with university students in Baghdad or Basra?” Their collective answer was, “Nothing.” It struck me that this was the heart of Iraq’s problem. If Iraqis could not agree on a shared set of ideas about what it meant to be Iraqi, the country seemed fated to exist in an extended condition of terminal collapse.
This is not a piece about how the United States is just like Iraq. But Americans have never been as different from the rest of the world as they reflexively believe. And just like many other countries, in the Middle East and elsewhere, the United States must confront the pathological state of its identity.
