Don't look to Islam to explain the Iraqi insurgency.

Most insurgents, says David Patel, who recently joined Cornell's government department as an assistant professor, are "pissed-off Iraqis," or POIs as the intelligence community calls them. Most are Sunni Arabs who are not fighting for Islam but are "resisting occupation, fighting to liberate Iraq" from the United States.

Patel has first-hand experience on his topic: In 2003-04 he spent eight months in Basra with an Iraqi family. He spoke about his experiences and his view of the insurgency in a lecture in Mews Hall on Oct. 25.

He encouraged students to think beyond Islam and jihad when examining the situation in Iraq, and instead to focus on the driving forces behind the violence and insurgency -- that is, "the monetary and political incentives that cause groups to fight."

It was only after the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra in February 2006 that "the civil war became about ethnicity," he said. But this was an isolated round of violence, he argued, and in the big picture, the insurgency is "about money, not really about Islam."

Patel stressed that Iraqis want to be free to buy what they were unable to during Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, when economic sanctions deprived them of everything from foreign goods to hot water.

"The first thing Iraqis did after the invasion [by] the United States was buy, buy, buy," Patel said. "The consumption splurge was a result of sanctions [under Saddam]. Now, with many parts of Baghdad's infrastructure completely destroyed, different groups are fighting to rebuild and regain property on their own terms -- fighting against each other and against Americans.

Also, "There are lots of old scores to settle," Patel said. "Most of the fighting immediately following the invasion was people settling scores that had occurred under Saddam's rule." In other words, he said, it was not sectarian violence.

"It is the quality and security of daily life -- that is what the United States owes Iraq," said Patel. Viewing the crisis as a Sunni vs. Shiite clash over Islam is an exaggeration that should not eclipse the fact that most of the violence in Iraq is a result of an American mishandling of the situation, he said.

However, dividing Iraq into three provinces along ethnosectarian lines would be the worst resolution of the conflict, Patel said, dismissing the idea that there is a tradition of violence between Sunni and Shiite as a convenient fiction.

"The majority of Iraq's population was not [Shiite] until the 1800s" when many southern Iraqi tribes converted to Shiism, he said, "[so] they can't have been fighting for hundreds of years." He compared the tension between the two groups to the relationship between blacks and whites in America.

"Somehow it is OK for us to say that Sunnis and [Shiites] should live separately, when in America an entire movement fought against such separation," he said.

Chandni Navalkha '10 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.