Politics & Power Quote by Adnan Pachachi

The line captures a frustration with identities that once anchored communities becoming cages. Sect and party affiliations promise protection and belonging, but when they define the limits of loyalty they shrink the political imagination. Loyalty to the group replaces loyalty to the common good, and public life hardens into a zero-sum struggle in which compromise looks like betrayal.

Adnan Pachachi spoke from the vantage of an Iraqi statesman who watched his country fracture after 2003. The postwar power-sharing arrangement, built on sectarian and ethnic quotas, institutionalized what it claimed to manage. Parties mobilized voters as sects rather than citizens, patronage networks replaced merit, and outside powers found easy entry points. The word imprisoned is precise: people are not only choosing these identities, they are compelled by fear, social pressure, and the distribution of resources to remain inside them. Such prisons are reinforced by memory of past wounds, by media ecosystems that reward outrage, and by leaders who profit from division.

Rise above names both a moral and institutional challenge. It asks for a civic identity that does not erase difference but subordinates it to shared rules, equal citizenship, and the long horizon of state-building. It requires institutions that reward cross-sect cooperation, protect minorities without freezing them into quotas, and make corruption costly. It also demands a kind of statesmanship Pachachi prized: the willingness to lose a tactical advantage today to preserve a national home for tomorrow.

The lament reaches beyond Iraq. Many societies drift toward party tribalism where the badge of affiliation eclipses the content of ideas. Pachachi’s warning is that politics organized solely around identity forecloses learning and locks nations into cycles of retaliation. The escape from that prison is not amnesia about differences, but a deliberate, disciplined commitment to a larger we.