It is only when you read something of stellar quality that has been written about Iraq that you begin to grasp the utter inadequacy of what is promulgated by western journalists and by what passes for an intellectual class. The distinguished Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami has written an absorbing, informed and intelligent piece for the Wall Street Journal. The piece conveys the subtleties, complexities, fragility and manifold uncertainty of the current state of play in Iraq – but also identifies something wholly foreign to the discourse about Iraq in the demoralised and defeatist west: cautious cause for optimism. After the serial mistakes and disasters caused by the coalition – including the precipitate withdrawal of the British from Amarrah, which delivered that area to the predations of the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr — he writes about the new Shia order which has arisen from the defeat of the Sunni:
There is a growing Shia unease with the Mahdi Army — and with the venality and incompetence of the Sadrists represented in the cabinet — and an increasing faith that the government and its instruments of order are the surer bet. The crackdown on the Mahdi Army that the new American commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has launched has the backing of the ruling Shia coalition. Iraqi police and army units have taken to the field against elements of the Mahdi army. In recent days, in the southern city of Diwaniyya, American and Iraqi forces have together battled the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr. To the extent that the Shia now see Iraq as their own country, their tolerance for mayhem and chaos has receded. Sadr may damn the American occupiers, but ordinary Shia men and women know that the liberty that came their way had been a gift of the Americans.
The young men of little education — earnest displaced villagers with the ways of the countryside showing through their features and dialect and shiny suits — who guarded me through Baghdad, spoke of old terrors, and of the joy and dignity of this new order. Children and nephews and younger brothers of men lost to the terror of the Baath, they are done with the old servitude. They behold the Americans keeping the peace of their troubled land with undisguised gratitude. It hasn’t been always brilliant, this campaign waged in Iraq. But its mistakes can never smother its honor, and no apology for it is due the Arab autocrats who had averted their gaze from Iraq’s long night of terror under the Baath.
One can never reconcile the beneficiaries of illegitimate, abnormal power to the end of their dominion. But this current re-alignment in Iraq carries with it a gift for the possible redemption of modern Islam among the Arabs. Hitherto Sunni Islam had taken its hegemony for granted and extremist strands within it have shown a refusal to accept ‘the other.’ Conversely, Shia history has been distorted by weakness and exclusion and by a concomitant abdication of responsibility.
A Shia-led state in Baghdad — with a strong Kurdish presence in it and a big niche for the Sunnis — can go a long way toward changing the region’s terrible habits and expectations of authority and command. The Sunnis would still be hegemonic in the Arab councils of power beyond Iraq, but their monopoly would yield to the pluralism and complexity of that region.
’Watch your adjectives’ is the admonition given American officers by Gen. Petraeus. In Baghdad, Americans and Iraqis alike know that this big endeavor has entered its final, decisive phase. Iraq has surprised and disappointed us before, but as they and we watch our adjectives there can be discerned the shape of a new country, a rough balance of forces commensurate with the demography of the place and with the outcome of a war that its erstwhile Sunni rulers had launched and lost. We made this history and should now make our peace with it.
Read it all.
