Fouad Ajami on Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq — and a thought on timetables
Fouad Ajami is given to seeing the complexities of situations as opposed to the broad strokes and perhaps facile assessments of some in our own intelligence community. In the WSJ, he takes on the NIE and wonders ironically why a “virtually incomprehensible Arab-Islamic world that has eluded us for so long now yields its secrets to a congressional committee.”
We should not try to impose more order and consensus on the world of Shiite Iraq than is warranted by the facts. In recent days a great faultline within the Shiites could be seen: The leader of the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, Sayyid Abdulaziz al-Hakim, has launched a big campaign for an autonomous Shiite federated unit that would take in the overwhelmingly Shiite provinces in the south and the middle Euphrates, but this project has triggered the furious opposition of Hakim’s nemesis, the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Hakim’s bid was transparent. He sought to be the uncrowned king of a Shiite polity. But he was rebuffed. Sadr was joined in opposition to that scheme by the Daawa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, by the Virtue Party, and by those secular Shiites who had come into the national assembly with former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A bitter struggle now plays out in the Shiite provinces between the operatives of the Badr Brigade and Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The fight is draped in religious colors–but it is about the spoils of power.
The truculence of the Sunni Arabs has brought forth the Shiite vengeance that a steady campaign of anti-Shiite terror was bound to trigger. Sunni elements have come into the government, but only partly so. President Jalal Talabani put it well when he said that there are elements in Iraq that partake of government in the daytime, and of terror at night. This is as true of the Sunni Arabs as it is of the Shiites. The (Sunni) insurgents were relentless: In the most recent of events, they have taken terror deep into Sadr City. The results were predictable: The death squads of the Mahdi Army struck back.
It is idle to debate whether Iraq is in a state of civil war. The semantics are tendentious, and in the end irrelevant. There is mayhem, to be sure, but Iraq has arrived at a rough balance of terror. The Sunni Arabs now know, as they had never before, that their tyranny is broken for good. And the most recent reports from Anbar province speak of a determination of the Sunni tribes to be done with the Arab jihadists.
It is not a rhetorical flourish to say that the burden of rescuing Iraq lies with its leaders. No script had America staying indefinitely, fighting Iraq’s wars, securing Iraq’s peace. The best we can do for Iraq is grant it time to develop the military and political capabilities that would secure it against insurgencies at home and subversion from across its borders.
Some days we wonder what the fuss is all about when some people get so worked up about leaving Iraq. We’re certainly killing lots of enemies (one wonders just how elated Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc are to be exporting Islamists to Iraq to get killed and cause no troubles at home). As Christopher Hitchens says, the US military is getting incomparable training, casualties are actually quite low compared to the 2000-3000 military deaths a year in the 1980′s, and consciption is non-existent (compared to 42,000 a month in 1968). Why all the rush? Why no patience as we help the Iraqi people sort out their complex problems? After all, in the United States itself, it took twelve years from the time the Articles of Confederation were submitted until the inauguration of the first President. Some days the impatience with Iraq just seems artificial — as though the real argument is about something else entirely.