A different view
Fouad Ajami reports on some conversations during a visit to Iraq in an article subtitled, “Iraqis of all sects report progress, not civil war.”:
“We liberated the Anbar, we defeated al Qaeda by denying it religious cover,” Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha said with a touch of pride and impatience. This was the dashing tribal leader who emerged as the face of the new Sunni accommodation with American power, and who was assassinated by al Qaeda last week. I had not been ready for his youth (born in 1971), nor for his flamboyance. Sir David Lean, the legendary director of “Lawrence of Arabia,” would have savored encountering this man. There was style, and an awareness of it, in Abu Reisha: his brown abaya bordered with gold thread, a neat white dishdasha, and a matching headdress. “Our American friends had not understood us when they came, they were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers.”…
“The Americans were slow to understand our sahwa, our awakening. But they have come around of late. The Americans are innocent; they don’t know Iraq. But all this is in the past, and now the Americans have a wise and able military commander on the scene, and the people of the Anbar have found their way…”
there is an unhurried quality about Nouri al-Maliki. There is poise and deliberateness in him. The long years in exile must account for the patience. He had waited long for the deliverance of his people; the time in Syrian exile must have been dreary. The Daawa Party had been the quintessential movement of the underground, it had suffered grievously, and sons and brothers of “martyrs” fill its ranks. The men arrayed around Mr. Maliki are resigned to their isolation in the Arab constellation of power. They had been forged by a history of disinheritance.
Mr. Maliki is not “America’s man in Iraq.” He had not been part of the American-sponsored opposition groups prior to the war of liberation. He is a man of the Shiite heartland; his peers in the Shiite political class are men of Baghdad, familiar with Western languages and ways. He is through and through a man of his culture, his Arabic exquisite and melodic. He takes in stride the sorts of things said about him by American officials and legislators. He is keenly aware of the debt owed America by his country–and by his own community, to be exact.
“We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of appreciation and gratitude,” he said. ” To them I say, you have liberated a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world, and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us. We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam’s endless wars, and we have now come into the light. A teacher used to work for $2 a month, now there is a living wage, and indeed in some sectors of our economy, we are suffering from labor shortages.”
Though Mr. Maliki had come to power with the support of Moqtada al-Sadr’s bloc of deputies in the parliament, he has given a green light for major operations against the Mahdi Army. He walks a fine, thin line between the American military and civilian authorities, and the broad Shiite coalition that sustains him. There is stoicism in him about the dysfunctional cabinet over which he presides; its membership was dictated by the political parties that had picked the ministers….”We will have come out of a hole only to descend into a deep well.” National reconciliation–the sword of Damocles held over his head by his American detractors–is not easy in a country “without a history of dialogue and give-and-take. This may require two or three years. Grant us time, and you will be proud of what you have helped bring forth here.”…”For the Kurds, this is the time of taking, for the Shiite, this is the time of restitution, for the Sunnis this is the time of loss. But ours is one country, and it will have to be shared.”…
“Historically we are winning.” The words were those of Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. This is a scion of Baghdad Shiite aristocracy, at ease with French and English, a man whose odyssey had taken him from Marxism to the Baath, then finally to the Islamism of the Supreme Islamic Council. “We came from under the ashes, and now the new order, this new Iraq, is taking hold. If we were losing, why would the insurgents be joining us?“
Imagine if, at the end of the day, George Bush turned out to be right.