John Burns of the NYT, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, has a great many serious things to say about Iraq.:

The ruling hierarchy, the Shiite hierarchy in Iraq presently led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, have made it very clear that they do not subscribe to the principle called Velayat e-faqih, which is the ruling principle in Iran. That’s just very simply put, they don’t think that the clerics should be directly and actively involved in politics. That said, Mr. Sistani is involved in politics without any doubt. He’s an extremely powerful figure. He’s simply less obtrusive about it. He remains in Najaf, the holy city in Iraq. He doesn’t talk, for example, never has to American officials directly. His hand is deeply involved in many, many things. But he doesn’t advocate clerics taking governmental positions in the manner that they have in Iran…

we’re dealing here with a problem that has its origins right at the very earliest stages of Islam, 1,400 years ago. And Iraq sits right on the fault line of that schism between what we now know as the Sunni and the Shia. What happened when the American invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003 was lifting the weight of terror which Saddam Hussein had managed to suppress that schism, if you will, has exposed it. And the notion that Sunni and Shia in Iraq can resolve differences which are so deeply rooted in history, as their more recent experience on the Shia side of repression, and on the Sunni side of seeing their ruling power usurped, the notion that that can be resolved in any brief period of time, I think, is entirely notional. I think it’s going to be a very long time before there is what you might describe as a lasting settlement…

let me tell you, for example, about the mood in the New York Times’ compound in Iraq. I think among media organizations, we are the largest employer. We have more Iraqi staff than anybody else. And one of the most pleasing things said to me as I left a few weeks ago by one of the Iraqi staff was that you’ve made it possible for us within these high walls, the high blast walls with which we’ve had to surround our compound in Iraq to protect ourselves, and our Iraqi employees, you’ve made it possible within these four walls for us to be Iraqis, not Sunni and Shia. There’s no sectarianism here. I have to say, I was extremely pleased to hear that. And it wasn’t we who created that. We made it possible for Iraqis, decent, hard-working, conscientious Iraqis, the sorts of people we employed, and who contribute so heavily to our daily report in the New York Times on Iraq, made it possible for them to be themselves.

And their natural default position, and I’m speaking now of the great majority of Iraqis, is one of peaceable intent and goodwill across the Sunni-Shiite schism, if you will. This sectarian violence has been provoked in the first place by al Qaeda and the Baathist underground as it became, that is to say the remnants of Saddam’s regime, who for a very long time, in the fact of, I have to say, passive Shiite resistance, were killing Shiites in very large numbers in their Mosques, in their markets, on the streets, in their schools, with the sorts of bombings which Americans became so familiar with. It was really only in 2006 that Shiites began to strike back in a serious way with militia death squads of their own. But on both sides of this, it’s extremists who have prevailed. I don’t think that they represent, they don’t represent the default position on either side…

in the early stages of our presence in Iraq, and I’m talking now in the period under Saddam, and the period after he was overthrown, and we began to build a bureau there, I didn’t personally know whether many of our employees were Shia or Sunni. It only became relevant for us to know that much later on, when after a couple of years of the war, when outside our compound, these schisms, this sectarianism, this killing, had become so severe that we then felt that we had to maintain a rough balance. And it’s not always easy to do. It wasn’t because we saw sectarianism arising within our ranks, but we felt that in order to be able to have access to both communities, and for our reporting to be, and to be seen to be even-handed, it was important that we should maintain that balance…

Since the principal spur to the rise of extremist Shiite sectarian groups in Iraq was the bombing by al Qaeda, and al Qaeda-related groups, to the degree that al Qaeda is put on the back foot by the rise of this moderate Sunni, mostly tribal phenomenon in Iraq, I think you’ll see that opinion in the Shiite community will moderate, and indeed there’s a very important development just over the weekend, when the American military command announced that they were having considerable progress with both Shiite and Sunni tribal leaders in Diyala Province to the northeast of Baghdad, which has become one of the focal points of the war, and to which al Qaeda migrated in large numbers as the tribal alliance against them grew in Anbar. So you have now Shiite tribal leaders beginning to move towards the moderate center, and against the more extremist Shiite militia groups led by, notably, Muqtada al Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army has been so deeply involved in this sectarian killing. And of course, as you know, Muqtada al Sadr has himself declared a six month moratorium on violence. He’s done that sort of thing before. And the proof of that pudding will be in the eating. But there are some significant signs of a move towards moderation…

my own personal relationships with the Iraqi Shia. My sense is that in the medium to long term, it will be, if you will, the fact that they are Arabs, not the fact that they are religious Shiites, that will be decisive. It’s worth bearing in mind that the majority of Iraqi troops who fought Iran during the eight year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s, the majority of those Iraqi troops were Shiites. Of course, Iraqis did not have a great deal of choice as to whether they went to war or not against Saddam. But I know a number of them, that is to say a number of Iraqi Shiites, who spent many years in the infantry and in the tank corps fighting Iran in the most bitter and violent conditions along the Iran-Iraq border in those years in the 1980’s, who never wavered for one second in that war, who absolutely then and still now felt that Iraq was justified. So my sense is that the natural, again, default position of Iraqi Shia places great importance on their, if you will, the affinity that they share as Arabs with Sunni Arabs in Iraq, that is to say, as Iraqis, more than it does in their identification of themselves as Shia…

I’ve never felt that there was a major political constituency in Iraq for the Takfiris, for the Salafists, for al Qaeda. What there was, was a major constituency among Sunnis for any formula that presented them with a possibility of regaining what they lost in April, 2003, which was political primacy. And it was on that basis, of course, that these extremist groups thrived, and it’s of course because of that that political reconciliation at the center is so important. But I thought it was inevitable, absolutely inevitable, and I felt this as early as 2003-2004, that the Sunnis would turn away from al Qaeda, because the Sunnis, as I knew them, were in the main a secular people. They do not wish to return to an 8th Century caliphate. They do not wish to be herded back as the people of Iran have been to a sort of Middle Ages version of their faith…

In the ranks of the Shiite religious parties, there are very many highly talented, highly skilled, and as I judge it, mainly secular people. I think for example, Sharistani, the present oil minister, a nuclear physicist by training, highly talented man, you could imagine Sharistani in other circumstances emerging as one the leader or one of the leaders of an entirely different kind of Shiite-led government in Iraq. In other words, there is tremendous talent there. The problem is that that talent is not mostly at the helm of the parties. The leadership of those religious parties passed during the years in exile, to people who have proved to be rather mediocre. But that’s not to say that there aren’t highly skilled, highly capable, highly educated people within those parties who could emerge in the future as the leaders of a much more responsible and indeed much more secular kind of government…

General Petraeus…I do know the General very well. I’ve traveled with him a great deal. I have a great respect for him, and a great respect for the really difficult, indeed, one’s inclined to think impossible, situation in which he’s been placed, and I think that as you would expect of a four-star general of the United States Army, under that assault that he faced, I think he behaved with a great deal of dignity and restraint…I actually saw him on numerous occasions in the weeks that led up to that testimony, and I know that to be true. At least what I can say is that I know that he was deeply involved in thinking about and drafting, along with Ambassador Crocker, what they were going to say. And indeed, what they said on the Hill was what they had been saying to people like myself, mostly privately, off the record, for some months beforehand. So I think that that was a misnomer to think that he was up on the Hill as his master’s voice. He wasn’t. I mean, David Petraeus is a serious individual, as is Ryan Crocker. They are in the service of the United States of America…

“we’re dealing here with a problem that has its origins right at the very earliest stages of Islam, 1,400 years ago. And Iraq sits right on the fault line of that schism between what we now know as the Sunni and the Shia.” We heard next to nothing about this point in the lead up to 2003, from either proponents or critics of the impending war. Four years later, it would appear to be one of the most important aspects of the Iraqi situation, with potentially far reaching consequences.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 6:31 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Religion, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.