Shek

Wall Street Journal
April 11, 2007
Pg. 15

Iraq In The Balance

By Fouad Ajami

BAGHDAD -- "For 35 years the sun did not shine here," said a man on the grounds of the great Shia shrine of al-Kadhimiyyah, on the outskirts of Baghdad. I had come to the shrine at night, in the company of the Shia politician Ahmed Chalabi.

We had driven in an armed convoy, and our presence had drawn a crowd. The place was bathed with light, framed by multiple minarets -- a huge rectangular structure, its beauty and dereliction side by side. The tile work was exquisite, there were deep Persian carpets everywhere, the gifts of benefactors, rulers and merchants, drawn from the world of Shi'ism.

It was a cool spring night, and beguilingly tranquil. (There were the echoes of a firefight across the river, from the Sunni neighborhood of al-Adhamiyyah, but it was background noise and oddly easy to ignore.) A keeper of the shrine had been showing us the place, and he was proud of its doors made of teak from Burma -- a kind of wood, he said, that resisted rain, wind and sun. It was to that description that the quiet man on the edge of this gathering had offered the thought that the sun had not risen during the long night of Baathist despotism.

A traveler who moves between Baghdad and Washington is struck by the gloomy despair in Washington and the cautious sense of optimism in Baghdad. Baghdad has not been prettified; its streets remain a sore to the eye, its government still hunkered down in the Green Zone, and violence is never far. But the sense of deliverance, and the hopes invested in this new security plan, are palpable. I crisscrossed the city -- always with armed protection -- making my way to Sunni and Shia politicians and clerics alike. The Sunni and Shia versions of political things -- of reality itself -- remain at odds. But there can be discerned, through the acrimony, the emergence of a fragile consensus.

Some months back, the Bush administration had called into question both the intentions and capabilities of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. But this modest and earnest man, born in 1950, a child of the Shia mainstream in the Middle Euphrates, has come into his own. He had not been a figure of the American regency in Baghdad. Steeped entirely in the Arabic language and culture, he had a been a stranger to the Americans; fate cast him on the scene when the Americans pushed aside Mr. Maliki's colleague in the Daawa Party, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

There had been rumors that the Americans could strike again in their search for a leader who would give the American presence better cover. There had been steady talk that the old CIA standby, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, could make his way back to power. Mr. Allawi himself had fed these speculations, but this is fantasy. Mr. Allawi circles Arab capitals and is rarely at home in his country. Mr. Maliki meanwhile has settled into his role.

In retrospect, the defining moment for Mr. Maliki had been those early hours of Dec. 30, when Saddam Hussein was sent to the gallows. He had not flinched, the decision was his, and he assumed it. Beyond the sound and fury of the controversy that greeted the execution, Mr. Maliki had taken the execution as a warrant for a new accommodation with the Sunni political class. A lifelong opponent of the Baath, he had come to the judgment that the back of the apparatus of the old regime had been broken, and that the time had come for an olive branch to those ready to accept the new political rules.

When I called on Mr. Maliki at his residence, a law offering pensions to the former officers of the Iraqi army had been readied and was soon put into effect. That decision had been supported by the head of the de-Baathification commission, Ahmed Chalabi. A proposal for a deeper reversal of the de-Baathification process was in the works, and would be announced days later by Mr. Maliki and President Jalal Talabani. This was in truth Zalmay Khalilzad's doing, his attempt to bury the entire de-Baathification effort as his tenure drew to a close.

This was more than the political traffic in the Shia community could bear. Few were ready to accept the return of old Baathists to government service. The victims of the old terror were appalled at a piece of this legislation, giving them a period of only three months to bring charges against their former tormentors. This had not been Mr. Maliki's choice -- for his animus toward the Baath has been the driving force of his political life. It was known that he trusted that the religious hierarchy in Najaf, and the forces within the Shia alliance, would rein in this drive toward rehabilitating the remnants of the old regime.

Power and experience have clearly changed Mr. Maliki as he makes his way between the Shia coalition that sustains him on the one hand, and the American presence on the other. By all accounts, he is increasingly independent of the diehards in his own coalition -- another dividend of the high-profile executions of Saddam Hussein and three of the tyrant's principal lieutenants. He is surrounded by old associates drawn from the Daawa Party, but keeps his own counsel.

There is a built-in tension between a prime minister keen to press for his own prerogatives and an American military presence that underpins the security of this new order. Mr. Maliki does not have the access to American military arms he would like; he does not have control over an Iraqi special-forces brigade that the Americans had trained and nurtured. His police forces remain poorly equipped. The levers of power are not fully his, and he knows it. Not a student of American ways -- he spent his years of exile mostly in Syria -- he is fully aware of the American exhaustion with Iraq as leading American politicians have come his way often.

The nightmare of this government is that of a precipitous American withdrawal. Six months ago, the British quit the southern city of Amarrah, the capital of the Maysan Province. It had been, by Iraqi accounts, a precipitous British decision, and the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr had rushed into the void; they had looted the barracks and overpowered the police. Amarrah haunts the Iraqis in the circle of power -- the prospect of Americans leaving this government to fend for itself.

In the long scheme of history, the Shia Arabs had never governed -- and Mr. Maliki and the coalition arrayed around him know their isolation in the region. This Iraqi state of which they had become the principal inheritors will have to make its way in a hostile regional landscape. Set aside Turkey's Islamist government, with its avowedly Sunni mindset and its sense of itself as a claimant to an older Ottoman tradition; the Arab order of power is yet to make room for this Iraqi state. Mr. Maliki's first trip beyond Iraq's borders had been to Saudi Arabia. He had meant that visit as a message that Iraq's "Arab identity" will trump all other orientations. It had been a message that the Arab world's Shia stepchildren were ready to come into the fold. But a huge historical contest had erupted in Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate had fallen to new Shia inheritors, and the custodians of Arab power were not yet ready for this new history.

For one, the "Sunni street" -- the Islamists, the pan-Arabists who hid their anti-Shia animus underneath a secular cover, the intellectual class that had been invested in the ideology of the Baath party -- remained unalterably opposed to this new Iraq. The Shia could offer the Arab rulers the promise that their new state would refrain from regional adventures, but it would not be easy for these rulers to come to this accommodation.

A worldly Shia cleric, the legislator Humam Hamoudi who had headed the constitutional drafting committee, told me that he had laid out to interlocutors from the House of Saud the case that this new Iraqi state would be a better neighbor than the Sunni-based state of Saddam Hussein had been. "We would not be given to military adventures beyond our borders, what wealth we have at our disposal would have to go to repairing our homeland, for you we would be easier to fend off for we are Shiites and would be cognizant and respectful of the differences between us," Mr. Hamoudi had said. "You had a fellow Sunni in Baghdad for more than three decades, and look what terrible harvest, what wreckage, he left behind." This sort of appeal is yet to be heard, for this change in Baghdad is a break with a long millennium of Sunni Arab primacy.

The blunt truth of this new phase in the fight for Iraq is that the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. The great flight from Baghdad to Jordan, to Syria, to other Arab destinations, has been the flight of Baghdad's Sunni middle-class. It is they who had the means of escape, and the savings.

Whole mixed districts in the city -- Rasafa, Karkh -- have been emptied of their Sunni populations. Even the old Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyyah is embattled and besieged. What remains for the Sunnis are the western outskirts. This was the tragic logic of the campaign of terror waged by the Baathists and the jihadists against the Shia; this was what played out in the terrible year that followed the attack on the Askariya shrine of Samarra in February 2006. Possessed of an old notion of their own dominion, and of Shia passivity and quiescence, the Sunni Arabs waged a war they were destined to lose.

No one knows with any precision the sectarian composition of today's Baghdad, but there are estimates that the Sunnis may now account for 15% of the city's population. Behind closed doors, Sunni leaders speak of the great calamity that befell their community. They admit to a great disappointment in the Arab states that fed the flames but could never alter the contest on the ground in Iraq. No Arab cavalry had ridden, or was ever going to ride, to the rescue of the Sunnis of Iraq.

A cultured member of the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars in Baghdad, a younger man of deep moderation, likened the dilemma of his community to that of the Palestinian Arabs since 1948. "They waited for deliverance that never came," he said. "Like them, we placed our hopes in Arab leaders who have their own concerns. We fell for those Arab satellite channels, we believed that Arab brigades would turn up in Anbar and Baghdad. We made room for al Qaeda only to have them turn on us in Anbar." There had once been a Sunni maxim in Iraq, "for us ruling and power, for you self-flagellation," that branded the Shia as a people of sorrow and quietism. Now the ground has shifted, and among the Sunnis there is a widespread sentiment of disinheritance and loss.

The Mahdi Army, more precisely the underclass of Sadr City, had won the fight for Baghdad. This Shia underclass had been hurled into the city from its ancestral lands in the Marshes and the Middle Euphrates. In a cruel twist of irony, Baathist terror had driven these people into the slums of Baghdad. The Baathist tyranny had cut down the palm trees in the south, burned the reed beds of the Marshes. Then the campaign of terror that Sunni society sheltered and abetted in the aftermath of the despot's fall gave the Mahdi Army its cause and its power.

"The Mahdi Army protected us and our lands, our homes, and our honor," said a tribal Shia notable in a meeting in Baghdad, acknowledging that it was perhaps time for the boys of Moqtada al-Sadr to step aside in favor of the government forces. He laid bare, as he spoke, the terrible complications of this country; six of his sisters, he said, were married to Sunnis, countless nephews of his were Sunni. Violence had hacked away at this pluralism; no one could be certain when, and if, the place could mend.

In their grief, the Sunni Arabs have fallen back on the most unexpected of hopes; having warred against the Americans, they now see them as redeemers. "This government is an American creation," a powerful Sunni legislator, Saleh al-Mutlak, said. "It is up to the Americans to replace it, change the constitution that was imposed on us, replace this incompetent, sectarian government with a government of national unity, a cabinet of technocrats." Shrewd and alert to the ways of the world (he has a Ph.D. in soil science from a university in the U.K.) Mr. Mutlak gave voice to a wider Sunni conviction that this order in Baghdad is but an American puppet. America and Iran may be at odds in the region, but the Sunni Arabs see an American-Persian conspiracy that had robbed them of their patrimony.

They had made their own bed, the Sunni Arabs, but old habits of dominion die hard, and save but for a few, there is precious little acknowledgment of the wages of the terror that the Shia had been subjected to in the years that followed the American invasion. As matters stand, the Sunni Arabs are in desperate need of leaders who can call off the violence, cut a favorable deal for their community, and distance that community form the temptations and the ruin of the insurgency. It is late in the hour, but there is still eagerness in the Maliki government to conciliate the Sunnis, if only to give the country a chance at normalcy.

The Shia have come into their own, but there still hovers over them their old history of dispossession; there still trails shadows of doubt about their hold on power, about conspiracies hatched against them in neighboring Arab lands.

The Americans have given birth to this new Shia primacy, but there lingers a fear, in the inner circles of the Shia coalition, that the Americans have in mind a Sunni-based army, of the Pakistani and Turkish mold, that would upend the democratic, majoritarian bases of power on which Shia primacy rests. They are keenly aware, these new Shia men of power in Baghdad, that the Pax Americana in the region is based on an alliance of long standing with the Sunni regimes. They are under no illusions about their own access to Washington when compared with that of Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and the smaller principalities of the Persian Gulf. This suspicion is in the nature of things; it is the way of once marginal men who had come into an unexpected triumph.

In truth, it is not only the Arab order of power that remains ill at ease with the rise of the Shia of Iraq. The (Shia) genie that came out of the bottle was not fully to America's liking. Indeed, the U.S. strategy in Iraq had tried to sidestep the history that America itself had given birth to. There had been the disastrous regency of Paul Bremer. It had been followed by the attempt to create a national security state under Ayad Allawi. Then there had come the strategy of the American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, that aimed to bring the Sunni leadership into the political process and wean them away from the terror and the insurgency.

Mr. Khalilzad had become, in his own sense of himself, something of a High Commissioner in Iraq, and his strategy had ended in failure; the Sunni leaders never broke with the insurgency. Their sobriety of late has been a function of the defeat their cause has suffered on the ground; all the inducements had not worked.

We are now in a new, and fourth, phase of this American presence. We should not try to "cheat" in the region, conceal what we had done, or apologize for it, by floating an Arab-Israeli peace process to the liking of the "Sunni street."

The Arabs have an unerring feel for the ways of strangers who venture into their lands. Deep down, the Sunni Arabs know what the fight for Baghdad is all about -- oil wealth and power, the balance between the Sunni edifice of material and moral power and the claims of the Shia stepchildren. To this fight, Iran is a newcomer, an outlier. This is an old Arab account, the fight between the order of merchants and rulers and establishment jurists on the one side, and the righteous (Shia) oppositionists on the other. How apt it is that the struggle that had been fought on the plains of Karbala in southern Iraq so long ago has now returned, full circle, to Iraq.

For our part, we can't give full credence to the Sunni representations of things. We can cushion the Sunni defeat but can't reverse it. Our soldiers have not waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against Sunni extremists to fall for the fear of some imagined "Shia crescent" peddled by Sunni rulers and preachers. To that atavistic fight between Sunni and Shia, we ought to remain decent and discerning arbiters. To be sure, in Iraq itself we can't give a blank check to Shia maximalism. On its own, mainstream Shi'ism is eager to rein in its own diehards and self-anointed avengers.

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.

Mr. Ajami, a 2006 recipient of the Bradley Prize, teaches at Johns Hopkins and is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq" (Free Press, 2006).

__________________
"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Ray

It is worth knowing whether Ajami is a Shia or Sunni since that is important to understand the sentiments behind this article.

Notwithstanding, it does give a glimpse of the situation and problems that confront Iraq of today.

The opinion of the author is his and he is entitled to it. It is also conceded that in an article, the issues have to be made concise and condensed. Therefore, to state that Khalizad was a failure sure requires elaboration. Right now, it is more of an opinion. Even Bremmer, who is blamed for many of the ills of today's situation, requires some elaboration by those in the know. What were his compulsions? Maybe history will judge them justly.

The execution of Saddam and his important members, against the advice of Bush, was expedient for the Shias since they were mortified of his shadow! It will remain a blot since the legal process had the makings of a circus and pantomime!

Maliki continues to bumble along. One does not know the pressures he is under and so one may give him the benefit of doubt. However, much more is desired if Iraq has to be brought under even keel.

Without the US presence and guidance, no govt in Iraq can stay even a minute because it is indeed the badlands. The reports from the western media are not the only ones that should be taken as the real McCoy. One has to also see the Arab media since that reflects some of the Arab views and Arabs are the citizens of Iraq and none other. It, however, does not mean that the Arab media, like the western media, has no axe to grind. Out of this partisan media fog, one has to make an educated estimate and even that, too, can be flawed.

Nonetheless, the article gives a view of the problems of Iraq and one has to take it for what its worth!

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

flogger

This article is nothing but a highly rose tinted personal view of Iraq today. It is totally at odds with the hell we have created and the views of those living in it 90% of whom say life was better under Saddam. The Red Cross latest reports say Iraq has become a humanitarian disaster of biblical proportions that is getting worse by the day.

Shek

Does he deny the many failings of winning the peace? No.

Has he visited Iraq and spoken to the players involved in the reconciliation attempts? Yes. So, you are wrong prima faccia.

Next, would you like cite your 90% figure? It is wrong prima faccia, as my guess is that down to the Kurd, they disagree with you. So, you're already off. Then you add in the vast majority of Shia who prefer life now vs. under Saddam, and you're even more incorrect. Then mix in a minority of Sunni (greater than 10%, so you're wrong even if you want to confine your statemtent to the most favorable demographic to your view), and you're even further off the mark.

Shek

Flogger,

I saw your citation for the 90% figure in the other thread. The conclusion from the survey is simply unsustainable. The sample is not representative of the population, as it only interviewed folks in 3 provinces, and even then, it doesn't provide any demographics to allow one to benchmark their findings. Sorry, but it's just bad science that a introductory stats course would identify as being a fatally flawed conclusion.

flogger

Why should populations in ANY Iraqi province provide the 90% figure after 4 years of of coalition 'altruism' ?

Here is an official British ministry of Defence report from 18 months ago that paints the same picture .... and things can hardly have gotten any better since then !

Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed.

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

• Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified - rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;

• 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;

• less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;

• 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;

• 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;

• 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces.

Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops | Iraq | Middle East | International News | News | Telegraph

Its is interesting that at least half of all Iraqis not only oppose our occupation but actually support suicide attacks on coalition forces and given the water that has passed under the bridge since this survey was taken it can only have gotten worse since then.

Ray

This gives a map and you can click on it and the location to find out about the violence levehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/baghdad_navigator/ls of that area:

Very interesting.

Shek

Flogger,

None of this can be used to support your fallacious 90% figure. Common sense tells us this via the Kurds. Also, your thought that the support for coalition forces could have only gotten worse needs to be backed up with numbers. For example, Sunni support of coalition forces has increased since 2005. I wouldn't be surprised if Shia support as waned, but your generality is not supported.

Ray

It appears that the War on Terror is being given a shot in the arm.

Now, instead of 12 months, the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq will have a 15 months. And a 12 month return to home bases for rest and refit.

This, it is said as per the report, will give adequate troops for ongoing operations.

How does the increase of tenure give 'adequate troops' because notwithstanding the tenure the troop commitment should be a constant as per the policy! For instance, right now there are 145,000 troops there in Iraq. How is this figure dependant on the tenure since I take it that before a unit is pulled out, a unit similar to the one being pulled out replaces it.

The report:

BBC NEWS | Americas | US extends troops' tour of duty

flogger

Of course its supported ! Here is a more recent poll that is even more damaging.

Most Iraqis Favor Immediate U.S. Pullout, Polls Show - washingtonpost.com

Plus the fact I have my own son on the ground in Basra giving me weekly reports first hand of just how increasingly desperately they want us out !

Ray

I have read of the Sunnis in Anbar revolting against 'foreign' terrorists. Therefore, there sure is reasons to believe that the Iraqis are tiring of the insurgency, if the report I read is to be believed.

This one, as given below, from South Iraq gives a different perspective. It does become difficult to fathom what is going on since one day the news is reassuring and the next day, it is not so good.

There is a TV channel in India that gives the news from Al Jazeera, but I, somehow most of the times, fail to see it owing to some preoccupation or the other. The times I have seen it, it appears to give a contrary view that what is being carried on our TV channels!

Shek

Flogger,

Only 1 in 4 Iraqis (26%) state that life was better under Saddam.

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/Charts.ppt

You can post strawman talking about how differing conditions are worse and the poll numbers there, but they don't directly address the conclusion that you drew, which is whether life is better now under Saddam. Only a poll question that involves Saddam can be used to make conclusions about what Iraqis think about life with/without Saddam.

Also, here a link where you can compare the sound methodology of the above survey with the methodology used by what you cited, and that should hopefully highlight for you what right looks like and why your cited poll isn't "right".

ORB - Opinion Business Research - Newsroom

Ray

It is a waste to time.

Like it or not and no matter what you all say, all polls are flawed.

I have lived in Kokata during the Naxalite (Communist armed insurgency times) and I know how opinions are obtained. Being a military man I was saved the ignominy, but I saw what happened!

My cousin (a brave chap and a wild chap) went into the Commie den, cut off the ear of the Commie leader, handed it to him and returned home. My house (we were a joint family) was bombed! We survived and we could take it because my father was a military man and so was I! But think of a civilian!

So all these polls are sheer hogwash! And fools will go by it! If it were so great, then Iraq would not have been such a screw up since polls show what a great thing has happened and yet on the ground, it shows what a screw up has happened.

It is time to see reality and not pull wool and be ostriches! If all was well, then the tenure would not have been extended from 12 months to 15 months or surges taking place at the drop of a hat!

When your life is at stake, the mouth says what the person wants to hear!

Survival is important when the govt can't protect you!

Shek

Sir,

I would agree that polls should not be a major determinant of policy, and that polls are the end all, be all. However, since much of OIF is being fought on the information battlefield, one cannot allow these flawed numbers to shape the information battlefield, and must be countered with methodological sound results, even as imperfect as they may or may not be.

So, wording in polls matter, and how the poll is conducted matters, and that is the major point I am getting across here - the poll that Flogger wants to use to support his conclusion is fundamentally flawed towards the conclusion. The question referred to doesn't even mention Saddam, and the sample frame doesn't represent the desired population frame (all of Iraq), and so one cannot extrapolate from the sample to the entire Iraq population. It is a non-starter.

Ray

Shek,

I am not meaning you or for that matter, anyone.

I am merely saying, take the polls for what they are worth. Don't take them as Gospel Truth!

They are excellent guides and as you have so wisely enumerated the issues that govern polls.

I am awfully worried about the outcome of the ME. The US as it appears, is working at cross purposes. It is abandoning Israel and at the same time embracing the Sunnis and also the Shias.

It is like jumping into a river of Pirhanas and believing that the Pirhanas have turned vegetarians!