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| Iraq-Jordan |
| End of the Illusion |
| 2004-12-05 |
| Falluja just might be the end of the beginning. The best news about the campaign to carry the Iraq war to the Sunni heartland is that the Bush administration has finally discovered, or admitted to itself, who the enemy is. It now remains to be seen whether this campaign has come too late to convince the Sunni-on-the-street that it's safe enough to stand up against the "insurgents" and to participate in the politics of Iraq's future by voting in the January elections. Given that the almost certain outcome is a Shia-led government, forward-looking Sunnis will need great courage. And the rejectionists can be expected to accelerate their own campaign of intimidation, execution, and terrorism, making it likely that the next two months will be very bloody ones, though much more so for Iraqis, and mostly Sunnis, than Americans. Even if the elections are very far from perfect, they will be a watershed event in Iraqi politics. And the elections will be followed in a few months by perhaps a more important event, the writing of a new constitution. But in both cases, the process itself is the purpose; as in the United States, it may well be the second constitutional convention and the peaceful transfer of power in a subsequent election that mark the real maturity of Iraqi democracy. It is a testament to both the thick-headedness and the bull-headedness of the Bush administration that we have been brought to this moment. It is quite true that we embarked upon the Iraq war more out of commitment to our own ideals than from a firm understanding of Iraq itself. But that's exactly the commitment and the kind of belief that has proven absolutely necessary to cast off the shackles of conventional thinking about the Middle East in general and Arab societies in particular. That conventional wisdom--promulgated by the foreign policy bureaucracy that's become a conduit for the views of the other Arab Sunni governments and remains traumatized by the Iranian revolution of 1979--was almost entirely blind to the rise of Sunni fundamentalism. Notably, Saddam Hussein was not; in his later years he became less Baathist and more Sunni. Just as American policy sought for decades to make a deal with the dominant Sunni power structures throughout the region--an effort that not only failed but exacerbated the level of violence--so has American policy for post-war Iraq been too accommodating to Sunni power. Perhaps we have simply hoped that the Sunni leaders would understand that their days of rule were at an end without feeling the hard hand of war. Perhaps now the example of Falluja will serve. But perhaps not. This insight--that the Sunnis are the central problem in Iraq--reveals too how the war in Iraq is intimately connected to the larger war in the Middle East. The real problem of Osama bin Laden is not that he is a terrorist but that he is a sectarian fascist. If he had tank armies and missiles, he would use them just as Saddam did. The enemy in Iraq is much the same as the enemy in Afghanistan, in Sudan, in Indonesia. Indeed, many Sunni Muslims--the Iraqi Kurds, most obviously--recognize this problem and are anxious to see the old order in the region swept away. It may be that Americans have now begun to see the conflict for what it is: a civil war within Islam. Whether we understood it or not, we have long been a participant in this war. The campaign in Falluja may signal not only the end of the beginning, but perhaps an end to our strategic illusion. |
| Posted by:tipper |