Moment of Truth
With an interim constitution, Iraqis inch closer to gaining control of their shattered nation. What happens after that is anyone's guess
"Infidel." "Feed the stomach, you embarrass the eye," a former major in the Iraqi armed forces said to me on the grounds of what had been Uday Hussein's "water palace." The kitsch of the place, and its gaudy, bad taste had driven me outdoors to the morning sun. The Iraqi, a man in his early 40s, most likely a Sunni Muslim, now a "minder" and a driver for foreigners working in the country, had no kind words for the Americans. We are "occupiers" and we had disturbed the "peace" of the country, we had handed it over to the Kurds and the Shiites, we had empowered a group of "hustlers" and outsiders keen on dispossessing the country of its wealth. There was no way of conciliating this kind of opinion. We had overthrown a system of privilege, and this man had been one of its beneficiaries. But days later, I read that Sheik Abdul Mahdi Karbalai, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the shrine city of Karbala, objected to a visit to the city by Bremer. "He is an infidel and an occupier and has no right to visit Karbala," this Shiite cleric said. The man no doubt lived through the terrors that the Baathist regime had inflicted on the scholars and seminarians of Najaf and Karbala. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the terror squads of the regime and the informers had the run of these holy cities. The number of seminarians had shrunk to historic lows. Scores of religious scholars fell to assassins. Deep down, it must be guessed that Karbalai knows the extent of his community's debt to American power.
It should be recalled that when "freedom at midnight" came to British India on Aug. 15, 1947, there was partition, and there was bloodshed, and the undoing of centuries of communal life on the fault lines. War, it is said, now stalks Iraq. The Kurds, for more than a decade outside Iraq's circle of terror, now want federalism, recognition of their language, and a share of the oil wealth proportional to their share of the country's population. They were America's friends when they were needed, they remind us, and both their weight on the ground and a moral debt owed them for that friendship entitle them to our support. For their part, the Shiites fall back on the weight of their numbers, while the Sunnis alternate between anti-American terror and a sullen sense that the Americans are bent on remaking Iraq, "de-Arabizing" it, as it were. American power had interposed itself between these two communities. It is the norm in Iraq for the Sunnis and Shiites to say that the country is above sectarianism and its plagues, that it is a place beyond the atavistic loyalties of the religious sect. That way of describing history is defective. In an Iraq that would go beyond the native tyranny and the foreign occupier, a more honest depiction of things will have to be put forth. Year 1 in Iraq yields no simple audit: the mayhem and the accomplishments side by side. On March 2, on Shiism's holiest day, commemo-rating the death of the prophet Mohammed's grandson, Imam Hussein, terror was unleashed in Baghdad and Karbala as the Shiite faithful were conducting their religious ceremonies. Suicide bombers and other attackers struck. The exact toll may never be known, but by one count, it was more than 170 lives. In the usual fashion, some Iraqis blamed American forces, but the terrors emanate from Iraq's own sectarian troubles and from the schemes of jihadists in neighboring lands. In the week that followed--as if to balance the heartbreak--Iraqi leaders stepped forth to embrace a constitution as modern and pluralistic as those authoritarian lands in the Arab world could imagine. There were guarantees for the minorities and liberal protections and assurance to the Kurds that theirs would be a safer fate now in the new Iraq.
From the very beginning of this war, this was a campaign fought under--and for--Arab eyes. Its aim was to take the fight against Arab radicalism to the heart of the Arab world. As the prospects of finding weapons of mass destruction recede in Iraq, that wider war against Arab terror comes increasingly to the fore. We have to remember that war as our soldiers press on in a war without clear front lines, and in a country where the gratitude for services rendered is often drowned out by Iraqis for whom liberty has come to mean steady volleys of abuse directed at those who provided the liberty to begin with. A cruel paradox comes with this war: We had swept into Iraq to strike against Arab malignancies--the radicalism, the unreason, a culture of terror, the abdication of responsibility on the part of the rulers for the deeds of the young and the embittered, the anti-Americanism. We had hoped to find Iraqis who had had their fill with all that and who were ready for a new dawn. We found those people to be sure. But there were echoes of Ramallah and Cairo in Fallujah and Ramadi. There are Gordian knots, it turns out, that no foreign sword can cut.
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