The Way Forward
There is light in Iraq, and there is darkness. And they alternate in ways that play tricks on the mind. There are reports of mayhem, and there are real accomplishments in a land once marked by brutality and sorrow. Forgive the writer's personal pronoun, but I am calmest about Iraq when I am in Iraq. Last month, I was there for my fourth visit since the fall of the despot. There were pockets of air and civility of unusual promise. In Baghdad, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a colleague, Leslie Gelb, one of America's most accomplished foreign-policy analysts, and I gave a lecture. "My father is Shiite, my mother is Sunni, and on my father's side the family is half Arab, half Kurd," a young man in the lecture hall said, his checkered identity speaking to the tangled reality of his country. "Where do I go, in a country that would split up along ethnic and sectarian lines?"
An idea of Iraq at peace, the promise of a country less lethal to its own people and to the peoples of neighboring lands, seems tantalizingly close. "My dream is to be the Tip O'Neill of Iraq," said Hajem al-Hassani, speaker of the National Assembly, a Sunni Arab who had emerged as the consensus candidate when other contenders had proved unacceptable to the Shiites. The reference to O'Neill was no accident. Hassani had spent most of two decades in the United States. Amid the mayhem of Iraq, he exuded unmistakable optimism.
The same serenity is the steady companion of the country's newly elected president, Jalal Talabani. This man has known hardship and had witnessed great barbarisms inflicted on his Kurdish community. By all measures, he should be a hardened, cynical man. But the joy he takes in human fellowship, and the faith he has in Iraq's future, are infectious. The man plying his guests with food, filling their plates with mounds of mushrooms from his beloved Kurdistan, is a natural at the political game. And the mind must absorb the fact that this beguiling, charming man occupies the same constitutional position that had once been the preserve of Saddam Hussein.
From afar, there are reports that the Shiites are hellbent on vengeance and on monopolizing political power. History has broken their way, it is said, and in this culture the winners play for keeps. In Iraq, it must be conceded, a stranger encounters Kurds and Sunni Arabs ill at ease with the rise of the Shiites. For one Kurdish leader in the north, the moderation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is only a pose, an act of taqiyya , dissimulation, permitted by Shiite doctrine. For one Sunni-Arab leader, in Baghdad, Isam al-Rawi, from the Association of Muslim Scholars, the reticence of Sistani and his unwillingness to be seen and heard in public are evidence of a dark scheme to manipulate power. But these are the "normal" suspicions and carpings of communities second-guessing each other in a time of political uncertainty. For the truth remains that the restraint of the Shiites has been remarkable in the face of all the violence hurled at them by the remnants of the old regime and by the Arab jihadists.
Religion over life. That herald of death, the Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi, has let loose on Iraq a new cycle of violence, more than two dozen car bombings over the course of a fortnight. But few really believe that this campaign of terror and nihilism can work. Even Zarqawi himself, in a 90-minute audiotape released last week, all but conceded that he has nothing save death to offer Iraqis. It is "religiously permissible," he said, "to strike at the enemy and the Muslims sheltering among them. It is more important to safeguard our religion than to safeguard human life."
The effort that matters for Iraq's future is the training of Iraqis to claim, and defend, their own country. In his headquarters in Baghdad, the indefatigable Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who has been overseeing this enterprise, has a PowerPoint presentation that quotes a maxim borrowed from T. E. Lawrence: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them." A stranger, given the gift of a limited time among the Iraqis, can only wish them well and watch them, amid the violence, building a better country.
This story appears in the May 30, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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